In one respect today has been a good day. I have made good progress with another piece towards my project based on Italian experience during the First World War. At the back of my mind all day, however, has been another war …. the conflict in Palestine.
The more I reflect on this situation the more it becomes clear to me that whatever the “international community” says or does, or whatever the response of Palestinians, the Zionist government is determined to eliminate any Palestinian state. It pays lip-service to the idea of a “two-state” solution, but this is denied by every action of the Israelis. They continue to expropriate land in the West Bank, and the increasingly disproportionate response to any resistance from Gaza (which has in any case become little more that an Israeli-managed concentration camp) can only be construed as directed at the ultimate elimination of any independent political focus for Palestinian identity.
It seems a cruel thing to say, but my words are chosen with care. I have become convinced that Israel has embarked upon its “Final Solution” to “The Palestinian Question”. However they try to dress it up and provide excuses for their actions, the Israeli government has in fact covertly committed itself to genocide.
I paint, responding to the still-visible remains of a conflict that began a century ago. What is certain is that in a hundred years’ time, some other artist will be reflecting sorrowfully on a war that was even more unjust, even more readily avoidable, and probably just as dreadful in its consequences. As in 1914 our government is trapped in a thoroughly unwise set of alliances and oppositions, held by illusions of our real interests. The British government is not going to abandon its idiotic belief in the special value and importance of an Atlantic alliance, whatever the Americans do to go on propping up the immoral Zionist regime, for its own despicable reasons. Westminster is not going to question its unexamined assumption that Arabs are Muslims, therefore all potential “islamists” and for that reason incipient terrorists. On this crazy reasoning, as in 1914, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, so we go on tolerating the Israelis.
How are we going to break out of this?