generalspeaking

Torching Mosques

That it appears some West Bank settlers have undertaken the outrage of setting fire to a mosque simply illustrates most graphically that no religion or ethnic group has a clear monopoly on boorish thuggery in the nth degree. Opposition by settlers who tend to be fairly fanatical in their religious devotion - to the potential for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, however unlikely that appears for the future, creates extreme tensions, obviously.

That the settlers would take it upon themselves - at least a small and bitter coterie - to demonstrate their contempt for the devotion of Palestinian Arabs to their house of worship, and claim their sacrilegious act to be justified by their disgust with the peace process and what it may portend for their ongoing building of settlements on land meant for Arab-Palestinian occupation speaks volumes about their gross insensibility and stupidity.

What they accomplish by these incendiary, brutal and nasty acts is to further the distance between Jews and Arabs, a situation that is so dire as things stand, that it needs no further tinder to fire up violent reactions that will most certainly redound on the very settlers that have chosen to assault and insult their geographic neighbours.

Needless to say this kind of reprehensible behaviour is not without its own returns, and is not, by any means, special to Jews resentful of Palestinian claims to a portion of the geography of the Middle East that was originally apportioned equally to both sides. For the truth of the matter is, there are exponentially greater incidents of Arab-Palestinian destruction of Jewish holy sites than what has occurred in Beit Faijar.

While Palestinians will eventually inherit by right and by mutual agreement the land that is meant to be theirs for their nascent state, they will also take possession of many Jewish holy sites, dating to ancient Israel and the Old Testament writings. Palestinians did their best to destroy the Tomb of Joseph, sacred to Jews, and they will do the same with the burial site of the prophet Samuel.

When Israel unilaterally vacated Gaza and left it to Palestinian Gazans to make something of themselves and the Gaza Strip, joyful Palestinian vandals celebrated Israel's departure by destroying a synagogue, and a greenhouse, left as a gift to Palestinians by Jewish philanthropists to give the Palestinians a head-start in developing their own agricultural businesses.

The planting of trees to produce forests in the wasteland of the desert is of primary importance to Israel and to their Jewish supporters world-wide who gladly fund these ventures. Palestinians set fire to Israeli orchards in a gesture of neighbourly rancor, and they have mounted a kind of Intifada against forests, cutting down and burning trees, or stripping the bark from them.

Arab Palestinians have been known to destroy Israeli-owned farms and their crops, and the compliment has been returned by West Bank settlers. Unsavoury in the extreme. And from this background of reprisal and counter-reprisal it is hoped that peace will suddenly bloom.

Labels: Israel, Middle East, Peace, Traditions, Troublespots

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, October 05, 2010