Planet Laurel

“Like Taking Candy From A Baby”
Israeli soldiers flaunt the “spoils of war” like this “Mickey Mouse” doll pressed into service as a hood ornament decorating a military vehicle. The doll is was captured from the remains of the homes of the children Israel’s “War” has killed, wounded or displaced.

The Israeli War on Gaza is not a war. War is something that happens between countries, and Gaza is not a country. The Gaza Strip is part of one of the pieces of Palestinian Territory that was meant to become the state of Palestine after the “Great Powers” divided the Land of Palestine roughly in half, granting the larger piece to the new State of Israel, and the smaller to the majority Indigenous population.

To effect this change, in 1920, the League of Nations granted the British Empire control of Mandatory Palestine, part of the territories the Ottoman Empire ceded after its World War I Defeat. The Zionists seeking to retake a Jewish Homeland abandoned in the diaspora two thousand years previously, were involved in the decision making. The Palestinian people were not consulted at all.

Naturally the British were disappointed when the existing majority Arab population took issue with the appropriation of slightly more than half of the land to create the new Jewish Homeland promised by the Balfour Declaration. The British felt Palestinian Arabs should have been grateful for the liberty of half their ancestral lands as a reward for fighting the Ottoman Empire alongside the Brits, instead of angry their people would be displaced from the rest of their territory to make room for a new state for immigrant European Jews.

Instead of fulfilling the terms of the Mandate, by overseeing the Partition of Palestine, the British washed their hands of the mess they had created to the Zionists, who had no compunction about going to war to “liberate” the land to which they believed themselves entitled in 1948.

The result has been ongoing unrest in the Middle East, the brunt of which has been felt by the Palestinian population, whose territories have been shrinking for 76 years, as they’ve been denied the self determination to decide their own future by the Israeli occupation.