Very interesting interviewee, but not perfect. I agree with her in her defense of the nation state of Israel, too bad that, as British, she she does not identify with Britain with the same ardor. It seems humans can not really belong to two tribes at the same time, like many xxx-British, xxx-Americans, xxx-Canadians, xxx-French, etc., pretend they can with all sort of demagogic pirouettes.
She obviously loves Israel, not so much Britain, in her speech you can see she feels Jewish (Israeli), not British.
It seems to me her genuine love for Israel and fears for its survival have made her irrational in relation to the growkng rejection of Israel by the peoples of the World.
She clearly atributes that to antisemitism, as if antisemitism is some sort of disease that takes over the minds of the goyim wherever Jews are. I suggest antisemitism is a tribal thing; as she could put it: “our culture, our traditions, our land, our territory, our control” It is not that the Jews or “the others” are bad, it is a tribal genetic and cultural issue which now and them explodes and will continue to, perhaps until the rest of humanity accepts the Swiss system of autonomy “tribe-territory-language-customs-traditions” with tribal interdependency within a territory with no dominant tribe.
The result of such irrational analysis is that it weakens Israel because it turns also into new antisemites, people who have nothing against Israel or Jews like her.
She fails to separate critics of what Israel is doing Gaza from the antisemites. It is possible those criticizing Israel in Gaza are wrong but clearly it is not rational to lump such critics with the antisemites. But that exactly is what she does when she states that demonstrations against Israel started on October 7 when, she says something like “the demonstrators were ecstatic because Hamas succeeded in killing Jews”.
It is obvious, unless emotions clouds one’s thinking, that such demonstrators have a very different frame of mind from those in the demonstrations against what Israel is doing in Gaza, even if both types are together in the same demonstrations.
It is obvious the demonstrations against Israel have become much larger, not because of an increase in support for what Hamas did on October 7 but because many new people critical of wjat Israel is doing Gaza decided they had to take stand.
The lady believes that what Israel is doing in Gaza is right, that the Palestinians want to genocide the Jews, that the number of non-Hamas killed by Israeli forces is not disproportionate, than in other wars the % of civilians killed was higher.
I do not dispute that but several facts I want to point out: Hamas may have genocidal intentions but clearly does not have the power; the killing of Israelis on October 7 presented no threat to the state of Israel, naturally, Israel is right in gping after Hamas for that action, the problem is the way Israel is going about it. What Israel is doing is not war, there is no army on the other side, out of Gaza no serious military forces can be seen facing the Israeli army. What we see is one army doing a massive destruction of civilian life and infrastructure, a gigantic “mowing the lawn operation”, which I believe is how Israelis refer to the periodic interventions of the IDF in Palestinian cities and towns. “Mowing the lawn” is perhaps a bit exaggerate but not too much; when we mow our lawns the grass and the creatures livin in it do not put much of a fight.
Hamas are murderers, but mostly desperate out of their weakness.
When we started to see the destruction of buildings in Gaza by Israeli forces, the massive killings of innocent civilians, even if that was not the intention of Israeli forces, made many of us horrified by the destruction and we feel it is disproportionate. Of course, there is no way to prove our feelings are right or wrong, just like there is no way to prove the feelings of those soldiers or of Jews supporting them are right or wrong, outside math and a few other sciences, there is no absolute right or wrong. As Trump put it, perhaps rather crudely, during an interview with some Israelis: “the optics in Gaza are terrible”, no need to argue about right or wrong.
The hard truth is that US public opinion is turning against Israel and its American Jewish supporters, and the American politicians supporting Israel in Gaza. Sooner or later, those politicians so vociferouslt supporting Israel (as long as the Jewish lobby helps them win elections), will quickly turn on Israel once they see the feelings of most Americans turn against Israel and that no amount of campaign contributions can produce the materials to win an election once winning votes needs to be seen as independent of the Jewish money or even requires turning against Israel and Jews. Likewise with politicians in other Western countries.
Unfortunately, withouy support of the US, etc., Israel will perish, fast by abandonment pr destruction; sooner or later a mad Islamist will have weapons of mass desttuction, nuclear or viral, and will not hesitate to obliterate the 7 million Israeli Jews, along with many more millions of Moslem (martyrs) inside and outside Israel, to get rid of Israel.
It is irrational for the Israeli government to do things that rapidly are alienating support for Israel and Jews, never mind who is “right”.
It is also irrational for this lady to say something like “the Biden Administration is turning on Israel”. That is not a rational statement, therefore the person making it is not rational in this regard. The rational thing is to say that the Biden Administration is not supporting Israel as much as she thinks it should.
Israel, Netanyahu and people like this lady, right or wrong, have turned into the existential threat to Israel than Hamas and the antisemites never imagined would be possible, particularly when there are still around survivors of the Jewish Holocaust.
This lady and many like her are hurting Israel, never mind their good intentions.
What amazes me is the inability of people like her to understand why normal people, people who are not antisemitic and even like and admire many of the achievements of individual Jews, can be horrified by what other individual Jews and the state of Israel are doing to Palestinians in Gaza and even in the West Bank (as reported even by some Jews).
To me, such blindness, such conviction; “we are right, they are wrong and evil”, is producing political stupidity I never thought Jews were capable of, but then I think that they lost Israel twice before because of tragic political miscalculations.
Then she says something absurd, that only somebody convinced of the superiority of her background (with no factua basis), could say: “Israel is the paradigm of the nation-state”. The modern nation-state emerged in Europe in the Middle ages, but I suggest the Greek city-states were Greek nation-states, so was Rome before the Empire, so was Ancient Egypt, so where the Phoenicians, so the Chinese, etc., I do not know if, as she says, Judea was also a nation state. In any case, Israel ressembles a European nation state, in fact the Sionism who gave birth to today’s Israel, is a movement of European Jews with strong elements of conquest.
It is a nationalistic movement built around ethnicity, language, culture and territory.
She also says “Greek Civilisation died”. Dead wrong, dead wrong. The Greek city states died but Greek civilisation carried forward with Rome, and when Rome died, it was resurrected by the Europeans when they got wind of what made them Europeans, in the Renaissance and onwards till right now. I would even suggest European Jews have “converted” to Greek civilisation (although they couls have done it sooner when the Greeks governed Ancient Israel, although many became Hellenized, perhaps I am wtong here.
Western Civilisation is Greek, its religion is Judeo-Christian since the conversion of the Romans. In my view the adoption of Judeo-Christianity was an great leap backwards whicc delayed the resurrection of Greek Reason, Greek democracy, the sciences, the Olympics, freedom of speech, etc. Resurrection is not fully complete because some clever jerks during the French Revolution came up with “representative democracy, which is not democracy because it deprives the people of the power to decide key policies and laws of the country. That is why we have policies and laws favouring the rich and big business, “globalization” (which means good jobs and ordinary single incomes sufficient to buy a house are gone), uncontrolled massive immigration, social degeneration brought about by cultural elites and money elites who do not identify with the culture, the land of the territory, etc., have brought to Western nations.
I do thank her for telling people in the West they have to defend culture, traditions, values and territory, and have more children like the Israeli Jews do.
The interviewer was a lap dog; what happened to that fellow I saw at the Oxford debate mopping the floor with Pelosi?
Victor Lopez
