Nettle Pines for Palestine

Senator Kerry Nettle, the Australian Greens Senator, recently visited "Palestine" and Israel, as she describes it in her online photo album here. Let's hope she travelled in an environmentally-friendly way.

Andrew Landeryou has some provocative words to say about Nettle here.

The title of her photo album immediately raises a few eyebrows. At the risk of bursting Nettle's balloon, Palestine currently does not exist, despite it having been offered to indigenous Arabs many times in the past 75 years or so, and more recently to non-indigenous Arabs like the Egyptian middle-class engineer Yasser Arafat. Israel is still waiting for the Arab Palestinians to take "yes" for an answer.

(Hmm. Yasser Arafat and Mohammed Atta were both Egyptian middle-class university graduates turned terrorists. What is it about wealthy professionals living in an Arab dictatorship that makes them terrorists? Whatever happened to good old-fashioned poverty?)

It may also be news to Nettle that Palestine was originally the land area now encompassed by modern day Israel, Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and Jordan. That is, the land on both banks of the Jordan River.

It was also promised to the Jews by the British, after which it was then promised to the Arabs by the British. The Ancient Greeks may have invented geometry, but the Brits invented the art of triangulation.

However, this all took place many years before scientists warned of a coming Ice Age, which means it's been revisioned out of Nettle's history.

There is one positive from the title of her photo album. Nettle mentions Israel, which presumably means she recognises its right to exist. And therefore, that makes her less radical than Hamas and Iranian millenarian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who both want to wipe the non-existent country off the face of the earth.

Some of the more noteworthy photos and captions include:

• graffiti on the concrete walled section of the security barrier that says "The Wall will not stop us". It's Nettle's caption too. Nettle either sympathises with this view or this is the only photo for which she remains neutral. I'll go the former. So who will not be stopped and from doing what? Palestinian terrorists killing innocent Israeli children in their beds? Palestinians illegally settling in Israel rather than the "occupied" land they have been "resisting"? Pro-Palestinian apologists from spreading falsities?

• Two photos captioned respectively "hummer + electric security wall" and "apartheid road, security wall + palestinian on horse". Rule #1 of propaganda satisfied on two counts: never let the facts get in the way of a great narrative. First count: the photos are of a chain-link fence, rather than a wall. Second count, it's not apartheid since it separates nationalities not ethnicities. Israeli citizens - Jews and non-Jews (e.g. Arabs) alike - use one road, while those without Israeli citizenship use the other. It's not dissimilar to the Australian-only and non-Australian queues at the airport immigration counter. Many countries discriminate between its citizens and non-citizens without it being called apartheid. Pretty soon, Nettle will be claiming these are apartheid walls too.
  

Not the sharpest Nettle in the Green bushes.