Where I stand.

A quick note, this is my opinion, not Jax’s, I don’t know whether she agrees with me, you would have to ask her.

My family have been farming in The Fens in England for generations, certainly I can track them back to about 200 years ago, and bearing in mind that people didn’t move around that much back then, it seems probable that my ancestors were there long, long before that, maybe they were Angles, or Iceni or Normans.

My grandfather was a farmer, and my uncles ran the farm after his death, one of my cousins lived in the farmhouse until his death, and his widow lives there now. I have many cousins and second cousins living within a few miles of that house, in the village and in other nearby villages and towns.

My brother and I are the exceptions, our parents moved away when we were very small, but I started to wonder how I would feel if that area started to be taken over by foreigners, people with alien background and culture who looked different and spoke a different language.

Let us say that they moved in and bought up the land, and replaced local workers with their own people. Let us say that they then set up their own nation state, with its own army, and the UN not only condoned them taking over, but actually supported them. Let us say that when my family and their friends and neighbours objected, they were fired on and killed by the army of these incomers, an army generously equipped with state of the art weapons from the USA.

How would I feel about that? Pretty angry I expect. And I would want to help them, even though I no longer live there, I would want to support and help them any way I could to get back their homes and be free of the invaders. I think I would sympathise with almost any extreme act they took to that end and I doubt I would feel much goodwill toward the US, or other countries I believed supported my people’s enemies.

An historical argument that 2,000 years ago the ancestors of the incomers had been expelled from the country by the troops of a foreign empire, and that the country was really theirs would make no difference to how I felt about it. I might feel sorry for their ancestors, but I would still not want these people to come back and do the same to my family.

So, when it comes to Palestine, my sympathies are with the Palestinians. I am not anti-Jewish and I sympathise with their desire for their own country, I just don’t think they had the right to take someone else’s.