Yesterday morning, I awoke an hour later to be greeted by the news on the radio that it was the Vernal Equinox which means we are in the mid-point between the longest and the shortest day and we enter the period of the countdown as the days get shorter and shorter until December 21st. The evening before, I went to church as I always have done on Saturday evening and managed to have a quick chat with my Irish friends at the end of the service. We were speaking about a mutual friend who is quite seriously ill and hoping for the best. Then, after returning home, I treated myself to a tin of soup recently purchased from Lidl. After I had done some domestic jobs, I settled down to listen to a long tribute to a singer one of whose songs I knew very well in my youth. The BBC had put on a special tribute compilation to Jonny Mathis who is now aged 90 but who only gave up his singing career two years ago. The track I particularly remember starts off with the lines ‘Let it rain, let it pour – I just do not care any more!’ and I think I must have bought this as a 45 (single record) in about 1961. For whatever reason, it is one of those songs which I used to sing to myself whenever it was a cold, wet autumnal day and I can actually remember all of the lyrics. I think the song has stuck in my memory because it one of those songs that is full of teenage ‘angst’ which was probably composed, and played, on the occasion of the breakup of probably a first relationship and it really does evoke the memory of a mournful teenager, probably stuck in his/her bedroom and being sorrowful and depressed whilst the rain pours down. So I watched the whole programme which was the best part of an hour and a half wondering if they would play this track but it was not included. So, I turned to YouTube and eventually I found and played the track which I intend to play to one of my friends who was due to call around in the morning. Straight after this track was played, the YouTube algorithm presented me with some Joan Baez tracks which I equally enjoyed so, all in all, I had a very different but still enjoyable evening taking me down memory lane.
There has been quite a significant cyber-attack on an organisation called Collins Aerospace which provides the software for many European airports and many airports across Europe were affected yesterday. A travel expert was shown on Sky News indicating that it was deeply concerning that an organisation of this size and complexity could be penetrated by hackers and there is even some speculation that a ‘large state’ actor such as Russia might be behind it all. Personally, I had never heard of this organisation but it is a third party to both the airlines and the airports and the disruption to flights across and through Europe is immense. At one stage, I thought I might have been in Spain at this time and so would have been caught up in all of this but I deeply relieved that I changed these plans and will probably now visit Spain in early February (when the UK weather might be bad)
The UK, together with Canada and Australia, has recognised Palestine aa a state in its own right. Starmer used the impending recognition, in advance of a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly as some kind of bargaining chip to attempt to nudge Israel into accepting a cease fire. But the total destruction and de ‘de facto’ emptying of the Gaza strip has proceeded apace and a figure has been published that more 65,000 Palestinians have lost their loves, many of them women and children. This must be one of the few occasions, if not the first, when a state has been recognised but there is no agreement as to exactly what territory the newly recognised state is meant to occupy. The Israeli government and a sizeable proportion of Israeli public opinion has now abandoned the whole policy of a ‘Two State solution’ Just out of interest, I looked up the whole of Balfour Declaration which reads ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.‘ What is interesting to us today is the part of the Declaration which specifies that civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities should not be prejudiced yet what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank are clear violations of this part of the Declaration. This must surely be one of the most intractable of all of the worlds’s geopolitical problems. What I think is so distressing to fairly neutral observers is that a ‘peace’ between the Palestinians and the Israel state must be so difficult to achieve when, in the view of the United Nations, acts of genocide are being committed against the Palestinian peoples. Even if the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza were to leave and take up a home in other Arab countries, then the resentments and hostilities would continue for years making a ‘peace’ solution along these lines impossible. My own solution, which is never going to happen, is to establish a Palestinian state on the West Bank making Israel withdraw to its pre 1967 borders . Meanwhile, a huge peace keeping force needs to be installed along the entire new borders and all f the substantial aid given to the new Palestinian state immediately withdrawn if as much as a single rocket is fired. But this is never going to happen and would require America to enforce it, which of course given the power of the Israeli political lobby in the USA is impossible. The trouble is that nobody in the world is trying to imagine how this conflict which has now existed since the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 (77 years ago) can possibly ever be resolved.