Libya, Israel and Palestine.

Seemingly in an attempt to generate as much publicity as possible Britain has announced that when it's SAS troopers were captured in Libya they were carrying automatic weapons, plastic explosives and false passports from half a dozen countries. Now there is nothing controversial about those first two items because automatic weapons and high explosives are the sort of thing the SAS take with them when they're simply going to the shops. The false passports though are much more interesting. They call to mind the incident in January 2010 when members of Israel's Mossad assassinated a senior member of the Palestinian group, Hamas in Dubai. The fact that the assassins used false passports caused Israel to be caught up in a worldwide diplomatic storm which saw Israeli ambassadors summoned and Israeli diplomats expelled from their host countries.

This however is not the only parallel between the Libyan rebellion and the Israel/Palestine conflict. Yesterday (7/3/11) the Libyan Youth Movement - who should be considered and extension of the British government - started to circulate unsubstantiated claims that Libyan government forces had been using civilians as human shields. Although highly illegal and deeply immoral the use of civilians, especially children, as human shields is considered something of a standard practice of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and there are a number of well documented cases of the IDF doing so especially during the 2009 war in Gaza and the 2006 Lebanon war.

The most interesting parallel though is concerned with a practice of Jewish settlers known as "Price Tagging." At it's most extreme this involves setting fire to the homes, cars and businesses of Palestinians living in Israeli occupied areas. More usually though it involves Jewish settlers smashing windows and daubing graffiti - usually the Star of David - on Palestinian properties that they intend to occupy. In essence the settlers are asking the Palestinians what price, in terms of damage and disruption, they are prepared to pay to continue living on what the settlers consider to be Jewish land. In the early days of the Libyan rebellion the rebels took to painting graffiti, including the slogan "Free Libya" and the Star of David on government posters, buildings and vehicles. To anyone familiar with the Israel/Palestine conflict this looked exactly like Price Tagging. However the fact that the rebels were doing it to themselves suggests that they know very little about the Israel/Palestine conflict and were being encouraged to do these things by an unseen hand that holds them in a sort of colonial contempt.

In light of these parallels I think what some of the younger, more westernised rebels are trying to do is draw a comparison between their situation and the plight of the Palestinians in order to gain sympathy from people who support the Palestinian cause. In itself this is more then a little bit offensive. What the Palestinians have to deal with is a neighbour that was born out of terrorism and has spent the last 60 years trying to expand into Palestinian territory forcing the Palestinians from their land as they go. By contrast the Libyan rebel's, who enjoy lower rates of imprisonment then the Czech Republic and lower rates of poverty then the Netherlands, main complaint seems to be that rather then oppressing them their government has been ignoring them.

However what is more worrying is why the rebels foreign handlers, who I believe to be Britain, are encouraging them to draw these parallels with the Israel/Palestine conflict. At present the situation in Libya has provoked wide discussion across the international community (NATO, the UN, the Arab League and the African Union) over what is acceptable force to use when dealing with an internal uprising or intifada and at what point the international community should intervene. Although Libya and Israel/Palestine are very different countries and the conflicts going on within them are also very different if someone in the international community stands up and says, for example, that it is acceptable for Qaddafi to use air strikes against the Libyan rebels it becomes much more difficult for them to stand up and say that it is unacceptable for the Israelis to use air strikes against the Palestinians without being accused of employing a double standard or being anti-Semitic. Therefore I think Britain is trying to inflame the situation in Libya in order to increase the level of violence the Israelis will acceptably be able to use against the Palestinians in the big war that they are planning for the summer of 2011.

In light of that I should probably explain why I support Qaddafi's use of force against the rebels. The simple answer is that I don't. However like most informed people I know that the Libyan rebels simply have no chance whatsoever of recording a decisive victory against Qaddafi and most of the talk now is not if they will win but how long they can survive for. This leaves two possible scenarios of what will happen next in Libya;

1. Qaddafi will be prevented by the international community from recording a decisive victory against the rebels. This will lead to the sort of stalemate we are seeing at the moment with both sides launching tit for tat attacks and counter attacks. Potentially this could go on for years and kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of people while Libya's oil is smuggled out and sold below the market price by both sides in order to buy more weapons and fuel the war machine.

2. Qaddafi is allowed all the freedoms afforded to him under the international rules of war to bring about an end to the rebellion as quickly as possible. Then the political reforms that were already underway in Libya resume but at an increased place.

Although it will potentially kill upwards of 10,000 people to my mind the second scenario is the most humane option and therefore the one that must be followed. And no I'm not happy about that either.