The Book of Alfred the Great II (Muggins!), as written by that famous prophet of Past Present and Future!

(which unfortunately did not quite get into the Bible as it was written 2,000 years too late! Neither did it get into the Torah or the Koran! – so those religions are not much likelier to take much notice of it either!)

23/10/23

1,400 Israelis are massacred brutally, and around 220 hostages are taken, presumably back to the warrens of Gaza. so what does the Great(er?) Israel do? It appears to take out its revenge upon the population of Gaza, hunting for Hamas amongst the ruins, to kill them all, and hardly protecting civilians in the process! The numbers killed appear now to be 5,000, not including the many extra injured sons and daughters of Gaza (and Palestine!) It is all becoming more medieval with each day passing. (You might be able to take off 500 dead if it is definitely proved that it was not an Israeli missile/bomb which hit the church hospital car park?) The more this goes on the more Arabs, Muslims, and international armchair observers around the world will start to protest. Israel may lose its boy scout image, even amongst the armchair brigade, and the longer it remains in the news the more those who do not know or understand the history will be faced by unpalatable truths and knowledge of the past, and the present, and will start to realise that the future may be even worse than the Past.

And when Moses led the Chosen People out of Egypt and through the desert they finally came across the Jordan River to lay claim to their chosen land, where they had once lived, and shepherded sheep, before Joseph earned his technicolour dreamcoat by serving the Pharoah and inviting his erstwhile brothers to come to safety of Egypt during the famine! Unfortunately the first thing they did was to parade around the walls of the Canaanite city of Jericho 7 times, until the walls fell down, giving them carte blanche to massacre every living being within those erstwhile walls! (except for Rahab, the woman who betrayed the city to them and her family!). It wasn’t really a very good start, particularly by modern standards, as it meant they had blood on their hands from the very beginning, a feature of their rule which was going to come back and haunt them a number of times over the many years in between, not least in the ethnic cleansing which preceeded and accompanied the creation of the Neo Israel of the 20th Century, and of course in the present collective punishment of Gaza for the crimes of Hamas!

(please do not take too much offence at Alfred’s possibly overdramatic representation of Past Present and Future. You just never know things might just hopefully all work out for the best one day soon and the politicians might just work it out fairly. Let us hope the Palestinian, and the Israeli populations survive this latest period of bloodletting in sufficient numbers to live another day in peace. After all one of the most important traits they both have in common is that they are both survivors!)