The propensity of the West, and Israel for that matter has been to impose a forced forgetting on the rest of the world. Each event that occurs in the present day is taken as a beginning and not a consequence of what went before. We have willingly adopted Orwell’s “memory hole” as our way of simplifying events and allocating blame to those we have chosen as the less than worthy scapegoat inferiors for our own failures.

The massive Iranian rocket response to the Israeli assassinations of Arab leaders raises the question of who began this process of escalation and why? Given the tinderbox present situation of the Middle East and the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, why has the conflict escalated to Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, at the very minimum?

In these complex Middle Eastern matters context and history are vital to a realistic understanding of the situation to enable workable solutions to be achieved. The entire Middle East has been unstable since the end of the Second World War and the consequent division of the region, previously largely the remnants of the Ottoman, British, French and Italian colonial empires, between the victorious Allies.

The US entered the picture rapidly as it recognised the oil resources of the region were the greatest prize in history, control of which would give them world domination. That commenced a nearly 80-year period of massive interference in the affairs of the region and major contestation between these powers and the Soviet Union for control.

In addition the West particularly Great Britain desired to salve its conscience for its utter failure to deal with the Nazi Holocaust, which was driven by a significant anti-Semitism in British policy under........

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