I sometimes like what that author has to say, but he’s obviously too emotionally involved in this issue to be trustworthy on it. He’s just a frothing-at-the-mouth partisan, as you can tell from his language.
He says, “The fact is that the Al Aqsa Flood from Hamas et al was a legitimate hit on an occupying army. Everyone is supposed to scrupulously condemn them, but for what? Breaking out of a concentration camp and hitting the guards?”
That’s one-sided to the point of being propagandistic. Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005. The Palestinians have been plagued not so much by Israel but by the totalitarian Hamas regime, which seized power in a coup and prevented further elections. Meanwhile, Israel had to contain Gaza with blockades and so on not because Israelis enjoy being jailers but because Hamas has been explicitly dedicated to violently destroying Israel as a Jewish state. Hamas doesn’t accept Israel’s right to exist. Was Israel supposed to give that medieval, fundamentalist, anti-Jewish regime free rein to attack Israel? No other state on Earth would have been expected to do so in such a hostile environment.
See the link below for more on Hamas: ‘As Hamas took over the remnants of PA institutions in the strip, it established a judiciary and put in place authoritarian institutions. In theory, Hamas governs in accordance with the sharia-based Palestinian Basic Law, as does the PA; but it has generally been more restrictive than the law requires, including by controlling how women dress and enforcing gender segregation in public during the early years of its rule. The watchdog group Freedom House found in 2020 that the “Hamas-controlled government has no effective or independent mechanisms for ensuring transparency in its funding, procurements, or operations.” Hamas also represses the Gazan media, civilian activism on social media, the political opposition, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), leaving it without mechanisms for accountability.’
So if Palestinians deserved to attack Israel for blockading Gaza (i.e. for containing a totalitarian, medieval regime bent on Israel’s destruction), why wouldn’t Israel have been justified in attacking Hamas to liberate Palestinians? Where’s the author’s condemnation of Hamas’s theocracy?
The author says many of the victims in Israel were active soldiers. But many weren’t, and Hamas targeted them rather than killing them only as collateral damage. Where’s the author’s condemnation of that war crime by Hamas?
He uses Iran’s language in saying, “These are the military occupiers of Palestine and legitimate targets for resistance.”
“Resistance”? Hamas resists modernity and human rights, not just Israel. Hamas wants to free Palestinians—to destroy Israel. So “resistance” there is a euphemism.
He says the pogrom was “a legitimate hit by oppressed people—while the colonizers try to smear it as a sea of savages.”
Again, where’s the author’s condemnation of Hamas for having oppressed the Palestinians in Gaza for two decades? Israel didn’t colonize Palestine. The UN partitioned the region to solve the problem of competing nationalisms, after WWII.
The author says, “Gaza is just an open air prison, a concentration camp for refugees from previous pogroms.”
But that analogy is incomplete. Gaza was ruled not by Israel but by Hamas, by a totalitarian regime of fundamentalist Palestinians. Israel blockaded Gaza to protect modern, liberal Israel from that medieval Palestinian madness.
I’ll wait for official investigations of how Israel handled the Oct 7 pogrom. There may well have been friendly fire incidents. Then again, Hamas uses human shields, so the blame isn’t so easily determined.
The author says, “Killing civilians is really all the IOF is good at it.”
That’s just dumb, hysterical partisanship. The label itself “Israel Occupation Forces” is itself stupidly partisan. Hello, McFly! Israel stopped occupying Gaza in 2005. And why did Israel occupy it in the first place? Because Israel was in the hunt for extra land? No, because Israel was about to be attacked by a coalition of Arab states, and that’s how the war ended up. Did Israel kill only civilians in the 1967 war? No, Israel kicked the shit out of those Arab states, humiliating them and prompting rounds of medieval terrorism by Arabs who don’t know how to take a hint: it’s time to modernize.
