Excellent and thoughtful by Mr. Ash. I only question whether any Israeli response could have been both proportionate and effective. Consider 2 historical facts and one on-going reality:
1. Bill Clinton’s peace plan offered Arafat 95% of the Palestinian position. Arafat walked out without leaving a counter-offer.
2. Prime Minister Sharon in 2005 pulled Israel out of Gaza lock, stock, barrel, and the buried dead. Europe and the UN poured billions into Palestinian coffers. What then did Hamas et al do with this statehood opportunity? We found out in this past year. Hamas and its Iranian backers, and other Iranian proxies—Hezbollah and Houthis—want permanent war against Israel.
3. Therefore, Israel is forced into war to the death with Iran and its three proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. This Axis is not fighting for a Palestinian state—a second state in Palestine. No, they want to destroy Israel. Now, for some reason, the West expects Israel to be philosophical and concede the goal of the Axis, but restrain itself forever to proportionality. The Jews should be nice.
There is only one way to save the Gaza populace. And that is to transfer the war front from Gaza to the prime mover, which is Iran. If Iran were reduced, Hamas would have no financial and material backers left, and Gaza could be restored with no further bloodshed. But so long as the West accepts the war aims of the Axis—on the terms of the Axis—Hamas will continue to use its own people as human shields, maximizing collateral deaths, and Israel will continue to draw the opprobrium of Western liberals by fighting Hamas under the hospitals and housing districts of Gaza.
As it stands, these Jews are different. They are going to live and die on their little piece of land. They hope for friends, but they depend on themselves alone.
The Jews have the right to defend against any agression but no right to be out of balance and proportion killing children doesn't help the Jews. 50.000 against 1700...doesn't make any sense ...that is not a war is just extermination. It is a sad and mercilessly military action and action that is undermining the Israeli cause. In war and peace proportion is key
So far every photo provided by UNRWA/ Hamas of an emaciated child has turned out to be fake, or from somewhere else, like Syria, where people are actually starving. Not from Gaza, where people seem, still, very well fed.
That is such a disingenuous comment , you haven’t seen enough starving children to believe it’s true ? Listen to the doctors , the aid workers the reputable organisations are they all wrong ?
Thank you, knowing that you write with a deep knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe, fascism and anti-semitism. As you suggest, this is tragic both for Israel and the wider Jewish community as both the Holocaust and anti-semitism have been invoked to defend the slaughter and destruction in Gaza, thereby debasing both.
What might have been added is the decades of oppression of Palestinians by Israel, the killings, the destruction of property, and the theft of land. The withdrawal of civil and legal rights to make Palestinians into un-persons. The excellent Jewish museum in Berlin has a section on how Jews were progressively excluded and prevented from participating in society. At the time we commented on how depressingly it paralleled Israel over the decades.
In these circumstances, with an ethnic minority being brutally oppressed by a powerful majority, a fight back or 'terrorism' is the almost inevitable response as history shows. Be it Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Northern Ireland ... or Palestine/Israel. It will continue until rights are restored. Or the minority physically eliminated which is Israel's current brutal strategy, demonstrated in their words and deeds.
Netanyahu and his gallimaufry of extremists are leading Israel to a very dark place . Why are moderate Israelis and those who speak up with authority about injustices in other countries ? It looks like they hide behind the flag and the extremists.
I appreciate it is not easy to live at a time of barbarism but there is no doubt that Israel is now acting as a barbarous state. Genghis Kahn and his Mongolian hoard killed every living person in some of the cities he captured, and then extended his barbarism to the cats and dogs, chickens and food animals. When this history is written what will we say of the Israeli armed forces, armed soldiers shooting unarmed civilians approaching food supply areas “they were felt to be threatening us” is used as an excuse to murder men and women seeking food for their children.
The Ukrainian invasion by Russian forces is in a different field completely. Putin thinks he is in the time when totally independent countries can be captured and incorporated into Greater Russia. Thousands of children in the captured areas have been kidnapped and sent to Russia to be indoctrinated. He bombs civilian areas in acts of terrorism, where no military advantage exists, apart from the hope that the civilian population will call for surrender. When Hitler bombed London there was no call for surrender, just as the British and American bombing of Hamburg in 1943 led to no calling by the survivors (over 70,000 civilians were killed) to surrender.
When this is over, as one day it must be over, the West should take it upon themselves to establish the State of Palestine, as the people themselves are unable to do so. By then, Trump and Putin will be gone and Netanyahu will be in gaol.
Thank you -- I am so grateful that you wrote this piece, and I hope many read this. After Panakj Mishra's comment on the Shoah (LRB), and Peter Beinart's lament -- this is a thoughtful piece that we all needed to read.
I am one of your regular readers nd a contemporary.Here are some of my thoughts in response to yours. I agree with much of what you write with some key reservations.
You write that this is a European story. I frame it as a Jewish story. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Bible can quote: If I forget thee O Jeruslem -- set to music many times by many people, not only Jews. Why has every nation except the Jewish nation a right to a national liberation movement and a national homeland? In every case of a national homeland I can think of (I was born Czech and I know you are ware of the expulsion of other national groups from Czechoslovakia) there were other indigenous populations that were forced to chose between accomodation to a new natioality or emigration -- and in so many cases they fought and lost.
The Sudeten Germans are only one of hundreds of such groups in history.
You wrote that you've never lived in the Middle East or know it well. I studied at Hebrew University in my early twenties ad began my career as a journalist at the Jerusalem Post. I know Israel well. Perhaps you are unaware of the nearly two million Arabs who live in Israel and who, despite their many grievances, would never consider living outside of their historic homeland. I have been their patient, their customer (at pharmacies as well as in grocery stores), their co-rider in taxis and buses, and fellow syudent in college.
So far as your feelings about killing children in war. I do not support the killing or starvation of children but have you thought about how many children were killed in the Allied Bombings of Hamburg and Dresden? (I have because my mother was among those bombed in Hamburg -- thought she was a prisoner in a work camp). Have you thought about what you would do if the enemy whose objective was to kill you and elimate your country set up shop in children's bedrooms and hspital wards? I have and I have not come up with an answer.
I very much appreciate your erudition (truly) but I wish you would extend it to these questions.
This “war” ( rounding up a hapless people with huge arsenal , isn’t a war) has a chance to end if Israel , Netanyahu and his gallimaufry of extremists , for once tried something different. Painstaking talking , recognise the horrid lives of the people in Gaza , acknowledge the random appalling racism in Israeli life . Don’t bring up Dresden surely we have learned something since then .
I liked reading this personal and open hearted comment. The argument about Dresden and Hamburg (where according to war historian Anthony Beevor died 33.000 people in two days), I find a strange one though. America and Britain (and it's colonies) fought in my view an almost holy War against the develish Nazi, SS- and Gestapo regime. Of course, what Churchill said on the issue are probably his most ugly, ghastly, unethical words ("We do not know if the bombings of German cities will have effect on the morale of the people, but "there is no harm in trying" [this strategy]"... Still, I find the comparison with nowadays (Netanyahou's!) Israel impossible. The develish behavior is clearly at one side, here. Especially when taking into account the fieldish behavior of Jewish colonizers in the past half century: stealing and demolishing houses of Palestinian families amongst other crimes, including shooting at civilians, as a neighbor here in Louvain has personally testified; he went as an observer to Gaza several times. I think you ought to read the argumentations made by Timothy again. This governement is criminal. It is a poisonous leadership to the Jewish troops, who are committing the worst in terms of "just war", war laws and the Geneva Convention. Amen.
Any government on the planet would have responded to the sadistic, inhuman barbarity of 7th October to protect its citizens and to ensure that the horror could never be repeated, as Hamas has promised it would be. Wars are awful and frequently involve terrible cruelty to civilians, but Israel’s war aims to protect its citizens from medieval barbarism are perfectly legitimate and there is ample evidence that it is conducting a just war in compliance with the laws of war. It is no more conducting a genocide than the RAF or USAAF did during WWII. Hamas started this war and could end it tomorrow by releasing the hostages they haven’t murdered and relinquishing control of Gaza. If they fail to do so then it is perfectly legitimate for Israel to do what it needs to do to end it.
Rounding up a mostly defensive people with huge arsenal is not a War” . When the IRA placed bombs in UK , the government did not decimate all of Ireland and its people , starving , bombing , humiliating denying them the ordinary freedoms of like . They used extensive dialogue and eventually catholics were included equally in life there .
No, it is historical fact that the Palestine-Israel war was started by Israel themselves starting from the Nakba genocide in 1948. Even the peace revolutions from native Palestinians in 1920 were met with violence from Israel; leading to thousands of displacement and murders of Palestinian civilians. Yes, October 7th was horrendous, but people refuse to acknowledge the numerous morally-deprived ethnic cleansing by Israel since decades ago– further allowing Israel's colonialism on Palestine. 'The ancient land is theirs' is based on Palestine-Israel lands belonging to Jews, but Palestinian Jews are being killed alongside their Christian and Muslim community. The ancient region wasn't even solely Jews', but shared with ancient Egyptians and Canaans.
I’m grateful to you for thinking out loud, but this is such a disappointingly uninformed and one-sided portrayal of the current war and its origins. Indeed, in writing that “the innocent Palestinians who were driven out of their homes and off their family lands in 1948 – and since – have been paying the price for European barbarism,” you invert the truth. The primary cause of the Palestinians’ suffering from 1948 to the present day has been homegrown Middle-Eastern barbarism.
Following the savage pogroms of the 1920s, which strengthened the resolve of Jews in Palestine to create their own state, this barbarism manifested in the Arab leaders’ rejection of the UN partition resolution of November 1947, and their concerted attempt to wipe the nascent state of Israel off the map and exterminate the Jews. It raised its head, once again in explicitly exterminist form, in 1967; once again, it was mercifully defeated. (Had the Arab leaders then accepted Israel’s victory and agreed to negotiate permanent borders, there wouldn’t now be the war in Gaza or the impasse in the West Bank. Instead, they responded to Israel’s overtures with the Khartoum Resolution: “No peace with Israel; no negotiation with Israel; no recognition of Israel.”)
The same Jew-hating animus drove Palestinian leaders’ rejections of perfectly viable two-state solutions in 2000 and 2008. And of course, it found abysmally evil expression in the October 7th pogrom, the aim of which, apart from the basic jihadi imperative of gleefully killing Jews whenever possible, was to prevent normalisation of relations between Israel and a number of Arab states, and thereby to prevent any moves towards a peaceful solution of the conflict.
Your account of the war launched by Hamas in October 2023 similarly minimises Palestinian agency. You make only brief references to Hamas. You acknowledge the initial atrocity, and rightly say that Hamas could and should release the hostages; other than that, Hamas appears to play no role in the war. Most inexcusably, you don’t even acknowledge that a significant portion of the overall death toll - 15,000 at an absolute minimum - is made up of Hamas fighters. It’s almost as if Israel is waging this war against the people of Gaza. You’re far from alone in doing this, but it’s highly reprehensible nonetheless.
So what’s Hamas’s role in this war? As has been well documented – for example in a recent report by the Henry Jackson Society – Hamas’s overarching strategy is one of using the population of Gaza as human shields. Hamas has engineered hundreds of kilometres of tunnels for fighters but built no civilian shelters. Hamas operates out of hospitals, schools, mosques, public buildings and community centres. Hamas fighters don’t wear uniforms, except on official occasions such as hostage releases during the ceasefire (and weren’t these ceremonies repulsive displays of Jew-hating sadism?) They move from building to building underground, popping up out of tunnels to pick up pre-positioned weapons, making the positive ID required under lawful rules of engagement difficult or impossible for the Israeli forces. In every way, Hamas deliberately places non-combatants in jeopardy, knowing full well that when the inevitable deaths happen, gullible Westerners will cry foul at Israel.
Hamas is a theocratic death cult whose entire modus operandi is a series of war crimes. Your failure to acknowledge this makes your account of the war unreliable, and gives a hollow ring to your condemnation of Israel. However, it makes for an interesting study in guilty liberal Orientalism, in which the Palestinian Other is deprived of agency and cast in the role of helpless victim, at a distance, of European barbarism.
David Britten: ‘It’s almost as if Israel is waging this war against the people of Gaza’. I could not have put it better, myself - that is exactly what it is doing.
John Woods: Excellent comments on the Genocide in Gaza. Unfortunately, you are way off-beam with regard to Russia/Ukraine. I urge you to free yourself from the stifling false narratives on that conflict, and expose yourself to independent alternative voices. The truth is out there, and remarkably easy to find - start with John Meirshiemer.
John Adebiyi: Just when you think the bar for stupidity, couldn’t get any lower on Substack - up pops this guy. Yes, the RAF & USAAF were committing genocide also. Duh! Fascinating to get an insight into his deeply thought through views…. ‘Hamas started this war and could end it tomorrow by releasing the hostages’. 😂😂😂 Of course - that is exactly what would happen 🤔…….. ‘perfectly legitimate for Israel to do what it needs to do’. Including of course, murdering women & children indiscriminately. This individual conjures up the camp guard at Auchwitz, who goes home to sit down to dinner with his family, after a hard day at the office - supervising the industrial slaughter of men, women, and children. One fears for the very soul of humanity. 😞
I agree. The opinion of this man reminds me of the testimony I heard from a Nigerian friend about certain most horrific practices, including magic using the bodies of babies murdered for the occasion, by criminals in Western Africa.
Frederick Horne: Lovely Zionist talking points, but all nonsense. I’ve got 15mins free, and I’m gonna enjoy this! 1. Every so-called ‘plan offered’ is a classic Bantustan, with the Israeli colonial entity controlling all external borders of said Bantustans. South Africans didn’t accept it, and nor will Palestinians. 2. The Israeli colonial entity absented itself from within Gaza (too many casualties), merely to relocate itself to the external boundary of Gaza; again maintaining rigid control over land access, sea access, and air access. No ports, no airports, and the occasional ‘mowing of the grass’ when the natives got too uppity. 3. Here the contributor is largely correct (1 out of 3 - better than nothing). Now the Israeli colonial entity is in a fight to the death, and need only look in the mirror to see who ‘forced it’. Quite correctly, the Axis of Resistance does have the noble aim of the destruction of the genocidal colonial entity, and the rebuilding of a Palestinian state on its ruins; one where Arabs & Jews, Muslims, Jews & Christians have their humanity respected, and enjoy full & equal rights. This quote from the contributor is a real corker…… ‘the West accepts the war aims of the Axis—on the terms of the Axis’. As cretinous statements go, that is right up there. No - the west is fully complicit in the Genocide, and whilst it’s establishment elites are embarrassed, they will do nothing to stop it. More Zionist talking points in the penultimate paragraph; ‘human shields, using hospitals, blah, blah’ yet more nonsense. Nobody (outside of Western Govts , their power elites, and an incredibly shrinking proportion of their western narrative addled populations) is buying that garbage after 20 long months of live-streamed Genocide. Here is what happens next…..a) Israel attacks Iran, and gets all its critical infrastructure destroyed. If it attacks Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, it gets Dimona destroyed. Or, b) Israel spends another 20 months failing to defeat Hamas, murdering children, destroying its economy, stoking its own civil war, and further pariahifying itself across the globe. Looking ahead further, I see the Israeli colonial imposition coming to an ignominious end; probably when the US Empire implodes, and America has much more urgent demands upon its limited resources, than the need to prop up a foriegn state 7,000 miles away. A geographically small Zionist entity, with a small Zionist population, utterly dependant the continuous largesse of others (in all respects), and surrounded by hundreds of millions of mostly Muslims that harbour an undying hatred towards it. Doesn’t look too promising, does it?
Israelis have been committing genocide against Palestinians for a long time, and have been occupying them illegally for many years. The Israelis have been committing genocide against the Palestinians for a long time, they have been illegally occupying the territory of Palestine for many years, more than a million Palestinians have been relocated, 2 million live in other countries, who will stop it?
Excellent and thoughtful by Mr. Ash. I only question whether any Israeli response could have been both proportionate and effective. Consider 2 historical facts and one on-going reality:
1. Bill Clinton’s peace plan offered Arafat 95% of the Palestinian position. Arafat walked out without leaving a counter-offer.
2. Prime Minister Sharon in 2005 pulled Israel out of Gaza lock, stock, barrel, and the buried dead. Europe and the UN poured billions into Palestinian coffers. What then did Hamas et al do with this statehood opportunity? We found out in this past year. Hamas and its Iranian backers, and other Iranian proxies—Hezbollah and Houthis—want permanent war against Israel.
3. Therefore, Israel is forced into war to the death with Iran and its three proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. This Axis is not fighting for a Palestinian state—a second state in Palestine. No, they want to destroy Israel. Now, for some reason, the West expects Israel to be philosophical and concede the goal of the Axis, but restrain itself forever to proportionality. The Jews should be nice.
There is only one way to save the Gaza populace. And that is to transfer the war front from Gaza to the prime mover, which is Iran. If Iran were reduced, Hamas would have no financial and material backers left, and Gaza could be restored with no further bloodshed. But so long as the West accepts the war aims of the Axis—on the terms of the Axis—Hamas will continue to use its own people as human shields, maximizing collateral deaths, and Israel will continue to draw the opprobrium of Western liberals by fighting Hamas under the hospitals and housing districts of Gaza.
As it stands, these Jews are different. They are going to live and die on their little piece of land. They hope for friends, but they depend on themselves alone.
The Jews have the right to defend against any agression but no right to be out of balance and proportion killing children doesn't help the Jews. 50.000 against 1700...doesn't make any sense ...that is not a war is just extermination. It is a sad and mercilessly military action and action that is undermining the Israeli cause. In war and peace proportion is key
So far every photo provided by UNRWA/ Hamas of an emaciated child has turned out to be fake, or from somewhere else, like Syria, where people are actually starving. Not from Gaza, where people seem, still, very well fed.
Well said. TGA would have been wise to observe his previous self-denying ordinance.
That is such a disingenuous comment , you haven’t seen enough starving children to believe it’s true ? Listen to the doctors , the aid workers the reputable organisations are they all wrong ?
So they are the videos showing people waiting long queues for food, aren’t they?
So far… but how about this one? Any information?
Self denial you just try to avoid to capture the cruel reality.
Thank you, knowing that you write with a deep knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe, fascism and anti-semitism. As you suggest, this is tragic both for Israel and the wider Jewish community as both the Holocaust and anti-semitism have been invoked to defend the slaughter and destruction in Gaza, thereby debasing both.
What might have been added is the decades of oppression of Palestinians by Israel, the killings, the destruction of property, and the theft of land. The withdrawal of civil and legal rights to make Palestinians into un-persons. The excellent Jewish museum in Berlin has a section on how Jews were progressively excluded and prevented from participating in society. At the time we commented on how depressingly it paralleled Israel over the decades.
In these circumstances, with an ethnic minority being brutally oppressed by a powerful majority, a fight back or 'terrorism' is the almost inevitable response as history shows. Be it Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Northern Ireland ... or Palestine/Israel. It will continue until rights are restored. Or the minority physically eliminated which is Israel's current brutal strategy, demonstrated in their words and deeds.
Netanyahu and his gallimaufry of extremists are leading Israel to a very dark place . Why are moderate Israelis and those who speak up with authority about injustices in other countries ? It looks like they hide behind the flag and the extremists.
Pertinent reasoning, using core issues!
I appreciate it is not easy to live at a time of barbarism but there is no doubt that Israel is now acting as a barbarous state. Genghis Kahn and his Mongolian hoard killed every living person in some of the cities he captured, and then extended his barbarism to the cats and dogs, chickens and food animals. When this history is written what will we say of the Israeli armed forces, armed soldiers shooting unarmed civilians approaching food supply areas “they were felt to be threatening us” is used as an excuse to murder men and women seeking food for their children.
The Ukrainian invasion by Russian forces is in a different field completely. Putin thinks he is in the time when totally independent countries can be captured and incorporated into Greater Russia. Thousands of children in the captured areas have been kidnapped and sent to Russia to be indoctrinated. He bombs civilian areas in acts of terrorism, where no military advantage exists, apart from the hope that the civilian population will call for surrender. When Hitler bombed London there was no call for surrender, just as the British and American bombing of Hamburg in 1943 led to no calling by the survivors (over 70,000 civilians were killed) to surrender.
When this is over, as one day it must be over, the West should take it upon themselves to establish the State of Palestine, as the people themselves are unable to do so. By then, Trump and Putin will be gone and Netanyahu will be in gaol.
The west should establish a Palestinian state , really? State building as we tried in Afghanistan, Irak ?
Pertinent piece of reaction
Thank you -- I am so grateful that you wrote this piece, and I hope many read this. After Panakj Mishra's comment on the Shoah (LRB), and Peter Beinart's lament -- this is a thoughtful piece that we all needed to read.
Dear Mr. Ash:
I am one of your regular readers nd a contemporary.Here are some of my thoughts in response to yours. I agree with much of what you write with some key reservations.
You write that this is a European story. I frame it as a Jewish story. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Bible can quote: If I forget thee O Jeruslem -- set to music many times by many people, not only Jews. Why has every nation except the Jewish nation a right to a national liberation movement and a national homeland? In every case of a national homeland I can think of (I was born Czech and I know you are ware of the expulsion of other national groups from Czechoslovakia) there were other indigenous populations that were forced to chose between accomodation to a new natioality or emigration -- and in so many cases they fought and lost.
The Sudeten Germans are only one of hundreds of such groups in history.
You wrote that you've never lived in the Middle East or know it well. I studied at Hebrew University in my early twenties ad began my career as a journalist at the Jerusalem Post. I know Israel well. Perhaps you are unaware of the nearly two million Arabs who live in Israel and who, despite their many grievances, would never consider living outside of their historic homeland. I have been their patient, their customer (at pharmacies as well as in grocery stores), their co-rider in taxis and buses, and fellow syudent in college.
So far as your feelings about killing children in war. I do not support the killing or starvation of children but have you thought about how many children were killed in the Allied Bombings of Hamburg and Dresden? (I have because my mother was among those bombed in Hamburg -- thought she was a prisoner in a work camp). Have you thought about what you would do if the enemy whose objective was to kill you and elimate your country set up shop in children's bedrooms and hspital wards? I have and I have not come up with an answer.
I very much appreciate your erudition (truly) but I wish you would extend it to these questions.
How would you end this war? helenepstein.com
This “war” ( rounding up a hapless people with huge arsenal , isn’t a war) has a chance to end if Israel , Netanyahu and his gallimaufry of extremists , for once tried something different. Painstaking talking , recognise the horrid lives of the people in Gaza , acknowledge the random appalling racism in Israeli life . Don’t bring up Dresden surely we have learned something since then .
Have we then learned nothing from the bombing of children in Dresden ? They did it do can we ? Is that the best we can do ?
I liked reading this personal and open hearted comment. The argument about Dresden and Hamburg (where according to war historian Anthony Beevor died 33.000 people in two days), I find a strange one though. America and Britain (and it's colonies) fought in my view an almost holy War against the develish Nazi, SS- and Gestapo regime. Of course, what Churchill said on the issue are probably his most ugly, ghastly, unethical words ("We do not know if the bombings of German cities will have effect on the morale of the people, but "there is no harm in trying" [this strategy]"... Still, I find the comparison with nowadays (Netanyahou's!) Israel impossible. The develish behavior is clearly at one side, here. Especially when taking into account the fieldish behavior of Jewish colonizers in the past half century: stealing and demolishing houses of Palestinian families amongst other crimes, including shooting at civilians, as a neighbor here in Louvain has personally testified; he went as an observer to Gaza several times. I think you ought to read the argumentations made by Timothy again. This governement is criminal. It is a poisonous leadership to the Jewish troops, who are committing the worst in terms of "just war", war laws and the Geneva Convention. Amen.
Any government on the planet would have responded to the sadistic, inhuman barbarity of 7th October to protect its citizens and to ensure that the horror could never be repeated, as Hamas has promised it would be. Wars are awful and frequently involve terrible cruelty to civilians, but Israel’s war aims to protect its citizens from medieval barbarism are perfectly legitimate and there is ample evidence that it is conducting a just war in compliance with the laws of war. It is no more conducting a genocide than the RAF or USAAF did during WWII. Hamas started this war and could end it tomorrow by releasing the hostages they haven’t murdered and relinquishing control of Gaza. If they fail to do so then it is perfectly legitimate for Israel to do what it needs to do to end it.
Rounding up a mostly defensive people with huge arsenal is not a War” . When the IRA placed bombs in UK , the government did not decimate all of Ireland and its people , starving , bombing , humiliating denying them the ordinary freedoms of like . They used extensive dialogue and eventually catholics were included equally in life there .
No, it is historical fact that the Palestine-Israel war was started by Israel themselves starting from the Nakba genocide in 1948. Even the peace revolutions from native Palestinians in 1920 were met with violence from Israel; leading to thousands of displacement and murders of Palestinian civilians. Yes, October 7th was horrendous, but people refuse to acknowledge the numerous morally-deprived ethnic cleansing by Israel since decades ago– further allowing Israel's colonialism on Palestine. 'The ancient land is theirs' is based on Palestine-Israel lands belonging to Jews, but Palestinian Jews are being killed alongside their Christian and Muslim community. The ancient region wasn't even solely Jews', but shared with ancient Egyptians and Canaans.
One wonders if the author has read TGA's piece, or is able to read, think or feel in a humane way at all.
I’m grateful to you for thinking out loud, but this is such a disappointingly uninformed and one-sided portrayal of the current war and its origins. Indeed, in writing that “the innocent Palestinians who were driven out of their homes and off their family lands in 1948 – and since – have been paying the price for European barbarism,” you invert the truth. The primary cause of the Palestinians’ suffering from 1948 to the present day has been homegrown Middle-Eastern barbarism.
Following the savage pogroms of the 1920s, which strengthened the resolve of Jews in Palestine to create their own state, this barbarism manifested in the Arab leaders’ rejection of the UN partition resolution of November 1947, and their concerted attempt to wipe the nascent state of Israel off the map and exterminate the Jews. It raised its head, once again in explicitly exterminist form, in 1967; once again, it was mercifully defeated. (Had the Arab leaders then accepted Israel’s victory and agreed to negotiate permanent borders, there wouldn’t now be the war in Gaza or the impasse in the West Bank. Instead, they responded to Israel’s overtures with the Khartoum Resolution: “No peace with Israel; no negotiation with Israel; no recognition of Israel.”)
The same Jew-hating animus drove Palestinian leaders’ rejections of perfectly viable two-state solutions in 2000 and 2008. And of course, it found abysmally evil expression in the October 7th pogrom, the aim of which, apart from the basic jihadi imperative of gleefully killing Jews whenever possible, was to prevent normalisation of relations between Israel and a number of Arab states, and thereby to prevent any moves towards a peaceful solution of the conflict.
Your account of the war launched by Hamas in October 2023 similarly minimises Palestinian agency. You make only brief references to Hamas. You acknowledge the initial atrocity, and rightly say that Hamas could and should release the hostages; other than that, Hamas appears to play no role in the war. Most inexcusably, you don’t even acknowledge that a significant portion of the overall death toll - 15,000 at an absolute minimum - is made up of Hamas fighters. It’s almost as if Israel is waging this war against the people of Gaza. You’re far from alone in doing this, but it’s highly reprehensible nonetheless.
So what’s Hamas’s role in this war? As has been well documented – for example in a recent report by the Henry Jackson Society – Hamas’s overarching strategy is one of using the population of Gaza as human shields. Hamas has engineered hundreds of kilometres of tunnels for fighters but built no civilian shelters. Hamas operates out of hospitals, schools, mosques, public buildings and community centres. Hamas fighters don’t wear uniforms, except on official occasions such as hostage releases during the ceasefire (and weren’t these ceremonies repulsive displays of Jew-hating sadism?) They move from building to building underground, popping up out of tunnels to pick up pre-positioned weapons, making the positive ID required under lawful rules of engagement difficult or impossible for the Israeli forces. In every way, Hamas deliberately places non-combatants in jeopardy, knowing full well that when the inevitable deaths happen, gullible Westerners will cry foul at Israel.
Hamas is a theocratic death cult whose entire modus operandi is a series of war crimes. Your failure to acknowledge this makes your account of the war unreliable, and gives a hollow ring to your condemnation of Israel. However, it makes for an interesting study in guilty liberal Orientalism, in which the Palestinian Other is deprived of agency and cast in the role of helpless victim, at a distance, of European barbarism.
David Britten: ‘It’s almost as if Israel is waging this war against the people of Gaza’. I could not have put it better, myself - that is exactly what it is doing.
Thank you. I'm writing about Germany of the 1930s ('Entartete Kunst') at the moment and finding it quite agonising. Good to have an echo.
I question the 'received knowledge' that the current situation in Gaza started on October 7th 2023.
Spot on. Two states is the only answer to this madness. One people cannot exist at the expense of another!
John Woods: Excellent comments on the Genocide in Gaza. Unfortunately, you are way off-beam with regard to Russia/Ukraine. I urge you to free yourself from the stifling false narratives on that conflict, and expose yourself to independent alternative voices. The truth is out there, and remarkably easy to find - start with John Meirshiemer.
John Adebiyi: Just when you think the bar for stupidity, couldn’t get any lower on Substack - up pops this guy. Yes, the RAF & USAAF were committing genocide also. Duh! Fascinating to get an insight into his deeply thought through views…. ‘Hamas started this war and could end it tomorrow by releasing the hostages’. 😂😂😂 Of course - that is exactly what would happen 🤔…….. ‘perfectly legitimate for Israel to do what it needs to do’. Including of course, murdering women & children indiscriminately. This individual conjures up the camp guard at Auchwitz, who goes home to sit down to dinner with his family, after a hard day at the office - supervising the industrial slaughter of men, women, and children. One fears for the very soul of humanity. 😞
I agree. The opinion of this man reminds me of the testimony I heard from a Nigerian friend about certain most horrific practices, including magic using the bodies of babies murdered for the occasion, by criminals in Western Africa.
Frederick Horne: Lovely Zionist talking points, but all nonsense. I’ve got 15mins free, and I’m gonna enjoy this! 1. Every so-called ‘plan offered’ is a classic Bantustan, with the Israeli colonial entity controlling all external borders of said Bantustans. South Africans didn’t accept it, and nor will Palestinians. 2. The Israeli colonial entity absented itself from within Gaza (too many casualties), merely to relocate itself to the external boundary of Gaza; again maintaining rigid control over land access, sea access, and air access. No ports, no airports, and the occasional ‘mowing of the grass’ when the natives got too uppity. 3. Here the contributor is largely correct (1 out of 3 - better than nothing). Now the Israeli colonial entity is in a fight to the death, and need only look in the mirror to see who ‘forced it’. Quite correctly, the Axis of Resistance does have the noble aim of the destruction of the genocidal colonial entity, and the rebuilding of a Palestinian state on its ruins; one where Arabs & Jews, Muslims, Jews & Christians have their humanity respected, and enjoy full & equal rights. This quote from the contributor is a real corker…… ‘the West accepts the war aims of the Axis—on the terms of the Axis’. As cretinous statements go, that is right up there. No - the west is fully complicit in the Genocide, and whilst it’s establishment elites are embarrassed, they will do nothing to stop it. More Zionist talking points in the penultimate paragraph; ‘human shields, using hospitals, blah, blah’ yet more nonsense. Nobody (outside of Western Govts , their power elites, and an incredibly shrinking proportion of their western narrative addled populations) is buying that garbage after 20 long months of live-streamed Genocide. Here is what happens next…..a) Israel attacks Iran, and gets all its critical infrastructure destroyed. If it attacks Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, it gets Dimona destroyed. Or, b) Israel spends another 20 months failing to defeat Hamas, murdering children, destroying its economy, stoking its own civil war, and further pariahifying itself across the globe. Looking ahead further, I see the Israeli colonial imposition coming to an ignominious end; probably when the US Empire implodes, and America has much more urgent demands upon its limited resources, than the need to prop up a foriegn state 7,000 miles away. A geographically small Zionist entity, with a small Zionist population, utterly dependant the continuous largesse of others (in all respects), and surrounded by hundreds of millions of mostly Muslims that harbour an undying hatred towards it. Doesn’t look too promising, does it?
Israelis have been committing genocide against Palestinians for a long time, and have been occupying them illegally for many years. The Israelis have been committing genocide against the Palestinians for a long time, they have been illegally occupying the territory of Palestine for many years, more than a million Palestinians have been relocated, 2 million live in other countries, who will stop it?