NB: I post this along with a separate view, contained in this essay: After the pogrom in Israel, the angel of death is licking his lips: Hamas is not identical with the Palestinian cause: it is a curse on it. With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an Isis-style force of bloodcurdling cruelty, one that brings calamity down on its own people – a calamity that threatens now to become even more devastating : Jonathan Freedland
I will also remind all observers that antisemitism was Christian in origin, and that it was a (briefly) German-led Europe that succeeded in fulfilling this genocidal ideology. The Nazis lost their war against the Allied powers; but they won their genocidal objective. All Western commentators ought to remember this bitter truth; along with the fact that at the Evian conference of 1938, the USA, along with the major powers, refused to increase their stringent quotas for the intake of Jewish refugees.
And finally, a reminder from an unlikely source, the arch-imperialist Lord Curzon: who as Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1923 warned that the driving out of peoples (in the exchanges between Greece and Turkey) was ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’: R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War; p. 71 fn. DS
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The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.
Israel’s response to these armed incursions will be a genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel will kill dozens of Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Hundreds of Palestinians have already died in Israel air assaults since the launch of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” on Saturday morning, which left 700 Israelis dead. Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza on Sunday to “leave now,” because Israel is going to “turn all Hamas hiding places into rubble.”
But where are Palestinians in Gaza supposed to go? Israel and Egypt blockade the land borders. There is no exit by air or sea, which are controlled by Israel. The collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers. We used it against Native Americans and later in the Philippines and Vietnam. The Germans used it against the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia. The British in Kenya and Malaya. The Nazis used it in the areas they occupied in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe. Israel follows the same playbook. Death for death. Atrocity for atrocity. But it is always the occupier who initiates this macabre dance and trades piles of corpses for higher piles of corpses.
This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar denouement to all settler-colonial projects. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence. The Haitian war of liberation. The Mau Mau in Kenya. The African National Congress in South Africa. These uprisings do not always succeed, but they follow familiar patterns. The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have a right to armed resistance under international law.
Israel never had any interest in an equitable settlement with the Palestinians. It built an apartheid state and has steadily absorbed larger and larger tracts of Palestinian land in a slow motion campaign of ethnic cleansing. It turned Gaza in 2007 into the world’s largest open air prison….
UN recognition of Palestinian Nakba counters the myth that Israel was created on empty land
Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War
After the truth-shower 