‘We have paid the price’: Gazans say Sinwar’s death will not change anything

In Israel, Sinwar’s killing brings catharsis, if not clarity

On Thursday afternoon on the beach in Tel Aviv, a lifeguard made an announcement through the broadcast system. “Attention all bathers,” he said. “It is not yet 100% confirmed … but the chances are very high that the rat from the tunnels known as Yahya Sinwar is dead.” The beachgoers immediately erupted into clapping and cheers, scenes replicated around Israel throughout the evening as the details of the Hamas leader’s killing in Gaza emerged. NB: Perhaps that lifeguard doesn’t know that Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as rats. De-humanising people you dislike or hate is the first step towards dehumanising yourself. Here’s a passage from Terry Eagleton’s book Ideology (p 12):

“A poem by Thom Gunn speaks of a German conscript in the Second World War who risked his life helping Jews to escape the fate in store for them at the hands of the Nazis:

I know he had unusual eyes,
Whose power no orders could determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.”

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Gideon Levy: Death of Sinwar Won’t End Israel’s War While U.S. Gives Netanyahu Free Rein

(This is a link to a video interview. I respect and salute Gideon Levy, along the many Israelis who retain their humanity, and can see and speak about the bloodthirsty culture that has endured for so long in Zionist attitudes towards the Palestinian people. The only thing I disagree with is that a change in America’s attitude will change anything. Every Western and Israeli commentator on the events of the past year should look into their consciences and reflect on what they would have said if one-tenth of the casualty figure of dead and injured Palestinians were to be applied to white people. (Killed: at least 42,500 people, including nearly 16,765 children; Injured: more than 99,546 people; Missing: more than 10,000. Killed: at least 757 people, including at least 165 children; Injured: more than 6,250 people. That’s nearly 160,000 human beings (not rats), of whom at least 52,000 are dead, if we presume the missing to be dead.) GAZA casualties, live statistics; Lancet warns Gaza death toll could be over 186,000

What makes any of you (I’m not referring to Gideon) think this wholesale slaughter will be forgotten, that the mountain of grief and humiliation will ever be eclipsed by some sort of ‘day after Gaza’? What are you smoking? The Palestinians have lived as stateless citizens since 1948, when 760,000 of them were violently driven out of their homes and villages; and under a vicious occupation since 1967. Yet the leading lights of Western leadership still talk as if history began on October 7, 2023. You think the rest of us can’t see you lying through your teeth? If you have even a hair’s breadth of moral courage go and see what you and your most moral army in the world have done. Go and see, and recall the plight of the innocents. This matter will not subside for a hundred years. You’re living in a dollar-inflated bubble.

(This is their latest massacre, residential block bombed, 73 killed; and here’s another. The IDF is an army of vampires)

If you think I’m joking, recall these words of Lod Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1923, who warned that “the driving out of peoples” (with regard to 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.

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‘We have paid the price’: Gazans say Sinwar’s death will not change anything

“I do not believe that the war will end with his killing,” Mohammed told CNN, adding that he was “saddened” to hear the news of the death of Sinwar. Israel’s most wanted man, believed to be one of the architects of the group’s October 7, 2023 attack, was killed by the Israeli military in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Wednesday… Born in a refugee camp in 1962, his family displaced from the Palestinian village of Al-Majdal – in what is now the Israeli city of Ashkelon – Sinwar was “a symbol of the Palestinian people,” in Mohammed’s view and that of many others..

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The End of Innocence

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Patrick Lawrence: Authorized Atrocities / Late-Imperial Duplicities

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The Death of Liberal Zionism

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