This isn’t a religious war but one of colonial oppression and the right of resistance. Collective Punishment is a war crime and more than half of Gaza are children the rest elderly being bombed and starved of food water and medical supplies,
The reality, as Raz Segal punchily declared, has been etched “into the landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories,” a policy of colonisation manifested “through walls, fences, other barriers, and roads intended only for Jews or only for Palestinians.” Writing in 2002, former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair merely confirmed that, “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.”
When allegations of apartheid are made, along with accusations that Israel’s policy towards Palestinians conforms to a long tradition of colonial oppression and displacement by the dominant power, defenders arc up in defiance, seeing antisemitism everywhere. On February 8, 2022, Deborah Lipstadt, in testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in confirmation hearings for the role as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, did just that. She rejected any claims of apartheid, notably by Amnesty International, as “unhistorical,” a crass act of delegitimising a proud democratic country.
And what of the comments from those engaged in planning the assaults of October 7? Mohammad Deif, leader of Hamas’s military wing, claimed that the operation was launched as a direct response to Israeli provocations towards the sanctity of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, notably by Jewish nationalist settlers. “They [Israeli forces] consistently assault our women, the elderly, children and [the] youth; and prevent our people from praying in the Aqsa Mosque while allowing groups of Jews to desecrate the mosque with daily incursions.”
olddogthoughts 