Max, a little over a year ago you wrote a post called Nihilism: The Complex and the Caliphate. About the situation surrounding the start of Israel's Operation Iron Swords. It's a clever blend of ideas, and it's wrong; You acknowledge Israeli victimhood, but you erase Israel's crimes. You can't do justice to the reality of the situation this way. It's dishonest. I'll respond to the problems in the order I find them.
Hamas terrorists promise no end to the rape and bloodshed.
There are two falsehoods in these ten words.
Hamas has promised an end to the bloodshed. Their demand, since their 2017 Statement of Principles and Policies, reduces to: Israel must abide by international law. Which implies relinquishing all control of the occupied territories. Israel is in violation of this requirement, and had been for decades. Not only has the 'International Order' failed to act to end Israel's criminality, this occupation has been materially enabled by the Western hegemony, chiefly the US, during all that time.
And there was no rape, as far as we know, on October the 7th. A year later the endlessly echoed anecdotes have not been substantiated by any stronger evidence of rape, and no victim claiming to have been raped was ever found, not for want of trying. Israel forbade an independent investigation into the matter. None of this is what we would expect if the rape stories were true.
The Palestinian cause in its essence is a cause of an occupied land and a displaced people. The right of the Palestinian refugees and the displaced to return to their homes from which they were banished or were banned from returning to – whether in the lands occupied in 1948 or in 1967 (that is the whole of Palestine), is a natural right, both individual and collective. This right is confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law. It is an inalienable right and cannot be dispensed with by any party, whether Palestinian, Arab or international.
You write:
The New York Times is happy to call Hamas terrorists “militants,” infected as they have long been with the mind virus of social justice.
The uncooperative reality is that these people are militants, and are resistance fighters. They remain resistance fighters even when they commit war crimes. And their war crimes do not erase or excuse the crimes of their oppressors (the correct word). If you want to call Hamas terrorists on the basis of their crimes that's your call. But if you're honest you must acknowledge that the occupiers who they are resisting are also terrorists by the same standard, and are part of an institutional apparatus that has illegally imposed systematic terror on a victim population for more than half a century.
Their medieval worldview compels them to sacrifice the children of three Abrahamic faiths, which includes their own.
It's striking that you invoke a 'medieval worldview', without mention of the messianic Zionism motivating many of the Israeli occupiers. Did you really not notice this slanting when you wrote it? Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant recently told Yeshiva students in Tel Aviv "The gates of heaven have opened and the time has come".
Why should we accept your framing that condemns resistance fighters for loss of life, but is silent about the culpability of the illegal occupiers who are the object of that resistance?
You missed out Israel in your accounting. The state that treats international law with contempt, that massacred and expelled thousands, that never fulfilled it's UN obligation to guarantee the survivors 'right of return' after accepting membership.
As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation (resolution 194 (II)). However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied.
https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba
Israel, the entire reason Hamas exists; From the radicalisation it engenders by inflicting decades of humiliation, torture, killing, maiming, and theft, to Netanyahu's strategic support of Hamas, believing this would undermine efforts towards Palestinian sovereignty:
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
Benjamin Netanyahu 2019
Given the scale of these crimes, and how easy it is to learn about them it's weird that you omitted all criticism of Israel in your piece Max. And weirder still that you left your article unedited, uncorrected, for a year now. What are you doing?
You included a startling excerpt from the 1988 Covenant of Hamas in archaic language bolstering the impression of the faction as insatiable bloodthirsty antisemites. You neglected to mention the appropriate passage from the more relevant 2017 document.
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
Hamas Statement of Practices and Principles 2017
You wrote:
When “Israel’s 9/11” portends more of the same on US shores, it’s nauseating to turn for security to a vast protection racket—one that censors us, surveils us, imprisons us, and puts its K-Street dinners on our expense account.
I agree that it's misguided to look to the security state for protection. But it's striking that you were concerned about October 7th as a portent of attacks against the US, while missing the fact that Operation Iron swords guaranteed massive radicalisation against Israel and its sponsors, and bloody reprisals for decades. This is easier to see now, but I was telling this to anyone who would listen during the week of October 7th too. It was clear on the basis of the unabashedly genocidal statements by Israeli leadership. Now the whole world has seen Israel and the US's total corruption and moral bankruptcy more clearly than it's ever been laid out before. The absolute lower bound on the killing in Gaza is equivalent to fourteen 9/11s, 40,000 killed. That was the number of recorded deaths caused directly by Israeli military action when reliable records stopped being updated months ago. The real death toll is much, much higher. That's where the future blowback is coming from.
I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. [...] We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly
Yoav Gallant. Israeli Minister of Defence
I'm not certain that I'm right about this but it looks as though you are too timid to speak frankly about the central, undeniable, role of Israel in all this Max. You didn't mention it in the article you wrote, nor at any time during the year that followed it. The year in which Israel has carried out its genocide in Gaza. Your article, more nuanced than most on the topic, was nevertheless part of a wave of media that ended up manufacturing consent for the ongoing genocide. In your case this was by repeating lies that help legitimise Israeli hatred of Palestinians, and by repeating a framing that dishonestly erases Israel's ongoing crimes and creates the impression that it is a blameless party. If you can't speak honestly on this topic, perhaps because personal or professional ties would be threatened by doing so, you shouldn't speak on it at all.
Yes it is absolutely a genocide. I understand that many don't want to hear that. But we're in an unprecedented moment where anyone with a constitution strong enough for the job can validate this for themselves. All they need to do is watch the hundreds of videos of dismembered Palestinians, read the Israeli telegram channels mocking images of pulverised Palestinian bodies, watch the hundreds of videos showing gleeful IDF soldiers demolishing entire neighbourhoods, and read the hundreds of genocidal statements by Israeli politicians, Israeli military commanders, Israeli Journalists, Israeli celebrities.
Yes Max, the world is run by sociopaths, and among the little we can, and must, do is to speak truthfully about what is happening.
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