Return to the cycle of revenge
Haaretz, by Amira Hass
In a few days, Israelis suffered what Palestinians have experienced daily for decades and continue to experience: military incursions, death, cruelty, children killed, bodies piled up on the road, the siege, fear, anguish over loved ones, captivity, being targets for revenge, indiscriminate killing of both those involved in the fighting (soldiers) and those not involved (civilians) ), a position of inferiority, destruction of buildings, ruined festivals or celebrations, weakness and helplessness in the face of all-powerful armed men and burning humiliation.
So it bears repeating once again – we’ve already told you. Continued oppression and injustice explode at unexpected times and places. Bloodshed knows no boundaries.
The world suddenly found itself turned upside down and the daily nightmare of the Palestinians shattered the façade of normality that had characterized Israeli life for decades. Hamas crushed it with the surprise operation it launched, which demonstrated its military ingenuity and its ability to develop plans, keep them secret and employ diversionary tactics.
Its agents have been creative in using various methods to breach the walls of the world’s largest prison, into which Israel has crammed two million human beings. His armed men embarked on this campaign agreeing to sacrifice their lives, knowing full well that they had a good chance of being killed. Some of them murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in what seemed like orgies of revenge, which their commanders did not have the wisdom, or did not consider important, to even prevent. for tactical reasons.
Three days later, the enormity of these collective acts of Palestinian rage has yet to be revealed, while Israel’s intensive air attack on Gaza has already resulted in the deaths of more than 560 people, most of them civilians. , more than 120,000 displaced and thousands injured.
As with every Israeli war against the Gaza Strip in which Hamas has had an interest, especially given the killing of civilians, one must ask: does this organization have a realistic plan of action and a goal? realistic policy, or did she mainly want to rehabilitate her own position in the eyes of the inhabitants of Gaza? Was his military operation accompanied this time by a logistical plan aimed at assisting and rescuing the Gazan civilians under attack? Or will it fall once again on international aid agencies?
Palestinians’ joyous reactions to Hamas’s ongoing success should surprise no one. After all, the all-powerful enemy has been revealed in all its nakedness – an unprepared army busy protecting settlers praying in the West Bank city of Hawara and Jews seizing Palestinian springs. Disoriented soldiers and police officers who have become accustomed to thinking that fighting means waking children from their sleep at bayonet point, or invading a refugee camp in an armored jeep. Spyware inventors and Shin Bet agents mentoring collaborators, who were so satisfied with their achievements that they neglected the human factor – that is, the aspiration for freedom shared by every human being.
“Half the people in Sderot are in Gaza, and half the people in Gaza are in Sderot,” Gazans joked on Shabbat after the number of Israelis taken prisoner became known.
These are the jokes of prisoners sentenced to life, of people who do not know the landscapes of Jiyya, Burayr, Hamama, Najd, Dimra, Simsim and other destroyed villages around the current Gaza Strip, where the kibbutzim and Israeli towns attacked, only by the stories told by their refugee grandparents. But what happens after this joy and this feeling of accomplishment?
Israel’s automatic conclusion, as on other occasions when its normality has been slightly upended, is that if death and destruction have not achieved their goal thus far, more aerial killings of Palestinians, more destruction and revenge are the answer. This is the conclusion of the government and the army, but also of many Israelis. And this is also apparently the conclusion reached by Western governments, who have rushed to express their support for Israel while ignoring Israel’s structural violence and cruelty, as well as the context of continued dispossession of the Palestinian people. of his lands.
Amira Hass
Sourec Haaretz,ttranslated by: AFPS
