By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
There are three lenses through which the Israeli government’s actions make sense:
They are supremacists who were looking for an excuse to escalate an ethnic cleansing they have no way to complete without a goddamn good framing for the Western press.
They’re a far right government looking to appease far right voters who only want to solve a blood conflict with more blood, and never by taking advantage of their superior position to force de-escalation. These are politicians merely trying to conserve their own seats, no matter ethical considerations or what’s good for their country.
Racism, ethnic supremacism, religious bigotry, emotional meltdowns and the unability to see a conflict in any other way than seeing you as the first and last victim are all great ingredients to enter into a spiral of terribly irrational decisions. All of these ingredients are present in the Israeli government and in a good portion of Israeli society.
So instead Israel kills 11K, and counting, razing to the ground entire neighbourhoods, causing humanitarian catastrophe while refusing any mention of humanitarian ceasefire or even pauses to let aid inside the enclave.
How noble of them. And by looking at the numbers of casualties and injured on both sides you will see the big picture that this is happening for years and years.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Look how many Iraqis were killed during desert storm 1&2 - makes this look like a picnic.
Oh, well I guess if someone else has already been evil before, being evil now must be okay then…
Thinking that murdering 10.000 innocent civilians is justified because a terrorist organization murdered/kindapped over 1.500 is psychotic. Get help.
First, there is zero information on the number of civilian deaths vs. Hamas deaths, they are all lumped together in that 10,000 number, so good job parroting Hamas propaganda. Second, here is what you sound like to me: “Thinking that murdering 500,000 innocent German civilians* is justified because the Nazi’s murdered/kidnapped a few Jews is psychotic. Get help.”
*The number killed in WW2, in case you’re wondering.
Contemporary historiography agrees that bombing civilian population during WWII didn’t contribute to actually winning the war, so congratulations on backing your psychotic position with your ignorance.