What Is A Palestinian To Do?
Every fervent supporter of Israel and/or Zionism can deny this all they want, but the evidence strongly indicates Israel's aim is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza permanently.
Marisa Kabas, a top-tier writer on this platform and great reporter to boot, wrote it yesterday. “i don’t know how the fuck to process this. FUCK,” she said, reposting a story about 700 civilians killed by the IDF in 24 hours in Gaza. “it’s taken me way too long to say the words even though i knew them in my heart: this is genocide and this is ethnic cleansing.”
After the ceasefire ended between Israel and Hamas, Israel turned its attention south. The IDF sent messages and a complex, numbered map out to tell people where to go to avoid being caught in airstrikes. Sounds good, until you learn that the airstrikes began ten minutes after sending those messages. Ten minutes isn’t long enough to escape a neighborhood. Ten minutes isn’t a proper warning time when the IDF has systematically attacked the Gaza communications infrastructure, keeping many from receiving any warning at all. It’s cover, pure propaganda so its defenders can continue saying how moral the IDF is while ignoring the stark realization that the warnings are farcical given the reality of Gaza under siege.
More to the point, look at the map above. Only 56 square miles out of 141 are left for nearly two million displaced Gazans to shelter. That is 32,142 people per square mile, twice that of Tokyo, which is home to ten times as many people as Gaza. Those people are facing the near-certainty of annihilation, being squeezed into an ever-shrinking radius as war rages around them. Israel told them to move south, and now the south is being bombed. The north is inaccessible. What is a Palestinian to do? Nowhere is safe.
This is a case study in a simple axiom: the ends do not justify the means. Hamas is evil, Hamas does evil things, and sometimes, yes, Hamas does use human shields. That doesn’t justify ignoring those innocent lives to kill Hamas terrorists. A human shield is designed to keep an attacker from attacking. The options are to either not attack or to ignore the innocent lives in danger and attack anyway. Israel does not have to carpet bomb the Gaza Strip to get Hamas. It does so because they don’t want to take casualties. Instead, it is the innocents of Gaza that are the casualties, their lives just pieces on a game board for sociopathic leaders on both sides to toss away. The IDF is not “the most moral military force in the world.” A moral force doesn’t declare a safe zone and then bomb the hell out of it.
Even now, with “safe” space running very low, even those places declared safe are still being bombed. The above linked story included this passage, which absolutely ripped my heart into pieces:
Bombing at one site in Rafah overnight had torn a crater the size of a basketball court out of the earth. A dead toddler's bare feet and black trousers poked out from under a pile of rubble. Men struggled with their bare hands to move a chunk of the concrete that had crushed the child.
Later they chanted "God is greatest" and wept as they marched through the ruins carrying the body in a bundle, and that of another small child wrapped in a blanket.
"We were asleep," said Salah al-Arja, owner of one of the houses destroyed at the site. "They tell you it is a safe area, but there is no safe area in all of the Gaza Strip."
Hamas doesn’t have bombs that big. This is a choice by the IDF. It is immoral. It is depraved behavior. The whole point of the post-World War II Geneva Conventions was to keep this from happening again, and Israel is refusing to abide by rules it signed in the aftermath of the greatest crime ever perpetrated against the Jewish people. Unfortunately, just like with German Jewish refugee Henry Kissinger, the wrong lessons have been learned by the IDF. They are effecting a campaign of genocide and doing so purportedly to protect Jews around the world, when the reality is that they are, much like Kissinger did, using a tragedy to promulgate a larger strategy, the expulsion of every Palestinian from land Israel considers to be theirs and theirs only.
Silence is complicity. We must speak up, or there will be nobody left to speak for.