A few questions have always occurred to me regarding this conflict and while reading the bickering going on in this thread they once again become apparent.
The State of Israel as the military occupying power of the Occupied Territories since June 1967 has a duty to protect civilians under its control. But instead every 6-7 years it slaughters them in the high hundreds or thousands. Now the State of Israel claims falsely that Gaza is not occupied, except the State of Israel controls the sky above Gaza, the water and land frontiers of Gaza (including by multilateral agreement the Egyptian frontier) and with stand-off observation and weapons platforms it controls and can interdict all movement in Gaza except for some subterranean movement. Furthermore Israeli troops guard security and kill zones on Gazan territory and regularly send troops in to Gaza to maintain those zones. So Gazan territory is militarily occupied with boots on the ground in these zones despite Israeli denials. So Gaza is effectively militarily occupied and according to international laws, which the State of Israel signed onto, the Israeli Government has a duty to protect civilians under its control and cannot change its occupier status unilaterally.
When Israeli forces blow up a building containing an Hamas command node and innocent civilians as well, it is okay because they gave the civilian residents a warning in the middle of ongoing air raids to get out, right? So if Hamas gives a warning that they are going to attack the State of Israel with its many command nodes and gives a warning to all Israeli civilians to get out of Israel before the attack, then why is that not okay?
We hear constantly that the State of Israel has the right to defend itself by attacking Hamas, Gaza and the Palestinian Arabs trapped there, when Israel proper is attacked by Arab Palestinian militants. Why do we not hear that the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories have a right to defend themselves by attacking the State of Israel proper or occupying troops in the Occupied Territories, when that state attacks Arab Palestinians in those Occupied Territories?
There are many double-standards and rather selective reasoning going on to try and shape the perceptions of this conflict and why people buy into it is puzzling to me. It is so evidently self-serving. The only answer I can come up with is conflicting tribalism and runaway ethno-nationalism on both sides of this over-a-century-long conflict. You pick a tribe and ignore consistent reasoning and rational argument unless those serve the interests of your chosen tribe.
But the tribes are not just Hebrew and Palestinian Arab. The State of Israel, although it does have a small long-standing Levant community of local Jewish residents, is largely composed of Europeans from Russia to Portugal and from Malta to the Arctic Sea. Add to that many Americans (the continents) of European origin. These are all recent immigrants to the disputed land, arriving only in the last century. Then add to that those Jews driven out of their Middle Eastern countries in reaction to the creation of the State of Israel. But these are somehow the original people of the Levant, we are told, when the facts glaringly contradict such an assertion.
Contrasted with that, we have Arabs including Palestinian Arabs, many with centuries long roots in the Levant. They have lived there for far longer than the proponderance of the settler and refugee Hebrews/Jews/Israelis. They lived there since the Bronze Age (not all Arabs came out of Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries CE) and continued to live there until modern times under Ottoman and later British/French rule. They are quite arguably more established than the European settler Jews and the expelled refugee Jews who seized by force and recolonised what today are the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories. And yet the Arab Palestinians are painted as the newcomers while the Hebrews/Jews/Israelis are characterised as the rightful original people of the land under contest. Hogwash. Both sides have ancient and legitimate claims but tribal factions are intentionally blind to that.
It's insanity to buy into either side's myths and justifications without questioning them, but we do it anyway. Why?
Evilroddy.
