At 5:40 a.m. on Aug. 10, the IDF Spokesperson sent a message to reporters informing them of an Israeli airstrike on a “military headquarters located in Al-Taba’een school compound near a mosque in the Daraj [and] Tuffah area, which serves as a shelter for residents of Gaza City.”
Shortly after this announcement, shocking images from Al-Taba’een school circulated around the world, showing piles of dismembered flesh and body parts being removed in plastic bags. The images were accompanied by reports that around 100 Palestinians had been killed in the Israeli attack, with many more hospitalized. Most of those killed were in the middle of fajr, or dawn prayers, at a designated space inside the school compound.
The IDF announcement explicitly stated that the school “serves as a shelter for residents of Gaza City,” meaning that the IDF knew refugees had fled there in fear of the army’s own bombings. The statement did not claim that there was any gunfire or rocket attacks from the school, but that “Hamas terrorists … planned and promoted … terrorist acts” from it. Nor did it claim that the civilians who took refuge in the school were given any warning, only that the army had used “precision weapons” and “intelligence.” In other words, the army bombed a populated shelter knowing full well the deadly repercussions its assault would inflict.
This dehumanization has reached new heights in recent weeks with the debate over the legitimacy of raping Palestinian prisoners. In a discussion on the mainstream TV network Channel 12, Yehuda Shlezinger, a “commentator” from the right-wing daily Israel Hayom, called for institutionalizing rape of prisoners as part of military practice. At least three Knesset members from the ruling Likud party also argued that Israeli soldiers should be allowed to do anything, including rape.
But the biggest trophy goes to Israel’s Finance Minister and Defense Ministry deputy, Bezalel Smotrich. The world “won’t let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned,” he lamented at an Israel Hayom conference earlier this month.
Again, Jewish people are not synonymous with Israelis. Those 1.5% Jewish people were not the zionist colonizers. They had existed there prior to Israel. Israel was created by colonizers who espoused the ideology of zionism, that the Jewish religion had a right to it’s own state and that it had the right to take land away from other people to make that state. This ideology is still in practice today. They are slowly committing ethnic cleansing to expand their state. They believe they have a right to significantly more than just Gaza or the West Bank. Which they never had the right to begin with. They displaced millions of people from their homes that had been there for centuries. Millenia in some cases. It is colonization.
Was manifest destiny wrong? Was it wrong for the American settlers to displace native Americans, to steal their land and ethnically cleanse them? Then it is absolutely unequivocally necessarily wrong for the Israelis to do the same to Palestinians.
It seems that you are arguing that only the Jewish people who stayed or managed to return to the region prior to the 18 or 1900s count as “real” Jews, and those that came after the foundation of Israel are Europeans faking being Jews for the purpose of colonizing the middle east?
I never made any statement on the legitimacy of anyone’s identity as Jewish. Israel is a country. Israelis are citizens of that country. Jewish people are Jewish people. Israelis are not one and the same with Jewish people.
Jewish people who existed in the region prior to the nakba and the colonization of Palestine were not Israelis. They were not zionists. They coexisted with Muslims in Palestine. Israel was conceived by zionists in Europe. It was a deliberate colonization effort. It didn’t just naturally occur amongst people already living there. Europeans traveled to the region and colonized it, much the same as other Europeans did to North America, Australia, South Asia, etc.
We see all those other colonization efforts as evil and genocidal, which they were. It is much the same with colonization of Palestine. Palestinians should always have had their own nation. They have been told multiple times throughout history both before and after the nakba that they would have their own nation. Israel colonized Palestine and evicted Palestinians from their homes, stole their land from them. They didn’t immigrate to the region to coexist with Palestinians. They came to steal their land, get rid of them, and make their own state on that stolen land.