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”.
Your last point is why I feel like what Israel is doing is just straight up illogical, even from a purely selfish point of view. The only thing they are doing here is basically proving Hamas “right” in the eyes of many Gazans, and fueling a fervent desire for revenge. If someone living in Gaza wasn’t already a terrorist, they sure as hell are much much more likely to be one now.
Imagine how you would feel if your home and possibly moved ones were bombed like this, losing you everything or nearly everything you hold dear. You lose autonomy over your own life, you lose your independence and rights. I imagine it feels a lot like losing rights as a minority, or something like getting an abortion becoming illegal, turned to the extreme. And these things being threatened to be done to me already cause me to feel strong contempt against the perpetrators. If pushed far enough, things like this would cause me to become a “terrorist”, in the sense of being willing to strongly resist it in an attempt to maintain my rights and autonomy.
But of course, whether I would be called a terrorist or not depends on how it’s framed, and how much compassion or understanding people would give me. Hell, in the US LGBTQ+ activists, or anti-racist/anti-fascist activists are already called terrorists sometimes.
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.
Their plan is to eliminate all Palestinians and take their land. The more each side escalates, the closer they can get to that; sure, some Israeli may die, but that gives them justification to exterminate scores of Palestinians every time.
No, what Israel is doing makes sense from a strictly selfish point of view.
The question of ‘Why doesn’t Israel integrate the Palestinians?’ is a good one. The answer is numbers.
Israel was founded as a Jewish ethnostate. Those who have immigrated there have done so because they wanted to live in a Jewish ethnostate. So one of the core values of the country is that it is primarily a place for Jews.
If Israel absorbed the populations of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel, the Jewish population would become a minority in Israel if not immediately then within a generation.
I don’t agree with the idea of ethnostates in general and I do believe establishing Israel as one was a mistake.
… But if you imagine the viewpoint of someone who does want a Jewish ethnostate like so many in Israel you can see why this solution is a non starter.
Israel has integrated what, 1.6 million Palestinians I to it’s society?
Something like that, yes.