"... a stark reminder that genocide is about more than just the premeditated mass extinguishing o human life; it's also about the calculated, and often vindictive, destruction of a people's culture, language, history, and shared sites of community." [source: Gabrielle Bates on X, formerly known as Twitter. 11/27/23.]
Original post they are responding to on Literary Hub: "Gaza's main public library has been destroyed."
The Israeli army is just shooting anyone they think is Palestinian, much the same way that Israel is indiscriminately bombing all of Gaza, including the “safe zones” where they have directed noncombatant civilians to go right before they bomb them anyway. It’s war crimes, plain and simple.
If you watch the interview, you'll know that the girl here and another one sat in their tank and shelled kibbutz for 17 hours straight, and yet they're being hailed as heroes.
From the beginning, we knew Israeli forces were firing at their own people. We knew that Hamas doesn't have the weaponry to result the destruction we've seen. But since nobody believed, now the truth keeps unfolding about Oct 7.
Watch the interview with Yasmin Porat who was at one of the kibbutz's. She said Hamas treated them humanely, she said they were scared but they [hamas] didn't abuse them. The interviewer was taken aback. The interviewer asks if "terrorists" killed all the bodies lying in the ground but she said: "NO, it was UNDOUBTEDLY our forces." Her exact words. Google her name and listen to the interview.
Whenever I see people try to differentiate what is “Israel” and what is the “Palestinian state” I always have a very awkward feeling - which is why I think a lot of people need to reevaluate how they speak about Palestine and Israel, specifically what they define as occupied Palestine.
My father’s family is from a village in Jaffa (the district), which is now part of what most people define as “mainland Israel” or an “undisputed” part of Israel - like that land was acquired legally or ethically and an unequivocal part of what is Israel vs what is considered (at least to some) Palestine (the West Bank & Gaza).
My father’s family had the choice to flee or die and to this day cannot return home to Jaffa. It leaves me with a strange feeling when people discuss a hypothetical “two state solution” as if that land is inarguably Israel and the West Bank and Gaza is inarguably Palestine - my family is not from the West Bank or Gaza, they’re from Jaffa. Proudly Palestinians from Jaffa - they’re not Israeli and never be Israeli, they predate the modern colonial state of Israel.
When people talk about occupied Palestine, they’re usually referring to the 1967 borders and the increasing settlements in the West Bank, when Palestinians talk about occupied Palestine, we’re talking about all of it - every corner of what people define as “mainland Israel” there is a story of Palestinian dispossession - It includes my family and thousands of others.
Leaving this map here for people to get an idea of how much destruction of Palestinian life and communities happened in what people see as an “undisputed part of Israel” - there is a reason the Palestinian population here plummeted in 1948.
To USamericans: don't get mad at people who call you settler/colonizer. get mad at the political and economic systems that forced that identity onto you. the people calling you settler/colonizer are only putting a name to something that already is. The worst thing that happens when called a settler/colonizer by indigenous and colonized peoples is that your pride is hurt. The worst thing that happens when born into the settler/colonizer class is that you are, against your will, defined by the imperialist regime and made to justify its existence. You are coerced from birth to participate in its markets and are passively made complicit in its crimes. The regime uses you as justification for its genocides, theft of resources, and its cruel global hegemony, all for the sake of "securing your future." You, the US American people, are the tool of an anti-people regime. Don't get mad at the indigenous/colonized peoples who call a spade a spade. Get mad at the people who made you into one.
So if Palestinians allow themselves to be subjected indefinitely, submit to Israeli apartheid without complaint, and if they promise to never be angry about the 22,000+ noncombatant civilians Israel has indiscriminately murdered, then Netanyahu will consider them “de-radicalized” and end his genocide, do I have that right?
Who is going to deradicalize Benjamin Netanyahu and the sadistic, far rightwing, Likud Israeli government?