Gurgen Thanks for the book recs, SIDE BY SIDE sounds interesting.
I've gotta admit that I don't find your line of argument compelling, but before your eyes fully glaze over, I hope you'll see that it's not about me correcting you, more that the additional context doesn't (and shouldn't) alter my judgement.
Like anyone who's been reading the news about this for decades, I am already familiar with a lot of the history you mention, albeit skewed to events since the establishment of Israel as a state, and some of the antecedents of that such as the Balfour declaration …
And as with any conflict we can talk about what the sides think about each other, and what the sides do to each other. The Nazis and the Jews hated each other.
Events such as the Six Days' War follow on the history of the Nakba, which continues today with the diplomatically and logistically difficult issue of the Palestinian right of return stacked on top of the question of Palestinian sovereignty for Palestinians already living in Palestine.
We could debate Israeli claims to indigeneity or Palestinian claims to a right of return and there are many perspectives, from the abstract to the pragmatic.
As far as that goes, I would affirm the descendants of people driven from their homes in living memory have a far stronger moral claim on territory or reparations than claims sustained by religious texts or ancient history.
This kind of settler-colonial question is very much active where I live in Australia by the way.
As in, if I walk downstairs from my office I will see marginalised Aboriginal people (the so-called "long grass" population of Darwin) who are the living avatars of the history in which Britain, then the newly invented "Australia" targeted their elimination by direct and indirect means.
The Australian Commonwealth only stopped trying to eliminate Aboriginal people in an absolutely blatant manner in the era of Israel's establishment.
I used to live a hundred metres from an asbestos-poisoned greenway in central Darwin, which up until around 1950 was the site of an internment camp where kidnapped "half-caste" Aboriginal kids were sent to be forcibly re-educated.
Anyway, like I said, we could fight over the questions of incident, policy and program for the rest of our lives. If I say "Israel should be partitioned" I don't mean to interpolate some sort of ideal process, a fantasy. I get that there are intractable issues in play given the way power is organised.
So that's not my point. My point is that these aren't the most important criteria in relation to Israel's conduct in Palestine or the conduct of this broader conflict, they are subordinate questions.
A horrifying war crime has been committed. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed it as genocide after a two-year investigation, but more than that, the evidence we have confirms it. That's despite Israel having prevented conventional journalism in Gaza during its campaign.
From a moral standpoint, Israel has committed a profoundly one-sided, brutal, premeditated, sadistic and gratuitous genocide. IDF officers have leaked commentary to the press about the horrifying bloodthirstiness of their work. Everybody knew. And the world looking on has also known.
I am saying when events like this take place, people in the world should ask "What should happen?"? Collectively, whether it's by the collapsing "rules-based order" of the era of nation-states, or it's by Elon Musk's fiat, or it's by way of alien invasion, we should want a politics that moves towards justice.
We seem to be living in a world that continues to permit and gloss over genocide. We should care about this and not walk past it.
