Just Kids
Israel's war on Gaza is killing civilians, including children
Israel's latest war on Gaza is following a familiar, brutal playbook.
One of the world's most lethal, powerful militaries is launching a full-on assault against a captive population and killing scores of innocent people, over a quarter of them children.
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“Green Light”
Israel has imprisoned a population of over 2 million—nearly half of them children—in Gaza, a strip of land about 25 miles long and five miles wide where the water often isn't safe to drink.
The latest round of attacks on the territory comes after weeks of increasing violence due primarily to Israeli settlers, with the implicit backing of the state and military, attempting to steal the homes and land of Palestinians in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. As tensions rose, Israeli police raided the Al Aqsa Mosque on May 10, a deliberate provocation.
Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, struck back using the limited means at their disposal—rockets—giving the Israeli military the pretext it had been looking for to attack the territory’s civilian population. The US, the only country that could conceivably stop the attack, effectively gave Israel a green light, as Spencer Ackerman noted on Twitter.
The current Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza has killed at least 40 kids. Eight were killed in the bombing of a refugee camp on Saturday morning.
“Zionism’s dream”
According to right-wing blogger Bari Weiss, the killing of children is sad but unavoidable.
Weiss, a former opinion columnist at The New York Time, wrote Thursday1 that while Israel's killing of innocent children was "an unspeakable tragedy" it has to also be seen as "one of the unavoidable burdens of political power, of Zionism’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination."
That’s saying the quiet part loud. Weiss’s former Times colleague Bret Stephens tried a different tack.2
“If past experience is anything to go by, an errant Israeli mortar or missile will mistakenly hit a civilian target, generating furious claims that Israel has committed war crimes, along with intense diplomatic pressure for Jerusalem to ‘de-escalate’ and seek a cease-fire — at least until the next round of fighting.”
Where Weiss justified killing kids, Stephens dodged the details. The end result is the same: rationalizing civilian deaths in an utterly asymmetrical conflict.
“Why do we deserve this?”
On Saturday, Middle East Eye interviewed a 10-year-old girl in Gaza who cried as she stood in front of a bombed out building—one of dozens of residential buildings flattened by Israeli airstrikes over the last few days—and described what Palestinian children are enduring right now. The girl talked about her frustration that she couldn’t do more for her people and asked, “Why do we deserve this?”
“You see all of the kids around me, they’re just kids,” the girl said, pointing to a group of younger children. “Why would you just send a missile to them?”
To date, 145 Palestinians have died and 10 Israelis have died, a ratio of almost 15 to one.
The disparity in the numbers of dead is striking and shows the power imbalance at play in the conflict.
It’s part of an ongoing campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing that’s becoming harder and harder for Israel’s defenders to explain away—when they even bother.
I’m not linking to this
Or this
"to attack the civilian population"? Hamas shoots rockets FIRST, and indiscriminately at Israeli homes. The IDF literally tries to evacuate buildings before bombing them. And to just entirely chalk off THREE THOUSAND rockets falling on israelis is not respecting their human right to safety. Still, I agree Israeli is in the wrong for overcompensated so harshly and israel has more ability to make changes first so they should---we must get rid of israel's right wing leadership. And stop right wing israelis from stealing land. They continue adding fuel to this conflict. I want the palestinians to have equal citizenship---that is a necessity to move forward. End the racist nation state laws. But we also cannot place the blame solely on Israelis and we cannot blow-off the threats Israelis face. That's just doing what right wingers do when they disregard the humanity of the Palestinians. Hamas' charter, the governing body of Gaza, literally calls for its members to kill Jews (not just Israelis). And that's just Hamas. Israel is quite literally surrounded by people who want to kill them. You just cannot separate that from the security-state oppression Israel inflicts on Palestinians. Nothing is simple.
Last year you declared yourself in favor of looting small shops, in the US, but then you were ecstatic that the official Star Wars twitter account supported Black Lives Matter so I guess looting Rodeo Drive was a no, [https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption/] and now you're supporting Palestinian demands for actually existing bourgeois democracy.
A binational state was always the only just solution after 1945, and the Israelis in their idiocy have made it inevitable. But the narcissism of American 'leftists' hasn't helped a bit.