Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib refused to apologize Wednesday for saying on Tuesday that Israel is to blame for the hospital explosion that day in Gaza, an accusation that sparked political backlash against her from Republicans as Israel denies fault.
Tlaib joined thousands of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza during a solidarity rally hosted by the left-leaning group Jewish Voice for Peace at the National Mall. She was visibly emotional, at times pausing her speech to openly weep and criticizing lawmakers who have not backed a ceasefire resolution.
Here’s the story of the last hostage negotiation between Israel and Hamas. Note that Israel released about half the prisoners from its side of the exchange after Shalit’s release.
Hamas, is, in fact, a cause. Those Israeli civilians were not murdered by some kind of bad-faith negotiation, they were murdered by people who decided to murder them. They were raped by people who decided to rape them. They were kidnapped by people who decided to kidnap them. We absolutely must blame the actual perpetrators of these atrocities, and not hand-wave them away as just a symptom.
The thing is: The atrocities themselves are symptoms. A free Palestine wouldn’t foster the conditions necessary for this kind of bullshit to happen at a large scale.
Note: I condemn any and all murder of civilians.
Humanity wouldn’t foster the conditions necessary for these things to happen. If the people in Hamas had any humanity left in them, they could not have done it. Is it not a symptom of their decisions, as people? Is it not a symptom of their sheer depravity?
A “Free Palestine” is entirely hypothetical, but back in Mandatory Palestine, the Muftis broke bread with Hitler and talked plenty about ridding the world of Jews. They launched pogroms against the Jews. They refused any kind of deal for Jews to even have a small piece of territory, even 20%—look up the Peel commission. They killed Jewish civilians, they made Britain ban Jews from purchasing land… The very prospect that Jews might want to peacefully buy unsettled land in their indigenous homeland was met with violence.
Today, while Israel is not at peace with the West Bank, nothing nearly so atrocious has happened there. The debate is not over civilian deaths, it’s over settlements and rocks and territory.
But Hamas reacted to to Israel’s unilaterally ending the occupation in Gaza by dramatically ramping up rocket fire. Hamas explicitly wants to kill Jews all over the world.
They’re human actors who decide to shed their humanity and brutalize civilians. When humans decide to do that, they’re not symptoms, they’re morally culpable agents.
The thing is: You normally can’t gather large numbers of those people and convince them to attack random civilians, especially when it involves a very good chance of dying. There’s a very specific combination of desperation and hopelessness that makes things like these
That’s just so wrong I can’t… Every year innocent people die in the West bank at the hands of the IDF and settlers. Also the “rocks and territory” are people’s homes. People are getting chased out of their homes for the sin of being born on land Israelis wanna settle. The West bank is definitely preferable to Gaza, but 7000 civilians died there since the Israeli occupation. The current state of the West bank is not a good argument against Hamas.
There was the whole blockade mess. That’s the cause of the rocket fire. Hamas has been pretty explicit about that, and signed two ceasefires before that had them stop launching rockets in exchange for Israel lifting the blockade (the blockade wasn’t lifted, so the rocket attacks came back).