#1982 hama massacre

[tomorrowusa]

There is no love for the al-Assad family which had brutally ruled Syria since 1971. Like North Korea, Syria turned into a hereditary autocracy.

Since the civil war began in 2011, a minimum of 580,000 Syrians have been killed. About 6,600,000 have fled the country and a similar number have been displaced internally. Putin's Russia has been propping up the régime for the past decade.

Hafez the father was not much better than Bashar the son. In 1982, Hafez massacred as many as 40,000 people in the city of Hama and largely destroyed it according to The Syrian Network for Human Rights.

Although Hafez has been dead since 2000, crowds struck back at him by torching his tomb.

[komsomolka]

No commentator on 7 October last year - myself included - would have predicted that the war would still be being fought with the utmost ferocity a year on. No one would have predicted a year ago that Israel would be fighting for longer than it did when it established its state in 1948. All wars Israel has fought since have been brief shows of absolute strength. [...]

Under Netanyahu’s right-wing government, the lives of the hostages were secondary to the aim of smashing Hamas. Had the hostages returned, Netanyahu could now be facing a long term in prison. But he has demonstrably failed to smash Hamas, hence the speed with which he has started a new war with Lebanon and Hezbollah. [...] Hamas re-emerges wherever Israeli troops are not. Plain clothes police officers emerge to settle disputes within a matter of hours.

At first, Israel tried to wipe out Hamas’s leadership. It has killed the first and second ranks of officials running the government, most of them in a massacre outside al-Shifa hospital.

But an insight into what is actually going on in Gaza was offered by Israel's latest announcement that it had killed three senior Hamas officials - Rawhi Mushtaha, the head of government and de facto prime minister; Sameh al-Siraj, who held the security portfolio on Hamas’s political bureau; and Sami Oudeh, commander of Hamas’s General Security Mechanism. The air strike happened three months ago, and no one had noticed their absence. This is because Hamas continued to function regardless of which leaders were alive or dead. [...]

Israel’s terror only begets more terror. The destruction of West Beirut in 1982 inspired Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. [...]

On 6 October, the Palestinian national cause was dead, if not buried. After more than 30 years of Oslo accords, Gaza was totally isolated. Its siege was permanent, and no one cared. Netanyahu claimed victory, in September 2023 waving a map at the UN in which the West Bank did not exist. There was only one item on the regional agenda and that was Saudi Arabia’s impending normalisation with Israel. [...]

Today, Hamas has changed the course of events, because the peaceful path to a viable Palestinian state was blocked. All talk of a peace process was a Potemkin-size mirage. Oslo not only failed to deliver a Palestinian state. It created the conditions for the Israeli state to expand and thrive as never before in the West Bank and Jerusalem. [...]

Regionally, the axis of resistance, which for much of the period since the Arab Spring, was a rhetorical device, has become a functioning military alliance. [...]

Palestine has returned to its rightful place, which is to occupy the key role in determining the stability of the region.

Israel’s brutal response to 7 October has reversed decades of Israeli and US efforts to convince Arabs that Palestine could no longer have a veto on Israeli-Arab relations. Today that veto is stronger than ever before. [...]

Of the two strategies, Sinwar’s seems to be working. Whether he lives or dies, that agenda already has an unstoppable momentum of its own. [...]

This war has stripped Israel of its liberal Zionist image, the image of the new kid on the block trying to defend itself in a “tough neighbourhood”. This has been replaced by the image of a regional ogre, a genocidal state, with no moral compass, using terror to survive. Such a state cannot live in peace with its neighbours. It crushes and dominates to survive.

Netanyahu’s war is short-term and tactical. Sinwar’s war is long-term. It is to make Israel realise it can never keep the lands it has occupied if it wants peace.

Netanyahu’s war is a year old and can only continue in the same way it started by meting out the same devastation to south Lebanon that Gaza received. It has no reverse gear. Sinwar’s war has only just started.

How Netanyahu stole defeat from the jaws of victory: Netanyahu's brutal response to 7 October has undone decades of increasingly successful efforts by Israel and the US to convince Arab governments to abandon the Palestinian national cause.

[moon1ight-me1odies]

"what about october 7th"

"what about hamas"

what about:

1937 Jerusalem Massacre

1937 Haifa Massacre

1938 Haifa Massacre

1939 Haifa Massacre

1939 Balad Al Sheikh Massacre

1947 Al-Khisas Massacre

1947 Al-Abbasiya Massacre

1947 Balad Al Sheikh massacre

1947 Al-Sheikh Break Massacre

1947 Bab Al-Amud Massacre

1948 Al-Saraya Massacre

1948 Yazur Massacre

1948 Haifa Massacre

1948 Tabra Tulkarem Massacre

1948 Sa'sa' Massacre

1948 Jerusalem Massacre

1948 Al Hussayniyya Safad Massacre

1948 Abu Kabir Massacre

1948 Saliha Massacre

1948 Ramla Massacre

1948 Deir Yassin Massacre

1948 Qalunya Massacre

1948 Nasir Al-Din Massacre

1948 Tiberias Massacre

1948 Haifa Massacre (Hadar Alkarmel and Marina)

1948 Ein El Zaitun Massacre

1948 Safed Massacre

1948 Abu Shusha Massacre

1948 Beit Daras Massacre

1948 Lydda Massacre

1948 Tantura Massacre

1948 Al Dawayima Massacre

1948 Safsaf Massacre

1948 Saliha Massacre

1948 Eilabun Massacre

1948 Hula Massacre

1948 Arab Al-Mawasi Massacre

1953 Qibya Massacre

1956 Kafr Qasim Massacre

1956 Khan Yunis Massacre

1982 Sabra and Shatilla

Massacre (Lebanon)

1990 Al Aqsa Massacre

1994 Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre

2002 Jenin Refugee Camp Massacre

2008-09 Gaza Massacre

2009 Ibrahim Al Maqadma

mosque Massacre

2012 Gaza Massacre

2014 Gaza Massacre

2018-19 Gaza Massacre

2021 Gaza Massacre

2023-now Gaza Genocide

2024-Flour Massacre

FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸

[septembriseur]

���The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

‘Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.

‘…Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.

‘…By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.’

[probablyasocialecologist]

According to Genocide Watch, dehumanization and the representation of target groups as animals or insects represents state 4 of the 10 stages of genocide. Staging the racialized human as animal was incremental during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and many others. In the more recent genocide case brought to the ICJ by South Africa against Israel, the framing of Palestinians as animal-like was used as evidence. Furthermore, such Israeli incitements also have historical precedents: As Darryl Li recently wrote, “the UN General Assembly recognized the 1982 Israeli-sponsored massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon as an act of genocide”, yet little has changed to protect Palestinians. In fact, some might argue, Israel grew more and more emboldened by the inaction of the “international community”, that as Li argues, witnesses a war over semantics that “gesture to a future in which the powerful decide that if they can’t control the use of the word genocide, it shouldn’t be used at all”. Denying people’s humanity and framing them through animality is often the pretext to materialize the imposition of unspeakable violence, cruelty and degradation through the optics of a security/health necessity and a larger argument about the defense of humanity. It is thus no coincidence, that during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, for instance, the then Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Moshe Feiglin, wrote a letter to Netanyahu in which he discouraged “civilians from staying in Gaza” by cutting off the “electricity and water supply”. He argued for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip”, the “annihilation” of Hamas and the “concentration” of civilians into camps marked for deportation to other countries. Finally, he also propsed that “formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power”. These proposed fantasies of annihilation existed within a larger context where Palestinian life has already repeatedly been called “human animals” or “cockroaches” in 2023, or snakes in 2014, or “drugged cockroaches in a bottle” in 1983.

[...]

According to the theorist of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, by decimating native peoples and their resistance, the ultimate goal of settler frontier violence is to “constitute its principal means of expansion”. In further steps, the transfer, incarceration, replacement and/or elimination of the native population takes place. In this scenario, frontier violence and its racializing semantic taxonomies structure settler colonial societies and the way they operate. Within such verbal power displays, taxonomies classifying the value of sentient life, in this case animals, are produced to signify brutality, violence, but also hypersexuality and beastiality in the racialized Other. While “invasion is a structure and not an event”, the genocidal nature of frontier wars and settler colonial expansion simultaneously separate and collapse into each other in the name of capitalistic reproduction and premature death the minute there are profits to be made from war. Within such settler colonial logics, there has also been a deeply ingrained interplay between figurations of the native, animal and plant life to structure their exploitation, dispossession, elimination and/or replacement. Hence, whether native or racialized life is metaphorized as plant life or as animalistic, both foils function to frame the Other’s personhood as devoid of social, political, or historical human context, and thus also do not need explanation or empathy during states of war and conquest.

[matan4il]

Isn't it ironic? If Israel accidentally killed a pregnant woman in Gaza, there'd be an international outcry. But when a terrorist intentionally kills a pregnant woman in the center of Jerusalem, there's barely a murmur.

Hi Nonnie!

Absolutely this. It's not the first time Palestinian terrorists target and kill a pregnant Jewish woman, murdering her and her unborn child, or just the child (Like in the case of Shira Ish Ran, who was seven months pregnant in 2018, she was shot in the stomach by Palestinian terrorists who attacked on the last night of Hanukkah, and she lost her first child. I remember they insisted on giving him a name and a funeral). And that's before we even talk about Oct 7. I will never, for as long as I live, forget that Hamas terrorists deliberately cut open a pregnant woman's stomach to kill her unborn child, then her.

(the first time I heard about this, it was from a first responder, whose job it was to collect body parts, so this was obviously an atrocity witnessed and recounted by numerous people)

And since I mentioned this brutal murder, I might as well also tackle the ugly lie spread by Muhammed El-Kurd (never not funny to me, that the poster boy for the anti-Israeli crowd is a Palestinian guy whose last name literally means, "the Kurd." Kurds are not Arabs), that this story is lifted from the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which happened in 1982 in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and El-Kurd said it was an Israeli soldier who committed this atrocity. Here's the problem with El-Kurd's lie, though. The Sabra and Shatila massacre wasn't committed by Israelis. It was committed by Christian Lebanese militants, and was a continuation of the violence between Christian Lebanese and Palestinians in Lebanon, going back to a series of mutual massacres between the two groups in the 1970's, during Lebanon's Civil War, such as the Damour massacre.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[battleangel]

ITS NOT ABOUT OCT 7TH OR HOSTAGES!

100 Years of Israeli Zionist Terror

•1937: Haifa massacre.

•1937: Jerusalem massacre.

•1938: Haifa massacre.

•1939: Balad al-Sheikh massacre.

•1947: Haifa massacre.

•1947: Abbasiya massacre.

•1947: Al-Khisas massacre.

•1947: Bab Al-Amud massacre.

•1947: Jerusalem massacre.

•1947: Sheikh Bureik massacre.

•1948: Jaffa massacre.

•1948: Nakba massacre & displacement.

•1948: Israel formed.

•1956: Khan Younis massacre.

•1964: PLO formed.

•1967: Israel occupied & annexed Gaza & West Bank.

•1967: Jerusalem massacre.

•1978: Israel invaded Lebanon.

•1982: Hezbollah was formed.

•1982: Sabra & Shatilla massacres.

•1987: Hamas formed.

•1990: Al-Aqsa massacre.

•1994: Ebrahimi mosque massacre.

•2002: Jenin refugee massacre.

•2008 - 2009: Gaza massacres.

•2012: Gaza massacre.

•2014: Gaza massacre.

•2018 - 2019: Gaza massacres.

•2021: Gaza massacre.

•2023 - Ongoing: Gaza massacre.

Israel has been massacring Palestinians for 100+ years!

Israel is now digging humongous holes in the ground, separating men from women — including male teenagers & children with the “men” as well as elderly disabled men in wheelchairs — blindfolding the men INCLUDING MALE CHILDREN and BURYING THEM ALIVE.

Israel is BURNING ALIVE Palestinian men, women & CHILDREN by dropping 500 lbs Boeing bombs designed for fortified military bunkers onto DEFENSELESS PALESTINIANS INSIDE TENTS IN REFUGEE CAMPS.

Israel is BURNING & BURYING ALIVE Palestinian MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN!

These are CONCENTRATION CAMPS!

These are MASS GRAVES!

This is ETHNIC CLEANSING!

This is a GENOCIDE!

NOTHING STARTED OCTOBER 7TH!

ITS NOT ABOUT HOSTAGES!

[low-cole-timothy]

Hey, remember that things that zionists accused Hamas of, about slaughtering Israeli women and cutting open their stomachs to remove fetuses? Apparently, it was called the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982.

A. The Sabra and Shatila massacre was not carried out by the IDF. It was a revenge massacre done by Christian forces in the Lebanon civil war. I do know that IDF was indirectly responsible for the events.

B. You are justifying a horrible act because it was done before to someone else. That is insane, wrong and mean.

C. Your grammar is still shit

D. Why are you such a coward to hide behind anonymity? You obviously have something to hide. If you had any integrity you wouldn’t hide.

[canmom]

Anarchists also used to have strategies like "assassination" and "terrorism." These seem to work pretty well, no? They worked well for Hamas, at least in the public relations department.

This is obviously bait, but I figure I'll address it anyway. So below some brief comments on the history of political terror.

Anarchists certainly employed assassinations and terror, particularly around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the decades after the suppression of the Paris Commune, a minority current followed a strategy called propaganda of the deed, generally carrying out bombings and assassinations of public officials. The belief was that these breaks with the established order would inspire the broader population to rise up and throw off the state oppressing them. These anarchists were generally prepared to die for the cause, again perhaps hoping their conviction would inspire others.

As programs go, it's hard to name a more miserable failure. The masses did not, in fact, rise up. The main legacy of 'propaganda of the deed' is the enduring image of the hairy bomb throwing anarchist in his top hat holding a round iron bomb with a fuse, which comes from newspaper cartoons of this period. The broader movement increasingly disavowed the individualist bombers in favour of trade unionism, the state made examples of the anarchists in question, and propaganda of the deed became a historical footnote. Anarchists would in general become politically sidelined in the wake of the Spanish civil war, and propaganda of the deed has long ago ceased to be a tactic pursued by the milieu.

Terror and assassinations, however, have been deployed by numerous organisations and states since then to, in general, mixed results in terms of satisfying political objectives. Nevertheless, it seems to be a recurring feature of social breakdown and desperation. The Russian Civil War for example saw widespread terror, both 'Red' and 'White', on behalf of the bolsheviks and monarchists respectively. Perhaps more relevant to you, anon, the Zionist movement establishing itself in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine would frequently employ terror through its paramilitary wings. This violence largely targeted Palestinians, though not always - for example in 1940, the Zionist paramilitary organisation Haganah bombed and unintentionally sank the French ocean liner Patria containing a group of Jewish refugees who the British planned to deny entry.

Terror was of course widely deployed during the 1957 Nakba and subsequently, it seems hard to find another way to describe the violence continually inflicted on Palestinians as anything other than a terror policy. Terror has also been a feature of Israel's other wars, as for example in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. All this terror can also be described as a failure - far from scaring the Palestinians into complacency, it has convinced many of them that the expected outcome of peaceful protest and violent resistance is much the same, that they have no future, and there's no reason not to take up arms. Hence the October 7 attack, a predictably sad result of treating a population as living dead.

As for Hamas, if the political objectives of the October 7 attack were to disrupt Israeli diplomatic normalisation and capture prisoners for a hostage exchange, the outcome of that attack has been at "best" an incredibly ghoulish trade, but realistically a complete failure. For the sake of preventing that normalisation, 30,000+ Palestinians in Gaza have already been sacrificed to Israel's berserk response, and Gaza has been completely liquidated as a polity - whenever Israel finally decide they're satisfied, it will take decades to rebuild even if the millions starving at Rafah survive the next few months. Hamas's survival as an organisation so far is kind of surprising, though no doubt Palestinian resistance will continue no matter what.

The ultimate outcome of all this remains an open question. Through their genocidal actions and rhetoric in the last few months, Israel have certainly made enemies of most of the world and helped radicalise a generation in the rich countries, but they still enjoy the patronage of the USA so... maybe they'll still get away with it. The Palestinians remain trapped in a geopolitical vice, tossed around by decades of stopgap measures, with no good option available to them. Most countries continue to call for a Palestinian state to be established alongside Israel, a plan with a lot of obvious issues given the balance of power, but maybe that's the 'solution' the world will settle on - Palestinian Authority 2.0, kick problems like right of return down the road.

Anyway if you're wondering why people sympathise with the Palestinians, it's because they're being killed en masse, and over the last decades the Palestinian movement has managed to successfuly spread a narrative context which lets people see the events playing out now as a continuation of 1957 rather than 2023. It's also because many of us feel implicated since we belong to countries which arm Israel and provide it diplomatic support. If anything, the October 7 attack at least briefly compromised a lot of that international sympathy for Palestinians. If Israel's military response had been less of an extreme massacre, we wouldn't see nearly so many people mobilising to protest it.

The genocide in Gaza is not the only one playing out right now. The genocide in Sudan is less of a celebrated cause, perhaps because it doesn't share the same sense of being perpetrated by a rich country in our 'bloc' that is dragging us into complicity, or perhaps from a general disregard for violence in Africa, which is often callously dismissed as expected. I haven't said much about it either, in part because I don't know what you would even want to call for - aid, sure, but who is correctly poised to stop the genocidaires? surely nobody would want the US to get involved. shit's fucked, I don't know enough about the history to say more than that.

(In general it is rare to nonexistent for a genocide to end except by force. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 ended when a Tutsi rebel group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front overthrew the government, although it would be wrong to say the violence ended there, it just mostly moved into the Congo. The Cambodian genocide of 1975-9 ended when the army of Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. And so on. Who will eventually play this role in Sudan, I can't say.)

I am, ultimately, just some girl with an internet connection, commenting on things far away that I'm nevertheless implicated in because the UK is a blight on history. I certainly can't control what Hamas does, hell I can't even seem to do much to influence what my own government does. The suicide in the news recently was disturbing to me because 'add my body to the geopolitical hecatomb' is a motive I find very comprehensible. If the affect of the last few months has been anything it has been a strange vice of complicity in horror and impotence - everything I do to try to express my convictions feeling like an empty gesture. I can only imagine how much more intense that would feel to someone in the intensely contradictory position of an anarchist in the US military.

Since Bushnell's suicide, there have of course been several hundred more Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, every one of these deaths equally as tragic and wasteful as that of Aaron Bushnell. There is roughly an October 7 body count every few days, less than a week. I don't get to know much about any of these people beyond names and perhaps on occasion a little of how they died. None of this shit needed to happen, and it certainly doesn't need to keep happening. But as long as the state-egregore 'Israel' continues to act out of wounded pride and delusion, enabled by the US and UK, it will.

I don't know you anon, I doubt you will even read this response, or that anything would connect to you or seem persuasive if you do. You seem inclined to adopt the perspective of the Israeli state. I can't stop you doing that. But it may serve you to consider that the motives of people who sympathise with the Palestinians are not driven by 'yay! terrorism!', if you want to get a more rounded picture of the world, yeah?

[alamwamal]

I was refraining from talking about what's happening in Syria because it'd require a lot of explanation to people who are not well versed in Arab world politics and cannot see the bigger picture, but...

I cannot not share the news of the liberation of more than 3000 prisoners, after revolutionists in Syria freed parts of Hama!

A lot of these prisoners were thought dead and some were in prison for 40 years, since 1982, when Hafez Assad committed the Hama massacre and he killed more than 40 thousand people in a month (nearly the number Israel killed in a year for reference).

It's estimated that more than 100,000 people are imprisoned in Syria by Ass/ad regime including women and children!

After all these years and people thought the Syrian resolution is dead. The happiness cannot be put into words. May Allah Swt guide them and support them. The videos of women escaping from prisons cannot be put into words.

People were sharing a recorded dua of an Imam who died at that massacre and sharing it today after 42 years feels surreal. My tears drop just as I'm typing this.

So happy to see things start to clear up.

[demolitonlover]

‘I’m Crying for All the Victims That Are Going to Suffer’

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Tel Aviv

Oct. 25, 2023

No one understands terrorism more viscerally than Maoz Inon: His 78-year-old father and 75-year-old mother were among those massacred by Hamas this month in southern Israel.

He mourns his parents, and he despairs for old friends who have been kidnapped by Hamas. Yet he also fears that the unbearable losses his family endured are now being used to justify an impending ground invasion in Gaza.

“I don’t stop crying,” he told me in the hostel he runs here in Tel Aviv. “I’m crying for my parents. I’m crying for my friends. I’m crying for those who are kidnapped. I’m crying for the victims on the Palestinian side. And I’m crying for all the victims that are going to suffer.”

“We don’t sleep at night, we don’t eat, we are under emotional trauma,” he said. “We are just broken. But from these traumatized days, we must learn the lessons from history.” And foremost among them, he said, is the need to break the pattern of escalating violence that feeds hatred, creates orphans and self-replicates indefinitely.

Inon is an outlier, but he’s not alone, and I’ve been speaking with several of those here in Israel who lost loved ones to the terror attacks yet argue that the next step should not be further destruction heaped on Gaza, even in the name of destroying Hamas.

These are Israelis in anguish at their own losses and also fearful that their suffering is being used to justify bombardments and a ground invasion of Gaza, killing innocents there and perpetuating bloodshed. I can’t emphasize enough that this attitude is the exception, but perhaps that’s why I find it so majestic.

I’ve been following the Middle East conflict for most of my life, and I can’t remember a time of such despair, trauma and mutual mistrust. It’s heartbreaking to see the collapse of all hope, and this month may be the nadir: the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and a devastating air assault and siege of Gaza that has claimed even more lives there.

In this grim context, people like Inon remind me of the human capacity for empathy and wisdom — two qualities desperately needed across the region. I told him he was out of step with the public mood, for most people have drawn a different lesson from history: that it is important to wipe out enemies who want to kill you.

“We have been doing exactly that,” he said, referring to reliance on military solutions, yet noted that that approach failed to keep his parents alive. “What I’m saying is we have to stop doing what we were doing before. We need a new policy.”

“Someone needs to be brave enough to stop the cycle of blood, dislike and violence that has been going on for a century,” he said.

This may require Gandhian levels of inner fortitude.

“I’m full of rage,” said David Zonsheine, whose uncle was murdered in the Hamas attacks. “But rage is one thing, and policy and plan are another.”

Zonsheine’s fear is that blind fury will propel Israel into a ground invasion of Gaza without any plan for what comes next. Even if it were possible to remove Hamas, he said, something worse may follow — just as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 helped spawn its great enemy to the north, Hezbollah.

A cousin of Zonsheine, a nurse, went missing in the attacks and presumably was kidnapped and taken into Gaza. Zonsheine worries that an invasion would lead to the deaths of hostages like her, and also of countless innocent Palestinians.

“Civilians there are being killed in massive numbers,” he said. “And they are not being killed by Hamas. They are being killed by us.”

That’s a triumph of compassion, at a time of personal and national trauma, that Zonsheine knows will leave him accused of naïveté or worse. But those favoring a more surgical response insist that they are the ones who are being tough-minded, for decades of occupation and military strikes have culminated not in peace but in the worst massacre of Jews in Israeli history.

Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, Vivian Silver, is believed to be a hostage in Gaza, makes the same point. “Mother always said we have to shift the paradigm,” he said. “We won’t have safety in a state of war. It can’t be done.”

Silver, 74, is a peace activist who spent decades volunteering to help people from Gaza. Zeigen and his brother, Chen Zeigen, told me they talk constantly about what their mother must be thinking now. Chen is not entirely sure, for their mother’s beloved kibbutz was destroyed, her family home burned to the ground and her friends murdered. But Yonatan believes she would be appalled by the relentless bombing of Gaza and preparations for a prolonged ground invasion: “She would have been, I think, mortified by the destruction in Gaza, and collective punishment and vengeance.”

That’s where Yonatan comes down as well. He is shaken by the savagery of the Hamas attacks, and understands why so many are determined to invade and bomb Gaza to try to destroy the terrorists forever, even at the price of many civilian casualties.

Vivian Silver lived at Kibbutz Be’eri, which was attacked by Hamas.

“I just don’t think it will bring us any closer to a better position,” he said. “Vengeance is not something to build foundations on. It is not a strategy. How many dead Palestinians will be enough for us to feel safe? I don’t think there’s any number. And it’s just the wrong thing to do.”

If even people like him, personally shattered by a barbaric terror attack, can muster the clarity to understand that relentless bombardment and a ground invasion may not help, perhaps there’s hope for the rest of us. May we learn from their wisdom and humanity.

Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in 1984 and has been a columnist since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. You can follow him on Instagram, Facebook and Threads. His forthcoming memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.”

[jewishicequeen]

Hey, remember that things that zionists accused Hamas of, about slaughtering Israeli women and cutting open their stomachs to remove fetuses? Apparently, it was called the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982.

Oh, took your time to arrive in my inbox, antisemistics!

Let's start by saying outright- I'm a zionist. If you use that word as a slur, you're NOT welcome on my blog. You're also welcome to fuck off if you STILL don't believe the attrocities done on Oct 7th, despite the AMOUNT of evidence we have.

Now. I never heard of Sabra and Shatila, but I googled that. According to Wikipedia the sabra and shatila massacre was done by the Lebanese Forces, not by Israel, though the IDF could've stopped it and didn't. It was met, again, according to Wikipedia, with disdain and critism in Israel and with calls to fire the prime minister of the time. The Lebanese Forces, by the way, was a mainly Christian group.

I can't find information about your claims that these specific deeds were done, but admittedly I only skimmed the article. However, I fail to see how the fact that these attrocities were commited during one group make them fine to be done to another. Make up your mind- are those actions valid during a war, or not? You can't say they're bad when done by Israel's allies(not even israel itself), but fine when done to Israelis.

P.S.

There was an Israeli movie made about this, called "Waltz With Bashir". It might interest you to know I am currently learning from the lead animator on this film.

[rouphicc]

1948 deir yassin massacre, 1948 tantura massacre, 1953 qibya massacre, 1956 rafah massacre, 1970 bahr el bakar massacre, 1982 sabra and sharila massacre, 1994 khalil massacre, 2002 jenin massacre, 2008 gaza war, 2012 gaza war, 2014 gaza war, 2021 gaza war and then hamas, a group of ORPHANS whose lives were DESTROYED by israels and their families were killed BEFORE THEIR EYES, decided to strike back in defence and not let other fellow civilians fall victim to the same injustices they faced. then you know what happened? 2023 gaza genocide. and hostages of hamas were released without scratches and they ate and wore the same as hamas did unlike israeli hostages who when released were missing body parts.

[thatdebaterguy]

Hey, remember that things that zionists accused Hamas of, about slaughtering Israeli women and cutting open their stomachs to remove fetuses? Apparently, it was called the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982.

No? Hamas was never accused of that? Neither the IDF or Hamas did that, that was done by Lebanese people against Lebanese people in a Lebanese civil war, in which the IDF just so happened to be backing the ones who did it, and they backed them before this even happened, and they only sided with them because they had a common enemy, not because they shared some view of morality. If you're gonna use an example, use one where Hamas was actually falsely blamed. Not to mention the fact Hamas is still guilty of god knows how many war crimes over the years. Hamas wasn't even around back then anyway, so I have no clue who said that, even they even said that, but they're illiterate.

[mortallycrispydetective]

Watch the chronology of Israeli massacres to the end:

• Haifa massacre 1937

• Al-Quds massacre 1937

• Haifa massacre 1938

• Balad al-Sheikh massacre 1939

• Haifa massacre 1939

• Haifa massacre 1947

• Abbasiyah massacre, 1947

• Alkhasas massacre 1947

• Bab Alamoud Massacre 1947

• Al-Quds massacre 1947

• Sheikh Brik massacre, 1947

• Yaffa massacre, 1948

• Abu Shusha massacre, 1948

• Tantara massacre, 1948

• Deir Yassin massacre, 1948

• Qubia Massacre 1953

• Khan Younis Massacres 1956

• The Kafr Qassem massacre 1956

• Al-Quds massacre 1967

• Sabra and Shatila massacre 1982

• Declaration of the founding of Hamas 1987

• These are "some" of the crimes of occupation from 1937 to 1987.

note:

• So, who says that Israel's occupation crimes were caused by Hamas, put a stone in his mouth. No 💩

[alain-keler]

Un pays entouré de murs.

J’ai cherché une définition de Mur. Comme dans tous les dictionnaires, les définitions sont multiples. Pour le Robert un mur est un ouvrage de maçonnerie qui s’élève sur une certaine longueur et qui sert à enclore, à séparer ou à supporter une poussée. Construire, bâtir, élever, abattre un mur, fermer un lieu de murs, murer, emmurer.

Les synonymes sont nombreux : Mur d’enceinte, raser les murs, mettre quelqu’un au pied du mur. Au figuré, ce qui sépare, forme obstacle. Un mur de manifestants, un mur d’incompréhension. On trouve aussi le mur du son, franchir le mur du son, au football faire un mur décrit une ligne de joueurs placés entre le tireur et le but lors d’un coup franc, ce qui est assez éloigné du travail que je vais développer, quoique !

En recherchant bien, on arrive à la définition d’une frontière. En géopolitique, on parle de murs, de murs-barrières ou de barrières frontalières pour qualifier les ouvrages visant à contrôler de façon drastique, voire à rendre impossible les flux illégaux de personnes, mais aussi de certains biens aux frontières.

Et puis il y a les drapeaux, symboles d’une identité, d’un groupe ou d’une communauté, brandis dans des manifestations, qu’elles soient sportives ou politiques.

 Les religions sont aussi des murs, souvent infranchissables, tant le travail fait sur des cerveaux dociles les rend inaptes au développement intellectuel. On le voit quotidiennement et mondialement !

Dans l’éditorial du journal Le Monde du mercredi 4 septembre 2024 on peut lire : « Le premier ministre israélien a décidé. Près de onze mois après le massacre de civils israéliens par le Hamas, l’éradication du mouvement terroriste demeure sa priorité. Pas la libération des dizaines d’otages capturés le 7 octobre 2023 et encore retenus dans la bande de Gaza. Au lendemain de la découverte des corps de six otages Netannyahou est resté ferme, insensible aux protestations que son intransigeance suscite dans l’opinion israélienne. Il exige ainsi le maintien du contrôle par Israël des quelques kilomètres de frontière qui séparent Gaza de l’Égypte, en désaccord avec son ministre de la défense ». 

 Le couloir de Philadelphie a été établi comme zone tampon entre l’Égypte et la bande de Gaza en 1979, puis reconduit en 1995 après les accords d’Oslo.

Le mercredi 13 septembre 2005 je me trouvais à Gaza après le départ des israéliens. Le Hamas avait fait exploser une partie du gigantesque mur d’acier qui séparait Gaza du couloir laissant la voie libre vers l’Égypte.

Voici un extrait de mon journal de l’époque et qui sera accompagné de deux photos du passage ouvert, pile et face !

« La frontière avec l’Égypte a été ouverte. Les égyptiens veulent faire un cadeau aux palestiniens après l’incident d’hier qui aurait vu la mort d’un jeune palestinien essayant de passer cette frontière. En fait, cette mort n’a jamais été confirmée, et l’explication de cette ouverture non plus. Il semble qu’il y ait eu une pression telle qu’il fallait faire quelque chose avant que tout cela ne tourne à l’émeute. De toutes manières, je ne vois pas trop les égyptiens faire des faveurs aux palestiniens, il se dit qu’ils sont très racistes à leur égard.

« It’s Christmas », me dit un homme traversant la frontière. Ils sont des milliers à escalader le mur qui sépare Philadelphia road de l’Égypte, en fait ce petit mur est la vraie frontière.

Hommes, femmes voilées, enfants, vieillards, moutons, j’ai même vu une grosse moto portée par-dessus ce mur. Ils sont simplement heureux. C’est une ouverture de la cage. C’est la première fois depuis 1982 et la construction de cette frontière que les palestiniens peuvent quitter librement Gaza. L’événement est de très grande importance.

Le pays entouré de murs, c’est Israël, ou-et la Palestine. C’est comme on veut, en fonction de ses idées politiques ou géopolitiques sur la question, un pays, deux pays, une confédération ou une union économique à l’instar de l’Union Européenne.