
No I don’t dismiss October 7. But it doesn’t justify killing thousands of innocent people, and it only happened because Israeli government policy created radicalized militant groups in the first place. Hamas was propped up by Israel for years. Israeli government policy was to funnel Qatari funds to them to prevent a unified Palestine under a moderate Palestinian authority. In 2018 when Gazans protested, IDF forces gunned them down. The government created radical militants as policy.
It is extremely common historically for the colonial process to radicalize subjugated people. This commonly results in a massacre attack against civilians of the colonizing ethnicity, which is then used to justify genocide. This occurred in Virginia after the Indian massacre of 1622. It was also the justification for the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia.
The 1622 massacre was brutal. Men, women, and children were killed with shovels, ropes, and kitchen implements. 347 English died, a quarter of Virginia’s population at the time. The British then began a campaign of ethnic cleansing across the Virginia peninsula against native Americans. Saying the genocide of native Americans is bad does not mean endorsing the massacre. But the massacre would not have happened if the English weren’t colonially expanding beyond Jamestown.
What I find truly interesting about Israel is how textbook and repeated its justifications for subjugation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are. They’re so well-used historically. Liberia, America, South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, Turkey, Cyprus, Bhutan, Greece, India, Algeria, Germany, Italy. None of it is new. It’s been used again and again and again.