After Hamas left Gaza and carried out of a brutal raid in western Israel, killing 1400 Israelis, Israel enjoyed the sympathy of the international community. They immediately retaliated with a saturation bombing campaign. Now many thousands of Palestinians are dead and that sympathy for Israel is all but gone.
Israelis’ Crazy Overreaction
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
5 Comments. Leave new
The 75+year-old overreaction was assembling representatives of an alleged intact civilization, culture, ethnic group(?), from around the world and bringing them back to their “homeland” from which their “ancestors,” who had actually once lived there, had been absent for the better part of two millennia.
Can anyone name an equivalent “repatriation” campaign as remotely absurd as this?
After the Holocaust there was much value in creating such a homeland but the then current inhabitants got screwed royally. Seventy-five years later, we have a similar problem, with the peoples reversed. Returning the land to the Palestinians would mean evicting the people who have made it their home and lived their lives there.
Evicting the current inhabitants didn’t work so well seventy-five years ago. We could instead try to compensate (the descendants of) those who were evicted in 1948 with other land or with money. That approach would fall short in multiple ways, but so does everything else.
Both the Palestinians and relatively new Israelis have been the victims of the cynical imperial game of the US & UK to gain a critical “presence” in the Middle East after WWII.
Speaking of “over”ness. Is anyone else getting a mite tired of how the media keeps permitting the utterance of the fantasy that any location bombed — in pretty much any war in modernity — has been evacuated?
In a city of 25,000, how many of those people are simply too old, too frail, too handicapped, to evacuate? How many people are — bad timing, you — about to give birth or are in the end stages of dying. How many people won’t abandon those people?
I really wish the media would point this out once in while. Instead of ramming the fantasy down out throats over and over.
Gaza is like Manhattan in size and density. Asking the north half of Manhattan to evacuate to the south half of Manhattan is just not feasible in so many ways. (Not that the Gazan militants have been any more reasonable than the Israeli military forces.)