Disproportionate response

Thank you to Ten Bears for the link.   Again it is becoming clear that the Israeli government is using this event to clear out and claim the entire territory of Gaza as Israeli and belonging to the Jewish people only.  The goal of Israel has always been to remove the Palestinians and claim all the land, all the territory as its own.  Hugs

A friend of the blog, a scholar I very much respect, recently wrote to inquire what I considered to be a “disproportionate” Israeli response to the morally abhorrent and strategically indefensible massacre of civilians by Hamas. Isaac Herzog has presented us with a very clear example of what I was talking about:

As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

Herzog’s statement has the same logic as “settlers aren’t civilians.” Given that this is coming from a president not a student group, the chorus of condemnations should be louder than that drawn by the Hamas apologists. Somehow, I don’t think it will be https://t.co/93SoZI3mBk

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) October 13, 2023

Holding civilians — half of them not adults — collectively responsible for atrocities committed by a democratically unaccountable regime and using this as a justification for destroying neighborhoods with little discrimination, cutting off water and electricity to an entire population, and ordering the 24-hour mass evacuation of over a million people from a tiny land mass with closed borders on both sides — if this isn’t a disproportionate response I’m not sure what would be.