catculationAfter six months of war, I fear we may lose Palestine completely | Raja Shehadeh
cavemanI’m for Palestine and their right to self defense and have their land back from Israeli robbers, but:
Before they were fighting to have their land back. Now they have to fight not to be genocided
On past conflicts, they always lost much more than Israel
Israel is military much more powerful
How can Hamas have thought that the situation would improve, even if Palestinians deserve freedom?
I’m coming to the sad conclusion that indeed Palestine will disappear, like the indigenous people disappeared in the US.
If they are lucky they will preserve they culture like the Jews did after being kicked out by Rome, and will come back 2000 years later, when they have more technology.
Is this a recurring pattern of people/cultures living in this region? I know of curds and other people who seem to suffer as well from a similar fate.
It was pretty clear that Palestine was going to disappear if the course of history didn’t change, and arguably is already gone. One can see that there’s simply no viable state of Palestine left—just fragments of land surrounded and controlled by an apartheid regime—by looking at the map.
If one were charitable, one could say that Hamas took an accelerationist approach as a hail Mary attempt to fight it. Or, as I think, they’ve gone down the path that so many radical groups in history have: Deciding that achieving their goal is worth sacrificing the people they originally set out to save, possibly even holding those people in contempt for not joining the noble struggle.
In any case, the only motive for the October 7th attack that sense to me is that Hamas wanted to provoke Israel into an all-too-predictable overreaction, to draw in the West Bank and other Arab powers, to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage, or both. Months later, we can see that it’s not not working. They are closer to diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state by a number of nations than they have been at any point in decades.
At what a terrible price, though.