Israeli airstrikes destroyed a tower block in Gaza City after Hamas militants launched a rocket and air attack on Israel in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The Israeli army launched Operation Iron Swords against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, with Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the country, is ‘at war’.
Al Jazeera journalist Youmna El Sayed was reporting live from Gaza the moment the missile struck Palestine Tower behind her.
Sources in Gaza said at least 198 Palestinians were killed in the strikes
As far as I’m concerned this conflict can stay on the other side of the world. Both sides seem pretty shitty in a lot of ways.
That being said, isn’t what you described the same way that every country in existence came to be? One group of people kills or runs off enough of the people who lived there and then claims the land as their own. Sure it’s shitty, but it’s also pretty much universal. Why do people present Israel as unique in this sort of behavior? Or Palestinians as unique in their methods of defending their perceived homeland? We’re all trying to impose modern Western morality on something that is inherently barbaric and lawless, namely war, and as previously stated, that thing is also the foundation of our own societies. It all seems so hypocritical.
Obviously we need to be critical about our own history, but with this line of thinking we literally couldn’t condemn anything.
“Slavery? Genocide? Mass rapes? Authoritarian persecution? Oh well, that happened here as well at some point so I guess it’s okay.”
It’s not about blame so much as the more practical question of where the hell these people are supposed to go. If Israel doesn’t deserve the land because Palestinians lived there in the recent past then where are Israelis supposed to live? If Palestinians don’t deserve the land because they couldn’t defend it or whatever then where are they supposed to go?
We all sorted these questions out through violence when claiming our land centuries ago. It seems to me that by failing to allow that to happen here all we’ve really accomplished is dragging the process out for the better part of 100 years. Is that really a better or more moral outcome?