Israeli and American officials, like many of their supporters, have called the Hamas incursion on Saturday “Israel’s 9/11”, drawing parallels between Hamas and al-Qaeda and between Israel and the United States.
The degree of hysteria and the hypocrisy are as mind-boggling, as they are reckless.
Some of the images from Israel are no doubt gruesome – but the images from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, etc have been no less horrific. Two decades of Western and Israeli wars in the Middle East have led to not thousands, but millions of Arab and Palestinian casualties
In the eyes of the West, it seems, Israel has a “duty” to defend its people, but the Palestinians don’t have the right to protect themselves as if they are people of a lesser god! Israel seemingly also has a right to defend and even expand its occupation and apartheid regime, but the Palestinians have no right to express their frustration or struggle for freedom and justice after seven decades of dispossession, oppression and siege.
For European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, “Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity … are acts of pure terror.” But Israel doing the same against Palestinians in Gaza is legitimate self-defense! That’s the very embodiment of hypocrisy and double standard.
To be clear, Hamas is an Islamist group that has routinely used and is still using controversial and unsavoury methods to further its agenda. But like other anti-colonial movements that employed questionable methods, it is first and foremost, a nationalist movement that long condemned al-Qaeda and ISIL, and never staged an attack outside historical Palestine. Unlike al-Qaeda, Hamas has won a majority in parliament in Gaza’s last legislative elections in 2006, and – after surviving an American orchestrated coup – it has acted as the de facto government of the besieged strip.
Israel does not seem to have any answers to these thorny questions about “the day after”. Indeed, there is no telling what will happen after such a genocidal invasion and occupation in Gaza, Palestine or the region in general.
There are already signs of the war spilling over to the north and east, forcing, or rather allowing, Israel to widen its circle of destruction. This could easily lead to the United States and its newly deployed naval armadas being drawn into yet another destructive regional war, as if two decades of forever wars were not enough.
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