It Was Never About Hostages. It Was Never About Hamas.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal.
“We have many objectives, many goals in this war,” Netanyahu said. “We want to bring back all of our hostages. That is a very important goal. In war, there is a supreme objective. And that supreme objective is victory over our enemies. And that is what we will achieve.”
Nothing the prime minister said here is true or valid — unless by “enemies” he means “all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.
Netanyahu has been fairly transparent about the fact that Israel’s ultimate goal in Gaza is neither freeing the hostages nor defeating Hamas, but seizing Palestinian territory and removing its Palestinian inhabitants. He has openly said that Israel will occupy Gaza via military force, completely ruling out the possibility of any form of Palestinian government for the enclave. He has openly said he wants to enact President Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza, which explicitly entails removing “all” Palestinians and never allowing them to return.
So they’ve made this perfectly clear. This isn’t about Hamas, except insofar as an armed resistance group will make it difficult to forcibly remove all Palestinians from Gaza. And it certainly isn’t about hostages.
And yet, bizarrely, this is how the western political-media class continues to frame this onslaught. They call it Israel’s “war with Hamas”, when it’s nothing other than an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation. They prattle on about October 7, hostages, and terrorism, even though it has already been made abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with any of those things. They act as though the admission was simply never made.
There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about hostages and Hamas after the US and Israel said the goal is the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They told you what this is really about. They said it. With their face holes. They said it right to you. End of debate.
Israel has been seeking ways to purge Gaza of Palestinians for generations. That’s all this has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not Hamas. Not terrorism. Everything about Israel’s operations in Gaza have indicated that their real goal is to remove Palestinians from a Palestinian territory and not to free hostages or defeat Hamas. And then when Trump took office, they started openly admitting it.
How is this not the whole entire conversation every time Gaza comes up? How is this not the beginning, middle and end of every single discussion?
This is like a cop looking right into someone’s phone camera while strangling a black man to death and saying “I am killing this man because I am racist and I want to kill black people,” and then afterward everyone’s still saying “resisting arrest” and “we don’t know what happened before the video started recording”. He said what he was doing and what his motives were with his own mouth.
You don’t get to babble about Hamas, October 7 or hostages in defense of Israel’s actions in Gaza anymore. That is not a thing. If you want to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza, the sole topic of conversation is whether or not it’s okay to forcibly purge an entire population from their historic homeland by systematically bombing, shooting and starving them while destroying their civilian infrastructure, solely because of their ethnicity.
That is what the discussion is about. Not anything else. That and that only.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my mailing list, social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
What really astonishes me is that all my life I've heard these noises about "Peace Process" and "Two State Solution" and we've silently transitioned into a reality where destroying all of Gaza and ethnically cleansing it for the Zionist colonizers, at any human cost being the totally normal and default response. Not even worth discussing. NONE of the voices who gave lip service to either of those (flawed) concepts are even standing up for them as we have lurched into the most extreme of scenarios. Now we are seeing images of concentration camps being constructed in Raffa, and not a single word.
This is like a cop looking right into someone’s phone camera while strangling a black man to death and saying “I am killing this man because I am racist and I want to kill black people,” and then afterward everyone’s still saying “resisting arrest”
Yeah, thanks for the great analogy Caitlin. But this is even worse than that because this is on constantly -- in our faces, flaunted, a gigantic screw you to the world from Israel and the USA -- every moment of every damn day. fiFP fk israel FREE PALESTINE