The Biggest Lie We're Being Told About The Gaza Assault Is That It Is Necessary

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The second-biggest lie we’re being told about the US-backed Israeli demolition of Gaza is that it is beneficial, and will lead to peace. The biggest lie we’re being told about it is that it is necessary.

The demolition of Gaza is not beneficial and will not lead to peace because, as we have discussed previously, it’s impossible to bomb a population into submission and obedience. Even if every member of Hamas is killed, Israel’s horrifying actions in Gaza will have radicalized far more people toward violent resistance against the occupation. Hamas is incapable of producing recruitment materials more effective than the footage Israel itself is creating by incinerating Palestinian families in full view of the entire world.

The demolition of Gaza is not necessary because there are real pathways to a true and lasting peace which do not require a single bomb to be dropped, and there are also very easy ways to return to the abusive status quo of October 6 without dropping a single bomb.

The path to a true and lasting peace in the region would be for everyone to sit down at the negotiating table, for Israel to right the wrongs of the past from 1948 onward, for Israel and its wealthy allies to invest heavily in financial reparations to Palestinian families instead of in bombs, and for Israel to completely change its nature and organization so that it is no longer a murderous apartheid state held together by endless violence and abuse.

This path would be difficult. Far more difficult than just raining hellfire on babies. It would be a long, arduous, two-steps-forward/one-step-back process that would require tremendous sacrifice, profound humility, the acknowledgement of many past offenses long held unacknowledged, a lot of tears, and a lot of healing. But it could be done.

Of course it could be done. There’s no basis for the belief that it can’t. If you can come together and make tremendous effort for war, you can come together and make tremendous effort for peace. The only way to believe such a peace is impossible would be to believe Hamas attacked Israel completely unprovoked and out of the blue, solely because they are evil and hate Jews, and thus cannot be negotiated with because they are all orc-like subhumans who are incapable of basic human rationality. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe this.

But let’s say you’re not up to the herculean task of establishing a lasting peace. Let’s say that goal sounds too naive and idealistic to your world-weary ears. Let’s say you desire nothing other than a return to the uneasy, abusive, highly militarized status quo of life before October 7. Well, that’s actually always been totally achievable too.

This is totally achievable because the damage Hamas inflicted on October 7 was completely avoidable, and was only able to occur due to the negligence and/or malfeasance of Israeli intelligence and military forces. If measures were taken to simply ensure that such colossal errors never again occur, then the abusive status quo of defending Israelis with the Iron Dome and border enforcement would work as fine post-October 7 as it did pre-.

Either because of negligence, arrogance, or for some other reason, the Hamas offensive on October 7 was left as undefended as could possibly be. Israeli defense forces did not respond for nine hours despite having received ample warning that an attack was coming for months, from both their own intelligence services and from Egyptian intelligence. No attempt was made to warn the Nova music festival of an impending attack despite Israeli security forces being aware the day before that an attack was coming, resulting in hundreds of deaths and captured hostages. The attack was met with so little resistance that Hamas themselves were reportedly surprised by how many Israelis they were able to capture and kill, their surprise perhaps due to the fact that they’d spent two years training right out in the open less than a mile from the border for an air, sea and land attack using motorized paragliders, drones and motorboats.

Then, either because of unpreparedness, incompetence, or for some other reason, IDF forces made the death toll from the attack significantly worse than it would otherwise have been by killing Israelis during the fighting. Numerous eyewitness accounts from Israelis who were on the scene, along with many reports from Israeli media, make it clear that IDF troops were firing indiscriminately into areas full of Israelis. Last month Netanyahu advisor Mark Regev acknowledged on MSNBC that the Israeli death toll from October 7 had been reduced because Israel had misidentified hundreds of Hamas fighters as Israeli because their bodies had been so badly burned by IDF fire, which logically means the Israelis said to have been burned alive by Hamas were actually probably themselves burned by IDF fire.

So it is false to say that it is necessary to destroy Hamas to keep Israel safe. All that is necessary to keep Israel safe is to do a deep investigation into exactly what happened that caused Israel’s military and intelligence services to fail so spectacularly on October 7, punish everyone who needs to be punished, and take steps to make sure those spectacular failures never happen again. Hamas is incapable of posing an existential threat to Israel, and is incapable of executing another attack like October 7 if Israeli military and intelligence services actually do their jobs.

None of this was necessary. Israeli forces could have heeded the intelligence which said an attack was coming, prepared accordingly instead of leaving itself completely undefended, repelled the attack while allowing (and causing) vastly less damage to its own people, negotiated for whatever few Israeli hostages Hamas were able to capture under those circumstances, and returned to the status quo.

Even after the October 7 attack as it actually occurred, no attack on Gaza was ever necessary. Israel could have fought off the attack, negotiated for the hostages, and then taken steps to ensure its military and intelligence services never repeat their massive faceplants which led to such losses.

Even now they could still halt their onslaught and return to the abusive status quo of October 6. There’s no reason they can’t just stop and make sure they can repel future Hamas attacks. Yes, Israel’s bloodshed in Gaza has radicalized a generation of future Palestinian resistance fighters, but that’s going to happen to a much greater extent anyway if the murdering continues. 

They can just stop. They could have stopped at any time. But they’ve kept going instead, fueled by hatred and vengeance and a pre-existing desire for another land grab from the Palestinians. And the world has been fed a pack of lies to manufacture our consent for it.

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