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Is Israel capable of visiting a holocaust on the Palestinians?
The old saw which holds that “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it,” has never held more relevant than now, over these past few weeks during which unremitting death and destruction has been visited upon the people of Gaza by the Israel Defence Forces in response to Hamas’ incursion into southern Israel on October 7 and its devastating result in terms of Israeli casualties and the hostages taken.
The mantra that the Hamas offensive operation on October 7 was unprovoked is an ahistorical absurdity. Confining 2.3 million people to the misery of existence on a latter day reservation for seventeen years is the very definition of a provocation. Routinely bombing and killing them over that time is a provocation. Controlling what goes and what comes out is a provocation. Illegal settlements expansion across the West Bank is a provocation. The decades-long occupation of the West Bank is a provocation. The Nakba of 1948 remains a provocation.
The violence unleashed by Hamas was ugly in the extreme. But an ugly occupation, siege and oppression does not give rise to a pretty resistance. Of this, history is in no doubt. Vietnam, Algeria, Angola, Ireland, Nicaragua, El Salvador — the experience of each has been of the violence of the colonised being but a pin prick compared to the violence of…
