So standing soldiers of the occupying army taken from a military kibbutz mere miles from the world's largest open air concentration camp? Hind al-Rajab was 6 years old and was found with hundreds of bullets inside her body. This is not a game Israel can afford to play, so let's just rewind to the beginning and ask how many the Irgun and Haganah killed and bombed to strong-arm the British into giving them Palestine? Or we can skip ahead a few decades and start here: https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and.... It's almost like Europeans have no business occupying the Middle East.
Fair enough, that particular kibbutz is not military, but most in the vicinity around Gaza were, and as I'm sure you know, the killed hostages along with most adult Israelis were either serving or former members of the IDF, the army of the occupying state that was formed by the merging of the Irgun and Haganah and still shares much of the same people and ideologies.
Yes, both of those kids were killed by Israel as clearly stated in your link, along with many others, because Netanyahu preferred carpet bombing as many Gazans as possible and didn't care whether it included hostages.
The defense of murder, rape, Holocaust denial, blood libels -- all grist for the Bitchat for Gaza and HN mill. Man, what a tidal wave of antisemitism we're experiencing.
Yes, antisemitism, in the same way it was anti-Americanism for the Viet Cong to resist the American occupation of Vietnam and that famous terrorist Mandela to resist apartheid South Africa. Desperate people who have heinous things done on them for 70 years do desperate, heinous things, and no-one is more desperate and more wronged than the Palestinians. Again, 70 years. It's almost like Europeans don't belong in the Middle East. Remind me what Netanyahu's real name is again? Also, since I'm sure you wouldn't want to be intellectually dishonest, I'm sure you no doubt equally agree that any criticism of Saudi Arabia, if it were doing anything remotely as heinous as Israel has for the last 70 years, would be Islamophobia, right? Right?
Is that what you see happening? Because I see most Western powers continuing to fund and enable Israel to act with impunity while reserving their harshest criticism for Hamas - the resistance movement set up in 1984, 40 years after Israel invaded Palestine, by the children who had grown up knowing nothing else. An occupier does not get to set the terms of how a desperate occupied people resist, least of all after 80 years, which was a lot longer than Vietnam lasted, and is much worse than South African apartheid. There's a reason Mandela was vehemently pro-Palestine. We can talk about how Hamas and the Palestinian people chose to resist their occupiers and hold them accountable for their relatively benign crimes once the occupation is ended. Right now, Westerners can't even admit that occupation exists, so we're nowhere near that, and virtually any criticism of Hamas is actually an attempt at deflection and maintaining the status quo of the last 80 years.
I'm not a "Western power". I am a person, and as such I am entitled to make my own personal judgments on ethical matters.
(But, yes, what Israel is doing is occupation, and most Western countries are explicitly or implicitly supporting it, including materially. And that is also wrong.)
I'm really interested in your reasoning, specifically this part:
> It's almost like Europeans don't belong in the Middle East.
What is "European" in this case and where do they belong? Do we measure by skin tone, genetics or language? What about birth place?
Wherever and whoever you are, your ancestors have definitely killed to be there, which lead you to being here somewhere.
So, where do we send white people? Can we do the same for asians/christians/arabs/blacks/people with glasses? And most important, what do we do with mixed heritage people? How pure must the blood be to consider them of some certain "race"?
Europeans are people, then and now, whose families have lived in European lands for hundreds of years, but believe they have the biblical right to "return" to a land they have no connection to and "settle on" (steal) the land and houses of Palestinians whose families have lived in those lands for almost a thousand years. This is common sense, and you know full well you would never entertain such a claim from a holy book of any other religion. No amount of semantic games and moving the goalposts changes this fact, or the fact that most "returning" Israelis were European Jews who changed their names to conceal that fact.
Odd that you talk about concentration camps when the George Washington of Palestinian nationalism collaborated with Hitler and help recruit Muslim SS troops in order to commit actual genocide.
"In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world." --
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-mufti-and-the-f-uum....
You're right, that historical event of WWII involving at most 20,000 Arabs absolutely gave Europeans the right to occupy a land they have no link to and conduct a genocide killing hundreds of thousands and ethnically cleansing millions more. Wait, were the Irgun and Haganah time travellers who predicted this historical event? Is that why they started moving towards their goals of Zionist occupation, colonialism and terrorism in the 19th century?
What about this, does this make the Zionists anti-semitic too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement It's almost like Zionists are closer in ideology to the Nazis than they want to admit.
Sure it is, the people that had been living there - Muslim, Jew and Christian - for almost a thousand years in relative harmony never actually existed and had no name or identidy whatsoever until Israel arrived in 1948 to give them one.
