The Israeli bombing attacks on the Gaza strip and one Hollywood Celebrity’s response
The ongoing air raids that began Monday on the Gaza strip by Israeli Defense Forces against Hamas top military hierarchy and facilities shared with civilian populations is not “collateral damage” but brazen state terror once again committed against Palestine. Of those killed so far in the air bombings are 24 confirmed civilian deaths (including children and women) with hundreds of others injured; innocent people enjoying the final moments of their lives by celebrating the final days of Ramadan, preparing for Eid al-Fitr. One of the attacked sites was the al-Bureij refugee camp belonging to displaced Palestinians. These are the 2nd set of attacks subsequently delivered by Israeli power apparatuses in the same day, as their police earlier stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem — the 3rd holiest site in Islam — and wounded over 300 Palestinians demonstrators inhabiting the space to protect it from Israeli occupation, and protest against the planned forced evictions of tenants in the Old City by Israeli security forces to increase Jewish presence in East Jerusalem (a war and hate crime itself).
Now the obvious racist and reactionary pushback to the Gaza air bombings are that “Palestinians started it first” since Hamas fired rockets from the coast towards Israel (no one confirmed killed), but the easy rebuttal to this is two-fold: the missile strikes were fired since Israel refused to stop harrassing Palestinian worshippers around the Al Aqsa mosque, which culminated in the eventual invasion by the security forces; the other is historical as Israel has been committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians since 1947 (under the United Nations Partition plan — subsequently forming the nation of Israel thereafter).
These events are very reminiscent of the 2014 conflicts between Palestine and Israel, however the offenses committed in the past couple of days are the worst instance of Arabic-Jewish brutality in recent years. The military offensives by Israel have continued into early morning Thursday in efforts to destabilize the Hamas military hierarchy and important establishments (operation headquarters), and will only proliferate in scope as Prime Minister Netanyahu sanctioned further attacks. Gaza as result, has been hit by over 350 missile attacks, turning the streets of the rightful Palestinian territory into desolate ghost towns as denizens are in hiding, fearing for their lives: “Gaza City resembled a ghost town as people huddled indoors on the final night of Islam’s holiest month of Ramadan. The evening, followed by the Eid al-Fitr holiday, is usually a time of vibrant nightlife, shopping and crowded restaurants’’.
Where do we go from here then? It seems the violence is on an unending vicious cycle with no viable answers that are adequate to both sides. The typical answers are usually the compromise kind whereby anti-Semitism and Zionism (ultranationalist Jews) are tolerated given the set of plights they both have been subjected to. Correlatively, their are the one-sided perspectives consisting of Palestinian anti-Semitism being warranted given West Bank occupation, or Israel’s Zionism being justified given the Holocaust. These types of answers will only reinforce antagonisms and further the violence. The predicament gets even more difficult when legitimate critiques of Israeli policy are claimed by Jews to be a method of concealing anti-Semitism, but this reproach is mainly employed in the inverse, whereby allegations of antisemitism are used to condemn and discredit warranted criticisms of Israeli policy. This means that showing support for Palestine tends to be discredited as anti-Semitic. Additionally, offering pragmatic solutions, including the famous 20th century proposal of the two-state solution (proposed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing two states for two peoples: Israel for the Jewish people and Palestine for the Palestinian people) which was the accepted global view, becomes condemned by Israel to be a threat to its autonomy and hence anti-Semitic.
Israel will incessantly claim that all the lands in Palestine belong to them which serves as the legal and moral basis for their relentless illegal occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But these lands have been inhabited by Arabs for millennia; it is their ancient homeland to begin with, exposing the fact that Israel views Palestinians as an inferior ethnic group that has no rights/protections of their own and deserve to be dispossessed of their roots (lands). Furthermore, there is an answer to this political crisis, which involves a supremely ethical dimension. While Anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands are two conflicts that are connected, both are also disparate in the sense that they are efforts aimed at achieving freedom. Both sides want peace in the region and to end the conflict, but as a rule peace equates to zero violence, which when applied in praxis in this context means that Palestinians would no longer resist Israel’s annexation of their territories. The need here for emancipation for Palestine is vital because their plights revolve around egalitarian justice and human rights, conditions that have routinely been violated by Israeli’s genocidal and imperial actions for decades. Supporting Israel in their inhumane and illegal attempts to appropriate the West Bank and Gaza Strip is a severe disruption of basic ethics worldwide.
Incidentally, on a much lesser note:
Gal Gadot, the famous Israeli Hollywood actress, was recently condemned online by many of her fans and haters equally alike for her tone-deaf Twitter post that ostensibly showed sympathy for both sides, as one part reads: “Israel deserves to live as a free nation. So do our neighbors”. The issue is her lack of courage to even name that “neighbor” (here one can see Sartre’s concept regarding Fear of the Neighbor being fully realized, as Gadot wants tolerance and peace insofar as Palestine is kept at a safe distance away from Israel) as Palestine and simultaneously denounce the persistent awful measures by the IDF, a military organization she was once a member of in her earlier years. While she deserves full condemnation, the typical liberal and Islamic online attacks against her are similarly wrongful: liberal left social justice warriors wanting to “cancel her” and reactionary Muslims wishing her physical harm is morally regressive. Finally, the absolutely hilarious meme down below is circulating social media towards Gadot’s response, which perfectly encapsulates her backwards logic along with supporters of Israeli’s current war crimes.
