We're being told that Israel needs to kill civilians by the thousands to eliminate Hamas, because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false.Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious;…— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 30, 2023
the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There's no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs.
the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. You think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not.
And Israel knows this, which is why its preferred solution is to kick all survivors of this onslaught out of Gaza and into refugee camps in the Sinai desert. It knows that nothing it's doing will actually work and it refuses to make the reparations that will work, so its only other option is the elimination of Gazans one way or the other. Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement is not "peace" by any stretch of the imagination, but it might allow Israel to keep its abusive status quo intact.
