I stopped saying ‘stay safe’ to my family in Gaza…
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
“Living through three wars was less painful than living through those 30 minutes last night,” said a cousin who lives in the north of Gaza, where the assault was concentrated, on Friday. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
The human cost is unbearable to contemplate.
But we cannot and must not turn away.
This article was originally published by Forward on Sat 15 May 2021. Read the original here.
I stopped saying ‘stay safe’ to my family in Gaza. Because there is no way to stay safe in Israel’s most intense assault yet.
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Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept pulls no punches in this hard-hitting piece:
But What About Hamas’s Rockets?
We must be clear: What started this immediate horror was the intensification of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Anyone who asks “But what about Hamas’s rockets?” has a moral obligation to put themselves in the shoes of the Palestinians of Gaza and do some very serious soul-searching.
What is my personal view? I would hope that if I lived in an open-air prison where my family and neighbors were being murdered, my humanity being erased by a powerful nation backed by the most powerful government on Earth, that I would find the moral strength not to fire rockets at the civilians of the country whose government wants me dead and repeatedly attempts to murder me. But I cannot state with certainty that I would not resort to such a response if I lived, as the people of Gaza do, trapped in a killing cage.
Impoverished, caged like animals and defenceless.Demonised and subjected to collective punishment by the Israeli settler colonial regime. The residents of Gaza and their representatives are being blamed for the death and destruction inflicted upon them by an overwhelming military power. They desperately need our solidarity. We must demand an end to the two way arms trade between Britain and Israel and support the BDS movement.