What do you call people who fight on their own land against foreign soldiers?
JVL Introduction
Amira Hass, daughter of Holocaust survivors, is an Israeli citizen who has lived in and reported for Haaretz from the occupied Palestinian territory, Gaza and then Ramallah, for the last thirty years or so.
Here she reports on a difficult conversation with a friend whose relative, a soldier in the Hamas army, was killed recently.
The media would call him a “terrorist”. Hass refuses to do so: “Terrorist” is a generic, condescending term, deliberately devoid of any historical, social and political context, and it fogs our ability to understand and analyse the situation.”
To label as terrorists those “who are fighting within their territory, in Gaza, against an occupying army and the soldiers of a foreign army” is wrong. Hass calls them “fighters”.
“It is easy,” says Hass, “to say these young militants have been brainwashed, that they hate Jews, that they want to see Israel eliminated. But it’s harder and more accurate to say that they have courage, and that they are ready to die, because the reasons to live – and not just to merely survive – have steadily diminished in Gaza, which Israel cut off from the rest of the world long before the war.”
What Israel won’t see is that the oppressed Palestinians, including those who are opponents of Hamas and despite seven months of an appalling war on them, will no longer go along with their oppression.
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Mon 20 May 2024. Read the original here.
What do you call people who fight on their own land against foreign soldiers?
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“It’s very easy to say that these young militants have been brainwashed, that they hate Jews …” Absolutely, too easy, usually wrong. But in interviews, video clips &c we regularly hear ‘Yahud’, which normally translates as ‘Jew’ or other forms of the noun. But when Palestinians say ‘Yahud’ is the real meaning ‘Israeli(s)’, ie the intention is to refer to Israelis who are perpetrating the oppression, not to Jews generally, and even when referring angrily to their persecutors in the Arabic word for ‘Jews’, they don’t mean all Jews as Jews, and don’t consider all Jews as their enemy? Is that correct? Thanks for clarification.
‘It’s very easy to say that these young militants have been brainwashed, that they hate Jews, that they want to see Israel eliminated”. Many do see all Israeli Jews as brought up to kill them and get away with it. It’s a lot more to do with life experience than the old anti-Semitic tropes. Every Israeli child is seen, by some, as a murderer in the making. As a lethal weapon pointed straight at them. That will himself be brainwashed into seeing the indigenous as vermin, to be got rid of, and that doing so is to serve some higher purpose. To be fully trained, kitted up, and taught of the ‘virtue’ of killing children whenever a vaguely workable cover story can be concocted. Confident in the knowledge that their ‘spokesmen’ and the Western worlds ‘journalists’ will do their duty. If a Palestinian decides, on this basis, to reciprocate, he fully expects to be killed whilst doing so. How is it that every trope they sling at Palestinians is somehow projection?
Israel has exposed itself as a barbaric State with no right to exist! And even more so its Western supporters! Whilst genocide continues UK newspapers carry pictures of King Charles III festooned with his medals: is this what we value most?
I have never been particularly proud of my political cynicism but have always felt somehow forced into it. Then I discover it has not gone far enough. Are we now to be expected to vote for some raft of “socialist” goodies for us brought to us by obedient operatives working hand in glove with genocide for the “other”? Doesn’t this remind you of something? Did I really imagine I would never have this choice? And we used to dismiss this problem as arising from some kind of flaw in the character of certain foreigners. The same mechanism over and over again.
“What do you call people who fight on their own land against foreign soldiers?”
The same as we called the French Resistance fighters attacking and killing the German occupiers of their land in WWII, for my money.