- Oliver Holmes tries to make out this is somehow a balanced conflict Archived Message
Posted by Raskolnikov
on March 26, 2019, 6:22 pm
|
In the long history of apologia for the settler-colonialist regime, particularly at the modern-day fraudian, you have to really go out of your way to stand out. Oliver Holmes manages this in today's propaganda bulleting from the Gaza Strip (he's not there of course, he's in some nice air-conditioned place in Jerusalem). https://www.dumptheguardian.com/world/2019/mar/26/israel-hamas-relations-a-predictable-but-fatal-dance It has become a near-monthly event with a predictable pattern – rockets from Gaza are traded for Israeli airstrikes Always Palestinian aggression first of course. In multiple rounds of fighting, neither side has used its full arsenal against the other. Yet both remain in a constant state of on-off conflict, always appearing on the verge of another major conflagration. Yeh, I'm sure the Palestinians are keeping their Appache helicopters under wraps for when they really need to #### some shit up. This seems to me to just be the writer cravenly saying "Israel has acted with restraint", probably like he was told to. The Israeli military said over the past 12 months it carried out about 900 strikes on Gaza and that Hamas fired more than 1,200 rockets and mortars. During the same period, however, there has not been an Israeli ground incursion into the territory that it occupied from 1967 until 2005. This is the paragraph that made me post this. This is such disingenuous bullshit. Just having similar numbers doesn't make it anywhere near a symmetrical war. Most of the "rockets" that are launched from Palestine are ineffective and certainly don't compare to the best technology U.S. money can buy used by the Israelis. The comparative power and effectiveness of these attacks is HUGELY imbalanced as you can tell by the casualty figures (admittedly these are in the last TEN years, not just the last 12 months): Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces (in Gaza): 2992 Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians (in Gaza):0 Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians (in Israel): 31 So yes, this is really a "predictable but fatal dance" that they have "fallen into". Predictable in the sense that a hundred times more Palestinians than Israelis will die. For reference, here is a table of the relevant figures (and much more at that site). https://www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/after-cast-lead/by-date-of-event |
| Message Thread:
|