A month after the October 7 Hamas terror attacks, in which 1,400 Israeli civilians were brutally murdered, the world's worst fears about the backlash they might provoke have been confirmed: an estimated 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's bombing of the Gaza Strip, i.e. Nearly half of the population of the Gaza Strip. who are the children.
The numbers speak for themselves. On both sides of this war, there are no standards Just war It is not worth the paper it is written on.
And for all the moral rhetoric, the senseless suffering and destruction are unleashed for reasons of political self-interest: Hamas, to bolster dwindling support in Palestine and beyond for a backwards theocracy based on the nihilistic cult of martyrdom; Israel, a deeply polarized population has been drawn into hyper-nationalist politics in recent years.
Every country has the right to defend itself. But Israeli policy under Netanyahu has blatantly mocked any responsible and far-sighted attempt to solve the problem of peaceful coexistence. Not to mention the politics of Hamas, whose ideology is openly genocidal, and has nothing to do with secular, republican, anti-imperialist politics. Under these circumstances, more violence awaits us.
But even though “escalation is an essential feature of any war,” writes James Dodd Public symposium,'It should not be taken as a determining factor that strictly determines a causal chain of events. Violence has no intrinsic logic, and dictates no necessity; This means that any escalation of violence, as Carl von Clausewitz argued, is at its root a political issue. We enter wars for political reasons, and we only solve them through political means.
A ceasefire is not a solution, of course. But this is the only humane option at this point.
Photo by Salah Ait Mokhtar via Unsplash
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