A response to Western "feminists": 5 facts about the Palestinian resistance movement and Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, October 7
This is a great article. But this part needs a response:
"What is in question here is not their condemnation of the violence Hamas inflicted on Israeli women, ... Phrases and labels such as ... “rape apologist”, “support for rape and kidnapping of women” ... liberally bandied about.... You rightly condemn the violence Hamas inflicted on Israeli women."
Yes, I do question Western feminists' condemnations of rape or sexual violence by resistance fighters against Israeli women, because it is a lie that has been retracted because no evidence has been found for it - just like the beheaded babies. Both claims were made up by the Zionists to smear a legitimate resistance movement:
"The Los Angeles Times retracts rape allegations against Palestinian group Hamas The allegations, which had initially garnered widespread attention, raised concerns about the conduct of Palestinian fighters during ongoing conflicts. However, following a thorough investigation, The Los Angeles Times has concluded that the reports in question do not meet the necessary criteria for substantiation."
A News
"“From unsubstantiated accusations of Palestinian fighters raping Israeli women to unsubstantiated accusations of Palestinian fighters beheading babies: These claims have spread like wildfire especially thanks to many journalists who are repeating things without any semblance of critical thinking or journalistic caution.” “What’s at stake here is literal human life,” Saeed added. “But Palestinian life matters so little, that spreading incendiary information that justifies Israeli war crimes isn’t a concern for those tasked to punch up to power by virtue of being journalists.”"
The Intercept
As for the idea that the Palestinian resistance fighters targeted Israeli women or civilians specifically, the beheaded babies and rape claims being debunked should give us pause. I present the following evidence that counters this claim:
"An Israeli woman who survived the Hamas assault on settlements near the Gaza boundary on 7 October says Israeli civilians were “undoubtedly” killed by their own security forces. It happened when Israeli forces engaged in fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters in Kibbutz Be’eri and fired indiscriminately at both the fighters and their Israeli prisoners. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling. The woman, 44-year-old mother of three Yasmin Porat, said that prior to that, she and other civilians had been held by the Palestinians for several hours and treated “humanely.” She had fled the nearby “Nova” rave."
Electronic Intifada
"An Israeli woman gave an interview to a local Israeli channel recounting her experience with Hamas fighters when they entered her home following the Hamas-led attack of 7 October." She says they treated her and her children "humanely", echoing Yasmin Porat's account.
"Elderly Israeli Yocheved Lifshitz turns around, shakes the hand of a Palestinian Qassam Brigades soldier and says "Shalom" as she is transferred to the Red Cross. The resistance are keeping their promise to safely return home all detained noncombtants, as conditions allow. Asked to explain that action at a press conference at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov hospital on Tuesday, Lifshitz said, “They treated us gently, they provided for all our needs.”"
Electronic Intifada
Edited to add: This article is a MUST READ. It confirms what the above testimony suggested, that many of those who died on October 7 were killed by Israeli forces, and that the Israeli army, the Israeli government, the Israeli and Western media pinned the blame for those deaths on the Palestinian resistance fighters, in order to demonise, and thus dehumanise Palestinians, and justify genocide against them.
Now you might condemn the "kidnapping" of civilian women and children in the first place, no matter how well they were treated by the Palestinian resistance fighters in captivity. But it's important to understand the facts and the context.
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𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭 #𝟏:
The Palestinian resistance targeted soldiers, army personnel, police and armed civilians (all legitimate targets under international law). I have read one figure (I can't give you the source right now, I haven't saved it) that 68% of the people who died on the Israeli side were soldiers. Yasmin Porat's account indicates that the civilians who died were deliberately killed by the Israelis, perhaps as an instance of the official Israeli policy the "Hannibal Directive", a policy to use overwhelming force to kill Israeli soldiers taken captive, which they employed several times in the genocidal war against Gaza in 2014. If true, this would be first recorded use of the Hannibal Directive against Israeli civilians.
All Israeli women are required to do military service, so half of the IDF is composed of women. They are legitimate targets because they are army personnel, not because they are women. Many of the videos of women being captured are of female IDF soldiers, but Western feminists get outraged by them anyway. In their mind, an armed woman serving a genocidal force and complicit in occupation and massacres is an innocent victim simply because of her sex.
Even in the case of soldiers, resistance fighters aimed to capture them, not kill. They invaded and occupied more then ten military bases and captured four generals. These are accepted facts and there is video evidence of this. Do you think if they could do that, they'd be going on a civilian shooting spree? The very reason Israel is targeting children, women, elderly, disabled people, journalists, and medics in Gaza is because *they* cannot and they are afraid of taking on the resistance fighters.
Here is a video that analyses media footage of the October 7 attacks and mentions these facts (of resistance fighters targeting soldiers, invading bases, capturing generals, etc):
These facts are left out of the mainstream media narrative, as if the resistance fighters went there specifically to massacre and abduct civilians. On the other hand, there is evidence of Israeli security forces committing war crimes against unarmed, surrendering Palestinian men and later posing their bodies with guns:
So the fact that they could not provide any evidence for their claims of beheaded babies, raped women, and this staged incident above (as well as their denial of the al-Ahli hospital bombing and fabricating a recording to implicate the Palestinian resistance fighters), all should cast doubt on the credibility on any claims made by the Israeli military and civil officials, and repeated by Western media.
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𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭 #𝟐:
Hamas officials and spokespeople have denied targeting civilians. I have heard from people accusing them of targeting civilians, that "Hamas has admitted it", which is contradicted by this video:
and this:
The second video explains the circumstances behind the capture of the elderly women and other civilians.
From the first Electronic Intifada article linked above:
"Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas military commander, has directly addressed Israel’s claims that his fighters set out to deliberately kill as many civilians as possible. The Israeli propaganda campaign has included lurid atrocity tales – for which no evidence has been produced whatsoever – that Palestinians beheaded dozens of Israeli babies and that women were raped. Al-Arouri said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday that fighters of his organization’s military force, the Qassam Brigades, were under strict protocol to not harm civilians. But al-Arouri said that after Israel’s Gaza division – the army unit that surrounds the Gaza Strip – collapsed much more quickly than expected, people in Gaza rushed to the boundary area after learning it had been opened, causing chaos. He said this may have included other armed persons who were not part of Qassam. Al-Arouri said that this caused Qassam fighters to engage with soldiers, settlement guards and armed residents, which led to civilian deaths.
Al-Arouri also invoked the possibility Israel used the so-called Hannibal Directive – a protocol that allows Israeli forces to use overwhelming force to kill one of their own captured soldiers rather than allow them to be taken prisoner. The rationale for the Hannibal Directive is to avoid allowing an enemy to have captives that can be used in prisoner exchange negotiations. However in this case, if the directive was implemented by Israeli forces, it would have been used against civilians. Al-Arouri told Al Jazeera, “We are certain that young men [fighters] were bombed along with the prisoners who were with them.” Porat’s account, among others, underscores the need for an independent investigation, one which Israel is unlikely ever to permit. The current propaganda narrative is simply too valuable to the genocidaires in Tel Aviv."
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𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭 #𝟑:
Before October 7, Israelis abducted and were holding a total of 5,200 Palestinians in their prisons, including 170 children (figures from B'Tselem). They routinely torture, rape and deny food and medical care to these prisoners. They keep children like Ahmad Manasra in solitary confinement for long periods of time. Many of these abductees are "administrative detainees", which is their euphemism for keeping Palestinians detained without charge or trial indefinitely.
The reason why the Palestinian resistance uses the tactic of capturing Israelis ("hostage taking" or "kidnapping") is because it has been an effective tactic to get Palestinian abductees held by Israel released. Specifically, they captured young Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held for 6 years in Gaza and treated like a guest.
Israeli society saw him as their own son and pressured the government to meet the demands of the resistance, leading to the release of 1,027 Palestinian abductees. This is a very important point to note, that the IDF is made of conscripts, so literally all Jewish Israelis are required to serve (with some religious exemptions). After their required two years of military service, they then become reservists, who can be called up at any time (and are being called up now to commit the final stage of genocide of Palestinians in Gaza). The minuscule minority of "refuseniks" who refuse to serve are jailed for two years.
So it is the "innocent civilians" that the Western feminists are crying for who are now dropping the bombs on actual innocent civilians in Gaza. When the resistance fighters target soldiers, as they have done, Israeli society erupts in huge displays of outrage and mourning because it is their sons and daughters who are being targeted. They do not make a distinction between soldier and civilian. I have seen one family member of an Israeli captive claim that his cousin is a "civilian", despite being a young, fit man who is almost certainly a reservist in the IDF and certainly served in the army oppressing Palestinians at one point in his life.
Since October 7, the Israelis have doubled the number of Palestinian hostages to 10,000, and two have died in the last week - one was denied food, water and medical care despite being sick, and other hostages report that they can hear screams and that the Israelis break their hands and beat them on their heads, so they are literally torturing prisoners to death. Contrast that with Hamas' treatment of Gilad Shalit and Yocheved Lifshitz.
Norman Finkelstein puts it best, regarding Western condemnation of hostage-taking by Palestinians:
"The crocodile tears have begun over Israeli hostages taken by Gaza militants. But Israel has held the 2.1 million people of Gaza, including one million children, hostage in one of the most densely populated areas on the planet for nearly 20 years. In fact, Israel was the only country in the world to have legalized hostage taking. Revered President of the Israeli High Court Aharon Barak held in 1997 that “a detention is legal if it is designed to promote State security, even if the danger to State Security does not emanate from the detainees themselves,” and that “detention ... for the purpose of release of ... captured and missing soldiers is a vital interest to the State.” (The decision wasn’t reversed until 2000.) If the past is any guide, Gaza’s leadership will swap the Israelis for some of the 4,500 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons on alleged “security grounds.” Gaza is only playing by the book written by Israel."
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𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭 #𝟒:
This is asymmetrical warfare between what is called one of the top five militaries in the world, the Israeli "Defence" Forces, and the unorganised non-state actors who make up the Palestinian resistance. The Palestinian resistance fighters are literally the sons and daughters of the people of Gaza. They ARE civilians who took up arms to defend themselves and their families. Many of them are bereaved men and women who lost their families in previous Israeli massacres. An 18-year-old who joins the Palestinian resistance movement has lived through five wars in her life. They have been immured in a concentration camp which has been blockaded for 16 years, living on the verge of starvation because the Zionists let in only enough food for them to barely survive. 97% of their drinking water was unfit for human consumption, even before the blockade.
They are no different from any other indigenous resistance fighters or Black men and women fighting against racist states in the West. They are a national liberation movement made up of ordinary Palestinians who have been forced to take up arms because all non-violent options have been suppressed (BDS was criminalised in the West, the non-violent Great March of Return was responded to by Zionist snipers killing more than a hundred and wounding 10,000).
So many Western people who claim to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people say, "the Palestinian people are not Hamas, and THEY don't deserve to be murdered by Israel", but this formulation condemns a legitimate resistance movement, and legitimises Israeli atrocities against Palestinians who resist oppression. Only those who fail to resist and meekly succumb to annihilation are considered "innocent" by these "pro-Palestinians".
Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza, voted into power through elections with international observers which have been called the most free and fair elections in the Arab world. Hamas is the government of Gaza. They are legitimate representatives and defenders of their people. They (along with other groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad) are their people, and I don't know of any Palestinian non-combatant who wishes to disassociate themselves from their sons and daughters, their defenders, and their legitimate national liberation movement. All Palestinians resist, grandmothers and children included. I saw that when I was there, and the images of stone-throwing children and grandmothers confronting soldiers are famous. As a colonised people, they have a legitimate right to armed resistance as well, under international law.
The disproportion in power between the Zionist military and the Palestinian resistance fighters is HUGE, especially with US support (they were already sending them more than $3 billion a year, now they are sending much more, plus aircraft carriers, weapons and collaboration between their troops like the Delta Force). The deterrence that the Palestinian resistance have achieved thus far has been with homemade rockets, which can barely do any damage and are very unlikely to cause fatalities. On October 7, they found ingenious ways to attack and defeat the Israeli army stationed around Gaza:
"We should also take a moment to look at the unorthodox tactics of the opposition, not only using boats you might well espy on Lake Michigan in the waters of Chicago, that is to say very small boats with outboard motors, but also paragliders, the fact that they developed these flying contraptions featuring one individual which of course bespeaks the failure of the Iron Dome and all the 'sophisticated technology' (so-called) that led many to conclude that Israel had one of the top five militaries in the world, something that's obviously going to have to be reconsidered. And also their use of drones, and the dropping of grenades from drones, the fact that they were able supposedly to take tanks away from the Israeli military, invaded Israeli military bases."
- Dr Gerald Horne, professor of African American studies at Houston University
All of these instruments are home-made, recycled and cobbled together with the few materials they had access to after a SIXTEEN-year-long blockade, in which the Zionists prevent the exit of cancer patients and the entry of children's colouring books and cement, using the excuse that all of these things may be used to manufacture weapons. The Palestinian resistance achieved this incredible feat alone. Yes, they have allies in Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Iranian government, but the credit for what happened on October 7, this brave and noble Gaza ghetto uprising, goes purely to the brilliant fighters of the Palestinian resistance movement in Gaza.
International law is meant to apply to state actors, so for example, they say that all precautions must be taken to minimise civilian casualties - but this injunction can only be followed if the army in question has access to precision weapons which can precisely target legitimate military facilities. To condemn the Palestinian resistance for their "indiscriminate" rocket attacks makes no sense. If they had access to precision weapons to directly target Israeli military installations (and spare non-combatants), they would surely use them. So to condemn them for their home-made rockets, is really condemning them for resisting at all. They have no other option. Non-violent resistance certainly didn't work. To condemn them for their tactic of taking prisoners to exchange for their own also makes no sense. You cannot condemn them without also answering the question, What ELSE are they supposed to do?
Furthermore, to invoke international law against the Palestinian resistance is hypocritical seeing as it has never been enforced while the US, Israel and other Western countries have been committing their genocides for decades, massacring millions of innocent people all around the world. Laws only apply if they are fairly and consistently enforced. It was the West which created a lawless world, and that wields international law as a weapon only against those who resist their imperialist terror. They set the precedent, so those who condemn the Palestinian resistance for their tactics which contravene international law are really saying that the law only applies to the weak, not the strong. Even those who condemn "war crimes by both sides" are actually only condemning the weaker side, because they know that it is impossible to hold the stronger side to account. So the asymmetry of the warfare must be kept in mind. Any reasonable human being who understands the context must agree that the guerrilla warfare techniques that Hamas is employing are legitimate, in their capacity as non-state actors to resist genocide. And of course, the spirit and the letter of the law is clear: all colonised people have a legal right to armed resistance against colonialism (by any means necessary, as Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X would add).
To judge them from our comfortable positions as people who are not targets of genocide, to say that they are wrong for not neatly distinguishing between civilians and soldiers in every conceivable instance, while the Israeli army is literally decimating, starving and thirsting millions of innocent children, women and men in Gaza, that's just indecent and inhuman hypocrisy.
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𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭 #𝟓:
Settler-colonialism is violence. Western women who are mostly settlers on indigenous land, or from the European coloniser states which stole indigenous land outside Europe, do not see settler-colonialism as violence. Settler-colonialism in Palestine and other colonies works like this: gangs of armed murderers ("civilians") go out to massacre, rape and terrorise the indigenous population, with the objective of making the majority flee:
Then they populate the land with unarmed settlers ("civilians"), including women and children, still guarded by the armed murderers, who attain legitimacy as a military or "Defence Force", and the settlements on stolen land acquire legitimacy as a state because they are recognised by other settler-colonial states.
Western women see settlers as "innocent", "human beings" and "civilians" just like them, people who just happened to be on Palestinian ("Israeli") land holding a rave "dedicated to peace" in front of a concentration camp. It is the very presence of these land thieves and colonisers that is oppressing the indigenous people; they commit violence by squatting on indigenous land. They are protected by armed murderers. So it is impossible to draw distinctions between "innocent civilians" and "soldiers" in a situation of settler-colonialism.
The Western feminist response to the events of October 7 was no different to white women's response to historical raids on white settlements by indigenous people or attacks upon slave-owning white women in slave uprisings in the US. Their outrage at the killings of white settler or slave-owning women and children completely denies the context of what those people were resisting: the brutal violence of settler-colonialism and slavery. Since they are imperialists, they don't see non-white women as women like them, they feel no solidarity with them. In their mind, "All the women are white, and all the Blacks are men." Therefore, all non-white people are "male oppressors", or mute, oppressed masses of brown women and children who are acceptable collateral damage in the maintenance of white, Western supremacy, to which they closely link their “movement for women’s liberation”.
The vast majority of people in Gaza are refugees from what is now Israel, who were ethnically cleansed and forced into the Gaza ghetto or concentration camp. It is their land they were going into on October 7, the lands of their mothers and grandmothers, and driving the settlers away to reclaim THEIR lands.
I would agree that they used terror, insofar as they wanted the settlers to be afraid to remain on Palestinian land, and it worked - dual-national Israelis are rushing to the airport en masse to leave Palestine, because it is not their land. All settlers all over the world are afraid of indigenous resistance, because they know their presence on stolen land is not legitimate. They should be terrified, and they should leave. Oppressors should be terrified to continue oppressing, there is nothing wrong with making them afraid to do that. Here is one example of such a campaign of terror by a group that Western feminists revere, whom they consider their political foremothers and whose sacrifices they honour today:
"After 1911, suffragette violence was directed increasingly at commercial concerns and then at the general public.[4] This violence was encouraged by the leadership of the WSPU.[8] In particular, the daughter of WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, took an active role in planning a self-described "reign of terror".[9] Emmeline Pankhurst stated that the aim of the campaign was "to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe".
Israel is not a normal society. They are not what Western people think they are (though Western people fail to notice their own brutality and racism, so what they feel for Zionists is the solidarity among oppressors). These are just some examples of what the "innocent civilian" settlers do to the indigenous people of Palestine, with the protection of the army, the state and the judicial system:
"Hussein’s son, Mohammed, was a 16-year-old Palestinian boy when he was killed by Israeli Jewish settlers. He was kidnapped on the morning of July 2, 2014, by the extremists in East Jerusalem. A few hours later, a charred body was found at the illegal settlement of Givat Shaul, in the Jerusalem Forest. Mohammed had been beaten, then burnt alive. "
Palestine Chronicle
""On 31 July 2015, Ali Saeed Dawabsheh was burned to death in his home. He was 18 months old. Ali suffered severe burns after his house, situated in the West Bank village of Duma, was attacked by Jewish Israeli settlers. Ali’s parents and brother also suffered second and third degree burns, and were taken to Rafedia Hospital Centre in Nablus.
Two extremist settlers were responsible for the attack on the Dawabsheh home, using Molotov cocktails. One settler was later named as 21-year-old Amiram Ben-Uliel; the other, a 16-year-old, could not be named for legal reasons. Ben-Uliel was believed to be part of a movement known as the “hilltop youth“, a group of young settlers who set up illegal outposts on hilltops in the occupied West Bank.
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Three days later, on 8 August, Ali’s father Saad, who had suffered severe burns to 80 per cent of his body, died of his wounds. In September, Ali’s mother Riham also died of her injuries. Doctors at Israel’s Sheba Medical Centre, where she had been undergoing extensive treatment, told the family that she had “stopped responding to medicine and skin cultivation and that most of her organs had stopped functioning.”
...
Ahmed was the only member of the family to survive the attack. He was treated in the intensive care unit in Tel HaShomer Hospital for five months and underwent a total of ten surgeries, including skin grafts. Almost a year after the attack, in June 2016, Ahmed could be seen with scars on the right side of his face and hands while attending the Palestine Media Forum in Istanbul, Turkey with his uncle Nassr. Two months later, Ahmed’s condition deteriorated and he was re-admitted to hospital. He remains under the guardianship of Nassr and his grandfather, Hussein.
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‘Ali on the grill’ – outside court, Israelis taunt family of Palestinian toddler killed in 2015 arson attack
On 11 May 2018, members of the extended Dawabsheh family were subjected to a second arson attack. “A group of settlers attacked my home at dawn,” explained Yasser Dawabsheh, “breaking a window and throwing a Molotov cocktail inside before fleeing the scene.” Fire crews were able to control the fire before the house burned down.
As the trial of Ben-Uliel continued into June, right-wing Israeli activists taunted members of the Dawabsheh family outside the courthouse in Lod, east of Tel Aviv. “Where is Ali?” the hecklers shouted, “Ali’s dead… Ali’s on the grill.” They were laughing as they heckled. Although 20 Israeli police officers were said to be at the scene, they made no move to stop the protesters.""
Shoah.org
Settlers are armed terrorists, they cannot be considered "civilians".
Graffiti like this ("Gas the Arabs") is common, showing that Zionist society is extremely similar to Nazi society.
Almost all Jewish Israelis support genocide.
It's normal in "Israel" to casually express support for genocide on camera:
"Israel" is the most racist country on Earth:
Their persecution of African refugees.
They treat genocide as entertainment.
Even now, they mock starving children who are being bombed to death - these videos are going viral on Israeli social media networks:
Jewish children in "Israel" get brainwashed from a very young age to believe in Jewish supremacy and Palestinian inferiority.
So by taking all of that context in mind, you must understand now that ‘Operation Al Aqsa Flood’ was an act of decolonization.
To treat Zionist settlers in any corner of occupied Palestine (from the river to the sea) as "innocent civilians" and condemn the Palestinian resistance against settler-colonialism is the same as condemning the resistance of First Nations people against US settler-colonialism (settler women and children were killed in their raids) or to condemn African slaves who rose up against their masters (similar propaganda was used to cast white slave-owning women as the victims of "bestial" Black men of the resistance). The Western feminist response to the act of decolonisation committed by the Palestinian resistance fighters on October 7 is exactly the same as the response of white women against uprisings by Native and Black resistance to settler-colonialism and slavery. Nothing has changed.
They only see resistance as "violence". They do not see slavery or settler-colonialism as violence. All children are innocent, and if children were caught in the crossfire, the only ones who can be blamed are the settlers themselves, illegitimately occupying indigenous land, terrorising indigenous people, and putting their children in harm's way, in the way of the legitimate resistance.
Western women who condemn decolonisation and resistance against genocide will find themselves in the same pages of the history books as their erstwhile settler-coloniser, imperialist, slave-owning foremothers. There is a direct line between them. They too are imperialists and racists, who feel solidarity with other settlers and colonisers, other white women, and are eager to believe and spread any monstrous lie aimed at brown-skinned men (and refusing to retracting it when the facts are known) and who treat brown-skinned women as disposable, less than human. It is racism, pure and simple.