“We must now resist the dizziness and intoxication of revenge”

VSher Ofer, more than a month has passed since October 7th. Today, after forty days of war, forty thousand tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza. This is equivalent to three bombs dropped on Hiroshima! More than 11,000 Palestinian civilians (according to figures from the health ministry in Gaza, under Hamas control) were killed, many of them children and women. More than 2,000 died under the rubble and more than 30,000 were injured. More than two million people live under threat of bombing – including phosphorous bombs (as stated by the NGO Human Rights Watch) –, deprived of water, food and electricity… it’s terrifying.

The proportionality of the number of victims in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is disturbing. One of you against twenty of us! What is even more disastrous is whether revenge must be proportional to an Israeli’s supposed worth. To avenge the murder of 1,400 people on October 7, we would have to kill around 20,000 to 30,000 of us! According to an Israeli minister, there would be nothing wrong with two and a half million people being killed.“human animals”. (Amichay Eliyahu, heritage minister, was suspended from the Israeli government on November 5 after saying the use of nuclear weapons on Gaza was “one of the possibilities”. On October 9, announcing the siege of the enclave, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “We fight human animals, and we act accordingly. »)

You were an advisor to Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by terrorism rooted in many extremists in Israel. This terrorism which persuaded them that a Palestinian state was a threat to their security, without telling them that giving Palestinians the power to determine their fate was in fact a major element in ensuring this security and their prosperity.

Since 1993, we have been waiting for our state and our self-determination. Instead of leaving the 22% of land needed to establish our state and end the conflict, you assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. You defeated the Camp David negotiations and imposed your presence on us in the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The second Intifada broke out and a wall was built between us, even within our lands. You besieged Yasser Arafat until he was martyred.

Injustice and oppression

The peace camp collapsed in the eyes of our two peoples, with the intensification of colonization and the Judaization of Jerusalem. The Annapolis conference at the end of 2007 was promising, but Israel put Ehud Olmert in prison (former prime minister from 2006 to 2009, Ehud Olmert was detained from February 2016 to July 2017 after his prison sentence for corruption). Benjamin Netanyahu, “king” of Israel, has been in power since 2009. He killed the dream of a Palestinian state. He imposed a stifling siege on Gaza, enabled the financing of the Hamas-led coup and intensified settlement activities. Donald Trump’s rise to power was a death blow to any hope of a two-state solution.

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