What do you call Israel’s *intentional* slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza, the *intentional* utter destruction of whole city blocks comprised of homes/apartments, small businesses, schools etc. intentionally and knowingly killing people unrelated to the enemy beyond being of the same ethnicity, herding that ethnicity into what they promised were safe spaces that would not be bombed and then bombing them, the public call by public officials to turn Gaza into another Auschwitz, the official proclamation that the intention is to drive those Palestinians they don’t murder out of the land, calling it a “voluntary immigration,” bribing countries in Africa to take them in, publicly saying the West Bank is next, (and there is much much more, too much for me to remember)? It’s not genocide, or even genocide-light I gather. It’s all just unfortunate collateral damage and it’s ALL Hamas’s fault?
Political entities almost always act on what they regard as “predictable” calculations. If we do this they’ll do that. For the life of me I can’t fathom what were Hamas’s calculations going into Oct 7. But Israel’s calculations are transparent: the decimation of the Palestinian people by any barbaric cruelty necessary to achieve the decimation. They have been saying it since Israel was founded, actually even years before its official (read that: western imposed) founding. What was Hamas thinking? Their actions probably saved Netanyahu from going to prison for corruption and united its citizens into a genocidal/racist fury that did not openly exist before. What a miscalculation they made! And the people of Gaza are having to pay the price.