Ben's Blog

A short, grim history.

26/2/24

2005 Hamas created with the help of guns and money from Bibi Netanyahu^*1

2006 Hamas wins elections in Gaza

Israelis killed   –  Response –          Palestinians killed       

2008                   13                                                  1110

2012                     6                                                    150

2014                   73                                                  2200

2018 Protests     0                                                     170 protesters  killed

2021                   10                                                    200

2022                   29                                                    146

2023                     2                                                      33

——————————————————————————

Total                            133 Israelis killed    – Response  – 4009   Palestinians killed

(Does not include Palestinians children shot on a daily basis for throwing stones)

So as we can see, for every Israeli death 30 Palestinians are executed!             

July ’23  Israel launches assault on Jenin refugee camp with 1000 soldiers

October ’23 Hamas kills 1600  – Response – Israel kills 30,000 Palestinians….so far,

With no sign of their enthusiasm waning.

 + all water, food & fuel to Gaza cut off, causing mass starvation!

Bear in mind that Hamas soldiers live in tunnels, so we can assume most of the casualties are civilians.

Now let us put this in historical perspective. Since time immemorial tribal people have played a never ending game of tit-for-tat reciprocal murders. We call this ‘pay-back.’ The pay-back is customarily roughly commensurate with the original crime, give or take a few souls. A crude but effective way to keep the tribes on an equal footing. Thus avoiding wholesale slaughter.

But the collective punishment of Palestinians in the recent past does not fit into that cultural context, it resembles more, ironically, the Roman practice of ‘decimation’*², a punishment of insubordinate and rebellious soldiers whereby 1 in 10 soldiers were selected to be executed by their own comrades.

Over the intervening millennia this form of collective punishment has been adopted and adapted by colonial powers the world over. When members of the Resistance killed  soldiers of the occupying force, 10 members of the local village were selected at random and summarily executed. This was standard practice for the Nazis and the Romans, ironically enough.

In the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, this practice appears to have gotten out of hand. Rather than executing 10 members of the local population, the Israelis have been executing about 30 Palestinians for every Israeli.

In this latest iteration, that began with Hamas executing 1600 Israelis. The I.D.F. has now killed over 30,000 Palestinian men, women and children. Yet their enthusiasm for mass murder has not waned. It seems that in the Israeli scheme of things, One Israeli is worth 30 Palestinians, which means they will not stop until they reach a death toll of 48,000. Almost every human being on earth desperately wants them to stop, but not the people in charge.

Source of data – The Washington Post – Palestine/Israel Conflict Explained

*1 Seymour Hersh – Netanyahu is Finished

*2 Over the millennia the word ‘decimation’ has come to mean the death of a large proportion of the population by pestilence or war, a reduction to 10% of what you started with, almost the opposite of the original meaning of a reduction of 10%. (Chinese whispers?)