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Question: Of course, war is horrible, so why did the Palestinians initiate this war with their vicious attack on Israelis on October 7th?
Max Blumenthal:
Well, they didn't.
This war has been going on for 75 years. Israel initiated it in 1948 by ethnically cleansing 750,000 people.
"We must expel Arabs and take their places, and if we have to use force, not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal."
David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, said that in 1937, and that's what they proceeded to do.
This is what you need to understand. The people in Gaza, over 80% of them are refugees. Many of them are from a place called Majdal Askalan in what is now southern Israel, in a city called Ashkelon, and they were dragged from their homes and driven from their homes, placed in prison camps, barbed wire prison camps, and then dumped in trucks in 1950 into the Gaza Strip, where they would be permanently warehoused. And then Israel proceeded to move Arab Jewish refugees and Russians into Ashkelon to prevent them from ever coming back, and pass laws to prevent Arabs, Palestinians from being able to return to their homes.
750,000 were ethnically cleansed. For 18 years, the remaining Palestinians, 100,000, were internally displaced inside Israel. The remaining were put under military rule. They were under military occupation until 1966. Then in 1967, Israel violently, in a war it initiated, occupies Gaza, occupies the West Bank, occupies the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights in East Jerusalem, and then invades Lebanon in 1982, attacking Palestinian refugees there. Puts Gaza under siege in 2005.
No one can get in or out without Israeli military permission.
"We must kill and kill all day, every day."
That's according to Arnon Sofor, an Israeli government consultant who helped devise the siege of Gaza.
For years, Israel would not allow certain chocolates and A2 paper into Gaza.
And then they began these brutal military assaults, which they call mowing the lawn, slaughtering a few people, we'll leave Hamas intact, but teach them a lesson.
So this didn't come out of a vacuum. You're not going to be able to hold people under siege, cut them off from the world, and then expect them to just play along.
That doesn't mean that I celebrate what happened on October 7th. It should have never had to happen.
The reason it happened is because of the Israel lobby here, the genocide Democrats and the genocide Republicans who deny the Palestinians any right to have rights.