A much more useful and interesting question than “What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7?” is “What were Palestinians supposed to do in response to all of Israel’s abuses prior to October 7?”

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

As Israel and its supporters continue to lose control of the narrative around the world with more and more people awakening to the reality that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, I’m seeing the resurrection of a talking point that western Israel apologists have been trying to make work off and on since this mass atrocity began.

“What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7?” they ask confidently, taking it as a given that there is no possible answer to this brilliant checkmate question besides “Rain vast quantities of military explosives on a giant concentration camp full of children and deliberately starve a civilian population using siege warfare.”

But the real problem is that they are asking the wrong question.

A much more useful and interesting question than “What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7?” is “What were Palestinians supposed to do in response to all of Israel’s abuses prior to October 7?”

Nobody’s ever been able to give me a serious response to this question which doesn’t entail mountains of lies and/or the dehumanizing expectation that Palestinians should accept conditions that none of us would willingly accept ourselves.

That’s why you never see me criticizing Hamas. If someone could tell me what specifically Palestinians should have done in response to Israel’s tyranny that they haven’t already tried in order to obtain real material justice, I’d happily say Hamas should have taken that option instead of resorting to violent force. But if that option truly existed, Hamas never would have been created in the first place. That’s why nobody’s been able to tell me what such an option would have looked like without lying.

What was Israel supposed to do after October 7? Same thing they should have done before October 7: dismantle the apartheid state, give everyone equal rights, pay massive reparations, and right all the wrongs of the past. October 7 was a response to the tyranny and abuse of Israel; the correct thing to do when things finally came to a head with the Hamas attack would have been to remove all the tyranny and abuse which gave rise to it.

That’s what Israel should have done. Of course Israel was never going to do this, for the same reason they spent decade after decade murdering, displacing and oppressing Palestinians since Israel was created. Israel would never allow justice and equality after October 7 for the same reason Israel would never allow justice and equality before October 7: because Israel has always been a settler-colonialist project that can only be sustained by nonstop violence and tyranny and theft and abuse and lies and breathtaking immorality.

That is the reason October 7 happened, and it’s the problem all decent people in the world are trying to address right now.

Those who suggest that everything Israel is doing in Gaza can be explained by October 7 have got it exactly backwards: everything we’re seeing in Gaza explains why October 7 happened in the first place.

The sadism and psychopathy we’re witnessing in Gaza didn’t magically appear 22 months ago; everyone in Gaza has been experiencing Israel’s abusiveness in various manifestations throughout their entire lives. 

Israel has always been this way. October 7 just gave it the excuse to completely unleash its genocidal impulses.

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