Before October 7th
Before October 7th
The “al-Aqsa Flood” is happening for the first time.
On October 7, 2023, approximately 1300 fighters from various Palestinian organizations escaped from Gaza prison.
On the day of their escape and the operation, 1139 people died, including nearly 700 Israeli civilians.
Much can be said about October 7, but there’s also a lot we simply cannot say.
What is clear is that October 7 was brutal and that no civilian deserved to die.
It is also clear that October 7 was a consequence of 76 years of occupation, harassment, murder, and oppression.
It has been clarified that Israeli intelligence knew about the attack, and that many Israeli civilians were also killed by Israeli fire (see, e.g., the Al Jazeera report on this matter, highly recommended).
We do not intend to discuss the formalities of October 7 in this article; at the end of the article, we provide some sources we consider meaningful, as well as additional critique articles on Palestine, including the equation of Zionism and Judaism, criminalization of Palestine solidarity, and the capitalist nature of this war.
In these 365 days since the flood, the state of Israel has carried out its genocidal tendencies; claiming to eliminate “Hamas and the enemies of Israel,” Israel has, in one year (directly), murdered 42,000 people, mostly civilians, and indirectly around 200,000 through hunger and disease.
In two and a half years of war in Ukraine, about 12,000 civilians have been killed; since World War II, nowhere in the world have so many people been murdered in such a short time as during this one-year genocide in Gaza.
The expansion of aerial bombings and war crimes (torture, sexualized violence, white phosphorus) in southern Lebanon follows the logic of this genocide: eliminate Palestine and its defenders, and reclaim Eretz Israel.
Western states, whose corporations are already securing deals in Gaza, see the genocide as an opportunity to expand their influence and eliminate their enemies’ capital.
The German state uses the solidarity of many people in Germany with Palestinian suffering to justify the reactionary reorganization of the BRD—since the 68ers, there has been no shortage of mass police violence, racism, and enforced loyalty to the state.