On Gaza
“One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire. They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies.”
“When the moon set over the charred corpses, there could never again be peace between the People and the Texans, so long as any of the People stood on Texan soil.”
— T.R Fehrenbach, Comanches
“So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.”
— Esther 7:10
“[The] Jews in the king’s provinces gathered together and protected their lives, had rest from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of their enemies; but they did not lay a hand on the plunder.”
— Esther 9:16
writes that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and this action has permanently altered its relationships with its neighbours, who will now never be able to accept it. He notes that American brutality in Japan and Iraq was never genocidal — despite the much higher death tolls — because the Americans never contemplated population extermination or extraction.
The thing is that Israel’s neighbours have never accepted her. Not in 1936. Not in 1948 or 1956 or 1967 or 1973 or 2000 or 2006 or 2023. What happened on October 7 2023 was celebrated on the streets of Gaza. Israel has many problems, but antagonising Gazans is not one of them: they have already maximally hated the Jews for a very long time.
My view is that Israel’s actions in Gaza are not genocidal, and the future in the region as messy as ever. But before turning to the specifics of Gaza, let’s consider some historic examples.
Comancheria
For the better part of two centuries, the Comanches lorded over one of the most terrifying stretches of land in history. Never numbering more than up to 30,000 heads, Comancheria spanned a territory larger than modern France. From this territory, the Comanche brutalised and repelled countless rival native peoples, the Spanish Empire, the French Empire, the Mexicans, and even the United States of America. At the nexus of these competing peoples, they became the largest slaveholders in the American Southwest. They harvested border regions for horses — their fiercest weapon — as well as slaves, arms, and sport. Sport for the Comanche was the raid and torture and rape of outsiders, skinning ...
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