On the morning of 7 October 2023, the author of the Guardian’s Gaza diary woke up planning to play tennis. “This year I decided to take care of my mental and physical health,” he wrote in his first entry, published six days later. “This means no stress, no negative energy and definitely more tennis.” Instead, with the news full of how Hamas had broken out of the territory, killing 1,200 people, he found himself scrambling desperately for the documents showing he owned his apartment in Gaza City, in the north of the strip. “If our building gets bombed, I need evidence that this apartment belongs to me,” he wrote.
Imagine the stunning narcissism and hatred for a race of people that causes you, on hearing your country has carried out an atrocity, to immediately switch to worrying what effect the inevitable repercussions will have on you personally?
On 13 October, Gaza City’s residents were told to evacuate and head south. “It feels like 1948,” the diarist wrote, a reference to the Nakba (“catastrophe”), when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from a newly independent Israel.
His diaries were full of questions. “Is the abnormal going to become the normal? Is two weeks of misery all it takes?”
Misery for the Palestinians, he means. Of course. The misery of the Israelis mourning their murdered relatives and the hostages means nothing.
A gentle man, he looks back at what he wrote at that time and says: “I see all these questions I was asking. I had no answers back then. Now I’ve seen how it turned out. And it was horrible.”
Good. Israel would have been entitled to drop a nuke on the wretched place.
He’s in his 30s, and one of Gaza’s intellectuals: middle-class Palestinians are known for their education throughout the Middle East.
And this is why unless Israel does indeed end it all with a nuke, it will go on and on. Or this wretched 'country' will be feted by idiots in positions of power in the West in order to appease their imported populations. If this is considered an 'intellectual' one can only imagine what the man in the street is like.
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For comparison: a guardian article by the son of a Nazi war criminal.
‘My family instilled in me the idea that we were the true victims upon whom Jews and Slavs preyed. Nowadays, we see this offender-victim role-reversal all around us. […] People seem to prefer to close their eyes and ears once more. Let my family’s story be a warning.’
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/my-family-and-other-nazis)
A rather fascinating dichotomy is that the Israelis could, if they wanted to, exterminate everyone in Gaza, but they choose not to, whereas the Gazans would like to kill every Jew not only in Israel but worldwide, but can't.
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