On the night of May 10, 2021, the situation on the border between Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip deteriorated dramatically. Six civilians and one Israeli soldier were killed in an almost non-stop rocket attack on Israeli population centers.
On the evening of May 13, the Israeli military issued a news release stating that since the beginning of the escalation, Hamas militants have fired some 1,750 rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, of which some 300 exploded in the Gaza Strip. Some 600 casualties were sustained by both the Arab and Israeli sides.
Israel launched strikes against the Gaza Strip, hitting Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets and killing more than a dozen militant leaders, including senior field commanders.In the early morning hours of May 14, the IDF spokesman’s office said Israeli air and ground forces began an offensive against the Palestinian Gaza Strip.
On May 12, Emergency UN Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Thor Vineland told the Security Council at UN headquarters in New York that the new conflict was the most serious escalation between Israel and the Palestinians in “many years,” warning that Israel and Palestine “are facing a full-scale conflict. “.
14 top Hamas and Jihad officials killed by Israeli reprisal bombing
Hamas rockets swoop in a straight line on the right, Israeli Iron Dome rises from the left
Foreword
Often on television, we see the masses in Gaza crying out, then the protests in Paris, the protests in London, and people all over the world, and many have formed the conditioned reflex: the Palestinian people are being bullied again. Through this article, it is possible to understand.
Is Hamas a liberator or a terrorist organization?
What are the causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
The Future of Palestine and Israel
At 8:00 a.m. on January 18, 2009, Israel imposed a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza, ending the 23-day war in Gaza. With the help of information from all sides, I began to understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to think independently about the moral issues related to this war, and found that the essence of this war is not a conflict over land and religion, but a war of civilization against totalitarianism and terrorism.
Hamas, which has not been recognized by the international community, is essentially a plague of civilization, but a new variant of totalitarianism, an outbreak of the darkness and depravity inherent in human nature. It is not only the enemy of the Israelis, but equally the enemy of the Palestinians. Or rather, it is the enemy of human civilization.
Who is responsible for the war in Gaza?
According to statistics, the war has left 1,284 Palestinians dead and 4,336 wounded. So, who is responsible for these deaths? Many might say Israel, of course, since they are the ones who crossed the border to fight in Gaza. It may not be that simple, but to answer the question of who is responsible, we should first go back to the cause of the conflict.
Let’s start with a brief history of Gaza. In November 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which established a Jewish and Arab state in the old Palestine, with 11,500 square kilometers of territory, including the Gaza Strip, under an “Arab state” and the internationalization of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was internationalized.
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed. Due to strong opposition to this resolution from the Palestinians and the Arab world, Palestine was not established. The day after the establishment of Israel, the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian guerrillas in its vicinity joined forces to attack Israel and prevent it from surviving. At the time, these five countries alone had a population of more than 40 million people, while Israel had only 600,000 and no regular army. However, the resilient Israelis won the war at a cost of nearly one percent of the population killed in action.
From 1948, when Israel was founded, to 1982, Israel and the Arab states fought five Middle East wars in which Israel was not only not destroyed, but grew stronger and stronger, and occupied a large number of Arab territories, including Gaza in 1967 during the June 5th War. But Israel had no intention of occupying the other side’s territory and returned the land to Egypt and Jordan when they acknowledged Israel’s existence and promised not to invade Israel again.
In September 1993, Israel and Palestine signed the Declaration of Principles, and in May 1994, the Palestine Liberation Organization took over Gaza, and about 60 percent of Gaza became self-governing. on August 15, 2005, Israel implemented its unilateral action plan and began withdrawing its troops from the Gaza Strip. on September 12 of that year, Israel completed its withdrawal, ending its 38-year occupation of the Gaza Strip, and Gaza was completely returned to the Palestinians.
In January 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, defeating Fatah, which had dominated the Palestinian political scene for nearly half a century. In June 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza through a bloody civil war with Fatah. Although the international community has repeatedly condemned Hamas’s terrorist activities and stressed the need to respect Israel’s right to exist, the organization, founded in 1987, has been a major player in the Gaza war. But the organization, founded in 1987, has always refused to recognize Israel’s existence, and its main goal is to “wipe Israel off the map.
Gaza, under Hamas control, has been turned into a base for terrorist attacks on Israel, where human bombs of all kinds continue to explode. The Israelis have built a 681-kilometer fence to essentially block the human bombs and illegal immigrants. But Hamas was not dead set on firing rockets into Israel from residential areas, and by one count, since Israel withdrew from Gaza three years ago, Hamas has fired more than 6,000 rockets into Israel. on December 19, 2008, the six-month ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel expired, and Hamas refused to renew it and fired more than 100 rockets into southern Israel for three consecutive days, starting December 24 On December 27, Israel launched troops into Gaza and war broke out.
Clearly, the war was neither a territorial nor a religious conflict, but a sovereign state’s self-defense against terrorist activities. Israel’s ambassador to China, Antaii, told the Chinese media: “We are fed up, and there is no country in the world that can stand to have 15% of its citizens living under the threat of force and terror attacks for eight years. I ask our Chinese friends to imagine what the Chinese government would do if Guangzhou was attacked by artillery every day.” In response, both the United States and Europe have expressed their support for Israel.
Who is killing civilians?
As the smoke of war clears and what remains is a devastated Gaza and thousands of casualties, including a large number of civilians, should the score be on Israel’s head? Here’s a brief comparison.
Israel has spared no expense in avoiding Palestinian civilian casualties to the greatest extent possible. To reduce civilian casualties, Israel sacrificed the effectiveness of the raid by calling people at the attack site ten minutes before the attack to inform them to leave. Prior to the ground assault, Israeli forces distributed a large number of leaflets in Arabic and dialed voice phones to tell civilians to stay away from Hamas and to make sure to leave if there were military targets near their locations. On Jan. 5 of this year, the Israeli military went to great lengths to jam Hamas television stations to remind ordinary Palestinians not to cooperate with terrorists and not to act as “human shields” for Hamas.
Israel even purposely procured the world’s most advanced precision-guided weapon from the United States, the GBU-39 small-diameter smart bomb, which has a charge of only 22.7 kilograms and much less collateral damage than conventional bombs. In a densely populated area like Gaza, with a mix of military and civilian buildings, Israeli airstrikes in the first few days killed more than 350 Hamas militants and more than 50 civilians. Professor Wang Mingzhi, a Chinese military expert and strategic researcher at the Air Force Command College, gave this high marks, saying that the Israelis had set a model for reducing civilian casualties in combat.
And what did Hamas do? Instead of organizing the transfer of civilians inside the building after Israel notified them of the attack, they arranged for civilians to go on the roof of the building as a physical shield! Using mosques as arsenals and Islamic universities as ammunition depots has long been a family affair with them, too. Their fellow Palestinian, Mohammed Dahlan, a former top Fatah official, said in an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel that Hamas doesn’t care about ordinary people, and they even go so far as to fire rockets into Israel from the center of residential areas, putting the local population at risk of retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces. One Palestinian commentator said that Hamas, which has no regard for the lives of others or for its own, and uses suicide bombers, may secretly expect more Palestinian deaths to prove Israeli “brutality.
For Hamas, the only thing more valuable than the killing of Jews is the killing of Palestinians. A case in point is the “Jenin massacre” that was once the subject of so much media hype, when the PA first announced that more than 10,000 civilians had died in the Jenin camp, then changed the story to 2,000 or 3,000, then dramatically changed it to 500 to 200. Eventually the bodies were found to be only forty-eight, seven of whom were civilians. An attempt was made to smuggle six bodies from the morgue into the camp that had died of natural causes before the Israeli attack, and they were caught red-handed by the Israeli military and confessed in public. This casualty figure is the result of insisting on using loudspeakers to inform civilians to evacuate the Jenin refugee camp even after the Israeli army had ambushed and killed more than twenty people in the camp. The integrity of the Palestinian side is evident.
Land and religion are nothing but excuses
Even in the West, many believe that the root cause of the protracted and bloody war between Palestinians and Israelis is that Israel’s statehood has usurped the Palestinians’ land and made it impossible for them to survive. This is a specious lie.
Not to mention the fact that Jews used to live on the land in distant antiquity. By 1939, on the eve of World War II, there were already 450,000 Jews and 1.06 million Arabs among the inhabitants of Palestine, with Jews accounting for about one-third of the total population, and at that time, the present state of Israel did not exist, let alone the state of Israel invaded the land of the Palestinians. And the founding of Israel in 1948 was under the auspices of the United Nations. Why shouldn’t a Jewish community of more than 10 million people have a state of its own? Not to mention the fact that this state only requires 18,000 square kilometers of populated land and is on top of their ancestral homeland.
History does not forget that as far back as August 24, 1929, there was the Hebron massacre by mobs against the Jews. The perpetrator of that massacre, Amin Al-Husseini, even met with Hitler on November 28, 1941, and the two demons talked about their common vision of the extermination of the Jewish people and agreed on the slaughter of the Jews. Subsequently, Al-Husseini recruited some 20,000 SS divisions in Europe to participate in the slaughter of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. 1947 saw the adoption of the partition resolution by the General Assembly, and the armed Al-Husseini family in Palestine immediately went into the war against the Jews. As you can see, these atrocities clearly had nothing to do with the establishment of the state of Israel.
In several subsequent Middle East wars, Israel did occupy some territories in Egypt and Jordan, but Israel has always stated that it would return those territories as long as those countries recognized Israel’s existence. After Egypt and Jordan recognized Israel, these territories were returned. As for the Gaza Strip, Israel withdrew completely from it in 2005, and the territorial issue of Gaza, as Hamas calls it, no longer exists, but Hamas continues to attack Israeli civilians. Israel has actively pursued its “land for peace” program, and Hamas has sought to undermine it. After the signing of the Oslo Accords, during the Israeli withdrawal and the demolition of Jewish settlements, terrorist organizations such as “Jahad” and “Hamas” planned a series of suicide bombings with heavy casualties. It is clear that it is not land they want.
Even if there is a territorial dispute between the two sides, this cannot justify the kidnapping and beheading of civilians, which is not resistance but a crime against humanity. Looking at the world today, how many countries have territorial disputes between them? Poland, Germany, Finland, and even China, to name a few, where were their previous national borders?
If they all treated land issues like Hamas, would there be anyone left alive in Europe? Will the terrorists stop if Israel gives in to terrorist blackmail and gives up the land completely? No, absolutely not. The Taliban brutalizes girls just because they go to school for education; Al Qaeda shoots national tennis players in the street just because they are wearing gym shorts; thugs in Indonesia attack Chinese; terrorists in Chechnya blow up schools, terrorists in Mumbai blow up hotels …… These terrorists, like Hamas, have nothing at all to do with the territorial issue related?
Well, is it because of the clash of religions and civilizations? Religion and civilization are better or worse than crying and killing, not by claiming how broad your ancestors were, but by what you have produced and contributed to the world.
We see that even with their own countrymen, Hamas kills without the slightest mercy. It is never just Israelis that Hamas wants to kill. In the 2007 Palestinian civil war, they threw their own compatriots from a dozen-story building to their deaths, blocked hospital doors to slaughter the enemy’s wounded who came to seek treatment, and killed at the funerals of grieving relatives of enemy families. Even the organization that once fought alongside itself, Hamas does not spare. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has launched numerous terrorist attacks against Israel over several years, and the two sides have also collaborated on several attacks against Israel in the Gaza Strip. One of its founders, Jamal Abu Al-Jadian, was executed by Hamas from his hospital bed with forty-one bullets; the body of another leader, Sami’a al-Madhorn, was dragged through the streets by Hamas after he was killed. As Sharon said: Hamas is all bloodthirsty.
A civilized system brings prosperity
Some media outlets often portray the poverty of the Palestinian population as if it is brought about by Israel’s appropriation of their resources. This is in fact a conclusion of a backward, small farmer mentality that takes for granted that modern industrial and commercial civilization is not a zero-sum game of resources. The theme of today’s world is that competition between technology and culture is the fundamental element. Looking at the world today, per capita land area and resources have little to do with affluence; it is the sophistication of institutions and technology that is the decisive factor in affluence.
It is important to know that since the founding of Israel, its population has increased more than tenfold, yet it has become more and more prosperous. Today Israel is the world’s scientific and cultural powerhouse, known for creating some of the world’s best technology and most sophisticated products. Israel is second only to Canada in the number of companies listed on the U.S. stock exchange. A desert country with a shortage of water has become an exporter of high-grade agricultural products and created a prosperity never before seen in the land, thanks to its unparalleled drip irrigation technology.
From 1949 to 2005, Israel’s Muslim population increased more than tenfold, from 9% to 16% of the total population. Within Israel, Arabs and Jews alike can live together in peace. The population of Israel today is eight million, of which there are about two million Arabs. They are all Israelis and enjoy the same affluent life as all Jews with a per capita income of $16,000 (2007), the 24th highest in the world.
The war, which hurts the most, is still hurting civilians, and the people in Gaza could have enjoyed a good life. The Palestinian region had a miraculous average annual economic growth of 30% between 1969-1979, and its GDP has still grown at an average annual rate of 8.6% since its autonomy in ’94. If there was no war, their living condition might not be as bad as we think.
Some sources show that the self-ownership rate of Palestinian housing ownership is 86%, with an average living area of 145 square meters per household, and 103 square feet for refugee camp households. The vast majority of households have refrigerators, color TVs and washing machines, and more than 1 in 5 households have imported cars. They also had a national income per capita of about $2,100 in 2000, despite having an average of 6.3 children per couple. Some media report that some Palestinian families live on less than $2 per day per capita, but let’s not forget that the vast majority of these poor families have more than eight children. May I ask how many Chinese families have a monthly living expense of more than 4,000 RMB by this standard?
In Palestine, 60.4% of the population has health insurance, and the rest enjoys free basic government or UN health care. In 2006 alone, for example, the U.S., EU and others contributed $1.5 billion to Palestine. We often see on TV young people who throw stones at Israeli tanks dressed to look more like city folk than our city folk. The claim that it is the Israelis who have deprived them of their land and resources is so patently absurd in a modern industrial society that we would never hear the native fishermen of Shenzhen complain that tens of millions of foreigners have occupied their land and deprived them of their resources for survival. On the contrary, advanced industrial and commercial civilization has benefited all.
But what does Hamas bring to the table? They can’t build even the crudest television set, the most ramshackle car, or the most primitive computer; they are nothing. After Hamas took control of Gaza, the Gaza economy deteriorated dramatically and the agricultural facilities left behind by Israel, such as greenhouses, were destroyed. Even though Israel withdrew from Gaza long ago, Hamas did not lead the people to build a state, to build roads and factories, to develop the economy, because they could do nothing but incite religious fanaticism and kill people.
Hamas is essentially a plague on civilization
At this point, many people are asking, so why does Hamas exist, why do these terrorists linger like a ghost, and what are their ideological roots?
In this regard, we can start with a very small phenomenon. I remember that when I was in high school, some students who performed poorly in all aspects were most likely to be attracted to the triads outside the school. The reason is simple: if he is at a disadvantage in all aspects of the normal competition, he will be eager to find the value of his existence in the abnormal aspects.
After these failed students get involved in the underworld, they often go back to school to take pleasure in bullying, especially beating and humiliating the best elements, a pleasure that is often extremely intense. Daniel Pipes, an international expert on the Middle East, put it well, “Blaming Israel for authoritarian politics, totalitarianism and violence against Israel in the Middle East is like blaming criminal gangs for hardworking students.”
The process of civilization is bound to be competitive, and inequality at the end is an inevitable life encounter for human societies. Throughout history, while such inequality causes human suffering, every utopian experiment that arrogates to itself the boundaries of man and seeks to pursue absolute equality results as if lifting itself by the hair and trying to leave the ground, is adding more suffering.
Imagine how easy and fast it would be if there were such a group of gloomy and lazy losers who were underdogs across the board in the competition in the civilized fields of economy, technology, military, freedom, and power, and an outsider appeared and surprised them with the best excuse for their failure, which was to blame others for all their failures. When this excuse is clothed in the garb of a holy religion or revolution, the lazy loser indulges in the illusion of being a hero even more comfortably. The temptation to be a hero by throwing stones at tanks without learning, without struggling, without improving one’s system and culture, is indeed a great temptation to degenerate.
It is in fact a virus of civilization, a darkness and depravity inherent in human nature, which seems to be inherent in every human being. In Christianity, it is called original sin. In the history of human civilization, it has always followed us. In different times, it has found different reasons and theories to produce different variants, but the essence of it is a suicide marching toward the darkness that destroys mankind and itself. It is always much easier to fall downward than to cultivate upward.
We can even say that the history of human civilization is the history of the constant struggle against this virus. In Wang Mang’s utopian experiment of “ruling by virtue,” in the tyranny of many peasant revolts, in the cruelty and illusions of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the hysterical killings of the Boxer Rebellion, in the Nazis in Germany, in the Khmer Rouge, and in the various “revolutions” of the twentieth century, we can see it all. “there, we can see a plague against humanity and civilization brought about by the spread of this virus.
Extremism and killing are the inevitable choice of Hamas
In traditional societies, the natural geographical barrier and relatively autonomous social units make it impossible for this virus to penetrate too strongly, and it will die down after a while. In modern societies, where the power of transmission and control is stronger, the destructive power of this virus has exploded spectacularly. Totalitarianism is the modern variant of this virus, which brought the 20th century to a catastrophic end. Modern fundamentalism, as represented by Hamas, is actually one of these totalitarianisms, but in the guise of religious belief.
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt dissects it. She argues that a key feature of totalitarianism is rhetorical control and inculcation of hatred, in which they want to constantly create a virtual enemy, portray it as extraordinarily vicious, and be present everywhere and all the time. They also used highly coercive ideological indoctrination to create a climate of terror to intimidate people into submission and to reinforce their image as the “protector of the people. In the Nazi regime, this “devil” was the Jews; in Hamas, this “devil” is the existence of Israel.
We have seen Hamas brainwash the ideology of hate into children’s television programs, and Saraa Barhoum, the 11-year-old host of the famous children’s program, told reporters that she would love to be a martyr. She hosts “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” an hour-long show that airs every Friday. The show is famous for its “Farfur,” a militant cartoon character dressed like Mickey Mouse, who often preaches anti-American and Israeli ideas on the show, and who is eventually killed by an Israeli soldier and becomes a martyr.
Of course, this ambitious goal they set can never be achieved, so totalitarianism opposes all static institutional constraints and is essentially a movement whose fundamental characteristic is that it is a constant struggle, struggle, and struggle again, without end. The day the movement stops is the day totalitarianism will be destroyed. In order for the struggle to continue, it is necessary to constantly create groups of so-called “enemies” as objects of struggle. From the very beginning of its operation, totalitarianism has been on a path of no return.
The speed of the downward degeneration of human nature is astonishing, and the speed of reproduction of this virus is astonishing. Because of the totalitarians’ tight control over freedom of thought and expression, if someone refuses to degenerate, he or she is immediately purged as a traitor. In the process of criticizing the target of the dictatorship, the person who strikes the hardest will be praised as pure in faith, so that the whole society will look to the lowest and most shameless in every field. The most direct result of this is that the entire organization becomes more and more radicalized and irrational.
All totalitarian organizations are inevitably subject to round after round of brutal purges within the ruling group, and in the end the most impersonal, despicable and cunning one often wins. That’s why there was the “Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934 – Hitler launched a surprise attack on the storm troopers, and the storm troopers’ leader Rohm, who was instrumental in their seizure of power, was killed on the spot, and the entire storm troopers’ leadership was slaughtered.
Throughout the history of terrorist organizations, more radical groups have continued to split from them, such as the Abu Nidal organization, which split from the PLO in 1974. Not only has the group carried out terrorist activities around the world, but it has also been suspected of killing several less radical PLO leaders, and even Arafat himself has been the target of repeated extremist hunts.
Mosab Hassan Youssef, who is the son of one of the founders of Hamas, once told reporters that the more radicalized a person is within the organization, the faster they rise through the ranks. Eventually, he chose to repent and leave after recognizing the true nature of Hamas’s radicalization during a raid on an Israeli prison.
Under the banner of great ideals, these terrorist organizations quickly lose their civilized bottom line. Senior Hamas leader Mohammed Zahar called out on local television on Jan. 5, 2008, to retaliate for the global slaughter of Jewish children. In Iraq, the al-Qaeda terrorist organization has carried out more than 100 suicide attacks in the past two years, 24 of which were carried out by child suicide bombers, accounting for about 20 percent of all suicide attacks. Of these child suicide bombers, the youngest was 9 years old. Among those Hamas suicide attackers were even mentally retarded teenagers and adulterous females.
What is particularly noteworthy is that such totalitarian organizations are not only brutal, but cunning. They are very good at exploiting the various weaknesses of free societies to gain room to reproduce.
Modern civilized societies follow the norms of freedom of speech and belief, and such systems for civilized people can easily be exploited by barbarians. For them, all existing rules can be trampled and broken. When they are still a minority and not powerful enough, they will superficially obey the social norms of civilized society and cry out for pluralism and freedom, but once they gain power, they will trample these civilized norms underfoot. It is only then that civilization wakes up to the fact that it is not one of the cultures of pluralism, but the end of pluralism; it is not one of the beliefs of freedom, but the gravedigger of freedom.
Look at the bill introduced in 2006 after Hamas gained a parliamentary majority: they called for a return to historical Islamic torture, including flogging, beheading, crucifixion, hanging, and the death penalty for “colluding with foreign powers against Palestinian interests” and “hurting the feelings of the Palestinian people in any way. “Other punishments include flogging 40 times for those who drink or sell wine and cutting off the right hand of a thief caught with stolen goods ……
Hamas is a public enemy of civilization
A brutal Hamas is bound for extreme isolation. The vast majority of the world’s nations have condemned Hamas’ terrorist acts, and since the start of the war, the more rational Arab nations have actively distanced themselves. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, writing in the New York Times, said that for there to be permanent peace in the Middle East, the Arab states must recognize Israel’s existence. Egypt has also made it clear that they will only negotiate with Fatah. Egypt has even helped Israel blockade Gaza, and as recently as February 5, 2009, the Egyptian side intercepted a $10 million payment from Hamas at the Rafah crossing. Egypt told domestic Hamas supporters that “if they don’t like it, they can go to Gaza and fight with them. Why did Egypt do this? President Mubarak told reporters the fundamental reason: “Hamas must not be allowed to win this war, or there will be no peace in the whole region!”
This reminds us once again of what Hannah Arendt told us: totalitarianism is anti-civilizational; it is barbaric in nature. Totalitarianism is not for the benefit of a certain part of humanity, but is utterly opposed to the whole of humanity, to all humanity, to all civilization. That is to say, totalitarian rulers also end up integrating themselves into a system and process that is not their own and cannot help themselves until their final demise.
Hamas, not some liberator, but the cancer of human civilization!
Recent Comments