The both-siding tragedy of Palestine-Israel crisis: the oppressor-colonizer can be depicted just as righteous victims as the oppressed-colonized
How the white privileged journalists have the additional expertise to use rhetorical gymnastics to make the oppressor look as oppressed, thus the oppressed is just as bad as the oppressor
Last update: Nov 1, 2023
Amidst the ongoing illegal occupier state Israel’s “textbook example of genocide”—killing around 100 babies a day at the time of writing—and dropping powerful bombs deliberately on refugee camps knowing almost all are civilians being targeted (e.g. Jabalia refugee camp massacre), the so–called left-leaning The Guardian’s columnist Jonathan Freedland, in his column (“The tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict is this: underneath all the horror is a clash of two just causes” The Guardian, Fri 27 Oct 2023), while writing on the Palestinians’ plight in Gaza following the tragic Hamas attacks on October 7, makes a point by acknowledging that there is a need to acknowledge the sufferings from both sides. Indeed Freedland is right to draw upon the 20th century Holocaust event as being the most tragic event in modern 20th century history for the European Jews which should be not be discounted when viewing the current Israel-Palestine crisis. But it is precisely by both-siding the positions of the affected parties—one being the oppressed due to settler colonization and illegal occupation over the indigenous Palestinians, and the other being Israelis as the oppressor due to the state’s illegal occupation and colonial enterprise—that Freedland utterly fails to give the accurate picture: Palestinians have solely been the main victims of the grotesque sufferings in modern postwar era, over the last 75 years of dispossession, occupation and periodically repeating massacres and pogroms from during and post-Nakba (Catastrophe) that resulted in more than complete wipe out of 500 Palestinian villages and towns and ethnic cleansing of 750,000+ Palestinians from their homes which are dotted around in what is today’s modern Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine—as a result of the European Jews’ persecution in the run up to the Holocaust. And that sufferings on the Palestinians’ side since then (since Europe’s redemption from its late 19th and early 20th century anti-Jewish persecution right through to the Holocaust) is still ongoing—the Nakba still continues—while the Israelis, notwithstanding condemnable attacks and killings inflicted on Israeli civilians by the indigenous Palestinians, is in a privilege position of enjoying the full power of a full-fledge state including enjoying the overwhelming military power and full military-led de facto sovereign control from the River to the Sea. Palestinians don’t have that as a result of the former. Palestinians are still illegally occupied and as late Palestinian American intellectual figure Edward Said once said that the Palestinians are “the victims of the victims”, that sufferings are still continuing as a direct result of Israel which has turned the current predicament into a zero-sum game. Freedland also fails to draw upon the fact that the Holocaust was a European crime inflicted on the European Jews which the Palestinians had nothing to do with it yet were made to pay the price by the European colonial rulers as redemption for the latter’s sins instead of Europeans coming up with the just solution in Europe and pay the consequences for what was a European crime (which Europeans already have been committing grotesque crimes against humanity in Africa, Americas and Asia in various forms and shapes over the Enlightenment era through to modern industrial revolution (that was founded on wealth exploitation from the colonized world), later to manifest in mainland Europe in early 20th century).
Freedland fails to see this by denying or whitewashing the original settler colonialism legacy initiated by the European Jews—that colonialism itself was termed by the
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