David lived in Philistine territory a year and four months. [He] and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites and the Amalekites. (From ancient times these peoples had lived in the land extending to Shur and Egypt.) Whenever David attacked an area, he did not leave a man or woman alive, but took sheep and cattle, donkeys and camels, and clothes. […] He did not leave a man or woman alive to be brought to Gath, for he thought, “They might inform on us and say, ‘This is what David did.’” And such was his practice as long as he lived in Philistine territory.

1 Samuel 27

In May 2024, parliamentarian Tally Gotliv said in a speech in Israel’s Congress: “The US is threatening not to give us precision missiles. Well, I have news for the US: We have imprecise missiles! So maybe instead of using a precise missile to take out a specific room or a specific building, I’ll use my imprecise missiles to flatten ten buildings. That’s what I’ll do. If you don’t give me precise missiles, I’ll use imprecise missiles.” (TofI)

A massive bombing force has destroyed eighty percent of Gaza. Thousands of people are missing under the rubble. Thousands will die (in fact, they are already dying) from hunger, lack of water, and preventable or curable diseases, as local and international doctors are reporting.

Meanwhile, it is demanded that those kidnapped by Hamas be released as a condition and “definitive solution” to the conflict, which is like saying that if someone kidnaps a member of my family I have the right to kill a thousand or ten thousand residents of their neighborhood and call them “side effects”. Hence, one of the favorite arguments, which functions as a justification for the repeated massacres, is: “Why don’t students in the United States protest for those kidnapped by Hamas?” That would be, they say, because for-peace and anti-genocide protestors “are anti-Semitic”, because “they are pro-Hamas”, as American legislators and the Israeli ambassador to the UN have said. Or “they are anti-Americans”, as Elon Musk uttered, which demonstrates once again that some immigrants need to be nine hundred “American” to feel one hundred percent American—a particular sort of American, needless to say.

Very American but brave and very well-educated students are accused of feeling more pain for some victims than for others, which is why we must legislate prohibiting hatred, etc. These accusations fail the first test of moral reciprocity, but the answer to why the students are protesting is simple:

They protest not an attack that began and ended on October 7, but a continued, ongoing and relentless massive massacre of people equally valuable—a concept many Zionists don’t understand.

They protest the root of the problem, which began generations ago and has not stopped poisoning the rest of the world since then.

They protest because they are involuntary and resistant participants in something they consider immoral. Their money, which students take from their future to study (in addition to their taxes) is not sent to the Palestinian legitimate resistance, or of food or medicines but, systematically and without limits, it is sent to the Israeli military to accelerate this massacre and the never-ending dehumanization of a people without the right to even protest, as has been demonstrated for years.

They protest against an apartheid even more brutal than that of South Africa, as the victims have described in detail, as anyone can see in testimonial videos or read in reports from those Israelis and Jews who have not been dehumanized by religious, political, and chauvinist fanaticism taught in schools and in the media.

They protest because they have become aware that democracy and freedom for all resemble the proud phrase “We the People” where people in theory are all of us, but in practice only a small group in power in a system served by slaves.

They protest because 2,500 of them have been arrested just for protesting and none of the anti-protest groups that started the confrontations on campuses have suffered the same fate.

They protest because they are being threatened with blacklists by large companies.

They protest because those who have not yet been arrested for protesting have already been informed that their faces are being recorded by cameras, by the new Artificial Intelligence systems and by the old Ideological Intelligence systems.

They protest because they are not allowed to protest.

Mandatory question: Does Israel not have the right to defend itself?

Terrorist suspected question: Don’t Palestinians have the right to defend themselves?

And the kidnapped?

The human kidnapped or the subhuman kidnapped?

There are currently 9,500 kidnapped people in Israeli prisons, detained without due process. Many have died in those dungeons after being in agony for years. As Jill Stein has acknowledged and courageously denounced, it is estimated that there are tens of thousands of detainees in prisons in Israel, tortured, humiliated, and amputated. The majority are not Palestinians from Gaza but rather the harvest of a long tradition of arbitrary detentions in the West Bank by the Israeli army. A large number of them are minors. Some Israeli soldiers have testified to the rapes and torture that are practiced in these prisons. Other organizations have reported sexual violations of detained minors, which the Israeli government has then labeled as anti-Semitic or “terrorist groups.”

In this latest escalation of violence initiated by the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 (the latest chapter in a long history of violent occupation of Palestine, displacement of its native population, brutalization, dehumanization, and demonization of its resistance as “terrorists,” a story that spans several generations), two great mysteries persist:

Questions on 10/7

Why was a music festival organized just a few miles from the Gaza border?

Did the most powerful and secret intelligence in the world know nothing about Hamas’ plans? Harder to buy than the CIA’s ignorance of 9/11.

Why did the most guarded border in the world let a group of armed militiamen pass through to kill and take hostages, while the Israeli reaction took several (several) hours and, when it was carried out, it did not prevent the kidnappings, but instead killed dozens if not hundreds of its citizens with a massive air strike?

Wasn’t this attack a perfect and carefully designed excuse to finish “killing all the inhabitants of Amalek” and occupy a strategic area in the name of the famous “right to self-defense”?

Questions on Israeli hostages

Why has the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza through massive bombings at a cost of several million dollars a day produced “collateral effects” that have led to the murder of 40,000 innocent people, two-thirds of them children, and women, but supposedly it has killed a very few, probably two or three Israeli kidnapped?

Why is Tel Aviv not afraid to kill any kidnapped Israelis when it drops bombs that wipe out entire neighborhoods?

Are they so sure that there are none of the kidnapped people hiding there, being used as “human shields”? How?

Or do they not matter either, because the goal is not their liberation but the continuation of the dispossession of the “subhuman Palestinians” by “the people of light” due to a 3,000-year-old God’s order?

Does Israeli intelligence know where they are and do they not bomb those “very precise” spots?

How is it possible that one of the most powerful intelligence in the world, operating with one of the most powerful armies in the world, without any type of technical or moral restriction, claims to have found empty and non-existent tunnels in hospitals, terrorist children, but cannot find one of the kidnapped people? Really?

If all the bombing and destruction was done without endangering the lives of the kidnapped people, it only means that Intelligence, the military and the Netanyahu government know perfectly well where the kidnapped people are and where their captors are.

Why haven’t they gone after them and, on the contrary, have dedicated themselves to massacring the population with the equivalent of October 7 every week for more than seven months?

You don’t need rocket science to answer these questions, but the answers are downright dangerous. Or are they also going to criminalize inconvenient questions?

Jorge Majfud, May 14, 2024.