October 6: Why the Flood was inevitable
Nothing worked. Things had come to a head. Something had to give. And it did.
Note to readers: I published three articles between October 6 and 8 last year, analysing the causes that led to Al-Aqsa Flood, what exactly happened on that fateful day, and the new world we inhabit in its aftermath. I will publish updated versions of those articles over the next two days. This is the first in that series. Thank you.
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In 2003 — four years before Israel imposed its crippling blockade of Gaza — Baruch Kimmerling, a sociologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, described the enclave as “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.” In 2004 — three years before the blockade — Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland categorised Gaza as a “huge concentration camp.” Being Jews, one assumes they would know a thing or two about concentration camps, since these have become a huge part of modern Jewish identity — even for Jews who have no connection to Germany.
Arnon Sofer, a demographer at the University of Haifa, is described as the architect behind the isolation of Gaza. In 2004, he advised the government of Ariel Sharon, the eleventh Prime Minister of Israel, to seal Gaza off completely and kill anyone who attempted to break out of the concentration camp.
This is how Sofer described his evil scheme in a Jerusalem Post interview: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” (Emphasis mine.)
Those were Israelis accurately describing the ground reality in Gaza before its illegal blockade and siege by the Jewish supremacist state began in 2007 and which remains in place to this day — the last two years of which have been a live-streamed show of extreme savagery as part of an extermination campaign, which has targeted everything, from humans to animals to physical structures, the likes of which has never been witnessed.
The illegal blockade begins
As it began its inhuman and illegal blockade, Israel withdrew its settlements from the tiny strip of land — which, at its longest stretch, does not exceed the total distance of a marathon by much and, at its widest, is barely 7.5 miles. On October 7, 2023, this besieged territory was home to 2.3 million Palestinians — over half of them children.
In 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories condemned Israel’s blockade as illegal, stating: “As a form of collective punishment imposed upon an entire population, the blockade is contrary to international law.”
The punishing Israeli blockade meant that no resident of Gaza — unless they had the Israeli government’s permission (which was nearly impossible to acquire) — could leave Gaza, no matter how urgent their need.
If you were a cancer patient in need of critical healthcare, you required Israel’s permission to leave. If you were a scholar selected at a top university in the US or Europe or another Arab state, you required Israel’s permission to leave. If you simply wanted to travel to see the Pyramids in Egypt — which are just across the border from Gaza — you needed Israel’s permission to leave. If you wanted to go fishing in the waters off your own shore, you could not go far without being fired upon and potentially killed by the Israelis patrolling the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel also controlled not only who, but also what, was allowed to enter or exit Gaza. It decided whether, and in what amounts, food, medicines, school supplies, toys, milk, and even chocolates could enter the besieged enclave.
In short, Israel exercised total control over Gaza, which it completely occupied despite its physical absence from the territory (discounting any traitorous informants).
Gaza becomes unliveable
The blockade made Gaza unliveable. As early as 2012, a UN report concluded that “to ensure that Gaza in 2020 would be ‘a liveable place,’” herculean efforts were required.
Those efforts were never made. As a result, two years before the United Nations’ estimated timeline, Gaza was already classified as “unliveable.”
In 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur said that “with an economy in free fall, 70 percent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed healthcare system, Gaza has become ‘unliveable.’”
‘Mowing the grass’
But Israel was not content with just the blockade and throttling all hope of a decent life and sustenance for the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza.
To make matters worse, the Jewish supremacist state regularly bombarded Gaza with lethal munitions from time to time, in line with its policy of “mowing the grass.” Those frequent bombing raids killed dozens in each strike and levelled homes that had been built after years of struggle.
It did not care that, as Norman Finkelstein once described, every blade of grass that it mowed in Gaza was a child, a mother, a father.
Once it had destroyed homes, hospitals, and schools through indiscriminate bombardment, Israel, for the most part, did not allow them to be rebuilt. In any case, the strict blockade on essential building materials made it nearly impossible to restore the damaged infrastructure promptly.
Often, before the destroyed infrastructure could be rebuilt, another round of bombings would commence, destroying even more houses, more schools, and more medical complexes. It was a perpetual cycle of destruction and humiliation — with no end in sight.
Between 2007 — when Israel’s blockade of Gaza began — and October 7, 2023 — the day of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — numerous reports were produced by humanitarian agencies, along with statements by relief workers and officials on the ground in Gaza, stating that conditions inside the enclave were not fit for human habitation.
The Great March of Return
In another attempt to gain concessions from the Israelis, Palestinians in Gaza launched the Great March of Return in 2018.
It was a series of peaceful protests during which, every Friday, thousands of Palestinians marched to the fence with Israel to protest their living conditions and demand the internationally recognised right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, stolen by Jews in 1948 in what is now Israel.
(Nearly four out of five residents of Gaza are refugees from historic Palestine — what is today known as Israel. They were forced out of their homes in 1948 by Jewish terrorists during the Nakba, or the Catastrophe.)
Also read: How the Zionists brought terrorism to the Middle East
Despite the peaceful nature of these protests — which lasted nearly two years, from March 2018 to December 2019 — Israeli snipers killed 223 Palestinians and injured more than 8,000.
Stunningly, Israeli soldiers, renowned for their barbarism and sadism, played a sick game of “kneecapping” the Palestinian protesters. “Kneecapping” is a term used by the Israeli military to describe firing directly at the knees of Palestinians to permanently disable them.
One Israeli soldier boasted about his personal tally of 52 kneecaps over the course of the protests. Another bragged about the occupation forces kneecapping 42 Palestinians in a single day.
In other words, the Jewish supremacists in Israel were shooting peaceful Palestinian protesters — armed with nothing more than catapults — for fun, crippling them for life, and killing them by the hundreds.
Also read: Israel: A children’s story
Oslo Frauds: A brief history
Palestinians did not need to suffer like that. Along with the West Bank, Gaza, which abuts the Mediterranean Sea on its western border, was supposed to be part of a future state of Palestine.
This was the promise of the Oslo Accords — a pair of agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel between 1993 and 1995. The Accords were meant to lead to peace in occupied Palestine and ultimately to the formation of a Palestinian state over the next five years.
However, the Accords had Israeli fraud built into them. The terms were so lopsided in favour of the Israelis that Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said described them “as an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” In other words: complete capitulation.
Said:
[In the Oslo Accords], there was nothing about the stopping of settlements, there was nothing about Jerusalem, nothing about refugees, there was nothing about sovereignty. It was a complete sham.
Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, who was part of the Palestinian delegation in Oslo, has said that “the agreements were set up in order to sell out the Palestinians.”
People believed that they could achieve liberation through a political process but these were dust afterwards completely.
When I saw that agreement, I was extremely disappointed. But I was extremely concerned that the built-in flaws — the serious obstacles within the agreement itself, conceptually, and in many ways — would backfire.
However, despite the complete capitulation of the Palestinians in Oslo, Israel still failed to fulfil its end of the bargain. It’s almost as if fulfilling the obligation was never in its plans and the sham of the Accords was only meant to give its regime propagandists a catch-all phrase to shut down any question about a Palestinian state. From then on, any question of Palestinian rights or statehood could simply be deflected with reference to the non-existent “Oslo peace process.” Israel and its propagandists would shamelessly milk this famished and emaciated Oslo cow for the next three decades.
Israel continued to expand illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories before, during, and after the Accords.
At the time the deal was signed, just over 100,000 Jewish squatters lived in the area that was supposed to become a part of the state of Palestine. However, instead of Israel withdrawing its squatters from the West Bank and Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement, their numbers had swollen to 700,000 in 2024.
They continue building new settlements to bring more Jews from around the world and settle them in the stolen Palestinian territories, while squeezing the native Palestinians tighter and tighter into ever-shrinking Bantustans.
Moreover, Jewish squatters do not live peacefully with their Palestinian neighbours. The squatters are heavily armed by the Israeli military — with weapons distributed by Israeli cabinet ministers. These vile ingrates use their state-supplied weapons to intimidate, assault, torture, and kill native Palestinians in their own homes and on their ancestral land for the “crime” of existing. The squatters vandalise farmlands of the indigenous Palestinians. They uproot their precious olive trees, steal their farm animals, and other belongings, even fridges and mattresses.
Israeli police either aid these violent squatters or simply look the other way as they go on frequent rampages, with the ultimate aim of scaring their targets into leaving their homes so the assailants can steal their belongings and squat in the abandoned properties.
Notably, squatter violence was at its peak in the lead-up to the Flood of October 7.
“Settler violence has been increasing across the West Bank over the past years,” a UN report stated in September 2023. “Three settler related incidents per day occurred on average in the first eight months of 2023 compared to an average of two per day in 2022 and one per day the year before. This is the highest daily average of settler-related incidents affecting Palestinians since the UN started recording this data in 2006.”
These Jewish squatters are proud of their barbarism and celebrate it — often right in the faces of the Palestinians they brutalise.
In one egregious case from 2015, a group of squatters set the Dawabsheh home on fire in Duma in the Nablus governorate of the occupied West Bank. Consider this reporting by Mondoweiss from a 2018 court hearing relating to this case:
“Ali was burned, where is Ali? Ali is on the grill!”, they chanted, in reference to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, who was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma in 2015. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.
The terror-supporters were actually taunting Ali’s grandfather, Hussein Dawabshe, who was attending a preliminary hearing at which the court decided to indict one adult suspect who confessed to the murders, as well as a minor who was an accomplice. Hussein was accompanied by Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers Ayman Odeh and Ahmed Tibi. Tibi posted the video of the chanting, with policemen standing by doing nothing, and wrote:
“Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill” — all this was thrown at our face — including at the grandfather Dawbsheh concerning his 18-month-old grandson by the riff raff of ‘price tag’. In front of us stood policemen and officers and did nothing. No words…
That was not all. Proud of their inhumanity, Jewish squatters were filmed at a wedding reception stabbing a photo of the deceased 18-month-old Ali. According to a Haaretz report from December 2015, the reception-goers were armed with “guns, knives, and a firebomb” and pictures of Ali for mock stabbing.
Jewish squatters — squatting in a land that does not belong to them, according to international law — are a constant menace and a mortal danger to the native Palestinians.
Oslo did the Palestinians no good. “The settlements have grown more after Oslo than before it,” one Palestinian native told Mondoweiss.
“We witness our own family and friends being killed and arrested on a daily basis,” said another. “We get humiliated at military checkpoints, whenever we are trying to leave or enter cities or villages. And we witness our people being expelled from their lands while more and more settlements are being built in their place.”
Yara Hawari, the co-director of Al-Shabaka — an independent Palestinian think tank — says the only party that benefited from Oslo was the Israelis:
The key process of Oslo was Palestinian statehood and we know that has obviously not been achieved. Instead, what we see is these little pockets of false Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank.
The only people that have won from the Oslo Accords — or who have actually gained — are the Israelis: the Israeli regime which now controls the West Bank in its entirety, has Gaza under siege and basically has looted all of the Palestinian resources — and this was laid out in the Oslo Accords.
So Oslo handed over exactly what the Israeli regime wanted, which was more land and less Palestinians.
Moreover, the Oslo Accords gave the Israelis a convenient mantra. Every time anyone spoke about the plight of the Palestinians or the possibility of a Palestinian state, the Israeli leadership would simply point to the so-called Oslo peace process — and move on. No debate. No discussion. “Oslo peace process” — a favourite Israeli catch-all to deflect and silence all criticism of their policies, which abuse, harm, and kill Palestinians on an industrial scale.
The Oslo process was supposed to end in 1999, five years after its commencement in 1993. Thirty-two years later, it remains a “process,” while the Israelis continue to devour vast chunks of Palestinian land.
Al-Aqsa Mosque desecration
Not only are the Israelis maiming and killing Palestinians and vandalising and looting their homes and shops, but they also frequently desecrate the third holiest mosque in Islam, Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.
Israeli authorities have imposed limits on the number of worshippers allowed inside the mosque complex for the five daily prayers, as well as the congregational Friday prayers. Those limits and restrictions continue to worsen with each passing day.
Furthermore, worshippers must pass through multiple security checks where harassment is rampant. Often, worshippers who travel long distances to pray at the sacred mosque are denied access by heavy-handed Israeli officials for no reason.
Worse still, the Israelis regularly beat Muslim worshippers and vandalise and desecrate the mosque complex. This desecration of the mosque has become something of a Jewish ritual, with celebrations of every Jewish festival marked by storming the mosque after closing it to Muslims.
During Ramadan, which fell last year between March and April, Israeli state authorities and squatters launched brutal attacks on Muslims merely for making their way to the mosque for prayers during the holiest month in the Islamic calendar.
The violation of the mosque’s sanctity was particularly severe in 2021, when the Israeli police attacked worshippers in the prayer area, fired tear gas shells, destroyed carpets and books, and broke the mosque’s glass windows. A similar sequence of events followed a year later, leading to the death of a Palestinian and dozens more being injured.
Moreover, while Muslim access to their religious site is increasingly curtailed by arbitrary rules prohibiting people above a certain age from visiting, intrusive checkpoints, and the ever-present threat of violence, the Israeli state grants its Jewish citizens near carte blanche at the site. They do as they please.
They attempt to smuggle literal goats for Passover sacrifice; they storm the mosque to celebrate Purim; they carry out Talmudic rituals and dance at the mosque to mark the eve of Yom Kippur; they trample upon the sacred site in celebration of Hanukkah; they assault the third holiest mosque in the world to observe Shavuot; and they make it a point to desecrate the Islamic holy site to celebrate Sukkot. The list is endless. You name a Jewish festival, and you will be sure to find Al-Aqsa desecration as part of the celebrations.
It is grotesque.
As if to rub the collective noses of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in their humiliation, the Israeli cabinet held a meeting inside a tunnel dug beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque in May 2023.
Also read: Israel continues Al-Aqsa desecration, one of the Hamas red lines that prompted the October 7 attack
Palestinian detainees
All this time, thousands of Palestinian detainees — numbering around 6,000 at the time of the Flood — were increasingly subjected to horrific conditions.
The Israeli detention regime was so extreme that every family in the West Bank had someone endure the institutionalised Israeli torture regime. “Every family in the West Bank has at least had one person who was detained, arrested, or brought before a military court system,” Milena Ansari, an advocacy officer at prisoner support group Addameer, told AFP in February 2023.
From the AFP report:
Around 800,000 Palestinians have been through Israeli prisons since the occupation of Palestinian territories following the 1967 Six-Day War.
Palestinians have a staggering 99.74 percent conviction rate, while only 1.8 percent of Israelis are convicted for crimes against the natives.
Ben‑Gvir, a Jewish nutcase who became Minister of National Security in 2022 and thus responsible for the prisons, boasted about tightening the screw on Palestinians — most abducted on flimsy grounds — and about 2,000 of whom were under administrative detention, that is, without being charged with any offence.
In February 2023, Ben-Gvir declared that the Palestinian detainees, whom he exclusively refers to as “terrorists,” would not even be provided with “fresh pita (bread)... every morning, as if they were in a restaurant.”
It is unlikely that Palestinians are ever served pita, let alone fresh pita, in these torture dungeons, where Jewish supremacists practise their most sadistic fantasies on the enslaved bodies of Palestinians.
In February 2023, Hamas fired a string of rockets in occupied Palestine to protest against the worsening detainee conditions, especially those of female captives. “The situation is going from bad to worse inside the prisons,” a Palestinian official told Al Jazeera at the time. “They [Israeli authorities] do what they want because there is no one to deter them or to hold them accountable.”
The situation was so bad that in March 2023 Palestinian prisoners across the Israeli prison system went on a collective hunger strike to protest their abhorrent conditions.
To make matters worse, the Israeli state targeted the stipends that the families of detainees received from the Palestinian Authority. There was an increasing pressure on the Palestinian political and military leadership from the detainees and their families to alleviate their suffering.
The cause of the prisoners has always been an extremely sensitive issue for Palestinian resistance.
Arab betrayal
On top of the Israeli treachery in their dealings with the Palestinians and the desecration of the third holiest mosque in Islam, the Palestinians were also being increasingly betrayed by their supposed allies, the Arab states.
In 2020, the United Arab Emirates signed the so-called Abraham Accords and normalised its relationship with Israel. Soon after, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan followed suit and signed normalisation agreements with the genocidal state.
Saudi Arabia appeared on its way to sign the Abraham Accords just before the Al-Aqsa Flood of October 7. The largest Persian Gulf state, which is home to the two holiest mosques in Islam, thereby deriving legitimacy from the Muslim world, still appears on course for normalisation despite witnessing two years of genocide against their fellow Muslims and Arabs by the Jewish supremacists in Israel.
No one was talking about the Palestinians, not even their fellow Arab and Muslim states.
Emboldened, Netanyahu unveiled a map of the “New Middle East” at the United Nations on September 22 — just two weeks before the Flood. In his map, there was no Palestine. All of Palestine was marked as Israel.
Everything failed
Palestinians in Gaza did everything within their means to alleviate their suffering.
They made appeals. They entered into talks. They held peaceful protests. They engaged in peace processes.
But nothing worked.
Their appeals were rejected. The talks ended in lofty statements but delivered no solutions. Peaceful protesters were maimed or shot dead. The peace process became an empty ritual, with no real prospect of peace.
When a group of brave activists attempted to end the blockade by sea in 2010, their flotillas were raided, and nine participants were brutally murdered by the Israelis. A tenth died of his wounds four years later.
The world watched in silence.
The Abraham Accords meant the Palestinians could not even count on their fellow Arabs.
Netanyahu’s brazenness at the UN with his “new Middle East” map meant that the Israelis were not even attempting to hide their genocidal ambitions anymore. Moreover, outside of Palestine, there were barely any protests against Netanyahu’s incendiary histrionics at the UN.
Things had come to a head.
Something had to give. And it did.
Read the second part of this series here.
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No words to describe the disgust I feel 🇵🇸🇵🇸
And now the Zionists are exerting total control of US media to assure the truth is never known or told.