Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
One of the many, many things that sucks about all this is knowing that when there is a violent retaliation for Israel’s actions in Gaza which kills Israeli civilians, Israel will look up with Bambi-eyed innocence and say “What did we ever do to them?? We just want to live in peace!”
And the entire western press will amplify the same message. They’ll once again frame it as an “unprovoked” attack and say there’s “no justification” for what was done, frame every conversation as though history began on the day of that attack, and demand that everyone who wants to say anything critical of Israel first preface that criticism with an adequately forceful condemnation of a small group of militants on the other side of the world who have nothing to do with the person who is speaking.
When this act of violence occurs (and it will), the ones behind it will have watched Israel murder children by the thousands in Gaza in 2023. Maybe they’ll be the orphans of parents killed in the massacre. Maybe they’ll have seen their sister ripped apart by military explosives, their brother’s head blasted in half, their neighbors crushed by a bombed building, their family’s bodies burnt to blackened skeletons. Or maybe they, like all the rest of us, will have simply watched it all unfold on electronic screens.
Whatever the case, the circumstances in late 2023, which planted the seeds of vengeance that we will necessarily see sprout some time later, will go unmentioned by the authorized narrative-makers of the western world. The fact that the violence is simply Israel’s chickens coming home to roost will be erased from the story.
Again.
Did you know that since the United States brought its “war on terror” to Africa, terrorist attacks on that continent have increased by 75,000 percent? That’s right: 75, then three zeros, percent. I learned this neat little stat from a new article by journalist Nick Turse, who also notes that “according to the Pentagon, terrorist attacks in the Sahel region alone have resulted in 9,818 deaths — a 42,500% increase.”
People have been documenting the way attempts to bomb terrorism out of existence actually creates more terrorism for many years. In 2010 Professor Robert A Pape wrote an article for Foreign Policy titled “It’s the Occupation, Stupid” about his study with University of Chicago which found that suicide bombings are the result not of Islamic fundamentalism but of foreign military occupations.
Some notable excerpts:
- “More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation.”
- “As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically — from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009.”
- “Over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American.”
- “Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined. From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.”
Journalist Jonathan Marshall wrote the following in 2017:
The most authoritative new study of the sources of terrorism and insurgency on the continent, Journey to Extremism in Africa (September 2017), finds that what triggers many individuals to join violent groups are incidents of government-sponsored violence, such as “killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend.”
“These findings throw into stark relief the question of how counter-terrorism and wider security functions of governments in at-risk environments conduct themselves with regard to human rights and due process,” concludes the report, based on interviews with more than 500 former members of militant organizations.
“State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse. . . These findings suggest that a dramatic reappraisal of state security-focused interventions is urgently required.”
Numerous other experts have drawn similar conclusions from conflict zones in the Middle East and Asia. In 2008, a RAND Corporation report on Lessons for Countering al-Qa’ida warned the U.S. military to “resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment. . . . Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended: It is often overused, alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature, and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment.”
Similarly, the Stimson Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy, composed of former senior officials of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department, warned in 2014 that U.S. strikes had strengthened radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
In other words, there’s no better way to make people want to attack you in whatever way they can than bombing their neighborhoods, killing and displacing their loved ones, and dominating them with an oppressive military occupation. All of which Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for generations.
October 7 was a response to decades of oppression and abuse by the Israeli regime. Israel created that violence, in the same way it created the violence that will with absolute certainty come its way in retaliation for its actions in Gaza today. The official narrative makers always try to restart history at the moment of the last act of violence from Palestinians, because it is only by framing such violence as unprovoked that they can legitimize the idea that it’s possible to bomb a population into submission and obedience.
But of course, it is not possible to bomb a population into submission and obedience. Every atrocity you inflict upon them will only increase their desire for revenge — a desire Israelis should sympathize with since it has consumed them and turned them into crazed genocide cheerleaders since October 7. But their desire for vengeance is only made possible by the false mainstream narrative that the attack came from nowhere, completely unprovoked.
The actual crime that Palestinians are being punished for is refusal to submit. That’s all this conflict has ever been, from the very beginning. Palestinians refused to accept being thrown off their land and killed and forcibly displaced at the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and that refusal has seen them hammered with tremendous amounts of violence and oppression from year to year and from decade to decade under the premise that it’s possible to bomb and tyrannize a population into obedience.
Nothing will radicalize you toward violence faster than seeing your neighbors and loved ones ripped apart by military explosives supplied by a globe-spanning empire. Nothing will ensure further violent resistance more certainly than murdering Palestinian children by the thousands in plain view of everyone. Which means that nothing but restitution, reparations and return of land to the Palestinians will end this nightmare once and for all.
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Caitlin Johnstone 