Palestinians have begun streaming out of Rafah ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack on the southern city that hosts some 1.5mn displaced Gazans.
Palestinians have begun streaming out of Rafah ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack on the southern city that hosts some 1.5mn displaced Gazans.
I’m saying this as someone who has done this from both the military and three letter agency side, and as an academic researcher.
You do know that actions like this will only increase support for Hamas, right? Like, for at least the next 20 years - a full generation and probably some change. This kind of adversity - especially this over the top - drives people together in solidarity. This isn’t seen anywhere outside of Israel itself as a war on Hamas. It’s seen as the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian people - most especially by the Palestinian people. They’re going to have a generation of children growing up prepped for an ideology that will make ISIS look like the cast of Sesame Street.
The children with missing limbs will remind the entire population what took place in 2023-24 for decades. The ones with diminished mental capacity from malnutrition will be blowing themselves up at the command of Hamas or whatever replaces Hamas. The aftermath will be broadcasted far and wide for a long time to come too. A lot of people are currently swallowing what’s happening as a side effect of war. The bombs will stop falling but the disfigured people will remain and the world would see them without the fog of war around them. I have a feeling what’s gonna be coming out over the years will have an effect somewhat similar to that of the Holocaust. It will be current, high definition and incessant.
Not to minimize malnutrition - that’s an effect that we know will be carried epigenetically for at least two generations even if everything stopped now and we weren’t looking forward to a decade-plus of occupation - but the situation on the whole is physically rewriting the brains of both the adults and more especially the children.
I am an adult, and I chose, more or less, to put myself into the situations I ended up in. I still have PTSD to the point that I had a flashback and panic attack in a friend’s bathroom during lunar new year when they set off a brick of firecrackers and it sounded exactly like a half dozen automatic weapons firing from across the intersection. It took me about 15 minutes of breathing exercises and pushing everything back down before I could come back out. What I went through was absolutely zero compared to what these people, including children, are going through. You’re going to have everything from suicides to psychoses to radicalization and hair trigger political violence. And it’s baked in at this point. It’s done. It’s going to happen with all of the physical certainty of billiard balls hitting each other. All they can do is make it worse, which is what they’re doing every day.
There’s going to be decades of consequences, and Israel is going to find itself isolated far more than it has ever been.
Forward and backward. Gazans have been suffering of malnutrition since 2006.
Yep, never said otherwise. And there are going to be a lot of Israelis who are traumatized to hell and back as well. But if you have such experience, you have to know that the trauma of WWII led to the Arab Israeli War in 1948 which led to the Palestinian Fedayeen Insurgency of the '50s which led to the Six-Day War, which led to the War of Attrition, which led to the Yom Kippur, which led to… You see? Any idiot that chooses one side or the other in this ridiculous shit is a moron. Unless you live there I suppose, then you have to stick to your tribe. Anyone who says “Israel, bad!” are right, but they sure as hell need to acknowledge that Hamas is in that same basket. Well, they don’t have to, ignorance is bliss and all.
You’re not wrong at all that it’s going to continue. There will likewise be a crazy level of PTSD and general trauma for all the people involved in Russia’s bullshit. I’m really beginning to think that humans are impossible of changing unless they go through a fucking extreme.
I grew up in the '70s with these posters and stickers all over the place. It was true then, it’s true now, but people suck.