The Seeds of the Past

If anything could explain the unconscionable abandonment of the Palestinians, it is theopolitics-a dangerous mix of misinterpreted theology and geopolitics

- A. Faizur Rahman

AN overlooked aspect of the horrific October 7 attack by Hamas is that it provided Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the pretext he needed to fulfil his dream of occupying the entire Palestine.

On December 30, 2022, Netanyahu dismissed the right of the Palestinians to establish their own independent state by declaring that "the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel", and therefore, his government "will promote and develop settlements" in those regions ... the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea, and Samaria."

Then, at the UN General Assembly on September 22, just 15 days before the Hamas attack, he mocked all UN resolutions favouring an independent Palestine by holding aloft a map of Israel, which included all Palestinian territories, including Gaza and the West Bank.

Confirmation of Netanyahu's determination to carry out his cartographic threat came on October 9, when he warned that Israel's response to Hamas will "change the Middle East." By October 12, a whopping 6,000 bombs had been dropped on Gaza, killing thousands of civilians, including a large number of children, and displacing over a million.

Palestinophobia

The brutally disproportionate response sparked huge protests across the globe. But despite their peaceful nature, several European nations banned them. In France-the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity-a legal challenge to the ban failed when a court upheld it, citing "the serious risk of disturbing public order" amid "heightened tensions linked to the events in the Gaza Strip with a rise in anti-Semitic acts in France". Germany too disallowed many rallies "to stop public disorder and prevent public anti-Semitism."