THE ORIGINAL SIN IN CONFLICTS

THERE'S something rotten in the state of global opinion, because it's become impossible to criticise either the October 7 Hamas attack or Israel's dilapidation of Gaza without being press-ganged into the ranks of the supporter of the other side. If you criticise the arbitrary violence of Israel's invasion of Gaza, then, of course, you must be a Holocaustdenier. And if you criticise Hamas for hijacking the Palestinians' right to resist being corralled in an open-air human zoo, then you must be a terrorist.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

The struggle between Zionists and Palestine has run for so long and has featured so much violence that no party can claim to be in the right anymore. Everyone is sort of wrong, all the way back to the colonial-era mandates in the Middle East when there were no formal nations in the region.

What's rotten about the majority discourse backing Israel is that it suggests that the curtain went up on October 7, when Hamas committed the original sin of attacking civilians. Hamas did attack civilians on that day, and that is a war crime, but it wasn't the original sin. There's no point looking for an original sin because such a thing does not exist in history which, in the case of Palestine, rolls back to remote antiquity.

Worse, the story that Hamas started it all, which is like the complaint that teachers field after schoolyard brawls, is being used to justify the indiscriminate punishment of the whole Palestinian community, including its children, using military weapons.

The attack on the Al Buraq school and AlShifa Hospital, the biggest in Gaza, where displaced people were sheltering, was justified by the claim that Hamas operates from the facility. The argument of an original sin which started it all can be used to justify any attack on civilians and their refuges, and even to urge them to flee to Egypt, to which a border crossing is pointedly held open. Depopulating a nation is also a sin.