Subject: Re: The Ultimate Irony
It is so clearly a colonial apartheid and genocide.

It is clearly neither.

Since Jews are just as indigenous to the region as anyone else, they cannot be placed into a colonial framework. And while Hamas' decision to wage war while embedded within a civilian population means that any responsive military action will have terrible consequences for civilians, that does not make such responsive military action a genocide. The civilian casualties are impossible to avoid because of Hamas' war crimes, but for something to be genocide the intent and goal of the action has to be the extermination/expulsion of the group.

To their everlasting shame, Egypt and Jordan derailed the partition of the area between two indigenous populations. That partition would have been traumatic for all involved anyway, just as the Partition of India was - and many, many people would have never been returned the status quo (just as millions of now-Pakistanis and Indians never got to return home during that Partition). And the two resulting nations might have had a very uneasy co-existence (again, as India and Pakistan did). But that potential pathway was derailed by the wars in 1948.

But trying to shoehorn the history of the region into a colonial framework ignores the complex history of the Jews in that part of the world, their own experience of conquest and diaspora, and their status as an indigenous people. And labeling it a genocide, rather than recognizing Hamas' strategic decisions to embed their forces entirely within civilian-populated areas (itself a war crime) is also a major mistake.