DO NOT FORGET

The Grauniad has an investigative story about Gaza today on the website. It's billed as following up on "Israel's war with Hamas". I took real effort for me even to write that, to put those words together, this fictional war. I wanted to write 'war on Hamas' and in fact wrote 'war on Gaza' initially before I had to force myself to rewrite it. But use of the word 'war' here is wrong in itself, let alone the preposition. What happened there was an assault, a massacre, an atrocity, not a war. We must not forget, and are in danger of allowing ourselves to forget two bald facts, that we should renew in our minds and not allow ourselves to forget for the time being. There may come a time of peace and forgetting, of reconciliation, where we don't need to bear this at the forefront of our minds, but this is surely a long way off yet.

Barely six months ago, the Israeli military massacred over a thousand Arabs in Gaza, in a cold-blooded atrocity perpetrated against defenceless, helpless civilians.

Less than three years ago, the Israeli military similarly massacred over a thousand people in Lebanon. Here there was 'war', a war with Hizbollah, that Israel lost – the massacre occurred in a distinct but simultaneous act however, in the bombing of civilian areas far from the frontlines.

In three years, around two-and-a-half thousand dead, massacred by the Zionist terror machine.

I remain convinced that the massacre in Gaza was precisely an attempt by the Zionists to wreak as much destruction as possible in the Gaza Strip while they still enjoyed the support of the Bush White House.