this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

There never was a feeling of invulnerability, but rather of containment and a tolerable level.

I was referring to the propaganda we were fed about Israel during the Cold War - you can still see it in a lot of right-wing narratives about Israel.

You learn to live with a certain amount of risk.

Here in South Africa, we call it "laager mentality" - in the US, wars fade into the background, but in places like Israel (and Apartheid-South Africa) the "open-ended-war-with-no-end-in-sight" cannot fade into the background. And, eventually, it leads to... consequences.

What this attack shattered was the feeling that Hamas is a threat that could simply be managed and ignored.

It's not Hamas - it's Palestinians. Before Hamas it was the PLO, and if Israel (somehow) neutralises Hamas there will be another "big bad" Israelis will have to live in fear of. Israelis know that - they just prefer referring to Hamas to deflect from the fact that their colonial war has always been against the entirety of Palestinians.

But yes... this attack has most definitely shattered the idea of "containment and a tolerable level."

Unfortunately, I think the Israeli leadership will only take the first lesson.

A colonialist project can only act like a colonialist project - if it doesn't, the colonialist state must cease to exist in it's current form and become something else.