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if this thread is now a discussion about israel/palestine and no longer about the op, then: the situation in which israel operates was fundamentally redefined after 1967. questions linked to its origin seem interesting but irrelevant in explaining post-1967 problems.
since 1967, you have israel in a colonial position and its exercize of power a central motor---THE central motor--in creating conditions that spawned the types of tactics people call "terrorism"---the big marker being the black september action in 1972.
if you were living under colonial conditions, under a brutal occupation, and you saw--clearly--that those conditions did not exist outside your immediate environment because they were not covered by the "free press"--and you saw that conventional political action offered you no hope of political redress--what would YOU do? sit around and take it? wait for some interest group style movement to knock hard enough top be let in to some process that would maybe at some future date result in the recognition of the fact that you were a human being endowed with certain human rights that were being violated by the occupation? well then chances are that you would suffocate, in silence, waiting...
and if you were moved to consider tactics like those of black september and their descendents, why do you think you would do so? is it a rational decision to underake such actions, one rooted in the oppressive character of the immediate reality, or is it an irrational type of action undertaken out of some spite?
oppression, direct and indirect: poverty, political marginalization, the lack of any sense that coherent political redress is possible, the politics of impunity as expressed every day by the occupying power: these are the kind of things that are the conditions of possibility for what the americans like to call "terrorism" for therapeutic reasons.
if you want to end such actions, undo the conditions that generate them.
like anything else, these conditions are the results of choices made by human beings in complex situations, and they can be undone by human beings. there is nothing necessary or given in advance about any of this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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