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i've been arguing since the start of the gaza incursion that this is by no rational standard an action of self-defense. i'm not going to go through it all again--but the basic problem is the context that you exclude when you make the claim that gaza was such an action. in the immediate situation, you exclude the siege. there is no way to do that and say anything coherent about the situation. you exclude the brutality of the action itself--the civilian population was trapped in place because of the siege. in the larger context, you exclude the continual violence of occupation and *especially* the routinized violence of and around the settlements.
this is not to say that it's ok to lob rockets, but no-one who has looked outside the idf marketing campaign that accompanied this action is fooled by the claim that this action was triggered by the rocket attacks---which in the main fell in fields. and no-one who has looked at the situation at a remove buys the claim that these were simply "terrorist" attacks--that rhetoric is threadbare at this point: it doesn't allow for anything remotely like a comprehensive view of the situation and so doesn't allow for anything like a rational assessment of the action in context.
this seems to me more an extension of the pathology of colonialism than anything else.
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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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