When Donald Trump came to power in 2017, I had a worst-case scenario in my head: the new president, easily manipulated, quick to endorse violence, and surrounded by warmongers and various extremists, would use the immense power of the office he had tripped and fallen into to facilitate some far-right government’s campaign of ethnic genocide. He would recklessly threaten countries that might stop it with war, repress and prosecute those who resisted it at home, and wage war on the fragile but irreplaceable system of international law that could constrain it. The world would be forced to sit helplessly and simply watch horror after horror take place.
It has been a grim year to find this nightmare coming true — only not under Trump but under Joe Biden, the liberal president who was meant to exorcize Trump from political life and “heal the soul of the nation” from his presence in the White House.
Much of the press and political leadership will spend this day exclusively mourning the victims of the October 7 attack itself. They should, as we all should, mourn the civilians massacred by Hamas a year ago today, as well as those killed by friendly fire from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). What happened to them was unspeakable.
But October 7 was more than the shocking violence of that one day. What it set into motion was the culmination of years of genocidal rhetoric that had become alarmingly normalized and common in Israeli discourse, and of the steady ratcheting up of Israeli state violence against ordinary Palestinians, who, instead of Hamas and other militants, were more and more viewed by Israelis as the enemy that had to be wiped out.
The shocking violence carried out by Hamas provided the pretext, resolve, and political legitimacy for…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
