As was hardly surprising, after almost erasing Gaza from the map, the Zionist state presses on in the West Bank with a campaign cited by critics as genocidal while a temporary truce with Hamas over the Gaza Strip holds.
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The actions unfold in full view and with the complicity of a world that seems to lack the minimal capacity or willingness to stop Israel from pursuing what some say it tried to inflict on European Jews during another dark chapter of history.
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The Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu launched a brutal military operation in Gaza with the stated aim of crushing the group responsible for the October 7 attack against Israel.
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But as former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy explains, citizens now watch with horror as the same day the truce began, Hamas militants reappeared proudly in their uniforms beside the first hostages they had agreed to release.
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As former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged, Hamas has not disappeared; it seems to have recruited nearly as many new fighters as it has lost in Israeli strikes.
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Because Hamas is portrayed as an idea—the idea that peace with Israel cannot exist while Palestinians continue to be oppressed and killed—netanyahu and the religious right in his government appear unwilling to accept it, for reasons framed by ideology and political calculations.
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Israel continues killings in the West Bank and bombs camps in occupied cities like Jenin, while crops are destroyed, homes are damaged, and arrests are carried out at will.
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Promises to release thousands of Palestinians in exchange for hostages seem hollow when detentions can resume at any pretext, as seen after the invasion of AlRazi hospital.
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Meanwhile, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” makes life in the West Bank increasingly difficult, expanding security checks that force Palestinians to detour long distances and endure daily humiliations when they go to work, tend fields, or seek medical care.
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And our democracies, which loudly tout “values” and impose sanctions to defend Ukraine, do not merely overlook Arab dictatorships; they also pursue those who protest in streets or at universities against the Gaza tragedy, waving Palestinian flags or wearing the kufiya.
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While condemnation falls on supporters of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel, the country is invited again to Eurovision, to be hosted in a Switzerland that keeps shifting its stance, featuring one of the survivors of Hamas’s attack as its representative.
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A festival organized by the same European Broadcasting Union that swiftly banned Russia when it invaded Ukraine, yet Israel seems to enjoy a permissive pass.
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