Hi RichardIt’s good of you to turn your attention to the Forum, which apparently is usually beneath your notice.I mentioned Hamas’ genocidal charter in reply to an earlier post which, if I understood it correctly, implicitly described the Israelis as ‘genocidal maniacs’.I don’t think that Hamas’ declared aim of exterminating the Jewish population of Israel can be described as ‘guff’. It is easy from the comfort of Putney to say that Hamas have no capacity to achieve their aim. They certainly had the capacity to rape, mutilate and murder almost a thousand civilians on October 7, an assault which they promised to repeat ‘again and again’. What exactly should have been the Israeli response to this pogrom? Should they simply have abandoned the south of the country and waited for Hamas to carry out further murderous incursions? At what point would Israel have been justified in taking steps to eliminate the threat of Hamas? When they had the capacity to kill five thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand?The loss of life in Gaza is undoubtedly tragic, most of it due to the fact that Hamas deliberately use the civilian population as human shields. Indeed Hamas openly welcome the death of civilians, treating them as martyrs who can serve to incite condemnation of Israel from beyond the grave. It is perfectly true that thousands of innocent people, especially children, have died in Gaza, but unfortunately that is what happens when one country declares war on another, which is what Hamas did on October 7. I am afraid that when in 2006 the people of Gaza voted for a party whose declared aim was the elimination of the State of Israel and the extermination of its Jewish population, they signed a pact with the devil, just as the Germans did in 1933 when they voted for the Nazis.
Steven Rose ● 5d