After this, please scroll down to view a video of the cartoon I drew about Hamas just after October 7.
This didn’t have to happen. And it wouldn’t have, if Israel weren’t led by a far right coalition that’s been sabotaging the peace process for nearly thirty years.
In 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords, establishing a timeframe for Palestinian self governance, for a phasing out of the Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, and promising further negotiation to determine the borders of the Palestinian state and the fate of Israel’s settlements in Palestinian territory.
This outraged extremists in both populations. For extremist Palestinians, it didn’t go far enough. For far right extremists in Israel, like Yigal Amir, it went way too far. Benjamin Netanyahu fanned the flames of Amir’s extremism, and then after Amir assassinated Rabin, Netanyahu capitalized on that extremism.
Netanyahu has spent the three decades since then brutalizing Palestinians, carving the West Bank into a Swiss cheese map of illegal Israeli settlements, and poisoning the prospects for peace.
Netanyahu faced a choice following the unforgivable atrocities Hamas committed on 10/7. He could give in to blood lust and revenge and obliterate the Palestinian population, or he could find another way to capture or kill Hamas and its leadership and get back to pursuing real, lasting peace. I don’t know what that other way would be, but then I didn’t have at my disposal one of the most vaunted intelligence services in the world, and the sympathies of every Western nation. It was obvious that Hamas wanted Israel to lash out in blind fury and obliterate its own standing in the eyes of the world.
They knew the racist, far right prime minister who’d spent half his life fanning the flames of bigotry and hatred and wrecking Israel’s efforts for peace, would fall for it. Monsters understand monsters.
-Drawn October 9, 2023
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