[sndman]

It's not a religious war. It's an anti-colonial struggle.

An understanding of events of October 7 starts with an understanding of the historical context of Palestine and Israel: most of the coverage of the events of October 7 deal with the symptoms of the violence and not the source. An understanding of the source of the violence, by no means justified, is needed.

This history starts with an understanding of Zionism, an ideology that is racist, not in its origin, but in the way it manifested itself in the land of Mandatory Palestine. And this racism is part of the settler colonial movement where the logic of the elimination of the Native was activated. These elimination policies were in the DNA of the Zionist encounters with the Natives of Palestine in the late 19th century. They wanted as much of the land of Palestine as possible with as few of the Palestinians as possible. There was always the demographic dimension as well as the geographic dimension in the earliest policies of the Zionist movement and into what later became Israel. The more space the Zionists had, the less space the indigenous people had. These elimination policies could take different forms: genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and they take different forms in different places. What happened in Gaza cannot be taken out of this context of Zionists/Israeli elimination and the ethnic cleansing of half of the population of Palestine that took place in 1947-1949 and the destruction of over 500 villages. The ruins of some of these same destroyed villages where the attackers originated from, and were next to the kibbutzim that were attacked. None of this justifies the violence that took place on October 7 but is needed to understand the source of the violence. The source of this violence is the racist ideology, of a racist Zionist ideology that needs to eliminate the Native. Zionism is not unique in this regard and is similar to other European colonial settler movements that desired to eliminate the native populations on the land they colonized.