Nachshon Amir looks like a military man. It’s decades since he served in the Israeli military, but with his shaved head, fit physique and rugged demeanour, it might also seem that he has just been demobbed.
Thousands of high school and university students across Australia ditched class on 29 February to protest in solidarity with Palestinians who continue to face severe privation, displacement and murder as part of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
To drive a whole people out of their land—to turn it into something akin to the Zionist myth of Palestine, supposedly “a land without a people for a people without a land”—requires many things. Most obviously, it requires the killing and terrorising of Palestinian people on a colossal scale.
The level of suffering in Gaza is more than the human mind can comprehend. As the war enters its twentieth week, it feels increasingly obscene to be going about daily life while an entire people are being systematically destroyed, their lives, histories and culture blown to pieces or buried under rubble.
Starving a colonised people has long been a favoured policy of imperial powers.
Over the past 128 years, the Zionist movement and later the Israeli state have constructed a web of fallacies that surround the creation of Israel and the ongoing conflict, and which also seek to justify Israel’s ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinian people.