Color Red
A music festival before dawn in a forest clearing near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel:
The music festival, known as Nova, was so loud that Cohen, who is thirty-one and lives in Tel Aviv, saw the rockets before he heard their sound. A handful of police officers soon arrived and broke up the party, shouting “Color Red”—code in Israel for incoming rocket fire.
As partygoers scrambled toward their cars or lay on the ground waiting for the barrage to pass, another kind of fire began. Cohen watched as four pickup trucks filled with armed militants and gunmen on motorcycles encircled the road leading out of the event venue, which was bottlenecked with cars attempting to flee the area. “They were shooting at people just a metre away,” Cohen told me over the phone on Sunday. “These were executions. We were like ducks in a firing range.”
The music festival was one of the first sites targeted by the unprecedented Hamas ground incursion into Israel. It is also perhaps the deadliest. At least two hundred and sixty [were] killed there, according to Israel’s search-and-rescue organization.
Allah hates music and the people who like music, especially the female ones.
I happen to have known a former Israeli army officer and commando, now an Australian citizen, who when I asked him what he thought of the situation between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs replied: “Terrible. Just terrible.” His view was that both sides were right, each in its own way, and of course in its own perception.
The Arabic term for ‘Palestine’ is ‘Felastin;’ making the Palestinian Arabs arguably descended from the Philistines of the Bible. But, whatever the origins of the peoples of the Levant at any stage, they had the misfortune of living right on the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. That led to a very complicated history of claim and counter-claim; each one (unsurprisingly) justified by the religions of the claimants and counter-claimants respectively.
And no shortage of wars. If you can’t defend it, you don’t own it; a simple principle going right back in time; and beyond the origins of humanity and right back to the dawn of the Animal Kingdom.
The Palestinian Arabs had the misfortune, after a long series of incorporations into various empires, to have their land eventually grabbed by the Ottoman Turks, only to have the Ottomans in turn defeated in the First World War. That set up the preconditons that resulted in time in the creation of the state of Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)
Definitely a gift to the proto-theocratic government (who will in their own turn aid Hamas in justifying further terrorism). They need each other and so more will die.
31 Harvard student organizations can’t be wrong.
I don’t have any sympathy for the current Israeli government, but surely the people who invaded and killed and kidnapped civilians bear some responsibility for the violence.
BKiSA,
Also benefits Iran, Putin, and the gop in the US. Basically just about every evil person or organization.
Back in the 1940s:
While the USA was turning back boatloads of Jewish refugees, Muslims were giving Jews sanctuary.
While Ford, IBM, Coca Cola made handsome profits, and the Catholic Church stood idly by, Muslims were feeding and housing Jews.
What changed after 1945?
Israel and Partition to name two.
Still my view that the colonial powers should’ve just stayed… Eighty years on the budding democracies turned to shit.
Not a nice view, Nehru and Gandhi have my utmost respect… Wish they were still around.