By Caitlin Johnstone

The least wise. The least intelligent. The least compassionate. The least insightful. We are ruled by sociopaths and morons.

You are being offered two narratives to choose from:

Palestinians in Gaza are evil orc-like savages who just want to murder Jews and must therefore be caged and killed.

Palestinians in Gaza are thinking human beings who are reacting to intolerable abuses inflicted upon them.

Which is more believable?

We're being told that Israel needs to wage a relentless bombing campaign which is killing civilians by the thousands in order to eliminate Hamas, because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false.

Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There's no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs.

Secondly the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. You think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not.