A Palestinian father who had lost nine of his 10 children in an Israeli airstrike has died from wounds sustained in the same attack, local health officials have said.
Hamdi al-Najjar, 40, a doctor at Nasser hospital, was critically injured when Israeli forces bombed the family house in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on 23 May, killing nine of his children. He had just returned home after accompanying his wife Alaa, a paediatrician at the Nasser medical complex, to work when the building was struck. He had initially survived alongside his son Adam, 11, who is still in hospital.
Even by the terrible standards of the Gaza conflict, their deaths had shocked the international community.
Footage shared by the director of Gaza’s health ministry and verified by the Guardian showed the burnt, dismembered bodies of Najjar’s children being pulled from the rubble of their house near a petrol station as flames engulfed what remained of the family’s home.
I’m extrapolating from my own experience (not Palestinian, but from a country in the vicinity). “Couldn’t Hitler have gotten rid of all of them and spared us the trouble” is pretty much a universal position from Morocco to Iraq, and I see no reason Palestinians—who have by far suffered the most under Israel—would be any different. This
Seems to confirm my suspicions. This is one of the things that I find very frustrating about my people, so I’m really not keen to sweep it under the rug.
Because they only ever have the misfortune of interacting with Jews who want to see them dead, would be my bet. Everything an antisemite in Palestine would think about Jews is confirmed by looking at their own lives, meanwhile there’s very little challenging those assumptions, so they persist.
Abbas is not necessarily the best source to quote, that quote in particular was something like 30 years ago and he had clarified his stance later emphasizing the horrific crime against humanity that the holocaust was, but he sucks anyway and has very low approval in Palestine, with a reported 90% of Palestinians wanting him to resign. But it is unfortunate that antisemitism like you describe is very common in the Arab world.
This is pure conjecture but it could be possible Palestinians would have a more accurate view of the situation because of their proxmity and history and therefore have less explicit antisemitism versus anti-Zionism, recognizing the distinction.
I assert that any Palestinian antisemitism will almost entirely evaporate the moment the Palestinians get national liberation. There is no deeply held, culturally rooted antisemitism in Palestinian culture, as exists for example in German or Russian culture. There is only the very understandable hatred of the oppressed for their oppressors. The same reason why for example Turks were traditionally hated throughout the Balkans. The problem is in fact that the Apartheid experience is creating such a culture in Palestinians, which is a moral catastrophe for which Israel is squarely responsible.
Certainly true, but by the time this all ends one way or another we’ll be looking at more than a century of Zionist colonialism, which I fear is more than enough to culturally root antisemitism in Arab culture. I certainly hope I stop hearing neo-Nazi conspiracy theories as fact from people I otherwise respect, but I think it’ll be up to the generation born after Zionist rule is over to fix this mess.
Yeah definitely, no argument there.