Gaza and October 7: The Israel-Palestine Conflict Since 1948

Of course war is horrible, so why did the Palestinians initiate this war with their vicious attack on Israelis on October seventh?

Well, they didn't. What do you mean they didn't?

They didn't. This war has been going on for seventy-five years.

Israel initiated it in nineteen forty-eight by ethnically cleansing seven hundred and fifty thousand people.

We must expel Arabs- Get out of here. We must expel Arabs and take their places.

The US- We must expel Arabs and take their places, and if we have to use force, not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel,

said that in 1937, and that's what they proceeded to do.

The people in Gaza... This is what you need to understand.

The people in Gaza, over eighty percent of them are refugees.

Many of them are from a place called Majdal Askalan in what is now southern Israel in a city called Ashkelon, and they were dragged from their homes and driven from their homes, placed in prison camps, barbed wire prison camps, and then dumped in trucks in 1950 into the Gaza Strip, where they would be permanently

warehoused. And then Israel proceeded to move Arab-Jewish refugees and Russians into Ashkelon to prevent them from ever coming back and pass laws to prevent Arabs, Palestinians from being able to return to their homes. Seven hundred and fifty thousand were ethnically cleansed. S-- For eighteen years, the remaining

Palestinians, a hundred thousand, were internally displaced inside Israel.

The remaining were put under military rule.

They were under military occupation until 1966.

Then in 1967, Israel violently, in a war it initiated, occupies Gaza, occupies the West Bank, occupies the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights in East Jerusalem, and then invades Lebanon in 1982, attacking Palestinian refugees there.

Puts Gaza under siege in 2005. No, no one can get in or out without Israeli military permission.

We must kill and kill all day, every day.

That's according to Arnon Sof-sofer, an Israeli government consultant who helped deci-- devise the siege of Gaza.

For years, Israel would not allow certain chocolates and A2 paper into Gaza. And then they began these brutal military assaults, which they call mowing the lawn.

Slaughtering a few people will leave Hamas intact, but keep them a less-- teach them a lesson. And I talked to you about those assaults that took place on Gaza. So this didn't come out of a vacuum.

This-- You're not gonna be able to hold people under siege, to cut them off from the world, and then expect them to just play along.

That doesn't mean that I celebrate what happened on October seventh. It should have never had to happen.

The reason it happened is because of the Israel lobby here, the genocide Democrats and the genocide Republicans who deny the Palestinians any right to have the r-- to have rights. And it's the right to have rights that defines you as a citizen. They're citizens of nothing.

And now we see what Israel really thinks of them, really thinks of their children.

Gaza has become a graveyard for children, according to UN Secretary General António Guterres.

So this didn't start on October seventh, and it's not going to end when there's a ceasefire.