Today marks both the first anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip and one week since Israel began its ground invasion of the neighboring country of Lebanon.
Israel’s brutal military response to the Hamas-led October 7 incursion has shown no sign of slowing down as the United States, its primary supplier of military aid, continues to commit weapons, funding and rhetorical support to its deadly assault on Arab populations in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon.
Over 1,000 Lebanese civilians have been killed and over a million displaced as they flee the encroaching violence. From Beirut, we speak to Rima Majed, a professor at the American University of Beirut, who highlights the disruption to daily life that Israeli warfare has created.
“This is really a huge catastrophe, and it’s not a humanitarian one. It is a political catastrophe, and it’s a social catastrophe. And this would not have happened … if it wasn’t for the [international] backing and the arming of Israel.”
I don’t know what’s so hard to understand. To bring an end to the violence and even begin to think about reconciliation, we need a secular state with equal rights and protections for Palestinians and Israelis. And that necessitates dismantling the colonial apartheid state that is current-day Israel.
Any call to displace Israeli citizens is obviously despicable. But pretending that Israel’s settler-colonial actions are in any way justifiable, legally or morally, is also disgusting. The violence and displacement must end, and I honestly couldn’t care less what the resulting state is called, as long as Israelis and Palestinians are given the same protections under it.