Free Palestine + Remember October 7

I want to start by making something unequivocally clear:

I believe there is a genocide occurring in Gaza, perpetrated by the Israeli government with the support of the United States government. Nothing I am about to write changes that position.

I have been writing about the treatment of Palestinians and the conditions in Gaza for more than twenty years, as documented by the date-stamped posts still sitting on my personal Blogger account, formerly BlogSpot. This isn't something I discovered on October 8, 2023.

But I think the sheer scale and horror of what has happened in Gaza since October 7 has obscured something else that should never be obscured:

The October 7 attack, led by Hamas and carried out alongside other armed groups, was horrific too.

I want to name Hamas immediately and deliberately because the distinction matters.

Hamas is not the Palestinian people, just as the Ku Klux Klan does not represent the American people.

The actions of an extremist organization should never be assigned collectively to an entire population.

Acknowledging the horror of what Hamas did does not diminish the suffering of Palestinians. It does not justify what the Israeli government has done since. And it does not make someone a Zionist.

We should be capable of caring about civilians regardless of which side of a border they happened to be standing on.

I think a lot of people now have only a blurry understanding of what actually happened on October 7.

They know Hamas attacked Israel. They know there was a music festival. They know people were killed.

Sometimes I see October 7 discussed almost as though armed men entered a music festival and opened fire—something comparable to the terrorist attack at the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in Paris.

It was much more than that.

So I went back and started reading.

OCTOBER 7, 2023 — APPROXIMATELY 6:30 A.M., LOCAL TIME

At approximately 6:30 that morning, a massive barrage of rockets began, followed by a coordinated ground assault in which Hamas and other armed groups breached the Gaza perimeter at multiple points and attacked civilian and military targets in southern Israel.

The Nova Music Festival was taking place only a few kilometers - around two miles - from the border with Gaza. Around 3,000 young people were there. According to the UN Commission of Inquiry, 

• 364 festival attendees were killed and 
• around 40 were abducted and taken into Gaza. 
• People were killed while hiding beneath the festival stage, in portable toilets, inside cars and while running through surrounding fields trying to escape.

But Nova was only one part of what happened that morning.

The Hamas-led assault struck civilian communities, the festival, military installations and other locations across southern Israel.

Approximately 1,200 people were killed in the October 7 attacks and their immediate aftermath, predominantly civilians.

And among the dead were children.

Later UN Commission reporting identified 40 children killed on October 7.

Then there were the people who were taken.

251 people were abducted in Israel and taken into Gaza as hostages.

Of those 251, 226 were civilians and 25 were members of the Israeli security forces.

Thirty-six were children.

Nine of those children were under five years old.

And ten children were abducted without another member of their family with them.

Nine were under five.

Think about that for a moment.

These children weren't the Israeli government.

They didn't formulate Israeli policy.

They weren't responsible for what had happened to Palestinians.

They were children.

And the hostages weren't all Israeli.

The 251 included foreign nationals. Thai workers were among the foreign nationals caught up in the October 7 attacks, alongside people of other nationalities.

Living in Thailand and being half Thai, that part hit close to home.

These were people who were living there. Working there. Visiting there. Or dancing at a music festival that morning.

People were attacked in their homes. Families were attacked. People were killed. Children were killed. People were kidnapped and taken across the border into Gaza. UN investigators documented entire families being killed or abducted, including babies and young children.

And for the people taken hostage, October 7 was only the beginning.

The UN Commission of Inquiry found that hostages were held without contact with the outside world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross. Released hostages described overcrowded, dark underground spaces, limited access to air and drinking water, inadequate sanitation and insufficient food.

And then there is something else that cannot be left out of this conversation.

Sexual violence.

Some of the people who survived captivity have since spoken publicly about what was done to them.

Amit Soussana was 40 years old when she was abducted from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. She was held captive for more than a month. After her release, she publicly described being sexually assaulted at gunpoint by one of her captors. Her account was consistent with what she had told medical professionals and a social worker shortly after she was freed.

And this was not something experienced only by women.

Rom Braslavski was 19 years old when he was abducted from the Nova Music Festival, where he had been working as a security guard.

He was held captive for 738 days.

He was nineteen when he was taken.

He was twenty-one when he came home.

Braslavski subsequently became the first male former hostage to publicly describe experiencing sexual violence during his captivity.

And the broader evidence does not rest solely on individual survivor accounts. The UN Commission of Inquiry reported receiving credible information that hostages were subjected to sexual and gender-based violence in captivity, including sexualized torture and abuse against both men and women.

A separate UN mission found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape occurred during the October 7 attacks at several locations and found “clear and convincing information” that some hostages taken into Gaza were subjected to sexual violence. Hamas has denied allegations that its forces committed sexual violence.

And I think it is important to say something else here.

Not every horrific story circulated after October 7 was ultimately substantiated. UN investigators themselves distinguished between allegations they could substantiate and allegations they could not.

That matters.

Because none of this needs exaggeration.

The verified facts are horrific enough.

Some hostages were held for weeks.

Others for months.

Others for years.

Some never came home alive.

And this is where I think something incredibly important has become lost:

HAMAS DID THIS.

Not the Palestinian people.

Hamas.

Acknowledging that does not somehow excuse what has subsequently happened in Gaza.

And acknowledging what has happened in Gaza does not require minimizing what Hamas did on October 7.

Those aren't contradictory positions.

In fact, I think the actions of the Israeli government since October 7 have done an enormous disservice to the Israeli civilians who were attacked that day. The scale of the destruction and civilian suffering in Gaza has become so overwhelming that the people murdered and kidnapped on October 7 have almost disappeared from parts of the conversation.

They shouldn't.

Because they were human beings too.

And there is another distinction I think we desperately need to protect.

Palestinians are not Hamas.

Israeli civilians are not the Israeli government.

Jewish people around the world are not the Israeli government.

A Palestinian child does not inherit responsibility for what Hamas did on October 7.

An Israeli child does not inherit responsibility for what the Israeli government has done in Gaza.

Neither does a Jewish child in London, Bangkok, New York or anywhere else on this planet.

You can condemn Hamas without condemning Palestine.

You can condemn the Israeli government without condemning Israelis or Jewish people.

You can mourn the people murdered on October 7 while mourning the people killed in Gaza.

You can care about a terrified young person running from a music festival and a terrified Palestinian child running from an airstrike.

Those ideas are not contradictory.

There is no moral requirement to ration your humanity.

Hamas is not Palestine. The Israeli government is not the Israeli people. Civilians are not their governments.