In the days immediately following the October 7th assault on the concentration camp boundaries of Gaza, the Israeli state sanctioned atrocity propaganda machine worked overtime to depict the Hamas-led action as the most dire form violence so as to justify what quickly became an open genocidal war upon Palestinian life. Indeed, rabid Zionists are still calling it the worst assault upon Jewish people since the holocaust despite the fact that now––following tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost to IOF ethnic cleansing, the targeting of hospitals and journalists and aid workers and children––the Israeli narrative of October 7th has been largely debunked or unsubstantiated. Back in early November I already noted that this narrative was dubious (the beheading of babies and similar such weird claims were already being debunked) but even more evidence has come to light since then––such as Sandra Ifrah, the main person behind the unsubstantiated stories of mass rapes, admitting that she
In Gillo Pontercorvo's anti-colonial film The Battle of Algiers there is sequence where three Algerian women plant bombs in cafes and an airport, killing French civilians. While notable because the preparation of this action eludes to Fanon's Algeria Unveiled , it also demonstrates how the actors of an anti-colonial struggle become locked into a particular logic of violence overdetermined by the original violence of colonialism. That is, this sequence takes place after a half-an-hour of the film's description of the colonial situation and is directly driven by the fact that French colonial police and civilians decided to bomb a civilian quarter of Algerians. Until then, the FLN had limited its violence to military targets; when it places bombs in European cafes and the Air France airport, however, it is because it is responding to the fact that all settlers are potential military targets. The film, while firmly on the side of the FLN, admits the tragedy of this civilian bo