Z Khan’s comparison of Shakespeare’s Shylock to Israel must be contended (Shakespeare’s work prophetic in nature, September 12, 2024).
Israel is not “recycling” the persecution that the Jewish people have suffered over millennia of oppression and violence against the people of Gaza. Such a simplistic view belies an ignorance of what occurred on October 7, 2023, and a further ignorance of the repeated attacks on the Jewish people by terrorist groups operating from Gaza and the West Bank over the past few decades.
Khan’s grandiose descriptions of “evil and wickedness”, “horror of unthinkable proportions” all performed by the “Zionist architects of apartheid” reveal that the article was written by someone more concerned with hyperbole and emotional propaganda than the facts.
Israel was founded as a safe homeland for the Jewish people to escape persecution. Not just from the Nazis, but from Russian pogroms, Arab forced expulsions and most of the world that had refused to help them escape the Holocaust.
Every attempt has been made over the past three quarters of a century to come to a peaceful resolution between the Arabs of the region and the Israelis, but there are radical groups identifying as Palestinian leadership that have prevented a lasting peace.
On October 7, the repeated anti-Israeli violence resulted in the murder of 1 200 Israelis, many of them children and the elderly, in a day. The violence involved mass sexual violence, torture and mutilation, all of which is well documented and recorded by the perpetrators themselves. The act of violence was organised and condoned by Gaza’s government. On top of this, well over 200 hostages were taken prisoner. Many of them subjected to torture, rape and execution.
If Lesotho were to wage a brutal invasion of South Africa, would we not have the right to retaliate? Would we not have the right to do what it took to save our hostages and prevent such an invasion occurring again?
This isn’t about blunt revenge. This is about stopping an October 7 from ever happening again. And Israel has more than a right to do what it takes to destroy Hamas and cripple the enemies that took so many of its people’s lives.
I urge Khan and others to have some empathy for the Israeli people. To see this conflict from their side, and to step into their shoes. And to not merely see them as an inhuman enemy to scorn and protest.
NICHOLAS WOODE-SMITH | Cape Town
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Daily News