Sometimes, I'll turn on the TV, start watching a football game, and, to work up a bit of artificial engagement, try to persuade myself that I like one team more than the other, so that I have a rooting interest, but usually I soon give up and just start vacuuming or something. It's a little like that when I contemplate the war between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force, only instead of running the vacuum I just wish they'd both stop killing the other side's civilians.
But some people are really determined to have a rooting interest, and in our country, the home team is Israel. Here is right-wing blogger Paul Mirengoff trying to persuade us, or maybe himself, that the civilians of Gaza are not wholly innocent since—it has to do with their responses to public opinion researchers soliciting their view of Hamas. By the same logic, Jewish civilians of Israel aren't innocent, either. Here is the conclusion to an interview Daniella Weiss, a leader of Israel's settler movement, gave journalist Isaac Chotiner:
Chotiner: When Israel pulled out of Gaza, in 2005, it also closed down settlements in the region. This was under the Sharon government. And there's been talk by some settlers since October 7th about the need to repopulate Gaza with settlements. What are your feelings about what should happen with Gaza?
Weiss: Right now, I'm on my way to a TV interview where I'm going to speak about our movement's efforts to return to Gaza, the entire Gaza, and build settlements.
Chotiner: So you think it was a mistake to pull out of settlements nearly twenty years ago?
Weiss: It was a mistake. The whole world is crying because of that. The whole world suffers from Hamas's rise. Not my problem. It's your problem. No country in the world said they were going to accept even a thousand people from Gaza. The world hates them. It was such a mistake to let them rise.
Chotiner: Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go?
Weiss: To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.
Chotiner: They're not Egyptian or Turkish, though. Why would they go to Turkey?
Weiss: O.K. The Ukrainians are not French, but when the war started they went to many countries.
Chotiner: Their country was being bombed, and so many of them fled west.
Weiss: And the Gazan people want to get bombed by us?
Chotiner: Maybe one option, other than bombing them, would be to help try and develop a society for them in Gaza, right?
Weiss: O.K., I wish you luck. Go ahead. Go for it.
Chotiner: Do you feel that Netanyahu and the people in his government are sympathetic to you and your cause?
Weiss: He's very sympathetic, but he is not as brave as we are. . . .
Chotiner: We saw some horrible images on October 7th of what happened to Israeli children, and now we see some horrible images in Gaza of what is happening to Palestinian children. When you see Palestinian children dying, what's your emotional reaction as a human being?
Weiss: I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.
Chotiner: We are talking about children. I don't know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here.
Weiss: Yeah. I say my children are first.
In another part of the interview, she refers to "the Jewish nation," causing Chotiner to ask what the boundaries of this nation are. She answers that it extends from the Euphrates River in the northeast to the Nile in the southwest, so I guess it's not just the Gazans who will be relocating. When someone in Hamas says that a Palestinian state should extend "from the river to the sea," meaning from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, he's condemned for endorsing the removal, or even the extermination, of the Jewish people in Palestine. I don't know why Daniella Weiss and her fellow settlers get a pass—if anything, her views are, morally and practically, even more outrageous. And it's not as if she's a crazy outlier. She correctly points out that her preferred candidates are in power in Israel.
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