"[Gaza] is - as a percentage of the population - the largest slaughter of human beings on the planet in this century, and the goals have not been met. They have not been achieved. And there were people who were saying this from the very beginning. They were protesting against this slaughter from the very beginning. They were mocked. They were reviled. Many of them were kicked out of school. They were suspended. They were expelled. They were called anti-semites. All of these things. And you know what? They were right.
They weren't just morally right in seeing that this would lead to a cataclysmic loss of life, massive war crime, something that that even more and more scholars, most scholars at this point, are calling a genocide. But they could see that this would not achieve its goals because it wasn't possible. Because slaughter and starvation doesn't actually defeat a guerilla insurgency. Because the only way to defeat an insurgency, which Hamas is, is to deal with the root of the political grievance.
And Palestinians in particular, and I've written about this, were saying this from the very beginning. They weren't only saying that their people in Gaza would be slaughtered and starved on an astonishing scale. They were saying that Israel's goals were unachievable. And these people also were marginalized, were mocked, were reviled.
And all of these people who have much much more prestige in the mainstream media, in mainstream establishment Jewish circles, who don't have any problem speaking and being considered serious people, now, after 21 months, after all of this, after most of the hospitals and the schools and the buildings and the bakeries and the agriculture have been destroyed, after Gaza has more child amputees than any other place on Earth, now they tell us, "Oh, oops. It turns out it's not possible. It turns out we can't do it."
