In a moving and stunningly clarifying interview with Chris Hedges, Middle East scholar, Norman Finkelstein gives a historical and personal lesson about the morality of oppression. He locates the meaning of terrorism and the targeting of civilians within the context of genocide and ethnic cleansing, he refers to the Slave Revolts of Nat Turner and John Brown, as well as his own parent’s experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and of Nazi concentration camps.

He contextualizes the acts of terror committed against civilians by HAMAS in terms of the traumatic spiritual and psychological conditions, the despondency and rage, of living in occupied Gaza. He cites Fredric Douglas and W. E, B. Du Bois (on John Brown’s killing of civilians) and, particularly, William Lloyd Garrison (on the killing of innocents in the Nat Turner Rebellion), all three of whom refused to condemn the brutal rebellions against the humiliations, degradations, and physical assaults of slavery. He also quotes his mother, whom he holds to be a deeply moral person, about her thoughts about the millions of German civilians who died in the Allied terror bombings of World War II. She said, “Our feeling was if we’re going to die, we’re going to take some of them with us.”

Describing Gaza as a “Concentration Camp” Finkelstein declares, “You want me to apply moral categories, condemn? … I’ll describe my reaction. I will acknowledge by a dictionary definition that it constituted a very large atrocity. That’s a dictionary definition, and it’s accurate. However, when you want me to apply a moral category to what happened, you lose me … I won’t do it!”

26. 10 2003 update: 7,028 people killed by air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-death-toll-names-killed-released-biden-questions