Montefiore — Example in “the Great”

“it is about treating people the same”

Recent months of the Hamas kill-&-rape attack against Israeli civilians & Israel’s war against Hamas have been marked by so much tragic killing and suffering of civilians, Palestinian & Israeli and the suffering of both populations must be told, all crimes exposed …. but this time has also been marked by towering displays of moronic almost comical ignorance of history & of even the most recent and well known events in the very same region by the inane, the self-righteous & the bigoted ‘expert’ hacks and activists online and in the media… Here yet another example in the great

The Guardian claims there is no precedent for what is happening in Gaza and ignores the multiple examples of towns and cities in Syria at the hands of #Assad #Russia where civilians ate grass, epidemics raged as Assad and Russians dropped barrel bombs and chemical weaponry while noone wrote such articles in the Guardian. And then there was Darfur in Sudan. There was Congo. There was Anfal by Saddam in Iraq. There was Homs in 1982 when around 40,000 civilians were butchered in two weeks by the Assads in the biggest atrocity in the Middle East. And there is what is happening right now in Sudan – a vast humanitarian crisis, 8 million people displaced, 30,000 killed in a colonial-cultural ethnic war – and as even the UN & BBC have commented completely neglected. All events in the very same region in recent times. This is v far from denying the coverage of war killing starvation happening in Gaza / Israel; it is about treating people the same, whoever they are, giving equal coverage to people because they are equal. And as for the history, fake history like this from the Guardian is meaningless. It is worth doing a bit of reading about the Middle East. For now the urgency is to get plentiful aid to the people of Gaza, to get the Israeli hostages back home, to negotiate a ceasefire from both sides, remove Hamas from the equation, end the war and start negotiations to create the truth for the pathway to Two Nations, Two Republics, a safe Israel next door to a Safe Palestine.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

British journalist and historian, Doctor of History, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have become world bestsellers.