7 October 2023: shocking yes, surprising no - new book by historian Eric Skare
https://x.com/MaryKostakidis/status/1975325176540926138
7 October 2023: shocking yes, surprising no - new book by historian Eric Skare
‘In 2004, following Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, its foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said the only question was why it had not happened sooner. We should keep this question front of mind in thinking about the events of 7 October 2023.
The vicious Palestinian breakout from Gaza that day and Israel’s ongoing neo-genocidal retaliation might shock in its scale and brutality. But it was long in the making. Skare’s insightful and richly detailed book, is therefore akin to seeing a disaster movie – seemingly powerless to change the script, we can but watch in sickened horror.
“So Gaza could not be contained after all,” is the singularly apt opening sentence of the book. Gaza had been under blockade (Egyptian as well as Israeli) for 16 years. Nearly 80% of its population of about 2.2 million people depended on aid and more than half of them were unemployed (70% for its youth population). According to the UN Relief and Works Agency, Israeli security forces had damaged or destroyed about 300 of Gaza’s water wells and more than 80% of the water extracted from the territory’s aquifers did not meet the World Health Organisation’s water quality standards.
By 2023, Skare writes, the majority of Gazans under 30 had never seen the world outside, and a 16-year-old would have experienced four wars and countless skirmishes, airstrikes and cross-border armed confrontations.’
johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/7
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:55
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