An Israeli woman kidnapped by Hamas militants on October 7 and held hostage for 245 days before being rescued lashed out on Friday at Israeli media outlets that twisted her words to make it seem as if she was wounded by her captors when in reality she was injured in an attack by the military in which she once served.
Responding to reports in outlets including The Jerusalem Post—which on Thursday ran the headline “Hamas Beat Me All Over”—Noa Argamani said on Instagram that “I can’t ignore what happened in the media in the last 24 hours.”
“Things were taken out of context,” the 26-year-old navy veteran from Be’er Sheva said of her earlier comments to Group of Seven diplomats in Tokyo. “I was not beaten… I was in a building that was bombed by the Air Force.”
“I emphasize that I was not beaten, but injured all over my body by the collapse of a building on me,” Argamani added. “As a victim of October 7, I refuse to be victimized once again by the media.”
You are making it seem as if Hamas are some legitimate resistance organization. They are not, they are brutal oppressors of their own. Their history also goes back further than 30 years, starting out as an offspring of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Radical Islamists like these are enemies of humanity and need to be eliminated. In order for Palestine to be free, they need to go first, with both Gaza and the West Bank experiencing the equivalent of denazification in order to prevent Islamofascism from rising up again in a few years after the end of this war. What should also happen at the same time is that the Israeli equivalent, the settlers, meeting the same fate, but expecting Israeli society to critically look inward when they are somewhat justifiably going through a phase of siege mentality isn’t exactly realistic. If Hamas only goal was to prevent Israelis and Palestinians growing used to coexisting, then they most certainly succeeded at that, for decades to come. The times when tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel and up to 100,000 were treated in Israeli hospitals per year - both of which played a huge part in enabling peaceful coexistence - are most definitely over, likely for many decades to come.
The slow genocide claim is absurd. Since when has any genocide resulted in more births from the supposed victims than the alleged genociders? Palestinian birth rates are high, consistently higher than Israel’s, and before the war, this also applied to obesity - in both Gaza and the West Bank. How exactly were they conducting this genocide? By making them all die from heart-disease due to overeating? Life expectancy was higher than the average in the Middle East too, which most certainly is not what would happen during an actual genocide. Even at the current rate of this war, it would take over 80 years for Gaza to be depopulated, assuming no new births. As horrific as the current war is, it’s “just” a war, but it’s perhaps the most televised (to use a slightly outdated term) and propagandized war in history, a battlefield in the current global Cold War between the West and an unholy alliance of Russia, Iran, China and their vassals. Most people following the war seem to be simply unprepared for the ugliness of an asymmetrical between a ruthless movement that would rather sacrifice every single Palestinian man, woman and child than surrender - vs. a military that after October 7th appears to be compelled to strike with the big hammer to prevent any chance of events similar to that ever happening again. It’s a dangerous combination. I’m glad that for all the mistakes the IDF has made that they haven’t given up on roof-knocking and similar warnings, which is why despite the immense destruction of buildings, far fewer people have died than in past wars that saw similar destruction. Doesn’t help the many innocent who are still caught between a rock and a hard place, of course.
I find it rich to blame Israel for the violence in the region. The original sin claim is almost offensive, given that the Holocaust led directly to its creation and that the young nation was attacked on day one of its existence. Seems to me like you want to blame the Jews for the antisemitism that caused both the Holocaust and the Arab League attacking Israel.
The creation of Israel itself is not the problem and neither is its continued existence. One would have to be utterly naive to assume that if Israel didn’t exist, there would be anything close to peace in a region as messy as the Middle East. The problem is that there are 22 Arab nations (or about 50 Muslim-majority nations), many of which can not accept the existence of a single tiny Jewish nation. One look at the treatment Palestinian Arabs are receiving in other Arab nation tells us just how little they actually care about the fate of this people. There could have been an Arab Palestinian nation from day one, but instead, Arab leaders wanted to take it all and subject the survivors of the Holocaust to yet another genocide a mere three years after the end of the previous attempt. When they failed, they occupied Gaza and the West Bank instead of allowing the people there to forge their own destiny, which shows that Palestinian freedom was never even a consideration.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge the crimes against humanity that came with the creation of Israel. The Nakba was inexcusable, there is no doubt about it. Israel should honestly deal with this part of its history instead of trying to suppress it. Using it as an excuse to keep a subset of the Arabian people in a perpetual state of statelessness however is nothing but irresponsible. It cannot be that Palestinian Arabs are the only humans on this planet who can pass down their refugee status, that they cannot gain citizenship in many Arab nations, leaving them trapped in this absurd limbo. By that logic, half of the people in my little town in Germany would be classified as refugees. Several Israeli cities that started out as refugee camps (housing many of the close to one million Jews that were expelled from Middle Eastern and North African nation at the same time as the Nakba) would also still have this status.
Meanwhile, while we squabble about this one conflict, far more horrific wars like the one in Sudan, where people armed with nothing but rusty AKs and blades are massacring more people in a single day as died over the course of months of fighting in Gaza. What are we doing here? Why is everyone so focused on this one war instead of appropriately dividing their attention and outrage? Is it the cultural and religious significance of this small part of the Middle East? Is it an echo of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union suddenly switched from supporting a sympathetic Israel to aiding its enemies, dragging much of the educated left with it in a move that seems right out of Orwell’s playbook? It almost feels like the entire human species is suffering from a collective form of ADHD, unable to address actually important problems and instead procrastinating with what should be nothing but a small regional conflict of limited global importance. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t pay some attention to it, but it just feels wrong for it to dominate the foreign policy part of our public discourse so much.
Sorry for the that stream of consciousness in the last paragraph. Wasn’t planned.
I’ll save someone a long read, this person is claiming higher birth rate as a counter point to genocide claims. All that digging for talking points must be dry, dirty work.
Yes, that’s the only thing I mentioned. You chose to ignore all the other points, like higher than average life expectancy for the Middle East.
All of your arguments are just as incongruous as the birthrate one, which is the case for most Zionist points. Saying that Palestinians are somehow responsible in this due to their inability to be accepted as refugees in other nations gives no merit at all to disproving genocide.
I did not blame Palestinians in my comment, but rather other Arab nations. Some Palestinian leaders most certainly are worthy of being blamed in part though, going as far back as Amin al-Husseini. Still, in the grand scheme of things, most Palestinians are just unlucky. They’ve never really been able to forge their own destiny, being used like pawns by both foreign and domestic powers who do little more than exploit their suffering for their own benefit.
If you can show any genocide to me that over the course of decades resulted in a higher birth rate than the nation that allegedly committed it, higher life expectancy and more obesity than the average in the region, then please, do so. I’ve studied enough genocides to know that this conflict clearly isn’t one, to the point that I’m convinced that those who initially made the claim did so maliciously in order to hurt Jews, trivialize the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and mask their own genocidal ambitions against Jews. I’m not accusing you of this - you are likely just repeating what you heard elsewhere without actually thinking about it. Benefit of the doubt.
Even the way Zionism is used by people like you as if it was some evil, as if Jews are the only people in the world whose desire for a home country is somehow not justified and worthy of being used like a swear word, an accusation against people who don’t agree in the disinformation- and hate-infested smear campaign that is being led against Israel. We can argue all day long that there need to be significant reforms in Israel itself, that the far-right government is as much of a stain on the country as similar governments are on other countries, that the settlers are an affront against humanity, etc. pp. - but going so far as to deny a people that is still hunted and persecuted around the world the one place in the world where they aren’t an endangered minority is nothing but despicable.
I’m ignoring your ignominious clinging to the birthrate argument too.
I guess if you run out of arguments and facts, switching over to using a thesaurus might in some circumstances mask this.
Facts are barbarians some times I guess.
Palestinians are closer related to Isreali’s than other nations, still an incongruity.
The responsibility lands on Isreal.
And to further clarify, these are two cultures of the same blood that have always shared the same land. You can’t use the examples of the persecution of the Jews worldwide to defend this.
Also people like me use the word as defined, Zion means holy land. They want a holy land for their religion. That right there means to me, as a Gentile, religious persecution leading to genocide. Did I muddy the word up at all?
First a thesaurus, now a dictionary. Will you attempt to score with a collection of formulas next?
This will be my last comment to you troll. I really can’t go any further in this (you refusing to acknowledge wartime rape, and even why you think pregnant women are the intended (or collateral )target of conflict, without getting a little sick. Your logic has me questioning if you belong in a civilized society at all.
Thank you. I was seriously growing tired of watching you working yourself off on the strawman you fabricated in your mind. How on Earth you came up with the absurd accusation in this comment in particular is beyond me.
It’ll be interesting to see if you actually stay true to your words.
Can’t have them breed tho?
Got to mow the lawn again?
You know, I’ve no love for Hamas whatsoever, but I can’t help but notice you consider “willingness to sacrifice civilians” to be somehow worse than, say, “actually, literally sacrificing civilians right now.” That’s not a very good look.