It would seem that most journalists and political commentators remain stuck on the terrible attack by the Hamas brigades (formally Islamic Resistance Movement) into Israel on 7 October 2023.

This incident is cited constantly, to explain and accept the ongoing genocide taking place before our eyes. Hamas, elected by its citizens in 2006, financially supported by Israel, was very soon vetoed from inclusion in the Legislative Assembly of the Occupied Palestinian Territories while Fatah ruled – with the financial and “iron fist” control from the occupying power Israel.

From 2008 to 2014, Israel, the occupying power, launched massive bomb attacks on Gaza, reducing many parts of cities and towns to rubble, and limited hours of power supply and supplied mostly contaminated water. Bombs were supplied by the US and European countries. In these attacks, 3804 Palestinians were killed, a third were children and youths. The majority of Israelis killed (87) were members of the IDF. In 2021, in response to a rocket attack from Gaza, Israel bombed built-up areas in Gaza over 11 days leaving 256 dead, including 67 children, 2000 were wounded (13 Israelis killed) and there was destruction of houses and and units. Every Palestinian citizen was mentally or physically affected, with every child understanding their oppression from those years. A child of eight in 2008 became a young man in 2023. The heart and mind knows only a hopeless future, the child will act.

It is to the academic journals and scholars and authors, Middle East political analysts, that a few of us turn to find a context for this particular day, this particular event, those particular tragedies and hostage-taking. The Hamas attack on 7 October was a reaction to decades of Israeli occupation, increasing blockades of supportive goods and services, the illegal settler violence in the West Bank and increasing numbers, according to ICJ rulings, of the takeover of Palestinian land and agriculture (now 770,000, many being zealots from Russia and America).

Palestinians were restricted from movement outside the Gaza Strip; thousands of its citizens were imprisoned in Israeli jails, most often without charges or trial, just taken off the streets on a whim – “he looked at me the wrong way”. There was insolence and disrespect towards Muslims attending prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, not to mention the increasing confrontations and insulting daily behaviour by youth and elders towards the small centuries-long Christian presence in the Old City. All these actions had been taking place for years even decades before 7 October 2023 and since then have increased daily.

It is from the scholars of the Israeli and Palestinian people that we find the cautious, yet damning, evidence that in fact this day did not emerge out of an empty space. It came as an outrageous and fateful attempt to finally say “enough is enough” to the suffering of the people of Gaza, those kept going on a subsistence diet assessed by Israeli health experts. It came out of an anger and fury at the indiscriminate arrests of men and women and children, taken into prisons, few ever facing a court and, if they did, a military court, the growing attacks by settlers in the West Bank, the destruction of so-called “illegal buildings’, the growing tensions, the exhaustion of families seeing their men and women, friends and colleagues increasingly “disappearing” into Israel, and the increasing limitations placed on their lives.

And yet, when we look at photos of the Gaza Strip before October 2023, and despite the sense of a large enclosed community constantly under military surveillance, we see a pleasant boulevard near the sea, we see apartments and shopping areas, we see cars and pedestrians, we see children attending school, we watch graduations from universities. Palestine was the most highly educated country in the Middle East.

So why the 7 October attacks? Because there was no hope the world would ever desire any change for Palestine. A forgotten place, rarely visited in the news, unless Israel was the focus of needing “national security”, with the mantra “Israel has the right of self-defence”. The world increasingly sided with the policies and influence of the US and Israel. The world divided, even the countries in the Middle East, often to ensure their economic growth, to appease the US and Israel, and many who already had absorbed Palestinian refugees after 1948, and could not absorb any more. Amid growing resistance, in Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt there was also a trigger for the “do-or-die” methods of Hamas.

That Israeli hostages have been taken, and some remain is an egregious act to be condemned by all. History will best explain all the truth of the actual day and events when international media gain access to records. However, there are thousands of Palestinians held in notorious prisons for decades, tortured, almost starved, denied medical care, many dying and their bodies held by Israeli authorities and not returned for family and burial; where are the voices for them? Is an Israeli life more precious, more valuable than any other? The Israeli Government obviously believes so. Their vicious attacks on the Gaza Strip, the killings, the destruction of homes, buildings, infrastructure and even the bulldozing of the rubble continues and there are statements that Palestinians will never return.

There has been gleeful dancing near borders by settlers and outrageous and barbaric statements from the Knesset on the “human animals”. Such arrogance, such cruelty, such evil in the 21st century, cannot and should not be accepted by anyone. That Israel is considered the victim by so many Western powers is astonishing. There is caution and reluctance from so many governments, including Australia, to stand and recognise the state of Palestine with full independence and the yoke of Israel’s “military iron band of control” totally removed. Perhaps this will only come when the International Court of Justice deems Palestine a site of genocide and ethnic cleansing and those countries, personnel, companies who supported Israel through these many years, will be named and face retribution, if only a loss of reputation and shame.

Where do journalists and media ever feel that growing “in the belly” tension of using powerful words to really objectively inform, and where do the media bother to read history of this tragic country? Do they bother or just take often subjective statements from our politicians and see it as the truth? Perhaps some compulsory reading and learning might begin with Palestinian Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine or Jewish-American Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza or historian and academic Avi Shlaim’s (an Arab Jew) Genocide in Gaza. Whether many of our politicians bother to read beyond what mainstream media published or listen to anyone beyond their advisers is anyone’s guess.

These historians and political analysts from Israel, Palestine, the US and Europe et al. will write the truth and compelling evidence of how the so-called democratic Western governments and their power-seeking decisions that have ruined the lives of millions of Palestinians. They will also relate the tale of the indigenous peoples of the land of Palestine, who show a heroism and tenacity so few of us even think or comprehend these days. What a troubled, dysfunctional and self-centred world we live in.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.