European leaders condemned the surprise attack on Israel by the Hamas militant group early Saturday and proclaimed Israel’s right to defend itself.
“It is terrorism in its most despicable form,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks.” European Council President Charles Michel and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola also condemned the attack.
Hamas caught Israel off-guard early Saturday morning with thousands of rockets fired and dozens of heavily armed gunmen storming into Israel’s south. The Israel Defense Forces responded by striking Hamas targets in Gaza. “The IDF is initiating a large-scale operation to defend Israeli civilians,” the IDF said in a statement.
Honestly I find it very hard to support either side in this one. Israel has as a state been marginalizing, stealing land from and generally pushing out Palestinians, and it is not exactly surprising that this will lead to support for extremist groups, but at the same time, the civilian populace of Israel itself contains many who had nothing to do with this and were merely born there, and so I cannot condone this kind of attack either. I’m not even sure what a good solution to this looks like either, splitting off Israel and Palestine would be difficult considering the disconnected nature of the two areas of Palestine, it’s hard to imagine a stable or economically viable Palestinian state emerging from such a split, and both sides would have every reason to distrust the other that would probably just lead to continued conflict. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to imagine a single state where both populations coexist peacefully at this point given the hostility between them for so long. Moving people around to try to create two states that have more viable geography has historically not often ended well, and would inevitably still leave minority populations in each that would be unlikely to be treated well.