One Possible Solution.
“I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life.” – Crazy Horse
Article republished by Jerry Alatalo | October 8, 2026
[Editor’s note: Here is my comment:
One solution worthy of consideration is giving Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu their own island prison, complete with fully-equipped 18-hole golf course, and warehouses continually stocked with booze, drugs, pornography etc., along with access to high-speed internet equipment making it possible for both to write their memoirs, – in the slim hope of something positive, specifically: warnings for future generations, coming out of their disgusting, despicable, morally-repugnant, pitiful, criminal, egomaniacal* lives.
*Egomaniacal refers to someone who is excessively preoccupied with their own ego, often displaying arrogance and an irrational belief in their own importance.
This is not an impracticable/pipe dream concept falling into the impotent category of pure sarcasm, but a deadly-serious proposal.
Peace.]
***
The Meaning of Oct 7
October 7, 2026
The Hamas incursion was less Israel’s 9/11 and more a Palestinian Tet Offensive, says John Wight. No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance.
Frantz Fanon at a press briefing during a writers’ conference in Tunis, 1957. (Unknown/Wikimedia Commons)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
First published Oct. 6, 2024
“When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.” – Frantz Fanon
Israel’s murderous assault on the people of Gaza over these past three years — with the material, diplomatic and political support of the collective West — has been tantamount to witnessing a rabid dog ripping the flesh from the bones of what many had allowed themselves to believe was a world worth living in. At this point, it is not.
Further still, the IDF’s ongoing exercise in mad slaughter has been of a piece with the rage unleashed by the slaveowner in response to recalcitrant slaves daring to break out of the plantation. And it is here where we understand the real “crime” of the Palestinians of Gaza — namely, their refusal to remain in the place accorded them by their coloniser and oppressor. That is, on their metaphoric knees, defeated and broken in mind, body and spirit.
This is the true significance of Oct. 7. It proved to the Israelis and their Western backers that despite their condition as a people confined to a latter-day reservation, that despite the racist disregard for their humanity, the Palestinians remained defiant. It also revealed a level of planning and ingenuity that no colonised people is ever supposed to be able to achieve.
Nobody understood or articulated the psychology of the oppressed better than legendary anti-colonialist militant and thinker, Frantz Fanon: “Violence,” he once wrote, frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self respect.”
Fanon (above) may have died in 1961, but his analysis of Western colonialism, its brutality and the dehumanising impact it has on its victims — forging psychological chains of oppression and self-hatred which can only be broken via a “murderous and decisive struggle” against the coloniser — remains apposite over five decades since it first appeared in his classic work, The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon wrote the book in the midst of the epic struggle for national liberation that was then taking place between the Algerian people and their French colonial masters, pitting the might of a first world European power against a poorly armed, but popularly supported anti-colonial insurgency. It was a fierce and bitter conflict which raged over eight long years, between 1954 and 1962.
Ultimately, the Algerian people’s quest for national liberation proved stronger than France’s ability to retain theNorth African colony it had possessed since the 1830s. By the time the conflict ended, marked by French President Charles De Gaulle’s pronouncement that the Algerian people had the right to determine their own future, 1.5 million had perished, of whom the vast majority were Algerian.
Oct. 7 was less Israel’s 9/11 and more a Palestinian Tet Offensive. It was a scream from the bowels of structural oppression, a reassertion of the self-respect Fanon recognised in the violence of a colonised and oppressed people. It was, in sum, the killing rage of those who refuse to accept the status of an unpeople.
In the spirit of Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. In the spirit of the Mau Mau, the spirit of Irish revolutionary leader James Connolly of Easter Rising 1916 fame. In the spirit of Bobby Sands and the other Irish Hunger Strikers who gave their lives for freedom in 1981. In the spirit of every anti-colonial resistance movement and struggle there has ever been, the Palestinians of Gaza on Oct.7, 2023, dared to say ”No!”
Palestinians in Gaza on Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation,/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
The resulting wave of total violence unleashed upon the Palestinian people since is not that of a just cause. It is precisely the opposite. As with the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and the British in Ireland, this Zionist settler-colonial project has failed on its own terms. This because it can only be sustained by extreme violence and slaughter, such is its unsustainability on the basis of its supremacist idea.
The simple and unvarnished truth is you cannot keep 2.2 million people confined to a latter-day Indian reservation for 17 years, control their access to electricity, clean drinking water — and all the other necessities of life — while also denying them freedom of movement, dignity, hope and a future. No, you can not do all that and expect resistance to it to consist of holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
This is the context in which Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Palestinians in Gaza three year ago, must be understood. No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance. Of this, history leaves no doubt.
The pretext for this audacious Palestinian operation was the repeated violation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site, during Ramadan in 2023. It was also predicated on the unrelenting refusal to accept the normalisation of their condition as a colonised and dispossessed people across the Arab and Muslim world, as set out in the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords.
Gaza today lies in ruins as a hellscape. At least 80,000 have been killed so far in Israel’s orgy of ethno-fascist revenge. The world has borne witness to a genocide unleashed.
There will be those, understandably, who will question the rationale behind Oct. 7, given the inordinate suffering that has been visited on the people of Gaza in its wake. But there is a marked difference between chronological and historical time. And with the latter in mind, it is still too soon to tell if on the level of the cause of Palestinian liberation going forward, it marked the end or instead the beginning.
But thinking about this particular question on a deeper level, this would impose the norms of the uncolonised onto the colonised. In truth, the real question we should be asking ourselves three years on is this: What choice did they have? When the choice is between living on your knees or dying on your feet, is there really any choice involved at all.
NB: This article has been written with the objective of neither condemning nor condoning the events of Oct. 7. It has, instead, been written as part of an attempt to understand.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, and ‘Gaza: This Bleeding Land’, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Follow his Substack.
Thank you for taking the time to read my work. If you enjoy my writing and would like to read more, please consider making a donation in order to help fund my efforts.
You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of my book, ‘This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality’, from all major booksellers, and my fiction novels ‘Gaza: This Bleeding Land’ and ‘The Ocean’ from same.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
(Source/credit: ConsortiumNews.com)
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