Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli air force bombed a refugee tent camp west of Rafah City around 8:45 pm local time on Sunday. The time is important, since +972 Mag reported that the Israeli total war on Gaza is being conducted by AI programs. One of them is called, sadistically, “Daddy’s Home.” The Israelis are tracking Hamas militants through the day but wait to strike at them when they come home at night, ensuring that their wives, children, relatives and friends are also killed. The AI program is set up to allow 15 to 20 noncombatant, civilian deaths for every member of the paramilitary Qassam Brigades killed in the attack. The eight missiles that struck the camp killed 2 Hamas operatives and left others 45 dead, mostly burned up in their flammable tents, the majority women and children.
Burning the tents of the indigenous population has a long history in colonialism.
Historian Jon Romats Broadhead wrote of the “Pavonia Massacre,” “Warrior and squaw, sachem and child, mother and babe were alike massacred. Daybreak scarcely ended the furious slaughter. Mangled victims, seeking safety in the thickets, were driven into the river, and parents rushing to save their children, whom the soldiery had thrown into the stream, were driven back into the waters and drowned before the eyes of their unrelenting murderers.”
The snow turned red with blood and “the sky, it was reported, was lit with the fires from their tents.”
For the colonizers to burn the tents of the colonized is to declare them without domicile or connection to the land on which they were used to camping. It is to erase them from the earth