c-optimistic

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Mostly living in cities, towns, and villages within Israel’s internationally recognised borders, many Palestinian citizens of Israel found themselves excluded from life-saving infrastructure during the worst nights of the Iran-Israel conflict to date. For Samar al-Rashed, a 29-year-old single mother living in a mostly Jewish apartment complex near Acre, the reality of that exclusion came on Friday night. Samar was at home with her five-year-old daughter, Jihan. As sirens pierced the air, warning of incoming missiles, she grabbed her daughter and rushed for the building’s shelter. “I didn’t have time to pack anything,” she recalled. “Just water, our phones, and my daughter’s hand in mine.” The panicking mother tried to ease her daughter’s fear, while hiding her own, gently encouraging her in soft-spoken Arabic to keep up with her rushed steps towards the shelter, as other neighbours climbed down the stairs, too. But at the shelter door, she said, an Israeli resident, having heard her speak Arabic, blocked their entry – and shut it in their faces. “I was stunned,” she said. “I speak Hebrew fluently. I tried to explain. But he looked at me with contempt and just said, ‘Not for you.’”

...

Yara Srour, a 22-year-old nursing student at Hebrew University, lives in the neglected neighbourhood of al-Mahatta in Lydd. Her family’s three-storey building, which is around four decades old, lacks official permits and a shelter. Following the heavy Iranian bombardment they witnessed on Saturday evening, which shocked the world around them, the family tried early on Sunday to flee to a safer part of the city. “We went to the new part of Lydd where there are proper shelters,” Yara said, adding that her 48-year-old mother, who suffers from weak knees, was struggling to move. “Yet, they wouldn’t let us in. Jews from poorer areas were also turned away. It was only for the ‘new residents’ — those in the modern buildings, mostly middle-class Jewish families.” Yara recalls the horror vividly. “My mother has joint problems and couldn’t run like the rest of us,” she said. “We were begging, knocking on doors. But people just looked at us through peepholes and ignored us, while we saw the sky light up with fires of intercepted rockets

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FYI

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to bomb apartment blocks in tehran while obsessively claiming you're only targeting nuclear sites is truly depraved

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no you see guys, israel has the right to defend itself, which is why it has to go to war with the entire middle east unprovoked with the full financial and nuclear backing of the united states government

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“A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement,” Yair Golan, a left-wing opposition voice and the former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, said in a charged interview with local radio station Reshet Bet.

Comparing Israel's actions to those of South Africa’s during the decades of apartheid, the leader of the small Democrats party and longtime critic of Netanyahu, added, “The Jewish people, who have endured persecution, pogroms, and genocides throughout our history .. are the ones now taking actions that are utterly unconscionable.”

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Around 14,000 babies in Gaza could die in the next 48 hours if more aid trucks did not reach the population, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday. In an earlier post on X, Fletcher confirmed the trucks' entry into Gaza, calling the convoy “a drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed.”

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“She acknowledged that she was in the minority in Israel when it came to speaking up about the terrible cost of the war to Palestinian life. “People here see Palestinians as the other and that’s why they have created a barrier,” she said. “They have managed not to feel their pain and I find that incomprehensible. To me, when I read the stories of their suffering in Gaza, it blends completely into how I feel about the Holocaust.”

Cohen’s eyes filled with tears as she recalled seeing a recent photo of a young Palestinian boy whose arms had been blown off by Israeli missile strikes in Gaza. “The news story said that when he woke up from his operation, the first thing he did was turn to his mother, and he said: ‘how will I hug you now?’ To me, that’s a Holocaust story. And that’s why we are here: to try to awaken people to their pain in any way we can.”

Ruth Vleeschhouwer Falak, 89, who survived the Nazi-occupation of the Netherlands as a child, said she was standing there because “in the 1930s, if Germans had stood up loudly against the Nazi party, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did to us. Speaking up is not a choice for me.”

“The saying is never again; that means never again for anybody. That’s really what we’re standing here for,” added Ilana Drukker Tokotin, 87, who spent her childhood in hiding from the Nazis.”

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hi hello are you a lawyer or work in the legal profession? join lawyers for good government (L4GG) a non profit taking steps around the country to fight for equal justice and protect our democracy

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Absolutely disgraceful

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“The average age of the children pronounced dead at Nasser hospital after this week’s new wave of attacks was between six and eight years old and about 35% of all casualties were under 14, said Morgan McMonagle, an Irish vascular surgeon volunteering with Medical Aid for Palestine, an NGO.

Among the casualties was a ten-year-old boy with a severed spinal chord who was completely paralysed from the neck down who was unable to breath unassisted, and a five-year-old with multiple shrapnel injuries including to her brain who is unlikely ever to speak again.”

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“The Washington Post could not independently verify the ministry’s figures; Israel has not allowed international journalists into Gaza since the start of the war. But Palestinian journalists, first responders, international aid workers and war-casualty watchdogs all say the official death toll in Gaza is probably an undercount, with the chaos of war upending what experts and researchers say was once a robust reporting system for tracking and identifying the dead.

During the nearly two-month ceasefire in Gaza, some people managed to recover the bodies of loved ones trapped beneath the rubble, but thousands more remain unaccounted for, according to Gaza’s civil defense.”

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hi, are you worried about the current president and the trajectory of our politics? me too! so here’s some unsolicited advice regarding the legal aspect of the next four years:

1) donate to legal non profits if you have the money! I don’t mean the big ones though, I’m talking the small ones. Legal aid in your city, your state’s chapter of the disability rights network, organizations focused on specific legal issues like immigration and reentry for those coming out of incarceration. if they have volunteer opportunities, volunteer! most of these legal aid orgs are super strapped for cash and don’t quite have the workforce needed to assist everyone in need. they help individuals and they do little litigation (tho when they do, it’s to help as many people as possible—impact litigation as it were)

2) spread the work of those big legal nonprofits. ACLU, SPLC, etc. Donate particularly if you live in a red state. Remember that their work is meant to help large swaths of people, not really individuals.

3) recognize that law is meaningless and as hard as civil rights attorneys work, they’re not going to be the change we need. This means, get organized. Within your community there are loads of programs and resources that help a wide range of folks. Join those efforts. For example: feeding the hungry, finding housing for those who need it, helping those with a record obtain employment, etc.

4) get involved in local politics. local judges, prosecutors, representatives, etc. Be extremely careful about elections for judges, at both the local and state wide level. And don’t fall for the ‘progressive prosecutor’ shit.

5) recognize that we have enormous power. sure it’s doom and gloomy, but as long as we show up, as long as we try, as long as we recognize that doing the work isn’t just saying we’re all fucked and blaming each other but focusing on how we can make today a little bit better than yesterday, we can do anything. remember than no politician will save us, that we have to do it ourselves.

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“Why aren’t you in The Hague?”

Journalist Sam Husseini is forcibly removed from Antony Blinken’s final press briefing as Secretary of State.

Butcher Blinken was interrupted repeatedly by journalists calling him out for providing cover for Israel’s genocide.

Freedom of the Press. US style.

(source)

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“This should have been made apparent in the last year as the atrocities and horrors in Gaza and Lebanon splintered any semblance of a coalition that had powered this pseudo-movement. Watching opponents of Trump legitimize and even support authoritarian actions was miserable business, but instructive in understanding the true nature of what had taken place in American politics and culture. Laid bare was a stark division between those who wanted the world to change for the better and those who wanted to express those desires while maintaining the disastrous status quo.”