convertish

[convertish]

Apparently the bodies of four deceased hostages will be returned this Thursday, and four next Thursday. Israel will receive the names of this week's four on Thursday morning. This was apparently a part of the deal that had not been publicly published. This is in addition to the three living hostages who will be released this Saturday.

I don't know whether these four are from the list of 33; but given the numbers (we know that eight of the 33 are deceased) I think they probably are.

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Following a bunch of Jews and allies like I have no idea what these fandoms are or what you're talking about, but at least I can trust that you don't want me dead, or won't cross-examine me to decide if I'm "one of the good ones" or not.

[convertish]

It's so clear to me that so many so called "anti Zionists" - especially the non Palestinian goyim - have no idea how the Israeli election system works, and how bibi remains in power, and why we had five elections in like, three years, despite elections supposedly being every four years - because he couldn't keep a government stable enough to stay in power. Bibi netanyahu is MASSIVELY unpopular, and his approval rate has tanked even more since the war started, even among likud voters, the people who vote for HIS party (although their approval rates ranked less than the rest of the population). He has an extreme right wing government because if he didn't cooperate with right wing extremists and haredim he straight up wouldn't have the majority he needs to be our prime minister in the first place. He's been on trial for corruption for years at this point, and tried to completely restructure the judicial system just to avoid prison - leading to nearly a full year of protests until Oct 7. Luckily it didn't end up passing.

If elections were held at any point in the last five months since this war started, not only would he not be PM, we'd straight up have a center-left government. My recent transformation into a Yair Golan stan account is a joke but also 100% real - according to polls from the last three months or so, if he does what he's campaigning to do, leading a combined avoda and meretz party, he'd get enough votes to have an actual influential left wing party in the government for the first time in decades. An unbelievable amount of Israelis are calling for bibi to resign, many of them not calling for it to happen after the war ends, but right now.

I am sourcing this information from polls conducted by channels 11 (kan), 12, and 13, as well as by the Israeli democracy foundation, all but one of our important news channels - channel 14, the last channel, is our equivalent of fox news, and despite their numbers often being extremely different due to what is in my opinion biased reporting and flawed methodology, even they at times have had to admit that gantz is currently leading in the polls.

(Disclaimer that I work for a company that provides subtitles for channel 13, but i do not directly work for channel 13. Channel 13 leans mostly center left, and employs several (self identified) Arab Israelis in front of the camera, including Lucy Aharish, who makes considerable effort to bring Palestinian and Bedouin perspectives to her show. It also employs at least one massive racist though.)

I write this post because I keep seeing an unsourced claim by goyim that there's a poll showing a high rate of approval - 88%! - of the destruction and/or deaths Israel and the IDF are causing in Gaza. I went down a rabbit hole and simply couldn't find a poll asking about approval of deaths or destruction, although maybe I was looking up the wrong keywords? As a result I have just... So many questions. Because with the information I have from trustworthy local news sources, from the news channels I mentioned above and papers such as yediot aharonot/ynet and Haaretz, it doesn't fit with current public opinion, including many recent protests for more efforts towards a ceasefire. So my questions are thus -

Who conducted this poll? Was it a think tank, a government agency, a paper, a news channel? If so, which one? Are they left leaning, right leaning? Was it conducted by an Israeli or foreign institution?

Who did they ask? Was it a sample of likud voters; all Israeli adults; did they include only Jewish Israelis or also Arab citizens (approx. 1.5 million out of our 8 million population), Bedouins, and other minorities?

When was the poll conducted? Was it in October, immediately after the Oct 7 massacre, before the death toll in Gaza grew? Was it conducted more recently?

What, exactly, did they ask? Did they ask about destruction in general, or about the death toll in particular? Did they ask about the attempts to rescue hostages with military means, or all military actions? Did they ask about the number of Hamas operatives dead, about their estimated ratio of Hamas to civilians, about the total deaths?

What was the size of the pool surveyed? Was it conducted on a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people?

Because without this information, that one, sole statistic is essentially useless. As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Always look at the source and ask: who asked the questions, who got asked, and what the questions were.

More specific statistics and sources under the cut.

I did find one survey by the Israel democracy foundation that asked if the IDF should take the Gazan suffering into account - an entirely different question, although it did still have a horrific 89% Jewish Israelis and 14% Arab Israelis and Palestinian citizens who said they shouldn't. That said, the pool they were drawing from was not very large - 500 of the interviews were conducted in Hebrew, 100 were conducted in Arabic. Also, of the people who supposedly said that they shouldn't, a little more than half of both populations said they should "somewhat" take it into account - that is, they didn't say they shouldn't take it into account at all, just not make it their first priority. This survey was conducted mid December.

In another survey by the same source with a slight larger sample size (a little over 600 Jewish Israelis and a little over 150 Arab Israelis), an insanely low 15% still wanted Bibi to be the PM, with the only candidate who received more than 6.5% being the center candidate Benny Gantz, who historically has tried to cooperate with center and left parties, with a whopping 23% of the votes. The survey included 10 candidates, as well as five other non candidate options. 4% voted "just not Bibi", and an actually insane 30.5% voted they were undecided. Only a quarter of those surveyed believed Bibi would manage to maintain a coalition after the war, a number that includes more extreme right wing voters, and only the ultra Orthodox haredi population had a majority of people (60%) who believed he can. This survey was conducted in January.

The channel 13 news survey from early March - barely over a week ago! - covered more specifically which parties would manage to get into the government and how many seats they would get, as under a certain amount of votes you simply do not get seats. Not all seats get into a coalition. According to their poll, the amount of seats the likud would get is halved, from 32 to 17, while gantz's the state camp would grow from 12 to 39. While currently meretz gets 4 seats and haavodah do not get enough votes to get a seat at the table so to speak, a combined haavodah and meretz under Yair Golan gets 9 mandates. In total, the right wing only get 47 mandates, well short of the amount of mandates necessary to create a government.

Channel 12's corresponding poll from January shows 35 mandates for gantz, and bibi had 18 mandates. Channel 11, in the same month, gave gantz 33 mandates and bibi 20.

I also sources an English Jerusalem post article which reports on channel 14's polls; jpost is a right wing biased paper, and yet even they report 36 mandates for gantz and 18 for bibi as of February.

Sources

The Israel democracy institute: 1 (English), 2 (Hebrew), 3 (Hebrew)

Haaretz: 1 (English) (paywalled)

Channel 13: 1 (Hebrew)

Ma'ariv: 1 (Hebrew) (reporting on channel 12)

Podcast which summarizes the above article: 1 (English) (includes transcript)

Kan 11: 1 (Hebrew)

Jpost: 1 (Hebrew)

[convertish]

I'm all for the movement of "if you're going to accept all autistics, that means all autistics. Even the weird ones" etc

But I much more fancy that we just accept weird people point blank. They don't need to share a diagnosis. They don't need to make themselves smaller just to fit into the world.

Cuz, as a late diagnosed autistic, my weird ass could have used just acceptance. Regardless of why I was weird.

[convertish]

Tbh I think a lot of the rank-and-file goyische anti-Zionists don’t really realize that a large majority of the Jewish community sees them as a new generation trying (and thankfully not succeeding—yet) to enact another full-scale genocide against us. They’re so insulated by their tokens—who have either been gaslighted into accepting abuse or are actively trying to avoid abuse by being Good Jews—that they honestly do not understand the Evil Jews they call Zionists (who may or may not actually be Zionists) are the majority of the Jewish community.

And we despise you. We’re disgusted by you. Some of us are downright terrified of you. We see you as no better ideologically than the genocidal maniacs who have spent the last 3000 years murdering us in increasingly horrific ways. And I cannot fathom how you can see yourself as a good person or ally to Jews when the majority of the Jewish community fears and hates you as much as we do the literal Nazis.

I know you won’t, because the truth is that you do hate Jews just as much as the Nazis and everyone who came before them did, even if you deny or justify it—but you should be ashamed.

[convertish]

also by revising history and denying indigenous peoples (hindus, jews, jains, sikhs, buddhists etc) their right to be called indigenous to a specific region, you further cement white supremacist and imperialist ideology that native people cannot belong to or be an advanced civilisation however if they pass a certain threshold of “civility”, then their right of indigeneity can also be revoked as they don’t carry the traits of their savage ancestors, hope that helps 👍

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People will say "Believe women! Believe when they say they've been sexually abused!" Then demand video evidence of horrific rape because they don't believe Israeli women.

People will say "Suicide isn't the answer! Self destruction isn't radical, staying alive is!" Then praise a man for killing himself and say how necessary it was.

Make up your mind. What exactly are your values?

[convertish]

really hope that people just don’t know that they’re cheerleading for racist sex slavers, as opposed to just not caring

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i've been talking about antisemitism for years and i shouldn't be surprised by anything anymore but even i was surprised by the speed and abundance of antisemitism about the tunnel thing

[convertish]

fart noise six hour extended track

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shot

chaser (from his bio)

‘human rights activist… horny shitposter’

[convertish]

"When we encounter difficult texts in our tradition - texts in the Torah or Talmud - what do we do? Women who learn have no choice but to figure this out. And since all women should learn, everyone has to figure it out.

Options that are off the table: 1. Ignore. 2. Apologize. It's the Torah. We can't ignore it. And saying things like "well it was different back then" is just silly. Yes the world was worse, and B"H the world has gotten better, but the Torah speaks to us in our own times. I think those apologetics are basically the same as ignoring.

Instead: look at it squarely. This text is misogynist. But then move past that to investigate for truth, because it's Torah so we start out knowing there's truth....is it harder to raise girls than boys today? Because then I have to work against the whole system [that] everywhere tells them they matter less, are less smart, are less capable? With daughters we have to fight the whole world. So maybe having sons is fortunate, at least a little bit?

Someone commented to me that in their opinion I am doing "gymnastics" and I just want to own that. Gymnastics takes years of training, precision and strength. It's uncomfortable, it's hard and it's worth it because this is an ancient tradition and it is ours"

- Rabbanit Leah Sarna on Pesachim 65, "fortunate is he whose children are males, and woe to him whose children are females."

[convertish]

You can get them back once you prove you know what they mean

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the essential problem is that many people don’t want Zionist Jews to change their frameworks and support the liberation of Palestine and the dissolution of the structures of the state of Israel. They want them to conveniently disappear. They want them to die. If you want Zionist (as you define it) Jews to die for being Zionist you still want Jews to die, and not only will this attitude do nothing about the systemic issues of antisemitism, it also continually convinces Jews that they need the state of Israel to be safe

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i actually do think individual human lives are unfathomably valuable

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This is 74 year old Canadian Israeli Peace activist Vivian Silver.

Silver dedicated her life to promoting peace. she co-founded Women Wage Peace, an interfaith grassroots organization, and was a board member of the human rights organization "Bzelem". she volunteered in "On the Way to Recovery," accompanying cancer patients from the Gaza Strip to hospitals in Israel. she was co-CEO at Ajik - an Arab-Jewish organization working since 2000 to support Bedouin society in the Negev and promote shared life for Arabs and Jews throughout the country.

When asked about her aspirations for the future of her grandchildren, she said, "May they have Arab friends, Palestinians. May they not be afraid."

On October 4th 2023, Silver helped to organize a peace rally in Jerusalem which attracted 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women.

The last connection with her was on the morning of october 7th, when she hid in a closet and texted her son. she wrote "well, the terrorists are in my house". he wrote "i'm on your side". "i feel you" she answered.

She was believed to be kidnapped, but today, 38 days later, her body was identified.

May this kind soul rest in peace. The mind can't comprehend that this was her fate. Thank you for everything you did. May we will get to witness something of your aspirations come true in our lifetime.

[convertish]

honestly if you're surprised b'tzelem exists it's cause you've dehumanized israelis to the point you see them as some sort of bloodthirsty hivemind