#Gaza-G

[gundamfight]

[tomi4i]

Where?

[jewishbarbies]

this women's day i'm thinking about all the women and girls who were tortured and killed for the crime of being jewish within reach of hamas, those that survived but were taken hostage to continue being tortured, every single woman who will never get true justice for what was done to them. the infants that will never see adulthood.

and i'm thinking about all the western women who cheered.

[is-the-fire-real]

Another bit on the pro-Pal fandom, this one axiomatic

Being a good person is not the same thing as pretending as though you believe you are a good person.

Being a good person takes work. You have to do stuff. Doing stuff is hard. Doing good stuff is harder, because you have to put thought into determining what you think is good beforehand. That requires self-reflection, honesty, a willingness to challenge oneself, and taking in information from other people to verify that your concept of "good" is, well, good.

The nice part is that once you evaluate what is good and start doing good things, it becomes easier. You gain inner calm, peace, and even joy.

("Good" is not always the same as "necessary". Necessary work can be a slog, or it can be horrific. But there can still be a calming satisfaction at the core, the security that this is necessary and therefore worthwhile.)

Pretending to believe you are a good person takes less immediate work. You don't have to do anything that positively impacts the real world, and you don't have to do any of that annoying, time-consuming self examination. But in the long run, it's more exhausting. By far.

You are insecure about whether or not you are a good person. You're pretending to believe you are good. You can't feel secure in something you pretend to believe. That insecurity gnaws at you, especially when you engage in bad behavior--harassment, doxxing, posting gore, swarming tags, encouraging and promoting suicide among your fellow "activists", telling your opponents to kill themselves, stalking, spamming unrelated content with literal Nazi propaganda.

None of those are good things good people do. And you understand that. You would think someone was bad if they did those things to you. The cognitive dissonance between who you want to be and who you really are, as determined by your actions, is scary. It's painful. It rears up every time someone you have labeled a Zio colonizer scumbag asks you to please just stop and you remember a time when you begged someone--an abuser, a troll online, a 4channer, your parents--to just stop please just leave me alone.

That must feel terrifying, and again, it makes you insecure. It makes you question if you're doing the right thing.

So you do the work to pretend to believe you are good. And that's far more work than goes into being good.

You recruit others, and all of you agree that you will pretend together. Tabletop gaming has taught us how powerful this imaginative play can be. You all reassure each other that you are good and you are right. But since you're all lying to each other, that means you must spend more, and more, and more time every day telling each other that you are good, chasing that high, that feeling that you are a good person and your actions are justified.

You tell each other that your "opponents" in this "battle" are not people, so anything you say or do to and about them is okay. You look at lists of "dehumanizing tactics" and instead of internalizing what those lists are teaching you, you go: "Ah, so if I don't use the word 'vermin', anything I say should be fine!" And then you say it.

You do not smile over good news. You only smile when one of your opponents logs off Tumblr because you made the site unusable and unsafe for them. (The expression you make there isn't really a smile, but we'll call it that, since the corners of your mouth do turn upward.) You tell yourself you're just attacking Zionists and pretend you do not see how you're really going after Jews.

No self-examination; that would mean admitting that you're lying to yourself and others. Instead, you traumatize and exhaust yourself until you're psychologically incapable of self-examination. You watch snuff films. You stare at mangled bodies until you're weeping and physically ill (certainly, you're too ill to check whether the video is real, or if it was taken from this conflict).

You force your beliefs into your fandom spaces so that others, the bad people, cannot escape their complicity in genocide.

But more importantly, you do that so you can't escape.

You cannot engage in any fandom but the pro-Pal fandom because that takes imaginative energy away from your biggest pretense--that you're a good person.

You are NOT hurting people because you are striking a blow for Palestinians. You are hurting people, including yourself, because you do not want to do the work of becoming a good person. You are afraid that self examination, at this point, will reveal to you that you are exactly the sort of person you believe you are fighting.

That fear, that insecurity, that dread, that restless sense that if you ever rest or stop or think for just a moment, you'll discover something awful? That's your conscience.

I do not ask you to change your mind about your political opponents. Your defenses are already on your lips and in your mind; a thousand How Dare Yous for me hinting that you look at other people as people. What I will ask you is to consider this.

I came to young adulthood just as Bush was elected, and the Iraq War post-9/11 was the first war I really followed as an adult. I did what you're doing now. I forced myself to look at photographs of destroyed bodies. I looked at photographs of torture perpetrated by US soldiers. I blogged about it obsessively.

I told myself that I was Doing My Part to end the war. But really, it's that the anxiety of being an American during the war made me insecure over whether or not I was responsible for all of this, and therefore, a bad person. If I pretended my looking at snuff photos was activism, and that it was good, then I could pretend to believe I was good and shout "Not in my name" at protests. I could deny my responsibility.

What I really did was traumatize myself. It's been almost twenty years. I can still see some of those torture pictures in my head. In the end, that is the extent of the impact of my online activism. The blogs are all long deleted, and nobody remembers them.

Only my trauma remains.

I do not want this for you. I want you to be wiser. There is still time. You can stop.

Stop hurting yourself and other people. Do the hard work. Examine yourself and your actions. Consider what your own heart is trying to tell you whenever you start to get the shakes and your throat gets tight. Do not take that feeling out on random people online because they have a Magen David in their pfp.

Once you have done the hard work, it gets easier. You will be able to advocate and work for whatever causes you believe in because you know they are good, not because you're joining your friends in cosplaying goodness. You will still be traumatized, and you will still be sad, and you'll definitely still get angry. You will have to face how you've acted exactly like your own past abusers, and that's a real tough row to hoe.

But at the end, you will be able to advocate and work because you want to, instead of feeling as though you must in order to keep up the masquerade.

[v1x-holo]

Traditional Palestinian clothing :]

Free Palestine 🇵🇸 🗣

[lets-all-calm-down-a-bit]

Every day I have been writing a message about Palestine on the college community whiteboard. Today I wrote one that said, “Israel has been using white phosphorus and killing women and children in Palestine for years. But yeah sure, this started on October 7th 2023.”

A man walked up behind me as I was writing: a professor about my fathers age. He began asking me about the message, then it became clear as I was talking that he had only asked in order to debate me. He told me he had been in Gaza on military business years ago. That he had shot people like that [referring to women and children] before, and that it was necessary. As we talked, I was terrified. I knew this was a possibility since I was writing these messages, but it was still scary.

He said that children can be terrorists simply by standing in front of people the military is trying to kill. He said a majority of women and children in Palestine who are killed, are killed because they are willfully acting as human shields for terrorists.

In the moment, I couldn’t form a proper response. I am young, and afab, so he was intentionally asking me many bombarding me with questions he knew I could not answer in order to make me feel dumb, or incorrect. (To be clear I cannot answer questions regarding exact dates or numbers easily because of memory loss and adhd. I can remember the thing that took place, and what happened a bit before and a bit after for reference on the timeline, however I cannot tell you exactly how many people died in a specific attack, or what date a certain event happened on the dot.) Along with this, I lock up from anxiety, so when he started raising his voice and getting in my space, I lost my whole case and points.

I look back now, and realize he probably tells himself this because he scared to face the things he has done in the name of “anti-terrorism.” Because there’s no rational way someone can believe that the millions and millions of Palestinian women and children (AND INFANTS???) who have been murdered by Israel were willfully acting as human shields.

Even then though, if a child is “willfully acting as a human shield” for someone dangerous; what really is this supposed “will” based on? If a kid can’t legally consent, drive, or vote, or live on their own, why the hell have we decided they can consent to being a human shield to a terrorist??? They can’t.

And they don’t, because this whole situation is made up. Children may try to protect their fathers, brothers, and uncles who are claimed to be part of hamas. However practically everyone in Palestine is claimed to be part of hamas by israel. So when is it “a child bravely trying to protect their family” and not, “a traitor terrorist protecting another terrorist” To israel it never is.

[autismserenity]

It's been incredibly difficult to hear from Palestinians in Gaza, not to mention center their experiences and platform their voices. Because ever since Hamas violently kicked the Palestinian government out of Gaza in 2007, it's denied Palestinians the right to free speech.

(Here's Palestinian human rights activist Hamza Howidy sarcastically wondering why Hamas isn't stopping the theft of humanitarian aid when it had the power to arrest him for a social media post within 4 hours.)

I'm working on a series of posts of Palestinians to platform. I came across this thread from someone who used Snapchat to talk to people in Gaza, so I thought I'd post it here in the meantime.

I've seen videos of Palestinians talking about not being able to evacuate because "Hamas has closed all the roads," a video of a Palestinian telling the IDF that Hamas has a car blocking the Salah-al-Din road (the evacuation route) and is pointing guns at people and telling them to turn around. But even as someone searching for Palestinian voices and looking for information about this, I hadn't heard that Hamas had been killing civilians trying to evacuate. (And probably reporting their deaths as part of the daily total.)

I mean, just the fact that the Gaza Strip is run as a separate country from the rest of Palestine is a huge barrier for Palestinians. It's hard to be accepted as a full member of the UN when your country functionally has two or three different governments.

(Confusingly, the PLO is considered the government of Palestine internationally. Abbas is the president of both PLO and the Palestinian Authority, so it sort of works as long as nobody has an election. But the fact that Palestinians have been denied an election for 18+ years, because Abbas keeps cancelling elections and Hamas is Hamas, is also a pretty big fucking problem.)

But it's also true that a huge number of the people in the Gaza Strip, while obviously having a big problem with the Israeli government, have at least as big of a problem with Hamas.

And for all of our decades of talk about Free Palestine, in the progressive movement, we pay shockingly little attention to that.

[aichabouchareb]

“She is not dead. Look how beautiful my daughter Mayss is. She would make me coffee every morning before work.”

A father mourning the killing of his daughter by Israel in Gaza, struggling to accept the diabolical reality of this genocidal war, and the fact that she is gone forever. 😢

[reportsofawartime]

米国は現在、ガザ地区を24時間衛星で監視している。 生成される画像の解像度は、個々の人間を識別するのに十分です。 米国はガザにおけるイスラエル国防軍の全ての通信を完全に監視している。 彼らがパレスチナ人囚人を殺害するのを私たちは目撃しました。 彼らが命令を出すのを私たちは聞いた。 沈黙すれば我々は共犯者となる。 アウシュビッツの後、私たちは「二度と繰り返してはならない」と言いました。 私たちはその恐怖を利用してイスラエル建国を正当化したのです。 そして今、イスラエルは当時世界が非難していたような国になってしまったのです。 我々は今日、イスラエルを非難しなければなりません。 そして我々はナチスを送り込んだ場所にシオニズムを送り込まなければならない。 地獄。

[neotaissong]

Rest in Peace Aaron Bushnell

"I will be no longer complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Free Palestine."

On February 25th 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old active member of the US Military, self-immolated outside the zionist embassy in Washington, D.C.

[cavalierzee]

Ireland Will Always Stand With Palestine

Today is International Day of Solidarity with Palestine

Proud that Strabane has one of the best Palestinian murals in the world

Ireland will always stand with Palestine

Órfhlaith Begley MP

@OrfhlaithBegley

[gundamfight]

[jewishbarbies]

this point being made on an instagram reel where the only jewish member of big time rush was explaining all the ways that jews look and where they come from in an effort to humanize jews is insane

[l0v3mi]

✭"she said she can't feel her face, right now I can't feel my heart,for your feelings there's no place, Yeah, but you knew that from the start" ✭

[walrusmagazine]

Trauma Is Shaping Our Reactions to the Violence in Palestine and Israel

This is a struggle where neither side is able to demonstrate grief for the other

Trauma acts like a force field that repels narratives that appear threatening to our own perspectives. The respective traumas—incurred by Jews through millennia of exile, culminating in the Holocaust, and by Palestinians through mass displacement during the Nakba—have kept us each in our camps, resistant to viewing the other and the other’s pain. Trauma is formed not just from the loss and grief of the present but also reflects past grief and fears of future grief.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.