#was founded and how Palestinians were treated as a result

[disco-cola]

the fact that there was an official UN-resolution „3379“ - declaring zionism as a form of racism and racist discrimination - in order from 1975-1991 should really tell you that this is not a new discussion at all. if you look at the world map from 1975 highlighting all the countries that were in favor and those against it is very obvious just how long this has been going on. it’s almost identical to those countries‘ positions even today. they should never have taken that resolution back tbh. could have saved tens of thousands of lives.

[fairuzfan]

academia is often used as the forefront of much of the violence inflicted on palestinians — for example in the library of congress, there is a collection called "the american colony of jerusalem" with racist photography and items that help visually perpetuate the "people without a land, land without a people" part of herzel's ideology, which itself is the forefront of much of zionist ideology. pointing out the systematic harm in academia is often considered "irrelevant" by zionists.... denies the origins of zionism as a political and academic ideology with physical consequences.

much of palestinian history throughout the last century has to do with erasure and silencing — that is how we got to this point. when i say no one listened to palestinians i mean NO ONE listened. they were ignored. all their demands were unreasonable. instead they get blamed for much of the world's unwillingness to listen. even my family members — i have stories of their work in academic resistance since '48. and some of them are well known contributions throughout euro-american and swana society. yet they're still ignored because of their palestinian origin.

"if you were just more reasonable" or "if you took the time to listen with compassion" or "you have to appeal to people's sense of reason" ignores the fact of the matter — this ideology's founding principals were built on "a people without a land for a land without a people." you cannot and should not ignore that. in order to complete the zionist ideology, you must remove the native population. therefore any subscribers to the idea of zionism are violent, whether they intend it or not.

and if it were true, that academia were irrelevant.... then that doesn't explain the systematic torture and imprisonment of writers and scholars, the exile of my family members who were journalists and activists, the captivity of friends for no other reason than they were deemed a threat by some list or the other.

oftentimes zionists, or zionist sympathizers, ignore our (diaspora's) material ties to the occupation and dismiss us as being "disconnected" from the "situation" in Palestine and "misunderstanding" or "misconstruing" israeli society. what am i misunderstanding exactly? that the origins of this "country" relies on violent displacement and exile? that for the past 75 years, that violence has not stopped once? that no matter what we say about the violence of zionism as an intrinsic aspect, it takes a secondary seat to the imagined realities of zionism?

therefore, anti-zionism is the logical conclusion for valuing palestinian lives. but what are the arguments against anti-zionism? that arab governments expelled jews from SWANA? do you think that's a result of anti-zionism? then you must not understand that palestinians are often treated poorly by the same governments that claim to have done this in the name of "anti-zionism," living in poverty in refugee camps, tortured and arrested, even in some cases exiled by governments. this also neglects to mention zionist collaboration with said governments to exile the jews of their lands.

so then, what?

if anti-zionism is the rejection of the settler colonial state of israel, which you must admit to be truly anti-zionist, then it is an exclamation of palestinian sovereignty and identity. so when you say anti-zionism and antisemitism are linked.... do you realize what you are implying? do you realize that zionism, the root cause of palestinian suffering, is the reason for our expulsion and displacement? so then when you write academic thinkpieces about the "complexity" of zionism, do you realize the harm you're doing? do you realize that this, in fact, is not a new or useful argument? that i've seen iterations of it for years and years? that at the core, the zionist ideology relies on this muddying of the waters for you to not do anything?

to be frank, your constant reminding of the complexity of zionism when people in palestine are suffering from the material effects of it only scream, to me, utter contempt and selfishness. zionism is violence, to me and my family. it is violence for every palestinian in this world. you must admit that to be a sincere advocate for palestinians, otherwise your words ring hollow. the present reality outweighs any possibilities.

[murphy-stamp]

What's happening in Palestine is not "complicated", and it's not some insane "2000 year war about religion".

1917 : The Balfour Declaration was passed by the British, signing over the Palestinian land that was not their's to begin with to the Jewish people. Jewish people are not native to Palestine, and “israel” did not exist until 1948. The Balfour Declaration was the most controversial and contested documented in all of modern history.

1936 : A partition came into play, where the British once again promised the Palestinian land to be allocated to the Jewish people to become a "Jewish state". A 3 year revolt takes place to contest the partition which brought an end the the British army having anymore control over Palestine, and over 5000 Palestinians were killed. During this time the first armed zionist group was formed (Irgun) and they launched a series of unprecedented attacks against the Palestinian people.

1946 : Irgun bombed the King David Hotel which killed another 91 Palestinians, then in May of 1948 "israel" was formed which resulted in 750,000 Palestinians being displaced and 530 Palestinian villages being destroyed - this is referred to as the 1st Nakba (which means "disaster" in Arabic) - the 2nd Nakba started on October 7th. The remaining 22% of Palestine that had yet to be occupied was then divided into the Gaza Strip and The West Bank. That same year the UN passed a legislation that allowed Palestinian refugees to return home, but they were treated as second class citizens. "israel" controls the Palestinian education, prohibits their involvement in politics & elections, they control how much food and water they get, and their medical supplies.

1956-1966 : "israel" massacred the Palestinian villages Qalqilya, Kufr, Qassem, Khan Younis, and As-Samu.

1967 : "israel" occupied the remainder of historic Palestine in Gaza & The West Bank (and by occupy I mean they forcibly removed Palestinians from their homes, demolished their homes, or lived in the upper parts of their houses, forcing Palestinians to live in the lower halves, and then they built wire fences over top of these houses on the outside to block their view of the sky and so they could also throw garbage, boiling water, & human waste at the Palestinians walking the streets below. During that time another 300,000 Palestinians were displaced. The UN called for "israel" to leave Palestine, but they did not do that.

1976 : 1000's of hectares of Palestinian land were forcibly confiscated & protests were brutally shut down.

1987 : The first Intifada starts (which means the Palestinian revolution) where "isreal" established 45 more settlements on Palestinian land. A massive peaceful protest broke out by the Palestinians to show that the occupation & brutalization of their land and people was no longer acceptable. The IOF defence minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, ordered the IOF to break the bones of all Palestinians who were protesting. This is when the Hamas resistance group was founded (it was actually created initially by "israel" in hopes that it would divide the Palestinian people and shut down the Muslim Brother Hood - another resistance group). During that time 1000+ Palestinians were killed by the IOF.

1993 : the 2nd Intifada begins. The Oslo Accord is signed which was meant to being "peace" and a "2 state solution", but that just turned into more brutality by the IOF and another 5000+ Palestinians were killed. The IOF instigated Palestinian protestors with 1.3 million rounds of ammunition. Diana Buttu (a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer) made a statement saying the bill for a "2 state solution" was no more than a distraction for "israel" to carry out their plan in silence from the rest of the world which was always for the extermination, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of Palestine.

2014 : The Gaza War happened. This is when "israel" introduced the apartheid wall, which further isolated the Palestinians. They also launched a large scale attack on Gaza with ariel & naval fire power, 2500+ Palestinians were killed in just 50 days. In Gaza the IOF destroyed 83 schools, 10 healthcare centres, and 12,600 housing units.

2008-2023 : 8000+ more Palestinians were killed by the IOF, and now since october 7th 23,000+ Palestinians have been killed, and 1.6 million have been displaced.

This is one of the largest ongoing examples of colonial violence in the world today.

[girlactionfigure]

hunting Jews: the truth about Hamas

SEPTEMBER 15, 2024

Islam is a religion.

Islamism is a political ideology.

Recently rescued Israeli hostage, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, an Israeli Bedouin Muslim, gave the following testimony:

Farhan’s testimony, along with a plethora of other evidence, only makes what we’ve been saying all along abundantly clear: Hamas is not a “resistance” group against oppression. Hamas is a genocidal antisemitic terrorist group that targets Jews.

ISLAMISM IS AN INHERENTLY ANTISEMITIC IDEOLOGY

Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group. What does this mean? 

Islamists believe that the doctrines of Islam should be congruent with those of the state. Islamists work to implement nation-states governed under Islamic Law (Sharia), emphasize pan-Islamic unity (in most cases, hoping for an eventual worldwide Islamic Caliphate, or empire), support the creation of Islamic theocracies, and reject all non-Muslim influences. For this reason, Islamists tend to portray themselves as “anti-imperialist,” while in truth they are striving to swap western imperialism with Islamic imperialism.

Islamist ideology can be traced back to Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Al-Banna viewed the 1924 dissolution of the last Islamic Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and the European colonization of the Middle East, beginning with France’s 1830 occupation of Algeria, as an affront to Islam. The early 20th century was a period of rapid secularization in the Middle East, when Arab nationalism threatened to replace pan-Islamic identity with a pan-Arab identity. Al-Banna opposed all of this, hoping to return to “authentic” Islamic practice through the (re)establishment of the Islamic Caliphate.

Islamism is an antisemitic ideology. Islamists hate Jews -- and by extension, the Jewish state -- because of the Prophet Muhammad’s conflict with the Jewish tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. Islamistsbelieve that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in a struggle between Muslims and their “eternal enemies,” the Jews.

Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, viewed the dissolution of the last Islamic Caliphate (empire) and the secularization of the Muslim world as an affront to Islam.

ISLAMISM, DHIMMITUDE, AND THE JEWS

Islamists seek to revive “authentic Islamic practice,” by which they mean, essentially, that they wish to go back in time. This desire to turn back the clock puts them in conflict with Jews for two reasons:

During his earliest conquests, the Prophet Muhammad and his army came into fierce conflict with a number of Jewish tribes that had settled in Arabia, some of which had refused to convert to Islam and even accused Muhammad and his followers of appropriating figures from the Torah. For Islamists, this initial conflict between Jews and the earliest Muslims is “proof” that Jews are “eternal enemies” of Islam.

Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the Arab Islamic empires conquered lands exponentially quickly. As a result of this rapid colonization, the Muslim authorities were faced with the “problem” of how to handle the conquered Indigenous peoples that resisted conversion to Islam. This “problem” was solved with a treaty known as the Pact of Umar. This so-called treaty allowed select religious and cultural minorities, known as dhimmis, or “People of the Book,” to practice their beliefs so long as they paid the “jizya” tax and abided by a set of restrictive, second-class citizenship laws.

Under Islamist regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jews are, to this day, still treated as dhimmis.

THE GENOCIDAL ANTISEMITISM OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Hamas emerged as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, worshipped Adolf Hitler.

Like Hitler, al-Banna sought to exterminate all Jews…in his case, from the Middle East.

According to German documents from the period, in the 1940s, the Nazis trained some 700 members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nazi Germany heavily funded the Brotherhood, which contributed to its massive growth. In 1938, the Brotherhood had some 800 members. By the end of World War II, it had grown to a million members.

In 1939, Germany “transferred to al-Banna some E£1000 per month, a substantial sum at the time. In comparison, the Muslim Brotherhood fundraising for the cause of Palestine yielded E£500 for that entire year.”

Naturally, Nazism deeply influenced the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology. 

The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yasser Arafat, the most influential Palestinian leader of all time, began his “career” fighting for the Muslim Brotherhood. Which brings us to Hamas. Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was responsible for establishing the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. In 1987, he founded Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s hatred for Jews goes far beyond its original Nazi affiliations. During the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, during which Palestinian Arabs revolted against Jewish immigration and carried out a number of antisemitic massacres, the Muslim Brotherhood began disseminating antisemitic rhetoric, often targeting the Egyptian Jewish community.

Al-Nadhir, the Muslim Brotherhood’s magazine, published openly antisemitic articles, peddling conspiracy theories and demonizing the Egyptian Jewish community for its success in various industries. Notably, Al-Nadhir even called for the expulsion of Jews from Egypt, accusing Jews of “corrupting” Egypt and calling Jews a “societal cancer.” Al-Nadhir made boycott lists of Jewish businesses.

Unfortunately, the Muslim Brotherhood’s antisemitism is not a relic of the past. Mohammed Badie, the Muslim Brotherhood’s present day “Supreme Guide,” believes Jews “spread corruption on earth” and calls for “holy jihad” as an antidote.

THE ORIGINAL HAMAS CHARTER: EXPLICITLY GENOCIDAL

Hamas’s founding 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and genocidal. Below are some excerpts:

“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” -- Introduction

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." -- Article 7

“In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” -- Aritcle 15 

“With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.” -- Article 22

“Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people.” -- Article 28

BUT...HAMAS CHANGED THEIR CHARTER!

Some Hamas apologists will tell you that Hamas no longer intends to exterminate all Jews, because in 2017, they “replaced their [openly genocidal] charter.” Well, lucky for you, Hamas is here to set the record straight. See, after releasing their “new” charter, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar assured the media that the 2017 document did not replace their original 1988 charter.

The 2017 document was thus not a “new” charter from a “reformed” Hamas, but rather, a propaganda document aimed at redeeming Hamas’s image to the west.

Since 2017, Hamas has made openly genocidal calls toward Jews. For example: 

In 2018, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV media channel predicted “the cleansing of Palestine of the filth of the Jews.”

In 2019, Hamas Political Bureau member Fathi Hammad said, “You seven million Palestinians abroad, enough warming up! There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on planet Earth –- we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help.” In 2021, Hammad called, via Al-Aqsa TV, for the Palestinians in Jerusalem to “cut off the heads of the Jews.”

In May of 2021, the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, led a rally in which the crowd was encouraged to chant, "We will trample on the heads of the Jews in front of everyone..."

ISLAMIST INFLUENCE ON PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM

The earliest Arab nationalists in Palestine were not necessarily Islamists. Falastin, an influential anti-Zionist, Arab nationalist newspaper, was founded by two Palestinian Christians in 1911. Khalil Beidas, who was the first Arab to identify as Palestinian, in 1898, was a Christian. Nevertheless, the Palestinian nationalist movement soon fell under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Initially, Palestinian Arab nationalists advocated for a unified Arab state in Greater Syria. In 1920, Haj Amin al-Husseini began advocating for an independent Palestinian Arab state. To draw people to his cause, which was not yet well-known to the average population, he began emphasizing the importance of Palestine to Islam, and particularly the importance of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Soon, he began disseminating the libel that the Jews intended to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque. This libel has cost thousands of Jewish lives and is spread widely to this day.

Early on, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt adopted the Palestinian cause. After World War II, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had spent the war working as a propagandist for the Nazis in Berlin, escaped to Egypt with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood fought against the State of Israel in 1948, along with other Islamist militias, such as the Army of the Holy War. Among its fighters were Yasser Arafat. In the 1960s, Arafat came under the influence of the Soviet Union and shifted his image to that of a communist counterrevolutionary, as opposed to an Islamist, though his rhetoric in Arabic continued emphasizing the importance of jihad and Al-Aqsa Mosque to the Palestinian movement. Nevertheless, after Islamic Revolution in Iran, after which the Islamic Republic adopted the Palestinian movement, and with the establishment of Hamas and groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestinian nationalism has once again been undergone an Islamization.

rootsmetals

as always: this post is not an endorsement of any given Israeli policy or politician. You can be highly critical of Israel’s handling of the situation without obfuscating or whitewashing the origins and goals of this ideology. It always, always came down to antisemitism. I won’t engage with straw man arguments in the comments 😗

MAIN SOURCES on Instagram

[drdemonprince]

also a good-faith question: what do i tell some of my friends who are terrified of the collapse of the current system for like, survival reasons? like in ways that mutual aid and community support can't really help.

i was trying to explain all this stuff to my friend the other day who is on government support and needs a lot of intensive, expensive medical intervention to live, and she accused me of being willing to sacrifice disabled people for the sake of ideological purity but like, i wasn't saying she doesn't deserve to live, but that she doesn't deserve to live more than palestinians do? and that she also doesn't deserve to specifically live on stolen land. and like, there are palestinians who also could really use those medical treatments that she has the privilege of accessing, why does she deserve them more?

she said she can't afford to not care about the election results because if anything happens to the aca or medicaid, or if anything happens to the medical supply chains, then she's fucked. like, yeah, but same goes for all these people our country is oppressing??

i feel like i just didn't explain this well and i want to give her some other stuff to read.

Great question! I think when people believe that all social care systems will collapse without the government, they are buying into a very colonialist idea that human beings are at their most basic level selfish and irresponsible and won't care for their communities. This is not the case! Thousands of years of human history prove this not to be the case, and so do the behaviors of humans right now during moments of crisis.

Look to the people of Gaza -- they are not leaving their disabled behind. People are sacrificing all that they have to care for their elderly relatives, neighbors, and friends. The only reason that disabled people in Gaza are dying is because the region is being deliberately deprived of resources by Israel. If aid were let in and the Palestinian people were free, they would feed their hungry, treat their sick, supply insulin, teach children, and perform everything that we currently in the US rely upon the government to supply.

Another example of this can be found in how humans respond to natural disasters. Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built in Hell is a beautiful read on this, following numerous real-life disasters across the globe. In every case, people did not riot and pillage or dissolve into violence--- they formed stable encampments, doctors and pharmacists worked their jobs without pay, cooks made food without expecting a wage, everyone pooled their resources and looked after one another.

We also see examples of this when other governments have fallen -- and all governments eventually do! When a nation-state ends, life doesn't end. People keep going to work to make the medicine and put on the leg casts and wash physically disabled people's bodies and make the food. People WANT to feel useful, helpful, included, and looked after, and they will do these things without being forced to by an authoritarian power structure. We see this in the campus encampments and the incredible outpouring of generosity they are experiencing too.

It is quite common for a person to mistakenly believe that the government is all that is keeping our social order working, and that we are all just one moment away from violent chaos and deprivation without it. But that really isn't true. Even without the government, we will still have the *people* who understand how food production and logistics work, the *people* who research and test the drugs, the *people* who watch the children and nurse the elders and fix the roads and butcher chickens.

Without the alienating, exploitative economic structure we currently have, it would actually be EASIER and more efficient for us to take care of one another with these skills, because our time wouldnt be wasted on bullshit jobs that don't contribute to society.

There are lots of great readings about all of this on the Anarchist Library, but I recommend starting with David Graeber's books! Bullshit Jobs, then Debt the first 5000 Years, then Utopia of Rules, then Dawn of Everything. Bullshit Jobs is the easiest read.

[queeranarchism]

"The quote is from Les Damnes de la terre (Wretched of the Earth), and can only be understood in the context of the fuller argument Fanon is making: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” No one can deny Fanon’s brilliance or his pioneering and profound understanding of the psychological effects of colonial violence on the colonised and the coloniser (as a psychiatrist, he treated French colonial officers and Algerians alike and found them to suffer similar psychiatric ailments). But the second and more famously quoted part of Fanon’s argument is not comprehensible without the first part, and the first part – especially in the Israeli context – is in fact profoundly wrong. Colonialism, especially settler colonialism – and even more particularly Zionist settler colonialism – is very much a “thinking machine” with very powerful and longstanding logic and rationalities that are the key to its success. Because of this, considering what “a greater violence” would look like and how it can be measured, never mind achieved, is a crucial task for those analysing and fighting colonial violence alike. I have yet to see any plausible scenarios in which Palestinians acquire the means to deploy “far greater violence” vis-a-vis Israel/the Zionist entity for any length of time in any conceivable geostrategic balance of power. Even if Iran (the only major power that supports Palestine in any meaningful way), for example, wanted to deliver heavier weapons to Palestinians, Israel’s control over access points, as well as Egypt’s and Jordan’s, will prevent that from happening. Palestine is not Ukraine, supported by major powers and able to utilise land, water and air corridors to obtain an unending stream of weapons deliveries to fight a much larger and better-armed adversary. Quite the opposite, in fact. More broadly, Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956, which was Fanon’s most important reference point. Nor is Israel France, with a metropole to which settlers can return (unless we consider Tel Aviv the metropole). There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews leaving à la française a reconquered Palestine. But there are several scenarios that could lead to a redux of the Nakba, as many Israeli politicians are now screaming for. [...]

Indeed, for over 50 years of occupation, and 30 years of the post-Oslo Palestinian “self-rule” rather than “the native cur[ing] himself of colonial neurosis … through force of arms”, what has occurred (as I learned in interviews with therapists at the few mental health centres in Gaza as far back in the later 1990s through 2000s) is the passing on of trauma, with former Fatah prisoners tortured by Israel torturing Hamas members using the same techniques as the Israelis used on them – often screaming at their victims in Hebrew while torturing them in the very same rooms where they were tortured. Hamas has continued this cycle in the two decades of effective control over Gaza. And now we see this with crowds cheering kidnapped, beaten, and murdered Israelis. Whatever catharsis this constitutes, it is not one that will lead to victory over an Israeli society that has been using violence against Palestinians as its own traumatic catharsis for 75 years, in a world that has a very high tolerance for Palestinian civilian casualties, with most people in the West still supporting Israel whenever there is a high level of Israeli Jewish casualties. [...]

Tragically, Fanon died in 1961, a year before Algeria achieved independence. He did not live to see the realities of postcolonial politics in Algeria, or across Africa for that matter, where, as Kenyan novelist and decolonial thinker Ngugi wa Thiong’o has so powerfully showed, leaders of newly independent states almost immediately began treating their peoples in much the same manner as their former colonisers (a phenomenon also experienced with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas since Oslo). Forty years ago, when he was describing this dynamic of postcolonial governance in his groundbreaking prison memoir Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir, Thiong’o used the term “neocolonial” – not to indicate the continuation of European control by other means, but rather to describe how anticolonial leaders adopted (and adapted) the same brutal and authoritarian techniques of rule as their colonisers to cement and maintain their power; a critique of the “coloniality of power” that is today at the heart of the ever more popular decolonial thought. That coloniality of power fundamentally will never allow for anything approaching actual independence for Palestinians, neither via the neocolonial PA nor with Hamas at the helm. If Palestinians are to defeat Zionist colonialism, it will likely take a much different sort of analysis of its violence and power than Fanon offered three-quarters of a century ago, and it will probably require a paradigm shift in the core concepts of what a nation, freedom and independence are at a moment when the entire world, not just Palestine/Israel, is heading towards conflagration.

read the full article

I really like this column. When western media is mindlessly parroting Israeli propaganda and western far-leftists (myself included) are primarily listing all the evils of the Israeli state to make it clear who the real bad guy of the story is, there's very little practical discussion of what is actually happening and what could come next.

[essence-inked]

So I’ve heard a surprising amount of people respond to the genocide against Palestine with things along the lines of “Well, you have to understand that…” and then go on to explain why, according to them, Israel has experienced context that justifies their actions.

Except, there is no context that justifies genocide. There is no context that justifies bombing hospitals and homes, or killing children - or anyone, for that matter - or treating people as sub-human, or all the rest of the atrocities being committed.

I remember when this first majorly hit the news. I had one particular conversation with someone about it who was horrified at Hamas’ actions, and I pointed out to them that they couldn’t very well take issue with Hamas until they took issue with all the atrocities people in power in Israel have committed against the people in Palestine. They were quick to say that this didn’t justify Hamas’ actions, and I responded that yes, exactly. Causing harm to other people when it isn’t explicitly to defend yourself or others isn’t okay, and that is exactly why nothing justifies the genocide Israel is committing. You can’t pick and choose when to be horrified about people getting murdered or raped or blown to bits by bombs. None of that is EVER justifiable.

And just real quick? Notice that fighting back against armed soldiers sent to kill you isn't on the list of unjustifiable things. Defending yourself or others against an attacker and resisting occupation is perfectly damn justifiable, and anyone who tries to compare that to actual war crimes can go right ahead and piss off. I’ve run into people conflating Hamas committing war crimes with Palestinians generally resisting occupation, and using that to say “resistance bad,” which is some truly next level bullshit.

But the critical thing here is that this is not a conversation about Hamas. If your response to a genocide is to say “but look at those guys over there also commiitting war crimes in response to the much, much larger scale war crimes,” that is not a defense - that’s a deflection. You can’t address the result of a genocide until you address - and fully stop - the genocide itself.

One tool I’ve found recently to put this in perspective is that if you go to the wikipedia article for war crimes committed during all of this, there’s a section for Hamas, and there’s a section for Israel. Notice how long it takes to physically scroll through the section for Israel vs. how quickly it takes to scroll through the section for Hamas - that’s a pretty good example of how staggeringly unequal the scale is in this. To be absolutely clear here, war crimes are horrific regardless of who’s committing them and regardless of the scale - the thing I’m trying to say is that it’s fucking absurd to do the equivilent of point to a house on fire and say “oh no that’s terrible, someone should do something about that immediately,” and then turn and look at an entire city ablaze nearby and say “well I’m sure that’s on fire for a reason.”

This is all to say that, at least what I’ve figured out over the course of various conversations - and the thing that I’m hoping might be helpful to people trying to raise awareness - is that when you’re talking about Palestine with someone who’s pro-Israel, it’s absolutely critical to not get sidetracked. This is not about Hamas, this is not about complicated politics, this is not about context. Plain and simple, this is about genocide, and about the fact that nothing - absolutely fucking nothing - justifies that.

[unhonestlymirror]

Nadia Lipes:

A moment of logic, including historical logic.

Now I will not chew on the facts about the ownership of a certain piece of territory by ancient Israel, otherwise a couple of large Arab countries will end up there, but I will focus on the beginning of the 20th century.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Jews did not live in the territory of Gaza for a long time, despite the village and Jewish history of that region, they were driven out of there a long time ago, and the area was overgrown with sand.

But Jews have always lived in Judea and Samaria. In general, it’s pretty fucked up to say that the area called Judea has nothing to do with the Jews. But that's not the point.

As a result of the 1967 war, Israel inherited both, lightly populated by Arabs. This increased slightly by 4 times, despite the horrors of the occupation. A unique demographic case, yes.

In general, so that the Arabs behave decently in those same territories, and since these regions are ancient Jewish, Israel revived Jewish settlements there in some quantity.

And everything was fine until some idiot with the letter R [Rabin] decided to be the most humane Jew in history. The next idiot with the letter Š [Sharon] continued this event, and the Jews left Gaza. For 16 years, there were no Jews there.

The Jews could not leave the West Bank. Even R and Š understood this with their meagre minds. It so happened historically that on the West Bank, there is indivisible Jerusalem and Hebron. Not to mention smaller Jewish sites like Rachel's Tomb.

Thus, this part can never be given away. And under no circumstances. As long as Israel exists. The whole world understands this.

Thus, what is this very world trying to achieve? Right. The complete liquidation of Israel, in fact, hiding behind strange slogans.

Although some countries have already realized what is the "from the river to the sea..." It is not very clear which sea and which river we are talking about. Some countries, but not all.

Minute of logic number 2.

As we know from the last post, Gaza has not been occupied in any way for 16 years. It was simply separated from Israel by a fence. If you wanted to separate, please, here is a fence for you.

Israel did not touch Gaza at all. However, it employed its inhabitants, treated them, supplied them with electricity and water, and allowed them to give them a suitcase of money from Qatar every month.

Gaza, on the contrary, was touching Israel more and more every year. With rockets. Israel, in response, targeted the launch points, and that was the end of it. Because the world community, that’s all.

As a result of this development of events, they became so emboldened that they broke into the territory of Israel using all sorts of improvised means, killed 1400 people, after raping half of them, including children, burning some, and they did all this on video. The Germans are quietly crying in the corner.

Not only did they film all this chaos themselves, but they also post it online themselves.

Among other things, 240 people were taken captive, including children. The war has been going on for 40 days, 4 were released by the Palestinians themselves because animal rights activists knocked them on the head for them, 1 was released by ours, and the bodies of the other two have already been found.

Let me remind you that captives, or prisoners of war, are people who need to be fed, watered, shown to the Red Cross and not killed. Moreover, civilians cannot be taken as prisoners of war. And even more so infants and ancient old people. This is written directly in the regulations of all countries.

Where is the reaction? Huh?

Well, denying the rapes filmed by Hamas themselves is generally the lowest point of bottom. And yes, the Israeli army has been in the sector for 40 days. And not a single case of rape of Arab women by Jews.

Surprisingly simple. They spend much longer than 6 hours there, but how do they control themselves?

In Kfar Yassin, by the way, it was the same. So the world community was also indignant. They said that Jews despise Arabs so much that they don’t even want to rape them.

Disgusting behavior. We condemn.

[eroticcannibal]

as a jew i understand why people are zionists and i have a lot of empathy for that viewpoint, bc it makes sense to want a safe place for us to live in the face of, you know, 5000 years of antisemitism that often leads to genocide. but i think as an ideology, there's no such thing as "good" zionism. at the end of the day, the state of israel was founded with the expulsion of thousands upon thousands of people who were already living there, who aren't allowed back, and whose continued degradation as human beings is a direct result of zionism.

so on the one hand, i understand why people are zionists, but to me i just genuinely don't think the treatment of palestinians (and the ongoing genocide) is a fair price to pay for jews having a safe place to live. i think it's totally possible for jews and palestinians to coexist in that land but it's just never gonna happen while the state of israel exists as it currently does. and honestly the only way to get justice for palestinians and free them from oppression is to ally with people who are against zionism and really listen to them and what they think about israel, because the way israel treats palestinians paints a very different view of zionism than how it would be for someone like you or me

While I dont agree with all of this (about 90%) this is a fair and reasonable view

[n0thingiscool]

Shame on Israel for exploiting the Holocaust to justify genocide

"

If my grandparents were alive today, this October would have marked the 80th anniversary of their meeting. In 1943, my grandparents, Isidor and Marianne, met in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what was Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. I was quite close to my grandfather, Isi, who outlived my grandmother. Among some of his things, he entrusted me with a yellow cloth “Jewish” star he was made to wear in the camp, with the word “Jude” on it.

At a United Nations (UN) meeting, on October 31, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s UN Ambassador, put on a Jewish star reminiscent of my grandfather’s. Addressing the UN Security Council, he said the reason he wore the star was to denounce their silence regarding the October 7 attack on Israel. Erdan compared this silence to the silence that allowed for the Holocaust to happen. In response to Erdan, Dani Dayan, the director of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum, quickly called out this misuse of the star, arguing that Erdan was “disgrac[ing] the victims of the Holocaust as well as the state of Israel.”

Dayan was absolutely right to call attention to how offensive it was for Erdan to don the yellow star. Dayan’s reasons, however, are entirely wrong. To make his point, Dayan argued that the yellow star symbolizes the weakness of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, continuing a disturbing and false historical narrative.

Zionists have long sought to paint Holocaust victims as weak to make the case for the founding and then maintenance of the state of Israel. These moves began even before the Holocaust when some Zionists aligned themselves with the eugenic racial science of the day, arguing that Jews must purify their own race creating their own strong breed. Arthur Ruppin, a leading social scientist and head of the World Zionist Organization’s Palestine office in the early 20th century, promoted the settlement of Palestine as the answer to the dangerous results of “racial-mixing” for European Jews. He was not alone, as many Jewish intellectuals argued that forming the Zionist state would allow Jews to “regenerate their own bodies” which were degenerated by the conditions of both assimilation and oppression in Western and Eastern Europe, respectively.

Once Israel was founded, Holocaust victims were regularly treated as weak and as examples of the opposite of what the Zionist state represented, leading to poor treatment for those survivors who became Israeli citizens. As Dayan, himself reiterated, the Holocaust represents a cautionary tale about the weakness of Jews in the diaspora to be juxtaposed with the strength of Jews in the State of Israel.

Despite their disagreement, Israeli leaders like Erdan and Dayan regularly make use of the Holocaust to defend state violence against Palestinians. Unlike Erdan and Dayan, learning about the genocide against my ancestors has allowed me to understand that what is happening today in Palestine is genocide. To know a genocide is happening is painful in and of itself. To know a genocide is being carried out supposedly in one’s name (as a Jewish person) is extra painful. But, to know a genocide is being justified through an appropriation of my family’s suffering, is infuriating. I am furious. How dare the state of Israel insult my family’s history.

The horrors that my family endured are unimaginable to most. My grandmother and grandfather, teenagers when they met at the camp, were the only surviving members of their families. My grandfather was part of a resistance in the camp, hiding people who were on lists to be transported to Auschwitz. My grandfather literally saved my grandmother’s life. This is not a story of weakness. However, it is a story from which I have learned many lessons about the conditions that allow for genocide.

I remember being 8 or 9 years old, sitting at the kitchen table for breakfast while my mother cooked. The radio was on as it was every morning listening to 1010 WINS news, “You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.” In the headlines, a resistance group claimed responsibility for a bombing somewhere outside of the U.S. I asked my mom, ‘What is a resistance group?” She explained the idea of resistance by talking about the Holocaust and her father’s struggle to fight back. While not every person claiming to resist is automatically righteous, I realized when I was older that how one views resistance in any given situation is based on their vantage point. That may seem obvious, but in Western media, politics, and educational contexts, we regularly see an association made between resistance groups and terrorism which creates a taken-for-granted right and wrong side.

In the days after September 11, 2001, as a U.S. citizen living in the United States, I was reminded when I challenged the drive to invade Afghanistan, that I was either with “us” or “against us.” To me, the forced nationalism reminded me of the studies I had taken up during college about the Holocaust. The creation of the “Us vs. Them” mentality to protect Germany was a key part of bringing on board large segments of non-Jewish Germans to the fight against Jewish people.

Resistance takes place against those in a place of power. Also, oppression, by definition, is about being on the losing side of a power dynamic. Then, how is it that, Israel, a country with one of the most powerful militaries in the world, supported by the most powerful military and economic power in the world, the United States, has tried to paint itself as champion of an oppressed people who must fight against Palestinian resistance movements?

Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), published an opinion piece in Time magazine after the October 7 attack, arguing that there is no way to understand Hamas’ attack except as “hate” and “toxic intolerance in its purest form.” Instead of exceptionalizing Jewish experience so that the Holocaust becomes one example in thousands of years of Jewish hatred, what would it look like to pay attention to the real lessons we can learn from the horrors of the Holocaust? The lesson we need is not that Jewish people have always been and always will be hated. The lesson of the Holocaust is that those with economic and political power used nationalism and the idea of so-called inferior types of people being a threat to the nation-state to justify genocide. Many Jewish and non-Jewish people resisted as much as they could. The problem was not a weak resistance, the problem was the strength of nationalist, eugenic narratives.

The good news is that millions of Jewish people and others are undertaking critical study of the situation and pushing against the messages being brought to us by the most powerful Israeli and U.S. leaders. We are standing in solidarity with Palestinians who are fighting for their right to existence and self-determination. We see changes in public opinion polls, and the number of Jewish-led and supported actions against the current genocide is greater than ever before. Many are speaking out and saying loudly, Never Again means Never Again for Anyone."

[berlinauslander]

Ilan Pape on the only democracy in the middle east:

The main Israeli response, diplomatic and academic, to the latter accusation is that all these measures are temporary —they will change if the Palestinians, wherever they are, behave "better." But if one researches, not to mention lives in, the occupied territories, one will understand how ridiculous these arguments are. Israeli policy makers, as we have seen, are determined to keep the occupation alive for as long as the Jewish state remains intact. It is part of what the Israeli political system regards as the status quo, which is always better than any change. Israel will control most of Palestine and, since it will always include a substantial Palestinian population, this can only be done by non-democratic means.

In addition, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Israeli state claims that the occupation is an enlightened one. The myth here is that Israel came with good intentions to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of the Palestinian violence. In 1967 the government treated the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as natural part of "Eretz Israel," the land of Israel, and this attitude has continued ever since. When you look at the debate between the right-and left-wing parties in Israel on this issue, their disagreements have been about how to achieve this goal, not about its validity. What every colonization project primarily needs is land — in the occupied territories this was achieved only through the massive expropriation of land, deporting people from where they had lived for generations, and confining them in enclaves with difficult habitats. When you fly over the West Bank, you can see clearly the cartographic results of this policy: belts of settlements that divide the land and carve the Palestinian communities into small, isolated, and disconnected communities. The Judaization belts separate villages from villages, villages from towns, and sometime bisect a single village. This is what scholars call a geography of disaster, not least since these policies turned out to be an ecological disaster as well: drying up water sources and ruining some of the most beautiful parts of the Palestinian landscape. Moreover, the settlements became hotbeds in which Jewish extremism grew uncontrollably — the principal victims of which were the Palestinians. Thus, the settlement at Efrat has ruined the world heritage site of the Wallajah valley near Bethlehem, and the village of Jafneh near Ramallah, which was famous for its fresh water canals, lost its identity as a tourist attraction. These are just two small examples out of hundreds of similar cases.

Another form of collective punishment that has recently returned to the Israeli repertoire is that of blocking up houses. Imagine that all the doors and windows in your house are blocked by cement, mortar, and stones, so you can't get back in or retrieve anything you failed to take out in time. I have looked hard in my history books to find another example, but found no evidence of such a callous measure being practiced elsewhere.

Finally, under the "enlightened occupation," settlers have been allowed to form vigilante gangs to harass people and destroy their property. These gangs have changed their approach over the years During the 1980s, they used actual terror-from wounding Palestinian leaders (one of them lost his legs in such an attack), to contemplating blowing up the mosques on Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. In this century, they have engaged in the daily harassment of Palestinians: uprooting their trees, destroying their yields, and shooting randomly at their homes and vehi-cles. Since 2000, there have been at least 100 such attacks reported per month in some areas such as Hebron, where the 500 settlers, with the silent collaboration of the Israeli army, harassed the locals living nearby in an even more brutal way. From the very beginning of the occupation then, the Palestinians were given two options: accept the reality of permanent incarceration in a mega-prison for a very long time, or risk the might of the strongest army in the Middle East. When the Palestinians did resist — as they did in 1987, 2000, 2006, 2012, 2014, and 2016-they were targeted as soldiers and units of a conventional army. Thus, villages and towns were bombed as if they were military bases and the unarmed civilian population was shot at as if it was an army on the battlefield. Today we know too much about life under occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the claim that non-resistance will ensure less oppression. The arrests without trial, as experienced by so many over the years; the demolition of thousands of houses; the killing and wounding of the innocent; the drainage of water wells— these are all testimony to one of the harshest contemporary regimes of our times. Amnesty International annually documents in a very comprehensive way the nature of the occupation.

[insomniaink95]

The Only Thing You Find…

I've been really frustrated by how the most common search engines are utterly useless recently and so I've been searching for lesser known but more reliable, safe, and unbiased search engines. I search for a lot of different things on each engine to test out how good they are, and one of the things I've been searching for to test their biases is the lone word, "Gaza." I mostly look at the general search results page and the news page on engines for that term to help determine how biased they seem to be. I finished doing that on one engine and was going to move on to see how robust the image searching on that search engine was so I clicked the image button…

Every image for pages and pages was just of devastation and suffering. Ruins everywhere, the injured being treated in crowded hospital wards, parents grandparents and older siblings carrying small children through rubble filled streets, plumes of smoke following bombings, people praying in the midst of the destruction, massive craters blasted in the ground within housing complexes, rows of bodies wrapped in sheets, I could go on… After about a dozen pages of image results I found an image of a map of Israel and Gaza here or there, and there would be the odd picture of Israeli tanks or soldiers making their way through the desolate streets from time to time, but it was still almost entirely a visual record of the devastation and suffering happening to the Palestinian people. The point is, there were no pictures available of Gaza that show what it looked like before, unless you load through DOZENS of pages and even then you only find a picture every couple of pages that shows the "before" and half of them are comparison pictures showing the before AND after. I attempted to add years to the search alongside the name "Gaza" and the results barely changed. There were a few more images of bombs exploding within villages and cities that were not already reduced to rubble, that's about it.

This land used to be, even while under occupation, brimming with life and beauty. I've seen the pictures before. They DID exist. But due to the variables that determine search relevance, that visible online history has been effectively wiped out by the sheer deluge of images of this genocide. Thinking that maybe it was just a fluke of that new search engine I was testing I decided to test DDG, Google, bing, and Yahoo for images as well. Same results. It is now extremely difficult to find images of Gaza that show a land NOT in utter ruin.

It's heartbreaking that the home of over two million people has been reduced to images solely of the people's suffering… but it also gives me a gross feeling kind of hope. Any young person who wants to know more about the land that this "conflict" is taking place in will have their image searches immediately met with the unequivocal truth of the matter. A search for Gaza returns nothing but destruction, carnage, and despair… a search for Israel, instead, returns images of beautiful architecture and landscapes and the ubiquitous images of sunbeams shining down through clouds onto the land or onto the Israeli flag…

[newstfionline]

Monday, October 9, 2023

Biden administration grapples with broad repercussions of Hamas invasion (Washington Post) The Biden administration moved quickly into crisis mode Saturday in response to Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel, condemning the “terrorist” assault from Gaza and reiterating “rock solid” U.S. support for Israeli security in public statements and calls to officials in Jerusalem. “The United States stands with Israel,” President Biden said in brief remarks after he phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among a flurry of administration calls, Biden spoke with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Blinken with his Saudi and Egyptian counterparts and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin with Israel’s defense minister. Beyond the outrage and reassurance, administration officials and regional experts struggled to understand how Hamas’s preparations for such a massive attack. Perhaps more important for the administration was what the shocking invasion could mean for U.S. efforts to forge a normalization accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a goal that has become one of Biden’s major foreign policy priorities. U.S. lawmakers and governments in much of the world condemned Hamas and expressed condolences to Israel. But several in the Middle East said Israel was to blame. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry “holds Israel solely responsible for the ongoing escalation due to its ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people,” a statement said. Saudi Arabia called on both sides to show restraint, but referred to its “repeated warnings of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the continuation of the occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights and the repetition of systematic provocations.” The Saudi government statement called for the international community to “activate a credible peace process that leads to the two-state solution” for Israel and the Palestinians.

Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta brings colorful displays to the New Mexico sky (AP) The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta has brought colorful displays to the New Mexico sky in an international event that attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators every year. The event started Saturday with a drone light show before sunrise followed by a mass ascension of hot air balloons. Over nine days, local residents and visitors will be treated to a cavalcade of colorful and special-shaped balloons. The annual gathering has become a major economic driver for the state’s biggest city. The Rio Grande and nearby mountains provide spectacular backdrops to the fiesta that began with a few pilots launching 13 balloons from an open lot near a shopping center on what was the edge of Albuquerque in 1972. The fiesta has morphed into one of the most photographed events in the world, now based at Balloon Fiesta Park.

Six Accused of Murdering Ecuadorean Presidential Candidate Are Found Dead (NYT) The six Colombian men accused of murdering an Ecuadorean presidential candidate were found dead in a prison in the port city of Guayaquil on Friday, Ecuador’s prison authority said in a statement. The assassination of the candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, as he exited a campaign event in August was a traumatic jolt for a nation that has been shaken by an increasingly powerful narco-trafficking industry in recent years. As foreign drug mafias have joined forces with local prison and street gangs they have transformed entire swaths of the country, extorting businesses, recruiting young people, infiltrating the government and killing those who investigate them. Mr. Villavicencio, who had worked as a journalist, activist and legislator, was polling near the middle of a group of eight candidates when he was killed 11 days before the first round of the presidential election on Aug. 20. He was among the most outspoken about the links between organized crime and the government. For some time, widespread speculation had suggested that the Colombians were guns for hire, and that powerful figures had ordered the assassination.

The Buenos Aires barber’s books: a history of 19,900% inflation (Reuters) The hand-written entries in the two dozen notebooks—date, haircut, price—chronicle decades of a Buenos Aires barber’s working life. But they tell another story too, Argentina’s most important: a tale of 19,900% inflation and its crippling impact. In his small barbershop with sandy wooden floorboards and a fishbowl glass window to the street outside, Ruben Galante has for some four decades watched presidents come and go, myriad economic crises, and fast-rising prices. The 67-year-old has jotted down every haircut for over 20 years, a rare personal history of the ebbs and flows of inflation during a period of patchy—and at times unreliable—official data. Galante’s colorful lined notebooks, tucked away on a small shelf in the corner of his store, show that between 1991 and 2023, haircut prices rose from 15 pesos to 3,000 pesos. And the current term of center-left President Alberto Fernandez has seen the fastest price rises of any administration during those three decades—some 757% since he took office in December 2019, according to Galante’s notebooks. “This is a long, long crisis and it’s constantly getting worse,” Galante told Reuters in his store. “It’s leaving us impoverished.”

Earthquakes kill over 2,000 in Afghanistan (AP) Powerful earthquakes killed at least 2,000 people in western Afghanistan, a Taliban government spokesman said Sunday. It’s one of the deadliest earthquakes to strike the country in two decades. The magnitude-6.3 earthquake was followed by strong aftershocks on Saturday. On Sunday, people attempted to dig out the dead and injured with their hands in Herat, clambering over rocks and debris. Survivors and victims were trapped under buildings that had crumbled to the ground, their faces grey with dust. “Besides the 2,060 dead, 1,240 people are injured and 1,320 houses are completely destroyed,” said an Afghan spokesman.

Israel intensifies Gaza strikes and battles to repel Hamas (AP) Israel’s military battled to drive Hamas fighters out of southern towns and seal its borders Monday, as it pounded the Gaza Strip from the air and mustered for a campaign its prime minister said would destroy “the military and governing capabilities” of the militant group. Civilians paid a high price on both sides. At least 700 people have reportedly been killed in Israel — a staggering toll on a scale the country has not experienced in decades — and more than 400 have been killed in Gaza. Palestinian militant groups claimed to be holding over 130 captives from the Israeli side. More than two days after Hamas launched its unprecedented incursion out of Gaza, Israeli forces were still battling militants holed up in several locations. Meanwhile, Israel hit more than 1,000 targets in Gaza, its military said, including airstrikes that leveled much of the town of Beit Hanoun in the enclave’s northeast corner. Israel’s declaration of war portended greater fighting ahead, and a major question was whether Israel would launch a ground assault into Gaza, a move that in the past has brought intensified casualties. An Israeli military spokesperson said that the army had called up around 100,000 reservists, and said in a statement that Israel would aim to end Hamas’ rule of Gaza.

‘The Children Were Terrified.’ Fear Grips Israel and Gaza (NYT) Israeli citizens, barricaded in their homes in towns near the Gaza Strip, called into television stations as Palestinian gunmen crossed the border into Israel and invaded their communities on Saturday morning. The Israelis spoke in whispers as they pleaded desperately for help. One woman named Doreen told Israel’s Channel 12 that militants were in her house in Nahal Oz, a small rural community, and that she was hiding in a safe room. “My husband is holding the door of the bomb shelter,” she said. “Now they’re shooting sprays of bullets at the bomb shelter’s window. Sprays. And my three children are here with me.” On the other side of the border in Gaza, Jamila Al-Zanin, 39, tried to distract her own three children as they fled their home and drove south. “The children were terrified. As we drove down they were looking left and right, everywhere there were explosions and booms,” she said. “They were hysterical.” Panic, disbelief and fear rippled throughout Israel and Gaza, as Palestinian militants on Saturday morning caught Israel off guard with a broad and coordinated assault—reaching 22 Israeli towns and army bases, and abducting civilians and soldiers. They fired thousands of rockets that reached as far as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Airlines cancel flights to Israel amid attacks (CNN) Airlines scrambled to cancel flights into Israel after Palestinian militants launched a surprise attack, firing thousands of rockets from Gaza into nearby Israeli towns during a Jewish holiday. As of Saturday afternoon, about 16% of flights were canceled and 23% were delayed to Ben Gurion International Airport, Israel’s international hub, located just outside of Tel Aviv. Some Israel-bound flights were diverted to other airports around the globe. United Airlines flight 954 left San Francisco International Airport on Friday night and diverted over Greenland about seven hours into the more than 13-hour-long journey, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. The flight would later return to San Francisco.

[uk-news-talking-politics]

The 'invented' free speech crisis

By Sam Fowles

Free speech campaigners are fond of describing things as “Orwellian”. For me, one of the most compelling passages of 1984 is the description of “doublethink”: “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.” The term doublethink is aptly applied to our current debate. Freedom of speech traditionally (and legally) means, broadly, that the state cannot punish or disadvantage individuals for expressing an opinion or belief. Increasingly, however, a small but highly influential group has attempted to claim the mantle of free speech to justify its opposite: expanding coercive state control over what we can say in public.

These “pseudo-free speech” activists might normally be dismissed as cranks. Yet they exercise substantial influence over our government and laws. Their current focus appears to primarily be on universities. The 2019 Conservative manifesto contained a promise to “strengthen… free speech in universities”. Last week the universities minister Michelle Donelan threatened legislation to protect “free speech” in universities. On the same day Andrew Lewer MP organised a letter signed by 21 Conservative MPs calling on the prime minister to crack down on “censorship” in higher education. The letter was based on a report by the right-wing Adam Smith Institute claiming that free speech is under threat on campus. Two days later David Davis introduced a ten-minute rule bill, which would allow the government to fine universities that permit students to deny a platform to racist and homophobic speakers.

In their seminal study of how elected leaders can subvert democratic values, Harvard’s Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe how “elected autocrats” use “invented crises” to expand their own power. While it may be premature to apply Levitsky and Ziblatt’s entire thesis to the UK, the “crisis” in free speech is decidedly invented. When one drills down into any example of “censorship” decried by pseudo-free speech activists, it becomes clear that these are not “attacks on free speech” but, rather, examples of traditionally privileged individuals being treated like everyone else.

Just a few examples can illustrate this point. The ASI’s contention that Peter Tatchell had been “no platformed” amounted to nothing more than an NUS representative declining to appear at the same event. In fact, according to the government’s own figures via the Office for Students, in 2017-2018 just 0.1% were blocked. A study of 10,000 student events in 2020, by the Higher Education think tank WonkHe, found just two instances of “no-platforming” (one involved a convicted fraudster and the other Jeremy Corbyn).

In 2017, the Telegraph claimed, “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”: The student had done no more than put in a request for some non-white authors to be included in the (entirely white) curriculum. Matthew Goodwin, one of the most high-profile proponents of the pseudo-crisis, claims that his “academic freedom” is infringed because of his right-wing views. Yet, as an example, he offers little more than the time a colleague described him as “problematic”. Professor Kathleen Stock’s warning that the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall had “politically captured every academic institution in the UK” turned out to be mainly a complaint that some institutions had adopted the charity’s “Diversity Champion” kitemark.

Another version of the pseudo-crisis is the claim that “cancel culture” has made those with right-wing views feel “afraid to speak out”. Given that the majority of the UK’s media, its best-funded think tanks, and its government all-platform right-wing views, this contention appears somewhat strange. Nevertheless, it is repeated in a recent report by Policy Exchange. Given, however, that pseudo crisis narrative is repeated in most news outlets and across social media, Policy Exchange’s results could just as easily be the result of perception as reality.

At the root of the pseudo-crisis narrative are two conflations. First, of “speech” with “platform”. Speech is a right, platform is a privilege. Universities and students unions are independent organisations and are entitled to offer their platform to whoever they choose. Similarly, Stonewall is entitled to put whatever conditions it wants on use of its kitemark. Davis, in introducing his bill, complained that various colleagues had been “no-platformed”. But Davis and his friends have no more right to speak at universities than I have to perform on Strictly Come Dancing: Both are limited platforms (i.e., not everyone can be included), and both belong to independent organisations.

The second conflation is of “censorship” with “criticism”. Professor Stock claimed, in the Mail on Sunday (not a platform that is generally offered to those with contrary views) that colleagues who signed a letter criticising her OBE were trying to “bully” her “into silence”. But Professor Stock’s colleagues are entitled to just as much freedom of expression as she is. If they want to use it to criticise her, that is their prerogative. The nature of free speech is that some people will have views you don’t like.

The crisis might be invented, but it is being used to justify a very real expansion of state control over universities. Roy Jenkins, a former home secretary and chancellor of Oxford University, once said: “It is difficult to think of any field of human endeavour in which central regulation is a greater enemy of excellence than that of the organisation of the teaching and research of universities.”

Yet central regulation is exactly what we are getting. In the 1980s the Thatcher government stripped universities of the power to determine how their funding was distributed, handing it instead to ministers and officials. The Cameron government eliminated funding for the humanities (coincidentally a discipline that commonly produces criticism of the state). Since 2015, universities have been forced to crack down on political dissent. The government has compelled them to ban events such as a panel on Kurdish political struggles at Cambridge and events supporting rights for Palestinians at Exeter and the LSE. It may be coincidental that universities and students unions have traditionally been centres of political opposition to Conservative governments.

Davis claims his bill will require universities to “uphold freedom of speech”. But such a duty already exists under both the Education Act 1986 and the Human Rights Act 1998. It seems, however, that Mr Davis’s bill will redefine the existing duty so as to require universities to police their academics and students. This will, in effect, force them to give a platform for speakers of whom the government approves. Mr Davis’s bill may be just the start. The Lewer letter calls on the government to ban student unions (the leadership of which is directly elected by the students) from engaging in activities that the government considers “political”. The report on which it is based appears to recommend using the coercive power of the state to break up unions that don’t conform to the government’s definition of acceptable student activities.

These are real threats to freedom of speech. They are justified on the basis of imaginary threats. As Levistsky and Ziblatt put it: “One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defence of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion.” War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Free speech is censorship. Censorship is free speech ...

[libertariantaoist]

Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country. To be Jewish, according to the prevailing view, it is enough to have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the many problems with this conception, such as: how can there be a secular Judaism?)

The definition of Jew has been bitterly controversial inside and outside of Israel since its founding. The point is, as anthropologist Roselle Tekiner wrote, “When the central task of a state is to import persons of a select religious/ethnic group — and to develop the country for their benefit alone — it is crucially important to be officially recognized as a bona fide member of that group.” (This is from the anthology Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, which is not online and is apparently out of print. But see Tekiner’s article, “Israel’s Two-Tiered Citizenship Law Bars Non-Jews From 93 Percent of Its Lands.”)

Second, Israel’s champions insist that Israel is a democracy — indeed, the only democracy in the Middle East. They vehemently object whenever someone demonstrates how Israel-as-the-state-of-the-Jewish-People must harm the 25 percent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, most of whom are Arabs.

Israeli law uniquely distinguishes citizenship from nationality. The nationality of an Israeli Arab citizen is “Arab” not Israeli, while the nationality of a Jewish citizen is “Jewish” not Israeli. Are citizens of any other country distinguished in law like that? The prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews is not the result of political bargaining with religious parties but of a desire to protect the Jewish people from impurity. These contortions are required by Israel’s self-declared status as something other than the land of all its citizens. Early Zionists said they wanted Palestine to be as Jewish as Britain is British and France is French — a flagrant category mistake that has had horrific consequences for the Palestinians.

The insistence by Israel’s supporters — that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic — thus is puzzling. What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state if that status has no real consequences for non-Jews? If all it meant was that the Star of David was on the flag, we might hear far fewer objections to Israel. But of course it means much more.

To see what it means, one has to look beyond Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Basic Law (its de facto constitution), and specific statutes, which contain language that on its face forbids discrimination against non-Jews. We should know better than to take official documents at face value. What matters in any society is the “real constitution,” the principles that underlie commonly accepted behavior. The old Soviet Union’s constitution listed freedom of the press among the “rights” of Soviet citizens, and the U.S. Constitution says that only Congress may declare war and that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

More pertinent, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, wherein the British government “view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” also stated that “it [was] clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” We know how that worked out.

So what’s the story inside Israel? (I’m not talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel has occupied for 52 years and where Palestinians have no rights whatever.)

After doing an interview recently about my new book, Coming to Palestine, I was challenged by a listener over my statements that the Israeli government treats Arab and Jewish criminals differently depending on whether they shed “Jewish blood” or “Arab blood” (no such distinction actually exists) and that political parties can’t call for changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of _all _its citizens.

Who is right?

Regarding criminal justice, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy shows anecdotally that Arab Israeli citizens who kill Jews can spend more time in prison than Israeli Jewish citizens who kill Arabs. “Arab blood is cheaper in Israel,” Levy wrote in 2014, “and Jewish blood is thicker.” He says things are the same today. Over the years, many articles have been published documenting this de facto, though not de jure, disparity. Indeed, Haaretz reported in 2011 that

Arab Israelis who have been charged with certain types of crime are more likely than their Jewish counterparts to be convicted, and once convicted they are more likely to be sent to prison, and for a longer time. These disparities were found in a recent statistical study commissioned by Israels Courts Administration and the Israel Bar Association…. The [unpublished preliminary] study is unique in that it is the first of its kind to be commissioned and funded in part by the courts administration, and in that it sought to examine claims by attorneys that Israeli judges deal more harshly with Arab criminals than with Jews.

Note that government discrimination against non-Jews across the spectrum of issues is not usually written into the law, although it may be. Mostly flagrantly, discrimination is legally applied to the “right of return.” People defined as Jews, no matter where they were born or live, can become Israeli citizens/nationals virtually on arrival, while Arabs driven from their ancestral homes in 1947-48 and 1967 may not go back, much less become full-rights citizens/nationals. Put concretely, I, an atheist born in Philadelphia to Jewish parents born in Philadelphia (with roots likely in the vicinity of the Black Sea), can “return” [sic] to Israel and become an Israeli citizen at once, while my friend Raouf Halaby, a naturalized American citizen born to Arab Christian parents in west Jerusalem three years before Israel was founded, may not. The only difference is that my mother was Jewish, making me, a Spinozist, a Jewish national in Israel’s eyes, and Raouf’s mother was not.

Regarding restrictions on political parties, the Basic Law: The Knesset states:

A candidates’ list [party] shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include…:

1.

1.

1.

negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;…

Before proceeding, let us note a conundrum. The issue I’m raising here is whether a state be both Jewish and democratic. The root of the word democracy _is _demos, _people. _So if the raison d’être of Israel is the welfare of only _some _of its citizens and millions of certain others who are citizens and residents of other countries, how can Israel be a real democracy? Strictly speaking, considering that word and, the law’s language legitimizes a party that “negat[es] the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish … state” but not as a democratic state. Would the Israeli election authorities accept that distinction? I don’t think so.

In the past the Israeli Supreme Court has reversed government bans on a party’s or candidate’s inclusion in an election. Particular cases will revolve around the exact wording of a party’s mission statement or candidate’s platform, and legal language is subject to endless, unpredictable, and political interpretation. But, regardless, the government has the power to ban at its disposal, and future Supreme Courts may not be so liberal. So the threat of a ban always looms. Incidentally, a party or candidate that engages in “incitement to racism” is also ineligible to participate in elections, yet this provision has yet to be applied to Jewish parties and politicians, such as Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu, that routinely spout racist rhetoric.

Israel’s champions also deny that Arab Israelis — citizens, mind you — have grossly inferior access to land, most of which is owned by a “public” authority and the Jewish National Fund (very little is privately owned); building and village permits; public utilities; education; roads; and other government-controlled services and resources. The Israeli government has carried out programs in the Galilee and Negev, known as Judaization, from which Arab Israelis, especially Bedouins, have been cleared to make way for Jewish Israelis. Such restrictions inside Israel have the stink of apartheid.

In his book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White documents that the Israeli government allocates resources — unsurprisingly — just as one would expect, considering that Israel by its founding doctrine is not the land of all of its citizens but only of some. This doctrine was reinforced last year in the Nation-State Law, which declares that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

So, as Israel’s champions say, all Israeli citizens are indeed equal. It’s just that some — those whose nationality is “Jewish” — are more equal than others — those whose nationality is “Arab” or anything else but “Jewish.”

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Lesvos

I've been procrastinating writing this blogpost for a long time because it's felt like I'd have too many thoughts to effectively capture on paper and that it would be too rambling. But it's about time now, during my last evening in Mytilini, while my housemates cook food for my farewell dinner/party tonight before I leave tomorrow, that I get to it.

Mytilini and Moria.

I was so looking forward to this trip for such a long time. I was determined to keep a journal while I was here, to document the things I saw, the people I interacted with, to bear witness to the events. However, it was a perfect storm of circumstances that have forced me to have to leave for the States two weeks early. Before I arrived on the island, we knew of the Golden Dawn and other fascist groups holding rallies in the city of Mytilini and on the road to Moria, but then Turkey opened its borders and things got worse. The school at the One Happy Family community center, where my organization, Medical Volunteers International, operates a refugee medical clinic, was burnt to the ground by suspected fascist activities. This paused MVIs activities out of the clinic, and as fascist rallies started becoming more frequent, with some even attacking NGO workers and breaking car windows, there was an exodus of volunteers at the same time as Greece started tightening restrictions on NGO activities and migrant/refugee processing. They even suspended their cooperation under international asylum laws, rejecting new arrivals. A fascist group physically forced one refugee boat back into the water as they made land, resulting in the drowning of a child onboard. Then COVID-19 becomes a serious threat. There is one confirmed case on Lesvos, being treated at Mytilini hospital, but no known cases elsewhere. NGO activity is further hamstrung, and the local government makes no effort to facilitate aid to people trapped in the camp.

Fascists, fires, a pandemic, a volunteer exodus, restrictions on NGO activities. I've been frustrated at not being able to do anything about it all, despite being here. I know I could be more effective once I'm done with school, but even MSF and Kitrinos, two of the bigger medical NGOs still operating, have had to scale back their work. It feels like I came all this way to try to make a difference, and aside from about a week's worth of seeing patients, I wasn't able to do anymore. At times this has felt more like a poorly planned vacation than a trip to help people.

I also noticed that I wasn't as phased by much of Moria's situation: the open sewers, the poor hygiene, the burning of plastic for fuel, the rampant scabies, the five families living in one tent together, because it all felt very familiar. Like any slum I've visited in India. We are rightfully enraged about the EUs treatment of the refugees, and the conditions they've been forced to stay in. Perhaps justifiably more so because the EU has significantly better developed infrastructure and more money than does a country like India. But it made me consider why circumstances I get angry about here don't provoke as strong a response in my back home. Why do I more readily accept the status quo in India? I had this thought in a different vein a few years ago when I realized I treated service workers differently in India than in the States. Not that I treated them badly or dismissively here, but that in the States, be it due to a more common language or a less internalized sense of class structure, I found I'd treat service workers like people like me who are working a job. Potential friends, whom I treated as true equals in the sense of actually engaging and invested conversation. Whereas in India, I realized I never extended the same idea of possibly being friends to those who worked there. It was always cursory pleasantries, but never with the underlying idea that this person is a "real" person just like me, with a life outside work.

Perhaps it's just silly or privileged or stupid to have been thinking this way. Perhaps it's normal to think this way, as we can't be friends with everyone we meet and so we draw up those invisible divisions to make our social lives more feasible. Either way, the discrepancy between my thoughts/actions in the States vs in India was noteworthy to me, and one I have been conscious of not propagating further.

People.

Aside from that overarching frustration and general cloud over my thoughts however, the people I coordinated to room with are fantastic. As are the others I've met here. The house I'm staying in houses me, a German/French medical student, a German nurse, an Italian junior doctor, and a Spanish Antifa activist, and the landlord is a Syrian refugee who arrived on the island four years ago.

The translators we work with who become fast friends quite quickly include a Palestinian, a Burundian, and a man from Burkina Faso, the latter two of whom speak predominantly French, forcing me to improve my French significantly, having entire conversations for entire evenings in an entirely different language.

Then there are the coordinators of the different NGOs here. There's a German retired GP who made the decision to extend his trip in light of all the changes because he knows that now the need is highest and it feels wrong to leave. His family understands and supports his decision. There's an Irish lady who works with unaccompanied minors, i.e. kids below the age of 18 who have lost or been separated from their parents, aunts, uncles, or any family at all, but have somehow managed to cross an ocean to get away from the people literally destroying their homes. She teaches them, cares for them (sometimes as simply as giving them a place to shower), and more recently put one in touch with a lawyer to delay his deportation due to turning 18 and therefore being able to be tried as an adult. A 17yo kid, running away from the Taliban in Afghanistan, having had his family killed in front of him, arrives in Greece finally hoping he's safe, only to be deported to Turkey, where he knows and has no one. There's an American journalist who started an NGO to teach refugee kids to film and document their lives, giving them skills, and the ability to bear witness, but more so, just giving them something to do. He's stayed to document the EUs mismanagement of this refugee crisis. And there's a Russian teacher who runs a school for minors and children of refugees so they have somewhere to go and don't miss out on some form of education while their parents do what they need to to get by.

And lastly, I met the settled refugees in Greece, including my landlord from Syria and his friends. Got a haircut from one of his Iraqi friends, met some other friends of his in the Olive Grove, the overflow camp surrounding Moria.

The people I've met here are incredible. From all over the world, trying to do what they think is some good for the people they know are in need, in conditions where the vast majority of people would not stay in.

The remind me that everyone we interact with is just another human being, and force me to consider my own biases that I didn't realize I held until this trip. I didn't realize I unconsciously put up a guard around people who didn't speak the same language as me, or more accurately, people who didn't speak the same language, and, I'm ashamed to say, were doing poorly socioeconomically. Having traveled all my life and seeing the ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, I always thought I was very accepting and comfortable around any conditions. But be it a product of internalizing the presentation of certain types of people as dangerous or undesirable, or a core poor judgement on my part, I realized I was being defensive. It was clear to me when I was sitting across from this person on the bus, obviously living in Moria. I remember feeling an almost subconscious desire to avoid conversation. But then the Irish lady asked him if he was on his way to school, to which he excitedly replied yes, and showed her his notebook. I noticed it in myself again when we were surrounded by refugees as the Irish lady spoke to the boy about to be deported, and I found myself feeling uncomfortable, or even unsafe. But these were literally kids. 10 years younger than me, having seen and experienced so much more than I could imagine, gathering around to listen to how they could maybe help one of their newly acquired friends. I couldn't understand when I started feeling this way. I even jumped into a jog for a couple steps before very ashamedly catching myself when a homeless man in Atlanta tripped behind me.

What exactly am I scared of? Where is that insecurity coming from? And why, of all people, is it directed at those who are least fortunate? I hate that I've had to ask myself these questions. But I'm glad that I have. I think these questions are exactly those that many people in the world need to be asking themselves right now as well.

Life.

Living here has been a unique experience as well. Since my arrival, I knew my housemates were a special group of people. I've always only seen it on TV shows or in fiction, the idea of communal living, or a family of sorts formed out of the people you live with. Even in the States, my roommates and I very much kept to ourselves and led our own, parallel lives. But somehow, and perhaps because of the relative non-fancy-ness of our accommodation, that's exactly what happened with us. We would cook together every night and have dinner, go out for drinks with the other teams and organizations, spend afternoons together just talking. And the scaled-down lifestyle was something I was slowly getting used to as well. The relatively spartan bedroom with the creaky and drafty windows, the limited facility bathroom with the hot pipes running along the walls and the shower I can't stand up in, the "kitchen" with one working burner, knives more blunt than the spoons, and poorly draining sink, the laundry machine that no one knows how to work shorter than 5 hours, the cafe cat that started staying with us for food since the covid-19 lockdown, the tiny living room space that everyone gathers in both because it's the only option and because we're all new here and subconscously I'm sure want to spend time together with familiar faces. It's a simple life, with people you like around you, doing work you enjoy and find important. Life in Dayton with all the other things I normally do to try and fill my time seems so far away. I haven't watched a youtube video in two weeks, when I usually spend at least a couple hours watching back home. I've cooked more often these couple weeks with these blunt knives and poor kitchen than I did in Dayton over two months. I've learned new, inexpensive dishes. I've met and befriended more new people.

As my last post captured a snapshot of what I could see as my potential future, I think this trip captured a snapshot of what I think I wish my life could ultimately be like at least intermittently, if not always. When I do this kind of work that I already feel satisfied by, that feels important and fulfilling, I realize I don't feel that underlying insecurity or restlessness than makes me want to get involved in other things. I started Dayton Driven because I was too restless in medical school, for example. This feeling here reminds me of when I felt similarly in Geneva, just, finally, content.

I know there are other things important to me too though, in normal life, if not within this parentheses. I may not be able to be the Irish lady or American journalist, but perhaps I can be the German retired doctor, still being involved, still doing what I think is right, and still holding on to the other things important to me. Saara said something to me a couple months ago that I didn't realize would become something I'd think of quite often. She said, "If you ever feel like you are torn between two things and have to give up one, then you have the wrong two things." Maybe that's true. Maybe I can have and do every thing that I want. Maybe I can make it happen.

Well, it's at least pretty to thinks so.