Israel, Palestine & the Levant rolling events: Oct 23 on

xp, thank you for that gyac, incredibly moving. I also recommend the NYTimes Daily from today on the situation on the ground in gaza from the perspective of people caught in it, difficult listening:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/podcasts/the-daily/gaza-israel.html

(the ep labeled "Voices from Gaza")

I’m just going to say that I am not in-between on this issue, but that should be obvious by now.

xp I know people are all about bearing witness but I find this stuff incredibly upsetting.

I don’t think it was mentioned but Humza Yousuf who is Scotland’s first minister has family trapped in Gaza. I am linking this video as I find this content extremely upsetting.

Bernard's mother and family went out of their way to tell me that they would be praying for my family in Gaza. We hugged, we cried, and we promised to re-dedicate ourselves to peace and to be unequivocal; no innocent man, woman, or child should pay the price of another's actions. https://t.co/Vv1fz9gXqJ

— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) October 13, 2023

Also, for context on the Kibbutz Be'eri post and those less familiar with the situation of the past 15-20 years (and again disclaimer I am hardly an expert myself): from Ariel Sharon onward, Israeli policy has been increasingly tilted toward a phony sort of "disengagement." In my mind, it traces back to the building of the West Bank wall although that could be simplistic take. But Netanyahu has turbo-charged this idea, basically that Israel could just kind of ignore the territories (at least other than soldiers stationed in the West Bank) rather than engage in any more ongoing negotiations, that the West Bank could continue to develop economically even without full agency or freedom, and that Gaza would be the kind of counterexample (i.e. life would be worse than in the West Bank) as long as Hamas was there. That terrorism could simply be prevented or minimized through "security," the settlements in the West Bank could continue quietly, and most Israelis would just live their lives and not worry.

Netanyahu is also notoriously corrupt and venal, and he has maintained power through a coalition with right-wing settler and religious parties, giving both more power (which also angers the more secular wings of Israeli politics as Israel gradually takes on additional trappings of theocracy, though it is hardly a full theocracy).

Netanyahu also favors his voters. The kibbutzes near Gaza tend actually to be center-liberal to left. They are not Netanyahu voters. There is a strong sense that Netanyahu "neglected" these areas as the girl expressed in her video, and that is also reflected in the sense that he neglected security near the Gaza border. I genuinely do not know whether Netanyahu "allowed" the attack but I seriously doubt it for reasons I stated in the prior thread. I think this was more hubris and stupidity and myopia.

"I don’t think it was mentioned but Humza Yousuf who is Scotland’s first minister has family trapped in Gaza. I am linking this video as I find this content extremely upsetting."

Mentioned this in the last Israel thread.

You can count on one hand the number of European leaders who have talked about Palestinians as human beings

And they’re all backpedaling now given protests and public pushback.

The President of the University of Pennsylvania has released her 3rd or 4th public statement apologizing for letting a Palestinian writers conference take place last month

The President of the University of Pennsylvania has released her 3rd or 4th public statement apologizing for letting a Palestinian writers conference take place last month

people are so fucking gross

Public statements issued by university presidents are generally tailored to a narrow and specific segment of the public, mainly anyone with influence over university revenues or endowments. They are paid to know how to read that room.

Aimless, we know. No offense.

Well, yeah. When you've got Dick Wolf threatening your donations because you let Palestinians into a building named after him...

a name like Dick Wolf must never be besmirched

Always guarantee the BBC will always be fucked.

The BBC admits that it misled the public about pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the UK. pic.twitter.com/oi4nVf5DN7

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) October 16, 2023

i think about this poem by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish all the time pic.twitter.com/jv5WOOjobb

— هستی hasti (@youarehasti) October 16, 2023

xp - That retraction was also poorly phrased and could be misleading.

This is @GhassanAbuSitt1, a surgeon who is currently saving the lives of Palestinians in a hospital in Gaza. He's just reported that counter terrorism police have showed up at his house in the UK and harrased his family.pic.twitter.com/GOvl5aQLHG https://t.co/bugmmZPAMM

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) October 16, 2023

That retraction was also poorly phrased and could be misleading.

glad i'm not the only one who thought this

OTM

I know this is old news, but it still blows my mind that the range of Acceptable Opinions on Israel is narrower in the West than it is in Israel.

That Darwish poem is great. Notable that Armenians were just cleansed from Artsakh by Azerbaijan and absolutely no-one in the west cared.

Yup. Armenia could be invaded in the next few weeks btw.

xxp two words: Social Media.

Nuanced discussions are often lacking in the echo chambers of social media and the 24 hour news cycle. The only place where I've seen nuanced discussions about the topic are on platforms that favor more nuanced discussion, such as ILX and (yes, believe it or not) Reddit.

I do wonder if the "outrage economy" of clickbait extremism online and the 24 hours news cycle will finally hit a limit of societal acceptability in western democracies, but I'm not holding my breath, they still make $$$

"We called a pro-palestinian march pro-Hamas. We accept that this was a thing that we said". WTF.

Now here's the weather.

True, I understand in theory how misinformation supposedly works. But I'm finding it extremely challenging to trust some of the news sources being cited and finding myself turning to reddit, and other news sources that I don't normally consult trying to see what areas of dispute exist over even just the factual reporting.

xp

Interestingly enough, a private forum I participate in is completely avoiding talking about this, and honestly it might be for the best.

The ukpolitics sub is overall fanatically pro-occupation and pro-genocide, and they are gradually losing their shit as they observe the public becoming turned off by this stance. Also they are usually witheringly critical of the Tories but have suddenly become staunchly supportive of Sunak and Braverman.

Are you taking about Reddit or something

I have met exactly zero people in between.

To the extent I've talked to people about this, almost everybody I know IRL is "in between" the two positions you describe.

Reddit is a paragon of “nuanced discussion” now. We are truly fucked.

Actually was just thinking about this specific issue in non-Reddit terms which still definitely apply to Reddit. How this conflict is a godsend for the extreme right (and whatever apologists they may have claiming to be “leftist”). Because it so thoroughly divides actual leftists from liberals steeped in realpolitik or whatever they’re on.

a name like Dick Wolf must never be besmirched

There's nothing decent to besmirch. The Law & Order "franchise" is a formulaic, sensationalist pile of shit. All 1,316 episodes of it.

Also pretty depressing how my social media feed was blissfully Ben Shapiro-free until various people decided his thick-headed, one-dimensional take on the Middle East was the voice of reason this past week.

xxp two words: Social Media.

Nuanced discussions are often lacking in the echo chambers of social media and the 24 hour news cycle. The only place where I've seen nuanced discussions about the topic are on platforms that favor more nuanced discussion, such as 4chan and (yes, believe it or not) Stormfront.

We get it. You don't like Reddit.

I don’t like social media illiterates upholding a literal right wing extremist-captured disinformation service as their go-to for balanced discussion.

lol what

Lol hey i wasnt even posting here viborg

Yes, the famously extremist platform, reddit

Extremely milquetoast maybe

i know this is dumb and unhelpful, but to illustrate the kinds of things i’m seeing regular jewish folks share these days: https://www.instagram.com/p/CyZO9L8sM01/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

That’s depressing

As noted, I know numerous IRL people with Israeli flag avatars saying that they stand with Israel no matter what.

Plus I know IlXorz and others who almost uniformly condemn Israel as a brutal apartheid state that continues to use "but the Holocaust" as a laminated carte blanche for every atrocity the IDF wishes to commit. (There is a bit of a strawman in there but that's another topic for another time.)

I have met exactly zero people in between. I know it is not about me and/or my feelz. And I don't love "both sides"ing US politics either. The discourse is polarized and will remain so.

I have also been finding the discourse polarized online - less so in person - but I think the first position you gave is actually an in-between position. I think the two poles of the discourse are actually "I stand with Israel no matter what", versus "Israel should not exist, and any conversation about Israel needs to go back to the fundamental problem of it existing in the first place."

My position is that Israel is not, at this point, fundamentally different from the US or Canada or Australia or any other country that was created by settling already occupied land. It should not have been created, but now that it exists, we aren't going to wind time backwards and expel the Jews from Israel any more than we're going to expel white people from the US. I do agree that it's a brutal apartheid state that uses the Holocaust as an excuse to commit atrocities. But I would like to be able to have conversations on the left about what to do about this that don't start from the implicit premise that Jews should just clear out, as if Jewish settlement is somehow different and more reversible than the Christian settlement our entire country is built on.

While I'm at it, I would absolutely love to be able to jump into discussions about Israel and Palestine that are not filled with coded and not-so-coded antisemitism from people I fundamentally agree with. I would like it if people didn't have to dismiss the Israeli victims in order to show sympathy for the Palestinian victims, or the other way around. It would also be very nice if the New York Times didn't publish bullshit articles about how Jews in New York have put aside their political differences to come together in their shared grief for Israel, as if to confirm every anti-Semite's conviction that when the chips are down all Jews are Zionists at heart. I would like to stop reading about the Hamas attacks as "pogroms" and "the biggest attacks on Jews since the Holocaust," like, no, dude, Israel is a country, you can't frame attacks on your country as an attack on The Jews. It's a horrific mass murder but it's not a pogrom.

Maybe none of this makes any sense. I don't really feel I know enough about any of this, and maybe I've gotten it all wrong. But it's been a hard week. I don't mean to ask for special sympathy for myself as a Jew, because many people are suffering more here, but do please consider that your Jewish posters are under a lot of stress. Some of us (not me, but people I know) have friends and family in Israel, so we may be dealing with worry for them, or with having family members whose political opinions we find abhorrent, or both. We're having to navigate liberal spaces where the justified anti-Israel sentiment gets mixed in with a lot of stray antisemitism. I know I feel a lot more visible as a minority right now than I'm used to being in the US. And for people like me, who are descended from Holocaust survivors, there's also a particularly helpless horror and grief at seeing Israel do things to the Palestinians that were done to us in the Holocaust. I've never felt any sense of identification with Israel, I don't rationally think that being Jewish connects me to the Israelis, and yet the idea of Jews being the ones to create the ghettos and the death marches is viscerally appalling to me and I can't help feeling an irrational sense of guilt and responsibility. But at the same time I don't want the Holocaust and its after-effects minimized. I think there's a willingness to forget that Israel was founded by people who were terrified and traumatized to an extraordinary level, and much as I oppose Israel and its actions, that's something I can't mentally take out of the empathy equation because it's a trauma that's also embedded in my family.

Sorry about the long post, which kind of went all over the place. I just wanted to convey that I feel like I'm being pulled in a million emotional directions at once even if my politics are pretty aligned with ilx, and that this is likely the case for a lot of Jewish people you know. So just keep this in mind, folks, if you find yourself putting pressure on Jews you know to say the right thing in the right way.

<3

<3

appreciate the post, lily

Yeah great post Lily.

But I would like to be able to have conversations on the left about what to do about this that don't start from the implicit premise that Jews should just clear out, as if Jewish settlement is somehow different and more reversible than the Christian settlement our entire country is built on.

the serious position i encounter most commonly on the left (and support myself) is for a one-state solution - a single, secular democratic state, with civil rights for all, right of return for palestinian refugees and some form of reparations. a two-state solution may be nice in theory but most on the left would tend to agree it's a dead prospect these days - israel has done everything it can with the settlements to make it logistically impossible, and the prospect of a lasting peace from it seems like it would be even less likely. "jews should just clear out" is just more ethnic cleansing, it is not a serious or just position.

That’s an amazing post Lily, thank you for posting.

Really no poing in discussing Trump itt imo, we already have like five threads for that shit and discussions about whether he'd be worse or not distract from the current atrocities.

The middle east is at war. Stop looking at polls all day xp

BREAKING - Some 1 million Lebanese have been displaced by Israeli attacks, 100s of thousands since yesterday — head of Lebanese government crisis cell Nasser Yassin to @Reuters

— Timour Azhari (@timourazhari) September 28, 2024

The ground invasion is starting:

Israel preparing for limited ground incursion into Lebanon: US official

Israel is preparing for a limited ground incursion into Lebanon, even after it killed around 30 top leaders within Hezbollah in recent weeks.

Israel has rejected a cease-fire proposal -- even a limited one -- in Lebanon, now bombing sites where there are suspected longer range missiles, according to a senior U.S. official. Israel is not listening to the Biden administration despite its repeated calls for a diplomatic solution.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/live-updates/israel-gaza-hamas-hezbollah-war?id=113917948&entryId=114317700

why would they? the administration piles approbation on every atrocity they commit

i mean we knew assassination and torture are okay; they have been for awhile; now it’s okay to “assassinate” someone by bombing six apartment buildings at the same time

the story just below that one was "Bomb used by Israelis in Beirut likely came from the US"

meanwhile: https://apnews.com/article/syria-militants-killed-airstrike-us-central-command-8921f045b25d621143778730d78bd4e4

BEIRUT (AP) — In Syria, 37 militants affiliated to the extremist Islamic State group and an al-Qaeda-linked group were killed in two strikes, the United States military said Sunday.

Two of the dead were senior militants, it said.

U.S. Central Command said it struck northwestern Syria on Tuesday, targeting a senior militant from the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others. They say he was responsible for overseeing military operations.

They also announced a strike from earlier this month on Sept. 16, where they conducted a “large-scale airstrike” on an IS training camp in a remote undisclosed location in central Syria. That attack killed 28 militants, including “at least four Syrian leaders.”

This will definitely work

Just kill all the bad guys, then things will settle down

Serious question from someone who doesn’t follow this stuff super closely: What is Israel actually trying to accomplish?

the story just below that one was "Bomb used by Israelis in Beirut likely came from the US"

― rob, Sunday, 29 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Many bombs.

Nasrallah was killed not by better and more precise intelligence, but simply more bombs. Specifically eighty bombs for one person. pic.twitter.com/OU52sz1qdB

— Mahdi (@mahdizda) September 29, 2024

yeah I didn't bother posting the story because it was speculative — the main point of it was that they used a "bunker-buster" 2000-lb bomb, which aren't normally used in urban areas.

notably, that same ABC News site has this as its sub-headline: "The U.S. and Israel have eliminated around 30 Hezbollah leaders in past weeks."

Serious question from someone who doesn’t follow this stuff super closely: What is Israel actually trying to accomplish?

― Marten Broadcloak, mild-mannered GOP congressman (Raymond Cummings), Sunday, 29 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Some of the strategy is driven by Netanyahu being propped up in power by eliminationist cabinet members, who have threatened to walk out of the coalition should a deal ever be reached.

Ultimately, this is on the US, who supply the bombs. And its hard not to see Israel as being also used by them to prosecute a war in the middle east to bring Iran to its knees.

Thanks

yeah fwiw here is what Netanyahu is saying:

'Work is not yet complete,' Netanyahu says

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah "settled accounts" for those who had a hand in killing.

"The elimination of Nasrallah is a necessary condition for achieving the goals we have set: Returning the residents of the north safely to their homes, and changing the balance of power in the region over the years, because as long as Nasrallah lives, he would quickly restore the capabilities we took away from Hezbollah," Netanyahu said in a video message Saturday.

Netanyahu said he came to the decision that what Israel had done to Hezbollah was "not enough" earlier this week when he gave the order to assassinate Nasrallah. But, he warned that Israel's work is "not complete."

"The work is not yet complete. In the coming days we will face significant challenges ... There is no place in Iran or the Middle East that the long arm of Israel will not reach, and today you already know how true this is," Netanyahu said.

"We are determined to continue to strike at our enemies, return our residents to their homes, and return all our abductees," Netanyahu said.

All of this benefits another one of the US's big allies, Saudi Arabia.

xp re: who made the weapons, the washington post reported that it was "U.S.-made BLU-109s and JDAM guidance kits", and then conspicuously neglected to mention the U.S. companies which make them (General Dynamics and Boeing). General Dynamics' HQ is in Reston, VA, so in the Washington Post local area.

i left a comment on the article pointing this out but was owned by the guy who asked me to think about all the terrorists that were killed

I didn’t anticipate such aggressive action by Israel toward Lebanon, and was puzzling over its strategic benefits for the past few days— a possible explanation that occurred to me is one of misdirection. Considering there’s all eyes on Gaza/West Bank, escalating conflict with Lebanon and Yemen might allow for the bulldozing of towns like Jenin to continue without as much global scrutiny

was puzzling over its strategic benefits for the past few days

I think Netanyahu's strategy is just what he's been saying out loud. It's the pure hubris of thinking he can eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah, raze Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon and kill so many Palestinians and Lebanese that it breaks their ability and their will to resist total Israeli domination. He's stupidly wrong to think this strategy will end Palestinian resistance or even benefit Israel. It's blind stupidity raised to the level of pure evil.

The Yemenis have launched a hypersonic missile against Tel Aviv three times since the last Israeli strike on Yemen. The last one yesterday, targeting Ben-Gurion Airport in an explicit attempt to hit it while Netanyahu was returning from New York, likely pushed the IDF to hit now.

— Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) September 29, 2024

Boeing’s HQ is in Arlington, Virginia. Literally across from the Pentagon. I joke that there’s a tunnel with a revolving door between them.

Xxp to Goon: Killing the press in Gaza and the West Bank has also been effective in suppressing news from there.

Told WSJ: The mood in Tehran all along has been not to take the bait. They know that Israel wants war now, because it has the intelligence and military advantage, because there is a political vacuum in the United States and because the US Navy is sitting in the Mediterranean,…

— Vali Nasr (@vali_nasr) September 29, 2024

Here is the piece:

https://archive.ph/nVvHv

Trade unionist murdered by @UniteTheUnion and @GMB_Union built weapons pic.twitter.com/JslSud0ju0

— jewdⒶs // ייִדהודה (@jewdas) September 30, 2024

Gong through this long read on Hezbollah:

https://www.hauntologies.net/p/hezbollah-10-things-you-need-to-know

The PFLP announces that its leaders Mohammed Abdel Aal, Imad Awda, and Abdul Rahman Abdel Aal, have been targeted and killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut. https://t.co/mlbZs1qP9P

— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) September 30, 2024

I think Netanyahu's strategy is just what he's been saying out loud. It's the pure hubris of thinking he can eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah, raze Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon and kill so many Palestinians and Lebanese that it breaks their ability and their will to resist total Israeli domination. He's stupidly wrong to think this strategy will end Palestinian resistance or even benefit Israel. It's blind stupidity raised to the level of pure evil.

Does Israel want to seize Lebanon? Is this a lebensraum move we're seeing?

Part of it, I would assume. They've done it before and a fat lot of good it did them or anyone else.

xp No, that's not on the table. I also don't think a re-occupation of Gaza is realistically on the table, though unlike in the case of Lebanon, there are some actors in the government who would like to see Gaza reoccupied, and the whole problem here is that Netanyahu for his own self-interested reasons has decided to give those people legitimacy and even influence when before they were excluded from government. Israeli expansionism is focused on the West Bank.

As for what Israel's strategy is, I don't think "Israel" speaks with one voice. Netanyahu's strategy is to stay prime minister and for that he has to keep the fighting going. But an actual regional war involving Iran would be a disaster for Israel far beyond anything experienced in most living peoples' memory and there's no constituency for it.

A partial occupation of Lebanon to create a "buffer" zone at the border seems fully on the cards -- why else send in troops? I was under the impression that they've already starting building the infrastructure for something similar in northern Gaza. WB expansion obvs ongoing yes

Any ideas about Iran would likely depend on what the US promises/agrees to, I would think.

afaict Israel has been wanting to provoke a war between the US and Iran for decades, so that Iran is neutralized before they can get a nuclear weapon.

I don't know if there is a coherent strategy - or if there is I've not been able to parse it - beyond keeping Netanyahu in power and out of jail.

I also think these things can be speculative and opportunistic rather than planned out, and things can take on a life of their own. As to what the US agrees to, that doesn't seem as relevant as it might have done in the past

A partial occupation of Lebanon to create a "buffer" zone at the border seems fully on the cards -- why else send in troops? I was under the impression that they've already starting building the infrastructure for something similar in northern Gaza. WB expansion obvs ongoing yes

How is this any different from Putin/Ukraine?

"A partial occupation of Lebanon to create a "buffer" zone at the border seems fully on the cards -- why else send in troops?"

Its so that displaced Israelis at the border can return to their occupied homes.

yes exactly. idk who this Novik guy is, but he explains the gist of it here: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/29/nx-s1-5132086/understanding-israels-strategy-in-lebanon-as-it-amasses-troops-along-the-border

And given that the primary objective of the entire engagement with Hezbollah is to stop their firing at Israel for 11 months and allow our northern population to come back safely to their homes, it may well be that the limited ground operation clearing up an area of something like 10, 15 miles north of the border cannot be avoided.

"clearing up an area" = ominously vague, of course

Here is a thread from Amal on Hezbollah's loss of leadership.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1840773042990928172.html