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

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.

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.

i think viborg was just calling reddit a nazi site in a particularly oblique way there but i wouldn't blame anyone for taking it at face value

Oh wait, it was a parody. Ignore that. Sorry viborg.

Lily Dale, I understand your point of view and you don’t have to apologise for it, or for having complicated feelings, or anything. I don’t think anyone should be asking anything of their Jewish friends about Israel anyway, like you have to prove your views are the right ones. I would very much like to hope that this is widely understood but I know that it isn’t.

In any case, the situation you describe where people may have family over there is complicated and people are being really short sighted and tbh dismissive when saying it’s happening “over there”. The relationship with the diaspora is pretty unique in many ways, which you’ve mentioned. I don’t have to think that anything Bibi’s government does or did is justified or right to feel sorrow for the hostages or the victims of the massacres, some of whom were literal Holocaust survivors.

So is Netanyahu dead? Lots of people on Twitter seem to think so, and the videos do look weird and have definitely been manipulated in some way, but just deeply weary of anything conspiracy-flavoured whether it's true or not.

George Galloway is continually posting about it, which doesn't mean it's wrong but you know

Am seeing that stuff. However, Netanyahu posted a denial yesterday (or the day before..)

joke’s on us, he posted that denial from the deepest pit of hell

that vid he posted with the coffee cup was definitely suspicious

Never deny it if you're accused of being dead, you'd think he'd know this.

The funniest thing about the Netanyahu alive/dead rumours (they've just appointed Yari Levin interim PM which means the cunt probably is brown bread) is how they responded with such amazingly shit AI slop videos as proof of life. My theory is that the first video they put out was so embarrassingly bad that they had to keep putting out more bad ones to make it look like it was part of the cunning plan all along, flood the zone with slop. Mossad have a rep for doing world class AI deepfakes and this was not good for it, lol.

Reuters) - Israel struck a main bridge linking Lebanon's south to the rest of the country on Sunday after ordering its military to destroy ‌all crossings over Lebanon's Litani River and to step up the demolition of homes near the southern border.
The destruction of bridges and homes marks a significant escalation in Israel's military campaign

And what kind of "military" campaign? From Haaretz:

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Sunday that, under orders from him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the IDF will accelerate the demolition of Lebanese homes in frontline villages along the border, "in line with the model we applied in Gaza's Rafah and Beit Hanoun," which have been largely flattened.

https://aje.news/b79m9v?update=4430623

This should link to a video of Israel destroying a mosque minaret in Lebanon. It's the only remaining structure standing in a blasted field, really evil

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HELF5JjXsAAOm5q?format=jpg&name=large

quite astonishingly this based headline briefly appeared on the Torygraph site yesterday, and no sooner after getting mass screengrabbed it was deleted.

Someone made a phone call quick lol

lol the url is still the top result when I searched the phrase: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/23/christians-hezbollah-unite-against-epstein-empire/

that is very dog whistley

no it's totally cool, it's what all the leftists with rizz are doing, putting Epstein in front of things to show that wars like to fuck kids

it seems the woke imperialists have got out of bed

No, we post from bed like Chappell Roan

maybe we could call ourselves the Axis of Billionaire Child Rapists, make it more explicit what we are fighting for and avoids accusations of anti-Semitism

Per Dropsite News -

Over 25% of Lebanon displaced as Israeli offensive drives mass exodus

Lebanon’s Social Affairs Minister Haneen Sayyed announced today that more than 1.16 million people have been forced out of their homes since Israel’s offensive began on March 2, calling it the most sudden wave of displacement in the country’s history.

➤ UNICEF says over 350,000 children have been forced from their homes.

➤ Around 133,000–134,000 people are staying in more than 630 official shelters, while most displaced families are staying with relatives, renting privately, or sleeping in public spaces and cars as capacity collapses.

The shelter system has rapidly expanded from 171 centers on the first day to over 640, with more than 470 schools now turned into shelters, disrupting education nationwide.

➤ Around 125,000 people have crossed into Syria, many of them Syrian nationals returning.

➤ The UN and human rights groups warn that displacement orders now cover up to 14–15% of Lebanon’s territory, raising serious legal and humanitarian concerns.

At least 1,039 people have been killed and 2,876 wounded since March 2, according to official figures.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEMAHwHXQAAV8NS?format=jpg&name=large

a quote from the Telegraph piece that got deleted

which part of that did you want to share with the thread?

it's all context, are you saying someone currently been genocided by the IDF should be tone-policed by people from co-sponsor state of their genocide? is that where you are going here?

In the UK the toxic part of that is the idea Hezbollah are friends of Christians, thats a dangerous idea in a largely Islamophobic country

maybe not country, it's the cursed the UK media classes who are rabidly Islamophobic

always found it weird that Israel also persecutes Christians with no pushback from the types who worry over the persecution of Christians in, say, Nigeria. And there is some inter-confessional solidarity among the Arabs. My brother knew a Lebanese Melkite Catholic girl in high school and she was furious about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

And, Lebanon too.

it's all context, are you saying someone currently been genocided by the IDF should be tone-policed by people from co-sponsor state of their genocide? is that where you are going here?

They shouldn't be tone policed. I'm saying you should tone police yourself a bit and not gleefully share blatant anti-semitic conspiracy bile here, no matter who said it or printed it. I say this as someone who is enraged at the US and Israel and wants this slaughter to end immediately.

Gleefully?

What's the conspiracy element?

the quote adds context to the deleted Telegraph article. A lot of people found it amusing because it's a vile right-wing pro-Zionist rag so was very out of character. Where is the conspiracy?

Eating children, maybe?

That part is a bit more in character for the telegraph tbh (as in yeah antisemitic as hell)

From Lebanon where over a thousand people have been murdered by the IDF in the last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, whilst the IDF are demolishing apartment buildings in the place and attacking civilians with white phosphorous, doing textbook genocide. The IDF declaring new boundaries. 15 year old kid got point blank executed in the street today by the IDF. Figuratively speaking, they are eating children. Anyone who is there is obviously going to be fucked up by events and suffering from PTSD. I wasn't posting it to offend Jewish people, because I don't conflate Jewish people with the wretched state of Israel or the wretched war crimes of the IDF.

You don’t need to speak figuratively about the murder of children you can speak literally! I hope none of us here conflate the state of Israel and Jewish people in general but surely you can see how “Israelis eat kids” is p textbook blood libel stuff? I don’t think we should tone police Lebanese ppl so much as we might think twice about reproducing statements that could be hurtful to Jewish posters here

that last 'ceasefire' with Lebanon? Israel has violated it every week if not every day

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/25/israels-death-penalty-bill-for-palestinian-prisoners-moves-to-final-vote

which contrasts neatly with: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/25/no-israel-prosecutions-for-killing-palestinian-civilians-in-occupied-west-bank-since-start-of-decade

On a book I read a long time ago and would find it difficult to pick up again

https://archive.ph/rfkc1