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.

Reportedly 280,000 in the streets in Tel Aviv, half a million nationwide.

accomplishing the war's stated goals of freeing the hostages and ending Hamas rule of Gaza.

Absolutely true, and again, Netanhayu's fault for declaring that any end to hostilities which left Hamas in charge would be a "defeat." Don't get me wrong, Israelis are not opposed to killing lots of Palestinians to achieve a military goal. But I think there is a feeling that what can be achieved -- a Hamas with a disrupted and weakened military and the tunnel system largely broken up -- has been achieved, and was achieved a long time ago, and since then Palestinians have been dying for not very much, and some Israeli hostages too. A new government is not going to be much friendlier to normalizing relations or establishing a state in Gaza free of Israeli military oversight, but a new government is not going to continue giving Ben Gvir free rein to try to create a second front in the West Bank -- indeed Ben Gvir and Smotrich will both be jettisoned once Netanyahu is gone.

pic.twitter.com/EQnH6BwESM

— Tom Blackburn (@malaiseforever) September 2, 2024

Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has welcomed the labour court’s decision to end the general strike.

“I am thankful for the decision of the Labour Court to stop the Histadrut’s political strike,” he said in a statement.

Israeli police have arrested some protesters in Tel Aviv as thousands of people took to the streets to demand the government agree a hostage release deal

israeli public getting off their asses for 6 dead people

I’ve seen a lot of chilling stuff over the past year, but nothing as awful as that clip of the podcasters talking about how they’d kill everyone in Gaza if only they had to smash a button to do so, and saying that everyone (in Israel) felt exactly the same.

There’s been so much coded rhetoric and appalling stuff and these two guys - civilians - saying this has upset me more than any of the government mouthpieces. I wish I could feel anything about citizens protesting against Netanyahu, a shred of some kind of hope that this will one day end, but nothing out there has suggested anything other than at best indifference towards the civilians of Gaza & the West Bank.

Genuinely, it left me cold.

talking about how they’d kill everyone in Gaza if only they had to smash a button to do so, and saying that everyone (in Israel) felt exactly the same.

They can say that, but it's just not true. Podcasters and radio guys in America also like to pretend that their own messed-up beliefs are shared by everyone.

“According to the Jenin municipality, more than 70% of Jenin’s streets have been bulldozed; 20 kilometers of water and sewage networks, communication and electric cables have been destroyed; and water has been cut off from 80% of the city.” https://t.co/eAtdz9Tjt7

— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) September 3, 2024

The West Bank is being forcibly annexed.

— Mariam Barghouti مريم البرغوثي (@MariamBarghouti) September 3, 2024

vote blue no matter who

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/06/middleeast/american-activist-killed-west-bank-intl/index.html

CORRECTION: Full name Aysenur Izgy, 26. pic.twitter.com/5c43zRQ0Wo

— Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) September 6, 2024

Or, you know, Ezgi

Almost certainly a Muslim, so no-one will care.

xp autocorrect is against 'foreign' names

oof there were no details in the CNN story when I posted that. horrifying

Aysenur Eygi seemed like an exceptional person. May she rest in peace. pic.twitter.com/lnMm2BqKGg

— Laila Al-Arian (@LailaAlarian) September 7, 2024

"Still, one thing has not shifted. Among hundreds of thousands of demonstrating Israelis, one would be hard-pressed to find more than several hundred calling for an actual end to the Gaza campaign."

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-protests-hostage-deal-palestine/

Really.

هنا كان مخيماً للنازحين، قبل أن تمحوه إسرائيل عن الوجود..! pic.twitter.com/NH4U1eJI3N

— أنس الشريف Anas Al-Sharif (@AnasAlSharif0) September 9, 2024

https://truthout.org/articles/un-expert-warns-israel-on-track-to-exterminate-nearly-entire-gaza-population/

Albanese cited a recent report from University of Edinburgh global public health chair Devi Sridhar finding that the true death toll from Israel’s genocide could be estimated at 335,500 as of September.

Sridhar based this rough calculation off of an estimate by public health researchers published in The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard in the field. At that time, the researchers estimated that the true death toll could be roughly 186,000, stemming from direct killings like bombings as well as Israel’s destruction of the health, food and sanitation systems in Gaza.

The death toll, then, could be between 15 and 20 percent of the population by the end of this year, Albanese said, in just over a year of Israel’s genocide. And, as Sridhar writes in her Guardian report, the calculation that she borrows from The Lancet editorial is highly conservative — meaning the death toll could be even higher than her 335,500 estimate.

Israeli officials have repeatedly suggested that they would be happy to kill all 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. Last month, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who is currently leading Israel’s charge to annex the occupied West Bank — moaned that international powers wouldn’t let Israel wipe out Gaza’s population.

“Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned,” Smotrich said.

bit stunned by that Smotrich quote, wow

Anyway, as I have said before and will say again…using old figures from the beginning and refusing to admit that the casualty numbers have increased immensely is just a form of genocide denialism at this point.

The death toll is creeping up to half a million people. https://t.co/oLGIcCJXnH

— Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura (@Rrrrnessa) September 11, 2024

is the Gaza Health Ministry/Palestinian Ministry of Health no longer the best source for those numbers?

My understanding is of a Palestinian authority still counting the dead, but also more work done to show that casualties are a lot more than what the Palestinian authority have come out with.

It's not a road I love going down, but I think it's reasonable to ask for a bit more information when a person with no listed credentials and no formal organization is claiming that you're obviously a genocide denialist if you don't already recognize that the death toll is multiples higher than even the highest estimates that have been put out, and the person she's retweeting is an unnamed business school phd candidate who just says "is now estimated" without a source. Even that Lancet thing was actually just an opinion letter written to the Lancet, not a Lancet-published peer-reviewed paper.

(xpost) The letter, and its appendix, are grim grim reading, but I don't understand reposting it as supporting a claim of 368k deaths - it really doesn't.

After a bit more reading, it seems to be some random shitposter deciding that the letter to the Lancet said "actual deaths to direct deaths are usually 3x to 15x so let's say 4x" and deciding, sure, let's do that here.

“they’re not killing as many innocent people as you say they are! you are wrong!!!”

listen to how you sound.

arguing over these numbers seems like a losing game to me. I think everyone here knows that there's no way the toll is truly 41,000, especially when you factor in disease and starvation. the horror is we can't know, the level of devastation is so immense.

stories like these are more horrifying to me (in a way) than trying to make estimates: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-war-hamas-dead-graves-40000-988d16b648e06e222f04964dc9440da0

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Tiers of graves are stacked deep underground in a bloated Gaza cemetery, where Sa’di Baraka spends his days hacking at the earth, making room for more dead.

“Sometimes we make graves on top of graves,” he said.

Baraka and his solemn corps of volunteer gravediggers in the Deir al-Balah cemetery start at sunrise, digging new trenches or reopening existing ones. The dead can sometimes come from kilometers (miles) away, stretches of Gaza where burial grounds are destroyed or unreachable.

The cemetery is 70 years old. A quarter of its graves are new.

...

Even in death, Palestinians have been displaced by Israel’s offensives.

Palestinians move corpses, shielding them from the path of war. Israel’s military has dug up, plowed over and bombed more than 20 cemeteries, according to satellite imagery analyzed by investigative outlet Bellingcat. Troops have taken scores of bodies into Israel, searching for hostages. Trucked back to Gaza, the bodies are often decomposed and unidentifiable, buried quickly in a mass grave.

or this: https://www.savethechildren.ca/article/gazas-missing-children-over-20000-children-estimated-to-be-lost-disappeared-detained-buried-under-the-rubble-or-in-mass-graves/

arguing over these numbers seems like a losing game to me. I think everyone here knows that there's no way the toll is truly 41,000, especially when you factor in disease and starvation. the horror is we can't know, the level of devastation is so immense.

OTM

Israel has overwhelmed Palestinians' ability to count the bodies, which is just...

I remember hearing all the time about these badass Israeli commandos, the 'best in the world' etc... seems like it was just utter bullshit. That's who you would send in to clear tunnels or liberate a school or hospital, instead they just call in airstrikes on said schools/hospitals

most moral army in the world, baby

Fuck off, tabes. Either you're being lazy or you're being dumb, and neither has a place on this thread.

rob otm

fuck you Andrew

Even that Lancet thing was actually just an opinion letter written to the Lancet, not a Lancet-published peer-reviewed paper.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, 11 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Would it matter to you that it was? Unless you or I have the skills to go through the evidence you are reading it in some form of good will.

But I think its worth sharing that people are doing some work on this and that we are staring at the extermination of a people.

yeah I should clarify that I believe researchers making these estimates is important work (the Lancet's work on the US's Iraq invasion death toll was critical to piercing the fog of jingoistic nonsense clouding those years). I just don't want to get into arguments about specific figures on ilx

I do think calling the Lancet letter "actually just an opinion letter" is going too far, given the institutional affiliations of the writers and the, afaict, eminently reasonable claims made in the letter.

but above all this was otm:

Israel has overwhelmed Palestinians' ability to count the bodies, which is just...

― symsymsym, Wednesday, September 11, 2024 6:39 PM (yesterday)

The Ministry of Health in Gaza has just published a 649-page document with the the name, age, gender, ID number of every Palestinian killed in Gaza from October 7 to August 31 that it has info for (over 34k out of 40k). The 1st 14 pages the age is listed as 0 (under 1 year old) pic.twitter.com/NZZNLLf7ml

— Sharif Kouddous شريف عبد القدوس (@sharifkouddous) September 15, 2024