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.

War crimes are not adequate for what has been happening, its just convenient shorthand.

xp
I know the Nazis used starvation and food control as a weapon in various ways across different contexts, but did they specifically do this bait & kill scenario? I wouldn't be surprised of course

War crimes are not adequate for what has been happening, its just convenient shorthand.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, June 16, 2025 1:28 PM (five minutes ago)

I agree. but bombing a TV station and then openly saying "yep we did it" literally could be used to explain the concept of a war crime

So Trump goes on social media and says everyone should evacuate Tehran...

Israel has already made the same announcement
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/iran-threatens-to-leave-nuclear-weapons-treaty-as-israeli-bombing-enters-fourth-day

*had

is it time for a war on Iran thread

Never has it been clearer that “no one is free until Palestine is free” is not a chant but a warning, as we all stare into the abyss of another world war.

— Heba Gowayed هبة جويد (@hebagowayed) June 17, 2025

Nothing I have ever studied or taught has prepared me for this phase. When a sitting U.S. president publicly threatens a civilian capital with annihilation on social media, turning genocidal language into official communication, IR’s clean theories of calibrated violence and…

— Amal Saad (@amalsaad_lb) June 17, 2025

of course right on cue putin bombs kyiv some more and nobody even notices

Israel-Iran war in 2025

"The Israeli government continues to claim that it's defending 'all its citizens.' But Arab towns are still last in line for basic services extended to other citizens, if they're in line at all. We've lived through 16 years of Hezbollah missiles, multiple Gaza wars, and now, the Iranian retaliation, and somehow the state has yet to install real shelters in most of our communities. And yet, you won't hear loud protests. Even after the deaths in Tamra, there were no fiery op-eds, no viral hashtags nor mass mobilization. In part, that's because we – Palestinian citizens – live in the overlap of two unbearable realities: the danger we face here, and the devastation we witness in Gaza" – Nagham Zbeedat

From Haaretz

https://archive.ph/VNsta

"As for how he’s managed to pull off this remarkable government takeover with virtually no meaningful opposition, Smotrich has always understood the origin of the current propelling him. “I believe that the yearning of generations for this land, and the confidence in our ultimate return thereto, are the most profound driving forces of the progression of the Return to Zion which led to the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote in the 2017 plan. On the inconvenient reality of the land’s current inhabitants, he added, “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect. It worked fine for the State of Israel, and it needs to work in the same way for Judea and Samaria."

“it worked fine” 🤮

I hope it doesn’t need to be said, least of all to Americans living under Trump and his horror show of cabinet members and other spokespeople, but Smotrich does not speak for all Israelis nor do all Israelis believe there is a cosmic “profound driving force” on the side of their government

What Israelis believe isn't the issue. The UK have been supporting this too; the sanctions imposed last week were a piece of theater.

Israelis convincingly voted for Likud in 2022, knowing that Smotrich and his party would be prominent in any coalition. Smotrich's party was the third largest on its own.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/not-for-you-israeli-shelters-exclude-palestinians-as-bombs-rain-down

The NYT with uh very helpful analysis:

The Israeli military campaign has weakened Iran, but it has not yet destroyed the country’s nuclear program or collapsed its government, and it may still fall short of both. The war could also devolve into an intractable quagmire with no exit strategy or offramp.

… “One wonders whether effective military performance is matched by a sober political vision,” said Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli official and a fellow at Israel Policy Forum, a research group in New York. “Or, like in Gaza, we are left without an endgame. Time will tell.”

lol “one wonders”

https://www.jns.org/chief-israel-planner-at-pentagon-bashes-jewish-state-publicly-extensively/

Shame these views can't form the basis of policy

Well he didn't last long.

https://www.jns.org/pentagon-removing-israel-planner-from-joint-staff-launching-probe-after-jns-scoop/

Israel now using tanks to kill people trying to get flour: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/israeli-soldiers-shoot-dozens-in-latest-massacre-at-gaza-aid-sites

For those who read these accounts (instead of going on about how its from twitter) may have noted Amal has been quiet for quite a while and only reposting.

Here she puts together her thinking on a future where Iran is defeated, but how the fight would go on and what potential shape it would take.

https://twitter.com/amalsaad_lb/status/1935406075479773570?s=19

Lol, deleted. Basically, things will get worse.

Its been slightly rewritten

THREAD: What would happen if Iran collapses as a state?
Unlike previous regime change wars that targeted individual states, what's happening now aims to eliminate the ideological and material infrastructure of resistance across the entire region. As a project rooted in a…

— Amal Saad (@amalsaad_lb) June 18, 2025

This thread is along similar lines

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935461018676740510.html

More horrific footage from the Israeli settler pogrom against the Christian village of Taybeh, Ramallah, in the West Bank, where settlers set houses and vehicles on fire. pic.twitter.com/97xW3epLEf

— Ihab Hassan (@IhabHassane) June 25, 2025

here's a big Haaretz piece on the food distribution killings; there have been 549 Palestinians killed in the month since the GHF started distributing aid: https://archive.ph/ilyEU

"It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire."

The soldier added, "We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces." According to him, "I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light".

How horrible. Can't even read it beyond what has been quoted. Don't even get the point of this published 'scoop'. Its all the in the open. It won't stop, even with the knowledge of it happening.

what’s most astonishing is that Bibi has called the article quoting actual IDF soldiers antisemitic an example of “blood libel.”

“oh my own soldiers following orders and describing what they are actually doing is antisemitic” this is cartoon villain shit, and talk about completely diminishing actual cases of antisemitism

Black-and-white photographs depict Historic Palestine as a regular society—not divine, and not perfect beyond comprehension. This was a civilization in which people lived, worked, and loved. They could travel freely, speak their own language, and live on their own property. Those roots of Palestine were torn from the Earth, and its memories were forced to be mediated as if through retelling dreams—what streets they were born on, how the salt of the sea smelled from their homes. This memory drove the fury of those who came afterward. Here is resilience against crimes done to innocents. Here is resistance to losing a historic home forever. This is testament: as long as there is one hand still above the earth, it will claw its way back to Jerusalem.

A crucial question to which I return now is this: if the Palestinians in Beit Hanoun and Jabalia never surrendered, why should any of us?

https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/axes-of-resistance

it is astonishing how every single day we hear about a few dozen palestinians being deliberately shot while trying to access food. or deliberately bombed while trying to administer health care

every single fucking day

i know. every day something new that, say, 100 years ago would have merited a physical memorial, international condemnation, sanctions, perhaps a revolution, and it's just every day

War in the information era. I'm not sure if what is happening is something new, or what's new is how it's being relayed and the world's apathy is being presented as a result. I lean more towards the later, with hopes that the relaying will eventually lead to a waking up/information-spurred-revolutionary moment. Far off, wishful thinking, but Mamdani gives small hope that the hegemony propping up this genocide can be changed from the inside out.

Just reading about chants in Israeli songs that are making the charts

My god did you hear what that singer said?? pic.twitter.com/96hK7tjbY3

— Alonso Gurmendi (@Alonso_GD) June 28, 2025

I think the seafront cafe bombing hasn't been mentioned yet. Children, young people, mothers wiped out in seconds

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/02/israeli-military-bomb-fragments-gaza-al-baqa-cafe

Endless, numberless war crimes