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

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.

xp yeah that’s my fault I’m not very awake

#The heroic doctor Hossam Abu Safiya is among the prisoners scheduled for execution 💔 pic.twitter.com/dSJv3Tq1Y0

— Abdullah Omar🇵🇸 (@Abdullah_Om3r03) March 31, 2026

Israel’s Message to a Broad Swath of Lebanon: Shiites Must Go
Israel has issued sweeping evacuation warnings, and pressed some Christian and Druse leaders to expel Shiite Muslims from southern towns, the leaders said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/world/middleeast/lebanon-shiite-israel-evacuation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XlA.5s-W.ZvuiCL9PP_Uk&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Israel not only taking a broad portion of southern Lebanon but trying to permanently evict Shiite Muslims from there and trying to force Christians and Druids who live there to help them do that

It's like they're systematically taking every mealy-mouthed zionist defence ever made — it's not technically apartheid, it's not technically ethnic cleansing, it's not technically genocide — and exterminating any remaining doubt or ambiguity.

Israeli attacks across southern Lebanon and the capital, Beirut, have killed at least 14 people, a day after Israel threatened to hit Lebanon’s main border crossing with Syria, forcing its closure.

...Israeli attacks on Lebanon since March 2 have killed more than 1,400 people, including 126 children, and displaced over 1.2 million, according to Lebanese authorities.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/5/at-least-14-people-killed-in-israeli-strikes-across-lebanon

Dropsite News on x -

Long bread lines have returned to Gaza. The UN said distribution for March reached only every other family with rations that cover only half of the minimum caloric requirements.

OCHA reported on April 2 that humanitarian needs in Gaza still drastically outweigh available aid

Animals

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-forces-beat-elderly-palestinian-woman-death

Israeli PM's office says two-week ceasefire does not include Lebanon.

agreement is supposed to be “fundamentally committed” to “stopping the war on all fronts”, so Netanyahu just carrying on being the freewheeling warlord/genocidaire. Someone has reign him in or finish him off, it can't go on like this.

לא היה אסון מדיני כזה בכל תולדותינו. ישראל לא היתה אפילו ליד השולחן כשנעשו החלטות הנוגעות לליבת הבטחון הלאומי שלנו.

הצבא ביצע את כל מה שביקשו ממנו, הציבור הציג חוסן מדהים, אבל נתניהו נכשל מדינית, נכשל איסטרטגית, לא עמד באף אחת מהמטרות שהוא בעצמו הציב.

ייקח לנו שנים לתקן את…

— יאיר לפיד - Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) April 8, 2026

Israeli opposition leader extremely unhappy with the ceasefire terms and the war he ordered (he was fully supportive of the war just 4 weeks back).

There has never been such a political disaster in all of our history. Israel wasn't even at the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security.

The military carried out everything that was asked of it, the public demonstrated amazing resilience, but Netanyahu failed politically, failed strategically, and didn't meet a single one of the goals that he himself set.

It will take us years to repair the political and strategic damage that Netanyahu wrought due to arrogance, negligence, and a lack of strategic planning.

Hebrew translation

Well if those ghouls are upset about it that can only be a positive.

Opposition leader, MK Yair Lapid, criticized the government's conduct: The Israeli government has been downgraded to the status of a "subcontractor" in decision-making...

completely at odds with the idea that Netanyahu has kompromat on Trump and uses it as leverage to get his own way!

Israel wasn't even at the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security.

after 50 years no one grasps that trump will do whatever best pleases him today, with no thought whatsoever about tomorrow

Man what a story.

A Palestinian grandmother took her grandson to Egypt for urgent heart surgery after Israel granted a rare medical evacuation, but he died during treatment. Returning to Gaza, she found her husband and children killed in an air strike. Now she is alone and shares her story. pic.twitter.com/cIAS6EhL7G

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 6, 2026

really horrific news coming out of Lebanon, just senseless massacres

it's an already out of control pariah state gone absolutely insane. Don't they realise when the food/medicine/oil shortages starts causing mass deaths throughout the north and south, they'll get sanctioned out of existence if they wreck this ceasefire

Israeli forces have killed at least 254 people across Lebanon, in the country’s most devastating day of conflict after the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire.

Israeli forces have killed Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah in a drone strike in Gaza.

Horrific

they kept this secret so the U.S. State Dept wouldn't tsk-tsk about it

The security cabinet approved the establishment of 34 new West Bank settlements in a meeting two weeks ago, The Times of Israel has confirmed.

The approval of the new settlements — brand new settlements as well as illegal ones retroactively legalized — constitutes the largest number of settlements approved by any government at one time, the Peace Now organization said.

(xp) Death toll has risen to 303, with 1,150 wounded.

Plus they've started bombing again tonight.

Heartbreaking account of life and death in Gaza. As she says, even those who live there can’t really grasp the enormity of the destruction. It’s too much to comprehend.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/opinion/gaza-cease-fire-death-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Z1A.DkWt.j_OUb-z4fZm5&smid=nytcore-ios-share

President of South Korea links his nation’s experience of Japanese atrocities to Israel’s brutalization of Palestinians https://t.co/0UsrV1TR2L

— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) April 10, 2026

The President is responding to a video of a Palestinian being thrown off a roof by the IDF

Ok

https://www.timesofisrael.com/judge-rules-slain-hostages-family-may-use-his-sperm-with-a-surrogate-as-he-wanted/

A Beersheba family court judge on Friday ruled that the sperm of Yotam Haim, an Israeli hostage who was mistakenly killed by troops after escaping Hamas captivity in Gaza, may be used to conceive a child, saying it was his express wish before his death.

In a statement hailing the end of “a year and a quarter of honorable and respectful legal and governmental proceedings,” the Haim family said “the State of Israel took an important step forward,” calling the decision “a significant point of light for bereaved families, and a source of pride for us.”

In the days following October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel — slaughtering some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages — embryologists and specialists reported an unprecedented number of requests for postmortem sperm retrieval.

Since then, according to Health Ministry figures from November 2025, postmortem sperm retrieval has been performed on at least 250 soldiers and security forces personnel, including 193 at the request of a parent. Sperm was also retrieved from 21 civilians, again with 10 of those requests coming from parents.

Before October 7, posthumous sperm retrieval was permitted for the parents only with court approval. After the start of the war, the Health Ministry and the Justice Ministry approved a temporary regulation allowing parents to authorize sperm retrieval without the need for court approval. But there is no national policy about what is done with the sperm.

Literally at the "Precious Bodily Fluids" stage

🚨 FOUND IN A LEBANESE HOME: MEIN KAMPF — IN ARABIC
IDF troops discovered a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Arabic inside a home in Lebanon.

‼️For anyone still asking why Israel is operating there, this your answer. pic.twitter.com/B0AunEDBqx

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) April 10, 2026

still doing this shit.

Burning readers is much better than just burning books.

are you familiar with this charade Aimless? The IDF murder a family in cold blood and find a copy of Mein Kampf in arabic under the settee ... RESULT!

Even if they didn't plant the book and it was genuinely owned by a resident of that home, that in no way justifies what Israel is doing in Lebanon.

If you apply this sort of reasoning fairly and equably you get this result: In a Mossad-owned library almost certainly there exists a copy of "MEIN KAMPF — IN ARABIC"!!! Therefore we must bomb Mossad, burn Mossad, and snuff Mossad out.

also that photo is completely without context, it could be a decade old

Pretty good (slightly annoying interludes in this twitter thread aside) on the US-Israeli r/ship

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2042175243289088185.html

Just got round to reading this obit:

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47227

Really breaks you.

https://archive.ph/QQZjU

I literally had to go see this for myself. Sure enough. Apple Maps has removed almost every town in Lebanon from the map while keeping every podunk town in Israel and Syria clearly marked. https://t.co/gD7xGjEThN pic.twitter.com/UfUJKU5gcK

— Mel (@Villgecrazylady) April 12, 2026

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strike-kills-infant-girl-south-lebanon-during-fathers-funeral-2026-04-12/

The URL is enough

this is a good, poignant piece: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/how-israeli-offensive-destroyed-entire-villages-in-lebanon

Apple are actually erasing South Lebanon villages off the digital maps as Israel wipe them out.