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

Israel has apparently been crossing the border and raiding Hezbollah sites for months already

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-forces-have-carried-out-raids-lebanon-months-military-says-2024-10-01/

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/01/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

iran planning imminent ballistic attack

More than 15 years ago I was giving a talk on the Arab-Israeli conflict at the University of Texas’ Law School. I recognized in the audience Admiral Bobby Inman (former deputy director of the C.I.A). During the Q and A, somebody asked me about Hezbollah and Nasrallah and whether Israel would take the decision to assassinate him.

I answered the question as best I could. Afterwards, Inman came up to me, introduced himself, and took me aside. He talked about that particular question, about the potential Israeli assassination of Nasrallah and said in blunt terms: Israel would not dare take Nasrallah out.

I said: why not?

He said: simple. Because the U.S. government told the Israelis categorically and repeatedly that they would not kill Nasrallah because of the repercussions for the region and U.S. interests.

Knowing that Biden has put no red lines on Israel since Oct. 7, he would be the one U.S. president who would also lift that one red line.

Nasrallah, unlike Nasser, leaves behind a doctrine and a strong organization that is likely to survive Israel’s unrelenting campaign of assassinations and slaughter. Hezbollah suffered a very severe blow, the worst since its formation, but it is likely to emerge again as a different organization under new leadership.

It is possible that U.S. opposed the assassination because it knew that no one but Nasrallah could control such a dangerous (from the U.S. point of view) organization.

After Nasrallah, the organization could become less disciplined and perhaps more dangerous to U.S. interests.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/30/asad-abukhalil-the-middle-east-after-nasrallah/

Amazing to be doing this so close to an election. If US personnel are lost it could impact the election? Its just crazy.

xpost

I'm guessing what's changed in the past 15 years is that the US no longer fears endangering its relationship with Saudi Arabia and other states when Israel assassinates Nasrallah.

I'm assuming Saudi Arabia were happy to see Nasrallah dead.

I'm finding the kind of blase way US ILXors and others say foreign policy doesn't matter in US elections a bit unnerving.

not sure when the history books are written nasrallah will be missed by many tbh

like most politicians esp those who started as warlords seemed like a bad dude

Has his plusses and minusses.

From The Guardian:

"Explosions can be heard above Tel Aviv and the sound of warning sirens wailing across the city, Israel’s largest urban and economic metropolis.

In Jerusalem, explosions are also being heard, witnesses have told Reuters.

Israeli media is reporting that Iran has launched more than 100 missiles at Israel. It’s unclear whether missiles are hitting home or being intercepted in the sky above the cities. This is a rapidly unfolding, ongoing situation.

The Israeli military is now reporting that sirens are sounding across the country."

⚡️🚨 Footage from impacts on Tel Aviv

3000 years old native settler is panicking in the video in his native language pic.twitter.com/5wyJJTprnC

— Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) October 1, 2024

Crowds in Gaza break out in ecstatic cheers watching Iranian missiles land on Israel. pic.twitter.com/uUkDxTOMBb

— red. (@redstreamnet) October 1, 2024

Is this how WWIII begins, or just more of the same?

Do I still have to pay rent today though?

Weve been in wwiii for the last two years

Paid it yesterday :-( xp

Does Israel now come clean about its nukes? And does Germany now come clean about its submarines that will fire them?

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) October 1, 2024

here's hoping this is a largely performative volley by Iran to avenge Nasrallah's death, as they said they would do

That is what I think is likely. And yet history is full of brutally destructive wars that nobody wanted and yet somehow happened.

Breaking: CNN’s @jimsciutto confirms Israel is using human shields, strategically positioning its command and control center in densely populated civilian areas pic.twitter.com/ApaA1KArau

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) October 1, 2024

I'll bet they have tunnels as well

To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs.

He’s just that fucking good.

— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) July 12, 2024

How does he do it folks?

Ok so we are having escalation...can we de-escalate?

There was also a shooting.

"Now back to that shooting incident in the Tel Aviv area that was still unfolding as Iranian missiles began raining down on Israel less than 90 minutes ago.

Four people were killed and seven wounded in the shooting attack in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Israeli police said in a statement, Reuters reports.

The police said there were two shooters and they had both been “neutralised”.

Law enforcement added that the situation was “under control”. The authorities previously called it a “suspected terror” shooting targeting Jewish residents."

I'm finding the kind of blase way US ILXors and others say foreign policy doesn't matter in US elections a bit unnerving.

“Foreign policy doesn’t matter” to a domestic American audience because for most people, this shit almost never gets covered in any accurate way and holds little to no salience. Its important as hell, but rarely addressed in ways that aren’t cheerleading for either an American effort or American proxy. Hell, Americans are in the Imperial Core, most of us here don’t know a goddamn thing and if my coworkers are any indication, just view the stuff as remote distraction that shows up in a newsfeed.

I think this idea was forged as CW in 1992 when George H.W. Bush got 37% of the vote in spite of having waged what was seen as the best war ever.

also if you only listen to sports talk radio 89.5 THE SPREAD, you maybe are not really hearing much foreign policy news

not hearing much on this thread either

Early signs are all military targets.

The next 24 hours will see journalists and politicians pretending Iran carried our indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas.

— Philip Proudfoot 🇱🇧🇵🇸 (@PhilipProudfoot) October 1, 2024

Heck, as a resident of Arlington Virginia I am a human shield for the US Military.

Oh yeah, you'll get it first

Multiple IRGC-affiliated Iranian outlets & Telegram channels report, "Iran has warned the US: if you target our refineries, we will set fire to the refineries and oil fields across the entire region, including those in Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain."

— Sina Toossi (@SinaToossi) October 1, 2024

I guess the U.S. has already started helping intercept Iranian rockets

Israel writing checks that its butt can't cash, expecting we'll come in to help

Well they ain’t wrong

...The invasion of 1982, which triggered the Second Lebanon War, was ordered by then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Overseen by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a former general, the incursion’s objective initially was to stop Palestinian attacks from Lebanon and to push back the Palestine Liberation Organization north of the Litani River.

But it snowballed into a more expansive operation to install a pro-Israel Maronite Christian government and Israeli forces remained in southern Lebanon for 18 years.

“Recall that Israel’s incursion in 1982 was also billed as a limited and localized incursion,” noted Lebanese commentator Michael Young. “But as Sharon understood, there will always be someone shooting at you from the next hill, so self-defense mandates that taking that hill …until they reached Beirut,” he added in a post on X.

Young suspected Israel would want more than just to eject Hezbollah from south of the Litani. “They will demand more,” he warned.

There are also signs that the underlying thinking driving the incursion, code-named Operation Northern Arrows, suggests much grander ambitions.

The “escalate to de-escalate” strategy risks being subsumed by greater Israeli ambitions and Hezbollah resistance, fears retired United States general, Joseph Votel, in a comment released to the media.

Votel worried that Hezbollah could pursue an attrition strategy “to draw Israel into a prolonged conflict that will undermine its government, economy, and global standing — buying time to recover from their recent setbacks and perhaps creating an opportunity for a strategic blow of their own.”