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

six dead btw

Per Reuters:

* QATAR SAYS REPORTS ABOUT BEING INFORMED OF ISRAELI ATTACK ON DOHA BEFOREHAND ARE FALSE

* QATAR SAYS THE CALL RECEIVED FROM A US OFFICIAL CAME WHEN SOUND OF EXPLOSIONS WERE HEARD IN DOHA

lol... thanks for the jet dudes!

Trump ‘feels very bad’ about Israel strike on Qatar: White House

I think we can safely assume everything Leavitt says is a lie.

if he feels bad, it's because that's the country that loaned Jared all the money

Saudis also own a big chunk of Jared too

“Reasonable suspicion is not just based on race, it’s based on a totality of the circumstances to review,” Leavitt said.

^ meant for US pol thread

truly astonishing that Israel can launch airstrikes against Qatar and no one seems to be regarding it as a rogue terrorist state

Elbowed off the front pages by Russia lobbing drones at Poland. Not that anything would ever have happened anyway.

More from "the only democracy on the Middle East":

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich

Islamophobic ex-US soldier motorcycle gang “Infidels Biker Club” running security at Gaza aid sites -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0m1t7ns

grim but probably true

“We were thinking that we are dealing with civilized people,” Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “That’s the way we are dealing with others. And the action that (Netanyahu) took – I cannot describe it, but it’s a barbaric action.”

Al-Thani added that he believes Israel’s strike on Doha on Tuesday “killed any hope” for the hostages remaining in Gaza.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/12/show-of-humiliation-as-israeli-army-lays-siege-to-west-banks-tulkarem

Israeli forces have sealed off entrances to Tulkarem in the northern occupied West Bank, further escalating a campaign of raids, arrests and collective punishment that has displaced thousands of Palestinians as the military relentlessly destroys Gaza.

Footage from Thursday night shared by residents showed soldiers marching Palestinians in lines through the streets in what many described as a humiliating show of force.

...

The escalation comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advances an illegal settlement expansion plan that would all but eliminate the possibility of a Palestinian state.

On Thursday, he signed an agreement to push forward with construction in the so-called E1 area near the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, several kilometres to the east of Jerusalem.

“We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us,” Netanyahu declared at the signing ceremony, adding: “We are going to double the city’s population.”

what a fucking toxic asshole

3AM in Gaza City. The shelling and airstrikes have not stopped all night. There’s no battle being waged here. It’s just the annihilation of a city hundreds of times the age of Israel, and the ethnic cleansing of its population. https://t.co/nZPSpFePND

— Mohammad Alsaafin (@malsaafin) September 15, 2025

Canceled Western weapon deals are leading the Israeli Defense Ministry to form a "Supreme Armament Council" to attempt to make the IDF as self-sufficient as Iran's military is.

The explicit intent: prepare for another war with Iran, more war with Yemen, and more pager attacks. https://t.co/FZKyTkOVd5 pic.twitter.com/8Z3HpX4M3b

— Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) September 16, 2025

^well they've already bombed Yemen today

https://bsky.app/profile/apnews.com/post/3lywsxr7yh52q

I can read the rest of the headline but "BREAKING: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza" sounds like a sick joke

It seems to me that a lot of what they're doing now is just demolition work, clearing land for what will become Trump Resort & Casino on the Levant©

there are 1 million people on that land though

And are they clearing Hamas?

they've made it abundantly clear that the safety & security of Palestinian noncombatants is not a priority, far from it

My point is they are accelerating the genocide. You're right that they are also pursuing the complete demolition of the built environment in Gaza, I just didn't agree that that is "a lot" of what they're doing, but it's not a big deal

The Nazis were very taken with Sparta too. Funny that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/16/netanyahu-super-sparta-vision-israel-economic-future-isolation

sparta was a machine dedicated to self-perpetuation based upon blood, death and cruelty. makes sense that Bibi is drawn to it.

I know we are John Ganz skeptical but I thought this was good: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnganz/p/israel-as-super-sparta?r=8btm1&utm_medium=ios

What's good in that article isn't what Ganz wrote, but the extensive quote from Hannah Arendt in 1948(!) during the war that seized the territory of Palestine, which is uncannily prescient.

…even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that—no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)— would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Under such circumstances (as Ernst Simon has pointed out) the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.

that's so otm it's gobsmacking

Hannah Arendt FTW.

Ganz piece doesn't really get to the issue, which is cancellations of arms contracts by the likes of Spain and the need for self-suffiency long-term to fight wars with the likes of Iran, Lebanon, possibly Turkey.

yeah, arendt quote is insanely otm

The strongest people and faith I’ve ever seen… pic.twitter.com/c73DnsjgUs

— Joram van Klaveren (@JoramvKlaveren) September 16, 2025

Justice Minister Yariv Levin said West Bank annexation was "much more significant" than defeating Hamas. Speaking at a conference sponsored by the right-wing Channel 14, Levin said annexation didn't even require a vote by lawmakers in the Knesset and could be accomplished by a cabinet vote.

From Haaretz news email summary

Looks like Netanyahu wants both . Horrific

There's an old saying: in for a dime, in for a dollar. Once you're fully committed to perpetrating crimes against humanity, there are no meaningful barriers left to constrain you.

It’s just the latest atrocity (well probably not the latest now) but the mosque bombing just wrecked me, this is full conscious evil, a stain on all our souls, and anyone who excused or supported this shit (since or before 7/10) must carry it forever

This footage of the ppl praying in the bombed out mosque is just...there are no words. Resilience, maybe, but there's something beyond that here.

for some reason, I haven't encountered this mosque story anywhere, not that I'm eager to.

current Guardian homepage gives a dismal snapshot of failure:

Israel army says it will use ‘unprecedented force’ in Gaza City and urges residents to leave

Gaza
More than 250,000 displaced from Gaza City in past month, UN figures show

UK
UK preparing to recognise Palestinian state as early as Friday

Trump can almost taste his Nobel prize, any day now

The United States once again vetoed a UN resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, following a vote in the Security Council on Thursday.

The negative vote was cast as the 15-member Council held its 10,000th meeting against the backdrop of famine spreading in the besieged enclave and an ongoing Israeli offensive to take full control of Gaza City.

The draft also demanded the release of all hostages held by Hamas and for Israel to lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid and ensure that it is safely distributed to the population – in particular by UN agencies and partners.

The US is one of five permanent Council members who possess the right to veto.