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

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

Lily, that was an amazing post. It resonates with me because (in the words of a progressive friend with hawkish family members) ‘your Jewish friends are not OK right now’ and I’m trying to make sure I say that I love them and acknowledge their feelings, whatever I may think about the actions of our/their elected officials, lobby groups and militaries. Same goes for friends who have connections to Palestinians (and those who advocate for them).

I’m really valuing ILX right now as a place where we can discuss the current situation with the candour, respect and seriousness it requires.

xp i didn't even notice it was a parody actually lol

good posts Lily, gyac and suzy

xp it's not very good parody, that's why

Wow, Reddit is not a nazi site, and comparing it to a few is abhorrently combative and reductive. Reddit, like fewer and fewer places online, has a variety of views and communities, but honestly even reading some of the threads posted in subs as large as /r/worldnews have been enlightening, empathetic, and nuanced in ways I haven't seen in places like Instagram and especially X, the latter being much closer to an actual nazi site these days.

I'm also Jewish, and battling complicated feelings about this as well (excellent post, Lily! Thank you for sharing), though fortunately I don't have family in Israel. I've already come out and shared this background in the Noname thread when I was confronted with the reality that one of my favorite rappers allowed some blatantly antisemitic raps on her new record. I also support a secular, one state solution as ufo describes above. I am really not looking forward to the heightened Islamophobia and antisemitism that will inevitably surge from all of this. The general upward trend of hate coupled with these events of the last two weeks have me feeling very concerned for a lot of people, both near and far.

xp ok I was wrong, we didn't get it.

Good post octobeard.

Yes I found that too re: reddit. There are people posting from Gaza and Israel in the r/worldnews daily megathreads.

Drawing comparisons between things that are not Nazis and actual Nazis violates the rules of several subreddits, including, I believe, the one devoted to discussing the Israel-Palestine situation.

One could say such comparisons demonstrates a refusal to engage in the actual conversation being had while also stoking the anger, prejudice, hatred, and vengeful thinking, behind the actions causing the cycle of violence and retribution in the first place. If people doing this are also willing to engage in the actual conversations being had, then it shouldn't matter, but sadly I find this is often not the case.

United Nations: 87% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been destroyed during the war, and the FAO warns of the collapse of the food system. pic.twitter.com/PF0I8g8Frk

— Sameh Ahmed 𓂆 🇵🇸 (@PalPress24) November 1, 2025

this story about the military prosecutor who resigned after leaking video footage of a Palestinian prisoner at SDE being sexually assaulted is really messed up: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyk1dk7d9do

and: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ex-israeli-military-top-lawyer-missing-after-admitting-leaking-soldiers-rape-video

just came here to post that. insane story, but most telling is this quote from Netanyahu:

The scandal has received widespread coverage in Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday calling for an independent investigation into the leak, which he says caused "enormous damage to Israel's public image".

"This is perhaps the most severe propaganda attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment," Netanyahu said.

And then there’s also this:
At least nine Israeli soldiers were questioned over the assault in late July 2024, sparking widespread anger across Israel, with polls showing that a majority believe the accused officers should not face criminal charges.

yeah that Netanyahu line is telling, as is Ben-Gvir saying "Anyone who spreads blood libels against IDF troops is unfit to wear the army's uniform."

"Anyone who spreads blood libels against IDF troops is unfit to wear the army's uniform," he said.

“Blood libel”= actual evidence of torture.
Fucking revolting.

Not even a token statement that rape and torture is bad

Simply noticing when IDF soldiers rape someone is now antisemitic, good to know

I thought libel was supposed to be a claim that was false. oh well.

I simply can’t understand how ingrained it seems to be in this discourse that “lying is an acceptable way to form an argument”; from the moment I heard/read the phrase “the most moral military in the world” it was definitely evident that the opposite was true (even just by dint of the fact that such an assertion needed to be made).

But as I’ve said before, the realization that to this population that there is no difference between a Palestinian life and a rodent infestation has seriously reduced any expectation of reasonable behaviour— we see murders where they see crop dusting

which he says caused "enormous damage to Israel's public image"

uhhh... I think the IDF has already done plenty to sully said public image. This woman should get a medal for the leak

This is what's actually happening to her:

An Israeli court on Monday extended the detention by three days of former Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who was arrested on Sunday night as part of the investigation into the leak of a video showing the abuse of a Palestinian detainee by Israeli guards.

...

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that Prison Service Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi had ordered that she be held in solitary confinement under heightened supervision, monitored by guards and cameras.

https://archive.ph/W1luL (Haaretz)

YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship/

Sure these horrors are saved somewhere...the question is whether this will ever be used to prosecute.

Utterly deranged society.

"A future in which IDF uniforms evolve from a military symbol into raw material for creation, fashion and hope": It should come as no surprise that the war in Gaza served as inspiration for shows at Israel's recent fashion week in Tel Avivhttps://t.co/DY7YYid8dL

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) November 11, 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/12/israeli-settlers-new-attack-violence-west-bank-palestinians

Israeli president condemns ‘serious’ attack by settlers on West Bank villages

oh, that's surprising

The Israeli army said soldiers had responded to Tuesday’s settler attacks, causing the settlers to flee to a nearby industrial zone, where they attacked soldiers and damaged a military vehicle.

The police also said they had arrested four settlers involved in the attacks, a rarity as settlers generally go unpunished in what human rights bodies call a system of impunity.

ah

The Haaretz summary:

PM Netanyahu said settler violence in the West Bank "will be addressed with full force," and that he still opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, despite the U.S. submitting a UN draft resolution that offers a "credible pathway" to statehood. Saudi Arabia will not normalize ties with Israel under the Netanyahu government, Palestinian sources told Haaretz, citing senior Saudi officials. Israel's government announced that it will probe the failures surrounding October 7, 2023, but not through a state commission of inquiry. Israeli troops fired at UNIFIL soldiers in southern Lebanon "due to poor weather conditions," the IDF said, adding that the incident is being investigated.

Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody have surged. A prison guard describes rampant abuse

CAIRO, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Gazans said they paid $2,000 per seat to fly their families to South Africa on a trip arranged by a group offering a way out of the devastated enclave, in what South Africa alleged on Monday appeared to be part of a bid to displace Palestinians.
Two Gazans interviewed by Reuters said they were among 130 Palestinians granted entry by South Africa after being bussed from Gaza and flown out of an Israeli airport last week, arriving in Johannesburg on Thursday after a stop in Nairobi.

bless this clip https://www.instagram.com/reel/DN6QtGgDZkp/?igsh=NGtqbGowczlhODZ5

How climate could intersect with the ongoing conflicts in the region.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202511209098

Not read this yet. Probably too much.

One of the best pieces written about the West Bank this year, imo, by @BenEhrenreich: https://t.co/16v0Ps8SjW

— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) December 1, 2025

the desperate lies and condescension of Hilary blaming TikTok for the growing domestic revulsion for US supported genocide and then giving an Arafat blaming genocide washing history of Palestine, that makes her husband look like a put upon heroic statesman who could have brokered an independent Palestinian state. get the fuck out of here, you belong in hell with your paedo husband, sick lying piece of shit.

Yeah, the nerve of her trying to Israelsplain to Jewish anti-Zionist teens.

Here's what Hillary's favourite truth-loving democracy has been up to: https://www.972mag.com/knesset-apartheid-laws-gaza-war/

Legislating apartheid: How Israel entrenched unequal rule during Gaza war
In a two-year blitz, Israeli lawmakers passed over 30 laws curtailing Palestinians' rights and punishing dissent, a new report shows.

How dare you kids have an opinion on Palestine when you didn't even fail to make a peace agreement

Contrast the op ed Ben Rhodes had in the NYT a couple days ago which demonstrates that you can still have an honest reckoning mea culpa on the issue, even with a neolib dem establishment perspective

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/opinion/democrats-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.508.gJ9t.0QpF8-g2TI3P&smid=nytcore-ios-share
(gift link)

A dire situation for Lebanon and Syria. Resistance, in whatever way, is the only way.

1. Lebanon’s appointment of a political figure to lead talks with Israel for the first time in decades, exposes the reality of normalisation without peace, not even an unjust one. Israel is not seeking to normalize itself as a state pursuing security or stable borders, as its…

— Amal Saad (@amalsaad_lb) December 3, 2025

Got round to a review of this book on Zionism, which has some interesting passages on Lebanese politics.

"Jiryis is a scholar; he witnessed the start of the Nakba and its consequences, and is not writing for those who won’t listen."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/given-this-reality-turfah

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/watched-tracked-targeted-israel-surveillance-gaza.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=nym

long detailed article by a Palestinian journalist who has since left Gaza, about how Israel tracks Palestinians on their phones, online, via drones ,etc.

Thank you for sharing, my god

It’s horrible and I wish some of my hometown Zionists would read it.