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.

Netanyahu still trying to deny this and even threatening a defamation action against Haaretz

I have to think Haaretz would have their story nailed down solid before they printed that. Netanyahu's defamation threat is purely for show, a futile sandbag thrown into the breach.

From a Haaretz editorial about the film Naza today.

https://i.ibb.co/tp2XcdFS/HSLV-Lxa8-AArtvj.jpg

Is the editorial about the threat to strip the filmmakers of citizenship?

this is grim:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/14/animated-map-shows-spread-of-illegal-israeli-settlements-across-palestine

Looks like a pox.

It isn't about the citizenship threat, no.

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-09-14/ty-article-opinion/.premium/watching-naza-shocked-me-so-did-what-its-creators-left-out/000001a0-9eac-df9d-a9aa-beecf9960000?taid=6aa7b4266a20e500010346a4

yikes

but he's right really, if I'm not reminded of Hamas's role in these events on a daily basis I forget it instantly and suddenly the mass slaughter of children starts to trouble me

It's kind of a joy-kill.

both sides now

On Tuesday, Sheeran responded with a lengthy Instagram post captioned: “It’s important that I set out some facts.”

“I am appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine,” he wrote in the first of several bullet-point statements. “The suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy. There are too many wars across the world causing immeasurable pain, none of which should be tolerated.”

on one hand there's an ongoing genocide - on the other hand there's the financial wellbeing of ed sheeran and his financers

that fact that he characterizes it as an ongoing 'conflict'.. is Hamas even fighting anymore? Hezbollah still flinging rockets but that's not Palestine

hardly the point, the point is to always say “it’s complicated” and then throw pocket sand in your interlocutor’s eyes like Dale Gribble

Well his band and all of the openers for his tour have quit, so kind of hard to tell whether he has a tour or not anymore. Maybe he should have tried having a fucking backbone instead of being a spineless genocide apologist

It's a lot to ask a non-sentient muppet like Ed Sheeran to have ethics/morals.

Guys there are too many wars. We're not sure what the optimal number is, but this is definitely too many.

Sheeran has expressed support for Ukraine, so the whole "I don't pick sides, war is bad period" stance is bullshit anyway. He just doesn't pick sides when it could affect his finances.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/16/building-gaza-city-damaged-israeli-strikes-collapses-killed

It's gotten a lot harder to get a sense of life on the ground in Gaza from afar

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/16/threats-against-israeli-directors-gaza-documentary-naza?fbclid=IwZnRzaAUYSS1wZG9mBWZkaWQWUOnh4VDUgW9Zw6FVzo7g9VV7xVvN4WV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR4KWMNoUC0FY0LPxwBpCVk1P8hFkdHFgRGnnyk5MzLtytDB4uLW3sllb2F2rA_aem_-5DktoU2NM7uEsOEbLVDfA

Threats against directors of Naza documentary

Threats are coming from Israeli citizens and Netanyahu and other Israeli government officials

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he would seek new laws allowing Israel to strip citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers, escalating the campaign against the Oscar-winning film-makers behind the Gaza documentary NAZA, who have faced threats from senior government and military officials and groups of far-right Israelis gathering outside their families’ homes.

those people are going to be killed before too long and then blamed for their own deaths

much like everything else israel does

Israeli committee bars leading Arab party from next month’s election https://t.co/qgQxHHjwAg

— Financial Times (@FT) September 23, 2026

They will take this to the courts (and may not win there)

can't get past the FT paywall, this article has more detail:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/election-panel-votes-to-bar-balad-chief-abu-shehadeh-over-alleged-support-for-terror/

they expect the court to allow the two Arab parties to run but to disallow one politician. and they will allow Netanyahu's coalition allies who explicitly and repeatedly call for genocide to participate.

The CEC accepted both grounds cited in the petition to ban Abou Shahadeh from running: supporting armed struggle by an enemy state or terrorist organization against Israel, and negating Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state.

Sohlberg took part in the vote — the first time in decades that a committee chairman has done so — saying Abou Shahadeh had failed to adequately answer allegations that he expressed support for Hamas’s armed struggle against Israel in an article he published a day after the October 7, 2023, massacre.

The decision stands out among the numerous disqualification petitions before the CEC this week for the unusually broad political and legal support behind it, potentially setting up a less predictable Supreme Court review than is typical for such decisions.

The petition, filed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, centered on an Arabic-language article Abou Shahadeh published on October 8, 2023, in which he described the assault a day earlier as “an important historic event militarily, politically and strategically” and wrote that others could learn from Hamas’s success in surprising Israel.

All opposition parties — Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Yair Golan’s Democrats, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White — backed the petition.

The petition is the only challenge before the committee this week to receive the backing of Baharav-Miara, who penned an opinion Tuesday supporting Abou Shahadeh’s disqualification while concluding that the other petitions lacked sufficient grounds.

The backing of Sohlberg and Baharav-Miara raises the prospect that the Supreme Court may uphold the decision, despite its historically high threshold for disqualifying candidates and its repeated overturning of such decisions by the committee.

Abou Shahadeh, who denies supporting the attack or political violence, called his disqualification an attempt to “silence” him and Arab society’s political voice. “I have never called for violence or terrorism. I oppose armed struggle, and remain committed to political and civil struggle for peace, justice and equality,” he said.

“The attempt to disqualify me is an attempt to undermine the representation and political voice of Arab society,” added Abou Shahadeh, who leads the hardline Balad party and holds the No. 3 spot on the Joint List slate.

Adalah, whose general director Hassan Jabareen represented Abou Shahadeh, condemned the decision.

“The article contains no direct call for violence, nor any statements that could amount to grounds for disqualification,” Jabareen said, arguing that the attorney general had relied in part on what Abou Shahadeh did not write — an explicit condemnation of the October 7 attack — as evidence against him.

He also accused the attorney general of applying a higher standard to Abou Shahadeh than to far-right candidates whom she opposed disqualifying, including overlooking those “who incited the gravest crimes against Palestinians,” specifically citing Ben Gvir, who was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization, and Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich.

Among other things, Ben Gvir said in August that Israel should kill “30 to 40” people in Gaza every night, including individuals who posed no immediate threat, saying some were “not worthy of life” and “not even people,” while Smotrich said last year that Gaza would be “totally destroyed,” previously called for the Palestinian town of Huwara to be “wiped out,” and said in 2024 that causing two million Gazan civilians to die of hunger unless the hostages were returned “might be justified and moral.”

Netanyahu speech to a UN hall where 77 delegations left was angry and full of lies and gross boasts

Netanyahu rejected allegations of genocide, saying "Israel prevented genocide" rather than committed it. "What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy's population?" he asked. Israel has not provided Palestinians with vaccines but has allowed international aid groups to conduct vaccination campaigns in Gaza. A few factchecks from Haaretz below and that’s barely touching the surface

The Israeli premier also downplayed settler violence, claiming that "maybe two or three" Palestinians are killed by settlers each year and reiterating his assertion that only around 150 "juvenile delinquents" are behind the violence. According to UN data, 26 Palestinians have been killed in such attacks since the beginning of the year

That is just a small part of a Haaretz article. Obviously others and even that article have even more items to address or did address

only around 150 "juvenile delinquents" are behind the violence

while IDF troops stand chuckling on the sidelines

putting two and two together, Netayahu thinks that murdering Palestinians amounts to juvenile delinquency

whoa

JERUSALEM, Sept 30 (Reuters) - The co-pilot of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv is believed to have stabbed the captain in a possible attempted “terror attack” on Wednesday, forcing the plane to divert to Saudi Arabia where it landed safely, three Israeli officials said.

They said the cabin crew entered the cockpit and took control of flydubai flight FZ1073 from the United Arab Emirates to Israel, which diverted to Saudi Arabia as it flew over Jordanian airspace. One of the officials identified the attacker as an Omani national.

could also have been interpersonal

Israel did 09/30