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.

Would hope that momentum might be high enough that a further massacre like this might be seen as an international incident and prompt a lot more grassroots action at least. It probably would elsewhere. Actually get foreign governments to respond in a more than nominal way. Consciously wake up to the Israeli narrative being a fiction.

If Italian labour has already had the country at a temporary standstill in response to the Sumud flotilla has that card been played ? Is it one that can only been played once? Is there any likelihood of similar action happening elsewhere. Is that going to provide enough leverage for the situation to permanently change. Or is this just going to linger indefinitely?
Hoping that BDS is going to have some effect but until something like that can get through to US and UK govts etc one can only hope.

I see.

JUST IN - Israel says Hamas committed a serious violation of the ceasefire and, in response, the IDF is currently conducting strikes in Gaza.

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 19, 2025

I'm not sure there is an answer to Daniel's question. Israel is a fascist country where the governing consensus is that genocide should continue or, at least, they should be maintaining and amplifying an apartheid regime while killing, starving, and imprisoning as many Palestinians as they can. I'm not sure there are any tenable short-term goals for non-local activists to strive for in this context.

Just had a friend of mine who was in the Sumud Flotilla speaking at a rally. She said that the ports of Israel are still full of foreign trading vessels, maybe container vessels.
So would be good if that could be heavily reduced. If anybody could leverage widespread boycott it would be great.
I did hear about unions in various places trying to prompt goods for Israel not being handled through departure ports. Or at least armaments so far.
If that could be brought to a halt there might be some hope. But Zionists proliferate

Can only hope people continue to wake up to the Israeli narrative being a fiction. Did seem to be happening more and more

Murdered this week.

We have same upsetting news. Our wonderful vet Mu’ath Abj Rakba tried to go back to his house in Jabalia on Friday and nobody has heard from him since. We are in touch with his wife and parents and siblings. His brother tried to go there, but unfortunately everybody who reaches pic.twitter.com/OGojETpoJF

— Sulala Animal Rescue (@SulalaSociety) October 12, 2025

Update on Israel's forever war on Lebanon: https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-gaza-ceasefire-new-normal-hezbollah-190eb8c2ec2d9fedc94c3fadfc1f41e2

Israel ordered the deportation of 32 foreign activists on Wednesday for their support to olive-harvesting Palestinians against settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

A statement by Interior Minister Yariv Levin and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the… pic.twitter.com/ovpnDpHGpy

— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) October 22, 2025

Israel kicks out permanently supporters of West Bank olive farmers who have been getting attacked by settlers

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251022-israel-deports-32-foreign-activists-for-supporting-palestinian-farmers-against-settler-violence-in-west-bank/

they’re building a reservation/concentration camps for Palestinians and a walled off colony on the rest of it to steal real estate. That’s the plan and we gotta be clear about it https://t.co/1AAYAmXBbC

— Ali A Olomi (@aaolomi) October 24, 2025

Watch this. This is what anti-Palestinian racism looks like. pic.twitter.com/Tr6e3nByft

— Linda Mamoun (@mamoun_linda) October 26, 2025

Israel doing air strikes on Gaza City...purportedly because of something that happened in Rafah

yeah, the historic ceasefire is already history

that's what they meant by historic... it will only ever exist in the past

that’s “historical” (pushes glasses up nose)

BREAKING: Netanyahu's corruption hearing truncated today due to 'security developments': Report

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/QbR0b44VuW pic.twitter.com/HtHn84rPwY

— Al Jazeera Breaking News (@AJENews) October 28, 2025

You know, it's very weird and sickening to live through a mass gaslighting like this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/29/israeli-strikes-in-gaza-overnight-as-ceasefire-looks-increasingly-fragile

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza overnight killed at least 104 Palestinians, including children, in what appeared to be the gravest challenge yet to the increasingly fragile US-brokered ceasefire and the deadliest day since the truce began.

The strikes, one of the bloodiest attacks in the two-year war, killed at least 35 children and injured 200 people, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency. They took place hours after Donald Trump said nothing would jeopardise the ceasefire agreement he had helped broker.

Dr Mohammed al-Mughir, the director of humanitarian support and international cooperation at the civil defence in Gaza, told the Guardian: “Among these attacks was the targeting of a cancer patient camp, the Insan camp.”

The toll was confirmed by an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally of reports from medical officials at five Gaza hospitals that received the dead and wounded.

So it's a ceasefire when Israel says it is, and it's a war when this regime of frothing at the mouth racist child and cancer patient murdering zealot genocidaires says it is. I see.

Also, it is maddening that no one (in leadership, in the media) makes the point that there seems to be some kind of silent consensus that the remains of a small number of dead hostages are more valuable than all living Palestinians. Nothing really shocks me about this conflict anymore, but this comes close.

it is disgusting and indefensible

you need a hierarchical view of human value based on ethnicity or religion, with your enemy so far down that they’re off the scale and yeah i think the IDF and Netanyahu have been there for a long time

hard agree on the hallucinatory quality of seeing more israeli bombs and more killings of palestinians and this being characterised as “ceasefire increasingly fragile”

It would almost be laughable if it wasn't so abhorrent: "one of the bloodiest attacks in the two-year war" cannot by definition occur during a truce or ceasefire.

I'm grimly grateful to have already read Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' on War on Palestine before this month. I'd recommend it if you haven't read it already and want to situate what's happening now into the longer historical context.

> a small number of dead hostages are more valuable than all living Palestinians

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "It looks like they dug up the incorrect set of moldering bones, and that leaves us with no choice but to kill another hundred-plus civilians."

What more to a expect of a country of psychotic racist liars

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)