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.

Greta Thunberg gives her first words after she was released from Israeli prison where she was beat and forced to kiss the Israeli flag. She says the story is not about them, the story is about Gaza. pic.twitter.com/cUspEsen3G

— WearThePeace (@WearThePeaceCo) October 6, 2025

sucks we have to look at Twitter to hear her very erudite words

from another thread:

Speaking of provocative I saw a video on Tiktok yesterday from a Palestinian American who had somehow been invited onto a radio talkshow called "The Patriot" and the host asked him how peace can be achieved, and he said "I'm not interested in peace." It had the desired effect because I, and presumably all the listeners to this station suddenly was like. wtf is he talking about. He said I'm not interested in peace, I'm interested in liberation. We tried peace for decades. We got killed, bombed and tortured. Now we have to try to liberate ourselves with violence because we have no other options. The host was aghast. "Yes, but both sides have to lay down their weapons" and he's like no - the idea that Israel will lay down its weapons is ridiculous. So we have to fight. And the host says, you'll die. And he says we're dying already. We'd rather die fighting for liberation than on our knees. Your great patriots, he said, your founding fathers - they said give me liberty or give me death. That's what we're doing. It's a hard point of view, but put in this way it's understandable. I went down a rabbit hole on this theme and there is a rich history of Palestinians as well as Black Americans in the 1960s with exactly this point of view. That "peace" is NOT the goal. That "peace" is a figleaf for domination. "Peace" is simply capitulation.

Simplified: Kicks man in face, takes his phone, says "Now you must forswear violence"

The colonizer demanding peace after violently destroying an entire society is pretty typical, sadly.

the new Sun City

Leonardo DiCaprio is co-financing a luxury hotel to be built in Israel

https://www.nme.com/news/film/leonardo-dicaprio-is-co-financing-a-luxury-hotel-to-be-built-in-israel-3881880

fascinating thread on IDF 3D-animated propaganda and its recycling of unrelated resources: https://bsky.app/profile/jacksapoch.bsky.social/post/3m2p4ghkft22i

isn't it blatantly against international law to kidnap people from the ocean?

how many divisions does international law have

xpost Against the Wakanda-Atlantis accords

Impressment (basically kidnapping) of American sailors by the Royal Navy was a contributing cause for the War of 1812

isn't it blatantly against international law to kidnap people from the ocean?

― encino morricone (majorairbro), Wednesday, October 8, 2025 9:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

No no no, it's Israel, international law doesn't exist for Israel or the US.

the new Sun City

Leonardo DiCaprio is co-financing a luxury hotel to be built in Israel

a million times worse than Sun City imo - where the hell is cancel culture these days? Hopefully DiCaprio's hotel get's cancelled by a shahed drone.

No thoughts on the big beautiful peace deal huh

if it really involves Blair being installed as the grand mufti of Gaza then it is absolutely vile and completely doomed. The only positive I can think of at this moment is that at least it could be a temporary pause of a hideously evil bullets and famine genocide.

having Tony Blair involved in anywhere across the Middle East is like having a convicted serial killer running a victim support group. It's fucking demented.

Yes, Trump and Netanyahu, two guys you can really trust.

calzino otm. Ending the bombing, shooting, and starvation is urgently necessary, but my read of the 20-pt plan is deeply pessimistic. And among other, longer-term concerns Israel obviously does not respect ceasefires, so the shooting will prob continue, the imprisoning obvs will, the occupation will, no change in the WB afaics, etc

Also extremely bad that Israel and even Netanyahu personally will pay no price for carrying out a genocide

If this holds there would be elections in Israel next year?

No Peace Prize for Donnie, that's something at least.

I presume the winner is some ghoulish Western backed stooge who has melt-lib hero status for repeatedly failing to coup Venezuela

LOL Trump you're fine, we like you, but we don't want Tony Blair.

https://news.sky.com/story/hamas-official-thanks-donald-trump-for-peace-deal-but-warns-tony-blair-not-welcome-13448166

The scene in the Knesset with Trump is like watching the inverse of a war crimes tribunal. The leaders and facilitators of the Gaza genocide are congratulating each other and applauding their crimes.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) October 13, 2025

There was an Egyptian plan for Gaza that did not include Tony Blair, but alas it did not get Trump and Netanyahu support

Trump talking about Netanyahu asking him for weapons and Trump giving him them to him and bragging about how he gave them to him . Ugh

https://www.tiktok.com/@cnn/video/7560709437334310157

Jared Kushner praising Israel with nonsensical speech

https://www.tiktok.com/@codepinkalert/video/7560407037306260750

While some killings still happening-

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/12/palestinian-journalist-saleh-aljafarawi-shot-dead-in-gaza-city-clashes

Palestinian sources said clashes were taking place between Hamas security forces and fighters from the Doghmush clan in Sabra on Sunday, although this has not been confirmed by local authorities.

A senior source in Gaza’s Ministry of Interior told Al Jazeera Arabic that the clashes in Gaza City involved “an armed militia affiliated with the [Israeli] occupation”.

The source said security forces imposed a siege on the militia, adding that “militia members” killed displaced people as they were returning from southern Gaza to Gaza City.

Trump talking about Netanyahu asking him for weapons and Trump giving him them to him and bragging about how he gave them to him . Ugh

https://www.tiktok.com/@cnn/video/7560709437334310157🕸

Can’t understand why he won’t get the Peace Prize

I'm very glad hostages on both sides are freed, and honestly surprised there were that many still alive. I'm not even cautiously optimistic that the future will be ok for Palestinians though.

An Israeli official told Haaretz that Hamas would release the bodies of more hostages on Tuesday night, after the group failed to fulfil its obligation to return all deceased hostages within 72 hours, according to the cease-fire agreement. Israel announced it would close the Rafah border crossing and reduce humanitarian aid in response to Hamas returning only four deceased hostages. Israeli officials said the IDF had not identified any significant efforts by Hamas to locate the remaining bodies. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum wrote to U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, saying, "What we feared is now happening before our eyes." Gaza's Health Ministry reported that six Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire, with Hamas saying Israel violated the cease-fire. Violent clashes occurred in Gaza City between Hamas members and local militias.

Oh nice, Israel is starving and killing more Palestinian civilians because Hamas hasn't pulled dead bodies out of the rubble quick enough.