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

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/spain-rejects-israeli-claims-of-its-officials-aligning-with-hamas

Just wanting to point out that Palestinians and others who have been subject to unjust and international war on their homelands are also feeling pretty traumatized at the moment.

What Lily Dale’s post speaks to is what a Jewish friend wrote a few days ago about what’s going on, and that is that despite the mentions of the Shoah, the overwhelming majority of Israeli and mainstream Jewish reaction to these events speaks to a complete and utter lack of connection with Jewish ancestors, who were a diasporic, hated, and perpetually exiled people. This is the pain and history that comes before the Shoah, and which the Israeli state is now enforcing on another group of people. To what end?

Thanks Lily. I've shared your post with my wife whose views and conflicts sound very similar to yours. She's Jewish and trying to navigate being pushed and pulled by people around her, talking with our kids about it who are getting views pushed on them by our temple, and her best friend who is coming down more pro-Israel than her.

Just wanting to point out that Palestinians and others who have been subject to unjust and international war on their homelands are also feeling pretty traumatized at the moment.

xposts

Yes, Lily, many thanks for that terrific post, I'm Jewish and it really helped me clarify my thoughts (it didn't go "all over the place" at all!). Literally everything you said resonates with me.

Not everyone seems to understand, which is why I posted it.

If you mean specific people itt, then by all means quote them. Otherwise it comes across like you’re taking issue with Lily’s post and replies to it.

I’d also point out that discussion not taking place on this thread doesn’t mean they’re not happening.

Thanks for your post, Lily.

I think my post was pretty clear, and wasn’t meant to denigrate Lily’s post. Not sure why I need to clarify for your sake only, since it seems what you’re looking for is a fight.

FWIW (and with respect!) I don't like that "mainstream Jewish reaction", feels reductive to me, a mainstream Jew who doesn't think that way

I imagine Bebe & Trump are already doing rough sketches of the waterfront casino they'll be building with Jared Kushner

https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/7/11/satellite-images-show-israels-gaza-concentration-camp-preparations

"You went to tear Gaza apart. You believed that's what needed to be done, so the damned Nazis from Gaza won't have anywhere to return to. You did it, Avraham"

Another one of Avraham Azulai's brothers, Mordechai, praises his brother's devotion to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. https://t.co/HSXY1yaZY9 pic.twitter.com/jce1bH8L4W

— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 13, 2025

Israeli settlers set fire to St. George Greek Orthodox Monastery and the Christian cemetery in the Christian village of Taybeh, West Bank.

This is the place Christ sought refuge in John 11:54 before His passion and death called Ephraim. pic.twitter.com/PozFbGucrT

— Theophan (@uncreated_light) July 10, 2025

You would never get any of this in newspaper coverage, if it wasn't for twitter.

More funeral eulogies.

"Every day when you came back from Gaza to sleep next to me, you'd tell me how many houses you demolished today... End this war already. Conquer Gaza as quickly as possible. There's no room there for pure evil... That stinking strip."

Rut Azulai, newlywed widow of IDF terrorist Avraham Azulai, eulogizes her eliminated husband, and calls for the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, so she could colonize it and set up a farm there

I really wonder if passionate American Christian supporters of Israel have any idea that Christians are persecuted there too.

I imagine they don't consider them proper Christians.

they're not white, they can't be Christian

Flip their wig by telling them Jesus wasn’t white

fake gnos

^^^ very good

They're from the Middle East, what does the Middle East have to do with Christianity?

They thought "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was about the former steel town in Pennsylvania.

"Every child had a pretty good shot/ to get at least as far as his old man got"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/13/dozens-of-palestinians-killed-in-latest-israeli-attacks-near-food-aid-distribution-sites-medics-and-witnesses-say

An Israeli airstrike has killed at least 10 people, including six children, who were waiting to collect water in Gaza, Palestinian health officials have said.

A separate airstrike on Sunday hit a home, killing nine people, and 31 others were shot dead near an aid distribution site on Saturday, marking another bloody weekend as the conflict’s death toll exceeded 58,000.

Witnesses said a drone fired a missile at a crowd holding empty jerry cans beside a water tanker in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. About 20 children and 14 adults were lined up when the strike occurred, Ramadan Nassar, who lives in the area, told the Associated Press. Al-Awda hospital received 10 bodies, including six children, health officials said.

The Israel Defense Forces said a “technical error” caused a strike aimed at an Islamic Jihad “terrorist” to fall dozens of metres from the target, and that the incident was under review.

The nine people killed in the separate strike on the home in Zawaida also included children.

The 31 Palestinians shot dead on Saturday were on their way to a distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israeli-backed logistics group, near Rafah in southern Gaza, according to hospital officials and witnesses.

Israeli arms company Rafael uses footage of a Palestinian targeted and killed by a Spike FireFly drone in Gaza to promote its military products

Obv not putting the footage here..

https://apnews.com/article/syria-clashes-druze-israel-92a72655b85fba1d0b12cc36ffe2cef3

Thread on potential for Israeli election, likely in early '26

Shas’ Council of Torah Sages has ordered the party’s 11 MKs to resign from their positions as ministers and Knesset committee chairs in protest at the government not passing a law exempting yeshiva students from military service. Netanyahu now leads a minority government. But… >

— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) July 16, 2025