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

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

Got it— I could have been more specific, in that what I meant was “the reaction of Jewish people as portrayed in the mainstream press.” Apologies for that.

That this reductive portrayal in the mainstream media speaks to what Lily and others have been saying— that these narratives are harmful and
antisemitic— is pretty clear! Obviously, I’m not trying to parrot them, as both irl and on here, I have many many Jewish friends who are against the occupation and ongoing state violence.

At this point the big question in my mind is whether the majority in Israel will ever be capable of accepting peace with a free and autonomous Palestinian state on their border, as opposed to seeking complete Palestinian capitulation, subjugation, or genocide - because Israel is demonstrably the only party to this war who can negotiate an enduring peace through offering meaningful concessions. the Palestinians have nothing left to bargain with but their lives and they have no motivation to sell them cheaply.

Times of London investigation: https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-times-magazine/article/israel-hamas-rape-investigation-evidence-october-7-6kzphszsj

Paywalled.

I found an archived version. If you just want to know what evidence there is, albeit this is two months old so possibly out of date, I thought this was a much better and more streamlined piece, free of the endless contextualization and meditation and chin-scratching under which any actual information is buried in these rape thinkpieces. I am tired of reading these long windups in which the already-debunked early, fog-of-war/telephone game type claims are debunked yet again so that we don't get to what actually happened until paragraph 20, at which point we are already primed not to believe them by insinuation that this is all just sexualized fear of Arab men.

https://www.haaretz.com/search-results?q=rape

Mass clearly occurred, some rapes almost certainly occurred, and there probably isn't a Hamas pamphlet that says "rape as many women as possible." Is this satisfactory yet? I certainly don't see any of the claims about abuse of Palestinian women in the LRB piece (I think it was in the other thread) subject to this kind of endless scrutiny.

Sorry, this is the haaretz piece I meant to link
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-18/ty-article-magazine/witnesses-confessions-naked-dead-bodies-all-the-evidence-of-hamas-rape-on-oct-7/0000018e-f114-d92e-abfe-f77f7e3f0000

I was just going to link the archive, fuck the Times (in general, not related to this piece): https://archive.is/NS2g0

Most articles (and discussion itt) touch on but don’t actually focus on a big part of the racialising of Muslim men, which is a trope that no doubt goes back centuries (the uncivilised savages targeting OUR women) and which you still see leaned on heavily today by Serb nationalists (re the Bosnian war) both in reference to the Ottomans and to the events of the war. Certainly Serb and Croat women were raped and assaulted in numbers, but the scale of the Serb camps for Bosnian women were of a different degree of both intent and execution. I think some of the degree of exaggeration deliberately mirror and reference this trope.

However, I refer to my previous points: nothing can justify the actions of the Israeli government. And there are women who have been assaulted, which I don’t think people itt dispute. I just don’t get the degree of constant fascination with this; because there have been so many lies by the Israeli government that have fallen apart. Israeli women still suffered, and it really makes me very uncomfortable that some seem incapable of threading the needle of the truth of what happened and the fact that women are and were suffering. They’re not the majority victims of this conflict, but they don’t have to be for their suffering to be meaningful, and it’s completely unnecessary to repeat the kind of talking points you see on the internet everywhere regarding discussion of rape.

otm

The Israeli army burning down the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, one of the largest in the area. Healthcare has been completely destroyed in Gaza in order to maximise Palestinian deaths. War of elimination. pic.twitter.com/4CzobecOSE

— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) June 15, 2024

In a Single Hour, Israeli Snipers Killed Seven Bystanders at the Jenin Refugee Camp (Haaretz article): https://archive.ph/rHAkE

Jenin has endured plenty of rough days lately, but May 21 outdid them all. In the course of one hour in the morning, snipers killed seven of the city's residents, all of them innocent passersby, even though the streets were quiet and the soldiers had no cause to open fire. They shot from high up in two buildings, called Rabia and A-Rein, just outside the camp, and the dead included two teenagers and the director of the surgical ward at the Jenin Governmental Hospital, who was just getting out of his car in the hospital's parking lot.

It’s like a horror movie that just keeps going.

https://archive.is/6ZFjn

It’s like a horror movie that just keeps going.

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Saturday, June 15, 2024 12:13 PM (one hour ago)

otm. adding to that feeling (for this useless spectator) is how the continual crackdown on recognizing this as a genocide is simultaneous with Israeli soldiers posting enthusiastically about how they're committing genocide: https://zeteo.com/p/gaza-israel-genocide-soldier-rhetoric-instagram

It's so obvious the Israeli army is deliberately killing leaders, professionals, and intellectuals, like a slow motion Katyn Forest massacre.

some more unapologetic genocide confessing: https://www.commondreams.org/news/moshe-feiglin-hitler

Former Israeli Knesset member Moshe Feiglin quoted Adolf Hitler as he called for Israel to resettle the Gaza Strip and create a "Hebrew Gaza."

Feiglin, who quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party to found the right-wing Zehut Party and plans to challenge Likud in Israel's next elections, made the comments during a panel discussion on Israel's Channel 12 that was shared on social media on Sunday, as Middle East Eye reported.

"We are not guests in our country, this is our country, all of it..." Feiglin said, adding, "As Hitler said, 'I cannot live if one Jew is left.' We can't live here if one 'Islamo-Nazi' remains in Gaza."

that said I would invite Feiglin to think about how that worked out for Hitler

That quote is actually shocking even in a continually shocking situation

tbf, I don't know how much political clout Feiglin has other than just being known for saying outrageous things. He served in Knesset for only two years, his weird libertarian party is defunct, and he is not currently in government in any capacity afaik.

yeah I was just about to post that I don't know anything about this guy or Zehut