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

Paul’s public announcement of his resignation sent shockwaves through the State Department on Wednesday. He said he was struck by how colleagues across the government and in Congress received his internal message: “I’ve been surprised by how many have said, ‘We absolutely understand where you’re coming from, we feel similarly and understand.’”

Paul told HuffPost he had been on leave last week, adding: “It was pretty fortunate because I think if I hadn’t been I would have been fired rather than have the time to think it over and resign.”

good stuff

Brave man

there we go. Josh Paul for president.

A Chicago police supporter has joined the protest, stating he visited Gaza or the West Bank after a trip to Turkey, and thought it was a lovely place. pic.twitter.com/r2n4iMPSvc

— Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere (@TylerLaRiviere) October 18, 2023

(Other flag is a thin blue line flag)

If that was a Hamas rocket, it will just make documenting and getting people to believe other atrocities that much harder. Mostly I hope the fatality count really is grossly inflated. Fewer dead people would be good.

pretty good summation of where things are: https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospital-blast-visual-investigation

Berlin police just removed me from a public square for standing alone with a sign reading STOP GENOCIDE. No free speech in Germany. I’m in their custody now.

— Tracy Fuad (@tracyfuad) October 18, 2023

Getting common mistake about the hospital explosion/attack. Hospital was more of a safe space gathering point that people were sleeping outside en masse.
So significant damage could be done to people without it bei8ng significantly reflected in structural damage. Certainly sounds like it would be reflected in structural damage from initial hearing which is misguiding. Think that has been mentioned in passing in some reports but if the reason for disbelief of damage is little damage to buildings full picture doesn't seem to be getting across.

Ok everyone time to move on from discussing the hospital bombing. Now let’s consider whether children gathering water at the mosque in which they’ve taken refuge may have inadvertently detonated themselves https://t.co/QXPNnWezKF

— Max Fox (@mxwfx) October 18, 2023

This level of bombardment is insane by any standard!

Israel is now flattening Tal Al-Hawa; one of Gaza's affluent areas with most high-rise residential buildings & least Hamas presence.

Israel has now destroyed over 121,000 housing units (partially & completely). pic.twitter.com/slgC7tb2bv

— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) October 19, 2023

are we sure they're not all just misfiring Hamas missiles?

I think the dominant theory is Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, not Hamas. But again the jury is out.

The Israeli government comes out with so much hysterical garbage.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/19/israel-accuses-bbc-of-modern-blood-libel-over-reporting-of-hospital-strike

I think “irresponsible reporting” would be sufficient. Atrocities, misreporting of atrocities, propagandistic usage of, exaggeration of, or even invention of atrocities, and mere fog of war confusion about atrocities, none of these things are unique to Israel/Palestine. I only object to the idea that Hamas isn’t somehow equally capable of any of these. As though only Israel does propaganda and Hamas (and the states actively supporting it) is just pure authentic expression of oppression with no sophistication.

The reporting from Sky was pretty much identical but the Israeli regime are well aware that the BBC is under constant attack from (fellow) right wing scumbags in the UK. It's also worth pointing out that the BBC was under attack from pro-Palestinian groups a couple of days earlier.

and under attack from the Lords for not using the word “terrorist” with enough brio

You forfeit the right to condemn media for getting the facts wrong when they can't travel there to get the scoop because you're conducting a siege.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/11/middleeast/idf-apology-shireen-abu-akleh-intl/index.html

Israeli PM Bennett was tweeting within days of the death that this journalist was likely killed by Palestinians. One year later:

The Israel Defense Forces has apologized for the death of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a year to the day after she was killed by a bullet to the back of the head while covering an Israeli military operation in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.

It is the first time the IDF has apologized for the killing of the well-known correspondent, after conceding last year that there was a “high possibility” she was shot by an Israeli soldier.

The apology came from the IDF’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, in an interview with CNN’s Eleni Giokos on Connect the World on Thursday.

“I think it’s an opportunity for me to say here that we are very sorry of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh,” he said.

“She was a journalist, a very established journalist. In Israel we value our democracy and in a democracy we see high value in journalism and in a free press. We want journalists to feel safe in Israel, especially in war time, even if they criticize us,” he said.

The apology comes days after The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) published a report that said it had found no accountability was taken by the Israeli military over its killings of at least 20 journalists over the past two decades.

The press advocacy group said it had documented at least 20 journalists killed by Israeli military fire since 2001, adding 18 of those killed were Palestinian. “No one has ever been charged or held accountable for these deaths,” it said in the press release.

The CPJ said its report – titled ‘Deadly Pattern’ – found a “routine sequence” that takes place when a journalist is killed at the hands of the IDF.

Israeli military took no accountability for journalists it killed over past 20 years, press freedom group says
“Israeli officials discount evidence and witness claims, often appearing to clear soldiers for the killings while inquiries are still in progress,” the CPJ said, describing the IDF’s procedure for examining military killings of civilians such as journalists as a “black box,” with the results of any such probe kept confidential.

“When probes do take place, the Israeli military often takes months or years to investigate killings and families of the mostly Palestinian journalists have little recourse inside Israel to pursue justice,” the CPJ said.

Israeli police are demanding that East Jerusalem Arabs now hand over their cell phones instead of merely present their ID cards https://t.co/F70iDbJqCc

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) October 19, 2023

You forfeit the right to condemn media for getting the facts wrong when they can't travel there to get the scoop because you're conducting a siege.

― Chyiv Kyiv (Fetchboy), Thursday, October 19, 2023 10:58 AM (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm conducting a siege?

he admit it

xp, That was in reference to Israel's whining abt the BBC, but yes, you're conducting a siege of my heart.

(I'm sorry if this has already been discussed, but is Israel calling for the evacuation of northern Gaza because they want to let settlers move there and will they use that toehold to take over Gaza? Is that what the Palestinians think?)

I don't think the exact rationale is clear, but the north is where the actual city of Gaza is. I have no idea how distributed the group is, but presumably that's where the administrative base would be

Yeah, I had assumed to prepare for ground invasion of Gaza City, although I have no particular insight.

I think it's unlikely Israel already has some kind of full Gaza long-term re-occupation plan ready to go (if it even wants to do that) but I have no particular insight. I would just think that the army is not prepared for and doesn't have the manpower that the re-occupation and settlement of Gaza would require even if that was the intention or hope. IDF is only about 170,000 active troops, the rest reserves. Reservists can't really be used for long-term occupation as the country's economy needs to function.

I have been concerned from the beginning that Israel doesn't have much of a plan, which is a nightmare for everyone. Although you would think that they wargame this kind of scenario, but then you would think a lot of things that haven't turned out to be true. If this doesn't devolve into a wider regional war, I think some kind of "regime change" situation in Gaza is more likely than re-occupation.

Biden asked Netanyahu and his war cabinet what was their plan for Gaza on the day after the war. They said they still don't have one. My story on @axios https://t.co/zit04eTbwe

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) October 18, 2023

is Israel calling for the evacuation of northern Gaza because they want to let settlers move there and will they use that toehold to take over Gaza? Is that what the Palestinians think?

haven't heard anyone floating this as a possibility. One (very understandable) fear is that Gazans who leave to Egypt or elsewhere will never be allowed to return

Forcing Palestinians to live in Sinai permanently is definitely a plan that would be popular with the current Israeli administration and their supporters.

“The New State Solution” as I’ve heard it called

Iirc the “new state solution” was one in which both Israel (to a degree) and Egypt (to a much greater degree) ceded some land to Gaza and encouraged their autonomy as an independent state

So Fetterman's tweet about Congress rushing to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy has gotten big-upped by... checks notes... Meghan McCain, Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro so far.

From Steven Salaita:
https://stevesalaita.com/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/

In corporate media of the anglophone world, siding with Palestinians, even haltingly, wasn’t an option. Quashing pro-Palestine sentiment has always been the norm in these environs, but the suppression in this case was harsher than usual. Politicians on both sides of the aisle rushed to condemn Palestinian terrorism. Corporations performed their usual gestures of anguish and concern. And in a type of pandering that came across more as cruel than vapid, a long list of celebrities pledged support for Israel.

Had this embargo on sympathy for Palestinians not existed, then more Americans might have learned useful context and considered some of the meaningful questions arising from Palestinian resistance.

Useful context begins with the nature of the Israeli state, an avatar of belligerence and inequality. Beyond its role as a force of extraction in the global nexus of U.S. imperialism, Israel was founded by conquest which has yet to be rectified. That conquest included mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs, theft of land, murder of entire villages, appropriation of resources, and destruction of the natural environment.

Given this context, the notion of “self-defense,” the Zionist’s discursive go-to, becomes more complicated. How can an occupying power be in a position of subjection or helplessness? Only in unusual circumstances does the historical oppressor get to claim self-defense. This isn’t one of those circumstances: Israel’s hostility as an occupying power is entirely routine. Checkpoints are aggressive. Border crossings are aggressive. Military patrols are aggressive. Embargoes are aggressive. Home demolition is aggressive. Settlement construction is aggressive. Extraction of land and water is aggressive. One cannot invoke self-defense as a counterpoint to nonstop aggression.

In short, there is no such thing as Israeli self-defense. It is a categorical impossibility.

Then again, maybe the problem with Americans isn’t ignorance or lack of information. Maybe they know damn well that Israel kills in great numbers and are glad of it. Maybe they’re acclimated to the spectacle of colonial violence. Maybe they see it as a benefit to humanity. Maybe they perceive in bloodshed the world as it ought to be. Maybe they know all they need to know about Israel, which is that it acts as a mirror for their own fantasies of heroism and probity.

....

Whenever Palestinian resistance threatens to gum up imperialism, cities throughout the democratic West readily enact fascist policies, shutting down protests, firing or arresting dissenters, doing away with civil liberties, and demanding obedience. In the immediate aftermath of the Palestinian operation, media outlets across the spectrum deployed a vocabulary that would facilitate Israeli genocide. The little bits of sympathetic coverage took the form of Jews talking to other Jews about Israel, which further consigned Palestine to a place of foreignness and unfamiliarity (the conditions for genocide in the first place). Boardrooms enacted swift discipline. University presidents made clear that Palestinian students and employees were prohibited from speaking.

The real conflict doesn’t exist between civility and terrorism; it exists between Palestinian fortitude and Western anxiety.

One of the many reasons that Irish people as a whole are largely sympathetic towards the plight of the Palestinians is due to our shared history of occupation and oppression. We are also extremely well versed in being called terrorist sympathisers (and less charming epithets) for pointing out that violent oppression and inevitably violent suppression of peaceful movements leads to inevitable results. Many of which are not going to even breathe on the notion of respectability politics, let exist in the same sphere as it. I’m putting the rest behind a hide tag cos long and not directly related.

So this is to say, as someone whose family has been directly affected by violence of the sort I describe upthread, at the hands of an occupying class upheld by state and military power - I’m absolutely sick and tired of seeing these takes posted here. Yes, states have a monopoly on violence. But I could not read about the suffering of the Israelis kidnapped and tortured and feel anything except immense sadness for them, personally. What did they do to deserve that? To cast that in the same view as militant resistance which usually goes against police or the military, the very people who usually inflict the most damage on behalf of a state? I read about the children killed in Coventry by IRA bombings and I thought, blood doesn’t pay for blood. The IRA killing those children and robbing any of their futures doesn’t bring back the dead of Bloody Sunday, or any of the countless millions the British killed or exiled or starved.

Which is really just to say: as comforting as it might be to imagine that everyone who posts here is a generic white American and that their lives or families might never have been touched by the violence so sweetly codified in that article and that therefore we all need telling, it’s wrong, it’s inaccurate, and it speaks over everyone who doesn’t want civilians to suffer in their name. Fuck that.

my first and last post itt: great post gyac

Oh fuck. Wishing I hadn’t said that now.

Lol.

But seriously, thank you for saying that gyac.

I don’t even know what Netanyahu and company thought the outcome of their short term plan that became the status quo was going to be. Occasional rockets from Gaza -> Iron Dome blocks most of it -> retaliatory strikes and conditions get progressively worse in Gaza, rinse and repeat… forever?

I feel like there’s a lack of interest in the material conditions of everyone in the region from his government, just a consolidation and expansion of power riding on everyone’s shared misery. And I don’t think we’ve seen the end of that yet. It hurts.

gyac, I know that not everyone needs telling— my mom and her sister were born in a demilitarized zone after their families were liberated from Oflag X C Lübeck. My mother doesn't have a birth certificate. They arrived in the US with nothing because of Nazi terror. Perhaps you could take a fucking step back every once in a while and think that other people have reasons behind their opinions, too. You don't have a monopoly on being correct.

It's curious that when mentioning civilians, often, only Israeli civilians are mentioned. This again fits a pattern wherein there are pleas for "humanity" but the Arab and the Palestinian are left out of that equation, for reasons that are pretty easily identifiable.

With that, I'm not going to post anymore in this thread or the antisemitism thread. I hope that this current conflict ends with as little further bloodshed as possible on both sides, and that there might emerge a peaceful, one-state solution in our lifetimes that allows Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, and others in the Levant the dignity they deserve.

For everyone else, I hope that our ideological differences don't make any of you think I'm a monster. I certainly care about many of you and wish you and yours peace and safety.

It's curious that when mentioning civilians, often, only Israeli civilians are mentioned. This again fits a pattern wherein there are pleas for "humanity" but the Arab and the Palestinian are left out of that equation, for reasons that are pretty easily identifiable.

Is that really true today? It's certainly not true in this thread. Is it true on NPR or CNN or in the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal? That's certainly not what I've seen.

Is that really true today? It's certainly not true in this thread. Is it true on NPR or CNN or in the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal? That's certainly not what I've seen.

It's absolutely been true in my experience — I mentioned upthread that the news will talk about "Israeli civilians" or "the Israeli people" but will then talk about "Palestinians" without ever using words like "civilians" or even "people." It's (relatively) subtle but it's absolutely rhetorical dehumanization in action.

It's curious that when mentioning civilians, often, only Israeli civilians are mentioned. This again fits a pattern wherein there are pleas for "humanity" but the Arab and the Palestinian are left out of that equation, for reasons that are pretty easily identifiable.

and that there might emerge a peaceful, one-state solution in our lifetimes that allows Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, and others in the Levant the dignity they deserve.

From that piece above:

"Whenever Palestinian resistance threatens to gum up imperialism, cities throughout the democratic West readily enact fascist policies, shutting down protests, firing or arresting dissenters, doing away with civil liberties, and demanding obedience."

They may have demanded obedience but governments haven't got it. There have been many demonstrations across Europe and the US. I can see a further shift of public opinion over time, which could lead to policy shift on Israel in the next decade.

While things look very bleak for Palestinians now it's a long game...

This stuff is just not going to work:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-surge-in-suppression/

They banned Palestinian solidarity demonstrations in France - but in Paris this evening people turned out anyway, and forced the cops to leave pic.twitter.com/xjkPOTKQ1N

— Steven Methven (@StevenJMethven) October 19, 2023

On the IDF's invincibility myth

I just keep finding these old threads where I repeatedly pointed out that the IDF is not capable of preventing infiltration from multiple borders 😮‍💨 while y’all were talking about some superpower force you made up in your heads… https://t.co/avfDrmxS8Z

— ‏تمار 🌴 Тама́р 🌴 תמר (@tamars) October 19, 2023

I've been staying away from social media and just catching up on events via Jonathan Katz's Substack page. It's been excellent at putting everything in a historical context (Katz studied history before moving into journalism) but it's also mightily depressing. This in particular:

It’s notable to me that in his Tel Aviv speech, Biden again name-checked the “two-state solution”—the old dream of the 1990s that envisioned a Jewish state and a Muslim-majority Arab state living side by side, or in a sort of checkerboard, within the borders of the old British Mandate (plus or minus the Golan Heights). Anyone who has actually been paying attention to the situation on the ground for the past 20 years knows that dream is completely dead; it was killed by an explosion of Religious Zionist settlement activity in the West Bank that, as Netanyahu intended, has stripped the Palestinian Authority of even more of its potential land and rendered any possibility of drawing a border impossible. Biden doesn’t know this, or feels he has to say he doesn’t know this, because most Americans don’t know it; for most of those 20 years it has been in neither the government, nor media, nor either political party’s interest to look at those facts or communicate them. “Confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia,” as the resigned State Department official Josh Paul said.

The problem is that a one-state solution is even less likely.

I think you could at least make the case that a one state solution is possible in the far future whereas I don’t know what a serious proposal for a two state solution could look like at this point. Anyone who is serious about a single binational state (I kind of dislike the word “solution”) would I think have to be playing a long game and thinking about how to lay groundwork.

Even after Israel told Palestinians to evacuate the north and head to what it called “safe zones” in the south, strikes continued across the territory overnight and Palestinian militants continued firing rockets into Israel.