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

Israel is ramping up the killing machine tonight

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/27/us-asks-qatar-to-turn-down-the-volume-of-al-jazeera-news-coverage

Antony Blinken, has reportedly asked Qatar to moderate Al Jazeera’s coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas, amid concerns within the Biden administration that the channel is inflaming public opinion and heightening the risks of a wider conflict.

so it's the coverage that is inflaming opinion, not the death and destruction being rained down

So fucking bleak

if Israel and its allies do not want a wider conflict perhaps they should stop indiscriminately murdering children

I assume everyone here already heard about the Al-J journalist whose entire family was killed in Gaza, right?

anyway, I am sorry to post US politics itt, but I am both livid and rather alarmed at the developing political climate around opposing this genocide. (and of course the US mil is up to its neck in this now)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/27/biden-israel-palestine-muslim-americans-war/

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/last-time-i-saw-yaakov/

I came across this moving, completely arresting essay today, from 1995

Two things about leaving Israel had been a huge relief to me: the absence of any clear risk of getting my limbs blown off; and the freedom from the endless talk about Israeli and Arab politics. In time, the circular arguments — the Holocaust and the necessity of a Jewish State, Palestinian terrorism, Arab antisemitism, Arab manipulation of the Palestinians as a tool against Israel, the Zionist justification of Israel — faded from my mind. So much so that when, on a Paris metro, a young Palestinian man, seeing a Star of David around my neck, felt obliged to make the victory sign at me and say “Vive la Palestine,” I felt nothing but agreement and curiosity. “Je suis tout fait d’accord,” I told him, “but why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re a Jew.”

“Yeah, exactly. A Jew, not an Israeli.”

“But the two are like this,” he said, holding up two intertwined fingers, and was surprised when I began to laugh.

I regret laughing now. A Palestinian acquaintance said recently that in the occupied territories, no one can tell the difference between a Star of David — the same as appears on the Israeli flag; the same as appears on the Israeli Army jeeps throughout the territories — and a swastika. The comparison is simplistic, and he knew it, but I take his point. Is it even possible to ask young Gazans or Nazarenes to bring a historical perspective to the fact of their life-long terrorization by an occupying army, symbolized by the Star of David? Should they think about the Sykes-Picot agreement during their daily humiliation by heavily armed Israelis? Should they think about Kristalnacht? Rabin himself has spoken of the occupation as having corrupted the Jewish state, and the silver Star of David I wear around my neck, a deeply personal acknowledgement of continuity between myself and the generations of the Holocaust, has been stolen from me by the years of occupation.

u find the same questions everywhere — the local Arab grocery, Middle Eastern cab drivers, Israeli shopkeepers. Nothing ever changes: sometimes, through the Internet, I check in on Middle Eastern newsgroups, or join the Palestinian chat channel, and I hear the same kind of nonsense I heard nearly 20 years ago in Israel. Is Israel justified? Are Hamas members terrorists, or soldiers? Did the Holocaust occur? Can the Israeli forces be compared to Nazis? Is terrorism justified? The names change, and the level of brutality has certainly escalated, but everything else is the same — same circular righteousness, same absurd justifications, same unending violence.

Since knowing Yaakov, if it all seems just as tragic, or more so, the absurdity of all this is more apparent to me. New generations, from Brooklyn to Nazareth, grow into consciousness of the argument, but the same underlying assumptions remain unquestioned: assumptions of nationalism, of righteousness, of revenge.

But I no longer see the argument in the same light. When I see a young Hamas member talking about how proud he is of the tragic bombing of a bus full of Israelis in Tel Aviv, I remember Yaakov talking about his responsibility to kill Arabs; when I see a Jewish West Bank settler defending the fanatic mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein, I see Frank, lying in bed, in trauma. George Orwell wrote somewhere that all of his writing, no matter how personal the story, is always political. Yaakov taught me that no matter how political things seem, they’re invariably personal. I see that for the Hamas member, the West Bank Settler, and my old friend Yaakov, politics are not, as they believe, purely moral commitments to the cause of right, but answers to personal needs: needs for personal meaning, perhaps, or for righteousness — needs for identity. The Hamas member has been raised through a lifetime of what can only seem to him castrating political and cultural oppression; threatening his masculinity, imposing poverty and marginality. The West Bank settler lives in a world he imagines is out to destroy him and his birthright; he’s haunted by the specter of the Holocaust, unable to rise above the threat to his personal safety he sees around him. And Yaakov, born guilty and oppressed by his personal history, finds his meaning in religious observance and the desire to kill. Everything is personal, and yet Yaakov and his religious kind, working in what Amos Oz so correctly describes as a powerful alliance with the ultra-orthodox and nationalistic Muslims of Hamas and Islamic Holy War, may well undo the Oslo Accords and the Rabin-Arafat peace process.

And Yaakov, who justifies murder with a religious myopia that, in turn, conceals personal trauma, fails to see that he of all people — he with his legacy of guilt and reparation — has made a travesty of the Holocaust and withdrawn any possibility of meaning from the brutal torture and extermination of millions of Jews during the Third Reich: he trivializes their memory, he makes transcendence hopeless. Perhaps the heroic Rabin, Peres, and Arafat will effect some meaningful change in Israel, if they’re not undone by the world’s great scourge, identical in Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike: fundamentalism. And certainly the great suffering and political complication of the Mideast cannot be simplified. But in the end, I come back again and again to a quote I discovered a few years ago in the mouth of Patrick O’Brian’s Dr. Stephen Maturin:

I have such a sickening of men in masses and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. . . . And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have — for what they are — are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.

I don’t know where Yaakov is now. I remember him often: his stories of his youth in a small town in Germany; the details of our lives as roommates; the utter absorption with which he mastered Hebrew and studied the violin. I think often of the way he comforted me after I had been disappointed in an infatuation, his faithful empathy and affectionate understanding. But when I think back to the friend I had, that year in Jerusalem, I must also think of the brittle, harsh ideologue I met years later in New York, a man who had by then killed for his religious and nationalistic beliefs, and then I feel the great and unheroic truth of Maturin’s words.

thanks for that

Yes.

Oct 29 (Reuters) - Thousands of Gaza residents broke into U.N. warehouses on Sunday, grabbing flour and other essential items in a sign they had reached "breaking point", the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said.

One of the warehouses, located in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, is where UNRWA stores supplies delivered by humanitarian convoys crossing into Gaza from Egypt.

Footage from Khan Younis in southern Gaza showed men frantically carrying boxes and large bags out of a warehouse, hoisting them onto their shoulders or loading them onto their bicycles.

...Touma said UNRWA had been forced to reduce the scale of its humanitarian operation in the densely populated enclave because it could not distribute fuel to some medical facilities. She said UNRWA had not received any additional supplies on Sunday.

"Those supplies are very, very little and they don't correspond to the huge needs on the ground," she said.

"We are asking for a standard and regular flow of humanitarian supplies, including fuel, and an increase in the number of trucks on these convoys."

UNRWA has said its ability to help people in Gaza has been completely stretched by air strikes that have killed dozens of its staff and restricted the movement of supplies.

"Fifty-nine colleagues at UNRWA were killed during the war," Touma said.

"This is only the number that UNRWA was able to verify and confirm. Sadly, the number of colleagues who have been killed could be in fact higher. We have also reports of people who are stuck under the rubble."

Even before the conflict, the organisation had said its operations were being jeopardised due to a lack of funding.

Established in 1949 following the first Arab-Israeli war, UNRWA provides public services including schools, healthcare and humanitarian aid in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

An Israeli website called Mekomit has leaked internal documents from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence that recommend a plan to permanently evacuate the population of Gaza into Sinai for permanent resettlement.

These docs were circulating on Twitter as evidence of a plan for ethnic cleansing. They are terrifying, but it’s worth noting that the author of the piece accompanying the publication of these papers has noted that these documents form a recommendation from the Ministry, not an actual directive.

I cannot read Hebrew, but translated the article from the site with Google Translate:

https://www-mekomit-co-il.translate.goog/המסמך-המלא-של-משרד-המודיעין-כיבוש-עזה-ו/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter) concludes in a video investigation that Reuters photographer Issam Abdallah and other journalists were deliberately targeted by the Israeli military while reporting in southern Lebanon https://t.co/hjDirz2rQS pic.twitter.com/jRxz7MU3TS

— Mohamad Bazzi (@BazziNYU) October 29, 2023

we are witnessing a second Nakba and at least in much of the west, our leaders are actively supporting it with our tax dollars. unconscionable and sickening only begin to describe it.

Didn't know that term, but now I see what you mean:

JERUSALEM (AP) — In Israel’s call for the evacuation of half of Gaza’s population, many Palestinians fear a repeat of the most traumatic event in their tortured history, their mass exodus from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.

Palestinians refer to it as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” An estimated 700,000 Palestinians, a majority of the prewar population, fled or were expelled from what is now Israel in the months before and during the war, in which Jewish fighters fended off an attack by several Arab states.

fled or were expelled

Spoke to @BBCNews earlier today pic.twitter.com/8EDiVtQzZP

— Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) October 29, 2023

I mean, anyone who believed in “International Law” applying to western countries before is also delusional, but the doublespeak from leaders is especially egregious right now.

BREAKING: The Israeli army bombs Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank after storming it and clashing with Palestinian resistance. pic.twitter.com/DGIgVifGB2

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) October 30, 2023

Feels like Israel knows this is its last shot given shifts in public opinion in liberal democracies.

Maybe they don't and shouldn't worry about that?

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https://www.ft.com/content/2723dc90-b3f3-407b-b111-08e350df284d

Hours after the escalation, the UN General Assembly adopted a Jordanian resolution calling for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” and demanding all parties comply with international humanitarian law.

The resolution passed by 120 to 14, with 45 countries abstaining, including the UK. The US was among the members that voted against the resolution.

John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said the US was not setting any “red lines” for Israel, even as Washington would express its concerns over the Israeli military’s “approach” to the conflict.

....More than 1.4mn people have been displaced and 641,000 are sheltering in UN-designated emergency facilities, according to UNRWA.

Oops, sorry FT!

The divide between public opinion and governments on this issue will continue to expand. Meanwhile, the dead will continue to pile up. Just seeing the numbers donated by the pro-Israel lobby to US Senators is enough to dissuade any reasonable person from thinking the official US position will ever change.

This book Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is pretty good on the Nakba I think and is existence shows that there are some people in Israel who are aware of this as part of the state's history. NOt sure what other books are as good on the subject or if there are others that are better. JUst that it is written by a non Zionist Israeli historian.
I picked it up in a charity shop a couple of years ago so it just happens to be the history book I have. If i is a biased book in any way it is still pretty scathing about the behaviour of those setting up the state.

Pappe is a controversial figure, mostly because he doesn’t justify the Nakba in the name of the creation of the Jewish state. Many of the New Historians (like Pappe) essentially agree on the facts— it is the interpretation and moralization of those facts that is disputed.

Good read: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-intelligence-hamas-attack.html

This book Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is pretty good on the Nakba I think and is existence shows that there are some people in Israel who are aware of this as part of the state's history. NOt sure what other books are as good on the subject or if there are others that are better. JUst that it is written by a non Zionist Israeli historian.
I picked it up in a charity shop a couple of years ago so it just happens to be the history book I have. If i is a biased book in any way it is still pretty scathing about the behaviour of those setting up the state.

― Stevo, Monday, October 30, 2023 7:10 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Benny Morris is probably the most credited Israeli historian on these things that is not anti-Zionist. His work is regularly cited by the Palestinian movement even though he would probably not call himself a friend of the movement. I don't know Pappe's work that well, I hear his name a lot in other people's work but I haven't read him. Every bit of historical scholarship written on the conflict seems to be politicized in some way, to the point that it has helped me realize how much you can find ideology and politics underpinning almost any work of history (except much more is immediately at stake here).

Benny Morris is an anti-Arab racist who once said “Ben-Gurion should have carried out a complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”. not a lot of credibility.

bibi now says “this is a time for war”

that asking for a cease fire is the same as asking israel “to surrender to terrorism”

compares 7 oct to 9/11 and pearl harbor

how many more children do they have to kill before terrorism is defeated

they’ll keep going until morale improves i guess

They don’t care. It’s simply a continuation of what the Israeli government has wanted to do since its founding.

the comparisons are just so disingenuous, hard to see who is buying them. i guess they’re aimed at “public opinion” outside the region

If it hasn’t been linked before, Verso books has relevant e-books available for free at the moment:

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading

-Ten Myths About Israel
by Ilan Pappe

-Palestine Speaks
Edited by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek

-Blaming the Victims
Contributions by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, G.W. Bowersock, Noam Chomsky, Norman G. Finkelstein, Muhammad Hallaj, Rashid Khalidi, Peretz Kidron and Elia Zureik
Edited by Christopher Hitchens and Edward W. Said

-The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Contributions by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Merav Amir, Hind Awwad, Mustafa Barghouthi, Omar Barghouti, Dalit Baum, Joel Beinin, John Berger, Angela Davis, Nada Elia, Marc H. Ellis, Noura Erakat, Neve Gordon, Ran Greenstein, Ronald Kasrils, Jamal Khader, Naomi Klein, Paul Laverty, Mark LeVine, David Lloyd, Ken Loach, Haneen Maikey, Rebecca O'Brien, Ilan Pappe, Jonathan Pollak, Laura Pulido, Lisa Taraki, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Michael Warschawski and Slavoj Žižek
Edited by Audrea Lim

-The Punishment of Gaza
by Gideon Levy

the comparisons are just so disingenuous, hard to see who is buying them. i guess they’re aimed at “public opinion” outside the region

― Tracer Hand, Monday, October 30, 2023 1:46 PM (twelve minutes ago)

yeah I just read this on the NYT live blog:

Asked whether Israel was exacting collective punishment on Palestinians, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel was doing what it could to reduce harm to civilians. But he said that no one told the Allied powers during World War II to stop targeting Germany because of the human toll of its bombing raids. “You didn’t tell the Allies, ’Don’t stamp out Nazism because of such tragic consequences,” he said.

They've been doing this since Day 1, I saw Naftali Bennett say nobody complained when Allies bombed Dresden to dust and I thought, do you really want to go there? Plus this ploy of constantly reiterating the phrase Hamas/ISIS and claiming Western civilization is at stake - I don't think anyone believes that, least of all themselves.

these are not statements to be believed nor are they pitched at ears to listen, they are simple conformations of intent couched in the softest material, its losing case defence attorney bad faith process following

Another book recommendation: Rashid Khalidi’s The hundred years’ war on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917-2017

xpost People love bad political/historical comparisons though. I remember when every attempt to negotiate anything was exactly like Chamberlain appeasing Hitler.

when you look back at europe’s neverending centuries of war you get this exact same revulsion and outrage at armies who accomplished their objectives much more quickly than expected and then lost their heads, raping, murdering, really becoming infernal animals, and great store being put by certain generals who seemingly had the combination of gentlemanliness and iron discipline to limit their troops to the clear military goals of the siege or relief etc. I mean i am really struck by the similarities.

and then as now you had great differences of opinion about exactly how savage different armies were depending on the who was telling it. and great disputes about it.

my conclusion if there is one is that any violent conflict will result in this sort of claim and counterclaim of savagery, most of it probably true

and the idea that it’s confined to one “uncivilized” side is propaganda as old as war itself

xpost People love bad political/historical comparisons though. I remember when every attempt to negotiate anything was exactly like Chamberlain appeasing Hitler.

No need to try too hard to remember it's been used dozens of time during the Ukraine/Russia war

I love how Europe has decided that the people they recently tried to exterminate are now the true bearers of their civilisation in the holy land vs the evil Saracens who inherently represent the exact opposite (in spite of history, present)- it's not hard to know who the bad guys are in this framing and I'm sure the familiarity is appealing

apparently Unicef estimates more than 400 children are killed or injured in Gaza every day. every day.

Citations Needed is doing a livestream ep this evening at 9:30 ET to go over the recent American media coverage. From their list:

Citations Needed Live Stream tonight 9:30pm ET on the building momentum demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and the counter-propaganda against this movement, from deliberately ambiguous calls for a "humanitarian pause" to the torrent of "terror tunnel" articles.

We will post live link when we go on at 9:30pmET, but youtube page can be followed here ->

http://www.youtube.com/@citationsneeded

report from Oct. 30 WSJ--I photocopied some of it from print at the library, but the whole thing is worth a look:

Palestinian Death Toll Remains a Question
By Yaroslav Trofimov, Margherita Stancati and Abu Bakr Bashir

...The Gaza-based Palestinian Health Ministry said Saturday that the death toll has topped 7,703, including 1,863 women and 3,195 children, information it says is based on data compiled by hospitals. The United Nations, which verified and documented previous deaths in in previous conflicts in Gaza, says it is unable to do so now because of the sheer scope of violence.
Some U.N. officials, however, say the real number of casualties is likely significantly higher because the health ministry’s tally doesn’t include people still under the rubble.
...The White House said Thursday it doesn’t dispute that several thousands of Palestinians have been killed...but said that thousands among them were Hamas combatants. Neither the U.S. nor Israel have their own tally or a way to independently count the casualties in Gaza.
...In the other two large wars since Hamas seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, however, the overall numbers of the Ministry of Health largely aligned with statistics compiled by the U.N. and Israel. The Palestinian toll for the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2014 was 2,310 people according to the Ministry of Health, 2,251 people according to the U.N. and 2,125 people according to an Israeli government investigation.
Despite Hamas’s political control in Gaza, many of the doctors and bureaucrats compiling the statistics are not affiliated with the Isalmist movement and the past accuracy of casualty statistics gives credence to current numbers, some officials with the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations say.
“We believe that the numbers being reported in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis but they grossly reflect death and injury on both sides of the conflict,” Michael Ryan of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergency Program said at a recent news conference.
The Gaza Ministry of Health numbers don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. But the ministry’s current statistics indicate a much higher proportion of women and children among the fatalities of the continuing Israel bombing campaign than in the 2008-2009 and the 2014 wars.
...In response to U.S. questioning, Gaza health authorities on Thursday released the names of the 6,747 dead whose identity healthcare workers were able to confirm. A further 281 people remained unidentified at the time of the report’s release and were buried in mass graves.
...Doctors and residents of Gaza say the current Israeli bombing campaign, with as many as 400 strikes a day, is by far more intense than anything the Palestinian enclave experienced in the past–-one explanation for the much higher proportion of women and children among the casualties.
...Hospitals in Gaza contacted by the Wall Street Journal confirmed they have received thousands of corpses and said that children account for a large proportion….
–-Suha Ma’ayeh contributed to this article.

More Palestinian casualties added, also this seems to be current:

...More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, most of them civilians who died in the Hamas rampage on 7 October. In addition, 240 hostages were taken from Israel into Gaza by the militant group.

Israel is really losing the narrative on this one.

An article looking at the current crisis through the lens of poets Bseiso and Darwish, as well as a choice bit from Said at the essay's end:
https://www.publicbooks.org/our-siege-is-long/?fbclid=IwAR2vH_NtUucJIjpKfxlyfVtLfbeEkXc6MKGw4M5MF1IulugaEn5wvSGo6kA