Israel/Palestine post 10/7 - follow-on events/thoughts as relate to other countries

I have been seeing the odd report of AS attacks across Europe now, like this one.

A Moldovan couple arrested for allegedly spray-painting Stars of David on a Paris school last week reportedly told investigators they were acting on orders from an “individual in Russia.”https://t.co/VvJOmmoCAh

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 2, 2023

in the larger world, the anti-semitism is probably largely being driven by people who care less about the plight of the Palestinian people and care more about being anti-semitic, and seeing an opportunity for an opening to be a bit more free with their bigotry.

"zionist jews" now trending on twitter, that's that shit i don't like

Caitlyn Jenner's dead name is also trending there today, which says it all

sorry meant to post on the "is this anti-semitism?" thread

I thought this was pretty good:

You are criticizing Israel wrong. Here’s how to do it correctly. pic.twitter.com/DiwBTJOuiG

— Matt Lieb?? (@mattlieb) October 28, 2023

nice to finally see a video of Van Horn Street

in the larger world, the anti-semitism is probably largely being driven by people who care less about the plight of the Palestinian people and care more about being anti-semitic, and seeing an opportunity for an opening to be a bit more free with their bigotry.

― omar little, Thursday, November 2, 2023 12:29 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is upsetting me a lot right now. I know it sounds naïve but I was genuinely surprised at how fast people seized the opportunity to be flat out anti-Semitic. I grew up spending 1/2 the year in a mostly Jewish community in NY where I as a gentile was often the odd one out. 3 of my 5 lifelong close friends are Jewish. I said to one of them yesterday that I think I grew up in this little bubble were I didn't realize how much anti-semitism there still was out there and he was like yeah no shit you're from NY. Anyway - there are a million upsetting things (upsetting isn't anywhere near strong enough) happening right now but I have been thinking a lot about exactly this, OL. :/

it's not good. i have a friend who was indulging in some "deep thoughts" about judaism around the time kanye was on one about jewish people, and i had an instagram convo w/him re: a couple of his posts. i don't know that i reached him, but i tried. another friend (no longer a friend) started to get very alt-right and was an associate of ow3n b3njamin for awhile, a podcast comedian type guy who started to get into some anti-semitic and racist stuff a few years ago. that particular friend is long gone. he was at my wedding. he probably helped hold me up high in my chair during the hora. he just wound up being a particularly "bad actor" in life. and a pernicious influence on others.

i live in a bubble in Los Angeles obv, but shit does happen here. threats against synagogues, anti-semitic graffiti on a famous local deli last night, etc...

the Poetry Foundation shelved a 3500-word review of a poetry book that discusses the book's criticisms of Israel...the poet author of the book is, of course, Jewish, and so is the reviewer.

The donor pocketbook is where artistic freedom hits a wall

This is where stuff like "It would be insensitive to publish this book about Soviet dissidents at this time" leads to.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

yeah that is obviously ridiculous

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive)

Reflexive censorship of art always seems to crop up when wars begin and wartime propaganda cranks up the red hot rhetoric. Even as recently as the invasion of Ukraine there were ridiculous people calling for cancellation of symphonies by Russian composers as a sign of solidarity with Ukrainians.

O rly

If a HAMAS sympathizer or a HAMAS-adjacent amateur lone wolf carries out a gun attack in the USA killing more than 10 people in the name is Palestine … this poll will flip like a flapjack. https://t.co/NkWdyaliV7

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) November 2, 2023

and if my granny had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. I like the specificity of ten or more people, it shows a vigorous imagination.

Reflexive censorship of art always seems to crop up when wars begin and wartime propaganda cranks up the red hot rhetoric. Even as recently as the invasion of Ukraine there were ridiculous people calling for cancellation of symphonies by Russian composers as a sign of solidarity with Ukrainians.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, November 2, 2023 1:41 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
My kid’s teacher canceled their Russia unit. Like I really don’t think it matters to Ukrainian lives whether our kids are learning about faberge eggs and Baryshnikov

re: that poll.. I'm not really sure that Israel needs much military support anyway... they're a major arms manufacturer/exporter, inventors of the Uzi submachine gun. And they seemed to have no issues selling arms to South Africa's white minority government

and yet the House just approved 14.5 billion in aide to Israel for some reason

$4 billion for the Iron Dome, which kind of seems like locking the gate after the dog gets out.

Wake Forest professor resigns after backlash due to tweet

https://journalnow.com/news/local/wake-professor-resigns-following-backlash-of-social-media-post-on-israeli-hamas-war/article_4e1022a4-78ea-11ee-a828-ffa8e334019a.html

(She’s a really good poet, fwiw!)

14.5 billion in aide to Israel for some reason

er, mm, by long tradition all those billions can only be spent on armaments produced by US-based death merchants military-industrial complex manufacturers.

And lots of defence contracting

Protests are being planned for Armistice Day. Looks like the match will be lit on the tiniest pretence

"They died for your freedom, but don't you dare think about exercising it." https://t.co/xyCICKV35j

— James B (@piercepenniless) November 3, 2023

Clare Hymer
@ClareHymer
HAPPENING NOW: Another peaceful sit-in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, this time at Kings Cross Station.

the only additional freedoms that came because of GB participation in the world wars was the bankrupting and partial destruction of an evil global empire and the resultant decline arguably sped up the process of decolonisation that followed. "Protect our freedoms" my fucking arsehole, it was a warfare state that forced conscripts onto the battlefield, which is the absolute opposite of freedom.

David Adler
@davidrkadler
New bill in the French 🇫🇷 Senate : 'An insult committed against the State of Israel is punishable by two years of imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.'

I don't even want to paste in what Germany are doing, just utterly disgusting

Belgian transport workers saved the lives of thousands of Jews in the 1940s by unlocking the doors of trains headed for the extermination camps. Now, they're refusing to load weapons onto ships headed to Israel. This is a meaningful & timeless solidarity with humanity. pic.twitter.com/kvcUMcnJd7

— Amro Ali (@_amroali) November 3, 2023

Wokeness run amok

Scoop: Blinken told Israeli war cabinet humanitarian pause will buy Israel time for Gaza operation. My story on @axioshttps://t.co/PkpZ8vrk5H

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) November 4, 2023

Sorry, I blocked the Nazi social media website but it seems as if somebody is accusing Biden in being “complicit” in Palestinian massacre? What a concept

Quite an interesting set of remarks by this father (terrible headline), on his daughter's who have torn up those Israeli hostage fliers.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/03/news/father-of-aya-and-dana-bakaret-who-tore-israeli-posters-insists-they-are-good-girls/

“What happened in Manhattan with my daughters, I believe them. The lady provoke them, stole from their hand a picture of the baby and told her ‘this is going to keep happening to you as long as you support these people.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2023/11/04/nyt-jazmine-hughes-resigns/

Central London blocked. Charing Cross station occupied.

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Georgie Robertson
@_GeorgieBlaise
·
2h
🚨 HAPPENING NOW: huge sit in at Charring Cross station. Police have closed every entrance so hundreds more outside can’t join us. #CeasefireForGazaNOW #FreePalestine

The New York Times
@nytimes
Jazmine Hughes, an award-winning New York Times Magazine staff writer, resigned from the publication on Friday after she signed a letter that voiced support for Palestinians and protested Israel’s siege in Gaza.

These new twitter links are hella annoying

psa for all you can paste x links into ilx and then just erase the x in the url and type in twitter and the tweet will embed like the old days

There are issues with tweets embeds as outlined here.

Is this anti-semitism?

While that's to do with threads and not individual tweets I am trying to just link tweets as it makes some people mad that I am just linking to twitter at all (I am not going to stop, though I am having a go at defusing the issue).

But right now I think we're past that, because a lot of the messaging that causes people to link together Israel and The Jews In General is coming direct from Israel and pro-Israel Jewish groups, on purpose, with no concern for how they are setting up Jews around the world for a rise in antisemitism. The corollary to "Israel = The Jews; if you are anti-Israel you are anti-Semitic" is "If Israel does something you have to take a stance against, then you may as well embrace antisemitism in general." And right now Israel is committing atrocities and the world is not going to forgive the Jews for that. It's been 2000 years and people are still saying "The Jews killed Jesus" - how long will "The Jews carried out an ethnic cleansing" be used as a weapon against the world's Jewish population? I was talking to my dad about this, and he pointed out that an explosion in global antisemitism means more Jews seeing Israel as the only safe place to live, which means more settlers, which is what Netanyahu wants, so why would he care about the safety of Jews worldwide?

I don't mean this to suggest that I'm looking at this whole conflict through the lens of "Is this good for the Jews?" My primary concern is for Gaza. But when I do take a moment to look through that lens, it is undoubtedly very bad for the Jews.

― Lily Dale, Sunday, 5 November 2023 17:11 (six hours ago) link

I understand this line of thinking, but will never accept it, it's just excusing antisemitism. No one is saying "well Islamophobia is mainly the fault of Muslim groups that associate Islam with radicalization" Plenty of people are just happy to have an excuse to be antisemitic. Antisemitism quite obviously did not start with the founding of Israel. Whatever Bibi does, it shouldn't change that we don't have to prove we are "one of the good ones" before being afforded basic respect and dignity. I apply the same standard to all groups of people.

Yes, it's sometimes difficult to discuss how it feels to experience this as an American Jewish person without others getting weirdly defensive about the mere suggestion that they may have a slight bias or blind spot.

It feels a bit like being a woman and trying to discuss sexism with someone who gets angry and then mansplains to you how he's one of the good ones.

I find it most discouraging when people try to rationalize by explaining there has always been antisemitism, and surely we need to admit this, as if it's just a natural feature of the landscape that we should just be expected to tolerate.

Luckily, I did not grow up to believe that. I had very idealistic and accepting friends and supportive family. I just tune people out that try to explain my own experience back to me in a negative way. We do not just experience history. We also make it.

man alive, I didn't mean to say that antisemitism was mainly the fault of Israel, or that Israel's messaging is an excuse for antisemitism. I just meant that I think any message that represents Jews as a monolithic group is its own form of antisemitism, and one that I find very dangerous right now.

I think the analogy man alive makes in your previous post is quite a good one. Regardless of whether or not one thinks that all Muslims bear responsibility for the actions of groups who purport that atrocities they commit are in the name of Islam (and, to be clear, this is similarly a horrible and racist idea) it is clear that to do so is common and, based on a quick skim of British newspapers, respectable in many quarters. In this equation I think its pretty clear that there are a range of actors linked by an interest in making Islam and violence synonymous, regardless of the extreme divergence of their motivations. Both are culpable for forging this slanderous connection.

The wholesale commandeering of identities by fringe or conservative elements within them, motivated by deep animus, is common and tends to be enthusiastically embraced by the sensible, measured bigots that populate the opinion columns of the world. I think also of the, often unchallenged, framing of transphobia as the protection of women's or "LGB" rights. The spectacle of swivel-eyed right-wing thugs 'standing up for "LGB" rights' is not a reassuring or comforting development, and I feel a deep but difficult to articulate resonance with the images of the Jewish protesters being arrested in NYC with 'Not in my name' t-shirts. The horror and nauseating feeling of being implicated and used in such a cynical way. It seems especially galling given that apportioning blame for the state of Israel to jewish people everywhere is recognised as a fundamental expression and vector of antisemitism.

Nicholas Courtman
@CourtmanNick
German MP from the liberal party (!) calling for the parliament to eliminate foreigners’ right to organise protests and deny their right to association as a response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, I see

dunno what that ! is about - the liberal party is the FDP, i.e. libertarian cranks, no surprise they'd be into this

Have seen a strong reaction to protests in Germany (and ofc the UK), across the pol class. But yes it's to be seen whether something is ratified in Parliament...just something to keep an eye on.

I could imagine it going through yeah, and it is v scary

wouldn't put it past the german left either tbh

Interesting thread on why the US having no red lines is bad foreign policy.

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Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
·
1h
1. I want to suggest that Biden shouldn't be guided by domestic politics on this but by what is in the foreign policy interest of the USA. Biden is giving de facto unequivocal support (with a few rhetorical cautions) to a massacre. That is bad for America. Period

the thing about this copy paste technique is that there's no way for us to click to the rest of the thread

he admit it

US ambassador to Israel says US no longer pursuing goal of independent Palestinian state

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has said that the US is no longer pursuing the goal of an independent Palestinian state, marking what analysts describe as the most explicit abandonment yet of a cornerstone of US Middle East diplomacy.

Asked during an interview with Bloomberg News if a Palestinian state remains a goal of US policy, he replied: “I don’t think so.”

did he say it with a chuckle? with a grim shake of his head? or was he just confused and uninformed?

mike huckabee is the us ambassador to israel? god help us all

The next step will be to stop using the word 'Gaza' and only refer to it as Trump Mediterranean Golf Resort & Casino

xpost sorry, Mike's God is only going to help 144 thousand of us.

Is he a JW? I don’t think he is, rather he’s one of those Christian Zionists who calls Israel ‘Judea and Samaria’.

xp ...and only the ones who convert to Christianity so good luck babe

Is he a JW?

It's a Left Behind thing too.

Dispensationalist Tim LaHaye, in his commentary Revelation: Illustrated and Made Plain (Zondervan, 1975), considers the 144,000 in Revelation 7 to refer to Jews and those in Revelation 14 to refer to Christians.

Is he a JW? I don’t think he is, rather he’s one of those Christian Zionists who calls Israel ‘Judea and Samaria’.

nailed it

“Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,” Huckabee was quoted as saying. Those probably won’t happen “in our lifetime”, he told the news agency.

When pressed on Palestinian aspirations in the West Bank, where 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, Huckabee employed Israeli government terminology, asking: “Does it have to be in Judea and Samaria?”

the idea is that the nearby predominately-Muslim nations can all chip in a few square miles, donate some idle territory, so that the Israelis aren't inconvenienced by these pesky, needy Palestinians

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/valedictorian-told-to-stay-home-after-making-pro-palestinian-remarks-in-grad-speech-1.5758371

The valedictorian at a west Ottawa high school says she's been told not to come to school Monday after she made pro-Palestinian remarks during a speech at her commencement ceremony.

Elizabeth Yao largely focused on highlights from the past four years at Bell High School during her speech on Thursday, including a memorable waffle fundraiser and the days spent dozing off while reading Shakespeare.

Her comments on the war in Gaza came at the end, after a land acknowledgement.

"As a commitment to truth and reconciliation, I must acknowledge colonial and genocidal atrocities today, including the massacre of more than 17,000 Palestinian children in Gaza," Yao said, breaking off as the crowd cheered.

The next day, Yao said she received a call from her principal, who said her statements had "caused harm" and told her she shouldn't come to school on Monday.

Call me naive at this point, but I am still a little perplexed at how compulsory the consensus on Israel's innocence is, that Israel must be permitted to pursue its murderous imperialism not only without hindrance but without so much as a single comment, trickling down to the absolutely powerless scene of a high school graduation in Canada. Utterly grotesque and immoral of course, but also just fucking bizarre — I'd be genuinely interested to hear of historical parallels.

I think I've mentioned this before, but right now, and in all sorts of areas, it feels like the disconnect between what ordinary people feel and what authorities and media are pushing as the consensus has never been more extreme.

definitely otm

It's so weird to act like it's beyond the pale to criticize another country's government. Especially in the U.S., where that's completely protected free speech, but a lot of people act like it's not. Like, even actual antisemitism is protected by the 1st amendment, never mind critiques of Israel's military campaigns.

I would have thought it went without saying in the US but it seems to have spread to other countries.

Sorry, but this happened in Canada, where politicians have to apologize for attending Kendrick Lamar concerts.

In the UK there are UNICEF TV adverts raising money for children in Gaza, do you get those in the US?

We do have hate speech laws here but that is obviously irrelevant in this case

Xp
Here = Canada

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/24/headlines/danish_shipping_giant_maersk_to_divest_from_firms_linked_to_israeli_settlements

completely protected free speech

You're confused. We used to have that here, but it was abolished in January.

1. Worth revisiting the debate between @ezraklein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about Israel/Palestine because there's a specific factual point that Klein got very wrong which he should apologize for. Klein insisted that unlike Hamas, Netanyahu was not "specifically targeting killing… pic.twitter.com/7D84IEgA9k

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 27, 2025

Saw a video of a "death to the IDF" chant at a Palestine march in Melbourne. Good stuff.

https://news.sky.com/story/british-israeli-soldier-killed-while-fighting-in-gaza-reports-say-13390342

Good on how Gaza is changing US politics. Might be too little too late for this moment. Nevertheless..

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zohran-mamdani-israel-stance-democratic-party-lesson.html

you'd never know it by what the major US national politicians and media outlets say but a lot of normal americans *actually don't like* waking up every day and seeing that israel gunned down 30 more gazans who were trying to get food from an aid station

a nation committing genocide calling the *entire rest of the world* anti-semitic is rendering the term useless for actual anti-semitism, of which there is still plenty -- not least in the trump administration

four months ago ranking democratic senator chuck schumer said his 'job' was to 'keep the left pro-israel'! which is yet another reason he has to go

https://www.ft.com/content/0b1bc761-c572-4b61-882a-fb4467259dcd

I mean..