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

The difficulty I feel in discussing anti-Semitism is simply this: I feel there is no greater threat to Jewish identity and Jewish safety than the actions of Netanyahu these past three weeks, than the continued status-quo existence of the two-states of Israel and Palestine; and this attitude was learned from a Jewish friend twenty years ago, himself the grandson of one of the founders of Israel, whose grandfather would later go on to feel the same way. Zionism puts Jews in danger, and this is (in part) why I oppose it.

(In part) because I am at present currently unable to sympathize with any parties in the region but those who are not even considered belligerents, that is Israeli hostages, that is Palestinian civilians; the latter are newly considered belligerents by the increasingly insane rhetoric I’m hearing from Israeli cabinet members, and talking heads in mainstream media.

I have seen critics of Israel compare the state to France-occupied Algeria, or Belgium-occupied Congo; I would argue that this situation is worse, for Israelis, because they only have foreign funding; they do not have a “homeland” to return to. Zionism is awful: and yet, it could have a positive outcome? Considering the extreme treatment of Jews in neighbouring Arab states, in North Africa, that it could be a safe haven for Jewish emigrants? And it already is? Except for the safety, because of the apartheid, because non-Jewish Israelis are not granted the same rights, which— along with being an affront to those people— endangers Jewish Israeli people, as well.

My heart broke when I read Josh’s post about his anxiety of “the end of Judaism”, because I also have this fear. I fear this may be the outcome of Netanyahu’s continued aggression. I fear this may be the outcome of the annexation of Gaza. That even in a “best case scenario”, as far as the state of Israel is concerned, specifically to its current government, that the opinion shifts far enough that the UN and EU and USA give a rubber stamp to like, fine, annex these places, that the resultant state of Israel will be an extremely dangerous place. Not a safe space for Jewish people. That the resultant global opinion of “Jews”— because of the resolute insistence that “Israel is a Jewish state”, despite so many Jews disagreeing that Israel’s actions have any positive effect on the Jewish diaspora, and in fact (as I believe) have a profoundly negative one— the global opinion of Jews will suffer extremely.

To be clear, if you felicity are desiring assurance here: if hundreds of Jews were being killed daily by bombardment from any nation, even if it was my nation, I would be just as vociferous and unbalanced as these past three weeks has seen me be.

I am not desiring your assurance about anything other than I want to be able to discuss antisemitism in North America - like I would want to talk about restrictions on abortion or hate crimes against Asian Americans - without you getting infuriated.

Oh! I was under the impression you respected me as much as I respected you, but if that’s the victory you desire, it’s yours and easily given

Sorry? I don't really understand what you are accusing me of here.

In case I worded it poorly, I totally respect your right to be angry about what is happening in Gaza and appreciate all your contributions here.

The part I was a little uneasy about was why taking about hate crimes directed at Jewish people in the US separately from that would make you infuriated. As if it's not the proper priority of things? Maybe I misinterpreted something.

Still unable to digest the fact that Israeli snipers were purposefully targeting children in the ICU of a hospital today. Looking through the sight and pulling the trigger, again and again and again. pic.twitter.com/n9Sx67XJP9

— Ben Ehrenreich (@BenEhrenreich) November 10, 2023

Anadolu English
@anadoluagency
·
2h
#BREAKING 39 babies have died in intensive care unit at Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital due to lack of oxygen: Palestinian health minister

This was corrected by the director of the hospital; 1 of the babies has died as of right now, though they remain in peril.

Between the iron dome and IDF and increased security and scrutiny, how likely is it that Hamas can immediately repeat Oct 7th? If a ceasefire is met with Hamas continuing to send rockets, which get shot down, and don't warrant the response of the killing of thousands of innocent people, maybe that's a naive high road to take, but seems like a better idea to me.

― dan selzer, Saturday, 11 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

It needs continuous financial and logistical support over many decades by governments other than Israel. Israel also needs a highly competent series of governments to keep watching over for Palestinian activity.

The attacks by Hamas -- after a lot of rhetoric about what a high end tech, militarised state it is -- have shown this to be a lot of hot air. Look at the two decades, a lot of money that propped the Afghan governments and how quickly that disintegrated once the US left?

The Israeli public have propped up Netanyahu's political career for two decades but as reports have come out one thing he isn't is a competent prison guard. It explains the reaction which is to annex Gaza, keep taking the West Bank, and disregard the hostages.

What the protests and continuous conversation of this issue across the West and the world are showing is that, at some point, pro-Israeli politicians in the West will face the end of their careers. Certainly my hope is that the calculus will change over time to Israel being treated like Apartheid-era South Africa. Pressure and boycotts from the outside with Israel being forced to reconfigure.

xp - ok, fair enough.

thanks for your posts fgti

Bio: "Israeli Government Spokesman🇮🇱 Former International Media Advisor to the President of Israel. Oxbridge grad, IDF vet. Keep Calm and Am Yisrael Chai"

@Eylon Levy
Hamas wants everyone in the hospital above the Shifa Terror Compound to die. Israel is going bananas urging them to leave already so they can live.

What don’t you understand

What the protests and continuous conversation of this issue across the West and the world are showing is that, at some point, pro-Israeli politicians in the West will face the end of their careers. Certainly my hope is that the calculus will change over time to Israel being treated like Apartheid-era South Africa. Pressure and boycotts from the outside with Israel being forced to reconfigure.

even if this doesn't happen immediately in response to the current war, there is a real generational shift in most of the west on the issue and i think it will eventually have an actual political impact yeah. though that's ignoring the scenarios where democracy in the usa completely collapses which is not really something that can be ruled out.

hardcore zionists like netanyahu and his cronies benefit from increasingly hostile attitudes towards jews abroad. in their view, the worse things are for jews in the diaspora, the more appealing israel looks as a safe haven

i would understand this logic more if israel didn’t rely so heavily on the united states: if the u.s. ever loses its appetite for funding israel, whether due to antisemitism in the government ranks, or simply because israel becomes too extreme themselves, the jig is up.

the only hope for israel in the long run is real peace—not “normalization” of relations with neighbors, but the end of occupation and apartheid.

These settlers need to be stopped.

"What are the borders of that Jewish nation?

The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest. [This would include the territory of multiple Middle Eastern countries as well as the territory that Israel controls today.]"

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers

worth remembering that the Likud Party manifesto includes its own "river to the sea" statement: "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty".

the only hope for israel in the long run is real peace—not “normalization” of relations with neighbors, but the end of occupation and apartheid.

I think that point is debatable considering Saudi Arabia and Israel were on the verge of normalising relations before all this happened.

People think peace is some nice sweet gentle thing. It’s not. Most often you’re going to find yourself shaking hands with people who’ve terrorised your ancestors and family, but it’s done to end violence and is a greater ideal than almost any others we have for exactly that reason. You just can’t shy away from what it demands, that’s all.

it's almost like the founding of the state of Israel was a dirty trick on the jewish population "hey leave Europe, go over...here, where absolutely none of your neighbors is going to tolerate you"

Oh yeah and Israel has nuclear weapons, forgot to mention that.

I think that point is debatable considering Saudi Arabia and Israel were on the verge of normalising relations before all this happened.

People think peace is some nice sweet gentle thing. It’s not. Most often you’re going to find yourself shaking hands with people who’ve terrorised your ancestors and family, but it’s done to end violence and is a greater ideal than almost any others we have for exactly that reason. You just can’t shy away from what it demands, that’s all.

There’s a passage in Beowulf about that…but it’s kind of about the inherent instability of it. Because at any moment the conquered who are old enough to remember the last violent incursion will see the gold embellishment their leader wore on the head of the rival leader and it will all come rushing back.

Killing everyone who remembers the last time is one way of circumventing that problem though

In Beowulf, that moment of memory leads the rememberers to burn their supposedly now peaceful coexisting tribe’s king’s castle

truth and reconciliation is a model but Israel and Palestine are not there

I’ve thought about this a lot because my family is from Kashmir. A huge part of why I feel fellow feeling with Palestinians.

It’s the relatively powerless who are coerced into forgiving and forgetting or just told what happened didn’t happen

@ voodoo chili, this was noted by Hannah Arendt decades ago:

In the words of a well-known Zionist in a letter to me discussing the original Zionist argumentation: ‘The antisemites want to get rid of the Jews, the Jewish State wants to receive them, a perfect match.’

@ felicity, I feel frustrated and sad that my posts are being felt as a personal accusation, they are not intended as such. The frustration I feel regarding discussions of "anti-Semitism" at this point in time are entirely informed by the changing definition of "what is anti-Semitic?" in other sources of media, as it broadens to cover "anyone who expresses criticism of the Israeli state" to "anyone who expresses sympathy toward Palestinians" to "anyone who seeks to document what is going on in Gaza": The Jerusalem Post's very-cute editor writing insane op-eds that would attempt to strip anti-Zionist Jews of their Jewish identity, calling them "non-Jews"; Columbia U shutting down pro-peace Jewish groups like JVP (and another, it slips my mind, but it happened yesterday); the continued portrayal of anti-war pro-Palestine protests in the right-wing American and Canadian media as being "hateful" and "racist".

Considering the number of individuals who have lost jobs, lost work, lost opportunities, been subject to harassment, for expressing even a "like" that opposed this Palestinian genocide-in-progress, considering that accusations of anti-Semitism are being used increasingly to silence those who oppose it, it does make me feel like debates about "what is anti-Semitic" are a smokescreen for filibustering, whether it's discussions about Rivkah or JVP or "whether it is appropriate to share n+1 articles on Facebook" (which I did, and realised that a lot of people would have a problem with it). And filibustering serves Netanyahu, as the bodies pile up, the buildings get destroyed, and annexation becomes increasingly like 'what is going to happen, here'. This is my frustration about these discussions; it's not that I'm not sympathetic, it's that it is happening broadly across the world as an attempt to silence and discredit those who oppose the bombardment of Gaza.

truth and reconciliation is a model but Israel and Palestine are not there

Although the optimist in me wants to disagree, I think you're right.

It’s the relatively powerless who are coerced into forgiving and forgetting or just told what happened didn’t happen

I read a quote recently, but it was late, and I forget the source. The quote, paraphrased: "I forgive my oppressors over and over, but my oppressor will never forgive me."

Horseshoe, thank you for posting, though increasingly I feel, like you, that posting about this issue online is a mistake.

I am Irish and I totally feel where you’re coming from. We still have the UK government this very year legalising atrocities, including the murder of children, that happened in living memory and making government reports of said atrocities undisclosable for decades. So I get it. I say it not to lean on the weak side - not at all, not remotely - but because I pretty strongly believe that the deaths have to stop. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight atm.

People upthread are aghast at the notion that violence creates terrorism, that people might respond to violence with violence, but of course it does and of course they do. There are so many documented cases of this. Maybe you need to be from a background where people were oppressed by an occupying force to fully understand that. Bloody Sunday was a better recruitment tool for the IRA than anything they could have done themselves. Most peace processes don’t end in truth and reconciliation - you know how strong the Hindutva movement is in India and how scary it is. I’m not denying any of those problems, just that the end has to be an end to the deaths, and the success of any peace process is how that’s done too. You have to give people alternatives.

<3 gyac thank you for that post. Maybe weirdly essentialist to say, but Irish leaders and regular people speaking with clarity about Gaza have been a source of reassurance for me in the past month. Also, perhaps more trivially, the first time I saw the first episode of Derry Girls and the British army boards the bus the girls are on and everyone barely reacts, I was like, this is Kashmir.

Back at you! I grew up south of the border though have friends and family up there or from there but the one time as a child I went over the border, we had armed soldiers board our school tour bus and go through our bags and examine the £ we had brought with us. It was so scary, and when I saw that scene as an adult, it really made me think of how normal that shit was for my friends and family up there.

Great posts recently. I want to say more when I’m not on my phone, but thank you horseshoe, gyac, fgti et al

People upthread are aghast at the notion that violence creates terrorism, that people might respond to violence with violence, but of course it does and of course they do.

Thanks for saying this, gyac.

Yeah that’s my cue to exit this thread. I didn’t say that for you to agree with, especially in the light of my earlier posts.

Fwiw I appreciated the rest of that post, too. I know you'll tell me to fuck off, perhaps deservedly from some perspectives, but oh well.

Yonatan Touval
@Yonatan_Touval
#BREAKING: Israeli cabinet told that up to 1,700,000 Gazans (out of a total population of 2.2 million) are no longer able to live in their own homes, either because they've been displaced or because their homes have been destroyed/damaged.

Almost there!

You can just feel Israel getting safer every day

The thing is they are displaced within Gaza. There isn't anywhere else for them to go. I don't even see how this achieves any sort of "ethnic cleansing" goal, and yet the destruction is so great there will be nothing for them to go back to for a long time. Contrary to any fantasy the Israeli right may have, I don't think Egypt would let them resettle in Sinai even if some of the displaced people wanted to, and I doubt there is the infrastructure for it either. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm wrong, and the plan is even more diabolical than I see, but it feels to me like there is no real, workable plan -- and that's a special kind of horror.

Well, there doesn't seem to be any real plan, but I'm sure cramming 2 million people into an even smaller space, and occupying and re-settling NOrthern Gaza will suit some elements in the Israeli government just fine. Just a tweak or two to the Iron Dome and it'll be perfect.

I really don’t think they are going to reoccupy and resettle Gaza anytime soon.

Avi Dichter, current Minister of Agriculture, former Internal Security director, gave an interview today on Israeli TV and said, apparently, “this is what we are rolling out now. Nakba Gaza 2023.”

going to need a source for that (not that I disbelieve it, but would like to see it myself)

Best I can do without linking to Twitter:

https://mobile-mako-co-il.translate.goog/news-military/6361323ddea5a810/Article-0a35938daafbb81026.htm?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

that's weird I get a "can't link to this website" message from that link

twitter embeds are fine. its links to giant threads on twitter that are an issue (IMO).

For any Hebrew speakers...

"We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba," says Avi Dichter, Israel's Minister for Agriculture and former head of Shin Bet.

pic.twitter.com/idUA5lnnmP

— Hanno Hauenstein (@hahauenstein) November 11, 2023

fuck

oh man

I didn't know who he was but apparently he has a history of invoking this idea.

I'm at a loss right now. I'm sorry.

Similar but vaguer statements from Netanyahu in a press conf today, refuses to cede Gaza to PA

https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/benjamin-netanyahu/article-772829

Not sure why anyone would be surprised by this tbh.

There is not going to be an expulsion from Gaza, Dichter is full of shit, what a time for Israel to have a government of buffoons, maniacs, and crooks