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

that is a really important thread, I've thought a lot about the irony of these peace activists' deaths being used to justify a campaign they would have despised

hope this link works:

https://nitter.net/purplechrain/status/1724195704568979911#m

my mom told me a couple weeks ago that she'd heard that the Canadian embassy thought Vivian Silver was dead, but I was hoping there was a chance that was wrong. hope her sons can find some measure of solace.

xps thank you, and I'm glad people have posted that. I especially feel awful for her family for what they've been going through in light of the struggles they had in getting help, much less answers.

FWIW, I mentioned this in passing in another thread, but a friend of mine was killed in the Middle East. He was a journalist, but he was very much a man of peace - he cared deeply for the people he was covering and did everything he could to help them. He was killed by terrorists, and more than once, some asshole would use his death to do the same mendacious bullshit of promoting a hateful ideology of destruction. The way he died changes nothing - he understood the risks of his job, and more importantly what terrorists did and did not represent. And his family understood that even when they pleaded to him not to continue his line of work. There's no greater credit to that than his mother, who not only dedicates her life to a greater cause but demanded that her son's killers be prosecuted without the death penalty (a unanimous request that was made by all family members involved in that case), and that request was honored.

I've thought about him a lot over the past few weeks in relation to Silver, and it's also been very unsettling seeing how a few acquaintances have angrily defended the bombings without ever engaging the reality that so many civilians, doctors, and children have been murdered in the process. I never believed in revenge but I opposed it with the stipulation that everyone grieves differently, that I'd accept someone's need for vengeance as valid and beyond my understanding, but honestly I've become really skeptical of that. In reality, vengeance isn't anything more than a perversion of justice, warped by anger.

my condolences, birdistheword

Thanks Alfred

my sentiments too, re condolences and what you've come to believe about vengeance (how many revenge-objects' last thoughts are "O now I see the error of my ways!")

Netenyahu claims that some evacuations have taken place
100 babies, the last I heard---how will they re-connect with their parents---?
― dow, Sunday, November 12, 2023

Also "tried" to deliver fuel, said rep

Thanks dow. And you're right about that - I can't guarantee a murderer will ever truly see the wrong they've done, but I'd rather they have the rest of their life to think about that and the bear the consequences it's brought.

*and bear

Yes.

Although removing them from public would be good too, incl. public office, not President 4 Life working from cellblock, as may happen yet somewhere.

Hah, yes absolutely.

FWIW, three individuals were involved in my friend's death - two were eventually brought to trial but the first was killed in a drone strike. These men weren't going to stop, they were clearly going to continue what they were doing, so it was a very real relief knowing that came to an end. There was definitely no joy on my part when the first man was killed - I don't even recall feeling good or bad about it either way because it did nothing to remove the sense of loss we all were still feeling.

One thing that experience brought to mind was the day bin Laden died. I remember the news broke on a weekday afternoon because I was in the office. A local news affiliate interviewed a grief counselor in their studio because he lost a brother in the WTC collapse. First thing he noted was seeing people celebrating in the streets because he couldn't understand how people could celebrate a person's death even if it was bin Laden. IIRC that sight was triggering for him. He had to pull himself together a few times, and he mentioned that the sense of loss was still there even though it had almost been ten years. Everything he said made an impression, and I got to understand it firsthand years later.

I remember when the US killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, the next day the Toronto Sun ran the image of their bloodied dead faces on the front page with the caption “WE GOT THEM” and I saw it and immediately vomited in the gutter

Condolences, birdistheword

My condolences, birdistheword.

Nearly everyday I see a tweet about one journalist being killed in this conflict

Very few people in the British press are marking, much less mourning, fallen journalists.

Arab journalists don't count obviously.

Everyone concerned with Israel/Palestine should listen to the simple truths @AyOdeh said in the Knesset this evening. pic.twitter.com/6rIjv4HYkz

— Nimrod Flaschenberg (@Nimrod_Flash) November 13, 2023

Yair Wallach
@YairWallach
·
5h
Danny Danon, former Ambassador to the UN (Likud, coalition), and Ram Ben Barak, former deputy head of Mossad (Yesh Atid, opposition) demand that the world help Israel expel Palestinians from Gaza by accepting them as refugees. Monstrous, brazen, stupid.

---

Also do you know what refugee discourse is like in the West?

Odeh's long statement (auto-translated from Hebrew on Twitter, hope this is roughly right). "Seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians are not going anywhere." Yes there are people in many political camps who like to fantasize about expulsion, but I think Odeh is right about this central fact of the matter.

*****

I'm not sober. Neither from the vision of peace nor from the path of the Jewish-Arab partnership. Read my articles in Israel ⬇️

https://haaretz.co.il/opinions/2023-11-12/ty-article-opinion/.premium/0000018b-c30b-d03e-a3ab-c3bfc9c70000

In the last month I hear more than once about people who "got sober". After the horrific massacre of the residents of the south of the country and the war that followed, one must have a calculator in hand and have an iron heart to calculate without tears the number of victims, the enormous loss of human life, hopes and dreams in Hebrew and Arabic that evaporated in an instant. It is difficult, very difficult, to escape the growing calls of people who now see reality "as it is", and "understand" - finally - who are the "Arabs" who live here in the area. They explain - some of them still in a hesitant voice - that all this talk about "peace" and "justice" may be appropriate for the gentiles in Europe, but not for us, the Jews, who live our lives in the Middle East.

These "disillusioned" already know that the idea that we have been fighting for for many years is not realistic. They "disillusioned" themselves, and now announce: two states - bad, and please, please, let us have a discussion about the future during the war. Then we will discuss "the day after". Meanwhile, Gaza is burning, and to hell with that word "peace".

I am unable to disillusion myself with the possibility of establishing peace. very far from it. Even after October 7, my belief did not change that the two-state solution is not only the solution with the most solid foundation of justice, the most humane, but also the only realistic solution. I repeat and remind my friends, Jews and Palestinians alike, that anyone who thinks that the suffering of a Gazan child is not different, even by one gram, from the suffering of a child in a kibbutz in the Gaza Strip must shout on every street corner: two states, this is the only solution. We have no more time to waste.

It is important for my Jewish friends to point out that the group of Jewish "disillusioned" from last month joins a large group of Palestinian "disillusioned" (in Israel and abroad), who have been claiming for many years that the occupation will never end and that the composition of the current government and its policies are another example of the intergovernmental conflict management policy for generations. Indeed yes, they also call me to "disenchant" myself from my illusions about the end of the occupation and the division of the land. Really, how is it possible not to be "disillusioned" by the illusion of a possible common life, when a minister in the government is mulling over whether it is worth dropping an atomic bomb on my people in Gaza?

But I refuse to be disillusioned with the dream of life together. I am not sober even though I read in Benny Morris's book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949", how hundreds of thousands of my people were forcibly deported during the Nakba; I do not become disillusioned even when I look at the photos of Haifa, my city, after '48, and see how the houses of its Arab residents were looted and completely destroyed so that they would not return there (read about this in the book by the historian Adam Raz, "The Looting of Arab Property"). I am not disillusioned even when I read how they destroyed and burned fields and orchards to prevent Palestinians from returning to their villages. I refuse to become disillusioned even after visiting places where war crimes and massacres were committed against Palestinians over the years.

I refused to be disillusioned even when I was present at the events of the last memorial day on October 29 for the Kfar Qassem massacre, and when I read in detail in Raz's book, "Kfar Qassem Massacre a Political Biography", what was hidden behind the massacre. I refuse to become sober when I talk to refugees who were expelled in the 1967 war from homes where they lived for generations, to which their return was forbidden; I still refuse to be sober when I meet the victims of the first and also the second intifada, which claimed thousands of victims.

I refuse to be disillusioned even though I have learned about the attempts to poison water wells in Arab villages (see the study by Bnei Kader and Morris, published last year), about the rape of Palestinian women (such as the "Nirim affair"), about the policy of opening fire that few give justice to, and The policy of not trying soldiers for many war crimes committed. I refuse to be disillusioned when I see the actions of the Israeli government in the occupied territories: how it seizes land, natural resources, how it abuses the helpless Palestinians, how it allows the settlers to do whatever they want, and the list, unfortunately, goes on.

I did not sober up even in the face of the long-term siege on Gaza, even after four wars in which thousands of Gazans were killed, and even when I heard that the United Nations declared that Gaza would not be habitable until the year 2020 due to a shameful lack of adequate humanitarian conditions. Three years later, I still refuse to sober up.

Not only am I not "sober", I am also not comparing. There is no point in comparing wrongdoing to wrongdoing. And this is because every blood price, whether Palestinian or Israeli, piles up and adds up and increases the common price that both nations pay to the gods of war. The pain of a disaster of a Gazan family that was buried under their residential building is intertwined with the pain of a disaster of a young family that was murdered in the Gaza Strip. The dreams that evaporated are the same dreams, and we, Palestinians and Israelis, who are left to count our dead, are sinking into the pit of bereavement, and the exit from it is not in sight.

The "disenchantment" means giving up. Giving up the simple dream of a normative life, where politics is only a small part of the citizens' lives, and does not occupy any good part of their daily lives. A normative life, meaning a life where the most important milestones are a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, a school graduation party or graduation. A life where the days of mourning are few. If we become "disillusioned" with the vision of a normative life, what will be said to our child when he asks when the war will end? When will he go back to school? When will he go back to playing soccer with the other kids in the neighborhood? When will his mother stop crying?

Seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians are not going anywhere. The destinies of the two peoples are intertwined, and we have no choice but to find a solution where the two peoples can live a normal life here, side by side. We must understand that there is no other way but the way of peace. This is the real disillusionment.

Ayman Odeh OTM. Honestly I think if there is any hope for a solution, the Israeli Arab parties might make good mediators.

This was good:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/podcasts/the-daily/hamas-israel.html?rref=vanity

Great piece. Thank you for posting.

Yeah, that was informative, thanks. (And wild that the phrase "militant Voltron" can just be casually dropped into conversation.)

Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده
@RamAbdu
Israel’s army released a photo of one of its soldiers talking to Bashir Hajji, a 79-year-old resident of Gaza City's Zaytoun neighborhood, as he travelled on Salah al-Din Road, the main route to the southern Gaza Valley. The soldier in the photo appears to be helping and protecting displaced Palestinian civilians, said Euro-Med Monitor, yet Hajji was subjected to a field execution on the morning of Friday 10 November

I was kind of gratified to see an Israeli relative reposting this from Peace Now (translated). She has been extremely upset by the attack and I think mostly focused on that and on how much she hates Bibi and his cabinet.

Our new report published today reveals:
Hundreds of thousands of IDF soldiers that protect us in the north and south have been forced to deal with an additional front since 7/10 - settlers that forcefully set the bank on fire.

For the crucial majority of Israelis, the last month was terrible that we knew since the establishment of the state. But there are those who have paid the terrible grief is actually an opportunity.

A new report we're publishing today shows how violent settlers in the hills are exploiting the security chaos to realize their corrupt fantasies. In most cases they are supported by the settler leadership - from the roaring silence to distributing weapons in the hills.

The Khanist rebels take advantage of the transfer of IDF's resources to fight Hamas in order to burn the territories and do not apply measures: expelling Palestinian communities from their territories, breaking roads to new detention centers and damaging IDF activity - all of these with increasing violence - which has already led to the murders of farmers.

The settler terrorism has two main goals: the seizure of land across the bank and the igniting of another war front from the East - both serve the super-messian goal of a dictatorship that went between the Jordan and the Sea and risking any possibility of a political solution.

I heard from an Israeli friend (living in the Bay Area now) that the worst West Bank settlers are mostly American-born, from Brooklyn and the like (in his opinion)... which really bums me out

I’m skeptical that it’s most, but I think it’s a significant percentage. I found a stat that it was 15% in 2015.

Heyyy, you're in the hospital! So now you'll stop bombing it, right?
Meanwhile:

...The army said it captured the legislature, the Hamas police headquarters and a compound housing Hamas’ military intelligence headquarters. The buildings are powerful symbols, but their strategic value was unclear. Hamas fighters are believed to be in underground bunkers.

For days, the Israeli army has encircled the hospital. Hundreds of patients, staff and displaced people were trapped inside, with supplies dwindling and no electricity to run incubators and other lifesaving equipment. After days without refrigeration, morgue staff on Tuesday dug a mass grave in the yard for more than 120 bodies, officials said.

Elsewhere, the Palestinian Red Crescent said Tuesday it had evacuated patients, doctors and displaced families from another Gaza City hospital, Al-Quds.

Israel has vowed to end Hamas rule in Gaza after the militants’ Oct. 7 attack into Israel in which they killed some 1,200 people and took roughly 240 hostages. The Israeli government has acknowledged it doesn’t know what it will do with the territory after Hamas’ defeat.

The Israeli onslaught — one of the most intense bombardments so far this century — has been disastrous for Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians.

More than 11,200 people, two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. About 2,700 people have been reported missing. The ministry’s count does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.

Almost the entire population of Gaza has squeezed into the southern two-thirds of the tiny territory, where conditions have been deteriorating even as bombardment there continues. About 200,000 fled the north in recent days, the U.N. said Tuesday, though tens of thousands are believed to remain.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said Tuesday that its fuel storage facility in Gaza was empty and that it would soon end relief operations, including bringing limited supplies of food and medicine in from Egypt for more than 600,000 people sheltering in schools and other facilities in the south.

On CNN this morning, an IDF rep gave correspondent Nic Robertson a guided tour of Hamas nerve center in hospital basedment: "rusty guns," sez Nic (a little pile), also a plastic chair said to evidence of hostage (NYTimes describes this area or one like it in a couple of videos shown to press: the very detailed article is marked Open Access for readers, in Chrome news app anyway, but won't let non-subscribing me link)

I heard from an Israeli friend (living in the Bay Area now) that the worst West Bank settlers are mostly American-born, from Brooklyn and the like (in his opinion)... which really bums me out

It has been noticed in the past...

15% is the figure I saw as well. Wonder what other countries make up the numbers.

Maha Hussaini
@MahaGaza
There are currently only 3 bakeries providing bread for the over 2 million residents across the #Gaza Strip.

Many bakeries have been targeted by Israeli airstrikes and the rest closed their doors due to the lack of fuel, electricity, wheat flour, and water

Wonder what other countries make up the numbers.

Russia and to a lesser extent other former Soviet states I presume, though I'm not sure to what extent

(xps) I could be, because they speak English, they're the ones you tend to see being interviewed.

I think there's also relatively significant movement from France to Israel in recent years, albeit not on same scaled as from ex Soviet states

On CNN this morning, an IDF rep gave correspondent Nic Robertson a guided tour of Hamas nerve center in hospital basedment: "rusty guns," sez Nic (a little pile), also a plastic chair said to evidence of hostage (NYTimes describes this area or one like it in a couple of videos shown to press: the very detailed article is marked Open Access for readers, in Chrome news app anyway, but won't let non-subscribing me link)

so are they doing these 4 hour humanitarian pauses or no?

“We will pause Nakba 2 for four hours every day”

15% is the figure I saw as well. Wonder what other countries make up the numbers.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 15 November 2023 08:24 (six hours ago) link

Well some % are Israeli born or born in settlements I assume.

There are also older “settlements” that have basically just become cities and towns, and people move there for cheaper housing rather than religious motivations, although you won’t find many liberal to left people doing that.

(it’s as implausible as it sounds)

"Evidence Points to Israeli Shells in Strikes on Gaza’s Largest Hospital:
Israel said Palestinian militants had misfired projectiles, but an analysis of photos and videos of Friday’s strikes shows that some of the munitions were likely fired by Israeli forces."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-al-shifa-hospital.html

Israeli occupation forces raise their fascist flag over Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Congratulations on ‘conquering’ a hospital full of the sick, dead and injured, full of premature babies on the cusp of death, congrats sick fucks. pic.twitter.com/rmXYZTmGvC

— Jennine (@jennineak) November 15, 2023

for a hospital on top of a Military base they sure were able to take it pretty easily

...U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths, also speaking in Geneva, implored Israel on Wednesday to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza via the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel. Aid is currently being allowed into Gaza via the Rafah crossing from Egypt but it was designed for pedestrians, not trucks.
Israel has so far rejected calls for a ceasefire, which it says would benefit Hamas, a position backed by Washington. But a pause in fighting has been discussed in negotiations mediated by Qatar to release some of the hostages held by Hamas.

An official briefed on the negotiations said Qatari mediators were seeking a deal that would include a three-day truce, with Hamas releasing 50 of its captives and Israel to release some women and minors from among its security detainees.

The official said Hamas had agreed to the outlines of the deal but Israel had not and was still negotiating terms.

...Dr Ahmed El Mohallalati, a surgeon, told Reuters by phone on Wednesday morning that staff had hid as the fighting unfolded around the hospital overnight. As he spoke, the sound of what he described as "continuous shooting from the tanks" could be heard in the background.

"One of the big tanks entered within the hospital from the eastern main gate, and... they just parked in the front of the hospital emergency department," he said.

The Israelis had told the hospital administration in advance that they planned to enter, he said. By mid-morning, he and other staff had yet to receive instructions from the troops, although the soldiers were "metres away" from them.

After five days during which he said the hospital had come under repeated Israeli attack, it was a relief at least to have reached an "end point", with troops now inside the grounds instead of outside shooting in, Mohallalati said.

The discourse around the hospital is so depressing. Even if IDF is correct and fighters were in the basement... so what? That makes civilians fair game, so it "doesn't count" as an evil thing?

It reminds me of reading contemporary reporting about the Vietnam War, when civilians deaths would be waved away by U.S. officials because "we didn't mean to" or "it wasn't intentional"--as though it was the intention that mattered, not the end result. As though it should make a different to some mother whether her children had been napalmed by design or by accident.

It's pretty appalling. I haven't responded but read all the support posted by a few acquaintances I have who have been extremely vocal about this, and it basically comes down to 1) we're trying to protect ourselves - are we supposed to NOT bomb them and give them a better chance to regroup and kill more of us? 2) if you have a problem with the civilian deaths, it's on Hamas, not us i.e. they're the ones who created this situation. What's appalling isn't the possibility of Hamas embedding themselves in the hospital - it's not a tactic I'd ever deny - it's how they've gone all-in into this deranged, nihilistic belief that it's better to indiscriminately kill over ten thousand lives in Gaza.

Orson Welles once famously delivered a powerful monologue as Clarence Darrow in which he says "if our state is not kinder, more human, more considerate, more intelligent than the mad act of these [sick individuals], then I'm sorry that I've lived so long," and the sentiment couldn't be more apt.

@MustafaBarghou1
The mother of all scandals
The Israeli channel 13 : Huge Israeli intelligence failure. Contrary to the Israeli army allegations There is no indication that there are any military installations in Al shifa hospital

this some WMD type BS

No fuckin way

It reminds me of reading contemporary reporting about the Vietnam War, when civilians deaths would be waved away by U.S. officials because "we didn't mean to" or "it wasn't intentional"

You don't have to go back to Vietnam for this.

WMD BS is an apt comparison too. Reading the "should we wait for them to attack us?" defense of the incessant bombings from one acquaintance was literally word-for-word what some asshole berated at me in 2003 when in my politically disengaged youth I was merely on the fence on whether or not we should initiate a war.