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

On top of the bragging about being the only democracy in the Middle East, Israeli governments like to present an image of being sleekly professional, efficient and effective in the midst of dreadful chaotic Arab states who couldn't organize the proverbial piss up in a brewery.

I didn't previously have much of an opinion either way on the attempted interference in UK elections thing (kind of presume all states do this to some extent), but it seems less likely now

A thread on the topic of hasbara and its failings as of recent:

https://x.com/MouinRabbani/status/1727948091053977757?s=20

The addendum points out something salient, too, and that is that since the late aughts, Palestinians have been training people to be citizen journalists and broadcast news to the world...so that the hegemony of Israeli narratives has essentially been shattered by social media platforms. This also explains why older people still tend to be more pro-Israel and younger people tend to be more pro-Palestine, I think.

Table

Americans overall continue to side strongly with Israel, but polling shows those views have grown increasingly polarized across party and generation since even before the war. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll earlier this month found 48 percent of Gen Z and millennial adults said Israel’s military response has been “too much,” compared with 38 percent of the public overall. Most young adults disapprove of Biden’s handling of the situation, according to national polls this month by Fox News, Quinnipiac University and Marist College. And a recent poll from NBC News found that 70 percent of voters age 18 to 34 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war.

This is from

https://wapo.st/410Ydis

(Non-paywall gift link)

thanks!

So tired of watching Israeli government spokespeople bullying, browbeating and arguing with interviewers, while mechanically churning out the same buzzwords and set phrases. Not sure what the point of interviewing these people is.

Hamas offering the release of the rest of the hostages for all Palestinian prisoners.

Here are the latest developments in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as the truce deal between Israel and Hamas enters its third day.

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/QSgZrAagUW pic.twitter.com/dJsmQJnEjV

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 26, 2023

https://news.snbc13.com/burlington-shooting-palestinian-students-hisham-awartani-kenan-abdelhamid-and-another-hurt-heavy-police-in-burlington-vermont/

Was about to post that. Awful.

It’s pretty bad when I have to sympathise with a cunt like Leo Varadkar.

Irish citizen Emily Hand was one of the hostages being held by Hamas. She is only six years old. When her father heard she’d been taken hostage and (initially) suspected dead, he said he was so happy she was dead because he feared what would happen to her.

She was released yesterday. Leo Varadkar made a statement about it:

This is the full statement I issued yesterday regarding the release of Emily Hand pic.twitter.com/v6N6bmbbmo

— Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) November 26, 2023

#Breaking The Israeli foreign minister says he has summoned the Irish ambassador in Tel Aviv "for a reprimand" following Taoiseach Leo Varadkar's remarks on the release of Emily Hand https://t.co/P57j6GyMMp

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) November 26, 2023

In response to Mr Varadkar's social media remarks, Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen accused the Taoiseach of "losing his moral compass" and needing "a reality check".

"Emily Hand was not 'lost', she was kidnapped by a terror organization worse than ISIS that murdered her stepmother," he said. He added: "Emily and more than 30 other Israeli children were taken hostage by Hamas, and you Leo Varadkar are trying to legitimize and normalize terror. Shame on you!"

That's so stupid

"his love has been constant" lol ok

Not sure what is “lol ok” about that.

not sure "thank god my daughter is dead" is a constant love but we all show love in different ways

Yeah because he was in the horrors imagining her being tortured and harmed - that’s the context for that remark. Given he didn’t know that he’d ever see her again, it would be better for the child to have died rather than the child to have been tortured during the rest of her life. Didn’t think that would need so much (or any) explaining. I’m not even a parent and I understand what he meant.

we all show love in different ways, don't we

I’d rather my child were dead than raped and tortured for two months. I’m glad you can be so smug about the superiority of the way you prefer people to show love. Get bent.

as a parent i’m saying each of you should stfu

Why are Israel going after...Ireland?!

yeah it's a mystery

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2023/11/09/there-can-be-no-peace-or-security-for-israel-without-justice-for-palestinians-says-varadkar/

worse than ISIS

this is some tim heidecker shit

This is where twitter really comes into its own.

this is actually so insane, does BBC think no one in the world speaks arabic and will be able to tell that they are lying? https://t.co/80wa1P7VUt pic.twitter.com/ccYx2DgMB4

— tara (@taraxrh) November 26, 2023

https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-arrested-shooting-3-students-palestinian-descent-vermont/story?id=105173520

https://heavy.com/news/jason-j-eaton-burlington-vermont/

another one of these people who sounds like they were in a precarious mental situation already and then spent entirely too much time online and went over the deepend.

Cindy McCain on Gaza:

“We are looking at possibly being on the brink of famine. With that comes disease. We need more trucks in, we need to have more access to distribute that aide. Hopefully a longer time to do that, not just four days.”

“It is a massive, catastrophic event… pic.twitter.com/vJMNHaSRIX

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 28, 2023

cindy mccain probably the only human in the mccain clan

Exqueeze me, are you hating on Edwin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qrTmNDZ-nc

i'm not fooled, you can't put a wig on Billy Corgan and get away with it

(in seriousness though, you know it's fucking bad when a McCain of all people says enough is enough)

she's like a director of the world food program it's kinda her job

ton of people whose job it is who are turning a blind eye to what's happening, tbf

not that anybody deserves special credit for doing their job in this case

Never has the university seemed so desolate and despicable. Institutions truly showing their asses.

@Columbia cancelled another #Palestine-focused event, this time one organized by Columbia Global Centers in Amman, Jordan. It was scheduled for this Thursday on "Academic Praxis and the Question of Palestine”. 🧵1/3 pic.twitter.com/DCKFWN4Jn4

— Katherine Franke (@ProfKFranke) November 27, 2023

Worth clicking through, but what it gets at is that Said had bulletproof glass on his offices and faced constant bomb threats throughout his time at Columbia. They've now effectively disavowed him and his scholarship. A real pity.

Thread from Vincent.

Vincent Bevins
@Vinncent
In May, I was invited to give the keynote address at an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Regensburg (Germany) to present my new book. Two days before the talk this month I was informed this invitation had been rescinded, due to pro-Palestine posts on social media

This was his post from October 7th but I feel that this is fine as a response from an outsider. Yair Wallach, who is a reasonable academic whom I follow, disagrees

This was neither smart nor cool https://t.co/0wwJTmO9DE

— Yair Wallach (@YairWallach) November 28, 2023

This was a further caveat

Vincent Bevins
@Vinncent
·
7 Oct
I find the death of any human being deplorable, and I admit I do not really know what is happening on the ground. But as a general principle almost everyone will justify war and violence under certain circumstances. Right now I truly hope for as little human suffering as possible

Bevins is in the right, imho.

YW is right to comment on that, though Bevins seemed to have been reacting to events before details emerged - who knows. He may have left the tweet up for accountability. Either way, he wasn’t just speaking in general terms, he was commenting on a live event, so criticism is deserved because he was not commenting on abstract events.

I am trying to be forgiving of people's in-the-moment reactions. I can even see how maybe, before the extent of the carnage was appreciated, some people might have gotten excited to see bulldozers tearing through the border fence and paragliders sailing over it and the like. The question I keep trying to ask myself is "Am I just using this person's behavior or statements as an excuse to wall myself off emotionally, because it's easier?"

Gyac, this may surprise you but I have actually thought about your comments to these threads a lot recently and they have been helpful to me in hanging onto some sense of humanity and hope.

Seconding appreciation of gyac

gyac as Valued Poster so great as to deserve its own thread IMO

Gyac, this may surprise you but I have actually thought about your comments to these threads a lot recently and they have been helpful to me in hanging onto some sense of humanity and hope.

longtime caller, first time listener (man alive)
Posted: 29 November 2023 at 14:43:09
I am trying to be forgiving of people's in-the-moment reactions. I can even see how maybe, before the extent of the carnage was appreciated, some people might have gotten excited to see bulldozers tearing through the border fence and paragliders sailing over it and the like. The question I keep trying to ask myself is "Am I just using this person's behavior or statements as an excuse to wall myself off emotionally, because it's easier?"

Gyac otm

My dear friend renounced her Israeli citizenship last week and made a video about it that has been making the rounds:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0NbMSkhxlb/?igshid=ZWI2YzEzYmMxYg==

thanks for sharing that FGTI

I often feel very torn between defensive and critical postures because so much completely batshit and covertly antisemitic stuff gets said about Israel and at the same time there is enough actually bad stuff to criticise. E.g. I just saw a college activist claim that the Israeli military killed its own civilians on 10/7 because it has a "doctrine" that it will kill anyone who comes into contact with Hamas. This was an extremely wild telephone game distortion of something called the Hannibal doctrine which actually was just a concept proposed with respect to military hostages and it's not clear it's ever actually been applied (the prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit would suggest otherwise).

Even the tenor of posts on the other thread occasionally veers not quite into conspiracy theory territory but "here is another bad thing said or done by an Israeli" with the implied collective effect of "Israelis are irredeemably bad people."

I appreciated and fully understood everything said by FGTI's friend, and at the same time I think there are *some* aspects of what she said that would be true of any society - the poor have less power than the rich, the poor get the shitty jobs in the military, hierarchy plays a major role in society, there is racism, the nation does not live up to its national mythology, etc. In the context of actual atrocities and her childhood experience, I can see how those other things take on a different significance. I have certainly had the thought cross my mind a bunch of times that I'd like to just never visit Israel again, dissociate myself from it, etc (I don't have citizenship nor have I ever intended to get it). At the same time I retain a certain feeling of "Jews are a small people in the world, and however imperfect, we have to stick together, no one else will come for us if we don't help ourselves." That remains my eternal internal conflict. Today I feel less like dissociating myself and more like advocating for some kind of political solution that will mean that Israel's existence (in some form or other) does not have to require the occupation and domination of another people or the deprivation of their rights. I don't know what it is, and I think whatever it is will have to be imperfect and messy and not a socialist utopia, but at least something with full rights for Palestinians (whether within a single state, two states, a federation, etc.) that doesn't cause so much death and humiliation and doesn't require so much of its youth to serve as an occupation force.

I often feel very torn between defensive and critical postures because so much completely batshit and covertly antisemitic stuff gets said about Israel and at the same time there is enough actually bad stuff to criticise. E.g. I just saw a college activist claim that the Israeli military killed its own civilians on 10/7 because it has a "doctrine" that it will kill anyone who comes into contact with Hamas. This was an extremely wild telephone game distortion of something called the Hannibal doctrine which actually was just a concept proposed with respect to military hostages and it's not clear it's ever actually been applied (the prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit would suggest otherwise).

Your post is thought provoking as well.

The thing is, I am psychically and emotionally attached to Israel in a way I can't fully explain, and that I don't think can be reduced to *only* a rational idea (I could go there if shit hit the fan) or solely to nationalist mythmaking/propaganda, and certainly partially though not solely being married to an Israeli. Like when Israelis are attacked, I feel attacked, and when Israel does something terribly wrong, I feel as though I am responsible for it in some way, to the point that it haunts me day and night. And I'm sure it is partially from generational trauma and partially from the mythology and partially from the role of the idea of Israel (not necessarily the modern nation state, but Israel) in Jewish liturgy and theology that I grew up with, and partially some complex I have about strength, weakness, masculinity and victimhood, and partially fear of death/non-existence. So I don't know how to answer the good question you ask about conflating Israeli, Israelis, and Jews more generally, because I feel this identification with the state I can't let go of, even though it's very much not of a piece with people who attend Israel rallies and wave flags.

Like when Israelis are attacked, I feel attacked, and when Israel does something terribly wrong, I feel as though I am responsible for it in some way, to the point that it haunts me day and night.

Yeah, intellectually of course I know that’s true. I have an obsessive personality. I don’t want to exaggerate either but the current situation is very much haunting me, as though I have an obligation to find an answer.