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

Thanks for sharing that.

On the literary side of things, my dear friend Emily Martin caused a stir at the Brooklyn Rail on Thursday, where she read a new iteration of a poem and prefaced it with a repudiation of the Israeli state’s policies. After months of staff trying to get the Rail to commit to BDS principles, the editor in chief and others on the board have agreed to write in support of these principles because of Emily’s reading— so, while small, poetry can have an impact on peoples’ hearts and minds. Instagram link, but here it is:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0ojqAGOqWC/?igshid=N2ViNmM2MDRjNw==

In many ways, it reflects the open letter that I posted above, with the most salient point being that violence and displacement of an out-group never makes an in-group more safe.

This comment from October is on the TL again after the debacle at the UN. Hard to disagree with.

I've been trying to find the wording of thr draft resolution, as I have read conflicting accounts of whether it includes a demand for release of hostages.

https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15519.doc.htm

I guess my questions here are:

Wasn't there a truce earlier and agreement to let Red Cross visit Hamas hostages? What happened?

Which member of the Security Council introduced this resolution? Is it hypocritical to introduce this resolution under Article 99 and not against Russia for invading Ukraine?

The earlier truce was brought about by diplomatic negotiations. Would it be productive for more neighboring countries to recognize Israel diplomatically as a step for negotiated peace?

I think we know more about how the hostages were treated since Oct. 14. There is a lot of skepticism about how slow the UN were to believe the accounts of sexual violence.

Who is recognised, and who is not recognised?

What accounts of sexual violence, who has bought them up and have they been independently verified?

Many questions, wonder if they'll be answered by the time this genocide ends? Maybe it isn't a genocide of a people?

Lots, lots of questions to look into. No time to lose!

why do we now need lots of independent verification of sexual violence?

Independent verification of sexual violence is nearly impossible in the circumstances. It’s usually wiser to assume any such statistics are underestimated, if anything. In the conflict in the eastern Congo, the percentage of women and children said to have experienced sexual violence from militants is exorbitant.

There is this very good piece today, which takes a broad view of what’s happening and doesn’t pull any punches.

Tapping my own personal sign because I feel like I am always saying this!

History also suggests a pattern in which representatives of movements dismissed as “terrorist” by their adversaries—in South Africa, say, or Ireland—nonetheless appear at the negotiating table when the time comes to seek political solutions. It would be ahistorical to bet against Hamas, or at least some version of the political-ideological current it represents, doing the same if and when a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians is revisited with seriousness.

Lots of questions.

I was responding to xyzzzz saying "hard to disagree with"

My first question was:

Wasn't there a truce earlier and agreement to let Red Cross visit Hamas hostages? What happened?

Questions back are fair. I thought people wanted genocide to end. These comments were on pointing to the UN.

also, I mean, cmon. I feel like there is a concerted effort at times to utterly dismiss the atrocity of Oct 7th from some people (these people being randoms I see on social media, admittedly). You know you can condemn the IDF and Israel's subsequent abhorrent actions in Gaza while also acknowledging the horror of Hamas' attack. The creeping narrative that Oct 7th didn't really happen the way it's said to have happened, that these are lies, etc is extremely disturbing to me, as disturbing as that poll that indicated that 20% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 think the holocaust is fake.

It's perfectly valid to say "fuck Hamas and the IDF". They are death merchants, all of them.

Justice requires evidence. I bring it up because of the way that comment is being deployed here, which is to discredit the UN and that Art. 99 resolution.

Ukraine - Russia comment is nonsense. Ukraine has full backing of the West to defend itself and are being supplied. Ukrainians are a recognised people and a state.

"Justice requires evidence"

why have different standards for sexual violence accusations committed in the west than during wartime actions in the middle east?

also, I mean, cmon. I feel like there is a concerted effort at times to utterly dismiss the atrocity of Oct 7th from some people (these people being randoms I see on social media, admittedly).

No one on ilx denies Oct 7th happened.

No one is asking for different standards.

This is a thread for reaction in the West to 10/7 in other countries. It's very true there is a denialist narrative growing on 10/7. It is of concern because there is also a growing belief (20%) among US young people that the Holocaust did not occur.

You feel you can use also "6 million" in criticizing Germany.

Why is it upsetting to discuss 10/7 denialism here.

thanks, yes, it really bothers me. I mean you can support Palestinians, Gaza, etc without turning a blind eye to Oct 7th and Hamas' actions. I'm gobsmacked. I think that if condemning Hamas gets us closer to ceasefire resolutions (I'm not sure what kind of actual power such UN resolutions have) then it should be done. The violence and killing has to stop. Maybe I'm a naive fucking hippy?

Negotiations happened with Hamas to open the Rafah Crossing to get humanitarian aid to Gaza and to secure the release of hostages and exchange of prisoners.

I don't see anyone needed to be convinced of that.

Why is it upsetting to discuss 10/7 denialism here.

OTM

If it upsets you, post it.

Calling for the death of a group of people of which you are a member sounds horrible.

We keep getting told about this stuff by various ILXors but, if you're not actually on Twitter 24/7, you'll be completely unaware it even exists.

I think its definitely easy to miss if you're not on twitter much, which is why the polling data came as something as a surprise to me

Saw some things about Ireland but didn't think it was my place to bringt it up.

If you want to discuss I think you'll find nothing but sympathy here.

xp but it doesn’t add anything, to me. I know these people are disgusting. I also know they aren’t representative. And I know most of all there’s so much misinformation around that there is no single source we all agree on, for all I know they are radicalised by whatever shit they read online - we don’t exist in the same reality.

When people bring up the UN voting I think reminding people that the UN had a terrible reaction to the sexual assualt on 10/9 is important.

What accounts of sexual violence, who has bought them up and have they been independently verified?

Reminding people that there should not be a double standard for this is part of this.

The reminder is again, serving to discredit a vote on a UN resolution, calling for a ceasefire that would save lives.

All that the Palestinians have is powerless orgs or demos happening in other countries, where they chant "from the river to the sea", which has also been questioned, also serving to undermine that effort

All of which is serving the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli fascist government. Nevertheless it is a state, like Ukraine, which has powerful backing, whether middle eastern countries recognise or not.

there is no single source we all agree on, for all I know they are radicalised by whatever shit they read online - we don’t exist in the same reality.

― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Saturday, December 9, 2023 9:52 AM bookmarkflaglink

This is a good point. Also we shouldn't feel the obligation that everyine has to agree, because then what you get is a group beholden to the most disagreeable member.

Agree with xyzzz's attitude of get the source out there and we can look at it.

Sorry I have been critical of source in the past. And also why early on I said Israel doesn't get to kill a lot of joutnalists and then complaint about slant.

The fact that we can discuss and disagree about source is healthier imo than having no source.

I think that one of the problems here and with this issue in general is that each person has differing loci of attention. Sexual violence is always abhorrent, and should always be condemned. Part of what makes people upset on either “side” of this issue is that it seems as if little attention is being paid to the atrocities being committed by the other “side.” This perception, in turn, leads people to dismiss the claims of atrocity. Because Israel has the backing of much of the”the West,” there is also an asymmetricality in terms of who gets believed and who doesn’t when talking about any kind of violence.

I am not targeting anyone in this thread with the above— just noting a dynamic I have noticed, and have admittedly been party to, of which I am regretful.

Also, it is important to note that there are numerous recent reports of sexual assault by Israeli prison guards against imprisoned Palestinians (see here and here.

These reports are not widely reported or talked about in the US media, from what I have seen, and they absolutely should be in the same way that sexual violence against Israelis is being talked about.

Again, this is not some sort of atrocity or oppression Olympics, but there should be equal treatment and coverage when such awful things occur.

You are right about that table. Hard agree.

The women and children assaulted by Hamas will likely never see justice; even if their rapists are killed, it cannot undo what has been done to them, and I believe some of the victims have attempted suicide. They will live with it the rest of their lives. The details are incredibly upsetting - it is hard to read and think on, because the idea of such harm being inflicted on the innocent with such brutality is just something I can’t conceive of.

I said perhaps in the original thread: blood cannot pay for blood.

The women and children who were assaulted with such viciousness - their suffering is and was abhorrent, it is unjustifiable. Full stop.

Their suffering is not justification for the indiscriminate assault on Palestinian civilians.

These two things are true.

Agreed.

I also agree but it’s a sign of how intractable the discourse on this is that even on these ilx threads — which are in general thoughtful and nuanced — we’re still circling back to those points.

It’s just exhausting and dispiriting. (Not the ilx threads, the whole thing.)

We keep getting told about this stuff by various ILXors but, if you're not actually on Twitter 24/7, you'll be completely unaware it even exists.

I'm on FB and I've never seen any of it. The only person who posts about the current conflict at all is my sister-in-law, who grew up on a kibbutz.

I have East Coast Jewish friends from college, one of whom is a Rabbi. As well as a lot of Leftist friends from here, some of whom are basically sharing propaganda from groups supported by the Iranian government… which makes me just feel like an old hippie saying “Can’t we all just get along and stop the violence?”

Table and I have some of the same Leftist friends tbh

Which gets into the awkward territory of whose Palestinian liberation memes are ok to share and whose aren’t, even if the messages are almost identical?

Brief thread on today's Palestine march.

The doggedness & steadfastness of huge numbers of people coming out week on week - I think we're at six now - for Palestine is quite something & really ought to be recognised.

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) December 9, 2023

which makes me just feel like an old hippie saying “Can’t we all just get along and stop the violence?”

I see sarah and I are turning into the same person

Magill goes down

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/09/penn-president-magill-antisemitism-harvard-mit/

one of the things i've been struggling is that the people who are most actively pushing the most horrific stories of sexual violence on social media were also pushing the extreme stories of atrocities like babies in ovens, beheaded babies, etc - which as far as i can tell were simply false. It all seemed very reminiscent of WWI propaganda about German soldiers killing babies with bayonets, to spread the message that Palestinians are monsters with no regard for human decency. And there seemed to be this sudden media push right as the ceasefire ended and people started seeing the horrors in Gaza filling their feeds again, with the implicit message of "stop talking about what the IDF is doing, you need to focus on the awful things that Hamas did." So I think there's an instinct to react to this with "these are dehumanizing bullshit talking points," but obviously it isn't just that, atrocities did occur, shouldn't be dismissed outright, and Israel's war crimes don't negate the experiences of the victims of Hamas. It feels irresponsible and dangerous to either accept everything at face value or dismiss it as propaganda, and god knows I don't want to spend hours digging through the layers of messaging around horrific stories of sexual violence to decide what to believe. I was sort of reluctant to write anything here because i don't want to come across as saying that victims of horrifying trauma are lying. There's just something really sickening about this pattern of posts about dead Gazan children being responded to with lavishly detailed descriptions of sexual violence against Israeli women.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hamas-rape-israeli-women-oct-7-rcna128221

This appears to be a pretty well-reported article that states:

Over the last several weeks, NBC News has reviewed five interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, an Arabic-language document that instructed Hamas how to pronounce “Take off your pants” in Hebrew, six images of naked or partially naked deceased female bodies, seven eyewitness accounts of sexual violence including both rape and mutilation, 11 testimonies of first responders, and two accounts from workers in morgues who handled the bodies of women after they were recovered from the massacre.

Frankly, deriding the accounts as "lavishly detailed descriptions of sexual violence against Israeli women" is gross, but I'm not here to yell at people, and overall your post wasn't unreasonable. The fog of war is very powerful in a situation like 10/7, and it takes a long time to sort it all out, to the extent it even can be sorted out. People misinterpret what they see, there are telephone games, and there can be exaggerators or fibbers even in an otherwise true scenario. But the implication that Israel is busy fabricating some elaborate web of false rape evidence (which I don't think you are saying), I just don't buy that.

"40 beheaded babies" was disavowed fairly early on, but continues to be invoked primarily by those seeking to discredit other 10/7 atrocities against Israelis. You're not going to get much direct testimony from rape victims right now - it's common for the victim to be killed in this situation (and that's exactly what eyewitnesses claimed in some cases), and any surviving victims are likely to be heavily traumatized and afraid to speak, especially so soon after the event. The day of the attack, police and rescue services were stretched way too thin to do the kind of normal evidence collection one might do in the case of a suspected rape. Many of the bodies were mangled or burned. Like when people say "where are the rape kits" or "where are the victim testimonies" I assume they either have no comprehension of the nature of the events that day, or are being disingenuous, or just don't want to believe that the glorious resistance that they support would do such a thing, the same way many pro-Israeli people go into denial about Israeli atrocities.

This is a delicate subject to discuss, because I don't want atrocities against Israelis to be used as an excuse for or distraction from atrocities against Palestinians, but I don't think that's the only reason people are still talking about them -- this just happened two months ago, and the aftermath is still being untangled. I obviously caveat this with the fact that Gazans have it even worse right now, but entire communities were destroyed on 10/7, people lost multiple family members and friends in one day, lost their homes, etc. Over 100 hostages are still in Gaza. It's normal and human that people who experienced it are still reeling from this and still talking about it.

Making my way through this.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-hamas-used-sexual-violence-on-october-7th

I've been excoriated for posting Salaita before, but I think it is important to keep up with his thoughts, as he is a Palestinian-American, an academic whose job was rescinded for his politics on Palestine, and a great polemicist— it is a genre of writing that isn't taken seriously by many people in this day and age, and with good reason in many cases, but I think he is one of the best even when I quibble with some of his turns of phrase.

Warning that there is a fair number of uses of the word Zionist in the article, linked here and excerpted below:

What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from all corners of the world?

...

More than anything, it tells us that in the benighted West there is no democracy, no free speech, no legislative remedy, no human rights, no right even to be human. These are illusions people repeat in an effort to survive pervasive depravity, or myths they cynically invoke to gather the crumbs of deprivation. There is a ruling class and various iterations of the dispossessed and the dispossessed exist only to serve ruling class gluttony.

That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal devices without being able to stop it. We are not simply ineffectual in the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their depravity.

What can we do, then? It’s important to start by recognizing that the entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of empathy or relief. Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence.

I also am moving through this Edward Said essay from the LRB nearly 40 years ago— how little has changed.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n03/edward-said/permission-to-narrate

Read the first of what you shared, it was brilliant and terrible to read, thank you for sharing it. Reading the second one now

Thanks for that, Table. And don't apologise for bringing the language used. It was part of his work.

I saw a clip of Said talking the other day. Didn't ever read him as I was coming across "Orientalism" through a literature lense so kept putting that off.

Might watch this video lecture later:

https://vimeo.com/887954478

Bipartisanship isn’t dead!

https://x.com/govkathyhochul/status/1733529147912155425?s=46&t=z1egexpHAtHcPPxgbp4Hrw

"Ignoring these developments also assumes that all information on TikTok is bad, self-generated and highly manipulable garbage. The reality is that news reports about Gaza from mainstream media are frequently clipped and circulated on TikTok, extending their window of relevance and consumption. Over the past few days the most-watched clip on CNN’s TikTok account, which has more than 3 million followers, is one of its news anchor Jake Tapper taking Mark Regev, senior adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, to task over the killing of the family of one of CNN’s producers in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes. On the Guardian’s TikTok account, the most-watched video of the past six weeks, with more than 7m views, is of a protester interrupting the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and calling for a ceasefire"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/11/tiktok-social-media-young-people-moral-panic

I saw a clip of Said talking the other day. Didn't ever read him as I was coming across "Orientalism" through a literature lense so kept putting that off.

― xyzzzz__

I recommend him, especially his memoir and general writing on Palestine.

infuriating

In the past few days:
- The UN said half of Gaza is starving
- WaPo found that the IDF used U.S.-supplied white phosphorus in Lebanon
- U.S. bypassed Congress to sell tank munitions to the IDF

Meanwhile, this is the homepage of the New York Times. Journalistic malpractice. pic.twitter.com/K4ney15pc9

— Jeremy Slevin (@jeremyslevin) December 11, 2023

This is where twitter and tik too come in and amplify the things that aren't making it to the front pages.