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

…And cancelling all US funding to the largest humanitarian org in Gaza because Israel falsely accused a bunch of its workers of taking part in the October 7 attacks.

good ideas all, but not nearly as effective as leaking measured private criticism to sympathetic media outlets

“i’m a good person”

…And cancelling all US funding to the largest humanitarian org in Gaza because Israel falsely accused a bunch of its workers of taking part in the October 7 attacks

has this been proven one way or the other? I lost track of this story.

No evidence given by Israel, head of UNRWA admits so:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/09/head-of-unwra-says-he-followed-reverse-due-process-in-sacking-accused-gaza-staff

has anyone even tried to deny the story of 6yo hind rajab's family being killed, and then the paramedics who thought they'd been given an ok to rescue her being killed, and then she herself being killed

my bad; they were all simply 'found dead'

In Gaza right now more people than in San Francisco and Kansas City combined have been driven from their homes to seek refuge in a city so small it only has a clinic, not a full hospital. Israel is dropping our bombs on its tents

— Max Fox (@mxwfx) February 12, 2024

LeMonde posted a string of portraits among the 28'000 allegedly killed. Among them a 12-year old named Dunia who lost her leg and her family in a bombing, had time to be filmed and speak to the press, before being killed in another bombing three weeks later. This is next to a girl of three who died in a refugee camp, a young woman 14 who wanted to be a famous violinist, people of all age and trades.

As if public opinion and outcry mattered, but at least stories are starting to be told for those who have eyes to see

hey it's long thread so forgive me if this has been asked and answered, but what's a good, reputable organization that's giving humanitarian aid, food, etc to gaza?

you just hear so many things about how some orgs just do general fundraising on the back of big world tragedies and i want to avoid that

thank you

here is what I did:
https://palestinesolidaritycompilation.bandcamp.com/album/palestine-solidarity-compilation

I personally donated to the PCRF but I believe this is a solid list below

27 new tracks, demos and covers from your favorite and new favorite bands. All songs are previously unreleased. In solidarity with Palestine, forever and ever.

!!! PLEASE DON'T BUY THE DIGITAL ALBUM HERE !!!
Because of some temporary tax issues, payment from this account to MAP is blocked by BC. We are trying to resolve the issue at the moment. In the meantime, please follow these steps to buy the album.

1. Donate the amount directly to UNRWA, PCRF, PRCS, ANERA, MAP, PYM etc.
2. E-mail the donation receipt to gd4palest✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧
3. Get a Bandcamp download code in return
4. Use the code to add the album to your library and download

It's fine to donate, but remember that not a lot of it will get in. Zionist Israelis are holding demonstrations— last night they held a rave— preventing aid from getting in.

one that I donated to and recommended earlier is anera.org

they've only ever been focused on helping victims or war in the region, and they are transparent about their daily activities:

https://www.anera.org/blog/gaza-and-west-bank-response-log/

honestly hard for me to even process how sick and barbaric Israeli civilians blockading humanitarian aid is

seems extremely under-reported by the North American media too, this is the only times piece I could find about it and it's about how Israel is "stepping up efforts" to stop the "protesters"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-aid-kerem-shalom.html

The goons at Kerem Shalom are not going to stop the IDF from doing as it pleases.

thanks for the recommendations

anera looks good

jfc

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/10/gaza-aid-blockade-protest-kerem-shalom/

Israeli minister blocking flour Bibi promised Biden would be allowed into Gaza: https://www.axios.com/2024/02/13/israel-gaza-flour-shipment

imagine what the UNRWA could do with all that flour, chilling

The teens, and a smattering of people in their 20s, have come from all over Israel. They say that humanitarian aid to Gaza helps Hamas, and they’ll block it even if it means innocents starve.

Ben Shabat argues sugar and flour can be used to make bombs. “When you mix flour with potassium nitrate you get an explosive for a warhead,” he says. “Every pound of sugar and flour that goes into Gaza from Israel, we will get it back by the way of a rocket that will kill our children.”

The tactic is also about starvation. “When a soldier is hungry, he’s not fighting so well.”

And the children? “Nobody can say children are bad,” he says. But “the children from the past were murdering and raping and kidnapping” on Oct. 7.

Others say the aid isn’t even necessary.

“We heard they are giving them stuff that they don’t really, really need,” Attar says. “Like strawberries. I don’t think people there are crying for strawberries.”

I hadn't read the WaPo story before posting, fucking hell

would the official diplomatic world reaction be any different if israel were using tactical nukes

Young Israelis sounding awfully Hitler Youth there, tbrh.

That’s what happens when you build a ethno-fascist state based on subjugation of another group of people

I keep thinking about how Jewish tradition includes all these rituals dedicated to reminding Jews of their traumatic history, when they were oppressed, killed, driven out of their homes, thousands of years ago. Every year, even non-observant Jews will tell the Haggadah etc. I can't help thinking that what's happening now is similarly traumatic and existential for Palestinians. That if they survive as a people at all, they will be telling stories about this time, in ritualised form perhaps, for hundreds of years. Or thousands.

Well, they already have that, the Nakba, or "ongoing Nakba" as it was already updated in the late 90s. Maybe the "ongoing, intensifying Nakba" now ? :(

Yeah you're right, I mean it's a continuum I guess

Haunting post from Mohammad Elhelo, one of only 2 journalists left in Khan Younis, posted as Israeli occupation forces storm the besieged Nasser hospital amid reports of executions and the order for thousands to evacuate.

“Forgive us and pray for us. Remember us fondly.” pic.twitter.com/RWgND5Dlf8

— Laila Al-Arian (@LailaAlarian) February 14, 2024

Netanyahu Jr. partying down in Florida

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13076037/Benjamin-Netanyahu-son-Yair-Florida-apartment-Israel-war-Hamas-Gaza.html

I keep thinking about how Jewish tradition includes all these rituals dedicated to reminding Jews of their traumatic history, when they were oppressed, killed, driven out of their homes, thousands of years ago. Every year, even non-observant Jews will tell the Haggadah etc. I can't help thinking that what's happening now is similarly traumatic and existential for Palestinians. That if they survive as a people at all, they will be telling stories about this time, in ritualised form perhaps, for hundreds of years. Or thousands.

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, February 14, 2024 4:18 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

IMO this is why Israel is so dedicated to denying and/or destroying Palestinian identity, betting that if they keep killing Palestinians and destroying their homes, they will have to leave and mix into the populations of other countries.

a diaspora, if you will

sure, but a lot of ethnic groups have been displaced, genocided, etc. over the past few thousand years, and I'm not sure how many have held on to a collective identity in diaspora.

I mean maybe but I don't think this reversal thing really works. It doesn't explain why Israel vacated Gaza in 2005 or accounts for Egyptian and Jordanian occupation of regions previously considered disputed.

sure, but a lot of ethnic groups have been displaced, genocided, etc. over the past few thousand years, and I'm not sure how many have held on to a collective identity in diaspora.

Palestinians: the new Roma?

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1655161?

Little has changed since Edward Said argued, in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that Palestinians have been denied the “permission to narrate.” According to him, the privileging of a “Western master narrative, highlighting Jewish alienation and redemption” erases the Palestinian understanding of reality, where the struggle for liberation is far from over. In this sense, the epistemic privilege accorded to the Israeli state and its institutions through its epistemicide of Palestinians plays a role in legitimizing it in the eyes of those more powerful than it.

Therefore, in attempting to resist the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and across the entirety of historic Palestine, it is absolutely vital to recognize and push back against epistemicide in all of its forms. Rana Barakat asserts the importance of centering Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, resistance, and endurance within analyses of Israel's settler colonial project. It is crucial to add here that recognizing Palestinians not just as narrators of history but as producers of knowledge within the context of the land of Historic Palestine and the experiences of Palestinian people all over the world pushes back against the Israeli state's attempts to solidify its epistemic privilege through escalating its epistemicide.

New polls indicate 71% of Israelis support expansion of the war into Lebanon.

jfc

Haaretz has published (in Hebrew, not English) an incomprehensibly vile article in the style of a lifestyle cooking feature, about Israel's soldiers finding and cooking with ingredients in the kitchens of Gazans who had to flee their homes and are now starving. pic.twitter.com/peOvTQm2cF

— gawanmac 🇵🇸 (@gawanmac) February 13, 2024

There's a lot to say about a start-up culture that continually innovates new grotesques. A telling part of the article comes at the end, where it's revealed that although most people fail escape rooms, this one is rigged so that the Israelis never lose https://t.co/HEBEkNRLTi pic.twitter.com/T5mhJhG84a

— David Grossman (@davidgross_man) February 15, 2024

what in the shit https://jewishcurrents.org/the-gamified-occupation

Rami Igra, previously head of the Captive & Missing Division in the Mossad, says there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza over the age of four, the "humane" Kan reporter Ayala Hasson agrees but clarifies that the 0-4 year old children are innocent and deserve humanitarian aid. pic.twitter.com/y1NtMoJtpW

— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) February 14, 2024

that would explain this utterly horrifying part of a harrowing editorial by an American doctor who volunteered in a Rafah hospital:

I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children

https://theintercept.com/2024/02/17/joe-biden-rafah-israel-gaza-bombs/

As the conservative death toll in Gaza nears 30,000 — with more than 13,000 children confirmed dead — the White House spin doctors are worried about the 2024 U.S. election. They are desperately trying to project a public image of compassion for the people of Gaza and to sell the public on the idea that Biden has reached the end of his patience with his great friend of nearly 50 years, Benjamin Netanyahu. Confronted with a disastrous series of public statements by Biden where he claimed to have recently met with long-deceased world leaders and a special counsel’s assertions about his mental acumen, the president’s re-election campaign has been thrust into a scramble to stabilize their public narrative.

Since the International Court of Justice formally ruled that South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel should proceed and issued a series of emergency orders directing Israel not to engage in genocidal actions, Tel Aviv has intensified its military operations, laying siege to hospitals and bombing civilian sites as it prepares for a possible full-scale ground invasion of Rafah. The city, which is on the border with Egypt and has been subjected to intense Israeli bombardment in recent days, creating an unsecured 25-square-mile death cage in which 1.4 million Palestinians are now trapped — after being told by Israel to flee there for safety.
...
It is possible — given the world of crass, cynical politics that permeates Washington — that the Biden administration views opportunity in the Rafah situation. If Netanyahu proceeds against the White House’s stated position, it could potentially offer Biden an opportunity to escalate the spin campaign at the heart of the monthslong drama about supposedly “losing patience” with Netanyahu. This, in turn, would help reenforce the fictitious story the president’s reelection campaign has been crafting: Biden did everything to support Israel’s right to self- defense, but he will draw a line when Netanyahu wants to take it too far. On the other hand, history is a strong guide and suggests Biden will support an Israeli ground campaign with some expression of disappointment over tactics, while also claiming victory in convincing Israel to protect civilians. The White House has regularly given itself credit for encouraging Israel to be a bit less murdery in its operations, even as the Israeli military continues to kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians.

A recent U.S. intelligence estimate indicated that Israel’s current weapons stockpiles only enables it to wage war against Gaza for an additional 19 weeks, unless Washington sends more ammunition. The fact that Biden has outright refused to use his leverage as Israel’s arms dealer is a stark indication that the occasional public platitudes, offered by U.S. officials and numerous media leaks about Biden’s mounting frustration with Netanyahu, are little more than a re-election campaign ploy.

Whatever “off-ramp” Biden world eventually chooses to extricate himself politically from the Gaza war will never obviate the innumerable moments over the past 134 days when Israel’s murderous actions could have provided an instant justification to threaten to end military support and weapons sales to Israel. There has been a deliberate and conscious choice by Biden and company to keep the munitions flowing even as the massacres continue in full view of the world. The president was warned very early on in the war by Arab and Muslim leaders in the U.S. that his support for a gratuitous Israeli war against civilians would cost him politically, and he chose to stay the course in his fueling of Israel’s mass killing campaign.

...

Whatever happens in the November election, it should never be forgotten that it was Biden, not those Americans who oppose Israel’s war and the U.S. facilitation of it, that bolstered Trump’s chances. That is entirely on Biden and the Democratic Party establishment.

Just pasting that last sentence again:

Whatever happens in the November election, it should never be forgotten that it was Biden, not those Americans who oppose Israel’s war and the U.S. facilitation of it, that bolstered Trump’s chances. That is entirely on Biden and the Democratic Party establishment.

Notice how much bigger these protests are than the ones in Israel specifically against the threatened onslaught against Rafah. Most Israelis don't oppose the actual effects of the war against Gaza, they oppose the government's incompetence and its poor optics. https://t.co/IHYRUZd8Fg

— Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) February 17, 2024

I don’t understand the point of Tweets like that. Collective punishment of Gaza is bad but Israelis should be held collectively responsible for the actions of their government? Pro-Israel propagandists are all the time “no one is innocent in Gaza they can overthrow Hamas anytime.” Why should our side use the same argument?

Israelis do have the option of a non-violent transfer of power available to them

The point of tweets like that is to point out the depravity of the Israeli citizenry.

“We don’t like the optics that the government is putting out, but we don’t mind ethnic cleansing.” Sorry, that’s depraved!

Israelis should be held collectively responsible for the actions of their government

They elect the governments that carry out the actions (the non-Netanyahu government would be indistinguishable aside from perhaps being more competent in carrying out genocide). A quarter of the population of Israel are foreign-born - even accounting for children, that's a significant chunk of the population that chose to emigrate. They mostly acquiesce to military conscription.

Yes, citizens of liberal democracies share some collective burden and responsibility for the actions of the government.