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

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families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn.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.

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

Look at the polls— an overwhelming majority of Israelis approve of the current war, 71% approve of expanding the war to Lebanon.

What gives me the heebie-jeebies is that a lot of Westerners refuse to accept that Israel is an ethno-fascist, white supremacist state and that it is replicating tactics most famously used by the Nazis, as well as other totalitarian regimes.

Israel is an ethno-fascist, white supremacist state

Your larger point (with which I agree) aside...are Israelis white? I think that's kind of a fraught issue. I don't know if the majority of white Americans consider Israelis white, and consequently I don't know if Israel is "white supremacist" in the same way as apartheid South Africa or pre-1965 Mississippi. In that skin color isn't the determining factor behind social privilege — religion is. So their fascism is closer to the Hindu fascism of Modi's India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel

Collective punishment of Gaza is bad but Israelis should be held collectively responsible for the actions of their government?

gazans being straight-up murdered for being gazan is subtly different from israelis being 'blamed' for the actions of their government

i.e. the latter are still alive

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?

― B. Amato (Boring, Maryland), Sunday, 18 February 2024 bookmarkflaglink

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

― symsymsym, Sunday, 18 February 2024 bookmarkflaglink

There is that. But the person writing the tweet might be thinking of the very small protests against the war in general, as opposed to the anti-Netanyahu ones.

Dudes, I get that Israelis are overwhelmingly in favor of the war. Also Likud's base is largely Middle Eastern Mizrahi Jews so not sure if they code white. I'm not arguing against that the Israeli government/army is committing genocide, and that many Israeli people support that. I'm arguing against dehumanizing the enemy no matter who they are. Israeli people are doing depraved things but calling them, as people, depraved, is the same language we deplore when used against Palestinians. And I don't place the responsibility for Greg Abbott's actions on Milo because he lives in Texas.

Well said.

It gives me the creeps hearing this kind of talk "even accounting for children." Especially from white American men living on stolen land who have no intention of ceding their own privileges.

xp You should, however place some responsibility for Greg Abbott's actions on Texans, given that he was democratically elected with 55% of the vote.

Texans, as a distinct class or set of individuals, did not give Greg Abbott the governorship. The distinct and numerable set of individuals who voted for Greg Abbott did so. You may dismiss this as quibbling, but it is true according to the logic of categories and also happens to reflect reality far more exactly. Your statement includes a huge number of the wrong people.

I get that Israelis are overwhelmingly in favor of the war...I'm not arguing against that the Israeli government/army is committing genocide, and that many Israeli people support that.

but these are the points the tweet you were objecting to was making

ftr I agree you should not dehumanize a people or call them as a group depraved, even when the overwhelming majority of them are enthusiastically cheering on atrocities

from what I read and hear the Israeli media diet assiduously avoids the human cost of their war:

What is not especially visible on Israeli television is the unrelenting horror of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, where more than twenty-three thousand people have been killed in three months, and an estimated 1.9 million have been displaced. Only rarely do Israelis see what the rest of the world sees: the corpses of Palestinian children wrapped in sheets by a mass grave; widespread hunger and disease; schools and houses, apartment blocks and mosques, reduced to rubble; people fleeing from one place to the next, on foot, on donkey carts, three to a bicycle, all the time knowing that there is no real refuge from mortal danger. Gaza is a presence on Israeli television mainly through the dispatches of reporters embedded with the I.D.F. And they tend to emphasize the experience of Israeli soldiers—their missions, their clashes with Hamas fighters, the search for hostages, the crisp pronouncements of generals and officials helicoptering in from Jerusalem.

A disregard for the suffering in Gaza is hardly limited to reactionary ministers or far-right commentators. Ben Caspit, the author of a biography critical of Netanyahu, recently posted that he felt no compunction about concentrating on the home front. “Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]?” he wrote. “They’ve earned that hell fairly, and I don’t have a milligram of empathy.” When I asked Caspit about this, he replied that he was “pro-humanitarian aid” and a lifelong “peacenik,” but insisted that there had been, until October 7th, a “ceasefire” with Hamas. And then, he said, they “crossed the border, came to our villages to loot, to rape, to kill, and to kidnap. So, as an Israeli, it’s difficult for me to feel sorry now during this war while we are going on burying five and seven soldiers a day.” He did not care about Gaza in “exactly the same way that the British did not care about the Germans in World War Two and the Americans about the Japanese,” he went on. “We were forced into this situation. We did not initiate it. On the contrary, we initiated peace.” His is a common sentiment among Israelis.

“You do see Gaza on TV, but not enough,” Ilana Dayan, the longtime host of “Uvda” (“Fact”), a kind of Israeli “60 Minutes,” told me one evening over coffee in Tel Aviv. Dayan, who has aired countless reports critical of the Israeli government and military, allowed that a patriotic tone has overtaken much of what appears on the air. “And when I come home and I say, ‘We have to know more,’ it’s hard for them to care. We know our audiences are impatient with any kind of deviation from the mainstream. We interview people about October 7th—we are stuck on October 7th—and, after those atrocities, we too often, understandably, lack the empathy to see what is happening on the other side of the border. As an Israeli, I felt so, too. As a reporter, I feel that we have to tell Israelis about the price being paid in Gaza.”

When Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up twenty per cent of the population, voice their political sentiments on social media, the result can be harassment, doxing, or even a visit from the authorities. Many are repulsed by what they are seeing on Israeli television, in the light of what has appeared on media outlets based in the Arab world. “I can’t stomach it,” Diana Buttu, a human-rights lawyer who was once a negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me. She lives in Haifa, a mixed city on the northern coast. “Palestinians are so dehumanized. They are not people. There is no sense of what it means that twenty thousand are dead, half of them kids. It’s only ‘We have to get Hamas.’ My neighbors in Haifa don’t see or comprehend what is being done in their name.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-gaza-hamas-war-hostages

I get that Israeli mainstream newspapers, TV and radio would be obscuring what is happening in Gaza but surely most Israelis have internet and are able to get something more about what's unfolding.

_I get that Israelis are overwhelmingly in favor of the war...I'm not arguing against that the Israeli government/army is committing genocide, and that many Israeli people support that._

but these are the points the tweet you were objecting to was making

but surely most Israelis have internet and are able to get something more about what's unfolding.

― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 18 February 2024 20:39 (twenty-nine minutes ago) link

Ok Mr. Houthi stan. That is not a good assumption at all and not a good argument for the hatred and prejudgment being spread.

Alex Jones is back on your beloved news source Xitter. Look at the state of politics fueled by "the internet". There are psyops and bad faith actors all over the "internet"

All reporting has some bias. There are polls going around showing all kinds of things. A poll from Gaza in July 2023 showed that 30 something percent of respondents believe the population of Israel is around 500,000.

Is this a good reason to pre-judge and dehumanize groups of people? No.

So, we're not allowed to pre-judge groups of people, many of whom support the carnage that their countrymen are doling out? Snipers shooting children in the head? Bombing hospitals? Officials saying in public forums that anyone above the age of 4 is a worthy target?

You realize that to many people, myself included, your statement reads like someone saying, "We cannot judge all Germans by the Nazi regime! Calling the Hitlerjugend "depraved" is just as bad as gassing Jews at Birkenau! Think about the feelings of the German people!"

It's ridiculous. There is always this sense where you expect people like me to believe that you also care about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, yet you only show up on these threads when someone says something that makes an Israeli feel uncomfortable. Well, guess what? Israelis SHOULD feel uncomfortable, and if they don't, they can burn in hell.

Like sorry not sorry, the problem here isn't me calling a depraved society what it is, but the actions of the depraved society.

table, I'm not sure if you are responding to me, but those are your words, not mine.

You will know I've said something when I say it.

"Ok Mr. Houthi stan. That is not a good assumption at all and not a good argument for the hatred and prejudgment being spread."

That is in response to that bit quoted, showing Israeli media is obscuring what is happening in Gaza.

So the question is. We have the internet, we can see Palestinians in Gaza begging the world for help, and your response is Alex Jones on twitter?!

It's just dissembling, afaic.

And The Houthis are doing something help the Palestinians. I'll stan for them anytime. Thanks.

We do have the internet and we can also fact check what we post.

I am not taking moral reasoning instructions from the person who thinks it's funny to cheer the Houthis and their charming flag.

I don't really care what you take and from whom.

And it goes without saying you fact-check what you want to fact check. Please don't think you are fooling anyone that you've got the story straight.

^ ^ ^

As felicity very smartly pointed out a few months back, this is a deontological ethical point of view, and has as much validity and reasoning behind it as more utilitarian views.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Wednesday, February 7, 2024 8:44 AM bookmarkflaglink

You care when you want to care.

I don't know what that means or suggests.

Do I value your opinions? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That said, I wish you all good things. I also recognize that we fundamentally disagree on a number of pretty major social and political issues, and this stuff gets contentious.

Oh, I see— yeah, I do care what you take and from whom, I was agreeing with xyzzz's second point, which I could have clarified.

Especially from white American men living on stolen land who have no intention of ceding their own privileges.

zing

Any posts on this thread that are not clearly intending to express a desire for an immediate cessation of the destruction of Gazan infrastructure and and execution of Gazans, my eyes glaze over and I have no kind words for you on this topic

Also let us not assume that all Israelis are the enemy, thanks

This thread is about Israel too.

Seamus' tweet is pretty reasonable. It's an observation of the size of a protest, and what people are protesting on.

If there had been consistently large protests in Israel against IDF action in Gaza I am sure there would've been reports bought in here every time it happened.

And the only reason I see any protests at all on this is due to twitter.

whenever me and my boyfriend watch the ICJ proceedings we sing 'all those beautiful girls' from follies whenever it gets to the bit where the judges file in and out of the chamber.

(I'm watching the ICJ proceedings while at work)

Can't fully focus for reasons of employment so I can't fully speak to the context etc but it was funny that they quoted Barack Obama writing in his post WH memoirs that pretty much every diplomat around the world that the US was in contact with felt that Israel was clearly acting illegaly and that the US had to defend actions they didn't agree with.

The other striking moment so far has been the PA foreing minister showing the familiar image of the maps of Palestine before and after partition, Nakba and but concluding with the image of Netenyahu holding up a map of 'Israel' encompassing the whole river to sea area at the general assembly last year.

SA currently presenting the legal case that Israel is guilty of Apartheid

I know that there has been great deal of legal scholarship in SA on this topic but surprised that this is part of proceedings as I assumed it would hew close to Genocide convention.

I have no idea how one is supposed to cede their privilege of existing aside from suicide but weaponizing American genocide in defense of Israel is a bad look IMO.

oh i'm an idiot, i didn't realise this was a separate case from the SA case

I have no idea how one is supposed to cede their privilege of existing aside from suicide but weaponizing American genocide in defense of Israel is a bad look IMO.

I'm probably admitting total ignorance here, but I thought early relations between the US and Israel were rather distant in the beginning couple decades? It definitely makes sense, though that we'd be interested in Israel in the 50s and 60s as a supposed bulwark against Arab nationalism and Marxism.

It was “distant” but the US was the first to recognize Israel as a state— Truman was an evangelical Christian, no surprise there— and it wasn’t as if the US was unhappy with a Western-backed presence in the middle east, and the young state of Israel received plenty of aid from the US. This was, in essence, forced diplomacy that many strategists didn’t endorse. JFK began the “special relationship” that exists to this day.