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

The phrase “a chaotic incident” compresses into three words the liberal method: allude to the complexity of the world not in order to confront reality, but to evade it

— Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation) February 29, 2024

that nyt headline is absolutely ghoulish

The EU has announced it will reinstate funding to UNRWA after having suspended it due to Israels allegations (for which they provided zero evidence) pic.twitter.com/P5Dya8awVj

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) March 1, 2024

The Washington Post headline this morning calls it "Chaotic Aid Delivery in Gaza Turns Deadly", which is infuriating since the Post news (as opposed to editorial) section has been consistently better than the Times on Gaza.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yhwb4flopeavzkwbybtojo2s/bafkreicxw3oen2savtlewx4b3okm5kf5nhkrucn5z2yg3mryi7gewbb6iu@jpeg

when the WSJ can say what you will not

This game is so absurd because it's evident to anyone with a brain that Israel is completely responsible for the entire situation no matter how much one-sided wait-and-see you want to do on who shot whom: the lack of food and water, the destruction of infrastructure, the slowing of aid deliveries, the false accusations against UNRWA and subsequent defunding, the base hunger and desperation of the Palestinians who are being mundanely bombed in Rafah when they're not being gunned down in headline-grabbing fashion. Even if you want to call it "chaos" or "disaster" it's chaos and disaster *deliberately* caused by Israel as part of a campaign of unambiguous genocide. What kind of false alibi is even being put forward here?

It's the Who Concert alibi as far as I've seen

the headlines may be different, but the opening sentences largely the same

agreed Rob, even if it was a "chaotic aid delivery", it's like, well, who's responsible for them starving in the first place?

Will dive into this at some point.

"Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief." https://t.co/7ugFOyuYC1

— michael (@Sisyphusa) March 1, 2024

apparently the Times newsroom also discriminated against Middle Eastern and North African employees in the wake of October 7, according to the Times union

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/03/01/nytimes-leak-investigation-guild-intercept-hamas/

President Biden announces U.S. will airdrop aid into Gaza

On Saturday, the U.S. began airdropping aid, according to a United States Central Command statement.

Jordan, France, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have already begun airdrops, which Canada said it is also considering.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/02/biden-ceasefire-hostages-negotiations-ramadan/#link-WJODKCSRVRG67CI6PN27OPLKPM

much easier and more effective than uh not stopping funding the UNRWA based on some sketchy allegations

Completely unsubstantiated and seemingly totally made up allegations.

There is no reason to believe anything that any Israeli official says, ever.

I would guess that the blowback from the Anat Schwartz incident might've helped the writers push for this? I can't imagine it even a month ago. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/world/middleeast/gaza-deaths.html

Saudi Arabia has put 7 protesters who were involved in pro Palestine protests to death in the single largest execution in years.

Saudi Arabia has already executed 31 people so far in 2024. pic.twitter.com/xNPA8sunzG

— nepal (@yatasuregima) March 2, 2024

Very good thread taking a red pen to Mishra's piece I linked to yesterday.

This article/lecture is full of errors, offensive historical distortions, and glaring omissions of contextual information. While it claims to be about Palestine it gives little info about the genocide, and really just whitewashes Western complicity in both current one and Shoah https://t.co/P655ndx50C

— ‏تمار 🌴 Тама́р 🌴 תמר (@tamars) March 3, 2024

I read the Mishra just now. I thought the lack of citations was a serious problem and his mentioning events that happened very recently was worrying from a "how/when was this edited?" perspective. But I find "While it claims to be about Palestine it gives little info about the genocide" to be a bizarre misreading of what the essay is about, which isn't remotely "giving information about the genocide." Unfortunately I can't read the rest of the thread, so I don't know if they make better points, but I'd be curious to hear about the errors, etc. Did you get around to reading it xyzzzz?

Eh. I don't know about that thread. She writes

Also “human debris from Hitler’s death camps” clearly weren’t fit material for a Jewish state since they were dead. Does @LRB not have an editor to avoid such amateurish phrasing".

But the article makes clear in the **second paragraph** that "human debris" was Ben--Gurion's term for how he "initially saw Shoah **survivors**".

Similarly, complaining that the article doesn't go into more detail about why Bauman left Poland seems like it is besides the point. I don't know enough (translation: I know basically nothing) about the actual histories in the article to ascertain who's right or wrong re: the facts, but a lot of the criticisms seem to be nitpicking made in bad faith, as if the poster is upset they're not the one commissioned to write the article.

xpost agree with rob about both lack of citations and "bizarre misreading" on part of thread.

Did you get around to reading it xyzzzz?

― rob, Sunday, 3 March 2024 bookmarkflaglink

I read the thread and not the piece, but will get to it tonight with those thoughts.

xp - I don't agree with everything she posts but it's another perspective, which adds to my knowledge. Will see how I generally feel, but I know less than her about specifics.

Yeah I found it to be very well written and interesting, and I do recommend reading it with the caveats I mentioned. tbf since it was intended to be a spoken lecture, the lack of citations is at least understandable. But ultimately I was left wishing I could have more confidence in his account

"Rashid Khalidi views Jabotinsky as “the only honest one” of the early Zionists. His mistake, Khalidi said, was that he “assumed that he was operating in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when you could get away with this stuff, an era when colonialism was seen as a good thing.” Native Americans certainly fought back, as did other aboriginal groups, “but they were crushed,” he added. “That didn’t work in the twentieth century. Libya didn’t work. Algeria didn’t work. Kenya didn’t work. South Africa didn’t work.”"

Halfway through this: https://newrepublic.com/article/179430/zionism-lost-argument-american-jews-israel

Piece of research touching on that poll that found a high % of young Americans engaging in Holocaust denial.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-opt-in-polls-can-produce-misleading-results-especially-for-young-people-and-hispanic-adults/

An interesting Rick Perlstein essay about Zionist fascism.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/05/uk-science-minister-michelle-donelan-apologises-and-pays-damages-after-academics-libel-action

"Rashid Khalidi views Jabotinsky as “the only honest one” of the early Zionists. His mistake, Khalidi said, was that he “assumed that he was operating in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when you could get away with this stuff, an era when colonialism was seen as a good thing.” Native Americans certainly fought back, as did other aboriginal groups, “but they were crushed,” he added. “That didn’t work in the twentieth century. Libya didn’t work. Algeria didn’t work. Kenya didn’t work. South Africa didn’t work.”"

Prof. Rashid Kalidi did a great extended interview on Majority Report yesterday that lays out so much of the history. The British fucking around in that region in the 30s led to so much damage today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CShikrXob10

The British continued fucking around in the region well into the 1940s.
From 1946 to 1949 Britain maintained internment camps for Holocaust survivors and other Jewish refugees on Cyprus under blockade where over 400 people died.

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

'I'd rather be a racist than a bore' – Israeli historian Benny Morris at @LSEnews, when some of his quotes on Palestinians as a 'time bomb', a 'fifth column', and 'wild animals' were put to him by students pic.twitter.com/4bPoW5Vyjk

— Jack 🍉 (@jack_mcginn) March 6, 2024

That's nice.

We were never being boring

Imagine having yourself quoted back to yourself, and then calling that "boring." My dude, you started it by being a racist fuck!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/06/us-weapons-israel-gaza/

The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing.

The triple digit figure, which has not been previously reported, is the latest indication of Washington’s extensive involvement in the polarizing five-month conflict even as top U.S. officials and lawmakers increasingly express deep reservations about Israel’s military tactics in a campaign that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health authorities.

Only two approved foreign military sales to Israel have been made public since the start of conflict: $106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5 million of components needed to make 155 mm shells. Those sales invited public scrutiny because the Biden administration bypassed Congress to approve the packages by invoking an emergency authority.

But in the case of the 100 other transactions, known in government-speak as Foreign Military Sales or FMS, the weapons transfers were processed without any public debate because each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to individually notify Congress, according to U.S. officials and lawmakers who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter.

speaking of arms and such:

a random thought i've had throughout all this is that the US ~deep state~ will likely never countenance a one-state solution simply because it would result in an arab-majority nuclear power. like, it'll just never happen for that reason alone imo

Canada also resuming its UNRWA funding: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-government-resume-unrwa-funding-1.7134961

Canada is now not officially resuming its UNRWA funding: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-unrwa-funding-restore-1.7136924

what a pile of crap

meanwhile the media is trying out the Jeremy Corbyn playbook in BC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/eby-robinson-resign-1.7136786

Robinson resigned as post-secondary education minister last month after saying modern Israel was founded on "a crappy piece of land" during a public panel, sparking outcry from pro-Palestinian groups that called the comments racist and Islamophobic.

She apologized and committed to taking anti-Islamophobia training.

On Thursday, Robinson said she plans to continue that work personally.

She said Wednesday her heart had been "shattered" by her treatment and that there were antisemitic voices within the NDP caucus.

To my knowledge she's the only politician in North America who faced any consequences for making anti-Palestinian statements

I think Zachary Foster and his email newsletter Palestine Nexus are essential reading, here's his latest on the Times' complicity in genocide.

https://palestine.beehiiv.com/p/new-york-times-complicit-plausible-genocide

The headlines conceal Israel’s war crimes, the word choice whitewashes Israeli violence while the focus of attention centers Israeli victims.

The Intercept study also found that for every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times.

Then there's the paper's peculiar commitment to documenting Hamas atrocities. What is worthy of 150 interviews? What story does the paper stand behind “200%”? What story does the paper provide as much time as needed for interviews and investigative research?

Not Israel’s plausible genocide; not Israel’s systematic torturing of prisoners; not Israel’s targeting of apartment buildings and civilian infrastructure (e.g. +972 reporting); not Israel’s killing of its own civilians on Oct. 7th (Electronic Intifada reporting); not Israel’s starving Palestinians to death; not even Hamas’s killing of 764 Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th. Nope. Nothing having to do with anyone killing anyone at all.

Instead, the New York Times decided it wanted to published a Hamas rape story and poured limitless resources into it. Anat Schwartz, a co-author of the now infamous Times piece, “Screams Without Words,” said as much in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. According to Schwartz, “The New York Times said, ‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’.” Remarkably, the Times had to convince Schwartz, a former Israeli soldier with no journalism experience, to do the story. Schwartz was asked, “it was a proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?” She responded: “Unequivocally. Unequivocally. Obviously. Of course.”

No surprise the sponsor of the piece, Executive Editor Joe Kahn, has strong pro-Israel sympathies. Also no surprise that Schwartz told interviewees the point of the article was to present Israel in a positive light. This fact was revealed by the lead author of the story as well, Jeffrey Gettleman, who said the point of the investigation was not to assess the veracity of testimonies collected, but rather the point was to present a story to move people.

And, indeed, the paper did not seem bothered by reporting fiction as fact. Raz Cohen, a key witness, had already changed his story at least 3 times before the Times cited it as fact. The family of the main character of the story, Gal Abdush, rejected the accusation that she was raped, claiming “the media invented” the entire thing. The spokesperson of Kibbutz Be’eri also rejected the claim in the article that the sisters, Yahel and Noiya Sharabi, were raped. The paper relied on Zaka testimonies, the organization responsible for intentionally spreading some of the most insidious lies that have circulated about Oct. 7th.
...

Study after study has documented the bias. During the second intifada (2000-2005), the Times over-reported Israeli deaths and and under-reported Palestinian deaths; it often called the Palestinian Occupied Territories "disputed” and referred to illegal Israeli settlements as "neighborhoods” and, whenever Palestinian civilians were killed, they were "caught in the crossfire." Moreover, the paper often described Israelis as dovish or peaceniks, but never Palestinians.

Similarly, during Israel’s 2014 War on Gaza, another study found that the New York Times often justified Israeli violence while condemning and exaggerating Palestinian violence.

All of these findings are a direct consequence of the newspaper’s curious choices for Jerusalem Bureau chiefs. The paper has a knack for finding journalists deeply embedded in Jewish Israeli society: Ethan Bronner’s child served in the Israeli military; Isabel Kershner has family ties to an Israeli think tank that promotes a positive media image of Israel; Thomas Friedman has said on numerous occasions he is deeply committed to the idea of the Jewish State.

How many more studies of the paper’s selection of editors and writers, headlines, word choice, focus of attention and carelessness with facts are necessary before its editors ask themselves, are we complicit in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians?

All of this is backed up by sources in the newsletter, and at the link above.

Super Furry Animals' singer Gruff Rhys has pulled out of a major US festival in protest over "the hyper violence inflicted on civilians in Gaza".

Rhys is the latest in a line of artists boycotting the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Texas, which is sponsored by the US Army.

On Instagram, the Welsh musician said he was "in dismay at the utter collapse of coherent diplomacy in the West".

Organisers said they respected artists' right to free speech.

Rhys has performed at the festival many times before. But he said the best way to use his platform to protest was to "withdraw my music" this weekend.

All my friends (and others of their community) have pulled out of sx

Yeah, the double whammy of the DoD and CIA sponsoring various events but also when you get something you might find cool that has no publicized MIC connection(like the Fallout party), you’re at risk of Elon and his dipshit ketamine coterie showing up.

And who(aside from the usual freaks) would want that

How else can the Army attract skinny indie fans?

Eurovision basically done.

London's biggest @Eurovision screening party has cancelled its 2024 edition over the participation of genocidal Israel.

We salute the Rio for courageously standing on the right side of history.

We urge all #Eurovision2024 party venues to cancel!#BoycottEurovision2024 https://t.co/ObB2dJQ8yz

— PACBI - BDS movement (@PACBI) March 17, 2024

Got round to reading this interview on the German left in Berlin and the weird Antideustche faction.

https://www.leftvoice.org/antideutsche-the-aberration-of-germanys-pro-zionist-left/

it's a real shame what these clowns have done to postone's legacy and reputation - the german left could really have learnt a lot from his work instead of using it as a kind of intellectual fig leaf for their weird offbrand version of german nativism

I didn't realise how specifically maoist their tendency's origins were (since one of the strangest things about them these days is how hard they are to distinguish from the mainstream) which is an awkward fit with the postonean stuff (his anti-stalinism was strong enough to occasionally take him to borderline reactionary places) (then again maybe he was their way out) but if that's their background their predilection for physically assaulting ("other") leftists makes a lot more sense

I need to stop with the brackets

Are they the only group that has Maoist tendencies that is pro-Israel? Most of the ones I encounter are borderline Soros=New Rothschild major anti-semitism vibes

I doubt they have maoist tendencies now (other than violence and the whole chauvinism in the name of its opposite thing) but you can mao yourself into basically any position by changing what the primary contradiction in society is and enforcing the new line on your cadre and then the world. most actual maoists I'm aware of are more "anti-zionist" than anti-capitalist right now but I wouldn't put it past them to switch those priorities at some point either

I would guess the antideutsche also have some interesting views on soros and probably think he's more of a nazi than their grandparents were

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/19/canada-halt-arms-sales-to-israel

can someone explain to me "Reality Israel"? asking because someone i know posted on Instagram how they were "given the opportunity to visit Israel" through this service and they shared photos, videos, etc of the experience. as someone who has great sympathy for those who died, injured, or otherwise traumatized on Oct 7, and who is sensitive to some of the more dog-whistley criticisms of Israel (though NOT the actually relevant, cold hard facts of the ongoing atrocity criticisms), i found it a bit distasteful and tone-deaf. one video showed a group of what amounted to tourists walking through and filming a bullet-hole filled kibbutz where i'm sure people died, followed by a cheerful group photo, followed by a long dining table where i guess everyone ate and chatted. the accompanying text was full of detail about how supposedly both sides were heard, but it felt one-sided, underscored by its conclusion to "release the hostages, eliminate Hamas, ceasefire" (apparently a suggestion of what order things should be done in.) lots of replies in the comments such as, "love you brother" and "so much this" and heart emojis and "good of you to bear witness". and while i am COMPLETELY on board with getting those hostages back, on board with seeing Hamas gone (and Netanyahu just as gone, since both sides deserve so much better), i was just taken aback by the post for some reason. and then one voice crying out in the comments, "we won't even talk about how you're going there for a nice meal while children in Gaza are starving and dying?" it did feel a bit like "i want to live like common traumatized people" on one hand, and atrocity tourism on the other, and so self-centered in the manner in which it was communicated. and disappointing. i didn't engage with the post, i know it's a very sensitive topic in general and it's a can of worms i choose not to open via social media.

i write all that as someone who again is vv sensitive to and sometimes disappointed in a bit of the ol ILX rhetoric surrounding these terrible events, which i won't get into now but just placing myself where i belong in the discourse.

It isn't a can of worms. The person you know doesn't care that 30,000+ Palestinians have been killed, and advertised it for their friend group to see. What else is there to know except that the person you know is not a good person?