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

My cousin thinks the BBC are far-left woke ideologues but he may be in a minority I find it difficult to tell

BBC news coverage is centre/lean right but like most broadcasters also lacks accuracy over the most basic party political shite; BBC arts and entertainment coverage leans left.

I'm assuming, unless I'm told differently, that the reason the BBC was mentioned at all was not about whether they had left or right bias but because of their attitude to Israel and the current conflict.

The initial steps of a real answer to "what is to be done about Hamas tho?!" are pretty clear if the question isn't concern trolling (which, when it comes from AIPAC-funded sources, it obviously is).

There's nothing you can do about Hamas while Israel is actively committing genocide or should Israel desist actively committing genocide if it continues to be the primary impediment to Palestinian statehood and autonomy (and oppress Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, etc.). There are no answers about Hamas or The Palestinian Question that don't start with "Israel stops committing crimes against humanity." There is no imposition of secular liberal democracy while settlers and soldiers are killing children.

felicity, you might have missed this, but Israel is also starving Gaza and bombing the shit out of their hospitals, so famine and lack of adequate medical care are also happening there.

Lack of adequate medical care is putting it politely

I know

That and the fact that the situations in both Haiti and Palestine are primarily the result of colonialism and racism are utterly lost on mainstream news outlets.

utterly lost on mainstream news outlets

One of the aspects of a lot of chattering around the last 5 months seems to be that there’s a cohort of folks running into the hard wall of what those mainstream news outlets are actually _for_ and whom theyre talking to, which I would posit ain’t anybody of our political-economic status.

Also that the lack of legitimacy these media corps are suffering both is kinda intertwined with and reflects the lack legitimacy that the current ruling establish has.

About the only credible reporting I've seen in recent years was this long NYT piece about France keeping Haiti in peonage for two centuries.

That series was good, Alfred, but the issue is that their reporting from Haiti that isn’t “historical”— that is, current reporting— doesn’t take into consideration many of the elements that series you mention brings to the fore. It’s just a usual sort of western “why are these countries so violent and dysfunctional?!!” handwringing. It is infuriating, to say the least.

Also, kingfish, yes— I am glad the veil is being lifted, but am also concerned about how basic reporting will take shape as the century marches forward as these legacy news organizations are seen as the ruling-class owned consent- manufacturers that they are.

Israeli relative shared this, hopefully it is being heard more widely. She is center left and anti Bibi but I would not call her a leftist. Auto-Translated so a couple of phrases are unclear.

Elections now

Yesterday Canada issued Israel a proxy warning from the United States. "If you don't change direction immediately - we'll stop selling you weapons." Actually, *The United States has already reduced to a minimum the supply of weapons to Israel and that's a security disaster! *

So why is this happening?
Every day, all over the world, we see that the israel state is starving the Gazans. Yesterday an IPC report was published stating that 667,000 people in Gaza are in a catastrophic diet (the most severe there is). In a month the number will exceed 1,000,000 people. *The hunger in Gaza today is the worst hunger in the world!! * We the Israelis, descendants of the Holocaust generation, foolishly created the worst famine in the world, and we think democratic countries will keep selling us weapons??
https://t.ly/PbXwj

*If hunger helped us fight, maybe this would have been an excuse. If the hunger would help us return the kidnapped, then of course it is a reasonable tool, but in fact the war ended a long time ago! We are carrying out targeted raids and exterminations in Gaza just like Judea and Samaria, and we will continue to do it for months, maybe for years. You can close your eyes, but there are 2 million people in Gaza who need to eat today, and tomorrow, and every day for the coming years. And this is also our problem and this problem will not go away!
https://t.ly/aYqnb

*The government of destruction makes israel the worst countries in the world. They bring political isolation and sanctions on us. They turn us from victims of terror into human beings, and all the Israelis sitting at home and not fighting in the government of destruction, they are partners in crime and will carry the Cain moral sign forever. *

The government of the United States and all the democracies in the world are doing everything to help us save ourselves, but the responsibility will always be on us - we must get out of the house and destroy the government of destruction!

*elections right now! - Add friends, join! Share with all your might! * ->>>
http://tiny.cc/amidror”

thanks for sharing

This piece of paper was hung today on the aid distribution center in North Gaza, it says:

"The aid delivery was canceled because the aid didn't reach and the organizers were killed" https://t.co/m4G1x5metj pic.twitter.com/JQmASOlbxd

— Mariam from Gaza 🇵🇸 (@KufiyyaPS) March 20, 2024

glad monstrous loon Daniella Weiss is getting more scrutiny

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/20/middleeast/israel-gaza-settlers-daniella-weiss/index.html

“Register, register. You’ll be in Gaza,” Weiss said with an intense gaze, the 78-year-old telling her audience she is absolutely convinced it will happen in her lifetime.

Any such land grab from the Palestinians would be illegal under international law, impractical and likely to engender global outrage against Israel.

you can kill all the people who live there, but formally *annexing* the empty ruins would likely engender global outrage

Breaking: Smoke rises from Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City after Israeli army forces detonated the specialized surgery building. pic.twitter.com/XlUrLFn3AF

— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) March 21, 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/20/world-bank-report-finds-imminent-risk-of-catastrophic-famine-in-gaza-strip

Half the population of the Gaza Strip is at imminent risk of famine as food shortages approach catastrophic levels for more than a million people, the World Bank has warned.

Almost six months after the war between Israel and Hamas began, the Washington-based Bank said urgent action was needed to prevent widespread deaths from starvation within the next two months.

The new data from the Bank came as the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called on Israel to give immediate and unconditional access to Gaza for aid via land.

“I call on the Israeli authorities to ensure complete and unfettered access for humanitarian routes throughout Gaza,” he said before a meeting with the European Commission’s president in Brussels.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/21/we-are-about-to-witness-the-most-intense-famine-since-world-war-ii-in-gaza

The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system, set up 20 years ago, provides the most authoritative assessments of humanitarian crises. Its figures for Gaza are the worst ever by any metric. It estimates that 677,000 people, or 32% of all Gazans, are in “catastrophic” conditions today and a further 41% are in “emergency” conditions. It expects fully half of Gazans, more than 1 million people, to be in “catastrophe” or “famine” within weeks.

Funny how destroying all those hospitals, schools, aid convoys, food stockpiles, are all critical to defeating Hamas.

hospitals are Hamas now.

It’s mad to remember the start of the conflict and the week of fraught argument about whether a hospital had been targeted, and how quickly (like within a couple of weeks and ever since) the discourse shifted to “actually hospitals are the enemy and it’s good to target them”

Quite incredible, guess there is nothing left to say beyond executions in hospitals and drones blowing up civilians.

I know that I am not interested in media bias.

This is pretty good.

Worth discussing more, if you don't mind though I'll move it to the "as it relates to other countries" thread, Alfred

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2024-02-28/ty-article-podcast/netanyahus-overconfidence-and-arrogance-led-to-oct-7-former-pm-olmert/0000018d-f07b-dd8a-a5af-f87ffc090000

I've started listening to the Haaretz podcast. Former PM Olmert's description of the far right agenda is pretty nightmarish and should give everyone serious pause, even a lot of the people who consider themselves "pro-Israel." I knew some of this already but it was admittedly hard to maintain focus on it in light of atrocities in Gaza. I think a lot of people who think of themselves as relatively more liberal or centrist but "pro-Israel are able to compartmentalize people like Smotrich and Ben Gvir as "extremists" and "not the mainstream." And that's half true, but Israel's parliamentary form of government combined with the cynicism of Bibi and the relative apathy or distraction of a lot of people to the left of Bibi mean that Smotrich and Ben Gvir have been able to leverage their minority support into disproportionate power.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJXhBsQWgAErIWu.png:small

A video on the Israeli nationalists— Zionist fascists, in less polite but more accurate terms— who are blocking aid into Gaza.

Journalist Jeremy Loffredo goes inside the grassroots Israeli campaign to block desperately needed aid to the besieged Gaza Strip and elicits the shockingly candid views of the Jewish Israeli nationalists manning the barricades.

Setting out on a bus caravan through illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, Loffredo arrives at the Kerem Shalom crossing to Gaza, filming Israeli citizens as they physically block trucks loaded with flour and other essential goods. There, a reservist who served in the military assault on Gaza confesses to an array of war crimes, including blowing up the offices of UN centers dedicated to providing food to the local population.

Loffredo then joins nationalists on a march toward Gaza, where they hope to establish new settlements after the population is violently driven out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqRzfb2oMaM

It seems hyperbolic to call those small protests a "blockade." Israeli police have not allowed them to actually prevent aid from going in through the crossing. GrayZone tends to be deliberately inflammatory and unreliable - they are the main promoter of the debunked theory that it was actually the Israeli military who killed most of the October 7 victims.

But we're supposed to take Haaretz podcasts at their word, got it.

I mean, yeah, Blumenthal is a nut, but it's not like the Times or WaPo or any other warcriming newspaper in the US is going to do good reporting on this topic, and Israeli sources can't be trusted either.

So who is blocking aid from going in? If it isn't these settlers, then it's...the Israeli military?

Sorry if that was a little harsh, man alive.

I think that part of it is that I am honestly struggling with how to find reliable, good information about what is happening in Gaza right now. What I see from Palestinian accounts, and what I hear from left-leaning media, is that the Israeli state and settlers (as in the video above) are preventing a lot of food aid from getting through. What I read of more center and right media seems to blame Hamas for the starvation crisis, dismiss it entirely, or cheer it on.

One of the things that has been most frustrating about this as it's gone on is that there is simply not a good way of knowing exactly what is happening, except that the asymmetrical nature of the situation is obvious, blatant, and not being addressed by the US in a way that is substantive. Hell, the US Congress just passed a bill that banned funding to the UNRWA, provides Israel with another 3.8 billion in funding, and limits aid to the Palestinian Authority if "the Palestinians" initiate or support an International Criminal Court investigation against Israel "for alleged crimes against Palestinians."

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the moral failings in this situation seem clear to me, on all sides— but finding out accurate and detailed information about what is happening on the ground is so tainted by bias and rhetoric that I find it hard to trust *any* news source entirely.

No that's totally fair. I have an allergic reaction to GrayZone. Clearly the people in the video are real people and I guess on some level they are representative of a mentality that exists and has some sway in Israeli politics. I just don't think that aid is being completely blocked by those protests, and in fact the police and IDF have broken them up. However there is no question that Israel's policies with respect to slowing down aid have been morally abhorrent.

Also, the Haaretz podcasts I posted were interviews, they were not presented as truth or as reporting but as the perspectives of two people - a former prime minister who is extremely critical of Netanyahu and Israeli policy toward Gaza, and an American Jewish playwright who is active in Jewish Voice for Peace, and the headline of his interview was his opinion that Israel is engaging in ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I'm not suggesting anyone take them at face value, they're just the perspectives of two people who are relevant to the situation.

But I do think Haaretz's reporting is relatively reliable on the whole (and is considered as such by many ardent pro-Palestine activists), and while you may not like all of the perspectives published, they also regularly publish people like Gideon Levy and Amira Haas. Headlines on the current op-ed webpage include "The Mass Killing in Gaza Will Poison Israeli Souls Forever" "Israel's Cruelty Is Concealed by Its Decentralization" and "Smotrich's Plan to Subjugate the Palestinians Goes Ahead." It's not an "anti-zionist" paper per se, but it has repeatedly done good investigative work into Israeli war crimes, prison conditions, etc. So I would encourage you to consider it as one source among many to be worth looking at, even if you don't agree with some of the spin/thrust of the paper.

Totally, I have seen some good op-eds published in Haaretz, and that’s why I felt shitty about my comment— it just wasn’t fair. I get the allergic reaction to GrayZone, it’s simply that even in
cases where it is clear that their reports are from Russian or Chinese agents, there are also times when the critique of western hegemony isn’t being done by others in such an involved way. Same with the Intercept, tbh!

The Intercept is at least a notch above GrayZone for me - I don't always agree with the way they frame things or report things, but I think their reporters are generally legit and do serious work.

What gave The Guardian balls?

As Gaza is destroyed, Israel is killing dozens of children in the West Bank https://t.co/mrhbvrD6km

— The Guardian (@guardian) March 23, 2024

at some point reality sets in for all but the most morally recalcitrant

I don't think its that fair to put the Intercept and Grayzone in the same bracket, Grayzone have increasingly run into some of the same problems with befell Q anon. Intercept make plenty of mistakes but I don't think its quite as central to what they do

BREAKING: During the negotiations in Qatar over the weekend, Israel agreed to release 700 Palestinian prisoners, among them 100 who serve life sentences for killing Israelis, in return for the release of 40 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, two Israeli officials tell me

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) March 24, 2024

I don't think it's fair to put the Intercept and Grayzone in the same bracket. Grayzone do investigative reporting and get attacked for it by the mainstream press (including the Intercept), and then weeks later when it's safer to do so the Intercept pick up and launder the story so it's safe for liberals to read.

GrayZone is a propaganda outlet for the governments of Russia and China.

A propaganda outlet for the governments of Russia and China, you say.

Russia and China.

Russia AND China.

Both of them together - gosh, the Grayzone must be really, really bad!

As someone who reads actual propaganda outlets for the governments of Russia and China, it seems unlikely that the Grayzone is one of them. (But then again I would say that, wouldn't I?)

Grayzone do investigative reporting and get attacked for it by the mainstream press (including the Intercept), and then weeks later when it's safer to do so the Intercept pick up and launder the story so it's safe for liberals to read. If you are not following Grayzone and Electronic Intifada you are missing a critical perspective on events in Gaza and the West Bank. Some of their guests and contributors have since been assassinated by Israel. I feel lucky to have the chance to briefly hear and read those voices before they were snuffed out.

I don't meant to derail the thread though, as you were.

Maybe you're right, but coming in with these being your only two posts on this forum doesn't help the case

I used to post here years ago under a different name, in the music section - can't log in under that name any more.

Anyway, I don't meant to disturb the vibe, I eavesdrop because (a) I used to come here 20 or so years ago and (b) because generally I enjoy / think it's important to hear perspectives I don't agree with.

fwiw I read Electronic Intifada

it shows

For what it’s worth the running dog Yankee imperialist Washington Post reported on the “protestors” more than a month ago. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/10/gaza-aid-blockade-protest-kerem-shalom/

I'm not saying there haven't been protests trying to block aid, just that (1) as far as I know there is not an ongoing "blockade" by protestors right now, and (2) gray zone is a peddler of conspiracy theories, atrocity denial, pro-authoritarianism, and other garbage regardless of who they are funded by

it's impossible to trust or forgive grayzone for their syria coverage and its consequences (on syrians and on the humanity of the anglo-european left) and by all accounts they have only been getting worse on other issues too - they are basically a propaganda outlet for the fascist international at this point

so the grayzone is apparently a propaganda outlet for the governments of Russia AND China... AND Syria... AND something called "the fascist international"(!?)

(I didn't know what that last one is, so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_Montreux_Fascist_conference - is this what the Grayzone represent?)

and yet they are the conspiracy theorists?