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

There have been so many different atrocities over the months and it’s really hard to not fall into despair over it because there’s nothing I can do. But the aid workers, it just got to me. Knowing how deeply the Famine scarred Irish history for over a century and how callous the British were in denying us food, and seeing the faces of the workers and the image of the van struck from above. I would always read about it in school and ask the same question: “why?” but it wasn’t until I was older and could be told that the British government viewed starving the population as, variously, payment for our sins and as a means of ridding the land of the surplus. It happens always in almost every conflict, people die from lack of food and clean water and no medical care so much more than in bombardments. It really got to me. I wept for them and the people they were trying to help.

I can’t express how angry and helpless I feel.

It's somehow both numbing and wrenching at the same time

At a certain point, and this is a topic and coping mechanism that always fires off pushback, but one kinda has to cut off the spigot of news one consumes of the horrifying developments.

Like there’s no utility past a certain point of continually hearing further devastation if you’ve already reached a conclusion about the situation but are also aware that these are massively anti-democratic national mechanisms that none of us can do anything to actually change.

It fucking sucks, but the firehose of misery of news seems way too intense to not traumatize the fuck out of the heavy consumer of it. We’re seeing 19th Century-style genocidal shit to accompany the 19th Century notions of nationalism in play but with 21st Century weapons and media and none of that we are built for.

I don't consume it non-stop like a few people I know, but I think that continuing to dispatches from the area as well as opinion pieces is really important, at least for me.

I mean

Walking through the streets of Rafah, it is evident that my neighbors are suffering immensely.

Every conversation is a quiet cry for comfort, an attempt to hold onto pieces of our lives.

The Gaza Strip has never felt as cramped or unlivable as it does now. Streets here in Rafah – Gaza’s southernmost city – are filled with makeshift tents.

We constantly stumble over one another as we walk.

After approximately 180 days of war, people have become somewhat desensitized.

Death is a daily occurrence.

Families can be wiped out entirely – or almost entirely. Anyone who remains alive will have to search for a new place to live and keep on looking for food after burying their loved ones.

The death toll is so high that we have been numbed.

Tears have dried.

Instead, we exist in a perpetual state of survival. Every moment is consumed by the urgent need to persevere during the ceaseless onslaught.

Muhammad Qeshta was a distant relative of mine. He was a kind neighbor with five grandchildren.

For nearly a decade, he was a diligent employee of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).

He was working at an UNRWA warehouse – distributing aid – when it was attacked by Israel a few weeks ago.

Fragments from missiles pierced Muhammad’s left eye, right shoulder and chest.

Muhammad died from his injuries within a week of the attack.

Meanwhile, many are of trying to leave, as explained here.

This is a lie. There are Gazans evacuating and people have been mobilised at the border in Egypt enabling evacuations and supporting them when they come through. The passage used to cost hundred dollars but currently is between 5 and 10k $ https://t.co/5LhWs6Vk4V

— Layla (@LaylaInBristol) April 2, 2024

Kingfish, otm, unfortunately. It’s fucking awful.

I have been consuming less news lately in order to preserve my sanity but I feel that because there is also at the same time a firehouse of propaganda and misinformation that I need to keep up in order to combat ignorance (my own or others’).

It’s so ugly that the natural impulse in leaving Gaza also serves Israeli’s purpose of “thinning out the population”.

I don't really want to make things about me, but yeah this has definitely been affecting my mental health. I've ruminated on it daily for the past nearly six months. I read stuff, I listen to stuff. I do fairly little in comparison to how much I think. I feel (metaphorically) this mild nausea that's there all the time. Making matters worse, there is the frequent misinformation, the actual antisemitism, etc. and it can be easy to distract oneself with that stuff and not focus on the horrific bigger picture. There are a lot of hills I don't want to make my stand on, so to speak, even when I disagree with some of the things being said. All in the context of the feeling that I am both connected to and identified with Israel in ways I can't really escape, that make this very different for me from Syria or Sudan. And meanwhile seeing some people (although thankfully not that many) who I genuinely like or even love just unable or unwilling to cut through the fog they are in about the real situation in Gaza.

It is a persistently awful and gnawing feeling that something you grew up associating with liberation and empowerment of your own group is also oppressive and destructive to another group. I think this is the main reason a lot of Jews have a hard time facing the reality today.

Not to mention that we are in a historical moment of unprecedented amounts of direct access to horrors on the ground in near real time.

my wife is probably in a state of feeling frozen about what's happening over there, this feeling of anger and sadness at much of what's being directed at jewish people, even more anger and sadness about what's being unleashed on Gaza, the previous lure to visit Israel (really a feeling i don't think anyone who's not jewish can understand, myself included tbh) now canceled out by feeling that she never can and maybe never should go there. plus our son having his bar mitzvah scheduled, and her saying she's glad it's at a private non-denominational venue vs being at a temple, and feeling guilty about being afraid, and worried that she'll have to be afraid forever but also worried about the kid and his future, the future that's being perhaps partially affected by what Israel is doing.

and being surrounded by those who are callous on all sides. not just anti-semites using this as a moment to pop their heads up, realizing it's their time to shine a bit. as i said in another thread, someone we know just popped over there for an instagrammable visit to have a full course meal and some chat with other visiting influencer types, plenty of smiling faces in photos, while you've got 12k+ dead children in gaza. then he left to head right to SXSW.

i think she kinda wants to keep her head down and offer zero takes.

"we're trying our hardest to accurately hit terrorists" https://t.co/RVM6EY0UFu pic.twitter.com/UnMhaijavc

— πατέρας raver (@mathaiaus) April 2, 2024

So it seems that two former soldiers were among the British aid workers killed by the IDF. That changes things, even the right wing rags (which is most of them) are up in arms over this.

I think this might be the first time since Oct 7 that even Bibi said they fucked up. It actually might be the first time I've ever seen him apologize for anything, in fact.

horrifying on so many levels that's this is what it takes for Israel to take responsibility

heart goes out to you and your families, Omar and MA

Haaretz Lead Editorial:

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-04-03/ty-article-opinion/israel-must-end-its-war-in-gaza-now/0000018e-a07c-d4c8-adce-f77c39e90000

Bibi also said something like 'this is war' implying that strafing aid convoys is just an inevitable fact of life

That's typical Bibi language

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-02/ty-article/.premium/idf-sources-gaza-aid-workers-killed-because-officers-on-the-ground-do-what-they-want/0000018e-a06e-d9c2-afbe-a8fe319b0000

I mean, if you "remove all restraints" and give commanders autonomy, this kind of thing is pretty much bound to happen.

When it's a few Western aid workers who are the collateral damage, there's outrage. When it's tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, who gives a fuck.

Archived version of the Haaretz editorial calling for an end to the war, which I think is a meaningful development:
https://archive.ph/HEin2

The editorial is not solely about the aid worker killings but also refers to their recent investigative report on IDF "kill zones" in Gaza (archived version here):
https://archive.ph/WV5ba

Hard to find words. It's really stomach turning and soul-darkening.

Flagrant war crimes

I mean, more of them

This week's incident cannot be distanced from the ease with which the IDF kills Palestinians in Gaza, as Yaniv Kubovich's March 31 report shows. His investigation casts doubt on the IDF's estimate that 9,000 of the 32,000 Gazans who have been killed in the war are in fact terrorists. Many of the reserve and career officers Kubovich interviewed say that the definition of terrorist is often a matter of wide interpretation. "In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate," said a reserve officer who has served in Gaza.

The report found that the terrorist designation is not based on what the individual was doing at the time he was targeted but on whether he entered the "kill zone" established by the local IDF commander. "As soon as people enter it, mainly adult males, orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed," the officer said.

unspeakable

A terrorist is anyone we kill, and we kill everyone who enters a zone that remains totally undefined/undemarcated. Struggling not to make some comparisons here...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war

IDF snipers deliberately targeting children

They managed to kill one Palestinian among the seven aid workers so they'll be pleased about that at least.

ZZ, gyac, rob, Boring otm - it's both enraging and deadening that this is what gets the slaughter on the front of all of the papers over here, it makes it so clear that the "us to them" humanity ratio isn't 1 to 10, or 100, or 1000, it's literally zero.

Am I the only one seeing Matthew Miller smiling as he spews lie after lie in every sentence that comes from his mouth?? His face basically betrays "this is line I gotta* go with even though we all know its bogus, evil, and continues to enable these daily unspeakable evils".

*you don't gotta

Sorry I realise that post should be in the other Israel thread

Yeah mine too, sorry.

it's both enraging and deadening that this is what gets the slaughter on the front of all of the papers

That wasn’t my point tbf, it was about the parallels of prolonged starvation on the civilian populace & the murder of people trying to alleviate entirely preventable suffering

It's enraging but unsurprising that this is what gets the greatest attention. At the same time, I have some hope that it will be a crystalizing moment and that it will open people's eyes to the way the IDF has been operating in Gaza.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.

"You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one intelligence officer said."

That wasn’t my point tbf

Yeah fair point - I wrote something connecting to your point but took it out, and left in that you were otm because you were

I'm trying to read the +972 report that that Guardian article is based on, and it is extremely difficult to get through (https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/). I was going to post a quote but it's honestly too disturbing.

oops I just posted this in the AI thread.

oops I just posted this in the AI thread.

That piece is just AI providing cover for the IDF. Not finished the piece but I'm not sure why 972 is entertaining it.

It doesn't read that way to me at all, but maybe because I've read a lot about machine learning and automated systems, so the idea that deciding to use AI could ever be exculpatory is a non-starter

Yeah it doesn’t strike me as remotely exculpatory.

AI churning out a list that no-one cares to check through is the IDF telling themselves a tale about these "terrorists", to me.

Must repeat I like what 972 do.

Struggling to see how the IDF comes out of that article anything other than very very very badly.

To bring in a first year law school term, it shows what you'd call reckless indifference to human life. I mean I guess it's one half notch better than literally just saying "Hey, let's bomb the shit out of as many civilians as we possibly can," but I never assumed that was how the decision making process went.

Interesting side story about military conscription in Israel:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/israel-ultra-orthodox-jews-haredim-benjamin-netanyahu-court-military-conscription-gaza-war

It's definitely an interesting and complex flashpoint in Israeli politics. I think I said upthread there's a chance it could undo the current governing coalition. The more secular side of society perceives the haredim as kind of like religious welfare queens. However there's a minority among them who consider themselves against zionism for religious reasons, don't take money from the government, and don't accept the state, and some of them descend from pre-Israel communities. Service in the army would radically change a lot of these communities, which are often fairly closed off from the rest of the country.