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

I just walked by a group of counter-protesters wrapped in Israeli flags and could hear one of them say, "They're a bunch of followers. It's just like with Covid."

We must restore order: https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/05/02/nypd-officer-fired-gun-columbia-hamilton-hall-raid/

Cop probably dropped a gun they were going to plant on a protester.

FYI: NYPD official Rebecca Weiner, who cited “outside agitators” as a reason for NYPD raids but offered no transparency is a Columbia adjunct. The unit she leads came under fire in the early 2010s for spying on Muslim New Yorkers. I know because I sued that unit for spying on me. https://t.co/NaxnDY36B0

— Asad أسد 🗽🍎 (@AsadFromNYC) May 2, 2024

See Colombia have cut all relations with Israel and Turkey are imposing sanctions.

Statement of the #ICC Office of the Prosecutor pic.twitter.com/Cw331pMcDm

— Int'l Criminal Court (@IntlCrimCourt) May 3, 2024

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/03/college-campus-protests-israel-gaza-student-journalists-00155672

US universities are toast.

During a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, said that “Hamas was hiding” in “Harvard, Columbia, and other elite universities,” in reference to the pro-Palestine protests breaking out in universities across the US. pic.twitter.com/zSx9pGbV6r

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 3, 2024

No-one believes anything that comes out of the mouths of anyone even remotely connected to the Israeli government anymore.

Right wing media is gonna have a field day with this one:

https://www.ktvu.com/news/photos-stanford-protester-seen-wearing-hamas-headband

the NYPD found a TERRORISM INSTRUCTION MANUAL guys

Pencils, books, laptops, those are the tools of students and what you expect to find on a college campus. But here’s what the NYPD found in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University after we were able to arrest the protestors and agitators for commandeering and barricading themselves… pic.twitter.com/EKQV6nJySu

— NYPD Deputy Commissioner, Operations Kaz Daughtry (@NYPDDaughtry) May 3, 2024

Harvard is not 'toast' give me a break. but lots of people on both sides of the issue may not want to go there as a result of all of this.

Gee officer tell us why protesters carry this stuff as standard equipment. Can’t possibly imagine.

Popular knapsack

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2655847/Video-Eric-Adams-teaches-parents-search-kids-rooms-2011.html

Apologies if someone shared this already

https://defector.com/going-off-script

This is an especially absurd story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2024/05/04/columbia-professor-arrested-nypd-protests-israel-gaza/73561493007/

Gregory Pflugfelder had just finished the final class of his career at Columbia. In 28 years at the university, he achieved many accolades as a professor of history who taught a popular course on Japanese monsters – mostly focused on Godzilla and "the role of the monstrous in the cultural imagination."

He didn't know it, but a cultural monster of sorts would soon be at his door.

The next night, on Tuesday, the 64-year-old silver-haired scholar stepped outside his apartment building, located off campus across the street from Columbia. He wanted to record iPhone video of hundreds of police responding to historic student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Fifteen minutes later, the NYPD arrested him.

The New York Police Department listed Pflugfelder among 112 arrests made at Columbia on Tuesday night, according to police records obtained by USA TODAY. But Pflugfelder was never on campus.

he's mentioned in yesterday's NYT story too

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/03/university-endowment-funding-protests-israel/

https://archive.ph/7bAhn

But student protesters could try a different tactic, one that doesn’t seem to have been found any traction amid the volley of demands. They could become investors in the U.S. defense contractors or other companies they want to influence. That would allow them to become activist investors and push for the changes they want to see from the inside as investors, Marsicano said.
“I would love to see that, as a public policy professor,” he said. “I would be fascinated by any student group that did that.”

Only 68 billion or so needed to take a controlling interest in Raytheon, students better start passing the hat.

"This could be a moment for significant reform, but it would require a challenge to at least some sections of capital. Changing university funding models means taking on Wall Street. Arms companies rely on US defence spending and its military interventions or proxy wars. Action on climate change means losses for fossil fuel companies, whose owners often fund the conservative right.

Liberals in the US and across Europe have decided they do not want to take on this challenge. Their latest wheeze is to de-risk investment in the hope that it will revitalise stagnating economies, while doing what they can to see off any challenge from the more progressive left. That means heavily policing and demonising protests, working with the right to undermine candidates and parties that do seek to challenge capital"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/may/liberalism-without-accountability

Israel’s military on Monday ordered about 100,000 civilians in parts of Rafah to evacuate “immediately”

Any hint yet where they are supposed to go

into the sea

Ipswich Town captain Sam Morsy @sammorsy08 celebrates the team’s promotion to the Premier League wearing the Palestinian flag 🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/dQXYsOVWEc

— Leyla Hamed (@leylahamed) May 5, 2024

Interesting statement

#Statement | The Foreign Ministry expresses Saudi Arabia’s warning of the dangers of the Israeli occupation forces targeting the city of Rafah as part of its systematic bloody campaign to storm all areas of the Gaza Strip and displace its residents towards the unknown. pic.twitter.com/3AQs9WgqUU

— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) May 6, 2024

Trinity College Dublin to divest from investments in Israeli companies that feature on UN ‘blacklist’https://t.co/s6aFISMETv

— Dr Mary McAuliffe (@MaryMcAuliffe4) May 6, 2024

the Israelis are starting the 'we'll just go it alone then' chorus that doesn't bode well... shades of Rhodesia in 1965

In the 1980s, Israel's defense industry was cash-starved until it struck a secret and unprecedented $1.7 billion deal to sell South Africa 60 Kfir combat planes. South Africa under apartheid was the Israeli defense industry's biggest customer and funded its most ambitious projects.

they do have a pretty massive weapons industry and can probably carry on even if the U.S. were to cut them off (which it won't)

I read Mads Gilbert's Night In Gaza this morning which was based on his time there 10 years ago. Spoiler At the end of the book the Israeli forces don't let his replacement emergency anaesthetist in and he hasn't been able to return since. But he does still do great talks.
The book is very scathing about Israel and lack of recognition of ambulance immunity and pretty much any form of truce/white flag/ whatever immunity. & since he is one of several people continually treating children who have suffered heavily from continual attack he doesn't have a lot of sympathy for the oppressor.
Good book anyway.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/05/university-of-chicago-shabbat-encampment-protest/

I thought this was a very interesting and rather moving article (though I wish the reporter had noted that the UC rabbi's appalling line about Black Confederate soldiers is not just racist but also inaccurate)

My friend was attending a JVP/anti-Zionist Jewish shabbat dinner at UKansas-Lawrence, and a bunch of Christian Zionists called him and his group a bunch of Nazis. Half his family was wiped out in the Shoah.

ugh that's awful

people feel emboldened to be disgusting in so many ways over this

would the university be willing to do anything about it?

in germany you have people literally raised on nazi plundered wealth equating their own ancestors with jewish people who question the national consensus - which in theory violates holocaust minimization laws but seems to be considered a respectable way to behave

I've also been enjoying the graphic hamas hate crime fantasies that queer people are currently being bombarded with by the pro-genocide crowd

the black confederates thing is a popular lost cause talking point - interesting convergences happening

Finally! The worst response I've read:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/shibboleth-the-role-of-words-in-the-campus-protests

I haven't read that essay (and I won't), but this Twitter thread on Why Zadie Smith Is Like That is very interesting, in a depressing way. It starts here:

Let me tell you what kind of a place Cambridge is. Thread. https://t.co/YSPp528tRA

— con questi nuovi ritmi americani (she/her) (@racheledini1) May 6, 2024

I started trying to read that Zadie Smith thing and just could not. I don't know what the world needs now, but 100 percent not that.

Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.

Do we have to choose just one?

zadie smith becoming the exact kind of person she satirized in on beauty, hate to see it

When I got to the last paragraph on Sunday, I felt stupid -- as in, she does think she's smarter than her readers.

I think its often the case that writers do think that.

They are usually bad.

"You may have thought about this Israel/Palestine situation. But have you thought about it with my brain?"

Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.

I'm your hell, I'm your dream I'm nothing in between

Unperson, thanks for sharing that Twitter thread, sums up a lot I've been feeling about my adopted home (though my life here only very rarely intersects with the university)

I will eventually read it because the title infers it is about semantics but so far she has devoted paragraphs to climate change and seems to want to discuss “tactics” in re protest but has not used the word “tactics” when it is kinda the most obvious term due to being concise and related to the history of leftist protest / activism

McSweeneys darling and alumnus turning out to be spoiled narcissist, story at 11

timely push notification from the NYT today

BREAKING NEWS
Speaking at the Capitol, President Biden said there has been a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.

an earlier version noted that this speech was part of a holocaust remembrance day ceremony

Salaita on the Z. Smith piece:

Smith speaks of activism that can lead to arrest or other forms of punishment, concluding that it “represents a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.” This royal “us” betrays Smith’s position as outsider and poseur. In reality, sacrifice is eminently imaginable to the countless people who have chosen to act on their conscience and subsequently languished in prison, lost jobs and careers, or suffered exile and ostracism. It is eminently imaginable to the very students on whom Smith lavishes so much scorn. They are being punished in horrible ways and yet they keep going. Sacrifice isn’t unimaginable to “many of us.” It is unimaginable to Smith and her cohort of frivolous lickspittles. This she confirms a few sentences later with what is supposed to be a droll anecdote about her inability to give up travel to New York for the sake of the environment. “What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)!” she laments. This singular (and parenthetical) flash of self-awareness, meant to be ironic and thus venial, is the only aspect of the essay worth the reader’s attention.

https://stevesalaita.com/our-your-pitiful-ethics-a-response-to-zadie-smiths-shibboleth

Years ago, a friend of mine once told me she was on the subway reading the New Yorker, and a man with a French accent sort of accosted her and said "This magazine -- what is it supposed to be about? It seems to me it is about nothing." More and more I think that is apt.

Thanks for that. xpost

Nah, The New Yorker still publishes first-rate reporting. Then they'll publish an issue like last week's that I threw in the trash, it was so content-free.

Yeah, it's spotty enough that I just look at the stack whenever I visit my parents and take one or two home with me for toilet reading.