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

My friend went to the funeral for ‘our’ hostage yesterday. Orión was a dual national so both nations’ embassies sent floral tributes, but not a single blossom or acknowledgement from the Israelis.

that’s awful, suzy.

regarding my previous article post, safe to say that if almost any other country did what Israel did, it would be a huge scandal.

There’s so much I want to say about what happened and how various state actors behaved between 7 October and today, but a) some of the incidents were very odd indeed b) the families have been put through the wringer and c) I am peripheral to this so feel it would not be my place to speak (apart from the things I have said).

Wtf happened to Piers Morgan?

Yeah, he's been pretty outspoken about this. (I saw something where he compares Netanyahu's actions and reasoning unfavorably to the way the UK handled the IRA.) I've only caught clips of him that get reported on or go viral - never watched his show - but he's like Bill Maher where he's just really outspoken about personal opinions that range all over the place from good to terrible and he knows how to leverage his platforms so that everyone knows about them. So yeah, wait a while and I'm sure he'll do something shitty again, etc.

BREAKING: Spain has said it will join South Africa’s case before the ICJ accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip https://t.co/YMNXYWyafJ pic.twitter.com/I1KRvqxzcY

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) June 6, 2024

nobody expects the spanish…

sorry

Interesting argument that anti-Palestinian racism is a linked but separate phenomenon from Islamophobia, and that it must be addressed differently as a result.

https://www.vox.com/policy/352663/anti-palestinian-racism-islamophobia-antisemitism

Sorry if link has already been posted here. Really thorough piece in the LRB from a month ago. It starts on the Hamas rape allegations, but it goes on to cover a lot of the ground we have here, plus a lot of the discourse, with detours into the history of sexual violence in the conflict and others throughout the world.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/azadeh-moaveni/what-they-did-to-our-women

BREAKING

UN investigation concludes that Israel is committing the crime of EXTERMINATION in Gaza.

The truth is out.pic.twitter.com/oVDMFfL4y4

— sarah (@sahouraxo) June 12, 2024

Good to see.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jun/14/barclays-suspends-sponsorship-from-download-latitude-and-isle-of-wight-festivals

she couldn’t catch a train directly between two parts (!). I think my main concern for functioning in such a state might be both under and overestimated: how do you live together in peace after that?

I realized later your friend might have been referring to the fact city buses don't go to Lukavica or Istocno, but turn around just before so you have to walk the last 15 minutes if you want the "other" bus station for Podgorica or Belgrade.

With the wider point about segregation, its difficult to answer. The segregation is between 3 groups not 2, and while it is very pronounced its not absolute. There are mixed towns with different sides like Mostar, but then other towns that are intermingled but have things like the "two schools under one roof" system, where Bosniak kids and Croatian kids are taught in the same building but under different systems due to the "different languages". But this isn't necessarily popular with people and is a lot to do with unintended consequences of Dayton rather than the conflict itself, which incentivised and entrenched corruption by the way it organised power along ethnic lines (Jews, Albanians, and others are barred from various forms of office)

The HDZ has long been upset with Komsic because although he is Croatian he has popularity with non-Croatians as well as Croatians, which makes him insufficiently nationalist for the HDZ, which is an example of how the major parties are anti-integrationist for pragmatic/cynical reasons, so there's a top down element to all this.

The current situation is very safe, low levels of crime and violence but high corruption, and high emigration, as the country is gridlocked by the consequences of Dayton itself (although I'm not saying it was wrong per se given the circumstances at the time).

As to what lies below the surface, I don't know. Its worth pointing out that up to a third of all marriages were mixed in the 1960-1980s and yet what happened still happened. Thats a topic all of its own, but I wanted to say that the solution to the conflict is itself has had a lot of unforeseen consequences (or foreseen but viewed as acceptable tradeoff)

A piece that attempts to describe those utterly insane IDF videos.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/running-amok-turfah

I don’t know what this is from but it is worth watching and also accurately describes why I feel we need to talk about what Zionism is and what it is doing to Palestinians and Israelis.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8XEOZ7OPpb/?igsh=MTJxY3dqNTFhem1qeg==

New German citizens must declare Israel’s right to exist https://t.co/jhGAIt5Im5

— Financial Times (@FT) June 25, 2024

Man when the Germans get into something, they really go whole hog: Antisemitism, Philosemitism, etc.

I wonder if it's reciprocal

So is Germany leaving the United Nations and Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_thought

Maybe Germany and Israel can make their own union. Sort of like the Odd Couple.

They didn't agree on very much with the League of Nations either iirc.

So ... our local pride organization just pulled out of a Pride Month event about Stonewall that was cosponsored by them and a local group called the Jewish Alliance (basically our local Jewish cultural organization). The Jewish Alliance is pretty much what you'd expect, a fairly squishy-liberal group that mostly organizes events around Jewish holidays and does various kinds of cultural awareness events that are useful in a place with a quite small Jewish population. A local leftist magazine/cooperative took to social media demanding that the pride group pull out of collaborating with the "genocidal" Jewish Alliance, an allegation based on what they said were their past interactions with the group (but I don't know the details of those, they didn't spell them out, and I'm not going to spend hours sorting through their social media posts to see if I can find anything more specific).

The Jewish Alliance issued a press release basically saying their feelings are hurt, they're sorry the pride group pulled out, they've always supported LGBTQ causes (true), and they have publicly decried the suffering in Gaza (true, although as far as I know they haven't called for a ceasefire). Anyway. I'm not taking sides on any of this, I know people involved with both the pride group and the alliance — very fine people on both sides, as they say — and it mostly strikes me as sad in a place where both groups are marginalized and vulnerable.

That’s pretty much anti-Semitism

Yeah. It feels ugly.

On the Iranian election and the gradual collapse..

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n13/azadeh-moaveni/election-in-iran

I don't really know how to find this balance, but it seems like there needs to be some recognition of the fact that many Jewish organizations have historical ties to Israel and that there are real even if deeply flawed reasons that many Jews feel an affinity for Israel, and that a system that places Jews into two buckets of "zionist" (bad) or "anti-zionist" (good) is going to alienate much of the Jewish community and prevent them from participating in other social justice activities. I don't know where you draw the line, but I don't think it should be you're either 100% against the existence of Israel or you are banned.

It’s disturbing when random
Muslims are demanded out of the blue to “denounce terrorism/Hamas” as a prerequisite to anything and it’s equally wrong when American Jews are supposed to answer for the actions of Israel.

There is a deep, catastrophic, intentional stupidity in the Biden White House that is going to tear the entire Middle East apart. pic.twitter.com/jyuun0pi0J

— Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) June 27, 2024

"we reject this logic". oh, ok.

Painful reading, ofc lots that we do know, tracked to one family's story.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ayelet-waldman-my-father-and-liberal-zionisms-downfall.html?

OK

this is genuinely incredible https://t.co/lY0U80Gzrj

— jeff computers (@allahliker) June 29, 2024

He did that in the debate, calling Biden a Palestinian. It’s a slur now.

One of the legit weirdest things I have heard a presidential candidate say.

today we are all Palestinians

Yeah, I don’t know how it happened.

Would love to have shakshouka for breakfast in the regular

nb: Shakshouka is not a Palestinian food. It was brought there by Yemeni Jews.

Brace Belden went on the Bad Hasbara podcast to talk about the weird propaganda exhibit that is the Scooter Braun Nova Festival Immersive Experience aka the Israeli psy-trance music festival thing in NYC right now, that will be coming to LA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIRpWS4hH-k

nb: Shakshouka is not a Palestinian food. It was brought there by Yemeni Jews.

Maghrebi Jews brought it to Israel/the Levant/Palestine but it’s an Ottoman thing, an unscrambled menemen.

I just had menemen at a friend's Turkish breakfast yesterday, was like "Oh, this is a variation of shakshouka."

In general there's so much commonality in foods across the Levant that it seems hard to isolate things as belonging to one culture or country.

not to mention that all the recipes I looked at online (a bit dubious tbf) have tomatoes in them

Yeah I always have to remind myself that any "traditional foods" with potatoes or tomatoes anywhere in the world outside the Americas can't be more than 500 years old. But a few centuries is long enough for a tradition, I guess.

In general there's so much commonality in foods across the Levant that it seems hard to isolate things as belonging to one culture or country.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Sunday, 30 June 2024 13:29 (three hours ago) link

Even hummus was part of the culture of the mizrahi Jews who came to Israel as well as the culture of Palestine, and Israelis eat hummus as much because of the former as the latter.

I long for the day when Israelis and Palestinians only ever beef one another about hummus.

BREAKING: Yesterday, the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to divest from Israel bonds and denounce Christian Zionism, citing human rights abuses against Palestinians.https://t.co/2g4wtEMqor

— IMEU (@theIMEU) July 2, 2024

Allright!

An unsurprising if trenchant essay on PEN America’s imperialist fantasia.

https://www.communitymausoleum.org/coma-journal/pen-america-cultural-imperialism-avant-garde

This is excellent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m1aDlglA-k

These are just claims but it seems totally plausible and totally fucked up!!

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cger582weplo