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

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.