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zvaigzdelasas · 4 months ago

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Do you have an analysis on Sinwar being the new politburo chief? Very unexpected choice.

Have a couple thoughts:

Dissolving more of the barrier between Hamas as a political organization & as an insurgent organization

Spitting in Israel's face who was hoping that a decapitation strike would leave hamas with a leader lacking broader political legitimacy in the organization or create divisions/deepen divisions between civilian governance & militant organization

Lessens the leverage Qatar has over Hamas as they were providing Haniyeh with refuge

Since Sinwar is (presumably) in Gaza, his presence will likely be used to justify decreasingly discriminate attacks even moreso than it was before

Likely much more uncompromising (not to imply Haniyeh was) in negotiations

Israel and the US will have to directly negotiate with someone they despise

Dropsite News describes sinwar as such:

Despite the sinister portrayals, Sinwar’s writings and media interviews indicate he is a complex thinker with clearly defined political objectives who believes in armed struggle as a means to an end. He gives the impression of a well-educated political militant, not a cult leader on a mass suicide crusade. “It's not this black image of Sinwar as a man with two horns living in the tunnels,” said Hamad, the Hamas official who worked directly with Sinwar for three years. “But in the time of war, he's very strong. This man is very strong. If he wants to fight, he fights seriously.”

In 1988, just months after Hamas was founded, Sinwar was arrested by Israeli forces and sentenced to four life sentences on charges he had personally murdered alleged Palestinian collaborators. During his 22 years in an Israeli prison, he became fluent in Hebrew and studied the history of the Israeli state, its political culture, and its intelligence and military apparatus. He translated by hand the memoirs of several former heads of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet. “When I entered [prison], it was 1988, the Cold War was still going on. And here [in Palestine], the Intifada. To spread the latest news, we printed fliers. I came out, and I found the internet,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist in 2018. “But to be honest, I never came out—I have only changed prisons. And despite it all, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher.”[...]

Sinwar, unlike leaders of Al Qaeda or ISIS, has regularly invoked international law and UN resolutions, exhibiting a nuanced understanding of the history of negotiations with Israel mediated by the U.S. and other nations. “Let's be clear: having an armed resistance is our right, under international law. But we don't only have rockets. We have been using a variety of means of resistance,” he said in the 2018 interview. “We make the headlines only with blood. And not only here. No blood, no news. But the problem is not our resistance, it is their occupation. With no occupation, we wouldn't have rockets. We wouldn't have stones, Molotov cocktails, nothing. We would all have a normal life."

Throughout 2018 and 2019, Sinwar endorsed the large-scale nonviolent protests along the walls and fences of Gaza known as the Great March of Return. “We believe that if we have a way to potentially resolve the conflict without destruction, we’re O.K. with that,” Sinwar said at a rare news conference in 2018. “We would prefer to earn our rights by soft and peaceful means. But we understand that if we are not given those rights, we are entitled to earn them by resistance.”[...]

After the end of Israel’s 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, Sinwar spoke to VICE News and sought to frame the Palestinian struggle in a U.S. context, using recent cases of lethal police violence against African Americans. “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and in the West Bank. And by the burning of our children. And against the Gaza Strip through siege, murder, and starvation.”

And additionally (echoing the words of Hagari)

Support among Palestinians for Hamas and its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, according to the recent poll, “remains very high” and has increased during the past three months. At the same time, while two-thirds of Palestinians polled in the occupied territories believe that Hamas will “win the war,” only 48 percent of those in Gaza agreed.

Hamas has insisted the war cannot destroy its movement and will remain part of the tapestry of Palestinian factions governing its besieged and occupied territories. “What matters is that you finally realize that Hamas is here. That it exists. That there is no future without Hamas, there is no possible deal whatsoever, because we are part and parcel of this society, even if we lose the next elections,” Sinwar warned in 2018. “But we are a piece of Palestine. More than that, we are a piece of the history of the entire Arab world, which includes Islamists as well as seculars, nationalists, leftists.”

Daniel Hagari has also echoed this last bit [TimesOfIsrael is Israeli Private Media]

“Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong,” he continued.

Rumors are that Netanyahu is trying to figure out necromancy in order to bring Haniyeh back

Also check out this interview conducted by Vice

youtube

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fairuzfan · 7 months ago

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Sorry one more thing I wasn't going to talk about but if you had asked me about the binational state/land thing maybe... in 2016, I might have given a somewhat positive answer but I think that since then, Israeli society has become exponentially more racist and anti-Palestinian. Since then we had the Abraham Accords, Sheikh Jarrah, Massafir Yatta, the highest child martyr count in years, and now finally a full blown genocide. Many Palestinians who previously advocated for equality in a single state look at all this, especially in recent months and think "how can I live side by side with these people?"

The vast majority of Israeli society is not against war for the sake of the Palestinians, they're against war for their own safety. They say as much. Hell, look at standing together. The founder guy says "our security is tied in with the Palestinians'". So if it wasn't tied with the Palestinians', you wouldn't care? And I get sometimes you need to introduce people to ideas gently, but their entire organization language emphasizes "shared pain" when there is an oppressor/oppressed dynamic they aren't even hinting at. How can anyone achieve safety if you won't even admit you have power over your Palestinian org members?

Even Brothers in Arms claims to want to "strengthen democracy" but they completely ignore Palestinians have never experienced democracy in "Israel". So what's the point strengthening your own standing when the most disadvantaged still are at rock bottom?? Plus your whole group represents the IOF reservists/members, you have no intention of helping Palestinians when you are the primary oppressors. And this is not an insignificant group in israel!

Not many Israelis are willing to put themselves on the line to protect or even advocate for Palestinians. I mean 7+ months into a genocide and what did israeli society do other than protest *netanyahu*? Hold up flour bags during the flour massacre??? The people serving in the idf are your friends and family and community. Tel Aviv is an hour away from Gaza. Surely you can do *something* physical!! They had people at their Gaza borders starving Palestinians on purpose and people just... watched it happen. Not to mention the IOF, which many Israelis are a part of, participates in the genocide and has been lauded for their "heroism". I look at that and I think "how can I expect you to seriously consider my rights as a person? How do I know you won't miss your old status and reclaim it?"

We've seen Israelis *celebrate* and *ridicule* our martyrs and people. So like where us the good faith in all this? Where can we work with some of these people and think "Yeah I believe they'll respect my inherent dignity as a person"?

Which binationalism relies on this. You need to have good faith between communities for this to actually happen. But when one community won't even acknowledge it's status as an oppressor at the height of oppression? Then what?

Israel as a country has never faced any retribution for its actions for 75 years. No one is holding them accountable. The country teaches propaganda in its schools about the Nakba. There is not serious consideration for Palestinian rights in Israeli society. Why would they suddenly decide to participate in a project that puts Palestinians as equal to Israelis when they learned all their lives that Palestinians are ruthless, unreasonable people who can't be reasoned with, and Israelis are logical, poor victims who are actually the ones who need protection from the Palestinians!

It just is mind boggling because I see people constantly complain about the way they hear things from Palestinians these days like "all Israelis need to leave". And they go on to say "why would you be so hateful/why would you say that" and don't think for a minute they're experiencing a televised genocide of their people (which they could have ended up in their shoes! People forget that Gaza has multiple refugee camps! Any one of us could have lived there!) And conversely are looking to Israeli society for them to do anything and they see nothing. At least think for a moment why they would say these things given the context of the situation. There's a genocide going on! And you're worried about what the people who are experiencing their people's genocide are saying because you're worried for the society conducting said genocide?? Let's deal with the matter at hand first!!!!!!

#palestine #palestine discussion

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halalchampagnesocialist · 26 days ago

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Historically, the violence of colonialism and imperialism has often been obscured behind the veneer of “decorum” and “politeness.” The same can be said for much of Zionism’s history. Another thing that permeates discourses around Israel/Palestine and Zionism is the politics of “moral respectability.” I would define this as morality politics seen as respectable or acceptable according to liberal, Western standards. We see this, for example, in the way that many liberal politicians talk about Israeli violence compared to Palestinian violence and so forth.

The politics of Zionism and moral respectability serve to act as double standards to absolve the Israeli state of its colonial violence. It is a politics that presents Israelis and Jews as deserving of sympathy, compassion, and solidarity, whilst Palestinians are merely a charity case at best, undeserving and facing an oppression of their own making, at worst.

A very recent example of this is the backlash to Mohammed El Kurd’s tweet about Jewish symbolism being appropriated by the state of Israel. For context, a Jewish man entered a Palestinian-owned coffee shop wearing a blue hat with a Star of David and was kicked out. This spawned outrage from many. Afterwards, Mohammed El Kurd tweeted the response below. This also drew outrage from some other Palestinians, Zionists, and everyone in between.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the equivocation of religious symbols with symbols like the Swastika, El Kurd is absolutely correct in his assertion that Zionism (and the state of Israel) have turned the Star of David into a racist symbol. We see the Star of David often graffitied onto Palestinian homes in the West Bank by settlers and now in Gaza by Israeli soldiers. There have been instances of the Star of David also being branded on Palestinian prisoners by Israelis. It is blatantly used as a symbol of violence and Jewish supremacy against Palestinians.

For those unfamiliar with El Kurd, he is a Palestinian New York-based writer, hailing from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied Jerusalem. Sheikh Jarrah, arguably, is one of the main sites of the ongoing Judaisation of Jerusalem. Palestinians in the neighbourhood are battling forced evictions and displacement against settlement organisations who plan to take their houses, remove their Palestinian inhabitants and give them to Jewish settlers to live in. El Kurd and his family are one of those families and he has been documenting this struggle with his sister Muna since he was a child. It is fair to say that El Kurd is not merely posturing about Zionism for ideological reasons, but like many Palestinians, he is a victim of Zionism in practice.

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wrote about zionism and morality politics for my substack. this is just a small excerpt, continue reading in the link.

#zionism #there is so much more i wanted to say and could've said but it would've been way too long

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eretzyisrael · 3 months ago

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by Corey Walker

The Black Lives Matter organization (BLM) faced an avalanche of backlash over the weekend after calling on the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to release the remaining hostages it kidnapped from Israel and took to Gaza on Oct. 7.

“Hamas: release the hostages,” the group posted on X/Twitter on Saturday.

The post generated outrage from activists who accused BLM of betraying the Palestinian cause. Left-wing social media personalities lambasted the group for supposedly minimizing the plight of Palestinians by showing empathy for Israelis in Hamas’s captivity.

“Did AIPAC write this post for you?” one X/Twitter user wrote, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“Guys please don’t associate this organization with the BLM movement. They are not synonymous. I founded a chapter of BLM in my city and I would never in a million years agree to be affiliated with this filth,” another user posted.

“This account just lost credibility,” someone else added.

“F—k you ZIONIST puppets,” posted left-wing social media personality Jackson Hinkle.

“Seeing black people backing Israel is one of the saddest things possible, given how the founders of Zionism considered black people to be inferior to white people,” wrote pro-Palestinian social media personality Ousman Noor.

After receiving a deluge of criticism over advocating for captive Israelis, BLM issued subsequent tweets calling for the United States to “disarm [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and defund the illegal military occupation” and for Israel to “stop murdering Palestinians.”

#blm #black lives matter #hostages #hamas #gaza #free the hostages

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apollos-olives · 10 months ago

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A few years ago I didn't really understand the reality of what Palestinians were going through, I didn't understand that it was an occupation I thought Isreal and Palestine were two countries having disputes over their boarders. It was the save sheikh jarrah campaign on twitter that lead me learning more. I saw how settlers in the west bank and east Jerusalem would just take people's houses and harrass Palestinians who lived there, and how soldiers harassed children who were going to school. There was one video that always stuck with me, i think it was from the west bank, these girls were walking to school and an Israeli soldier kept following them and telling one girl she was so sexy there was no way she was 15. She just tried to ignore him and keep walking, I think once he noticed someone was filming him he stopped.

I think that if I hadn't seen these things on twitter I would still be ignorant and resistant to learning more, I hate to give twitter this w but social media was vital for my learning about palestine. (Sorry to send you a whole essay, I saw some people asking if posting about palestine actually mattered and I felt like sharing this)

yes this is very important to mention. while social media has it's bad aspects, it can also be a persons greatest tool to spread resources and information on important things like palestine and other countries suffering under oppression. so while people may think that their reblogging isn't doing a difference, it can and WILL educate people even if they don't realize it. plus the attention it adds to the flame is very helpful to get people to start caring more and more.

#palestine #free palestine

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beguines · 4 months ago

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Mohammed El-Kurd, "Who Lives in Sheikh Jarrah?", Rifqa

Erasure of an article with the same name, published in the New York Times, April 2010.

#mohammed el-kurd #rifqa #poetry

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la7ma-mafrooma · 10 months ago

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"OP you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic 😠"

And is the "antisemitism" with us in the room?

The "antisemitism" being = criticizing a brutal occupation that's ethnically cleansing Palestinians and dehumanizing them in every way possible.

The "antisemitism" being = criticizing settler violence which has been exposed by BOTH Palestinians and former Zionists who lived in Israel and saw how settlers attack Palestinians, including children.

The "antisemitism" being = criticizing and condemning the continuation of an apartheid regime that subjects Palestinians including CHILDREN to being kidnapped in the middle of night, getting tortured and subjected to r*pe threats and actual sexual violence in Israeli prisons, no legal representation, military courts, signing papers in Hebrew -a language they do not speak-, and their families sometimes cannot visit at all. Oh and all of this? Without an actual charge! They just kidnap Palestinians and label them as prisoners. "The only democracy in the Middle East" my ass.

The "antisemitism" being = wanting an end to a brutal occupation that doesn't give Palestinians the right to having the name of their country back on the map nor the right to self-determination to begin with. A brutal occupation that KICKS Palestinians out of their homes* just for Israeli settlers to take over them.

*There are videos from 2021 if you look it up and see what happened in Sheikh Jarrah, and even before that, there are documentations of Palestinians getting displaced.

The "antisemitism" being = saying that there are Jews who have been advocating for a free Palestine and saying "not in our name". It is apparently saying how holocaust survivors and their descendants have opposed the stealing of Palestinian land and the colonization of Palestine as a whole. Apparently I'm being "antisemitic" if I amplify these voices that oppose the occupation.

The "antisemitism" being = asking not to equate Zionism with Judaism because that's real antisemitism. And this has been stated MULTIPLE times by both Jewish people and Holocaust survivors, but apparently Zionists don't like listening to that.

The "antisemitism" being = posting a map of Palestinian cities' names which have been replaced by an illegitimate state SIMPLY to erase Palestinian history while ethnically cleansing them and making them leave their original cities, which got colonized and became occupied by settlers. Just because the current names are in Hebrew or/and have a history, it doesn't mean that Israel is any less colonial and imperial. Israel already exploited an entire religion, y'all think they won't go beyond? The way the map post went over y'all's heads was embarrassing to see fr, and it still is.

Please go educate yourself on antisemitism before you accuse me and any Palestinian/pro-Palestinian of antisemitism. Y'all look stupid af.

#free palestine #tired of y'all #Zionism ≠ Judaism #We don't tolerate antisemitism on this blog #Jews are welcome #Zionists are not

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haveyoureadthispoll · 8 months ago

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Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanfani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah—an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

#book: rifqa #author: mohammed el-kurd #genre: non fiction #genre: poetry #genre: palestinian literature #year: 2020s

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beardedmrbean · 11 months ago

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hey quick question look up jewish expulsions and massacres in all the countries immediately bordering Israel. Look up how many Jew live in Yemen. I support Palestinian freedom, safety, and their right to live - I currently support a two state solution because none of the people advocating for a one-state solution have convinced me that it would be best for any of the people involved. But I think pretty much everyone in the Knesset rn should be hanged for crimes against humanity. But you CANNOT pretend that if someone waved a magic wand and the IDF vanished along with other tools of oppression, that there isn't a problem with Hamas and their "kill all jews" charter (which they changed to look prettier only recently) along with other factions who would want to kill Jews either for revenge or for more power or just because of antisemitism.

I'm going to specify - I don't think there is any inherent Palestinian bloodlust or whatever crock of shit a lot of Zionists peddle. I think that Israeli control of the region clearly models what happens when you have one ethnic group in power over another - I think the human evil we see from Israelis committing atrocities against Palestinians is exactly what we would see if the situation reversed. I don't buy that Palestinians are uniquely savage OR uniquely peaceful. "They just want a land in which to live in peace, and they're willing to fight for it but once they have it there would be no reason for violence" perfectly describes Jews fleeing the Holocaust to try to settle Palestine, and we can see where that logic ends. The myth of a perfectly peaceful pre-Israel Palestine is also not actually the prettiest picture.

I will also clarify that I don't think that 2 ethnic groups can't coexist in one nation as a general rule. I just think that in a region shaped by violence for so long, and such extreme violence right up to now, it is much harder to do so. I think its human nature that when things are so violent, most people aren't going to spend energy making sure they're not being prejudicial, both because energy can be better spent either on survival or joy with your own community, and also because it often feels like your prejudice is keeping you safe, or is proven every time One Of Them attacks One Of You. There are plenty of ways they can try to bridge the gaps, but I don't think that "dissolve Israel immediately and completely" accomplishes any of that

Ya, they're gone from pretty much every MENA nation there is or at least at a handful of their previous population, forced expulsions will do that to your population.

As for the palestenian population, to some degree I think they were ok to stay in Israel as it formed they'd just need to accept Israeli citizenship, there's some issues like the Sheikh Jarrah thing from a few years back that kicked off a short war, Muslim family got evicted from a home they'd been squatting in since before the formation of the country of Israel, people that owned the property had the receipt and deed from when the Ottomans still existed.

Folks still called that stealing their home. I imagine a whole bunch of that happened early on, someone's family had purchased a home of some sort with plans to move there but politics and eventually a war got in the way of that and such.

I would love to see the palestenian types free from the various terror groups that keep starting wars and stealing all the resources meant to aid the standard every day person.

As for the multicultural thing, there's 2 million arabs living in Israel who owing to the fact that they're arabs never need to sign up for military service, where as most every single Jewish citizen does and generally speaking they get along well enough and are even friends.

And to address the ethnic issue

These guys mostly just have 'being Jewish' in common with each other, if they can go and fit in there should be easy enough for anyone that isn't of a mind to start trouble.

If the arabs that identify as palestenian want to stay balkanized that's fine, just stop trying to kill the people that want to live in peace.

(still love the story of the Kaifeng Jews, wild stuff and makes for a good read)

#anonymous

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sidleyparkhermit · 4 months ago

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[Mohammed] Atta never wrote a manifesto describing what he hoped to accomplish by flying a passenger airliner into the World Trade Center. “Atta was such a tortured individual,” McDermott says. “I don’t think Atta is much different than the guy who tried to shoot Trump. He’s just a warped person in some regard. But he was making his mark on history.” Although the attack is always portrayed as an act of religious extremism, there is evidence to suggest Atta and the members of his Hamburg cell were also steeped in radical politics. When a German newspaper went through a library of materials Atta left behind at a study group he led in Hamburg, it found a library of tracts about globalist conspiracy theories. Ziad Jarrah, the group member who took the controls of United 93, made a martyrdom video that was recovered by U.S. intelligence and introduced at the military trial of an Al Qaeda propagandist, in which he delivered a speech about the “New World Order” and striking “the head of the Jewish and crusader snake.” It may be that they had more in common with American extremists than is generally appreciated. In 2007, in his only extensive statement before the military tribunal, KSM described himself as an anti-imperialist soldier, saying “the language of war is victims.” He said he was “responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z,” and also claimed he had planned to destroy other landmarks, including the Sears Tower and Big Ben, to blow up nuclear plants, and to assassinate Presidents Clinton and Carter, as well as the Pope. But as McDermott points out, KSM has never fully explained what incited his hatred of the United States, where he lived as a university student. Prior to 9/11, KSM operated semi-independently of Al Qaeda, and the fragmentary evidence suggests he saw Bin Laden as something of a religious flake. “My main interests are motivation,” McDermott said. “I would like to know, beyond the usual cant, how KSM came to be what he became. He is one of the greatest mass murderers in history, and we really don’t know why he did it.” History will have to wait for the answer.

#9/11

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gavisuntiedboot · 1 year ago

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Hey I was just wondering if you could link some articles about everything israel has been doing to Palestine in the last 16 years (so basically the time Gaza’s been an open air prison) bc tho I’m pretty invested in politics the media in my country hasn’t been covering this whole situation in Palestine apart from this past week (and the bigger attacks from a few years back) and even then the articles are pretty clearly pro israel so I do know to a certain extent what the situation is and has been like between Palestine and israel (the basics of these two countries’ history since WW2) but not the details and I’d like to inform myself

Unfortunately the media in Canada the UK the United States (obviously) and France (again this isn’t really surprising) isn’t really good at covering what’s happening in the Middle East so informing myself objectively and via reliable sources on the history of these places (when it doesn’t affect the western world) can be a bit hard I genuinely spent a lot of fucking time researching the subject but I just haven’t been satisfied with what I found (it’s all really repetitive and it doesn’t really cover the details tho I did find some really interesting articles written by Palestinian journalists) I did try watching documentaries but they all cut out the more awful parts of history which kind of really sucks (the one thing that was easier to find and that conveyed good and objective info is the statistics of the conditions Palestinians in Gaza have been living in)

If you don’t want to that’s totally fine feel no pressure about doing it but if you don’t wanna link articles could you maybe pls talk about what you know and again no pressure

Hello lovely,

So this has been sitting in my inbox for a while because I've been busy (school, protests, funerals and vigils, etc). I decided to respond to this one because I think the ask is framed very well.

It is common knowledge that Israel puts forward a large media and PR effort to hide the atrocities being committed. There is a huge monetary fund dedicated to this - what other country pays fully for college students to come for week-long trips and see how wonderful the country is? The entire regime is built on propaganda, and I think it's important that everyone try and dismantle our reliance on one or two sources of media. In school, we are constantly told who are the "reliable" sources of information, but in times like this, when the media and press are so controlled, look at the best and most reliable source: primary sources. I encourage you all to follow people who are on the ground in Gaza like Motaz Azaiza, who is on the ground in Gaza and has been for several years. I also encourage you to follow Mohammed El Kurd, who is from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied Jerusalem. He is brilliant and articulate and doesn't mince words, and he has done dozens of interviews and talks about the plight of Palestinians, both at home under occupation and in the diaspora. For news, I think one of the best sources has been Al Jazeera, which is a Middle Eastern news reporter. It is banned in some countries, but they release the most accurate information about what is currently happening. Many of their journalists have just had their families wiped out for the work they are doing.

In regards to what you can watch, there is a plethora of Palestinian film that you can consume. The ones off the top of my head are '5 broken cameras' and 'Omar', which are both critically acclaimed, brilliant films on Palestine. Here is a link to more documentary than film style pieces on Palestine: https://remix.aljazeera.com/aje/PalestineRemix/films_main.html

There are many YouTube videos on the subject as well. A very good article is the one published in n+1 by Saree Makdisi.

I personally don't have many articles to share, because everything I know about my home and my people was told to me by my family. So, allow me to share with you a little bit of my life story:

My grandfather was born in a small village in Palestine just outside of Nablus. He would have been about 8-10 years old when the Nakbah happened. Nakbah is the Arabic word for 'catastrophe', and it describes the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. My grandfather was not one of them because of how far in the West Bank he was. He remained in Palestine, trying his hardest to flee despite the immense debt that his own father had passed onto him. He worked in shops. He picked olives from the hundreds, if not thousands, of trees in the village. He was trying to save himself and his 12 siblings, all on no income and a 4th grade education. There was no more school when the occupation started.

My grandmother was born in the neighboring village. She was looked after by two brothers and a father that would have torn the world to shreds for her. She met my grandfather when he came to help repair their home. They were married young, around 19, and they had their first son, my uncle, in their home in Palestine. The occupation got worse and worse, with people having their homes invaded, guns to their faces, being told to leave. My grandmother fought one such settler, and they took one of her beautiful green eyes for it. My grandparents tried everything they could to keep their house in Palestine, but it was no use. They had to flee to Kuwait (twice actually), a journey that takes 72 hours nonstop on foot, in order to not be killed by Israel. My grandmother took her house key with her, thinking she would need it to open the door when they were able to return. And that key still sits in her house, staring at her and her 8 children and 30 grandchildren who have never seen our home in Palestine.

I fortunately don't have direct family in Gaza, but I have living family that fled Palestine. I have so many family members who will never be able to see our land in our lifetime. Our house is gone. The olive trees are gone. Everything that my grandparents knew of the world for a quarter of their lives is gone. How long until we are gone? How long until the plan is successful, and our young are murdered and our old left to die so that Israel can say that Palestinians never existed in the first place?

Between three of my friends, they have lost 100 family members. Between Palestinians, we have lost over 7000 people. Civilians. Children. Mothers. Fathers. Neighbors. People. I want to educate, I want to be a voice and rally, but I can't do it every day. I'm struggling with the guilt of being alive as a Palestinian right now. My entire bloodline, my history, is being wiped off the face of the earth before my eyes. And I'm sorry I can't be more help.

#free palestine 🇵🇸#free palestine #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #save gaza

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bonmonjour · 1 year ago

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Some Thoughts

“A few years ago, I was in DC in the summer. The week of July 4th, to be specific. On America’s Independence Day, I was on the wharf, a few miles south of the Mall. This was during Trump’s presidency, and this year, he had decided he wanted his own military parade. There, on the wharf, the most I saw of that was the planes. I saw Air Force One fly by, though I didn’t get a picture. At one point, a few fighter jets flew over and it was at that moment that my outlook changed completely. “The wharf on that day was not a war zone but hearing those jets and feeling how they hurt my ears, I pictured what hell those in the Middle East must live through. Imagine those planes and the bombers flying over your land, over your house, day after day for years. Imagine a star of metal, falling from the sky and lighting your neighborhood ablaze. Imagine the sound and sight of those buildings collapsing, the rubble falling. The things that are usually relegated to the newspaper once before moving on with their lives suddenly became real for a second. “That is the reality for the millions living in occupied zones all around the world. In Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and (most relevant to the past week) Palestine.”

I wrote that more than two years ago at this point (writing October 9th, 2023) and unfortunately it still holds true. It was the week that the IDF shot worshippers in Al Aqsa during Ramadan, and civilians chanted “may their names be erased.” I think the reason I never finished what I started writing last time is because I bit off more than I could chew. I was all over the place, frankly. With this, I hope to talk about what Palestine is like, what this conflict is about as far as I understand it, (de)colonization, settlers and violence, and perhaps end with some thoughts on propaganda and the international “community.”

This week, Gaza broke down its prison walls. War has broken out, Netanyahu has promised genocide on the captive population of Gaza, and the international press stands against Palestine. All too predictably. Many, incredibly many, official statements include the word “unprovoked” in their descriptions of Palestine’s rebellion. For some reason, perhaps even intentionally, no one’s memory can be bothered to be longer than that of a goldfish. The very state of Gaza’s existence today is horrid proof of Israel’s wrath–the open satisfaction of its anger and hatred against the people it dispossessed.

I don’t even have to go back to 1948 to find examples of cruelty, nor to 2014. Nor really to 2021, but I wrote this then and I’m re-using it. The second week of May 2021 began with the seizure of Sheikh Jarrah by Israeli settlers. Imagine if, one moment, you’re sitting in your house, and the next, your door’s been broken, and an Israeli family starts moving in. You try to argue, they harass you. Attack you. Force you to the streets. They break the shop windows and burn the buildings. These aren’t terrorists working for some shadowy organization, these are average everyday Israeli men and women who participate in this theft. On top of the seizures, Israel controls Palestine’s food, their mud that passes for water, their electricity, and their movement. ("I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly." —Yaov Gallant) They could be bombed at any hour of night or day without warning. Residents are frequently subject to the whim of Israeli military and police; they are always at risk of physical violence, lethal and sexual. The whole of Gaza has been blockaded since 2005. 44% of its population is under 15 years of age, with a further 21% being 15-24 years old. Half of Gaza’s population has lived their entire life–their entire development–inside this open-air slaughterhouse, never having been allowed to venture out.

What’s perhaps even worse is that the children trapped there are used to it. Two years ago, there was a video going around of a little girl jumping on her trampoline while in the left of the video, a building goes up in flames with thunder ascending from the earth. She kept on jumping. This literal hell, this world of fire in the sky and brimstone on earth, is the only one they’ve ever known. What happens to the ears when all one hears are bombs exploding, guns firing, jackboots marching, and children crying? What happens to the eyes when all one sees is stars of fire and brimstone on earth; structures falling and your impending death a furlong in front of you? What happens to the mouth and stomach when the food is dung and the water is mud? And to call that just another Thursday takes an inhuman, immorally inflicted amount of desensitization. Each day, nay, each hour, you hear of how so and so many kids were killed in such and such a bombing. Those kids had families, mother and father, brothers and sisters, they had dreams and hopes. They wanted to live, and they were snuffed out, and relegated to being a statistic in the morning paper that peoples’ eyes skip over. Even right now, Israel orders houses, apartments, schools, and hospitals be bombarded. White phosphorus has gotten involved.

These hellish conditions are part of the reason for why Palestinians even fight: freedom from that. This conflict that has raged for over 70 years now has never been about religion, as some might be inclined to believe. It is not a simple story of Jews contesting the Holy Land with Muslims. Yes, no one should ever forget the atrocities of the Holocaust committed against Jews, but Jews are not immune from fascism–no group of people is. From its very inception, Zionism was meant to be a colonialist project intended to drive out the mostly non-Jewish Palestinians, settle the land, and create a Jewish nation-state. When you have a nation (ein Volk) and a state (ein Reich), it shouldn’t come as a surprise when eventually someone decides to complete the quote. On the other hand, Palestine is not all Muslims. There are plenty of Palestinians of other religions, most notable for European Christendom, Christians. If this were strictly a religious war, a crusade for the Holy Land, why would European Christians, many of whom are anti-semites (let’s face it), side against Christians in the Holy Land? Just as Spanish colonialism was never about which god the Aztecs should worship, the conflict in Palestine was never about which of Abraham’s children should get exclusive right to live there. I have not seen many liberals come at it from the religion angle, but for the few that do, they always side with Israel because to them Islam is a barbaric backward religion that murders queer people and rapes women, and so why should they support that. Almost always, they end up being ridiculously racist, and the one I had the misfortune of seeing was arguing with a Muslim woman.

Israel is a settler-colonialist state founded on the dispossession of Indigenous people. As such, the only way forward for Palestine is decolonization. Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang’s 2012 paper, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” gives the definition of settler-colonialism, what it entails in terms of relations, and its incommensurability with other social justice movements.

Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between the metropole and the colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations [mirroring the removal of Palestinians from their homes into Gaza or the West Bank], indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal… and external… with a frontier�� The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments (5). Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event (5). In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there… For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts (6).

Basically, what these passages illustrate is that due to Israel’s very nature as settler-colonialist, apartheid ends up being the only situation. Israel lays claim over the whole land, but as long as a pocket of Palestine exists, it exists as a colony within Israel’s contiguous claim. Thus, Palestinians are turned into colonial subjects, subject to different law than that of the metropole. To make this relatable to Americans, many of the indictments against George III are the unfair application of the legal system between Britain itself and the colonies across the Atlantic. In the region, if an Israeli and an Arab commit the same crime, they are subject to different laws in different legal systems: the Israeli to civil court, and the Arab to military court.

Furthermore, it’s not just the internal colonialism of Arabs that Israel is interested in, such as “segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization.” No, Israel needs Palestinian land as well, for lebensraum and for capital. The violence of this (recent, remember Sheikh Jarrah) settlement is reasserted every day that the settlers remain settled, and the Indigenous people remain dispossessed. The need for land as lebensraum also necessitates the total elimination of Indigenous peoples from the land “because the presence of Indigenous peoples–who make a priori claims to land and ways of being–is a constant reminder that the settler colonialist project is incomplete” (Tuck and Yang 9). That is, the very existence of Palestinians is a daily reminder to the Zionists that Zionism is incomplete. Thus, the only way to complete Zionism, to complete the project of a “Jewish homeland,” is for Palestinians to be made into ghosts.

They go on to say the following about decolonization:

In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent [or European Jewish, in this case], and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces… Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation (7). Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity. “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone (7).

What they mean here is that real geopolitics is complicated. There is no one demographic that is completely the victim or completely the perpetrator. In the US, there have been many, many people who came here fleeing from hard times in their own countries or were brought over to face a hard time in this country. It doesn’t matter what non-Indigenous group it is (the Africans who were stolen to be slaves, and their descendants; the Irish, Italians, Swedes, Germans, Poles; immigrants from China, Japan, India; refugees from Central America and the Middle East), they are still settled on stolen Indigenous land. They are still settlers. And so, it doesn’t really matter who lives in Israel, how they got there, or why they came, because ultimately, they settled there on stolen Palestinian land and thereby continue the everyday settler-colonialist violence against Palestinians.

Tuck and Yang further bring up the complication of immigration. Basically, immigrants must abide by pre-existing laws; settlers upend pre-existing laws. As an immigrant in Canada, I do not establish my own laws, I have to abide by Canadian law. The settlers who came here hundreds of years ago did not abide by pre-existing laws of the Indigenous peoples. And even in me having to abide by Canadian law, I am upending the pre-existing Indigenous laws. Israeli settlers in Palestine do not follow the pre-existing laws of the Palestinians, they bring their own law with them. Immigrants who come to live in Israel have to follow the Israeli settlers’ laws (and be complicit in the upending of laws and ways of being that went before.)

I think this is one of the reasons why decolonization is such a fraught issue, incommensurable with many other social justice movements. To me, decolonization is a non-negotiable that every colonized people deserve. My own great-grandfather, who I knew for about 6 years, was probably one of the worst people I’ve known: he yelled at me, he was mean to my grandma, he was apparently a physically abusive father. Despite all his flaws that I would never defend, he was born and grew up under British colonialism. Even he deserved to have Britain’s knee off his neck. I’ve seen quite a few posts I can bring up here.

Many people, usually liberals, are offended at the mere suggestion of supporting Palestine because apparently Palestinians (just in general, I guess. Twitter: where nuance goes to die) are racist, they’re misogynists, they have a barbaric religion, they hate queer people, and on and on and on. I frankly don’t give a single shit. I don’t care if they were even the rudest, meanest, ugliest people on the planet interpersonally. For the sake of argument, even if every Palestinian was a barbaric racist, sexist, and queerphobe, they would still not “deserve” Israeli colonialism. Being colonized is not some punishment doled out by the colonizers for some flaw of character. J.K. Rowling is a horrible, wretched woman responsible not only for crimes against humanity (the Harry Potter books /j), but also for spreading her vile transphobia all across Britain and the rest of the world. Even on her, I would not wish rape. Because it’s not some punishment for flaw of character. It is easy enough to fight for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to fight for the miserable and corrupt.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen some people defending Israelis (is that the right phrase?) by pointing to anecdotes about how nice the Israelis they know are. I’m sure they’re sweet, kind people who say nice things to you, and bring you gifts and knick-knacks and so forth. They’re still settlers on Palestinian land. Not to compare everything to the Nazis, but I’m sure many, many German citizens who moved to SS-occupied Poland as part of the Race and Resettlement Bureau’s initiative were good and fine citizens if you knew them. They probably greeted you friendly, threw parties, gave gifts, and so forth. And yet, they were complicit in the actions of the Reich. My own grandma is one of the nicest people I know. Frankly, she spoils me whenever I visit. She’s nice to all her grandchildren, she gives us all gifts and money, she’s well respected in her community. She still thinks “Hitler wasn’t that bad” (real quote) and supports Modi’s BJP. Even the nicest people can be complicit in horrible violence, and even the most wretched can be victims of that violence. Personality and attitude mean absolutely nothing.

One thing that all this discourse around settlers seems to take for granted is that the situation in Anglo countries today is at all anything like Israel/Palestine today. The people who throw out strawmen about “if the Native Americans started decolonizing, should they gun you down too?” and the people who say “Yes” both seem to hold to that. The reality is that in the Anglo countries, most of the settlement was done hundreds of years ago. All the Native land has already been divided up and settled by the White men, the freed slaves, the European migrants looking to get their free acres. The Homestead Act and Dominion Lands Act were passed more than 150 years ago. For settlers and recent immigrants who buy land today, they buy it from another settler/immigrant, and so on. No, the situation in Israel/Palestine is much more akin to the first European settlers that came to the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries. There is a reason Opechancanough and his men killed 347 people in Jamestown. Maybe it wasn’t justified, but they did have reasons. Maybe another example is the German settlers in SS-occupied Poland. Their very presence, very settlement, in Germany’s eastern occupations was predicated on the resettlement of the Poles that were there before elsewhere.

And let’s be honest, it’s not like the average Israeli citizen is the paragon of morality. Israeli civilians chanted from the Book of Judges “may their names be erased” when Al Aqsa mosque was thought to be on fire during Ramadan. Civilian children signed missiles meant for Lebanon. Ordinary civilians are largely the ones seizing Palestinians’ homes. It was civilians treating the massacre of Gaza as “the best reality show in town.” It’s Israeli civilian settlers calling for lynchings in occupied Jerusalem. I could sit here, safe in Canada, saying Palestine should’ve done this or that, but I am not the victim of Israel’s daily violence. I will not make grand-standing moral judgments on how the victims of colonialist abuse should respond to their abusers. I could debate whether an Algerian child wanting to cut a Frenchman into pieces was morally right, but I can’t deny that there were very real and valid psychological conditions for the child wanting that.

Someone also brought up the notion of “sins of the father” and I think that’s very interesting to think about. In general, I say it’s not very leftist to blame children for their parents. Children are not their parents’ property, nor are they responsible for something done before they were even born. But as I’ve mentioned, settler colonialism is a structure. It doesn’t matter whether you personally went out and killed a Native and stole his land, you live on stolen Native land nevertheless. You materially benefit from your ancestors’ settlement and perpetuate settler-colonialist violence. Without any notion of “sins of the father,” projects like reparations or LANDBACK do not make any sense. After all, who am I to give this land back to the Musqueam, I didn’t take it. I think perhaps a comparison to other structures like patriarchy or white-ness might be apt here. Even though any given man might never have committed violence against a woman to explicitly maintain patriarchy, nevertheless he benefits from the structure of patriarchy. I did not come up with laws or social norms treating women as lesser, but still I inherit them and am responsible (at least in part) for what happens to them: whether they are perpetuated or abolished. A white person living today never invented the concept of race, played no part in coming up with concepts of racial supremacy or polygenism, but still they materially and psychologically benefit from being white in a world where white people are still at the top at the expense of others. However, despite the complicated web of relations involved in settler-colonialism, the fact of the matter is that no one chooses to be born a white man, but many a white men have chosen to be settlers. Or in this case, nobody chooses to be born Jewish, but many Jews have chosen to settle.

I keep coming back to this quote from Gerrard Winstanley, a proto-communist writing during the time of land enclosures in England:

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land. (A Declaration, p. 2)

Notice that he does not say, “till you, bloody thief, be rooted out of the land.” No, he says, “the power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword” and “that sins of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children… till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.” The power of settler-colonialism is what needs to be rooted out, not necessarily the people.

Palestine’s only main way out is violent rebellion because no peaceful supplication will ever be satisfying to Israel or its friends. Israel doesn’t want a subjugated Palestine; it wants an extinct Palestine. And also, a note on terminology, under Israeli law, every resident of Palestine is a combatant. Every bit of violence in the name of resistance Palestinians do can be labeled as the action of combatants. Palestinians are often called “terrorists,” and Palestinian resistance “terrorism.” The word itself means nothing. Groups like ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, etc. can all be called terrorists. As can the US government. And so can the protestors fighting against Cop City or against pipelines. Thus, the usage of “terrorism” gives a very easy way for anti-Palestinian people to portray their resistance-violence as akin to ISIS-violence. These takes often come from those who think Hamas is Palestine or statements like “What did you think decolonization was going to look like?” are blanket excuses for war crimes.

All that said, rape and the indiscriminate killing of children is morally reprehensible and should be condemned equally. I say “equally” because Israel massacres Palestinian children everyday, and commits sexual violence against Palestinian men and women, boys and girls. And yet, there is never any international outrage at these daily occurrences. After all, Palestinians are not human, right, why should we care? I don’t know if the video of the woman in the back of the truck is real. If it is, then obviously Hamas’ actions should be condemned. Hamas is not a paragon of virtue either: they’re a right-wing anti-communist Islamic fundamentalist organization that openly wants to kill Jews. They should not be praised for who they are. But still, they are the enemy Israel created for itself. Even today, they threatened to air the killing of civilian hostages.

However, funnily enough, that woman is the only incident I’ve heard brought up against Palestinian rebellion. Every day Israeli men rape Palestinian women, and I don’t see the outrage online. But when those ‘barbaric’ Palestinians might have done it, suddenly the whole timeline is equating “support for Palestine” as “support for rape and beheading and etc.” This, even though many Palestinians say the evidence is lacking. I do think a part of this selective outrage is the racism involved. Palestinians fighting against their oppressors are “terrorists;” Ukrainians fighting against theirs are brave warriors. Israeli war crimes are downplayed; Palestinian groups’ war crimes are blown up to “those brown savages are coming for our women”-levels of racist. The number of posts I've seen along the lines of “Palestinians are sand-dwelling rape monkeys” is so incredibly disheartening. In short: war crimes are bad; Hamas and Israel both doing war crimes is bad; resorting to racist caricature to criticize Palestinian groups is also bad. The unfortunate reality is that pretty much every armed force has partaken in sexual violence against women and children. This does not change the validity of the cause they fight for. Sexual violence is not legitimized by anti-colonialist causes, nor does it delegitimize the causes.

I’ll end this by just mentioning how none of the violence that Israel does ever matters to those outside. Israel can commit flagrant war crimes–collective punishment, executions, rape, white phosphorus–and receive no backlash from the leadership or media in its ally countries. Israel knows that it can do this with total impunity. It can steal homes and massacre children on camera, have that video footage published by major outlets and still expect no punishment. Not even a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to. It’s that same gall, that same flagrant arrogance that allowed them to literally bomb and collapse a building that housed the offices for the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and others back in 2021. It truly speaks to the effectiveness of their propaganda and the sickness of their ideology that other press outlets will voluntarily cuck themselves by defending Israel in attacking their fellow journalists. The amount of brain worms it takes to look at reality, refuse to accept it because it doesn’t fit your preconceptions, invent a fictional narrative, and then accuse the victims of being the real aggressors is truly staggering. Israel will constantly play up their “right to self-defense” so that people will sympathize with them, and they will accuse anyone critical of them of antisemitism. No matter what Israel does, the reaction will always be “Israel has a right to defend itself – full stop,” without an ounce of support for Palestine’s right to not be wiped off the face of the earth.

#own post #palestine

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