#he’s half white half israeli I think

[the-winds-of-destiny-xxx]

.

[ilookattextile]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

[hussyknee]

[embedded screen recording of a tweet.

Quoted Tweet by Q. Anthony Ali

What rules about this clip is how effectively it demonstrates that less than 30 seconds of interacting with the average Israeli will turn almost anyone into an anti-Zionist

Tweet by Frank (@forget_exit)

"No politics here" 😂

[embedded video. Description: a young white football fan inside a stadium is being offered a mic by an interviewer off-screen as people mill around behind him.

Interviewer: "And what do you think about the game?"

Young guy: "I thought it was a good game. I thought in the beginning Israel was better, but now Mali is destroying them I think."

A squat, middle aged, bespectacled white man advances angrily, shoving the end of the blue-white Israeli scarf around his neck in the young guy's face. Young guy says placatingly, "Israel is not bad, Israel is not bad."

Middle aged guy: *holding up his finger threateningly* "No politics here! No politics here!"

Young guy: *resumes* "I think Mali is going to destroy them."

Middle-aged guy: *continues shouting* "No politics here!"

Young guy: "No, I'm just talking about football—I'm just talking about football."

Middle aged guy: *retying his scarf with his chest puffed out* "Mali's the best—no politics here! Okay??"

Young guy: *stares at camera for half a beat* "...Free–Free Palestine! Free Free Palestine! Free Free Palestine!"

Middle aged guy: *hands on hips, leaning towards him like he's going to spit* "Fu-Fu Fuck you, Fu-Fu Fuck you!"

Young guy: *holds up red trumpet and blows "pra-pra pra-pra" to the rhythm* A short squat middle aged blonde woman who looks like the illustrated definition of a Karen chimes in to chant with the middle aged man: "Fuck-you fuck-you fuck-you!"

A tall Black man appears and tries to calm them down as they both gesticulate and yell angrily after the young man who ignores them and walks off camera./video description]

28 July 24. /ID]

[directactionforhope]

Pictured: President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on March 25, 2019, the day Trump signed a U.S. declaration recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing more than a half-century of U.S. policy.

Article

"Former president Donald Trump promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, telling a roomful of donors — a group that he joked included “98 percent of my Jewish friends” — that he would expel student demonstrators from the United States, according to participants in the roundtable event with him in New York.

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said on May 14, according to donors at the event.

When one of the donors complained that many of the students and professors protesting on campuses could one day hold positions of power in the United States, Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. He praised the New York Police Department for clearing the campus at Columbia University and said other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now.”

“Well, if you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he said, according to the donors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private event.

Trump has waffled publicly about whether Israel should continue its war in Gaza, saying “get it over with … get back to peace and stop killing people.” Major Republican donors have lobbied him in recent months to take a stronger stance backing Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The private New York meeting offers new insight into his current thinking. Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, Trump said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror” and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel...

Trump has offered few policy specifics about how he would treat Israel in a second term. He cast doubt on the viability of an independent Palestinian state in a recent Time magazine interview, saying he was “not sure a two-state solution anymore is gonna work,” adding: “there may not be another idea.” A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the end goal of U.S. policy under Democratic and Republican presidents for decades...

Trump took a different tone [than his public comments] in the meeting with donors. Instead of saying it was time to wrap up the war, he said he supported Israel’s right to continue its attack on Gaza.

“But I’m one of the only people that says that now. And a lot of people don’t even know what October 7th is,” Trump said.

Trump repeatedly listed for the donors everything he believed he had done for Israel in the White House. He moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, bucking decades of U.S. policy. He recognized the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967, as an integral part of Israel after what he said was a five-minute conversation with David Friedman, his ambassador there.

He also polled the room if they liked Friedman.

“So I did Golan Heights. You know that’s worth $2 trillion, they said, that piece, if you put it in real estate terms. But it’s worth more than that. It is,” Trump said, according to donors present.

Israel, Trump argued, needs his help. Street demonstrations for Israel get smaller crowds than his rallies, he said. In Washington, and particularly in Congress, “Israel is losing its power,” he added. “It’s incredible.” ...

Trump and Netanyahu’s relationship will “continue to prosper and flourish” if they’re both in office at the same time again, Matthew Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in an interview.

“He’s giving the Israelis a blank check to go in and do what they need to do to destroy Hamas and eliminate the threat in Gaza from Hamas. And what he’s also saying, which is actually true, he said ‘but do it quickly’ because time is not Israel’s ally right now,” Brooks said."

-via The Washington Post, May 27, 2024

--

Reminder that just because the status quo is fucking bad, that doesn't change the fact that under Trump, it would be fucking worse.

[0cryder00]

why are people switching up on noah all of the sudden?? like did we forget that he’s a white supremacist and a genocide supporter??

“oh but he apologised!!” you mean that half assed “apology” that he posted at 4 in the morning?? yeah, ok…

he supports israel, an apartheid country that kills innocent children. do i think it’s ok that hamas took israeli people as hostages? NO!! do i think it’s ok for isrealto kill civilians and kidnap them as a form of “self defence”? ALSO NO!!

defending noah schnapp is defending zionism!! it’s weird and gross!!

i do not think people should call him slurs OR tell him he deserves to die in a gas chamber. those actions are disgusting and it hurts the entire jewish community!! jewish people are not our enemies!! zionists are!!

[sunbeamedskies]

I've seen a lot of troubling antisemitism in the Our Flag Means Death fandom lately regarding Taika Waititi. Please hear me out.

A lot of people want everyone to comment about the Israel/Palestine war. It's understandable. What Palestinian civilians are going through in Gaza is a nightmare that no one deserves. They are overwhelmingly paying the price for Hamas' actions- a group they have no control over and are also harmed by. Thousands have been killed.

After October 7th, Taika signed a letter asking for the Israeli hostages to be released. It did not endorse any specific actions taken by the Israeli government- it was simply in support of the hostages.

But you know what he was immediately accused of?

Supporting genocide. Even though what he signed was about Israeli civilians- including the elderly, disabled, and children- who were being held captive by Hamas.

On October 7th, Jews died in a single day in numbers that hadn't been since the Holocaust. Israel contains half the world's entire Jewish population. The majority of its population are descendants of Jews from middle eastern and north African countries who were forcibly kicked out in violent pogroms and had nowhere else to go. Many are descendants of Holocaust survivors as well.

I think most non-Jews would be astounded at how much the majority of the worldwide Jewish community is still mourning and reeling from October 7th. It triggered a lot of intergenerational trauma in many of us, yet I hear barely any non-Jews talk about it.

And yet you immediately accused Taika, a Jewish man, of supporting genocide just because he didn't support hostages being taken and random civilians being murdered. Do you really think he trusts people not to twist his words if he attempts to talk about Palestine too, when you turned a moment of legitimate pain for members of one of the persecuted groups he's apart of into accusing him of being a genocide-supporting monster?

We Jews not only have to deal with the memory of October 7th, but also with people conflating any support for the hostages with support for the Israeli government. When we say that criticism of Israel can at times get antisemitic, this is the kind of thing we're talking about.

Many of us are simultaneously mourning for Palestine and horrified that a right-wing fascist government that has little care for Palestinian lives has taken over Israel. Innocent lives taken shouldn't justify the killing of other innocent lives, and we are watching it happen, feeling powerless.

And it gets worse, because targeting Taika specifically because he's a person of multiple marginalized identities, when you don't attack white members of the crew nearly as much, is ironically racist.

Unintentional antisemitism and unintentional racism is still antisemitism and racism.

Take a deep breath and please reflect on how you have no idea what it's like to be Jewish right now, and how some of your own antisemitic criticism about his signature has likely contributed to his silence about Palestine. If no matter what he says his words and actions are twisted by so many of his "fans", he might think there's nothing he can say that will do any good.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Woooooof.

I think Klein's criticisms of Israel, in this conversation, are clear-eyed, informed...and uncomfortable to swallow for those of us who want Israel to be a liberal democracy. I think we need to swallow them regardless.

I also think Klein's criticisms of Coates are on point.

Coates says openly that he did not seek to provide a nuanced, sophisticated, contextual take. His goal was always pure polemics.

That admission, that he did not even seek to be clear-eyed, should inform how people read Coates' on Israel.

Coates won't unconditionally condemn the events of 10/7/23. He rightly points out that Israeli governments haven't honestly worked towards peace in decades, but pointedly ignores the very same problem in Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. (This isn't whataboitism, it's pointing out a double standard.)

Coates legitimately focuses on Palestinian trauma, but refuses to acknowledge the impacts that suicide bombings had on any attempts at a peace processes.

He acknowledges that Hamas/Sinwar surely knew the 10/7/23 attack would have disastrous consequences for the Palestinian people, then denies that Hamas should take any responsibility for the consequences.

He ignores the decades when one side worked for peace and the other did not.

He compares, briefly, Palestinian violence to the Civil Rights movement in the US by calling the Civil Rights movement a "catalogue of violence towards black people," and he's right about that. That was the whole point.

The primary tactic of the Civil Rights movement activists was non-violence. This let the world see on their televisions that peaceful protesters were met with wildly disproportionate violence by the powers of white supremacy. It made absolutely clear that the violence was not only one-sided, but that the violence was in response to Americans only peacefully protesting for equal rights. This was a powerful illustration that the positions of the protesters were unambiguously ethical and moral. It made clear that the powers of white supremacy were violent, hateful, unethical, and morally evil. There was unambiguous right and unambiguous wrong.

Thought experiment: Imagine if Dr. King, instead of leading peaceful demonstrations, had led a slaughter of 1,200 unarmed Americans in 1963. Would the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been accomplished?

Imagine if Dr. King, instead of calling for legal equality, had called for the death of European-descended people around the globe and was willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of his followers to achieve this genocidal goal.

If these thought experiments sound absurd, consider that Hamas has repeatedly, explicitly called for the death of Jews everywhere. Consider that 10/7/23 planner and leader of Hamas in Gaza Yahya Sinwar was jailed for murdering 12 Palestinians. Consider that Sinwar is thrilled to sacrifice tens of thousands of Palestinian lives to further his explicitly genocidal goals.

Hamas is not the SCLC. Sinwar is not King. To suggest these movements have commonality is shameful. And Coates' greatest failing here is that he will not even allow these facts into the context of his narrative. He falsely claims that these circumstances are similarly unambiguous, but can only make that case by openly refusing the facts which don't suit his narrative.

(This is why I admire Klein. I think he's more interested in truth than in serving a narrative. That's why he's an effective critic of Israel.)

I am disappointed that Coates calls his work journalism at the same time he openly acknowledges it is pure polemics which pointedly, deliberately, consciously, willfully ignores atrocities committed against Israelis and ignores the explicitly, repeatedly expressed genocidal intent of Hamas. Coates can't make his case without excluding half the picture, so he admits that he omits half the picture. That's not journalism.

Coates is right to fault the Israelis for ceasing to work towards peace in the last couple decades. He is profoundly wrong and dishonest in his assertion that this is a unilateral failing. He is dishonest in his counterfactual denial of Palestinian agency.

Despite all this, the conversation is worth listening to.

I think the part which starts at 1 hour, 11 minutes, and 10 seconds is particularly worth considering. I appreciate that Coates hears Klein's point about what would happen if Israel pulled out of the West Bank without security guarantees, and that Coates acknowledges it as true.

(For myself, I think Israeli settlements in the West Bank should be evacuated. I think they should never have been built, and I find them ethically indefensible. I can't imagine how such a pullout could be made to practically work and how international powers would manage peacekeeping, but I think that should be the goal.)

Coates wants to hear more Palestinian voices. I do, too.

But in the same way that I don't want to hear a peep from @#&*ing Kahanists because their views are built on racist, morally indefensible foundations...I also don't want to see their mirror images in Palestine legitimized.

(Hey, if there are Palestinian voices you can recommend, please inbox me? I'd like to hear Palestinian voices which don't dehumanize/demonize Jews, which don't call for Israel to cease to exist, and which grapple with Palestinian failings as honestly as Klein grapples with Israeli failings.)

[stonewall2023]

A Perspective on Noah Schnapp and Israel/Palestine from someone who studies the region

I don't really comment on this tag much. Over the last two years, it has just been a fun place for me to go because I've always seen so much of myself and my childhood in Will's character. It is a nice break from the stress that is my day job. However, it really hasn't been as much of a fun place to go in the last few months because of the posts on Noah Schnapp, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As someone who has spent half their life in the region, speaks Arabic, and studies Israel/Palestine, I thought I would throw my two cents in on Noah and this whole controversy. As a supporter of Palestinian rights, I do think that there was a lot of things wrong with Noah's initial statements that he posted a few months ago. I don't think he understands the root causes of why Hamas has engaged in violent behavior, the historical occupation of the West Bank/Gaza strip, land confiscations, settler violence, etc.. The conflict is not black and white obviously. However, I am as bothered by many of the responses to Noah Schnapp on this tag as I was with Noah's take on the conflict. There seems to be a complete lack of empathy for the Jewish plight or an understanding of where the Israeli state comes from. Zionism emerged in the late 19th century among Jewish intellectuals facing persecution in Europe who thought that the only way the Jewish community could survive was by establishing a state of their own, and not all of these intellectuals favored going to Palestine. It was the British at the end of WWI that conquered Palestine and started allowing Jewish emigration under the Belfour Declaration. Jews fled persecution and massacres from not only Europe but the Middle East and North Africa over the next two decades. Half of Noah's family fled persecution in Morocco and the other half from Eastern Europe. That is his family's experience and why he supports "zionism" and the existence of Israel. While Israel's far right interprets zionism as the right to conquer the entire holy land for religious reasons, Israel's center and left wing sees it merely as the right to exist as a state and a secular one at that. Palestinians, for their part, feel that their land was taken from them through colonization, but Israelis feel that they were driven from their homes throughout Europe and the greater Arab world due to persecution. At the end of the day, the United Nations established Israel and Palestine in 1947 by splitting the land for both peoples, and that is what I support as do millions of moderate Palestinians and Israelis. I don't support the tactics and rhetoric of the Likud Party and Israel's far right nor do I support Hamas and other far right Islamists--neither of these sides supports peace, democracy, multiculturalism, or the rights of the lgbtq community, issues that are all dear to me. Noah was right to criticize people justifying Hamas' use of violence against civilians just as the supporters of Palestine are right to condemn Israel's government for the indiscriminate violence. Based on Noah Schnapps previous statements, he seems to support a two state solution and isn't calling for people to be massacred, which quite frankly, makes him quite moderate. While I don't agree with everything he is said or how he has said it, he seems like a good kid who just needs to learn more about the conflict...and quite frankly, so do many of you as well...Anyway, that's my take.

[dizzymoods]

[Link to original article]

I do not disagree with the sentiment expressed by Malm in this article nor in the excerpted quote. However, how it is expressed and celebrated is bothersome.

i was in middle school when the war on terror started. The use of "civilian" is not a neutral descriptor. "Civilian" has a connotation denoting whiteness, ascribed with a degree of innocence. Civilians killed by the US in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, [pick a country] are "collateral damage" not "civilians". We've seen israelis call Palestinian babies born in the months after October 2023, Hamas ie enemy combatants.

Almost all israelis are ex-colonial soldiers. How do we describe them as "civilians" when they partook in violent military action against Palestinians? Those that are not ex-idf still maintain the colonial society. Religious, pacifist objectors to service rarely renounce their citizenship. The idf, even if they brutalize these objectors, nevertheless protect their spot on the land — ironically the very reason for the punishment, "you're only here bc of us dummy". And then you have civilians, who may not be active military but become avatars of the colonial army when they call upon the idf to help them kick Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank.

I met someone who is descended from the family who enslaved my maternal family. We are related and to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin, "my grandmother is not a rapist." Even though slave owners or settler/colonizers may not be official government employees, they authorize the state. We see this expressed in 1776 and 1948, for example.

Calling israelis settlers is not an indictment of their morality or an indication of the level of violence they've personally conducted. It is a descriptor of the violence inherent to their class position in the way bourgeois is. Calling them "civillians" is invoking a moral sentiment that the people they are colonizing, the Palestinians, are not afforded. Zionist rag The Atlantic literally said it is okay to kill babies the day before the firebombing of Rafah where we actually saw people burned alive and decapitated babies. That's one.

Two: Why are we re-litigating 7 October over half a year into a genocide?

"Critically" supporting Palestinian armed resistance 184 days and 75 years after Al-Aqsa Flood is a bit late, no? (Malm's original article was published on 8 April 24) So how is this statement exactly brave when people were supporting Palestinian armed resistance for decades? I mean Wu Tang Clan was rapping about PLO style 31 years ago. Chavez, Mao, Malcolm, the Panthers, Castro, Mandela, Shakur, Jordan etc etc etc have all supported not just the Palestinian cause but the righteousness of their armed struggle. Unequivocally, mind you. It's only been settler-supporters of Palestine that equivocate on this matter.

Liberal supporters of Palestine still wince at the celebrations of Al-Aqsa Flood. And of the Haitian Revolution and of the FLN, ANC, etc etc. They think it is a celebration of killing settler-"civilians". It's not. It's a celebration of the advancement of or the success of the liberation movement.

It sounds callous but everyone has a matter of fact relationship to violence. It's not cause for celebration. it's actually a tragedy. Violence is a sign non-violent means we're ineffective. It means the endurance people have of death without concessions has been exhausted.

The zionist Jabotinsky understood this in 1923. It doesn't matter if the jewish settlers are benevolent or malicious: there is a contradiction between the zionists who want to settle the land and the Palestinians who refuse to cede the land, which can only be reconciled through violence. And if the zionists were to be successful, he said they will need to ceaselessly employ offensively defensive violence to maintain their settlements. Hence the mowing of the lawn in Gaza every two years, the ever expanding settlements in the West Bank. Jabotinsky's analysis is 40 years older than Wretched of the Earth btw. Straight from the colonizer's mouth. So again, what is brave about this statement?

[edited for spelling]

[hero-israel]

But how can you just tell Palestinians to move south. Israel is committing war crimes by denying water to civilians, it’s collective punishment and they don’t want Gaza to exist. What on earth is Hamas going to do with water other than drink it, how can you defend this position, how is Israel at all heroic. All you can say is for Palestinians to get over the past and fight Hamas, but how? Half of Palestine are children and there are few resources. You can’t just offer some weak critiques of Netanyahu; the right wing Israel political machine is still Israel; you can’t separate some ideals from what is happening now.

"Weak critique", seriously? I have repeatedly said that the Babi Yar, Rwandan Genocide style atrocity inflicted against Israel was made possible by the dysfunctional government Bibi built to legalize his own crimes and that tore society and military readiness apart as a side effect. Hamas would ALWAYS have done it, I've known they are genocidal fascists for quite some time, it is the job of the Israeli govt to watch Gaza and they didn't. How is literally "You made this possible" weak?

Israel re-allowed water as of 2 days ago and is now re-allowing food.

Palestinians are horribly oppressed by Hamas, if they tried to rise up against Hamas they would surely be killed on the spot, and I am not so far out as to say "these are the brutes who they support so bomb them all." But if I don't want the civilians bombed, and you don't even want them moved so they dodge the bombs aimed at facilities, then what is there left for Israel to do at all? How do you imagine a country of Jews, shaped in memory of historic persecutions and genocides - many of them by Arab and Muslim regimes that oppressed and massacred them for 1,000+ years - ought to respond to having the very worst of those events re-staged in their own homes, against their children, their grandparents, the helpless? If any possible action in Gaza is "collective punishment," is Hamas simply to be left unscathed? What would stop them from doing it again, plus a dozen copycats? What do you want, and what country do you imagine would meet your wishes?

There is no government in the world - in the history of the world - that would tolerate a Hamas on their border after what it just did to them. If a Mexican drug cartel seized control of Tijuana and said it was going to "liberate California" in the name of all the Hispanic Catholics who are TRULY indigenous to California instead of White Protestant colonizers, occasionally firing missiles at random into the U.S., then snuck in a death squad and raped and butchered 40,000 people in their homes (and that's the count, adjusted for population), what do you think America would do to Tijuana?

This is why I said previously - as terrible as a full military commitment absolutely would be, "alright, well, don't do that again you meanies!" very well could be worse. People need to deeply and honestly confront whether any retaliation for crimes against humanity is allowable, or whether we are in a perverse mirror image of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" gun law, where the man standing atop a corpse said "he scared me!" and gets away with it. In this case, violence is so forbidden that whoever commits a violent crime first wins.

[blorbocedes]

HRW has a lot of issues as an organization but regardless even you can see that the last mention of white phosphorus on their feed is from over a month ago and with good reason. the BBC verify team has also debunked lots of claims about the use of it in this conflict. it also isn’t even illegal to use for illumination but that’s a separate issue. even in speeches from politicians and activists who agree with you and loathe zionists you can see they don’t make the phosphorus claim because it’s not credible. where are the pictures of people with phosphorus burns? it’s a very distinct injury. nearly all the info from both sides on tumblr is total garbage, fully half of it is just recycled shit from syria and iraq, but i haven’t said anything so far because what’s the point, people on this site only believe what they want to believe and think they’re making a difference by spreading stuff that only ends up discrediting real reports

hey. I asked you for a link of the debunking, which you did not provide. so I googled it

and the only BBC articles are them confirming Israel used it in 2010, and 2013

the only article from 2023?

only the IDF denying it. the IDF who constantly lies. I remember Shireen Abu Akleh's murder by the IDF very well, and how they tried to blame Palestinians for it until independent investigations (AP, WaPo, NYT, and Amnesty) made them retract and admit guilt.

so yeah, I will believe Amnesty International's independent review until you can show an independent body debunking it, cause rn your only claim is the IDF.

if you follow Palestinian doctors and citizens, even they have talked about treating burns, here's a Doctors Without Borders doctor talking about how he treated white phosphorus burns in 2009, is familiar with the distinct pattern, that in 2023 he's treated patients including a 13 year old boy with those distinct burns.

you made the claim, the burden of proof is on you. saying "where are the pictures of people with burns???" "why aren't activists/politicians mentioning it" is not a very compelling argument, more of a logical fallacy. unless you can provide any actual evidence of independent debunking, I have no reason to believe you through conjecture alone.

peace be upon you.

[jewishbarbies]

https://www.tumblr.com/jewishbarbies/755194286127054848/good-news-though-the-actor-who-plays-superman-in?source=share

I think it helps that James Gunn is Jewish and Irish (Irish ancestry on his father’s side and Jewish from his mother) so maybe they’ll be a reduction in antisemitism in the comic movie industry, or maybe I’m a little too optimistic lol. But it got me thinking, the contributions that Jewish people have made to entertainment, especially comic books and movies are just so wonderful and immense so I don’t understand why people are so determined to erase their representation in the media. Whether it’s people “boycotting” Sabra (Israeli marvel superhero set to premiere in MCU in Captain America movie), Magneto and Scarlet Witch being portrayed by non Jewish white actors (Quicksilver in the MCU is played by Aaron Taylor Johnson, who is Jewish. However Evan Peters is not Jewish), fans dismissing Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne’s Jewish backgrounds, dismissing the stories of the Jewish immigrants who created the DC/Marvel superheroes and villains that we know of today and how those stories influenced the creation and portrayal of these characters in the comics, etc.

It’s as if they want all the benefits of Jewish cultures and creations, but not the Jewish people themselves. As a black person, I know that feeling all too well. They want everything about us… just not us.

that’s been the case with antisemites for centuries. clear back when the romans decided to adopt their own version of torah, adding jesus and extras, while actively making it illegal for jews to be jewish in OUR land. it happens in everything jews set foot in and improve.

I actually got into a brief argument with some dudebro a while ago because he was saying Bruce was “half jewish”, and I was like “um no, he was just jewish. all you need is one parent.” and he kept arguing with me. like. dude. I’M JEWISH. you’re gonna tell me how MY culture works?? because you don’t want your batman “full jew”? it was……a wild time. even David Mazouz, the jewish child actor who played Bruce in the Gotham series, said an exec at Warner Bros told him he looked “too jewy” to play batman. a jew looks too jewish to play a jew.

now we’ve got chuckle fucks trying to retcon magneto into some antisemitic leftist icon. ironic that they killed off immediately the only quicksilver to be played by an actual jew. oh also, I found out a while ago that superman originally had green eyes and they were changed to blue once they started making him a christ figure instead of a Moses allegory. :) I’m not mad about that at all. :)

we built hollywood, we built the comic industry, and we’re consistently pushed out of both places specifically for being jews.

[canichangemyblogname]

So. Let me get this straight. Israeli forces see three men in the street. These three men are half naked and waiving a white flag. A soldier feels threatened. Soldiers shoot and kill two of the men. They wound the third. The third man crawls to safety. The third man speaks to the soldiers in Hebrew. He identifies himself and the others. They’re escaped Israeli hostages. A soldier then shoots and kills the third man.

1.) This really does not bode well for the way that the Israeli Army has been handling and treating unarmed citizens in Gaza. They shot these men— who identified themselves as unarmed non-combatants— simply for existing in Gaza.

2.) What do you mean you can’t tell the difference between your own people and the terrorists you’re supposedly fighting? What do you mean you “misidentified” half-naked men holding a white flag?

3.) This is a war crime.

4.) This reminds me of how Israeli soldiers also fired on their own citizens as they fled on Oct. 7.

5.) Nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed for this. They’ve been murdered en masse just so Israel can get in and kill its citizens.

6.) The Israeli government does not give a shit about the safety and well being of Israelis or Jews. They care only whether their body can be used for political means.

7.) The excuse that Israel is using is: “Hamas,” just in case you were wondering if the Hamas dogwhistle would be used to justify executing Israeli Jews. Their argument is that because Hamas uses deception tactics, they have to shoot any unarmed non-combatant that makes them feel unsafe. I want you to take that logic to it’s end and really think about what it means for Palestinians.

8.) The tactics Israel is using are proven to not quell terrorist organizations, to not deradicalize a people, and to not help with the release of hostages. These three men are not the only hostages who have been killed by Israel.

But— yeah— a world nuclear power is defending itself and fighting to free it’s captured people.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Philosopher Susan Neiman: ‘I hate the words pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. I’m pro-peace’

American commentator criticises tribalist politics and pushes for Jewish universalism

+

Out of centuries of Jewish suffering have come two contrasting philosophical impulses. One focuses on the need for the Jewish people to protect themselves against inevitable attacks. It is supported by the biblical verses that urge Jews to remember the Amalekites, the tribe who once killed their ancestors. It is epitomised by the nationalism of Benjamin Netanyahu. The second emphasises Jews’ responsibility to other oppressed peoples. This was the tradition Susan Neiman imbibed as a child in 1960s Georgia. She attended an Atlanta synagogue whose rabbi supported Martin Luther King. When she was three, it was bombed, most likely by white supremacists. She recited Passover verses with her mother, remembering those that urged Jews not to oppress strangers because they were once “strangers in the land of Egypt”. “That was the central experience of growing up — if you’re a Jew, you care about social justice and the civil rights movement.”

Now an outspoken philosopher, Neiman wants to reclaim Jewish universalism as a radical act. Israel’s war with Hamas has pushed the world to pick sides. “People have, differently in so many places across the world, become so tribalist. I hate the words pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian: they make it look as if we’re talking about a football match. I’m pro-peace.” She has the advantage of being able to invoke Albert Einstein. For 23 years, she has led the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, a research institute based at his one-time summer home. “Einstein was a total universalist Jew . . . We do care about his politics and his biography because that’s why he became a cultural icon. The second half of his life, he spent more time as a public intellectual than he did working on physics.”

Einstein became convinced of the need for a Jewish national home, but he feared the cost if it came without peace. “Should we be unable to find a way to honest co-operation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing from our 2,000 years of suffering and will deserve our fate,” he warned in 1929. Today Neiman echoes Einstein’s concerns. “[Netanyahu’s] policies are creating anger and frustration all over the world, they will rebound on Jews, see Dagestan [where an antisemitic mob stormed an airport].” The “carpet bombing . . . of Gaza is not in Israeli interests, even if you just care about Jewish lives.”

She strives to see the mistreatment of Jews and non-Jews through the same eyes. “Discrimination and oppression of any group of people on the basis of their ethnic heritage is racism.” She condemns Hamas’s “pogrom” against Israeli Jews and the ensuing “pogroms” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Yet a strong universalist commitment faces a difficult context. In 1948, Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jewish figures wrote to the New York Times, criticising a future Israeli prime minister’s party as “fascist”. By contrast, “calling the Israeli far right fascist today would not just bring accusations of antisemitism, it would carry a professional death sentence,” says Neiman.

To many Germans, criticism of Israel clashes with the paramount importance given to remembering the Holocaust. To many Jews today, universalism itself feels hollow, when parts of the left have shown little compassion for Jews’ own suffering. “I’m scared about rising antisemitism,” says Neiman. “But I don’t think the way to solve the problem is to become more anti-Muslim. That is one direction that people are going in, particularly in Germany.”

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Adam Kredo

Israel has destroyed scores of Hezbollah missiles, drones, and rocket launchers across Lebanon over the past several days, orchestrating an unprecedented series of pinpoint airstrikes and intelligence-driven operations that have quickly degraded swaths of the terror group's arsenal—and eliminated at least three of the group's senior commanders.FreeBeacon

Israel's air force is pummeling Hezbollah's arms depots and targeting its senior leadership, marking the "most extensive" strikes "ever carried out in its history," according to the country's military leaders and regional news outlets.

Hezbollah, long known as Iran's preeminent regional terror proxy, is being defanged by the Jewish state's armed forces in the process. It has lost almost half of its medium and long-range missiles in a series of Israeli raids designed to annihilate "surveillance equipment, command rooms, and other infrastructure" used by Hezbollah to rain terror on Israel's northern border.

On Wednesday, Israel continued its offensive, showing no signs of backing down from a fight that it largely avoided for months as it turned its attention to Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror spree. Around 60 key targets belonging to Hezbollah's "intelligence division" were struck across Lebanon, with Israeli military leaders promising to destroy "all of their rocket capabilities" and bases.

All told, Israel has logged close to 3,000 flight hours, using more than 250 warplanes to drop an estimated 2,000 munitions across 200 separate locations in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon. The strikes have destroyed around 400 medium-range rocket launchers, 70 weapons storage depots, and around 80 drones and cruise missiles. They've also killed at least three senior commanders—rocket and missile division head Ibrahim Qubaisi, military operations head Ibrahim Aqil, and training unit head Ahmed Wahbi—along with other top fighters.

The coordinated attacks, Israel says, are "changing the operational situation in the north, changing the reality," for Hezbollah as the terror group goes on defense after nearly a year of nonstop terror strikes on Israeli towns throughout the country. The ongoing aerial assault is being viewed as a regional game changer, proving to Hezbollah that it is not as untouchable as its leaders once believed.

Still, experts who spoke to the Free Beacon emphasized that Israel has a long way to go in its bid to defeat the terror group.

Hezbollah has missiles "dispersed and buried" across Lebanon, said David Schenker, the State Department's former assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs.

"They still have capabilities, and I think that they always manage to surprise," he said. "There's no knockout blow here."

At the same time, there's "still a long way Israel can go up the escalation ladder," Richard Goldberg, a former White House National Security Council member, told the Free Beacon. The Jewish state, for example, is reportedly readying a full-blown ground invasion into Lebanon after a Hezbollah missile attack targeted Tel Aviv for the first time in the conflict on Wednesday.  Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military's chief of staff, reportedly told forces stationed along the northern border "to prepare the terrain" for a possible ground incursion.

For Goldberg, Israel's actions leading up to the potential invasion have helped provide a strategic advantage.

"Israel is finally committed to climbing the escalation ladder until its primary objective is achieved: the return of 60,000 civilians to their homes," Goldberg said. "Israel has disrupted communications, eliminated key leadership assets, degraded command and control, and is now working through every target in the bank to degrade Hezbollah's strategic capabilities."

[thatstormygeek]

And yet we can predict with great accuracy what Israel’s reaction will be. Not just because we’ve seen what Israel has done consistently for five and a half months now, despite international outcry, but because Netanyahu has already threatened and rebuked the United States simply for abstaining from the Security Council vote. First, Netanyahu said that if the U.S. abstained from this vote, he would cancel an Israeli delegation to Washington. Now that the American representative on the Security Council has abstained, the delegation has indeed been canceled.  This news comes on the heels of Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer calling out Bibi, Biden approving of his speech, and increased speculation about a rift leading up to the U.S. abstention on the ceasefire vote. And yet, despite the endless leaks from the White House, and the slow inching away from Israel’s horrific actions, the U.S. didn’t vote for a ceasefire. Despite the shift in rhetoric, the bombs and arms keep flowing. And, despite wanting people to think the administration’s position on Israel has substantially changed, the State Department still finds the IDF to be in compliance with International law, a laughable statement contradicted by the International Court of Justice, among countless others.

For Democrats, the path is clear. It’s been clear. All efforts to make Biden do the right thing, demand peace, and cut off funding and weapons to Israel must be redoubled. Just like the uncommitted vote movement, anyone who wants Trump to lose should press Biden to do infinitely more to promote, or force, peace in Gaza. Anything short of that leaves a lane open for Trump to continue outflanking Biden on an issue that has become extremely important to crucial voters across the country. Every elected Democrat from Joe Biden right through Congress should have been pushing for peace for months now. But there’s no use looking back, or in appealing to their altruism. I want to rant and shout at the vast majority of elected officials in D.C., and plenty of people seem to be tracking them down and doing that. Yet more than venting I want peace. I want Israel’s genocide in Gaza to end. So, to appeal to a politician you have to appeal to one thing: their self-interest. And here is the crucial selfish motive: if you want to win, push for peace.