#likud charter

[bakrishna]

[notaplaceofhonour]

As a leftist Jew who believes strongly in the cause of dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people, and that Israel has abused them, I am begging fellow leftists to understand that real life is not a comic book. A government being “the bad guy” in a situation does not automatically make anyone who opposes it “the good guy”.

Hamas denies the Holocaust. Hamas disseminates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the conspiracy theory it paints is what they mean by “Zionist”. Hamas forbids foreign aid educators from teaching human rights to Palestinians, and claims that even teaching that the Holocaust happened is a war crime. Hamas has written the aim of annihilating Israel (the country and its people) into its charter—the mass slaughter and violent expulsion of 7 million Jews from the land is written into its laws.

There is no crime any state could ever do that would justify any of that; there is no act of state repression that could ever make it acceptable to side with the organization spreading Nazi pamphlets and Holocaust denial.

Oppose Bibi Netanyahu. Oppose Israel’s far-right, authoritarian government. Oppose Likud’s policies. Oppose its violence against Palestinian civilians. That isn’t antisemitic. But Hamas is—verifiably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to its core—antisemitic. Its portrayal of Israeli Jews as blood-thirsty, child-killing master manipulators that control international media and finance is antisemitic. Its insistence that Palestinian freedom necessitates the death & expulsion of Jews from the land is antisemitic. Its redefinition of “Zionism” as a pejorative to mean genocidal Jewish/Israeli Supremacy is antisemitic.

Supporting the Palestinian people in their plight is a noble and loving goal; please never stop that. But do not let Hamas co-opt that into excusing or denying their rampant antisemitism and war crimes.

[mariacallous]

If there was a pro-Palestinian movement that wanted to capitalise on the disgust at the destruction of Gaza, it would be moving now to demand a compromise peace.

Western and Arab governments should use every sanction to enforce the removal of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, it would say. They are designed to so change the demography of the West Bank that a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility.

 Since Netanyahu came back to power in a coalition with the far right,  mobs have wrecked Huwara and other Palestinian villages.  It is not too fanciful to imagine a future when ethnic cleansers will run riot.

Western governments have already made tentative and, from the point of view of any robust and principled supporter of Palestine, wholly inadequate gestures. They have issued sanctions on groups that fund extremism, and left it there.

But instead of the global left demanding that the world begins to lay the groundwork for compromise, it insists on war, and a war to the death at that.

I could moralise about left ignorance. I could say its position that Israel is a settler colonial state is at best a half-truth which fails to acknowledge that its population is made up of the descendants of refugees from Arab nationalism and European fascism.

Let me for once avoid preachiness, however, and say that from the practical point of view, the global left has adopted a disastrous position.

It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.

In any war to the death, Israel will win. It has nuclear weapons and a population under arms

Those who urge the abolition of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” or by demanding that the descendants of Palestinians refugees have a right to return to swamp the Jewish state may think they are being principled. But they are playing into the hands of the Israeli right.

Netanyahu tells the West that he has no partners for peace. By supporting the programme of Hamas and Iran, the global left is proving him right.

When Iran attacks, the Israeli right can say completely accurately that its enemies want to wipe Israel from the map. And look what happens then. Not just Western countries but Arab states like Jordan defend Israel.

Two can play at the game of demanding total victory, and one side has all the advantages.

As the charter of the hard-line rightist Likud party put it, in  language which sounds familiar: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

If I were Palestinian, I could imagine myself wanting Israel gone. But the hope of total victory has been a disaster. In 1948, 1967 and 1973 the Arab states tried to wipe Israel off the map and succeeded only in strengthening it.

There is still a great deal of argument about what Hamas thought would happen when its terrorists attacked Israel in October. One theory holds that Hamas was possessed with the same delusion that misled the Bolsheviks in 1917, and hoped to ignite a general uprising.

The Arab masses failed to rise up on Hamas’s behalf and Iran made it clear it was not prepared to engage in more than token warfare with Israel.

Once again, an attempt to wipe out Israel has brought harm to Palestinian civilians.

If you doubt me on the dangers of going for a purist, maximal strategy and demanding total victory, listen to a true leftist, Norman Finkelstein.

There was a time when I admired his attacks on the “Holocaust Industry” and Jews who exploited Nazism to help Israel.

But after my own experiences of left antisemitism, I became suspicious of an argument which, when taken to extreme, was used to maintain the pretence that anti-Jewish racism did not exist, or barely existed, and that accusations of antisemitism were log rolling by cunning Jews seeking to exploit the compassion of naïve gentiles.

The parallels with anti-black racists who claim their opponents are merely “playing the race card” were too obvious to labour.

No such qualms held Finkelstein back. He helped build the anti-Israel movement in the US, and you might have thought his comrades would have listened to him.

He gave a speech at the student sit-in at Columbia university saying they should not chant for the abolition of Israel and for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

If you leave “wriggle room for misinterpretation,” he said, your enemies will exploit it.

The speech was a faintly embarrassing performance. Finkelstein is an old man now, and he rambled down many rhetorical cul-de-sac​s. At the end the students just laughed at him and began chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”.

A part of the explanation for their disastrous flight to the extremes lies in the appeal of ​Manichaeism.

People want to feel wholly virtuous and by necessity want to believe their enemies are wholly evil. In these circumstances, only the co​mplete destruction of evil from the river to the sea will suffice. It’s simply not enough to say that Israel must merely withdraw from the occupied territories. Satan and all his works must be renounced.

You might object that some protestors say they want to replace Israel with a sweet, multicultural liberal democracy. But this is progressive thinking at its woozy wishful-thinking worst: an argument made in clear bad faith.

If they were serious, they would damn Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran who want to create an Islamic state. But it is not just that they do not criticise radical Islam, they barely acknowledge its existence. If you listen to the speeches at the rallies and sit-ins, Hamas and its ultra-reactionary blood-stained ideology are simply not mentioned.

The effort is self-defeating. By going to the extremes, a protest movement has a Manichean appeal but it plays into the hands of its enemies.

The “evaporation theory of protest” explains the phenomenon. When the Gaza war ends, and let us hope that it ends soon, most of the protestors will drift away and get on with their lives.

As they evaporate, all that is left will be a residue composed of the most committed and the most extreme.

They will carry on campaigning when the cause is all but forgotten. When Palestine and Israel are no longer in the news, they will still be there.

And when the next war begins in Israel/Palestine – and I am afraid that there will be a next one – they will organise the protests, write the extreme slogans and set the maximalist demands.

This is why the far left dictates the terms of left-wing protests, and why those protests fail.

Or to put it another way, this is why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party and then lost every election he fought

I could be wrong. Perhaps the global wave of protest will bring change for the better. I hope it does. But I fear that, as so often, Palestinian people will be worse off than they were before.​

[socialistexan]

So tired of the response to me saying "Palestinians deserve human rights" being, "Yeah but Hamas--"

Okay, are all Israelis Likud? No? Then why did they vote to keep Likud in power? Likud came from the political arm of far-right terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi which frequently committed acts of terror

And those organizations and their leaders (and even the leaders of Likud today) talk about the inherent inferiority of Arab people, and call them subhumans that need to be wiped off the face of the earth.

I mean, genocide of Arabs is in their charter! How could we not want to stop them! And Israel voted for them! And it's not like the Palestinians, where they haven't had a free election since 2006 (when their options were severely limited), Israel has frequently had elections since then including just last year!

So if there are no innocent Palestinians - including the children - because they voted for Hamas, there are no innocent Israeli, I guess. I'm just using that same logic.

[armed-with-a-waffle-iron]

You do realize that river to the sea is about ethnic cleansing right? Maybe not a good thing to be standing by. Can't rightfully claim a genocide if the people purporting are trying to stop the people who have explicitly said they want every one of them dead world wide

🇵🇸From the River to the Sea! Palestine will be FREE!🇵🇸

Some genocide sympathiser needs a history lesson. I'm mostly a comic blogger.....but I'm also a history student so here it is.

The phrase "From the river to the sea" was born as a Zionist phrase indicating where the supposed "Israeli state" was to be, which we can also see echoed in Israeli political statements welcoming the colonisation of Palestinian land, such as that of the Likud Party in 1977: “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. (Kelley, 2019)

In the middle of the 1960s, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) took the phrase back in a call for de-colonisation; the 1964 and 1968 charters of the Palestine National Council (PNC) demanded “the recovery of the usurped homeland in its entirety” and the recovery of rights to the indegenous population, including right to self-determination. This has ZERO to do with antisemitism; the PNC did not want to remove Jews from a Palestinian nation, just the settler-colonists. The 1964 Charter states that "Jews who are of Palestinian origin shall be considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine” and the rhetoric would become more inclusive following the 1967 war, when the PLO merged with Arab National Movement and the Palestine Liberation Front to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); which espoused Third World-oriented nationalism and Marxist-Leninism. The PFLP call for a single, secular, democratic, and possibly socialist Palestinian state in which all peoples enjoy citizenship, embracing ALL Jews as citizens. “If we are fighting a Jewish state of a racial kind, which had driven the Arabs out of their lands, it is not so as to replace it with an Arab state which would in turn drive out the Jews. . . . We are ready to look at anything with all our negotiating partners once our right to live in our homeland is recognized,” said one Fatah leader. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was therefore a call for a single, democratic, secular state to replace the genocide committing ethno-religious state of so-called "Israel". (Kelley, 2019)

Kelley, R.D. (2019) ‘From the river to the sea to every mountain top: Solidarity as Worldmaking’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 48(4), pp. 69–91. doi:10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.69.

So, NOT antisemitic. The media, right wing and "Western" states's fear mongering and criminalisation of the phrase is an attempt to stifle anti-imperialist, anti-colonial voices, and somehow justify so-called "Israel"'s slaughter, cleansing and oppression of Palestinians by dehumanising them.

Next off, if you're so concerned about antisemitism, oppression and the safety of Jewish people, I think you're better off organising in person with anti-fascists around you who oppose literal white supremacists and nazis whenever they pull a hateful stunt instead of playing victim online to people showing solidarity for Palestine.

Moreover. So-called "Israel" is committing a genocide. This state is built on the back of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homelands and the state never stopped. Zionism is by definition a fascist project that seeks to create an ethnostate on stolen land through the oppression and genocide of its indigenous population; the Palestinian people. It's an imperialist and settler colonial project that is backed by fellow settler colonial states such as the US and former colonial powers such as the UK. There is nothing that can justify settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. NOTHING. Not by the British Empire, not by Apartheid South Africa, not by Nazi Germany, and not by so-called "Israel" and its imperialist allies.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine 1948 by Ilan Pappe

No Muslim, Jew, Christian or Agnostic on that land is free until they're allowed to live as equals under a single, secular nation, and the Palestinians people are allowed to return to their homeland. No one in the world is free until we are ALL free!

Anon, where do you stand when, as of now, around 19,000 Palestinians have been murdered since Oct 7 by the so-called "Israeli" regime, backed by some of the most powerful nations in the world? When the Palestinian people have suffered 75 years of forced displacement, and state-back massacre, terror and discrimination. What the fuck did children in Gaza do to deserve being born into this hell on Earth? I'd hope you choose to stand on the right side of history but frankly it doesn't matter; in our thousands and in our millions, in our millions and in our billions— all of us who march and chant and organise and act and stand in solidarity with the oppressed— we are ALL Palestinians and we will see a free Palestine in our fucking lifetime.

Free the people, free the land! Justice is our demand!

Free the people, free them all! Occupation has to fall!

Free the people, free the land! No peace on stolen land!

Free the people, free them all! Break the chains and let them fall!

Free, free Palestine! Stop- the genocide! End- apartheid! De-DECOLONISE!

🇵🇸From the Sea to the River! Palestine will live forever!🇵🇸

[petrified-aspen]

Been hearing a lot of people parroting the propagandized idea that "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!" is an inherently anti-semitic slogan. Immediately upon hearing it, this stinks of anti-Palestinian bias; only the worst faith interpretation of the phrase possible could be taken as even slightly problematic, and I doubt Columbia student protestors mean it in that bad of faith.

But there is a specific assertion that I found particularly fishy:

(if you harass this person, i will be disappointed in you. Feel free to block though.)

This is a big claim: That the phrase originally called for Arabic supremacy over the land, and by saying a 'translated version' of it that has a completely different literal meaning, you are also calling for Arabic supremacy and the ethnic cleansing of Jews. If this is true, this could mean there are violent anti-Semites at your child's school, revolting in support of a new anti-Semitic state! Gasp!

Wait, wait, slow down, don't get wound up so quick! before we act on what we just heard and repost it without a second thought, let's look into it and find a source that isn't complete conjecture from a Tumblr blog!

There's an easy place to start: Wikipedia. I know, I know, you shouldn't cite it in your essay, but it might have some sources that are useful for us! Okay, scrolling.. perfect, a blurb detailing exactly how it was used in the 60's!

Okay, so immediately, we have an example of a pro-Palestinian organization, which predates Hamas, using the phrase to mean something completely different from what the commenter claimed. Now, they would probably wrinkle their nose at the original intent, the "call for an Arab state", and interpret it to be a call for ethnic cleansing. I would like to point out, though, that Zionists have been calling for a Jewish state encompassing Mandatory Palestine for, like, a century (more on that later). Knowing this, it's complete hypocrisy to wrinkle your nose at the implied call the PLO once made while turning the other cheek at Zionist rhetoric which says functionally the same thing. This hypocrisy is made even more obvious by the PLO's revised usage of the term.

See, if you actually wanted to engage with pro-Palestinian protestors in good faith on this topic, you would reasonably assume that the students at Columbia mean the phrase as a call for an Arabic and Jewish state. At the VERY least, you would entertain the idea that they are just as likely to be benign as they are likely to be ideologically aligned with Hamas.

But let's see what the article that Wikipedia cites has to say, just because I'm curious.

Here is a paragraph from page 77 of "From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top" by Robin D. G. Kelley:

Turns out, slandering people for their benign use of the phrase "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free" is nothing new, having occurred when Marc Lamont Hill used the phrase in a speech to the UN in 2018. Just a reminder of exactly how deep and how far back these lies run.

The article goes on to identify the ACTUAL origin of the phrase--and what do you know, it isn't Palestinian! In fact, it isn't even Arabic:

"First, the odious phrase in question began as a Zionist slogan signifying the boundaries of Eretz Israel. The Likud Party’s founding charter reinforces this vision in its statement that 'between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.'" (Kelley, 78).

The hypocrisy deepens. Not only does "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free" not have anti-Semitic roots, it has Israeli supremacist origins, and was appropriated into a rallying cry for solidarity by the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

"But Hamas is still using it in an anti-semitic way, and you shouldn't contribute to that," you might say. I'm glad you did, because it begs the question; why do Hamas and the PLO have such different ideologies, despite both fighting for Palestinian liberation? Why don't resistance fighters in Gaza align with the PLO rather than with Hamas?

Well, Hamas is really the only group with the funding, equipment, and ranks able to put up an organized resistance against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. There's a very specific reason why; the organization that would become Hamas, as Andrew Higgins wrote in WSJ, was influenced heavily by Israel:

TL;DR: Israeli government officials with jurisdiction over Gaza promoted the development of charities that would fund and build the foundation for Hamas, all because Hamas' right-wing militancy made them an enemy of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Fatah.

So let me get this straight. Zionists created an Israeli-supremacist slogan, a leftist pro-Palestinian organization (and generations of pro-Palestinian activists afterwards, including Angela Davis) appropriated it to be a rallying cry that promotes cross-cultural and ethnic solidarity, then the Israeli state propped up an anti-semitic group who then re-appropriated the phrase, and now there are politicians, journalists, and likely members of your community spreading lies about the meaning of the phrase to slander a humanitarian movement as anti-Semitic. Did I get everything?

This is what we mean when we say that Zionist propaganda manufactures accusations of anti-semitism to rally more people to their ultimately genocidal cause. All I had to do was open two Wikipedia articles to find evidence of a decades-long effort to project every flaw of Zionism, in all of its senseless violence, onto Palestinians. It took FIVE MINUTES for me to think critically, do a bit of research, and come away from this a more educated person.

I don't doubt that many of the people who are raising the alarm about anti-Semitism in the Palestinian liberation movement are acting in good faith. As a Jewish person, I am grateful for any legitimate, moral defense of my culture. But if you aren't willing to put the work in to analyze if what you're reading (and repeating) is actually true, then you will only harm the movement in the long run; at best, you're depriving yourself of crucial tools for solidarity, such as this rallying cry. At worst, you're slandering people and and risking their livelihoods and their safety.

Here's my citations, I highly recommend you check them out:

Oh, and I almost forgot: From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26873236

[sourcreammachine]

SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY MANIFESTO 2024 SUMMARY

cw: extreme transphobia

ok story time. after thatcher happened the labour party elected a left-wing leader to try stop her. four labour MPs left the party in protest and formed the SDP. they formed a non-aggression pact with the Liberal Party, and after a couple years voted in favour of merging to form the Liberal Democrats. one of the four founders disagreed with the merger and founded a new party, calling it the SDP again and acting like it was the rightful successor. after a year or two the continuation party had been destroyed at every little election it had tried to fight, and it voted in favour of disbanding. however, a few activists disagreed with the disbanding and founded a new party, calling it the SDP AGAIN and acting like it was the rightful successor. this second continuation, this third SDP is what survives today

when reading about this party thirty years later, i’d found descriptions that they had become ‘economically left-wing but socially right-wing’ and tbh, i took them at their word. i were told they were communitarians, using traditionalist conservative moral frameworks to promote social democratic economics. that description is very, very wrong

this manifesto is deeply fascistic

i was expecting a couple of yikes moments, especially about trans people, and while there is truly an avalanche of transphobia and trans-hostile policy proposals, the fascistic nature is all over the place, especially on migration, hypernationalism and security. they are beyond Likud on some security matters – if the IRA came back under the SDP we’d be living in a hypermilitarised apartheid state before you can say boyfanny

the reason i’m covering this manifesto is because they’re comfortably the sixth largest party in terms of seats contested at 122, narrowly behind the workers’ party (though they have a suite of endorsed independents). i want you to look at this atrocity. i want you to see the number of votes they get in these 122 seats and despair. this is your country, this is your fascism

💷ECONOMY

abolish housing benefits

audit board of private industry to audit the entire public sector every three years

ban the public sector from buying from foreign manufacturers. at all.

stop benefits after six months. councils required to “hire” (force the labour of) six-monthers for random stuff like street sweeping

expand tax incentives for marriage

raise the minimum wage to 2/3 median wage

raise corporation tax to internationally standard levels, but instead rollout freeports and Special Economic Zones

introduce laws discriminating in favour of parents for redundancies, “protecting them” as a protected category in equality legislation

unilateral expansion of fishing. sorry iceland, it looks like we’ll be having another war

🏥PUBLIC SERVICES

renationalise rail, water and energy

require the showing of an ID card to access the NHS and basically any free public service to prevent its use by illegals. immigrants, when given ‘indefinite leave to remain’, STILL won’t get the right to use any service for ten entire years

massive rollout of elite selective schooling

reduce the number of bachelors’ degree places

force over-65s to do community service to pay for their eventual social care

“teaching will reflect Britain’s important contribution to the world in the context of its time. teachers will avoid advocacy of unorthodox or sectarian agendas”

fully nationalise the BBC to seize state control, requiring it to ‘promote national cohesion’

schools to confiscate all phones during the day and “impound” (their word) any found phone for two weeks

ban the NHS using any language other than english or welsh. whoops looks like they forgot to include BSL

the manifesto includes a whiny “charter” on “academic freedom”

mandatory one mile walk every day in schools

require international students to take a strict english test before being offered a place

“public funding of culture, media and sports organisations will be conditional on those organisations respecting the principles of balance and free speech. institutions that fail to do so, by censoring artefacts, promoting sectarian agendas or deterring people from civil discourse, will have funding withdrawn”

rewrite the PSHE curriculum to prioritise “parenting and household management”

🏠HOUSING

“the fundamental aim of national housing policy shall be to ensure that young people seeking to start a family will be able to find a suitable home in which to do so”

create a public company to create 100k new social houses a year

discriminate in favour of the married and veterans for council and social housing

suspend but later reintroduce right to buy with a one-in-one-out clause

ban buy-to-let

👮FORCE

“restore the offence of sedition and actively use this law to pursue those who incite terrorism overtly or covertly, or who act in flagrant support of the UK’s enemies”

abolish the supreme court and transfer its powers to the house of lords, which due to reform will be more politically partisan

leave the UN refugee convention

abolish the human rights act

abolish the european convention on human rights

leave the council of europe

surge defence spending

surge funding for MI5 and the NCA

surge police funding and pursue an aggressive broken windows policy

double all sentences for violent crime, and for any repeat offence

mandatory minimum of ten years after three serious offences

mandatory hard labour for parolees for two years after release

all non-citizen prisoners to be deported and permabanned after release

any legally resident non-citizen to be deported for “any act considered materially hostile to Britain’s social peace”

“prisons will become safe, orderly institutions - whatever it takes”

asphyxiating migration cap of 50k/a, but “agreements between key strategic partners may result in selective exemptions if clearly in the national interest” (ie, we’ll let in anglophones, but probably not anglophones from africa or asia or the caribbean )

“promote a generation-long cessation of mass migration”

cease all aid for ukraine

🌱CLIMATE ?

“overrwhelming focus on climate ‘catastrophe’ is fostering anxiety and despair in children. from early years to key stage 3, all children will learn about British wildlife. the Natural History GCSE will [teach] the inspiring achievements of Britain’s pioneering naturalists”

abandon net zero

re-legalise fracking and expand oil and gas

pursue energy autarky where the country always has 12 months’ supply of fossil fuels

prohibit the rewilding of farmland

create no new low emissions zones

the fishing industry to oversee existing marine protection areas and any proposal for any new ones

🗳️DEMOCRACY

english parliament for english people

explicitly codify the fact that scotland can’t leave

proportional representation (specifically STV) for the commons

evict the hereditary lords and bishops but keep the appointees, capped at 400 with 15 year terms and appointed by committee

increase the powers of parish councils

🏳️‍⚧️REACTIONARY AGENDA, other than everything else

strip trans people of discrimination protections in both the equality and gender recognition acts to protect “sex-baesd rigths”

catastrophic reduction in NHS funding for trans healthcare, remaining funds to be for “psychological intervention” (state-mandated conversion therapy)

mandatory profiling of all trans people for all public data for all purposes by keeping separate sex and gender categories across the ENTIRE public sector

ban ALL pharmacological care for trans minors

ban trans women using women’s shelters

ban trans participation in sports competition

force trans prisoners to be incarcerated at the prison for the opposite sex

all public sector DEI to be stopped, so goes the policy

introduce a bad internet bill, require id for porn sites, require all tech companies to “promote free speech”

mandatory spyware on all devices: “a digital border application will be created to detect digital content which is malignantly pornographic, supportive of terrorism or otherwise contrary to law. all internet service providers operating in the UK will be required to utilise this scanning software and take steps to block undesirable content.” all smartphones “sold to or used by” an under-16 to have mandatory age restrictions

[rounderhouse]

Hello yes did you know that "From the River to the Sea" is a call for genocide? Especially with Hamas at the helm? Can you please not do that it would be appreciated.

actually it's a call for a free palestine! no major Palestinian group advocates a total ejection of Israel from the Levant; the PLO charter and now even the Hamas charter advocate a return to the 1967 borders before the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank -- borders that still leave 76% of the land in what was once Mandatory Palestine under the Israeli state. the idea that Palestinian liberation necessarily involves the destruction of Israel is an idea even Hamas has given up on -- the only people spouting it now are Likud members.

[tomorrowusa]

'They cut heads off people': IDF major general describes aftermath of Hamas attack

A lot of people are still not clear about what happened in Israel last weekend. It was not a military operation, it was a massive terror attack.

It had no military goal that anybody can discern. Its only motive was to kill and kidnap a lot of civilians – and in the most brutal way possible.

Hamas acted like a cross between Hitler's SS and ISIS – and should be regarded as such.

People in the West who make excuses for Hamas terrorism are cheerleaders for atrocities. Do their friends and family know that they approve of babies being beheaded to further political goals?

To be clear, I am sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people. I believe in a two-state (or possibly even a three-state) solution. I feel that Netanyahu's Likud Party has harnessed the support of religious fanatics and ethno-nationalists to prevent such a solution and, as such, they are a danger to peace in the Eastern Mediterranean. Netanyahu is a power-craving dickhead who is on the wrong side of history.

The Hamas orgy of murder and brutality has done nothing for Palestinians and has resulted in a war that will not end until those who committed last weekend's atrocities are dead or off the scene for good.

Ukraine has suffered for centuries – not just decades – because of Russian imperialism. Stalin even starved to death much of the population in the early 1930 in a genocide known as the Holodomor.

And Vladimir Putin has renewed Stalin's efforts to eliminate even the concept of Ukraine. Yet despite this long history of persecution, Ukrainians have not been conducting mass murder sprees in Russian villages across the border – even though Putin's Russia has no qualms about murdering Ukrainian civilians either close up or by drones and missiles.

What Hamas did is not liberation or resistance. Nobody got liberated and many people in Gaza are now suffering because of Hamas.

Read the Hamas Charter. It is filled with anti-Semitic tropes which sound like they come from Mein Kampf. This is NOT anything like the Freedom Charter of the Nelson Mandela era ANC.

It is easily possible to be pro-Palestinian without being a shill for anti-Semitic mass murderers. But some people on social media haven't gotten that message.

[eris-and-lokis-love-child]

I think you misunderstood the point of that ask about the occupation of the West Bank. Saying it’s only become occupied in the past few weeks is in and of itself a denial of the fact that armed Israeli settlers have been illegally invading the West Bank and stealing homes and land and property since 1967, all with the backing of the IDF. This process is ongoing and has never stopped. I don’t blame you for not knowing that that wasn’t happening, but if you did know, I’m not sure how that could be viewed as anything but occupation

Oh, I see. You're talking about how, in a defensive war, Israel took the west bank from Jordan, which had been illegally annexed by Jordan in 1950, and all the Jews living there (many of which had lived there prior to the foundation of modern Israel) were kicked out... The Oslo accords split it into three regional levels of sovereignty, and the ICJ confirmed that it should stay under Israeli occupation in 2004. I thought you were talking about how the PLA sovereign areas had been seeing Israeli security forces encroach upon their lands, which has been a slowly ramping up thing since a terrorist organization controlling PLA lands (Gaza) invaded Israeli territory, killed, raped, and took hostage Israelis of both Jewish and Arabic descent, of multiple religions, as well as foreigners there, with the result of actually extending Netanyahu's term, and this was likely done at the instigation of Iran, as Saudi Arabia was about to normalize relations with Israel, and in the Middle East, the three big powers are Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and Iran is opposed to both Israel and Saudi Arabia? And sure, holy run-on sentence Batman, but the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is a direct consequence of Jordan's actions between 1947 and 1967, the concessions granted to the PLA a direct result of the Oslo accords, and the current state of affairs a direct result of a terrorist attack.

I don't condone the attacks by Israelis upon Palestinians in the West Bank, nor their moving into sovereign PLA territory. I think Likud and Netanyahu should be out of power, and should have been much earlier. They would have been if not for October 7th. I absolutely believe that some members of the IDF have committed war crimes, and that those war crimes pale in comparison to those of Hamas. I believe in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are two entities that have a goal, stated or otherwise, of genocide, and that the one actively trying to pursue that goal is the one that has it in its charter. The other is a political party that was failing before October 7th.

I see a lot of simplistic idiocy coming from your position, even if it's not from you, and I'm sorry if you aren't one of them, but there's several different ways people use 'Occupation' in terms of the West Bank, and in context, I believed you were referring to a different way.

The actual situation on the ground is unbelievably complex and complicated, and all that Hamas is doing is ensuring it takes longer to reach any sort of resolution.

[gardengnosticator]

zionists looking at the hamas charter openly describing how their struggle is not against jews and somehow claiming that it’s actually a super secret hidden antisemitic code phrase for a genocide is like qanon for likud voters

[socialistexan]

I want every single Zionist that called "from the river to the sea" to be a call for genocide to read the original platform for the right-wing Likud party, which has been in power the majority of Israel's existence. The number one or two party in Israel in every election except 1!

This is the first line of the platform. It's right there. The phrase, as far as I can tell, originated from this text.

If we're going to say that Hamas's charter from the 80's still applies to them today, then we should also say that the charter of the ruling party of Israel that the people voted into power many times since the last time Hamas was voted into power in 2006 should also apply to them today.

And if we say that a Palestinian saying "from the river to the sea" is a call for genocide, then we should also say that if an Israeli says it, it is a call to genocide.

The point is, it isn't.

From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!

[thelearnedwobbly]

See normally I'd just block this and move on, because while this is just plain wrong, and not only that, it's dangerously wrong, I normally just do not have the wherewithal to unpack posts like these, nor do I typically have the leg to stand on, but someone I care about deeply reblogged this, so I feel a need to unpack the assumptions being made here.

I'm Irish. Should mention that up front. I have family who fought in our wars of independence going back literally centuries, and I can literally name family members who fought with the Fenian Brotherhood and the First IRA, including survivors of the Easter Rising, Irish War of Independence, and Irish Civil War(incidentally my great granddad was all three)

The cause of Irish independence is extremely deeply held to me, and realistically if I'd been born a couple decades earlier I probably would have been a Provo.

And before someone makes the argument that that makes me a hypocrite, that if I support Irish independence and the reunification with the occupied North then I must be racist--I support free Palestine. I believe that they have every right to live safe and happy lives without the IDF brutalising them, without the threat of bombs or rockets or tanks destroying their homes. I believe that they deserve to be fully independent and equal members of the international community. Hell, I'm an anarchist, so I'd rather we tear down borders altogether, but we're not there yet, so I'll settle for harm reduction and national sovereignty.

The problem is that this entire argument I keep seeing--that Palestine are just defending themselves, that they're freedom fighters no different from any others, that they're only being called terrorists due to racism or zionism or islamophobia--is predicated on a massive logical fallacy.

It's one that a lot of bad actors--including those in Israel--are counting on you to not notice.

Hamas is not Palestine.

This is not a case where the people attacking Israel are a group of grassroots freedom fighters who just want a better world. Hamas are a theocratic authoritarian minority government with a massive paramilitary wing that is occupying the Gaza Strip. The IDF do not have a formal presence inside the Strip, but Hamas does.

Hamas are not freedom fighters. Their founding charter calls for the extermination of all Jewish people. It calls not for a free Palestine but for a mass pogrom of Israelis, and the establishment of a far-right islamist regime instead.

Hamas opened this war by killing thirteen hundred innocent people. And you can try to claim that they were 'settler-colonials' or whatever buzzword is the current way to describe living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping people--many of whom in the Kibbutzes Hamas destroyed wholesale, slaughtering children alongside noncombatants--were pro-peace activists. Leftists and progressives who wanted the same thing this post ostensibly does.

Palestine and Hamas are not interchangeable. Hamas is not the only possible answer--they are not an example of extremists being the only ones willing to fight, as sometimes happens in history, and I know this, because Fatah is right there.

Fatah, who have a democratic majority in the West Bank. Fatah, who want a peaceful two-state solution. Fatah, who have a militant wing they use when necessary. Fatah, who do not use their citizens' bodies as human shields. Fatah, who do not call for the extermination of their enemies, down to the last man, woman, and child.

Men, women, and children who did not ask to be born in Israel. Innocent people whose only 'crime' is of faith. People whose ancestors moved to Israel on a broken British promise, just two years after the end of World War Two and the Holocaust. People who, until the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, had a real chance at peace through negotiations with Fatah...until the far-right of Israel shot that peace dead, then tore up the Oslo Accords and took power.

The Israeli government under Likud are absolutely an increasingly-corrupt right-wing regime intent on theocratic and autocratic rule...but the Israeli people are not their government any more than Palestine is Hamas. This is not a war of revolution, and Hamas are not freedom fighters, any more than Likud and the current IDF are liberators or whatever propaganda they're spouting right now. But they were attacked first, and not in the manner of a freedom fighter; not in the desperate use of limited force against civilian officials because every other option has been closed to them; wanton, pointless slaughter and kidnapping; rape and torture of random, innocent Israelis, many of whom were anti-Likud. The IDF had entire units on strike due to Netanyahu's attempts to gut the judiciary and increase his own power; there were protests in the streets. And then Hamas killed their families and kidnapped their friends, and many of them picked up weapons to defend themselves. Do you blame them?

There is no easy 'good guy' or 'bad guy' here, and I question Tumblr's current fixation on trying to find one; sometimes, two right-wing regimes hellbent on establishing theocratic rule go at each other, and the civilians--and the people who actually want to fix the problems of their forefathers--get caught in the middle. That is who you should root for.

I just...do not understand how so many people who should know better have failed to research this before making their voices heard; I barely understood this conflict a year ago, and I have refrained from saying anything until I'd done my own independent research. Now I can avoid putting my foot in my mouth, and I'm so late to the races I'm seeing people I genuinely care about claiming an antisemitic terror organisation are comparable to an Irish nationalist militia whose primary motivation when the fighting began was preventing pogroms against catholic neighbourhoods. And that really fucking hurts, to say nothing of how badly my Jewish friends are hurting to see leftists and progressives unbashedly rooting for Hamas or framing the IDF as intrinsically evil; claiming that Jewish people in Israel should pay for the mistakes of terrified ancestors and the idiocy of the British government of the late 1940s. Even if you don't mean to be antisemitic, even if you just care deeply and want to avoid seeming like you're sitting this one out, I promise you, the people you're trying to support wouldn't want you to root for their oppressors--whether that's Hamas or Likud.

I'm trying to find a pithy or cathartic way to end this. I can't. This is a humanitarian tragedy with no easy answers, and people I know don't mean to are repeating propaganda uncritically from both sides because they don't want to be seen to be silent--take the time, breathe, think about what these posts are trying to sell you, and do your own research. And I get that this is a busy, shitty world, with a lot going on, and you can't always make that time, but if you can't do that, you need to try to avoid weighing in, because you're extremely liable to do more harm than good. And I don't mean 'boost people who seem to know what they're talking about', I mean don't even reblog a post if you can't vet it, because the information war is active, and you are very likely to become a casualty.

you know when irish people were fighting for freedom the rebels were never considered revolutionaries or freedom fighters. we had only ever been called terrorists by the british government, because when you call a people fighting for their rights and their freedoms terrorists you can distance yourself from them. people aren't fighting because they've been radicalised by 800 years of colonialism or 75 years of brutal settler imperialism, they're fighting because they're dirty terrorists trying to hurt our democracy and kill our children. and now we don't have any responsibility to reckon with the years of subjugation and settler violence and attempted genocide, because how can you expect us to deal with terrorists? the same story repeats itself over and over n it's shocking how people will eat it up every time when it comes to protecting and maintaining western power.

[sethshead]

There are three trains of thought among Likudniks concerning Hamas. The first, which may explain Yoav Gallant’s recent statements, is that Hamas has been chastened and can be managed. I am the furthest thing from Likud, but I think that policy was permanently discredited Oct. 7, 2023.

If Israel concedes to Hamas demands to withdraw completely from Gaza in return for (some) remaining hostages (in a few months, maybe), Hamas will come out from underground, reassert its rule & return to working toward its reason for being: the eradication of Israel & of Jews worldwide, as per its charter. We should have learned to believe them the first time.

The second train is to crawl through all Gaza in mopping-up missions, pretending there are no civilians in the zone of combat, and control the strip militarily thereafter. Day-to-day administration would be handed over to the tribes to do as they wish to govern themselves as a premodern, nonpolitical society. There would be no two-state solution de jure or de facto. Gaza would instead be a primitive bantustan.

This is a fantasy. Palestinians would not accept indefinite Israeli presence. Blowback would be inevitable, just as happened in southern Lebanon with Hizb’allah. Further, Palestinians are too sophisticated and worldly to return to a tribal lifestyle that dates back to the British mandate.

The third train, and the preferred one of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, is essentially the second plus the reintroduction of Israeli settlers. This compounds the second’s apartheid with an additional violation of international law. It also sticks Israel ever more closely to the Palestinian tar baby, eroding Zionism by exerting Jewish self-determination at the expense of Palestinians’, leaving the latter stateless non-citizens in what is functionally Israeli territory. That undermines all justifications for Israel’s existence.

Netanyahu publicly states he is in favor of the second train, but he’s never been averse to lying for convenience. If it is politically advantageous to give Smotrich and Ben-Gvir an open hand in Gaza, he will do so.

All these Likud plans are awful, and disastrous for Israel long-term.

Hamas must be rendered unable to restore its power in Gaza. It must be weakened to a point that administration and security can be handed over to a party palatable to Gazans themselves. I dream of Emiratis, Moroccans, and Saudis, with an interim government provided by liberal Palestinian expats like Salam Fayyad and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. Gazan public opinion appears to be ready for enlightened technocracy that seeks equal and independent coexistence with Israel. Such an outcome would be to both people’s long-term benefit.

[bllsbailey]

Meta (FACEBOOK) Decides 'From the River to the Sea,' a Call for Genocide Against Jews, Is Not 'Hate Speech'

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has determined that the antisemitic phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” does not violate its hate speech policies.

The slogan has seen a resurgence in popularity amid widespread protests across the country against Israel’s military campaign against terrorist group Hamas.

Meta’s Oversight Board has found that the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” used to express Palestinian support, did not break the company’s hate speech policies. Critics of the phrase, which refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, say that it calls for the abolishment of the Israeli state. The Anti-Defamation League accused the slogan of being antisemitic and a “rallying cry (that) has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas.” But the chant is also frequently used at pro-Palestinian demonstrations by protesters who say it is to call for equal rights and an independent state for Palestinians. It can refer to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are restricted in their movements and from visiting Jerusalem. The Board said it reviewed three cases involving the use of “From the River to the Sea” on Facebook and said that all appeals to remove the content were closed without human review. Those users then appealed to the Board, which exists for users to challenge Meta’s appeals process on Facebook, Instagram or Threads.

The Oversight Board argued that “the three pieces of content contain contextual signs of solidarity with Palestinians – but no language calling for violence or exclusion” and “do not glorify or even refer to Hamas.”

Some on the board acknowledged that the phrase can have multiple meanings, but pointed out that it appears in Hamas’ 2017 charter.

The antisemitic Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) praised the Oversight Board’s decision, claiming that some activists use the phrase to “call for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in one state with equal rights,” and that it “does not inherently constitute hate speech.”

CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper celebrated the decision:

“We appreciate Meta recognizing that the Jewish, Palestinian and other activists who sometimes use this phrase as their way of advocating for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in one state with equal rights are not engaging in hate speech. This stands in stark contrast the official position of the Likud Party and the Israeli government, which calls for a permanent state of occupation and subjugation 'from the river to the sea' in its official platform. It is essential that Meta also take action to ensure that voices opposing the genocide in Gaza are not being unjustly censored or banned.”

Despite CAIR’s claims, the slogan has been parroted by pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses and other areas since the war in Gaza began with Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians and others on Oct. 7. It has been used by Hamas and other terrorist entities to promote violence against Jews.

The slogan is a rallying cry typically used to advocate for the elimination of Jewish sovereignty in the region. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described the phrase as a classic example of antisemitic rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist.

It is fundamentally a call for a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, territory that includes the state of Israel, which would mean the Jewish state being dismantlied. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.

It is possible that some who use the phrase do not know its history or actual meaning. But most of those pushing the slogan understand precisely what it means--even if they are too cowardly to admit it publicly.

The notion that the phrase does not constitute hate speech is laughable, considering what Facebook and other Meta-owned platforms actually consider to be objectionable. It appears this move may have been aimed at quelling backlash coming from the anti-Israel crowd. But in the end, it only highlights the company’s hypocrisy in its content moderation practices.

[amaditalks]

Multiple things are true at the same time.

It is absolutely true that Hamas, as the government of Gaza, has fundamentally failed to use the funding and resources available to them to provide infrastructure and resources for the people of Gaza, even as the population has doubled in the last 20 years. (They also haven’t done anything to mitigate population growth despite the lack of resources and infrastructure for the people.) 

There is one main source of water, an aquifer which is compromised by several factors, including infiltration of seawater, overuse, pollution, and lack of rain. There are waterworks that can extend the supply of water but they just aren’t sufficient for the needs of the population. This is an explainer with video from the World Bank programs for Gaza dating back to 2022. 

They do have their own greenhouses and farms, but without a steady supply of freshwater what those greenhouses and farms are able to supply for the people is insufficient.

Electricity is also a problem. This is largely due to a power struggle between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority/Fatah in the West Bank. Even with Israel and Egypt providing slightly more electric power than the Gaza power plant, the needs of Gaza are not met, and the local power infrastructure has not been improved.

Without sufficient electricity, other infrastructure projects and the waterworks projects are all compromised. 

Gaza does have a port, it is a small one. (It may not really be in existence now, after the last seven months, the US military is building a floating pier at that port for the direct delivery of aid) but that port, like land crossings, has been blockaded by Israel, since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. That blockade has also meant that some — not all — of the supplies needed for infrastructure projects have been kept out of Gaza. It’s not all due to the blockade by any means. 

We can definitely argue about both the legitimacy and impact of the blockade, but we cannot argue that the blockade arose specifically because the organization that took over Gaza had, at the time, a pledge in its charter to destroy Israel that was only removed for political, not ideological, reasons.

Ultimately, the conflict between Israel and Palestine must be peacefully and equitably resolved in order for the people of Gaza to have access to the basic features of a modern society, and the people who were “chosen“ to lead Gaza, whether you want to call them a government, a resistance force, or a terrorist group notwithstanding, have shown that they are not capable of or particularly interested in running a functional society, unwilling to deal with their own corruption, and a major impediment (along with Israel’s Likud government leadership) toward that peaceful resolution.

Palestine should have already built their own port, but they didn’t.

They should have their own greenhouses and farms, but they don’t.

They should have their own bomb shelters, but that’s clearly not the case.

Their hospitals should be state-of-the-art - they shouldn’t need to go to Israel for treatments - but they do largely rely on Israel.

And instead of asking why this country that has received billions in aid still doesn’t have basic infrastructure, you get mad and blame Israel.

You don’t question why the leaders of Hamas are billionaires. You don’t question why their military budget is so high if their people apparently live in squalor. And you don’t question how this country can build extensive tunnel networks, but not a single damn bomb shelter.

No, you just blame Israel - a separate country - for the failings of the Palestinian people and their government.