#mondoweiss

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

[fiercynn]

With Palestinians breaking free of their besieged ghetto, we suddenly hear the all-too-familiar chorus of “the cycle of violence” and other such clichés. As usual, this fixation on pacifism only arises when the oppressed strike back at their oppressors. It seems that the refusal to live in a cage is not a convincing explanation for violence and armed resistance. Regardless of whether Israelis were killed or not, there was no way Palestinians could have launched an effective resistance campaign without being widely condemned or demonized. Even when resorting to tactics such as BDS campaigns to effect change, Palestinians were quickly rebuked, with critics likening the tactic to a “Nazi campaign,” and eliciting draconian legislation to legally ban the practice in places like the United States. In 2018, Gaza launched the unarmed Great March of Return to challenge the occupation and demand the right of return. It was dubbed a “riot,” and met with sniper fire, killing over 300 Palestinians, and creating an entire generation of maimed youth. Palestinian administrative detainees — prisoners held without charge, trial, or access to lawyers — are demonized for daring to go on hunger strikes. Even merely trying to access the International Criminal Court, which in theory should be the most agreeable arena to air grievances in the supposed “rules-based-international-order,” was met with hostility and rejection. These specific examples were chosen not to imply that other forms of resistance are illegitimate but rather to illustrate how even when Palestinians try to play by the non-armed rules set out for their resistance to be seen as “legitimate,” they are still framed as aggressive terrorists. There is always a reason why even the mildest methods of resistance are deemed wrong, always some technicality explaining that while “usually” this would be the right way to do things, it doesn’t apply to Palestinians. The goalposts are infinitely shifting, and it becomes glaringly obvious that the issue is not with the methods, but instead with who is undertaking them.

fathi nemer on october 24, 2023 for mondoweiss

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

BY: GILEAD INI

Before looking at specific examples of disinformation by the “critics,” as the Times and NPR calls them, we should address a few broader points.

Despite evidence of rape, those defending Hamas from charges of sexual violence point to a lack of forensic evidence — the kind that might be revealed at the denouement of a television crime show. Indeed, Israel’s frontier with Gaza on and after Oct 7 was less untouched crime scene and more battlefield and disaster zone.

But this is neither exonerating nor unusual. “There is very much what’s known as the CSI effect, where there is a perception that without forensic evidence or DNA, then you don’t have a case,” an expert on sexual violence in conflict zones told NPR. “And that’s just patently not true.”

In this case, the full CSI treatment was impracticable. “As is common in war, collection of physical evidence was hindered by ongoing combat and a large, chaotic crime scene,” NPR reported.

With limited resources and such a large-scale attack, compromises were necessary, journalist Carrie Keller-Lynn explained. “Instead of going through CSI, which would make it possible to produce evidence of crimes, the bodies are being processed through the disaster victim identification (DVI) track, as is common for mass casualty events,” she reported. Or as the UN mission put it, there was a “prioritization of rescue operations and the recovery, identification, and burial of the deceased in accordance with religious practices, over the collection of forensic evidence.” (The mission noted additional factors, too, that hindered the collection of forensic examination. See paragraph 46 of its report.)

The deniers had also pointed to lack of testimony by victims — a puzzling defense in the context of this story, where survivors describe women raped then murdered; where recovery workers noted naked and bound corpses; and where released hostages say those still in captivity had said they were sexually assaulted. Which category of those victims, exactly, would the deniers expect to have heard from? (When a hostage did eventually speak out about being sexually assaulted, the self-appointed investigators were not particularly interested, or worse, dismissed her account.)

None of this means every testimony is beyond reproach. Just as the record of 9/11 was contaminated by multiple false accounts and fake survivors, likewise after 10/7 false accounts were reported by pretenders, and some unfounded atrocity charges were shared, believed, and repeated. The “critics” did not miss the opportunity to capitalize on these inaccurate accounts in order to push the idea, through innuendo or explicit denial, that every witness of rape and every first responder account of sexually abused bodies are fake.

The Critics

NPR’s story about “critics” of a New York Times piece on sexual violence repeatedly cites The Intercept.

Once of many acknowledgements by The Intercept that its claims come from the further fringes.

And across The Intercept’s incessant efforts to discredit those shining a light on Palestinian sexual violence, its reporters cite Mondoweiss, Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada, and Max Blumenthal of Grayzone.

It is an echo chamber of Hamas apologia — invariably, one story links to identical accusations by the others, which link back to similar pieces by the rest. The common theme, other then denial, is the extremism of its participants.

Consider, most relevantly, their response to the Oct 7 massacre:

A writer for the Intercept, at least, grants that the attack was “horrifying” — though this was in a post whose argument was that we shouldn’t view it as horrifying.

Others are less subtle. Denier Ali Abunimah, for example, was self-evidently delighted by the slaughter of civilians in Israel. He not only defended the attack, calling it “just”; not only insisted we shouldn’t feel bad about it (this just minutes after he posted video of elderly female hostage paraded and taunted on video); but also viciously attacked those — including critics of Israel — who would dare share any sympathy for the victims of the mass slaughter of Jews.

Mondoweiss summarized the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust with an announcement that “Gazans have broken out of their open air prison imposed by Israel and launched an elaborate surprise attack on their occupier,” while pooh-poohing the idea that Hamas had started a war. As the extent of the atrocities became apparent, Mondoweiss’s defenses of the assault grew more emphatic. On Oct. 8, its culture editor Muhammed El-Kurd insisted the attack was a cause for “celebration.” On Oct. 9, it published a piece insisting we “must shout our support for the resistance from our rooftops.”

Max Blumenthal minimized Hamas’s slaughter as ”guerrilla bands bursting out of a besieged ghetto with homemade weapons.” In response to a Twitter post noting that at its attack on a music festival Hamas “began shooting those in attendance,” Blumenthal mocked the victims and justified their slaughter.

The motivation for their leap to action at the first accusation of rape, then, is as simple as it seems: It is born of sympathy for Hamas.

[eretzyisrael]

by Chaim Lax

Concurrent with the attempt to delegitimize the case that there was a rash of sexual abuse and rape is an attempt to absolve Hamas of any wrongdoing.

For these observers, even if sexual abuse did take place during the massacre, it was certainly not perpetrated by Hamas, the noble Palestinian resistance movement dedicated to fighting the evil Jewish state.

Both freelance British journalist and anti-Israel activist Jonathan Cook and The Intercept seem to largely absolve Hamas of any guilt in this regard and re-focus it on the deluge of Palestinian civilians that followed the initial wave of Hamas terrorists into southern Israel.

The Grayzone and Mondoweiss even go one step further, using the opportunity to not only call into question the use of sexual abuse by Hamas terrorists, but also to seemingly glorify those who took part in the October 7 invasion.

In its questioning of The New York Times, The Grayzone ponders whether it’s “plausible that a group of hardened Hamas commandos suddenly paused their surprise attack, which was focused on taking as many captives as quickly as possible, stood in a circle and gang raped a woman, one after another, while Israeli forces mobilized to attack them?”

For The Grayzone, it appears to be inconceivable that these “hardened Hamas commandos,” who also engaged in the butchering of 1,200 people and the war crime of kidnapping roughly 250 others, would engage in the demeaning tactic of sexual abuse. While sex crimes are not uncommon in wartime, The Grayzone judges it to be absurd that Hamas terrorists would stoop to such a level.

For its part, Mondoweiss claims that not only did Hamas members not engage in sexual abuse, but the Islamist terrorist organization is known to treat women properly, based on the calm comportment of those hostages who were freed in November 2023 as they were released to the care of the Red Cross.

While there have been published videos of captured Hamas terrorists admitting to sexual abuse and rape, and there has been testimony that the released hostages were sedated prior to their release (along with the fact that many still have relatives in Hamas captivity), Mondoweiss disregards these pieces of evidence as “absurd” and discounts their validity.

For a publication that seems intent on attaining the facts regarding October 7, it seems that it only cares for the facts that are convenient to its narrative and disregards the rest.

It should be noted that these Western media outlets are echoing the same sentiments expressed by Hamas itself, alleging that Hamas members can’t have engaged in these acts as they are against “Islamic values and culture.” At the same time, Hamas also regarded the October 7 massacre as “glorious.”

For those who seek to invalidate the claim that sexual abuse occurred on October 7 and “debunk” The New York Times’ in-depth profile, the allegations of abuse and rape are part of a campaign by the Israeli government to validate its military actions in Gaza.

[goeatsomeveggies]

PLEASE PLEASE FOLLOW THESE ACCOUNTS ON IG!

I can't stress enough how y'all should be following these two news outlets.

They are GREAT!

The Mondoweiss has the most insightful and intelligent analysis about Palestine.

And the Electronic Intifada uplifts the most soulful, beautiful, touching stories about Palestine.

[houseofpurplestars]

"Keep my stories alive so that you keep me alive. Remember that I wanted a normal life, a small home full of my children’s laughter and the smell of my wife’s cooking. Remember that the world that pretended to be the savior of humanity participated in killing such a small dream.

Remember me, as I prepare myself to leave this world by force and go to a better one — one where the U.S. and Israel do not exist."

Tareq S. Hajjaj,

October 15, 2023

This could be my last report from Gaza

Tareq Hajjaj at mondoweiss

[goose-onthe-loose]

PLEASE stop using Mondoweiss as a news source, the man who founded it and remains the editor-in-chief is a raging antisemite, as evidenced in this article:

https://mondoweiss.net/2015/04/forgiving-anti-semites/

Apart from the deeply questionable title, the article (which is still up, because apparently nearly a decade to self-reflect wasn't enough for the folks at Mondoweiss) features classic antisemitic tropes, including

"Jews love cheating"

"Jews hide things from non-Jews"

And of course,

"The US helps Israel as a thank you to the Jews for 'driving the economy'."

Non-biased reporting at its finest.

[disruptiveempathy]

Accompanied by the perpetual Israeli statements promising that the army would invade Rafah soon, the past few weeks served to terrorize the civilian population in Rafah. Thousands began to flee back up north, heading towards the cities and refugee camps of central Gaza. The campaign of forced displacement has been caught on camera for all to see, repeated again and again throughout the war. But the difference during this most recent campaign is that there is nowhere to flee. Wide swathes of central Gaza have been leveled and converted into an open field for the Israeli army’s operations.

—Tareq S. Hajjaj, from "Fleeing Rafah," in Mondoweiss

[chimaeraonwards]

"The stories I never wanted to write" by Tareq S. Hajjaj (2 November 2023)

Mahmoud al-Na’ouk, The Dreamer

Rushdie Sarraj, The Journalist

Ismaeel Barda, The Vendor

Remember them. Palestinians are more than just numbers.

Read the full story here:

[soon-palestine]

Since October 7, there has been no shortage of genocidal calls from Israeli leaders, as well as clear plans, also at ministerial level, for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And while the usage of biblical euphemisms like Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “Amalek” reference may appear too vague for some, even if the story suggests killing infants, on Sunday ret. Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council and current advisor to the Defense Minister decided to spell out genocide more explicitly. In a Hebrew article on the printed edition of the centrist Yedioth Ahronoth titled “Let’s not be intimidated by the world,” Eiland clarified that the whole Gazan civilian population was a legitimate target and that even “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.” His bottom line leaves no doubt as to his view: “They are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th.” [..] A concentration camp Eiland has a long history of being surprisingly forthright about his view on the state of the Gaza Strip. In 2004, then as head of the National Security Council, he regarded the Gaza Strip as “a huge concentration camp” as he advocated for the U.S. to force Palestinians into the Sinai desert as part of a “two-state solution.” As per a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked to Wikileaks here: Repeating a personal view that he had previously expressed to other USG visitors, NSC Director Eiland laid out for Ambassador Djerejian a different end-game solution than that which is commonly envisioned as the two-state solution. Eiland’s view, he said, was prefaced on the assumption that demographic and other considerations make the prospect for a two-state solution between the Jordan and the Mediterranean unviable. Currently, he said, there are 11 million people in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, and that number will increase to 36 million in 50 years. The area between Beer Sheva and the northern tip of Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza) has the highest population density in the world. Gaza alone, he said, is already “a huge concentration camp” with 1.3 million Palestinians. Moreover, the land is surrounded on three sides by deserts. Palestinians need more land and Israel can ill-afford to cede it. The solution, he argued, lies in the Sinai desert. It is interesting to see Eiland recognizing such a reality even before the Gaza “disengagement” of 2005, before the election of Hamas in 2006, and before the genocidal siege of 2007, which has only been upped in its severity since October 7. At this point, regarding Gaza, as a concentration camp appears perhaps too weak a term — it has become an extermination camp.

[ahaura]

(Dec. 30) [Article]

[fiercynn]

White settler institutional support of Israel — such as that of the University of California — points to two historical contexts. The first is the history of the formation of the Israeli settler state, since 1948 and before and after, its expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and homes, its depopulation of over 400 Palestinian villages, and its ongoing attacks against Palestinian individuals, communities, and institutions, including, as the Palestinian poet and translator Fady Joudah has observed, Palestinian memory. All of this is ignored by political and educational leaders in the United States in the interest of the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the subjection of Palestinians to settler obliteration.   The attachment of these institutions and leaders to the Israeli state points to a second context: the racialization of social understanding among white settler individuals, institutions, and collectives, and an identification of individuals, institutions, and collectives with white settler life, self-understanding, and social sense. The affirmation of Israeli acts of genocidal violence as self-defense is not only a grotesque distortion. It points to a social truth: that the social form of the American settler state foments an identification with settler ways of being—with white settler life and social existence—through which individuals, collectives, and institutions understand themselves and in relation to which the world becomes legible for them as a space for life.  This identification suggests a third context: the ongoing attempts to domesticate the struggles for decolonization following World War II in the institution of the modern state and the modern terms for the law. These include the basic terms through which the social is understood, terms such as the “individual,” “right,” “property,” and “whiteness,” which sustain the law and which the law reinforces. It is not only that Palestinians are a non-white, non-European people struggling for liberation and freedom against a settler colonial oppressor—and this is the case—but that their struggle, in whichever form it takes, conjures a panic in white life and settler being, a fantasy, as the anti-colonial militant and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, in 1961, of “swarming” and “gesticulating” Black and Brown beings, against whom the settler colonial state sets its police, military, and pedagogical forces. It is in this context that we must understand the many attacks against Palestinian academics and intellectuals, such as Nadia Abu El Haj, the author of a pathbreaking book on Israeli archaeology and its relation to colonization; the attacks against psychoanalysts, such as Lara Sheehi, who has brilliantly studied the links among settler colonialism and psychoanalysis; the attacks against the Palestinian novelist, essayist, intellectual, and teacher Adania Shibli, whose receipt the LiBeraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 20 has been unjustly delayed; the attacks against the Palestine Writes conference, a gathering of Palestinian writers, activists, intellectuals, and artists held from September 22-24 at the University of Pennsylvania and “dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.” The desire to prevent Palestinians from publicly and collectively celebrating their literary, artistic, poetic, and cultural productions is a social and psychical assertion of and an identification with a mode of being and life: a form of life that one might call “settler life” in all of its whiteness and in all of its attachment to the state and the law, and in its racialized, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous social sense and ongoing counterinsurgent and carceral practice. [x]

- jeffrey sacks for mondoweiss on october 18, 2023

[hussyknee]

Thanks for posting news resources but just to make sure, isn't Mondoweiss a company financed by white supremacists? iirc I heard something about that being the case

It's really weird how one of the most prominent Jewish political news sites whose brand is being bluntly anti-Zionist, critical of the West in its commentaries of the Middle East and part of Palestine's Jewish alliance against Israel, is financed by... white supremacists. Lol. Lmao even.

No, it is not backed by white supremacists. That's just the go-to conspiracy theory of the ADL and Zionist media against anybody that calls them on their bullshit.

[riotouseaterofflesh]

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/are-israelis-jews-returning-to-jewish-minority-life/

Are Israelis Jews? Returning to Jewish minority life

Israel has erased the Jewish people and destroyed the possibilities for Jews to live in Palestine as non-colonizers. “Israeli” is a colonial identity we should renounce, because it harms both Palestinians and Jews.

By Yarden Katz November 9, 2023

The project of decolonizing Palestine must also be a Jewish liberation project. Jews should be part of the struggle for decolonization because Jews have always been part of Palestine, as a minority community — even while the effort to liberate the land is clearly and rightly led by Palestinians. Decolonization means a return to Jewish minority life in Palestine. A return to minority life, for me, isn’t about numbers — although even if every Jew now living in Palestine stayed after the Israeli state was dismantled, Jews will still be a minority when Palestinian refugees in the diaspora are included. Rather, it is about reviving a non-colonial way to relate to the land and to others, one that builds on pre-zionist modes of living.  This will require not only material changes to life on the land, but also changes to culture and language. It will mean unlearning the colonial “Israeli” identity — that is, refusing “to be an ‘Israeli,’ to think like an Israeli, to identify as an Israeli, or to be recognized as an Israeli,” as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay urges, “because being an Israeli means being entitled to stolen lands and the property of others.” Rejecting Israeli identity should include reclaiming Hebrew as a diasporic language, moving past the lie that Hebrew was a “dead” liturgical language prior to the zionist movement. The end of the Israeli state could liberate Jews everywhere to revive non-zionist Jewish culture.  Yet, given the unspeakable crimes of the zionist state, I find it increasingly difficult to envision Jewish life in Palestine. Let’s be honest. If the Israeli regime were dismantled, then how and why would Palestinians want to live with a population that has cheered for their death and expulsion? And how could we imagine non-colonial Jewish life in Palestine when nearly every organized Jewish institution is currently some flavor of zionist? 

[hummussexual]

For decades, Michigan has been a Democratic stronghold – due to union power and the party’s blue-collar base. But that support has eroded over the years as the state’s Arab and Muslim population has grown, and Biden’s visit did not even have the air of a suitor showing up with wilted flowers long after the date had passed. Instead of wilted red roses, the Palestine supporters were met with “teams of riot police wearing helmets and wielding sticks were brought in for reinforcement.”  -- Mondoweiss: Michigan Muslims and Arabs are over Biden

[tieflingkisser]

Palestinians in Gaza’s displacement camps face rampant disease due to destroyed infrastructure

Those who survived Israel’s deadly bombardment now have to contend with the rising environmental disaster in Gaza’s displacement camps, including insect infestations, dangerous amounts of garbage and human waste, and the spread of infectious disease.

It is an unexpectedly hot day in Rafah City. A tent catches on fire in the middle of the camp. The fire spreads quickly, spreading to other tents with the wind. People look on in astonishment or run between the tents in an attempt to put it out. They scream loudly and call for help, but the fire keeps spreading. Civil Defense crews near the Tal al-Sultan area in Rafah arrive on the scene and put out the fire, but not before it had spread to a few other neighboring tents. A few meters away, Samih al-Nahhala, 48, explains how his tent had been the first to go up in flames.  The minute he and his family had sensed danger, they jumped out and were able to avoid the sudden conflagration, Nahhala says, but they lost all their belongings, or at least all that they owned that had not already been lost since their displacement.  “Using the tent for everything in one place leads to many risks,” al-Nahhala tells Mondoweiss. “Including this fire that broke out as a result of my family’s use of cooking tools near the tent. That’s what caused it.” Behind Samih are the charred remains of a row of several tents.  “These four meters house more than a single family,” he says. Because there was no space between Samih’s tent and that of his neighbors’ when the fire broke out, the spread of the flames through cloth and nylon was something akin to a wildfire.  Fortunately, the accident led to no casualties, Samih tells Mondoweiss, but they lost all of what little belongings they still owned, forcing them to look for new clothes, pillows, mattresses, and other essentials at a time when all of those things in Gaza were scarce. In the backdrop to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, a daily reality weighs heavily on the ability of people to survive. Even after they escaped the bombs, they now have to contend with Gaza’s decimated infrastructure, its collapsing healthcare sector, and the spread of infectious diseases. Coupled with an oppressive heat wave that has taken over Gaza in the past few weeks, these daily realities have made life in Gaza’s displacement camps actively dangerous, creating a new threat that looms before its residents.

Not enough to survive

Flooding sewage passes under the tents of the displaced and on the sidewalks and roads of Rafah. Piles of garbage litter the entrances to school shelters and around displacement camps, attracting flies and insects, which fill tents. Children play barefoot in the sand, mixing with mud, water, and sewage, and transporting germs and microbes to their tightly packed living quarters. In the heat wave, the nylon-covered tents trap in more heat and turn shelters into ovens. This level of pollution is a direct result of Israel’s deliberate targeting of infrastructure, which has led to the bursting and overflow of sewage wells that pass through crowded places such as Rafah. Once the sewage flows through these areas, insects follow. Mothers inside tents complain about insects biting their children’s bodies, while the heat and humidity are causing skin diseases and rashes. During the day, flies feast on the piles of garbage, and at night mosquitos descend upon the displacement camps. The next day, children and residents wake up from unexplained itching. The Gaza Municipality says in its statements that over 270,000 tons of waste are piled up in the streets and in various displacement areas, warning of the environmental disaster that might occur if the waste is not cleared away. Specialists say that the environmental problems that have arisen during the war are mainly caused by its after-effects, such as the massive destruction of buildings, which creates a severe problem represented by rubble, construction waste, land, air, and water pollution, damage to the electrical network and sewage networks, and surface and groundwater pollution as a result of the massive destruction.

‘This is the occupation’s war objective’

The information published by the government media office in the Gaza Strip indicates that 80% of the buildings in Gaza City have been utterly destroyed and reduced to rubble. In Khan Younis, 61% of buildings have so far been destroyed.  Destroyed houses and the remains of murdered bodies they contain inside them may be one of the reasons for the spread of diseases and disease-carrying insects, according to Dr. Rana Dawoud, an environmental field researcher in Rafah. “We suffered from high temperatures and climate change and its effects before the war, and we could barely cope with them,” she tells Mondoweiss. “Now, after everything has been destroyed in the Gaza Strip, where there are no resources to help people, where the health situation is deplorable and people suffer from malnutrition…it is too difficult for an ordinary person living in a tent in the Gaza Strip to bear.”

[keep reading]