#this is ethnic cleansing and methodical genocide of Palestinians by Jewish settlers

[a-typical]

But there’s something wrong with that debate. It’s omitting a third alternative, namely the one that is being systematically implemented by Israel, ever since 1969 or so, is the creation of a ‘Greater Israel’, which will take over. Everything that’s of value to Israel will leave out the Palestinian population concentrations.

So, Israel doesn’t want to incorporate Nablus within what will be the ‘Greater Israel’. Has to maintain a large Jewish majority in a racist, Jewish-dominated state. So that means take over the Jordan Valley, kick out the population.  One or another pretext is used … and then it turns into Jewish settlements.

They take over towns deep in the West Bank like Maale Adumim, built mostly in the 1990s, state-subsidised pleasant housing … You can go from your subsidised villa in Maaleh Adumim to your job in Tel Aviv and not even know there are any Palestinians. By now, the Palestinians who are left in the regions that Israel’s integrating and planning to take over are divided into … about 160 or so small enclaves surrounded by Israeli forces, which may or may not allow Palestinians to tend their crops, tend their livestock and pick their olives and so on, basically imprisoned.

The far-right nationalist religious government, extended the right of Israeli settlement to the northwestern West Bank, what Israel calls Western Samaria … [seeking to] integrate into Israel whatever is valued of Israel within the occupied territories. Jerusalem’s now maybe five times whatever it was historically, taking in surrounding villages to ensure a Jewish majority.

Q&A: Noam Chomsky on Palestine, Israel and the state of the world

[buddhistmusings]

The Palestinian people are being failed on all sides.

Obviously, the state of Israel and its current government are engaging in an ethnic cleansing of the region and engaging in irresponsible and malicious methods to maximize Palestinian suffering as part of a project to cripple Palestinians.

Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as shields for its operatives and impose far right Islamist ideology on Gaza, all while their leadership is safe abroad.

The United States and Europe fail to condemn the actions of Isreal. Through the funding of the IDF and the direction of resources to the Israeli government, they further enable Isreal to carry out it's atrocious actions. It's also important to note that Israel is quickly losing the goodwill of Americans and Europeans, and that American and European support of Israel is not guaranteed. Even President Biden, who is known for his support of Israel, has been hardening his stance and been voicing concerns, both publicly and privately, about the actions of Israel.

Palestine aligned governments like Egypt and Jordan fail to accept refugees, even when doing so would save many lives, especially in light of the attack on Rafah. They are complacent and complicit.

And some loud voices within the Free Palestine movement engage in extreme and explicit, as well as more mild and implicit, antisemitism. Many endorse Hamas and the Houthis as organizations, despite the fact that they're explicitly antisemitic and Islamist. Some endanger the lives of Jewish people and harm the Free Palestine movement as a whole by discrediting the movement's validity by behaving in these ways.

If you want peace, advocate for peace. Do not, as part of antigenocidal efforts in one location, endorse genocide in other locations. Such as the ongoing anti-Jewish ethic cleansings across the Middle East. Do not endorse Islamism or Islamist organizations, which are far right genocidal organizations. Do not amplify the voices of antisemites. Think critically about whether a speaker is advocating for Palestinians or against Jews. Do not claim that all Isrealis are settler colonists. Many live there because they were expelled from their homelands or to escape genocide in thier original countries. When you do these things, you are failing to advocate in a way that is helpful to Palestinians.

Palestine deserves educated, reasonable, peaceful, and strong advocates - not advocates who overshadow thier concern for victims of war and violence with prejudices.

May all beings be happy, may all beings be free. 🙏

[lurkiestvoid]

got called a "Zionist" today, so here's my one and only post about that. TL;DR at the bottom.

I rarely share anything here on this blog about any of this, both due to nonexistent platform and because I don't perform my activism online. That said, this is what I've seen, learned, and come to believe over the last 8 months, and the ten-ish years before that since I first started learning about it:

I am anti-Kahanist and anti-Likud, as in Netanyahu's far-right fascist political beliefs and party, who are the main driving force behind the horrific ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, and also the main blockades to Palestinian statehood.

I want Palestine to be free, to have the right of return, to have self-determination, and an official voice & presence on the world stage. I want them to have a functional government they can actually vote for, as the last election was over a whole generation ago and iirc enforced at gunpoint. I want living settler-colonists to return to Israel. I want a complete cessation of the occupation and constriction of their territories, of the trade and travel bans, of the restriction of resources, and I want the Palestinians unjustly imprisoned in Israel to be released. I do not believe the US should intervene to force these changes, as that is simply further imperialism (even if it's "for a good cause").

I don't believe many if any of the hostages survived, if only due to the fact Israel is deliberately destroying the places they would have been held, and I do not agree with Netanyahu's Hamas (nor Iran, nor Houthis) but neither do I agree with the IDF's methods of wanton destruction or the insane death tolls especially of children, civilians, journalists, and relief workers.

I believe both Jews AND Palestinians are indigenous to the Levant, and that neither Israelis nor Jews are an ethnic or political monolith. I also want Jews and their diaspora to feel safe, and I consider them to be the authority on their own culture.

"Zionism" is a Jewish word inherently tied to and heavily debated within their religious communities, and both inside AND outside Jewish culture it has MANY definitions that sometimes conflict. It is NOT my word to define, gatekeep, nor to attack people over. It's simply not my lane.

The way a lot of fellow "leftists" are abusing the term is amplifying decades-old literal fucking Nazi language and propaganda, and perpetuating the "good Jews versus Bad Jews" trope regardless of intent, as in, 'the only good Jews (for now) are the ones who agree with us and everyone else is horrible evil inhuman scum deserving of death.' Too many "awareness" posts online contain fascist dogwhistles and antisemitic propaganda mixed in with the very real and much needed information.

This never needed to be about Judaism, but it can't not be when their language has been misappropriated and weaponized against them the EXACT same way Nazis do and have done. We could have just identified the root of the problem, Israel's MAGA-equivalent Likud party and their christofascist-equivalent (judeofascist??) Kahanists, rather than arbitrarily throwing Jews under the bus about it and subsequently spraying friendly fire against Israelis and Jews of color, their own progressive activists and organizations, and their diaspora and/or immigrants.

It is not antisemitic to be pro-Palestine. It is not islamophobic to call out antisemitism. The current movement has allowed antisemitism to flourish in its allies, sometimes unintentionally but sometimes very intentionally, and any pushback or criticism on this is flat out being treated as anti-Palestine, or apparently "Zionist."

But I don't give a fuck about the existence of any particular country, including Israel -- only what their leaders and authorities are currently saying and doing -- because no one's calling for the abolishment of China for the Uighur genocide, nor the abolishment of Sudan or the Congo for their genocides, nor Russia, AND because it's a pointless and fantastical demand that overshadows Palestinian liberation with a different flavor of ethnic cleansing ('go back to Poland/the Bronx/just die').

I fully admit I don't know what a solution to this very old conflict would look like, but I do know it shouldn't and can't involve evicting nor eradicating either side. I simply have zero authority nor expertise in any of this, and I refuse to pretend I do.

If any of this is a deal-breaker for you, I enthusiastically welcome you to please just block me. If you'd instead like to discuss any of the above, my asks are open.

TL;DR:

impact > intent

listen to marginalized groups (including Jews)

Free Israel from Netanyahu and Kahanists

Free Palestine from Israel and Hamas

Free Sudan, Congo, Ukraine, and Chinese Uighurs

AntiKahanism > antizionism

Liberation > performativism

[barbarastreisandof]

Hamas is not a terrorist organization.

The Israeli government is a terrorist organization.

The Palestinian people as a demographic do not hate Jewish people.

Jewish Israelis as a demographic hate Palestinians.

These are facts that are only provocative insofar as they go against the mainstream narrative. If you spend time learning about the history of the region and the people, and spend time talking to Israelis and Palestinians, spend time reading their respective literature and engaging with the news published by Haaretz, spend time watching Al Jazeera, you will come to understand these things as pretty uncontroversial normal statements of fact.

I'm saying these things plainly here so you, as the reader, can check in with your emotions reading them. If you find yourself getting defensive or angry or nervous or upset reading these things, that is a strong indication that you are not very knowledgeable about what's happening and would benefit from learning more.

Hamas won elections overwhelmingly in 2006, getting over 70 seats in the legislature. Israel and the US promptly blockaded Gaza and arrested 68 of those elected. Hamas has tried peace and negotiations many many MANY times. The peace march in 2018 where thousands of Gazans marched to the wall to draw attention to the genocide taking place were met by Israeli snipers who spend days killing and shooting out the knee caps of literally thousands of Palestinians. The Al-Aqsa Flood was an attempt by Hamas to confront the IDF around Gaza. They did not know there was a music festival taking place and upon realizing it, immediately began asking people where the military was and taking hostages. The IDF responded by shooting from among the crowd at Hamas militants while an IDF Apache helicopter shot indiscriminately at the crowd and later, IDF artillery was launched at Hamas as well as at Israeli civilians. The operation by Hamas had been planned for two years to target IDF military installations. Of the roughly 1200 Israelis killed on October 7th, 1/3 were military and of the remaining civilians, almost all were killed in the crossfire between Hamas and the IDF, and many possibly even MOST of those were killed by the IDF themselves in an attempt to kill Hamas.

That is not a terror attack just because people were terrified. Terror attacks are defined as targeting civilians for the purpose of terrorizing a populace in service of a political or ideological objective. Civilians getting killed during an attack on military infrastructure is not a terrorist attack.

Conversely, Israel has continuously and openly committed terrorist attacks against the Palestinian people for 75 years. Even before then, the Zionist settlers who were occupying Palestine engaged in terrorism in Palestinian villages. A man named Orde Wingate trained Zionist troops in what was called hasiyur ha-alim, or 'violent reconnaissance'. It was a terrorist method utilized by the Hagana, the Zionist paramilitary group that aided in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and formed during the British mandate. This is the practice: Pick a village that has no defense or weapons so there is no risk of combat, enter the village around midnight, stay for several hours and wait. Shoot anyone that leaves their home during this time. Then depart after several hours have passed.

This example is particularly stomach churning and I would genuinely caution you to skip it if you're at all unsure. It concerns the killing of gay men by the Israeli military and it is one of the more horrific things I've read.

This is a passage from the book Brothers and Others In Arms, a collection of interviews with gay and bisexual Israeli soldiers.

The state of Israel has been a terrorist organization from the beginning - the Jewish Zionist population in 1947 was 600,000 compared to the 1.3 million Palestinians living on that land. Terrorism was an essential tool in gaining power and ethnically cleansing the land of Palestinians and has remained a key pilar of Israeli policy toward Palestinians ever since.

It is crucial to talk about Zionist Jews and Israeli Jews and not simply "Jews" because "Jew" is not a universal identity the way Zionists make it out to be. The vast majority of Palestinians do not hate Jewish people or oppose the Jewish faith. Jewish people existed peacefully among Christians and Muslims in the region for a long time, which is why when the Zionist movement chose Palestine as the location for a Jewish only theocracy and there was a large influx of Jewish Zionist immigrants, Palestinians hardly took notice or felt concerned. They had no reason to think in the years between when the Zionist project began and when the Nakba took place in 1948 that their Jewish Zionist neighbors and friends and community members would turn against them or want to expel them from the land. The Palestinian people have no historical or present day grievances with Jews, what they DO have are grievances with Zionists and Israeli Jews who insist on a Jewish-only state on Palestinian land.

Conversely, the vast majority of Israeli Jews DO have a problem with Palestinians and DO see Palestinian liberation and freedom as a threat. If you look at polling and public opinion and Israeli politics since the state's creation, what you will find is support for either complete Palestinian genocide, or support for a two state solution where Palestinians are ghettoized and forced to live as they do now - on tiny tracks of separate, disparate plots of land that are managed and defined by the Israeli government. What almost no Israeli Jews support is a single secular state where Palestinians have equal citizenship and where Jewish citizens do not receive special rights or privileges.

That is because Israel has a concept and practical entity is a Jewish supremacist theocracy whose entire reason for existing IS to be a Jewish state, which by definition means legal and institutional authority for Jews above all others. That project is inherently at odds with the Palestinian population who is A) Majority NOT Jewish and B) are the rightful and original inhabitants of that land and thus wish to return to the now occupied homes that were once theirs.

This is a broad strokes overview of the initial four points but I want to emphasize: if you take the time to learn more about all of these things what you will find is that I have downplayed each of these facts. I have understated Hamas' role as a governing body that provides healthcare and services to Palestinians, I have downplayed the conscious and deliberate terrorism inflicted by the Israeli government and by Israeli settlers, I have undersold just how much Palestinians want a free state that is open to Jews as it is Christians and Muslims, and I have vastly understated just how much the average Israeli resents and derides the average Palestinian.

These are things you can learn about on social media, but they are best learned through reading books and through first hand engagement where possible.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe Orientalism - Edward Said The Holocaust Industry Norman Finkelstein Expulsion of the Palestinians - Nur Masalha These are good starting places. From here, it will become obvious what to read next. Be patient and remain committed to genuine growth and learning and you will come to have a much stronger and clearer intuition when it comes to processing the news and understanding what is happening not just in Palestine, but across the globe.

[johnvazhathara]

One-state solution, the way forward in PalestineThe whole premise of the two-state solution is wrong, providing Israel the immunity to continue its ethnic cleansing

26/05/2021 



AFPMOHAMMED ABED/AFP

For more than 50 years, well-intentioned and more cynical, local and external actors involved in the attempts to bring peace and reconciliation to historical Palestine have religiously adhered to the two-state solution as the only way forward.

The idea of partitioning Palestine between the settler movement of Zionism, and later the state of Israel and the indigenous population of Palestine is not new. It was first offered by the British in 1937 and rejected by the Palestinians already then. The Zionist movement was hardly 50 years old and was already offered by the new British occupiers of Palestine, a chunk of the Palestinian homeland as a future state. This in the 1930s and 1940s would have been akin to an offer to decolonise India by partitioning it between a British India and local India or to propose the decolonisation of Algeria by dividing it between a French Algeria and a local Algeria. Neither the Indian anti-colonial movement nor the Algerian one would have ever consented to such a post-colonial arrangement; nor did the British and French dare to offer it when they reconciled with the fact that they will have to leave their colonial empires and go back to Europe.

Catastrophic event

But even when decolonisation was achieved in India in 1947, not only the British but also the so-called civilised world through the United Nations insisted that the Palestinians should give half of their homeland to the settler movement of Zionism. The Palestinians attempted to convince the international community that the problem was not only aboutdispensing with half of their homeland but that the settler movement of Zionism would not be content with just half of the country and intended to take as much of it as possible and leave in it as few Palestinians as possible. This ominous prediction turned out to be chillingly accurate and true in less than a year after the UN insisted that partition was the only solution for Palestine. Under the guise of UN support, the new Jewish state took over nearly 80% of historical Palestine and ethnically cleansed almost a million Palestinians (more than half of Palestine’s population), and in the way demolished half of Palestine’s villages and most of its towns in nine months in 1948; an event known by the Palestinians as the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Incremental cleansing

In 1967, Israel occupied the rest of historical Palestine, and in the process expelled another 300,000 Palestinians. Like all settler colonial projects, it had to navigate between a wish to take over indigenous territory while downsizing the number of native people living on it. It was impossible after 1948 to repeat a massive ethnic cleansing, so it was substituted by incremental ethnic cleansing (the last stage in this process was one of the root causes that ignited the cycle of violence last week — the proposed eviction of Palestinians from Shaykh [Sheikh] Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighbourhood, as part of an overall attempt to Judaise East Jerusalem).

Incremental ethnic cleansing is not the only way of achieving the old Zionist goal to turning historical Palestine into a Jewish state. Imposing military rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after they were occupied was another means which enclaved the people there without basic human and civil rights. Imposing a version of an Apartheid regime on the Palestinian minority in Israel is another method and the constant refusal to allow the 1948 refugees to return completes the matrix of power that allows Israel to retain the land and disregard a demographic reality by which the Jews are not the majority in historical Palestine.

It is Israel that decides

The two-state solution, offered for the first time by liberal Zionists and the United States in the 1980s, is seen by some Palestinians as the best way of ending of the occupation of the West Bank and at least the partial fulfilment of the Palestinian right for self-determination and independence. This is why the Palestine Liberation Organization was willing to give it a go in 1993, by signing the Oslo Accords. But the Palestinian position has no impact in the current balance of power. What mattered is how Israel interprets the idea and the fact that there is no one in the world that could challenge its interpretation.

The Israeli interpretation, until the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu to power in 2009, was that the two-state solution is another means of having the territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, without incorporating most of the people living there. In order to ensure it, Israel partitioned the West Bank (which is 20% of historical Palestine) into a Jewish and an Arab part. This was in the second phase of the Oslo Accords, known as the Oslo II agreement of 1995. The Palestinians were forced to accept it under American and Egyptian pressure. One area, called area C, which consists of 60% of the West Bank) was directly ruled from 1995 until today by Israel. Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel is in the process of officially annexing this area while at the same time ethnically cleansing the Palestinians living in it. The remaining 40% of the West Bank, areas A and B under Oslo II, were put under the Palestinian Authority, which optimistically calls itself the state of Palestine, but in essence has no power whatsoever, unless the one given to it, and withdrawn from it, by Israel.

A Bantustanisation

The Gaza Strip was divided too. But the Jewish part was small and could not be defended from the local national movement’s wrath. So, the settlers were taken out in 2005 and Israel hoped that another Bantustan, like the one in areas A and B, would be established there under the Palestinian Authority’s rule and under the same conditions. But the people of Gaza opted to support a new player, Hamas, and its ally, the Islamic Jihad, which resisted this offer. They supported them not only because there was a return to religion in the face of the ongoing predicaments but also because there was big disappointment from the compliance of the PLO with the Oslo arrangements. Israel responded by imposing a callous siege and blockade on the Gaza Strip that, according to the UN, made it unliveable.

To complete its strategy that included the partition of the West Bank, its Bantustanisation, and the siege of Gaza, Israel passed in 2018 a citizenship law, known as the nationality law, which made sure that the Palestinian citizens who live in Israel proper (which is Israel prior to the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and who are supposedly equal citizens of the Jewish state, will in essence become the “Africans” of a new Israeli Jewish apartheid state: living in a permanent regime that discriminates against them in all aspects of life on the basis of their nationality.

The endless negotiation on the two-state solution was based on the formula that once the two states become a reality, Israel will stop these severe violations of the Palestinian civil and human rights, wherever they are. But while the wait continued, more Palestinians were expelled and the Jewish settler community in the West Bank doubled and tripled and took over the fertile land, leaving no space for Palestinian expansion. The presence of more than 600,000 Jewish settlers, with a very high rate of natural growth, means that Israel will never consider moving them out; and without that, even a soft version of a two-state solution is impossible.

Decolonise, build a new state

The whole premise of the two-state solution is wrong and that is why it did not materialise. It is based on the assumption of parity and of framing the conflict as one fought between two national movements. But this is not a “conflict” as such. This is a settler colonial reality which began in the late 19th century and continues until today. The late scholar, Patrick Wolfe, described settler colonial movements as motivated by a logic he called “the elimination of the native”. Sometimes it led to genocide, as it happened in North America, sometimes it translated to an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation, which is what has unfolded in Palestine. The two-state solution is not going to stop the ethnic cleansing; instead, talking about it provides Israel international immunity to continue it.

The only alternative is to decolonise historical Palestine. Which means that we should aspire to a state for all its citizens all over the country, based on the dismantlement of colonialist institutions, fair redistribution of the country’s natural resources, compensation of the victims of the ethnic cleansing and allowing their repatriation. All this will be so that settlers and natives should together build a new state that is democratic, part of the Arab world and not against it, and an inspiration for the rest of the region which desperately needs such models to push it forward towards a better future.

Professor Ilan Pappé is the Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, U.K. He is the author of 20 books