Israel has become a nazi shithole and is doing a holocaust in a concentration camp called Gaza. If there is any successful resistance in West Bank, they will spark up the next one there (they might anyway). USA is fully culpable for supporting it. None of this feels like hyperbole or radical language.
As always, thank you for your tour of all things awful. I feel depressed, but informed. As a reader, I appreciate the invitation to engage, and so, to your two questions :
1) Without losing our collective shit? Hmm, with lots of caffeine and cute pet videos, I guess.
That aside, it is OK to keep focused on occupied Palestine and Gaza. Separation of tasks, kind of thing. There are great journos out there covering Iran, maybe find a few to promote (and have them return the favour?) who do similar weekly roundups for other regions? (Lest we forget Lebanon and Syria. And Yemen. And Sudan. Oh, and the DRC, why not?)
We are being flooded with reports of daily atrocities - keeping it compartmentalised for factual reporting is perfectly acceptable, in my view.
2) As an armchair dilettante on the topic, I think we *are* in the worst case scenario. Have been swimming in it for a while. Narcissistic fools are running the show, and, worst of all, are enabled by bootlickers, power-crazed sociopaths and bigots. (And I hate that I am thinking about them that way. Bigots are people too.) Unfortunately, average citizens can't yell them out of power. And they command the guys with the big guns.
We are just at a time where incomprehensibly large numbers of innocents might get mulched in the short term, but, you know, every life snuffed out adds up. Hundreds of people have been killed in the past week - to those ordering the killing, adding one, two or five zeros to that number doesn't make a difference. So the worst is already unfolding. But we should still boycott McDonald's, I suppose.
I will stop the rambling here and go be sad for a bit. The sun is shining on the green hills outside my windows, maybe I'll take the time to contemplate this serene beauty.
This is a mask off moment for western empire. We're watching the same tired tropes of xenophobia, existential threat narratives & western saviorism being regurgitated like they always have. The difference now is that they're falling flat.
The wealth gap is so obscene now that the propaganda is harder to sell versus when material conditions were more stable. The contradictions just can't be dulled anymore.
And now we're witnessing Palestinians live stream their own genocide & the facade of international human rights has collapsed. The West's use of human rights language has been exposed for its hollowness.
And what's also happening is that more & more people are connecting the dots. From Sudan to the Congo to Palestine - the struggles are linked. I was a teenager during the Bush years & even though there were global protests against the Iraq war, I don't remember people using words like imperialism or connecting different global struggles.
So I think as long as people continue to weave the threads and expose the patterns - that's the right path.
I don't understand how so many Americans (Jewish or not) can continue to deny or ignore the fact that they've been manipulated and exploited by Israel. There are so many conversations necessary to break down the years of propaganda about a lot of it, I understand that. However the actions taken against Palestinians these past years have been so beyond the pale of what is acceptable human behavior that I can't believe any decent person can be aware of them and be on the fence. Yet that's what we see in so many of our neighbors and elected officials. It has to end.
I assume it’s the same reason people can be so resistant to leaving abusive romantic partners: the unknown is scarier than the known.
Which is why I think it’s so important to make the unknown less unknown and therefore less scary.
As for the Palestinians… the perverse realization I’ve had over the past two years is that it’s more effective to talk to Liberal Zionists about how Israel sabotages and murders diaspora Jews than it is to talk to Liberal Zionists about how Israel sabotages and murders Palestinians.
I can see how that would work better, but it bothers me more than a little when they're not aware of how poorly they'd be treated there just generally, as Reform, or as women, etc. It's not secret information, not really. You're right that it's easier to get people to feel empathy when they can see the things they share in common with others. I don't admire it, but it is a thing.
On some level I think the repression of Palestinians has always been a warning by Christian Zionists to diaspora Jews.
That is, Zionism is “necessary” because if diaspora Jews don’t support Zionism then Christian Zionists are threatening to do to diaspora Jews what Christian Zionists already do to Palestinians.
Most Zionists are Christian Zionists. And Zionist spite towards diaspora Jews has just as long a history as Zionist spite towards Palestinians, if not an even longer one.
If I were to pick one thing as the defining feature of Zionism, it would be shlilat ha’golah, or negation of the diaspora, not just as a concept (shlilat ha’galut) but negation of diaspora Jews themselves.
Zionists signed the Haavara Agreement with Nazi Germany in defiance of the global Jewish boycott (BDS, much?) of Nazi Germany.
Zionists made the Blood for Goods deal with Adolf Eichmann, knowingly concealing knowledge of the Holocaust after it was well underway in order to save Zionists while throwing non-Zionist Jews under the bus.
I could keep going…
Even today, Israelis hold Netanyahu responsible for Oct 7th and for hostage deaths, but it remains forbidden to acknowledge this in English.
So when Zionists say that individual diaspora Jews are Hamas, they mean it as a threat: Israel and its Christian Zionist backers are coming for you next.
The most important difference between Trump and Bush is that Trump is fully solipsistic, whereas Bush was at least *aware* of the reality-based community.
Personally I think the complete abandonment of reality by some of the most powerful people on earth creates a great opportunity for the reality-based community to build Leninist “dual power” in the vacuum they willingly leave behind.
Israel has become a nazi shithole and is doing a holocaust in a concentration camp called Gaza. If there is any successful resistance in West Bank, they will spark up the next one there (they might anyway). USA is fully culpable for supporting it. None of this feels like hyperbole or radical language.
I'd argue that it always was a nazi shithole. Just obvious now.
Like the US. Always very racist, corrupt and cold hearted, but now we really see it!
As always, thank you for your tour of all things awful. I feel depressed, but informed. As a reader, I appreciate the invitation to engage, and so, to your two questions :
1) Without losing our collective shit? Hmm, with lots of caffeine and cute pet videos, I guess.
That aside, it is OK to keep focused on occupied Palestine and Gaza. Separation of tasks, kind of thing. There are great journos out there covering Iran, maybe find a few to promote (and have them return the favour?) who do similar weekly roundups for other regions? (Lest we forget Lebanon and Syria. And Yemen. And Sudan. Oh, and the DRC, why not?)
We are being flooded with reports of daily atrocities - keeping it compartmentalised for factual reporting is perfectly acceptable, in my view.
2) As an armchair dilettante on the topic, I think we *are* in the worst case scenario. Have been swimming in it for a while. Narcissistic fools are running the show, and, worst of all, are enabled by bootlickers, power-crazed sociopaths and bigots. (And I hate that I am thinking about them that way. Bigots are people too.) Unfortunately, average citizens can't yell them out of power. And they command the guys with the big guns.
We are just at a time where incomprehensibly large numbers of innocents might get mulched in the short term, but, you know, every life snuffed out adds up. Hundreds of people have been killed in the past week - to those ordering the killing, adding one, two or five zeros to that number doesn't make a difference. So the worst is already unfolding. But we should still boycott McDonald's, I suppose.
I will stop the rambling here and go be sad for a bit. The sun is shining on the green hills outside my windows, maybe I'll take the time to contemplate this serene beauty.
This is a mask off moment for western empire. We're watching the same tired tropes of xenophobia, existential threat narratives & western saviorism being regurgitated like they always have. The difference now is that they're falling flat.
The wealth gap is so obscene now that the propaganda is harder to sell versus when material conditions were more stable. The contradictions just can't be dulled anymore.
And now we're witnessing Palestinians live stream their own genocide & the facade of international human rights has collapsed. The West's use of human rights language has been exposed for its hollowness.
And what's also happening is that more & more people are connecting the dots. From Sudan to the Congo to Palestine - the struggles are linked. I was a teenager during the Bush years & even though there were global protests against the Iraq war, I don't remember people using words like imperialism or connecting different global struggles.
So I think as long as people continue to weave the threads and expose the patterns - that's the right path.
I don't understand how so many Americans (Jewish or not) can continue to deny or ignore the fact that they've been manipulated and exploited by Israel. There are so many conversations necessary to break down the years of propaganda about a lot of it, I understand that. However the actions taken against Palestinians these past years have been so beyond the pale of what is acceptable human behavior that I can't believe any decent person can be aware of them and be on the fence. Yet that's what we see in so many of our neighbors and elected officials. It has to end.
I assume it’s the same reason people can be so resistant to leaving abusive romantic partners: the unknown is scarier than the known.
Which is why I think it’s so important to make the unknown less unknown and therefore less scary.
As for the Palestinians… the perverse realization I’ve had over the past two years is that it’s more effective to talk to Liberal Zionists about how Israel sabotages and murders diaspora Jews than it is to talk to Liberal Zionists about how Israel sabotages and murders Palestinians.
I can see how that would work better, but it bothers me more than a little when they're not aware of how poorly they'd be treated there just generally, as Reform, or as women, etc. It's not secret information, not really. You're right that it's easier to get people to feel empathy when they can see the things they share in common with others. I don't admire it, but it is a thing.
On some level I think the repression of Palestinians has always been a warning by Christian Zionists to diaspora Jews.
That is, Zionism is “necessary” because if diaspora Jews don’t support Zionism then Christian Zionists are threatening to do to diaspora Jews what Christian Zionists already do to Palestinians.
Most Zionists are Christian Zionists. And Zionist spite towards diaspora Jews has just as long a history as Zionist spite towards Palestinians, if not an even longer one.
If I were to pick one thing as the defining feature of Zionism, it would be shlilat ha’golah, or negation of the diaspora, not just as a concept (shlilat ha’galut) but negation of diaspora Jews themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negation_of_the_Diaspora
Zionists signed the Haavara Agreement with Nazi Germany in defiance of the global Jewish boycott (BDS, much?) of Nazi Germany.
Zionists made the Blood for Goods deal with Adolf Eichmann, knowingly concealing knowledge of the Holocaust after it was well underway in order to save Zionists while throwing non-Zionist Jews under the bus.
I could keep going…
Even today, Israelis hold Netanyahu responsible for Oct 7th and for hostage deaths, but it remains forbidden to acknowledge this in English.
So when Zionists say that individual diaspora Jews are Hamas, they mean it as a threat: Israel and its Christian Zionist backers are coming for you next.
That is a very interesting point
Thanks for this insight! Didn't know any of this.
Oh my God, so much horror and cruelty and yet so much courage.
Sociopaths run the world and have many minions.
These amputations. FUCKING HELL
The most important difference between Trump and Bush is that Trump is fully solipsistic, whereas Bush was at least *aware* of the reality-based community.
Personally I think the complete abandonment of reality by some of the most powerful people on earth creates a great opportunity for the reality-based community to build Leninist “dual power” in the vacuum they willingly leave behind.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
[EDIT] For those who don’t get the reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community