Surely the whole extended area will be populated by the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?
A note again that mainstream genetic studies have the Palestinians as descended from the Bronze Age population of the Levant; so in reality most of them are the descendents of the Jews and other people who lived there historically, some of whom converted to Christianity before later converting over multiple centuries to Islam.
What Gold Meir was pointing out was that Palestinians aren't exclusively muslim, but also Jews, Christians, and Druze.
To be clear what she says is this:
"When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. East and West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 and 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians. There were Jews and Arabs."
What does that mean? I don't know why someone would have separated out Palestinians from Arabs if they weren't listing all the other peoples who are Arabs. So it makes sense to me that the last sentence puts them together.
What does that mean? I don't know why someone would have separated out Palestinians from Arabs if they weren't listing all the other peoples who are Arabs. So it makes sense to me that the last sentence puts them together.
She was denying 'Palestinians' existed - there were Jews and Arabs, and they lived in an area that the British ran that used to be part of the Ottoman empire. But there were no Palestinians.
You get echoes of this in the occasional (though less prominent these days than when it was a mainstream argument) demands for a three state solution - Gaza to Egypt, West Bank to Jordan, Israel.
You can argue that convincingly if you start from a position that the whole area is a blank sheet of paper that happens to have people in it...
What does that mean? I don't know why someone would have separated out Palestinians from Arabs if they weren't listing all the other peoples who are Arabs. So it makes sense to me that the last sentence puts them together.
She was denying 'Palestinians' existed - there were Jews and Arabs, and they lived in an area that the British ran that used to be part of the Ottoman empire. But there were no Palestinians.
You get echoes of this in the occasional (though less prominent these days than when it was a mainstream argument) demands for a three state solution - Gaza to Egypt, West Bank to Jordan, Israel.
You can argue that convincingly if you start from a position that the whole area is a blank sheet of paper that happens to have people in it...
I'm not sure that's quite true (what she meant) but ultimately I'm not sure it matters. The settlers are generally extremely rightwing and have members in the Israeli government. It suits their narrative to say that there are no Palestinians just Arabs even if that's not really what Goldmeir meant. There's a powerful stream of Israeli political opinion that things that Israel should exist on the East Bank of the Jordan. Which means inside present day Jordan, Heshemite Kingdom of.
The "there are no Palestinians just Arabs" phraseology is an effort to diminish the idea that there is a Palestinian national will for statehood and to insist that it is no big deal if the population moves to Jordan or Syria or Lebanon. Denying the reality of life of millions of refugees for 80+ years.
As it stands, there's no real interest in Jews living within the occupied Palestinian Territories under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. It's a broken, no-mans-land with few facilities and any Jew can live under Israeli jurisdiction in Israel proper or the settlements, so why would you. I don't know exactly which homes were taken from the Jews in the Hebron pogrom, but a) the city is grown massively in the last century and b) there's a big settlement which controls much of the old town of Hebron anyway.
The division of the Palestinian population to make statehood impossible was a deliberate political tool by the Israeli gvernment.
Except that it’s not a vacuum - Egypt and Jordan (at times, Egypt more so) made it difficult for refugees to move further than the borders because (initially) they had an interest in the destruction of Israel. Later that transformed into ‘we don’t want them, it would be importing a problem’ but the initial line was ‘stay put and we’ll get you back home.’
For the avoidance of doubt I’m not supporting either side here, I’m just laying out what happened. The Palestinian refugees ended up as pawns for various surrounding states, while being assaulted by Israel
Later that transformed into ‘we don’t want them, it would be importing a problem’ but the initial line was ‘stay put and we’ll get you back home.’
Yeah, but on the other hand - and given this is Epiphanies and we privilege 'own voices' - despite a big diaspora in some of the neighbouring countries, a large number of Palestinians continue to want to live where they are or want to go back to their former homes.
Later that transformed into ‘we don’t want them, it would be importing a problem’ but the initial line was ‘stay put and we’ll get you back home.’
Yeah, but on the other hand - and given this is Epiphanies and we privilege 'own voices' - despite a big diaspora in some of the neighbouring countries, a large number of Palestinians continue to want to live where they are or want to go back to their former homes.
That’s sort of how chronology works though - those people do now because of what happened in the last 80 years, but there were jumping off points between the beginning and now.
On ‘own voices’ I can’t/won’t/refuse to go further than I said almost at the start of this thread. While I don’t doubt the integrity of any poster here this is a public forum and I don’t think it’s a safe space to write personal things on this subject*
So own voices will continue to be a challenge.
*amongst others - we kid ourselves this is Epiphanies but there are things those involved would be mad to write about a certain southern African country on here too - just because stuff gets read and dots are joined.
Later that transformed into ‘we don’t want them, it would be importing a problem’ but the initial line was ‘stay put and we’ll get you back home.’
Yeah, but on the other hand - and given this is Epiphanies and we privilege 'own voices' - despite a big diaspora in some of the neighbouring countries, a large number of Palestinians continue to want to live where they are or want to go back to their former homes.
That’s sort of how chronology works though - those people do now because of what happened in the last 80 years, but there were jumping off points between the beginning and now.
Yeah, but equally if things had worked out differently they would have continued to - largely - live in the places they had done for many generations. Mass population movements being the exception rather than rule, and if you are going to consider counterfactuals you have to consider all of them.
Later that transformed into ‘we don’t want them, it would be importing a problem’ but the initial line was ‘stay put and we’ll get you back home.’
Yeah, but on the other hand - and given this is Epiphanies and we privilege 'own voices' - despite a big diaspora in some of the neighbouring countries, a large number of Palestinians continue to want to live where they are or want to go back to their former homes.
That’s sort of how chronology works though - those people do now because of what happened in the last 80 years, but there were jumping off points between the beginning and now.
Yeah, but equally if things had worked out differently they would have continued to - largely - live in the places they had done for many generations. Mass population movements being the exception rather than rule, and if you are going to consider counterfactuals you have to consider all of them.
‘Yeah, but’
Like I said. I’m not going to own voice this so will mostly continue to read what others say - own voice and/or not.
In September, the local PSC group where I live arranged a showing of 'Where Olive Trees Weep' at the independent picture house. Well attended by those already convinced. Lots of first person voices. I found it a hard watch, as it was made over a year ago, and the film found it hard not to fall into having a 'third act'.
We have family links to some of the people involved in 'We Are Not Numbers' (https://wearenotnumbers.org/). I'd commend the project to all here - it focuses on sharing the stories of young people in Gaza and Lebanon. Some here may have met Ahmed at Greenbelt.
Our MP is left-leaning - but the Overton Window has moved so far as to render any criticism of Israel problematic - and the MP has already been mired in complaints following relatively innocuous comments.
If nothing else, we continue to bear witness and do not look away.
I've read that it's a very touchy situation because while the questionably-democratic governments of the neighboring countries would rather not pick a fight with Israel, a lot of the citizens of their countries would. And I think that a lot of regional rulers are scared of adding more understandably-cheesed-off militants to their populations. They see Palestine as another hotbed of militant terrorism and they have enough of those in their own states to begin with. Ethnic solidarity is a flimsy thing, nonexistent in my experience. It's about power and control. Nobody wants more angry radicals within their borders.
I think "nations" and identities are always products of their environments, products of culture. My own religious identity is mostly a product not of any grand religious history, but of my self conscious understanding and appropriation thereof. I really worry about what all of these people over there are making themselves into. There is so much manipulation going on.
Several American news outlets are reporting that Hezbollah is ready to talk about a ceasefire with Israel. Hezbollah has dropped a key demand that there must be a truce in Gaza before they will accept a ceasefire.
At the same time, they are still exchanging rocket fire with the Israelis. And Israel is continuing its ground incursion into Lebanon.
Maybe, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the north.
Several American news outlets are reporting that Hezbollah is ready to talk about a ceasefire with Israel. Hezbollah has dropped a key demand that there must be a truce in Gaza before they will accept a ceasefire.
At the same time, they are still exchanging rocket fire with the Israelis. And Israel is continuing its ground incursion into Lebanon.
Maybe, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the north.
Going to be interesting, I suspect in a not-good way, to see how that plays out for Palestinians. At the same time, for the sake of the larger world, I guess de-escalation is a good thing.
I really hate the way that it feels like a hostage situation on more levels than one.
Several American news outlets are reporting that Hezbollah is ready to talk about a ceasefire with Israel. Hezbollah has dropped a key demand that there must be a truce in Gaza before they will accept a ceasefire.
It is very unclear whether this actually happened, it was a interpretation of Hezbollah's support for a particular individual negotiating a ceasefire and an omission of the Gaza condition in one speech:
Eyal Weizman's Forensic Architecture team at the University of London have published a report summarising the effects of a year of military action by the Israeli Armed Forces inside Gaza:
And no genocide? Come on. If Netanyahu and Gallant are being charged with the war crime of intentionally starving civilians it sounds like a duck.
In practice the specific crime of genocide requires certain other conditions to be present (approximately the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part as such). There's a good explanation contained in the interview with Raz Segal I linked up thread.
An Amnesty International Investigation concludes Isreal is committing genocide in Gaza. Here is their news release.. They concluded daily attacking of civilian targets, destruction of critical infrastructure, blocking critical food and medicines and other actions amount to genocide.
People, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
I hope and pray that those responsible for atrocities will be brought to justice.🙏
Meanwhile, people continue to suffer with no hope of an end of this horror on the horizon. It has been going on for over a year, those not killed or maimed physically will undoubtedly have been damaged mentally. It is all so cruel.
The article suggests strongly that pressure from Trump is responsible for this. I was struck by this paragraph near the end:
“The pressure Trump is exerting right now is not the kind that Israel expected from him,” lamented the rightwing commentator Jacob Bardugo on Channel 14 on Monday. “The pressure is the essence of the matter.”
Trump has not been slow to claim credit for this. Question: is he right? Should we be thanking him?
I have no doubt the idea of Trump entering the foray unnerved a lot of people, including the Israelis in that he is like a bull in a china shop. He claims to know the art of a deal but seems like not many of his deals work out for other people.
Thank him if you want; but ultimately, it was the Biden team that closed the deal/
I suspect that Trump is not prepared to continue to send the amount of military aid necessary for Israel to continue the war. He is primarily transactional - I suspect he would simply asking, what am I/USA getting for this ?
I suspect that Trump is not prepared to continue to send the amount of military aid necessary for Israel to continue the war. He is primarily transactional - I suspect he would simply asking, what am I/USA getting for this ?
He would continue to find favor with the Fundamentalist Christian Nationalists which he needs to push his agenda through Congress. Frankly, he is not interested in the USA, though.
“The pressure Trump is exerting right now is not the kind that Israel expected from him,” lamented the rightwing commentator Jacob Bardugo on Channel 14 on Monday. “The pressure is the essence of the matter.”
Trump has not been slow to claim credit for this. Question: is he right? Should we be thanking him?
It's substantively the same deal that was offered in May to which Hamas agreed, so if the difference was the amount of pressure applied (and Haaretz implied it was significant this time around), then it would seem the prospect of Trump is what contributed to the difference.
ProPublica has a very damning article on the State Department, detailing how the Biden administration shielded Israel from consequences, and despite the tough sounding words undermined every effort to bring pressure to bear:
My impression is that Netenyahu has more fondness for Trump, because Trump doesn't have any pro-Palestinian voters in his base to cause any trouble. So it's in his interest to give Trump the credit instead of Biden. He wants Zionists to be dominant in the US and, for various reasons, the GOP has made itself the party of Zionism.
I suspect some older folks may not recognize that dynamic, perhaps including Joe Biden.
Joe Biden could've given Israel the best possible deal on a platter and they'd spit on it because they can see the Palestinian advocates standing in his party. Guys like Netenyahu don't want to see those people anywhere near anything resembling a position of power.
That's my impression at least. Pardon me for being a bit cynical.
My impression is that Netenyahu has more fondness for Trump, because Trump doesn't have any pro-Palestinian voters in his base to cause any trouble. So it's in his interest to give Trump the credit instead of Biden. He wants Zionists to be dominant in the US and, for various reasons, the GOP has made itself the party of Zionism.
I suspect some older folks may not recognize that dynamic, perhaps including Joe Biden.
Joe Biden could've given Israel the best possible deal on a platter and they'd spit on it because they can see the Palestinian advocates standing in his party. Guys like Netenyahu don't want to see those people anywhere near anything resembling a position of power.
That's my impression at least. Pardon me for being a bit cynical.
My impression is that Netenyahu has more fondness for Trump, because Trump doesn't have any pro-Palestinian voters in his base to cause any trouble. So it's in his interest to give Trump the credit instead of Biden. He wants Zionists to be dominant in the US and, for various reasons, the GOP has made itself the party of Zionism.
I suspect some older folks may not recognize that dynamic, perhaps including Joe Biden.
Joe Biden could've given Israel the best possible deal on a platter and they'd spit on it because they can see the Palestinian advocates standing in his party. Guys like Netenyahu don't want to see those people anywhere near anything resembling a position of power.
That's my impression at least. Pardon me for being a bit cynical.
How do you mean “Zionism” here?
I'm assuming the usual usage - supportive of a Jewish ethnostate with control over Israel-Palestine.
I mentioned this on another thread, but it also applies to this thread. I have just finished reading the book My Brother, My Land: A Palestinian Story. It is about the conflict from a Palestinian perspective from 1967 to just before the Gazan incursion. It talks about a family who tried to protect their land and how their son became radicalized. Kind of jarring from a Western perspective.
My impression is that Netenyahu has more fondness for Trump, because Trump doesn't have any pro-Palestinian voters in his base to cause any trouble. So it's in his interest to give Trump the credit instead of Biden. He wants Zionists to be dominant in the US and, for various reasons, the GOP has made itself the party of Zionism.
I suspect some older folks may not recognize that dynamic, perhaps including Joe Biden.
Joe Biden could've given Israel the best possible deal on a platter and they'd spit on it because they can see the Palestinian advocates standing in his party. Guys like Netenyahu don't want to see those people anywhere near anything resembling a position of power.
That's my impression at least. Pardon me for being a bit cynical.
How do you mean “Zionism” here?
There's a dangerous question! Well played!
It's not my affair to define someone else's ideological group, especially when it's one I in no way-shape-or-form associate with.
But I think that, in this case, I'd regard "Zionist" to mean people who think that whatever acts of war Israel commits are justified, up to and beyond bombing vast swaths of civilian territory to kill a small number of "militants." And that Israel is, by degrees, entitled to encroach upon the land surrounding it because of ancient claims, with no regard for the people who actually live there and have lived there over the past millennium or so.
There are, of course, Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists, who each approach this project with different motivations, though I think their material ends are similar enough.
I'll grant that this ideological perspective comes with degrees of discomfort for people who see themselves in support of Israel, and that my description of Zionism is a bit harsh, but the harsh side of the movement appears to be ascendant. Biden himself may ID as a Zionist and had opportunities to try to put the brakes on the bloodshed, but for lack of will or mechanism, he failed.
I do not ID as one, as such I hope folks will take my attempt to define "Zionism" with a grain of salt. At the same time, I am an observer of religion and politics and it is a political-religious category that has been around since before I was born. I am dealing in the world as it has existed in my adult life, the past 20 or so years.
I mentioned this on another thread, but it also applies to this thread. I have just finished reading the book My Brother, My Land: A Palestinian Story. It is about the conflict from a Palestinian perspective from 1967 to just before the Gazan incursion. It talks about a family who tried to protect their land and how their son became radicalized. Kind of jarring from a Western perspective.
I wonder how it would relate to this book I read called The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth. It's a novel written in 2014 about an Englishman in 1066 who gets radicalized after his entire family dies during the invasion of William the Conqueror. It's a neat book because the author tried to write it in a pidgin he made out of Olde English, he uses the language to try to get inside the protagonist's head, their cultural universe. And I think it also captures the sudden turn to violence and profound hatred that goes along with the loss of land and identity.
I'm a pretty serious peacenik and I'm objectively terrible at violence, but can easily understand how people get radicalized.
I mentioned this on another thread, but it also applies to this thread. I have just finished reading the book My Brother, My Land: A Palestinian Story. It is about the conflict from a Palestinian perspective from 1967 to just before the Gazan incursion. It talks about a family who tried to protect their land and how their son became radicalized. Kind of jarring from a Western perspective.
I wonder how it would relate to this book I read called The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth. It's a novel written in 2014 about an Englishman in 1066 who gets radicalized after his entire family dies during the invasion of William the Conqueror. It's a neat book because the author tried to write it in a pidgin he made out of Olde English, he uses the language to try to get inside the protagonist's head, their cultural universe. And I think it also captures the sudden turn to violence and profound hatred that goes along with the loss of land and identity.
I'm a pretty serious peacenik and I'm objectively terrible at violence, but can easily understand how people get radicalized.
I will have to look for it. Thank you.
I am sure the invasion of William the Conqueror is a good approximation, though. In truth, that is how my family settled in the Northampton area. We were part of the Norman invasion.
I mentioned this on another thread, but it also applies to this thread. I have just finished reading the book My Brother, My Land: A Palestinian Story. It is about the conflict from a Palestinian perspective from 1967 to just before the Gazan incursion. It talks about a family who tried to protect their land and how their son became radicalized. Kind of jarring from a Western perspective.
I wonder how it would relate to this book I read called The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth. It's a novel written in 2014 about an Englishman in 1066 who gets radicalized after his entire family dies during the invasion of William the Conqueror. It's a neat book because the author tried to write it in a pidgin he made out of Olde English, he uses the language to try to get inside the protagonist's head, their cultural universe. And I think it also captures the sudden turn to violence and profound hatred that goes along with the loss of land and identity.
I'm a pretty serious peacenik and I'm objectively terrible at violence, but can easily understand how people get radicalized.
I will have to look for it. Thank you.
I am sure the invasion of William the Conqueror is a good approximation, though. In truth, that is how my family settled in the Northampton area. We were part of the Norman invasion.
It's neat to know history on a level like that. I know from relatives' research that I have ancestors who were on the Mayflower, speaking of bloody invaders.
And I do recommend the book. It's a bit gnarly, but telling. It's also a lot of fun to read aloud because of the pidgin dialect, makes it a little easier to understand.
Bumping this thread back up as I'm reading in the NY Times (free link) that Israeli officials know that Gazans are on the brink of starvation:
Some Israeli military officials have privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks, according to three Israeli defense officials familiar with conditions in the enclave.
...
Israeli military officers who monitor humanitarian conditions in Gaza have warned their commanders in recent days that unless the blockade is lifted quickly, many areas of the enclave will likely run out of enough food to meet minimum daily nutritional needs, according to the defense officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.
Here in California, over 30 students are on a hunger strike, demanding that their universities divest holdings in defense contractors supplying the Israeli government. They're at both public universities and private. Long Beach Watchdog, a small local digital outlet, discusses the hunger strike at the California State University campus close to me. The CSU has already said they will not change their investments, and I'm not seeing much coverage in major news outlets, other than one piece on KQED, a public radio outlet in Northern California.
The full blockade has gone on for over a month at this point. The World Food Programme said that they had run out of supplies to distribute last month:
With over 70,000 children hospitalized for malnutrition, Israel's blockade on the Strip has left parents to watch helplessly as their children waste away
On BBC Radio 4's PM news programme the entire top of the programme was 12 minutes straight of the UN's Humanitarian affairs chief making an urgent plea to the security council to do something - that's very very unusual- exceptional for them to run that.
Comments
A note again that mainstream genetic studies have the Palestinians as descended from the Bronze Age population of the Levant; so in reality most of them are the descendents of the Jews and other people who lived there historically, some of whom converted to Christianity before later converting over multiple centuries to Islam.
Which is what happened to my late aunt, who moved to live with family in Gaza. Of my cousins, one was born in Gaza, the other in Jerusalem.
What Gold Meir was pointing out was that Palestinians aren't exclusively muslim, but also Jews, Christians, and Druze.
To be clear what she says is this:
"When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. East and West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 and 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians. There were Jews and Arabs."
She was denying 'Palestinians' existed - there were Jews and Arabs, and they lived in an area that the British ran that used to be part of the Ottoman empire. But there were no Palestinians.
You get echoes of this in the occasional (though less prominent these days than when it was a mainstream argument) demands for a three state solution - Gaza to Egypt, West Bank to Jordan, Israel.
You can argue that convincingly if you start from a position that the whole area is a blank sheet of paper that happens to have people in it...
I'm not sure that's quite true (what she meant) but ultimately I'm not sure it matters. The settlers are generally extremely rightwing and have members in the Israeli government. It suits their narrative to say that there are no Palestinians just Arabs even if that's not really what Goldmeir meant. There's a powerful stream of Israeli political opinion that things that Israel should exist on the East Bank of the Jordan. Which means inside present day Jordan, Heshemite Kingdom of.
The "there are no Palestinians just Arabs" phraseology is an effort to diminish the idea that there is a Palestinian national will for statehood and to insist that it is no big deal if the population moves to Jordan or Syria or Lebanon. Denying the reality of life of millions of refugees for 80+ years.
As it stands, there's no real interest in Jews living within the occupied Palestinian Territories under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. It's a broken, no-mans-land with few facilities and any Jew can live under Israeli jurisdiction in Israel proper or the settlements, so why would you. I don't know exactly which homes were taken from the Jews in the Hebron pogrom, but a) the city is grown massively in the last century and b) there's a big settlement which controls much of the old town of Hebron anyway.
The division of the Palestinian population to make statehood impossible was a deliberate political tool by the Israeli gvernment.
Yeah, but on the other hand - and given this is Epiphanies and we privilege 'own voices' - despite a big diaspora in some of the neighbouring countries, a large number of Palestinians continue to want to live where they are or want to go back to their former homes.
That’s sort of how chronology works though - those people do now because of what happened in the last 80 years, but there were jumping off points between the beginning and now.
On ‘own voices’ I can’t/won’t/refuse to go further than I said almost at the start of this thread. While I don’t doubt the integrity of any poster here this is a public forum and I don’t think it’s a safe space to write personal things on this subject*
So own voices will continue to be a challenge.
*amongst others - we kid ourselves this is Epiphanies but there are things those involved would be mad to write about a certain southern African country on here too - just because stuff gets read and dots are joined.
Yeah, but equally if things had worked out differently they would have continued to - largely - live in the places they had done for many generations. Mass population movements being the exception rather than rule, and if you are going to consider counterfactuals you have to consider all of them.
‘Yeah, but’
Like I said. I’m not going to own voice this so will mostly continue to read what others say - own voice and/or not.
More recently the church I go to screened 'The Tinderbox' a film about Israel/Palestine. (Guardian review here: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/21/the-tinderbox-review-israel-and-palestine-debate)
We have family links to some of the people involved in 'We Are Not Numbers' (https://wearenotnumbers.org/). I'd commend the project to all here - it focuses on sharing the stories of young people in Gaza and Lebanon. Some here may have met Ahmed at Greenbelt.
Our MP is left-leaning - but the Overton Window has moved so far as to render any criticism of Israel problematic - and the MP has already been mired in complaints following relatively innocuous comments.
If nothing else, we continue to bear witness and do not look away.
I think "nations" and identities are always products of their environments, products of culture. My own religious identity is mostly a product not of any grand religious history, but of my self conscious understanding and appropriation thereof. I really worry about what all of these people over there are making themselves into. There is so much manipulation going on.
At the same time, they are still exchanging rocket fire with the Israelis. And Israel is continuing its ground incursion into Lebanon.
Maybe, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the north.
Going to be interesting, I suspect in a not-good way, to see how that plays out for Palestinians. At the same time, for the sake of the larger world, I guess de-escalation is a good thing.
I really hate the way that it feels like a hostage situation on more levels than one.
It is very unclear whether this actually happened, it was a interpretation of Hezbollah's support for a particular individual negotiating a ceasefire and an omission of the Gaza condition in one speech:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-officials-drop-gaza-truce-condition-lebanon-ceasefire-2024-10-08/
Even if it was unlinked, it's now relinked (or their position never changed):
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hezbollah-relinks-lebanon-truce-to-gaza-says-new-tactics-aim-to-inflict-pain-on-israel/
In any case, the Israeli government is not negotiating for a Gaza ceasefire and has signalled it plans annexation of some territory:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-13/ty-article/.premium/israeli-defense-officials-govt-pushing-aside-hostage-deal-eyeing-gaza-annexation/00000192-8585-d988-a3ba-dde59a470000
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-announces-israel-carrying-out-precise-strikes-on-military-targets-in-iran/
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-cartography-of-genocide
It includes a geographic map of all confirmed attacks, and then a summary of their collective impact on the lives of those living in Gaza.
But the suffering of so many people continues. 🙏
Will this make any difference?
https://icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges
In practice the specific crime of genocide requires certain other conditions to be present (approximately the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part as such). There's a good explanation contained in the interview with Raz Segal I linked up thread.
People, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
Meanwhile, people continue to suffer with no hope of an end of this horror on the horizon. It has been going on for over a year, those not killed or maimed physically will undoubtedly have been damaged mentally. It is all so cruel.
The article suggests strongly that pressure from Trump is responsible for this. I was struck by this paragraph near the end:
Trump has not been slow to claim credit for this. Question: is he right? Should we be thanking him?
Thank him if you want; but ultimately, it was the Biden team that closed the deal/
He would continue to find favor with the Fundamentalist Christian Nationalists which he needs to push his agenda through Congress. Frankly, he is not interested in the USA, though.
It's substantively the same deal that was offered in May to which Hamas agreed, so if the difference was the amount of pressure applied (and Haaretz implied it was significant this time around), then it would seem the prospect of Trump is what contributed to the difference.
ProPublica has a very damning article on the State Department, detailing how the Biden administration shielded Israel from consequences, and despite the tough sounding words undermined every effort to bring pressure to bear:
https://www.propublica.org/article/biden-blinken-state-department-israel-gaza-human-rights-horrors
I suspect some older folks may not recognize that dynamic, perhaps including Joe Biden.
Joe Biden could've given Israel the best possible deal on a platter and they'd spit on it because they can see the Palestinian advocates standing in his party. Guys like Netenyahu don't want to see those people anywhere near anything resembling a position of power.
That's my impression at least. Pardon me for being a bit cynical.
How do you mean “Zionism” here?
I'm assuming the usual usage - supportive of a Jewish ethnostate with control over Israel-Palestine.
There's a dangerous question! Well played!
It's not my affair to define someone else's ideological group, especially when it's one I in no way-shape-or-form associate with.
But I think that, in this case, I'd regard "Zionist" to mean people who think that whatever acts of war Israel commits are justified, up to and beyond bombing vast swaths of civilian territory to kill a small number of "militants." And that Israel is, by degrees, entitled to encroach upon the land surrounding it because of ancient claims, with no regard for the people who actually live there and have lived there over the past millennium or so.
There are, of course, Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists, who each approach this project with different motivations, though I think their material ends are similar enough.
I'll grant that this ideological perspective comes with degrees of discomfort for people who see themselves in support of Israel, and that my description of Zionism is a bit harsh, but the harsh side of the movement appears to be ascendant. Biden himself may ID as a Zionist and had opportunities to try to put the brakes on the bloodshed, but for lack of will or mechanism, he failed.
I do not ID as one, as such I hope folks will take my attempt to define "Zionism" with a grain of salt. At the same time, I am an observer of religion and politics and it is a political-religious category that has been around since before I was born. I am dealing in the world as it has existed in my adult life, the past 20 or so years.
Answer your question?
I wonder how it would relate to this book I read called
The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth. It's a novel written in 2014 about an Englishman in 1066 who gets radicalized after his entire family dies during the invasion of William the Conqueror. It's a neat book because the author tried to write it in a pidgin he made out of Olde English, he uses the language to try to get inside the protagonist's head, their cultural universe. And I think it also captures the sudden turn to violence and profound hatred that goes along with the loss of land and identity.
I'm a pretty serious peacenik and I'm objectively terrible at violence, but can easily understand how people get radicalized.
I will have to look for it. Thank you.
I am sure the invasion of William the Conqueror is a good approximation, though. In truth, that is how my family settled in the Northampton area. We were part of the Norman invasion.
It's neat to know history on a level like that. I know from relatives' research that I have ancestors who were on the Mayflower, speaking of bloody invaders.
And I do recommend the book. It's a bit gnarly, but telling. It's also a lot of fun to read aloud because of the pidgin dialect, makes it a little easier to understand.
Here in California, over 30 students are on a hunger strike, demanding that their universities divest holdings in defense contractors supplying the Israeli government. They're at both public universities and private. Long Beach Watchdog, a small local digital outlet, discusses the hunger strike at the California State University campus close to me. The CSU has already said they will not change their investments, and I'm not seeing much coverage in major news outlets, other than one piece on KQED, a public radio outlet in Northern California.
https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-runs-out-food-stocks-gaza-border-crossings-remain-closed
The UN has condemned the Israeli plan to dismantle the existing food distribution network:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/05/1162886
https://www.972mag.com/gazan-children-starving-israeli-siege/
On BBC Radio 4's PM news programme the entire top of the programme was 12 minutes straight of the UN's Humanitarian affairs chief making an urgent plea to the security council to do something - that's very very unusual- exceptional for them to run that.
This is an enormous humanitarian disaster.
And a crime against humanity.