I have been hanging around Daily Kos since the time of the Obamas. I have had writers block for about that long. There have been many things that I have wanted to write about, but I couldn’t put the words together in a way that satisfied me, or I was too angry, too sad, too overwhelmed. Surely someone would say the things that needed to be said. And sometimes, someone did. But in this case many comments in many articles about Israel and Palestine have been echoing some things I saw during the BLM protests and I haven’t seen a diary that said exactly what I wanted to say. In addition, today I was looking through my notebooks and the title of the diary popped up on one of them. “It doesn’t have to happen to you to matter to you.” Considering the fact that, among other things, many people in the comments have been saying that the college students should shut up because whats happening in Gaza does not affect them, I thought it was a sign.
So here is an assemblage of sentences, scattered thoughts and links. This was supposed to be one diary, but became a set of diaries about responses to Palestine, and there will be later thoughts about the response to BLM.
Starting with Palestine, reading the comments and some of the articles on whats going on, a few themes keep being hit over and over again. And its not just here. I follow a few more liberal sites and some of the same things are being said in those places as well.
1. Why do these college students care? This doesn’t affect Americans as there are no boots on the ground.
2 There are antisemetic protesters and therefore all of them are antisem etic and the protests are bullshit as a result.
3.They are protesting wrong.
4. Nobody else cares so why should they!
5. If they don’t vote for Biden it will all be lost as Trump is worse, so not only are they cutting off their nose to spite their face, they are also endangering a lot of people with the refusal to vote for the lesser evil.
6. Other countries are using the causes to undermine American cohesion and power. So they should shut up and stop giving those countries a reason.
Why should these college students care? This doesn’t affect America because there are no boots on the ground.
Well. In February, NPR reported that Gaza’s death toll exceeded 30,000 people and this is viewed as an undercount. www.npr.org/…
In March, the Washington Post said it was 33,000 and odd.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
The Telegraph questioned the number and said it was closer to 18.000 people.
www.telegraph.co.uk/…
Even if we take the lower number, that’s a HELL of a lot of people who are now dead because of this war. And the vast majority of them are women and children, not Hamas. It is very fucking normal to look at the disparity of dead on either side: Israel 1,410 vs 18,000 to 33 or 34,000 and go: this is disproportionate. This is collective punishment. This isn’t fair. I don’t want my tax dollars supporting this.
And this is before we have Israeli soldiers doing some fairly shitty things: like wearing the underwear of Gazan women and taking pics and videos and putting that shit on social media:
www.reuters.com/…
and surveilling all 2.3 million Palestinian residents and using AI targeting to kill who they consider militants, and they dont give a flying fuck about any civilian deaths that might happen in the course of this:
foreignpolicy.com/…
www.972mag.com/…
www.theguardian.com/…
Which might explain why entire generations of Palestinian families, from great grandparents to infants, have been wiped out.
apnews.com/...
Then there is there is the fact that all 12 Palestinian Universities have been damaged or fully destroyed and “three presidents and nearly a hundred deans and professors have so far been killed in the bombardments.”
www.lemonde.fr/…
I wonder why university students might give a fuck about that. Like I get that university deans here are under pressure from pro Israeli forces, Claudine Gay got fired and her academic reputation shredded. See If Books Could Kills podcast episode DEI Part 2 The Harvard Wars for the low down on her actual acts and who was behind the bullshit. podcasts.apple.com/…
But fired vs bombed to shreds. Fired vs literally being killed. Fired vs all your universities are fucked. Its not close.
We can also talk about the destroyed and damaged mosques and churches:
www.reuters.com/…
The destroyed hospitals
www.cnn.com/…
The rounding up and stripping of Palestinian men and boys:
And now, the goddamn famine:
Humans have empathy and compassion in varying degrees. Among the things many parents and preschools try to teach their kids is to care about other people. So why are you surprised that at least some of the kids and young people you raised are looking at whats going on down there are and are like, what the fucking fuck?! No! Stop! And begin protests. That is literally how humans work! That is literally how many of you work! How many times have you seen unfairness or suffering somewhere and been moved to speak up, donate, at the very least mention to a family member or friend: thats not ok. Why do you think the first amendment is a right? And we absolutely don’t just care about Americans, Ukraine is RIGHT THERE as an example, even though there are no boots on the ground there! Of course, Ukraine is a much more black and white issue, there is a clearer aggressor and an innocent, but we will get back to that.
I for one just read about a 6 year old girl who died when the Israeli military killed her family then killed the ambulance workers who were sent to save her and kept everyone else from getting there. I feel sickened. I am a human being and I hurt for her and her family and the would be rescuers who listened to her pleas on the radio and couldn’t save her. I cannot fucking imagine what kind of PTSD and mental illness they are going to come out of this war with. If they even survive. I am no longer in college but I definitely would have been tempted to go hold up a sign. And I cannot understand why some progressives and liberals who claim to be moral actors, that we are better than the cruel right wing, then say things like: why do the college students care, it must be Russian agents, they must be stupid, they must be virtue signaling, shits going wrong in the US and that is what they should be paying attention to, not this etc etc. Like, do you hear yourselves and what you sound like when you say this?
You sound cruel. Dismissive. Racist as fuck. Assholish. Awful. And very far away from the parents who taught their kids compassion and empathy.
But I would also like to point out that support for Palestinians among university students and other lefitsts didn’t spring out of nowhere. I was on twitter when that platform was worth a damn, and I saw Palestinians supporting the Indigenous pipeline protests and BLM.
drilled.media/…
www.salon.com/…
www.vox.com/…
www.thenation.com/…
I saw solidarity, advice about how to survive teargas and police brutality and general support. And as the last two links in particular show, this mutual support has deep roots. The Palestinian issue bears a marked resemblance to other peoples colonization fights and the pipeline protests and BLM came with reading lists on social media. Hell, there are current reading lists at Verso books talking about the issue www.versobooks.com/…. I sure as hell read some of the recommended items and have plans to read more. Many people read at least some of it.
Furthermore, the idea that what is happening in Palestine doesn’t affect us here in the USA is not true, on both the we are all humans level and what affects one affects all, and the lets talk about weapons and crowd control techniques and Israeli police and armies training police and armies around the world including in the USA to suppress dissent and selling them the weapons they perfected on the Palestinians to do it level. Cause umm-— that’s happening.
www.versobooks.com/…
The Palestinian Laboratory
Israel's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies. For more than 50 years, occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an "enemy" population, the Palestinians. It's here that they have perfected the architecture of control.
www.amnestyusa.org/…
With Whom are Many U.S. Police Departments Training? With a Chronic Human Rights Violator – Israel
This blog post is from August 25, 2016, authored by Edith Garwood, Amnesty International USA Country Specialist covering Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the State of Palestine.
When the U.S. Department of Justice published a report opens in a new tab August 10, 2016, that documented “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), there was rightly a general reaction of outrage.
But what hasn’t received as much attention is where Baltimore police received training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance: Israel’s national police, military and intelligence services.
Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida opens in a new tab, New Jersey opens in a new tab, Pennsylvania, California opens in a new tab, Arizona opens in a new tab, Connecticut, New York opens in a new tab, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia opens in a new tab, Washington state opens in a new tab as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.
www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/…
REVEALED: ADL’s US-Israel Police Exchanges Militarize the Police
New York City (March 17, 2022) — A key facilitator of police exchange programs between the U.S. and Israel was forced to pause its programs following a nation-wide grassroots campaign, according to a leaked document and their own admission. Articles published today by The Guardian and Jewish Currents reveal a draft memo addressed to Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, written during the height of the Black-led uprisings in June 2020 sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. Entitled “Law Enforcement Trainings in Israel” and authored by senior staff at the ADL, the document details how the ADL, one of the main facilitators of police exchanges between the U.S. and Israel, was forced to acknowledge that its exchange program helped militarize U.S. police and harm communities of color.
The leaked memo also reveals that the ADL decided to disrupt their police exchange program in large part due to sustained campaigning by the nation-wide Deadly Exchange campaign and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). JVP, along with its coalition partners across the U.S., sees this as a key, vital step towards stopping the militarization of our communities, defunding and abolishing policing, and challenging the US-Israel alliance that maintains Israeli apartheid.
So if you think that the students need a self centered motive to give a fuck, welp. There you go.
Now, lets dig a bit into the pushback to people pointing out that the Israeli army is doing serious fuckery in Palestine. Argument one: The Palestinians deserve this because Hamas is a terrorist group and the Palestinians voted them in. Hamas is a terrorist group and they have done some utter shitty things. If they were the ones who had the weapons, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t do similar things to Israelis. But the median age of the Palestinian population is NINETEEN: www.statista.com/…
and Hamas has been fucking around the elections in Gaza for 18 goddamn years. www.newarab.com/…
45% of the Palestinian population are children and 44% are refugees. Speaking of refugees, did you know that 5.9 million Palestinians are refugees? And that they are the largest stateless community worldwide? And that literal generations of Palestinians have been born into refugee status starting from the first displacement in 1946-48? www.migrationpolicy.org/...
From the Palestinian perspective, a bunch of people were dropped on their land with no consultation with them, the people who were and are living there; and they were and continue to be raped, imprisoned, murdered, surveilled and generally fucked over for fighting back! They have been dealing with landloss, lack of rights, extreme poverty and general fuckery for since 1946. Of COURSE at some point when they couldn’t defeat Israel militarily, Hamas was going to come about. Having read Kos’s commentary on Ukraine, didn’t he point out that a similar thing would have happened if Russia had succeeded in its invasion of Ukraine? What one man considers a freedom fighter, another man considers a terrorist.
And yes, according to the lore, God gave this land to the ancestors of the Israelis some time ago. But that brings up the thorny question of who was there when said ancestors came a-conquering, did the Canaanites deserve to have their land stolen from them? Oh that was very long ago and should not be counted because everyone was acting that way back then? Ok, but this long ago event is the literal foundation of why the Israelis are there and were given this land by the asshole colonials in the first place.
Which is not to say that the Israelis don’t need somewhere to fucking live. They do and I will dig into that more in the antisemitism diary because dear goddess this damn thing has gotten SO MUCH LONGER than I thought it would be when I sat down to go at it.
And the thing is the Palestinians will fail in getting a lot of where they used to live back. There are 10 million Israelis living there now, even if they did manage to displace them, which they won’t because they don’t have powerful friends like the US backing them, and even if they did, where would the Israelis go? At best what the US is going to do is use Israel’s overreaction and their subsequent fall in support around the world to ram through a two state solution. Which is, frankly, the best solution to the problem anyone is going to get.
The tree of peace, watered by decades of atrocity. And yet, peace. Rebuilding homes, mosques, universities. Hopefully all the money helps fund decades of therapy because whooooooo they’ll all need it. Perhaps the whole thing will end up like Ireland, split between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. I don’t know how much justice they are gonna get but peace. Maybe both nations might go through Reconciliation like Rwanda and South Africa did. There have been weaknesses to the process but maybe healing and peace can be cemented more through that. jspp.psychopen.eu/…
foreignpolicy.com/...
The hilarious thing is, if Americans were in the Palestinian situation they would not do better than the Palestinians have! Powerful Americans have time and time again carried resentment and punished less powerful Americans have daring to try and share in the resources of this nation, which were stolen from the Indigenous Peoples to begin with. We are LITERALLY living on stolen land, and the powerful have lynched, and raped, and enslaved and spread disease, burned and destroyed towns, the cops have been sicced on the vulnerable groups, various populations have been intentionally kept in poverty, people’s cultures, health, wealth, strength, lives, ability to have children, actual children, ability to LIVE even, never mind pursue happiness, has been stripped from them systematically, willfully and viciously. Do you really think that if America was weaker and some coalition of countries have dropped some population of: say, indigenous peoples back here because said countries didn’t want to take responsibility for their slaughter and 1000s of years of fucking them over; Americans wouldn’t be trying their best to kick their asses and get rid of them? Even if said indigenous people have ties to the land that are more than some god fucked them over? And if that population got outside help and kicked American asses and kept expanding their territory, what exactly do you think would happen?
Americans right now are screaming that people trying to immigrate from countries whose economies got smashed by American foreign policy, and increasing Indigenous people’s calls for their land back and Black people daring to demand that they get jobs and proper schooling and not have the police murder them at will are a threat to them, will lead to their destruction as a people and have already elected a fascist to power, which many of them are planning to elect again! Several of them are giving up on democracy entirely! There are literal fears of terrorist activity that will start in the US if they don’t get their way! Yet if said hypothetical indigenous people decided to respond to a hypothetical terrorist attack like this, how would you respond? Exactly.
In addition, if we are going to say that Palestinians should be collectively punished because there is a terrorist group running things currently, then I invite us to look at the beam in our own eyes. What should other countries that have been invaded and have their governments toppled by the actual factual democratically elected United States government that at the very least holds more elections than goddamn Hamas; demand of us, I wonder? Puerto Rico is a colony, we invaded them and they have no freedom to determine their own lives. Hawaii is a state. How did it become one? Whats happening with the Native Hawaiians? Part of the reason we are so supportive of Israel is that we are using them as a club against their Arab neighbors so that US interests in oil and whatever else can be satisfied. Shall we talk about Latin America and the Caribbean? The fact that the US wants to pivot from the Middle East to fuck around in Africa, as if Africa hasn’t been fucked with enough? If people are responsible for what their governments do, and ought to be punished for it, then what do we owe? Its real easy to say dismissive things about weaker peoples when so far, no one is powerful enough to come collect our bills that are due.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
theintercept.com/…
www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/…
I want to next talk about antisemitism, but I didn’t realize the diary would be so long to begin with. So in part 2, which I will hopefully put up tomorrow will tackle that. The general gist is: two things can be true, antisemitism is a huge fucking problem around the world, and that absolutely includes in leftist and progressive places including the protests and 2. People are using that to say that criticizing Israel’s actions at all are antisemitic and so the protests are ipso facto antisemetic. Which, no.