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Gotta say, an ouroboros of "what if we responded to war crimes with our own war crimes" does not lead to great results.
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Oct 10, 2023 14:58
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Reminder to be very skeptical of anything sourced from social media right now. There's a lot of fake news spread by people looking to dial the bloodlust up to 11 that is being taken up by news agencies without due vetting. https://bsky.app/profile/bellingcat.com/post/3kbfyohy6ql2x Grip it and rip it posted:You think that all 1500 of the reported killed Hamas Troops were actual combatants? Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Oct 10, 2023 |
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Oct 10, 2023 17:17
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Maybe the real Hamas was the friends we made along the way
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Oct 10, 2023 20:44
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Setting aside the dire humanitarian catastrophe unfolding at the moment, I just have to say, what really gets my goat about this is the abject unreadiness of Israel's border troops. This is a relatively small border—how were there not sufficient automated systems in place to detect unusual activity and pull in humans to review and slam the "WAKE THE gently caress UP AND GET YOUR GUN" at the border outposts?
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Oct 10, 2023 22:57
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Handsome Ralph posted:https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-urges-israeli-leader-minimize-civilian-casualties-war-hamas-rcna119826
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Oct 11, 2023 03:25
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golden bubble posted:the warning system for the human soldiers on the second line also gets knocked out. It sounds like their monitoring systems got destroyed, telemetry stopped emitting, and the right alarming mechanisms either weren't in place or were ignored by a human operator.
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Oct 11, 2023 05:20
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Things may be heating up with Hezbollah. Both sides seem like they've tried to hold back in the last few days, with violent incidents being sporadic, but neither side is willing to fully ignore what they perceive as the other's aggression, so retaliation is ramping up. Hopefully won't boil over...
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Oct 11, 2023 10:22
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There's a weird absence of discussion in the limited Israeli media I have visibility into about what "victory" looks like beyond the overly ambiguous "elimination of Hamas". I worry that the ground troops will roll in and all it'll take just a handful of soldiers to break the taboo to unleash a flood of retributive violence against the population of Gaza, worse even than the bombing of entire city blocks. And even then, once the blood debt has been repaid by an order of magnitude or three, will creating a wave of martyrs and traumatized orphans "eliminate Hamas"? I don't know that their stated war goal is achievable without genocide and I'm not entirely confident that's not exactly what will be attempted. There's also little reflection about why Hamas has the support it does and why Palestinians in the West Bank have been turning increasingly towards violence. Little admission among liberals that the relative peace and prosperity they've won over the last two decades, even with periodic lawn mowing operations, has perhaps blinded them to the urgency of the suffering and anguish inflicted by the apartheid regime. The peace process for many has perhaps been an election issue, something that could sit until they retook the Knesset, not a time bomb that had been waiting to explode. All the while, the youth radicalize ever further toward the right. I've feared Israel has been on the path to no return for awhile now. I suspect we might see in the months to come that it is in the rear view mirror.
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Oct 13, 2023 04:54
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Dan Carlin, famous for being the most popular history podcaster, is a Nazi by any other word Figuring out how to integrate peacefully would be a challenge after decades of bad blood, but... Israel has had had the dominant position for decades and have only exacerbated the situation in that time.
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Oct 13, 2023 14:20
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Discussion Quorum posted:This has all the signs of a politician demanding that something be made to explode on TV right now quote:Republican members of Congress are now openly advocating the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. "Level the place," says Lindsey Graham. "No rules of engagement" says Rep. Max Miller, a former Trump aide.
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Oct 13, 2023 15:06
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quote:One thing we can all do - right now - is call the White House & tell them that you expect the Biden administration to do everything possible to encourage Israeli restraint & avoid attacks on civilians in Gaza. The comment office is closed on Fridays (!), so call the switchboard: 202-456-1414. (we really need Bluesky embeds)
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Oct 13, 2023 18:19
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Handsome Ralph posted:
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Oct 14, 2023 00:30
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mllaneza posted:I'm getting the sense that all the residents of North Gaza gathering in a small area designated by Israel might be a bad idea. Maybe because Israel has a history of ethnic cleansing, with millions of displaced Palestinians already living in refugee camps in neighboring countries for generations? Maybe because we should be demanding that Israel stop it's genocide? The only moral action open to the United States foreign policy is to bomb the IDF to stop the genocide. Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 03:19
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Potato Salad posted:I don't think we're going to be able to agree. The history of warfare overwhelmingly involves war made for the purposes of statecraft where preservation and even creating favor with a civilian population is the entire war goal, even between ethnicities with longstanding grudges *points toward AD 900 through the Renaissance in Western Europe* But this all veers wildly from the topic at hand, which is that Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza and appears on the verge of taking things up a few notches.
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Oct 14, 2023 16:21
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So about Bibi getting the boot...quote:Draft emergency regulations from Israel's Communications Minister would "allow him to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if he believes they have spread information that could harm national morale or served as the basis for enemy propaganda."
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Oct 16, 2023 14:43
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The Promised Podcast just put out a special episode offering the perspective of a Palestinian Israeli on the last week. Definitely worth a listen as I've not seen similar elsewhere. Sally Abed is a Palestinian-Israeli activist seeking election in Haifa and she describes a visceral fear of a new Nakba of potentially unlimited scope—in Gaza and West Bank, obviously, but even to those 1.8 million Palestinian Israelis who have citizenship. There've been a wave of arrests targeting anyone who makes statements even remotely expressing solidarity with the people of Gaza, there's fear of random acts of violence from Jews against anyone perceived on the street to be Arab, and an unnuanced demand for revenge even from left-wing Israelis. Talk about how the ongoing apartheid regime could have been a causal factor in the attack elicits condemnation as justifying the raid. Separately, I saw that Blinken was asked about conditions put on aid to Israel to rein in the IDF's violence against civilians and their homes, to which he responded that Israel has an absolute right of self-defence and the United States would never imagine conditioning aid under any circumstances. What a sharp contrast with aid to Ukraine... In the one case, you have a relatively small, poor state scrabbling against an obviously existential threat from (what remains of) one of the world's two superpowers. In the other, you have relatively large, prosperous state engaging a tiny terrorist organization which is fundamentally incapable of posing a significant threat outside the borders it's been corralled into (even last week's raid, atrocious and shocking though it was, hinted at no existential threat and was utterly unachievable without one of the most dire intelligence and military failures in history—Hamas may possess the will, but it obviously lacks the means). Ukraine is burdened with extensive conditions imposed by its suppliers, yet Israel, a country fully capable of funding its own defense, receives none. Publicly, at least.
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Oct 18, 2023 02:39
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60-some Palestinians murdered in the West Bank since 7 Oct. Suspected to be "reprisal" killings carried out by Israelis. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/18/1198908667/palestinians-appear-to-have-been-killed-in-reprisal-attacks-in-the-west-bank
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Oct 19, 2023 14:51
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Saw the "centrist" editor of the Times of Israel referring to Gaza as "Hamastan" today in an oped. Really cool dehumanization of the 2 million civilians Israel has confined to the Strip.
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Oct 20, 2023 22:26
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How could Israel possibly allow fuel into Gaza—do people really expect them to fill the tanks of Hamas's legions of Panzers?!
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Oct 24, 2023 04:28
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mrmcd posted:There's a book called The Yiddish Policeman's Union that's a detective novel set in an alternate universe where Israel was setup in a part of coastal Alaska America donated to them instead of Palestine.
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Oct 27, 2023 17:32
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Maybe instead of "giving" any group already populated territories, we could call out the whole concept of ethno-states is bankrupt and morally appalling, no matter where they are or what ethnicity asserts dominance? Whether such states actively expel and exterminate other-ized groups, shunt them into ghettos and bantustans, or even grudgingly afford them semi-equal second-class citizen status, it's all vile poo poo. Western countries are grossly imperfect and we're all well aware of their shortcomings, but they do today offer a level of genuine openness that make them relatively safe to traditionally marginalized groups. Hell, the largest Jewish population in the world is in the United States (and would be even larger if liberals hadn't been complicit for decades in whitewashing the ethno-colonialist enterprise as a noble homecoming). The subtext of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, as I read it, is that home is the family you make along the way and that the messianic, violent retaking of fabled ancestral lands is not just a short-sighted dead-end, but a tragic stoking of a cycle of pain and trauma.
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Oct 27, 2023 18:10
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Alchenar posted:I'm going to post something a friend of mine posted on Facebook shortly after the attacks. It's tragic that we've not been able to recognize the evils of ethno-nationalism as universal, not isolated to any individual bullshit construct of race or ethnicity. The only difference between the ethnonationalism of the white supremacist and the Jewish supremacist is that the latter has a historical reference point for when their own group was subject to the abject horror of a maximalist ethnonationalist state. What really gets my goat is that, instead of recognizing that only an open, tolerant society can afford true safety for all, so many have been lured in by the false promise of safety through supremacy and have for decades viciously exploited the long history of the wrongs done to their group to inflict the same depravations on another. That Israelis play this up, inciting fear in Jewish populations abroad to bolster their own state's ethnonationalist agenda is utterly despicable, and, as events have shown, an utter lie: Israel's decades-long occupation and subjugation of the Palestinians has fostered a degree of internal prosperity and bred a great deal of complacency, but there's no true safety to be had while digging a boot into the necks of an otherized minority.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:39
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Israel sent a hundred armored vehicles into Jenin in the West Bank and they're tearing up the place. Not entirely clear yet what the ultimate goal is, if any. https://www.timesofisrael.com/?post_type=liveblog_entry&p=3138831
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Oct 30, 2023 04:35
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I bet we're going to discover one day that skibidi toilet was a psyop all along.
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Oct 31, 2023 15:38
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Just watched a wonderful take which explained with a straight face that Israel's 21st century border defense system was just too modern for Hamas's 20th century infiltration tactics, so Israel can't be blamed too much for failing to mitigate the threat.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:45
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Twitter embeds still work for me  Really wish we just jumped to Bluesky, though.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:16
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Handsome Ralph posted:I only went as far as Y3 ROTC but even that was hammered into us early on, and we had cadre who had gone to Iraq that told us about units that relearned that lesson the hard way. So yeah, complacency/under estimating Hamas which, you'd think they would stop doing that due to last month's events and yet.
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Nov 2, 2023 14:32
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Herstory Begins Now posted:MSF is furious *uses an advanced drone to track a Gaza ambulance in hi-res 8k, watching it pick up injured children from the unrecognizable devastation of their home, then make its way to the front gates of a hospital overwhelmed with abject human suffering* IDF soldier: "Would you constrain our ability to defend ourselves from extermination??!" *reaches lazily toward a big red button, waiting for responders to rush towards the incoming emergency vehicle before pressing it. Outside the hospital, the lives of the last members of a once large family are snuffed out, alongside those desperately trying to save them* IDF soldier: "These barbarians only understand violence."
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Nov 4, 2023 15:19
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Winning hearts and minds among young Westerners https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1721457922859729398?s=20 @Israel posted:"I'm not antisemitic, I'm racist fluid." - random @Columbia student
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Nov 6, 2023 15:46
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Yeah, the former half tragically seems more "this must never happen again to anyone, but our largely rhetorical opposition to our inflicting it will do nothing more than slow-roll the process; when the victims inevitably resist, we'll adopt a slightly softer version of the exterminationist rhetoric" these days.
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Nov 7, 2023 15:38
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Lum_ posted:Israel doesn't WANT Gaza. We'd like to think that it can't happen again with the whole world watching, but the US, and especially the UK and Germany, give nothing publicly but tepid lip service to humanitarianism while enabling the worst of Israel's excesses.
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Nov 7, 2023 16:02
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Given the lack of clarity on what comes next, I worry the public statements that Israel seeks no expulsion will give way to facts on the ground.
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Nov 7, 2023 16:44
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This kind of poo poo creeps me the gently caress out. The unspoken implication of "and we're retaking the land for our religion; all interlopers shall be cast out!" lurks just barely beneath the surface. https://twitter.com/msfreund/status/1721975029850628104 quote:Wow! For the first time in decades, #Israeli soldiers prayed in the ancient synagogue in #Gaza which was built in the 6th century and where a beautiful mosaic floor depicting King David was unearthed years ago. #Jews have returned to Gaza!!#Israel #Hamas pic.twitter.com/H9huNA7FVM
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Nov 9, 2023 05:16
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PurpleXVI posted:If I was to give people some benefit of the doubt, rather than just considering them to be utter ghouls, I could see a disregard towards the lives of Israeli settler civilians from the logic that they are directly choosing to benefit from the IDF's crimes(and that if they weren't choosing to move in and settle on the ruins of Palestinian homes, many of those crimes might not happen at all) and that many of them do pick up guns and go commit some war crimes in their spare time.
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Nov 10, 2023 01:57
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Alchenar posted:The conditions in gaza suck, but they aren't untenable at all. There was no great looming catastrophe that forced their hand - that was Israel's problem, things in fact looked so stable that they took their eye off the ball. But for the average Gazan, and increasingly the average Palestinian, embracing the status quo has meant accepting the inevitable demise of their people under the slow, incessant grind of the occupation. The Palestinians have repeatedly tried peaceful protest to staunch the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank or to call global attention to the prison that is Gaza, but have been violently thwarted at every turn by an Israeli state which is deaf and blind to their pleas and an Israeli population which, to a too significant extent, actively rejoices in the depravation of Palestinian land, liberty, and even life. That some increasingly marginalized Israeli liberals opine wistfully for a equitable peace means little when that peace every day looks more and more like a coping mechanism, a delusional fantasy Israeli liberals tell themselves to absolve themselves of their participation in an enterprise of slow-motion ethnic cleansing. It's little wonder that some Palestinians look at this situation and choose hope for a better future over either ignoring their own plight or giving fully into despair. The absolute tragedy of that hope is that, for many, the only vehicle for it perceived to be still viable is in the virulent and exterminationist missions of Hamas and other extremist groups.
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Nov 11, 2023 17:22
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Ezra Klein actually had a great episode with Amjad Iraqi this week that covered exactly this topic.
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Nov 11, 2023 18:17
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The Times of Israel has had multiple stories in the last weeks exposing the lurid outline of Hamas's brutal plans of total conquest, uncovered as the IDF proceeds further into Gaza. All of it is, of course, obviously silly and non-serious. "IDF uncovers Hamas plot to seize Knesset!!"; "How Hamas planned to push through to the West Bank and start a wider war—what YOU need to know!!!"; "Video recording exposes Hamas leader's plan to escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by And this is one of the centrist/liberal papers.
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Nov 14, 2023 02:14
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The IDF assaulted NPR journalists in the West Bank and kidnapped the farmer they were interviewing.quote:It's morning as our NPR team is traveling from Tel Aviv to the West Bank to see a small town called Deir Istiya, and to meet a 54-year-old farmer named Ayoub Abuhejleh. Like many Palestinians in the West Bank, he tells us he hasn't been able to access his land and harvest his olives. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1211987812/israel-hamas-west-bank-gaza-war-conflict-idf
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Nov 14, 2023 03:32
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Uhh... https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1724392576516600204?s=20 quote:Shaylee Atary's husband Yahav was murdered by Hamas terrorists.
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Nov 14, 2023 21:02
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| # ¿ Jan 17, 2026 17:19 |
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ranbo das posted:I mean it wasn't too long ago American soldiers shot American college students to death with American guns, just guns being pointed seems pretty tame on the scale of American atrocities. 
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Nov 14, 2023 23:19
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