Trish Donovan

Librarian and recovering children's book hoarder.

[Trish Donovan @AsprntLibrarian]

#postyouryes
#marriagequality
#fightyourownprejudice
#voteyes

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Charlotte Church has entered the chat.

“Whilst he has made millions and has an enormous following, he has an enormous platform to do real good in the world. He chose consumerism and capitalism over doing the right thing...Ed Sheeran, we’re watching you. Free Palestine.”

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

“Fiasco” is a weird way to describe war crimes and aiding genocide.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

@TomiLahren Almost like we care about the planet and the people in it.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Ms Rachel stating facts about an ongoing genocide is what they call “controversial.”

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

Writing about Gaza has become much harder since I left it.

This sounds strange, because distance was supposed to make writing easier.

Inside Gaza, I knew exactly where the invisible lines were. There were things I could write, things I could only hint at, and things I knew I should leave untouched.

Not because they were untrue.

Because sometimes the truth has consequences.

A sentence written from Gaza does not remain a sentence. It can reach the wrong person, close a door, hurt someone you love, or make an already impossible life even harder.

So I learned to walk around certain truths.

Now I am outside, and those invisible lines are no longer around me.

Yet strangely, I find myself writing more slowly than ever.

I can spend two hours staring at a paragraph whose meaning has been perfectly clear in my head from the beginning.

Because now the question is no longer whether I can tell the truth.

It is whether I should.

There is a Gaza that appears in photographs, statements, speeches and slogans. And then there is the Gaza we lived from the inside, the one made of contradictions, failures, fear, courage, corruption, kindness, cruelty, sacrifice, exploitation, and ordinary people trapped somewhere between all of them.

Some of its truths are ugly.

Some will anger people who love Palestine.

Some may be used by people who do not.

But what troubles me most is something else entirely:

sometimes exposing what is wrong does not only punish the guilty.

You expose a rotten part of a system, and perhaps the whole system loses what keeps it alive.

You reveal how something meant to save people is being abused, and perhaps tomorrow someone far away decides to stop supporting it altogether.

The guilty may lose something.

But so may the innocent person who depended on it to survive.

And this is where I remain stuck.

Between a truth I feel morally obligated to tell, and the knowledge that its consequences may fall on people who had no part in creating it.

If I remain silent, I may be protecting corruption, failure, or injustice simply because exposing it is dangerous.

But if I speak, the truth may travel into hands that do not care about fixing what is broken, only about finding another reason to abandon the people still trapped inside it.

And perhaps this is the cruelest thing Gaza has done to the meaning of truth itself:

it has made honesty capable of hurting the innocent, and silence capable of protecting the guilty.

So what is the moral choice when both speaking and remaining silent can produce victims?

Do we owe history the truth, even when the living may pay the price for it?
Or do we protect the living, even if that means leaving history with a lie?

I still do not know.

#SurvivalTestimony

[Silence Elbit Drones @SilenceElbit]

BREAKING: Nine people block opposite sides of the road to shut down Elbit's Israeli drone factory in Staffordshire.

The blockade is part of the launch of a new direct action group called 'Silence Elbit Drones'.

In order to silence the skies above Gaza, we must shut Elbit down.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

Artists in Gaza are painting murals on destroyed walls, honouring US rapper Macklemore for his support for Palestine. Despite a ceasefire agreement, Israel continues to kill Palestinians in frequent strikes across Gaza.

[HatsOff @HatsOffff]

Historian Avi Shlaim: ‘Britain stole Palestine from the Palestinians and gave it to the Zionists’

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Wonderful to see the great Avi Shlaim on Piers Morgan. The @BBC of course, shamefully, never platforms our greatest Middle East scholar

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Savages

[WearThePeace @WearThePeaceCo]

After being fined $11,941 by the NFL for wearing “Hind Rajab” on his eye black, Houston Texans linebacker Azeel Al-Shaair did it again.

During Sunday’s game against the Bengals, Al-Shaair wore “Wafaa Aqila” on his eye black, honoring a Palestinian girl who was killed alongside her father in an Israeli strike on their vehicle in Gaza earlier this month.

[Josh Bornstein @JoshBBornstein]

Footballers are role models except when the violence is an impediment to playing in the grand final.

[Prof Ben Saul - UN SR Human Rights & Counterterror @profbensaul]

I join UN experts in welcoming the United Kingdom's ban on trade with Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, and call on other states to also enforce international law

[Eye on Palestine @EyeonPalestine]

Azeez Al-Shaair, an NFL star, paid a touching tribute to Wafaa Akila, an 8-year-old girl, and her father, who were martyred in an airstrike targeting their car on her first day of school. He wrote her name on his eye black strips as he met with children and families on the field. Al-Shaair has continuously honoured those suffering in Gaza in similar ways, repeatedly turning his eye black into a form of protest, despite the fines he receives from the NFL.

قدّم عزيز الشاعر، نجم دوري كرة القدم الأمريكية (NFL)، تحية مؤثرة للطفلة وفاء عقيلة البالغة من العمر 8 سنوات ووالدها، اللذين استـ ـشهدا جراء قصف استهدف سيارتهما في أول يوم لها بالمدرسة. فقد كتب اسمها على شرائط العيون السوداء الخاصة به أثناء لقائه بالأطفال والعائلات على أرضية الملعب. ويواصل الشاعر تكريم أولئك الذين يعانون في غزة بطرق مشابهة، محولاً باستمرار شرائط العيون السوداء إلى شكل من أشكال الاحتجاج، على الرغم من الغرامات التي يتلقاها من رابطة الدوري.

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

After a few years on Twitter and X, I've got it. It can't be ethnic cleansing because the Palestinians don't exist. And the land belongs to us because the god I don't believe in gave it to Abraham who is my ancestor. The US helps us do this because it'll ensure Jesus comes back.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

"The children will grow up".

This was also the argument that Nazi officials gave, during the Nuremberg Trials, to justify why they had killed children during the Holocaust.

[matt bernstein @mattxiv]

i don’t think ed sheeran can single-handedly end zionism but i think it’s worth examining how zionist rhetoric has evolved into something that sounds polite and sympathetic towards palestinians but is designed to uphold israeli apartheid

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israelis: It’s okay to kill children

Ed Sheeran: This is a complex political issue

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

Really great to see this: six Nobel Prize-winning economists (Duflo, Krugman, Diamond, Banerjee, Acemoglu and Stiglitz) just came out in favor of the California billionaire tax.

You don't have to be a radical leftist to see why it's a good idea. First, look at the numbers: ten years ago, the richest 0.001% of Californians were worth $700 billion. Today, that same group (about 250 people) is worth $2.3 trillion.

From 2019 to 2025, their wealth grew by $1.4 trillion. The California income tax they paid over that period was just 1.6% of that gain. A nurse or a plumber pays a higher state tax rate.

Yes, many of these people built great companies, and they've made a lot of money in the process. Good for them! The problem is that wealth on this scale stops being just money. It becomes extraordinary power.

In 2000, billionaires accounted for about 1% of all donations in federal elections. In 2024, it was 19%. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the platform you're reading this on: all owned and controlled by billionaires.

Now add AI. If you think power is concentrated now, just wait five years. It's going to get much worse.

So, what does Prop 40 actually do? It's a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of California's billionaires. That would raise about $100 billion, enough to offset the federal Medicaid cuts.

"But they'll all leave!" the critics say. Nope, they can't. The tax applies to any billionaire who lived in California on January 1, 2026, and the initiative only became public about five weeks before that.

"But it'll kill Silicon Valley!" Uh no, that won't happen either. Since the tax was announced, California's share of all new US venture capital has gone up, from about 50% to 80%. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who would be one of the biggest payers, said he would be "perfectly fine" with it and had "not even thought about it once".

Sure, some other billionaires can't stop thinking about it. Sergey Brin has already spent more than $100 million to defeat the proposal. At a holiday party in December he pulled Gavin Newson aside and said 'he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax', because he thought the 5% tax would turn California into some kind of Soviet Union.

That is, of course, nonsense. This is not going to be some kind of socialist revolution. The proposal is about restoring balance to a mixed economy. You could even argue it's about saving capitalism itself from oligarchs like Sergey Brin. I think that's exactly why Nobel Prize-winning economists are coming out in favor of this tax.

If Prop 40 passes in November, it will be the first tax aimed specifically at billionaire wealth anywhere in the world. I think it could be the start of a global movement.

Anyway, read the whole letter here. It's really good 👇 https://t.co/cFUtgzfoLy

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

I actually have a great idea for Israel to improve its image: end the occupation of millions of Palestinians and curb Israeli settler terrorism.

Sounds like a great place to start, Mr. Congressman.