Mike Groszmann

[Noah Garfinkel @NoahGarfinkel]

A key point missing in a lot of post debate analysis is that Trump’s claim about immigrants eating pets almost perfectly syncs up to the piano in the Peanuts theme song.

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

3/ Some excellent analysis from @NuffieldTrust 👇

https://t.co/J1XK1Y6F7r

Its very clear to me where goverment really need to sharpen their pencil #PayRestoration

[Sir Michael Marmot @MichaelMarmot]

Is Britain sicker than a decade ago? What if all political claims were tested against the evidence. https://t.co/UVTLBUWy1l

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

1/ NEW & IMPORTANT: So we need to talk about NHS pay. NEW shocking [post DDRB] data just in 4/1/24 👇 (SPOILER: Not "fair & reasonable")

We need to fix pay/retention to fix waiting lists- increasingly clear next GE will won/lost on NHS

Please read whole 🧵 & share widely/RT

[Rory Conn @roryconn]

Please watch this short clip.
The largest group being those aged 10-19 and, in particular, children in the care system.

[Omid Djalili @omid9]

In the absence of any adults in the room, so glad to see Israeli and Palestinian mothers make this important stand. Great to see diplomats and politicians join them.

[Isaac Saul @Ike_Saul]

People ask me all the time if I am "pro-Israel" because I am a Jew who has lived in Israel, and my answer is that being "pro-Israel" or being "pro-Palestine" or being a "Zionist" does not properly capture the nuance of thought most people do or should have about this issue. It certainly doesn't capture mine.

I have a lot to say. I’ve spent the last 72 hours writing, texting, and talking to Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and Palestinians. Much of my reaction is going to piss off people on "both sides," but I am exhausted and hurting and I do not think there is any way to discuss this situation without being radically honest about my views. So I'm going to try to say what I believe to be true the best I can.

Let me start with this: It could have been me.

That's a hard thought to shake when watching the videos out of Israel — the concert goers fleeing across an empty expanse, the hostages being paraded through the streets, the people shot in the head at bus stops or in their cars. I went to those parties in the desert, I rubbed shoulders with Israelis and Arabs and Jews and Muslims, I could have easily accepted an invitation to some concert near Sderot and gone without a care, only to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Or, perhaps worse, taken hostage and tortured.

I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They're doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They're doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood — an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic — it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it.

It’s not possible to recap the entire 5,000 year history of people fighting over this strip of land in one newsletter. There are plenty of easily accessible places you can learn about it if you want to (and, by the way, many of you should — far too many people speak on this issue with an obscene amount of ignorance, loads of arrogance, and a narrow historical lens focused on the last few decades). But I'll briefly highlight a few things that are important to me.

In my opinion, the Jewish people have a legitimate historical claim to the land of Israel. Jews had already been expelled and returned and expelled again a half dozen times before the rise of the Muslim and Arab rule of the Ottoman Empire. Of course it’s messy because we Jews and Arabs and Muslims are all cousins and descendents of the same Canaanites. But Arabs won the land centuries ago the same way Israel and Jews won it in the 20th century: Through conflict and war. The British defeated the Ottoman Empire and then came the Balfour Declaration, which amounted to the British granting the area to the Jewish people, a promise they’d later try to renege on — all before the wars that have defined the region since 1948.

That historical moment in the late 1940s was unique. After World War II, with many Arab and Muslim states already in existence, and after six million Jews were slaughtered, the global community felt it was important to grant the Jewish people a homeland. In a more logical or just world that homeland would have been in Europe as a kind of reparation for what the Nazis and others before them had done to the Jews, or perhaps in the Americas — like Alaska — or somewhere else. But the Jews wanted Israel, the British had taken to the Zionist movement, the British had conquered the Ottoman Empire which handed them control of the land, and America and Europe didn’t want the Jews. As a result, we got Israel.

The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans. Many of us would probably react the same way. So, just as humans have done forever, they fought. The many existing Arab states turned against the burgeoning new Jewish state. One side won and one side lost. This is the brutal and broken and violent world we live in, but it is what created the global world order we have now.

Are Israelis and British people "colonizers" because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it.

You can’t speak about this issue in a vacuum. You can't pretend that it wasn't just 60 years ago when Israel was surrounded on all sides by Arab states who wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. Despite the balance of power shifting this century, that threat is still a reality. And you can't talk about that without remembering the only reason the Jews were in Israel in the first place was that they'd spent the previous centuries fleeing a bunch of Europeans who also wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. And then Hitler showed up.

American partisans have a narrow view of this history, and an Americentric lens that is infuriating to witness. As Lee Fang perfectly put it, "Hamas would absolutely execute the ACAB lefties cheering on horrific violence against Israelis if they lived in Gaza & U.S. right-wingers blindly cheering on Israeli subjugation of Palestinians would rebel twice as violently if Americans were subjected to similar occupation."

And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza.

Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this.

I'm sorry to say that while the blood on the ground is fresh. The Israelis who were killed in this attack largely have nothing to do with those conditions other than being born at a time when Israel and Jews have the upper hand in this conflict. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists. This is why we describe them as “innocent” and why Hamas has only reaffirmed that they are a brutal terror organization with this attack — an organization that I hope is quickly toppled, for the sake of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis. But as someone with a deep love for Israel, with friends in danger and people I know still missing, it breaks my heart to say it but I'm saying it again because it remains perhaps the most salient point of context in a tangled mess full of centuries of context:

You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.

You can't. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising.

And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle:

1) Israel has already responded with a vengeance, and they will continue to. Their desire for violence is not unlike Hamas’s — it’s just as much about blood for blood as any legitimate security measure. Israel will “have every right to respond with force." Toppling Hamas — a group, by the way, Israel erred in supporting — will now be the objective, and civilian death will be seen as necessary collateral damage. But Israel will also do a bunch of things they don't have a right to. They will flatten apartment buildings and kill civilians and children and many in the global community will probably cheer them on while they do it. They have already stopped the flow of water, electricity, and food to two million people, and killed dozens of civilians in their retaliatory bombings. We should never accept this, never lose sight that this horror is being inflicted on human beings. As the group B’Tselem said, “There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” I mourn for the innocents of Palestine just as I do for the innocents in Israel. As of late, many, many more have died on their side than Israel's. And many more Palestinians are likely to die in this spate of violence, too.

Unfortunately, most people in the West only pay attention to this story when Hamas or a Palestinian in Gaza or the West Bank commits an act of violence. Palestinian citizens die regularly at the hands of the Israeli military and their plight goes largely unnoticed until they respond with violence of their own. Israel had already killed an estimated 250 Palestinians, including 47 children, this year alone. And that is just in the West Bank.

2) Every single time Israel kills someone in the name of self-defense they create a handful of new radicalized extremists who will feel justified in wanting to take an Israeli life in retribution sometime in the future. Half of Gaza’s two million people are under the age of 19 — they know little besides Hamas rule (since 2006), Israeli occupation, blockades, and rockets falling from the sky. The suffering of these innocent children born into this reality is incomprehensible to me. They will suffer more now because of Hamas’s actions and Israel’s response, all through no fault of their own.

There is no way out of this pattern until one side exercises restraint or leaders on both sides find a new solution. Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.

So, why did this happen now?

I'm not sure how to answer that question except to say it was bound to happen eventually. It was a massive policy and intelligence failure and Netanyahu should pay the price politically — he is a failed leader. Iran probably helped organize the attack and the money freed up by the Biden administration's prisoner swap probably didn't help the situation, either. Israel's increasingly extremist government and settlers provoking Palestinians certainly didn't help. Nor has going to the Al-Aqsa mosque and desecrating it. Nor do blockades and bombings and indiscriminate subjugation of a whole people. Nor does refusing to talk to non-terrorist leaders in Palestine. Nor does illegally continuing to expand and steal what is left of Palestinian land, as many Jews and Israelis have been doing in the 21st century despite cries from the global community to stop. A violent response was predictable — in fact, plenty of people did predict it.

Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources. But if you want to blame Israeli leaders for continuing to expand and settle land that does not belong to them (as I do), then you should also spare some blame for Palestinian leaders for repeatedly not accepting a partitioned Israel during the 20th century that could have led to peace (as I do).

Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn't Hamas. Will some Palestinians cheer and clap at the dead, or spit on them as they are paraded through Gaza? Yes they will. And they have. Many will also mourn because they loathe Hamas and know this will only make things worse. This is no different than how some Americans cheer at the dead in every single war we've ever fought. It's no different than the Israelis who set up lawn chairs to watch their government bomb Palestine and cheer them on, too. This doesn't mean Palestinians or Israelis or Americans are evil — it means some of them are giving in to their violent impulses, and their zealous feelings of righteous vengeance.

Solutions, you ask? I can’t say I have any. If you came here for that, I’m sorry. The two-state solution looks dead to me. A three-state solution makes some sense but feels out of the view of all the people who matter and could make it happen. I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.

Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.

I'm pro-not-killing-civilians.

I'm pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.

I'm pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.

I'm pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.

I'm pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.

I'm pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.

I'm pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.

Whatever this is, I want none of it.

[Omid Djalili @omid9]

The world is finally aware that the “Islamic” Republic of Iran have been funding and training the terrorists that attacked Israel. So here are SOME QUESTIONS FOR THE REGIME:

HOW DO YOU EVEN DARE TO SPEAK OUT against Israeli oppression, when 10M Jews, Christians, Bahá’ís and Muslims have left Iran for fear of being killed or meaninglessly executed?

HOW DO YOU DARE TO TRY and align yourselves with an oppressed people, when you’ve raped & slaughtered your own people for the past 44 years?

HOW DO YOU DARE TO SPARK A WAR THAT NO ONE WANTS except a fanatical minority which celebrates the slaughter of Israeli civilians, including hundreds of women & children?

HOW DO YOU DARE DISPLACE 260,000 Palestinians so children continue to be born in Gaza with no prospects other than a choice between misery or death?

NO ONE WANTS more war crimes inflicted on yet more civilians. What is coming is chilling. And it will get worse:
Russia backing the IRI because they’re dependent on the IRGC for military hardware & drones, war in the Ukraine, the US parked in the Mediterranean and Israel fighting Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north and potentially the IRI too, it’s a world war that will affect every single one of us.

If we are humanitarians, everyone of us on this platform must call for a cease fire immediately. We know what each side is capable of. Killing more innocent people gets us nowhere other than a fast track to Armageddon.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

Robert De Niro’s full statement on Trump. Please read and let me know your thoughts:

I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men.  I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly.

I see an evil one.

Over the years, I’ve met gangsters here and there. This guy tries to be one, but he can’t quite pull it off. There’s such a thing as “honor among thieves.” Yes, even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong.  Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story — but — they have a moral code, however warped.

Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself — not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him, blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves his “friends.” He has contempt for all of them.

We New Yorkers got to know him over the years that he poisoned the atmosphere and littered our city with monuments to his ego.  We knew first hand that this was someone who should never be considered for leadership.  We tried to warn the world in 2016.

The repercussions of his turbulent presidency divided America and rattled New York City beyond imagination.  Remember how we were jolted by crisis in early 2020, as a virus swept the world. We lived with Donald Trump’s bombastic behavior every day on the national stage, and we suffered as we saw our neighbors piling up in body bags.
The man who was supposed to protect this country put it in peril, because of his recklessness and impulsiveness. It was like an abusive father ruling the family by fear and violent behavior.  That was the consequence of New York’s warning getting ignored. Next time, we know it will be worse.

Make no mistake: the twice-impeached, 4-time indicted Donald Trump is still a fool. But we can’t let our fellow Americans write him off like one. Evil thrives in the shadow of dismissive mockery, which is why we must take the danger of Donald Trump very seriously.
So today we issue another warning. From this place where Abraham Lincoln spoke — right here in the beating heart of New York — to the rest of America:
This is our last chance.

Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator.

And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided.

So what do we do about it?  I know I’m preaching to the choir here.  What we’re doing today is valuable, but we have to take today into tomorrow – take it outside these walls.   We have to reach out to the half of our country who have ignored the hazards of Trump and, for whatever reason, support elevating him back into the White House.  They’re not stupid, and we must not condemn them for making a stupid choice.  Our future doesn’t just depend on us. It depends on them.

Let’s reach out to Trump’s followers with respect.  Let’s not talk about “democracy.”  “Democracy” may be our holy grail, but to others it is just a word, a concept, and in their embrace of Trump, they’ve already turned their backs on it.  Let’s talk about right and wrong.  Let’s talk about humanity.  Let’s talk about kindness.  Security for our world.  Safety for our families.  Decency.  Let’s welcome them back.  We won’t get them all, but we can get enough to end the nightmare of Trump, and fulfill the mission of this “Stop Trump Summit.”

[nazir afzal @nazirafzal]

It is NOT islamaphobic to detest, as I do, Hamas for the murder of Israelis
It is NOT anti-Semitic to detest, as I do, Netanyahu’s Govt for its treatment of Palestinians

It IS Islamaphobic or anti-Semitic to attack Muslims or Jews for the actions of Hamas or Netanyahu’s Govt

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

1/29 We need to talk about these graphs 👇

We have nurses & junior doctors on strike & consultants potentially joining them very soon. Lets talk about inflation & pay. How to fix this car crash (& perhaps more importantly, how NOT to). Please read full 🧵 to end and share / RT

[Tim Farron @timfarron]

We have a staffing crisis in the NHS and yet the Government have foolishly decided to treat junior doctors as the enemy.

We owe a massive debt to junior doctors who have been underpaid and undervalued by this Government for far too long.

My letter to the Health Secretary 👇

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

@enixmeta @Conservatives @UKLabour Im sorry you think I'm a #Lying Dr and have presented data only from 2008 to only show the current government and have ignored @UKLabour where the problems "began".

I chose the graphs I did because they were from government, but if you want to go further back look at the @FT 👇

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

@ShaunLintern @RishiSunak The DIRE performance in the NHS👇is precisely nothing to do with strikes, and very little to do with COVID (though has worsened).

Its everything to do with poltiical choices.

And those choices extend to #payrestoration

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

1/ Well it being 1st April, I thought I would dust this one off from 2021 and see where we have got to, and whats left to sort

#AFD 🧵 Please share / RT!

https://t.co/26kloursrD

[Peter Kay (🦋@theonlypeterkay.bsky.social) @theonlypeterkay]

A retired GP in tears when he tells the interviewer why he’s there to add moral support: Back in 1962 he went to help at a bad car smash. The couple in the car were from the USA. The first thing the injured woman said was “how much will it cost?” Sunak wouldn’t ever need to ask.

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

12/ So @Jeremy_Hunt has opportunity to address pension taxation issues that have cause so many problems. Would strongly urge

🔼LTA to where it was
⏫AA = bigger problem, so dont restore to a much lower level than prior peak
⚠️Dont ignore tapering
⚠️Index
⚠️FixNegativePIAs
RT!

[Dr Tony Goldstone @goldstone_tony]

1/2 BREAKING: @NHSEmployers CEO calls for AA to be scrapped in public sector

"The govmnt still need to do more. The chancellor @Jeremy_Hunt now has an opportunity in his upcoming Spring Budget to end application of annual allowance pension taxation to public sector pensions

[Mike Groszmann @MikeG_CAP]

A must read for anyone with ambition, direction, aptitude and pressures in life. Written by a dear friend and one of the wisest and most impressive people I know. Who happens to also be a fantastic writer! Thank you @benramalingam for #Upshift

[Ben Ramalingam @benramalingam]

Quite simply a dream come true for this geeky war child who found his safest refuge in libraries and bookshops.

Thank you @Waterstones for the Upshift table!