shantiwater

news reporter at KPFK Pacifica Radio, Los Angeles and freelance writer for the Daily Breeze and LA Daily News

[shantiwater @shantiwater]

300-plus Culver City demonstrators call for justice amid week of George Floyd protests – Daily Breeze https://t.co/0TZHIltDfg

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

Miko Peled is asked if he will condemn Hamas and the Palestinian resistance. Here is his response:

[B'Tselem בצלם بتسيلم @btselem]

The killing and violence Israel is responsible for are escalating across the West Bank. But the Elimination Project that Israel is carrying out goes far beyond that. As our head of field research Kareem Jubran explains, it is about dismantling the conditions that allow Palestinians to exist as a people, a society and a collective in their homeland.

The Elimination Project is an ongoing process that affects every aspect of life. It involves demolishing homes, expelling communities, taking over land and water sources, destroying livelihoods and suppressing political and social organizing. Israel prevents people from getting to work, going to school or harvesting olives on their own land. Violence by soldiers and settler militias keeps millions of Palestinians in a constant state of fear, turning even simple everyday activities into potential threats to their lives and physical safety.

This is the Elimination Project: a set of mechanisms working together to push Palestinians off their land and dismantle their ability to live together as an independent society, with their own institutions, identity, rights and future. At the same time, Israel is expanding and deepening its control and Jewish presence across the West Bank.

How do all these mechanisms work together? Watch our short film about the Elimination Project that Israel is carrying out in the West Bank >> https://t.co/salSW7Cq1J

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

"Zionism is vast, enormous unbelievably successful rescue project." -Haviv Rettig Gur

This is a lie. It's the single biggest lie Zionists tell about Zionism.

Zionism was never about rescue. Zionism would be more accurately described as an anti-rescue movement.

Zionists sabotaged countless rescue efforts & condemned hundreds of thousand of Jews to death in their greatest hour of need throughout the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Let's dive in.

1890s-1914: Before 1914, the Zionist leadership rejected 61% of Jews hoping to colonize Palestine. They were rejected because they were too poor, too persucted. The Zionists wanted wealthy Jews who could bring capital to Palestine to infuse in the Jewish colonies' flailing enterprises. And so, the Jews most likely to suffer from pogroms in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and 1910s doubled as the Jews most likely to be rejected by the Palestine Office in Jaffa, led by Menachem Sheinkin & Arthur Ruppin. It was essentially an anti-rescue office https://t.co/s0Sxuy44gX

1918-1922: hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews fled their homes after the deadliest wave of pogroms to date, leaving tens of thousands killed. Many were looking to Palestine as a safe haven. The Zionist movement categorically rejected them all. The Zionists wanted builders of a nation, not refugees “weak in body and soul.” https://t.co/7jZXWRab9U As Chaim Weizmann said: “Even one percent that’s bad will spoil a great many good people,” He was so worried about the influx he actually persuaded the British authorities to reduce Jewish immigration quotas in the early 1920s, just as Ukraine’s Jews were in their greatest hour of need. https://t.co/BpcUC1oDQK

1922: In Urmia, Iran, Jews faced anti-Jewish violence and famine, forcing thousands to seek refuge in Baghdad during & after World War I. The Zionist office in Baghdad wrote to Jaffa that these refugees needed a safe haven. The Zionist leadership said no: They wanted pioneers, not refugees. They were all rejected https://t.co/7jZXWRab9U

1920s-1930s: The Zionist immigration policy was highly selective: immigrants were screened for health, skills, capital & ideological fitness. Sick & diseased Jews were rejected. Orphans, widows, rape victims, famine survivors & bankrupted Jews were “wounded in body or spirit” & therefore rejected. Those seeking to immigrate to Palestine for reasons other than ideological commitment to the cause, such as in search for a safe haven, were rejected. Those who could not afford to pay large sums of money for their immigration certificate or who could not bring enough capital to sustain themselves in Palestine for a year or more or whose skill sets were not relevant in Palestine’s economy were also rejected. https://t.co/UaG3lPyW5P and https://t.co/z6rk4oaARL

In 1933, despite Hitler’s rise to power, and despite the increasingly dire situation faced by Europe’s Jews, most Zionist factions continued to support a highly selective immigration policy -- i.e. young, healthy "pioneers", capitalists and professionals -- no refugees. https://t.co/VVcnpdV9SH

As Ben-Gurion put it in 1933, the Zionist movement was “not primarily engaged in saving individuals … in the event of a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise … the enterprise comes first.” https://t.co/hd0NQ0MIal

Between 1933-1939, two-thirds of German Jewish applicants were rejected, while those accepted were lamented as low quality “human material.” https://t.co/uLIzdGYOAd

During the late 1930s and 1940s, it got worse: For decades, tension had simmered between Jewish Zionists and Jewish humanitarians. For the former, the goal was a Jewish State in Palestine. For the latter, the goal was Jewish safety and prosperity, be it in Palestine, Argentina or Mauritius.

In other words, there were the Jews who focused on rescue, on the one hand, and there were the Zionists, on the other. The Zionists were on the anti-rescue side.

That's because the Zionists were worried the Jewish donor class would fund rescue efforts over colonization of Palestine. And so the Zionists insisted that the two goals were actually just one goal, that the only way to rescue Jews was to rescue them to Palestine, even if that meant a lot less rescue.

The mental gymnastics went something like: in the future, hypothetical Jews would be in need of hypothetical rescue and that the hypothetical Jewish State would be hypothetically focused on that, and that goal trumped the real rescue needs of real Jews today.

And so Zionists around the world squashed rescue effort after rescue effort, because these were efforts to rescue Jews to places other than Palestine.

At the Evian Conference held in France in 1938, the Dominican Republic President Rafael Trujillo offered to issue up to 100,000 visas for Jewish refugees from Central Europe and settle them in an agricultural colony that became known as the Sosúa settlement. The Zionist movement quickly shot down the idea. https://t.co/OXAE4ZLBMX and https://t.co/6BQi7bDNa5

In 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain suggested Tanganyika in Africa as a possible site for German Jewish refugees, Reform Rabbi and president of the AJC, Stephen Wise, said “I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany.” https://t.co/CZJUzbToHC

Zionist representatives also shot down a British proposal for a settlement of five hundred Jews in British Guiana. https://t.co/OXAE4ZLBMX

1940: When President Roosevelt proposed a joint plan with Britain in 1940 to admit 150,000 refugees into the US, Zionist leaders opposed it as "treason." Roosevelt ultimately scrapped the initiative, admitting to British officials, “we cannot put it over because the dominant Jewish leadership won’t stand for it.” https://t.co/GHcKRjZold and https://t.co/uZ0cpPsK1F

1943: British Zionists sabotaged a motion signed by 277 Members of Parliament calling on the Government to provide asylum in British-controlled territories for victims of Nazi persecution. Both the president of the [Jewish] Board of Deputies, Selig Brodetsky, and the general secretary of the Zionist Federation, Lavy Bakstansky, worked to collapse the initiative on the grounds that the rescue effort omitted any reference to Palestine. https://t.co/4fBI92TyC2

Zionist leaders in the United States also pushed for a Palestine or nothing policy. They rejected a piece of legislation known as the Alaskan Colonization Act, which would have settled ten thousand refugees a year in Alaska over a five-year period, including many Jewish refugees. https://t.co/OXAE4ZLBMX

The Zionist focus on statehood rather than rescue did not come without controversy, even if some Zionists were happy to say the quiet part out loud.

As the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee in Palestine Yitzhak Gruenbaum put it in 1943, “we have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row… we do not give priority to rescue actions… Zionism is above all - it is necessary to sound this whenever a holocaust diverts us from our war of liberation in Zionism.” https://t.co/okcs61pXaI

He repeated the point in 1946. “I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry,” he wrote. “Let them say that I am anti-Semitic… I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.” No wonder the Zionist “rescue” committee was given little in terms of resources, funds or personnel, and even declined to accept funds contributed by the United Jewish Appeal for the rescue of Jews in Europe. Its leader thought saving Jewish lives was anti-Zionist. https://t.co/uLIzdGYOAd

Most efforts to rescue Jews to safer places abroad during WWII were sabotaged by the Zionists, who insisted on a Palestine or death policy.

After WWII, it got worse. I've written about that here: https://t.co/Jy9YA2ooYh

Most everyone understands that Zionism was catastrophic for the Palestinians. But, for Jewish supremacists like Haviv, Palestinians do not matter, so they have to invent other feel-good if fictional stories about what the Zionist movement was.

Haviv -- do you still believe in other fairy tales you were told as a kid like Santa Clause and the tooth fairy?

I've summarized some of these points in this piece below. For more content like this, subscribe to my substack: https://t.co/f41Z9QeqjB

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

One of the biggest lies repeated about the Palestine question is that the Zionist leadership "accepted" the November 1947 Partition Plan.

It was "accepted" the same way Israel "accepts" ceasefire deals in Lebanon & Gaza.

The moment after the deal is accepted it is violated.

In the case of the partition plan, within weeks of "accepting" the plan, Jewish militias in Palestine attacked Palestinian neighborhoods, villages & cities in areas allocated to the Arab State, including Jaffa, Acre, the Galilee, the Jerusalem Corridor, the Judean Hills, the Latrun area and Jerusalem itself.

Strange how this lie is never debunked in debates about the Palestine question. For a blow-by-blow account of how the Jewish militias violated the partition plan almost from the very beginning of fighting, see: https://t.co/A6l95xmlpG ch.3

[Post-Left Watch (postleftwatch.bsky.social) @PostLeftWatch]

Briahna Joy Gray gives credit to Tucker Carlson for wanting to break ties with Israel and being anti-interventionist compared to Democrats. She wants Tucker to force Republicans to contend with Trump's populist rhetoric instead of getting J.D. Vance. She worries that Tucker will be a Republican version of Bernie Sanders, by which she means a candidate who runs to the left or right of their party but pushes their supporters to vote for the nominee.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

“As a Palestinian, I am the direct subject of Zionism. I’m an expert on it, in fact, because it is practised on my body”

Mohammed El-Kurd defines Zionism in under 5 minutes. He says everything that needs to be said👇

[Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah]

“Conflict resolved” is DEMON SPEAK for ONGOING GENOCIDE

[Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah]

My latest:

Amid UN circus, Gaza economy reduced to 58 cents per person per day https://t.co/GXaLA2N3XF

[Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah]

Every Palestinian prisoner in "Israel's" torture and rape dungeons must be freed, but people need to understand that the liberal Zionist obsession with Marwan Barghouti is about finding a "credible" Palestinian leader who can make concessions to "Israel."

[President Dolund Trump 🔻 @trap_trooper]

@yuval_abraham All things said and done, to pin the blame of 7th of October is wrong. Hamas is a resistance movement, and their actions have only been a reaction to the oppression, the ethnic cleansing, and the illegal occupation of Palestine. 🇵🇸

[Captured by Ros @capturedbyros]

@yuval_abraham ‘Recognizing the atrocities in Gaza does not diminish for a moment the heinous massacre of October 7, for which Hamas is responsible’

Why keep repeating the same lies over and over when we all know about the Hannibal Directive, as reported in your own press?

[Brathwaithe Bonespurs Quackerbush IV @BrathBonespurs]

@yuval_abraham You're still complicit, laundering the October 7th Hoax, where the IOF vaporized everyone, under The Hannibal Directive.

There were no beheaded babies.

There were no rapes by Hamas.

👹🤮👹

[Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם @yuval_abraham]

בגלל העניין והחשיבות הציבורית אני ורחלי החלטנו ביחד עם הגרדיאן שהסרט נז״א יהיה נגיש באינטרנט בחינם, ללא הגבלת זמן, כדי שכל אדם יוכל לצפות בו ובעדויות החיילים. זה יקרה בעוד כמה שבועות, בנובמבר, במועד הכי מוקדם שהצלחנו לקבוע. עד אז פנינו לבתי קולנוע בישראל והצענו להם את הסרט ללא עלות, בתקווה שיוקרן בארץ כבר עכשיו, במקביל להפצתו בבתי קולנוע בעולם. הצגתו תהיה החלטה אמיצה אל מול אלימות גדולה שמכוונת להסתרתו. אני יודע שיש ביקוש אדיר לצפות בסרט ואני מקווה שבאופן הזה כולם בקרוב יוכלו לראות אותו: בין אם בבתי הקולנוע ובין אם באינטרנט בעוד כמה שבועות.

הרבה דברים לא נכונים נאמרו עלינו ועל הסרט בשבוע החולף. הסרט מבוסס על תחקיר עיתונאי מקיף של שלוש שנים והפרטים בו מאומתים ומוצלבים. הוא ידבר בעד עצמו והאמת סופה להתבהר.

עשינו את הסרט כדי לעורר דיון ציבורי לגבי המעשים של הממשלה בעזה, ההרג של יותר מ73,000 בני אדם, רובם אזרחים, הנרמול של מלחמת השמדה, של התפיסה ש״אין בלתי מעורבים״. עשרים וארבעה חיילים וחיילות עשו צעד ודיברו מול מצלמה על מה שחברה שלמה לא רוצה לדבר עליו.

ההכרה בזוועות בעזה לא מפחיתה לרגע מהטבח הנפשע של השבעה באוקטובר, שחמאס אחראי עליו, שחיילים מדברים עליו בסרט, ושאין לו שום הצדקה. להפך. הרי ההתעלמות ממה שקורה בעזה היא מהגורמים שסללו את הדרך לשבת הנוראה ההיא. וההתעלמות הזו נמשכת.

עיתונות היא לא בגידה. ביקורת היא לא בגידה. זו חובה של כל אזרח שממשלתו מבצעת פשעים לדעת ושל כל חייל שהיה עד להם לספר. מסתובבים כאן אלפי חיילים כאלה, שיצפו בסרט ויזהו את מה שמתואר בו באופן אישי: את ההרג של אנשים לא חמושים שחוצים קו מדומיין, את אישורי הנז״א במאות, את התקיפות המערכתיות בבתי משפחות, את השריפה וההשמדה הפיזית של עזה, רצח וירי על אנשים רעבים במרכזי מזון ופשעים נוספים שאין להם הצדקה. גם אם זה מפחיד, זו חובתכם למצוא את הדרך להעיד על מה שראיתם. יגידו לכם שכדאי להסתיר את האמת למען הסברה בחו״ל, אבל זה קשקוש. שם יודעים כבר הכל. פשעים לא מסבירים אלא עוצרים. הסתרת האמת קודם כל מרעילה את החברה שלנו ומעל הכל מאפשרת לפגיעה בבני אדם בעזה להימשך.

ובנימה אישית: אני כותב על מדיניות האש של הצבא בעזה בעברית ב״שיחה מקומית״ כבר שלוש שנים. התחקירים זכו להתעלמות בישראל. עכשיו בפעם הראשונה משהו נסדק במסך ההתעלמות - וזה דבר חיובי. זה דבר בריא. כן, זה מגיע עם מחיר אישי גדול. היה שבוע קשה. אבל בתוכו גם יש המון תמיכה, והרבה נדיבות. מה שבטוח: האיומים לא יעזרו. זה לא מרתיע אותנו. אני ורחלי נחזור לארץ ונמשיך להיאבק על עתיד המקום הזה ביחד עם שותפים רבים.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

💢 Israel has killed 1,402 Palestinians and carried out more than 5,000 ceasefire violations in Gaza

Israeli forces have carried out at least 5,064 ceasefire violations across Gaza since the ceasefire agreement took effect, including 2,187 airstrikes and shelling attacks and 2,097 incidents of live fire, according to a report shared by the Palestinian side with mediators and obtained by Drop Site News.

Since the “ceasefire” took effect, 1,402 Palestinians have been killed — including 300 children, 141 women, and 42 elderly — and 4,880 wounded, nearly half of them children, women, or elderly. Another 194 Palestinians have been detained.

Israel also continues to hold approximately 34 square kilometers beyond agreed withdrawal lines and has blocked urgent repairs to electricity, water, and sewage infrastructure, as well as the entry of heavy machinery.

▪️ Only 13,397 of 34,400 planned crossings through Rafah were carried out (~38.9%)
▪️ Only ~34.6% of agreed humanitarian and commercial aid has entered — an average of about 208 trucks per day vs. 600 agreed
▪️ Fuel deliveries at just 15.4% of agreed levels

[shantiwater @shantiwater]

I saw Kirk say this and was aghast - his racist orientalism views are out there and I’m so sorry that you and khalil were subjects of his deranged bigotry. I subscribe to Zeteo and appreciate your work!

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

@AnaKasparian A bizarre response. I point out that Kirk wasn’t the champion of free speech you suggested he was, and wanted me deported for my speech - he also wanted Mahmoud Khalil deported for his speech - and your response is to mock and be snarky?

Bizarre.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[Phantom Pain @phantompain1984]

ISRÆLI INTELLIGENCE HACKED THE PHONES OF YOUNG GIRLS IN GAZA TO HELP TARGET THEIR FATHERS.

@MaxBlumenthal, speaking about the NAZA documentary:

“Isræli intelligence hacked into the phones of young girls in Gaza to determine when their fathers would come home.

Then they would order an airstrike on their homes and listen to the girls burn alive.”

This is what NAZA exposed. Check the quoted thread for more details 🧵⤵️

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

Millions of Americans are learning for the first time about Israel’s genocidal “Where’s Daddy” targeting system, and the IDF’s policy of exterminating entire Gaza families in their homes while they sleep

[The Grayzone @TheGrayzoneNews]

Max Blumenthal tells Tucker about crimes exposed in the new film NAZA:

“Israeli intelligence hacked into the phones of young girls in Gaza to determine when their fathers would come home.

Then they would order an airstrike on their homes and listen to the girls burn alive”

[shantiwater @shantiwater]

😱😱this sadly does not surprise me as there is nothing the Zionists won’t do .

[Briahna Joy Gray @briebriejoy]

A cartoonishly evil country.