ntf

[ntf @akexperiments]

What are you doing to combat this? @JoeBiden @DrBiden @BarackObama @MichelleObama @BillClinton @HillaryClinton @SenSchumer @SenWarren @RepRaskin @SenGillibrand
Thank you for your ongoing efforts. @SenSanders @AOC @SenatorSlotkin @KamalaHarris @Tim_Walz David Remnick @NewYorker.

[António Guterres @antonioguterres]

The Palestinian people have the right to simply live as human beings in their own land.

The @UN is fully committed to peace, stability, and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

With no real defense to its war crimes and genocide in Gaza, Israel announces that it will no longer participate in sessions of the UN Human Rights Council -- no more embarrassing pseudo justifications for the indefensible. https://t.co/oUpMKPigQi

[Sulaiman Ahmed @ShaykhSulaiman]

These journalists were killed for showing you the TRUTH

Don’t forget them.

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

People in Gaza “are searching for family members… [in] the remains of their homes. And you see the dogs as well, on the rubble. And what you notice is that the people searching are thin, and the dogs are fat – because the dogs are also searching for corpses.”

@UNReliefChief @TFletcher is in Gaza and witnessing the devastation firsthand. “This is the toughest working day of my life,” he tells me.

Yet even amidst the desperation, he says he is hearing “defiance” from Palestinians, as more aid gets in: “This is our home and we’re not going anywhere.”

[Jewish Voice for Peace @jvplive]

The Trump administration is launching an aggressive campaign to attack free speech. His first target? Universities where students have organized for Palestinian freedom. Trump is using Jewish safety and the specter of antisemitism as tools to silence calls for Palestinian liberation on campuses.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

If the International Criminal Court prosecutes Trump for obstructing justice for imposing sanctions on ICC personnel -- a real possibility -- Trump's world would become much smaller. To avoid arresting him, the 125 ICC members would tell him not to visit. https://t.co/Y58rnG9FWt

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

The world’s richest man has decided that the world’s richest country shouldn't help some of the world’s poorest people.

This is blatantly illegal. An unelected billionaire cannot simply shut down federal agencies authorized by Congress at will.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

As I seem to be shadowbanned, I repeat:

The "riviera plan" for Gaza is nonsense, which nonetheless must be taken very seriously. President Trump has basically declared his intention to commit the int'l crime of forced displacement and resort to unlawful use of force against the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination, in violation of the UN Charter - amounting to aggression.
The 191 members of the UN who still have an interest in protecting themselves from this madness, better recover from their paralysis and stand united against this imperialist lawlessness.

PS: In any case, this plan won't work. How do I know? 76 years of failed attempts by Israel, including 16 months of genocidal assault. Indigenous people do not leave their land.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace in oblivion and disengagement. But, it is not only ethically wrong to surrender to despair – it is also factually wrong that nothing good can be expected. Things change every day and, yes, the seeds of hope are already planted on the blood soaked soil of the ancient land of Palestine. They may be only seeds, but that’s how new life is born.

So, let’s take a look at the seeds of hope that are taking root underneath the rubble.

1. Israel is not winning on the battlefield

Gaza has been destroyed. Its population is on death row. And yet the smart people in the Israeli military know full well that the destruction they wreaked does not translate into a victory. Fifteen months after they re-invaded the open prison that has been the Gaza strip since 1948, they still cannot control more than a small portion of it at a time. Armed resistance, including the regular blowing up of Israel’s mighty tanks, is continuing. Israeli military officers also know that their political leaders’ stated aim, of eradicating Hamas, can never be demonstrably achieved, however many Hamas fighters they kill. As a former Israeli general put it to me: “Even if we kill most the Gazans before we declare victory, a single teenager raising the Hamas flag over a pile of rubble will prove that we failed.”

Similarly in Lebanon. Yes, Israel has killed much of the Hezbollah leadership and, yes, the ceasefire it imposed on Hezbollah succeeded in stopping the Hezbollah missile launches in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance further south. However, the ceasefire was also forced upon Israel by its army’s inability to venture without massive losses by more than a few kilometres into Lebanese territory. And, lest we forget, it is simply not true that Hezbollah had to accept the ceasefire because its missile arsenal was destroyed: Israel signed the ceasefire hours after missiles hit Haifa, and indeed Tel Aviv.

The past year, in other words, will be remembered as a cruel paradox: Israel destroyed Gaza and much of South Lebanon, mainly from the air, but failed abysmally to control the ground. The time is fast approaching when Israeli society will realise that the thousands of Israeli soldiers who died or were seriously injured were the victims of a leadership that, ultimately, placed the Israeli people’s interests very low in their own list of priorities. This is also confirmed by the readiness of Israel’s government to lie through its teeth about its own casualties on the battlefield: compare the low number of casualties officially admitted with the more than twenty thousand soldiers that Israel’s health authorities say have been admitted to veteran rehabilitation centres.

2. Israel’s economy has entered a ‘spiral of collapse’

Turning now to the medium and long term impact of the war on Israel’s economy (which is of great importance from the perspective of the apartheid state’s capacity to reproduce itself through war and devastation financially), it is instructive to read a letter signed by Israeli economists, including Dan Ben-Davidwho explain how Israel’s economic miracle hinges on a hi-tech sector that numbers at most 300 thousand people (including doctors, scientists, academics etc.) His point? If only 10% of these people leave the country, say thirty thousand, Israel’s already hugely indebted economy will fade. In Ben-David’s even starker words,

“We won’t become a third world country, we just won’t be anymore. Only 0.6% of the population are doctors, but who trains them? The senior staff in research universities are 0.1% of the people. High-Tech workers are 6% of the population. Altogether it’s 300,000 people. It’s enough that a critical mass of this group chooses not to be here tomorrow morning, and the State of Israel leaves the developed world.”

Are they leaving? You bet they are – leaving behind them more influential, more dominant than ever before the low-productivity bigots who are driving the fascist settler movement. And, the more dominant these low-productivity bigots are in government and in society, the greater the exodus of the high-tech, secular more liberally minded Israelis. This is the definition of a spiral of collapse.

3. Israel has lost in the court of public opinion – the illusion of a liberal democratic state is gone

Meanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians, and in particular the manner in which so many Israeli soldiers and politicians celebrate it in videos, speeches and posts, has claimed what is left of the illusion of Israel as a European liberal democracy embedded in a hostile Middle East. That illusion has been a central underpinning of the propaganda that helped Israeli lobbyists succeed in Washington and Europe. Now it is gone. It has drowned in the sea of flesh and blood the Israeli military has strewn all over Gaza – and the trail of destruction, hatred and viciousness that the settlers have unleashed in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Once Israel’s cleverly constructed reputation was gone, sullied, it cannot be reclaimed. And that is good news in the sense that the first step toward a just peace is the ethical fall from grace of the aggressor.

4. The situation in the Occupied Territories

Turning now to the situation in the West Bank, it is heart-wrenching to watch the non-stop violence against the Palestinians living under brutal apartheid conditions there. The violence against them comes from three quarters: From the Israeli military. From Israeli settlers. And, most tragically, from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) own security forces who are, in the midst of the genocide of their people by the apartheid state, are cooperating fully with the security forces of that apartheid state. Why the army is doing this, we know. Why the settlers are doing it, we also know. But why is the leadership of the PA doing it?

This is not the first time the PA has cooperated fully with the Israeli occupiers who steadfastly reject any prospect of a Palestinian state – the stated objective of the PA. Sure enough, the PA’s leadership have been doing this for years. But, now, in the face of the fully-fledged genocidal campaign by Israel, the PA’s excuses are becoming transparent. The unelected, unrepresentative, patently corrupt leadership of the PA is behaving as if to impress Netanyahu and Trump that they can do their dirty work for them, with a veneer of legitimacy courtesy of being Palestinians themselves. That they have a role to play. It is a pathetic plea to the genocidal US-Israeli establishment to give them a job to do against the Palestinian Resistance now that the Palestinian people has seen through them. Nothing else explains why they are turning even against Fatah members who continue to resist in Jenin and elsewhere.

This is the saddest, most depressing, aspect of the Palestinian tragedy. So I shall not dwell on it further except to reiterate the urgent need for the election of a representative and thus legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people. No peace can be imagined, let alone negotiated, otherwise. I hope and trust that the Palestinians will find a way to speak with one non-sectarian voice. Nothing short of succeeding in this will curb the genocide they face. As for the rest of us, we must stand by to help give this voice, their voice, a chance to be heard.

5. Summary

To sum up, days before Donald Trump enters the White House – a man who has never not liked any war crime aimed at eradicating the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinians as a people native to Palestine – we are at a crossroads. Mega Death and uber destruction on the ground wreaked by a US-armed and EU-supported Israel. A spiral of collapse within Israel’s social economy. Arab countries split between complicit regimes and enraged citizens. A Global South that is becoming increasingly powerful and intolerant of the Western-Israeli self-awarded right ethnically to cleanse the non-Jewish native population. And a Western public opinion that can no longer pretend to not know. What is the upshot of these ingredients?

If I were to issue an educated guess, it would be this: Things will get even worse for the Palestinians in the short run. But, in the longer run, the possibility of liberation, of a just peace for both Palestinians, who refuse to go gently into the good night, and for Israelis, who understand the trap into which Netanyahu has ensnared them, seems stronger than it has been for thirty years.

[ntf @akexperiments]

@HannaKienzler @Columbia @UCLA @nyuniversity @EmoryUniversity

[Prof. Hanna Kienzler 🧡 🇵🇸 @HannaKienzler]

Chapeau! The president at Berlin University stands her ground preventing the police from entering the building explaining that she hasn't called them, that they are unwanted, and that students in solidarity with Palestine pose no threat.

[AFSC @afsc_org]

We’ve canceled planned advertising with The New York Times after it refused to allow an ad referring to Israel’s genocide in #Gaza.

Joyce Ajlouny, AFSC's General Secretary, called the refusal “an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth.” https://t.co/gDfNmDEOSH

[Sulaiman Ahmed @ShaykhSulaiman]

FREE DR. HUSSAM ABU SAFIYAH NOW!

[Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye]

“It came under hostile fire despite having received all of the necessary clearances from Israeli authorities.”

The UN’s World Food Programme condemned Israel’s attack on its convoy in Gaza on Sunday, describing the attack as "horrifying.”

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

A night of horrors last night in Gaza. Israel killed 31 and injured 57 Palestinians over the past 24 hours. And the West watches on in full, unremitting, nauseating complicity https://t.co/toDW8VX6hF

[Paul Bongiorno @PaulBongiorno]

Just finished reading and notating this meticulously researched book.
My own ignorance shocked me as much as the chronicled atrocities.

[ntf @akexperiments]

@btselem @POTUS @VP @Pontifex_es