Liran Shapiro לירן שפירא ‏‎ ليران شابيرا

Dad of 2 girls, husband, Israeli/American, Atheist, Volleyball coach, aspiring Pracademic. Do your best to be your best.

Remember, It's just a ride- Bill Hicks

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

עינת וילף צריכה להיות שרת החוץ של ישראל.

פשוט לא הגיוני שהאישה הנפלאה הזו הקימה מפלגה, והיא לא מופיעה בשום סקר ואף אחד לא מציע לה שריון. איזו שיטה מקולקלת.

[ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf @EinatWilf]

את המילים הללו כתבתי למחרת הדיבייט באוקספורד ״ישראל מעולם לא רצתה שלום עם פלסטין״. אני מצרפת כאן את הלינק לדיבייט במלואו להתרשמותכם (החלק שלי מהדיבייט עם כתוביות בעברית נמצא בציוץ קודם):

https://t.co/lEa4Oi7Y4B

1) קל לזלזל באוניברסיטאות או בארגוני דיבייט של סטודנטים, אבל מלחמת התודעה מתנהלת בשלל מקומות וזירות וזו אחת החשובות שבהן. אוניברסיטאות משמשות כ״מלבינות״ של שקרים ועלילות דם נגד ישראל ונותנות להם מכובדות.

2) יש חשיבות אדירה להגיע למקומות הללו מוכנים וכן - עובדות זה דבר חשוב - התוצאות היו 208 מול 129 לנו, שבהינתן הסביבה והקהל זה הישג מרשים ביותר. מתוך אלה שהצביעו לנו באו אלינו כמה בסוף להגיד שהם מאוד העריכו שהתייחסנו ברצינות לדיון והבאנו עובדות ולא צרחנו. אפשר לשכנע. כל מי שמוותרים מראש לא מבינים שמסוכן מאוד להשאיר את הזירה ריקה.

3) משהו על המצב היהודי - היה מאוד ברור שמן הצד השני לא היה מאמץ בכלל לטעון טיעונים רציניים, לא היתה הכנה ותיאום - ומבחינתם אין שום סיבה, כי הם כבר רגילים שמספיק לומר אפרטהייד ורצח עם ומחיאות הכפיים מובטחות. מצד שני, יש בכך הזדמנות - עצלנות וזלזול שנובעות מכך שקל מדי הן תמיד נקודות תורפה. אנחנו שידענו שמצבנו קשה התכוננו, תיאמנו ודאגנו שנהיה מאוד מדויקים - אין ספק שקושי מחדד את המחשבה.

4) ועכשיו משהו על פוליטיקה - אחת הסיבות שאני מתמודדת בראשות מפלגה היא שאין היום אף ראש מפלגה שבאמת מבין את גודל האתגר של מלחמת התודעה בעולם שמנוהלת נגד ישראל והציונות ומוכן להשקיע מאמץ להיאבק באופן מערכתי - כלומר, לא לתת נאום פה או שם - אלא באמת לבנות מערך (שלא תלוי באדם אחד או באנגלית של אדם אחד) של מיטב הישראלים (ויש רבים) בשלל שפות, שיודעים להתמודד, שמכירים את העובדות, שנמצאים כל הזמן בזירה ולא משאירים אותה ריקה לרגע, שמבינים את האופן שבו המלחמה נגד ישראל והציונות והמתקפה על היהודים בעולם פועלת ודואגים לפעול כל העת.

[ouriel daskal 🏳️‍🌈 @odaskal]

I am not a "Hasbara" specialist or a "Zionist activist". I think the Israeli government is full of war criminals and fascists, but I have to say something to the actors from the @Marvel Cinematic Universe - your hero, Marwan Barghouti is a villain.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

The speech the U.N. would rather forget: Kofi Annan on Israel and double standards

[Marten Visser @martenvisser]

Dit is een grafiek van de oorlogsslachtoffers in Gaza, op basis van Hamas-cijfers. Ga ervan uit dat alle vrouwen burgerslachtoffers zijn. Ga ervan uit dat er net zoveel mannelijke als vrouwelijke burgerslachtoffers zijn. Dan is de verhouding strijder-burger onder de slachtoffers 1:1,5.

De grootste database ter wereld over zulke situaties is van het Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Die geeft voor conflicten in grote stedelijke gebieden een gemiddelde van 1:2. Een groter percentage burgerslachtoffers dus dan in Gaza.

Dit zou voor altijd voldoende moeten zijn om beschuldigingen van genocide in Gaza van tafel te vegen. Uiteraard kun je erover discussiëren of het gerechtvaardigd is dat Israël tegen Hamas blijft vechten zolang die zich niet overgegeven heeft of ontwapend is. (Voor de duidelijkheid: ik vind het wel.) Maar dat is echt iets anders.

Maar de vrijwel exclusieve aandacht voor deze oorlog; de vrijwel exclusieve morele verontwaardiging over deze oorlog; en vooral het ter verantwoording roepen van niet-Israëlische joden overal ter wereld over deze oorlog: dat is zo diep onlogisch. Dat is antisemitisme.

Ik zie je bruine hemd.

[Kadima Yalla @KadimaYalla]

Resolution 242. Oslo. 2SS. All part of the same siren song pulling us toward obliteration.

@EinatWilf: "I'm seeing with my own eyes Palestinians walking away again and again from an opportunity to have a state,” she said. “And it just doesn’t make sense.”

She searched for historical parallels and found none. “I checked it. You don’t have an example of a movement that claims to want independence, liberation, and self-determination repeatedly saying ‘no,’” she said. “At one point, you have to say it is not a movement for independence, liberation, and self-determination – they want something else.”

Another turning point was living through the massacres of the Second Intifada. “I began to ask a simple question: What is going on?”

https://t.co/HEtAAWKSaH

[Imshin @imshin]

An Overview of Palestinian Society

Part 1 https://t.co/wEN5bFno77

Part 2 https://t.co/om3F1QGod8

Part 3 https://t.co/NFskKQ6UrK

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Is this vital piece of information of interest to the mainstream media ?

[Shany Mor שני מור شني مور @ShMMor]

These headlines are astonishing. And it's worth asking why nothing like this emerged in 1990 or 1993 or 1996 or 2000 or 2005 or 2006? The answers tell us a lot about what's wrong with the way international community's approach to Arab-Israeli diplomacy is so fatally flawed.

1/8

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This deserves a serious answer, because I think Ihab is totally honest here.

A serious answer isn't short, but hopefully it's interesting. If you don't read it, you'll save yourself another interminable round of Israeli-Palestinian wrangling. Hopefully Ihab will read it.

This response is sad, Ihab, because you know what Hamas is, you know what it wants and what it's capable of, and you want Israelis to somehow pretend that none of the things you yourself know to be true are true.

Most of the complaints you list here go back to Hamas. Gaza's borders are closed because of Hamas. Gaza has borders with both Egypt and Israel and managed to go to war with both during Hamas's rule.

Israel doesn't "control" Gaza's electricity, it *provides* Gaza's electricity - because Hamas bent the entirety of the Gazan economy to build a tunnel system unprecedented in the history of war instead of a proper energy infrastructure.

Gaza has natural gas reserves, something that never for a moment suggested to Hamas that maybe it should stop seeking endless war for a few years to develop that energy source and develop Gaza economically.

It's depressing that Israel must provide Gaza with electricity, and not Gaza itself. But that part isn't Israel's fault. Gaza could have taken a very different path.

The population registry question is similarly a function of Hamas. Israel won't work with Hamas, mainly because it wants to murder all our children. But nothing prevented Hamas from running its own population registry and coordinating it for travel purposes with, for example, Jordan or Egypt.

Or, heck, from coordinating with the PA, which itself imposed sanctions on Gaza under Hamas rule. Even the PA.

Hamas's refusal to actually run and build Gaza is the main cause of half this list.

But there's a deeper problem with this answer. It doesn't actually address my point about the catastrophic effect of the Second Intifada and Second Lebanon War and other assorted violence from Hamas and its fellow travelers on the politics of ordinary Israelis.

You accuse me of a "comforting illusion" of Palestinian rejection (I'll respond to that in a sec), but here's your comforting illusion: "Yes, Palestinians have made mistakes, and leadership failures have cost dearly."

No, Ihab. The 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada weren't a "mistake" or a "leadership failure." It was the heart of it all, it was what Arafat always was. The bombings were popular, the discourse in the Palestinian street - discourse Palestinians expressed to my face on countless occasions and still say today in Arabic social media - was that the very fact that we were willing to withdraw for peace proved we weren't authentic inhabitants in the land and could be removed by violence.

You know that's how they talk in actual Palestine, away from the coddled Westernized elites we usually read on Twitter. But you pretend the Second Intifada was some aberration of a failed leadership, and that peace would be available if only the Israelis weren't assholes.

"Palestinians have never rejected a genuine peace deal. Even in 2008, Ehud Olmert himself admitted that the Palestinians never said “no.”"

They never said no to Olmert, perhaps, but they also never said yes, or provided their own map for Israel to consider. That kind of non-answer can reasonably be interpreted as refusal. Someone who isn't refusing generally provides a counter-offer.

No Palestinian leader ever provided that counteroffer, that Palestinian map, a specific delineation of the end of the conflict. No Palestinian leader ever had the courage to say, "this is the line, and after this line is drawn there are no more refugees, no demand to dismantle Israel or flood Israel with descendants or end Israel in any way. This is the end of war, and from now on we build new and better things."

That is not a thing any Palestinian leader has ever offered.

"And the story of 2000, endlessly recycled as proof of “rejectionism,” is far more complicated than Israel’s convenient myth — it wasn’t simply that Palestinians refused."

Of course it's complicated. Also, the Palestinians refused.

Arafat didn't just refuse Barak's specific suggestions (warning stations in the Jordan Valley or whathaveyou), he never offered a specific map for Barak to consider. It was always a tease waiting to be offered more.

That's rejection.

Pro-Palestinian scholars explain that his options were limited by Palestinian politics, pro-Israel ones that he never actually wanted peace. I don't know which is right, but it hardly matters. He couldn't accept anything being offered - and in Arabic explained that nothing he accepted would truly end the conflict in any case.

But even this endless back and forth that Israelis and Palestinians have been doing for 30 years wasn't really my point.

My point was that my little brother stood in the Ben Yehudah Market in central Jerusalem and watched a suicide bomber blow up. My point is that a friend of mine died in another bombing - and 20-year-old me, fresh from voting for Barak and a Palestinian state, had no explanation for that Palestinian response. I was willing to fight half of Israel to build a Palestine, and Palestine's only message to me - no Palestinian leader has ever actually spoken to the Israeli people in any serious way - was that I and everyone I love should be lying dead in the street.

Fall back on your comforting narratives about Netanyahu's "schemes" for eternal occupation. Palestine's problem isn't the Israeli right, it's the collapse of the Israeli left, a collapse I witnessed, a collapsed that took place in my own heart and mind in 140 little increments of fire and blood, and then hundreds more little brutalities in the ensuing years.

Until the goal of Palestinians on the ground stops being our eradication, none of the world's love and sympathy, none of the blatant antisemitism that swings into action for you at each war, none of the rage and horror and anger and marches will matter.

No more comforting illusions. I accept that there's no peace without ending the military rule, without independence and freedom. Now where's the Palestinian political faction that can win Palestine over by accepting that I too deserve to be here?

[Mosab Hassan Yousef @MosabHasanYOSEF]

Pogrom: Pierre Rehov's raw October 7 doc-from ancient hatreds to Nova's beheadings. Survivor voices. Jihadist clips. Uncomfortably real.

If you can handle truth, press play.

[•• Mahmoud @moebari97]

If you are not in Gaza, just shut the fuck up and don’t impose your ideas on us; the Palestinians suffering on the ground of ultimate hell. If the majority of us here no longer want Hamas in power, then just respect our decision, listen to us and shut the fuck up again. ENOUGH

[Kareem Jouda @kareem_1087]

I was born in Gaza. I grew up in Gaza. I’ve been living 2 years under a war that destroyed my city, Gaza. I’m telling you all, Gazan people HATE Hamas. Even their own employees hate them now. Even before October 7, the majority of Gaza wanted Hamas out. Maybe to you outside, Hamas means Palestine. To us, it’s the opposite. We are Palestine, we the people.

Being pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas is not the same thing. Don’t teach us about our community and our struggle. We were doing much better before they existed and will do much better after they get out of power in Gaza.

The Palestinian people are who you should support, not a political party that has caused us so much pain and misery. Either support our people, or at least get out of the way.

[HonestReporting @HonestReporting]

This set of maps is designed to promote the lie that Israel has been stealing land from "Palestine" since 1946.

Shame on @thetimes for including it in an "explainer."

Here's an explanation of what these maps really show. 🧵

[Kevin → Plant Daddy @KevinEspiritu]

Everything I've learned about drawing after 78 days of teaching myself to draw from scratch:

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Please, just die for the cause! It is official: Hamas’s strategy in Gaza City, which is experiencing the beginning of a ground invasion by the Israeli military, is to use the entire population as human shields to cause casualties and stop the Israeli military’s advance. This has been promoted by Hamas mouthpieces, activists, and journalists all over social media and Telegram, whereby they are telling civilians not to evacuate and remain in Gaza City even if the Israeli military issues evacuation orders, urging them to be part of the “existential fight” for the Strip.

A year and a half ago, I wrote about how in the early days of the war, Hamas both directly and indirectly prevented hundreds of thousands of Gazans from evacuating the north, causing thousands of unnecessary civilian casualties, and shared firsthand testimonies from Gazans who were shot at by gunmen affiliated with the terror group while attempting to flee.

Disturbingly, members of Hamas and sympathetic clerics kept citing an Islamic war-fighting doctrine from Surat Al Anfal in the Quran, Ayah 15 and 16, that prohibits turning one’s back to the enemy when facing them on the battlefield. One man told me that his brother was pressured by his Hamas neighbors to stay in Gaza with his family and children. They referenced these Quranic verses over and over and threatened severe consequences now and “on Judgment Day” if he were to flee the incoming IDF invasion. Imagine how many more lives could have been saved had Hamas not used its Islamist ideology to force Gaza’s population into an untenable situation.

The fascist death cult must not be able to repeat this strategy once again; all journalists, activists, humanitarians, and those who can, must do everything to expose this heinous strategy of Hamas and ensure that evacuation orders and information are disseminated widely and that safe corridors for civilians are identified and marked so that Palestinians in the Strip do not needlessly lose their lives on behalf of a Jihadi terrorist outfit whose sole strategy is to cause pressure on Israel through civilian casualties.

[Shawn Myszka @MovementMiyagi]

"In many sports (e.g., rugby, mixed martial arts), the most specifying informational variables (e.g., interpersonal distance, posture/kinematics, relative velocity values) will be directly related to the movement behaviors of another athlete (teammate or opponent; Passos et al., 2008). As Gibson stated, “behavior affords behavior” (Gibson, 1979, p. 135), meaning that how other individuals are moving in an environment will channel the opportunities for all others to behave and perform. Therefore, if opponents are not present in practice environments, as is the case in many traditionally prescribed training drills, athletes will not have the opportunity to perceive and act upon the behaviors of other living, breathing individuals who are also concurrently carrying out movements in dynamic fashions. Thus, whenever possible, it is vital that opposition is present in practice activities to maintain high levels of aliveness, so athletes are able to become more attuned, intentional, and adaptable (Myszka et al., 2023b)."

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Israel is an indisputable fact, even as we morally condemn many Israeli actions, including the limiting of food entering Gaza a few months ago, the killing of thousands, the destruction of large parts of the Strip, or the seizure of vast Palestinian lands for the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

It is nevertheless a reality that we cannot simply condemn an entire nation and await its demise, for that will not achieve our goal of a Palestinian homeland. Instead, we must transform the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis. We must restore in both Israelis and Palestinians the belief in peace as a realistic and desirable possibility.

The Palestinian narrative cannot preach the destruction of Israel and then expect Israelis to support Palestinian statehood, just as the Israeli narrative cannot promote the erasure of Palestinians and the forced displacement of two million Gazans and expect international support. Everything we do must be inspired by mutual understanding, and anything that undermines it prevents us from living together in peace.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

While in Egypt, Hamas’s senior leadership from Qatar was offered a chance by Cairo to visit the borders with Gaza and look at how humanitarian aid was making its way from Egyptian soil into the coastal enclave via territory and the Keren Shalom border crossing. The terror group’s leadership refused to go to the Gaza border, with some speculating they feared being in close proximity to the Strip might endanger their well-being and safety, or that they may literally be thrown onto a humanitarian aid truck and sent back to Gaza.

This is Hamas; this is terrorism masked as ‘resistance’; this is what it means to trigger the most destructive chapter in the Palestinian people’s history and to hide like rats out of fear that your own people are going to eat you alive for destroying their future and leaving them to be annihilated.

I call upon Arab countries, the United States, INTERPOL, the UN, International Authorities, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and all legal and executive tools for justice and law enforcement to immediately and expediently arrest Hamas’s leadership in Qatar, Turkey, and elsewhere.

I also call upon the United States Treasury Department to spearhead a global effort to seize and forfeit Hamas’s vast resources and finances and to redirect those funds for the purchase of food, medical supplies, and temporary housing units that can be sent to desperate civilians in the Gaza Strip.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

What is Zionism?