I am co-sponsoring the @RashidaTlaib-led resolution recognizing the ongoing Nakba, the erasure and dispossession of the Palestinian people who currently face a brutal occupation.
This is the first time I’ve heard an American at John’s level speak the truth as is:
Evangelical Christians in the U.S. have destroyed the Christian community in Palestine.
That conversation is long overdue
A Palestinian whose family was ethnically cleansed from Gaza in 1948 won the Nobel Prize. He was lucky 1srael did not kill him, as they routinely do with skilled Palestinians.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan says Western states have "burned down" the UN Security Council, the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to protect Israel.
One has to be blind to history to forget that Jews lived 1300 years in Arab lands, & self-identified as Arabs, without any marked social tension with Muslims (<< than between Muslim groups). A rabbi could certify meat as halal & could get involved in Islamic jurisprudence.
The wedge started in Algeria with Cremieux.
1/ I’m an Israeli academic. My community is still too silent about the war in Gaza. Following my viral tweet last month, this is the updated & expanded version of how I see things based on >1000 articles and 1000s of videos/images of the war. 🧵of summary conclusions:
Supporting Palestinian human rights does not make you an Islamist.
Criticising the Israeli government for their crimes against humanity does not make you antisemitic.
Fear of being labelled as one of these is the goal to silence you.
Do not cower.
Lives depend on our voices.
This is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary interviews of a former senior US government official on Gaza.
This is Chas Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Key points in the video:
- He agrees that many of the victims of Oct 7th were killed by the Israeli army in the form of "undisciplined fire by helicopters with hellfire missiles or by tanks with incendiary rounds directed at buildings". In the case of the victims of the music festival he even says they "were largely killed, it appears, by hellfire missiles and by other undisciplined fire by Israeli forces". To him this "disgrace in military terms" stems from a "lack of discipline and training necessary to respond" but also from the IDF's "Hannibal directive", which "says that rather than get into bargaining over hostage exchange you should just kill the Israeli hostages along with their captors."
- He says that with Oct 7th "Hamas had 2 objectives": 1) "Put the Palestinian self-determination issue back on the global agenda", something he says they've "succeeded" in doing since they're is "widespread recognition outside Israel that only self-determination for Palestine in the form of a 2-state solution can provide security to Israel". He says that even in "the US, which has a larger Jewish population than Israel, many Jews have come to realize that this is the case. Younger Jews in particular in the U.S. are very disillusioned with Zionism and don't want to suffer contagion from it in the form of antisemitism, which is actually growing now as a result of Israeli actions".
2) "Give Hamas enormous popularity among Palestinians because they are seen as having stood up, as having been willing to accept death rather than captivity". He refers to Norman Finkelstein's "analogy of slave revolts in the U.S." and particularly the "1831 revolt by Nat Turner, a well-educated very intelligent enslaved African who led a slave revolt in Southern Virginia which had as its objective the murder of every white person they encountered." He says it "raises a moral question: 'Is the violence of the slave-owner morally the same as the violence of the slave trying to end that violence?'. The same moral question arises with Israeli oppression of Palestinians versus Palestinian resistance to oppression."
- All in all he concludes that much like the violence against African-Americans that followed slave revolts in the 19th century, the Israeli vengeance against Palestinians "won't be remembered fondly by anyone in the future". In fact he goes as far as saying that "when people think of Israel in the past they thought of it as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust... now they will think of it as the home of perpetrators of genocide. When they think of Israel, they will think of burned buildings and dead babies. This is an image problem of a fundamental nature and from the point of view of Israel it strips Israel of its protection by charges of antisemitism against anyone who is critical of Israel because to be critical of people who are carrying out genocide cannot be antisemitism, it cannot be considered immoral. Antisemitism is a despicable attitude but to oppose genocide by Israel is not."
WOW, this might be THE most important piece of journalism on the war on Gaza since it began, by Israeli newspaper @972mag :
https://t.co/njWGP6RpDO
Essentially they confirm, with unimpeachable sourcing, that the killing of civilians was all calculated and intentional.
Their investigation is "based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions."
What the investigation reveals is that "the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed."
One source told them: "Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home."
Even more dystopian - and this might be a first in the history of warfare - a lot of the targets are identified by AI: for instance they "use of a system called 'Habsora' ('The Gospel'), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can 'generate' targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a 'mass assassination factory.' According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives."
I'm not going to copy the whole article here, you have to read this for yourself. IT IS INSANE. They've essentially been running, as the sources say, a "mass assassination factory" at a terrifying scale with massive and intended "collateral damage" (often the targets' entire families, or even sometimes much of their neighborhood), alongside an objective to destroy much of Gaza to “create a shock”, all on a population that had nowhere to escape. It'll likely remain in history books as one of the most depraved massacres in modern history.