Robert van Krieken

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, U. Sydney, Adjunct Professor, UCD, Adjunct Professor, U. Tasmania. #VoteYes

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

This conversation between Alexei Sayle, Miriam Margolyes & Michael Rosen is magnificent. Funny, fascinating, heartfelt, insightful & wise. The very best of Jewish humour, intellect & progressive politics. Definitely the Right Jews

[Josh Bornstein @JoshBBornstein]

Very good column by @mehdirhasan on the destruction of free speech on Palestine although as I noted on my book, the right declared war on free speech well before October 7 2023. https://t.co/WbIgoyYdyE

[Woke Doggie @DoggieWowser]

@DavidShoebridge Jennifer Parker disabled commenting on her post, because she knows people would post this short video that perfectly explains what she can't and won't.

[Rabbi David Mivasair @RabbiMivasair]

This mass murder by Zionist terrorists was committed on Dec 18, 1947 -- nearly half-a-year before the supposed "invasion of the nascent Israeli state" by five Arab armies.
The genocide of Palestinians goes back before the founding of the State.

[Alex @Alex_963__]

'If you ever repeat one word about the USS Liberty, and who did it to you, ''I guarantee you, I'll see you in Leavenworth or worse'', you know what worse means...?'

-'The Liberty is this microcosm of this much bigger problem in the Middle East'

[Sacrificing Liberty, 2020]

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"He venido a tomar tu casa, para eso estoy aquí. Quizás no te robe tu casa mañana, ni pasado, pero te juro que me la quedaré, creéme. Puedes ir haciendo las maletas y llevarte a tus hijos. Y si sales, acabarás en el hospital".

Colonos sionistas amenazan con robarle la casa a palestinos en Hebrón (Cisjordania), acuden a la puerta de las familias palestinas y le dicen que se quedarán con su casa como si tal cosa.

Así funciona el apartheid y la limpieza étnica sionista, con el acoso, la persecución y el saqueo.

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

And after killing her, they threw Pancake themed parties where they made pancakes celebrating "turning her into a pancake". The Israeli depravity you see on display today is not new. It is not something that started on Oct 7th. It is how the Israeli society has always been!

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Why was there a war in June 1967 in the Middle East? (800 word response):

Israeli leaders lamented the failure to conquer all of Palestine in 1948. “I never forgave the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion for not letting us finish the job in ‘48-49, both militarily and politically,” said then deputy prime minister Yigal Alon.

Or, as the military leader Moshe Dayan put it in 1949, the “frontier of Israel should be on Jordan [River]... present boundaries [are] ridiculous from all points of view.”

The feeling among many in the highest echelons of power was that “we had not completed the job in the War of Independence,” while the failure became known in Israeli folklore as the “weeping for generations.”

Few Israeli leaders were as illustrative as Abba Eban, who once said the map of Israel from 1948-1967 “reminds us of memories of Auschwitz.” Anyone who believed Israel ought to exist within its borders apparently also supported another Holocaust.

As the Israeli government's Year Book put it in 1951, “only now have we reached the beginning of independence in a part of our small country," adding "to maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic state bent upon ... expansion.”

Needless to say, Israel was unsatisfied with its borders after the war, and so it never declared them, insisting the armistice agreements resulted in armistice lines, not borders.

That’s why Israel repeatedly crossed the lines, pushing Israeli control beyond the lines in Gaza, the West Bank and Syria, if at the margins.

Although many Israeli leaders believed the country could realize its national aims within its 1948 borders, many also supported their expansion should an opportunity present itself.

This aligned with a new military doctrine gradually adopted in the 1950s, namely, “Israel must not leave the initiative in enemy hands.” Israel had to choose the conditions and timing of the fighting.

In 1962, Levi Eshkol was elected Prime Minister of Israel, & in 1963, his deputy IDF chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, outlined to him Israel’s ideal boundaries: the Jordan River in the east, the Suez Canal in the south and west and the Litani River in the north.

Many high-ranking army officers wanted to avenge their losses in 1948 in Jerusalem, Latrun, Bab al-Wad and other areas of the West Bank. Plans were developed to occupy Jerusalem and the Latrun area, the entire West Bank, and a separate plan to conquer Qalqilya and destroy it. There was also a plan to carry out “a transfer” in Hebron to avenge the 1929 massacre. “The idea that the IDF might actively seek to expand Israel’s borders came up repeatedly during the mid-1960s,” as one scholar put it.

On 1 January 1964, Yitzhak Rabin, now the army’s Chief of Staff, explained his military doctrine. For Rabin, the military would bring peace closer by “readying itself for war [through] a greater momentum for operational activity.”

War was apparently the gateway to peace. Rabin also discussed the possibility of an Israeli preemptive strike and the need to prepare talking points to support one. He saw “‘no moral flaw in thinking that the State of Israel must be large.” It was apparently a moral flaw to think Israel should remain within its borders.

After the 1966 military coup in Syria, Israel repeatedly threatened to overthrow the new government in Damascus if it did not cease support for Palestinian militant groups.

The Soviets, worried their ally in Damascus would fall, sent a false report to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser of an imminent Israeli threat to Syria in May 1967 to shore up support for the Syrian regime, leading Nasser to move troops into the Sinai.

The Egyptian army expelled UN forces from the Peninsula and closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israeli and US intelligence assessments agreed Israel would destroy the combined Arab armies with ease even if Egypt attacked first.

But to Israeli leaders, this was not a crisis, it was an opportunity. The feeling among Israel’s military leadership was that Israel had a narrow window to act. Israel could transform the balance of power in the region and renew its deterrence capacity if it acted first.

After the war, Israel’s apologists claimed the country faced a threat of annihilation and had to strike first. Yet, zero Israeli leaders who went to war in 1967 believed that. The existential threat was contrived after the fact to justify the war of choice. Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev, Ezer Weizman, Mordechai Bentov and Matityahu Peled all confessed as much in the years after the war.

And so, beginning on 5 June 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt and then invaded and occupied the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights.

Source: https://t.co/6UToS7bfGt

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

"It brings me no pleasure to compare what Israel is doing to what the Nazis did, but how can we not? When you have things like ghettos, starvation, concentration camps and planned systematic extermination of people"

Jewish journalist @kthalps

CC: LBC @lewis_goodall @hasanthehun

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Lo que las heridas cuentan".

El periódico holandés De Volkskrant ganó el Premio de Prensa Europea después de su investigación sobre al menos 114 niños palestinos de Gaza de menos de 15 años, que fueron disparados en la cabeza por "Israel", todos murieron o quedaron vegetativos.

[Hugh Laurie @hughlaurie]

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.

One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??

The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.

Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

[Robert van Krieken @robertvk]

@jan_murray @Roisin_Garden Also, House is sure patient is lying, eventually discovers what they're lying about, so as to announce left-field diagnosis and treatment, patient doesn't die.

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.

This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Peace activist Rachel Corrie, crushed to death in Gaza in 2003 by an Israeli army bulldozer destroying sections of Rafah city, wrote in her diary:

“I just want to write to my mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature.”

Rafah, like the rest of Gaza's cities and villages, is now gone – laid waste in that genocide Rachel Corrie saw unfolding 20 years earlier.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

Jimmy Dore: "We preach democracy to China. But we don't have democracy here - the oligarchs run everything. The Princeton study proved 90% of people's wishes never become law. Only the top 10% of wealthy matter.

In China, the government sits above capital. The economy works for the people. Here, capital sits above government. The economy works for billionaires"

[TBC @TBC_on_X]

Anyone else gonna buy the Chinese clown robot that'll beat your kids up for you?

[Dr Sheep Person Podge @noplaceforsheep]

.@SenatorWong?

[Dr Sheep Person Podge @noplaceforsheep]

WTF???

We aren’t human beings anymore.

We’re to be robotic cheerleaders for Israel.🙄

[Kate Emerson 🇵🇸 🔻 @KateEmersonBri]

“We call it the ‘P-word’ now,” Talwar said, referring to faculty’s hesitation to discuss Palestine amid a repressive climate on US college campuses. “There is no tolerance for the very word.”
A US academic has been suspended for assigning a case study that mentioned Palestine. The student complained (and has apparently complained about anti-Semitism in the past). This is madness under Trump and not much better elsewhere.
Talwar said her case was an example of mounting “political pressure” in higher education.

“We call it the ‘P-word’ now,” she said, referring to faculty’s hesitation to discuss Palestine amid a repressive climate on US college campuses. “There is no tolerance for the very word.”

https://t.co/igTDCOb5qn

[Dr Rhonda Garad Difficult by Design @RhondaGarad]

About 8 in 10 Australians have a negative view of Israel, with nearly half holding a very unfavourable view.