Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism

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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • The transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel may constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws and risk State complicity in international crimes, possibly including genocide, UN experts said today, reiterating their demand to stop transfers immediately.

    “These companies, by sending weapons, parts, components, and ammunition to Israeli forces, risk being complicit in serious violations of international human rights and international humanitarian laws,” the experts said. This risk is heightened by the recent decision from the International Court of Justice ordering Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, having recognised genocide as a plausible risk, as well as the request filed by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. “In this context, continuing arms transfers to Israel may be seen as knowingly providing assistance for operations that contravene international human rights and international humanitarian laws and may result in profit from such assistance.”


  • Sending Israel military aid explicitly for uses that must abide by International Law, such as to protection from Iran for example, that is conditional military aid. The Biden Administration is not doing that, they know full well that the unconditional military aid sent to Israel is being used for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza

    Saying that they support a ceasefire while simultaneously supplying unconditional military aid to a nation engaging in genocide, while it might provide some plausible deniability, is still a violation of international law and morally representable










  • The destruction and control of water infrastructure is deliberate

    In 1967, Israel seized control of all water resources in the newly occupied territories. To this day, it retains exclusive control over all the water resources that lie between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, with the exception of a short section of the coastal aquifer that runs under the Gaza Strip. Israel uses the water as it sees fit, ignoring the needs of Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip to such an extent that both areas suffer from a severe water shortage. In each of them, residents are not supplied enough water; in Gaza, even the water that is supplied is substandard and unfit for drinking

    Israel has been holding the Gaza Strip under blockade for more than a decade, since June 2007. It does not allow any materials in that it considers “dual purpose”, i.e., that can be used for either civilian or military purposes. This includes construction materials, such as cement and iron, and other raw materials. All these are needed to repair Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure, which were heavily damaged by Israeli bombings, especially in Operation Cast Lead (which began in late 2008) and Operation Protective Edge (the summer of 2014).

    The coastal aquifer, on which residents of Gaza depend for water, has been polluted by over-pumping and wastewater contamination, making 97% of the water pumped from it and supplied to homes unsafe to drink. As there are no other water sources available, the over-pumping continues and the aquifer is on the brink of collapse. Residents have no choice but to cut back on drinking and buy desalinated water from private vendors. Yet an estimated 68% of this water is also polluted, increasing the risk of diseases spreading among the population.


  • You mean the Al Ahli Hospital? The one instance where it is still inconclusive? Yet you are convinced it’s Hamas, I wonder why. The hospital where we know for a fact was hit by Israeli rocket fire days prior. All the while, Israel has never stopped bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, historical sites, Refugee camps, tens of thousands of children, hundreds of journalists, and international aid workers

    The IDF lies routinely, yet your so caught up in Israeli propaganda you still justify all that with the ‘human shields’ bullshit. Yet the only side that has extensive evidence of using actual human shields, is the IDF using Palestinian civilians.

    This was not the first airstrike on the hospital in question. The New York Times confirmed that the same hospital had been hit by rocket fire on Oct. 14, 2023, before the more recent attack, in which four people had been injured.

    More than half of Gaza’s homes destroyed or damaged, 80 percent of commercial facilities, 85 percent of school building, 16 out of 36 hospitals are partially functioning, 65 percent of road networks, 65 percent of cropland damaged

    Following past Israeli military operations in Gaza in 2009 and 2014, Amnesty International repeatedly investigated “human shields” accusations and, while it did accuse Hamas of other violations of international humanitarian law, it found no evidence to back up the specific accusation of “direct[ing] the movements of civilians to shield military objectives from attacks.”

    there is extensive evidence of the IDF quite literally engaging in human shielding — forcing Palestinian civilians to approach houses for them because they’ll be less likely to be shot at than Israeli soldiers, for example. Israel’s High Court banned the practice in 2005, but Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports that “soldiers continue to occasionally use Palestinians as human shields even after the court ruling, especially during military operations.”





  • I’m not comparing the treatment to death camps, I’m comparing it to concentration camps.

    The mass executions of prisoners by the Nazis ramped up in the last few years. Is your argument that we need to wait until the death rate is comparable in the Palestinian Occupied Territories? Because my argument is to stop it now

    If you want to go for a direct comparison with Nazi Germany, then you’d want to look at the Jewish prisoners in the Warsaw Ghettos.

    What is the point in trying to rank genocides? The only useful part of doing a comparison is to recognize how dehumanization occurs, and how to recognize a genocide early in order to prevent as many deaths as possible.




  • The cause for the split was that Fatah was viewed as corrupt. Since at least 2012, Israel has focused on strengthening the split to keep Palestinian leadership fractured while the settlements continue.

    This really turned and came to a head in 2007, when Hamas, after winning democratic elections in 2006, rose to power, and the Israeli authorities, along with the U.S., attempted to initiate a regime change operation, which facilitated a civil war between Hamas and Fatah and allowed Hamas to take over the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israeli authorities have actively embraced the idea that Hamas would be accepted as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip. Now, part of the calculus in that is because of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians. This is a demographic issue. Israel wanted to sever the Gaza Strip from the rest of historic Palestine in order to reinforce its claim that it’s a Jewish-majority state. By getting rid of 2 million Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are refugees demanding return, Israel can claim to be both a Jewish state and a democracy and restructure what is its apartheid regime.

    As far back as December 2012, Netanyahu told prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Margalit, in an interview, said Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.

    Israel’s goal was “to ensure that the next confrontation between Israel and Hamas will be the final showdown”, he wrote in the memo, dated December 21st, 2016. A pre-emptive strike, he said, could remove most of the “leadership of the military wing of Hamas”.


  • I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted when you’re right. The right-wing of the Israeli Government even assassinated Rabin because any concessions to Palestinians was seen as too far. Instead, Israel continued the settlements based on the Areas A,B and C from Oslo, while the PA denounced and rejected Resistance of the encroaching settlements/military bases and violent settlers. Meanwhile Palestinians were never given self-determination and the Right of Return was never even considered. These failures led directly to the conditions for the 2nd Intifada

    The Oslo Accords were supposed to bring about Palestinian self-determination, in the form of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This would mean that Israel, which was formed on the land of historic Palestine in 1948 in an event Palestinians know as the Nakba, would accept Palestinian claims to national sovereignty. The claims, however, would only be limited to a fraction of historic Palestine, with the rest left to Israel’s sovereignty.

    Elements of the far-right were so opposed to the Oslo Accords that Rabin himself was assassinated in 1995 for signing them. Among the people who had threatened Rabin before his death was Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s National Security Minister.

    Meanwhile, Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, warned that a two-state solution would forgo the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created.


  • Did you read the article or just the headline?

    In order to achieve a cease-fire deal that leads to international funds to rebuild Gaza, Hamas understands it must make concessions.

    “We are not willing to come back to govern the Gaza Strip,” Naim says, though he doesn’t say for how long.

    “What we are calling for is a Palestinian unity government, formed from technocrats who are not affiliated to any faction but supported from all factions … to run the situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” he says.

    Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah, which has a bigger presence in the West Bank, struck a deal recently, with China as a broker, that calls for the creation of a unity government. It’s unclear when, or if, this will happen. The two factions fought one another for control of Gaza in 2007, leading to Hamas’ takeover of the territory and an Israeli-led blockade strictly controlling movement in and out of the enclave.

    Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution

    Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ

    How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution

    ‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe