As the state of Israel behaves with consistent brutality and racism, decade after decade, public opinion has slowly turned against them. (You wouldn't know that from our shit-for-brains politicians and our shit-for-brains corporate media, bathed as they are, in the corruption of Zionist/US imperialist propaganda, and morally damaged by their own opportunism and cowardice. These are the people who gave a former SS fighter a standing ovation in the House of Commons recently. Complete fucking idiots.)
You also wouldn't know this from the online presence of some Jewish people who appear to insist that there is no sunlight between Israeli propaganda and what what every Jewish person is supposed to believe. Like their cousins, the liberal-centrists, these particular Jewish people assert that Israel has done everything in its power to co-exist with a degenerate, violent people who psychotically seek their total destruction. Arabs, Arab Muslims, and Muslims in general, have been, are, and will always be a violent, superstitious, ungrateful, impossible people who deserve everything they got, everything they're getting and everything they ever will get.
Disputing that racist claim is racist antisemitism.
Anyhow, ... I want to get back to making constructive, positive posts, but whatever.
Let’s remember how Israel’s Western allies have responded to various forms of nonviolent action by Palestinians and their supporters in recent years. In 2021, the Palestinian Authority (PA) asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories, including the attack on Gaza in 2014. The US government immediately condemned the move, and Joe Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken issued the following statement:
[T]he United States believes a peaceful, secure and more prosperous future for the people of the Middle East depends on building bridges and creating new avenues for dialogue and exchange, not unilateral judicial actions that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution.
We will continue to uphold our strong commitment to Israel and its security, including by opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.
This statement was a calculated insult to the intelligence of those who had to read it. Blinken knows perfectly well that there are no “efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution” that might be “undercut” by an ICC investigation. In practice, the Biden administration wants Israel to be shielded from any legal accountability for its actions from here to the end of time.
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In the same month as Blinken’s J Street speech, there was another attempt to hold Israel accountable through the international legal framework. The UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion on “the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.” The United States voted against the referral, along with European states like Britain and Germany. In July of this year, the British government submitted a forty-three-page legal document to the ICJ urging it not to hear the case at all.
Speaking to the Guardian, a senior Palestinian source described the document as “a complete endorsement of Israeli talking points.” Antony Blinken had previously objected to the ICC case on the grounds that the Palestinians “do not qualify as a sovereign state.” Now his British allies turned that argument on its head by presenting the occupation as a “bilateral dispute” between states. The only consistent principle at work was the demand that Israel should enjoy complete impunity.
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Israel’s backers in Europe and North America are equally hostile to the idea of pressure being applied through civil society. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is an attempt to compensate for the refusal of governments to impose any sanctions on Israel for its oppression of the Palestinians. However, there have been repeated attempts to outlaw that movement, from France to the United States.
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The hostile, authoritarian response to legal and civil society initiatives from Israel’s Western allies shows us what they really want from the Palestinians. They don’t just want the Palestinian national movement to refrain from using violence against Israeli civilians, or even to refrain from using violence at all. They want it to renounce any form of action whatsoever that might compromise their ability to support the occupation and all the violence needed to enforce it.
Next up is Cody the News Guy from two years ago:
Yeah. That's the thing that liberals are famous for. Telling us that simple issues are "complicated" and often accompanying that stupidity with ridiculous claims that they're the brave few capable of negotiating said "complexity." (Perhaps they genuinely believe their shit, immersed as they are in their garbage information system, totally divorced from reality.)
An antidote to muddled thinking is Caitlin Johnstone. Here's she is with "This Is Exactly What It Looks Like":
The Israel-Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don’t have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it’s complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would’ve told them so.
Really Israel-Palestine is one of the easier conflicts to understand on the world stage; conflicts like Ukraine or Syria are much more complicated. It’s obvious at a glance that there’s one group in power and another group being treated very badly by that group, but because the press frames it as a complicated issue with its sympathies wildly slanted toward the apartheid regime, people assume it can’t be as simple as what it looks like at first glance.
It is, though. Israel is exactly the abusive apartheid regime it looks like on the surface. Remember this as the bodies pile up and Gaza is turned into a smoldering crater. This is exactly what it looks like.
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Killing civilians with military explosives is not actually any more humane or civilized than killing them with firearms. They’ll cause gruesome injuries and slow, excruciating deaths by suffocation, burns and body trauma. They’re horrific weapons of mass murder.
The one and only reason you don’t see as much shock and horror in response to killing with military explosives as killing with firearms is because killing with military explosives is something you do from far away. When they show video clips of the buildings getting blown up, you’re not seeing the people being crushed to death underneath them and ripped apart in the blasts. It’s just a fun little sanitized clip of an explosion, like you’re watching an action movie or playing a video game.
It’s not actually any nicer than if the IDF were running around shooting civilians with rifles or running them through with swords, it’s just more detached, so it lets people psychologically compartmentalize away from what’s really happening.
That’s what so much perception management is about with the US and its allies these days; helping the public compartmentalize away from the horrors their side is unleashing upon the world. They do it with their propaganda, their lies by omission and their “Palestinian child walks into bullet” headlines, they do it with the uniform “unprovoked act of terror” statements by their government officials, and they do it by the actual ways in which they conduct their acts of mass murder.
It’s all about sedating the public to sleep and never startling them into a wakeful recognition of the ghastly things that are being done with the support of their government.
Finally, Norman Finklestein explains things on a recent "Jimmy Dore Show" that I can actually sit through:
That's my good deed for today.
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