spot on. it bugs me when ppl who are opposed to zionism make it an entirely “white/ashkenazi” problem bc like. y’all. sephardim and mizrahim in israel tend to be extremely zionist. they also tend to hold a lot of anti arab bias bc of their experiences being violently expelled from arab countries. is it right to have those biases? no. but it’s understandable given what they went through, the majority of them within their or their parents’ lifetimes. itamar ben-gvir is not a “white eastern european ashkenazi colonizer” he’s a brown jew whose parents are iraqi kurdish, and he’s arguably one of the most extremist right-wing leaders in israel right now. he’s a straight up kahanist. he makes netanyahu look like a centrist. so all the ppl who are like “just ship all the white jews back to poland and balance will be restored!!” are just revealing how little they actually know about israel and the real issues there, let alone how to fix them. if you want arab-jewish relations in the area to improve, you have to acknowledge the deep seated trauma and resentment that’s been festering in the sephardi/maghrebi/mizrahi jews of israel whose experiences are repeatedly erased, ignored, denied, and still ongoing, and you have to stop thinking of this shit through the leftist american lens of “white people inherently bad and racist, brown people inherently good and righteous.” most of the time trauma does not make you better, it just fucks you up.

#i/p discourse#yeah this#like if you’re drawing a line in the sand and it’s based on skin color I am… suspicious#but if that line in the sand also puts fucking ben gvir on the ‘right side’ then I’m not just suspicious I am laughing in your face#you cannot claim to be pro-Palestinian if you casually make comments that erase the existence of millions of Palestinians#while simultaneously uplifting literal kahanists just because they have the right phenotype and you don’t know enough to understand#that the things that are coming out of their mouths are not just anti-Arab but literally genocidal#I keep thinking about that person who literally thought his name was ‘Benjamin Gvir’#like girl I’m sorry but I don’t think you’re qualified to speak on this issue lol

@penrosesun, your tags pass peer review.

tbh i don’t really recommend that video. it’s not from a jewish perspective, so it’s missing a lot and there are definitely some biases of hers that really show through. if you’re interested in a historical jewish perspective, dr. henry abramson has a ton of videos about jewish history, including the early zionist movements to modern jewish history. obviously he is not without bias, which he is very transparent about, but his perspective is very much the standard jewish historical perspective. and if you want the perspective of an israeli mizrahi jew, i recommend “a mizrahi manifesto” by hen mazzig. also not without bias, and it might be a tough read, but i think it’s an important perspective to understand, whether you agree with him or not. basically, overall, if you’re wanting to learn about zionism (not kahanism, to be clear) your best bet is to go to jewish sources first — and yes, sources you might disagree with.

I was asked why there's a zionist claim that the Palestininian identity is not legitimate. And I think it's important to understand why Palestinians as a whole are seen as a threat by Israel. To understand why it's not about Hamas.

The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.

I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.

Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they're just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just... scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go "Arab." An Arab is an Arab. It's a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it's all the same to them.

It's a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.

Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren't the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don't create an ethnostate by sharing.

You still hear echoes of this mentality. Why won't all these Muslim countries take the people of Gaza as refugees? That's asking why they won't let Israel make its ethnic cleansing more neat and convenient. Yes, refugees should be taken in and given shelter. But this question shifts responsibility away from Israel. Palestinians shouldn't be forced suffer either ethnic cleansing that leaves them as refugees, or a genocide.

August 18, 2014

August 19, 2014

Hey Lexi!

It’s a pretty messy and complex situation, in that there are factors dating back to Israel’s founding 64 years ago that continue to contribute to every aspect of the situation.

But I’ll do my best for a brief “What’s happening now”.

The Gaza Strip is a tiny 4 by 23 mile strip of land along the Mediterranean that is home to 1.6 million Palestinians, 80% of whom are refugees who were forced into that corner when they were kicked out of their homes during Israel’s founding in 1948. 

In 2006, the US and Israel basically forced an election on the Palestinian people to decide what group would run the country, and the top two contenders were Fatah, which has a long-running history of aiding the Palestinian cause but have recently become nothing more than Western-Backed and funded cronies, and Hamas, which was basically a more radical group that was created as a response to Israeli aggressions and the lack of an armed, unified group to resist it.

The US and Israel were banking on Fatah winning, but instead, Hamas won, because it was basically an election of “The old and corrupt” against “The “not” old and corrupt”, and the Palestinian people wanted a change from the stalemate we had been stuck in with Fatah.

Because Israel and the US weren’t happy with the results, they funded and armed Fatah to “fight out” Hamas, who were democratically elected through an process that they pushed in the first place, which resulted in civil war, and Hamas being pushed into the Gaza Strip, where they currently rule, while Fatah retains control of the West Bank.

After the brief civil war, Israel imposed a siege on the Gaza strip, allowing no-one in or out, no medical/building supplies, food, clothing, or anything else without Israeli approval, which was never granted.

Fast-Forward, to 2012, the Gaza Strip is in shambled, people are dying of malnutrition, facing medical crises’ because they have no supplies, and are basically forced to merely “exist”, rather than to live as normal human beings. The siege is so severe, that Israel has literally set a calorie limit in which it dictated the amount of food that was allowed in that would keep people from just barely starving to death, with multiple reports stating that within 6 years, the Gaza Strip will be an unlivable region unless something drastic is done to save the area.

Last month, Israel “accidentally” killed a 13 year-old boy as he was playing soccer with his friends after a bullet struck his abdomen. Shortly after, they opened fire on a 23 year-old mentally disabled man who wondered too close to the “buffer zone” surrounding Gaza, and refused to allow anyone to treat his wounds, from which he could have been saved. He died shortly after.

In retaliation, the PFLP [another armed group within Palestine] launched a rocket attack on Israeli patrol forces near the border of Gaza, wounding 4. 

That attack is what Israel considers the “start” of the current conflict, while ignoring the previous two killings.

Israel responded by assassinating one of the top leader of Hamas and the Gaza Strip, who had at the time been drafting peace-plans towards Israel, despite having a history of terror attacks. 

Hamas then responded by launching many rockets into Israel, while Israel continued to launch relentless, punishing air-strikes on the Gaza Strip. Due to the fact that the strip is so small and so crowded, and due to Israeli use of massive missiles in their strikes, no where is safe within the strip, and no one is allowed to even leave. There are no places to seek shelter, no places to hide, and nothing to do but stay in place and pray that you’re not the next piece of “collateral damage”

In the last 4 days, 73 Palestinians have been killed, with early reports claiming 21 children, 9 women [two of whom were pregnant] and 6 elderly among them, with an estimated 700 injured [with injuries ranging from mutilations resulting in physical disabilities, broken bones, or other less extreme tragedies], of which 150 are children. 

In the same time frame, 3 Israeli civilians have been killed from the same blast on Thursday. 

While Israelis have an active missile defense system called “Iron Dome”, which shoots down rockets, along with sirens to warn of incoming rockets and when to seek bomb shelters to protect themselves from the home-made rockets of Hamas, those in Gaza are subject to shelling by land, air and sea. 

There have been talks that the conflict could escalate and that Israel may send troops within the Gaza Strip, which is a source of great fear, considering the last ground invasion Israel launched resulted in the deaths of 1400 Palestinians, between 750 and 930 of which were civilians, while Israeli forces lost 10 combatants [4 to friendly fire] and 3 civilians.

I know this is a exhausting wall of text so I’m sorry about that, but I tried to cover all the bases of the conflict so that I can have this here for future reference. 

I hope I helped you a bit :)

[Made rebloggable by request]

thanks mohammad!

this was a really good summary of what is going on in Gaza, if you have any questions or comments about what’s going on mohammad is a great resource of information and conversation!

Stuff like this just hurts my heart and makes me sick

This is helpful.

Ah, wonderful. Another 'it is all their fault' walloftext.

Don't get me wrong, it's great to have facts out there. And this is, at least, accurate so far as it goes (and so far as my knowledge can tell). Trouble is, there's another set of facts equally accurate and equally persuasive from Israel's side of things. Pretending that one side is a poor suffering victim and the other is a violent monster never. helps. anything.

And no, I'm not Israel-partisan. I'm not Palestine-partisan. The whole sorry mess just makes me nauseous.