The Middle East Thread

You would be branded as an anti-Semite, or worse.

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This morning in western #Rafah: families have moved as far west as possible, now reaching the shore & along the beach. Today awoken by navy shelling.

Inland in Rafah is now a ghost town. It’s hard to believe there were over 1 million people sheltering here just a week ago. pic.twitter.com/2vcJRutzOS

— Louise Wateridge (@UNWateridge) May 14, 2024

Sticks and stones


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I’d live with that. But that’s me

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“Look how many police officers are here,” he said. “Where were they on October 7? A force like this could conquer Lebanon. I feel no differently toward them than I do toward the terrorists of the Nukhba [Hamas’ elite commando unit]. I’m an Israeli citizen, loyal to the state, I do national service — and this is what happens.”

Cunts :rage:

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Decent discussion of the tightrope act that Egypt has been forced into:

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This is very significant. Gallant openly rebels agains Netanyahu. His words are very interesting and he also makes a hell of a lot more sense than Netanyahu, who seems to have no plan but to please everyone in his coalition:

Thread by @OrenCNN on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App?

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https://twitter.com/Joyce_Karam/status/1790822559690133914
https://twitter.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1790766751300366833

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Meanwhile, in the asylum part of Israel:
https://twitter.com/IhabHassane/status/1790842821190041807
https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/politic/749674/

It’s just babble and I don’t think Netanyahu decided on this tbh. But Smotrich and Ben Gvir did say those words of course, but they are delusional fascists, so I don’t know about how serious I take them.

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Wouldn’t be a bad thing if the Palestinian Authority do collapse. Probably that’s why it wouldn’t happen.

Surprised that Benny wasn’t the one speaking out.

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Can’t find the link (WP/NYT) now, but I read a news that several Israeli soldiers have been killed by friendly fire in northern Gaza today/yesterday.

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Spain denies port of call to ship carrying arms to Israel

Spain has refused permission for a ship carrying arms to Israel to dock at a Spanish port, its foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, said on Thursday.

“This is the first time we have done this because it is the first time we have detected a ship carrying a shipment of arms to Israel that wants to call at a Spanish port,” he told reporters in Brussels.

“This will be a consistent policy with any ship carrying arms to Israel that wants to call at Spanish ports. The foreign ministry will systematically reject such stopovers for one obvious reason: the Middle East does not need more weapons, it needs more peace.”

Albares did not provide details on the ship but the transport minister, Óscar Puente, said it was the Marianne Danica that had requested permission to call at the south-eastern port of Cartagena on 21 May.

El PaĂ­s said the Danish-flagged ship was carrying 27 tonnes of explosive material from Chennai in India to the port of Haifa in Israel.

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He’s not known as ‘the magician’ for nothing. Who would bet against him being re-elected on a anti-two state manifesto were elections to be called , in spite of his litany of failure and corruption ?

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Marwan Barghouti spends his days huddled in a cramped, dark, solitary cell, with no way to tend to his wounds, and a shoulder injury from being dragged with his hands cuffed behind his back.

The point has been made a few times that Israel as a country has changed and while there is a significant opposition to him and his policy they are now the minority. I strongly believe that a big issue in US politics is too many in power have an ossified view of the Israel they knew when they were younger and have not grappled at all with the change that has slowly occurred. This piece by the NYT is a good description of that change

https://x.com/KBAndersen/status/1791120398882394470

Also of note that the author or the tweet has written a couple of fantastic books on similar themes in US politics

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Another factor which I had not appreciated until this week is the ethnic composition of Israel now. An Israeli-Canadian friend of mine who is unapologetically Zionist but troubled by what is happening in Gaza explained to me the significance. In much of the world, we still think of Israel as being fundamentally a nation state of European Jews, and it really isn’t that anymore. The majority of Israeli citizens now descend from populations from the Middle East and North Africa, and the prism through which they view the Palestinian Nakba is more akin to the Partition of India than any colonization framework. Equally, they all have similarly brutal family histories that don’t make them particularly sympathetic, and generally have not come from societies with even weak democratic traditions.

Throw in a sprinkling of the nutjob ultra-Orthodox Americans, and the balance is completely different from when he was growing up in Israel. As he simply put it, despite growing up with the active terrorism of the PLO/PFLP/etc. and being traumatized by Munich, he simply doesn’t have the same deep well of hatred driving his thinking.

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