#like mass destruction of nations | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

zvaigzdelasas · 4 months

Text

[NewYorkTimes is Private US Media]

Over the past month, we’ve watched an astonishing, high-stakes global drama play out in The Hague. A group of countries from the poorer, less powerful bloc some call the global south, led by South Africa, dragged the government of Israel and, by extension, its rich, powerful allies into the top court of the Western rules-based order and accused Israel of prosecuting a brutal war in Gaza that is “genocidal in character.”

The responses to this presentation from the leading nations of that order were quick and blunt.

“Completely unjustified and wrong,” said a statement from Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister.

“Meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the United States National Security Council.

“The accusation has no basis in fact,” a German government spokesman said, adding that Germany opposed the “political instrumentalization” of the genocide statute.

But on Friday, that court had its say, issuing a sober and careful provisional ruling that doubled as a rebuke to those dismissals. In granting provisional measures, the court affirmed that some of South Africa’s allegations were plausible and called on Israel to take immediate steps to protect civilians, increase the amount of humanitarian aid and punish officials who engaged in violent and incendiary speech. The court stopped short of calling for a cease-fire, but it granted South Africa’s request for provisional measures to prevent further civilian death. For the most part, the court ruled in favor of the global south.[...]

The court was not asked to rule on whether Israel had in fact committed genocide, a matter that is likely to take years to adjudicate. Whatever the eventual outcome of the case, it sets up an epic battle over the meaning and values of the so-called rules-based order. If these rules don’t apply when powerful countries don’t want them to, are they rules at all?

“As long as those who make rules enforce them against others while believing that they and their allies are above those rules, the international governance system is in trouble,” Thuli Madonsela, one of South Africa’s leading legal minds and an architect of its post-apartheid Constitution, told me. “We say these rules are the rules when Russia invades Ukraine or when the Rohingya are being massacred by Myanmar, but if it’s now Israel butchering Palestinians, depriving them of food, displacing them en masse, then the rules don’t apply and whoever tries to apply the rules is antisemitic? It is really putting those rules in jeopardy.”[...]

The military campaign has “wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II,” the report quoted researchers as saying. The researchers, hardly some raving left-wing activists, are experts cited in one of the most respected news organizations in the world, The Associated Press.[...]

The International Court of Justice issued a nonbinding opinion in 2004 that the security barriers Israel was erecting in the West Bank violated international law, but that ruling has had no effect. The walls still stand.[...]

Indeed, what is a rules-based system if the rules apply only selectively and if seeking to apply them to certain countries is viewed as self-evidently prejudiced? To put it more simply, is there no venue in the international system to which the stateless people of Palestine and their allies and friends can go to seek redress amid the slaughter in Gaza? And if not, what are they to do?

For the cause of Palestinian statehood, every alternative to violence has been virtually snuffed out, in part because Israel’s allies have helped to discredit them. The most recent example is the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that has, in many places, been successfully tarred as antisemitic or even banned altogether. Efforts to use the United Nations Security Council have drawn U.S. vetoes for decades. Is seeking redress at the appropriate venue for alleged violations of international law also antisemitic, as Israel’s defense minister said on Friday? Does no law apply to Israel? Are there no limits to what it may do to defend itself?[...]

The Biden administration has made the shoring up of the international rules-based order a centerpiece of its foreign policy but, unsurprisingly, has struggled to live up to that aspiration.[...]

Occasionally straying from your principles because circumstances require it is very different from being seen to have no principles at all, and that is precisely how much of the global south has come to regard the United States.

It seems especially shortsighted in these times that the Biden administration elected to wave away the carefully documented case prepared by South Africa. One of the biggest threats to the rules-based international order is the growing consensus in the poor world that the rich world will apply those rules selectively, at its discretion, when it suits the powerful nations that make up the global north, such as when Russia invaded Ukraine.[...]

As far as the rules-based order is concerned, when it comes to crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, it simply does not matter who started it. [...] The best way to shore up the rules-based order is to be seen, in word and deed, as committing to the institutions and moral commitments of that order.

28 Jan 24

1K notes · View notes

spacelazarwolf · 7 months

Note

Hey there! I’ve really appreciated your posts and perspective over this past month, I’m having a hard time (as so many Jews are) and your voice helps.

I’m hoping you can help me with reliable resources. A friend of mine condemned the Hamas attacks etc (as they should, to my relief) but is under the impression that Israeli govt is doing genocide to the Palestinians. I’ve no idea how to approach that to verify (or not), I don’t even know where to start looking. Do you have any suggestions?

Thank you.

thanks! this is a really tough question, but i'm going to do my best to break it down. also if anyone's thinking of clowning on this post without reading it, inb4 "omg ur denying genocide!!!!!!" bc this post is literally outlining, in detail, all the ways the israeli government is, by definition, committing genocide.

this is really long, just a heads up.

a big frustration i have with a lot of progressive or leftist spaces is the tendency to throw around words like genocide without being able to define the term or properly apply it to the situation in question. this isn't just a semantics issue. if all you're doing is repeating the buzzwords you've heard on social media, your "activism" is going to be less than useless. it is crucial that if you are going to talk about the current genocide in gaza, you must be able to define exactly what a genocide is and how it applies to what's happening in gaza.

i'm paraphrasing from this article by the united nations. the word "genocide" was coined in 1944 by raphael lemkin in his book "axis rule in occupied europe." it was developed partly in response to the shoah, but also to previous instances of what we would now define as genocide. it was recognized as a crime under international law in 1946, and codified as an independent crime in the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide.

the definition of genocide

(from article II of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide):

in the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. killing members of the group; b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

the 10 stages of genocide

a model created by gregory stanton, the founding president of genocide watch

classification - people are divided into "them and us"

symbolization - when combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups.

discrimination - law or cultural power excludes groups from full civil rights: segregation or apartheid laws, denial of voting rights.

dehumanization - one group denies the humanity of the other group. memmbers of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.

organization - genocide is always organized... special army units or militias are often trained and armed...

polarization - extremists drive the groups apart... leaders are arrested and murdered... laws erode fundamental civil rights and liberties.

preparation - mass killing is planned. victims are identified and sepaarated because of their ethnic or religious identity.

persecution - expropriation, forced displacement, ghettos.

extermination - it is 'extermination' to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human.

denial - the perpatrators... deny that they committed any crimes.

application to the crisis in gaza

to start with the first definition from the united nations:

a. killing members of the group - YES

the death toll in gaza has risen above 8,000 according to the associated press. as far as i know, as of writing this post, there has been no ceasefire so the death toll will continue to rise.

b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group - YES

over 20,000 people in gaza have been injured, and gazans - particularly children - suffer incredibly high rates of ptsd.

c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part - YES

the israeli blockade of gaza has had devastating consequences for gazans. they are running out of food, water, fuel, and medicine, and this is costing additional lives.

d. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group - unclear but leaning toward YES

whether or not it is the explicit goal, the current bombardment of gaza has put the lives of 50,000+ pregnant women in gaza at risk, along with their babies. babies who need incubators are also in danger as generators begin to run out of fuel.

e. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group - as far as i am aware, NO

according to the us embassy in israel, the palestinian authority ministry of social development is the only authorized entity regarding adoption of palestinian children. this doesn't mean it isn't happening, it just means i was not able to find any credible sources.

the 10 stages of genocide

classification - YES there is a long history in israel of othering palestinians, both socially/culturally and legally. former israeli minister of interior and minister of justice ayelet shaked shared a racist quote from netanyahu's former chief of staff explicitly framing palestinians as "the enemy."

symbolization - not yet there are no overt symbols palestinians, even within israel, are required to wear to outwardly identify themselves, but there are identifying features on their ids. in fact, the opposite has been happening, with far right members of the israeli government attempting to pass legislation making it illegal to publicly display palestinian flags.

discrimination - YES there is, again, a long history of discrimination against palestinians within and by the state of israel. it is difficult for palestinians from the west bank or gaza to gain status in israel, israeli work permits are used as a form of control, and often forcibly separate palestinian families.

dehumanization - YES former israeli deputy minister of defense eli ben dahan said of palestinians, "to me they are like animals, they aren't human."

organization - YES israel is currently carrying out an organized and brutal attack on gaza.

polarization - YES from extremist groups like hamas, to the corruption in the likud party in israel, there are very clear signs of extreme polarization. israel's siege against gaza has caused polarization across the entire globe.

preparation - YES gazans in particular are unable to leave gaza without a permit, and now with the blockade from both israel and egypt they are essentially trapped.

persecution - YES gaza in particular could absolutely be likened to a ghetto. as stated above, (in "usual" circumstances) they are unable to leave without a permit, and since hamas took control it is nearly impossible to get an israeli work permit.

extermination - GETTING THERE if the siege continues and gazans are unable to get out of gaza, there will be catastrophic casualties.

denial - YES i often hear that "israel has a right to defend itself" but i cannot possibly find a way to frame the current siege as "self defense."

so in conclusion, israel is - by multiple definitions - committing genocide against gazans. and it's very important to be able to identify specifics, especially if you are planning on having discussions about it. and i've said it in the past, but if you are not directly affected by what's happening - palestinians in particular, but israeli citizens and jews and muslims in the diaspora are also getting hit hard - it is IMPERATIVE that you are able to talk about this with a level head. escalating tensions and pushing away potential allies is only going to make things worse. find common ground, form connections, and then have a productive discussion.

#ask avishai #i/p

2K notes · View notes

terrible-eel · 9 months

Text

I may be too stressed to articulate this clearly but I am going to try.

While Hawai'i and Maui are trending I'm going to share this link. Its a FAQ about Hawai'i's statehood and the situation Hawai'i is in at the moment. There are people who want to be part of the U.S in Hawai'i and there are people who don't, but the people of Hawai'i were never, at any point, given an option to choose.

If you want to help Hawai'i and it's people but can't donate, spread this word. Help educate people. Make Hawai'i as the tropical paradise be replaced with the sovereign nation stolen by the u.s.

It is subtropical, meaning it is much more vulnerable to arid climates caused by climate change.

It has been systematically stripped of its native food harvesting practices and any ability to farm and self sustain. It has been systematically stripped of its previous industries. Maui used to export milk and cattle. That's all been taken away.

The islands since the 1800s were exploited as plantations, burning sugar cane and growing pineapples which are not native, diverting the water and depleting the water table.

Lahaina burned because of these practices. Because the native people were no longer allowed to govern their lands.

We as local people know that tourism is bad because this systematic destruction has happened in living memory. Within my grandparent's lifetimes, within my lifetime. I have watched this island crumble at the hands of mainland startups, hoping to take people on whale watching tours that cut the whales with their boats while people aren't allowed to have a ferry between islands. People create ziplines and tours through lands that used to belong to local people for farming and cattle. Now they're bought out for photos and hikes the local people can never afford. Hundreds of jobs have been lost in the past thirty years. Mass migrations to the mainland have been made by local people, myself included because we can no longer afford to stay on the island where we were born. Working three jobs is not enough to cover the rent because the houses are bought up by mainland people who then turn these houses into vacation rentals and charge hundreds a night. Right now these very homes are being paid for by the government so that Lahaina people have somewhere to stay and it's costing the state millions that people in the mainland are reeping.

People ask why tourism is bad. Because there are people alive today on Maui that have watched the foreign industries destroy everything. Because people alive today know what used to be and knew how to take care of the ecosystem so that this kind of calamity didn't happen. Lahaina was not just fertile. They had canals and waterways. Rivers that they would drive boats through to go from one part of town to another. It was more like Venice than this desert you see in pictures.

And do your own research. The information is out there. There are two Hawai'i's. The one you see as a tourist, and the REAL one. The one we need to protect.

Let Hawaiians have their land back. Let them restore the water to the land so we can prevent further catastrophe. Tell people about REAL Hawaii.

#hawaii #Hawaii fires #Maui #maui fires #Lahaina #lahaina fires #injustice #sovereignty

1K notes · View notes

deadpresidents · 3 months

Text

The reasons Mr. Hussein failed to clarify that he had no weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to 2003 are embedded in his tragic, decades-long conflict with Washington: his furtive, mistrustful collaboration with the C.I.A. during the 1980s; the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991; the U.N.-backed struggle over Iraqi disarmament that followed; and the climactic confrontation after Sept. 11. Shortly after the Gulf War, he secretly ordered the destruction of his chemical and biological arms, as Washington and the United Nations had demanded. He hoped this action would allow Iraq to pass disarmament inspections, but he covered up what he had done and lied repeatedly to inspectors. He did not tell the truth to his own generals, fearing that he might invite internal or external attacks. His decision to comply with international demands but to lie about it to U.N. inspectors defied Western logic. But Mr. Hussein would not submit to public humiliation, not least because he thought it wouldn’t work. “One of the mistakes some people make is that when the enemy has decided to hurt you, you believe there is a chance to decrease the harm by acting in a certain way,” he told a colleague. In fact, he said, “The harm won’t be less.” Mr. Hussein believed the C.I.A. was all but omniscient, and so, particularly after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush accused him of hiding weapons of mass destruction, he assumed that the agency already knew that he had no dangerous weapons and that the accusations were just a pretense to invade. A C.I.A. capable of making an analytical mistake on the scale of its miss about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was not part of his worldview.

--Steve Coll, "Why Authoritarians Like Saddam Hussein Confound U.S. Presidents," New York Times, Feb. 28, 2024.

#Saddam Hussein #Steve Coll #New York Times #Iraq War #U.S. Invasion of Iraq #CIA

446 notes · View notes

mephistopholes-brain · 3 months

Text

“If the citizens of Gaza were white there’d be more outrage and this would be stopped!!!” This is NOT just rooted in racism! Just like in the 1400s, the Western bourgeoisie saw profit in the dehumanization of POC! Not to say there isn’t racism and Islamophobia that heavily plays into this, but writing it off as ONLY racism ignores that this is fundamentally a problem brought on by capitalistic greed. Those children are primarily being murdered because the West and IsraHell sees profit in the ethnic cleansing of an entire country. They see profit in selling weapons of mass destruction and draining the land of its resources.

On top of that, they’re using this to set an example and see how much they can get away with before people snap and recreate the French Revolution. Fuck peaceful protests. There’s nothing peaceful about the ethnic cleansing of an entire nation. In the first place, peaceful protests just means the protesters aren’t being violent! The reason it ever worked in the past was because outsiders saw the government and industries enact violence on the protesters! Even Dr. King aligned with Malcolm X!

VIOLENCE ENACTS CHANGE! IT IS YOUR CHOICE WHETHER THE ONE FACING THAT VIOLENCE IS YOU AND YOUR FAMILY OR THE CAPITALIST SCUM PROFITING OFF OF GENOCIDE!

#palestine #israhell #israel #genocide #protest #aaron bushnell #free palestine #free gaza #gaza

282 notes · View notes

workingclasshistory · 1 year

Photo

On this day, 8 April 2013, former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher died. Street parties broke out across the UK, particularly in working class areas and in former mining communities which were ravaged by her policies. Her legacy is best remembered for her destruction of the British workers' movement, after the defeat of the miners' strike of 1984-85. This enabled the drastic increase of economic inequality and unemployment in the 1980s. Her government also slashed social housing, helping to create the situation today where it is unavailable for most people, and private property prices are mostly unaffordable for the young. Thatcher also complained that children were "being cheated of a sound start in life" by being taught that "they have an inalienable right to be gay", so she introduced the vicious section 28 law prohibiting teaching of homosexuality as acceptable. Abroad, Thatcher was a powerful advocate for racism, advising the Australian foreign minister to beware of Asians, else his country would "end up like Fiji, where the Indian migrants have taken over". She hosted apartheid South Africa's head of state, while denouncing the African National Congress as a "typical terrorist organisation". Chilean dictator general Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the rape, murder and torture of tens of thousands of people, was a close personal friend. Back in Britain, she protected numerous politicians accused of paedophilia including Sir Peter Hayman, and MPs Peter Morrison and Cyril Smith. She also lobbied for her friend, serial child abuser Jimmy Savile, to be knighted despite being warned about his behaviour. Margaret Thatcher was eventually forced to step down after the defeat of her hated poll tax by a mass non-payment campaign. Pictured: Jimmy Savile welcoming Thatcher to hell, reportedly. Learn more about the great miners' strike of 1984-5 in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/1984-5-miners-strike/ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=605239344982618&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

1K notes · View notes

frida-kahl-of-the-rocky-horror · 5 months

Text

Okay, @sihatn wishes to be so hung up on the particular war crime the Israeli government is using to excessively slaughter innocent Palestinian civilians, so let’s explain the difference between Genocide, Ethnocide, and Ethnic Cleansing:

Genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group

Examples: The Armenian Genocide (where the term actually originates), the Shoah/Holocaust, Taíno Genocide, and Rwandan Genocide to name a few.

I have seen some Zionists on this platform and on Instagram argue that Israel cannot be committing Genocide because it is a “very specific instance in history that only includes the Holocaust��. That fact is ardently incorrect. For one, the first event to be called a Genocide and where the term was coined was the Armenian Genocide and countless events have been labeled a Genocide since 1943/1944 when the term was initially coined (including events coined after the fact that had already happened like the aforementioned Taíno Genocide).

Ethnocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of the culture of an ethnic group or nation without deliberately killing large numbers of people within that ethnic group or nation

Think “kill the Indian, save the man”, the American and Canadian policy against American Indian tribes and First Nations that sought to forcibly assimilate them into W.A.S.P. culture. A similar policy occurred in Hawaii during the “Republic of Hawaii” and “Territory of Hawaii” days, and even the destruction of Yiddish Culture by Zionists in Israel who feared it for being “too Middle Eastern”. Most Re-Education camps fall in this category too.

Ethic Cleansing: the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society

This term is relatively new and was coined in the aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia and Serbia’s treatment of Croats, Bosnians, and other ethnic minorities, as well as the Stalinist movement of ethnic minorities to different SSRs.

Mass Homicide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people

The only distinction here is the people are not being killed because of their ethnicity or nation, but for ✨ other reasons ✨

Now here’s the kicker, most Zionists would say they are committing Ethnic Cleansing. They might not say it out right, because the term has a nasty connotation, but they will say they’re doing the definition of ethnic cleansing.

Some propaganda reblogging Zionists might claim that they’re just committing Mass Homicide but here’s the thing, almost every example of mass homicide being committed by one nation to another nation has been an example of one of the first three categories. The only real examples of Mass Homicide actually being Mass Homicide occur within a state (see Mao famines, Pol Pot’s mass killings, or the countless purging of communists or anti communists during the Cold War).

Some (wrong) historians may claim the Bengal Famine and Irish Potato Famine were examples of mass Homicide but here’s the thing, in both cases aid from other nations and governments were barred from entering the effected places because the UK forbid it. Food exports were forced to continue to come from Ireland and Bengal because the UK forced it. The reasons these famines were so severe was because the UK had a eugenics inspired belief that the Irish and Bengalis were “sub human animals” and “less deserving of food than the Brits”.

The Irish Potato Famine and Bengali Famine were Genocides, with famine being the preferred method of killing.

Was it intentional at first? Maybe not. Did it become intentional after the fact? Yes.

But this takes us to the most important point. The difference between Genocide, Ethnocide, and Ethnic Cleansing AND Mass Homicide is the intent.

But the intent isn’t truly known until after the fact, when internal government documents are released and the facts of the situation are holistically known.

The Jews/Poles/Romani/etc knew they were going through a Genocide (or well, they didn’t know the word, but they knew what was happening) but most of the outside world didn’t because the N@zis were secretive about it. Yes some activists and Jewish/Polish/Romani/etc diaspora groups warned other governments, but these other governments (US, UK, USSR, China, France, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Italy even) were skeptical.

We don’t full know intent now, but given Herzl and Jabotinsky’s rhetoric which essentially established modern day Zionism and the Israeli state, and the establishment of Area C for Israeli settlement after conflict in the West Bank, the fact that Israel has threatened a Second Nakba, an event internationally acknowledged as ethnic cleansing, the fact that there are oil reserves underneath Gaza and the forcing of 2 million people into an airport sized camp would allow Israel to open up drilling where the ruins of Gaza city lay, or the fact that Israel is an Ethnonationalist country that relies on the superiority of Israelis over Palestinians and other neighbouring countries in order to exist makes the intent known to those of us familiar with the history of this conflict.

Ok ok ok ok ok here’s where I M. Night Shyamalan this whole thing: Genocide, Ethnocide, and Ethnic Cleansing are all the same crime according to multinational organizations like the United Nations. They are all Genocide.

All Ethnocides are Genocides, but not all Genocides are Ethnocides.

All Ethnic Cleansings are Genocides, but not all Genocides are Ethnic Cleansings.

The Nakba was an Ethnic Cleansing, therefore the Nakba was a Genocide.

The Netanyahu administration claims that their on going attack on Gaza is a “new Nakba”.

Nakba = Ethnic Cleansing = Genocide

The Netanyahu administration claims that their on going attack on Gaza is a “new Genocide”.

Genocide carries with it negative connotations. If the term was as widely used in 1944 as it is today, Hitler would deny genocide allegations, just as the Turkish continue to deny genocide allegations from the Armenian Genocide, why the Japanese continue to deny Genocide Allegations during their rule of Korea, Taiwan, parts of Micronesia, Manchuria, and Nanjing. Why the British refuse to acknowledge the Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famine as Genocides. Why the conservative right want to ban the teaching of American genocides against countless groups (namely Native Americans, African Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Chicanos). And why Zionists get so offended when you refer to the actions of Israel as a Genocide.

Those who commit Genocide will never acknowledge that they are committing genocide. The fact that the current mainstream Zionist reaction, like @sihatn, is to deny that the ongoing genocide exists just proves that one is happening… if the horrific videos didn’t prove it enough (this one is from an American pro Israel source, but it doesn’t not take long to find ones from individuals in Gaza)

In conclusion, Israel is committing a genocide, and if you say otherwise, you are blinded by Ethnonationalism just like the Germans were in the 30s/40s, the Turks were during the 10s/20s and onward, the Brits were for (well forever), and the American right wing is.

If you don’t acknowledge the fact that Israel is committing a Genocide you are part of the problem shawty, and it’s not a good look 😬

361 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 18 days

Text

If there was a pro-Palestinian movement that wanted to capitalise on the disgust at the destruction of Gaza, it would be moving now to demand a compromise peace.

Western and Arab governments should use every sanction to enforce the removal of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, it would say. They are designed to so change the demography of the West Bank that a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility.

Since Netanyahu came back to power in a coalition with the far right, mobs have wrecked Huwara and other Palestinian villages. It is not too fanciful to imagine a future when ethnic cleansers will run riot.

Western governments have already made tentative and, from the point of view of any robust and principled supporter of Palestine, wholly inadequate gestures. They have issued sanctions on groups that fund extremism, and left it there.

But instead of the global left demanding that the world begins to lay the groundwork for compromise, it insists on war, and a war to the death at that.

I could moralise about left ignorance. I could say its position that Israel is a settler colonial state is at best a half-truth which fails to acknowledge that its population is made up of the descendants of refugees from Arab nationalism and European fascism.

Let me for once avoid preachiness, however, and say that from the practical point of view, the global left has adopted a disastrous position.

It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.

In any war to the death, Israel will win. It has nuclear weapons and a population under arms

Those who urge the abolition of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” or by demanding that the descendants of Palestinians refugees have a right to return to swamp the Jewish state may think they are being principled. But they are playing into the hands of the Israeli right.

Netanyahu tells the West that he has no partners for peace. By supporting the programme of Hamas and Iran, the global left is proving him right.

When Iran attacks, the Israeli right can say completely accurately that its enemies want to wipe Israel from the map. And look what happens then. Not just Western countries but Arab states like Jordan defend Israel.

Two can play at the game of demanding total victory, and one side has all the advantages.

As the charter of the hard-line rightist Likud party put it, in language which sounds familiar: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

If I were Palestinian, I could imagine myself wanting Israel gone. But the hope of total victory has been a disaster. In 1948, 1967 and 1973 the Arab states tried to wipe Israel off the map and succeeded only in strengthening it.

There is still a great deal of argument about what Hamas thought would happen when its terrorists attacked Israel in October. One theory holds that Hamas was possessed with the same delusion that misled the Bolsheviks in 1917, and hoped to ignite a general uprising.

The Arab masses failed to rise up on Hamas’s behalf and Iran made it clear it was not prepared to engage in more than token warfare with Israel.

Once again, an attempt to wipe out Israel has brought harm to Palestinian civilians.

If you doubt me on the dangers of going for a purist, maximal strategy and demanding total victory, listen to a true leftist, Norman Finkelstein.

There was a time when I admired his attacks on the “Holocaust Industry” and Jews who exploited Nazism to help Israel.

But after my own experiences of left antisemitism, I became suspicious of an argument which, when taken to extreme, was used to maintain the pretence that anti-Jewish racism did not exist, or barely existed, and that accusations of antisemitism were log rolling by cunning Jews seeking to exploit the compassion of naïve gentiles.

The parallels with anti-black racists who claim their opponents are merely “playing the race card” were too obvious to labour.

No such qualms held Finkelstein back. He helped build the anti-Israel movement in the US, and you might have thought his comrades would have listened to him.

He gave a speech at the student sit-in at Columbia university saying they should not chant for the abolition of Israel and for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

If you leave “wriggle room for misinterpretation,” he said, your enemies will exploit it.

The speech was a faintly embarrassing performance. Finkelstein is an old man now, and he rambled down many rhetorical cul-de-sacs. At the end the students just laughed at him and began chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”.

A part of the explanation for their disastrous flight to the extremes lies in the appeal of Manichaeism.

People want to feel wholly virtuous and by necessity want to believe their enemies are wholly evil. In these circumstances, only the complete destruction of evil from the river to the sea will suffice. It’s simply not enough to say that Israel must merely withdraw from the occupied territories. Satan and all his works must be renounced.

You might object that some protestors say they want to replace Israel with a sweet, multicultural liberal democracy. But this is progressive thinking at its woozy wishful-thinking worst: an argument made in clear bad faith.

If they were serious, they would damn Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran who want to create an Islamic state. But it is not just that they do not criticise radical Islam, they barely acknowledge its existence. If you listen to the speeches at the rallies and sit-ins, Hamas and its ultra-reactionary blood-stained ideology are simply not mentioned.

The effort is self-defeating. By going to the extremes, a protest movement has a Manichean appeal but it plays into the hands of its enemies.

The “evaporation theory of protest” explains the phenomenon. When the Gaza war ends, and let us hope that it ends soon, most of the protestors will drift away and get on with their lives.

As they evaporate, all that is left will be a residue composed of the most committed and the most extreme.

They will carry on campaigning when the cause is all but forgotten. When Palestine and Israel are no longer in the news, they will still be there.

And when the next war begins in Israel/Palestine – and I am afraid that there will be a next one – they will organise the protests, write the extreme slogans and set the maximalist demands.

This is why the far left dictates the terms of left-wing protests, and why those protests fail.

Or to put it another way, this is why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party and then lost every election he fought

I could be wrong. Perhaps the global wave of protest will bring change for the better. I hope it does. But I fear that, as so often, Palestinian people will be worse off than they were before.

160 notes · View notes

kirbyskisses-main-moved · 2 years

Text

Okay, okay, I don’t want to be the one person focusing on the white people in Black Panther Wakanda Forever but

Val’s response when Ross goes “could you imagine how destructive it would be if a place like America got its hands on Vibranium weapons of mass destruction?” and she gives the most sadistic, nonchalant laugh and goes “I literally dream about it.”

That one interaction is a stunning display of what American militaristic nationalism, capitalism, and neocolonialism looks like and how white people in places of power such as the FBI or the CIA have always been about stealing away the resources and stability of BIPOC.

Shout out to Julia Louis-Dreyfus for that delivery; it is absolutely vile and she should get props for it.

#julia louis dreyfus #black panther spoilers #black panther #black panther wakanda forever #valentina allegra de fontaine #tenoch huerta #namor #martin freeman #everett ross #marvel #mcu #I have a literally not at all cared about her character but I’m glad she exists for that moment alone

3K notes · View notes

jacensolodjo · 2 years

Text

Every once in a while, I think about how Raphael Lemkin, a Polish (and JEWISH, this is important) man who coined the term ‘genocide’ never kept quiet about “yes, USSR, I DO mean the Holodomor counts, too!” How the USSR blocked every attempt to make the official definition include what happened to Ukrainians in the early 1930s. That the only way it got approved for the use in legal trials and such like Nuremberg was because everyone bowed to USSR’s pressure to hide their evil doing.

The man went to his grave fighting to call Holodomor a genocide. Just like the Holocaust. Just like the Armenian Genocide.

This isn’t some bullshit ‘death of the author’ or what the fuck ever. This is telling a man who had very clear rules in mind for what counts that he’s WRONG about a thing HE CAME UP WITH.

In essence:

A Polish Jew creates the term ‘genocide’. Everyone tells him he’s wrong about the definition of a term he created. He knew exactly what he was doing when he created the term and gave the examples of what he knew to be considered the term he created.

Raphael Lemkin lost 49 PEOPLE IN THE HOLOCAUST and you DARE to say you KNOW BETTER THAN HIM what counts as a GENOCIDE? (Yea, 49. Only like 3 relatives survived. May all their memories be a blessing.)

The Nuremberg Trials would never have happened the way they did without Raphael Lemkin but he doesn’t fucking have the right to call something a genocide SOMEHOW.

In 1953 he published a whole speech/article that literally said “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” aka Holodomor.

But sure, because that one little time Holodomor wasn’t included means it was never meant to be considered one.

Raphael Lemkin, in his own words on his original definition of genocide:

“Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”

Raphael Lemkin, of blessed memory, knew exactly what he was saying. Poland and Ukraine have always been neighbors and have both been bullied by Russia. To say nothing of having their borders shifted around that a Pole could find themselves a Ukrainian and vice versa one year then go back to the start the next year. Raphael Lemkin, coiner of the term genocide, saw the destruction of the Holodomor and the Shoah and knew they both fit his definition.

Pray tell how a nation such as Russia can overrule the man who coined the term of their crime?

Raphael Lemkin would call the war the exact thing it is: genocide. We all know it. And I for one will continue his fight to making sure everybody knows exactly what Russia represents and what they have done and will continue to do until we are believed more readily than people want to believe an ex-KGB fuckhead.

#war in ukraine #russia is a terrorist state #raphael lemkin #holodomor #anti communism #genocide #текст #holocaust mention /

3K notes · View notes

probablyasocialecologist · 6 months

Text

Municipal authorities in Gaza have accused the Israeli army of deliberately destroying thousands of books and historical documents. They have also called for the intervention of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to “intervene and protect cultural centers and condemn the occupation’s targeting of these humanitarian facilities protected under international humanitarian law.” As was the case in Sarajevo in 1992—when Bosnian Serb forces, stationed in the hills above the city, razed the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the ground—the targeted destruction of Gaza’s primary public library is a stark reminder that genocide is about more than just the premeditated mass extinguishing of human life; it’s also about the calculated, and often vindictive, destruction of a people’s culture, language, history, and shared sites of community. Like the purposeful wiping out of entire families, a tactic employed by the Israeli army long before this latest assault began, the deliberate destruction of cultural and historic sites is a way for Israel to erase all evidence of Palestinian life, Palestinian humanity, from Gaza. To turn the besieged enclave—with its ancient mosques and archeological sites, its labor-of-love bookstores and meticulously-curated libraries, its pesky health care workers and journalists and sole survivors—into an empty soccer field.

#israel #palestine #gaza #library #libraries #genocide

303 notes · View notes

fairuzfan · 3 months

Note

(This got soo much longer than I meant for it to be omg... sorry about that!!)

American Holocaust by David Stannard is a flawed book with some dated language, but of everything I've read, I think I like its explanation/argument against this weird sort of... competitive genocide stuff. I'm gonna butcher it a little by cutting out a LOT in order to not nuke your inbox with a super long ask, but:

[…] To say this is not to say that the Jewish Holocaust-the inhuman destruction of 6,000,000 people-was not an abominably unique event. It was. So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about 1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust. So, too, was the deliberately caused "terror-famine" in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s, which killed more than 14,000,000 people. So, too, have been each of the genocidal slaughters of many millions more, decades after the Holocaust, in Burundi, Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Brazilian Amazon, and elsewhere. Additionally, within the framework of the Holocaust itself, there were aspects that were unique in the campaign of genocide conducted by the Nazis against Europe's Romani people, which resulted in the mass murder of perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children. [...]

Each of these genocides was distinct and unique, for one reason or another, as were (and are) others that go unmentioned here. In one case the sheer numbers of people killed may make it unique. In another case, the percentage of people killed may make it unique. In still a different case, the greatly compressed time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. In a further case, the greatly extended time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. No doubt the targeting of a specific group or groups for extermination by a particular nation's official policy may mark a given genocide as unique. So too might another group's being unofficially (but unmistakably) targeted for elimination by the actions of a multinational phalanx bent on total extirpation. Certainly the chilling utilization of technological instruments of destruction, such as gas chambers, and its assembly-line, bureaucratic, systematic methods of destruction makes the Holocaust unique. On the other hand, the savage employment of non-technological instruments of destruction, such as the unleashing of trained and hungry dogs to devour infants, and the burning and crude hacking to death of the inhabitants of entire cities, also makes the Spanish anti-Indian genocide unique.

[…]

A secondary tragedy of all these genocides, moreover, is that partisan representatives among the survivors of particular afflicted groups not uncommonly hold up their peoples' experience as so fundamentally different from the others that not only is scholarly comparison rejected out of hand, but mere cross-referencing or discussion of other genocidal events within the context of their own flatly is prohibited. It is almost as though the preemptive conclusion that one's own group has suffered more than others is something of a horrible award of distinction that will be diminished if the true extent of another group's suffering is acknowledged.

Compounding this secondary tragedy is the fact that such insistence on the incomparability of one's own historical suffering, by means of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls "moral bookkeeping," invariably pits one terribly injured group against another […]

Denial of massive death counts is common--and even readily understandable, if contemptible--among those whose forefathers were the perpetrators of the genocide. Such denials have at least two motives: first, protection of the moral reputations of those people and that country responsible for the genocidal activity (which seems the primary motive of those scholars and politicians who deny that massive genocide campaigns were carried out against American Indians); and second, on occasion, the desire to continue carrying out virulent racist assaults upon those who were the victims of the genocide in question (as seems to be the major purpose of the anti-Semitic so-called historical revisionists who claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened or that its magnitude has been exaggerated). But for those who have themselves been victims of extermination campaigns to proclaim uniqueness for their experiences only as a way of denying recognition to others who also have suffered massive genocidal brutalities is to play into the hands of the brutalizers. Rather, as Michael Berenbaum has wisely put it, "we should let our sufferings, however incommensurate, unite us in condemnation of inhumanity rather than divide us in a calculus of calamity."

The whole thing is available to read on the Internet Archive if you're interested. (This part starts on pg 149, if you'd just like to have the full context without the parts I chopped.)

Additionally, Carrol Kakel's book The American West and the Nazi East, while imperfect, too, is also very useful in getting at the core issue with these arguments and what makes them harmful--regardless of intent. I'm gonna spare you and not quote too much from this one, but the general gist of what it's about and argues in favor of is summed up like this in its conclusion:

In the case of the Holocaust and its contexts, the new ‘optics’ helps us see that – contrary to the prevailing image of ‘industrial genocide’ – many aspects of the Holocaust are akin to earlier ‘colonial genocide’. It is worth noting (and emphasizing) that the distinction I make between ‘colonial genocide’ and ‘industrial genocide’ is not to suggest some type of crude and arbitrary ‘partitioning’ of the Nazi Holocaust; it is, rather, to suggest and reassert the (settler) colonial roots, content, and context of the Nazi project in the ‘Wild East’ – a content and context linked, in Hitler’s and Himmler’s ‘spatial’ and ‘racial’ fantasies, to the ‘North American precedent’. And finally, the new ‘optics’ also allows us to understand that the ‘genocide and colonialism’ nexus holds the key to recognizing the Holocaust’s origins, content, and context; that the Nazi Holocaust is not a copy – but an extremely radicalized variant – of earlier ‘colonial genocide’; and that ‘holocaust’ is not a separate category from, but the most extreme variant of, the blight on human history we call ‘genocide’.

One of the more infamous examples of someone trying to argue against comparison (at least in the NDN circles I run in, anyway) was Deborah Lipstadt claiming that "[What the United States did to Native Americans] was not the same as the Holocaust" because, she says, "The Native Americans were seen as "competitors" for land and resources. There was, therefore, a certain logic-horrible and immoral as it was-to the campaign against the Native Americans."

Just for context, the full paragraph from her blog post:

What the United States did to Native Americans was horrendous. I have not studied it closely and it's not my area of expertise, however, it seems clear that the treatment of the various Native American tribes was revolting. However, it was not the same as the Holocaust. The Native Americans were seen as "competitors" for land and resources. There was, therefore, a certain logic-horrible and immoral as it was-to the campaign against the Native Americans. [Please note: I am NOT justifying the attacks.] The German campaign against the Jews had no logic and was often completely illogical. People who were "useful" to the Germans were murdered or exiled, e.g. slave laborers in factories producing goods for the Wehrmacht and scientists who were producing important technological advances for the Germans. In a prime example of illogic, in June 1944 at the time of the landing at Normandy, when the Germans were truly on the defensive, they used precious ships and men to go to the Island of Corfu and deport the 1200 Jews who lived there. They ended up in Auschwitz. Approximately 100 of this old Jewish community survived.

This is obviously a repulsive take, but the bizarre rationalization of abject evil isn't what I think makes this such a good example of the big issue at the heart of the constant emphasis on "uniqueness." There are plenty of people who hold these "exceptionalist" beliefs without taking it that much further and dismissing other genocides altogether. No, the thing that makes this such a perfect encapsulation imo is the very first sentence, where this historian, this professor of "Holocaust Studies," this woman who's ostensibly spent most of her entire life studying genocide openly admits she's never really bothered to look into what, exactly, happened to all those Indians way back when.

This is ultimately what I, personally, see as the main issue with this line of thinking. The harm doesn't necessarily come from holding the Holocaust up as "worse" than any other genocidal event, though that way of thinking definitely has its own problems, but from holding it up as fundamentally different.

It's the way this view holds it up as completely separate, in its own little bubble of history where we can study it and analyze it and teach about it all we want... all without ever having to broach the subject of colonialism. You can have entire classes where you study every single minute detail of this one specific genocide without ever having to mention or--god forbid--criticize the system that's driven pretty much every other instance of it.

Deborah Lipstadt has spent the better part of a century learning everything there is to know about the Holocaust, but in all that time, she's apparently never felt the need to look into the events that its perpetrators openly and repeatedly referred to as their inspiration.

This is what makes this sort of framing so dangerous imo. You can spend your entire life educating yourself about genocide, but if it's only in the context of one genocide and the belief in the uniqueness and incomparability of that single event is core to your understanding of both it and your worldview as a whole, you will still be completely incapable of recognizing the signs when it starts to happen again.

this is a really informative ask. thank you so much for sending this in (love the citations haha) i think it adds a lot to the overall discussion.

201 notes · View notes