barbarastreisandof

[barbarastreisandof]

I actually won’t call celebrities or politicians pro-Palestine just for calling for a ceasefire (the literal bare minimum). A ceasefire is not the end goal - if you’re not for Palestinian liberation, the right of return, and land back - I don’t consider you pro Palestine. Argue with the wall

[barbarastreisandof]

If safety in your ideal society is entirely based on care by networks of affinity, and does not provide care for people who are not liked by anybody, then your society is actually even worse than the situation we are in now.

Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.

There has to be unconditional care available for the more unlikable of us, or there isn't really a safety net for any of us.

[barbarastreisandof]

This isn't true

How people treat you is a result of how they view themselves, their fears, their anxieties, their values, their desires, and their conditioning/traumas. Its not about you

Nor is their perception of you actually in your control in the way this post and the reblogs seem to believe it to be

Make peace with people not being nice to you and leaving them to their business. You can't control other people and that's ultimately what the desire being expressed here - to behave and appear in ways that get others to act how we want them to

"don't worry about how other people perceive you" okay but like how they treat me is frequently determined by how they perceive me and I would prefer people be niceys to me

[barbarastreisandof]

#palestine #politics #israel

[barbarastreisandof]

tbh when i hear some people talk about 'breaking cycles of abuse', it becomes clear pretty quickly who has come to understand that phrase to mean 'since i was a victim of abuse/neglect by my parents/caretaker/s i will do everything to be nothing like them' and that is all. its not a completely flawed way of thinking either - something that hurt you would very likely hurt someone else; through empathy we learn to understand not to hurt others the way we were hurt too.

but what 'breaking cycles' looks like is more complicated than just not being your parents/caretakers - it's about recognizing how the things that happened to you changed you and how you can heal so you don't hurt someone else in turn. the survival skills you learned in an unhealthy enviroment often translate to poor if not unhealthy interpersonal skills in an enviroment where things ARE safe.

its a difficult pill to swallow for a lot of survivors of abuse (trust me, i know) because we have a tendency to simply want our pain to be recognized. by painting yourself as "absolutely nothing like my abuser" you can abstain from recognizing your own harmful tendencies and live comfortably in the role of victim hood for the rest of your life. it can be tempting to do this especially when so many people will do their best to deny what you experienced - almost like leaning into a stuck door that just won't budge.

the problem with this is if you never recognize that being mistreated made it so you LACK a lot of what other people learned from a loving enviroment, you can hurt people pretty badly even when doing your best just not to replicate what your parents/caretakers got wrong.

this also hurts for victims because, when it comes down to it - it's not FAIR. you were hurt for no reason, and most of us will never hear an apology or even admittance from the person who did it - so why do YOU have to change? why do YOU, the person hurt unjustly, have to put in the work?

and i mean. that's what breaking a cycle is. it means pushing against what's fair and comfortable deliberately so that you can stop something that's been repeating. it's work. its not just recognition of pain, it's the purposeful healing and treatment of it. but thats scary, and it's not fun, so a lot of people fall right back into it. its a lot easier said than done.

[barbarastreisandof]

An important thing to understand when learning to merge your political beliefs and values into your daily life, something most Westerners are not accustomed to doing, is to learn the difference between community and social circles.

Online interactions are within your social circles, but this is not your community. Community refers to the people in your physical life, and that separation is key to understanding what effective discussion and messaging can be.

Because online, it can be, and often is, very useful to speak strongly and authoritatively about your beliefs. To advocate firmly without concession. To even bully and insult and demean those who disagree with you.

Giving ground to Zionists online does nothing except allow their supremacist ideology to fester and grow. There is no reason to pay them any respect or consideration whatsoever.

But offline? In your actual communities? That's trickier. Because if you're not Palestinian but wish to be in solidarity with Palestinians, part of your responsibility is changing minds and building power in support of Palestinian liberation. And that means being willing to sit with exhausting, frustrating, or offensive people if you think there's a chance you can change their minds and get them to alter their position.

Be hostile to proud Zionists always, fuck them, they're Nazis.

But someone who is maybe ignorant about history and has been taken in by Zionist talking points? They might be reachable, and in that case, taking the same strident aggressive tone you do online is more likely to alienate than help that person shed the propaganda. Being a good communicator means being able to reach and influence people who not only hold different views, but who even hold a vested interest in their views.

Don't spend all your time on this, it's not productive - there are plenty of sympathetic people who need that extra push and support to come around into being in full solidarity and your time is better spent talking to them than someone who thinks genocide is complicated.

BUT, if you do find yourself talking face to face with someone who says things like "I just want the violence to stop" or " I condemn the violence on all sides" or "What Hamas did is terrible but there needs to be a ceasefire", this may be someone who can be reached and as a non-Palestinian, yelling at them the way you might online won't actually help anything. In that moment, the best thing you can do is work on your conversational skills and rhetorical ability and try to talk to that person about this in a way that leaves them with a greater understanding of Palestine and a greater awareness of the genocidal origins and purpose of Israel.

What works and is just online is not necessarily so in person, and that is a lesson worth internalizing sooner than later.

#palestine #israel #activism

[barbarastreisandof]

I don’t know if people here have been talking about the #1 song in Israel right now “Charbu Darbu” is an Israeli war anthem that calls for the destruction of Gaza and for the IOF to kill “terrorists” Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa

Beyond the disgusting lyrics, it is very telling that Israel will say that “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is calling for a genocide, but they celebrate a song with lyrics that are a call to action for people to encourage the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

[barbarastreisandof]

Everytime I see news about Eurovision my eye twitches because every year Palestinians said stop watching this and the response was “how dare you take away my emotional support pinkwashing show”

[barbarastreisandof]

It would be horrible for the government to deploy the military against protestors. Imagine if like, a group of natives were protesting to protect their water and then the president used the police and military to attack them and end the protest. That would be deeply un-American and fascist and- wait- I'm just getting word this already happened, that Obama already did this

Okay well nevertheless, remember the Muslim ban? When Trump halted travel from seven Muslim-dominant countries? Do you want that back agai-wait, sorry-I'm being told Barack Obama was the president who originally implemented the travel restrictions on those seven countries, whereas Trump was responsible for stricter enforcement and greater public messaging.

Okay, but even setting aside all that, at the end of the day, this is about voting to prevent fascism: the single ideological rule of a nation where force is used to maintain loyalty to nationalistic values of tradition, racial supremacy, and unity. This is the greatest threa-wait, apologies again- I'm just being told about the police response to BLM, McCarthyism, thr Japanese concentration camps, the prison industrial complex, the literally millions of Latinos currently being held and malnourished and tortured and raped in concentration camps spread across the US run by ICE and expanded by every single president since Bush, the destruction of Native land and breaking of treaties, the assassination of Tortuga at the Cop City protest, the surveillance and jailing of countless left wing activists and whistle-blowers, the state sponsored genocide of the Palestinian people and targeting of anyone speaking out in opposition to the genocide, Joe Biden expanding US oil drilling to greater levels than Trump, the assassination and jailing of climate activists...

If you're still under the impression that the political spectrum runs Democrat to Republican and not US Oligarchy to everything else then read more history and get the fuck off tumblr. You're politically inert and morally unserious, there is no reason for anyone to take anything you say with more than a grain of salt. If you don't know who the Chicago Boys and Milton Friedman are, get off tumblr. If you don't know what the Balfour Declaration is and who Theodore Hertzl is, get off tumblr. If you don't know about Harry Dexter White and the IMF and World Bank get off tumblr. If you don't know about the UN nature preserves in Congo and the assassination and dispossession of the local people, get off tumblr.

Stop trying to morally guilt strangers into taking actions when you have less than zero knowledge about why the world is the way it is or even what the world actually is. You cant jerk off to mpreg Stucky and Critical Role fanfics for seven hours a day and then hop on here to tell people the only way to fight fascism is to color in a box next to the name of an 80 year old segregationist. Its not criminal to be clueless and ignorant but its fucking shameful to be clueless and ignorant and bossy and smug so get off this stupid site and spend some time on the ground organizing, getting yelled at, getting harassed by cops, reading books, and actually bothering to get some real experience with the politics you claim to care Oh So Much about.

If you fucks actually go through with not voting on your next USA president elections and subsequently lead Trump to power again.

Yes. Yes I'm going to blame every single American for that. Collective responsibility and all that jazz.

[barbarastreisandof]

Journalist Abdullah Darwish has been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza, less than 3 hours after the truce ended.

This brings the total number of journalists killed since the 7th of October to 60.

[barbarastreisandof]

Must be real scary being a liberal and seeing all of this extremely bad shit happening in the world right now and having no idea how to make sense of it. It's no wonder they spend all of their time lashing out at people who don't want to vote for Genocide Joe.

[barbarastreisandof]

people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm's length continuously for seventeen years

[barbarastreisandof]

i think what pisses me off the most is that last year, nobody had trouble going against russia. companies dropped everything so they could keep russians off their sites, to block them from their news articles and to sanction in other ways. eurovision kicked it out. even steam, discord, any fucking western apps or websites have been so willing to perform in ‘activism’. musicians and celebrities speaking out and country-blocking their work, and so much more. but now what? where is all of that now for israel? where are all the brands leaving the country to ‘protest’? where is anything? what pisses me off the most is that none of them have actually really cared about ukraine, ever, and none of them care about palestine now.

[barbarastreisandof]

13% of the Palestinian population is Jewish... where do you get this statistic from? I promise I'm not doubting it, I'm genuinely curious. I thought all Palestinian Jews (old yishuv and jews who arrived late 1800's to 1940's) became Israelis in 1948, and generally now live outside the West Bank and Gaza.

I think it's also dangerous to sell those facts as wholesale, I'll admit. Vivian Silver, one of the women who died in the attacks or in the crossfire, regularly helped drive Palestinians to hospitals within Israeli borders, and used her privilege to stand up for them at checkpoints.

Hi anon

I will post my original sources as soon as I'm able to find them. It's a bit of information I came across over the past year and not something I've had saved so I'm currently digging through old searches to find it again. To be clear, I'm not only speaking about people in the West Bank and Gaza - I am referring to all people who identify as Palestinian Arab and Jewish. I can't guarantee it's entirely up to date - it may be data from a decade ago - so it be lower now, say 10%, or could be slightly higher.

I'll remove it from the post for the time being till I can link to the source.

Also, more broadly, you're free to doubt me. I don't expect, or want, anyone to take what I'm saying as gospel. If anything I say sounds questionable or doubtful, by all means, doubt me and interrogate my points and research them or dig deeper. I'm not offended at being doubted - I'm a series of texts posts on a screen, there's little reason to trust what I say without critical thought or reflection and if something I post doesn't sit right, it makes sense to me to challenge it.

To your latter point, I am not saying there are no Israelis sympathetic to Palestinians. I am saying that the narrative that this is a problem of governments and not the people themselves is disingenuous when a majority of Israelis are NOT in favor of a single state where Palestinians are given equal rights and say in the governing of the land. To the point of Vivian Silver, I am not familiar with her specifically. What you've described, however, does not mean she saw Palestinians as equally human or deserving of liberation. It might sound harsh, but those facts alone don't communicate how she saw Palestinians as people or whether she would support true equity and liberation for the Palestinian people.

I personally know people who marched during the Civil Rights movement in the US and who supported black Americans at the time who currently oppose defunding the police and consider many outspoken black liberation activists to be too extreme and unreasonable in their demands.

Her actions and behaviors show a basic regard for Palestinian life that is often missing, but I want to be careful not to valorize those actions - those actions are part of what all Israelis owe to all Palestinians. It is not saintly or heroic for an Israeli to treat Palestinians with the same humanity and regard that they would show other Israelis. Beyond that, I can't say much because that alone is not sufficient information to surmise her politics, which from context I feel is what you're wanting me to comment on, i.e. "Here is an example of an Israeli leftist who stood with Palestine who was killed" which is not a sentiment I can agree with without knowing more about this person. Lastly, I will say, I have neither seen nor heard anything in all my reading or conversations to suggest that any Palestinian, including anyone in Hamas, would wish death upon her or want to kill anyone like her. I have seen and read and engaged in many conversations that assure me that there are many Israelis who would consider her a traitor and collaborator and want her dead for showing any basic decency to Palestinians. This is obviously subjective as I'm just reporting my own experiences, but nothing you've shared here compels me to modify any of my original points.

[barbarastreisandof]

Hamas is not a terrorist organization.

The Israeli government is a terrorist organization.

The Palestinian people as a demographic do not hate Jewish people.

Jewish Israelis as a demographic hate Palestinians.

These are facts that are only provocative insofar as they go against the mainstream narrative. If you spend time learning about the history of the region and the people, and spend time talking to Israelis and Palestinians, spend time reading their respective literature and engaging with the news published by Haaretz, spend time watching Al Jazeera, you will come to understand these things as pretty uncontroversial normal statements of fact.

I'm saying these things plainly here so you, as the reader, can check in with your emotions reading them. If you find yourself getting defensive or angry or nervous or upset reading these things, that is a strong indication that you are not very knowledgeable about what's happening and would benefit from learning more.

Hamas won elections overwhelmingly in 2006, getting over 70 seats in the legislature. Israel and the US promptly blockaded Gaza and arrested 68 of those elected. Hamas has tried peace and negotiations many many MANY times. The peace march in 2018 where thousands of Gazans marched to the wall to draw attention to the genocide taking place were met by Israeli snipers who spend days killing and shooting out the knee caps of literally thousands of Palestinians. The Al-Aqsa Flood was an attempt by Hamas to confront the IDF around Gaza. They did not know there was a music festival taking place and upon realizing it, immediately began asking people where the military was and taking hostages. The IDF responded by shooting from among the crowd at Hamas militants while an IDF Apache helicopter shot indiscriminately at the crowd and later, IDF artillery was launched at Hamas as well as at Israeli civilians. The operation by Hamas had been planned for two years to target IDF military installations. Of the roughly 1200 Israelis killed on October 7th, 1/3 were military and of the remaining civilians, almost all were killed in the crossfire between Hamas and the IDF, and many possibly even MOST of those were killed by the IDF themselves in an attempt to kill Hamas.

That is not a terror attack just because people were terrified. Terror attacks are defined as targeting civilians for the purpose of terrorizing a populace in service of a political or ideological objective. Civilians getting killed during an attack on military infrastructure is not a terrorist attack.

Conversely, Israel has continuously and openly committed terrorist attacks against the Palestinian people for 75 years. Even before then, the Zionist settlers who were occupying Palestine engaged in terrorism in Palestinian villages. A man named Orde Wingate trained Zionist troops in what was called hasiyur ha-alim, or 'violent reconnaissance'. It was a terrorist method utilized by the Hagana, the Zionist paramilitary group that aided in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and formed during the British mandate. This is the practice: Pick a village that has no defense or weapons so there is no risk of combat, enter the village around midnight, stay for several hours and wait. Shoot anyone that leaves their home during this time. Then depart after several hours have passed.

This example is particularly stomach churning and I would genuinely caution you to skip it if you're at all unsure. It concerns the killing of gay men by the Israeli military and it is one of the more horrific things I've read.

This is a passage from the book Brothers and Others In Arms, a collection of interviews with gay and bisexual Israeli soldiers.

The state of Israel has been a terrorist organization from the beginning - the Jewish Zionist population in 1947 was 600,000 compared to the 1.3 million Palestinians living on that land. Terrorism was an essential tool in gaining power and ethnically cleansing the land of Palestinians and has remained a key pilar of Israeli policy toward Palestinians ever since.

It is crucial to talk about Zionist Jews and Israeli Jews and not simply "Jews" because "Jew" is not a universal identity the way Zionists make it out to be. The vast majority of Palestinians do not hate Jewish people or oppose the Jewish faith. Jewish people existed peacefully among Christians and Muslims in the region for a long time, which is why when the Zionist movement chose Palestine as the location for a Jewish only theocracy and there was a large influx of Jewish Zionist immigrants, Palestinians hardly took notice or felt concerned. They had no reason to think in the years between when the Zionist project began and when the Nakba took place in 1948 that their Jewish Zionist neighbors and friends and community members would turn against them or want to expel them from the land. The Palestinian people have no historical or present day grievances with Jews, what they DO have are grievances with Zionists and Israeli Jews who insist on a Jewish-only state on Palestinian land.

Conversely, the vast majority of Israeli Jews DO have a problem with Palestinians and DO see Palestinian liberation and freedom as a threat. If you look at polling and public opinion and Israeli politics since the state's creation, what you will find is support for either complete Palestinian genocide, or support for a two state solution where Palestinians are ghettoized and forced to live as they do now - on tiny tracks of separate, disparate plots of land that are managed and defined by the Israeli government. What almost no Israeli Jews support is a single secular state where Palestinians have equal citizenship and where Jewish citizens do not receive special rights or privileges.

That is because Israel has a concept and practical entity is a Jewish supremacist theocracy whose entire reason for existing IS to be a Jewish state, which by definition means legal and institutional authority for Jews above all others. That project is inherently at odds with the Palestinian population who is A) Majority NOT Jewish and B) are the rightful and original inhabitants of that land and thus wish to return to the now occupied homes that were once theirs.

This is a broad strokes overview of the initial four points but I want to emphasize: if you take the time to learn more about all of these things what you will find is that I have downplayed each of these facts. I have understated Hamas' role as a governing body that provides healthcare and services to Palestinians, I have downplayed the conscious and deliberate terrorism inflicted by the Israeli government and by Israeli settlers, I have undersold just how much Palestinians want a free state that is open to Jews as it is Christians and Muslims, and I have vastly understated just how much the average Israeli resents and derides the average Palestinian.

These are things you can learn about on social media, but they are best learned through reading books and through first hand engagement where possible.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe Orientalism - Edward Said The Holocaust Industry Norman Finkelstein Expulsion of the Palestinians - Nur Masalha These are good starting places. From here, it will become obvious what to read next. Be patient and remain committed to genuine growth and learning and you will come to have a much stronger and clearer intuition when it comes to processing the news and understanding what is happening not just in Palestine, but across the globe.

#palestine #israel #politics

[barbarastreisandof]

James Baldwin

[barbarastreisandof]