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plounce · 3 months

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researching stuff for a post about misinformation regarding girl scout cookies and man this article (10/28/23) about this palestinian-american girl scout nearly made me burst into tears

In her short 17 years on earth, Amira Ismail had never been called a baby killer.

That’s what happened one Friday this month, Amira said, on New York City’s Q58 bus, which runs through central Queens.

“This lady looked at me, and she was like: ‘You’re disgusting. You’re a baby killer. You’re an antisemite,’” Amira told me. When she talked about this incident, her signature spunk faded. “I just kept saying, ‘That’s not true,’” she said. “I was just on my way to school. I was just wearing my hijab.”

Amira was born in Queens in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. She remembers participating as a child in demonstrations at City Hall as part of a successful movement to make Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha school holidays in New York City.

But since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, in which an estimated 1,400 Israelis were killed and some 200 others were kidnapped, Amira, who is Palestinian American, said she has experienced for the first time the full fury of Islamophobia and racism that her older relatives and friends have told stories about all her life. Throughout the city, in fact, there has been an increase in both anti-Muslim and antisemitic attacks.

In heavily Muslim parts of Queens, she said, police officers are suddenly everywhere, asking for identification and stopping and frisking Muslim men. (New York City has stepped up its police presence around both Muslim and Jewish neighborhoods and sites within the five boroughs.) Most painful though, she said, is the sense that she and her peers are getting that Palestinian lives do not matter, as they watch the United States staunchly back Israel as it heads into war.

“It can’t go unrecognized, the thousands of Palestinians that have been murdered in the past two weeks and even more the past 75 years,” Amira said. “There’s no way you can erase that.” That does not mean she is antisemitic, she said. “How can I denounce one system of oppression without denouncing another?” she asked me. The pain in her usually buoyant voice cut through me. I had no answer for her.

Many New York City kids have a worldliness about them, a certain telltale moxie. Amira, a joyful, sneaker-wearing, self-described “Queens kid,” can seem unstoppable.

When she was just 15, Amira helped topple a major mayoral campaign in America’s largest city, writing a letter accusing the ultraprogressive candidate Dianne Morales of having violated child labor laws while purporting to champion the working class in New York.

“My life and my extremely bright future as a 15-year-old activist will not be defined by the failures and harm enabled by Dianne Morales,” Amira wrote in the 2021 letter, which went viral and helped end Ms. Morales’s campaign. “I wrote my college essay about that,” Amira told me with a slightly mischievous smile.

In the past two years, Amira has become a veteran organizer. Last weekend, she joined an antiwar protest. First, though, she’ll have to work on earning her latest Girl Scout badge, this one for photography. That will mean satisfying her mother, Abier Rayan, who happens to be Troop 4179’s leader. “She’s tough,” Amira assured me.

At a meeting of the Muslim Girl Scouts of Astoria last week, a young woman bounded into the room, asking whether her fellow scouts had secured tickets to an Olivia Rodrigo concert. “She’s the Taylor Swift of our generation,” the scout turned to me to explain.

A group of younger girls recited the Girl Scout Law:

“I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place and be a sister to every Girl Scout.”

Amira’s mother carefully inspected the work of some of the younger scouts; she wore a blue Girl Scouts U.S.A. vest, filled with colorful badges, and a hot-pink hijab. “It’s no conflict at all,” Ms. Rayan told me of Islam and the Girl Scouts. “You want a strong Muslim American girl.”

At the Girl Scouts meeting, Amira and her friends discussed their plans to protest the war in Gaza. “Protests are where you let go of your anger,” Amira told me.

Amira’s mother was born in Egypt. In 1948, Ms. Rayan told me, her grandfather lost his home and land in Jaffa to the state of Israel. At the Girl Scout meeting, Ms. Rayan was still waiting for word that relatives in Gaza were safe.

“There’s been no communication,” she said. When I asked about Amira, Ms. Rayan’s eyes brightened. “I’m really proud of her,” she said. “You have to be strong. You don’t know where you’re going to be tomorrow.”

By Monday, word had reached Ms. Rayan that her relatives had been killed as Israel bombed Gaza City. When I asked whom she had lost, Ms. Rayan replied: “All of them. There’s no one left.” Thousands of Palestinians are estimated to have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in recent weeks. ... Ms. Rayan said those killed in her family included six cousins and their children, who were as young as 2. Other relatives living abroad told her the cousins died beneath the rubble of their home.

As Ms. Rayan spoke, I saw Amira’s young face. I wondered how long this bright, spirited Queens kid could keep her fire for what I believe John Lewis would have called “good trouble” in a world that seems hellbent on snuffing it out. I worried about how she would finish her college applications.

“I have a lot of angry emotions at the ones in charge,” Amira told me days ago, speaking for so many human beings around the world in this dark time.

I thought about what I had seen over that weekend in Brooklyn, where thousands gathered in the Bay Ridge neighborhood, the home of many Arab Americans, to protest the war. In this part of the city, people of many backgrounds carried Palestinian flags through the street. Large groups of police officers gathered on every corner, watching them go by.

The crowd was large but quiet when Amira waded in, picked up her megaphone and called for Palestinian liberation. In an instant, thousands of New Yorkers repeated after her, filling the Brooklyn street with their voices. My prayer is that Amira’s generation of leaders will leave a better world than the one it has been given.

i believe she recently got her gold award (which, if youve never been in girl scouts, is really difficult - way more difficult than eagle scout awards), or is almost done with it. i hope she's doing okay.

this article (no paywall) about muslim and palestinian girl scout troops in socal also almost made me cry (it's like 2am). i really really hope all these kids are doing alright. god. they and their families all deserve so much better

#chirps

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autismserenity · 1 month

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Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.

Let me teach you too.

The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.

The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.

There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.

Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.

Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.

That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.

The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.

The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.

From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.

Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.

Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)

By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.

In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.

Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.

Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.

Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.

In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.

As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.

At least, that was the plan.

Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.

And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.

They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.

They were very wrong.

He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.

He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.

He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.

Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.

As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.

The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.

But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.

About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.

Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.

By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.

That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.

Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.

(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.

Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.

Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)

Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.

Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.

Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.

Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.

But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.

Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.

Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.

It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."

(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.

It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)

Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.

It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.

Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.

Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.

The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.

Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.

That is how this conflict came about.

A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.

And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."

As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.

Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.

#free palestine #free gaza from hamas #free everyone from hamas it's awful #we want to live movement #free gazans group #center the people directly affected #Ironically it's almost exclusively zionists who know about and support the actual activists in Palestine #because Zionism is a real Jewish term for self-determination not something you can redefine to demonize us #and the pro-hamas movement is inherently both antisemitic and anti-Palestinian #wall of words #jumblr #jewish history #palestinian history

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lyomeii · 10 months

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a great leader

❁ warnings: yandere themes, death mentions, f! reader.

❁ request by anon! Anastacius & Claude [both of them Yandere] With Sultan wife?

❁ a/n: I had to do a little research before writing this one anon! meaning of sultan: a king or ruler especially of a Muslim state. with that in mind, I hope you enjoy!

ANASTASIUS DE ALGER OBELIA

-> he meet you as a child. your parents brought to become closer to him as a way to (maybe) his wife or just to be a great ally of the empire. anastasius was really happy to have as cool as you around, especially as you taught him a little of your birth language.

-> the two of your were were considered the best from the many future leaders, destined to rule over the world with a great alliances and yet, he died. leaving you alone for years as you take over the control of your father’s throne to became someone stronger and influential both inside and out of your territory.

-> once claude take over the throne of the empire, you took a visit to see the boy that once hide in his older brother’s shadow. it was quite nice to see how he got taller than you and it was even better meeting his beloved daughter.

-> once you returned home, you failed to notice the shadowy figure following you and once you did realize someone behind you, it was too late. anastasius has stolen you from your own bedroom in the middle of the night, leaving no trace behind. he has you trap inside a nice place where he will free you once he became the emperor.

CLAUDE DE ALGER OBELIA

-> once he took the throne, your family send you as a representative of your country since one day you will take the leadership of your nation. and surprisingly, claude enjoy having you around him.

-> as someone who was raised to become the face of your territory and guide the citizens, you are a quite mysterious to him. hiding your emotions behind a monotonous expression in fear of being hurt, claude admire you and definitely wants to be closer to him, either as a friend or a ally.

-> originally, you were supposed to be there for a few months for whatever reason that your parents send you, but claude decides to make you stay forever with a marriage proposal.

-> that made you angry, probably furious. how can this man think you could easily abandon your legit place as a nation’s leader to be with him? he is delusional, you said. but it was your parents that easily thrown you to him and made one of your siblings become the new sultan, leaving you with no other option than marriage.

@lyomeii stuff || don’t repost

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matan4il · 6 months

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To the Nonnie who asked me about the Druze and Bedouins in Israel, here's a recounting of the history of these two communities here.

The Druze in Israel

The Druze are members of an ethno-religion that split from Shiite-Isma'ili Islam in the 11th century in Egypt. For a while, people could join the Druze faith, but then that period was over, and since then, you can't convert to become a Druze. In order to maintain their ethno-religious group, they're not supposed to marry non-Druze. Most of the Druze originate and live in Syria, with small numbers in southern Lebanon and in northern Israel.

Most of the Druze who came to live in Israel, did so in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Ma'an Druze rulers of Lebanon rebelled against the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, and occupied northern Israel. Along the years, the Druze repeatedly attacked and stole from Israel's Jews. In the northern city of Safed, for example (one of the four holy Jewish cities, considered holy for ALWAYS having had Jewish presence, no matter what happened to Jews in Israel), notable Druze attacks against Jews happened in 1567, 1604, 1628, 1656 and 1838.

When did this change, and the relationship between the Jewish and Druze residents of the Land of Israel become better? Well, in 1936-1939, as Muslim Arabs in Israel (inspired by their antisemitic leader Haj Amin al-Husseini) attacked the Jews and the British in what came to be known as "The Arab Revolt," they also attacked the Druze, who intended to remain neutral in the fight between the Arabs and Jews. There were some Druze who did join Arab forces attacking Jews. Probably the most prominent Arab militia the Druze joined was the one led by Yussuf Abu Durra. This man used the opportunity of the revolt to attack Arab and Druze villages, and the latter target made his Druze fighters abandon him, and even start fighting against his militia.

These Arab attacks on the Druze pushed both them and the Jews to forge an actual alliance. Here's the example of the Druze village of Isfiya. It's built on the ruins of an ancient Jewish village, and the name Isfiya is a mispronunciation of the village's original Hebrew name, Husifa. How do we know this original name? Archeological digs in there revealed an ancient Jewish synagogue, with this mosaic, which includes the Hebrew words "Shalom al Yisrael" (peace upon Israel), as well as the name "Husifa":

During The Arab Revolt, the village's leaders turned to the adjacent kibbutz Yagur. A Jewish underground movement called Hagana (Hebrew for 'defense,' because it was established 1920 to defend Israel's Jews from Arab attacks) had a group of fighters there, to defend the kibbutz. The Druze asked for the help of the Jews in defending their village from Arab attacks, and the Jews of Yagur agreed. They started collaborating, among other things the Druze provided the Jews with intel, and the Jews provided the Druze with weapons and ammunition. Isfiya's village council ended up incorporating the Jewish synagogue's mosaic into their emblem (this pic is from their Facebook page):

By the end of the revolt in 1939, most of the Druze were on the Jewish side, even if they weren't actively fighting. This opened the path for the same alliance to play a significant role in Israel's War of Independence from Nov 1947 to Jul 1949. There was one Druze unit that fought under Fawzi al-Qawuqji, an Arab commander from Lebanon, who led a militia in Israel during The Arab Revolt, collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and then led the Arab Liberation Army during Israel's War of Independence War. BTW, this was the antisemitic emblem of the ALA:

Fawzi al-Qawuqji sent his Druze unit to attack the Jews at the Ramat Yochanan battle, on Apr 16, 1948 (meaning, this is during the first stage of the war, when most Arab armies had not yet invaded the Land of Israel. That starts in May 1948). The Druze were defeated, and after that, all of the Druze in Israel were on the Jewish side.

So the answer to what forged the alliance between the Jewish and Druze residents of Israel, is a combination of the Muslim Arabs' violence at the time, and the fact that Jews were no longer a defenseless minority, but got to defend themselves by fighting back. NEVER underestimate the importance of the right to self defense, and the truth is that the only place in the world where Jewish people have this right as Jews is the State of Israel.

When the State of Israel was established, there were 14,500 Druze living here. Today, they number about 150,000 and make up roughly 1.5% of the Israeli population. Back in 1949, Druze service in the Israeli army was strictly voluntary. At the request of Druze leaders in Israel, this was changed in 1956, but the service is mandatory for just the men (while for Israeli Jews, it's mandatory for both men and woman, and for Arabs and Bedouins, it's still voluntary). They're recognized as the most loyal and contributing non-Jewish minority in Israel, and many Druze have reached some of the highest positions of power here.

The Bedouins in Israel

The Bedouins are nomadic tribes, originally native to Arabia (and in fact, while non-nomadic Arabs refer to them as Bedouins, from the Arabic word for 'desert,' they refer to themselves as Arabs, sometimes even as the "real Arabs"). Over the centuries, their routes have continuously expanded, taking them from the deserts of Arabia, through Israel, Jordan and Syria, to northern Africa. A part of what they would often do for a living is connected with herding and commerce, another part is attacking local communities along their wandering routes for loot. Most Bedouins had converted to Islam, and the Islamic conquests coming out of Arabia in the 7th century, taking over the rest of the Middle East, have helped in that expansion of their wandering routes.

In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire (the Turks) wanted the Bedouins to be more settled, so they would be easier to govern. At the same time, the Ottomans wanted to artificially increase the Muslim population in Israel. So under them, in addition to European converts to Islam (mostly Bosnians and Albanians) settling in Israel, the Ottomans also forced many Bedouins to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and settle in Israel, mostly in the south, in the Negev desert. Some Bedouins completely settled, while some opted for a semi-nomadic life (meaning they still move from where they're staying at least twice a year, but it's not constant wandering, and they move between designated spots, over a relatively small distance).

The exact number of Bedouins in Israel before the establishment of the state is unknown due to the semi-nomadic lifestyle some of them still went by, but estimates are around 110,000 people. During the Independence War, most of the Negev Bedouins fled to Gaza (which came to be occupied by Egypt until 1967). After the state was founded, some returned to Israel. The state established seven villages and a city for them, the only Bedouin city in the world, Rahat (and the biggest Arab city in Israel). Today, the Bedouins in Israel number over 300,000 people in the Negev, about 110,000 people in towns and villages in northern Israel, and over 32,000 living in other cities across the country. They are about 3.5% of Israel's population.

The Bedouins have a more complex relationship with the State of Israel, due to several issues. The state has been seeking solutions for these problems, with varying degrees of success.

One issue is land ownership. You'd think it wouldn't be, with many still being semi-nomadic, but a part of the problem is that more than once, they will simply decide that if they've wandered to a certain spot enough times, it's theirs. In certain cases, these spots are in military zones, which means they're endangering themselves and soldiers by settling there even part time, and the state repeatedly has to evacuate them from those places, including for their own safety. More than once, anti-Israelis will talk about Israel destroying an ancient Palestinian village, and in reality it's a recent Bedouin settlement, where there's no proper infrastructure for them, including for their kids (no water lines, no electricity), and it's in the middle of a dangerous fire zone.

Another issue is polygamy, which is customary among Bedouins, but legally forbidden in the State of Israel. So again, it creates friction between men who want to marry multiple wives, and the authorities.

One more thing is that the traditionally nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins means they've never really had a history of belonging to specific states, and feeling it's a part of their identity. So they don't feel too obligated to the state and its rule. One example is that they run their own courts. The Ottomans tried to dismantle those, and force the Bedouins to adhere to a Sharia court that they opened in 1906, but when the British took over Israel in 1917 they dismantled it, and allowed the Bedouins to have their courts, out of a colonialist perception that they're too savage to be able to accept western laws. So the Bedouins to this day have issues accepting the authority of the state's courts.

Having said all this, there are also Bedouins who are very loyal to Israel, feeling like the state has drastically improved their life in comparison with how they were treated before (under the British, and before them the Ottomans), or that they have better living conditions than they would have had without the state. Here's one Israeli Bedouin woman, Sophia Khalifa Shramko, speaking about how Israel has bettered their lives:

Also, while most of the Negev Bedouins fled during Israel's War of Independence, there were a few Bedouins from the northern part that fought for the state, and to this day, the northern Bedouins are known as the more loyal faction from among Israeli Bedouins. The state built several permanent settlements for the northern Bedouins, and today they live across 24 communities.

As I mentioned, army service is voluntary for the Bedouins. Over time, it went from a very small number who did serve in Israel's War of Independence, through a big decline in the 1980's, but then since 2002 there's been a small, but steady rise in the number of Bedouins choosing to enlist. In 2003, the first Bedouin woman insisted on serving (she had to fight many in her own society who objected to this, mostly for religious reasons), she succeeded, and opened the path for other Bedouin women to serve as well. There's no official or expert explanation offered for this, but you want my guess? In 2001, Hamas started firing rockets at Israel, and the most targeted are was the Negev, so as Palestinian terrorists made it clear they have no qualms about killing Bedouins simply for being citizens of the Jewish state, my guess is more Bedouins who didn't identify with the state protecting them from Hamas, started to. I think following the Oct 7 massacre, in which at least 19 Bedouins were murdered by Hamas, at least 6 were kidnapped, and dozens are still considered missing, the Bedouins' identification with Israel is at an all time high. We've seen collaborations of Jews helping Bedouins, and Bedouins helping Jews, reaching an unprecedented peak.

Before the Oct 7 attack, the overall number of Bedouins serving was still rather low. In 2021, it was a total of 1,500 people. All the same, Israel has built a special commemoration site for the Bedouin soldiers, including several monuments. Here's one (you can see the Arabic writing at the top if you click the pic):

Israel as the Jewish nation state

The State of Israel is the Jewish nation state. That's not different to other nation states. But I want to emphasize, being a Jewish state, doesn't mean it's a Jew only state. It never was, it was never meant to be, it never will be.

Yes, on the national level, it has Jewish characteristics. The official language is Hebrew, the state calendar follows the Hebrew one, it has Jewish symbols in the flag and state emblem. And Israel also has a law of return for Jews, so they would never have to fear persecution elsewhere ever again. It allowed the saving of Jews from Syria when the civil war started there in 2011, or more recently the war in Ukraine, it allowed Israel to support Jews fleeing rising antisemitism in places like France in the last few decades, and it allows Jews one place where they don't have to constantly adjust themselves to the dominant non-Jewish culture, where they don't have to live by a Christian or Muslim or Buddhist calendar, where they can speak, and consume culture, and create it in their own native language, where they don't have to consider whether they can find a synagogue or kosher food before they move to a certain town, where they get to walk down the same paths their ancestors did thousands of years ago, where they will never be told that Jewish boys wearing a kippah to school is prohibited, and so on.

Every single one of these elements can be found in at least one other country out there, and very much so in nation states. Britain is quite clearly a Christian country when the head of the state is also the head of the church, so is the US when Christmas is a national holiday, but Yom Kippur isn't. Germany is the nation state of the Germans, its language is German (not Turkish, as much as there is a big Turkish community there), the Bundestag, the German parliament building, has a writing dedicating it to "Dem Deutsche Volk" (the German people), and it has a law of return for people of German descent, returning from eastern European countries. In this sense, nothing about Israel as the Jewish nation state is out of the ordinary.

Israel can and should do everything in its power to make life here good for the non-Jewish communities. By law, they have the same civil rights as the Jews. At the same time, these communities actually have less obligations when it comes to army service. Are things perfect? No, and Israel should continue to work on it, always. Just like every country should continuously strive to be better for its minorities. But if the Jewish character of the State of Israel troubles you, ask yourself why are the Jews the only ones not allowed to have a nation state of their own? One place upon the earth, where they're not the minority, in case being a minority elsewhere is something that's become too difficult or too dangerous? Or if they simply want to go back to their roots, to their people and to their ancestral land?

Am Yisrael Chai!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#israel #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #terrorism #anti terrorism #antisemitism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish

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a-very-tired-jew · 22 days

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A little hope in these dark times

I have previously talked about the token "Good Jews" that I know. One of them is dear to me so whenever they share something that is blatantly false I will then reach out. Each time they are receptive and delete the offending post and it allows us to have a conversation. In each instance they go "Oh, I didn't know that." That's the important part. They're Jewish, but they didn't know better. This friend was born into a Jewish family, went through all the standard Reform milestones, but after 13 they stopped engaging. Being Jewish became a tertiary thing for them and did not necessarily matter. As such they did not learn about the history of our people, the actions taken against us, and other major events outside of what they learned through high school and from their social circle (of which is mainly made of goys, so it's wild they take Jewish history from non-Jews). How do I know this? In our most recent exchange they shared something from IG that stated the persecution of Jews only happened in the West (read: Wester European Christian majority countries and the USA) and never is Muslim countries. I reached out and said this is demonstrably false and referred them to the Shiraz incident(s) that happened in the late 19th and early 20th century. They tried to double down and imply that the persecution that occurred in these pogroms was somehow exported to Iran from the USA at this time. So of course I gave examples of persecution prior to the colonist arriving in the USA. The response? "Oh...this is deeper than I thought." And they further admitted they had only a basic understanding of Jewish history that wouldn't even fulfill a 101 course. So it looks like they are finally grasping that the posts they are sharing from goy on Jewish history and events are in fact wrong and they need to become educated on their people's actual history. My fingers are crossed that this will actually happen and they won't fall back into being a token and share misinformation. And as always, this is my own personal experience and interactions. I'm not saying this is true for all tokens, this is for one particular instance with someone I care for.

#jumblr #activism #Token Jews learning their history and realizing they're being lied to by the people tokenizing them #Learning Jewish history helps fight misinformation about us

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wrappedinamysteryy · 3 months

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Yearning | تَوّاق

Though delays in our unanswered prayers can be difficult to bear,

Do you see how they can often lead us to strive harder to limit our sins and please Allāh?

Our yearning for something from Allāh can benefit us in the afterlife.

It's as if our yearning itself becomes a form of goodness that guides us to be a better human being and a better Muslim.

Knowing how deeply you desire it, you strive for patience and avoid displeasing Him in any way.

Though patience wanes and fatigue sets in, I seek refuge only in You, my Rabb.

-Mona Al Kabir (wrappedinamystery)

And Allāh accepts all duās right away, or in delay or grants something beyond our comprehension.🧡

#my writings #my writing #islam #muslim #islamic reminders #islamic quotes #islamicreminder #islamic #muslim writers #dua

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dungeons-and-dictions · 8 months

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Brandon Sanderson’s Laws of Magic, Expounded

0. Err on the side of awesome

Tons of stories actually start with an awesome idea that is fleshed out.

You can always work out how to make the awesome fit into these rules.

1. An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic in a satisfying way is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.

Deus ex machina is to be avoided at all costs.

There is a sliding scale of “sense of wonder” and “solving problems with magic”/scientific explanation of magic. You lose wonder as you increase science, and vice versa.

Main characters tend to use magic tools instead of magic itself to do this. Think monkey’s paw stories.

Ex. The One Ring is more science, and Gandalf in LotR is more wonder, especially since most of his magic is offscreen. His magic is there to keep the hobbits small and relatable to readers. The One Ring is used by Frodo to solve problems.

This is also a law of foreshadowing, especially since wonder can become science later in the book or another book in the series. Can also be how a magic mystery is solved.

2. Flaws or limitations are more interesting than powers.

Cost and stakes for using magic plays a big part into limitations, too.

Basic limitations as a plot device: someone has better magic; characters cannot use magic; a character’s magic isn’t working/lost; a character/people don’t understand the magic enough

Magic limitations can be combined with character flaws/limits, and social aspects too.

Work with the limitations! Characters don’t need to overcome every weakness, but it should add to the story somehow.

3. Expand what you already have before you add something new.

For magic systems, think of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim split versus ALL the world religions. Those 3 share the same foundations despite being vastly different.

Quality vs quantity

You aren’t required to have languages. Similarly, you don’t need to overwork the magic.

If you add a secondary magic system, your first must have indicated holes in the magic to be filled. It also helps to sprinkle in hints and foreshadowing of a second one and its abilities.

And all of these rules can be applied to your setting and characters in a general sense, too!

Brandon Sanderson’s free 2020 lectures on YT

#writing #writing advice #brandon sanderson lectures #brandon sanderson #story writing #magic system #fantasy writing #Sanderson’s Laws of Magic #rule of cool #literally the only advice from him I found online #which is why I am doing this series

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hero-israel · 6 months

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What they said.

And I could have put another 4-6 similar messages in here, I can tell what is weighing on peoples' minds. Though we are outnumbered, it is not hard to see through the lies of our enemies. We just need people who will listen to us.

"Every accusation is a confession" was never more true than in claiming JEWS want to kill off ARABS. The briefest review of regional demographics - WHO has actually wiped out WHOM - makes that instantly clear. Mahmoud Abbas said his family fled their home in Safed in 1948 because they were sure the Jews would try to get revenge for Arab massacres in 1929. In 1967 when Israel took the West Bank, Arabs in Hebron were so afraid of reprisals for 1929 that they flew white bedsheets from their windows and piled their weapons outside their front doors.

There is no such thing as a "genocide" that is true for Palestinians but false for white people. And while most of the time, posting about hypocrisy and double standards isn't going to make a real-life change, this is one time where I'd really like people to point it out, to demand answers from those who correctly identify the Alt-Right as lying. We should also request clarification on whether all warfare involving urban bombing is automatically considered genocide (spoiler: it isn't, but this time Jews are involved, aha!).

Desmond Tutu was notorious for insisting Jews forgive the genocide that had actually been committed against them and also that they be constantly condemned and judged for the potential genocide they were always just about to commit. It is not even meant as a statement of fact - just a way to put us in our place. As David Schraub put it:

For thousands of years, for much of the world, part of the cultural patrimony enjoyed by all non-Jews -- spiritual and secular, Church and Mosque, enlightenment and romantic, European and Middle Eastern -- was the unquestionable right to stand superior over Jews. It was that right which the Holocaust took away, or at least called into question; the unthinking faith of knowing you were the more enlightened one, the spiritually purer one, the more rational one, the dispenser of morality rather than the object of it. To be sure, some people were better positioned to enjoy this right than others. And some people arrived onto the scene late in the game, only to discover that part of the bounty they were promised may no longer be on the table. Of course they're aggrieved! The European immigrant who never owned a slave but was at least promised racial superiority is quite resentful when the wages of Whiteness stop being what they once were. Similarly, persons who lived far from the centers of Christian or Muslim power where Jewish subordination was forged are nonetheless well aware of what was supposed to be included in modernity's gift basket. They recognize what they've "lost" as acutely as anyone else.

Every definition of "genocide" rests on intent; you cannot accidentally do it. That's what both the U.N., Genocide Watch, and basic common sense say. The militia going door-to-door to torture and massacre all the children and elderly is genocidal intent. "The missile launcher built into your house just fired at us, we will now destroy it, you have 5 minutes to evacuate" is not.

I have no idea what is coming next in Gaza, how long it will last or how bad it will get. Godforbid, if the death toll gets another zero at the end, it may become impossible to get people to see it as non-genocidal, regardless of what is empirically, definitionally true. But if people are going to cite sources and moral authorities, let them stick with the boundaries they have introduced.

#Genocide #Israel #Palestine #Palestinians #Gaza #jumblr #Arab antisemitism #leftist antisemitism

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fromchaostocosmos · 3 months

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Lets talk about trauma

I know that on the many years I've been on this site that the Jewish users of tumblr have discussed, explained, broken down, and shown over and over the multiple ways we are all effected by our generational and communal trauma.

The way that Jews from all over world and varying backgrounds yet all shared the same fears, learned the same survival mechanisms, played the same "games" that were not games, but rather ways to teach children how to survive, just the same everything.

Ask any Jew if nightmares about pogroms and/or the Holocaust and being taken or dying in it and they will tell you yes.

The amount of trauma Jews carry within us is, withing our DNA, within our bodies, within our brains in is immense. We carry several thousands years worth of trauma.

We carry it all. The hypervigilance, that stress cycle, the paranoia, the various of hormones that keep us in semi permanent state of stress, the tension, and more. If you have ever done any research into what trauma does the body, the brain, to a person then you can understand.

Currently Jews who stressed and traumatized people doing our best are being severally stressed and traumatized on a whole new level.

I fear for what this will do to us in the long term. I will not be surprised if Jewish people come out this all with PTSD. I know that I've already had a nightmare where I was at some nebulous Jewish place and a bunch people who came and shot and killed us including me and did so claiming to so in name of freeing Palestine.

Which is sad that I nightmare like that because I shouldn't have to experience that. And Palestinians deserve better than to have antisemites hijacking their cause and needs so that these antisemites can pretend that they are not antisemities.

It is honestly very sad to watch how much of the pro-Palestine movement/people do not actually listen to Palestinians themselves. How much they do not care about what Palestinians want, think, or need. How much this movement supports Hamas despite Gazans direct statements and feelings that say don't support Hamas. How much these groups still will push "charities" that send funding to Hamas or not credible instead of ones that give help to Palestinians.

The self-immolation of the air force man really cemented for how much this movement has been over taken and how little they care for what Palestinians think, say, or want. Because these people have been praising, lionizing, and glorifying this man death is direct defiance of what Palestinians have said.

The way this man death has been treated and talked about makes me extremally worried, and I know other Jews are too, that we may see suicide bombers attacking Jewish centers of life and community. Which in case it isn't clear then I want to make clear this not something I blame Palestinians or Muslims for.

No, this is something we are seeing from people living in the west who culturally Christian.

The way these people talk about martyrdom is terrifying. The way that they talk about Jews is I want to say horrifying and I want to terrifying because it is and it is all not anything new or suprising.

It is horrific, it is disturbing, and there are moments of shock, but not surprise.

I don't know if it is because I've just become numb or because it is the shit gets regurgitated over and over or maybe some combination of both.

Here is a picture of pomegranate for making to the end of this rather depressing post. Pomegranates are wonderful and make things better.

#jumblr #jewish trauma

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creekfiend · 7 months

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Hey, do you have family in Israel? Do you know whether they are alright?

sure, I do. in my experience most American Jews have family in Israel. When my family left their village in what is now Belarus, half of those leaving came to the US and half went to Palestine. (and those who remained were killed and that village does not exist anymore) I am not in close contact with the Israeli side but I expect I would have heard something if any of them had been hurt. Josh has much closer Israeli family as his brother Yoav and nieces/nephews all live there but they are also fine to my knowledge.

I appreciate the check in, but I will be perfectly honest with you that while it hurts my heart immensely that so many Israeli civilians have been killed, right now I am primarily concerned about the millions of people in Gaza without electricity or running water who have been ordered to evacuate or get exploded but who have nowhere to go. I am very, VERY concerned about the statements being made by the garbage fascists in control of the Israeli government right now openly stating their genocidal intentions on a scale that we haven't previously seen.

we are all triggered and traumatized as hell about everything, and by we I mean Jews, and I think it's understandable for us to feel that way. but I also am struggling a lot with the degree to which many of my fellow American Jews are making this ABOUT our big feelings of fear and anxiety. I understand that anticipating things becoming More Dangerous is something all Jews have had to do constantly forever. I understand that "position of relative privilege" is something that's extremely conditional for Jews and something that can be taken away at the drop of a hat. but... I don't know. I've been trying to think of anything coherent or helpful in any way to say for the past several days and coming up short. it's a nightmare. But it would be disingenuous to deny that it's a nightmare for me in ways that are removed pretty significantly from the ways in which it is a nightmare for other people.

my family is fine. I understand and empathize with the sentiments of "but what if my family becomes NOT fine?" especially when this is the largest mass killing of Jewish civilians since... well. and I am also enraged and terrified by the comfort with which many leftist gentiles seem to be practically celebrating those deaths. but I'm really preoccupied by the fact that millions of people and their families in Gaza are Not Fine in a huge and terrible way right now as we speak. this is not to say that it is a contest, but if I am doing triage, it is very clear to me whose leg is more broken right now. While acknowledging, again, that we are in a scary place globally regarding antisemitism.

Angry Jew on fb has been posting a lot of stuff that really speaks to how I am feeling right now. devastated by the horrible ways some of my people have been killed, and devastated also that inexcusable violence is being done, essentially, in my name. I hate to talk about this publicly because I also fucking wish American gentiles would kind of shut up about it a lot of the time, to be honest. and I hate feeling like I am giving anyone ammunition in their weird ideological internet fights about having The More Correct Opinion in the hypothetical trolley problem-ass situation that so many of them act like this is. the refusal to learn about any specifics of the situation in favor of just deciding it must be exactly like some other unrelated geopolitical issue that they feel they have a better handle on, and then just... overwriting the reality of the situation so that it matches up with what they are comfortable imagining in their heads. I have had to unfollow and block a lot of people lately.

I mostly talk to my safe Jewish and Muslim friends about this. and select few safe non-muslim gentiles.

Right now I am grieving for many reasons. Since you asked me about my personal connection I will tell you the main things I remember learning and feeling about this growing up. I've never been to Israel. Not close enough to my family there to visit, although my dad did, & never comfortable with programs like Birthright. I remember in the 90s my dad, who was an administrator at the school of Public Health at the local university, was helping put together programs that would bring Israeli and Palestinian universities and public health groups together to work on universal public health issues like helping ppl stop smoking, vaccination, etc. it was going really well at the time. he was going over there a few times a year to coordinate with the people running the programs there. he was really optimistic about it, & several other similar programs. this was back when Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin/Shimon Peres were having a lot of talks that were seemingly productive and hopeful. like obviously it was hardly a golden age but it seemed like maybe Israel was moving away from violence. and then 9/11 happened and everything exploded and all the little programs simply disappeared and my dad never went back to work with anyone. and then fucjing... Netanyahu. and it seems like since then everything only gets worse and worse and further and further from anything other than horrible violence, and that devastates me

In high school I took a Mideast Civ class and one of my fellow students was a kid whose parents had been expelled from Palestine during the war and fled to America. what I remember being struck by when he talked about this was how his family's story was so similar to my family's story and a deep sense of shame and anger that people who had undergone what my family had could then make his family undergo the same thing. That's still a pretty big part of how I feel. I don't accept that that kid's experience was necessary to keep me or my family safe.

I'm just a guy. I try my best to learn as much as I can and listen to a large variety of people connected to this so I can have a more holistic view of things. I'm not making this post rebloggable for obvious reasons but since it's here on my blog, for anyone reading who is also feeling despair, here's some organizations that are good to follow & support if you are able (non-exhaustive obviously)

synagoguesrising.org Synagogues Rising is a coalition of leftist synagogues in the US who advocate for Palestinian liberation and who are currently begging the US government to work to deescalate military violence and provide humanitarian aid to people in Gaza

refuser.org Refusers Solidarity Network is a group advocating for Israelis who refuse to serve in the military as conscientious objectors

map.org.uk Medical Aid for Palestinians living under occupation & as refugees

Genuinely, thanks for asking about my family. if you also have family in the area, I hope they are also alright.

I want everyone to be alright. I know this is a lot of big baby feelings and no particular political ideologies or solutions and that's because I'm just one fucking Jew and I'm not an activist or a revolutionary and I kind of feel a bit like other online people could stand to admit more often that they're also just some guy and also not activists or revolutionaries. I sure have beliefs and I sure feel strongly about them, but man, right now I just want to express grief & anger & worry about how awful this government is and how many people they're going to kill and how much I wish it was not happening

my family is Ok.

eta: I'm reading this back and realizing that as a response to this ask it makes it sound like I'm saying that inquiring about the well-being of someone's Israeli relatives is like, inherently devaluing the well-being of other ppl and I very much am not saying that and do not believe that. I'm just enormously emotionally dysregulated and this got me kind of stream of consciousness about all of the things I have been chasing around in my brain about this.

#jewish #long post #israel palestine tag

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bfpnola · 7 months

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ID 1: Instagram post by @/therwees. It reads: “I do not envy those of you with the ability to look away, to "log off", to prioritize your "mental health" over bearing witness to genocide. one day you will be in the position to tell someone where you were when all this happened, when an entire people were wiped off the map - what you said, how you reacted, which congress people you called on to help stop it. and you'll have to tell someone - a daughter, a grandson, a niece or nephew, a boyfriend - that you couldn't even look. that you couldn't even give those people the easiest thing you could give them, which is an eyewitness testimony of their pain, their suffering, and the denial of their freedom.” End ID.

ID 2: “here is what you must know, deep down inside of you: that the only way you are to rationalize all this death, all this tragedy, is islamophobia and racism. the only reason you are able to look away is because there is a grotesque part of you, a dead appendage of your soul, that believes brown people are destined to be miserable forever. that we deserve these calamities thrust upon us. It's why so many of you readily shared racist fabrications about baby beheadings, mass rapes, a global day of jihad. you are so ready to accept the image of the angry arab, the evil muslim, the heinous savagery innate to our identity.” End ID.

ID 3: “to be arab or muslim in this country is to be burdened with the task of constantly proving your humanity and your innocence. there is always some awful thing to condemn - a terrorist attack, a corrupt regime on another continent, a preacher's vile sermon. it is psychically_draining to be suspicious of everyone, to wonder *all the time* if your next date is gonna say something islamophobic or if your employer will hold your faith against you or if the man staring at you on the bus is going to erupt with violence. to wonder if simply advocating for the liberation of Palestinians or Iraqis or Afghans will get you fired or ostracized or even just marred with the reputation of a histrionic.” End ID.

ID 4: “and then, when the drum beat of war starts again, and the headlines start to look like guns, and the correspondents start to sound like executioners, it becomes obvious that our anxieties were not unjustified. that some of you do want us dead. that you only like falafel, that you only enjoy vacationing in marrakesh, that if bella hadid said hello to you on the street you'd have a story to tell forever, at every thanksgiving. that we bring color and vibrance to your social circles but only when we're quiet about our heartbreak. that arabic is a beautiful, sophisticated language for a barbaric people.” End ID.

ID 5: “I know, as I've always known, since 9/11, and maybe even before, since I wore the hijab for ten years during the war on terror, since I saw my mother terrorized by our neighbors, that our lives are political fodder. you like us better than we're dead. we've learned nothing from our follies in Iraq, follies that came at the cost of more than half a million Iraqi lives.” End ID.

ID 6: “american life is underwritten by the suffering of others after all. every shein haul, every iPhone, every meal delivery comes at the cost of another person's hardship. I think we really underestimate the psychic toll of this, to enjoy excess and convenience and peace at the price of someone else's despair. it has rotted our souls, to know that every gallon of gas we use steals a moment away from someone else's future, and to continue doing it.

so it is easy for us to look at the Israelis say: they should be able to enjoy their nice tel viv beaches, their lovely kibbutzes built on stolen palestinian land. civilization is built on the graves of barbarians, of people lesser than you. manifest destiny and all that.” End ID.

ID 7: “I am so heartbroken for the palestinian people. I have faith that liberation is possible, but the price they've paid for it is too heavy. it's too too heavy. and now muslims and arabs all across the world will also pay the price. the very least you can do is look.” End ID.

#reaux speaks #instagram #resources #bipoc #palestine #free palestine #arab #muslim #islam #anti zionism #united states #iraq #afghanistan #islamophobia

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septembriseur · 5 months

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The other day I was talking to a friend who's a Muslim activist, and I made the connection between Amitav Ghosh's analysis of the climate crisis and my feelings about the genocide in Gaza and, more broadly, to the enforcement and regulation of inequality in our current moment. Ghosh refers to the way that we are living in the climate crisis as "the great derangement." There is a kind of collective madness, he argues, in the fact that we all know that climate change is happening and why it is happening and that every day we contribute to it happening, and yet at the same time climate change appears almost nowhere in our culture. We don't talk about it. We don't engage with it. Engaging it with would mean acknowledging that the premises on which our society is built are false and unsustainable. And the genocide in Gaza functions in a similar way: we know that it is happening and yet we don't talk about it or engage with it because it exposes the falseness and unsustainability of the premises of our society (premises that in this case include human rights).

I think that a lot of the things that Ghosh says illuminate how these two derangements are actually the same derangement, the derangement of what people in the environmental humanities have started calling the plantationocene. This has to do with a world ecology that sustains a hegemonic elite (and Eurocentric) modernity through the breakdown and (re)circulation of everything that is deemed to belong to the non- or subhuman. The world of the plantationocene is one that has always been defined by the ability of hegemonic power to treat both ("sub")human and nonhuman populations as interchangeable resources that can be deployed whenever and wherever they are most profitable to hegemonic powers: vide the relocation of African slaves and South Asian laborers, the disastrous ecological reshapings of colonized territories to better produce an elite European modernity.

To challenge what is happening in Gaza requires a challenge to several key principles of this world: that hegemonic elite modernity (which Israel has always formed a part of, as one can easily see by glancing at attempts to define the "Global North") has the right to regulate populations as it sees fit; that this regulation of populations is right because the sub-/nonhuman does not possess an unquantifiable wholeness that can be damaged or destroyed through civil destruction and forced relocation (i.e. it makes no difference to resettle indigenous peoples of the Americas or to transport South Asian laborers to islands halfway around the world, because their interchangeability means that nothing important is lost in the process— no more than transporting a plant to a different continent entails a loss or damage to the plant or botanical world); that the sub-/nonhuman exists as a resource to fuel, produce, and sustain hegemonic elite modernity, and can be simply wiped out if it becomes inconvenient or counterproductive to that modernity.

If you start to pursue these ideas, you realize that the genocide in Gaza is enmeshed in the "border crisis" and "refugee crisis" in Europe and the U.S.; you realize that all of these are enmeshed in your ability to walk into a superstore and purchase cheap consumer goods produced and assembled under inhuman conditions; it is enmeshed in everything you touch. And it becomes so overwhelming that you simply do not know how to think about it, because the suffering and the culpability for the suffering become so vast.

But we cannot let ourselves perpetuate this derangement. We have to look straight at the fact that it is absolutely insane that Gaza is no longer even the top headline on news sites. It is absolutely insane that Americans and Europeans (and even some Israelis!) can walk around and go through their days and not think about it at all. It is absolutely insane that we know what is happening and don't act. And I think that a lot of what Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement about the nature of contemporary politics explains why we don't act— but we have to live in the dissonance and tension of how absolutely insane it is that we don't act. We can't let the derangement trap us inside of it.

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2goldensnitches · 1 month

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ngl since october i've been feeling very uneasy in fandom, like lots of other users in the ones im familiar in are propalestine which is fine until they start throwing dogwhistles around and reposting obvious misinformation about i/p and dehumanizing jews/israelis/zionists as if that does anything to help palestinians (meanwhile when politicians like biden actually try to help they're either ignored or accused of bizarre conspiracy theories that don't make sense with even basic knowledge about the conflict)

i was guilty of sliding down the rabbit hole myself bc i wasn't thinking critically, like oh, this blogger started reblogging some suspicious stuff like the "river to the sea" stuff but if i don't support it i'm Evil and Hate Palestinians so i reblogged it like the Good Tumblr User i wanted to be. i've had reservations about how weirdly people talk about israel, but they say its progressive and moral, and i fell for their words. in hindsight, i really should've known better than to take them at their word, and now i don't really reblog much about the conflict anymore bc holy shit people really showed themselves to be utterly vile about this conflict and i don't trust a lot of people here anymore

then people i thought were trustworthy started getting really mask off. one semi popular fandom account i followed reblogged jvp as a reliable source, but i later learned from browsing jumblr posts that jvp is actually really antisemitic and basically autism speaks for jews. and in addition they also reblogged stuff about how israelis are all Evil and don't deserve any sympathy for 10/7, which is just cruel. i couldn't associate w/ them in good faith any more. other fandom accounts i used to follow started reblogging some really stomach churning (but concerningly popular) posts such as one about how hamas treated the hostages "so well" and another about houthis supposedly attacking ships for palestine's sake. this and looking beyond my usual fandom circles really opened my eyes to just how toxic and ass backwards this was becoming, and how this kind of vitriol is spilling over into the real world and hurting jews while doing nothing to help palestinians or muslims affected by the concurrent rise in islamophobia. it's so nervewracking. now whenever i see fandom blogs post propalestine stuff w/ "river to the sea" in big letters i feel very wary that they might be hiding more dangerous prejudices under the surface. even those who do try to be more aware about the surge in antisemitism still can't help but put down israelis, dabble in conspiracy theories, and/or condescend to jews or occasionally their allies

honestly kudos to you for staying strong in these times. you're a lot braver than me and you and the rest of jumblr deserve better than this horror show

Thank you for the ask. I would just like to say that i don’t care if people support palestine and i don’t give a shit about the israeli government—i just want them to be normal about israelis and jews and not treat an actual war like team sports and fandomise this. Ideally people should want peace instead of thinking about innocent people in terms of a team they can root for while watching a match on the telly. Unfortunately, while the insanity didn’t start on social media, the current nature of the internet facilitated a really shit union between “activism” and fandom where more people are concerned about fictional antisemitic goblins than they are with real flesh and blood people doxxing jews and forming actual lynch mobs. They sloganeer for actual terrorist groups while ignoring the lives of palestinians and yemenis and lebanese and syrians and iranians directly impacted by them. All we can do is sit tight and hope more people come to their senses at least; if they don’t, then we shouldn’t waste time lamenting them.

#asks #israel hamas war

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