Comrades, For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Below, an essay on the manipulation of truth and Gaza. For most of us, telling the truth means making a statement which fits the facts. If I say, “I am now on the island of St Helena observing Napoleon’s residence” - this statement is true if I am in fact really there, observing Napoleon’s residence. The so-called postmodernists proceed in a different way: they reduce truth to a discursive “truth-effect.” For example, Michel Foucault’s notion of truth can be summed up by the claim that truth/untruth is not a direct property of our statements but, in different historical conditions, alternative discourses produce their own specific truth-effects, i.e., they imply their own criteria of what values as “true”:
It’s funny that even zizek just parrots the culture war talking points on this topic, just dressed up and preceded by some wandering notions about Truth. There’s almost nothing in here I haven’t seen condensed into a twitter screed
I'm not even dismissing the claims. Many of them are valid points. It's just an interesting development. Zizek did not do that 5-10y ago. I would think that he could add a bit more value to the discussion
Unfortunately the Palestinian hopes since the 1940s has been the elimination of Israel and the reversal of the Nakba. There’s a reason the Left wing of Israeli politics collapsed after selling the idea of a deal so hard in the 90s and 00s.
16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
17. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.
Israel 2023-2024
Netanyahu's repeated statements (and current genocidal tactics) as recently as This Month: Using the term Amalek which is used to describe those who need to be wiped from the face of the earth. If you read South Africa's application regarding the very real threat of genocide, you will know that more than a few Israeli leaders are parroting the same outcome.
I love people who act as if this whole conflict started in about 2010. The Palestinians have been trying to eliminate Israel since the 1940s, since well before Gaza and the West Bank were ever occupied. Was there some amazing peace process hope on the Palestinian side in the 1960s and 1970s? No, this was reaching the height of their armed struggle phase, in fact.
Because some terrorist organization changes their slogan or charter to appeal to useful idiots the world over doesn't mean the basic aim is not the same. And Netanyahu and his government is a clear reaction to the wounds that the Palestinians inflicted on the Left wingers who went out on a limb for the peace process. Don't think there's some magic government that's not Netanyahu coming in that's going to be starry eyed about what great partners the Palestinians are for peace.
Your post is based on White Supremacism. The idea that European, or Europeanized settlers have a right to displace non-European peoples. And if those non-European peoples fight back or defend themselves in any way - they are "terrorists." This is White Supremacism at its purest.
The Arabs and Palestinians have tried and failed to eliminate Israel multiple times now. They are clearly genocidal in their intent. Palestinians have been anngry and aggrieved about the foundation of Israel for 100 years, and it becomes immaterial now, whether they deny any historical connection of Jews to Israel as you seem to is also immaterial. Israel is a fact on the ground, and the Palestinians are extremely late now with accepting it and coming to some kind of status quo with it.
What you call "Israel" is an Apartheid State. Since there are equal numbers of Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land - about 7.5 million each - the only way you can have a "Jewish State" is by Apartheid and Genocide. In the end, that's not a viable proposition.
Note that as recently as 2013 when Donald Sasson wrote the following review of Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Land of Israel" he is speaking of Israeli officials being tried at the ICC in figurative terms. In that time, Israeli officials have appeared at the ICJ, Swiss police are still seriously a request for an arrest warrant request made against President Herzog when he appeared at Davos, and the clearly biased and compromised ICC prosecutor Karim Khan is under pressure to get his finger out and actually prosecute the war crimes that occurring the glaring light of day. This pressure will only increase if the ICJ issues an injunction against Tel Aviv and if the case brought against the Biden gains traction.
"The "Land of Israel" is barely mentioned in the Old Testament: the more common expression is the Land of Canaan. When it is mentioned, it does not include Jerusalem, Hebron, or Bethlehem. Biblical "Israel" is only northern Israel (Samaria) and there never was a united kingdom including both ancient Judea and Samaria.
Even had such a kingdom ever existed and been promised by God to the Jews, it is hardly a clinching argument for claiming statehood after more than 2,000 years. It is an irony of history that so many past Zionists, most of whom were secular Jews, often socialist, used religious arguments to buttress their case. Besides, the biblical account makes it quite clear (insofar as such accounts are ever clear) that the Jews, led by Moses and then by Joshua, were colonisers themselves and were commanded by God to exterminate "anything that breathes". "Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you." Imagine if the Amorites came back and claimed their ancient land. If they did, this is what Deuteronomy 20 has to say: "Put to the sword all the men ... As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else ... you may take these as plunder for yourselves." Today, such an injunction would take you straight to the international criminal court."
THE LEGAL CASE AGAINST JOE BIDEN FOR ENABLING ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST GAZA
"We had an amicus brief go into our case in the U.S. proceedings, our case against Biden, by 77 human rights organizations, bar associations, international legal organizations that are committed to ensuring that the best of international law, the best of those principles, apply equally for the protection of all. And that brief warned about the real risk to the international legal order, and to humanity, if the United States continues down the course of action that it’s on, of fueling, rather than ending, a genocide.
It spoke about the fact that there would be a complete erosion of rights. And, as a Palestinian human rights defender that some of us know, Raji Sourani often says, “We either have the rule of law or the rule of the jungle.” And I think we are at that moment.
What was also important, though, about that amicus brief is it put in context how we got to this place that is a breaking point, and that it went back to the post-9/11 so-called “war on terror.” The United States’s embrace of torture regimes. embrace of so-called “targeted killings,” embrace of a global battlefield where it could bomb and shoot anyone who they considered a, quote, “terrorist,” with impunity and without explanation. Or where they can have a preventive, so-called “preventive” war against Iraq. A war by choice that led to a horrifying occupation with tremendously cruel and long lasting impacts for the Iraqi population and their country.
This is the context that we need to see to understand why a case at the International Court of Justice between South Africa and Israel is about much more than just the outcome in a judgment. It’s really about what kind of world we want to have, and is it going to be one where some powers have to comply with the law while punishing others who don’t. Or will it be a moment where the law will equally protect and hold the powerful to account?
Impunity breeds repetition and recurrence, and what we’ve seen from Israel with its military assaults on Gaza — in 2009, in 2012, in 2014, in 2018, in 2021 — is that each military assault they’ve gotten farther, been even more brutal, with more destruction, more death, and they’ve never had to pay a cost. And that is why, at this moment, we have at least 23,000 Palestinians who’ve been killed, 1.9 million who’ve been displaced, and so much of the infrastructure, including homes, destroyed in Gaza.
So, international law really needs, at this moment, to be given effect, or else we are in a point of a true lawlessness, and it will extend far beyond the occupied Palestinian territory in Israel, or even far beyond what the United States has done in black sites it over the years of the War on Terror. It really will be a lawlessness that will be global.
And I think when we see so much risk of the end of democracy, as we’ve been experiencing these last five, ten years, it’s really quite a concerning moment. A scary moment."
The International Criminal Court must intervene to deter potential genocide in Gaza
In an open letter published on 19 October 2023, over a 100 genocide scholars, Palestinian and international civil society organisations call on Prosecutor Khan to issue arrest warrants, investigate Israeli crimes and intervene to deter incitement to commit genocide in Gaza.
Open letter to the Assembly of State Parties regarding the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s engagement with the Situation in Palestine
we demand the Assembly of State Parties to:
• Provide adequate political and financial support to the Court, ensure that the Prosecutor disburses resources on the basis of investigative needs as opposed to politically-motivated prioritization, and urge it to expedite its investigation into the Situation in Palestine.
• Investigate the adherence of the Prosecutor’s Office to ICSC Standards of Conduct, particularly in relation to impartiality, and non-discrimination.
• Investigate the conduct of the current prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, and take appropriate measures in accordance with the mandate of the Assembly derived from Article 112 of the Rome Statute.
The truth is that we once enjoyed a spirituality that was not a religion. We are told, nay, it is actually beaten into our heads that such was barbaric, primitive and wrong. However, it was the onset of religion, of this abrahamic ascendency that invented the religious war.
Truly, this has now become pathological, for religion to justify war even to atheists.
Socrates famously said that the purpose of philosophy is to convince one that the mass of humanity has utterly lost its mind.
Most of them were burned by US supplied Apache helicopters on the Hannibal Directive, which mandates the IDF to kill Jews rather than allow them to become prisoners of Palestinian forces. Even the Israeli media admits this.
Ironic to the situation in Gaza. Truth can very much be like a firearm. If you fire it too soon, or in the case you presented, too late, it will miss the target and have little to no effect. Timing and precision is everything.
In this case we see the media carry the message and the consequence- Israel lied Palestinians died. Often we don’t see, Washington lied Falujaians died. Or it’s obscured, Washington lied, East Timor, Nicaragua, Haiti died. Why postmodernist analysis when the psychos own the media and the white settler tells the story?
The truth about Gaza is that until the current residents are relocated, there won’t ever be peace. More people know this to be true than are willing to say it. A Palestinian state (Gaza and/or West Bank) is both practically unworkable and morally outrageous.
Being from Slovenia must give someone the biggest inferiority complex, who knew the country even exists?!? At least its better known than Moldova...perhaps less interesting though.
The disgusting spectacle of a recently remilitarized German state engaged in the most despicable and bloodthirsty forms of Genocide Denialism is especially damnable when considered within the German domestic political context in which a revived ultranationalism has been an ever-present danger for all of this century.
“It also exposes the deep-rooted white supremacy in German society. Indeed, the reaction of the German authorities to what is going on in Gaza demonstrates that they want to strengthen and solidify racist hierarchies in German society: white Germans at the top and people from “the Third World”, including victims of Israeli violence, at the bottom, doing in silence dirty menial jobs and being expected to show their gratitude and “integrate” into German society.
Covering up German anti-Semitism
But there is something even more pernicious about misrepresenting anti-Semitism in Germany as a foreign “import”, brought to the country by non-white immigrants. This increasingly popular lie obfuscates Germany’s brutal, anti-Jewish history and somehow dumps blame for the suffering of Jewish people onto Palestinians who are victims of a European racist, settler-colonial regime.
It also covers up the German society’s anti-Semitic present. Anti-Jewish sentiment still persists in Germany. According to official statistics, the vast majority of documented anti-Semitic incidents are committed by the political right.
It is not coincidental that the far-right party AfD has reached an all-time peak in popularity in recent weeks. According to polls from mid-December, it is now standing at 23 percent, second only to the right-wing CDU and far ahead of any of the parties in the current governing coalition.
AfD representatives have glorified German ethno-nationalism and downplayed the crimes of the Nazi regime while consistently insisting that immigrants are anti-Semitic and demanding that the federal government prioritise combatting “imported anti-Semitism”.
This combination of Zionism and toxic German nationalism may further fuel racist violence against minorities, including the Jewish community.
Germany’s anti-Palestinianism needs to be viewed not as a reaction to, but rather a continuation of, Germany’s racist crimes. Palestinians and other victims of Israeli and German violence have never been considered human enough.
Like Germany’s colonial genocides and its support for apartheid in South Africa and racist regimes elsewhere – which never received sufficient attention in public discourse – its role in the genocide in Palestine upholds racist hierarchies and its own self-image as a “civilised” and “morally superior” nation.
The German-backed slaughter of Palestinians thus serves to strengthen the fantasies of white, ethnic German supremacy.”
Jurgen Habermas has damned himself to be banished into the history of genocidal infamy.
“we are deeply troubled by the apparent limits of the solidarity expressed by the authors. The statement’s concern for human dignity is not adequately extended to Palestinian civilians in Gaza who are facing death and destruction. Nor is it applied or extended to Muslims in Germany experiencing rising Islamophobia. Solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict.
(…)
We are concerned that there is no mention of upholding international law, which also prohibits war crimes and crimes against humanity such as collective punishment, persecution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Being guided by principles of international legal standards, solidarity and human dignity compels us to hold all participants in the conflict to this higher standard.
We cannot allow the atrocities to force us to abandon these principles.”
The German project of adopting a Genocidal anti-Palestinian military-colonialism in the forlorn attempt to paint the Germans as repentant and subsequently reborn philo-Semites can be seen as especially mentally and morally bankrupt if we examine the *real* history of how Israeli Jews regarded and treated Holocaust survivors.
The Holocaust was ideologically militarized by Zionists from the very beginning. The Shoah was immediately seized upon as one more reason to strengthen and arm the necropolitical, military-colonial State into a permanently belligerent state of arms.
This is the militaristic obscenity of a Shoah (anti)Theology bastardized into a Genocidal program of a Holocaust 2.0. This militaristic, ethno-nationalist doctrine of a universally conscripted Israeli people permanently under arms, in a permanent state of Schmittian exception, is violently antithetical to the humanist universalism of the Shoah Theology of the numerous Jewish Voices for Peace groups around the world.
"‘Jews against genocide’ protesters disrupt Austrian parliament
“Never again for anyone.” The ‘Not in Our Name Vienna’ group is at odds with Austria’s support for Israel and wants to see an end to the killing of Palestinians."
Significant numbers of warlike Israelis were deeply ashamed of Jewish survivors and treated them with exceptional cruelty and disdain. Every Jewish wound or death is exploited by the Israeli state apparatus for its agitational capacity to excite violent bloodthirst in the Israeli population of universal military conscription.
Israel is a military-colonial rogue-nuclear, apartheid state built upon a theocratic ideological foundation of militant ethno-nationalism
“Sabonim - Sabra mistreatment of Holocaust Survivors
The Holocaust survivors, who came to Israel after WWII, were called "sabonim" by local Zionists, which has a double meaning of "cowards" and "soaps" (meaning the narrative that Nazis made soap out of Jewish corpses). Below are several links to what it felt like and what it led to. “It’s all lies,” she shouted. “They didn’t want us, any of us, didn’t matter where we came from, what we had been through. On the contrary, it was precisely because of what had happened to us that they wanted nothing to do with us.
“They even discussed building a second dining hall so they wouldn’t have to eat with us, the sabonim. That’s what they called us: sabonim, nothing but bars of soap. Because the Germans are supposed to have made soap out of Jewish corpses.”
I was shocked into silence. It seemed beyond belief, such a level of hostility, such cruel contempt. Perhaps she had misunderstood? Edith shook her head. I had never seen her look so grim.
“In a way, I wish they had put us in a different dining room. As it was, the sabras, the old-timers, always kept themselves to themselves, joking in Hebrew. They would glance across at us from time to time, so it was obvious they were talking about us.”
“‘Us’? So you weren’t quite alone.” “Yes and no. There was a woman from one of the camps who had lost her husband and two children. She didn’t last long: hanged herself in the kitchen one night."”
"“They called us the sabonim,” he says — using Hebrew slang for “cowards.”
But it also sounds like the Hebrew word “sabon,” or soap, which survivors perceived as a reference to the soap the Nazis made from Jewish corpses.“ The emphasis is on the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust, such as the need to have a strong state.
“The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is instead that of military-colonial agit-prop: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.”
But war against Israel was only divine when God Spoke directly with the leader of Israel (Moses, Joshua, etc). So It's not that Netanyahu knows very well but nonetheless believes God gave Israel to the Jews. Worse, he knows very well but nonetheless believe he is the next Moses. The fist thing Joshua did when crossing the Jordan was circumcise all males, probably so they felt that they are mutilated freaks anywhere else but Israel and therefore there is no plan B for them and they won't disband. When Netanyahu has his circumcision moment we will know he is the true Moses. Moses with nukes.
In reality, the so called "two state solution" was never anything more than buying time for the Zionists to eat up what was left of Palestine. The job is nearly done now. There is no basis for a Palestinian state. The only Progressive position is to call for a single state, from the river to the sea, where everyone has equal rights and an equal vote. There are 7.5 million Jews - and 7.5 million Muslims. So a "Jewish State" is a complete fantasy - just as much as a Palestinian state is. What we need is an end to Apartheid. Calling for anything less is really just supporting reactionary backwardness.
The courage and truth that I’ve been waiting to see from the intellectual elite! Vive Zizek, a scholar of integrity and courage!
It’s funny that even zizek just parrots the culture war talking points on this topic, just dressed up and preceded by some wandering notions about Truth. There’s almost nothing in here I haven’t seen condensed into a twitter screed
If the psychoanalyst tells this to his patient too early, the patient will dismiss it as irrelevant.
I'm not even dismissing the claims. Many of them are valid points. It's just an interesting development. Zizek did not do that 5-10y ago. I would think that he could add a bit more value to the discussion
Unfortunately the Palestinian hopes since the 1940s has been the elimination of Israel and the reversal of the Nakba. There’s a reason the Left wing of Israeli politics collapsed after selling the idea of a deal so hard in the 90s and 00s.
Let's look at the facts:
Case in point - Hamas Charter of 2017
16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
17. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.
Israel 2023-2024
Netanyahu's repeated statements (and current genocidal tactics) as recently as This Month: Using the term Amalek which is used to describe those who need to be wiped from the face of the earth. If you read South Africa's application regarding the very real threat of genocide, you will know that more than a few Israeli leaders are parroting the same outcome.
I love people who act as if this whole conflict started in about 2010. The Palestinians have been trying to eliminate Israel since the 1940s, since well before Gaza and the West Bank were ever occupied. Was there some amazing peace process hope on the Palestinian side in the 1960s and 1970s? No, this was reaching the height of their armed struggle phase, in fact.
Because some terrorist organization changes their slogan or charter to appeal to useful idiots the world over doesn't mean the basic aim is not the same. And Netanyahu and his government is a clear reaction to the wounds that the Palestinians inflicted on the Left wingers who went out on a limb for the peace process. Don't think there's some magic government that's not Netanyahu coming in that's going to be starry eyed about what great partners the Palestinians are for peace.
Your post is based on White Supremacism. The idea that European, or Europeanized settlers have a right to displace non-European peoples. And if those non-European peoples fight back or defend themselves in any way - they are "terrorists." This is White Supremacism at its purest.
The Arabs and Palestinians have tried and failed to eliminate Israel multiple times now. They are clearly genocidal in their intent. Palestinians have been anngry and aggrieved about the foundation of Israel for 100 years, and it becomes immaterial now, whether they deny any historical connection of Jews to Israel as you seem to is also immaterial. Israel is a fact on the ground, and the Palestinians are extremely late now with accepting it and coming to some kind of status quo with it.
What you call "Israel" is an Apartheid State. Since there are equal numbers of Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land - about 7.5 million each - the only way you can have a "Jewish State" is by Apartheid and Genocide. In the end, that's not a viable proposition.
Muted. Blocked.
Coward
Mute. Block.
Note that as recently as 2013 when Donald Sasson wrote the following review of Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Land of Israel" he is speaking of Israeli officials being tried at the ICC in figurative terms. In that time, Israeli officials have appeared at the ICJ, Swiss police are still seriously a request for an arrest warrant request made against President Herzog when he appeared at Davos, and the clearly biased and compromised ICC prosecutor Karim Khan is under pressure to get his finger out and actually prosecute the war crimes that occurring the glaring light of day. This pressure will only increase if the ICJ issues an injunction against Tel Aviv and if the case brought against the Biden gains traction.
"The "Land of Israel" is barely mentioned in the Old Testament: the more common expression is the Land of Canaan. When it is mentioned, it does not include Jerusalem, Hebron, or Bethlehem. Biblical "Israel" is only northern Israel (Samaria) and there never was a united kingdom including both ancient Judea and Samaria.
Even had such a kingdom ever existed and been promised by God to the Jews, it is hardly a clinching argument for claiming statehood after more than 2,000 years. It is an irony of history that so many past Zionists, most of whom were secular Jews, often socialist, used religious arguments to buttress their case. Besides, the biblical account makes it quite clear (insofar as such accounts are ever clear) that the Jews, led by Moses and then by Joshua, were colonisers themselves and were commanded by God to exterminate "anything that breathes". "Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you." Imagine if the Amorites came back and claimed their ancient land. If they did, this is what Deuteronomy 20 has to say: "Put to the sword all the men ... As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else ... you may take these as plunder for yourselves." Today, such an injunction would take you straight to the international criminal court."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/18/invention-land-israel-shlomo-sand
THE LEGAL CASE AGAINST JOE BIDEN FOR ENABLING ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST GAZA
"We had an amicus brief go into our case in the U.S. proceedings, our case against Biden, by 77 human rights organizations, bar associations, international legal organizations that are committed to ensuring that the best of international law, the best of those principles, apply equally for the protection of all. And that brief warned about the real risk to the international legal order, and to humanity, if the United States continues down the course of action that it’s on, of fueling, rather than ending, a genocide.
It spoke about the fact that there would be a complete erosion of rights. And, as a Palestinian human rights defender that some of us know, Raji Sourani often says, “We either have the rule of law or the rule of the jungle.” And I think we are at that moment.
What was also important, though, about that amicus brief is it put in context how we got to this place that is a breaking point, and that it went back to the post-9/11 so-called “war on terror.” The United States’s embrace of torture regimes. embrace of so-called “targeted killings,” embrace of a global battlefield where it could bomb and shoot anyone who they considered a, quote, “terrorist,” with impunity and without explanation. Or where they can have a preventive, so-called “preventive” war against Iraq. A war by choice that led to a horrifying occupation with tremendously cruel and long lasting impacts for the Iraqi population and their country.
This is the context that we need to see to understand why a case at the International Court of Justice between South Africa and Israel is about much more than just the outcome in a judgment. It’s really about what kind of world we want to have, and is it going to be one where some powers have to comply with the law while punishing others who don’t. Or will it be a moment where the law will equally protect and hold the powerful to account?
Impunity breeds repetition and recurrence, and what we’ve seen from Israel with its military assaults on Gaza — in 2009, in 2012, in 2014, in 2018, in 2021 — is that each military assault they’ve gotten farther, been even more brutal, with more destruction, more death, and they’ve never had to pay a cost. And that is why, at this moment, we have at least 23,000 Palestinians who’ve been killed, 1.9 million who’ve been displaced, and so much of the infrastructure, including homes, destroyed in Gaza.
So, international law really needs, at this moment, to be given effect, or else we are in a point of a true lawlessness, and it will extend far beyond the occupied Palestinian territory in Israel, or even far beyond what the United States has done in black sites it over the years of the War on Terror. It really will be a lawlessness that will be global.
And I think when we see so much risk of the end of democracy, as we’ve been experiencing these last five, ten years, it’s really quite a concerning moment. A scary moment."
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/17/intercepted-gaza-israel-genocide-icj/
The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective
https://ccrjustice.org/genocide-palestinian-people-international-law-and-human-rights-perspective
Israel’s Unfolding Crime of Genocide of the Palestinian People & U.S. Failure to Prevent and Complicity in Genocide
Emergency Legal Briefing Paper
https://ccrjustice.org/israel-s-unfolding-crime-genocide-palestinian-people-us-failure-prevent-and-complicity-genocide
The International Criminal Court must intervene to deter potential genocide in Gaza
In an open letter published on 19 October 2023, over a 100 genocide scholars, Palestinian and international civil society organisations call on Prosecutor Khan to issue arrest warrants, investigate Israeli crimes and intervene to deter incitement to commit genocide in Gaza.
https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/the-international-criminal-court-must-intervene-to-deter-potential
Open letter to the Assembly of State Parties regarding the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s engagement with the Situation in Palestine
we demand the Assembly of State Parties to:
• Provide adequate political and financial support to the Court, ensure that the Prosecutor disburses resources on the basis of investigative needs as opposed to politically-motivated prioritization, and urge it to expedite its investigation into the Situation in Palestine.
• Investigate the adherence of the Prosecutor’s Office to ICSC Standards of Conduct, particularly in relation to impartiality, and non-discrimination.
• Investigate the conduct of the current prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, and take appropriate measures in accordance with the mandate of the Assembly derived from Article 112 of the Rome Statute.
https://twailr.com/open-letter-to-the-assembly-of-state-parties-regarding-the-otps-engagement-with-situation-in-palestine/
The truth is that we once enjoyed a spirituality that was not a religion. We are told, nay, it is actually beaten into our heads that such was barbaric, primitive and wrong. However, it was the onset of religion, of this abrahamic ascendency that invented the religious war.
Truly, this has now become pathological, for religion to justify war even to atheists.
Socrates famously said that the purpose of philosophy is to convince one that the mass of humanity has utterly lost its mind.
Still true today.
Have you been drinking the Jackson Hinkle kool-aid? Jewish bodies were burnt on October seventh.
Looking forward to the Zizek holohoax post next, I guess.
Most of them were burned by US supplied Apache helicopters on the Hannibal Directive, which mandates the IDF to kill Jews rather than allow them to become prisoners of Palestinian forces. Even the Israeli media admits this.
I am asking you, as I ask anybody else: WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
Without being able to offer a vision that you consider humane, equitable and feasible, all of this is just empty blabber.
So, WHAT IS THE SOLUTION ZORK? Otherwise, all of this is just empty blabber.
https://zorkthehun.substack.com/p/the-jewish-solution
it is scheduled to be up tomorrow 8am
Besides, a question is a question, not blabber per se.
I happen to have an answer, but that is, again, beside the point
Beautifully written, Z.
Ironic to the situation in Gaza. Truth can very much be like a firearm. If you fire it too soon, or in the case you presented, too late, it will miss the target and have little to no effect. Timing and precision is everything.
Tell the Germans they need to question what is illegal to question, full stop, and to quit with the Stockholm syndrome!
In this case we see the media carry the message and the consequence- Israel lied Palestinians died. Often we don’t see, Washington lied Falujaians died. Or it’s obscured, Washington lied, East Timor, Nicaragua, Haiti died. Why postmodernist analysis when the psychos own the media and the white settler tells the story?
The truth about Gaza is that until the current residents are relocated, there won’t ever be peace. More people know this to be true than are willing to say it. A Palestinian state (Gaza and/or West Bank) is both practically unworkable and morally outrageous.
https://zorkthehun.substack.com/p/the-jewish-solution
Being from Slovenia must give someone the biggest inferiority complex, who knew the country even exists?!? At least its better known than Moldova...perhaps less interesting though.
The disgusting spectacle of a recently remilitarized German state engaged in the most despicable and bloodthirsty forms of Genocide Denialism is especially damnable when considered within the German domestic political context in which a revived ultranationalism has been an ever-present danger for all of this century.
“It also exposes the deep-rooted white supremacy in German society. Indeed, the reaction of the German authorities to what is going on in Gaza demonstrates that they want to strengthen and solidify racist hierarchies in German society: white Germans at the top and people from “the Third World”, including victims of Israeli violence, at the bottom, doing in silence dirty menial jobs and being expected to show their gratitude and “integrate” into German society.
Covering up German anti-Semitism
But there is something even more pernicious about misrepresenting anti-Semitism in Germany as a foreign “import”, brought to the country by non-white immigrants. This increasingly popular lie obfuscates Germany’s brutal, anti-Jewish history and somehow dumps blame for the suffering of Jewish people onto Palestinians who are victims of a European racist, settler-colonial regime.
It also covers up the German society’s anti-Semitic present. Anti-Jewish sentiment still persists in Germany. According to official statistics, the vast majority of documented anti-Semitic incidents are committed by the political right.
It is not coincidental that the far-right party AfD has reached an all-time peak in popularity in recent weeks. According to polls from mid-December, it is now standing at 23 percent, second only to the right-wing CDU and far ahead of any of the parties in the current governing coalition.
AfD representatives have glorified German ethno-nationalism and downplayed the crimes of the Nazi regime while consistently insisting that immigrants are anti-Semitic and demanding that the federal government prioritise combatting “imported anti-Semitism”.
This combination of Zionism and toxic German nationalism may further fuel racist violence against minorities, including the Jewish community.
Germany’s anti-Palestinianism needs to be viewed not as a reaction to, but rather a continuation of, Germany’s racist crimes. Palestinians and other victims of Israeli and German violence have never been considered human enough.
Like Germany’s colonial genocides and its support for apartheid in South Africa and racist regimes elsewhere – which never received sufficient attention in public discourse – its role in the genocide in Palestine upholds racist hierarchies and its own self-image as a “civilised” and “morally superior” nation.
The German-backed slaughter of Palestinians thus serves to strengthen the fantasies of white, ethnic German supremacy.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/7/why-is-germany-so-viciously-anti-palestinian
Jurgen Habermas has damned himself to be banished into the history of genocidal infamy.
“we are deeply troubled by the apparent limits of the solidarity expressed by the authors. The statement’s concern for human dignity is not adequately extended to Palestinian civilians in Gaza who are facing death and destruction. Nor is it applied or extended to Muslims in Germany experiencing rising Islamophobia. Solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict.
(…)
We are concerned that there is no mention of upholding international law, which also prohibits war crimes and crimes against humanity such as collective punishment, persecution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Being guided by principles of international legal standards, solidarity and human dignity compels us to hold all participants in the conflict to this higher standard.
We cannot allow the atrocities to force us to abandon these principles.”
https://publicseminar.org/2023/11/a-response-to-principles-of-solidarity-a-statement/
The German project of adopting a Genocidal anti-Palestinian military-colonialism in the forlorn attempt to paint the Germans as repentant and subsequently reborn philo-Semites can be seen as especially mentally and morally bankrupt if we examine the *real* history of how Israeli Jews regarded and treated Holocaust survivors.
The Holocaust was ideologically militarized by Zionists from the very beginning. The Shoah was immediately seized upon as one more reason to strengthen and arm the necropolitical, military-colonial State into a permanently belligerent state of arms.
This is the militaristic obscenity of a Shoah (anti)Theology bastardized into a Genocidal program of a Holocaust 2.0. This militaristic, ethno-nationalist doctrine of a universally conscripted Israeli people permanently under arms, in a permanent state of Schmittian exception, is violently antithetical to the humanist universalism of the Shoah Theology of the numerous Jewish Voices for Peace groups around the world.
"Never again means never again — for anyone."
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/11/statement23-10-11/
"‘Jews against genocide’ protesters disrupt Austrian parliament
“Never again for anyone.” The ‘Not in Our Name Vienna’ group is at odds with Austria’s support for Israel and wants to see an end to the killing of Palestinians."
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/1/16/protests-distrupt-austrian-parliament
Significant numbers of warlike Israelis were deeply ashamed of Jewish survivors and treated them with exceptional cruelty and disdain. Every Jewish wound or death is exploited by the Israeli state apparatus for its agitational capacity to excite violent bloodthirst in the Israeli population of universal military conscription.
Israel is a military-colonial rogue-nuclear, apartheid state built upon a theocratic ideological foundation of militant ethno-nationalism
“Sabonim - Sabra mistreatment of Holocaust Survivors
The Holocaust survivors, who came to Israel after WWII, were called "sabonim" by local Zionists, which has a double meaning of "cowards" and "soaps" (meaning the narrative that Nazis made soap out of Jewish corpses). Below are several links to what it felt like and what it led to. “It’s all lies,” she shouted. “They didn’t want us, any of us, didn’t matter where we came from, what we had been through. On the contrary, it was precisely because of what had happened to us that they wanted nothing to do with us.
“They even discussed building a second dining hall so they wouldn’t have to eat with us, the sabonim. That’s what they called us: sabonim, nothing but bars of soap. Because the Germans are supposed to have made soap out of Jewish corpses.”
I was shocked into silence. It seemed beyond belief, such a level of hostility, such cruel contempt. Perhaps she had misunderstood? Edith shook her head. I had never seen her look so grim.
“In a way, I wish they had put us in a different dining room. As it was, the sabras, the old-timers, always kept themselves to themselves, joking in Hebrew. They would glance across at us from time to time, so it was obvious they were talking about us.”
“‘Us’? So you weren’t quite alone.” “Yes and no. There was a woman from one of the camps who had lost her husband and two children. She didn’t last long: hanged herself in the kitchen one night."”
https://search-for-emes.blogspot.com/2011/08/sabonim-sabra-mistreatment-of-holocaust.html
"“They called us the sabonim,” he says — using Hebrew slang for “cowards.”
But it also sounds like the Hebrew word “sabon,” or soap, which survivors perceived as a reference to the soap the Nazis made from Jewish corpses.“ The emphasis is on the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust, such as the need to have a strong state.
https://www.jta.org/archive/behind-the-headlines-holocaust-restitution-deals-fail-to-engross-israeli-public-2
“The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is instead that of military-colonial agit-prop: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/kidnapped-posters-israel-latin-america/
But war against Israel was only divine when God Spoke directly with the leader of Israel (Moses, Joshua, etc). So It's not that Netanyahu knows very well but nonetheless believes God gave Israel to the Jews. Worse, he knows very well but nonetheless believe he is the next Moses. The fist thing Joshua did when crossing the Jordan was circumcise all males, probably so they felt that they are mutilated freaks anywhere else but Israel and therefore there is no plan B for them and they won't disband. When Netanyahu has his circumcision moment we will know he is the true Moses. Moses with nukes.
In reality, the so called "two state solution" was never anything more than buying time for the Zionists to eat up what was left of Palestine. The job is nearly done now. There is no basis for a Palestinian state. The only Progressive position is to call for a single state, from the river to the sea, where everyone has equal rights and an equal vote. There are 7.5 million Jews - and 7.5 million Muslims. So a "Jewish State" is a complete fantasy - just as much as a Palestinian state is. What we need is an end to Apartheid. Calling for anything less is really just supporting reactionary backwardness.