Has The Israeli Goverment BecomeThe Monster?

[Free]

Netanyahu vows there will be no Palestinian state ahead of UN meeting

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a ceremony in the West Bank celebrating his government’s expansion of the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

abcnews.go.com

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Sadly Netanyahu has a valid point here, because Israel is working since decades to prevent the forming of a Palestinian state if the momentum should become big enough with the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The question where it should be located is a real problem to solve here, and Israel did all it can do to make it impossible.

 

[Ellie]

Even Jewish genocide experts are now calling it a genocide.

From Mehdi Hasan, who, after his MSNBC show was cancelled, went on to start Zeteo.

Mehdi Reacts to Ben Shapiro's Gaza Genocide Denial

"Saying you can't separate Zionism from Judaism is a dangerous road to go down," Hasan argues. "I grew up telling my Muslim and lefty friends not to blame Jews for Israel, don't conflate Judaism and Zionism – that's antisemitic. Now, Jewish organizations and leaders say they're inseparable. It's the same problem Muslims face with Islamism and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan. We have to separate religion from political ideology. The conflation is dangerous. I worry that my Jewish friends and communities will regret this in the years to come, because white supremacists will jump on this once the dust clears."

https://archive.md/TWIAY

Mehdi skewers Israeli adviser Mark Regev over false Israeli "Hamas Duty Roster," war crimes, etc, claims in MSNBC interview.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Guardian: How to burst the Israeli bubble: Noam Sheizaf

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

Duh. Let's see what excuses the neocolonialists will invent to continue enabling this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/16/israel-committed-genocide-in-gaza-says-un-inquiry

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Israel threatens national film awards after Palestinian story wins top prize - BBC News

The Sea follows a boy from the occupied West Bank who wants to visit Tel Aviv to see the sea for the first time.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

Israel threatens national film awards after Palestinian story wins top prize - BBC News

The Sea follows a boy from the occupied West Bank who wants to visit Tel Aviv to see the sea for the first time.

www.bbc.co.uk

Isn't this what democracies do (and especially The Only Democracy in The Middle East®) when a movie documenting the suffering of a minority within their borders gets an award?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Netanyahu and Trump disgrace the fight against antisemitism

And fatally undermine it too

nickcohen.substack.com

Hardly anyone who isn’t Jewish notices, but when Russia or any other country goes to war, thugs do not target Russians in London, Paris and New York. When Israel fights, however, antisemitic attacks on Jews explode. Meanwhile, one need only read Hamas’s founding covenant to see it took a large part of its ideology from the Nazis.

But no amount of racism excuses the tactics of the far right – not least because they are dangerous for Jews as well as Palestinians.

We are witnessing the culmination of an effort going back 20 years to redefine criticism of Israel as antisemitic, even when that criticism comes from within Israel.

Netanyahu and Trump don’t seem to care that they are discrediting the fight against antisemitism by making most of the world see it as a scam. One can already picture the grateful reaction of conspiracy theorists everywhere as the far right hands them a free pass

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

UK, Canada and Australia announced today the formal recognition of Palestine as state. Up to 10 states could make the effort, including more allies of Israel.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/21/uk-canada-and-australia-announce-formal-recognition-of-palestine-with-wave-of-israel-allies-to-follow

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

UK, Canada and Australia announced today the formal recognition of Palestine as state. Up to 10 states could make the effort, including more allies of Israel.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/21/uk-canada-and-australia-announce-formal-recognition-of-palestine-with-wave-of-israel-allies-to-follow

Too little, too late, too tokenist. This move will be utterly meaningless as long as they keep merely shedding crocodile tears while Israel continues its illegal land grab and annexation rampage. Also, given their role in censoring and cancelling advocacy for Palestinian rights, in arming and funding Israel, in providing it with extreme diplomatic and political support, the West is being ridiculous, callous, and disgusting even in this display of "good will": several of these countries are tying their recognition of a Palestinian state (which they're doing nothing to help emerge and exist - quite the contrary) to an erosion of Palestinians' right to self-determination and self-governance, i.e. who the Palestinians may choose to run the show.

Wake me up when these states finally decide to listen to the people and sanction this genocidal ethno-religious state, whose laws reek of "Ελλάς Ελλήνων Χριστιανών" - the Greek Junta's ethnoreligious purity slogan "Greece of and for Christian (Orthodox) Greeks", like they're sanctioning Russia.

 

[Ellie]

Agree it won't stop the genocide, or bring back the civilians who've been slaughtered, but it is a step in the right direction.

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

Agree it won't stop the genocide, or bring back the civilians who've been slaughtered, but it is a step in the right direction.

In Greece, we say "να σε κάψω Γιάννη, να σ'αλείψω λάδι."

Literal translation: "let me burn you, John, and then I'll rub oil on your burns." Which basically means "first I'll cause you a great harm and then I'll 'make up' for it by doing something utterly meaningless about it."

The UK is every bit as complicit as the US, Australia, Germany, Czechia, Hungary, and all those states that have for nearly eighty years treated Palestinians as subhumans and "terrorist by nature" that may be killed without batting an eyelid. And now they're throwing them a meaningless bone. What exactly is Keir Stürmer doing to end the genocide? He keeps sending Israel F-35 parts, munitions, and so on. He appoints Israeli lobbyists in government posts. He cracks down on pro-Palestinian advocacy and protests. He denies that what every genocide scholar, the UN, the IAGS, B'Tselem, and so on recognise as a genocide is a genocide, siding disgracefully with Greek far-right Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis (look him up, he's a riot).

What's needed is a full-blown package of boycotts and sanctions against Israel and its affiliates, including its spyware (or, more accurately, kompromat) industry and its partners (Palantir being the prime culprit).

 

[Innula Zenovka]

In Greece, we say "να σε κάψω Γιάννη, να σ'αλείψω λάδι."

Literal translation: "let me burn you, John, and then I'll rub oil on your burns." Which basically means "first I'll cause you a great harm and then I'll 'make up' for it by doing something utterly meaningless about it."

The UK is every bit as complicit as the US, Australia, Germany, Czechia, Hungary, and all those states that have for nearly eighty years treated Palestinians as subhumans and "terrorist by nature" that may be killed without batting an eyelid. And now they're throwing them a meaningless bone. What exactly is Keir Stürmer doing to end the genocide? He keeps sending Israel F-35 parts, munitions, and so on. He appoints Israeli lobbyists in government posts. He cracks down on pro-Palestinian advocacy and protests. He denies that what every genocide scholar, the UN, the IAGS, B'Tselem, and so on recognise as a genocide is a genocide, siding disgracefully with Greek far-right Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis (look him up, he's a riot).

What's needed is a full-blown package of boycotts and sanctions against Israel and its affiliates, including its spyware (or, more accurately, kompromat) industry and its partners (Palantir being the prime culprit).

What effect do you say "a full-blown package of boycotts and sanctions against Israel and its affiliates" would achieve if the US is not on board with them? It would certainly disrupt NATO procurement, which would greatly advantage Russia and disadvantage Europe and Ukraine, but I don't see what good it would do the Palestinians.

Also, what is your desired outcome for Palestine and the Palestinians, and what role do you see there for Jewish Israeli residents of that area? Do you propose that another country should impose a solution (presumably through military occupation) or what?

Unfortunately, I just don't see any solution that can realistically be achieved. Perhaps you do. I mean, I'd like to see both the Palestinians and the Israelis living harmoniously together in some sort of secular liberal federal republic that respected the human rights of both sides, but I have no idea how to get there, or even how to persuade the Palestinians or the Israelis that it's a good idea.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Oh good grief!

Washington backing plan for Tony Blair to head transitional Gaza authority

The White House is backing a plan that would see Tony Blair head a temporary administration of the Gaza Strip – initially without the direct involvement of the Palestinian Authority (PA), according to Israeli media reports.
Under the proposal, Blair would lead a body called the Gaza International Transitional Authority (Gita) that would have a mandate to be Gaza’s “supreme political and legal authority” for as long as five years.

Evernote link to Haaretz

 

[Free]

Can't they resurrect Margaret Thatcher? Then she could have a chance to make good on her promise.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

The UK is every bit as complicit as the US, Australia, Germany, Czechia, Hungary, and all those states that have for nearly eighty years treated Palestinians as subhumans and "terrorist by nature" that may be killed without batting an eyelid. And now they're throwing them a meaningless bone. What exactly is Keir Stürmer doing to end the genocide? He keeps sending Israel F-35 parts, munitions, and so on. He appoints Israeli lobbyists in government posts. He cracks down on pro-Palestinian advocacy and protests. He denies that what every genocide scholar, the UN, the IAGS, B'Tselem, and so on recognise as a genocide is a genocide, siding disgracefully with Greek far-right Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis (look him up, he's a riot).

Let me put it that way: if Hamas, Fatah and whoever not would have been able to realise their preferred solution of that topic the result would have been a genocide on the jews of Israel decades ago, because that's what "from the river to the sea" means.

Now it is happening the other way around. Which fits, since we are in the region of the holy bible and such.

Anyway: I do not have much sympathy left for neither side. Both have been doing horrendous things in the past, the present and and will continue to do in the future. Both could just go to hell in my opinion. Both need to overcome their fascist regimes on their own.

 

[Free]

They know who the monster is.

U.N. Delegates Walk Out En Masse as Netanyahu Speaks

The Israeli prime minister delivered his speach to a mostly empty chamber, as no one wanted to hear him speak.

newrepublic.com

 

[Free]

This is a brave girl. I hope she's safe - I mean, considering.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This new history of the term "antisemitism" looks interesting

Antisemitism by Mark Mazower — shifting senses (Evernote link to FT because £wall).

While Jew hatred remains a serious — at times, deadly — problem, Mazower writes, those “who take antisemitism seriously as an ongoing problem” ought to be “dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning”.

Mazower sets about his task with diligence and style in On Antisemitism, which is divided into two parts. In the first, Mazower “looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement”. Here, Mazower carefully distinguishes prejudice against Jews — which had indeed existed for centuries — from “antisemitism”, which “emerged as a countermovement aiming to . . . reverse the achievements of the Jewish emancipation” across the continent.

The aim of its adherents was “not so much . . . persuading people of negative stereotypes about the Jews . . . but rather in getting them to believe that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns”. Antisemitism was, Mazower emphasises, “a reaction against modernity itself”, which treated Jews as both synecdoche and handmaid for everything depraved, tumultuous and unmooring about modern life.

In the book’s second half, Mazower carefully analyses the “origins and spread of a new conceptual paradigm”, propagated in the 1970s, which equated antisemitism primarily with hostility to Israel — from Arabs, Black nationalists and the Third-Worldist left. The twin historical preconditions for this paradigm shift were the founding of Israel in 1948 and the new prominence of American Jewry on the world stage.

But as Mazower shows, its success was not fated. Jewish leaders in the US remained ambivalent about Israel through the early 1960s, resenting the implication — inherent to “Zionism”, the philosophy of Israel’s founders — that Jews would never be safe or self-actualised in the diaspora. The ironclad union of Israel and American Jews had to be forged. Only after 1967’s Six-Day War, and with the advent of American Holocaust commemoration in the 1970s and ’80s, did mainstream American Jewish life become thoroughly “Zionized”.

Not sure how far this gets anyone, since the sad fact remains that people who -- quite rightly -- want to protest against Israel's destruction of Gaza and Netanyahu's fascist policies in general seem to have little difficulty marching alongside Jew-hating fascist Arab and Palestinian groups (rather as, a couple of weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of people who are not themselves fascist thugs were nevertheless prepared to join a mass demonstration in London against immigration organised by Tommy Robinson and his supporters).

Similarly, many people who certainly don't support Netanyahu and his fellow fascists and ethnoreligious supremacists nevertheless find their justified concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish Israelis leads them to support genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

As the review concludes

In the first half of the 20th century, it was Jews, writes Mazower, who “feared the arbitrary power of the state and understood all too well the dread of a knock at the door”. Now, in the US, he writes, “some are so at ease with their own access to power and feel their interests to be so happily aligned with those of the American state that they publicly brag about their role in getting others defamed, expelled, dismissed, or arrested”.

It’s a bewildering, infuriating saga. We are in Mazower’s debt for unearthing it. But by the end of his book, my admiration was mixed with a sneaking suspicion that Mazower’s careful spadework would not be richly rewarded. Alleviating a great confusion is an intellectual generosity, but only to those who wish to be unconfused.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Netanyahu apologized to his Qatari counterpart for Israel's attack in Doha on phone. Netanyahu was as guest in the White House during that call with Trump also being in Washington, D.C.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-apologizes-qatar-attack-doha-source-says-2025-09-29/