In a highly unusual move, the White House has requested for it to be able to conduct arms deals with Israel in complete secrecy, without oversight from Congress or the public — in a time when the U.S. is supporting a military that experts say has been committing war crimes in Gaza and beyond.
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I figured this was coming - arguing for herem for the Jewish American Anti-Zionist left:
The time has come to regard these individuals and groups as having separated themselves from the Jewish community and the Jewish people. As we at the Post wrote in an editorial on the subject this week, “anti-Zionist Jews are not representative of the Jewish community and they don’t speak in its name. They are as Jewish as the Westboro Baptist Church is Christian.” While they may still technically be Jewish due to their parentage or conversion, while they may lead superficially Jewish lives, we can no longer consider them part of Klal Yisrael.
Concluding that these people, whose actions directly endanger the Jewish people, are no longer part of us will be immensely painful to their families, their communities, and our entire nation. Like my friend Dan, many of us have long believed that every Jew is worth fighting for. And like him, I consider these lines some of the most difficult I have ever written. But the past few weeks since the October 7 massacre have represented a watershed moment, a turning point in the history of the Jewish people and of their greatest collective project in the modern era, the Jewish state. A line has been drawn in the sand.
Those who have aligned themselves with the murderers of Jewish children are not with us. They are against us. And even as we hold out hope that perhaps, someday, they will repent and return to the Jewish fold, we need to view them as lost to our people and treat them as such.
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…one should keep in mind that no matter how much the Israeli government ‘warned’ this will be a ‘long and costly’ war, actually: it can’t go on like this forever (especially not with much of northern Israel completely evacuated for weeks).
Atop of this, though as expected, all the possible weaknesses in IDF’s training are exposed:
they’re not used to countering enemy mini-UAVs (Hamas is also regularly bombing Israeli troops, ‘Ukraine-style’: by mortar bombs released from UAVs);
while advancing into the Gaza Strip, they’re fighting from ‘under armour’ only, without infantry support and thus greatly restricting their field of view, and making themselves vulnerable to this kind of close-range attacks;
….and no matter how ‘methodical’ and ‘cautious’, the slow IDF advance is only buying plenty of time for Hamas and PIJ to react, to re-deploy their forces and counter-attack at selected points in time…
…while carpet bombing and random shelling of (hundreds and thousands of) ‘terrorist command centres’ in densely populated areas by the IASF and the IDF is exposed as exactly what it is: entirely pointless mass-murder.
This is exactly what corrupt opportunists like Netanyahu, and extremists like Gallant and others that are nowadays dominating the political landscape of Israel, were dreaming about for decades. A big, ‘everybody against Israel’ conflict prompting the West to demonstratively reinforce its unconditional military- and political aid to Israel, while masking continuous mass-murder and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank (and, now the Gaza Strip too).
Problem: it’s exactly what such corrupt extremists like Khamenei in Iran, Nasrallah in Lebanon, Haniyeh (Hamas-leader living in exile in Qatar), were day-dreaming about for decades, too. It’s playing straight into their hands, because it’s ‘rallying their public around their flag’ - and attracting lots of financial support, too….
Problem: while Israel and the West ‘must’ operate officially (even if, for example, deploying Mossad, CIA and different other intelligence services in clandestine fashion), Iran and Qatar have it easy to deploy all of their proxies - while remaining ‘non-involved’, and well-masked: it’s the ‘Axis of Islamic Resistance’ (see: Hezbollah/IRGC/Hamas/PIJ etc.) that’s fighting Zionist occupation, after all.
But hey: the West – foremost the USA, but much of the EU too – is certain it can solve this situation by ignoring reality.
Good luck with that.
Continued:
Also check out the part where he describes being stopped by an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint, who asks him what his religion is. When he says he doesn’t have one, the soldier asks him his parents’ religion. When he says they don’t have one, the soldier asks him his grandparents’ religion. When Coates says they were Christian, he’s allowed through.
Hmm, where else did they ask you to go back to your grandparents’ religion in order to determine your basic rights?
Have a listen to the whole interview, in which TNC connects his own awakening to Israeli apartheid to his reading of Black American history.
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A UN official who declined to be publicly identified said his agency had used and checked Gaza health ministry data for years.
“I have seen nothing that says to me they are making the numbers up. We looked at some of the Israeli bombings and the numbers of deaths the ministry is claiming for a particular attack are broadly in line with what we have seen in previous wars.”
He said the reason for the higher overall casualty figures was that the attacks were “much bigger than anything we’ve seen in previous wars. It’s not that they’re inflating the numbers.”
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Ugh.
A Biden administration official said on Friday that efforts to get Americans and other foreign nationals out of Gaza, a process that began on Wednesday, had been held up by a Hamas attempt to get its own wounded fighters included among those to be escorted into Egypt through the Rafah gate.
and
The official said that about a third of the wounded Palestinians on the first list were Hamas fighters and that allowing them to exit Gaza was unacceptable to officials in Egypt, the United States and Israel. The delays continued for some time, the official said, because Hamas kept offering lists that turned out to include its members.
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cnn.com -– 4 Nov 23
‘An existential threat’: Antisemitic attacks soar across Europe amid Israel-Hamas warVienna, Austria CNN — “This takes us back to the darkest times,” Chief Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer told CNN, as he surveyed piles of destroyed holy books in a blackened and burnt out ceremonial hall.
(sorry, url preview failed)
F’ck.
Edit: Adding more to this since it’s all related and I’m the last comment.
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