Thread by @SanaSaeed

I'm going to breakdown parts of this Atlantic article - how dangerous this and the ideas presented in it are.

This piece isn't concerned with truths of colonization & Israel, but with dismissing Palestinian claims of history & crimes by Israel.

It's Nakba denialism.

🧵

2nd paragraph. Zero sources provided for grandiose claims we're expected to take as true. On Oct 7, before anyone knew how many Israelis had been killed, many were shocked &, yes, happy that a displaced population that has been imprisoned & besieged broke out.

The reason there are no sources provided and we're expected to take as true, I assume, is because the underlying assumption here is that Atlantic readers will not question assertions of Arab & Muslim barbarity as well as the barbarity of their 'leftist apologists'.

Framing "from the river to the sea" as a call for genocide is dangerous: its part and parcel of the accelerated attempt to criminalize phraseology within Palestinian solidarity & Palestinian claims of history, land and liberation. Which is the goal of this piece.

There are material consequences to this criminalizing of phraseology - take, for example, how ADL/Brandeis center have called for 'terrorism' investigations into Students for Justice in Palestine (also highlighting how anti-'terrorism' are abused, often to suppress speech)

The paragraph also characterizes Hamas as 'genocidal' while currently Palestinian Muslims & Christians trapped in a tiny strip of land being bombed relentlessly &starved by Israel, which has an explicit state ideology of Jewish supremacy (Zionism). This is purposeful obfuscation.

For not a single sourced claim, we get a diagnosis - the problem is "decolonization". This is Montefiore's focus: making phraseology of Palestinian claims of history and violence at the hands of Israel & ideology of Jewish supremacy not amoral but virulently immoral.

And anyone with any basic knowledge of the situation on the ground knows that the two state 'solution' has long been dead. Funnily enough, since 2017 Hamas has accepted (at least in its charter) two states on the '67 lines.

We still don't know who Montefiore is talking about here. But now, "settler-colonialism" is made akin to Nazism & Holocaust denialism. We also don't know which claims in particular he's referring to- but here's Weiss bringing up Holocaust denialism re: unsubstantiated claims

By calling use of settler-colonialism worse than Nazism & Holocaust denial, the author is calling Palestinians & those in solidarity - including many Israelis, Jews - Nazis and Holocaust deniers. The language in this piece is purposely unspecific.

Incredible to write this after two weeks of Palestinian claims of war crimes and death tolls being called 'Hamas propaganda' and dismissed as Israel increased its bombardment, killing now over ten thousand Palestinians.

This whole article reads like a bad twitter thread. But how was the Zionist project understood? What did early Jewish colonizers call their project? Also, what do we think Herzl thought of his project (final image, 06/12/1895)?

(enjoy this thread when you have time later)

Once again, no sources, no references. For someone very concerned with the use of words, Montefiore chooses to leave terms undefined and instead fall back on tired 2021 reactionary "the wokes are at it again" framing that has the singular goal of silencing critique of Israel.

If you still think "racism" means xenophobia, in 2023, and you're being positioned as an 'intellectual beacon' and 'required reading', then we're really in a confederacy of dunces. I also enjoy that Montefiore talks about the 'lack of factual rigor' without any sense of irony.

Montefiore here is also doing the base level anti-semitism when he conflates Israel with all Jews. He also makes zero references, again, to *who* is saying this. We're supposed to take his word. A

Israel controls Gaza - it controls both entries/exits (Rafah & Erez), it controls what goes into Gaza, it controls the water. There is no official border "between" Israel and Gaza.

Gaza is occupied.

Israel called Gazans 'human animals'. They have said they're going to make Gaza into a territory of tents. Netanyahu explicitly referenced Amalek. There is clear evidence of forcible displacement in addition to state-sanctioned killings of civilians of one ethnic group.

Ahh, yes, it's only genocide if your population has decreased.

Note the 5 acts that individually *and* together comprise genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Ok, this thread is long so I'm going to summarize my responses to the next half of the piece which finally gets to the "Israel isn't a settler-colony" - these two passages both obfuscate history & deny ethnic cleansing. Once again we see Palestinian claims to history denied.

While no doubt that many Jews were escaping persecution (esp post WWII), this idea flies in the face of how the Zionist project saw itself from its inception as establishing a state in Palestine, how ethnically cleansing entire villages (via Irgun, Haganah, etc) was part of it.

This is why Nakba denial is critical for Montefiore - his entire "argument" about Israel not being a settler colonial state relies on the premise that it was a refuge for the persecuted. And that narrative *only* holds if we diminish & deny the Nakba.

This is Nakba denial as it is denial of the system of apartheid in Israel recognized internationally.

Here Montefiore channels Netanyahu - Oct 7 as the beginning of the 'second war of Israeli independence'.

X is saying I can't post any more in this thread. Hope it's clear this poorly written, all-over-the-place article is dangerous Nakba denialism, through criminalizing phraseology of Palestinian history & liberation, meant to silence critics of Israeli crimes.

Guess it lets me add more after I've posted the thread? Anyway, another reminder--

This piece did not deserve this engagement but these ideas - of Nakba denialism, of spreading dehumanizing narratives about Palestinians that render their language "genocidal" and thus their claims - need to dismantled.

Zionists & Zionist groups in the early to mid 20th century expliclty *pushed* Jewish conquering of a frontier as a narrative to mirror American colonial history & conquering of the frontier as well as exceptionalism. Here’s an episode I did on it.