Don't be mistaken - the Israeli assassination of 3 Palestinians in a Palestinian city in broad daylight is *designed* to bring about a wave of violence and bloodshed. This is what Israel always does when it's cornered: incite bloodshed.
It took only 7 days between @Amnesty releasing its report about Israeli apartheid and Israel committing a mafia-style assassination in broad daylight. I bet they're hoping to point to the Palestinian reaction and say "See, we told you, Israel is merely defending itself"
Reminder that Palestinians have lived and continue to live under constant, relentless systemic violence by Israel. To Palestinians, there is no "break" from violence; and to Israel, there is no act of Palestinian resistance that is not met with brute force.
A few are accusing me of equating Palestinian resistance with "bloodshed", or denying the daily, relentless, systemic violence Palestinians are subjected to. I did neither of these things. I'm saying Israel wants an escalation for its own reasons. You can agree or disagree.
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Yesterday, Amnesty released a report identifying Israel as sustaining an apartheid regime under international law. Israel was pissed, but also, there were Palestinians who were unimpressed. A thread about the strategic significance of the report for the Palestinian cause:
In straightforward terms: Israel can do whatever the fuck it wants to us because it's more powerful than us. It's more powerful than us because it has the explicit or tacit support of a broad segment of the "international community", and benefits from the existing world order.
As someone recently said, "The reason we cannot defeat Israel is that we are not *only* fighting Israel". We are fighting an entire world order. Nearly every global system of oppression intersects upon us. I tweeted about this previously here:
It's because they're freaking the fuck out. When it's HRW *and* Amnesty agreeing that this is apartheid, it's a watershed moment for the normalization of the apartheid framing across the entire global human rights community. This *is* indeed big.
From here on, it's Israel vs the global human rights community. They can't even use their normal whataboutism to attack Amnesty - "hey why don't you call out human rights violations in Mozambique!" - because Amnesty is *global*.
And so they'll go to their usual offence/defence - accusing everyone and everything of antisemitism. That strategy may work against individuals or small teams. But not against *the global human rights community*.
What a moronic statement. 1. If there were liberal democracies in the Arab world, *they* would not make peace with Israel, because they would reflect the will of their public, and over 80% of the Arab public reject Israel
2. Israel is a counter-revolutionary force backing dictatorships and preventing democratization. It backs coups and sells cyberweapons to dictators to target pro-democracy activists. It knows well that democratization in the Arab region is a threat.
10 rules if you want to stay safe as an outspoken Arab:
1. You can't be an independent intellectual in the Arab world. You must stop being independent, or stop being intellectual, or stop being in the Arab world. Maybe "stop" is too harsh, but you have to compromise, or you'll be unsafe.
2. As the world order shifts, Arab regimes feel more threatened, and as they feel more threatened, they become more repressive. The same world order changes make it very difficult to campaign for the release of individual prisoners. Lesson: Avoid going to prison.
According to this, MBS called Netanyahu in Sept 2020 asking to renew the license for Pegasus, which had been withheld by the Israeli defense department. Netanyahu agreed, on condition that Saudi Arabia will open its skies to Israeli flights. news.walla.co.il/item/3485535
A month later, this happened. An Israeli commercial airliner landed publicly in Saudi Arabia for the first time. jpost.com/middle-east/fi…
So many idiots at the time hailed this as "progress towards peace". In fact what happened was that a corrupt politician facing indictment offered a bloodthirsty tyrant cyber weapons in return for a public gesture that he can sell as "diplomatic victory" to his electorate.
I don't think we've fully grappled with the insidious and deeply destructive impact the last 7 years have had on the social fabric of Gulf countries. The rise of hyper-nationalism (and of Mohammad bin Salman) has had traumatic and mostly* invisible effects
I say "mostly invisible" knowing full well just how traumatic the visible effects have been - the treatment of activists, dissidents, and a whole lot of others in these countries, or the mass traumatization of Yemen. Yet, yes, I think the invisible is larger than the visible
Some analysts think the rise of Mohammad bin Salman caused this bent; I actually think it was correlation and not causation. Mohammad bin Salman was meant to be a model, and was a symptom/external effect of a deeper cause/agency that is yet to be fully exposed.