July 6 UNOSAT data of Gaza City; every red dot is a building damaged or destroyed by Israel
there is a bright red dot off-centre in the circled area
that is the location of al-Tabi'in school
as you can see, it was one of the few standing buildings in a heavily-damaged area
here's the zoomed-out map showing everywhere in the Strip that has been bombed as of July 6.
when you overlay damaged agricultural land, the dearth of spaces untouched by the Israeli military becomes abundantly clear
the map of damaged agricultural land is so clearly now *all agricultural land* (again, UN/FAO satellite data) that you can literally use it to see the outline of cities
here's another simplified map.
only two layers, none of them geographic:
- damaged agricultural land (UN/FAO satellite data)
- damaged structures (UNOSAT satellite data)
Ismail Haniyeh lived in Qatar and was principally responsible for hostage negotiations with Israel
He was the head of the political bureau of Hamas — not its military wing
His assassination by Israel serves to kill the negotiations and score a PR win to defuse domestic tension
Haniyeh’s death has negative bearing on the war goals: organizing a hostage release will now be far more difficult, which is what Israeli leaders want
but his prominence allows Israelis to feel like they’ve scored a “win” against Hamas
so they can comfortably pivot to Lebanon
the lack of clear military objectives in Gaza, paired with an amorphous ambition to “destroy Hamas” has resulted in declining morale and a clear need for some sort of symbolic victory
particularly since it came out that Israel flooding Hamas’ tunnels was defeated by…drains
Early Zionists like Herzl were explicitly inspired by 19th century European nationalist and colonial movements. They saw — and frequently spoke of — Arabs as backwards savages who would benefit from the “civilizing force” of European Jews. (something echoed to a degree today)
Contemporary Israel ultimately makes a lot more sense when you see it as a 19th Century colonial movement that got its legs a hundred years too late, only to find itself in a world where colonialism was no longer in vogue
Hence the, “you got to do it, why can’t we?” claims now
There’s a certain set of Revisionist Zionists who see the Trail of Tears and other atrocities America conducted against its indigenous peoples until they were no longer a sizable enough population to resist
and considers it unfair they are not allowed to do the same today
What they don’t realize — or refuse to accept — is that the change did not come from Western morality shifting, but because decolonization happened and subaltern peoples become a lot more effective at mounting resistance against industrial metropoles.
I've been reading a lot of old Neurath for work, and it really strikes me as a failure of modern journalism that so much fundamental information about the world is collected but largely unknown
we pile story upon story but provide no context for people to anchor around
for all the talk of "data journalism", we've practically regressed since the days of Rudolf Modley's Telefacts in newspapers through the 1940s.
I've been finding the "we have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips" take increasingly anemic lately.
We have a very narrow subset of human knowledge recorded and digitally accessible. And a lot of opinions and marketing material. So much else is routinely lost.
Every time a team collapses, a company folds, or a person passes, knowledge is lost. And not easily-recorded knowledge, either!
Specific, embodied knowledge of how a thing works "in the real world", stored experientially in the liminal space between individuals.
Even the law recognizes the sacred status of this knowledge. "Trade secrets": the things you learn on the job that set you apart, but aren't necessarily recorded anywhere. That perfect workflow; how to get a machine to work *just right*, the "secret sauce" in a recipe.