Since October 2024, seven institutions have published damning reports of Israel's cruel, immoral, illegal annihilatory campaign targeting children and intent on preventing a Palestinian future. For #Christmas, I am sharing them here. #Thread #Gaza #Genocide #Nakba
(& from May 2023): University Network for Human Rights: Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of International Law and its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023
Israel just banned @UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, from operating in the West Bank and Gaza. In the midst of a debilitating famine. This is a broader attack on the UN and multilateral legal institutions. 🧵
Last week, Israel banned the UN Secretary General from traveling to Israel- similar to how the UN special rapporteurs to the OPT have long been banned.
Israel has attacked both ICJ and the ICC for pursuing accountability goimg so far as accusing the ICJ of “blood libel” for applying law to facts and finding genocide plausible.
In my most compassionate listening, I hear the folks who oppose genocide but are voting Harris as seeking to unite the center & the left in an effort to defeat fascism. There are problems with this: 🧵
This imagines that fascism is emerging only from a Trump camp. It does not recognize how the mobilization of state violence, identity politics, the disregard of law/accountability, rejection of “truth”, media censorship,& normalization of genocide stems from the Dems now.
It also forgets that in 2020, this was the same impulse that united the left with the Dems to defeat Trump. The compromise then was dropping abolition as a serious social and political priority.
I appreciate Mehdi & disagree at least on latter 2 of 3 points.
Re: accountability. First I think the more accurate example is 2004 & the reelection of Bush after invading Iraq. We shouldve voted him out & failed again when Obama pardoned the entire leadership for unity #Thread
Together this has created an imperial amnesia where no one learns anything- my students dont know about the war on Iraq let alone how it constitutes the crime of aggression for which no one has been held to account. It also makes plain both parties are the problem.
Which is connected to point 3: things will be worse. I keep wondering how it is we can expect things to be even semi-normal as we perpetuate a genocide? Is this some form of privilege we feel we’re entitled to within the metropole? Ofc, things are not normal, ofc we are in crisis
The WH response to Nasrallah's assassination is dismal. It reflects 2 decades of altering laws of war in the "GWOT." The outcome is to apply laws of war only among Western powers & apply what reads like just war theory to the unruly Global South #Thread
To regard Nasrallah’s assassination as “a measure of justice” evacuates Lebanese from the category of the civilian & deprives Lebanon any measure of sovereignty. Neighborhoods have been levelled, humans turned into landmines in the middle of civilian centers…
The equivalent would be to raze Tel Aviv bc it is home to an urban military base. Or attack Israeli reservists & idle combatants in their homes w their families. It would be the flattening of the north to prevent civilian life in the name of deterrence.
We are so tired. After 11 months of a live-streamed genocide w advanced weapons shipped from global superpower w 0 impunity, Israel began an assault on Lebanon through a terrorist attack blowing up humans, non-combatants, that blinded & mutilated 1000s. #Thread
I witnessed social media streams celebrating this as a victory – fantasizing that the attack cleanly targeted “terrorists” – completely oblivious &/or unconcerned that the targets were medics & other noncombatants...
that the “precision strikes” turned humans into land mines in the middle of civilian centers- that nothing has been left sacred.
I wish @AchilleMbembe1 also did more reading 2 understand Hamas-not as fascist, messianic boogeyman- but as part of a Palestinian national fabric. The refusal to study Palestinian knowledge production while feigning expertise about them is also quite colonial. Short list follows: