First, Israel ordered the starvation and displacement of 1000s of Palestinians. Then, it used this displacement as an excuse for disproportionately bombing whoever remained in whatever areas they deemed bombable. Eventually, this turned into official “death zones” 🧵
Invisible lines in the sand where anyone trapped in them (even people waving white flags and Israeli hostages) were seem as targets. These zones emptied large portions of Gaza, that were then systematically demolished to create “buffer zones” and prevent people from returning
Then these death zones were turned into death traps. Israel placed food in the middle and forced Palestinians to traverse the death zones to get to food. Whoever made it was screened to see if they were sent to a torture camp, shot “in their direction” or displaced again
Now, the level of population control secured by the death traps will be used to build a concentration camp / ghetto for whoever survived with the express intention of deporting as many people as possible under the guise of “voluntary migration”
Meanwhile, whistleblower soldiers again and again report how a large percentage of IDF soldiers simply does not consider anyone in Gaza, not even the children, innocent. All this while the media tries hard to hide the genocide from its audience
As Raz Segal said all those months ago: a textbook case of genocide.
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Guys it’s very important for you to understand: I’ve never in my life claimed to be normal. I’m weird af. I care about things you’ve never even heard of in your life. Don’t even get me started on Star Wars continuity errors or the llama on Troy
This article concludes that Israel’s plans to “concentrate” Palestinians in Gaza is a war crime & a crime against humanity. It also very relevant and arguably marks a turning point in how Israel’s actions in Gaza can be discussed.
Because it is authored by Prof. Eyal Benvenisti, who literally represented Israel before the ICJ
Prof. Benvenisti actually surprised many by joining Israel’s legal team. He has been one of the highest authorities in the law of occupation in decades and until recently held the Whewhell Chair of Int’l Law at Cambridge - one of the most respected positions in the field
I think Ahmed misunderstands my point. Nothing in my tweet defends Iran’s atrocious human rights record or justifies/minimises 7/10. What it does is break the actual simplistic narrative of the Middle East, that he supports, that ontologically Israel is good and Iran is evil
The more complex reality is that the brutalities Israel has subjected Palestinians to are always held at a different standard than the atrocities committed by Iran against its own population. Something @afalkhatib himself does, as shown by his recent @jubileemedia
In other words, @afalkhatib can’t really show that I minimise atrocities. In fact, I would gladly join him in condemning Iran’s violations against Iranian women, their support of armed groups that directly target civilians, and the authoritarianism of its government.
See for instance his postcolonial analysis of the Rwandan Genocide, where he dissassembles the argument that Hutus simply hated Tutsis and reframes it as a result of Belgium’s colonial policies
Then of course is his excellent Neither Settler nor Native, an exploration of how the nation state is inherently a colonial entity that creates “permanent minorities”
When the story of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is told, it will tell the story of how it cut electricity, food and water from the “human animals” and how Israelis mocked the starving thirsty children with videos of running water taps and lit lightbulbs 🧵
It will tell the story of how Israel used unreliable technology and massive collateral damage - bombs “focused on destruction, not accuracy” - to bomb sleeping children next to their sleeping parents, accused by some algorithm of being Hamas
It will tell how families were forced to flee their refuges once, twice, three even four times, fleeing due to evacuation orders that made no arrangements for them and pushed them into areas that were then bombed by the IDF in a perverse theatricality of insincere “humanity”
I really like it when Zionists try to turn the tables of coloniality on me so to speak because I’m a white Peruvian, because it gives me the opportunity to explain how coloniality works in Latin America - you know, the thing I used to tweet most about before the genocide started
I’ve said this many times before: this isn’t about Israel per se. Israel is not important or relevant as a place or location. The reason why it matters is Zionism is a 19th C remnant of extreme coloniality in the 21st C and I oppose coloniality on principle -and genocide ofc
If Israel were not a colonial apartheid state subjugating and colonising Palestinians and bombing Lebanon, Iran, etc and it were a democracy instead I would frankly not care about its politics