Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Alonso Gurmendi Profile picture
Alonso Gurmendi
@Alonso_GD
Fellow in Human Rights @LSESociology | writes @opiniojuris | Editor @j_ufil | Streams @Twitch | Esp/Eng/Port | Views personal
14 subscribers
Jun 24 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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
Jun 23 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Lol not me learning through Canary Mission that Zohran Mamdani is the son of Mahmood freaking Mamdani

Mamdani’s work is just excellent. Highly recommend. Here’s some recommendations 🧵 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 Image
Jun 20 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
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
Jun 19 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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
Jun 19 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Shooting a missile…

- at a hospital...

- that you can’t aim properly, at a military target, but hitting a hospital instead...

- at a military target and causing disproportionate harm on a hospital…

…is a war crime

It doesn’t matter who does it The problem is this has been normalised for 20 months by Israel and now the cat is out of the box. International Hasbara Law has severely harmed International Humanitarian Law
Jun 18 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Israel’s Letter to the UNSC is interesting in that it accuses Iran of being “substantially involved” in the funding, arming, training and guidance of a “network of terrorist proxies”. To the trained eye, use of this terminology is interesting because of what it *doesn’t say* 🧵 Image Under int’l law, there are essentially two standards to determine when the actions of an armed group are “attributable” to a state - meaning that the group acts on behalf of the state or as part of its forces: the ICJ’s Effective Control and the ICTY’s Overall Control Test
Jun 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Israel’s objective is to turn its regional rivals into what I call in my research a “bombable geography” - spaces where cross-border military action requires no justification and is subject to no limitation. They see the writing in the wall: Whatever strategic objective Israel can’t achieve in the next 4 years will never be achieved. It knows they will become un-supportable pariahs as soon as Gen Z is done turning 18.
Jun 15 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
“Conventional wisdom” wants us to see Iran as the irrational authoritarian regime that can’t be trusted with nukes, and Israel as the moral Western liberal democracy that can.

But Israel has unlawfully attacked Iranian territory / diplomatic premises 4 times in 5 years. Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and supporting murderous terrorists in the West Bank leading an ethnic cleansing campaign while it imposes an apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It is also collaborating with ISIS gangs in Gaza
Jun 15 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Some thoughts on the law applicable to the Iran-Israel War and the dangers of what I call International Hasbara Law (IHL).

First let’s establish some groundwork 🧵 1) Israel’s attack is an act of aggression against Iran. This is not a fringe position among scholars. It’s the normie one

2) Israel is not just targeting military objectives it is also targeting civilian scientists, which only some scholars agree with, very controversially
Jun 14 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
On 19 Oct ‘23, 450 civilians were sheltering in St Porphyrius Church, Gaza. @amnesty could not find any evidence of a military target in the church. The strike killed 18 civilians, including a 2-month old baby, and injured at least 12 others Image
Image On 14 December 2023, at 11:45am, Israel destroyed a 3-storey house in Rafah belonging to the Shehada family. 45 civilians were sheltering there. Israel killed 31, including 11 children, and wounding 10. Image
Image
Jun 13 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
That is not a map of Israel Also not a map of Israel
Jun 12 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Much of the confusion surrounding the term “indigenous” is linguistic. I don’t have this problem in Spanish, where the word for “person who is originally from” (oriundo) is not the same as the word for “person who is Indigenous” (indígena). 🧵 So yes, there’s people who are “indigenous to”, as in “originally from” Britain - British people. But there is afaik no such thing as a British (capital I) Indigenous People, because there’s no population in Britain that was racialised as indigenous in a modern colonial relation
Jun 12 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
It’s amazing seeing a bunch of US folks saying “can you imagine if Americans [insert violent, illegal thing here] in Mexico?!” without realising that yeah you don’t need to imagine. Whatever it is, you can be sure that Americans did do it to Mexico. “Can you imagine if undocumented Americans invaded Mexico and took over their cities?”

Yes, yes I can.

Texas Rebellion 1836
Jun 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
California was never “full” in the Spanish/Mexican era. It had a censed population of 90k in 1850. It was mostly inhabited by uncounted indigenous people who were estimated to be at least >100k in 1850. Down from an estimated pre-contact population of 705k As of the gold rush in 1848, US settlers began to move into California and displace, exploit and kill the native population in order to secure the gold. It is estimated that settlers directly killed ~16k indigenous people and that indirect deaths from the gold rush were ~70k
Jun 9 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It is not. Israel’s presence in Palestinian territory, resulting from the Six Day War, is not legal, as it has no jus ad bellum justification. Even assuming the war was legal, Israel & Egypt signed a peace treaty. With the war over, all force over Gaza should have ended as well The Palmer report, chaired by two politicians, not experts in blockade law, one of which (Alvaro Uribe) should be disqualified from the start for being an anti-human-rights authoritarian) erred on the law by not even considering jus ad bellum considerations
Jun 7 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Hi @piersmorgan here you misunderstand how the right of resistance works. Like the right to self-defence, it doesn’t qualify military action as legal/illegal. It’s not that illegal actions can’t be resistance or self-defence. Acts of resistance or self-defence can be war crimes Take Poland in WWII, which fought a war of self-defence against the Nazis. Does it mean that Poland had a blank check to do anything it wanted to German civilians or soldiers it captured because it was acting in self-defence? Of course not. It could still commit war crimes
Jun 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
No. Israelis, like all human populations, are not a monolith. Israel is also not “more evil”. Most states are based on settler colonialism, most discriminate and oppress. Most have committed one or more genocides in the past. Israel is not special. You want it to be, but it isn’t I’m simply reacting to an ongoing genocide and mass atrocity in the normal human way and you - you specifically, Salo - and those who think like you, are not. This is not about prejudice against Israel. It’s about your (yours specifically) prejudice against Palestinians
Jun 6 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Peru is also sort of an apartheid state. Not imposed through law or military occupation but mostly through social norms. Indigenous people are sidelined in similar ways as Palestinians and the way this system is defended by Peruvian elites is cringely similar to Zionist arguments In upper-class households, it is common to have a “live-in maid” - a young indigenous or indigenous-descent (I/I-d) woman. They essentially work day-round in service of the family. They have their own room (the “service room”) next to the laundry area and their own bathroom
Jun 6 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I dont think it’s this technical or that I’m inherently “polychronic” and can’t be on time period, but I do think there is a different perception of time from culture to culture and different material factors that influence this. So no, it’s not “race science” that is dumb For example, one thing that bothers me is the US is there is no concept of “sobremesa”: You’re done eating, so it’s time to have a chat about life and family, not get a bill and annoyed looks from the waiter! Eating out in the US is just too rushed.
May 31 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
.@piersmorgan is referring here to what is known in genocide studies as a “subaltern genocide”. The key point being that this argument requires a broad concept of genocide, as opposed to the narrow one he has been defending for the past 19 months 🧵 A narrow-definition genocide only occurs once a systematic plan to exterminate the group emerges. In the paradigmatic Holocaust example, the narrow genocide only started as of the Final Solution in 1941. Kristallnacht therefore was not part of the genocide under this definition
May 30 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Actually yes, absolutely. Several Eastern European thinkers concluded that Nazism applied in Europe the same kind of colonial dynamic Europe applied in Africa and the Americas. One of these Eastern Europeans was a man called Raphael Lemkin, who called this dynamic “genocide” The same happened with Postcolonial scholars like Aimé Césaire who coined the term “colonial boomerang” to describe how colonial practices in the colonies always “returned home” as fascism. (Hannah Arendt wrote a similar argument although with a bit more problematic undertones)