Alonso Gurmendi Profile picture
Fellow in Human Rights @LSESociology | writes @opiniojuris | Editor @j_ufil | Streams @Twitch | Esp/Eng/Port | Views personal
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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)
May 28 6 tweets 2 min read
2 hubs in the south that can handle demand for 300k *pre-approved* homeless people giving them food for 2-days at a time but no water, formula or blankets, for a population of 2.1 million, located mostly in the north.

No, more food will not reach Palestinians. I seriously refuse to believe that seemingly educated professional people are this ignorant. Which either leaves me to believe this is about denial (not wanting to accept Israel would actually do such monstrosity of a plan) or malice (actually liking that it will starve people)
May 27 7 tweets 2 min read
This persistent delusion that Israel is *literally the only state that has to X* is both disgustingly dehumanising of Palestinians and tiresomely privileged and self centred. No Israel is not the only occupier who has a duty to keep those it occupies from starving. They all do 🧵 First let’s disprove the concrete claim. During the Iraq war, the US sent 600,000 tons of grain, funded WFP with $200 million and sent $530 million dollars worth of aid just as a short term solution for 2005
cfr.org/backgrounder/i…
May 26 7 tweets 2 min read
On Saturday, January 8, 1994, UNAMIR Commander Romeo Dallaire had a chat with an informant who told him some Hutu thought there were no innocent Tutsis, even those who were not RPF. It took him 3 days to write UN HQ warning of the risk of Tutsi extermination. They did mot listen Image
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The Rwandan genocide started 2 months later, on April 7, 1994.
This document is now known as the “Genocide Fax”. It is a symbol of not taking the risk of genocide seriously and with the urgency it deserves.
It took Dallaire 3 days to know. It took us about the same with Gaza.
May 25 6 tweets 1 min read
I disagree that Europe turning on Israel has anything to do with shock at their cruelty. 2 things simply have conflated at the same time:

1) leaders hoped that Gaza would fade in the background and people would forget, but they never did, which increased its political cost 2) Trump betrayed Europe, which meant European leaders needed to find a way to signal both a) their disapproval of the new US and b) their security and foreign policy independence / self-sufficiency.

Turning the heat on Israel was the easiest way to do this
May 5 7 tweets 2 min read
I see some reacting to The Settlers by either complaining that “those are the extremist settlers” or claiming that “actually it makes sense to carry AR15s in settlements because the real violence comes from Palestinians”. These are frankly messed up arguments. First, if you are comfortable living in a segregated community where one group that you consider different from you is banned, for whatever reason, I’m sorry to tell you: you are an extremist. There’s no moderate version of Jim Crow. Actually, I’m not sorry.
Apr 30 15 tweets 4 min read
The thing is that the way the West discusses political violence is trapped by “just war” approaches that make its moral/legal appraisal dependent on (racialised, colonial, gendered, class) power dynamics, so that anticolonial violence is simply seen as “bad” / “unjust” This is because discourses on political violence are dominated by notions of “just war” that trace their roots to Medieval European warfare. It is state-centric and Eurocentric. They usually fully erase colonial experiences from their theoretical framework
Feb 22 10 tweets 3 min read
“No IDF soldier has ever entered a family home, looked into their eyes, then shot at point blank the children”

Uh-huh… right. Sure.

“Among those killed during the raid was 15-year-old Taha Mahamid, who Israeli forces shot dead in front of his house as he came out to check whether Israeli forces had left the area. Taha was unarmed and posed no threat to the soldiers at the time he was shot, based on witness testimony and videos reviewed by Amnesty International. A video filmed by one of his sisters and verified by Amnesty’s Crisis Evidence Lab shows Taha walking on the street, peeking to check for the presence of soldiers and then collapsing on the street outside his house, after the sound of three gunshots… when Taha’s father, Ibrahim Mahamid, then attempted to carry his injured son to safety, Israeli forces shot him in the back.” Source: amnesty.org/en/latest/news…
Dec 21, 2024 5 tweets 4 min read
Thread of Islamophobic and still un-community-noted tweets calling the AfD-supporting, Greater-Israel-advocate atheist attacker an “Islamist” and/or blaming all Muslims for his crimes.🧵

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Dec 13, 2024 19 tweets 6 min read
This thread is making the rounds, so let's test it. Why is it problematic to craft a standard so narrow that it concludes there was no genocide in Croatia/Gaza? Well, let's apply it to something we know was a genocide and see where we land. Let's imagine it's Germany in mid 1941 I don't think I need to convince you that The Holocaust was a genocide. It obviously was. It is the paradigmatic genocide. But where we may find some disagreement is *when* - when did the Holocaust become a genocide?
Nov 27, 2024 6 tweets 2 min read
Many are asking me what is a “Platt Amendment”, so here it goes.
After the 1898 Spanish-American War, the US ended up occupying Cuba. They did not want to annex it, because cheap Cuban sugar was bad for Colorado’s sugar beets industry, so the Senate came up with a compromise 🧵 The US would not annex Cuba and end its occupation on condition that the new independent Cuban republic amended its constitution to specifically state the following:

“That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty (…)”.
Nov 25, 2024 7 tweets 2 min read
This is an incredibly racist worldview. It essentialises Muslims into a single category (“the dominators”) against the overwhelming evidence that Israel’s own security actually depends on Muslim allies like Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf states It also discriminates against Muslim Israelis who are looked down as receiving the favour of rights in a non-Muslim state. Democracy is based on the idea that human rights protect minorities from the dictatorship of the majority, not on the mercy of the democratic dictators
Nov 21, 2024 31 tweets 7 min read
Tracking state reactions to the ICC Arrest Warrants against Netanyahu, Gallant, & Deif 🧵 Methodology notes:
Except for key actors (Israel, Palestine, US) I will only track MFA, HoS and HoG statements.
Simple retweets of the ICC press release are not counted
Nov 20, 2024 12 tweets 4 min read
Hen likes to portray himself as the friendly face of genocide denial, which is why him joining the talking point du jour, about the CIA estimating population growth in Gaza as proof there is no genocide, is rather out of character. It is a really bad & violent argument 🧵 Hen doesn’t specifically say it, but the claim is there between the lines: “if population grew, there can’t be a genocide under way”. This is of course patently false from the definition of genocide alone. Population decrease is simply not part of it Image
Nov 12, 2024 19 tweets 5 min read
In celebration of @FranceskAlbs recent standing ovations at both LSE and SOAS, let me highlight the main contributions her Reports have made to the way we understand the genocide of the Palestnian people in Gaza 🧵 .@FranceskAlbs' first and perhaps most important contribution is to put the issue of settler-colonialism front and centre of the discussion of genocide. In essence, genocide is not an accident, but a feature of colonialism; and it is not a rare find in colonial societies Image
Nov 1, 2024 6 tweets 1 min read
Many accounts have began to erase Palestinian history these past few days. One common take is the equation of Arabization with modern settler colonialism, as if Palestinians were the result of waves of population transfer from the Hejaz, replacing local communities. This is not only wrong, it is also dehumanising 🧵 Pre-modern conquests (like the Arab conquests) often (but not always) involved a change in elites and the establishment of some form of tributary system. In the Levant, this change of elites led the local population to “Arabize” over the centuries.
Oct 11, 2024 11 tweets 3 min read
Listening to people tell me “this is not what happened” reminds me of how I too grew up with a sanitised version of my country’s history, where the Spanish conquest of the Inca led to the creation of a post-racial Peruvian identity, where colonialism and racism play no role 🧵 Powerful cultural forces reinforce this idea. In this narrative, Peruvian indigenous people are the “minorities” that failed to acculturate into our post-racial, Western(ised) society and are thus misguidedly “opposed to progress”

scielo.org.pe/pdf/anthro/v27…
Oct 6, 2024 5 tweets 1 min read
Israel’s post Oct 7 policy has led to:
- 80k displaced Israelis
- Tel Aviv bombarded
- Hezbollah hitting Haifa
- Diplomatic isolation
- Pariah status among Gen-Z
- ICJ/ICC cases
- Downgraded credit ratings
- GDP growth stalled
Unrestrained war has shown it’s obvious uselessness Anyone who tells you all of this was “part of the plan” or “to be expected” is lying to you. Israel expected to recover what its strategic security doctrine calls “strategic deterrence” - the belief that “teaching the enemy a lesson” is a security imperative.
Oct 2, 2024 20 tweets 4 min read
I’m rly tired of the “what else where they supposed to do” brigade. The main reason why they are comfortable with Israel’s response is because it is happening “over there” where it is acceptable to bomb human beings into oblivion. Nobody would suggest doing this in London or NY🧵 It was patently obvious from the beginning that a broad and intense military response was, even under the most expansive definitions of self-defence, difficult to justify; not just because Israel is unlawfully occupying Gaza but bc of the urban nature of the conflict
Sep 18, 2024 10 tweets 3 min read
Tracking State reactions to recent attacks on Lebanese pagers 🧵 Lebanon 🇱🇧
“serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards”
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…