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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
Sep 6 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The IDF’s new international hasbara law excuse to justify imposing conditions of life that make civilian life in Gaza impossible seems to be that the military advantage of destroying a camera justifies the “incidental” civilian harm of dozens of homes destroyed Imagine for a second this logic replayed for residential buildings in Tel Aviv. There’s security cameras managed by the city hall on top of the building and a Palestinian group is planning to attack the city. Thus, so the IDF does not use it, they blow up the whole building
Aug 27 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I’ve been thinking a lot about this tweet and how it perverts decolonial epistemology in service of coloniality. It argues that there is a parallel “non-Eurocentric” history of indigeneity where Jews worldwide are the colonised “natives” of (somehow) 8th C BCE Arab “colonisers” But this is a manipulation. The very concept of indigeneity and nativeness emerged because of notions that can’t be simply transposed to every single defeated / expelled people in history. The Gauls were not “indigenous” to the Roman “colonisers”
Aug 25 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This works only if you draw an artificial line between Iron Age Israelites and 20th century Zionist Jews and not between those who lived in what is today Palestine in ancient times and those who live there today.
“Name 3 ancient Israelis” is just as much a “gotcha” if you don’t We get that when we say Ancient Egyptians there’s been a lot of changes since the Pharaohs. Hellenisation, Arabization, etc. We are able to recognise these differences and changes over time. It’s the same with the original inhabitants of what is today Israel-Palestine
Aug 23 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
This kinds of argument is why it is important to understand Israel as a colonial endeavour. There is a reason why the demographics of the area look like this and it is not because of any kind of “Palestinian apartheid” 🧵 Gaza’s current form is the direct result of the Zionist plan to “cleanse” the land of Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcefully expelled to Gaza from other parts of Palestine. After Egypt’s intervention, an armistice line separated Gaza from Israel
Aug 22 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is from the Nazi propaganda film "Das Ghetto" purporting to show how "there is no hunger in Warsaw". Image This is what one of the witnesses of the shoot, Abraham Lewin, wrote in his diary on 13 May and 20 May 1942 Image
Image
Aug 19 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Genocide is not and has never been defined as “killing everyone in sight”. Since 1948 genocide is a crime that can be committed without a single person dying. This popular notion comes rather from exceptionalising the Holocaust’s Final Solution as the only “real” type of genocide But the extermination camp is unique to The Holocaust not to all genocides. It’s just that popular imagination is so tied up to the image of The Holocaust (and the Holocaust Movie) that we feel anything “less” than The Holocaust can’t be genocide bc it “cheapens” the term
Aug 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
To give you an idea how the IDF lies, a year ago, The Guardian published a piece quoting an IDF Spokesman that the IDF saw “no difference” between Hamas’ TV network and its military wing. The IDF quickly issued a “clarification” denying this. But now they want to normalise it so: It’s “the IDF doesn’t target hospitals” all over again
Aug 13 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I agree with @owenjonesjourno here and I’d caution against views that only frame “terrorism” from its problematic uses in the Western authoritarian gaze. These views risk Eurocentrism and the erasure of non-Western experience. Terrorism doesn’t only exist in a West/non-West axis Indigenous Peruvians talk about the Shining Path in the context of the Manchay Tiempo (the Time of Fear/Terror) and talk about their fight against them as a fight against “the terrorists”. In Argentina, collective memory has framed the Junta’s atrocities as “state terrorism”
Aug 13 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I can’t believe how incredibly stupid this is. I’m sorry this garbage deserves no scholarly respect. It’s called a *threshold* of harm BECAUSE THERE IS A THRESHOLD. Not every harm counts. If I call an IDF soldier a doo doo head I’m “harming” them, but not in legally relevant ways Image Obviously, “shaping a narrative against the IDF” (even if that were what Gaza journalists do - it isn’t) is below that threshold. If Fox had done even the most basic of lit revs he would have come across the ICTY Prosecutor’s Report on the NATO Bombing Campaign of Serbia: Image
Aug 11 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I don’t get this viral trend of extremist Zionists sharing long-form testimonials about why they wont go on his show. It’s a bizarro negative-earth virtue signalling where it makes you popular to advertise you care about defending war crimes too much to tolerate any pushback Yes, he interrupts his guests. Boo hoo, how mean. Are you serious? You’re defending one of the worst atrocities of this century and you’re the victim? Seriously these porcelain dolls would not last a day as Palestinians.
Aug 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is… not a very good argument? Of course the meaning of the sky has changed over time (and space). From hunter gatherers tracing stars for navigation to the home of [the] God[s] to modern-day astrophysics, the sky has *meant* many different things for many different people You can argue the “nature” of the sky never changed, that it was a constant regardless of social meaning all you want. When you see a beautiful sunset, you don’t think “this is lovely because it is just a giant ball of gas refracting light through water vapour at an angle”
Aug 9 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
For many Zionists it is simply methodologically impossible to conclude Israel is committing genocide, in Gaza or anywhere, bc Israel can’t genocide, period. Which is why it is important to be cautious with lists of scholars who say Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza If they believe this because they believe Israel is incapable of committing genocide, as opposed to their reading of a definition, their view is unreliable. I explain this in further detail here:

“What is the Academic Consensus on the Gaza Genocide?”
Aug 7 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
“La frontera con Perú es la línea más profunda del fondo del río Amazonas” *en 1922*.

En ninguna parte del tratado Salomon Lozano dice que la frontera cambiará con el cambio de la morfología en la zona.

Al revés: el propio acuerdo de Río que menciona Petro le da la contra 🧵 El Protocolo de Amistad y Cooperación de Rio de Janeiro de 1934 que Petro cita es claro al señalar que la línea que traza el Tratado Salomón Lozano solo puede ser “afectada” por “mutuo acuerdo” o “decisión de la Justicia Internacional”. No dice por “cambios morfológicos” Image
Aug 4 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It is anguishing to think, after so many boycotted negotiations, that the remaining hostages’ plight will end with Hamas executing them so Netanyahu can claim their lives as the excuse for taking over Gaza. The worst most cruel most bloody outcome possible I am in despair for the hostages and their families and for the thousands of Palestinians that will be killed as a result of this new demential course of action. No one -NO ONE- should be used as bargaining chip for geopolitical goals. I know the despair of hoping against hope
Aug 4 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Ok, let’s read it, cuz I’ve really had it with the distortion being made by some here

🧵 The article starts:

“Each High Contracting Party shall allow the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores and objects necessary for religious worship intended only for civilians of another High Contracting Party, even if the latter is its adversary”
Aug 4 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’d argue the main reason why it would be incomplete to assess Israel’s operations as “indiscriminate” is because there is increasing evidence that Israel is not simply failing to direct attacks at military targets, but that it’s directly targeting civilians So really the attacks are not indiscriminate in the sense that they do not distinguish between military targets and civilian populations. On the contrary, they do distinguish between them and then shoot at the civilians.
Aug 4 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This is the problem with racist colonial mindsets. They define “advanced” as “those things about me that I like, minus what I don’t, w/o minding local context”
Ffs the Spanish also burned people alive to appease their god, what the hell do you think was the Spanish Inquisition?🧵 The Inca also did have a way to record valuable information- it was just not written through an alphabet. The quipu was a complex system that records information based on texture, colour and the shape of knots. It’s so complex that we have not been able to decipher it to this day Image
Aug 2 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Bartov, Grossman & a growing number of Israeli public intellectuals are saying things like “I refused to believe it but now I can’t deny it further: Israel is committing genocide”. As they open the Overton Window in ways genocided Palestinians never could, one thing is important This “I can’t deny it any longer” angle was part of the global structure that enabled a genocide. What for you was a process of personal self discovery, for Palestinians it was months of atrocity denial where tens of thousands of people died, were tortured, starved, etc.
Jul 31 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I just made an hour-long video on how frustrating it's been to see academics excluded from Israel-Palestine discourse and here we are, a few days later, with ALL my academic mutuals saying this letter on recognition and Montevideo is an embarrasing joke and no media asking them🧵 Marco Milanovic, University of Reading Image
Jul 28 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
The problem with Elliot’s analysis is that frankly it is trapped by two methodological choices: narrow interpretation and excessive formalism. Why he makes these choices is for him to reveal, but I do think it is important for people to know they are choices 🧵 It is a fundamental principle of law that laws that protect rights should be read expansively and laws that restrict rights should be read narrowly. Rules regarding the protection of people from genocide therefore should be read expansively.
Jul 26 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
I’m pretty sure I’m one of the people who knows most in the world about a relatively obscure Brazilian diplomat and nobleman called Felippe Lopes Netto. I came across him researching for my PhD and I’ve been obsessed with his life ever since. 🇧🇷 😍 I was looking for non-Euro-American actors implementing the laws of war in the 19th Century. One of the key arguments I make in my dissertation is that 19th Century laws of war were really, literally, *laws* in plural, with different parts of the world adopting different readings