I just learned that Eid al-Hathalin was arrested by Israeli soldiers today after a violent raid on the village of Umm al-Kheir. Basically all the protagonists of the book I wrote about nonviolent resistance in the West Bank have been arrested since October. 1/ It should go without saying that none of them are Hamas militants, or even remotely sympathetic to that movement. Reports of torture and severe abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons are at the moment nearly universal. 2/

Israeli propaganda can afford to be preposterous because racist dehumanization has already done the real work for them. If you accept that Palestinians are irrational and violent (“human animals”) and that Hamas is uniquely barbaric then even the flimsiest lies will do. 1/ A missile launched agst them becomes a missile that they launched, a hospital becomes a terror ward, an ambulance could only be a transporter of terrorists, a basement room clearly used as a shelter from bombs could only have held hostages because only Israelis can be victims 2/

As some of you may have guessed, @B_Ehrenreich is my mother. I had no say in this arrangement but I am nonetheless very proud of it, and proud of her. 1/ I have no illusions about this platform. Long before I joined it I saw friends and enemies alike go down in feeding frenzies that would make hyenas blush. 2/

1/ A brief historical thread/footnote to my column on climate change and capitalism. The first general strike in the modern (industrial and capitalist) era, and as far as I know the first general strike anywhere, occurred in the UK in 1842. 2/ Britain was by then decades ahead of the rest of the world in the use of coal-powered steam engines, mainly in the textile industry. Steam engines had the advantage of weakening manufacturers' dependence on skilled human labor, which gave workers what little leverage they had.