THREAD: There’s much to be said about recent developments in Syria, the background and context, the implications and repercussions. Indisputably, the Syrian government was, like its neighbors Iraq and Israel, and many others in the region, brutally repressive, not only within but also beyond its borders.

THREAD: It is a persistent fad among Israel flunkies to invoke Palestinian toponymic surnames that reference foreign territory to make the argument that these individuals have no business living in their homeland. Thus, surnames like Masri (“Egyptian”), Mughrabi (“Moroccan”), Kurdi (“Kurdish”), Halabi (“Aleppine”), Baghdadi, Hijazi, Hourani, Irani, etc. are presented as proof positive the individuals concerned are not really from Palestine, cannot therefore claim rights within it, and should permanently depart to the territory identified in their surname. There are needless to say multiple fallacies with this approach. A toponymic surname may well indicate foreign origins, but not necessarily so. It could also have originated because the family, or a prominent ancestor, had a particular connection with that territory on account of e.g. commerce, a government posting, or military service. Or because a prominent individual from that territory married into a local family, giving it its current name.

THREAD: Encounter with the Thought Police (Remarks delivered at the Fletcher School's Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies) It’s a real pleasure to be speaking again at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School. I’m particularly grateful to its Director, Professor Nadim Rouhana, and his colleague Amaia Arregi for bringing us together.

THREAD: The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, today released a 12-page report on the events in Amsterdam during the past week. It provides the most detailed account we have thus far, and corrects some details in my earlier posts on the matter. For example, and contrary to what I reported, the police did in fact arrest a few Israeli hooligans (ten in total), but appear to have quickly released them as well. The above notwithstanding, Halsema like virtually every other Dutch politician continues to frame the disturbances within the broader framework of the long history of anti-Semitism rather than the specific one of opposition to continued Israeli participation in international sports competition while the state engages in genocide against the Palestinian people, or more directly of Israeli hooligans running amok in the streets of Amsterdam. As if the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans were singled out because they are Jewish, rather than on account of their violent and vile conduct. As if Israelis were singled out not because they were presumed to be visiting Maccabi supporters but because of Jew hatred.

THREAD: It’s now pretty clear what happened in Amsterdam this week. But first some background. For over a decade the football governing bodies FIFA, the International Federation of Football Associations, and UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, have consistently rejected demands to suspend or expel the Israel Football Association (IFA) and individual Israeli football clubs from their ranks.

THREAD: Citing a “crisis of trust”, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has finally fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. He’d fired him once before, in March 2023, when Gallant warned that Netanyahu’s program to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, and the consequent polarization of Israeli Jewish society, would have negative repercussions for Israel’s security. On that occasion widespread protests forced Netanyahu to reinstate Gallant. The insight that got him fired the first time notwithstanding, no Israeli leader was caught with their pants further down on 7 October of last year than Gallant himself. On this occasion as well it appears that Gallant’s failures as defense minister were not the reason for his dismissal. Rather, Netanyahu’s primary motivation appears to be Gallant’s role in drafting members of the Orthodox Jewish community known as Haredim, measures which he and the military’s leadership consider necessary to address the Israeli military’s growing manpower shortages. Other differences, among them those relating to Gallant’s leadership of the Israeli military, the future of the Gaza Strip, and relations with Washington also played a role, but a secondary one.

THREAD: On 2 November 1917, Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. The document is of enormous significance because it transformed Zionism from a political aspiration into a credible project. The First Zionist Congress, convened in the Swiss City of Basel in 1897, recognized that great power sponsorship was vital to the success of Zionism. Thus Article 4 of the Basel Program called for “Preparatory steps for obtaining the governmental approvals necessary for the achievement of the Zionist goal”. For the next two decades, Zionist leaders spent as much effort obtaining imperial sponsorship as they did to promoting what the Basel Program called “The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and businessmen in Palestine”.

THREAD: On Friday 27 September Israel launched an unprecedentedly intense series of air strikes on the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Multiple 2,000 pound missiles flattened an entire area of the city’s densely populated southern suburbs, including multiple apartment buildings comprising many dozens of homes. The explosions were so powerful they could be felt dozens of kilometers away. Casualty figures are expected to be massive. Israel claims it targeted the central command headquarters of Hizballah, and that this facility was situated below the buildings it targeted. Multiple Israeli press reports indicate the target of the bombings was Hizballah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, and that Israel had received a “golden tip” that the senior Hizballah leadership was meeting the moment it struck. If its claims are accurate and the strike was successful it would, in combination with a series of assassinations over the previous weeks, amount to a decapitation of the Lebanese movement.

THREAD: The latest fad among Israel flunkies is to denounce the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa as illegitimate colonizers. In this telling, not only are Russians, Germans, and Lithuanians indigenous to the Middle East, but those who have actually lived there for millenia are not. The claim is based on the supposition that the Arab Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa collectively hail from the Arabian Peninsula. It is often accompanied by an insistence that Christians, Jews, Druze, and members of other faiths in the region are not Arabs at all, but rather the surviving remnants of distinct indigenous populations that are living under a foreign Arab colonial yoke to this very day.

THREAD: Developments in Lebanon during the past week have once again focused attention on the Axis of Resistance and its role during the current crisis. A few observations: 1. The Axis of Resistance is a coalition rather than a formal alliance. It consists of states, movements, and militias that share the common objective of confronting and reducing US and Israeli influence in the Middle East, and at times of weakening governments allied with the West as well.

THREAD: Text of a short intervention of mine at a recent panel entitled "The World is Watching: Who Shapes the News": The panel title puts it quite well. It explains both Israel’s unprecedented challenges in the court of global public opinion, and the unprecedented global solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

THREAD: As the war in the Middle East approaches its first anniversary, a full-scale regional conflagration is very much on the cards. The crisis, which had been years if not decades in the making, erupted on 7 October 2023 with Hamas’s multi-pronged offensive into southern Israel. In a series of attacks on Israeli military installations and population centers, more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers, security personnel, and civilians were killed, most by Hamas and other Palestinians, many by Israel pursuant to its Hannibal Directive. A further 250 Israeli soldiers and civilians were taken captive and held in the Gaza Strip.

THREAD: @jsternweiner has dug up this excerpt from the memoirs of Lt Gen E.L.M. Burns. Burns (1897-1985) was a Canadian military officer who served in both world wars, and was in 1954 appointed Chief of Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), the UN peacekeeping mission established to maintain the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreements. In 1956, in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Burns was transferred from UNTSO and appointed Force Commander of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the world body's first peacekeeping force that was stationed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip until 1967. Burns, who remained with UNEF until 1959, published his memoir, Between Arab and Israeli, in 1962. Burn's description and choice of words is particularly relevant given that he served in Europe in World War, and also because these were written half a decade before the second Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip that commenced in 1967 and continues to this day: "There are about 310,000 Arabs resident in the Strip, 210,000 of them refugees… Thus there are about 1500 persons to the square kilometre of arable soil… The available fertile soil is intensively cultivated… But, of course, it is impossible for the food thus produced to feed more than a fraction of the population. The 210,000 refugees are fed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The standard ration provides 1600 calories a day, mostly carbohydrates. By Western standards, 1600 calories is a reducing diet…

THREAD: Several people have identified the problem with US Middle East policy with the purported “dual loyalty” of senior US officials. In other words, these individuals are said to be consciously acting in the interests of a foreign state, rather than that of the government they serve, with the knowledge that their actions are contrary to US interests. Such accusations are usually, but not always, made against individuals who have a real or perceived ethnic or religious connection to a foreign entity. When Kennedy, the first Catholic to occupy the White House, was running for president, his opponents suggested he would take orders from the Vatican and US policy would be formulated by the Pope. Currently, such accusations are directed primarily at US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

THREAD: I’ve been making the argument that the ongoing negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire are a diversionary US-Israeli charade and shouldn’t be taken particularly seriously. Initially, their primary purpose was to serve as a fig leaf for Israel to continue with its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip. In other words, their purpose is process, and their objective has therefore been to avoid reaching a ceasefire agreement rather than concluding one. An Oslo process for genocide, if you will. Just as Oslo served as the essential fig leaf enabling Israel to intensify settlement expansion and annexationist policies, while Washington ran interference for Israel with a “peace process” designed to go nowhere, so with these ceasefire negotiations that commenced many months ago.

I received the following response to my thread about human shields from Ellen Cantarow: "When I was allowed briefly into South Lebanon during Israel’s 1982 invasion of that country, I was allowed in only on condition that I be embedded in a group of right-wing reporters and others who could be reliably pro-Israel. We were promised that we would see an enormous arms cache in, I believe, Sidon, left by the PLO. First day, I went there with cameramen from ABC and others. No cache was found.

THREAD: Every time Israel conducts a massacre in a school, hospital, or designated safe zone, it claims the facility was being used for military purposes by Palestinians. Most famously, we were asked to believe Al-Shifa was not really a hospital but a mock medical facility concealing beneath it a Palestinian Pentagon. Israeli intelligence even provided detailed maps and images of this very extensive facility,

THREAD (Part V, Section 1): The 2000-2004 Al-Aqsa Uprising, more commonly known as the Second Intifada, was neither a war nor an armed conflict in the conventional sense. But it represents an important chapter in Israeli-Palestinian relations and played a crucial role in forming the context for subsequent developments, including those of the past year.

THREAD: There have been suggestions that Israel’s recent assassinations of Hizballah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyya in Tehran were not designed to scuttle ceasefire negotiations and escalate Israel’s war against the Palestinians into a full-blown regional conflagration. Rather, they form the prelude to bringing the horrific slaughter to an end.

THREAD: On 30 July Israel bombed the Lebanese capital, Beirut. It proclaimed the purpose of the attack was to kill Fuad Shukur, one of the most senior members of Hizballah’s military council. The attack appears to have been conducted by several missiles fired from a drone. Although it killed a number of civilians in the targeted building and largely destroyed it,

THREAD: I’m interrupting my review of Arab-Israeli wars, which I will resume next week, to comment on a current development: On the morning of Monday 29 July, a contingent of Israel’s military police – the agency responsible for policing the security forces – showed up at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert that now serves as a prison camp for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.