Is it possible to speak of the Palestinians as adults?

I ask this after reading the harrowing stories of the graduating class of new dentists profiled in this @nytimes article.

1/

nytimes.com/interactive/20… It starts with a video of their festive graduation (recommended viewing), one that puts paid to the "open-air prison" lie frequently trotted out as an excuse for attacks on Israelis. The abrupt transition from celebration to tragedy is described thus:

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Judge Aharon Barak's dissenting opinion in yesterday's ICJ ruling is worth reading in full. His opening autobiographical remark about surviving the Holocaust is remarkable not just for its description of the German crimes but also...

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icj-cij.org/node/203452 ...its acknowledgement that liberation came from offensive military action by the Soviet Red Army.

He describes South Africa's case as one not made "in good faith," which seems orthogonal to the rest of the argument.

Until you read...

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The rank dishonesty of this @NYTimes Op-ed by @Megankstack begins with the truncated legal definition of genocide.

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nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opi…


The "as such" is a crucial part of the definition, and distinguishes people killed in war from people killed for no other reason than belonging to some national, religious, ethnic, or national group. It is deliberately left out here.

2/20

This article completly misreads the key Arendt quote that the entire argument rests on.

The "galut-and-ghetto mentality" refers to the small-mindedness, insularity, and overwrought fearfullnes Arendt claims to have found in Israel.

1/11

https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1736920605977391500

The ghettos she's glibly comparing Israel to are the districts in European cities where for hundred of years Jews were confined, not the urban prisons in Poland where in the 1940s occupying German forces herded Jews to be starved before being shipped off for extermination.

2/11

The Israel that will face the end of a cease fire after four days will be a completely different society from the one that enters it, and it is impossible to predict what the emotional impact of this partial hostage release will have.

https://twitter.com/ShMMor/status/1726995380565590105

It will be our first direct encounter with the 10/7 events since that horrific Saturday. Our first real understanding of the conditions of captivity for the remaining hostages. And we may quickly discover cases where those presumed missing might no longer be among the living.

Did you know that today is the 35th anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence? It happened on November 15, 1988 in Algiers. Yasser Arafat read out the declaration, composed for the most part by Mahmoud Darwish.

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english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/… The authoritative English translation was by Edward Said no less. The word Nakba nowhere appears, btw.

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en.wikisource.org/wiki/Palestini…

Longtime followers here might recall my post on the four tenets of "anti-racist" discourse on Jews. Today's @nytimes article by @katierosman on people tearing down posters of Israelis abducted by Hamas features all four. First a refresher on the tenets:

https://twitter.com/ShMMor/status/1482647530999619585

Here's the @nytimes article. Let's highlight the passages that correspond to each tenet.
nytimes.com/2023/10/31/nyr…

Operation Inherent Resolve was launched in 2014 by the second Obama Administration together with key allies (Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium) to crush ISIS, an organization that by that point had not yet carried out its huge attacks on civilians in Europe.

1/7 It involved air strikes and a few large ground operations in urban combat, notably in Raqqa (Syria) and Mosul (Iraq).

Estimates of the number killed in airstrikes by US, UK, and French air forces range from 70,000 to 80,000.

2/7

If you saw a co-worker behaving to colleagues in a misogynistic manner, and you happened to know he was going through an acrimonious divorce, which of the following two would best summarize how you related those two things? 1) While I certainly condemn workplace misogyny, I understand where all his anger at women is coming from, and I don't realistically expect him to stop disrespecting women at work until his ex-wife comes up with a more just proposal for dividing their assets and child custody.

Part of the explanation for how Israel managed to sleepwalk into catastrophe in 1982 was that a series of coincidences put manifestly unqualified people in key roles. Just Begin without Sharon or Eitan, or just Sharon without Begn and Eitan wouldn't have been enough. But the combination of the three meant that there was no adult in the room, that decisions were made on fantasies and apocalyptic historical myth and self-deception. There have been mediocre politicians and mediocre generals throughout Israeli history, but...

If the IDF occupies part or all of the Gaza Strip in the current fighting, what will the international law "experts" and humanitarians who claimed it was under Israeli "occupation" for the last 18 years call that? A double-dog occupation? Occupation Extra? Could get awkward. Occupation in international law is defined very clearly: "Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.
The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised."

On May 14, 2018, Hamas massed its terrorists along the border between Gaza and Israel and, with the diversion of "protests" nearby, made attempts at several points to breach the fence and enter Israel, all of which were prevented by live fire by the IDF.

1/8 Global media described a "massacre" of "protestors," (even though it rapidly emerged that nearly all the casualties were Hamas combatants) and Israel was unviersally condemned for its "disproportianate" response.

2/8

I have no idea if the Biden administration’s initiative for a Saudi-Israeli peace treaty will succeed or not (and neither do you).

1/ It’s remarkable, however, that the entire endeavor basically violates every single precept of the approach associated with the clique which in recent years came to be known as the “peace processors.”

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I have a post today in @unherd on Nakba Day commemorations at the UN.

In the post I refer to the work of the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch on the "culture of defeat," which was particularly illuminating for this topic.

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unherd.com/thepost/the-un… Schivelbusch passed away in March, but because his death went mostly unreported, The NY Times ran an obituary only eleven days ago.

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nytimes.com/2023/05/04/boo…

In my @unherd post today, I discuss the UN's "Nakba Day" commemoration.

Referring to the events of 1948 as a "nakba," Arabic for "disaster," originates with the book "The Meaning of Disaster" by Constantine Zureiq, published as the war was ending.

1/15

unherd.com/thepost/the-un… I bring a few quotes from the book in my post, but it's worth reading the whole text to see just how much the political usage of the term nakba has evolved and why.

Let's begin with the very first page of Zureiq's book, in fact, just the first three paragraphs.

2/15

In @unherd, I wrote about the UN General Assembly's "special commemorative event" for Nakba Day today.

The UNGA is an especially obscene setting for this obscene assault on historical memory for several reasons:

unherd.com/thepost/the-un… 1) The Arab catastrophe came in the defeated effort to block implementation of a landmark UNGA resolution (181), the one that called for partitioning British Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) initiated the current Gaza crisis last week, having vastly overestimated its own capabilities and greatly underestimated the operational and intelligence capabilities of Israel.

1/5 PIJ ended the crisis with none of its demands met, none of its goals achieved, its arms stock depleted, and its two most senior operatives killed.

2/5

This op-ed in today's Times on the gradual disappearance of the death penalty in the US hits almost by accident on a crucial point about the politics of reform, one that is particularly apposite in thinking about Roe v. Wade too.

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nytimes.com/2022/06/29/opi… The Supreme Court's decision banning the death penalty in 1972 was an even bigger political disaster than the abortion decision a year later. The death penalty was gradually disappearing anyway in the US (just as in Western Europe), but...

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Three years ago at a panel at @BrookingsInst on democracy, nationalism, and populism, I spoke about the short-term satisfaction and long-term danger of relying on courts to impose liberal policy preferences.

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brookings.edu/events/democra… It was not, of course, a new theme for me.

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tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

I also thought this poignant @unherd piece by the supremely talented @b_judah was beautifully written, but it leaves me more frustrated than wistful.

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unherd.com/2022/03/the-ru… The description of the boozy millennial Euro-Brit “hackpack” mostly coheres with my memory of this crowd, who I believe were genuinely having a good time and a right adventure, and didn't stop to think of who was shut out of the party.

2/

Russian leadership feels a real grievance from Ukraine's existence as an independent state. It is seen as an artificial creation in the heart of Russian civilisation, whose capital city bears an enormous symbolic and historical importance to the Russian people.

1/11 Ukraine's borders are seen as an unjust imposition from a time of imperial collapse, forced upon Russia by scheming outsiders and perfidious leaders inside back in an era of imperial collapse, and its (Jewish) leaders are regularly called Nazis by Russian state organs.

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