I want to make a point about settlers. Under many definitions Sam is a settler, a non-Palestinian Israeli and one living in the West Bank.

But in reality he’s not. Why? Because settlements are not simply a function of nationality and living place. It’s about Israel creating

https://twitter.com/the_andrey_x/status/1856682272272859493

a parallel society in Palestine that displaces and excludes Palestinians. In a word, colonization.
Every society has immigrants and residents from other places. Sam is one of those. He is throwing in his lot with his Palestinian community. The opposite of what settlers do.

ADL’s new campus report is as usual full of inflation of incident totals and conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
I went through the 52 reported incidents at a Columbia University, by far the campus with the most (second place has 38). Here’s what I found: 1/6 15 are labeled “harassment.” Some appear to be real harassment, e.g.harassing phone calls and texts to a pro-Israel student, and one was real antisemitism—someone on campus yelling “f**k the Jews.” But about half are just political messages like 2/6

Israel’s DEFENSE of bombing WCK is: They suspected there was an armed man in a truck with the WCK convoy. So they decided to bomb the whole convoy.
Even putting aside the likely lies, and their purported “mistake” that the man was gone by the time they bombed the convoy, this is confession of unimaginable atrocities. Israel is ADMITTING that they saw a convoy transporting life-saving food, staffed by international humanitarian aid workers, and because they thought an armed man was in a truck with the convoy, they decided to bomb the whole thing.

Imagine if there was an allegation that 12 teachers in New Mexico took part in the January 6 insurrection, and because of that the United States decided to defund the New Mexico education system.

That’s what’s going on with UNRWA. Except UNRWA doesn’t just run schools in 1/3 Gaza. It runs shelters, provides healthcare, distributes food, and provides other social services, across refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem, which Israel claims to have annexed but doesn’t provide social services), and other countries with 2/3

“But Hamas” is a constant refrain. Previously, my main objection has been that Israel’s genocidal attack has little to do with ending Hamas and the civilian death is unbearable. Implicit was me agreeing that ending Hamas, on its own, would be a good thing. I no longer think that. I have no love for Hamas. I don’t support its religious fundamentalist worldview and I don’t support attacks on civilians. But at the moment, Hamas is the sole group defending Palestinian lives.

As someone who very gradually made my way from anti-occupation liberal Zionism to anti-Zionist support for Palestinian rights, I pinpoint the key moment of my transition as learning about the Nakba. 1/6 Liberal Zionists march side by side with Palestinians and non-Palestinian anti-Zionists in fighting settlements, checkpoints, the siege on Gaza, and the Israeli army’s brutality. But they part ways when talking about eventual solutions, or when talking about refugees. 2/6

There’s a fiction in law that lawsuit damages “make the plaintiff whole,” that compensation makes things as good as it beforehand. But it doesn’t work like that. Nor do the crimes of colonialism and mass murder. Decolonialism is complicated. Wrongs are never fully righted. 1/ Algeria is perhaps the greatest decolonial success in modern history. Narly all the French pied noir left Algeria after its independence. But French is still an official language, and the traces of French rule remain strongly in other ways. 2/

If Israel needed to disenfranchise all Palestinians to maintain Jewish power, it would. But like the Jim Crow south, it maintains the facade of democracy while ensuring Palestinians have no self-determination. A 🧵 Under Jim Crow, Black people technically had the right to vote. The barriers that Jim Crow put to suppress the vote—poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries—were not absolute. In some states almost no Black people could vote, but in others a minority still voted.

65 years later, Israel has finally released documents about the Kafr Qasim massacre. We can expect damning, if unsurprising, new information in the coming days. One of the few massacres taken seriously and condemned even within Israel, but of course no one was held accountable.🧵 After the Nakba, Israel granted citizenship to most Palestinians within the Green Line, but it considered them hostile citizens. Palestinians were largely forced into separate towns and placed under martial law. This would continue until 1966. 2/11

A great example of just how much Zionism is entangled with colonialism is the 1920 Battle of Tel-Ḥai, which Zionists claim as the first battle for a Jewish state but which was in fact part of the Syrian/Lebanese war against colonial France. 1/11 In the aftermath of WWI, Britain and France divided up the Levant between them into "mandates," supposedly different from colonies (but which France treated as colonies). France acted to prevent Faisal from forming an independent Arab state in Syria so as to form a mandate. 2/11

Israeli discourse over “Arab crime” has now moved to a campaign to extend the martial law tools Israel employs in the West Bank to Israel as well. This gives away the game: the denial of WB Palestinians’ rights has always been about their ethnic origin, not citizenship. 1/7 Among the tools the news reports the government has been considering, specifically against Palestinian Arabs in Israel proper with Israeli citizenship, to curb domestic crime: 2/7

An Israeli court just reversed the incitement convictions of five Israeli teens who openly celebrated the burning alive of a Palestinian baby in 2015. This is the latest in a string of heinous court decisions related to the murder. 1/12 Context: In July 2015, a group of Israeli settlers firebombed the home of the Dawabsheh family in the village of Duma in the West Bank. One year-old Ali was burned alive and died, as were his parents Sa'ed and Riham; four year-old Ahmed suffered serious burns but survived. 2/12

Zionists are simultaneously pushing the theory that only a Jewish ethnostate of Israel keeps Jews worldwide safe from antisemitism, and raising alarms about worldwide Jews being in danger from antisemitism. 1/13 The root of this deserves sympathy: an intergenerational narrative of oppression, of being hated, of pogroms and scapegoating and yes the Holocaust. Intergenerational Jewish trauma is real. 2/13