In 1982, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was in Beirut when the city was besieged by the Israelis. As part of his book "Memory for Forgetfulness" (ذاكرة النسيان) Darwish mentioned an acquaintance of his who could not believe that a siege was underway "unless it was written in Hebrew," and "since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn't acknowledge that Beirut was under siege."
"But this," Darwish writes, "is not a madness I suffer from."1
We are now over a year into Netanyahu's genocide in Gaza. As I write these words, his einsatzgruppen death squads have unleashed hell on a hospital and tents in northern Gaza as part of his ongoing plan to "liquidate" that section of the Palestinian ghetto.2 As Netanyahu expands his extermination campaign to my country, Lebanon, we bear witness to this world we live in, a world in which Israel's Milošević can confidently broadcast his crimes against humanity. He can speak of turning Lebanon into Gaza because he knows that we know what this means.
And yet, large swaths of the Western media, its politicians and its think tanks are scarcely different than the Israeli researcher that Darwish knew. They reject the reality broadcasted live to the same smartphones we all have.
They suffer from the same madness.
That researcher could have still been active today3 and had a successful career without needing to learn anything new. Although his reliance on Israeli sources was inferior in quality to Darwish's reliance on Beirut-based journalists, he had an advantage that most Beirutis did not and still do not have: he could be comforted by a seemingly self-sufficient narrative.
“I’ve got two options for you.”
No one made it more blatantly obvious than the British Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson. In a recent interview, he admitted to Isaac Chotiner of being unable to conceive of Israeli Jews committing crimes against humanity as, in his mind, this would mean that the antisemitic blood libel against Jews "was true."
This nonsensical take is best included in full:
You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.
How exactly is paying attention to what a modern state in Israel-Palestine is doing related to antisemitic blood libels of 700-800 years ago in Europe, I do not know. He seems to have convinced himself that Jews are incapable of acting the way he thinks Arabs act, when the fact of the matter is that this is how the Israeli army, the one which has obligatory conscription for most Israeli Jews, is acting.4
He repeats this a number of times: "I'm not going to buy it," "I’d like to think," "I would like to think," and so on. He is unable to answer a single question about Israel's well-documented crimes against humanity with a straight answer, something he has no trouble doing where Russian crimes against humanity in Ukraine are concerned. Could it be that Ukrainians count as valid sources to him, but Palestinians do not?5
Despite not being Israeli and even being older than the state of Israel itself, Jacobson seems unable to imagine his identity beyond it. This speaks to a profound instability at the heart of his identity which he clearly refuses to reckon with. This is not what concerns me, however. What concerns me is his reliance on this infrastructure of storytelling when it is brutalising our bodies and murdering our children.6
Jacobson's intervention is what the proliferation and replication of White supremacy looks like in the West, itself linked to the specific Zionist project of Jewish supremacy in Israel-Palestine.7 It is a project of giving oneself the right to determine whose kids are disposable in exchange for never having to exist in this world as responsible adults.
The truth is, James Baldwin tells us, that the West does not want to face the world that has been made in their name. They do not want to deal with the consequences of a world that puts a hierarchy on a child's worth and their right to live. This applies to much of so-called intellectuals in the West.
Can they truly comprehend why they are still able to find ways to excuse a regime that leaves premature babies in their incubators to die of thirst, hunger or lack of thermoregulation? Their sense of self-worth depends on the dehumanisation of babies who have not yet had to time to grow into toddler, children, teenagers, adults. And no one an dehumanize a child without first dehumanizing themselves.
The child here has no power, no agency. They are the definition of innocence. The perceived power is projected by those who call that child a demographic threat, a supremacist logic that was always at the heart of the Zionist project.8 It is the same phenomenon that leads to the adultification of Palestinians:9 even when our children are children, they must be spoken of as adults to justify their murder.
A CNN commentator called six-year old Hind Rajab, who was murdered by the IDF in January 2024, a woman. Conversely, Sky News called the 19 year old Israeli soldiers killed by a Hezbollah drone in October 2024 "teenage victims."
This is the deployment of innocence as a tool of domination which discursively separates worthy from unworthy victims. They get to be viewed as innocent children despite actually being armed adults engaged in an invasion of a sovereign nation. Our children don't get to be children at six years old.
Jacobson, as with Darwish's Israeli acquaintance, should have spent some time reading Edward Said, and specifically his analysis of Western reactions to the 1982 siege of Beirut and war on Lebanon
They, he says:
have been accommodated in all but a few places in the public realm to the view that prevailed before those events: that since Israel is in effect a civilised, democratic country constitutively incapable of barbaric practices against Palestinians and other non-Jews, its invasion of Lebanon was ipso facto justified.
Is that not what Jacobson revealed? He is able to take in the news of murdered children but somehow cannot ascribe too much blame to those doing the mass murdering. Why? Because he cannot conceive of a world where Israel is not this civilized Western outpost in a sea of uncivilized Arabs. In his words: "I think the West should continue to give them weapons because I think they are an island surrounded by enemies."
I cannot prove it, but I genuinely don't believe he believes that. Not really. I think he makes himself believe that because the alternative is facing the reality of a genocidal state he has supported for so long. As he put it, he got only two scenarios he's willing to believe. The third one, the one proposed by reality, was not an option for him.
Decades and decades of extermination campaigns from Deir Yassin to Gaza to Beirut to Gaza to Jenin to Gaza to Qana to Gaza. Year after year, despite all of this, Jacobson was still able to tell himself that he was on the right side of things.
He wrote of British Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust and convinced himself that this was enough, but it wasn't. "Never Again" is a duty to prevent genocide wherever it occurred regardless of who the genocidaires and who their victims are.
He failed, and his unwillingness to deal with his moral responsibility towards the Other leads him to advocate for arming a state committing genocide against children. There is a direct line between the two. To many people like him, the extermination of Palestinian children is an easier pill to swallow than admitting they were wrong for so long. Again, reality is not one of the two options he is willing to consider.
I Am Forced to Deal With This World
Unlike Jacobson, I recognise Netanyahu's playbook because I do not have the luxury to ignore it. I do not have the luxury to ignore the IDF's Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee, who I've named the Face of Death in my previous piece, as he announces almost every night, multiple times, which neighborhood of my country that most moral army in the world is planning to obliterate.
Choosing to ignore Adraee is choosing not to warn friends and loved ones who may be in harm's way. The second I do, if they haven't done so already, they open their map application to measure the distance between where they are and where Adraee announced death was coming.
If I adopt a fraction of Jacobson's unwillingness to deal with reality, my loved ones can die. Instead, I am forced, like so many others, to compensate for such widespread moral cowardice that defines so much of so-called intellectuals in the West, a group of people with few things in common besides their persistent belief in their camp's eternal moral superiority, no matter how many civilians Israel burns alive.
Death Interlude
As I write these words, the Israelis are carpet bombing Nabatiyeh. They already destroyed its century-old market a few days ago, and have now destroyed its century-old municipality, killing its mayor in the process.10
A friend's friend is from there and told him “today is a very very dark day. Everyone I grew up with got killed all at once.”
Back to Mahmoud Darwish:
The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of creation. Where are they going to strike next? Where are they not going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself?
Caption: Middle East Airlines landing at Beirut airport following an Israeli strike in Beirut a couple of weeks ago.
These words could have been written a couple of weeks ago as Israel struck the road to the Beirut airport, Lebanon's only airport. In fact, Darwish's 1982 description of Israeli jets is identical to how friends in Beirut talk about Israeli jets and drones today.
A few days ago a friend sent me a voicenote during which the sound of drones could clearly be heard in the background. “Don't mind the sound of the drones,” she told me. "It's background noise now, driving us crazy for days non stop.” This is an audio clip of another friend recording an Israeli drone in Beirut.
Thanks to the US and Germany,11 Netanyahu has had a year of experimenting with actual weapons of mass destruction on the Gaza ghetto, and has more recently turned his arsenal of death to the West Bank and Lebanon.
What follows is what has already occurred: Entire villages have been, are being and will be raised to the ground. He has, is and will burn medical patients alive. His einsatzgruppen death squads has, is and will assassinate journalists like Lebanon's Issam Abdallah just as they did Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin, and just as they murdered 123 journalists in Gaza so far, including Abdallah Alwan and Assem Kamal Moussa.12
More children will be annihilated for the crime of being near an undesirable, and the civilized state reserves the right to determine who is undesirable, how many of their children can be killed, and how fast or slow their deaths can be. They can also choose to drop a bomb without even knowing whether children are there in the first place. As long as they get to decide.
This is not complicated to understand: to Netanyahu and his genocidal allies, we are the untermenschen, the subhumans to be exterminated. One does not get to 11,000 children and 6,000 women murdered in a year - and these are very conservative numbers - by accident.
We are beyond any of that. We are now in the active phase of supporting the genocide.
Here is Germany's "feminist" and "Green" foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, herself the granddaughter of the Nazi Waldemar Baerbock. In her own words, being able to define when civilian areas in Gaza lose their protected status is "what Israel's security means for us."
What she says about Gaza's civilian areas would apply to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, almost word for word. Fortunately for her grandfather's friends, they exterminated the Warsaw Ghetto a few years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately for her, there are too many of us untermenschen outside of the Gaza ghetto today and we will not be silent.
An Infrastructure of Storytelling
Maintaining willful ignorance in the face of the most documented genocide in human history could not happen without a storytelling infrastructure deployed almost as fast as a US-made bomb is dropped on a child in Gaza.
The genocide cannot be sustained for this long without that infrastructure. This is why the New York Times instructed its journalists to avoid terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupied territory or refugee camps. The word Palestine was also to be avoided, “except in very rare cases.” This is a political choice made by a group of people with names and careers. We have seen similar decisions made by the BBC, Sky News, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Telegraph and so many others.13 This is not even including the vast majority of German outlets that have been entirely in favor of the genocide.
This is why those same outlets continue to take for granted the voice of Israel's own army and politicians because, to quote Said again, Israel's actions is ipso facto justified no matter how long it took them to let Hind Rajab die in agonizing fear or how many premature babies Israel let starve to death by forcing their doctors and parents out at gunpoint.
The longer Israel commits crimes against humanity, the more children they murder, the more there is a need to move the goal post and redefine what is right and moral. The two follow one another, otherwise we wouldn't have the BBC describe starvation as a weapon of war to be a "controversial plan" and the WSJ accuse United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon of being "Hezbollah's best friend." These are decisions made by the editorial boards of these publications, and they will all be included in books detailing their complicity in this genocide.
What those outlets are doing is telling a story. When the Israeli ambassador to the UK was recently asked about the medical reports clearly outlining how Israeli einsatzgruppen snipe children with head shots, she made sure to talk about the West Bank and say "Judea and Samaria, the way we call it."
The Israelis cannot merely destroy our bodies. They learned from the 1948 Nakba that this wasn't enough. This is why the Israeli historian Benny Morris told Mehdi Hassan recently that the problem with the Nakba was that not all Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Morris is one of the 'New Historians' of Israel who used declassified Israeli archives to write about the Nakba. He knows very well what Zionist militias did to make way for the state of Israel. He wrote books about it. This is why he is very clear in his conviction that they should have, to quote Donald Trump, "finished the job."
And Morris is right: Finishing the job of genocide would have made way for a purer Jewish Israeli society instead of the impurity embodied by all the inconvient dead children. “I am the impurity that makes the zinc react," Primo Levi wrote, and Palestinians are the impurity that olive trees rely on for protection from Israeli ecocide.
What Morris and others like him who refuse to acknowledge their responsibility as moral actors in this world do not understand is that purity consumes itself.
No society is able to purify itself as it perpetually requires narrowing the boundaries of who is in the in-group. Do they think that the Zionist supremacist project's enemies are only Palestinian non-citizens? Do they think Palestinian citizens of Israel are not next? Is the religious fanaticism unleashed by Ben Gvir and his ilk going to leave Israeli Jewish LGBTQ people alone? When is it the turn of Ethiopian Jews?
Just how many adaptations of Martin Niemöller's "first they came for" must we go through as a species since the Holocaust before Never Again is adopted seriously?
Our Pain and Heartbreak
James Baldwin once wrote that "you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." So I turned to an essay that Baudrillard wrote during the siege of Sarajevo. I am including one passage here.
Note: I replaced “Sarajevo” with “Gaza-Sarajevo” and “Serbs” with “Israeli-Serbs."
And it is true that the theater of the transparency of Evil is indeed there, in Gaza-Sarajevo. The repressed canker which rots the rest, the virus of which European paralysis is already a symptom. . . . The ghost Europe, the unfindable Europe, the jerry-built Europe in its most hypocritical convulsions, fails utterly at Gaza-Sarajevo. And in this sense, the Israeli-Serbs serve almost as the instrument of demystification, as the savage analyzer of this phantom Europe, this Europe of techno-democratic politicians as triumphal in their discourse as they are enfeebled in their actions. For one sees clearly that Europe degrades itself even as the discourse on Europe blossoms (as one sees clearly that the rights of man are debased as the discourse on the rights of man proliferates). But in fact, this is not the last word in this story. The last word is that the Israeli-Serbs, insofar as they are the carriers of ethnic cleansing, are the narrow edge of that wedge into which Europe is creating herself. For “real” Europe is in the process of creating herself as White Europe. Whitened Europe, integral and purified—morally, economically, or ethnically. She is in the process of creating herself victoriously at Gaza-Sarajevo, and in this sense, what happens there is not at all an accident on the highway of a nonexistant Europe, pious and democratic; it is a logical and ascendant phase of the New European Order, subsidiary of the New World Order,14 which is everywhere characterised by “white” fundamentalism, protectionism, discrimination, and control. We say: if we let this happen at Gaza-Sarajevo, we have every right to expect it to happen to us also, as a consequence. But we are already there.15
Again, we should stop acting as if what the Israelis are doing is occurring despite the West's best intentions and actions.
Israel is doing what many Western governments are currently unable to do. How many German politicians today not-so-secretely wish inconvenient pesky Arabs, Muslims, Turks and others just disappeared overnight? How many American politicians not-so-secretly wish to see Gaza razed entirely and turned into another Dubai?16 What does Israel's ‘right to defend itself’ translate to in Italian, Dutch, Hungarian or Polish if not what it also means in English: The right to annihilate?
George Orwell may have correctly identified political language as consisting “largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” but some of what passes for normal discourse today are quintessential examples of doublespeak, contradictions that serve the purpose of obfuscating what is patently obvious.
To name but one example, American officials claimed that Israel is seeking “de-escalation through escalation,” a sentence which is so blatantly Orwellian it may be too obvious in a modern adaptation of 1984.
Again, this is all part of the storytelling infrastructure required during a genocide.
The Rwandan genocide was not possible without the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC, nicknamed Radio Genocide) calling Tutsis cockroaches. The Bosnian genocide was not possible without Radio Television of Serbia telling Serbs that Sarajevo was being liberated. The ongoing Ukrainian genocide is not possible without Russian state TV promoting similar rhetoric.
The particularity of the Gaza genocide is that many Western media outlets are acting like Israeli state media outlets when they are not. They choose to represent the genocide this way because, as in Sarajevo before, they fundamentally agree with it.
But this deference to power is more than just a bias against Arabs, or Orientalism or an internalisation of the War on Terror discourse that became so ubiquitous after 9/11. It speaks to a longstanding status quo within establishment media that allows power to pre-define terms of legitimate debate.
Should a president Harris start saying Israeli apartheid must end it would dethrone decades of talking points virtually overnight.17
Should a president Trump tell Netanyahu to "finish the job", which is what Biden effectively told him anyway, the talking points will be between those who believe in dropping many Mother of All Bombs (MOABs) and those who believe in starving the population to death, and then those who take the centrist position of a few MOABs only and fewer children starved to death.
Just like that, there will suddenly be those who agree and those who disagree on these new terms of legitimate debate. Salaries will be paid for talking heads to position themselves on something that will affect other people's children. The content of the claim does not matter as much as who is making them.
"Israel has a right to defend itself" is the term of legitimate debate in the West today. From that, pundits and commentators position themselves between those who say 'yes but' and those who say 'yes and.'
"Yes but this is too much, think of the children of Gaza." "Yes and this doesn't go far enough, think of the children of Israel." We see variations of this all the time. These are the terms.
Do Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? You might ask. No.
Does Lebanon have a right to defend itself against the invading Israeli army just as Ukraine has the right to defend itself against Russia? No.
Is Hezbollah allowed to strike at Israeli soldiers in Israel? No. How about at Israeli soldiers illegally occupying Lebanon? No.
How about Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank? Do they have a right to defend themselves against the settlers backed by the IDF and Ben Gvir's police? No.
Does any Palestinian or any Lebanese have the right to defend themselves against Israel? Of course not, you savage. The answer is no.
What Gaza allows us to see is how power operates when it is naked. The empire has no clothes. "All you really have, after all, are space shuttles, banks, and weapons. What you don't have is me, me the slave, me the n*gger," Baldwin told a Dutch interviewer in 1981. And when the untermenschen defies submission, they must be punished.
To the West, the crime committed by Hamas on October 7th is not the massacre itself. The West has no problems with hundreds being needlessly murdered. What the West found objectionable is that Palestinians broke the siege imposed on them.
So much financial and political capital went into turning Gaza into an open air prison - and Hamas just broke through?
Israel has an advanced air force and navy, in addition to a US-funded iron dome, and Hamas just used para-gliders?
How dare those savages leave the cage we put them in. This is why any attempts by Hamas to release the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire was rejected by Netanyahu. How dare they?
They kill 'our own' and now want us to not kill every one of 'their own'?
This is the insult. This is why Hanieh, Hamas' Qatar-based negotiator who was not involved in October 7th, was killed by Netanyahu. Who was he to think he had the right to talk to me, let alone make demands of me? The innocents murdered on October 7th were quickly used by Israel and its Western allies to implement the year-long, and ongoing, extermination of Palestinian children. For every Jewish child killed by Hamas on October 7th, the West made sure that Israel could kill 1,000 Palestinian children.
It is a carceral logic taken to its natural extreme, and the Gaza ghetto had to be punished for rejecting its status as the world's largest open air prison. The untermenschen are not supposed to say no.
Even as an entire year passes since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, it is still controversial to mention that word - genocide - in most western media outlets.
You could be silenced mid-sentence if you dare utter the fact that Israel has been targeting journalists, medical workers and children. You could be one of the dozens of doctors who have been to Gaza and witnessed multiple children with single head shot wounds, and you could still be called antisemitic. You could even be Jewish and get accused of being a self-hating Jew supporting Hamas because you oppose Israeli apartheid and genocide.
Video: excellent intervention by European Jews for Palestine at the EU parliament.
This is what we are cursed with today. We are forced to suffer the consequences of adults in arrested development proclaiming their right to perpetual mediocrity through the deployment of discourse. They want to eclipse the screams of children by telling each other and everyone else to look the other way because staring directly at the fiery ball of death unleashed by Israel makes them feel bad.
Consequently, we find ourselves in situations where people in positions of power get to opinionate ad-nauseam about the fate of an entire people while.
They get to be untethered from their own consciences while Sha'ban al-Dalou was forced to burn to death while tethered to an IV.18
Several months after telling its journalists not to use accurate descriptors like genocide and apartheid, the New York Times published on October 9th 2024 the testimony of 65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics. Of those, 44 saw multiple cases of preteen children shot in the head or chest in Gaza by the IDF. Will this change the NYT's editorial position?
Maybe, but I remain skeptical. After all, the NYT is also this:
Conclusion
After receiving confirmation of the basic facts of the siege of Beirut, did the Israeli researcher mentioned by Darwish experience a change of heart? Did he question the discourse that the Israeli army was putting forward? Or did he go on with his life simply accommodating to his pre-existing conviction in Israel's civilized status, its monopoly over what is the defacto story?
I cannot know for sure, but if the past four decades of western media coverage of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon are of any indications, I suspect that he would remain the same man today, suffering from the same madness.
How to Support Lebanon
If you're in the West, do whatever you can to force your government to expel Israeli ambassadors, embargo Israel and cut all ties with Israel. This would obviously also help Palestinians.
Please consider a monthly donation to Megaphone News, Lebanon's best independent media outlet right now which also covers Israel-Palestine, Syria and beyond. Israel thrives in media blackouts and their military imposes nationwide censorship. Do not let them get away with it. You can also follow Megaphone on social media as well.
My friend Liz did an infographic of the Lebanon-based mutual aid groups you can support. They are also linked on our website.
Queer Mutual Aid Lebanon https://www.patreon.com/qmalebanon
Vulnerable queer community: https://www.gofundme.com/f/lebanon-urgent-shelter-and-humanitarian-relief
Mutual Aid for people forcibly displaced from South Lebanon
Help equip Lebanon’s first responders https://fundahope.com/en/campaigns/equip-lebanons-first-responders
Support Network (شبكة دعم): https://fundahope.com/en/fundraisers/shbk-daam-support-network
Saqf Wahad (سقف واحد): A voluntary solidarity initiative that seeks to provide housing for those displaced by the ongoing war in Lebanon. https://sakf1initiative.carrd.co/
Beit Aam (بيت عام): We are distributing this form amid the murderous war Israel is waging against our people in Lebanon. Our Beit Aam is taking care of a number of displaced families in Beirut, but we need a number of volunteer to help move food, mattresses, and other necessary goods. Kindly fill the form to volunteer. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSftZZv00pA8l0DgkvS8bF1YCqlFsYTZ7ZHLX_KX8LmzG7DaGA/viewform
Emergency Response Coalition: Voices of the Unseen: “coalition of groups focusing on various topics such as migrants’ rights, refugees’ rights, LGBTQ rights, menstrual poverty, food security as well as housing security.” https://gogetfunding.com/emergency-response-coalition-voices-of-the-unseen/
Support Basmeh & Zeitouneh via The Syria Campaign. “Founded by refugees, for refugees” https://act.thesyriacampaign.org/donate/donate-to-B-Z/
Jeyetna: addressing period poverty in Lebanon https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/jeyetna-8c9552ee-7ca1-44dc-ae85-c9d6974b1737
Lebanon Solidarity Collective est un réseau indépendant de personnes et d’organisateurs de base résidant au Liban, qui s’engage à fournir une aide mutuelle directe et un soutien sur le terrain https://app.lacagnottedesproches.fr/cagnotte/liban-unite-secours-durgence-dons/
Hostel Beirut for people physically in Beirut
Tres Marias is aiding Filipinos from Tyre, planning outreach with the Philippines embassy, and conducting food relief around Beirut https://www.instagram.com/tresmariaslebanon/
Propaganda is a volunteer group collecting donations in Beirut and assessing needs in Tripoli, with plans to establish a community kitchen https://www.instagram.com/propaganda.rm2/
I understand that the title might sound ableist but I felt it important to use Mahmoud Darwish’s own terminology here. I'm myself autistic and I have ADHD so I'm sensitive to ableist language, but sometimes it's the language itself that fails me and this is one of those times.
I am writing these words as I watch the 19 year old software engineering student, Sha'ban al-Dalou, burn to death alongside his mother as the Israelis bombed Al-Aqsa Hospital in northern Gaza. I can see him as clearly as I can see these words, just as I can hear the screams of his brother witnessing his agonising death, unable to get any closer. Al-Dalou had survived multiple displacements and was in hospital recovering from an Israeli airstrike on a mosque that killed 20 people last week. He was also suffering from Hepatitis. His mother was by his side, and was also killed in the Israeli airstrike on the hospital.
Abubaker Abed wrote a piece on him for Dropsite News
Maybe he is.
If it makes Jacobson feel better, they are acting like the Assad regime does. Maybe he'll feel better if he knows that Arabs can also be this bad?
How about Israeli sources? Because Israeli NGOs are currently sounding the alarm and calling on the world to intervene to stop Netanyahu's extermination campaign of the northern section of the Gaza ghetto.
Had he kept his identity crisis to himself instead of writing a Guardian op-ed and making it my problem, I wouldn't have felt the need to respond.
As well as, evidently, parts of Lebanon and Syria.
I’m referring here to the form of Zionism that led to the modern state of Israel. There were schools of Zionism that were less rigid, including non-state ones, that believed in the need for Jews to leave Europe and settle in Palestine while acknowledging that land is already inhabited by the indigenous Palestinians. Those schools lost to the version of Zionism we see today, which is why I am not focusing on them in this piece.
This is not dissimilar from how African-American children are adultified: as a result, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was among those more likely to be murdered by that enforcer of carceral violence, the cop.
This was planned as early as 2021 as a report by the Meir Amit Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center made clear: civilian infrastructure affiliated with Hezbollah are to be bombed.
This is the Dahieh doctrine I described in a recent 972Mag article.
And every state that maintains relations with Israel despite the genocide.
Also Ibrahim Al-Gharbawi, Mohamed Abu Hassira, Samer Abu Daqqa and so many more. For a full list you can read the Committee to Protect Journalists' continuously-updated page.
Al Jazeera Investigation: Journalists at CNN and the BBC expose the inner workings of their newsrooms, a year into Israel’s war on Gaza
This is a loaded term as it's been co-opted by conspiracy theorists, antisemites, and other dipshits. All Baudrillard here means it Fukuyaman 'realism' status quo
For another time: I wish to explore how Europe's complicity in the Palestinian genocide goes hand in hand with the growing consensus of normalizing the Assad regime as that would facilitate the forced return of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Syrian refugees. In both cases, the goal is ‘Whitening’ Europe and Israel.
This is a reference to Dubaization, which is sort of what it sounds like. It's a thing Jared Kushner pushes for, no doubt with some Gulf Arab support. You can listen to the episode Lebanese journalist Justin Salhani did with Yasser Elsheshtawy on The Fire These Times.
Not that there's any indication she's even thinking about doing that.
And I didn’t even get into the role of social media companies like Meta and X. That's for another time.
Also for another time: Whatever the future holds for Gaza, the West has made itself more vulnerable for authoritarian takeovers by the ongoing hollowing out of systems democratic accountability in favor of supremacist ideologies.