Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism. Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Everyone deserves Human Rights

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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • Would you be less supportive of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising if they did kill more civilians in Nazi Germany?

    Masha Gessen

    For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

    The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

    The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

    Adi Callai

    Another case that is especially important to me as a Jewish person, having studied our history of persecution and rebellion, is the Sobibor Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is of course the most famous Jewish revolt of that era, and many people made the analogy, including Refaat Alareer, a Gazan poet who generated controversy for drawing this comparison on BBC, and who was murdered by Israel as a possible consequence. The Sobibor revolt, while much less well known, was more of a success story. Sobibor was a concentration camp where, in 1943, realizing they were all going to get killed, a small group of maybe twenty people, some of them prisoners of war, organized in secrecy, came up with a sophisticated plan to kill high-ranking SS officers, sabotage the electricity and communications infrastructure, take the guards’ weapons, loot the armory, arm the other inmates, open the gates, and let people escape and join the partisans. Launched on October 14, 1943, it worked, to an extent. Approximately half of the camp escaped. But only about fifty rebels survived the war. Still, that’s a much higher percentage than would’ve survived otherwise. And of course, there are infinite differences between these cases, but I instantly thought about it when I got the news from my sister, who lived in one of the settlements of the Envelope until October 7, in the family WhatsApp group, saying that their power went out, that there was some kind of sabotage of the electricity infrastructure in the October 7 operation.

    In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Masha Gessen, the situation in Gaza is compared to the Warsaw Ghettos. The comparison was also made by a Palestinian poet who was later killed by an Israeli airstrike. Adi Callai has also written on the parallels in his article The Gaza Ghetto Uprising and expanded upon in his corresponding video



  • Regardless, it doesn’t justify throwing Molotov cocktails at them. That dude was clearly unwell and was lashing out in a completely unacceptable way

    That said, the adminstration and legacy media will absolutely weaponize this incident to justify further crackdowns on 1st amendment free speech, on fascist deportations, and criminalizing of pro-palestinian voices

    Of course, the main root cause of this kind of escalation of violence is Israel’s live streamed genocide, and frustration from lack of any tangible change surely plays a large role here. Liberal Zionist media is already blaming it instead on the reporting of the genocide itself, instead of the actual genocide.




  • Did you really just make that claim without going though the actual reporting? That’s absolutely disgusting. Even the majority of children detained and held in these torture prisons experience sexual assault.

    They spoke with B’Tselem after they were released from detention, the overwhelming majority of them without being tried. Their testimonies uncover a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners. This includes frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation; prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment.

    Various testimonies revealed repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity, by soldiers or prison guards against Palestinian detainees as an additional punitive measure. The witnesses described blows to the genitals and other body parts of naked prisoners; the use of metal tools and batons to cause genital pain;the photographing of naked prisoners; penises being grabbed; and strip-searches for the sake of humiliation and degradation. The testimonies also reveal cases of gang sexual violence and assault committed by a group of prison guards or soldiers. One particularly grave testimony, quoted at length below, reports the attempted anal rape of a Palestinian detainee by several prison guards. Similar incidents were mentioned in other testimonies.

    • BT’Selem Welcome to Hell

    In addition to being crimes against humanity and full-fledged war crimes, the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation army and other Israeli security forces against Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip also amount to acts of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Strip, because they are carried out in a systematic and brutal manner. These acts include the killing of Palestinians and the infliction of severe physical and psychological harm, including torture, other forms of ill-treatment, and sexual violence, including rape, and are carried out with the goal of eradicating the Palestinian people as a whole.

    • Euro-Med Monitor

    The video of the alleged gang rape at Sde Teiman is the latest piece in a growing body of evidence of abuse, sexual assault and the systematic withholding of food and medical care that Palestinians endure within the Israeli prison system

    “The conditions at Sde Teiman aren’t unique. They’re just the tip of the iceberg,” the organisation’s spokesperson, Shai Parnes, told Al Jazeera by phone from Jerusalem

    "We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic,” he said

    • Al Jazeera

    On June 27, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said that the Israeli army’s use of police dogs to attack Palestinian civilians during its military operations in the Gaza Strip, in addition to their use to terrorize, maul and rape prisoners and detainees in Israeli detention centers, is “a systematic and widely practiced behavior"

    • IsraelPalestineNews

    Save the Children’s new consultation showed that:

    During arrest, 42% of children were injured, including gunshot wounds and broken bones, and 65% of children were arrested during the night, mostly between midnight and dawn. Half of all arrests took place in the children’s home.

    The majority of children experienced appalling levels of physical and emotional abuse, including being beaten (86%), being threatened with harm (70%), and hit with sticks or guns (60%).

    Some children reported violence and abuse of a sexual nature, including being hit or touched on the genitals and 69% reported being strip searched.

    60% of children experienced solitary confinement with the length of time varying from one 1 day to as long as 48 days.

    Children were denied access to basic services, 70% said they suffered from hunger and 68% said they didn’t receive any healthcare.




  • They are a legitimate resistance regardless of whether they meet your own imagined standard of what legitimate resistance is. Hamas is not being ‘used’ by Israel, for the same reasons the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising wasn’t ‘used’ by Nazi Germany. Read Franz Fanon if you want to understand the reality of anti-colonial resistance. All you’re doing is carrying water for Zionism, whether you recognize that or not.



  • Frankly both Hamas and the Isreali government are complicit in the genocide

    Oh so you are assigning blame for this genocide to Hamas. Insane. You’re saying Hamas’ actions justify or are responsible for Israel’s response of literal genocide. No, nothing justifies genocide. You can’t expect a civilian population subjected to the unfathomable daily violence of settler colonialist apartheid to not fight back. Fuck off with that shitty hasbara. This is as ridiculous as both-sides-ing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

    You are led to believe that if one side is evil the other must by default be good

    If an ethnosupremacist Apartheid state that has continued to live-stream genocide for well over a year is evil, yeah, resistance against that apartheid and genocide is good. In fact, it’s just and moral.

    You already have the position that Israel’s response is expected due to the actions of Hamas. If an apartheid state’s inevitable response to resistance against that apartheid is genocide, then yes, that state deserves to be dissolved and the occupied, and especially victims of a genocide, have a right to resist and armed struggle.

    In this case I only see a master and a puppet

    No, again that is the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is a case of Counter Insurgency (COIN).

    The october 7 attacks were exactly what and when Netanyahu wanted.

    Because he a fucking genocidal Zionist who knows western counties, in particular the US, will give them unlimited material support, international support, and propaganda support for Israel’s genocide. Became Zionism is not about the security of Jewish people or even of Israeli’s. It’s about the extermination of Palestinians, Palestine, and even beyond with Greater Israel.

    Hamas was groomed by Israel to shape as many Palestinians as possible into the kind of people that other nations fear and contributed with their own senseless violence to radicalize the survivors against them.

    Wtf? This take is fucking ridiculous. Islamphobia in the west is not the fault of Palestinians, nor Arabs or Muslims in general. Islamphobia is deliberate to justify the unfathomable amount of violence they have subjected the population of the Middle East to. It is state policy and used to dehumanize the victims of Western Chauvinism.

    What makes Palestinians the ‘kind of people that other nations fear,’ exactly? Because by any metric of violence Israel has been far worse both before and after any violent act of resistance by Palestinians. Nor have Palestinians been the one preventing a peace resolution.

    ‘their own senseless violence to radicalize the survivors against them.’ You mean the survivors of terrorist attacks against Israel? The party responsible for this violent occupation in the first place? Without which these terrorist attacks wouldn’t have happened in the first place? The sense is resistance. Unlike for Zionism, who’s many magnitudes more terrorism they subject the Palestinian population to, the sense is to ethnically cleanse the inferior natives.

    Israel managed to paralyze the international community into inaction with telling them they are antisemites if they condemn their crimes

    No. Western nations have supported Zionism, a fascist project, since it’s beginning. Zionism weaponizes antisemitism. These countries weren’t ‘paralyzed.’ They’ve supported the setter colonialism for many decades. They even continue to support the genocide by continuing the provide weapons, do business with, and refuse to sanction a state committing genocide, on top of the violent settlements and ethnic cleansing done for over 76 years. There are much more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists. They are not ‘paralyzed by the a (false) accusation of antisemitism.’ Their interests are ideological and financial.



  • The existence of Hamas, and any armed resistance movement, is directly due to the decades of violence experienced daily under the permanent occupation, the Apartheid State, of Israel. It’s impossible to understand their existence if you don’t understand the lived experience and material conditions they are forced to live under. There is no such thing as a perfect victim when it comes to anti-Colonialist resistance, not for the Vietcong, the IRA, or the ANC either. Can you condemn the violence of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the same way as the violence of the Warsaw Ghetto?

    In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Masha Gessen, the situation in Gaza is compared to the Warsaw Ghettos. The comparison was also made by a Palestinian poet who was later killed by an Israeli airstrike. Adi Callai has also written on the parallels in his article The Gaza Ghetto Uprising and expanded upon in his corresponding video

    Adi Callai has also done a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history, as well as an analysis of Franz Fanon and Identity Politics in the context of Colonialism and Anti-colonialism.


  • “The atrocities committed against the Palestinian people continue to reflect indifference and double standards,” Mohamad said.

    “ASEAN cannot remain silent,” said Mohamad, whose country holds the rotating chairmanship of the bloc.

    Foreign ministers from the 10-member association in February asserted their “longstanding support” for Palestinian rights.

    Muslim-majority Malaysia has no diplomatic relations with Israel and many in the Southeast Asian country support the Palestinians.


  • What Fanon implored us to do was to view the struggle of the oppressed as a struggle to create a new mode of being, a new form of humanity. Within the revolutionary struggles of the masses, he insisted, lie the seeds of a new humanity. The ongoing resistance in Palestine today is not a new phenomenon, but is rather the latest episode in a decades’ long struggle for freedom and what Hegel and Fanon both agree on, recognition. Not recognition to live within shrivelled little cantons and drip-fed subsistence, but recognition as a human being in the holistic sense of the term. The stone throwing, the stabbings and the bombings are a reaction to a colonial regime which denies this recognition.

    https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20151019-palestine-through-the-lens-of-frantz-fanon/

    I’m well aware that Israel has propped up Hamas for their own ends. It was both to divide the leadership between the West Bank and Gaza and justify it’s violence against a civilian population in the eyes of Western Nations as ‘fighting terrorism,’ which works due to the decades of Islamphobia and hasbara in Western Nations. That does not change the dynamic, whoever funds hamas does not change what their decisions or aims are. It’s not sabotage, it’s blowback.

    Hamas is not controlled under Israel, unlike the PA. Who’s police force works at the behest of Israel as an arm of the occupation, cracking down on resistance against any violent settler colonialism taking place.

    Hamas on the other hand, is a legitimate resistance group against a colonial occupying force that has been committing genocide for over a year, and a brutal blockade and occupation for generations. The goals of Hamas is to end the occupation, now genocide, and for liberation against Zionism. I certainly don’t agree with all the violent actions Hamas has taken, but I also don’t live in Gaza. The median age is 18, compared to 30 is Israel or 40 in European countries, all with experience living under Israeli violence.

    Hamas is one of the many Palestinian resistance organizations that has existed under Zionist colonialism, and currently the most prominent. I support Palestinian resistance unconditionally, regardless of what form that takes.

    I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

    • Martin Luther King Jr. 1963

  • Wtf? Stop comparing the violence of Colonialism to the anti-colonial violence that exists only as a resistance to that occupation and Colonialism.

    The violence of the anti-colonialism is done as a last resort to resist the unimaginable amount of violence the occupiers do on a daily fucking basis.

    How fucking gross to compare Hamas, which only exists because of the Israeli Apartheid, with the fucking Nazis. While Israel is litterally doing a fucking genocide in Gaza as we speak, and has been for over 18 fucking months. Not to mention the blockade and ‘mowing the lawn’ which are some of the most brutal aspects of the apartheid that’s been happening in the occupied territories since 1967.

    JFC, what your doing is akin to both-sidesing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Have a shred of humanity. Anti-colonialist doesn’t come out of fucking nowhere and is completely fucking different than the fascism of Colonialism.