Untitled

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Then I found it on my parents bookshelf and read it again. With a short break to borrow a copy of LOTR, look up the dwarves alphabet in the appendices, and translate the runes myself.

When there was a reaction read-a-thon, no one would sponsor me more than 50c per book, for fear of going broke.

This part. This is the part I’m talking about

This is not a woman falling to pieces because her father won’t let her marry a man she just met.

This is a woman born to a life she has very little say in. She has never had a genuine friend (besides a tiger). She is facing a marriage to a man she doesn’t know and doesn’t like but duty (and the law) demands it. So she took a risk, ran away, ran to a world she doesn’t know or understand and when she landed in trouble (serious, serious trouble) a stranger came to her aid. She finally (finally!) made a real connection with someone but they didn’t get much time together before the guards showed up and she had to reveal who she was.

This moment when she’s crying her heart out? It comes after she’s been told that the first person she ever connected with, the first person to be genuinely interested in her for who she is and not what she is, the first real friend she has ever made, was executed… because of her.

"What made you change?"

Nothing. I still hold the same beliefs, the same values, the same morals. I'm still the same person I was when I attended Pride, when I volunteered, when I was loudly fighting racism, sexism, and inequality. 

But at some point you found a dusty old sign in your grandfather's attic. You gave it a lick of paint and proudly placed it on the front door.

"NO ZIONISTS ALLOWED"

it reads. "Don't worry" you told me. "We like you. We just mean the racists, the fascists, the evil ones. We don't mean you. You're one of the good ones."

But the thing is, I'm not stupid. And you didn't do a very good job. The paint has already begun to peel, and the original words are peeking through.

But its JUST antizionsim, right guys? It's JUST antizionism.

Yeah, no. This is an example of people in the comments on this post (and no, I won't blur their names or cut them out. They're down there saying this shit with their whole fucking chest). This is what EVERY SINGLE SO-CALLED 'ANTIZIONIST' TOLERATES.

You allowed this shit into your movement. Because, let's be real. The reason so many of you assholes are complaining about "But but but you're making this up!" is because you know the OP is right. You know that the functional result of "antizionism", whether you admit to yourself that it is antisemitic or you're still coping by denying it, is that Jews are not allowed. Because you vet us all. You treat us all like enemies trying to sneak into leftist spaces (gee, where the fuck have I heard that about Jews before?).

Antizionism is antisemitic. Antizionists demand that Jews turn out our pockets and present ourselves for your fucking judgment, so you can decide which of us are "good ones" and which of us deserve to be harassed, to be assaulted, to die for the crime of not assimilating to your bullshit colonizer mindset of "We know your history and desires and culture and people more than you do."

One of the main actors served in the IDF during the Intifadas, and suddenly every other post is calling him a genocide supporter, for doing mandatory service.

There’s even a bunch of idiots claiming that the “morally correct” thing to do would have been to refuse to serve and ho to jail, thereby tanking his entire life.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

Borrow from a library or a friend, read it at a book cafe, whatever. You don’t have to give the author money.

But you should read their work to understand how they think, and why it’s problematic.

JK Rowling isn’t just problematic because she’s a TERF, her books have a LOT of low-key and not-so-low-key racism and unexamined biases, but it’s worth reading to spot where those instances cross from ignorant to problematic.

HG Wells was an unabashed paranoid racist, but it’s worth examining how he was also such a popular author, by playing to subconscious fears in his readers.

- Abuelaish was raised in Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Something that I think gets glossed over in the Western understanding of Palestine is that there’s a deep status divide among Palestinians between those who already lived in Gaza and the West Bank, and those who came there as refugees in 1948. The Palestinians who already lived there tend to have better housing, better jobs, and better education; the refugees usually remain trapped in the camps and told by those who already lived there that to resettle outside the borders of Israel is a betrayal of their nation. In this way, they face two injustices: the first expulsion, and the continual confinement to refugee camps without any hope to improve their conditions.

- I was actually reading Return to Zion at the same time as this, and reminded of Golda Meir’s initial impression of the refugee camps in Gaza: “I was appalled by what I saw there, and by the fact that these miserable people had been maintained in such degrading condition for over eight years only so that the Arab leaders could show the refugee camps to visitors and make political capital out of them. Those refugees could and should have been resettled at once in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East — countries, incidentally, whose language, traditions, and religion they share. The Arabs would still have been able to continue their quarrel with us, but at least the refugees would not have been kept in a state of semi-starvation, or lived in abject terror of their Egyptian masters.”

- Abuelaish describes horrific living conditions and overcrowding. He recounts the morbid death of his baby sister Noor: without room for a crib, his mother put her to sleep in the dish basin at night; one day, his brother, trying to escape a punishment, jumped into the basin to hide and crushed the three week old baby.

- He has a low view of intidafas generally. The second one he largely blames for the collapse of the peace process, but even the first one he sees as reprehensible. He says the fight against the Israelis was just as much a fight against other Palestinians, and quickly devolved into a witch hunt. Of the 2,000 dead, half of them were killed by other Palestinians who accused them of disloyalty and insufficient devotion to the cause; this disgusts Abuelaish, who has a deep reverence for life over death.

- “Many Palestinians couldn’t see any future for themselves — they began to see their lives as useless. And then, when one person goes crazy and becomes a suicide bomber, no one around him tries to prevent the act. Instead they call him a hero. That’s the way things get worse.”

- “I felt as if we’d been so close to peace [before the second intifada]. Like many others, I had been full of hope. I’d been conducting tours, and had even opened clinics in Gaza with the help of Israeli doctors (which all had to close). I find it astonishing that the two sides could be so close to a peace agreement and then see our relationship deteriorate so rapidly. As the second intifada raged, each side was focusing on its own pain and blaming the other instead of realizing we have to recognize the rights of both peoples to live in harmony and peace; the alternative is war and distrust. I wished then that I could close my eyes and open them to where we had been before the second intifada began, when we were still talking to each other.”

- Abuelaish becomes a doctor specializing in obstetrics and fertility; this allows him to move his family out of the Jabalya camp and gives him a permit to work in an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, which means he has to cross the border from Gaza twice a week to get to work. He describes this as an agonizing, humiliating, arbitrarily difficult process where he was randomly turned away or searched on the whims of the Israeli and Hamas border guards. “People often tell me they admire my patience and ability to be calm. I tell them I learned all of it while waiting in line at the Erez checkpoint.” Because there is no way of knowing how long a border crossing will take, he rents an apartment in Beersheba to try and prevent work absences and tardiness, keeping him away from his family for most of the week.

- His commitment to life comes through in everything he does. When Gazan object to his helping Israelis, he tries to force an understanding of common humanity. “Some have suggested I am helping to deliver a new generation of occupiers. I try to tell them that these Israeli babies could grow up to be doctors.” He strongly believes in health care as a unifying force.

- In the second intifada, a woman named Wafa al-Biss was caught trying to cross the Erez checkpoint with explosives for a suicide bomb, in a plot to destroy a hospital where she was receiving medical treatment — the same hospital that Abuelaish worked at in Beersheba. He wrote an open letter to Times of Israel: “She should have been a messenger for peace among her people, and should have been bringing flowers and appreciation to the Soroka doctors for healing her burns.… Is this a reward for kindness? Is this an advertisement for Islam, a religion which respects and sanctifies human life? This is aggression and a violation of humanity." He adds that many Gazans were pleased that he wrote the letter, and they said it spoke for them. “As for Biss, she’s in an Israeli prison and I doubt she’ll be getting out any time soon.” This book was published in 2010; she was released months later in exchange for Gilad Shalit’s body.

- “I was heartbroken by [Hamas’s takeover] in Gaza. How could we heal this new wound and cope with the resulting scar? The Israelis were the enemy, but we’d become enemies inside our own house, too.”

- “The last decade has been a particularly disappointing period in this grinding conflict that keeps us apart. Our leaders bicker like children, breaking promises, behaving like bullies, keeping the kettle of trouble boiling. The people I talk to — patients, doctors, neighbors in Gaza, friends in Israel — aren’t like our leaders. They worry about my family as I worry about theirs. We all lament the lost decades, the uncertain future. And as amazing as it may seem to someone watching us from afar, we believe in each other, in our ability to share this Holy Land.”

- “Trust in the Middle East is such a rare commodity today, it's gasping for air. The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and go after a dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn't work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbours and colleagues — Jews, Arabs — and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and were all fed up with the violence.”

- “One of my Israeli friends at Soroka told me, ‘Izzeldin, I heard that you were afraid to come back. I want to tell you, I am ready to sacrifice my life for your safety if any Israeli tries to do harm to you.’ What more can one do than this?”

- Abuelaish’s wife dies suddenly and unexpectedly of leukemia. She’s treated at an Israeli hospital, which means only one family member is permitted to cross the border with her. Abuelaish’s travel visa randomly flags him as a security threat and he spends a full day in detainment before he’s able to see her; he describes it as the most stressful and helpless day of his life.

- With his wife dead and Hamas restricting life in Gaza, he makes plans to take his eight children to Canada. One of his main ideas in this book is the empowerment of Gazan women, who are often put into arranged marriages as teenagers and confined to the home under their husbands’ rule.

- “One of the ways to alter the status quo is to look to the women and girls. It's easy to find a thousand men in favour of war; it's difficult to find five women who are inclined that way. I feel it's time to empower Palestinian women and girls, to give them respect and independence and let them take the lead. Too many girls cannot get an education because of financial and cultural considerations…. I grew up watching the way women in Gaza raised their children. I saw the decision making and the perseverance, but I understood that the women weren't being given the opportunity to bring their own expertise to the table. Women and girls are not able in Gaza to rise to their potential, and as a result they cannot participate to their fullest.”

- I’m reminded a lot of Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib; Abuelaish has a similar medical background and regard for life, and understands the necessity of uplifting women. I saw an interview with Alkhatib a few months ago, where he said that even before the war, Hamas was severely curtailing women’s freedom of movement, and harassing women who left their homes without male accompaniment.

- “A healthy society needs wise and educated women. An educated and healthy woman will raise an educated and healthy family. We need to link education with health care, and the most effective way to do that is to make sure that education and health care are available to women. It's an investment that can shift not only the thinking but power in the Middle East. Removing the barriers that confront our women and girls could very well lead us to peaceful coexistence.”

- In 2008, Israel and Hamas have a twenty-two day war that begins with a suicide bombing at a checkpoint and a volley of Qassam rockets. Abuelaish’s home is hit by two shells. Three of his daughters and his niece are killed instantly, and two others are gravely wounded. Content warning for gore: He describes walking into what was once his daughters’ bedroom and seeing one of them decapitated, another’s body crushed, dismembered limbs, and his surviving daughter standing in the middle of the room holding her eye out of its socket. [END]

- Abuelaish calls an Israeli news reporter friend of his to try and stop the shelling and get medical care to his daughters. Shlomi Eldar answers live on Israeli television, and Israelis mobilize to expedite an ambulance crossing. His family spends the next three weeks in Israel with a daughter and a niece in critical condition; after many surgeries, both survive, and the family misses the funeral of the four girls who died.

- “The Quran says the deceased must be buried quickly, and it was impossible for me to get a permit to cross the border in time to be there for them. Even in death we are separated from our beloved ones.”

- “We struggled together, my children and I, and I tried to respond to the chorus of people calling for Israeli blood to atone for the deaths of my girls. One said, ‘Don't you hate the Israelis?’ Which Israelis am I supposed to hate? I replied. The doctors and nurses I work with? The ones who are trying to save Chaida's life and Shatha's eyesight? The babies I have delivered? Families like the Madmoonys, who gave me work and shelter when I was a kid? But the cries for reprisals didn't stop. What about the soldier who fired the deadly volleys from the tank — didn't I hate him? But that's how the system works here: we use hatred and blame to avoid the reality that eventually we need to come together. As for the soldier who shelled my house, I believe in his conscience he has already punished himself, that he is asking himself, ‘What have I done?’ And even if he doesn't think that now, tomorrow he will be a father. He will suffer for his actions when he sees how precious is the life of his child.”

- “To those who seek retaliation, I say, even if I got revenge on all the Israeli people, would it bring my daughters back? Hatred is an illness. It prevents healing and peace.”

- “Shlomi Eldar told me later that our few minutes together on television had left an indelible impression on his viewers. He said: ‘The broadcast had a huge effect on Israelis who until then didn't want to hear about anything from Gaza because they were so angry about the eight years of rockets being fired into Israel by Hamas. The majority of Israelis were in favour of the incursion. Now, for the first time, they understood what was happening inside Gaza. I'm told it was Izzeldin's voice and my face that made the story. I was very close to crying as I listened to his agony. That same agony affected the Israelis who were watching the program. Even the Prime Minister of Israel told me he was crying when he saw this on TV. It wasn't prime time, but even six and seven months later people tell me they saw it live on TV. I believe those five or seven minutes of television led to the ceasefire.’”

- “As much as I reached for calm and a larger mission during those terribly dark hours, my thoughts kept drifting back to the girls — those beautiful, innocent daughters of mine. I sat in the hospital, imagining their futures, their weddings, the contributions they would have made to the world. And I thought about how a dream of happiness can turn into a nightmare in a matter of seconds. A person you've nurtured for years is lost to you in a flash of destruction. It felt as though they'd been kidnapped from me.”

- “That's how things happen in the Middle East — the size of the rhetoric trumps the facts on the ground. In my experience, the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians were horrified by the terrifying events of the three-week war. The reaction of ordinary people strengthens my case about our need to talk to each other, to listen, to act. And it reinforces my lifelong belief that out of bad comes something good. Maybe now I really have to believe that: the alternative is too dark to consider. My three precious daughters and my niece are dead. Revenge, a disorder that is endemic in the Middle East, won't get them back for me. It is important to feel anger in the wake of events like this, anger that signals that you do not accept what has happened, that spurs you to make a difference. But you have to choose not to spiral into hate. All the desire for revenge and hatred does is drive away wisdom, increase sorrow, and prolong strife. The potential good that could come out of this soul-searing bad is that together we might bridge the fractious divide that has kept us apart for six decades.”

- “This catastrophe that killed my daughters and niece has strengthened my thinking, deepened my belief about how to bridge the divide. I understand down to my bones that violence is futile, a waste of time, lives and resources, and has been proven to beget more violence. It does not work, just perpetuates a vicious circle. There's only one way to bridge the divide, to live together, to realize the goals of two peoples: we have to find the light to guide us to our goal. I'm not talking about the light of religious faith here, but light as a symbol of truth. The light that allows you to see, to clear away the fog—to find wisdom. To find the light of truth, you have to talk to, listen to and respect each other. Instead of wasting energy on hatred, use it to open your eyes and see what's really going on. Surely, if we can see the truth, we can live side by side.”

This is one of the best books on the conflict I’ve read; it’s one of the most hopeful works I’ve read in a while. I have great respect for pragmatic peace activists; at every turn, you can feel his frustration and exasperation with the leaders who have no regard for life and are willing to sacrifice everything to gain nothing. Laying it all out like this makes it so clear how futile and senseless violence really is in matters of justice against justice, and need against need against need. I want to share the foundation that he started in memory of his daughters, to uplift and empower women in the Middle East through education:

I don't label my politics, but I'm what someone would call on the left. I spent my teenage years when Tumblr social justice was at its height. I learned things, checked my own biases, and I would like to think became a more empathetic person because of what I learnt from online progressive spaces.

The way these spaces have treated Jewish communities over the past 2.5 years has been nothing short of fucking appalling.

The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was minimised, denied, justified, or outright celebrated.

Jewish people were immediately told to put their grief and trauma over this to away, because Palestine's pain was more important to talk about.*

Jewish and Israeli people were told they needed to try and understand why armed men raped, tortured, and killed members of their community. Because, you know, the murderous rapists are who we need to have sympathy for here. Anyone can be pushed to the point of, I don't know, murdering a young woman and parading her corpse around a street for men to spit on her dead body. If you really think about it, isn't that actually kind of an understandable thing to do?

When raising concerns over the rising antisemitism that was starting to look a lot like the build-up to that little historical tidbit called The Holocaust, Jews were told they were selfish for raising the issue.

When asking people not to call for intifadas that have historically resulted in thousands of dead Jews, they're told they're taking it all the wrong way.

When Israeli victims spoke of the abuse they received on Oct 7 and in captivity, they're told they need to stay silent because otherwise they risk justifying the genocide of Palestinians.

When 15 people were murdered at a Hannukah festival, there were no social media icons, no surge from progressive groups to find out what support they needed.

To be clear here, progressive groups seem more concerned with antisemitism in the Harry Potter books than they are about the actual, you know, string of dead Jews that have been murdered over the past few years. If you condemn antisemitic representations in diction and then turn around and completely ignore real-life fucking murder, then I'm sorry I genuinely do not think you ever gave a shit about fighting antisemitism, you just wanted to fight Jk Rowling. **

Absolutely fuck everyone who has justified or denied what happened on Oct 7th. There were ways to advocate for both Israeli and Palestinian victims, but the people who should have known better have ensured that Oct 7th wasn't just one day of hell for Jewish communities, but that its been currently 2.5 years of hell that seems to just be getting worse.

And the most infuriating part is the people who did justify Oct 7th will never admit they were wrong, because that would mean admitting they argued that the murder rape mutilation torture and kidnap of a Jewish community was acceptable, and that would break their brains. I mean it. The cognitive dissonance between believing you are someone who cares for human rights, whilst also being someone who justified all of that, is too great. The brain will always protect itself. Its why people are currently doubling down on there being no rapes on Oct 7th. Rape is not resistance, it is not self defence, it is not landback, it is not right of return, it is not decolonisation, it is not any of the shit people tell themselves Oct 7th was. Rape is just rape. It is just men torturing people (mainly women) for no other reason than because they enjoy it. You will never see these people admitting rape occurred, because the second they do is the second they realise just how horrifically they have behaved.

And it's not getting better. Hate crimes and murders of worldwide Jewish communities are rising. Jewish people are looking to leave places like the US, UK and Australia, which were once considered some of the safest places for them to live. A KKK slur (zio) is now common online usage. Jewish people are expected to sever any connection to an important part of their culture (Israel/Hebrew) in order to be treated somewhat civily. The more IDF crimes are uncovered in Gaza, the more worldwide Jewish communities bear the brunt of the anger. Typing 'Jewish' into any social media brings you into an absolute clusterfuck of the most horrific things you can possibly see people say about their fellow human beings.

I am just sick and exhausted and furious and it feels like I'm hitting my fists against a brick wall that is not knocking down. How do you even get people to realise how bad this is????

I am not Jewish. I know full well that Jewish people talking about all of this get ignored. I know full well that a Jewish person standing up for Palestine gets thousands of notes, and a Jewish person standing up for their own people barely breaks 100. I know full well that Jewish people are being smeared as paranoid or crazy or selfish. I know full well that non-Jewish people speaking up about antisemitism is taken more seriously than Jewish people talking about their own experiences.

Can you all just start fucking having some fucking empathy for Jewish and Israeli communities who have been facing the worst 2 years of their lives. Fucking please. It is not that fucking hard to feel empathy for lots of groups at once. To empathise with both Palestine and Israel, Muslims and Jews. Empathy for all is part of what brings us away from just being animals and makes us human.

If you can't do it, it is not an issue with Jews or Israelis or Zionists or the IDF, it is an issue with you.

*I am not saying Palestinian pain isn't important to raise awareness of, and the people fearing what the IDF would do immediately after Oct 7th were right to raise it. I'm saying asking Jewish communities to take on the trauma of Palestinians, when they were still reeling from their own inter-community trauma, was wrong and unhelpful. I wouldn't ask Palestinian communities to have centered the trauma of Oct 7th either. Trauma is not a competition and everyone deserves to have their respective pain treated fairly.

Dangers of working on a set.

he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks

refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel

basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible

often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended

repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off

had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming

the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained

carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington

an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot

infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot

Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface

We all know that’s bullshit because if you did spend all your time writing “Free Palestine” comments underneath everyone’s posts — more than just Jewish people would be complaining.

Like, Darling (derogatory), this is Decendants fanfiction, and I made it abundantly clear that while Auradon should have and must do better towards those who never did anything worth being punished, it isn’t as simple as “be one big happy family”.

Those who want to commit villainous acts because they’re determined to be villains can stay right where they are.

Even the ones who want to live normally but have no framework are going to need support in learning what “normal” is, plus a ton of therapy to unlearn conditioned behaviours.

And that’s a fandom where you can actually look at it as an allegory!

When October 7th happened, and the world screamed “FAKE!!!” while Israelis were still burying their dead and working out who was missing and who was too burned/mutilated to identify easily.

When everyone is horrified about the plight of the “poor Palestinians”, demanding Israel let them back in so they can get paid to do jobs they can’t get in Gaza, but have zero concerns about young people fighting a war for their existence, children sleeping in bomb shelters, and the cost of everything going up to afford the Iron Dome missiles…

I’m not even Jewish or Israeli, but I find it harder and harder to care meaningfully about people who not only don’t seem to want Peace, but are still actively cheering for anything that gets in the way of a peace process.

You are directly harming your own cause.

Refusing to acknowledge the existence of the State of Israel doesn’t materially change the reality that Israel is a sovereign nation with over ten million citizens. When leftists in the west chant “from the river to the sea” and “we don’t want no two states”, regardless of the intention, what do you think Israelis hear? What do you think a people that has faced genocide in living memory, from which our population still has not recovered, gets from that? We don’t hear it and consider your points, we hear it and remember all of the times Israel has been attacked with genocidal intent, and only survived through our own defense.

And what does this ultimately result it? It results in Israelis who no longer believe in the peace process. It results in Israelis who feel a visceral sense of fear which leads to doubling down on national security. It leads to diaspora Jews feeling unsafe in their communities and immigrating to Israel.

Greta Thunberg and her activist flotilla friends have accused Israel of piracy and kidnapping for intercepting their boats en route to Gaza. The language is bold, dramatic, and made for TikTok.

But is any of it true?

Let's check the law, check what happened, and see if the law has been breached.

What's the Gaza Freedom Flotilla again...?

A coalition of pro-Palestinian activists launched the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a series of small boats sailing toward Gaza saying it was in protest of Israel's naval blockade. Their stated goal is to deliver humanitarian aid - but their real goal seems to have been to provoke confrontation and draw headlines.

Is the blockade even legal?

Yes. That’s not just Israel saying so—it’s the United Nations.

The 2011 Palmer Report, commissioned by the UN, concluded that:

Israel's naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure... and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.

To be legal, a blockade must:

Be part of an armed conflict (check),

Be declared and enforced properly (check),

Serve a military/security objective, not a civilian one (check, again).

Is What Israel did in Intercepting their ships piracy?

Not even close.

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, Article 101), piracy requires:

A private act,

Committed on the high seas,

For private ends (think ransom, robbery, pillaging),

By one private ship against another.

Israel is a sovereign state, acting under a declared naval blockade, during an ongoing armed conflict. It's not pirating granola bars. It's enforcing maritime security under international law.

Even the serious and informed critics of Israel admit this isn't piracy.

Is It Kidnapping?

Also no. Unless we've decided airport security is "hostage-taking."

Here’s how it actually goes:

Israel intercepts the ships,

Redirects them to port (usually Ashdod),

Detains passengers briefly (often because they refuse to cooperate),

Then deports them.

This isn't vanishing dissidents. It's blockade enforcement under the laws of armed conflict. If you’re challenging a legal blockade, you don't get frequent-sailor miles.

So Why are Greta and Friends Using Words like Piracy and Kidnapping?

Because in activist media, legal nuance is a liability. It doesn't fit on a protest sign.

Calling Israel's enforcement actions "piracy" or "kidnapping" is designed to evoke visceral, emotional responses- but it’s legally empty. It's branding, not an argument.

It cheapens the terms for situations where actual piracy and kidnapping do occur.

All's Well, Then!

Nooooooooo. Is the blockade ideal? No. Is Gaza suffering? Absolutely. Should humanitarian conditions improve? Yes - urgently. But that doesn't mean words like piracy and kidnapping suddenly apply just because someone with a lot of Instagram followers says so. Words mean things. Specific things.

If we want to hold Israel accountable in meaningful ways, we need to deal in facts - not hashtags.

TLDR:

Israel's blockade? Legal.

Stopping ships? Legal.

Detaining activists? Legal.

Piracy and kidnapping? Not even close.

This is a multi-country blockade specifically because of Hamas.

Whole post on that:

Egypt, the Gaza Blockade, and the March for Gaza Activists

and now those same people are crying to me about how civil war is on the horizon (I don't agree, but they think that). You wanted this!!!! You wanted accelerationism!! Pick up your gun, white boy, you wanted the glorious revolution and it is here. Your black and jewish friends are not gonna save you now cus we TOLD you. Ugh. And even after all that, they are now blaming jews for everything trump does. As if I wasn't called a "genocide joe" lover for a whole year. It makes me want to throw hands.