it’s just shipping

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

And yet it’s also a product of 1949. Despite Welles’ track record on race, it barely has a black character. Its sexual politics are not blatantly offensive, but its female characters still exist to be props in Kane’s story. There’s a lesbian-coded librarian who’s very shrewish and cold to the reporter for no reason, and that’s probably not a coincidence. Its sole Jewish character is not the most negative stereotype ever, but there are definitely some very dated ideas about Jewish men still clinging to his character.

And we have to say, hey, this is a piece of art, it’s a window on a time that’s worth understanding, and it’s part of a conversation worth having about power, money and fame. What does it say that in some ways Welles failed to live up to his progressive ideals at time? What does that say about him and what does that say about society in 1949? And how does that inform and/or conflict with the themes of the film?

I just - can you hear yourself? I know many of you have studied fascism and the rise of genocidal attitudes. Do you think you’re immune? Do you think being Jewish, or educated, or the descendant of genocide survivors makes you immune? You know better.

My god, if the 20th century can teach us one thing, let it be that humans are great at justifying genocide to themselves and each other when motivated to. No education can inoculate against it. Every excuse had been used before. Every feeling of righteous justification for slaughter has already been invoked.

It is undeniable that there are tens of thousands of dead. So many thousands upon tens upon hundreds of thousands of children dead maimed orphaned traumatized by bombs that Israel dropped, shells that Israel fired, targets chosen by software Israel made.

This is undeniable; I can see it with my own eyes. You can say, this is the reality of war, and I will say: this is the reality of your choices. How Israel wages “war” is a choice. How they go about statecraft is a choice. We cannot and should never accept their justifications that some action of the enemy necessitated this response; they still chose the response.

There was a euphemism in some death camps in Poland: “dirty work”. It was often literally true - there’s horrific stories about the smell and texture of industrial amounts of human ash - but also figuratively; the work of mass executions is more often seen as a necessary evil for the accomplishment of a greater good. It’s rarely celebrated or acknowledged openly for what it is at the time. All of this is very normal in genocide.

I look at my timeline in the past months, at the choices Israel has made for its “greater good”, I have listened to the justifications. What I see is Israelis making the same old tired weak excuses for their own dirty work.

And all I have to say anymore is: this is what it sounds like when you defend genocide. You have not invented a new thought in all of it. “They’re not a real group, they’re monsters, we don’t want to kill them but we have to, we just want them to leave before they kill us all and they’ll try to exterminate us the second we stop killing them” - save it.

Do some fucking reading on other genocides - the Armenian one is particularly relevant - and read arguments from genocide deniers and you will quickly see it is all the same shit. Check out Facebook posts from Myanmar during the genocide and it’s basically indistinguishable from tweets from Zionists today. It’s the same shit, over and over and over again.

Literally billions of people with eyes can see what Israel is doing and call it what it is, because it’s been done before, and all the defensive answers and excuses have been done before too.

1. Question and minimize the statistics.

2. Attack the motivations of the truth-tellers.

3. Claim that the deaths were inadvertent.

4. Emphasize the strangeness of the victims.

5. Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict, coming to the victims out of the inevitability of their history of relationships.

6. Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings.

7. Avoid antagonizing the genocidists, who might walk out of “the peace process.”

8. Justify denial in favor of current economic interests.

9. Claim that the victims are receiving good treatment, while baldly denying the charges of genocide outright.

10. Claim that what is going on doesn’t fit the definition of genocide.

11. Blame the victims.

Help a Palestinian family directly:

gazafunds.com - Donate directly to a Palestinian family in urgent need of evacuation, medical attention, food, rebuilding homes/businesses etc. (Spotlights 1 verified gfm at a time so if you don't know who/where to donate to just go here and donate to the one they show you!)

Help provide tents (urgent):

The Sameer Project: Currently providing tents for displaced families in Gaza (emergency bc tents in Rafah are being burned as we speak) (paypal) (gfm)

Food, cash & essentials:

Care for Gaza: Working on the ground in Gaza to distribute food, cash, medicine & other essentials to displaced families. (paypal) (gfm)

Direct Aid for Gaza: also working on the ground in Gaza to distribute food, cash & other daily essential suppliess to displaced families. (paypal) (gfm)

Water:

Gaza Municipality's water project: The official Municipality of Gaza needs help rebuilding the water infrastructure in Gaza City to restore access to clean water and waste management services for the people of Gaza. (This campaign only has a couple of weeks left but it's still only at 15%!)

eSIMs (urgent):

guide to buy & send esims for gaza

crips for esims for gaza: If you don't know how to buy esims or don't have the capacity to manage them (e.g. topping up regularly), this team of volunteers are collecting funds to buy & manage gaza esims regularly

Medical Aid

Like The Jewish State kicks off with

Like I understand that the misery could be an activating force, but that’s a far cry from basing your political ideology on the idea that your people have always been miserable, will always be miserable, and can only be marginally more safe by creating a bunker nation on colonized land and enforcing an demographic majority with walls and an army.

The people who buy into this are the same people who tell me that genocide is inevitable; that “never again” means never again for specifically the Jews, that “sometimes ethnic cleansing is the only option” because “the Jews can never be an ethnic minority in their own land again”, that any crime is worth achieving that outcome because it is the only possible bulwark against another Holocaust

And it’s like do you not see that this is how fascism happened! This kind of ethnic in-group protectionism and Nihilism about the ability of humans to ever achieve long-term cooperation and the beliefs about fundamental human inequality and the assertion that nothing but maintaining a majority which can forcefully suppress any minorities is the only way to stay safe as a nation is - just nuke them already, if that’s what you think. just get humanity over with, because if youre right we're all fucked. there is nothing down that road but endless cycles of ethnic cleansing and revenge.

Like we could have gone down a road where international bodies had more power, where people had more ability to reign in nations committing civil rights violations, where human rights are not subject to national sovereignty. We could have lived in a world where Jews used their unique position as a people to act as advocates for all minorities everywhere, to establish political bodies which actually had some means of intervening if a state began to violate the human rights of its ethnic minorities.

reading Herzl is a trip because I did not expect him to so explicitly blame anti-Semitism on Jews

In some ways I really recognize a naivety in Herzl in this book. I’m sure I’m not the only one to think so. He even says explicitly that the creation of a Jewish state will end anti-Semitism:

My guy is so shockingly wrong about this that it kind of hurts to read. And he is not coincidentally wrong; I think he’s wrong because his base assumptions about the causes of anti-Semitism lying in the Jews themselves is wrong.

Based on early Zionist thinkers’ descriptions of the Jewish condition and my own knowledge of how things played out, it seems to me that Herzl placed the root cause of anti-Semitism in Jews when in reality the roots of anti-Semitism are the overlap between their unique geopolitical status and the world order which places minorities and their resources in a uniquely vulnerable position. And Zionism is essentially an attempt to just put some Jews in a better, more “normal” geopolitical position. It accepts as inevitable a world order in which Jews can never and will never be safe as a minority.

Like The Jewish State kicks off with

Like I understand that the misery could be an activating force, but that’s a far cry from basing your political ideology on the idea that your people have always been miserable, will always be miserable, and can only be marginally more safe by creating a bunker nation on colonized land and enforcing an demographic majority with walls and an army.

The people who buy into this are the same people who tell me that genocide is inevitable; that “never again” means never again for specifically the Jews, that “sometimes ethnic cleansing is the only option” because “the Jews can never be an ethnic minority in their own land again”, that any crime is worth achieving that outcome because it is the only possible bulwark against another Holocaust

And it’s like do you not see that this is how fascism happened! This kind of ethnic in-group protectionism and Nihilism about the ability of humans to ever achieve long-term cooperation and the beliefs about fundamental human inequality and the assertion that nothing but maintaining a majority which can forcefully suppress any minorities is the only way to stay safe as a nation is - just nuke them already, if that’s what you think. just get humanity over with, because if youre right we're all fucked. there is nothing down that road but endless cycles of ethnic cleansing and revenge.

Like we could have gone down a road where international bodies had more power, where people had more ability to reign in nations committing civil rights violations, where human rights are not subject to national sovereignty. We could have lived in a world where Jews used their unique position as a people to act as advocates for all minorities everywhere, to establish political bodies which actually had some means of intervening if a state began to violate the human rights of its ethnic minorities.

reading Herzl is a trip because I did not expect him to so explicitly blame anti-Semitism on Jews

I’ve seen several media outlets trying to claim that the UN has ‘quietly’ halved the number of Palestinian women and children killed since October 7th. Some have gone so far as to allege that Hamas fabricated the original numbers to try and cover for the 1:1 ratio of insurgents to civilians killed.

They’ve chosen to ignore the fact that the UN published a completely separate report, comprised of individuals whose remains have been identified.

And now they're doing this

Palestine is not over. Palestine is not dead. Gaza, the West Bank, the entire region between the river and the sea, and the various countries across the world where refugees have fled to, house a surviving people and surviving culture. Palestine is not dead, and WILL NOT die.

I'm seeing a lot of very valid despair online, but if you're someone like me, living a privileged life in a Western country NOT under active bombardment, and which is actually COMPLICIT to some degree in that bombardment: we don't get to give up. Not now, not ever.

You can still get involved in protests or direct actions (e.g. blocking supply), you can still donate eSims or fund UNRWA on your government's behalf, you can still hassle the crap out of your local MP. No, it won't roll back the harm that's already been committed, but all of those things are STILL WORTH DOING. PEOPLE ARE STILL ALIVE OVER THERE. PALESTINE IS STILL WORTH SAVING.

If you've bothered to read this far, you're probably already aware of what's going on over there right now. If not, check out Al Jazeera's fantastic coverage. But also remember that Palestine, and Palestinian culture, is more than just death and despair. Examples below: