yarn lover 🍉🇵🇸

Headline: What it’s like to be a family caught in the crosshairs of Israel’s ‘de-Palestinization’ of Jerusalem

Publisher: Mondoweiss

Date published: 25 March 2026

Selected text from article:

Samer Hamdia, a middle-aged construction worker, walks over the remains of the house he spent a lifetime of savings building, and where, until recently, he had lived with his wife and six children. Israeli forces demolished it last December as part of Israel’s surge of demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. 

The village of Qalandia, adjacent to Israel’s separation wall, is treated by Israel as part of annexed Jerusalem. This has made it a target for demolition over the past several years, with some 30 houses demolished in Qalandia in a single night in 2016. Since then, it has been periodically issuing demolition orders to more families in the village.

According to Jamal Jumaa, the coordinator of the grassroots Stop The Wall campaign, the north of Jerusalem area “is a crucial part of Israel’s settlement plans around Jerusalem, as it has already surrounded the city from all sides, isolating it from the rest of the West Bank.”

[...]

For the Hamdias, building the house was more than fulfilling a dream or getting more space. It represented the growth of their extended family and the deepening of its roots in their village.

In Palestinian villages, extended families have lived together in small complexes for centuries. Commonly known as a “hosh,” these complexes are composed of multiple individual houses belonging to siblings and their families. When even the grandchildren marry and begin forming their own families, they split off and form a new hosh for themselves. “Mahdi getting married and Mahdi building a house were the same thing,” Samer explains. “This was going to be the first building in the Samer Hamdia hosh, which would include more homes for Mahdi’s brothers when they married as well.”

Samer’s wife, Najla, joins the conversation with her youngest daughter, Mira, aged 11. They walk around the rubble, looking at the details in every corner. “I never came back since the demolition until now,” says Najla. “It hurts my heart seeing it in rubble. It’s like living through the loss all over again.”

why the fuck do i even need to say this. "it's googly eyes" no, real people look like that. and you know they do. i know you know they do

ID: a graphic titled "strabismus (misaligned eyes) by Cleveland Clinic. there are 4 types of strabismus, each represented by a drawing of a person with it.

Hypotropia: eye points downward.

Exotropia: eye points outward.

Hypertropia: eye points upward.

Esotropia: eye points inward.

this joke when it appears in media is not usually just "hey this person has a weird eye" it's "hey this person is disabled", specifically, 99% of the time, "this person is intellectually disabled and either has or potentially has brain damage". (alternatively, rarely, "this person is mentally ill", such as fiddleford mcgucket and his glass eye, and a handful of cartoon villains i saw growing up for some reason)

strabismus jokes are not harmful because they "wrongly associate strabismus with stupidity", they are harmful because they are making fun of disabled people, especially intellectually disabled people and people with brain damage, who often do have strabismus, because many congenital and neurological conditions cause strabismus, intellectual disability, developmental disability, and cognitive disability. so while they think our eyes "look funny", that is only part of it

the strabismus jokes i see are generally about exotropia or esotropia. i see them on tv in comedy skits, i see them in cartoons both new and old, i see them in just random peoples's fucking art, i see them in reaction images often, i see them in memes often, i see them in emojis in discord servers, i see them in new media like fionna and cake (candy queen) and dungeon meshi (most notably marcille's "if i'm not useful to anyone" scene, laios, and an orc are all portrayed with exotropia as a joke at least once.)

there is a tv tropes term for this: fish eyes. and another! comically cross-eyed. the second even mentions this:

"In Real Life strabismus is a serious condition and poking fun of it is likely to offend some people, as it's a relatively common disorder. Despite this it's still an Acceptable Target in most circles, and mockery of strabismus is surprisingly common even in modern media."

but why are we considered an acceptable target? is it so normalized to make fun of people with visible differences, especially facial differences, that you need someone on a condemned social media platform to tell you it's not ok?

how do you "not know" that people with strabismus exist? stop putting that on my post. how could you not read between the lines when you see characters take a blow to the head and suddenly become cross eyed, speaking and walking like they're drunk? when things fall out of their hands and they drool? i always remember patrick going "wall eyed" and drooling and spongebob snapping his fingers. how could you not see what was being made fun of? did you not have disabled kids in your schools? have you never seen people with strabismus outside, even though there's at least 13 million of us? i just can't wrap my head around it- how could you "not know"?

someone i know recently said that people with visible disabilities are so hyper-visible that we've become "invisibilized". inconsequential. i'm hidden in my house and a shadow at my mother's heels, a flea bitten bad dog who does not speak unless i'm spoken to, does not try to take or want more than i have been graciously offered, and does not challenge the way things are

i refer back to the ugly laws- that unless we were there for the purpose of entertainment (jokes, inspiration porn, "feel good" stories that dehumanize us and shower praise upon able bodied people for being so kind as to take care of us or to take us to prom or to dance with us or to fucking... take us to a strip club, because we are also desexualized, and degendered, rendered entirely fucking inhuman and only existing for able bodied consumption, even in our day to day irl interactions) or reminding people to be repulsed by us (horror, villains, "undesirable" characters like loser nerds or stalkers), we were not to be seen in public.

I wish they would realize that universal healthcare doesn’t mean they HAVE to get healthcare through the state, just that it is there. You can still pay millions of dollars out of pocket for your own treatment at a private hospital.

America actually has terrible healthcare compared to a lot of nations with socialized medicine:

but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)

or this pic of me

or this pic of me

BUT