Tag: israel

Why No Real Antiwar Movement Has Developed in Israel | The New Yorker

Why No Real Antiwar Movement Has Developed in Israel

Even many of Benjamin Netanyahu’s harshest critics have supported the military campaign in Gaza. “We are seeing a different war than you are seeing,” the writer Yossi Klein Halevi says.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-no-real-antiwar-movement-has-developed-in-israel

Since October 7th, I feel that I am fighting a three-front war. There’s the war on my borders against the forces of October 7th; I’m fighting a war around the world for the legitimacy of the Jewish story; and I’m fighting a war in my own country against the forces that want to turn us into the criminal country that our enemies say we already are

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-no-real-antiwar-movement-has-developed-in-israel

October 24, 2024
Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza | The New Yorker

Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza

The novelist Howard Jacobson has argued that too much press coverage of dead Palestinian children is a new form of “blood libel” against Jews.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/rationalizing-the-horrors-of-israels-war-in-gaza

What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/rationalizing-the-horrors-of-israels-war-in-gaza

October 16, 2024
We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable. – POLITICO

Link:

The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/19/gaza-hospitals-surgeons-00167697?src=longreads

July 25, 2024
No Human Being Can Exist | Online Only | n+1 | Saree Makdisi

No Human Being Can Exist | Saree Makdisi

What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.

via n+1: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/no-human-being-can-exist/

His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you defend Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently

November 9, 2023
Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech | The New Yorker

Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech

Since the October 7th attack, Palestinians and peace activists in Israel have increasingly been targeted by employers, universities, government authorities, and right-wing mobs.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech

When Frey tried to check if there was anyone outside his apartment door, he discovered that someone had blocked the viewfinder. The sounds in the street were getting louder. He could hear people shouting “traitor.” They seemed to be hurling firecrackers at the building. He rushed his wife and two children, aged eight and thirteen, out of the living room, which has a large window, and frantically texted friends: “People are attacking my house. Please come and do something.”

November 8, 2023
Israel’s Calamity—and After | The New Yorker

Israel’s Calamity—and After

October 7, 2023, will be a date etched in Jewish history.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/israels-calamity-and-after

“Snuff films,” one Israeli friend called them. And yet, he said, “for some people it’s the only way to discover if their friends or relatives are alive or dead.”

October 9, 2023
The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon – The New York Times

The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon

A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html

The Israelis’ anger was, in part, about U.S. hypocrisy: The American ban came after years of secretly testing NSO’s products at home and putting them in the hands of at least one country, Djibouti, with a record of human rights abuses. But Israel also had its own interests to protect. To an extent not previously understood, Israel, through its internal export-licensing process, has ultimate say over who NSO can sell its spyware to. This has allowed Israel to make NSO a central component of its national-security strategy for years, using it and similar firms to advance the country’s interests around the world.

April 1, 2022