This is really nuts.

The “candidate” is Brad Lander. I assumed this was going to be about a fringe person running a protest campaign, but Lander is a major politician, and he’s guaranteed to win his race, so he’s about to be a sitting representative.

He’s also – at least when last asked – a liberal Zionist. When the IDF is giving the Palestinian treatment to Jewish Zionist members of Congress they’re really showing their hand and making enemies they can’t afford to make. And doing it a week after a journalist got beaten by a gang of hilltop youth a week before Israeli elections is definitely showcasing the lack of internal control or restraint by the occupying government.

It’s both terrible but also a sign of an undisciplined, unstable power. It’s very dangerous, but also increasingly unsustainable. Wow.

This is cute, but the article feels… off to me.

My understanding is that Bolsonaro is heavily favored to win the runoff, and this article about a social media trend feels very reminiscent of coverage of Harris in 2024, when the warning bells were ringing that mass dissatisfaction was leading people to abandon support for a ruling party that was failing in its bid to give people a reason to stand against fascism.

I hope to god that Lula wins. But this article seems so incongruent with the moment.

Personally, I feel like their behavior has assigned an appropriate amount of terror to the word that I have no issue with it.

And considering that this is the broadly accepted term for hundreds of thousands of normie tech workers and aunties who are taking land by squatting on it without personally shooting guns, I find that the use of the term accurately indicts all the people involved in the conquest of the West Bank as dangerous radicals.

Conversely, I think terms like ‘settler terrorists’ sound like they’re meant to other the violent participants and exonerate the settlers who are ‘simply moving into a nice new suburban subdivision’ as though the American cooks and mechanics in Vietnam weren’t still participating in war crimes.

Fwiw, the journalist, Heidi Levine said, “I don’t know how a parent can raise such a monster. They’re not even humans, and yes, they are Jewish terrorists. … And you know what? Sadly, none of them will be prosecuted. I am sure of it.”

The brazenness is shocking, but the bubble of immunity in the press coverage is also cracking.

Stop suggesting this. It’s gross as hell.

Setting aside the fact that the current Democratic leadership – Hakeem Jefferies and Chuck Schumer – are ardent Zionists, it makes me so angry that you see this problem, and your solution is asylum. For the purpose of ‘winning votes’.

You should be demanding the US stop funding and arming the people who want to kill them, their families, and millions of Palestinians.

It’s like hearing that a child is being abused at home and suggesting that Target should buy them tickets to Disneyland because it would generate good press.

Sort your priorities out, mate. Christ.

Yeah.

I have high hopes that one day, they will be among the future leaders of a new Israel-Palestine.

People like these – as well as many Palestinians currently in detention or living in exile – will be the Nelson Mandelas of whatever is one day built over the ruins of the present Nakba.

I’d be angrier about this deal if I didn’t suspect that Trump tweeted this without any planning and when his flunkies try to act on it they’ll just get stuck asking Grok 'how do I import russian diesel" and never actually figure out how to do this.

I don’t know if this is a hot take, but I don’t think Trump’s administration knows how international business or oil shipping works. I legit don’t think they can figure out how to buy diesel from Russia.

Sixty percent of the time… it works everytime.

My suspicion is that a collapse in the Israeli state would look a lot like the present, spiraling out of anyone’s control: the settler terrorists would further ratchet up attacks in the West Bank; soldiers in the West Bank would harass and kill more brazenly, without fear of even the limited accountability that can come from a toothless denouncement or a suspension. Soldiers in Gaza might move from checkpoints and bombing runs to militia pogroms driving through streets gunning down civilians. The limited protections for the relatively privileged Arabs & non-Jews within the '48 borders could evaporate: mobs dragging women from their homes for sexual violence and murder in the daylit streets. And all of this would likely be in a shroud of fog, as the limited journalistic capacity that occasionally breaks through to international attention is drowned out by attention on riots in the imperial core of the nation.

In the long term, this could be a step towards a better future. But in the short term I would expect a shift from organized military-led genocide to a more traditional form of rabid mass ethnic killing.

Yeah.

I know it’s natural to feel schadenfreude at the prospect of state collapse in Israel, but fwiw, I don’t look forward to it with any joy.

If this is the next phase, so be it. But it will be very, very ugly. The violent collapse of Israel will not lead to relief for Palestinians in the short term.

Still, I’ve said for years: what Israel is doing to the Palestinians they are doing to themselves. Watching the corrosion of Israeli society, their violence has always looked like a manic frenzy of mass-self harm.

ULGH!

I’m pissed at Lula. I like his general movement, but I see two lessons we all need to recognize:

1. Every left-leaning movement needs youth and dynamism. No matter how much we may appreciate elders like Bernie Sanders, politics is a contact sport, and if we can’t find people who aren’t grand parents, it’s because we haven’t been training our bench. We can include our elders, but we need to have much more regular turnover, with far fewer elder leaders.

2. We cannot allow corruption in leftist movements. This shit is WAY too important. The global far right has major structural advantages, and public trust is one of the biggest requirements for antifacist movements. When leftists get associated with self-interest, it blows the project apart and creates openings for this shit.

I hope Lula wins, but after this, get the new leaders with iron-clad integrity ready and get the old guard the fuck out of leadership into an advisory capacity.

We have to break this cycle. A successful leftist movement should gain power between elections, not be back to defending itself from coin-toss election after coin-toss election.

I take issue with this framing on multiple levels.

First: our goals should not be to score political points on Twitter: they should be to provide security, dignity, and political rights to the persecuted.

Second, inviting political activists exiled by a country we materially support to the US is like demanding ICE deport foreign nationals to nicer third countries: it misses the point completely. This shouldn’t happen. And US lawmakers have the power to stop it, so that’s what they should do.

Finally, the current Democratic leadership is Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies. Despite highly visible outliers, this whole premise assumes Democrats want to support human rights in Israel. This is like believing that Trump is working tirelessly to bring Epstein’s coconspiritors to justice.

Yeah: the filmmakers themselves have said this repeatedly as well.

With all due respect, Democrats shouldn’t be offering safe harbor to exiled dissidents: they should be threatening to sanction Israel if it exiles dissidents.

They should be a doing a lot of other things too, but we need to be much clearer with our demands. These people are Israeli, and deserve protection in their own country. I don’t think they want to leave, I think they want their country to change.

I choose to believe that 10 years from now, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor will be leaders of a free Israel-Palestine, and the people who called for their denaturalization will be dead or living out life sentences for perpetrating atrocities.

I hope Abraham and Szor are careful, though. That future does assume that they survive long enough to reach it.

Either way, there can be no doubt that history will view their journalism and activism with great admiration.

Walkin’ on the Sun, by Smashmouth

It’s from '97, but for anyone who wants to know what the end of the twentieth century sounded like, this, imo, is it.

Source?

This is so bleak. I’m constantly trying to stave off doomerism, and focus on what we can do to help, but this article is just a gut punch.

If you wish to share this or any other opinion expressed by an actual Palestinian or person who can speak to their opinion through first hand knowledge, please share.

Otherwise, please recognize that they are not characters in a fictional story for you to write your own opinions onto. They are human beings desperately fighting to be heard and have their agency respected.

What’s your point?