Those more extreme than Netanyahu are at least still a minority, albeit empowered by their position in the coalition. The majority of the protests against Netanyahu come from the same kind of centrists as the Americans you saw protesting Trump in 2017, who objected to the fascist boomerang coming around to hit them but wouldn’t have raised nearly as much of a fuss about deportations and overseas assassination campaigns if Hillary Clinton had been the one behind them.

I think it’s all too easy to imagine a mass of undifferentiated monsters rather than confronting the connection between unfortunately familiar patterns of political engagement and the slaughter they cause, just because that connection is more obvious closer to the blade of the imperialist knife. Plenty of militaristic genocide deniers are just as much liberal progressives as their counterparts in western countries until the switch flips back to their military brainwashing and they start talking about security guarantees and buffer zones.

Maybe I’m naive for believing that people can change, but I don’t think that everyone who’s been sold on the lie that forever war is the only way for them to be safe is as committed to violence as the backyard terrorists with lawn chairs.

Neat! Genuinely cool to see more models of governance than the default BDFL/cool kids’ club online.

Will community moderation policy be determined by sortition?

It’s not even secret, there have been highly publicized tests of ground- and air-launched interceptor missiles, and a fair few tests observed by amateur astronomers where military satellites rendezvoused and closed to observation/weapons range with dummy targets. It’s very hard to hide anything that happens in orbit.

PETA is funded by the meat and dairy industry to give animal welfare/rights activists the worst possible PR. It’s hard to imagine doing much worse of a job at what they claim to be their goals.

Chabad are mostly notable for being less insular than most Orthodox sects, doing a lot of outreach to secular/Reform/Conservative Jews, and thus ending up as one of the big names in overseas funding for Zionism in the modern day. They’re really the mainstream face of Orthodox Judaism, and the fucked up abuse scandals in Israel have tended to come from fringe, Messianic sects that the state’s Rabbinate and larger organizations like Chabad can at least pretend to distance themselves from.

As for the Talmud, it’s weird how much it tends to get played up in antisemitic narratives, because in my (very limited) experience it is really, incredibly dry and mostly boring. It’s like reading Reddit comments on every page of the scriptures, where 5 incredibly pedantic nerds are arguing over what exactly counts as a fork, or what a story about a wage dispute is supposed to say about contract law and social hierarchy. There’s a predictably authoritarian “just listen to your boss and your rabbi” bent to the morals it extracts, but at the end of the day it’s a couple thousand pages of mundane, day-to-day legal doctrine. Anyone can learn Talmud, it’s just a lot of effort, and like a lot of difficult religious texts, it mostly ends up being a source local authority figures can pull out to settle arguments in their favor.

There’s a lot of government and religious NGO money funneled around Israel for religious schools and student stipends, so any unscrupulous rabbis looking to start an abusive cult have plenty of opportunities handed to them. It’s really not unlike the various Christian cults that sprouted up on compounds in the American West, taking advantage of cheap resources and isolation tactics to build organizations that beat the shit out of children or do whatever else they want.

Edit: I think the settlements in particular create a similar physical dynamic, where living on stolen land ringed with fences and security checkpoints allows leaders to create an insular community that keeps victims in and accountability out. Even twenty minutes’ drive from Jerusalem, no one gets into a settlement without arranged permission, and a housewife with no car may as well be stranded out on the prairie.

edit: Actually this isn’t worth dignifying with a response in the first place.

Are you aware that Bedouin exist? That an area not being solid fields and cities on a map doesn’t mean people can just be resettled there without consequences? How Palestinians feel about Egypt, by and large?

I can only wish for a less internet-poisoned figurehead of anti-genocide activism, but it’s still amazing to me how a man who spends all his waking hours in front of a webcam is enough of a big deal to be considered a national security threat. This is a man who has spent years in a self-imposed hell of nonstop news clips and hate chatter clapbacks, constantly under attack and arguing with people who hate him, and now the anger is actually coming from a place of power. Hasan is like a guy made in a vat to get in a loud, public fight with the ADL.

Funny how for all the quotes they pulled, the article couldn’t dig out any instances of the more common traps leftist criticism of Israel falls into, like slipping into ZOG/“Khazar elite” talking points or rants about how murder is “their” culture. It’s honestly just laughable at this point seeing organizations like the ADL try to argue that anyone pointing out the obvious fact that Hamas aren’t baby-eating Islamist rape demons is engaging in religious hatred while geo-targeted online ads from Christian Zionist organizations blast me with “Jesus the messiah will save you” daily. This whole “debate” is a joke, but Hasan is an experienced clown, so he’s in his element.

Oh, the white supremacy even against other Jews was there from the beginning. It’s a real mess.

Western liberals weren’t paying attention to the years of massive protests against corruption and consolidation of power that make Trump and his pet SCOTUS look like amateurs even to the liberal-Zionist Ashkenazi centrists, starting well before 2023. Western media loves to totally ignore the millions of Israeli subjects living under permanent martial law, too, so of course their viewership would say “democracy” based on what they were shown. The final crack in the facade doesn’t make the lies before it real.

Ask the average Mizrahi restaurant worker living in a moldy studio sublet in Rehovoth what good that weapon money is doing them. The upper classes of both countries make out just fine, everyone else suffers.

Federal money goes into the pockets of US corporations, spare weapons using the same tech “mysteriously” show up around the world in the hands of extremist groups the US openly condemns, and everyone involved gets to pat themselves on the backs for “supporting the Jewish people” as their stock portfolios climb.

Most of the energy from the rocket that launched the satellite went into pushing it fast sideways. If you wanted to slow it down enough to drop straight down, you’d just about need a second rocket to stop it.