Anti-war protest in Tel Aviv. The signs say in Hebrew and in Arabic: "Only peace will bring security," and, "The majority demands a ceasefire agreement."
I need to start with some explanations for my silence.
Despite not having written any diary on any topic for 11 months, I am cumulatively the most prolific Israel and Palestine diarist who still has some connection to this site; most prolific I-P diarists had either left in disgust or were banned. But somehow I-P isn’t going away, nor does it stop being America’s — and Democrats’, dammit! — problem, even if all Democratic politicians and pundits agree to continue burying their heads in the sand. As they’ve done for 30+ years and counting.
In all previous I-P conflagrations during my time here (joined late 2006), I had written lots, helping Kossacks make sense of the situation as the only person actually from I-P and willing to put in time over years and years, and to stay here despite site leadership’s cowardice on the matter. So how come now, in the most horrific Israeli-Arab war since 1948, four months going and I have not written a Daily Kos word till now?
The reason for my silence has nothing to do with I-P. I was furious and disgusted by site ownership/management’s ugly crackdown on its labor union the Daily Kos Guild, and disappointed and heartbroken by the site community’s quick, convenient moving on as if nothing happened. I still am.
My last diary here was devoted to this issue. In it I speculated that the eerie silence after immediate layoffs taking place Feb 28 2023 (which meant that laid-off workers had to scramble to find health coverage the very next morning), that silence suggests that the Guild had been actively gagged. Many commenters ridiculed this, but later I received solid confirmation of the gag order. I am proud of that diary and of my silent strike since then. Take my opinion on that or leave it; it’s my opinion.
And I would have not broken my strike, and was gradually stopping to even read anything here — if not for Oct. 7 and the war. And even though I don’t hold much hope that posting on Daily Kos will change anything in the lives of Palestinians and Israelis, I realize that I shouldn’t give up on trying. Not now.
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For our family in Seattle, Oct. 7 actually started on Shabbat dinner Oct. 6 night; our journalist son saw rumors on Twitter, and then Orna opened WhatsApp and saw that the group of her high-school class (some of whom are now well-connected denizens of Israeli society) started sharing surreal videos of, e.g., pickup trucks with bearded militants roaming through south Israel towns, then stopping and shooting.
The only visual precedent for such a surreal dystopian sight inside Israel was — with absolutely ZERO coincidence — a 2015 election campaign ad by Netanyahu’s very own right-wing Likud party:
We immediately called Orna’s mom. Orna grew up in southwest Israel <15 miles from the Gaza Strip, we lived there before coming here in 2002. Her mom and two brothers still live there. We spoke with them. We did manage to sleep that night, if only because on Saturday morning in Israel the confusion was so great that it was unclear how bad things really were. But by Saturday morning in Seattle, it was clear enough. And on Sunday morning we learned that Hayim Katsman, who taught Hebrew at Kadima in Seattle with our eldest son, was murdered in Holit.
I won’t belabor you with more recollections of those early days. Orna’s family is ok. Mine is too. Well, sort of: we both have conscript nephews in the middle of this war. Mercifully they’re at least not frontline ground soldiers like I was.
A bunch of us likeminded Israelis here in Seattle have gotten together, have been conversing and commiserating for months, and published on Monday an op-ed in Seattle’s The Stranger, calling for a cease-fire. I will share some excerpts while respecting fair use (even though I guess I have some rights to share as co-author).
A Stronger, Broader Call from Americans for a Ceasefire Is Necessary and Overdue
...
We were horrified, outraged, and saddened by the acts of Hamas and other militants on October 7, sadistically butchering hundreds of civilians, abducting over 200 people, and wiping out entire communities inside Israel. Many of our Seattle friends and neighbors have extended messages of sympathy to us. Their response is drawn from the humanity of October 7’s victims, not from their religions or nationalities; from the principle that all lives are precious. The US-supported Israeli response to the massacre should have been rooted in these values.
Instead, the Israeli operation in Gaza has turned into a bloodbath. The corrupt Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and dominated by extremists, has exploited the war to distract Israelis from its failures in protecting border communities. Over 1% of Gaza’s total population has been killed, the vast majority of them women and children. As the war continues, nearly 200 more Gazans are killed every day. Over 10,000 children have died already, and thousands more have been maimed or orphaned.
…..Israel’s government claims that it is not intentionally causing this horrific level of death, suffering, and destruction, but this is incompatible with the results on the ground, and it contradicts numerous atrocious statements by senior Israeli leaders. This has led the International Court of Justice to decide with an overwhelming majority that Gaza’s population is at genuine risk of genocide and must be protected.
...In recent weeks there has been growing protest and outrage [in Israel] against the government. These protests are driven mostly by concern for Israeli hostages: months of intense military action have not only failed to release the hostages, but actually killed quite a few. Mothers of soldiers, seeing their loved ones placed in harm’s way for dubious aims, have also organized in protest. Some Israelis have bravely broken ranks and spoken out directly against the slaughter of Gazans. They include relatives of UW graduate Dr. Hayim Katsman, murdered on October 7.
[...unfortunately,] Although the vast majority of Israelis hold Prime Minister Netanyahu responsible for the failures of October 7 and expect him to resign eventually, many are willing to wait until after the war. The government now operates under a perverse incentive to prolong the war, buying Netanyahu time to salvage his political career, and creating opportunities for his Jewish-supremacist coalition partners to implement their ethnic cleansing plans.
If you haven’t heard about the hideous messianic Jewish-supremacist “summit”, held last week in Jerusalem’s main conference center, calling for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and mass Jewish settlement in Gaza — well you haven’t been paying attention and go read about it (or watch videos, whatever works for you). While the views expressed there were outlandish, politically it was no fringe affair: 11 cabinet ministers from 4 different parties including Likud, as well as dozens of parliament members attended it — a substantial chunk of the governing coalition, and arguably the more dominant chunk.
Unlike most normal people, they are not horrified at this war; they are salivating. They literally think the End Times have arrived. They are fully willing to sacrifice their own sons — and many of that milieu are indeed there in Gaza, killing and getting killed — so for sure, they have long ago written off the hostages for dead. Their leader Finance Minister Smotrich said as much on the very first day.
Bibi, too, has written the hostages off, out of his own degenerate calculus.
Meanwhile, something that didn’t make it into our op-ed: there’s also massive ethnic cleansing taking place in the region these folks care about much more: the West Bank. I edit the English website for a group of Israeli allies to some rural West Bank Palestinian communities. The torture they’ve been going through since Oct. 7 is hidden in plain sight by the much greater horrors taking place in Gaza.
Biden now issued action against 4 West Bank settlers. But there are thousands of them roaming around the West Bank now, assaulting, robbing, pillaging, and who knows what else.
What does all this have to do with YOU? Well… everything.
...this war has seen an unprecedented duration and intensity of US support. Some of it has been heartwarming, such as Biden’s personal October visit to Israel. But most has been disheartening and damaging: The massive shipment of weapons and ammunition despite civilian carnage in Gaza, the shameful parroting of Israeli propaganda talking points later exposed as false, the meaningless lip-service and sometimes even callousness towards Palestinian civilian lives, the diplomatic stonewalling and watering-down of international action followed by a refusal to hold Israel accountable to even the most watered-down decisions, such as safe corridors and increasing humanitarian aid. More than ever before, in this war the US has been complicit, and it is seen internationally as culpable for Israel’s actions.
...We are worried that the high-stakes 2024 election may be clouding the Administration’s judgment and dissuading it from taking effective steps to stop the bloodshed. While the Administration might worry about losing pro-Israel voters to the right, its infuriating behavior is bleeding support from a growing pro-Palestinian contingent and from young voters—both increasingly crucial Democratic voter blocs. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, it is high time that President Biden simply do the right thing: stop this war and make sure it does not resume.
I have seen here way too much finger-wagging at Arab-Americans and young progressives. Daily Kos has never been a welcoming place for Arab-Americans. How many are there here? In particular, every single progressive Arab who tried to write here about I-P was shown the way out, whether by harassment or by outright banning.
I know and am grateful for the exceptions who continue to speak out, such as — above everyone else — Alessandra and Jen, as well as Lefty Coaster (who, I now discover, got The Hammer dropped down on him in October for a Gaza diary, and has hardly written since) — and others. Thank you!
Hard to believe that this site was born as an anti-war site, as a challenge to Dem Establishment. Now it behaves as part and parcel of this Establishment. And it is inexcusable, that even as the site waves the banner of racial justice and inclusivity, it cannot bear to include Arab members here. Not if they dare be Arab in public, and write about Palestine, just like — well, just like the crackdown inside Israel itself now against Arabs speaking out.
Nancy Pelosi literally jumped the shark the other day claiming that antiwar protestors might be “funded by Russia”. Setting aside the ridiculous parroting of right-wing talking points against her own people, isn’t she noticing that the government she’s debasing herself in order to shelter them from criticism and pressure, these dudes are actively blowing up the Middle East? With half them literally fantasizing about it? The most charitable thing I can say about Pelosi’s words is that she has a Senior Moment.
Where’s Daily Kos team in the middle of all this massive systemic failure by Dem leadership? Crickets. And — are there more examples I don’t know of? — engaged in silencing longtime respected members like Lefty Coaster. Front Page writers have paid zero attention to the war, except for the first week which saw some pitiful hot takes by Markos, and a very uncharacteristically shallow diary by Mark Sumner. As far as site leadership is concerned, the Gaza war might as well be happening on Mars, or in some AI-generated universe.
Oh and btw. If y’all still think you can just continue whistling past this immense graveyard. Humiliating and running out the clock on Biden, and fracturing his political support, is totally part of Bibi’s Gaza war plan. He’s been meddling in US politics since his first election in 1996, and he can’t wait to get Trump back with the war still on, and then really go at it. Ben-Gvir was stupid enough to say the quiet part out loud to the WSJ last weekend. Doesn’t seem to matter: the Dem leadership will just wipe the piss and spit and snot and shit off its face, and then continue to run interference vs. all the rest of the world including most of its own voter base, in order for this abominable war to continue, for Bibi to drag on as Israel’s worst PM ever for a few more months or a bloody year or two, and drag the entire region to Hell with him.
Last but not least:
...Our duty does not end there: as UN Secretary António Guterres has said, this war is not happening in a vacuum. For two generations we have forced a racist occupation regime upon Palestinians – Israel directly, and the US as chief enabler.
In particular, Gaza’s entire population has been living in an open-air prison for nearly 20 years. This was never a recipe for security; it has always been a travesty waiting to turn into catastrophe. The occupation regime must end, once and for all.
The travesty of jailing an entire population indefinitely, the betrayal of the supposedly Enlightened World (TM) paying less than lip-service to this crime against Humanity by their own protege, by an aspiring member of their cool-kids club - and mostly looking away, decade in decade out — in the bottom of my heart I always feared, or even knew, that this would end badly.
There was simply never a way for such a travesty — jailing an entire population with no end in sight — to end well.
But it has turned out even worse than my worst nightmare. And yes, it can still get even much much worse than now if we don’t act.
Please, do your part to end this horror.
I will always know that I haven’t done enough :( :( :(
Well, at least take 3 minutes and read the full op-ed. It ends with more specific calls to actions by Americans. I was just invited to support one such action: to help pass a ceasefire resolution at our legislative district’s Democratic party meeting. Small things might add up.
And do follow antiwar Israeli media such as 972mag. Here’s a long, harrowing report just posted there by journalists inside Gaza.
