davel

Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.

Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.

Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.

The Atlantic Council is the Global North’s premier foreign policy think tank, and the fediverse is on its radar now. PDF

Emphasis mine:

Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.

Transcript

TL;DR: Flatten the buildings and then use upgraded American bunker buster bombs, which may or may not be able to penetrate deep enough. And then ultimately, “The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands.”

In other words, Israel’s Final Solution to the Gaza Palestinian Question is ethnic cleansing.

The systematic destruction of the remaining buildings in Gaza City will start within days, the Israeli insider said. The bunker-buster JDAMs could come next. Then, in the planners’ scenario, I was told, the Israeli infantry will be assigned to mop-up operations: searching out and killing those Hamas fighters and workers who managed to survive the JDAM attacks.

The major issue for the Israeli war planners is a reluctance, despite the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists, to engage in a door-to-door street battle with Hamas in Gaza City. One veteran of the IDF, who served in a high post, told me that half of the Israeli Army has been engaged for the past decade or more in the protection of the increasing number of small settlements scattered in the West Bank where they are bitterly resented by the Palestinian population. “The Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” the insider said, nor their willingness to go to war but what could be a disastrous lack of combat experience.

“…where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.” — Bryne Hobart

[via @gvwilson@mastodon.social]

Governments with monetary sovereignty, anyway.