"A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human."

Macklemore’s statement on speaking out for Palestine

There’s a lot of shit going down…

Matt Dragon - We’re in another election season and Justin...

We’re in another election season and Justin Goldsman is again running for West Orange Town Council. He is receiving support from groups and individuals who either haven’t seen his past public...

Matt Dragon - If you're here looking for a disgusting,...

If you're here looking for a disgusting, antisemitic post attributed to me, you won't find it. Because it's fake. People are creating fake posts because I care about Palestinians and children being...

…so no long write up at the top this time. But all these pieces are important and I’ve put some thoughts inline below. I had already wanted to send this out for like 2 weeks, so just getting it out the door and resetting the procrastination clock.

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Israel admits firing on car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab, opens probe in Al Jazeera

Two years, to admit something everyone knew 2 seconds in, because there was no other entity in Gaza who could have done this… We are complicit. It’s the US weapons, the US vetoes at the UN, the US funding, the US attacks on Iran, the US decades of drone strikes undermining the rule of law. This is ours as much as it’s Israel’s.

More than two years after Hind Rajab was killed, becoming a symbol of the suffering of children in Gaza, Israel’s military, long accused of the atrocity, has announced a criminal investigation into the death of the five-year-old girl.

At first, Israel denied that its soldiers were even in the area where she was killed. After journalistic investigations, including by Al Jazeera, Israel’s army said it had raided “terror targets” in Gaza City that day. In January this year, Israeli officials said they were reviewing the case.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/19/israel-admits-firing-on-car-carrying-hind-rajab-symbol-of-gazas-suffering?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialPulse

White people’s humanity is just humanity. My humanity is politics. by Reema Schonbeck

This really nails it. Our entire society and country is built around whiteness. If you’re religious, that is our “original sin.” The thing we must admit to, and atone for, and do our penance to erase from our permanent record.

If you’re not religious, it’s just the foundation everything else is built on. And it’s an ongoing load bearing piece of our society, which is why we call it politics, so we don’t have to talk about how it’s actually inhumanity.

White people’s humanity is just humanity.
My humanity is politics.

Their grief is grief.
Their fear is fear.
Their safety is safety.
Their right to exist is assumed.

But my grief is political.
My fear is political.
My safety is political.
And asking people to recognize the humanity of my people is treated like a political statement.

White people get to decide they’re tired of politics. They get to be “apolitical.” They get to look away.

I do not.

And staying “neutral” in the face of oppression is not neutral. It protects the status quo. It benefits the oppressor.

Reema Schonbeck - I needed a day to process Ed Sheeran—an...

I needed a day to process Ed Sheeran—an artist I respected—bending the knee and once again being reminded that no words seem to be more weaponized than words that give humanity to my people. Many of...

‘NAZA’: Exposing Israel’s killing machine in Gaza by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

This is what all of the tech giants are doing, actively supporting, machine automation of killing children, vaporizing whole families. You can’t avoid this, you can’t be doing good work inside these companies. You can’t have as market that chases the highest profits, and have a for profit war machine, because that will always be where the highest profits are.

We made this film for one simple reason: We understood that testimonies from officers and soldiers in the army that annihilated Gaza — those who conducted the surveillance, who calculated how many innocent people were likely to be killed in each house, and who repeatedly gave the green light to bomb entire families — would make it even harder to deny the crimes. And that denial is part of what allows these crimes to continue until today.

This is a film about a system. It focuses on orders, policies, and patterns of operation, not deviations from them. The conclusion that we draw from the testimonies is clear: The mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza was not a “tragic byproduct” of a war against Hamas, as it is commonly portrayed in Israel, but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act. This is why a UN commission, the world’s leading human rights groups, and Palestinian, Israeli, and international scholars have described it as a genocide.

NAZA by Mo Husseini

Naza is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage” or what we would call terrorism if it was Black or brown people doing it.

The film is being critiqued by people with whom I am aligned: those who support the cause of Palestinian freedom and self-determination.

And their critique is a pointed and valid one that I have shared on many occasions, and it comes with the name of a particularly odious genre of Israeli artistic and cultural conscience-porn: Shoot-and-Cry: יורים ובוכים (yorim u'vochim).

…

From what I’ve seen of and about (again) a film I haven’t seen, be it the reviews or the interviews or Abraham and Szor’s own words describing their approach, NAZA subverts the genre in one CRITICAL way: it does not include the crying or the agony or the regret. It does not center the feelings of the person doing the bad thing. It merely exposes the bad thing.

The directors have said flatly that the feelings of the soldiers were not something they wanted to focus on because that focus “shifts the center of gravity away from the victims.” They were clear-eyed about the mechanisms of the Shoot-and-Cry contraption and built their film to escape the black-hole pull of the perpetrator’s regret. …

NAZA, at least from my perspective, complicates the comfortable fiction that coddles some on the left: “Bibi bad. Ben Gvir bad. Settlers bad. But there are so many good people in Tel Aviv who vote the right (left) way and are ethical and moral actors in an impossible situation.” The soldiers being interviewed are interviewed in the heart of that liberal dream. From a Mediterranean beachfront with bottomless Mimosa brunches and Pride parades, sixty clicks from the horror that is Gaza, people who believe they are decent tell you how they were just following orders.

… But a deeper and more pointed critique is available: take a look at who is allowed to speak. Notice that even here, even in a film this unforgiving of Israeli moral and ethical failures, Palestinians are the object and not the subject of the sentence being spoken.

…

… The dead in Gaza are granted anonymity too, by the tens of thousands. But theirs is the other kind of anonymity. It is the anonymity of Western apathy and erasure.

…

The confessional, with its latticed privacy screen, offers anonymity to comfort the sinner. The meeting with the informant offers anonymity to get at the crime. To enter a hidden truth into the record.

NAZA is a deposition. It is not shielding and protecting these soldiers to absolve them. It is offering darkness in payment for truths they will not say in the light. The teary-eyed soldier of the Shoot-and-Cry wants understanding. NAZA is building an indictment.

And so, at least for me, a constituency of one, the film survives the Shoot-and-Cry accusation. My vote is Not Guilty. On that charge, at least.

NAZA - by Mo Husseini

or, On the Peculiar Credibility of War Criminals Who Look Like You.

The Stranglehold of Memory by Omer Bartov, Arnon Grunberg

There’s no good faith argument that this isn’t a genocide. It’s not antisemitic to say so. It’s not a blood libel. People attack the messenger when they can’t argue with the message.

In his book, Bartov writes that, as an expert on genocide, he came to the conclusion, after careful consideration between October 2023 and May 2024, that the Israeli army in Gaza is guilty of genocidal operations. He bases this judgment on statements by certain politicians (intent), the cessation of humanitarian aid, and the displacement of the population from northern Gaza (ethnic cleansing). During our conversation, he stated that he no longer wishes to spend time on further evidentiary argument.

“If you use that word,” I suggest, “no one can still claim to be an innocent bystander. Is that why the word is so important to you?”

… And that is what is interesting about genocide: it seeks to make everyone complicit. Moreover, there exists a Genocide Convention. Israel, Germany, France, America, all of them have signed that document. If you sign it, you are obliged to prevent genocide. And if you cannot prevent it, you are obliged to punish the perpetrators. But the international community does nothing. Trump does nothing, and Biden did nothing.”

Lay Down and Die by Jasper Diamond Nathaniel

Every day Palestinians are being attacked, assaulted, and killed in the West Bank. There’s a ton of shit going on in the world, but the genocide and ethnic cleansing grind on, day by day, life by life.

When I was a child,
I learnt to count to five
one, two, three, four, five.
But these days, I’ve been counting lives, so I count

one life
one life
one life
one life
one life

because each time
is the first time
that that life
has been taken.

The Pedagogy of Conflict by Pádraig Ó Tuama

The hikers entered Tal, a Palestinian village that had, just a week earlier, seen one of its homes burned by settlers. So perhaps the residents weren’t so thrilled to see these uninvited guests. The machine guns may have had something to do with it, too. When locals came out to confront them, the settlers began beating them, aiming their weapons at them, and firing into the air. One of the Palestinians, Sheikh Farouk Ramadan, wrestled a gun away from a settler “security coordinator,” Benayahu Melet, and shot him dead as Melet reached for his pistol.

Ramadan then laid down the gun, and sometime later—at least an hour, according to this settler—a settler ordered an Israeli soldier to execute him, which he did. Three of Ramadan’s cousins, who were unarmed and lying on the ground, were then summarily executed one after another.

At some point during all this, an Israeli soldier was also killed—the settlers quickly blamed the Palestinians, but Israeli media is reporting he was killed by friendly fire.

Lay Down and Die - by Jasper Diamond Nathaniel

As settlers launch pogroms across the West Bank, Palestinians are told to quietly accept their fate.

Hamas Offered to Release all Civilian Hostages on Day 1 - without Preconditions. Israel Said No. by Trita Parsi

Biden and his national security and state department ghoul squad have so much blood on their hands. Anthony Blinkin Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Biden himself, probably Harris too, should all be facing war crimes and crimes against humanity tribunals. But instead they’re getting 5 digit checks for speaking gigs and teaching the next generation at the Ivies, waiting for their chance to get back in government and fuck up some more Arab and Muslim kids.

The Biden administration was well aware of the Hamas offer to release all the civilian hostages - and of Netanyahu’s rejection of the offer. Biden administration officials pressed Netanyahu gently to accept the offer. But once Netanyahu rejected it, Biden officials completely shifted and justified all measures Israel took - including blatant war crimes such as bombing hospitals - by pointing to the hostages in Hamas’s custody, knowing very well that a majority of them could have been released on day one. So many hostages died while being held by Hamas - or were held far longer - due to Netanyahu’s decision and the Biden administration’s complicity.

Remember, Biden was not passively going along with Netanyahu’s fatal decision. The US vetoed six UN Security Council resolutions and provided all kinds of economic and political support for Netanyahu’s policy - even though they knew that the civilian hostages remained in Gaza because Netanyahu preferred it that way.

Hamas Offered to Release all Civilian Hostages on Day 1 - without Preconditions. Israel Said No.

I joined the LeftHook to discuss the bombshell story about Netanyahu ignoring warnings about Oct 7, the UK imposing sanctions on Israel - and why a third round of US/Israel-Iran war is likely

The Short Life of a Newborn During the Iran War by Peiman Salehi, Nick Turse

It’s unclear if Hannaneh and Ali’s apartment building was the intended object of a U.S. or Israeli strike, a targeting error, or so-called collateral damage. The family says it knows of no regime officials who resided in the building or military uses of the site.

The Israel Defense Forces announced it killed “Mehdi Rostami Shamastam, one of the key commanders in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence” in Tehran on the same day that Mehdi Rostami and his family lost their lives in Hannaneh’s apartment. Sarbaz said her son was an academic, not an intelligence official. “I deny this,” she said of the assertion. “My son was a university professor. But if what Israel claims were true, I would be very glad.”

Sarbaz said that if her son was, in fact, a top intelligence chief, killing him alongside his family, including a baby, would make it an even graver atrocity. “The presence of a 20-day-old infant among the victims, and the killing of eight members of one family, is such an enormous crime,” she said. “Why didn’t they target him in the street?”

The Short Life of a Newborn During the Iran War

“What crime had my 20-day-old grandchild committed?”

It’s Not Just the West Bank Settlers. It’s Israel. by Mairav Zonszein

I deeply wish that one could extract the country from the violence. But as the US showed via our invasion of Iraq, and thousands of drone strikes across the globe, this is us. Democracy, self-defense, “Western values” don’t wash the blood off our hands.

The West Bank is far more strategically and ideologically vital to Israel than any war it is fighting, and it is the area in which Israel has the most longstanding, coherent and unchallenged goal: as much land for Jews with as few Palestinians as possible. The West Bank is also the only arena in which Jewish settler militia groups are operating like a paramilitary force to advance Israel’s goals.

These militias are not rogue entities, as Israeli leaders have proclaimed. They are organized groups of civilians made up of a combination of Israeli settlers who establish new settlement outposts across the West Bank, settlers who were called up for reserve duty since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and serve in regional defense units, and rapid response squads, which are local volunteer emergency teams tasked with providing first response in their settlements. Imagine a neighborhood watch, but with military-grade weapons and the use of deadly force. In June, a United Nations report found that “financial and military support” from Israeli authorities had “enabled settler attacks.”

…

In other words, what’s happened in Qusra is a feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy, which has expanded and deepened its control over the occupied territory over the last four years. This has been accomplished through intensifying economic strangulation, restrictions on freedom of movement, transferring governing powers from military to civilian control and, most egregiously, the emboldening of settler militias. …

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/opinion/israel-west-bank-settlers-violence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CFE.0qcA.IbOaFFI_Wm-r∣=url-share

The Silence of Western Feminists Over Gaza Exposes Their Fraud by Fatima Bhutto

Of course not. Feminism today is dead, and it was killed by its supposed icons who urgently rallied for what women wear and how much they earn in Fortune 500 companies but sit silent and pathetically useless while women suffer a historically grave maternal health crisis in Gaza. Not only did doctors raise the alarm about Gaza’s astonishing rate of miscarriages, but doctors have also reported seeing a “sharp increase in premature births before 26 weeks of pregnancy,” when survival is not guaranteed and only possible with access to medical care. Images of a damaged maternity ward from Israel’s attack and raid showed destroyed incubators. There are videos of Israeli soldiers smashing ultrasound machines. Some of the videos I remember seeing are now impossible to find online. YouTube deleted more than 700 videos of Israeli human rights violations, Meta routinely removes documentation of Israeli war crimes, and AI platforms are being programmed to deny Israeli genocide. It’s not just that we are watching the jolly violence of a deranged army being erased; we are watching the erasure of acts of genocide.

Under Article II (d) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the definition of genocide includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within” a specific target group. Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure was purposely and maliciously targeted; its doctors tortured and taken hostage. Add to that repeated displacement, malnutrition, unavailability of medicine, machinery, and diagnostic tests, exposure to white phosphorus among who knows what else as Israel tests its military technology on Palestinians, starvation, heat, cold, and unrelenting chronic stress, and you have Israel’s genocide in action. Israel’s criminal siege of Gaza means NICU equipment is highly restricted, often blocked, from entering the Strip. …

The Silence of Western Feminists Over Gaza Exposes Their Fraud

What exactly is global feminism about if it doesn’t care about the fact that miscarriages tripled in the Strip this year, or that Palestinian mothers are so malnourished they can’t feed their babies?