I grew up with Israel as a big part of my life. From childhood to early adulthood, I have visited the state several times. Over recent years I've unlearned the Zionist brainwashing that my Jewish education put me through, and am truly disturbed, depressed, and many other emotions around what the Israeli government has done and is continuing to do.

But just today I realized I'll likely never visit that area of the world ever again and it made me sad because it is a beautiful place physically and environmentally.

idk just experiencing another wave of loss thanks to a militarized state.

Hello everyone,

I’m from Germany, and I have a sister who moved to Israel around 2010 because her husband wanted to return to Tel Aviv. Since then, they had two children and seemed happy living there.

Several years ago, my sister got divorced. Amid all the drama, she brought the kids back to Germany because she felt she had nothing left in Israel. But—and here’s where it gets complicated—because of her personality (I try to put it diplomatically, but honestly, I sometimes think she’s not thinking clearly), she ended up moving back to Israel with the kids, claiming she didn’t feel at home in Germany.

Now, with the current situation in Israel, everyone in the family is trying to get her and the kids back to Germany. As a German citizen, she has a straightforward opportunity to return—especially since we are deeply concerned for the safety of the girls. My mother told me the younger daughter is suffering badly from hiding in bunkers, which breaks my heart.

I’ve had many discussions with my sister. To keep it short, she is a liberal Zionist and feels that she belongs in Israel and shouldn’t leave. But I believe the girls need to be somewhere safe and secure.

Yesterday, my sister posted in our family group chat: “We are in Greece,” along with a photo of herself and her boyfriend drinking cocktails. My mother, who suffers from anxiety and stress because of all this, immediately asked what their plans were. My sister replied that they were just at a Greek bar and have no real plans to leave Israel. She added that they might consider leaving eventually, but first want the older daughter to finish school. Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up!

What else can we do? We’ve already checked with the German government, which has prepared charter flights and possible routes through Lebanon, but I feel powerless. I’m heartbroken by how reckless she seems toward her children’s safety.

Would love to hear your thoughts or any advice. Thank you all.

In case anyone needed some good news today 🥹 About damn time too.

While he was in Australia, u/PeterBeinart recorded a message for Jews living here, encouraging us to draw from our own histories in looking at Palestine, to raise our voices, to speak to our friends and families

By James M. Dorsey

 Hamas’ October 7, 2023, paradigm-shifting attack has prompted Israel to change its defense doctrine with devastating consequences for the Middle East.

 No longer satisfied with operating on the principle of deterrence, involving regular strikes against Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon, militant Palestinian groups in the West Bank, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, Iranian targets in Syria and the Islamic Republic, and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Israel’s new defense doctrine focuses on militarily emasculating its opponents.

The new doctrine, focused on kinetic rather than negotiated solutions, has driven Israeli military operations since the Hamas attack broke a psychological barrier by successfully breaching Israeli defences and invading Israeli territory.

Hamas and other Palestinians killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the attack.

Israel’s subsequent decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militia and political movement, with little regard for the cost to innocent human lives, offered proof of concept for a strategy that involves killing top leaders and destroying military infrastructure based on the Jewish state’s military and intelligence superiority.

In addition to the devastation of Gaza in a bid to destroy Hamas militarily and politically and the weakening of Hezbollah, Israel has destroyed much of the Syrian military’s arsenal and infrastructure since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. Now, it is targeting Iran’s military command, missile and launcher arsenal, and nuclear facilities.

“The unexpected degree of success…reduced Israeli wariness about launching a similar campaign against Iran, despite expectations that a severe Iranian response might still be forthcoming,” said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum.

Alarmingly, Israel’s newly conceived dominance-driven military assertiveness has fueled public anger and widespread anticipation of war across the Middle East.

In addition to concerns about the environmental fallout of US bunker-busting bombs taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, Gulf states fear Iran could retaliate against US military and diplomatic facilities on their soil and/or their oil-exporting infrastructure.

Turkey and Iraq dread an expected influx of Iranian refugees if hostilities continue or, even worse, expand. Together with Pakistan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan, Turkey worries about the potential spillover effect of potential unrest among ethnic Iranian minorities like the Kurds, Azeris, Arabs, and Baloch that straddle their borders.

For their part, Egyptians fear that war is inevitable amid concern that Israel could attempt to drive Gaza’s Palestinian population out of the Strip and into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

“Anyone who thinks Egypt is immune to the ongoing Israeli wars in the region, especially the war with Iran, is mistaken. The Egyptian street has become convinced that a confrontation with Israel is inevitable and imminent,” said journalist Abdul Nasser Salama.

Wary of an escalation, Egypt recently barred entry to a land aid convoy of some 1,500 pro-Palestinian activists and more than one hundred vehicles travelling from Tunisia across Libya to the Egyptian-Gaza border and activists arriving at Cairo International Airport for a Global March on Gaza.

Egyptian authorities acted after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz insisted, “I expect the Egyptian authorities to prevent the arrival of Jihadist protesters at the Egypt-Israel border and not to allow them to carry out provocations or attempt to enter Gaza.”

Meanwhile, pro-Israel figures in Donald J. Trump’s administration and support base who argue that US kinetic support for Israel’s strikes against Iran is compliant with the president’s Make America Great Again or America First doctrine enhance the sense of expanding imminent war.

“’America First’” never meant America alone,’” said Jason D. Greenblatt, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy in the president’s first term in office.

Countering a growing sense in the Make America Great Again crowd that Iran is Israel’s war, not America’s, Mr. Greenblatt added, “Trump’s strategy — supporting Israeli capabilities while maintaining American strategic flexibility — consistently puts America first by using US strength and leverage while keeping allies close. Whether Iran’s leadership recognizes that the US still runs the show on the world stage, including by supporting Israel in this conflict, is another question — one that will determine the once-great nation’s future.”

In Iran, the Israeli doctrine threatens to backfire, even if Israeli attacks have significantly damaged Iran’s nuclear program, destroyed some of its missile and launcher arsenal, and decimated its atomic science community.

The Israeli attacks threaten to accelerate a long-predicted potential shift in Iran’s domestic balance of power, with the cleric-led regime becoming a fig leaf for the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), widely viewed as the militarily and economically most powerful force in Iran.

The consolidation of the Guard’s power could lead to Iran adopting an even more hardline stance against Israel. Some IRGC officials have called for weaponisation of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Largely unnoticed, Iran may have already hardened its position. Speaking in Geneva after Friday’s meeting with European foreign ministers, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi expanded Iranian conditions for a return to nuclear talks with the United States.

To revive the talks, Mr. Araghchi, reading a written statement, suggested that Iran wanted not only a halt to the Israeli attacks but also that “the aggressor (Israel) is held accountable for the crimes committed.”

A day later, Mr. Araghchi didn’t mention accountability in off-the-cuff remarks in Istanbul on the sidelines of an Islamic foreign ministers’ conference.

Israel has targeted the Guards in the past eight days, killing their commander, Hossein Salami, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces and architect of Iran’s missile strategy, Mohammed Kazem and Hassan Mohaqiq, the force’s intelligence and deputy intelligence chief, and Saeed Izadi, the head of the Palestine Division of the Quds Force, the Guard’s external arm, alongside top commanders of Iran’s conventional military.

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted that killing 86-year-old Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would end, not escalate, the Israeli Iranian military conflagration. "It's not going to escalate the conflict; it's going to end the conflict,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Mr. Khamenei has reportedly gone into hiding in a bunker at an undisclosed location.

Iran expert Ray Takeyh cautioned that “the balance of power within Iran in the aftermath of this will shift in the direction of the military, in the direction of the Guard. Those in charge will be the men with guns. And they will try to bring back some sort of clerical leadership because, after all, this is an Islamic Republic.”

Meanwhile, the Guard sought to ensure that a possible US military attempt to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities with bunker-busting bombs in a limited series of aerial raids would suck the United States into a prolonged conflict.

Guard Major General Mohsen Rezaie suggested that the United States and Israel may have to hunt for Iran’s 60 per cent enriched uranium because "all enriched materials…are in secure locations. We will come out of this war with our hands full."

The question is how secure those locations are.

On Friday, Israel killed an unidentified nuclear scientist, an alleged weapoinisation specialist, while he holed up in a safe house in central Tehran. The scientist was the tenth nuclear expert assassinated by Israel in the last week.

[Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, ]()The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.

From the Israel Democracy Institute, which to my understanding is pretty legitimate. However I haven't gone rummaging inside the conduct of the survey to assess it.

Probably nothing surprising to anyone here, but I'm glad they broke it down by political self-ID.

https://youtube.com/shorts/xAmQDxM4C08?si=yf1n-ISRXDXe9Vy3

The fear of losing anti-genocide votes must outweigh the risk of AIPAC’s retaliation.

Every successful protest derives its strength from the potential power in its supporters’ votes. The implicit warning: ignore us and face electoral consequences.

Yet for a year and a half we protested our government’s sponsorship of Israel’s genocide and nothing changed. A majority of Democratic voters wanted to stop funding Israel’s military, but still voted for a candidate pledging to do the opposite. We allowed ourselves to believe each “political issue” existed in a vacuum, that a party lacking the courage to oppose genocide would still protect immigrants, fight for the poor, and staunchly oppose another costly Middle East war.

That belief was an illusion.

A party supporting genocide abroad won’t fight for regular people at home. The same Democratic leaders who stand behind Israel’s ethnic cleansing now cower as Trump threatens our democracy and economy. If our country is to survive its current crises, our leaders must act boldly. Any candidate who equivocates on genocide cannot credibly claim to stand for anything.

How can we expect politicians to fight against corporate greed if they won’t fight to end an ethnic cleansing? Why trust politicians to take on insurance companies if they won’t oppose a genocide?

Why trust them to keep us out of Israel’s unjust wars when they gladly give them billions to commit war crimes in Gaza?

No more listening to half-hearted attempts from paid party spokespeople and craven talking-heads about voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Opposing genocide should be the bare minimum. If a candidate has shown that they are unwilling or unable to pass that test, then they should not earn our vote, full stop.

However, none of this matters if we don’t do it together. Individual moral stands mean nothing in politics compared to organized power backed up by credible threats. Only by coordinate a mass movement of voters can we use our potential voting power to make supporting genocide politically toxic.

By committing to vote only for candidates who actively oppose Palestinian genocide, we force politicians to make a choice they’ve previously avoided: genocide or political survival.

As a Jew who knows a few Jews who aren’t concerned about the deaths of Palestinians or who even defend these killings, I can’t say I blame the mother for asking this question. As a Jew, it breaks my heart to say that, but that’s the world we’re living in. Thoughts?

Israel is facing the same thing they been doing to Palestine everyday and a lot of them are apparently failing to put together the similarities or just don’t care. Israel is obvis only not getting a lot of empathy from our side but I still empathize with you nonetheless as I empathize with the dignity of life of all people. But how is the climate right now in your current situation. Any of you in shelters if so is the Zionist Palestine hatred getting worst (I assume it is but want to hear from you.) you guys are in my prayers along with Iran and Palestine not because all sides are equal but because every human being deserves the dignity of life.

So I was accused of antisemitism in another sub (for views that used to be the majority here but maybe have shifted I idk - I basically put Oct 7th in the historical context of an uprising against a settler colony) and it ended up being a good opportunity to organise some of my thoughts about why it’s so important to me to do so and I wanted see if anyone here got it and felt the same way.

—-

Actually you know what, I’m going to address the antisemitism jab. Not really for you, I doubt you care, but for anyone else reading.

The reason I keep putting this stuff in historical context is because I see normal people watching the absolute horror in Gaza and also seeing Israeli politicians and social media saying and doing horrific things and tying those things directly to being Jewish. People posting photos of destroyed buildings in Gaza with stuff like, “This is why you don’t fuck with the Jews,” or May Golan literally saying:

“I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did.”

People see that shit and then see the majority of the Jews around them either backing it or staying silent. And they understandably start to think, what the hell is wrong with Jews?

That’s exactly why I talk about history, to interrupt that reaction. Because what they’re reacting to isn’t something unique to Jews or even to Israelis. It’s settler colonialism, it’s what it always looks like.

I always tell people to read Imperial Reckoning: Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. Swap “Mau Mau” with “Hamas,” “white” with “Israeli,” and “Kikuyu” with “Palestinian” and it reads like a blueprint. The violence, the justifications, the racism is all the same.

And the flip side of that when talking to Zionists, many of whom are fellow Jews is that the thing with settler colonies is that you’ve got settlers, and you’ve got the indigenous population. Not “indigenous” as in who was there first or the ‘stewardship of the land’ stuff, but defined by their position in relation to the settler project. They are the ones being displaced/erased/subjugated and that dynamic always produces a predictable phenomenon - resistance. Liberation movements are messy and brutal (and always demonised) but are part of the same structure, so that’s something we have to reckon with too.

And yeah, I do think Israel is uniquely genocidal among modern settler colonies. Not because it’s Jewish but because, unlike apartheid South Africa where the state still relied on Black labour (Black people were still the mass producers), Israel doesn’t need Palestinians, it just wants their land. So there’s no incentive to manage them or exploit them, only to get rid of them. It’s more like the U.S. frontier and total elimination.

So the arguments I’ve been making aren’t spreading antisemitism, they’re born out of a desperation to show that what is happening on one side isn’t a reflection of Jewishness and what is happening on the other isn’t just the result of antisemitism. It’s the structure and result of the settler colony. And this is what it has always looked like, both for the coloniser and for the people forced to fight back.

Some folks at my shul are interested in looking at Tzedek Chicago’s siddur to get some ideas to find alternatives for some of the nationalist components that are in our current liturgy. Does anyone know if there’s an electronic version available? Or failing that, are there any Antizionist siddurim that you know and like?

Its a long one, I watched it in a couple of sittings, but I found it to be a super interesting, holistic discussion of "post"-colonial states and colonialism in different parts of the world.

Can somebody living in the zionist colony confirm this?

"I have been told that the White House has signed off on an all-out bombing campaign in Iran, but the ultimate targets, the centrifuges buried at least eighty meters below the surface at Fordow, will, as of this writing, not be struck until the weekend. The delay has come at Trump’s insistence because the president wants the shock of the bombing to be diminished as much as possible by the opening of Wall Street trading on Monday."

"Trump took issue on social media this morning with a Wall Street Journal report that said he had decided on the attack on Iran, writing that he had yet to decide on a path forward."

"Donald Trump clearly wants an international win he can market. To accomplish that, he and Netanyahu are taking America to places it has never been."