@staff Yeah, I think it's about time to do something about the raging violence and antisemitism in Tumblr. This isn't normal. Stop ignoring Jewish users' reports.
where do the reports of IDF intentionally targeting children come from?
They come from a mix of sources, Anon, and the quality varies wildly.
Some originate from Hamas-controlled media in Gaza, which has obvious incentives to portray Israeli actions in the worst possible light. Others come from activist organizations like Defense for Children International-Palestine, which has documented ties to terrorist groups.
The most problematic source is social media, where unverified videos get shared with inflammatory captions. A video of injured children in Syria gets recycled as "proof" of Israeli war crimes.
Here's what makes this tricky - children do die in Gaza, and some are killed by Israeli strikes. But there's a massive difference between children being killed in military operations (tragic but not illegal) and children being deliberately targeted (which would be a war crime).
The "intentionally targeting" claim almost never has anything remotely like evidence. It's usually inference: children died, therefore they must have been targeted.
There's also something darker at work here. The idea that Jews deliberately murder children taps into blood libel accusations that have persisted for centuries. Today's version just swaps IDF uniforms for medieval robes, but the underlying antisemitic fantasy remains the same.
Credible investigations find no systematic policy of targeting children and there's been no direct evidence of the IDF targeting children.
But facts now matter less than narrative and emotional resonance.
and these photos are so obviously photoshopped. like itâs not something subtle that could trick someone. itâs really obvious fake imagery that anyone can make on the computer at home.
The New York Times has a history of spreading obvious propaganda. This isnât bias. This is an intentional campaign. The only possible explanation is that some people there are knowingly cooperating to do this. Probably some of them are actually working with Russian and or Iran and or Chinese agents just break propaganda, but even if itâs just a group of people at the Times doing it on their own out of hatred, itâs still evil and wrong.
this kind of propaganda incites hate and cost lives. Itâs part of a digital information campaign designed to incite genocidal hatred of Jews and Israelis around the world. Itâs not enough to stop it. It needs to be exposed. And the people involved need to be held accountable.
Just like during the Holocaust while the first priority was obviously stopping the mass murder machine, that wasnât enough. What happened had to be documented and exposed and the perpetrators had to be held accountable (tho of course not nearly enough were).
Researchers identify a neural signature for dreaming that occurs in both wakefulness and sleep, challenging the binary definition of conscio
Found this article through X-Twitter. Copying my comment on there:
This is kind of revolutionary. I have to wonder if this can shed some light on how neurodivergent people's brains work, considering we often have both sleep issues and a strong tendency to both daydreaming and disrupting thoughts.
I wasn't ever under the impression that leftists can't be antisemitic or whatever. But it wasn't always so acceptable the way it is now. It was expected that people would correct misinformation and call out nazi conspiracy shit.
And I'm not a jew but the culture change has been a mind fuck.
Since when was it ever okay to compare Jews to the people that literally did a genocide against them?? Or to act like all Israelis unilaterally support the government they live under? Or to laugh about Jews in America who are worried about antisemitism?
You can say "antizionism isn't antisemitism" all you want. But it really doesn't mean shit when you spend more energy condemning random Jews on social media as "zionists" than you do republican senators.
I've seen people who claim to be left wing sharing stone toss comics, for fucks sake.
Itâs been such an eye-opening experience. It made me realize that far too many people do not have an internal sense of morality, and instead rely on the zeitgeist and other people to determine their sense of right and wrong. Which is terrifying, because that makes them absurdly easy to indoctrinate into hatred.
Can you speak to any similarities or differences between the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the situation of Israelis in Gaza 20 years ago? I really think that Israel needs to do more to discourage the settlements, ideally get rid of them altogether, and definitely crack down on the attack by settlers on locals.
At the same time, I feel that the example of Gaza, where Israel withdrew to its borders and was rewarded by 20 years of Hamas launching attacks culminating in October 7th is the worst possible way to persuade Israel to withdraw from areas itâs currently illegally occupying. How did the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza even come about?
(For context, Iâm not Jewish so I wouldnât call myself a Zionist but Iâm a liberal two-state supporter. I actually used to be quite anti Israel, I believed the simplistic and offensive idea that âthey settled there because the holy book told them toâ. Iâm probably one of the few people who was made more pro Israel by October 7th, it made me research Zionism, the archaeological and cultural history, and the fact that some Jews have always lived there. So now I see it as a land back project, albeit one thatâs become sadly right wing.)
There's a lot to unpack here, but since you're asking these questions in good faith, let me start with some foundations before we get to your actual questions.
On "illegal settlements"
I'll bet you've never actually looked into why you call Israeli West Bank settlements illegal and that it's simply a phrase repeated so often it feels like established fact.
Jordan's 1948â1967 military occupation of the same land was not labeled "illegal" even though it lacked legal title and involved a change of sovereignty. The international community ignored the "illegality" of the Jordanian occupation because it served a specific political status quo, and then weaponized it against Israel.
The "international legal system" is consequentialist in that it applies the label of "illegal" based on the actors (Jews) rather than the act (taking control of territory in a defensive war). This is a conspicuously selective application of international law and a double standard with a very limited number of explanations, none of which are flattering.
It's also worth noting that Israel didn't cling to the West Bank out of expansionist ambition. After 1967, Israel actually offered to return the territory to Jordan. The Arab League's response came at the Khartoum Summit later that year: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel." That's the Arab League's own document.
Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 in a war Jordan started by joining Egypt's attack.
So what's the legal theory that made Jordanian occupation fine but Israeli control illegal?
The legal status is genuinely contested, and the confident "illegal" framing you've absorbed deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. If you're actually interested in the facts, start with the sources at the end of this post. If you have specific questions after that, feel free to send them my way.
On Zionism
You say you're not Jewish so you wouldn't call yourself a Zionist.
This means that you don't actually know what "Zionism" means, likely because your understanding of the term comes from social media.
Zionism is the belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
If you support a two-state solution, you support Israel's right to exist and are in fact a Zionist.
The word has been so thoroughly demonized that people like you are now disavowing positions they actually hold.
You say October 7th inspired you research Zionism, but if you'd really researched Zionism, Anon...you'd be able to define it.
I think what's more likely is that you're conflating research with encountering content tagged #Zionism on social media.
[Media literacy pro tip: Unless you're a scholar studying social media, nothing you learn on social media is "research."]
On why Jews settled there
You say you used to believe they settled there "because the holy book told them to," and I'm glad you've moved past it, but I want to make sure you've replaced it with something accurate rather than just a softer version of the same misconception.
Jews didn't flood into Palestine because of a religious text. They went there for two reasons:
It is where they are from (Jews are from Judea...hence the name) and there has been continuous Jewish presence in the region for millennia.
The world kept making it lethally clear that Jews had no future anywhere else.
European Jews fled to Palestine because Europe was in the process of wiping them out, eventually succeeding in murdering 2/3rds of Jews in Europe.
But the founding narrative that focuses exclusively on European Jewry leaves out roughly 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who were expelled or forced to flee from Arab countries (like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Morocco) in the decades following 1948, most of them stripped of their citizenship, their property, and their assets. Most of them ended up in Israel not because of Zionist ideology but because Israel was the only place that would take them. (I'll bet you don't know what the Farhud was, but do know a false narrative about the Nakba.)
The Israel that exists today, as a result, is probably a bit more than half Mizrahi. Their ancestors never lived in Europe, never spoke Yiddish, and had lived in those countries since well before Islam existed. Baghdad was once 30% Jewish. (Think about that for moment: New York City is only 12-15% Jewish.)
When people talk about Israel as a European colonial project, they are entirely erasing them. Erasing their history, their expulsion, and their thousands of years of lived experience. Like their cousins who survived WWII in Europe, they weren't people from a powerful empire claiming distant territory to reap resources to send back to imperial overlords. They were a stateless people, from many places, returning to or arriving at the only homeland that would have them. Israel is made up of the Jews who survived Europe and the Eastern hemisphere. To be antizionist is to say that they were supposed to have died at the hands of the Nazis and the Islamists.
On Gaza and what it means for the West Bank
Now, your actual questions, which are good ones.
The Gaza withdrawal in 2005 is a huge topic, but the short version: it was essentially Prime Minister (and former General) Ariel Sharon's decision, driven by the argument (associated with strategist Dan Schueftan and others) that Israel couldn't simultaneously hold Gaza's territory and avoid either a demographic crisis or permanent military occupation of a hostile population. Sharon forcibly removed roughly 8,000 Israeli settlers (many of whom had been there for decades, and did not go quietly), dismantled every settlement, dug up every Jewish grave, and withdrew completely to the 1967 border. The international community called it a promising step.
Hamas then won the 2006 Palestinian elections, violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007, and spent the next 17 years building the infrastructure for October 7th.
So when you ask whether this is the worst possible advertisement for further withdrawal...? The answer is yes....and that's not a right-wing talking point.
Any serious discussion of West Bank settlements has to grapple with the fact that Israel tried the full withdrawal approach and was rewarded with two decades of Hamas rockets, then a massacre. The people asking Israel to do it again need a much better answer to that problem than they currently have. (This doesn't even start on the fact that the PA couldn't provide security guarantees even if they wanted to...and they don't.)
Why the West Bank is not Gaza, and why 2025 is not 2005
They're not really comparable situations.
Start with geography. Gaza is a coastal strip, flat, self-contained. The West Bank is a mountainous plateau that literally overlooks Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
When Sharon withdrew from Gaza, he was making a painful political concession. If Israel withdrew from the West Bank under current conditions, it would be handing an enemy the high ground above its own capital.
Then there's the question of who would actually govern a post-withdrawal West Bank. In Gaza, the Palestinian Authority was at least nominally in charge before Hamas violently removed them. In the West Bank today, the PA totally controls Area A (which contains the major Arab cities) with Israeli security forces still operating in Area B, and total Israeli control in Area C.
It's worth knowing what those zones actually represent:
In square miles, Area A is roughly 18% of the West Bank, but contains approximately 55% of the West Bank's Arab population.
Area B covers another 22% of the land and roughly another 40% of the population.
Area C, the remaining 60% of the land (where all the Israeli settlements are located), has a relatively small Palestinian population, somewhere around 5% of West Bank Arabs, mostly in rural and Bedouin communities.
So the PA nominally governs the areas where most West Bank Arabs actually live, but it does so with Israeli security forces operating alongside and often inside those areas because the PA cannot secure them on its own.
This isn't Israeli propaganda, it's something PA officials have effectively acknowledged. The PA is financially insolvent, deeply unpopular with its own population, and has no answer to the armed militant factions like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Lion's Den, which have been growing in cities like Jenin and Nablus. If Israel left tomorrow, the most likely outcome isn't a Palestinian state. It's a violent Hamas takeover of the West Bank, with the difference that this Hamas would be sitting on those ridges above Tel Aviv rather than behind a fence in a coastal enclave.
Then there's the Israeli electorate, and this is important context for understanding why the political situation looks the way it does. In 2005, Sharon could sell the Gaza withdrawal to a significant portion of the Israeli public because the Oslo process had created at least the theoretical framework of a negotiating partner and there was a plausible story about what peace might look like. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, a majority of Israelis supported trading land for peace - even after the Second intifada's ~140 suicide bombings..
Twenty years later, Israelis have watched that withdrawal empower Hamas, seen the Oslo Accords set the stage for the Second Intifada, and witnessed every major peace offer (including Camp David in 2000, and Olmert's extraordinary offer in 2008) get rejected or ignored. The Israeli center-left, which was once the dominant force in Israeli politics and the driver of the peace process, has been essentially obliterated as a political force. It didn't lose because Israelis became cruel or indifferent. It lost because its central argument that territorial concessions would produce security and peace failed visibly, repeatedly, and lethally.
October 7th didn't radicalize the Israeli electorate. It confirmed what the electorate had already concluded.
On settlements specifically
You want Israel to crack down on settler violence against Palestinians, and I think you're 100% right. Settler attacks on Arab villages are indefensible, frequently go unpunished, and are a genuine moral catastrophe for Israel. The current Israeli government's tolerance of this violence is disgusting. Terrorists should be treated like terrorists, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, or motives.
The broader settlement question is harder. The circumstances under which Israel could realistically dismantle settlements include:
a credible Palestinian negotiating partner
security guarantees that don't rely purely on faith
Neither of those conditions currently exist. That's not an excuse for an indefinite status quo, but it's the actual situation.
On "land back, but sadly right wing"
You're saying the project is legitimate but you're troubled because the current governing coalition is right-wing.
I want to push back on this framing with a thought experiment:
Imagine the Ojibwe recover some of the territory stolen from them by European settlers and the governments of both the US and Canada:
Then, 50 years later, they democratically elect center-right leaders whose priorities are free markets, strong national defense, and the belief that individual rights are the foundation of human freedom and achievement.
Does the Ojibwe's landback project suddenly become illegitimate because you don't care for the government they democratically elected?
The political character of a particular government doesn't retroactively invalidate the underlying claim. You can think Netanyahu is a disaster (I do and many Israelis do) without it meaning the entire project of Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland is tainted. (Interestingly, when the socialist Labor party ran Israel for decades, many used it's leftist government to delegitimize it.)
That aside, the landback framing you've arrived at is pretty solid.
Some sources are below, follow-up questions are welcome.
The West Bank as Occupied Territory: The Irrelevance of the Mandate and the Lack of Jordanian Sovereignty
Until a peace treaty is concluded, Israel is entitled, under international law, to continue the settlement of the territories of Judea and S
Jordan formally annexes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, allowing the Palestinian inhabitants therein to obtain Jordanian citizenship.
woah wait youâre telling me that you actually donât oppose genocide on principal. and itâs only when (((certain groups))) of people engage in mass killings that you give a shit. awesome. you totally owned us dude and youâre definitely not proving our point for us
titsay
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
origamiaround
kianamaiart
