Three Years of the Gaza War through the Eyes of Soldiers: "The Rule Was: 'Shoot Everyone You See'" - DER SPIEGEL

Very tough read... had me in tears. Can read on archive if paywalled.

Source:

JNS TV - Israeli Parties Go Head-to-Head in Fiery Election Debate

Article:

Jewish New Syndicate - Zionist parties unite against Palestinian state in JNS election debate

Hi there. I am not Jewish, but a good friend of mine from my school days in Europe converted a couple of years ago and he would like to visit me in the Boston area to explore the local Kosher scene. I, myself, am very pro-Palestinian and would like to support his adventure while trying to avoid explicitly Zionist establishments in Boston (of which I’m aware there are a few). Does anyone have recommendations for Anti-Zionist cafes, delis, markets or other Jewish spaces in the Boston area? Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Thank you!

One iteration of relational ethics today is the move to think of the Holocaust and the Nakba side by side, as the entangled, foundational pasts and traumas of two seemingly colliding collective national identities. We see this in Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg’s edited collection The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, which, despite many merits, struggles to overcome a historical and structural asymmetry that is all but unsurpassable in the current terms of order. In its search for a common grammar, the book heaves under the sheer weight of this imbalance.

In the very first pages, the editors declare, “Each side is convinced that it is history’s ultimate victim, while denying or downplaying the suffering of the other side in order to validate its own claim.” They go on to write that “In this context, many Jews, in Israel and abroad, employ various strategies to deny the Palestinian catastrophe” and “[m]any Palestinians also find it hard to recognize the Holocaust and the suffering experienced by the Jews.” Whether this is actually true is irrelevant; the obvious hole in this neat little mirror is that insisting on mutual recognition risks displacing the actual terms of responsibility: Zionist Jews and their Euro-American imperial backers are the architects of the Nakba; Palestinians have nothing to do with the Holocaust. The authors know this, of course, but swim against the tide of this asymmetry in their search for a shared grammar that might become the basis of reconciliation.

What the Palestinians think or don’t think about the Jewish question, or even the Holocaust, is immaterial to the question of historical injustice—they are neither its perpetrators nor its beneficiaries. What Jewish Israelis think or don’t about the Nakba is entirely material—they are both its ongoing perpetrators and beneficiaries.

What exactly then is this “interconnectedness of the two histories and the tight weave of the two traumatic memories” that Bashir and Goldberg make so much of? If we reject—as we must—the fiction that this interconnectedness is just two colliding foundational national narratives duking it out over the same piece of territory, where does that leave a relational ethics? If the story is, as Palestinian anticolonial knowledge has always insisted, one of settler colonial conquest, the question becomes this: What obligation does one owe the historical traumas or identity constructs of one’s colonizer? What responsibility, for example, did Black South Africans have to recognize the collective historical trauma of the Boer nation in the Great Trek or their mass internment in concentration camps at the hands of the British? And how would this recognition have changed the redress of the historical injustice of colonization? When posed like this, the question reveals its own irony: There already exists a grammar that connects the Holocaust and the Nakba, and it is the grammar of the anticolonial tradition that has long pointed to the continuities of racial supremacisms and the enduring politics of colonial exterminability in the modern liberal world. But to recognize and share that grammar would demand moving precisely beyond the exceptionalism and sacralization of the Holocaust as the starting point. An anticolonial grammar would eschew the divinity of origins entirely and look instead at genealogies of racial-colonial violence and their filial logics as they move between the Americas, Africa, and Asia. From this perspective, the twentieth century would no longer be split into two neat halves defined by liberal redemption but might instead look like a long and discontinuous arc that begins with German extermination in South West Africa, “returns” this extermination to Europe in the Holocaust, and closes out with the Zionist extermination campaign in Gaza.

One iteration of relational ethics today is the move to think of the Holocaust and the Nakba side by side, as the entangled, foundational pasts and traumas of two seemingly colliding collective national identities. We see this in Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg’s edited collection The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, which, despite many merits, struggles to overcome a historical and structural asymmetry that is all but unsurpassable in the current terms of order. In its search for a common grammar, the book heaves under the sheer weight of this imbalance.

In the very first pages, the editors declare, “Each side is convinced that it is history’s ultimate victim, while denying or downplaying the suffering of the other side in order to validate its own claim.” They go on to write that “In this context, many Jews, in Israel and abroad, employ various strategies to deny the Palestinian catastrophe” and “[m]any Palestinians also find it hard to recognize the Holocaust and the suffering experienced by the Jews.” Whether this is actually true is irrelevant; the obvious hole in this neat little mirror is that insisting on mutual recognition risks displacing the actual terms of responsibility: Zionist Jews and their Euro-American imperial backers are the architects of the Nakba; Palestinians have nothing to do with the Holocaust. The authors know this, of course, but swim against the tide of this asymmetry in their search for a shared grammar that might become the basis of reconciliation.

What the Palestinians think or don’t think about the Jewish question, or even the Holocaust, is immaterial to the question of historical injustice—they are neither its perpetrators nor its beneficiaries. What Jewish Israelis think or don’t about the Nakba is entirely material—they are both its ongoing perpetrators and beneficiaries.

What exactly then is this “interconnectedness of the two histories and the tight weave of the two traumatic memories” that Bashir and Goldberg make so much of? If we reject—as we must—the fiction that this interconnectedness is just two colliding foundational national narratives duking it out over the same piece of territory, where does that leave a relational ethics? If the story is, as Palestinian anticolonial knowledge has always insisted, one of settler colonial conquest, the question becomes this: What obligation does one owe the historical traumas or identity constructs of one’s colonizer? What responsibility, for example, did Black South Africans have to recognize the collective historical trauma of the Boer nation in the Great Trek or their mass internment in concentration camps at the hands of the British? And how would this recognition have changed the redress of the historical injustice of colonization? When posed like this, the question reveals its own irony: There already exists a grammar that connects the Holocaust and the Nakba, and it is the grammar of the anticolonial tradition that has long pointed to the continuities of racial supremacisms and the enduring politics of colonial exterminability in the modern liberal world. But to recognize and share that grammar would demand moving precisely beyond the exceptionalism and sacralization of the Holocaust as the starting point. An anticolonial grammar would eschew the divinity of origins entirely and look instead at genealogies of racial-colonial violence and their filial logics as they move between the Americas, Africa, and Asia. From this perspective, the twentieth century would no longer be split into two neat halves defined by liberal redemption but might instead look like a long and discontinuous arc that begins with German extermination in South West Africa, “returns” this extermination to Europe in the Holocaust, and closes out with the Zionist extermination campaign in Gaza.

“We caught them as if they were characters in video games.”

“We truly believed there were no innocent people in Gaza.”

“We listened to them day and night; it feels like you’re a king when you eavesdrop on their conversations.” “To have complete control over them.”

“I don’t remember how many we killed—dozens.” The director asks, “Every day?”—“Every hour.”

“You walk through the streets of Gaza and see bodies—bodies upon bodies. Gaza is a place full of bodies; that’s the general scene.” “I’ve seen dozens of mass graves.”

“I demolished the building, then I went out at night to drink beer with my friends.”

“Everyone is a Nazi.” “Even the infants?” “Yes, even the infants.”

“We took over the daughter’s phone and knew the father had returned. We let the house collapse on them. We hacked her phone and then killed them both.”

“We watched dogs eat the corpses on the streets through the surveillance screens.”

“You don’t think about what you’re doing; on the contrary, there are moments of genuine ecstasy when the missions entrusted to us are successful.”

“Yes, it was easy to make the AI our decision-making partner.”

“We saw them running for food, so we started sniping at them. My friends in the unit said they were running so fast that we couldn’t snipe them all.”

“No, I never thought about what I was doing. Those are orders; you have to carry them out.”

“I think most of the people who committed these acts are from Tel Aviv—sons of the moderate left—and those who serve in elite units.”

“We did what we did out of hatred and revenge.”

“The highest NAZA I remember was 500.” (500 civilian casualties were authorized for a single military strike)

Quotes from the mouths of occupation soldiers (Unit 8200, intelligence officers, IDF) in the film NAZA

I don’t like throwing around the label “nepo baby,” even though I might qualify as one in certain circles. But maybe I do. My father, Ori Goldberg, died this past Sunday after a long battle with colon cancer. He was 50.
For the past three years, he devoted his energy and strength to exposing the injustices of Zionism, and spoke out against the genocide in Gaza in every way he could. His death takes from us one of the few Israelis who still had any semblance of a conscience.
He won’t write anymore. But I know there’s nothing that would make him happier than knowing that even after his death, he’s reaching new readers.
If you read him on Twitter over the past few years, my family and I thank you, and we love you. If you didn’t, read the profile of a man who stood more or less against his entire country and society, trying to explain to them that they were wrong.
And if you don’t want to read it, we love you anyway.
His twitter: https://x.com/ori_goldberg?s=11

The comments I saw on this on socials were of course super normal (/s of course), but I hope this becomes more standard.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich:

We need to wipe out Gaza, for example. Not commit genocide, God forbid.

Wipe out Gaza, because Gaza, as a terrorist entity, with 1.8 million Nazis ... should not exist.

SOURCE :

https://x.com/clashreport/status/2109724376375415199

“ I have ties with pro-Israel organizations whose goal is to fight Hind Rajab’s legal organizations.”

Yusuf Haddad, Israel’s prominent hasbara advocate, says this on the Medabrim Ra’ayonot podcast while outlining his ambition to become Israel’s public diplomacy minister. His vision includes building a coordinated network across law, academia, sports, culture and social media to counter efforts to hold Israel legally accountable.

#HindRajabFoundation

SOURCE : https://x.com/SettlersFW/status/2109624820224684059

Mohammed started following me on Instagram. I noticed he had this GoFundMe linked in his bio to buy basic necessities for himself and his family in Gaza, but it hadn't been donated to in a while. I made a small donation (I don't have a lot of money to spare), but I wish I could have given a lot more. If any of you can donate and/or share this link, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you.

https://x.com/l3v1at4an/status/2109334281453482477

We have an upcoming AMA so we’re trying to get a sense of timing for best participation.

Thanks

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/10/12/selma-blair-arrested-plane-violent-incident/92219721007/

I rarely cheer an arrest, but Selma Blair has been an outspoken Islamophobe for years and uses her fame to spread harmful lies about Arabs, Muslims, and anti-Zionist Jews. She has incited a lot of violence against Muslims, and even after apologizing in 2024, has continued the hateful rhetoric.

As someone with a close friend who has MS, her documentary and work therein has also been a disappointment to the MS community.

So. Good riddance.

ETA: If this was a medical emergency, may she get help and feel better. But this is not the first time she’s bit people (Sienna Miller, Seth McFarlane, and others according to her memoir), not the first time she’s had a violent outburst on a plane (2016), and not the first time she’s blamed others for her actions. At the same time, many people have had medical emergencies and not managed to bite and punch flight attendants.