There is something about the pro-Palestine anger that isn’t really about Palestine at all, but what the entire state of the Palestinians represents. The protests are increasingly an immersive cathartic state of mourning for all the losses that many have to reconcile themselves with; the weakness and lack of solidarity and compact between a large bloc of countries that have chosen to pursue self-interest rather than pan-Arabism, the dearth of democracy in the region, and the lack of dignity and human rights that comes with it
A few years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war, when the country seemed like one that had buried its past of conflict for ever, I heard an interview on the BBC with a Lebanese woman from Beirut that has stayed with me for 30 years. She was asked if the country, then a flourishing cultural hub that seemed to take over the Arab airwaves and satellite TV almost overnight, had healed the deep divisions that fuelled the war. “They are buried,” she said. “But if you squeeze me very tight, it’s all still there, deep inside me.”
Perhaps it was still too soon after the end of the civil war, and that woman would feel differently today. But her words instilled in me a formative awareness that, no matter how dormant grievances are, they can still, under pressure, for good or for bad, come alive. Little flashes and large upheavals have validated that view, over and over again. The Arab spring was an uprising of grievances that several strongmen and deep states thought had been put to sleep for ever. But even as the forces of the status quo regrouped and the Arab spring was consigned to the tragic file of history, rumblings in places such as Egypt show that no matter how strong the crackdown, the threat of eruption remains.
The issue of Palestine is a constant. For years it can be forgotten, even closed, as it was by successive peace and normalisation treaties signed between Israel and Arab countries. But it doesn’t take much to open it again. The generations that lived through the wars with Israel are now passing away, and with them goes the lived experience that proved war with Israel was always going to be a lost cause. In their place, new generations knew Palestine only as a relentless injustice, one that they had to accept as a bitter inheritance from their forebears….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/22/gaza-bombed-starved-arab-world-watching-angry
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
No Path to Ending Bloodshed If Palestinian Rights Continue to Be Denied
Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)
Saudi prince slams Hamas, Israel with India praise: ‘Prefer civil disobedience’
Peacekeepers, Fatah or anarchy: what would follow an Israeli ‘victory’ in Gaza?
Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Really?
We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza
Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself
After the truth-shower 