Jasper. they/them. Canadian grad student & museum curator, nonbinary bisexual, recon pagan. I try to tag consistently but often forget - feel free to message me if you need something tagged!
sideblog: @ofbonesandblood
twitter: @thumoleonta
There is still hope. Say it out loud. Palestine will be free. The Palestinian people will celebrate their culture and heritage with each other. We will love and be loved. Do not fall into the trap of despair.
i really would like other americans to understand that american foreign policy choices are not an abstract hypothetical thing. they determine whether people live or die. they determine the outcome of millions of lives of the people who live in places the us has invaded and couped and exploited. and what the us does and says influences the decisions close us allies make. you should care more that american politicians and american mainstream media are generally united on violent imperialist policy and see this as the primary contraction in our society that we have to combat. americans only think this is a secondary political issue because they dont see the negative outcomes up close. they only, and in alienated form, experience the positive outcomes, like cheaper imperial spoils and a stronger war economy
its also ahistorical to claim that european states are “not siding against isr because they don’t want to look antisemitic” governments do not care about that even though liberal norms might have convinced you they do. they’re siding with isr in droves because it is in line with their own political and economic interests, i.e., continuing to have a militarized outpost in the middle east through which they can run intelligence and exercise some degree of control over the rest of the region. they are not random accounts on twitter who don’t want to be “accused of being problematic”
yiddish theatre, yiddish newspapers and other yiddish cultural stuff was illegal in israel for years and actively discouraged and attempted to make obsolete, yiddish lectures were disrupted and the israeli state translated the testimonies of holocaust survivors to hebrew rather than keep them in yiddish (the language spoken by most jewish holocaust survivors) but tell me more about how israel and zionism are saving jews and making jewish cultural identity stronger rather than destroying and devaluing jewish diasporic culture 🤔
reminder that Jews from North Africa and West Asia also often spoke dialects of Judeo-Arabic as their first language and this is still heavily repressed by the Israeli state in an effort to distance Arab Jews from Palestinians and other non-Jewish Arabs
Moreover, only after the Yom Kippur war Israel allowed Holocaust survivors to openly speak about their experiences. Between 48’ and the 70’s, there was no support nor sympathy for Holocaust survivors. They were seen as weak, a “perfect example” for what a Jew or zionist shouldn’t be. The Holocaust survivors were just used as a reason to spread and justify the zionist ideology
also around 1/3 of holocaust survivors in israel live in poverty and israelis very vocally talk about how much they look down on holocaust survivors and diaspora jews
[Image description: two screenshots of an article. The first reads, ‘"We saw the Holocaust survivors as a very weak population,“ says Nava Ein-Mor, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1945, the year World War II ended. “We were very different from them. We were strong, and we were not going to allow ourselves to be in that position."’
The second reads: ‘Echoing the accounts of other survivors, Roth said that when she arrived, Israelis treated Holocaust survivors as if what happened to them was somehow their fault. "I heard many times that we went like sheep to the slaughter,” Roth told me. Yet, she continued, the Israeli government was happy to take money from the German government for the suffering she and millions of others endured.’
In capitalist political economies, illness is seen as a drag on productivity. Frequent or prolonged illness is often seen as disqualifying or devaluing an individual’s labor power. There is a rush to be over with ill health and get back to work as quickly as possible. Rest is scarce, and all treatment under health-capitalism is rationed along class lines. The ways we encounter medicine reflect this dynamic: care is designed around billable encounters, acute care is the most easily accessible, and our cultural imaginary frames disease as something which is episodic. The provisioning of medical care and the social determinants of health have been based on a system of triage that attempts to devote maximum care resources to those most able to contribute productively to the economy.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
the fact that we made it through the Cold War is nothing short of a miracle. I wish we talked about Mutual Assured Destruction more in schools
William Gibson once suggested that the days on which we almost destroyed the world with nuclear weapons should be recognized as international holidays, to raise awareness of how very precarious the situation has been at times.
If you would like to observe such a holiday, October 27th should be Vasili Arkhipov Day. During the Cuban missile crisis he was first officer on Soviet submarine B-59 off the coast of Cuba. When the destroyer USS Beale began to drop depth charges to force them to the surface, his captain decided that WW III must have started, and ordered his men to arm and fire a nuclear torpedo at a group of American ships. Due to a strange circumstance, the captain had to seek Arkhipov’s approval to fire the weapon, because while he was only second in command of the sub, he was in command of the flotilla of which the submarine was a part. Arkhipov, outnumbered three to one, steadfastly refused to give his approval.
Important context: Arkhipov had previously been involved with a nuclear incident aboard another sub, and cited the things he witnessed happening to the crew as one of the reasons he refused to give approval.
