israel

The Gaza Pause That Isn’t

by damagecollateral

They’re calling it a breakthrough. A triumph of diplomacy. The latest example of American leadership bringing peace to the Middle East, or some such hogwash.

Let’s cut through the victory-lap fog: this ceasefire isn’t about ending anything. It’s about managing the optics of a 77-year-old project that’s been running on autopilot since the Nakba. The deal everyone’s celebrating is really just a calibration—turning down the volume on ethnic cleansing from a scream to a whisper, dialing back to the pre-October 7th simmer that didn’t make quite so many people uncomfortable at brunch.

What’s actually changed on the ground? Let me count the ways: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Gaza remains an open-air prison. The West Bank is still a patchwork of checkpoints and settlements where armed zealots terrorize families with impunity. Palestinians live under a surveillance state that makes the Stasi look like mall security. And Israeli officials keep saying, out loud, with cameras rolling, that there will never be a Palestinian state—a detail that somehow never makes it into the “path to peace” coverage.

Oh, and Gaza? It’s rubble. Flattened. Block after block of what used to be homes, hospitals, schools—gone.

But sure, let’s pop the champagne.

The kicker? Israel’s already violating the agreement. Five Palestinians dead today. Aid trucks stopped at the border. The usual script. While Gazans understandably grab any respite they can get from the nightmare, the rest of us have zero reason to pretend this represents progress.

Don’t believe the hype. This isn’t Washington riding in on a white horse to save Palestinians from Israeli bombs. This is the U.S. and Europe throwing themselves in front of a runaway train – one they built, fueled, and waved goodbye to as it left the station.

The real story? Israel was about to become ungovernable for its Western sponsors.

In recent weeks, the global backlash hit critical mass. Hundreds of thousands were flooding European streets every weekend, not in scattered protests but in coordinated eruptions of rage. In Italy, the government was staring down the barrel of an actual political crisis. These weren’t your standard-issue marches-that-change-nothing. People were done.

Meanwhile, aid flotillas kept multiplying in the Mediterranean, each one a floating middle finger to the official narrative, magnetic poles for thousands of people who’d had enough of doom-scrolling genocide from their living rooms. The couch-to-action pipeline was real, and it was accelerating.

The imperial brain trust looked at the board and realized Israel had painted itself into a corner so tight that the whole regional chessboard was about to flip. That’s what this “peace deal” is actually about – damage control for the alliance, not mercy for the dead.

The American foreign policy establishment is engaged in a grotesque, self-fellating victory lap, pumping out grandiose “peace” announcements like a pharmaceutical company distributing free samples of Xanax. This isn’t celebration—it’s sedation. It’s a calculated dose of institutional Valium, mainlined directly into the cerebral cortex of an global public that was getting dangerously close to giving a damn.

The game here is transparent if you squint even a little: they need us to exhale, high-five each other about “getting the win,” and then zombie-walk back to our regularly scheduled programming. The pressure worked—actual, real pressure from normal human beings who briefly remembered they’re supposed to have opinions about whether we incinerate strangers on the other side of the planet. So naturally, the Blob is betting we’ll do what we always do: declare victory and go home, precisely at the moment when not going home actually matters.

It’s the oldest trick in the Washington playbook. Give the plebes just enough of a “win” to shut them up, then resume operations while they’re still drunk on their own sense of accomplishment.

Don’t take the bait.

The names of American mercenaries in Gaza must be disclosed

by damagecollateral

– “I think you hit one.”

– “Hell yeah, boy!”

The above is from a recorded exchange between two American mercenaries working with the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (HRF) as they shot live ammunition at unarmed hungry Palestinians seeking aid.

No; I’m not merely talking about Israeli soldiers. I’m talking about American mercenaries, many of whom are gentile, who have so far killed a significant portion, if not all, of the 800 unarmed hungry Palestinians murdered for sport as they came to receive flour.

These mercenaries are eventually coming home, and we need to be ready to bring them right to court. In fact, we should be taking legal action now against the GHF and working to incarcerate its Christian Ziosupremacist CEO Johnnie Moore. Human life isn’t something humanity can just brush off as some kind of incident in a conflict. If the death penalty came into existence for a reason, setting up a flour trap for hungry unarmed people that you helped starve then picking them off from the safety of a tower above is exactly that reason.

Of note, these mercenaries do not enjoy the legal protections offered by being active service members. Also, many of them signed up specifically so they can kill people with ease. This is evident by the fact that they shoot humans even as they’re leaving aid distribution sites. They know, and have been promised by their handlers, that they will not be fighting Hamas. They would not have signed up otherwise.

Yes, there’s a reason why the word mercenary is a dirty word.

You probably think I’m exaggerating, but if you’ve been in a conflict zone you’d know it’s a magnet for psychopaths from all corners of the globe. It’s one of the things no one writes about in war. Many snipers working in Syria, for example, were neither Syrian nor ideologically aligned with the side they were killing for. Locals working to scout out and hunt down such snipers have gotten used to the unsavory discovery that the sniper they’ve been pursuing for weeks is actually some suburban white dude from Europe or North America who is only there for the “thrill”. He’s bored of a life without murder. There’s a hole in his heart that can only be filled by seeing human heads exploding through a rifle scope. This is a very real and pervasive thing in war.

And the GHF makes it all “legit”. No need to smuggle yourself solo into a conflict zone and have to learn the terrain the hard way. Apply online and you get to satisfy your thirst for blood and act out your hatred toward “Muzlums” all at once! And if you have a chronic case of butt hurt from what happened to you or your comrades in Iraq or Afghanistan, you get to enjoy the illusion of reclaiming part of your lost manhood, too, by offing some brown people who speak the same language as those who gave you said butt hurt. Not only that, but you get to make a boat load of tax payer money to boot! Apply now!

The reason for the existence of the GHF is to upend the well organized, fair, dignified methods of distribution already established in Gaza by the UN and other humanitarian organizations and replace them with one chaotic, Darwinian scheme in order to humiliate Palestinians and spread chaos to weaken the resolve of Gazans. Many of the GHF’s mercenaries, and certainly all of its management, are fully aware of this and have signed up knowing that this is their goal. Surely some of them, such as the whistleblowers behind the AP report linked above, signed up genuinely thinking they’d be helping Palestinians, but the murder toll so far is too great and the reports too damning to give the GHF or the majority of its mercenaries any benefit of the doubt.

Enough is enough. These f*ckers need to be put on trial. I don’t want one of them to be my neighbor when they come back, and I’m sure most Americans share my sentiment.

To My Dear Conservative Friends

by damagecollateral
Conservatism. The fake kind.

I share your conservatism. Heck, I’m more conservative than half of you on the stuff you supposedly care about. My conservatism actually informs my worldview, which apparently makes me some kind of radical. Because when my conservatism sees over 12,000 children transformed into hamburger in Gaza, it doesn’t shrug and change the channel. It doesn’t wait for permission from a think tank to feel something. My conservatism—the actual, functioning version—makes me want to do something about it right friggin’ now.

My conservatism also tells me that if someone shows up at my door claiming they own my house because their great-great-great-grandfather’s cousin’s neighbor maybe lived here three millennia ago, I’m not handing over the keys. I’m reaching for the gun you people won’t shut up about. And if they start “mowing the lawn”—that’s the term, by the way, that’s what they call it—slaughtering my family and turning me into a refugee, you bet your bum I’m using violence.

Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t? You, with your Gadsden flags and your Toby Keith ringtones and your entire personality built around the Second Amendment, you’re going to lecture me about “peaceful resistance” while your kids are getting vaporized? Please. Spare me the performance.

My conservatism puts me on the side of people who don’t surrender their homes to satisfy someone else’s delusional sense of divine real estate entitlement. My conservatism tells me I don’t owe reparations for some Bronze Age exodus that may or may not have happened when people were still figuring out the wheel. That’s conservatism. Or it used to be.

My conservatism makes my blood pressure spike when I watch foreign lobbies actively work to abolish my First Amendment rights—making it literally illegal to boycott a country or criticize an ideology. They’re doing this right now, in state legislatures, in Congress, attaching it to highway bills like a tumor. How’s your conservatism handling that? Or does it only activate when someone says “Happy Holidays”?

My conservatism believes in fiscal responsibility, which is apparently now a fringe position. So when we’re shoveling tens of billions to a government conducting a livestreamed genocide while Americans can’t afford insulin and cops are working second jobs at Walmart, my conservatism gets twitchy. Does yours? Or is yours only concerned with deficits when a Democrat’s in office?

So here’s my question: when does your conservatism kick in? What’s the activation code? Do you need Tucker Carlson to say it’s okay first? Or did you buy some premium version of conservatism that only works when it’s convenient, that somehow malfunctions every time it might cost you something real? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re running a demo version that only boots up when the TV tells it to.

How you know Israel is doomed

by damagecollateral

You know it by the renewed reminders of Israel’s origins. Every time the Palestinian strife is in the news, a lot of the online educational content among Palestine supporters (which is most people around the world and most social media influencers) is about what happened in 1948 and about how Zionism began in the 1800s.

That is to say, the historical examination does not stop at how Israel has been illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. No, it almost unfailingly goes back to Israel’s establishing. In other words, the very legality of the existence of Israel is always being subjected to scrutiny.

This is profound. Consider over 7 decades of complete Western acceptance of Israel, journalistic complicity and endorsement, billions spent to prop up and maintain Israel, countless tours for Westerners hosted by Israel, military and intelligence complete integration with the West, thorough corporate endorsement.. All of that, and yet Israel’s very right to exist keeps being reevaluated.

By now, it’s safe to say that this reevaluation will never go away so long as Israel is in existence.

If I were a philosopher, I would be fascinated by this. It is a strong example of the universality and permanence of certain moral values. Despite all efforts, time lapsed, and all attempts at revising history by erasing all mention of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-1948, the establishment of Israel never became right, Israel remains an uneasy anomaly and the truth about Israel’s founding could never be concealed. The validity of Israel’s founding is always being questioned and even lamented among large swaths of intellectuals in the West.

To be fair, though, there are factors without which this renewed examination of Israel’s establishing may not take place. If, for hypothetical example, there were no Palestinian resistance, if said resistance were too meager to be of much significance, if Palestinians were not as numerous, if Palestinians were not relatively homogenous culturally, if Palestinians were not relatively universally oppressed, the balance may have tipped in favor of Israel being an easy fit into the collective conscience of the world.

Regardless of the causes and factors, the end result is the same. Israel’s right to exist is always in question despite all efforts, and that’s astonishing and damning at the same time.

American foreign policy strategists should start to envision a future without Israel

by damagecollateral

It should have never made sense. A country created by importing foreigners to steal the lands of the locals and ethnically cleanse them, and in the heart of the Muslim world? On one of Muslims’ main holy places?

Just thinking about the idea feels exhaustingly anti laws of nature. Whoever thought it would work for long cannot have been thinking clearly. If I had to guess, I’d say it was power drunkenness. What we’ve been seeing since 10/7 (and for most of the year in the West Bank) is not some glitch in the code. It’s not an anomalous breakaway event that needs to be corrected so we can go back to the same old program. Rather, what we’re witnessing is the only possible natural consequence for this unnatural project called Israel.

Israel is the way we chose to treat Muslims in the East Mediterranean. The question I keep asking myself is: why did we in America choose to treat Muslims based on a European narrative? Why did we have to transfer Europe’s Crusader baggage into our mindset? After all, it was Muslims in Morocco who were the first to recognize the US after its independence. In fact, Muslim sentiments were in favor of the US since Americans revolted against, and gained independence from, an enemy of Muslims called Britain. Muslims loved the American ideal of freedom from oppression and, after our independence, welcomed our convoys and embassies with open arms.

So why, then, did we decide that we need to stick this thing called Israel as our colonial outpost in the heart of the Muslim world to keep Muslims under our boots? Which brilliant think tank came up with that one?

It could have been much different. We could have chosen to have the whole Muslim world be our friends. Things could have been much more peaceful even without us losing our power or influence in the world. But instead we chose to create an entity that would upend world peace for decades, spend billions to preserve it, and have the planet witness so many wars and conflicts because of it.

Why?

To what end? That is the question that needs to be on the minds of American foreign policy makers. How did the idea that Israel is good for us come to be and how is it actually good for us? It’s ok to rethink basic questions like that every now and then, and for us, it’s about time we do so.

Palestinians may be the most oppressed, but the most manipulated and mislead are Jews

by damagecollateral

In July, President Biden said in a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “If there wasn’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one“, and Jews around the world need to understand the implications of this revealing statement.

Jews have long been manipulated into thinking that it is they and their lobbies that have a strong influence on Washington; that Washington is, to some degree, under their control. Many non-Jews around the world have also been manipulated to believe the same. The narrative of a “powerful Jewish lobby” that “controls Western powers” is quite pervasive in many societies. While there is some truth to that narrative, it is only because Israel’s presence is seen as a strategic benefit for Western powers. What Jews need to understand is that Israel benefits Western powers much more than it benefits Jews. In fact, those who pay the highest price for the West’s insistence on the preservation of Israel are Palestinians and Jews.

The billions of American taxpayer dollars that go to Israel each year aren’t some sort of charity or gift that is given out of an emotional commitment. That money is actually a lucrative investment by the US that brings hefty returns. If there were no Israel, America would have to pay billions of dollars more for maintaining several aircraft carriers that would be needed in the region, only without the intelligence, weapons, and technology benefits that Israel provides in return.

Meanwhile, nearly all of the damage incurred upon Israeli Jews from having to contend with Palestinian and other regional enemies is suffered by those Israelis alone. America and its allies cheer on Israel and send all kinds of aid (as an investment, as they benefit greatly from Israeli services) but suffer almost none of the human and security losses suffered by Israeli Jews. At some point Jews need to start wondering if America would ever send its own soldiers to fight Palestinians on the ground instead of using Jews as canon fodder to preserve its interests. At some point, Jews need to ask themselves what it is exactly they are gaining from all of this.

Any insinuation that Hamas’ recent attack is unprovoked or disproportionate is either hopelessly ignorant or extremely supremacist

by damagecollateral

So yeah, Hamas’ ongoing attack is shockingly massive even to Palestinians themselves. But if you’ve been following the Palestinian struggle from the inception of Israel to the ongoing attacks on Gaza and the West Bank to the home and land confiscations to the daily humiliation and subjugation of Palestinians to the constant encroachments on Muslim holy grounds, Hamas’ ongoing attack compared to what Israel does is like a drop of ink in a tank of blood.

You can compare however you wish. Civilian casualties? Let’s not even go there. Frivolous imprisonment without charge? Even for minors? Hamas keeps a few captives for exchange negotiations while Israel has a whole prison system for Palestinian resistors. Deliberate targeting of schools, shelters, hospitals, and places of worship? Israel has done all of that while Hamas hasn’t (they’ve leveled seven mosques in Gaza in the last 48 hours). Daily humiliation and subjugation of an entire population and reducing them to dwellers of an open air prison? That’s Israel’s line of work, not Hamas’. Use of white phosphorus and cluster bombs on civilians? Israel did it. Hamas did not. Economic and agricultural sabotage? Israel did it. Hamas didn’t.

If you’ve been following things, you know that the list goes on. And if you’ve been following things, you know that the damage Hamas has incurred is literally nothing compared to Israel.

Now, if someone has indeed been informed of Israel’s actions but still chooses to be outraged by Hamas’ ongoing attack then excuse my French, but that’s an extreme case of supremacism. I don’t have to explain why this is the case but I will exercise my right to judge that person’s world view and to treat it accordingly.

I just ask that such people acknowledge and embrace their own supremacism. I hope they can reach the courage to be open about it. After all, being supremacist and honest is better than being supremacist and dishonest. I wish they would just say that Palestinian/Muslim lives are worth less than Israeli/Jewish ones. The world can see their supremacy pretty clearly, so their dishonesty is only making them look worse. Being honest might be a minor upgrade.