I’m reading about how Israel, in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, deliberately replaced olive trees and other indigenous flora with European plants. This ecological disaster, which is now proudly hailed under the banner of ‘making the desert bloom,’ was done to 'de-Arabize’ the landscape, and to cover up - often with fast-growing European pine trees -the ruins of Palestinian villages that were destroyed by Zionists forces.
And I just need everyone to read this passage from Pappé, because the symbolism of what happened to those European pine trees in the desert speaks for itself:
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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappé (2006, p. 227-228.)
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappé (2006)
Just a reminder that Israel was built, by design, on ethnic cleansing.
When Palestinians, who by 1947 were used to their country being passed from one ruler to another, didn’t react to the UN partition with lasting mass acts of violence — they had, of course, no idea that the coming Israeli rulers would be the ones to force them from their land — the Zionist leadership were not relieved, but disappointed, as the lackluster Arab response didn’t give them the pretext (i.e. the ‘opportune moment’) they needed for their ethnic cleansing
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But, even in the absence of retaliatory pretext, the Zionist leadership still ramped up the violence; in part, by embracing a new tactic of intimidation:
In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.
the thing about the Zionist accusations of Palestinian baby-beheadings and wartime rapes is that even if they were true (which they aren’t), there is no ethically consistent way to denounce Hamas for those actions while still supporting Israel. if you accept the axiom that “any group that kills children/civilians or rapes women from a specific demographic is irredeemably barbaric and so is the cause they’re fighting for and everyone in the same demographic as them and anyone who supports them”, you would have stopped supporting Israel as soon as you learned how to use Google, because they have been killing and raping Palestinians for decades. you cannot claim to be taking a principled stand against rape and civilian killings by supporting the settler colony that proudly wields both of those things as tools in their ongoing genocide against the people you are mad at. Israel loves killing civilians as an act of ethnic cleansing so much that they sent weapons to Azerbaijan LAST MONTH to help them do exactly that in Nagorno-Karabakh. Israel is the schoolyard bully who never gets in trouble because they’re the principal’s kid but any of their victims who hit back with a fraction of the force are instantly expelled, except instead of giving out swirlies and purple nurples they’re running the largest concentration camp on earth and violating human rights like it’s going out of style
Israelis of any gender (yes including women) have been raping and torturing Palestinians of any gender—as well as anyone else who crosses their path in solidarity with Palestine—for the entirety of the Zionist state’s existence. e.g. see here:
(WARNING: graphic text descriptions of rape and torture)
one baseless rumor Zionists are pushing of supposed Brutality by Palestinians was shamelessly lifted from statements by the survivors of the 1982 Shatila and Sabra massacre, describing what Israeli settlers did to them
meanwhile, western media is reporting as fact every single unsubstantiatedrumor of supposed Palestinian brutality, including the one about “beheading babies”
Zionists don’t care about rape, or about the murder, abuse, and imprisonment of children (CW: child abuse, csa, torture). if they did, they wouldn’t be Zionists
even if Palestinians genuinely wanted to (they don’t) or were trying to (they’re not), they still could not inflict even a fraction of a percent of the gleeful colonial terror, torture, rape, starvation, caging, dehumanization, apartheid, and genocide that Zionist colonizers have continuously inflicted on Palestinians for 75 fucking years going back to the Nakba. but again, that is not what they are doing. they are fighting for their liberation
the other thing that makes this a moot point is like… okay, say Hamas is committing war crimes. what can actually be done about that? you can’t exactly ask them to continue with the decolonization but maybe ease up on the murders (what phone number would you even call?), so if you want to stop them, your options are limited to Israel either negotiating some sort of ceasefire by capitulating to Hamas’s demands or killing them with overwhelming military force. one of these is unthinkable and the other was always going to happen regardless of how “barbaric” Hamas actually was. two guesses which is which.
it has never mattered whether the accusations were true or what your stance on them was. they just needed to exist to flood the US news cycle as pretext for Israel to do what it was always going to do next (genocide Gaza). Zionists and other useful idiots buying into that narrative and using it to silence support for Palestine and criticism of Israel was just a side benefit; that support was never going to stop the bombs, and the criticism was falling on deaf ears anyway.
ant queen: iam so dehydrated and full of eggs can smebody get me a class of water…. ogf
the HUD in the corner of her vision at all times: larva3847 has begun to pupate! 😯 larva3848 has begun to pupate! 😯 antwarrior234579 has died in battle! 😨 antwarrior225680 has died in battle! 😨 antwarrior234236 has died in battle! 😨 larva3849 has begun to pupate! 😯
you would make this post
antwarrior214267 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214268 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214269 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214270 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214271 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214272 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214273 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214274 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214275 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214276 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214277 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214278 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214279 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214280 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214281 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214282 has been deployed! 😈 GREATERANTWARRIOR425has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214283 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214284 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214285 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214286 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214287 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214288 has been deployed! 😈 GREATERANTWARRIOR426has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214289 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214290 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214291 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214292 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214293 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214294 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214295 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214296 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214297 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214298 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214299 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214300 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214301 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214302 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214303 has been deployed! 😈 antwarrior214304 has been deployed! 😈
ever since reading addiction by design and vicious games i’m insane about the machine gambling industry. one of the most evil soul-crushing parts of this world
there’s a passage in vicious games where cassidy interviews betting shop owners and literally every single one of them tells her that once they started introducing betting machines (slot machines, video poker, etc.) customers getting violent went from being a rare possibility to being a regular occurence that had to be considered ‘part of the business’
and the pathologization / disease model of gambling addiction is so fucking evil too. these industries are spending millions of dollars to create open air spike traps and invite people to take long walks on the slippery path around the spike traps and when people fall in and get impaled by spikes they say “it’s very sad that these people had personalities that were so prone to getting spiked and are now suffering from spikes-impaling-them-disease. we have utmost sympathy and encourage everyone to walk responsibly around our giant open-air spike pits”
crushing excerpt from addiction by design that stuck with me
sometimes I miss las vegas. It felt honest in way nowhere else I’ve lived has. Honest in the ways it hated you and tried to kill you. Honest in that everyone was on meth or running from meth. Honest in that tourists and locals viewed each other with open spite and tried to avoid each other at all costs. Honest in that if you just picked a direction and walked all day and laid down to sleep you’d never get back to civilization and would probably die of thirst. You don’t get any of that in the pacific northwest
Everyone who lives there wants to escape, but it mutilates you, learning to live there prepares you to live nowhere else on earth. It’s a place where ambition goes to die. The casinos are all laid out to draw feet into their gravity, implosive forces on a tremendous scale. Twisting the orbits of daily life like an occult star. You walk into a convenience store, a laundromat, a pharmacy, and there’s always someone there up front, by the slot machine, just gambling everything away. Usually smoking, often retired. They’ll run out of money and just sit there for a while, not looking at anything. Every day feels like poison in the bloodstream, blackout curtains drawn against the oppressive light of the sun, wall AC caked with frost, dark all the time. Light is for outside. The lights outside are so bright you could walk onto the street with a book at midnight and keep on reading. Keeps killing birds, knocking them out of the sky. They used to detonate nuclear weapons under the earth, keeping their eye sharp for the end of days. They used to set them off above ground, too, and I imagine those people at the up-front slots, dead eyes catching distant reflections of hydrogen bombs, not even paying attention - pulling the arm, pressing the button, winning big, and going back to the busy work of losing everything
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