Bilal Barakat 🍉

RE: @Sui@troet.cafe

Kennt ihr den Spruch "hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue"?

Ja, die "realpolitische" Haltung "Der Angriff auf den Iran ist zwar eindeutig formal völkerrechtswidrig, aber ist das wirklich schlimm?" ist sogar EINDEUTIGER ein Abschaffen des Völkerrechts als ein heuchlerisches Theater aufzuführen, dass er doch, doch sehr wohl irgendwie schon völkerrechtskonform sei, weil Selbstverteidigung und so.

Wer das nicht kapiert, ist nicht bloß Teil, sondern Kern des Problems.

Human shields for me but not for thee. @adamjohnsonchi@bird.makeup

Is there even a single person who doubts that if Israel attacked Turkey, and Turkey tried to invoke collective defence under Article 5, the governments of Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. at a minimum would not only refuse to honour their treaty obligation but would actively provide material, logistic, and intelligence support to the attacker?

«It is no accident that what for many years was regarded as the only Israeli work of fiction to confront the Nakba was written in May 1949, when the graves were still fresh, most of the churches and mosques still standing. In their first years of statehood, Israelis were well aware of the ethnic cleansing they had perpetrated, the swift reduction of a Palestinian majority into a minority. They had seen the columns of haggard refugees. They had looted the furniture and valuables left behind. They had helped new immigrants move into emptied Palestinian homes. They had watched bulldozers destroy ancient villages, and they had planted trees that covered up the crime. Their own army intelligence assessment of June 1948 had determined that most refugees were driven out by “Jewish military action” and not by calls from Arab leaders to flee, as later Israeli propaganda asserted. Denial had not yet taken hold.

And so it was that Khirbet Khizeh could become an acclaimed and best-selling book when it was published in September 1949. The subject of expulsion was not yet taboo, and most of the critics didn’t focus on it.
…
Khirbet Khizeh is often cited as the pioneering work of a genre Israelis call “shooting and crying.” The term is a pejorative, though the insult intended varies from speaker to speaker. To the Israeli left wing, the problem is not crying but having shot first. To the right, it is the hypocrisy of crying afterward.
...
The narrator’s awareness of his own hypocrisy is among the great virtues of the story. After the expulsion of the inhabitants of Khirbet Khizeh, he agonizes over Zionism’s greatest contradiction—the notion that Jews have a right to return to a homeland after two thousand years, while Palestinians cannot return to actual homes after two or twenty
...
It took time for these events to fade from collective memory and later to be repressed. When in 1964 Israel’s education ministry adopted Khirbet Khizeh as an optional part of the high school curriculum, the decision hardly attracted notice. But by 1978 the TV broadcast of an adaptation of the book produced a public outcry.
...
Debates about 1948 are now a thing of the past. Most Israelis rarely think of the expulsions carried out in their name, neither the ones in 1948 and 1967 nor those in the present. During the last three years, dozens of Palestinian communities have been violently driven out of their West Bank lands, dozens of Khirbet Khizehs entirely uprooted. As this process accelerates, most Israelis look away.
...
Among younger Israelis, ignorance prevails. ... In the early 2000s the Israeli historian Anita Shapira screened the film adaptation of Khirbet Khizeh for her students at Tel Aviv University. They reacted with shocked silence, then asked for reassurance that what they’d seen wasn’t true: “Anita, it wasn’t like that. You’ll explain it to us, right?”

Such expressions of incredulity seem almost quaint now. Young people today would be more likely to dismiss the film out of hand or demand that their teacher be fired for showing it—no land acknowledgments here, not while there is still dirty work to be done.
…
Yizhar’s text, long considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, is no longer part of the curriculum. In fact, in bookstores across the country the Hebrew edition of Khirbet Khizeh can scarcely be found. Like the ruins of Khirbet al-Khisas, it has become a relic, a vestige of an unwanted truth.»

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/03/26/dirty-work-khirbet-khizeh-s-yizhar/

#Nakba

Israeli society is not alright.

«Once reports began to emerge of civilian casualties — especially from the girls’ elementary school in Minab, where some 150 children were killed in an apparent Israeli airstrike — the supposed concern for the Iranian people revealed itself to be paper-thin.

Shocked, I shared the videos from the school on my Facebook page. I confess I did not expect the torrent of hatred that followed.

I already know that, aside from a very narrow fringe, one cannot expect empathetic reactions to the mass killing of Palestinians; that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish public in Israel not only does not mourn but openly rejoices at every Palestinian death, under any circumstances. But I did not imagine that similar bloodlust would accompany the bombing to death of little girls in school uniforms, particularly after so many Israelis rushed to declare that it wasn’t the Iranian people who are our enemy, but the regime.

Within five hours, my post had accumulated hundreds of hateful comments, and [a] larger portion rejoiced at the fate of the murdered girls.

“Too bad they don’t close schools on Shabbat!” someone wrote, adding five laughing emojis to underline his delight. “Excellent, excellent, excellent, joyful and heartwarming. May there be many more cases like this, and soon among the leftists,” wrote another. »

https://www.972mag.com/2026-israel-iran-war/

Is it possible to use polymarket or whatever it's called to bet on literal biblical armageddon happening? 🤔

“If you'd like to witness human evil at its worst, come with me any day to the West Bank.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/03/12/evil-in-the-west-bank-david-shulman/

https://www.telepolis.de/article/Macht-vor-Recht-Wie-sich-Europa-vom-Voelkerrecht-verabschiedet-hat-11197158.html

Of course, it's only ‘quietly’ if you categorically refuse to listen to Palestinians.
@Gerd_Brodowski@mastodon.social