“this kind of attitude is ridiculous and disconnected from the reality of Palestinians” this is you engaging in an argument on behalf of Palestinians and their reality

Got me. You’re right. I concede the point.

What I should have said is “they feel they’re doing the right thing within their reality we from the outside we should not judge them”.

For most of the other points, I’m not sure I have anything to add, it’s becoming belaboured at this point.

On the Trump analogy I think you’re wrong. On two counts.

First: For the sake of argument only I’m going to call the Palestinians engaging with what you call liberal Zionists “defeatists”. I’m not saying i see them as such but let’s use this word to caricature them. So: defeatists are nowhere near the same thing as collaborationists. Even if we agree that Abbas is acting as the long arm of Netanyahu, that’s not the same as the defeatists who see a human connection in grief and want to chant kumbaya with Israelis who oppose the genocide and the apartheid. That’s nowhere near the same. It’s a world of difference between active collaboration with a genocidal apartheid regime and the hosting of common events with people who also oppose that regime. Just like Palestinians are not a monolith, so aren’t Israelis.

Second: Yes, Trumpists get a say on a discussion about democracy. I’m not American, so I’ll extrapolate to my own contexts. Yes, far right nationalists, stupid as they are, are my co-citizens. So long as they’re not trying to do a coup, yes, they do belong in a discussion about democracy. I can’t flick my magic wand and make millions of right wingers disappear, so finding a way to have a discussion about the rules of the democratic game is absolutely important. I’m not saying anyone should be conceding any arguments to them. I do believe in the cordon sanitaire approach, and more crucially I believe in populist policies to “drain the swamp” on which the fascists feed. But you can’t mute and block your way out of proto-fascism.

Anyway, thanks for introducing me to Ghassan Kanafani, I didn’t know, holy shit.

I’m not going to enter into a discussion about the righteousness or the feasibility or political usefuless of this or that solution as my opinion on the matter ultimately doesn’t matter.

I will only point to this key phrase of what you wrote:

The existence of collaborators and propagandized Palestinians who aren’t well read on their own history (as a product of the ongoing colonization) doesn’t mean the “jury is out on the debate”, they aren’t part of the debate.

Because this what it boils down to, right? Palestinians are not a monolith, even if you, a Palestinian, cast out of the story some (a few?) other Palestinians as irrelevant to recreate a kind of monolith that you can call “a very mature body of literature” (and whoever is outside that is “not part of the debate”, i.e., outside the monolith).

And here’s the thing. You can do that. I can’t. You have a “we” to refer to. I don’t. I only have a “you” (the plural you, vous, εσεις). So, I don’t have the standing to take this step and label Palestinians who don’t share your political vision as “collaborators” and “propagandized” even if yours is the majority opinion. Small example: the Barghouthis are calling for releasing Marwan Barghouthi as a step to revive the two state solution. Am I to start going around like an asshole calling Marwan fucking Barghouthi a propagandized collaborator? You can, without being an asshole. I can’t. Same with the people whose event the other commenter called a joke. You can call them a joke. The other commenter can’t.

So, I am also not going to start going around like a western asshole shitting on people on the ground who risk their safety, going against the genocidal Israeli right on a project of shared grief like this. In the exact same way that I don’t go around blanketly condemning groups that take on armed struggle to exercise the Palestian people’s legal right to armed resistance to occupation under international law.

And for the same reason, I’m going to call the other commenter out, just like I would (and have) call out someone for blanketly denouncing Palestinian armed resistance.

Yet you feel compelled as an outsider to speak with such authority and conviction.

I don’t claim authority. I do claim the conviction of my own ideas and a measure of consistency in their application.

If Italy accepts they will be made fun of for the next 50 years.

There is a difference between you making those judgement calls within your own community and us from outside picking and choosing good and bad Palestinians. The commenter I responded to above has no standing to condemn the people that pour their energy in organizing this event.

In fact from where I’m standing I’m seeing the genocidal Israeli right getting pissed off by this and trying to violently shut it down, so they must be doing something right. Such as:

The ceremony offered bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families a rare space to jointly mourn loved ones lost to the conflict, and to raise their voices in calling for an end to war and Israeli occupation.

And there is a distinction between goals, strategy and tactics. The right of return and reparations are goals. These kinds of initiatives are tactics. And you can meaningfully debate with other Palestinians their efficacy or on diversity of tactics but I don’t think the jury is out on that debate, such that would compel outsiders to declare something like this a meaningless joke.

I could quote to you parts of the article that explain why this kind of attitude is ridiculous and disconnected from the reality of Palestinians and Israelis that organize with personal danger against the apartheid and occupation but I’d end up copying the entire article. Go read it before playing the edgelord.

And his father.

No way the police are going to use this to further harass young people, especially from racialized communities.

And no way this will create pathways to link marginalized youth with organised crime and such.

You can literally solve the problem with a stroke of the pen you warmongering kusok derma.

Who says they are not a credible organization?

Are we going to see him holed up in an Equadorian embassy soon?

That would be funny.

I take it to be self evident. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom

I actually don’t. It is fundamental enough that I can take it as an axiom. If you want to claim its negation, the burden of the argument is on you, so go ahead and make the case against it.

The guy was an idiot. Doesn’t change the fact that Singaporean authoritarianism is fucked up. Being an idiot shouldn’t be a death sentence.

I was reticent to post this, given that it’s based off of one person’s hearsay. What tipped me over is that it is confirmation of stories also relayed by Palestinian prisoners in the fall of 2025 (linked in the article) about the goings on in the Sde Teiman torture camp.

Al-Jazeera by the way reports that the IDF soldiers who were at the center of a very public case of gruesome sexual abuse of prisoners in the same torture camp are returning to duty.

End the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime. Boycott Divest Sanction. Criminals at the Hague.

I would be more sympathetic if the UAE was not responsible for an actively unfolding genocide in Sudan.

That’s really fucked up.

Objective moral foundation: capital punishment is bad.

Edit: I think your framing of “white knights” and “colonial mindset” in this context is really fucking bad and toxic.

I’m a dual Canadian-EU citizen and I oppose Canada joining the EU. I’m all for tighter relations of course but there are parts of the EU legal and economic framework that Canada should not have anything to do with.

Most importantly, the EU rules for state aid make it impossible to implement democratic socialist policies that remove sectors of the economy from the for-profit market. The public options that new NDP leader Avi Lewis is proposing to correct market failures become legally impossible. The bold ecosocialist policies needed to transition away from the planet killing economic policies, predicated on infinite growth, become legally impossible.

Beyond that, joining the EU means signing on to the Stability and Growth Pact and taking up the commitment to join the Eurozone. The SGP would have made even the left-liberal policies of first term Trudeau impossible. The Euro structurally ties the Canadian economy with that of Germany’s and its sclerotic fiscal dogmatism. (You’re goddamn right I haven’t forgotten how the Eurogroup treated Varoufakis’ reasonable proposals with contempt and condemned Greece to decades of unnecessary misery.) Canada does not need them.

Of course, if the EU were to reform and climb down from the doctrinaire neoliberalism that underwrites many of its most important treaties, I would be open to changing my mind. But as it is, nope, nope, nope.