A Palestinian-American acquaintance of my wifeās (who I didnāt know) died a few years ago, and when we went to her funeral, many people spoke about her dream of a free Palestine (also, not for nothing, she & her family who emigrated here are Christians, not Muslims; the struggle for Palestinian liberation is not only a religious one). Some of those people were Black Americans who talked about her allyship with them in Black Lives Matter and similar movements, and how clearly she connected the Black experience in America to the Palestinian experience for them, because thereās not that much daylight between fighting racial inequality in the U.S. and fighting apartheid in Israel.
In that light, itās not at all surprising that this topic resonated so much with Coates:
What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now ā to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. āIām not worried,ā he told me, shrugging his shoulders. āI have to do what I have to do. Iām sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didnāt write it, I am fucking worthless.ā
Article is a long read about what heās been up to for the last several years and how it ended up as his new book, The Message, which comes out next week:
The Message ā a return to nonfiction after years of writing comics, screenplays, and a novel ā begins with an epigraph from Orwell: āIn a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.ā Our own age of strife takes Coates to three places: Dakar, Senegal, where he makes a pilgrimage to GorĆ©e Island and the Door of No Return; Chapin, South Carolina, where a teacher has been pressured to stop teaching Between the World and Me because it made some students feel āashamed to be Caucasianā; and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is in the last of these long, interconnected essays that Coates aims for the sort of paradigm shift that first earned him renown when he published āThe Case for Reparationsā in The Atlantic in 2014, in which he staked a claim for what is owed the American descendants of enslaved Africans. This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, āI donāt think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.ā
The point is to eventually exterminate all palestinians living on Isreali (in their mind) soil.
this really is so underreported
I listened to a self-described āmoderateā podcast yesterday that spent one hour on this situation, two āmoderateā hosts (one of whom literally self-described as a zionist in the episode) and a āmiddle east expertā (who, it was revealed over the course of the episode, has a shitton of personal bias) and the west bank, the word āsettlementsā etc were mentioned a grand total of zero times. Complete propaganda
Everyone knows you canāt get to the good stuff underneath without blowing up the buildings on top (and the people inside them) first:
Very cool!
The world is basically a tootsie pop with civilians on the outside and Hezbollah and Hamas on the inside.
Guess itās time to update this thread titleā¦
Serious chance that weāre going to see WW3 now?
Geopolitically, Iran jumping into the fray here probably forces the US to back Israel regardless of how much genocide they do. Putin wonāt like that, hopefully his hands are too full.
Iran is giving Trump a major opening to exploit and if he wins, aide to Ukraine is done and Putin may look to push farther, opening up more fronts.
All that instability at least increases the odds Xi invades Taiwan.
The US isnāt sending troops to fight Iran, weāll keep arming Israel like always and they can defend themselves.
Yeah I donāt mean sending troops, I mean backing them up with no holds barred support instead of trying to reign them in.
Once Trump gets in heāll clean it up with a few nuke strikes.
Tough to see how you get a land war between Israel & Iran given the geography. Too many countries in between. Iād guess Israel lobs a bunch of missiles back? Although theyād have to violate airspace to do so.
Thatās the normal state of the USA-Israel relationship, though, and a normal way for proxy wars to work.
Itāll be missiles/drones back and forth, and it probably increases the likelihood of a more substantial Israeli ground invasion into Lebanon and perhaps towards Iran-backed militias in Syria.
Israel has to violate a lot of friendly/allied airspace to do it though. Like, Iran DGAF if they piss of Jordan, but Iām pretty sure Israel does.
I just donāt see Netanyahu not responding to this with what is at a minimum a proportional response, more likely an escalation.
CNN is discussing the possibility that Israel will target Iranās nuclear facilities and try to wipe them out, if not, perhaps their oil facilities in the Persian Gulf.
If Iām Biden, Iām pitching a next step where the US hits Iran symbolically but with enough advance warning that Iran suffers no casualties. Take out a couple airbases where this strike was launched from. In exchange, Israel agrees to stand down against Iran on this round, and we warn Iran that next time weāll let Israel hit back for real and the US will have their back. The US would also have to give Netanyahu some red lines, and enforce them by cutting off support when they cross them.
Itās a clusterfuck, and it seems like a US non-escalation escalation may be the only path to prevent actual escalation.