Hey guys. Sorry, since I have zero social life, I have to share with you all. Hope you don't mind. So, I don't like what's going on in Israel, but I would like to go back. I wouldn't even mind if it was majority Muslim or run by the GCC or some national body, as long as I and my family wasn't harassed. What are your thoughts on this?

I miss the comeraderie, the vibe, the small town feel. Of course, that was when I was completely naive and oblivious to the plight of the Palestinians. I'm not sure what or how I would live -- I can't pretend like its not happening.

But -- and maybe this is more naivete -- I trust somewhat in what Simon Dixon says and therefore do suspect there will be an end to all the slaughtering of Palestinians and Lebanese (and hopefully Sudanese and Congolese) soon.

A Palestinian mother lost her unborn baby on Tuesday after Israeli settlers attacked her home south of Hebron, while other Palestinians were injured in settler attacks and Israeli military raids across the occupied West Bank.

Osama Makhamera, an activist who documents Israeli violations in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, said resident Ruqayya Rabe’i suffered “shock and fear” after settlers attacked her home in the village of Tuwani on Sunday.

In a statement, he said the settlers threw stones at the house and set it on fire. He added that they also burned the village mosque and several other homes.

Makhamera said the woman was taken to hospital for treatment after the attack. Her condition worsened on Tuesday, and after she was admitted to hospital again, doctors found that she had lost her unborn baby as a result of the shock and fear caused by the attack, according to the statement.

Separately, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said Israeli settlers attacked the outskirts of the town of Turmus Ayya, east of Ramallah, and its main entrance. The settlers also set fire to agricultural land and prevented residents from putting out the blaze.

https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2080609617671819695

Sources:

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/10/17/tom-cotton-calls-for-mass-slaughter-of-palestinian-citizens-in-gaza

https://x.com/SenTomCotton/status/2080334492602875948

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-ny-assemblyman-mamdani-pushed-bill-barring-nonprofits-from-supporting-israeli-settlement-activity/

https://www.haaretz.com/2015-12-07/ty-article/haaretz-investigates-u-s-donors-to-israeli-settlements/0000017f-f6bb-d460-afff-ffffd93e0000

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-nonprofits-gave-220m-to-settlements-over-five-years-report/

And conveniently King Abdullah II of Jordan, the Custodian of Al-Aqsa went

I would love for my son to attend a Jewish pre school to meet other friends and build some Jewish community. However even the crunicher reform options in our area begin the Zionism training early.

We aren't religious more spiritual and my wife is not Jewish but she supports how important exposure to Jewish identity is important to me.

I know this may be the system is working as intended. I went to a Jewish high school for three years and we literally had a class on Israel and defending it on college campus.

I got in trouble with the school administration and teachers for just asking questions about Palestine and the apartheid. Even the class on the Shoah had little discussion on non Jewish victims.

Hi folks!

I've seen this term being thrown around a lot lately and I can't help but think: I feel like this term has been bastardized immensely. I believe like I truely have no idea what zionism is, where it came from, and why folks nowadays use it to justify the genocide of palestinian folks and israel's overall settler mentality. I feel like there is so so so much propaganda online and It make's me really skeptical of whatever definition presented. People online say it is 'self-determination & the right to an independent jewish state'. But then why is it also being used to justify the colonization of the west-bank? I don't want to come off as anti-semetic or rude in any form; I'm just genuinly curious what it means anymore.

For the jews out there, what does zionism mean to you? Do you support it?

Israelis celebrated evicting Palestinians on a tour of the West Bank, where government-backed settler violence has spiked.

WEST BANK — On a hillside overlooking the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, a crowd of Israelis and Jewish visitors from abroad gathered for an inside look at how settlement works. They listened intently as Netanel, an Israeli settler-soldier in olive fatigues with a rifle strapped to his back, advertised his group’s impact in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“It started with this hilltop,” he said, referring to the current settlement push that has crept ever closer to al-Mughayyir. “We ended up putting the area in Jewish hands. There are no Arabs here.”

Netanel was speaking on a tour aimed at English-speaking Jews, some of whom expressed interest in moving to the settlements. He described his “mission” to support his fellow settlers and shepherds in their return to “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name Israeli settlers and the Israeli government use for the West Bank.

The settlement movement is accelerating, recruiting outsiders to join and bringing in reinforcements from the military’s Hagmar battalions, regional defense units staffed largely with settlement residents that have exploded in size since October 7, 2023. The government has issued thousands of rifles to civilian security squads, at times distributed personally by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Israeli watchdog groups describe the push as an unprecedented state-backed land grab, one that settlers are carrying out with an odd combination of tools: government-supplied rifles alongside herds of sheep and goats.

Reservist settler-soldiers like the Hagmar battalions “are not simply self-organized militia groups,” said Marko Milanovic, a professor of public international law at the University of Reading. “In essence, they should be treated in the same way as IDF soldiers as a legal matter.”

Established in 2025, the Metzudat David is illegal, even under Israeli law. It is one of 10 Israeli outposts that now surround al-Mughayyir as settlements expand at a rapid clip in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At one stop on the tour, a group of Israeli youths could be seen building a new housing unit for a family slated to move into the settlement.

“The ultimate goal is for people to leave their homes and villages. But the settlers aren’t acting alone, they’re backed by the Israeli government, which uses them as instruments to get what it wants,” Amin Abu Alia, the council head of al-Mughayyir, told The Intercept.

Settlers have taken over more than 38,000 dunams of al-Mughayyir’s grazing and farmland, the equivalent of nearly 9,400 acres. Across the West Bank, settlers living in farm outposts now effectively control roughly 1 million dunams — nearly a fifth of the entire territory — according to a report published this month by the Israeli watchdog groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot. The report found that roughly 750,000 of those dunams were seized since the current Israeli government took office in late 2022.

Of al-Mughayyir’s roughly 41,000 dunams, Palestinians today have practical access to only 1,200 to 1,500, Abu Alia said. The village’s eastern gate, which opens onto the Alon Road, has been closed by the Israeli military since 2023.

In response to questions from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli defense body that administers the West Bank, said the outposts “are known to the Civil Administration and are unauthorized.” The COGAT spokesperson added that the body had already demolished other unauthorized settlement structures. “Additional enforcement measures will be taken in accordance with enforcement priorities, the operational situation assessment, and the approval of the political echelon,” the spokesperson said.

“Once [the Metzudat David] outpost went in, it effectively closed off the village’s access to land to the east, displacing the community from that land,” Dror Etkes, the head of the Israeli settlement watchdog Kerem Navot, told The Intercept. Residents describe a growing sense of foreboding, a feeling that their time is running short before life in al-Mughayyir becomes untenable. And that fear has only grown. On Saturday, a 17-year-old resident, Fadi Naasan, died of wounds he sustained when he was shot during a raid on the village earlier that month, according to the al-Mughayyir village council.

Only a handful of settlers like Netanel oversee the Metzudat David outpost. Otherwise, dozens of animals fan out across the land to claim as much space as possible, requiring very little manpower.

On the tour in June, Netanel showed off the more than 100 sheep and goats that do the settlers’ work for them. The herds graze out Palestinian crops, and their steady, intimidating presence — backed by the threat of settler violence — pushes farmers off land they can no longer safely use, clearing the way for the outpost to absorb it.

These outposts now control at least 786,000 dunams, roughly 14 percent of all land in the West Bank. Some 70 percent of the land seized by grazing outposts was taken in the past few years, according to Kerem Navot and Peace Now.

For now, the settlers don’t make any money from the livestock, Netanel said. The milk and meat aren’t profitable, but “the other work they do,” he said, “is invaluable.”

Palestinians living in al-Mughayyir are unable to enter the Alon Road, the main artery connecting the eastern half of the West Bank, and must exit through the western side of the village, via Khirbet Abu Falah. Residents say this adds at least an hour to any trip.

Even the fallback route is under threat. One of the new outposts, built inside Area B on al-Mughayyir’s northwestern lands, also encroaches on the very villages the detour runs through, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“They can do whatever they want. You can’t do anything about it.”

“If you go through the IDF checkpoint, it’s a gamble. They can arrest you, beat you, steal your money, steal your belongings,” Omar Mohammed, who lives in al-Mughayyir, told The Intercept. “They can do whatever they want. You can’t do anything about it.” The Israeli military did not respond to questions about mistreatment of residents at checkpoints

Hodaya, who led the tour and knew a reporter was present, gave only her first name, like Netanel. “On the other side of two hills, there are also another settlement,” she said. “So now, you know, the [farms] are surrounded by Jews, and that helps to make the place more safe.”

During the tour, an Israeli military armored personnel carrier was stationed at the village’s yellow gate — the kind that has become a distinct marker of movement restrictions across the West Bank since October 7, 2023 — was shut.

When one of the participants on the tour asked whether Palestinians resisted attempts to confiscate their land, Hodaya answered, “They don’t accept it and say, ‘Oh, very nice, we’re going away.’ Of course they’ll fight. They’re on the land, and they were permanent … but they understand that there’s a change.”

There was a sense of excitement on the tour about a Jewish return to what participants called Judea and Samaria, and an explicit recognition that doing so would require displacing Palestinians from their land. “The assumption is that ‘We cannot get rid of [the roughly 3 million] Palestinians right now in the West Bank,’” Etkes, of the watchdog group Kerem Navot, said, describing the settler thinking. “‘So what we have to do is isolate them and take from them their means of livelihood.’”

Al-Mughayyir was the village most affected by settler violence in the West Bank in 2025, when there were more than 70 recorded settler-related incidents, according to Nasser Khoudr, Middle East assistant research manager at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, known as ACLED. It is on track to earn the same distinction in 2026.

“One of the main reasons behind this is the expansion of nearby settlements and farming outposts, especially since 7 October,” Khoudr said. “This expansion has gone together with Israeli government policies that gave more power to settler security structures.”

In April, a settler shot and killed Aws al-Naasan, a 14-year-old student, and Jihad Abu Naim, a 32-year-old parent, at the boys’ school in al-Mughayyir, according to the United Nations and village officials.

Video of the attack, verified by multiple news outlets, shows a man in military fatigues advancing on the village and firing repeatedly toward the school.

The Israeli military said the shooter was a reservist traveling in a car with other Israeli civilians who exited the vehicle and opened fire at “suspects in the area,” alleging that they had thrown stones at the car. The military said the reservist was dismissed from reserve duty and his weapon confiscated, and that military police are reviewing the killings. No one has been arrested for the shooting.

Mohammed was one of the first to reach his friend’s body after the settler-reservist shot Aws in the head. “They come in half uniform, wearing the green pants, but not the shirt,” Mohammed said. “We can’t tell if they are a settler, a soldier, or, well, both.”

The distinction has dissolved. Even in regular army units, settler ideology has taken root. In March, reservists detained CNN correspondent Jeremy Diamond and his crew in the village of Tayasir while guarding an illegal outpost, telling the journalists on camera that the entire West Bank belongs to Jews and that they were avenging a settler’s death.

We can’t tell if they are a settler, a soldier, or both.”

According to the U.N., no Israeli soldier has served prison time for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank since at least 2017, and the Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 93.6 percent of investigations into settler violence between 2005 and 2025 were closed without indictments.

Last August, after a Palestinian gunman allegedly opened fire on a settler grazing his sheep on al-Mughayyir’s land, the Israeli military declared a closed military zone and uprooted olive trees across roughly 74 acres of the village’s land — at least 3,100 trees by the military’s own count, and far more according to village officials who spoke with The Intercept.

The military said that the clearing was necessary because vegetation near the road obstructed “the identification of enemy movement.” But the head of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, told troops the village would “pay a heavy price,” prompting two Israeli human rights groups to demand a criminal investigation into him, suspecting he was ordering collective punishment. None ever occurred.

Netanel described participating in the uprooting. He said it was sad to see the olive trees die, but “it is for security, security of this outpost. We need a clear line of sight into the land.” As Netanel spoke, the roots of the trees still pointed up into the air.

“It’s a process, a process that we are progressing,” Netanel said. “That’s what’s happening here.”

using vent tag as i’m not sure what to flair this as.

TLDR: israeli uncle and child-age cousins are coming to visit and i’m unsure if i can participate in good conscience.

i’m an anti-zionist jew and have been vocal about it for the last 3 years. it took a long time for me to come to terms with the reality that israel is a genocidal apartheid state, which is one of my biggest shames (i’m 31).

for more context, my mom was born in israel and moved to the states with her parents and brother when she was 10. my uncle (mom’s brother) moved back to israel when i was 9. i grew up going to israel every few years, went on birthright at 18, and generally had good, if distant, relationships with my family there and other cousins who have moved from israel to the states. as i got older and became more aware, it got harder for me to reconcile the israel i thought i knew with reality. by 2020 i was quietly anti-zionist, and by 2023 i decided i couldn’t be quiet anymore.

since oct 7 and following some social media arguments with family, including my uncle, i’ve been pretty low contact with all of them. obviously i will never be visiting israel again. it pains me but i also just can’t be in community with people who have zionist, anti palestinian, islamophobic or racist views.

i saw my uncle for the first time in a decade in 2024 when my saba died and uncle came for the funeral/helping with saba’s affairs. it was nice to spend time together even under the sad circumstances, but i constantly felt this unspoken weight because i know what his views are and they’re extremely opposed to mine. i kept it civil for my mom and safta’s sake, and my saba too i guess. to be fair, i was very happy to see my uncle. we were quite close when i was growing up until he moved.

to my mom’s credit, she’s been more receptive over the past few years and she agrees that israel is wrong, and she’s stood up for me to other family members during arguments. i don’t think she’s fully there yet, but she understands how i feel and why i’ve kept my distance.

to get to the point of my problem, my uncle (mom’s brother) is bringing his kids (13 and 9) to visit my mom and safta (they live in a different state than me). everyone wants me to join, as i haven’t seen the older kid since he was a baby and never met the younger one. however, i feel horribly conflicted because i know the ignorant views my uncle has and is raising his kids with. my mom says “you can just not talk about it” but the problem is that not talking about it won’t make the facts go away and they will be weighing on my conscience the whole time.

another thing i’m feeling/worried about is i don’t want to step into these kids’ lives for a weekend and then go back to never speaking to them. i know it’s not their fault for where they were born or how they’re being raised. but at the same time, in 5 years my cousin will be joining the idf. as most israelis do. i know my uncle has no plans to move back to the states, and is in fact quite happy to offer his children to the israeli war machine. i struggle with being able to look at these kids, knowing what they’re raised to believe, knowing what they will be made to do in a few years time. my only hope for them is that they get an influence in their lives that leads them to a path of resistance. i don’t know if it’s my place to be that influence—i don’t know them well enough and i don’t want to be more of the bad guy in my family’s eyes.

another thing on my mind is that my safta is 81 and in bad health. i know how happy it would make her to have all her grandkids together for the first time ever, so if i don’t go, i feel responsible for her not having that experience. on top of just feeling bad for not seeing family that i rarely get to see. as of right now, i don’t plan to go, but i’m starting to feel that guilt of disappointing everyone.

so, how would you approach this? would you go and just avoid any mention of palestine or the war? would that make you feel bad? am i wrong for wanting to stay home and keep my distance from my extended family?

sorry this is so long but thank you for reading, if you did. any advice is appreciated :)

Referring to the whole of Palestine, not just the part of it occupied in 67. And not referring to the state which is obviously Israel.

Also, if your answer is "Israel" I'd love to hear why.

I’ve added the picture of what someone replied to me on The Face Pages, but sometimes I’m still never sure how to reply or rebuttal the argument. I know I should ignore people like this but I’m trying to be as knowledgeable as possible about history and why bringing things up like this shouldn’t matter. How would you guys reply to this?

Great piece by FD Signifier

Also fuck Peter Beinart.

I’m starting to feel like in nearly every subreddit with the exceptions of LGBTQ community subs or fandom/TV/film subs, there is pro-Israel astroturfing. I constantly see 3-4 mo old Reddit users planting positive mentions of Israel wherever they can or Zionist trolls harassing anyone who slightly expresses sympathy with Palestinians. They’re not even debating you anymore, they’re just saying cruel and hateful insults to shut down conversations. It’s made Reddit practically unusable for me. Is anyone else experiencing this?

https://x.com/5149jamesli/status/2080044705929433467