Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • At the first checkpoint, we were ordered to raise our identity cards for photographing by a soldier, while tanks moved menacingly toward us. We continued on to the second, where the army separated men from women and instructed us to kneel. Then, an officer began to lecture us, blaming Hamas for our displacement, the destruction of our homes, our need to seek refuge, and the fear we are experiencing.

    He then told us that in order to be allowed to pass through the checkpoint unharmed, we had to chant slogans against the resistance: “The people want the overthrow of Hamas,” and “God is sufficient for us, and he is the best disposer of affairs against Hamas and the Qassam Brigades” (appropriating a line from the Qur’an). The officer insisted on the repetition of these slogans; only after more than 45 minutes did the soldiers permit women and children to pass, while men were kept behind.

    At the third checkpoint, a soldier told me that in order to proceed I must leave my bag behind — which contained all of my belongings, including blankets and clothes for my whole family. The soldier then told me to part with my children so they could pass through before me. I refused, fearing that I would lose them in the crowd, and he eventually allowed me to cross with them. Others lost their children and faced great distress while searching for them.





  • The only way to replace apartheid is with a democratic system.

    The West Bank is like an open-air prison where you send petty criminals who are allowed more time to go outside and work outside. And there’s no harsh regime inside but it’s still a prison. Even the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, if he moves from Area B to C, he needs the Israelis to open the gate for him. And that’s for me very symbolic, the fact that the president cannot move without the Israeli jailer opening the cage.

    There is, of course, a Palestinian response all the time to this. Palestinians are not passive and they don’t accept it. We saw the first Intifada and the second Intifada, and perhaps we will see a third Intifada. The Israelis say to the Palestinians, in a prison management mentality, that if you resist we will take away all your privileges, like we do in prison. You won’t be able to work outside. You won’t be able to move freely, and you will be punished collectively. This is the kind of the punitive side of it, collective punishment as retaliation.

    INTERVIEW: Ilan Pappé: How Israel turned Palestine into the biggest prison on earth

    Israel controls all aspects of movement, Water, Air space, Sea access, borders, Imports (food and building supplies), Labor exploitation, and maintain the apartheid through violence

    A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where people are confined against their will and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state, generally as punishment for various crimes. Authorities most commonly use prisons within a criminal-justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those who have pled or been found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.

    It is absolutely an open air prison, except you get in just by being born inside the OPTs with the only court you’ll ever see being a military court where even children can be taken from their families indefinitely with administrative detention


  • Hamas was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with sheikh yassin as the ‘spiritual leader’ in 1987. Those links go over the Intifada’s and Hamas in detail.

    The intifada was a massive protest against the occupation that was ongoing since 1967, so yes there would be no Hamas if there was no occupation.

    The First Intifada was a largely spontaneous series of Palestinian demonstrations, nonviolent actions like mass boycotts, civil disobedience, Palestinians refusing to work jobs in Israel, and attacks (using rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms) on Israelis.

    -PBS