"The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine allocated the majority of the land to a Jewish state, even though Jews were a minority of the population and owned only a small fraction of the land. The war that followed, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, produced the mass displacement and killing of Palestinians. In that sense, the creation of Israel represents a foundational contradiction — an original sin within the supposedly rules-based international order.

Yet the political conversation rarely confronts that contradiction. Instead, it fixates on the ritual question of whether Israel has a “right to exist.” In reality, international law does not recognize such a right for states; it recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest. The question functions less as a legal inquiry than as a political litmus test.

As Mohammed El-Kurd has argued, this framing forces Palestinians and others into a rhetorical trap. Rather than addressing dispossession, occupation, or unequal rights, they are first required to perform a moral certification assuring the world they do not seek violence before their political grievances can even be heard. The result is a debate that substitutes abstract pledges for the material realities of military rule, displacement, and statelessness.

The answer to those two fundamental questions should start with the fact that the very order itself was founded on an initial contradiction that set it up for hypocrisy — and hypocrisy is the ultimate vulnerability. The system at once created this contradiction and is weakened by it. What comes next need not rely on false promises but on actions rooted in reality."

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/israel-right-exist-palestine-self-determination/

#Israel #Zionism #Palestine #SelfDetermintation #InternationalLaw

Laptop is Dell Precision 5690. Camera is a PCI ipu6 device:

$ lspci -knn -s 0000:00:05.0
0000:00:05.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake IPU [8086:7d19] (rev 04)
        Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0cc8]
        Kernel driver in use: intel-ipu6
        Kernel modules: intel_ipu6

Now I manage to get picture (non-optimal quality) from qcam. I also get the same picture from cheese and from gst-launch-1.0 pipewiresrc ! autovideosink .

Next step was to get browsers to use the camera. At first, both firefox (packages firefox-esr and the mozilla copy) and packages chromium refused to use it. It turned out that there were at least two issues:

Portal permissions issue: I had the following:

$ flatpak permissions devices camera 
Table   Object App Permissions Data
devices camera     no          0x00

(Nothing runs from flatpak. flatpak was a convenient tool at the time of writing the article below to handle those permissions. Anything better today?)

And of course, I had to enable in firefox's about:config media.webrtc.camera.allow-pipewire (and restart firefox). Otherwise I saw a long list of "ipu6" devices (all the /dev/videoN files?) instead of a single camera named "Built-in Front Camera".

I had help from, among others, https://jgrulich.cz/2024/12/13/when-your-webcam-doesnt-work-solving-firefox-and-pipewire-issues/ on getting libcamera to work with browsers.

The quality could be improved, but my laptop's camera is finally usable.

#ipu6 #libcamera #pipewire #DellPrecision #IntelIPU6

Laptop is Dell Precision 5690. Camera is a PCI ipu6 device:

$ lspci -knn -s 0000:00:05.0
0000:00:05.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake IPU [8086:7d19] (rev 04)
        Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0cc8]
        Kernel driver in use: intel-ipu6
        Kernel modules: intel_ipu6

Now I manage to get picture (non-optimal quality) from qcam. I also get the same picture from cheese and from gst-launch-1.0 pipewiresrc ! autovideosink .

Next step was to get browsers to use the camera. At first, both firefox (packages firefox-esr and the mozilla copy) and packages chromium refused to use it. It turned out that there were at least two issues:

Portal permissions issue: I had the following:

$ flatpak permissions devices camera 
Table   Object App Permissions Data
devices camera     no          0x00

(Nothing runs from flatpak. flatpak was a convenient tool at the time of writing the article below to handle those permissions. Anything better today?)

And of course, I had to enable in firefox's about:config media.webrtc.camera.allow-pipewire (and restart firefox). Otherwise I saw a long list of "ipu6" devices (all the /dev/videoN files?) instead of a single camera named "Built-in Front Camera".

I had help from, among others, https://jgrulich.cz/2024/12/13/when-your-webcam-doesnt-work-solving-firefox-and-pipewire-issues/ on getting libcamera to work with browsers.

The quality could be improved, but my laptop's camera is finally usable.

#ipu6 #libcamera #pipewire #DellPrecision #IntelIPU6

השלד של הסדר הקיבוצי שאני מכיר הוא ארבע הכוסות שנחלקות אותו לארבעה חלקים. מה שאני זוכר זה:

• כוס ראשונה: אביב, כולל עומר, וציטוטים משיר השירים
• כוס שניה: חרות. כי עבדים היינו בארץ מצריים
• כוס שלישית: עצמאות
• כוס רביעית: קיבוץ גלויות

הכוס השלישית: הצמדנו להא לחמא עניא לזכר הרעב שיתקוף אותנו אם לא נתחיל לאכול מייד (לא הצלחנו למצוא עוד משהו מוצלח).

אז הסדר הנוכחי שלנו הוא:

• כוס ראשונה: אביב. עם השיר ים השיבולים
• כוס שניה: חרות. עם השיר קומו תועי מדבר
• כוס שלישית: אפריטיף. עם השיר הא לחמא עניא
• כוס רביעית: תקווה, עם נאום שאמור לא לשעמם.

ומילה לסיום על הגדות קיבוציות, למי שלא מכירים את הז’אנר. בקיבוצים החליטו להגדיר מחדש את סדר פסח. קיבוצים כתבו לעצמם הגדות שונות, עם תוכן שונה של החג. ההגדות כללו את סיפור יציאת מצריים, אבל עם המון משה, והרבה פחות אלוהים. הם התייחסו להיות החג חג האביב, ולא רק חג המצות, והוסיפו לעיתים גם אקטואליה (כגון התייחסות לשואה).

יש אוסף מקיף של הגדות קיבוציות בארכיון האינטרנט: https://archive.org/details/thomasfisherhaggadot
הזכרתי כאן את:

• הגדת הקיבוץ המאוחד, 1971: https://archive.org/details/druck00118
• הגדת איילת השחר, תשי״ב: https://archive.org/details/druck00526

#פסח #סדר_קיבוצי #הגדה #הגדה_קיבוצית

Someone posted a such a nonsense "theory" about how come there are no new cemeteries in the US (spoiler: this is wrong). So in the short discussion they raised some points:

Land used by cemeteries needs to be close to cities, and therefore is expensive, as it replaces buildings. Therefore, cemeteries have been using the same land more efficiently: use parts that were previously unused, bury more people in the same space, and such. And of course: cremation greatly reduces the space requirements.

And this is why there are way fewer new cemeteries built in the US.

The points above are the ones raised in the show, that I'm just repeating. I'm not as familiar with what's happening in the US. I do know what's happening in Israel. Because it gives an interesting perspective.

In Israel cemeteries are run by non-profits, almost all of them are run by religious institutions. The Jewish ones are called חברא קדישא (Hevra Kadish, literally, "a holy soceity"). Each such non-profit maintains the cemetery. It is funded by payments people pay for new burials. But they have to keep maintaining the cemetery for eternity.

In practice cemeteries do fill up and new ones need to be built. This is a serious issue in the larger cities. Cremation is not socially acceptable by most people. It is also more expensive than other alternatives.

And the price matters here. Decent burial is considered a basic human right and therefore Social Security covers basic costs of burial. The cemetery non-profits still make money from selling pre-allocated plots (for those who want to buried next to their partner, or people who want to be buried near a holy guy).

Any form of more burial that has more graves per area, e.g.: a tower of graves, is way more expensive to maintain, and therefore costs more, even per single grave. Therefore those non-profits prefer to continue using the "good old" single-graves burial. And as it happens, some of them have quite some political power.

There is more to it, but suffice it to safe that land for graves is one of the long-term issues in Israel that will not be solved unless Someone does Something about it:
https://library.mevaker.gov.il/sites/DigitalLibrary/Documents/2024/2024.05/EN/2024-05-205-Burial-Taktzir-EN.pdf

[1] Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast: https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ . Besides the regular weekly podcast they also have a more casual weekly chat that they stream live on Youtube and also release to their RSS feed.

Sde Teiman detention camp was created shortly after the beginning of the war. A place was needed to detain the many new Palestinian prisoners. The civilian Prison Service wanted nothing to do with it. Sde Teiman is an existing military base near Be'er Sheva and the existing emergency military plan for a PoW camp was there. There was no plan for that many prisoners. The camp housed, at the time, several thousands of Palestinians. Some of them were Hamas people. Some weren't (this is where they were supposed to be interrogated, potentially).

While there were technically some plans for the camp, they were not prepared for the scale. And there were no trained prison guards. Therefore regular reserve soldiers were drafted to guard the camp, and a special unit, Unit 100, was created from volunteer reservists, to be the intervention force. They ended up more interacting with the prisoners.

There were rumors of misconduct in the camp, and military police didn't bother very much to investigate them. However, in some cases they had to: when a detainee ended up in hospital (which means that he couldn't be treated in the in-facility clinic) and doctors found signs of brutality, military police had to step in.

They already did this once in March 2024. And they we get to the events of April 2024 when another detainee ended up in hospital and an investigation was launched.

BTW: initially a sexual assault was suspected, but pretty soon the findings were re-examined and the allegations were changed to "merely" brutality. The MP investigators looked at video footage of the event and could clearly see that the event is hidden: the detainee was taken by 8 soldiers of Unit 100 who stood as a wall hiding the event from the camera. And afterwards he ended up badly injured.

So after a while the MPs came to investigate those soldiers. And at that point all hell broke loose. The soldiers did not want to go to jail. So they decided to overrule the MPs. Now don't get me wrong, soldiers overruling MPs by the way of brute force is a well honored military tradition, but not when done in plain sight.

In this case they called for all of their friends to come and help them. Not only for other soldiers in the base: everybody. Most of the people in Unit 100 happen to be settlers, and this is who they called. And thus not long afterwards there was a whole mob outside the gates of the base.

There was several politicians, including a (government) ministers and two members of parliament present. And they were heading the mob. Eventually the mob broke into the military base. Much so because the (civilian) police didn't do anything. Some of the MPs have managed to escape with detained soldiers, and a mob was waiting for them in their home base in Beit Lid (and again, the civilian police did nothing).

At this point a major outcry started in the right wing circles claiming that those poor soldiers did nothing and that they are being wrongly accused. Israel has already been heavily polarized, with an efficient propaganda machine that spreads lies of Netanyahu and co. and now that propaganda machine set its target on the (investigative) military police and the military prosecution, because it's obvious that that case is bollocks and why won't they release our heroes?

So at that point we finally get to Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi: the head of the Military Advocate General. She gets crisped by the right wing propaganda machine, including outright lies, merely for doing her job. And now she does her big mistake: she leaks the video footage. The footage shows the guards standing as a wall and hiding all the event from the camera. It is not a complete proof, but it shows that this was not "nothing happened".

It is stupid, because at that stage only the prosecution has that evidence, and therefore that leak can only come from a small set of people. And should could have released that footage in a simpler method: directly. she makes a further blunder by not admitting it was her.

Leaking the footage was a minor offense. The really bad thing she did was claiming to not have leaked it to various forums, including eventually to the (civilian) supreme court. This is something a high-ranking officer, let alone the Advocate General, must not do. When this was found, she was immediately forced to resign.

However, this is not the end of the story, because this affair lives on in the politically charged investigation to see who else knew (but I'll leave that one out).

All along, the minister and the MPs who broke into the base refuse to be interrogated regarding their part. People on the right try to shift the whole affair to be the issue of the military prosecution. And it's not. This case was very effective in deterring the military police and military prosecution from further probes into those fields.

Another thing to take from it is that people on our side are not always perfect, and that's OK. Tomer-Yerushalmi was right to press on the investigation. She was wrong in the way she leaked the video and later tried poorly to cover it up. But the fact that she was wrong, does not make our case wrong (and this likewise should apply on the other wise and to people we disagree with).

#Israel #Sde_Teiman

The stated goal of the Israeli government is a "complete victory over Hamas" using military power. And to release the Israeli hostages. Hamas basically tries to survive.

There are currently 58 hostages (not all alive) held by Hamas in the #Gaza Strip. Specifically, for all we know, they are probably mostly in an area in the center of the Strip. The IDF thus avoided and ground assaults into those areas, leaving them as generally safe areas for Hamas.

Therefore in the last year or so, Israel has not been getting much closer to defeating Hamas by military force. Those goals are very clearly conflicting.

And then again, people call for a "deal" to release all hostages. And ignore the fact that Hamas has just about no interest in doing so. Those hostages are all that keep Hamas afloat (That said, I hope to be wrong on that).

So basically for over a year we have a stalemate between the Israeli government and Hamas. Hamas won't release hostages. The Israeli government won't consider alternatives. And people of Gaza bear the consequences.

But it's not good enough to be a naysayer and just complain that things are broken. It also helps if you know where you're heading. The current government is actually very bad at this and there's not enough public debate at what we should do going forward. Steering the public debate our way is quite useful.

Furthermore, being optimistic is important. If you're busy fighting a big machine all day, you need reasons to be optimistic. Granted, those should not be of the unrealistic and fanatic type. And this is another useful reason.

(Note: written from my alternative account that does not have a limit on the number of characters per message)

#Israel

A picture I took yesterday at a demonstration in #Jerusalem:
https://tooot.im/deck/@tzafrir/114455460519068781

The text in Hebrew is a pun: הקטאר הטרויאני: the second word is the adjective "Trojan". The first word, קטאר, means Qatar. But sounds like the related word קטר: locomotive[*]. The colors are those of the Qatari flag. The silhouette is that of Prime Minister #Netanyahu.

Later on there were two actors, one with a fact mask of Netayahu and another dressed as a "Qatari Emir". I wrote before about this local #Qatargate:
https://cohens.org.il/social/tzafrir/p/1743448078.070798

Protesters are upset that while Qatar is considered to be a patron of #Hamas and generally of quite a few extreme Islamist groups, the Israeli government chooses it as a partner all too often.

[*] A bit of etymology: the word stems for an ancient word that is related to steam. As it happens, the the Arabic word for "train" is similar: قطار, vs. the name of the country that is قطر. It seems both words were coined in the era of steam trains.

So what did Netanyahu do in the face of a wave of protests: start a war. launched an attack on the #Gaza Strip. And later launched attacks on #Lebanon and intensified attacks on #Syria.

It did help to partially quell the protests. It did somewhat break their momentum and they failed to create a general strike or something close to it.

Note: this is certainly not the single goal of the recent attacks. It is also an excuse for some parts of the government of the more lunatic nature (BTW: Katz is not lunatic by nature. He just follows Netanyahu's orders to cooperate with the lunatics).

#Israel

Netanyahu is known for not caring about hiring people with lax morality (e.g.: Natan Eshel) and even criminal behavior (e.g.: Ari Harow). The crux of this affair is that some of his closest aids also ran a side gig, and in their side gig (among other jobs) did some PR work for Qatar. A country Netanyahu himself occasionally considered an enemy.

And then we get the separate issue of Eli Feldstein. He was investigated on a different affair. And then it turned out that he could not get a government job because he failed to pass a security clearance. Netanyahu still wanted to hire him. So he looked for someone else to pay his salary. And that someone ended up being a lobbyist for Qatar in the US government.

There is also another document mentioned, that is very likely faked: I'm not going to elaborate on them, but they were republished by Memri after being published by some dodgy French sources.

So far the main issue for Netanyahu is potential financial misconduct (which could potentially amount to allegations of bribe). The real problem is that Netanyahu not only did not help the investigations: he immediately tried to fire the head of the secret service (who was running it, because the police are a bit lax nowadays). So basically he behaves as if he has something to hide.

#Israel

However, the government (rightly so) wants people to return to their old homes and has announced that they will stop paying at the end of June. There's also a considerable "early birds" bonus for those who return by March 1st.

The town of Metula (along with two or three other villages: Manara and Avivim, not sure of others) had considerable damage from the war and will not be ready in time for that. The current plan for both Metula and for Manara is that by September most houses will be sort of ready. Some will require much more work.

Originally it was planned that those three municipalities will have their own special terms until the place is fit. Lately the government, wanting to cut spending, decided to skip that. This is he crux of the protest.

There are certainly many people from those places and all around the North who will not want to live next to the border again. After seeing how it was bombarded for more than a year and what plans (backed by enormous stashes of arms) the Hezbollah had there. But it seems most people will return.

https://furilabs.com/

I have so far not switched to it because it will take time. My initial impression is that it is much closer to a Just Works[tm] phone that I can actually recommend people to use. I guess I'll report about that later once I started using it.

There are two things I'm concerned about:

First off: mainline kernel: The phone is based on an Android kernel and a translation layer. This is simpler in the short run, but is more difficult to support in the long run. In the booth, the developer mentioned some plans (though nothing concrete) to switch to mainline kernel. I hope this works out.

But more importantly: what is the relation between this project and the rest of the #MobileLinux community? The @furilabs@fosstodon.org booth at #FOSDEM25 was in building AW (next to some interesting embedded stuff) and not next to the three other Linux-mobile booths. They were hardly mentioned in the Linux On Mobile talks track .

The phone itself seems to use something that is quite an up-to-date #mobian (#debian) system. I still need to figure out if I can also use it as a developer phone.

Anyway, it's good to see more people making Linux phones proper products. I really hope that their improvements will be shared with the rest of the community where applicable.