Still waiting for someone to counter my argument that, currently, Israel is the biggest threat to world peace, and if the world had an inch of morality, we'd all BDS Israel until it learns it can't act with impunity.

You have a pretty young country, that since it's inception has fought endless wars of aggression, refused to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Agreement, and neither confirms nor denies the existence of a nuclear arsenal that would be enough to end humanity several times over.

#Iran #Israel #Geopol #Geopolitics

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.

@Gerd_Brodowski
The discourse about it is somewhat misleading. This is because most UNRWA facilities are not in an area that is strictly governed by Israeli law.

This law was strictly about East Jerusalem.

#UNRWA is an organization that provides support for Palestinians instead of a non-existing state.

#Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and states that it should provide the infrastructure there.

(Claims. Provides? partially at best. This is a politically charged topic)

#east_jerusalem

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

@Gerd_Brodowski
Didn't listen to that one. The problem is that Israel does not want to repeat 2006, when the Lebanese side promised there will be no Hezbollah near the border, but Hezbollah slowly rebuilt itself, under various covers and with an enormous arsenal.

There needs to be Lebanese control north of the Israeli border and not #Hezbollah control. Right now the Lebanese military is still weaker than the Hezbollah one.

#Lebanon #Israel

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