Support for Palestine at Glastonbury

[Finallyloggedin]

Daman Albarn

https://x.com/damonunofficial/status/1806744107181642172?s=61&t=nilGqPeurpC5xVqZAZdZog

Very true @SharonEllis

I think what is hard to take on all sides is the level of compromise that will be needed.
I think everyone is fully aware that compromise is needed but
@Shutupaboutthesun posts are only recommending compromise on one side. That isn't how you negotiate for peace

This is true of course. Compromise is needed from both sides.

@Shutupaboutthesun you keep using the term Arabs it has been highlighted to you by a Palestinian that they are Palestinians why are you not calling them Palestinians?

I'm not sure what's 'unfair' unless he thinks Palestine losing the war it started is 'unfair.' If Israel didn't have such a good defence system and the tens of thousands of missiles Palestine is bombarded it with were getting through there wouldn't be any handwringing.

Ignore the ignorant pea-brains. You are correct, ironically seeing as so many people like to use it as a slur, Palestinians along with the Lebanese have very little "Arab" DNA, 80%+ of their DNA can be traced back 3700 years to where they are. Here is a wonderful Ted Talk by geneticist Nathan Pearson.
https://www.ted.com/talks/nathaniel_pearson_the_splendid_tapestry_how_dna_reveals_truths_ancient_lasting

I can’t keep up with all the posts right now but I just want to highlight one recurring theme I am seeing - the suggestion that it is ok to murder thousands upon thousands of people because you say they are a threat.

This is wrong on so many levels. There is also a nasty racism running through many posts implying that Palestinians are not capable of running their own state.

Palestinians have exhibited such grace and dignity in the most horrific of situations. Really none of us can even begin to imagine how terrible things are in Gaza right now, (all the aid workers coming out seem to say it’s much worse, even than the videos we are seeing) and yet we see volunteers cooking, treating the wounded and trying to entertain children as best they can, with nothing. People trying to dig men, women and children out of the rubble with their bare hands as israel has blocked even basic equipment from getting through.

it seems many of the posters on here have closed your hearts and are not really witnessing the terrible, unimaginable crimes being perpetrated against this group of people.

There is such a dissonance between what is actually happening right now and what you seem to be focusing on.

The idf soldiers have shown themselves to be bloodthirsty and callous. They blow up neighbourhoods for fun, they record themselves and act with such impunity that they are dumb enough to upload it all online. Countless photos of them with women’s underwear - where they have ransacked the home of some poor dead or displaced woman who has fled and gone through their drawers - smashing up homes for fun, posing with murdered childrens toys. The list goes on and on. They are also allowing the Israeli settlers (or whoever is doing it) to block aid going in. This could be stopped instantly if they wanted to. They support it really.

When something terrible is bought to your attention, such as the awful actions of the settlers (who are provided with so much from the government and looked after by the idf, military police, etc) you seem to think it’s ok to say ‘they shouldn’t have done that’ and then expect everyone to move on. But this is ongoing, every day settlers are committing more crimes and stealing more land and homes. You say they are a minority but they need to be stopped right now. Why are they not being stopped by the government? The absolute opposite is happening, they are being supported. And therefore they do represent the government.

Also, this point has already been made but I think it is worth repeating - some of you on this thread are very keen to talk about how there was a “ceasefire” until October 7th, which Hamas broke. Again, you gloss over all the Palestinians who were killed leading up to that day. 2023 was already the bloodiest year for Gazans. Many children had been killed by the idf. Many more were taken hostage without charges. Yet you gloss over all that. Tell me, are these lives less important to you because they are Palestinian lives?

These are terrible injustices.
I do understand where the anger is coming from.
And I agree that the settlers do represent the far right government who support their acts.
Palestinian lives are as precious as all our lives.

I am very glad to hear that Glastonbury showed support for all the innocent victims of the conflict.
Glastonbury has always been a festival of peace and love and everything about the festival is about respecting and celebrating our shared humanity so I’m very happy that tradition continues.

Indeed.

Slogans, chants, same old, but lacking awareness of 7th October.....a music festival.... now imagine if that happened at Glastonbury.

This too.

Simplistic.

But we were a people living there calling ourselves Palestinians. Do not lie about that.

I'm not lying about that. Anyone who reads the sources written before about 1965 can see that the Arabs referred to themselves as Arabs and rarely used the word Palestinian. The Palestinian Arab leaders who testified before the Peel Commission called their people Arabs, the first book written about the Nakba does not use the word Palestinians once:

The Meaning of the Catastrophe

As far as I'm aware it only began to be widely used by Arabs after the establishment of the PLO.

In saying the Arabs had no institutions of governance in Mandatory Palestine, I was not claiming that they didn't have homes or farms or a right to live on their land. Obviously, they did and they do. But there were no states in existence at that time, and I can't agree with the Anti-Zionists that the Jews had no right to work towards building one there. Any fair-minded person would agree that the Palestinian Arabs also had that right, of course.

If you genuinely think this started with a massacre of innocent people at a musical festival (which I find VERY difficult to believe) I suggest you read a book. Or at least familiarise yourself with the history of Palestine and Israel. JFC.

It’s interesting how when someone says something about Jews / Israelis and the community says please don’t use as it’s offensive to us then everyone tries to stop using it and I’d not their comments get reported and deleted

here we’ve the opposite , a person saying that there was no palestines that they were Arabs. We’ve got someone from Palestine saying please don’t use it like that , my family were Palestines and referred to themselves like that decades ago and yet posters insist to call them Arabs and refuse to recognise what someone local is saying.

It’s interesting how when someone says something about Jews / Israelis and the community says please don’t use as it’s offensive to us then everyone tries to stop using it and I’d not their comments get reported and deleted

😂Yeah sure, that's what always happens.

Fits the narrative... there's no Palestine.

I'm old enough to remember when Jack Straw, the then Foreign Secretary, was forced to apologise for simply uttering the word.

The posts by @Shutupaboutthesun are revisionist history aka a rewrite of history by islamaphobic propagandists.

Fake facts include but are not limited to-
-The assertion that “the Arabs” invaded the Palestinian Mandate in 1948 with the goal of “taking all the land” instead of accepting the UN partition. The Arab League only intervened when over half a million refugees from the Nakba had streamed into their countries due to the village by village massacres and ethnic cleanising by Jewish paramilitary groups rejecting the UN partition and seizing land set aside for Palestine. This is stated in the Arab League’s UN cable. In addition they did not set foot into any of the land set aside for Israel in the UN partition but tried to defend the land set aside for Palestine with limited success.

-The statement that this war caused the Palestinian refugee crisis. As you can see the Palestinian refugee crisis (Nakba) cannot have been caused by this war as the Nakba started a full 7 months prior to Israel being formally inaugurated and the Arab League later intervening on a defensive mission on behalf of the Palestinians.

-The statement that “pre-October 7, Gaza had not been under occupation since 2005” is patently false. The UN and all other international experts state that Gaza has been under continuous military occupation by Israel since 1967.

-The statement that “Egypt did introduce a blockade after Hamas was elected in 2007” is also false. Israel implemented a partial blockade in 2005 which was then upgraded to total permanent blockade after Hamas murdered their way into power in Gaza.

-The statement that “Hamas had total control of the Gaza strip” is only true in the sense of a criminal gang having power within the walls of an open air internment camp. Israel still was the occupying and besieging power and as such were legally responsible for allowing a criminal gang to take root within Gaza and prey on the 2.3 million interned civilians.

-The statement “there's no way Hamas would have been able to build 500km of tunnels there [if Israel were occupying it] is deceptive. Hamas did not build the majority of tunnels under Gaza as most of the tunnels predate Hamas/2005.

-The comment “Turning the first bit of territory they actually controlled into a base from which to attack Israel was a decision taken by Palestinians. Building their military installations under schools, hospitals and mosques so as to deliberately turn the civilian population of Gaza into military targets..” is also mostly false. They never “actually controlled” the territory of Gaza as it was still under military occupation and total blockade by Israel. There is also no evidence that Hamas has had any “military installations” under schools, hospitals and mosques. In the early months of he current conflict, Israel attempted to construct proof of these allegations which were quickly discredited by independent investigative organisations and fact checking intelligence agencies world wide. Israel doesn’t bother with proof any more on this, they simply destroy everything and make the same unevidenced allegations that the school/hospital/mosque was a military target.

Then there are various Islamaphobic comments such as- “450 million Arabs” vs “7 million Jews” and “the Palestinian cause is an extension of the Arab conquest” In fact, the Jewish population has always been a minority in the Levant region and the Arab conquest of the Christian kingdoms happened in the 7th century so the Israeli military occupation and ethnic cleansing is the only current ongoing conquest in Palestine.

One could with temerity call the Israeli military occupation in the area a “reconquest” if the area sought aligned with the borders of ancient Israel and Judah as described in the Torah (although archaeological evidence says these borders and kingdoms are vastly exaggerated), but even the Torah’s expansive territorial claims excluded the Gaza Strip from its description of the bounds of the Promised land and the Jewish kingdoms of 1100 BC.

People who think that the Israelis are responsible for their own actions AND also responsible for the Palestinians' actions have a very skewed view of the conflict, IMO. Every barbarous action of the Palestinians is simply further proof in their eyes of how bad the Jews are. Look at them, what truly terrible people they must be, to provoke the Palestinians into doing such terrible things to them. The leftist oppressor/oppressed framework that the stronger party is always to blame and the weaker one is always the victim is something I will never understand. You have to distort the humanity of both peoples to make it make even a little bit of sense.

In any case it seems clear the Palestinians don't see themselves as the weaker party, not really. Temporarily weaker militarily, but zoom out and you'll see the conflict as the Palestinians see it: as a contest between 7 million Jews and 450 million Arabs. That's why they say stuff like 'the end of the Zionist entity is a mathematical certainty'. That's why they have never felt the need to compromise on their demand for the whole of the land.

@Shutupaboutthesun ‘s contributions to the thread are incredibly valuable imo, but for me, in broad terms the above is so important to understand.

It is ridiculous, I would argue racist against Palestinians as well as Jews, to cast the Palestinian people as so lacking in agency and the Jewish people as so malign (an ancient antisemitic trope - often absorbed by people who are not actively or consciously antisemitic).

We do need to zoom out geographically and historically. It serves nobody to assign a shallow victim/oppressor narrative to what’s happening.

they have never felt the need to compromise on their demand for the whole of the land.

This is incorrect too. At various points in the 75yr history of Israel, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders have compromised on the land and borders. Sadly, extreme elements within both sides have consistently sabotaged all efforts towards enacting these written compromises into the formation of two states.

Indeed.

Arafat and Rabin signed the Oslo accord in 1995.

Rabin was promptly assassinated by an Israeli.

There is plenty of evidence that Hamas embed themselves in hospitals, schools etc.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to say that because there are old tunnels, somehow Hamas hasn’t built, reinforced, ‘upgraded’ and used a network of tunnels to consolidate itself. The use of tunnels and civilian buildings ensures that warfare is of the grinding almost guerilla type which maximises civilian and IDF casualties. It’s a strategy Hamas is using and it works for them but it’s not Israel’s fault.

Rabin’s wife and many moderates blamed Nethanyu for inciting the assassination.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JhMF30VLZCA

There is next to no evidence that Hamas embeds itself in hospitals, schools and mosques.

I don’t think it is disingenuous to correct a flat out false claim that “Hamas built 500km of tunnels” since 2005 by stating the fact that most of the tunnels pre-exist both Hamas and 2005.

Tunnels and guerrilla tactics are completely allowable under the rules of war and do not inherently maximise civilian casualties. If an enemy uses these legitimate tactics, armies still have to avoid killing civilians as much as possible.

The leftist oppressor/oppressed framework that the stronger party is always to blame and the weaker one is always the victim is something I will never understand. You have to distort the humanity of both peoples to make it make even a little bit of sense.

I'm really not sure about this, in a moral sense. I have always believed the stronger party in any conflict must show restraint, and not do harm. At the point where the stronger party uses their strength to inflict greater harm, they are to blame. I thought this is why we are moving towards a social consensus, at least in Europe, that children should not be hit, the elderly and disabled should not be abused, the mentally ill should be supported, animals should have welfare rights, women should have legal protections from men etc. I thought this was all a recognition that those with much greater power to harm the more vulnerable must be restrained, legally if necessary. I have worked in different social care environments, and there are times I have met with aggression. I believe the emphasis is always on keeping people safe and never on quashing with more violence. The left does indeed believe in preventing abuse where there is asymmetry of power, but I think this is part of a general move towards a more unified and harmonious world. Humans are always moving forwards. It seems regressive to return to thinking in the punitive ways this comment suggests. It suggests a return to corporal punishment, institutional abuse of the sick, elderly and vulnerable, increased violence from men against women etc.

Perhaps the IDF is working to minimise civilian casualties, in the circumstances? here is an article which seems balanced (I have skimmed it)

https://www.justsecurity.org/93105/israeli-civilian-harm-mitigation-in-gaza-gold-standard-or-fools-gold/

It is challenging for the IDF to prosecute a war in which their opponents are terrorists who are prepared, indeed eager, to sacrifice their own civilians. The IDF has a responsibility to its own troops as well as to civilians in Gaza. Are they the gold standard? No. Are they making efforts to minimise civilian casualties? Yes. Is the loss of civilian life a tragedy? Unquestionably, yes it is and it is hard to read about ‘collateral damage’ etc even though this happens in all conflicts, and it is a good thing that pressure is put on states and armies to minimise civilian deaths.

The recently rescued hostages were kept in civilian homes.

I do think your statement about tunnels is disingenuous but I take your point that they weren’t built from scratch for the purpose of this particular conflict.