abushalom

אשלי ומיכאל מילנר, ילדיה של היידי לוין, צלמת ה"וושינגטון פוסט" שהותקפה אתמול בידי פורעים יהודים בבנימין: "אנחנו פשוט מזועזעים. ככל שאנחנו לומדים יותר את הפרטים, אנחנו לומדים על המחדל שהיה פה. מצפים לחקירה אמיתית, רוצים לראות מעצרים" #שרוןואורי עם @WexlerSharon ו-@rubih67

Yesterday, I watched Naza. I did not go to learn what had happened in Gaza. I am from there. I am one of the victims of this war, one of its witnesses, and one of those who have paid a price that will not end when the war does. I did not need a film to tell me how entire neighborhoods were wiped away, how residential buildings were bombed with the people still inside them, or how families were forced to leave their homes without knowing where they were supposed to go. Nor did I need anyone to tell me about the famine. I lived through it twice, with all its humiliations, down to the smallest detail. Or about the starving people who were killed while trying to reach what were so absurdly called “food distribution centers.” I know all of this. I was there. Read the whole Thread below : #Naza @yuval_abraham

The New York Times has become an embarrassment to journalism. Its latest hit piece targeting David Milstein is another example of a newspaper so consumed by its hostility toward Israel that even an American serving his country becomes a target if he refuses to conform to its preferred narrative. I have known David for many years. He is a man of extraordinary integrity, impeccable character, and fierce loyalty to the United States of America. He serves his country with honor, carrying out the mission of Ambassador Mike Huckabee and the administration. Apparently, that is enough to make him a target. What we are witnessing is a deeply disturbing pattern: anonymous accusations, damaging insinuations, and the willingness to destroy a person’s reputation in pursuit of a predetermined narrative. The parallels to the Dreyfus Affair are impossible to ignore. A Jewish patriot accused, his loyalty questioned, his reputation dragged through the mud. History has shown us where this kind of prejudice can lead. And the timing? David is about to get married. The willingness to inflict this kind of pain on a young man and his family, at what should be one of the happiest moments of their lives, is especially cruel. The New York Times seems incapable of seeing Israel or its supporters without finding something sinister. That obsession has consequences. It poisons public discourse, encourages suspicion of Jewish Americans, and raises profoundly troubling questions about antisemitic double standards. The paper that once claimed to report the news increasingly seems determined to manufacture a narrative, whatever the human cost. David Milstein’s integrity is not diminished by this attack. The New York Times’ credibility is. Shame on the New York Times. Shame on those who confuse character assassination with journalism. And shame on anyone who thinks that destroying a good man’s reputation is an acceptable price for advancing an anti-Israel agenda.

My thoughts on the 3rd anniversary of Oct7: “Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories,” wrote Amílcar Cabral in 1965 It's easier said than done. In the last 3 years, almost every conversation I’ve had with decision-makers started with the question “this is off the record, right?" followed by breathtaking honesty that startled me. Like the top EU leader I met in July 2024. After he made sure the conversation was confidential, he circled his tablet around the table with satellite images of Gazan neighbourhoods & said Israel was “wiping out” the enclave systematically to make it “unliveable” & force its people to leave. He then said 80% of EU governments wanted to let Israel do whatever it wished in Gaza. He sarcastically added "we're very kind. We send Gazans food and medicine in the morning, then send Israel bombs in the evening," so if Palestinians get killed, they wouldn’t die on an empty stomach and if they survive, they would plaster their wounds. He admitted that EU governments carefully and deliberately say “Gazans are starving or dying” instead of “Israel is starving or killing Gazans” because the latter would be a recognition of war crimes and they would have to do something about it. He said when he first walked into office, he was told to “look away” from Gaza and the West Bank. “You'll burn a lot of political capital, time and energy, and won’t get far,” EU leaders told him. His truth serum unfortunately ran out as soon as he left the room. Or the senior Arab diplomats who told me they knew when they pushed for Trump’s Gaza ceasefire that it was a scam. That the maximum outcome they expected from it is “more food, less killing, and preventing ethnic cleansing,” but not an end to the genocide let alone reconstruction. Or the Israeli former advisor to Netanyahu who told me Israel would not leave Gaza even if Hamas disarms. “We know Hamas doesn’t have any heavy weapons left”. He added “We have all the leverage, we have the upper hand, what’s the incentive for us to engage?” He explained that Israel is more comfortable with the status quo in Gaza than with the big changes attached to allowing the new Palestinian government NCAG to enter Gaza and take over from Hamas, decommissioning and Israeli withdrawal. Or the Hamas leaders who told Arab mediators behind closed doors that October 7 was a “disaster” & a “strategic mistake,” but still glorify it in front of cameras. Some of those leaders also said Ghazi Hammad “represented only himself” when he said Hamas would do October 7 “a million times again & again”. They laughed at his "embarrassing performance" in the Piers Morgan interview and said “he doesn’t have the language skills” and “shouldn’t be on TV.” Or the countless Israeli politicians who tell us behind closed doors they “support” the two-state solution but can’t campaign on it in because that would be "political suicide." Or the journalists from CNN, Washington Post, WSJ and other mainstream media outlets who told me horror stories of editorial manipulation, systemic bias, suppression of nuance, disinformation by omission, and outright parroting of Israeli talking points. The examples are countless. Snippets like this occasionally spell into the public domain either as leaks or when people retire from their positions. Candidness, the kind Cabral wrote about in 1965, is extremely rare in today’s political mainstream. “You ask me, if I had known on July 11... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not." These were the words of Hassan Nasrallah about the 2006 war with Israel. Only one senior Hamas leader, Musa Abu Marzouk, made a similar statement during the genocide “If it was expected that what happened would happen, there wouldn’t have been October 7.” Hamas then officially rejected that statement as “incorrect and taken out of context,” and said “The October 7 epic marks a strategic turning point in the Palestinian national struggle.” Romanticism is more politically expedient than honesty. “Escalation, in this interpretation, is not merely a political choice, but a harbinger of the end times, a spark of ‘divine deliverance,’ thus making sacrifice acceptable as long as it contributes to such a scenario,” Mohammed Madhoun, former Hamas minister wrote in July 2025 about the romantic language Hamas uses about October 7. “In this way, the conflict is stripped of its real responsibilities, and the catastrophe is imbued with a sanctity that elevates it above criticism and accountability,” Madhoun added. “Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel and going to the core of things” as Rosa Luxemburg put it “is the life's breath and light of the proletarian movement.” Imagine if those in power internalised this adage for a moment; if they were less paranoid about approval ratings, competition, popularity, careerism, self-interest, of if they drank some liquid courage. The Palestinian Authority leaders would tell us that they had long forfeited the Right of Return. “The concept of 1.5-2 million Palestinians returning to their homes in Safad, Haifa and Jaffa is an unrealistic concept.” Yassir Arafat’s advisor Mohammed Rashid said, “in slogans and speeches, we can continue raising the ceiling to this level because no one wants to incur personal damage [by saying otherwise]”. They would tell us that the peace process has always been a façade to domesticate the Palestinian liberation movement. That they are stuck today in the role of the occupation’s subcontractor and don’t have any cards of leverage to break free. That PA leaders have been tamed by Israel giving them special privileges (VIP permits, freedom of movement) and are afraid of losing those if they step out of the line. Hamas would tell us that armed resistance in Gaza has reached its limit and exhausted itself, and October 7 was a “strategic mistake,” as they say behind closed doors. Or that “[Sinwar] didn't consider all the possibilities... he considered the least harmful possibilities, but you always have to consider the worst one," as Madhoun the former Hamas Minister said in July. They would tell us that they made a mistake to trust that Iran and Hezbollah would join in their "multi-front war" and that they’ve been sold mere slogans. Western diplomats and politicians would tell us they are afraid about their individual careers and reputation and are being threatened, intimidated or blackmailed. As one senior Swiss diplomat once told me “our statements come from Tel-Aviv not our ministry… and when I protested about it… I was told if I keep speaking up I would never have a job again.” Or they would tell us “we made record profits in weapon sales to Israel” and that “Gaza is a showroom and laboratory to field test weapons, spyware, surveillance technology and population control tactics.” Or they would be more blunt and tell us “Palestinians are lesser people” and our destruction is justified in their eyes in the name of “progress,” “productivity” and capitalism. As a European diplomat warned me “some of our leaders want the genocide to happen because they consider Palestinians a financial burden; hungry mouths that keep asking for aid and money.” These truths would lay bare that Gaza, as Norman Finkelstein wrote in 2018, has been “betrayed by the cupidity and corruption, careerism and cynicism, cravenness and cowardice of mortal man.”