"Israeli president Isaac Herzog insisted that “an entire nation” was to blame for Hamas’s actions, and that the idea of “civilians not being aware, not involved” was “absolutely not true”. While Rageh Omar reported on this for ITV News, it did not make the BBC or the New York Times or Sky News. Nor did it make most anglophone outlets. Ariel Kallner, in a now-deleted tweet, called for another Nakba on the Palestinians, repeating the crime of 1948 in which 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. “Right now, one goal: Nakba!” He exhorted. “A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” This was picked up by Associated Press but missed by most anglophone broadcasters and press. When Tally Gotliv, a Knesset member for Likud, called for a nuclear strike on Gaza – “Jericho Missile! … Doomsday weapon!” ­– and for “crushing and flattening Gaza … Without mercy! Without mercy!”, this also went curiously unnoticed.

Again, when an anonymous Israeli defence official briefed Israeli broadcasters that Gaza would become “a city of tents” where “there will be no buildings”, it was largely ignored. When Sara Netanyahu’s advisor, Tzipi Navon, said that it would not be enough to “flatten Gaza”, and that Palestinians suspected of involvement in the Hamas attack should have their nails pulled out, their genitals removed and their tongues and eyes saved for last “so we can enjoy his screams”, “so he can see us smiling”, that too was curiously overlooked."

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-equanimity-of-lunatics

- Unlike the impunity the police have extended to far-right mobs, left-wing activists are facing detention and arrests for much less.
- Ben-Gvir boasted about Haifawi’s arrest on social media and upon his release, accusing the presiding judge, who happens to be Arab, of being “an enemy from within.”
- Repression of activists is not confined by the Green Line. On the day of Hamas’s attack, Palestinian human rights activist Issa Amro was taken from his home in Hebron by settlers and soldiers, who arrested him for over ten hours. He was cuffed, degraded, and attacked. Two weeks later, soldiers forced him out of his home for having guests — Breaking the Silence founder Yehuda Shaul and a foreign journalist — which he was forbidden from doing earlier that week.
- In Area C of the West Bank, as many Palestinians suffer displacement by violent settlers supported by the Israel Defense Forces, anti-occupation Israeli activists who seek to aid those Palestinians are facing attacks. In the now-abandoned community of Wadi a-Seeq, as settlers held Palestinian residents at gunpoint and tortured them for hours, soldiers joined the settlers in beating, robbing, and arresting Jewish activists on the scene. After the violence ended, authorities wiped activists’ phones to erase any trace of what had happened. In the village of At-Tuwani in Masafer Yatta, activists were shot at by a settler as they were filming his partners bulldozing an agricultural garden.
- As early as October 16, over a hundred citizens had been arrested or taken in for investigation over social media posts, among them actors, singers, and public figures.
- The Israeli government is now considering laws and regulations that would go still further. Potential changes include making “excessive consumption of terrorist media” punishable by prison sentence, banning foreign press and ignoring freedom of information requests for the duration of the war, attempting to revoke the citizenship of those charged with supporting terrorism, and a for-now-shelved proposal legalizing the use of live fire on protesters blocking roads during wartime. The police also attempted to ban all political protests, but ended up backing down.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/israel-far-right-government-suffocating-domestic-dissent-palestine-solidarity/

This community mental health approach, which I have contributed to designing with the Collaborative for Community Wellness, consists of three interdependent parts. First, to relieve police of their responsibility to function as mental health workers, it calls for the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) to build out a nonpolice mobile crisis response system for the entire city. Second, it entails reopening the network of nineteen public mental health centers that CDPH operated until the 1990s to now function as crisis reception and stabilization centers, as well as community hubs for everyday preventative outreach and supportive services.

Third, TNT revolves around hiring a large-scale community care worker corps comprised of lay residents from Chicago’s most dispossessed neighborhoods who are then trained and employed by CDPH in dignified, career positions (i.e. with compensation, benefits, and protections parallel to those currently given to police officers). These workers will collaborate and share tasks with supporting mental health professionals in communities with greatest unmet social, medical, and economic needs. It’s this last part — a bottom-up human infrastructure for community care that seeks “mental health for all by involving all” — that’s the most essential, transformational, and currently widely overlooked element of the TNT agenda.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/chicago-public-mental-health-policing-treatment-not-trauma/

The repression isn’t just coming from the top — the government is encouraging and empowering mass snitching campaigns and mob violence against Palestinians. Israel’s student union issued a call for students to report any “incitement to terrorism or support of terrorism” they see to an anonymous Google Form.

Throughout Israel, Jewish Israelis are taking up this call, reporting coworkers, classmates, and friends for their social media posts in support of Palestine. The examples of this “support of terrorism” included a photo of Gazan children captioned “Israel’s bank of targets” and a post reading, “Please delete me if you delight in the death of innocents.”

Alongside police violence and snitching, fascist mobs have taken to the streets to intimidate and attack Palestinians and their allies. Two weeks ago, a lynch mob of Jewish supremacists surrounded a dorm where Palestinian students resided and attempted to break through the gates while chanting “Death to Arabs.” The students were then evacuated, a stated goal of the mob’s far-right leader.

Fascist mobs have also come after journalists like Israel Frey, who had to go into hiding after a mob came to his house threatening to lynch him and his children. And in the West Bank, armed settlers have shot at Jewish Israelis for documenting their attacks on Palestinians.

he Israeli state was increasing repression from the river to the sea. In 2021, in response to mass Palestinian protests, the Israeli police declared “Operation Law and Order,” where thousands were arrested across Israel (only 10 percent of whom were Jewish). During this time, Zionists who openly lynched a Palestinian in Lod were released by police on the grounds of “self-defense,” the state refused to investigate hundreds of cases of intimidation and assault against Palestinians, and digital surveillance increased. What an anonymous activist described to us as “fascization of the police” from above and increased settler violence from below prepared the ground for the even more intense crackdown of the past few weeks.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/israel-cracking-down-internal-dissent-gaza-idf-benjamin-netanyahu/

"According to the Sunday Times account, between 2017 and 2020 McSweeney failed to declare £730,000 in donations from a slew of millionaire businessmen, misreported and underreported other payments, and falsely assured supportive MPs that electoral law was being followed.

A 2021 investigation by the Electoral Commission found Labour Together guilty of more than 20 separate breaches of the law, imposed a higher-end fine, and rebuked the organisation for failing to provide a “reasonable excuse”. But by then, as Pogrund and Yorke observe, “money at a scale rarely seen in Labour politics had already changed the party’s future, setting Starmer on the path to Downing Street.” McSweeney (and through him, Starmer) has since avoided being connected publicly to the scandal – until now.

The old Watergate adage of “follow the money” may at last be shedding some media light on Starmer’s political ascendancy. The Sunday Times revelations are of a piece with Starmer’s own refusal to reveal the donors to his leadership campaign until after the ballot when it was too late. Pull at the threads of this story and preferred official accounts of Labour party politics over the last five years begin to unravel, with a far more sinister picture of antidemocratic plotting and scheming emerging instead."

https://novaramedia.com/2023/11/14/the-corruption-behind-starmers-rise-has-finally-been-exposed/

- Billionaire Contributions Doubled in the 2020 Elections
- 'Dark Money' Tripled in the 2020 Elections
- Outside Spending Doubled in the 2020 Elections

https://readsludge.com/2023/11/01/three-striking-charts-about-money-in-elections/

Nelle settimane successive, tuttavia, le cose sono peggiorate visibilmente. L’ultimo sondaggio mostra che Donald Trump supera Biden in cinque stati chiave del duello (Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan e Pennsylvania) e il presidente si trova in vantaggio a malapena in uno (Wisconsin). Altrettanto significativa è la frattura all’interno della coalizione elettorale di Biden per il 2020 suggerita dai sondaggi. Tre anni fa, gli afroamericani sostenevano Biden con un enorme margine del 78%: oggi quel margine è solo del 49%. Sta inoltre perdendo notevole sostegno da parte degli arabo-americani e dei minori di trent’anni, il suo indice di gradimento è sceso di ben undici punti tra i democratici solo nell’ultimo mese.

https://jacobinitalia.it/biden-paga-lappoggio-incondizionato-a-israele/

Hinting at a new Red Scare, Trump used a Veterans Day speech to declare, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. . . . We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

He also recently proposed reinstituting the “Muslim ban” to prevent entry to the United States from certain Muslim-majority countries, he has floated a plan to fire tens of thousands of federal employees on political grounds, and he has said he will try to end birthright citizenship, enshrined in the 14th Amendment after the Civil War.

Last week, after saying immigration is “poisoning the blood” of the country, Trump and his advisors unveiled the anti-immigrant plan for his next presidency, which would essentially turn the United States into a police state. In his proposed effort to deport millions of people per year, Trump would reduce due process rights for immigrants, dramatically expand internment camps near the border, and “deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states,” the New York Times reported. The plan would also “shift from the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.”

In other words, Trump wants to hire police and reserve soldiers unfamiliar with immigration law to conduct public mass arrests of presumed undocumented immigrants with little or no probable cause

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/donald-trump-mass-violations-civil-rights-immigration-authoritarianism/