Scottish historian & art historian;
@EmpirePodUK
podcaster & Jaipur Lit Fest co-director. Visiting Fellow at All Souls, Oxford. Writes the occasional book.
First review of The Golden Road just out in the Daily
@Telegraph
- and it's a goodie!
"Substantial and extremely readable... The Golden Road takes a keen interest in the complex logistics of cultural transmission from India to countries separated from it by seas, mountains and
So all you cheerleaders for "the most moral army in the world" with your claims of "pinpoint accuracy." Take a look at what you enabled. This is the Genghis Khan model of warfare: total destruction, mass slaughter of civilians, complete eradication. Netanyahu says he has barely
This is what happened at the Nakba in 1948. Its exactly the same playbook. First the Israelis drove out the Palestinians with atrocities & mass murder. Then they demolished the villages & built settlements over the ruins. Then they denied the Palestinians had ever been there or
Israel is demolishing what remains of the houses, so it can't be restored.
This is a full-swing plan to destroy all houses in the north of
#Gaza
so that displaced people who were told to go to south TEMPORARILY can't return; this is same scenario as what happened in 1948 & after.
I stayed in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem for several weeks in 1994, while writing From the Holy Mountain. I regularly used to hear armed Settlers shouting "Death to the Arab," as they passed along the outer walls, smashing windows and breaking into shops. Now the Settlers
Utterly unacceptable. We are watching ten of thousands of innocents being slaughtered with no escape. Our leaders have completely lost their moral bearings.
This appalling
@nytimes
headline, which in an instant erases the 23,000 Palestinian dead in Gaza & the flattening of a metropolis as populous as South London, may win the Gold Medal 🏅 for most biased, insensitive and bigoted headline of the war, in a very, very crowded field.
I'm appalled by how many otherwise decent people see nothing wrong with this mediaeval slaughter of a trapped and penned civilian population- even as both the IDF and the Biden administration say that the actual casualties are likely far higher than the 10,000+ dead posted by the
2 million people are meeting the fate of inmates of a sieged city or a concentration camp but one under constant bombardment. This happens not in a forgotten corner of the world but under everyone’s eyes and with the cheerful support of the most respected and civilised opinion
Exactly what Israel did to 530 Palestinian villages in 1948 "so that they would have nothing to come back to." Everything the IDF do every day in Gaza is a reminder that Israel is a state built on the ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian inhabitants.
In Parliament today, the Prime Minister and then a Tory MP invoked Islamophobic tropes against me.
Rishi Sunak suggested I was responsible for Hamas and the Houthis. A Tory MP then implied I was "giving a free pass to terrorists" before pretending he hadn't.
Watch for yourself:
It is open to debate whether Israel's massacre of ten of thousand innocent Gaza civilians constitutes genocide, at least yet. But as these clips from Netanyahu's civil and military leadership show, there can be little doubt of genocidal intent. Here, collected on this link, are
A horrifying and blood-chilling compilation of clips and verified quotes from the current Israeli civil and military leadership calling for the levelling of Gaza and/or the extermination of its "human animals." After seeing this, no one should believe any PR spin about "doing
Israel's ministers, parliamentarians, generals, president, & prime minister have all said stuff about Gaza that *sounds* genocidal to a lot of experts on genocide.
I laid out the evidence on the
@MehdiHasanShow
.
Israeli officials, in their own words:
The Biden administration has lifted the suspension on a shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel, ending a two-month pause that meant to “reduce civilian casualties in Gaza”, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
More details:
Braverman doesn't even once mention the fact that nearly 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last two weeks: around three times the number of Americans killed in 9/11. It is as if they are untermensch to her- invisible and needing literally no comment. She, and much of
Here is the clip.
Suella Braverman is branding all the pro-Palestinian marches as “hate marches” which have the aim, in her view, of “wiping Israel off the map”.
She includes all the tens of thousands of protestors in that statement.
Textbook case of the extreme prejudice Palestinians face in so much of the Western media. Horrible to watch this combination of bigotry, Islamophobia and ignorance being played out in real time-and wonderful to watch the patience and good humour of the interviewee.
Forget 30,000 dead in Gaza, tens of thousands more in prison without charge, five MILLION in stateless serfdom, forget 75 years of torture, rape, dispossession, humiliation and occupation, ITS ALL ABOUT YOU, Bella
Very Important... Netanyahu explaining how he succeeded in wrecking the Oslo Peace Accords, neutering for Palestinian Authority and doing his best to stop a Two State Solution
Netanyahu, believing he is off-camera, explains how he manipulates and fools the United States, Europe and the international community into believing he will abide by agreements... while all the while he concedes nothing and builds more illegal settlements on Palestinain land.
The most impressive politician in the United Kingdom in the last week of horror and crisis in the Middle East has been, without exception,
@HumzaYousaf
.
While
@RishiSunak
,
@Keir_Starmer
and especially the shameful
@SuellaBraverman
have all been grandstanding for political
First Minister
@HumzaYousaf
attended a service of prayer and solidarity last night with Scotland’s Jewish community.
Expressing sorrow for those who lost loved ones, he said
@scotgov
stands in solidarity with all communities in Scotland suffering the loss of innocent life.
"Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died."
Nothing at all biased about this description in today's London
@thetimes
: complete neutral like the rest of their coverage. That's the
I have rarely felt more ashamed of my country, both government and opposition, not just for tolerating but for actively enabling this daily mass-murder of terrified, trapped, unarmed civilians, shot down in cold blood because our politicians are either massively ignorant or
Bullshit. It was a choice. No modern professional military HAS to bomb indiscriminately with dumb bombs and random barrages. No modern professional military HAS to murder civilians or level whole areas of civilian housing. Its a choice. And the IDF deliberately chose war crimes
Hamas has accepted Biden peace proposal. Netanyahu has turned it down. But you'd wouldn't know this from reading the BBC's headline, which yet again seems to have been written by the Israeli Embassy or a lobbying group in their employ.
BBC News - No Gaza ceasefire until Israel
The UK Tory government has completely lost any moral compass it ever had. How could a sniper shooting Catholic civilians within a church possibly be justified as legitimate self defence against Islamist militants? The simple truth is that
@RishiSunak
and his government are
A Palestinian woman leaving a church shelter to go to the toilet was shot dead by an Israeli sniper & her daughter who went to help her was killed as well
UK govt minister Lee Rowley is asked about this and says Israel has a right to defend itself against murderers
I am a life-long supporter of the Palestinian search for freedom and statehood , but this morning am feeling only utter revulsion, horror and depression at the press descriptions of yet more innocents massacred. No one, least of all children, should ever have to endure violence
Time for sanctions on Israel. Enough of breaking every tenet of international law. Israel already stands condemned in no less than 45 resolutions of the UN for building settlements in land seized and conquered in war.
Israel approves plans for 3,400 new homes in West Bank
Why does a terrible attack on Ukrainian children bring about an immediate response from our new Prime Minister
@Keir_Starmer
while he has said nothing about the horrible slaughter of Palestinian children in nine months of relentless mass murder?
Just to put this in context by
The worst Prime Minister of Britain since Anthony Eden, the man whose long series of lies & lazy misjudgements has done more damage to this country than anyone else in modern history, rides to the support of his Israeli counterpart, the equally catastrophic Benjamin Netanyahu.
Surprise! Half of Israelis don't want Palestinians to live as normal human beings, as citizens in their own state, but would prefer to keep them as stateless serfs sweeping Israeli streets and cleaning Israeli toilets, or else be removed completely so the Settlers can occupy the
New poll shows about half of Israelis would oppose a deal to end the war in Gaza if it includes Palestinian statehood and peace agreements with other Arab countries, and only 39 percent think Israel is ensuring the security of its citizens /
@LindaDayan9
How can a massacre that kills 200 and leaves 600 wounded possibly be called 'a surgical strike'
@thetimes
? Or does the Murdoch group not regard the Palestinians as human beings?
@SaulStaniforth
@DalrympleWill
@Stone_SkyNews
Today's Sunday Times
@thetimes
headlines the "daring raid" for 4 hostages. I'm happy for hostages recovered, but there's no mention that Israel killed over 200 Palestinians during its "surgical strike." In fact no mention of any Palestinian deaths from that massacre. Outrageous.
I am very happy to say that on Thursday afternoon, at around 2.30pm, after four years work and 120,000 words, I finally finished The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. It should be out sometime next year, published by
@BloomsburyBooks
&
@BloomsburyIndia
Deeply concerned about the prospect of a military offensive in Rafah – over half of Gaza’s population are sheltering in the area.
The priority must be an immediate pause in the fighting to get aid in and hostages out, then progress towards a sustainable, permanent ceasefire.
According to the translation, these kids are singing:
"Planes are bombing,
destruction, destruction...
In a year there will be nothing there,
And we will safely return to our homes,
Within a year,
We will annihilate everyone,
And then we will return to our fields..."
Hebrew
Here is the heart of the problem. It is not just the Israeli President who believes that all Palestinians in Gaza are guilty, as
@CIJ_ICJ
noted, many many Israelis agree with him, including much of the army and the security services, as we see in the clip below. Hence the
Rami Igra, previously head of the Captive & Missing Division in the Mossad, says there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza over the age of four, the "humane" Kan reporter Ayala Hasson agrees but clarifies that the 0-4 year old children are innocent and deserve humanitarian aid.
This image is so very telling of current attitudes in the IDF, whose soldiers are clearly unable to treat Palestinians with even a modicum of decency, humanity, or even to imagine them as human beings at all. Given the total power these cruel,vengeful and hate-filled occupying
You need to learn some history, Anton. Like many Arab-speaking peoples, the Palestinians are a rich mixture of all the peoples whose genes have passed through the Levant over the centuries: Caananites, Philistines, Samaritans, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs,
Wait until Richard discovers Jews came from Israel whilst much of the Palestinians came from Egypt, Jordan, etc
It will be like when Bobby Ewin woke up in the shower
UN warns Gaza is now ‘uninhabitable’ as war continues
Humanitarian chief fears ‘famine is around the corner’ with 85% of population displaced and more than 20,000 dead
For anyone who wants to know more about the roots of the conflict between Palestinians & Israelis, I recommend these two excellent books: Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.
I admire the Israelis who speak out against this monstrous occupation, dispossession and subjection of the Palestinians more than I can say. Just listen to this clip: heart-breaking
Important: Max Hastings overhearing the young Benjamin Netanyahu dreaming of a war when, "if we get it right, we'll have a chance to get all the Arabs out... We can clear the West Bank and sort out Jerusalem."
Given the leaks we've seen about him trying to bribe Egypt to take
In the 70s, historian Max Hastings interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu extensively, after the the Netanyahu family recruited him to write an official biography of Bibi's brother Yoni. Here Hastings, in his memoirs, recalls Bibi's racism and enthusiasm for total ethnic cleansing:
Complete shocker, putting into law the concept that the Palestinians are not allowed to have human rights, only Israelis, and that the Palestinians will be punished if they have the temerity to ask for their human rights to be upheld. Why isn't every American journalist
“Limits aid to the Palestinian Authority if "the Palestinians" initiate or support an International Criminal Court investigation against Israel "for alleged crimes against Palestinians"
A horrifying thread of recent IDF abuse of Palestinians not in Gaza but the West Bank, as recorded and celebrated on their own social media feeds.
Frequently Israel's apologists will tell you, all Hamas needs do is to give back the hostages and all will be well. These West Bank
🧵 West Bank |
Israeli soldiers smashing shops & humiliating detained Palestinians and abusing them in several villages throughout the West Bank.
1. Ramallah.
“Who needs Sabotage we are here” says Israeli soldier Liad Abada. A workshop in the city.
The Israelis are eliminating one of the last Christian Palestinians strongholds in the West Bank and the place I chose to stay when I was researching the Palestinian Christians in From the Holy Mountain. It is a place with an incredibly ancient history, a cradle of Christianity,
Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich officially announces building a new settlement in Jabal al-Makhrur in the town of Beit Jala near Bethlehem. The settlers and the army have begun expelling the citizens and declaring it a closed military zone. Many of its residents are holding a
@BellaWallerstei
Forget 30,000 dead in Gaza, tens of thousands more in prison without charge, five MILLION in stateless serfdom, forget 75 years of torture, rape, dispossession, humiliation and occupation, ITS ALL ABOUT YOU, Bella
Few know the history of the violent explusion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948: it is not taught in schools, and instead many- myself included- were taught outright lies about Palestine being an empty desert, "a land without a people for a people without a land." As ideas for a
The Tragedy of the Palestinians -
so many bright & opinionated people remain completely ignorant of their history of dispossession and subjugation, and go out of their way not to even try to understand it. There are no well known movies about the Nakba in English, no TV series
"You are from Britain, would you accept to give Manchester to some other people [the Israelis]?"
Today marks the birthday of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser: an anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist, pan-Arabist, and the most popular Arab president in history.
The most depressing imaginable presidential debate between two fourth-rate candidates. One is unable to tell the truth and the other unable to string a sentence together. How on earth did the most powerful country on earth end up having to choose between two utter duds?
Why are we selling arms, and providing diplomatic support, to a country that allows these sort of pogroms and whose army stands by and allows innocent civilians to be shot, robbed and dispossessed? Enough already!
Really an extraordinary moment when both the UK and the US allow themselves to he humiliated by Netanyahu, and yet continue to back him despite the UN, the ICJ, the ICC, Amnesty, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch & OCHA all coming out unequivocally to accuse Israel of major war crimes
For anyone who wishes to learn more about earlier rounds of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state, I recommend Walid Khalidi's All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied & Depopulated by Israel in 1948. It's a forensic examination of what happened to each and every
I am very happy to say that on Friday night, at around 9.30pm, after five years work and 160,000 words, I finally finished The Anarchy: The Fall of the Mughal Empire and the Rise of the East India Company, 1599-1803. It should be out in October, published by
@BloomsburyBooks
.
Worth remembering this telling 1969 quote from Moshe Dayan this week as leaks indicate that Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and their extreme far right wing government are drawing up plans to expel the shattered refugees of Gaza into Egypt
A blindly ignorant and near- Orwellian tweet that inverts the truth, sir! How can you not know that Israel illegally occupies the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of 47 UN Resolutions, and daily keeps 5.5 million Palestinians suspended in stateless serfdom, demolishing their houses
Please find a couple of minutes to watch this important interview with Meir Baruchin, an Israeli history teacher who explains with great clarity what few in the West seem able understand: the daily discriminations & dispossessions suffered every day by the Palestinians living
Meir Baruchin, an Israeli history teacher and anti-war activist, revealed how he was arrested in October and imprisoned in solitary confinement in November after he posted a photo online of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army on 7 October in opposition to the war on Gaza.
Public opinion in the West is finally beginning to understand what the Israelis are up to in Gaza. It has been painfully slow to happen, but when even Piers Morgan realises a campaign of indiscriminate mass murder is being waged against the Palestinians, you know the blank cheque
During a monologue on his show Uncensored on Monday, Piers Morgan highlighted how Israel has dropped eight times more bombs on Gaza in the span of 100 days than the US army did during six years in Iraq.
Former UK Prime Minister
@trussliz
: “The left are aided and abetted by our enemies overseas. That includes Russia, it includes Iran and most of all, it includes China…they don’t want economic competition, they want to undermine our very way of life, they want to undermine our
Just in case you're reading the New York
@nytimes
, the Wall Street Journal
@WSJ
or London
@thetimes
or
@TheEconomist
, in which case you won't be aware that any of this was ordered by the International Court of Justice, or even that Palestinians are suffering anything more than
To be clear,
@scotgov
has not paused or withdrawn aid to
@UNRWA
We have previously provided as much as we can within our financial constraints.
We will always seek to do more where we can & urge others to continue to provide aid to the people of Gaza
"Let’s be frank: there’s a very good likelihood Zelensky will not physically survive this conflict. And yet, there he is. He’s not running. It’s hard not to compare him — though the acts are vastly different — to Ashraf Ghani, who got the hell out..."
1/2
Open calls for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza are becoming ever more frequent in Israel. The Palestinians have been reduced to subhumans, to be shot, starved, dispossessed, subjugated, tortured, bombed, abused and expelled with barely a shrug.
Good
@nytimes
report on how genocidal language has been normalised in Israel
"Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X...
The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public
Trinity College Dublin agrees to divest from Israeli firms after student protest
Five-day encampment in university grounds that caused the college major loss of income ended in victory for campaigners
Amira Hass, the only Jewish Israeli reporter to have spent 30 years living in the West Bank and Gaza, delivered the 2024 graduation speech at Columbia Journalism School and encourages journalists everywhere "to resist the normalization of evil and injustice."
This is an incredibly important thread and deserves your time and attention. It is a compilation of calls for the erasure, dehumanisation, dispossession, subjugation and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza by the highest officials of the State of Israel. This is a government
Cameron says Israel has not shown intent to commit genocide. False. Israeli leaders have made genocidal comments ever since 7 October. The UK has not called them out. They are terrifying, even more so given what Israel has and is doing to Palestinians in Gaza. A small selection
The very day the
@icj
found "plausible" evidence of Israel committed genocide in Gaza, almost all Western governments fell for an Israeli counter narrative than led them to halt
@UNRWA
despite Palestinians being on the verge of starvation. Now the narrative is unravelling and
Lord Ian Austen points out that Israel is capable of surgical strikes and would never indiscriminately rain down missiles or send drones against innocent civilians... apparently forgetting that Israel has done just this for six months in Gaza slaughtering 33,000 Palestinians
This is the difference:
Israel carried out a surgical strike on one building to deal with Iranian commanders planning terrorism.
Iran fired hundreds of drones and missiles indiscriminately at civilians and would have killed many thousands were it not for Israel’s air defences.
A US State Department spokesperson has called on Israel to investigate “credible allegations of law of war violations” after a video aired by Al Jazeera showed the moments when four Palestinians were killed by Israeli air attacks.
🔴 LIVE updates:
Today I announced €20 million in support for the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), which provides healthcare and other services for those in need, and urged countries that have suspended funding to resume and increase support to the agency.
Another great Israeli hero: the astonishing Amira Hass of
@haaretzcom
breaking down on television as she calls for "an end to this terrible slaughter... how can they stand on the side and do nothing... Nothing can justify what is happening" in Gaza.
Veteran Israeli
@haaretzcom
journalist Amira Hass in her own words.
As the region once again plunges into a Cycle of Vengeance, Amira is a North Star for many of us…for her searing honesty…as she continues to speak uncompromising truths.
This makes extremely grim reading. The terms 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' may conceivably be open to debate, but the term "Occupied Territory" simply reflects the legal status of Gaza and the West Bank in International Law.
@nytimes
is siding with extremists like Ben Gvir &
It's just baffling why Biden & Sunak can't see these monsters & war criminals for what they are, and are not only prepared to arm them, but to bring down the whole international system of justice to protect them from prosecution for War Crimes
💥NatSecMin Itamar Ben Gvir, on The Day After:
• Only Israel will control Gaza.
• Israel will occupy Gaza, completely & fully including Jewish settlement in entire enclave & "encouragement of voluntary migration" of Gazans.
• He wants to move to Gaza.