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Grave Dohl

@letsdestroy.bsky.social

760 followers 330 following 3.7K posts

Void boi. Balkan bear-man living in exile in the decadent West. Union thug. Scientific socialist. Neurodivergent. I'm sorry for whatever it was that I said.

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Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · Jul 2

I started ADHD meds and am reining in my social media usage, including Bsky. I'll be posting a lot less and will probably start unfollowing a lot of people. It's nothing personal, and I'm doing well, I just need to unplug from The Discourse to a large degree.

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 15h

I rescind my criticism of Bono and apologize for slandering his name

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 15h

Holy crap, Bono is an even bigger villain than I realized

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 17h

process of either a one-state or two-state solution. But I don't support them. I don't support any political party or faction. I support the BDS National Committee and the trade unions and civil society organizations that are part of the BDS coalition in Palestine. They have my complete support.

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 17h

But I don't support Hamas either as a political party or an armed resistance faction. They are part of the Palestinian body politic that is not going away and cannot be ignored. Peace is made between enemies and, like Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, I think Hamas has a future in the political...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 17h

liberal and too 'both sidesy'. Maybe they're right. But I can't endorse violence against civilians. Full stop. End of sentence. I devote a lot of time and energy to supporting the Palestinian struggle because I see the occupation as a monstrous injustice that we in the West help to perpetrate.

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 17h

A lot of my comrades are unreservedly pro-Palestine, pro-resistance and frankly pro-Hamas (though they're usually discreet about this). If you're Palestinian, this is a completely rational stance and I might feel the same way if I were Palestinian, but I'm not. Some of my comrades seem me as too...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

benefit (god forgive me) both sides. Ending western support for Israel, and levelling the playing field between the two "sides", is the only way the core issues can be resolved so there is justice and peace. In other words, justice must come first in order for a lasting peace to prevail.

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

Nonetheless, however lopsided it is, there is an armed conflict in Israel-Palestine and there are "cycles of violence". Understanding the conflict's colonial nature is important, but as an outside observer, I would like to see the conflict resolved so the violence can end. I think this would...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

agency through organized violence in an attempt to establish a state. Many Palestinians would bristle at the attempt to cast them merely as victims. Their range of movement is extremely limited under occupation, but they do exercise agency, often in the same brutal ways that a State would.

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

despite the well-meaning chant of "not a conflict, not a war". The chant seeks to emphasize the occupation and the genocide—rightly so, in my opinion. But it is also a conflict, albeit a colonial one, and I think the Palestinian resistance would consider it a "war" in which they are asserting...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

I'm not a pacifist. Maybe I should be, but I'm not. Armed resistance is a right of occupied people. But there are rules of war. Just as it's illegal to settle civilians on occupied territory, it's illegal to target civilians. And at a certain level, Israel-Palestine *is* a war, *is* a conflict...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

reaction, but look more brutal and barbaric in comparison because they lack the veneer of legitimacy afforded to state violence. Nonetheless, I can't support that kind of indiscriminate violence against an occupying settler colonial power, even if I support the struggle of the colonized people.

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

and the Haitian revolution. We're somewhat blind to the structural violence of the settler colony, most of which is committed by uniformed armies with spokespersons and PR departments who can sanitize their actions. Explosions of violence in the opposite direction, like Oct 7th, happen in direct...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

reflects the incredible ugliness of settler colonial war, a "hundred years war" that was imposed on Palestinians against their will by the British. I think their reaction of horrific violence is a human reaction to being colonized, as witnessed in Algeria, the Mau-Mau uprising, Nat Turner's revolt..

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

complicit. But I can't give Hamas, or *any* Palestinian resistance faction, my unreserved support, because they all target civilians and that's a red line for my liberal human rights-centered sensibilities. I don't think that tactic reflects anything in particular about Palestinian culture. It...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

evoke terror. How could it not?

Anyway, I've gotten completely side tracked. The point is that I've always found Hamas's tactic of attacking civilians disgusting. This is minor in comparison with my disgust with Israel's tactics, which are far more systematic in that regard and in which I feel...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

natural targets for both "sides" because it's very much a conflict over whose civilians get to live between the river and the sea. And maybe it's because I live in a settler colonial society myself, one that resembles Israel in many ways, but the idea of a suicide bombing on a civilian site does...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

imagine that Israeli civilians (who are widely viewed by Palestinians as 'settlers' even in the 1948 borders, a view I largely agree with) are a more tempting target than Israeli soldiers. As I've discussed elsewhere, the settler colonial nature of the "conflict" also means that civilians become...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

myself in the shoes of a Palestinian, I could understand the desire for revenge, the desire to strike back at your oppressor's vulnerable point, to cause them suffering. These are normal human impulses. And given the dominance of the IDF and its deeply dug in infrastructure of control, I could...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

to react and resist, like any people would. I recognize that the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada also involved factions other than Hamas, and began to materialize after protests, strikes and riots had been put down brutally by the IDF. In other words, it was part of an escalation. Putting...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

think the answer is more or less "no". As long as Israel had full US support, they were going to maintain the occupation and keep up the settlement enterprise. Oslo Accords or no, Second Intifada or no, things were going to get progressively worse for Palestinians and they were inevitably going...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

the suicide bombings are rational tactic as part of a strategy to restore some 'balance of terror'? Did they succeed or did they make things worse? Was there anything Palestinians could've done differently that would've resulted in an improvement in their situation? On the latter question, I...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

documentary 'Palestine is Still the Issue' (and it is, 23 years later). He called the suicide bombings acts of desperation. The death toll then was 5:1 Palestinians:Israelis and it's not unfair to say that Israel created the conditions for, sparked and escalated the Second Intifada. But were...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

were used. In retrospect, and we'd Edward Said had it right, the Oslo Accords were a mistake and Hamas was right to oppose them. But why suicide bombings? I can sort of grasp the rage and desperation that sparked the campaign of the Second Intifada. John Pilger addressed this in his 2002...

Grave Dohl @letsdestroy.bsky.social · 18h

has historically allied with. Where their actions begins hard to defend is with deliberate attacks on civilians going back long before Oct 7th to the suicide bombing campaign that started in 1994. Suicide bombings of cafés and buses were a powerful terror weapon, which presumably is why they...