Palestine (live version)

Thanks for making this video Shaun. After watching it several times, I decided to finally become a patron (long overdue!) Your content is a breath of fresh air on the cesspool that is YT. Thanks to you I also became acquainted with the PCRF and made a donation. You're making a difference! Thank you for your relentless support for Palestine, as well as for the lgbtq+ community ❤️

Dai Derong

Just a reminder: On February 25, in 22 days, we will honor the memory of our brother, Aaron Bushnell, who, one year ago, self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy to protest the genocide in Gaza. His last words were ‘Free Palestine.’ May his sacrifice never be forgotten.

farfasha now

You and people like you are contributing to saving what remains of Gaza’s children by educating the world on what is really happening and exposing how the media is complicit with powerful governments in the genocide. Eventually, this will lead to increased pressure on those governments to stop Israel from committing more war crimes and to accept a ceasefire. Thank you so much.

farfasha now

There is no defending the IDF. No one cares about your comparison to racist cops, that doesn't do you favors.

MadeOutOfCake

Keep the name leftist out of your mouth. We want nothing to do with you. From the river to the sea.

Ian Romines

We stepped into antizionism from the same image, it seems - I had to unlearn a lot of things that had been a huge part of my life before then. I appreciate you putting this out; I work hard to talk about this a lot but I think there are a lot of people who would be even more supportive of not just a ceasefire but Palestinians more broadly if they just knew a bit more. Over the past 9+ years I've been having a lot of conversations with my family about it as well and it's taken a lot to finally shake them from zionism...though it's happening.

Em

Thank you for taking the time for this elaborate response. This video's been Shaun's first whose perspective, factuality and framing I've felt serious off-vibes about, so it's very valuable for me, and I think important for many others, to see counter-takes.

Nikki

Hey Shaun, this comment of mine doesn't show on youtube... Hey, my name is David, I’m from Israel. Thanks for not lying (accept for one thing I mention bellow) in your video, also, thanks for not being antisemitic. However, I don’t really think you – or any other English-speaking leftist I’ve found on youtube, for that matter – actually bother diving into this region’s reality as deep as one should in order to understand it. Just to give you a taste of the lack, here you won’t find a single leftist – Jewish or Palestinian – saying ‘Israeli people’ and ‘Palestinian people’. It’s sort of a stupid-centrist thing, pretending there is such thing as an ambiguous nationless ‘Israeli’ person. According to the local left, both Jewish and Palestinian, the peoples here are divided to: Israeli-Jews, Israeli-Palestinians, and Palestinians that are citizens of the PNA or of Hamas. We also don’t use the name ‘Palestine’ for anything but the historic name of this piece of land, and usually we’re not teaching history… When we discuss the facility run by Mahmoud Abbas we say PNA, and I guess this is what you mean most of the time. Sure, we don’t make more many than a fifth of the 14 millions here, but I assume if you visited you’d hang with us, so this terminology might be relevant to you. And that’s just a taste. The rest of this comment will be devided to: 1 – Inaccurate analysis 2 – False wishes 3 – Raising certain voices? 4 – Factual inaccuracies 1: You repeatedly interpert our army’s crazy bombing policy in Gaza as ‘murderes’ and ‘genocide’ – but if you look at the history of the IDF’s actions towards Palestinians, an accurate decription of its methods would be: an INDIFFERENCE to casualties, not a wish to make lots of them, which is a different, much more difficult societal problem to analyze: if you’re familiar with the famous case of Eyad al-Hallaq (איאד אלחלאק), resembling lots of police racist violence in the US, I can tell you, THAT is much more similar in its internal logic to our army’s actions in Gaza than that (logic) of genocide. The US policemen and policewomen don’t set out a goal ‘let’s kill black people’ – they simply are indifferent to black people’s lives (not all of the police, of course). So it’s an important difference between 2 types of deadly logics – and one (genocide) is worse than the other (indifference). You see, the heads of our army are – surprisingly – not yet complete morons, and the ICJ and ICC scare them. The IDF’s policies are more similar to the US’s ones in its recent wars than to those of its old wars. This is why the ICJ didn’t convict us for genocide – it’s not, it’s just ‘not giving the f*ck a 21st century state is supposed to give about civilians’ lives’. It matters, because if you want to understand Israel, you’ve got to understand our military. Try reading the writings of prof. Yagil Levy, most recently an essay titles ‘Dehumanization of Neglect’ (דה-הומניזציה של התעלמות). 2: Also, you assume that Zionism is not here to stay when you say, “[…] long as Israel is run by colonial zionists who view Palestinians in this dehumanizing way, the fate of Israel will be eternal conflict with its neighbors” (40:43). That assumption is pretty dumb. Non-zionist Jews in Israel make less than 1 percent of the population, and I’m being generous here. There is simply no way Zionism is going to dissapear. The actual meaning of that sentence of yours I quoted is: an honest to God leftist can’t support Israel as long as it is Zionist… and that’s just giving yourself a big excuse to do nothing, or maybe something worse. You realize if the US forced Israel to stop the war and get to peace talking (all those, honestly, great things you incourage your viewers – me included, I guess – to act upon and try to make happen) we might be in a better place, without losing one bit of our Zionism, don’t you? 3: The instagram account you showed, ‘wizard_bisan1’, has in her highlighted stories multiple from-the-river-to-the-sea maps. The political meaning of such a map – wether presented by right-wing Israeli Jews or by right-wing Palestinians – is the elimination of the other people in the land. It is NOT a legitimate political goal. As a leftist, who does not support the continuation of this war, and who hasn’t supported many, even most, of my country’s military operations in Gaza over the years, and does not support the ethnic clensing in the West Bank and in some parts of Gaza, I’m actually pretty shocked you didn’t notice that, or worse: you did notice but don’t care about it. Also, the twitter account you showed, of ‘Refaat in Gaza’, is a denier of the MASSIVE s*xual violence Hamas inflicted upon my people, and it was MASSIVE, the scale of it, so many r*pes, so many. We endured hundreds of r*pes, how could you share this twitter account in your video? Why would you elivate that guy’s voice? Have you read Liza Rozovsky’s article, published also in the English version of Haaretz? This is truly not like you, Shaun. TF. I hope you’re not one of the deniers yourself. Please do something to show that you’re not. 4: You refer to our army’s airstrike in 53:40 as ‘airstrikes against a refugee camp’. But that’s not accurate. This particular refugee camp, Jenin, and lots of the north of the occupied territories, are filled with weapons, in the hands of terrorist militias that no moral person will support, even if s/he is connected to reality and understands the not-suprisingness of the occuring of these militias under occupation. Sure, if I was the head of the army, I wouldn’t have used the airforces to destroy the weapon stocks, but still, it’s legitimate, and it is legal. Reality sucks hard enough, there is no need of inaccurate framing.

דוד צמיר-גל

Omelas seems to be on all our minds for this one. Isabel Kim also had a recent story out about it. I didn't like it and can't articulate why, but here it is anyway https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

SlothMachine

citation; https://www.reuters.com/world/us/protester-self-immolates-outside-israeli-consulate-atlanta-2023-12-01/

Lind

Lind

Hey, thanks again for another spot on video. I know that, in addition to the hard work of producing this, it must have taken a mental and emotional toll, just wading through all this shit to make a coherent argument so I appreciate it a lot. BUT I am nevertheless going to make a cheeky request; given that most of your videos are a single static image with occasional pull quotes, have you ever consider another platform like a podcast or just SoundCloud or whatever, something people can play in the background without stopping? Because I will never pay for YouTube premium

Johnny Moxley

This video provides some rehumanization - for both the dehumanized genocide targets in Gaza and for those of us who lose a little of our humanity as our states (US & UK) continue to enable this horror Thank you

OnlyUkeThatMatters

You're not wrong about the heartache that comes from feeling helpless at being unable to prevent atrocities. I nearly went mad from following the events in Gaza. In fact I think I did go mad. When I heard about the pre-term babies left to die and rot after the hospital they were in was forcibly evacuated, I just didn't have it in me to care or be angry any more. It hurt too much to feel. Which really is a madness. What sane person can't care about dead babies? I think I needed a calm and reasonable voice to discuss rage and grief and helplessness, because heaven knows I haven't been able to engage with Gaza without fear of being overwhelmed by the madness again.

Queen of Narnia

Thank you ❤️

Valium Sadfemme McGirlBoss

Very interesting to see Ursula K Le Guin quoted here. She's my hero. Love her fiction and sci fi stuff, especially Wizard of Earthsea. I never knew Omelas was pronounced that way, I always heard it in my head as oh-MEH-luss. Google says you're right so that's not a critique, just interesting to me.

Cujo

Not quite done yet, but great vid as always. Re: the bit about Omelas and people saying the pictures are just dolls, it reminds me of why Don Quixote terrifies me on an existential level so much. Even after charging the windmill and getting thrown by it, he still insists he was right, that they only look like windmills NOW because some evil enchanter transformed them to mess with him. No matter what the evidence, people will just find higher levels of delusion in order to preserve their existing narrative. People rarely if ever actually change their minds no matter how much they see to challenge their preconceptions.

Sanson Carrasco