Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 20

Israeli soldiers and police tipping off groups that attack Gaza aid trucks (The Guardian)

I do want to say here that I doubt everyone in Israel approves of this but the last sentence here send a chill down my spine:

On Sunday, the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, suggested the government itself should be stopping aid trucks to Gaza instead of leaving it to groups of activists.

“We are in a democratic country and I am in favour of freedom of protest. They are allowed to demonstrate,” he said in an interview with Army Radio. “I am against them attacking and burning trucks … It’s the cabinet that should be stopping the trucks.”

Just... people are starving in Gaza and this happens? And this is the reaction of some people?

ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Israel's Netanyahu and Hamas leaders (Reuters)

Norway, Ireland and Spain say they will recognize a Palestinian state, deepening Israel’s isolation. (AP News)

Humanitarian operations ‘near collapse’ in Gaza, says World Food Programme (The Guardian)

The UN has suspended food distribution in Rafah owing to a lack of supplies and insecurity, the world body said late on Tuesday, and delivery operations from the new US-funded floating pier have also been halted after desperate people seized most of the shipment offloaded on to trucks on Saturday, an incident in which one person was killed.

Since 10 May, shortly after Israel seized control of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, through which the majority of aid to Gaza flows, only about three dozen trucks have successfully been delivered via the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing, and only about a quarter of the allowed fuel has been delivered since the Israeli operation began.

The ongoing fighting means that both Kerem Shalom and Rafah are effectively blocked, and perishable food and medicine is piling up on the Egyptian side of the border. Egypt and Israel have traded blame over a failure to negotiate Rafah’s reopening, which has also prevented sick and injured Palestinians from leaving the strip for treatment elsewhere.

“It is better than before in the market right now, there are bananas and peaches, and the prices are more normal, but we are worried that it will not last,” said Mohammed Azaiza, an accountant from Deir al-Balah whose home was destroyed and is now sheltering with his family elsewhere in the central city.

“There are so many people to feed now too. Thousands of people who were in Rafah have come to Deir al-Balah.”

Limited distributions of reduced food parcels are ongoing in central Gaza, said Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), but the agency’s food parcel supplies are expected to be depleted within days.

Egypt changed terms of Gaza ceasefire deal presented to Hamas, surprising negotiators, sources say (CNN)

Posting this in case anyone is still under the impression that the Israelis backed out of an agreed upon ceasefire deal at the last second. It's more complicated than that; there's a lot of fog of war.

Pentagon’s maritime aid operation faces immediate obstacles in Gaza (Washington Post)

According to officials with the U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP), 10 trucks’ worth of food assistance were delivered from the U.S.-established staging area to a U.N. warehouse Friday.

On Saturday, however, some aid was looted during a subsequent delivery to the storage facilities. Of 16 trucks transporting aid from the staging area that day, five arrived with shipments intact, while most or all of the food parcels were taken from 11 other trucks, WFP said.

...

Many of the details about the nascent aid operation remained unclear Tuesday, and officials gave conflicting accounts about the situation on the ground.

While [Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s spokesman] said that none of the U.S.-facilitated aid had been distributed to civilians in Gaza, where U.N. officials are sounding the alarm about famine conditions, WFP officials said that some of that aid had reached recipients.

...

Ryder said the complexity of operating in a war zone, rather than poorly executed planning or coordination, led to the slow start of aid delivery. The estimated cost to the U.S. government is about $320 million, officials have said.

A chill has fallen over Jews in publishing. NYTimes Opinion. Gift link

The spreadsheet [which lists Zionist and suspected Zionist authors, sometimes on shallow evidence] is but the crudest example of the virulently anti-Israel — and increasingly antisemitic — sentiment that has been coursing through the literary world since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Much of it revolves around the charge of genocide and seeks to punish Zionists and anyone else who refuses to explicitly denounce the Jewish state for allegedly committing said crime. Since a large majority of American Jews (80 percent of whom, according to a 2020 poll, said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of their Judaism) are Zionists, to accuse all Zionists of complicity in genocide is to anathematize a core component of Jewish identity.

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

As is always and everywhere the case, this burgeoning antisemitism is concomitant with a rising illiberalism. Rarely, if ever, do writers express unanimity on a contentious political issue. We’re a naturally argumentative bunch who — at least in theory — answer only to our own consciences.

To compel them to express support or disapproval for a cause is one of the cruelest things a society can do to writers, whose role is to tell society what they believe, regardless of how popular the message may be. The drawing up of lists, in particular, is a tactic with a long and ignominious history, employed by the enemies of literature — and liberty — on both the left and the right. But the problem goes much deeper than a tyro blacklist targeting “Zionists.”

...

Until relatively recently, the use of “Zionist” as a slur was most commonly confined to Soviet and Arab propagandists, who spent decades trying to render the word the moral equivalent of “Nazi.” Today many progressives use the word in similar fashion, making no distinction between a Zionist who supports a two-state solution (which, presumably, most Jews in the overwhelmingly liberal literary world do) and one who believes in a “Greater Israel” encompassing the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And while anyone can be a Zionist, I’ve found in my 20 years of reporting on antisemitism that many Jews essentially hear “Jew” when someone shouts “Zionist" at them.

...

The real objectives behind the cynical weaponization of the word “genocide” and the authoritarian insistence that anyone who disagrees with it is an enabler of one are to shut down debate, defame dissenters and impose a rigid orthodoxy throughout the publishing world. It is a naked attempt to impose an ideological litmus test on anyone hoping to join the republic of letters — a litmus test that the vast majority of Jews would fail.

A campaign of intimidation, the sort of thing that happens to the dissident writers in closed societies whom PEN regularly champions, is afoot to pressure writers into toeing this new party line. PEN’s current president, Jenny Finney Boylan, recently said that she had heard from “many, many authors who do not agree with those withdrawing from PEN events and who do not wish to withdraw from our events themselves but are afraid of the consequences if they speak up.”

...

Neil Gaiman, Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Ms. Mandel and other hugely successful authors need not worry that being denounced as a Zionist will hurt their careers. But the blacklists and the boycotts are not targeted at them. The real targets of this crusade are lesser-known authors, budding novelists, aspiring poets and creative writing students — largely but not exclusively Jewish — who can feel a change in the air.

“I do now definitely have concern as a Jewish author — two years working on a novel that has absolutely nothing to do with Jews in any way, just because it says ‘National Jewish Book Award winner’ in my bio — that it may change the way readers see the work,” said a Jewish creative writing professor and novelist who spoke to me on the condition of being quoted anonymously.

No longer is being on the receiving end of a review bomb the worst fate that can befall a Jewish writer exploring Jewish themes; even getting such a book published is becoming increasingly difficult. “It’s very clear you have to have real courage to acquire and publish proudly Jewish voices and books about being Jewish,” a prominent literary agent told me. “When you are seen as genocidal, a moral insult to humanity because you believe in Israel’s right to exist, you are now seen as deserving of being canceled.”

There’s a distasteful irony in a literary community that has gone to the barricades fighting book “bans” now rallying to boycott authors based on their ethnoreligious identity. For a growing set of writers, declaring one’s belief that the world’s only Jewish state is a genocidal entity whose dismantlement is necessary for the advancement of humankind is a political fashion statement, a bauble one parades around in order to signify being on the right team. As was Stalinism for an earlier generation of left-wing literary intellectuals, so is antisemitism becoming the avant-garde.

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

Two Weeks Inside Gaza’s Ruined Hospitals

Be warned, the video is extremely graphic in parts.