Sina Toossi

6/ From his talks with Palestinians & Israelis, it was clear: the goal is “Greater Israel."

Not only the West Bank but ambitions in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt.

And this isn’t fringe. It's a driving force in Israeli society, fueled by impunity & deep ethnosupremacism.

5/ He said the atmosphere at al-Aqsa is increasingly suffocating.

Jewish extremists roam around, hurling insults at Muslims & their religion.

New layers of restrictions with ever-narrower definitions of “locals allowed.”

4/ The West Bank feels like open season for settlers.

Palestinians endure nonstop harassment.

Land is seized overnight as encampments swell into hundreds & gain state backing.

More “Jewish-only” roads, ever longer checkpoint routes for Palestinians, increasing raids & killings.

3/ And for Palestinians inside 1948 Israel, the myth of "democratic rights" for all collapses quickly.

Many cannot even repair their homes, let alone build new ones.

Their lives & livelihoods are constantly squeezed.

Discrimination is structural & aimed at getting them to leave.

2/ He encountered settler teens acting with impunity, cussing at Palestinians, spitting, throwing stones, all in front of Israeli soldiers.

The goal is humiliation & provocation.

If a Palestinian flinches or pushes back, the army steps in to beat, arrest, and escalate.

A friend just returned from Palestine.

Daily humiliation & oppression is intensifying everywhere: raids, settler attacks, home seizures, checkpoints, systematic discrimination for Palestinians in 1948 Israel.

It's hard to fathom. Yet this is what so many in Washington defend.

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Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues unabated despite ceasefire More than a month after a ceasefire was announced and all living Israeli hostages were released, Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by c...

Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues unabated despite ceasefire

8/ And the answer is simple and desperately needed:

treat Israel like a normal country, whether you defend it or oppose it or are (somehow) ambivalent about it.

This breaks an illusion that many pro-Israel forces actually want to sustain.

7/ On the right, this belief “Israel will destroy me if I criticize them” is louder and more explicit, especially these days.

But many self-styled liberals share the same idea in subtler form.

6/ You’re exposing and reinforcing your own prejudiced worldview, including toward the very people you imagine your silence is somehow simultaneously both shielding and protecting you from.

5/ It boils down to this:

if you can watch a genocide unfold — carried out by a modern ethno-supremacist project rooted in 19th–20th century ideology, not an ancient faith — waging destruction across a region and destabilizing the world, and still choose silence, you’re not just perpetuating war...

4/ That notion actually has deep antisemitic roots.

And in trying to avoid “controversy,” many of these pundits end up perpetuating the very prejudice they claim to reject.

3/ This instinct to tiptoe around Israel is not neutrality, certainly not now.

It rests on — and reproduces — an old, harmful idea that Israel or its supporters wield some extraordinary, almost mystical power capable of punishing dissent.

2/ It’s no longer just careerism or “risk aversion,” but an unexamined belief that Israel is shielded by a uniquely punitive, almost omnipotent force — that speaking honestly about Israel carries a singular cost.

There’s still a segment of the liberal political & foreign-policy pundit class that, even now, can’t bring itself to criticize Israel — though they’d condemn any other state for the same actions.

At this point, that silence says something deeper and darker about many of them.

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5/ Israeli analysts' Telegram channel:

"In Beit Jann they are occupied with the funerals of those who were eliminated, and in the background you can hear the noise of the Israeli aircraft circling overhead."

4/ Israeli analysts such as Yossi Eliezer frame the protests as justification for more Israeli intervention in Syria.

They regularly invoke Syrian “minorities” to legitimize their involvement.

3/ Syria is also seeing large demonstrations backing the Al-Sharaa government and condemning Israel.

They come just days after Al-Sharaa’s anniversary speech marking his rise to power, where he urged Syrians to take to the streets and “express joy” over Assad’s fall.

Syria calls Israeli incursion, strikes that killed 13 a ‘war crime’ Two Syrian children are among those killed by Israeli strikes following the incursion into the town of Beit Jinn.

2/ Yesterday, in the latest Israeli incursion into Syria, Israeli forces killed at least 13 Syrians, including children.

Most casualties were civilians fleeing artillery and air strikes Israel used to pull out a military unit.

www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11...

Israeli analysts are whipping up a more fervor against Syria as Israel expands its attacks.

On Telegram, Eran Lahav, fresh off a program with FDD, casts Syria’s internal dynamics as “Al-Jolani’s sophisticated jihad.”

The narrative is clearly primed for more attacks.

🧵>>>

Apartheid South Africa waged endless regional wars under a “total strategy,” claiming it was fighting the Soviets while feeding off Western backing.

Israel now does the same with Iran.

But Pretoria’s militarism only brought isolation, economic strain & accelerated collapse.

🧵>>>

On Thanksgiving & Gratitude Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it’s devoted to one simple, profound act: being grateful.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it's about gratitude.

It reminds us how interconnected we are.

Even in foreign policy, the suffering we cause elsewhere reshapes us at home.

Gratitude brings us back to our better nature.

Some thoughts ⬇️

14/ Apartheid South Africa's lesson for Israel is clear: ethno-supremacist projects built on regional destabilization can last a while on western indulgence & manufactured existential threats, but they can't indefinitely survive legitimacy crises, isolation & economic attrition.

13/ And the cooperation then was extensive: Israel became Pretoria’s top arms supplier, built up its weapons industry, shared missile and nuclear know-how, provided uranium, trained its security forces and offered the political cover that kept apartheid afloat under sanctions.

12/ Both Israel & Apartheid South Africa pursued regional domination through cross-border invasions, proxy warfare, and economic coercion designed to destabilize neighbors and keep them weak and dependent.

11/ Pretoria justified wars of aggression by invoking the western “bête noire” of the time — the Soviets — much like Israel frames its regional campaigns around Iran.

Both used an external scapegoat to mask the permanent militarism needed to sustain their political systems.

10/ The parallels between the two apartheid states aren’t just in their domestic repression of a subjugated population, but across every critical dimension of state policy, including and especially their regional strategy.

9/ For South Africa, the ultimate result may have come across as paradox to its former rulers:

The pursuit of absolute military dominance hastened the internal & external conditions for apartheid’s collapse.

Militarism bought time, but it made collapse inevitable.

8/ And strategically, the "Soviet bogeyman" project to sustain apartheid failed.

Zimbabwe rejected Pretoria’s vision of a South African-led bloc & instead helped build regional solidarity against apartheid.

For most of Africa & the world, apartheid was “more evil than socialism."