Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man

I see it now. He’s darth vader.

My intergenerational traumas are in retrograde this month

Can Trump legally force US universities to silence protests? Trump threatens universities with withholding federal funding if they allow ‘illegal protests’ to resume on campuses.

Trump’s threats to force universities to silence protests are a “twisted new form of transnational repression. Restricting free speech...by cutting state funds, or more accurately, creating a chilling effect by threatening to do so, is a hallmark of autocratic takeovers,” said @omerman.bsky.social.

So what are the chances that this grows into a benevolent dictatorship?

New president, new flag on the house

In case Trump doesn’t read Hebrew, here is Smotrich’s statement: “Netanyahu gave us assurances that Gaza will become uninhabitable…he agrees with and accepts our approach: The war will change and Israel will control Gaza”.
Smotrich may be a theocratic-messianic fascist, but he’s no liar. Believe him

3)
Nobody will do anything about it. (8/8)

They will portray Trump lifting the settler sanctions as the right moment to carry out a renewed ethnic cleaning campaign, as if to say “ball don’t lie.” (7/8)

The settlers have been ramping up their demands to do to Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm what was done to Gaza. This is the part they’ve been waiting for. Settlers will try and drive entire Palestinian communities off their land, as they did after Oct 7. (6/8)

2)
Israel will launch a major military operation in the West Bank soon. The Israeli army will largely withdraw from Gaza per the ceasefire deal, but will regularly send in troops to operate there. The world will be too focused on the killing and destruction in West Bank to even object. (5/8)

I’m reminded of the days before Mohammed Abu Khdeir was murdered. But at such larger of a scale. It’s terrifying. (4/8)

Netanyahu will use this manipulatively aggravated national trauma to double down on the need to eliminate Hamas completely, but it will also tear at an already fractured Israeli society. And the genocidiers will use it as a tool to further dehumanize and demonize Palestinians. (3/8)

Hamas has long been saying the two children and their mother were killed in an airstrike but Israel has never declared the family to be dead, so Israeli society has been holding up photos of this baby for 15 months as a symbol of the urgency of a hostage release—and to dehumanize Palestinians. (2/8)

Three depressing predictions re Israel-Palestine: 🧵📜

1)
The Israeli baby (Bibas family) who was taken on Oct 7 along with another sibling and their mother, is supposed to be returned in one of the early rounds of hostage releases. (1/8)

Define winning and losing however you want, but this man always figures out how to live to see another day.

This way Netanyahu buys himself another six weeks to avoid making up his mind about whether to go back to genocide and stay in power or end the war and face uncertain elections.

Meanwhile, Lapid has publicly offered to keep the government in power in order to get a hostage deal done (but only that long).

Parliamentary politics, amirite?

Ben Gvir says his party will leave the government if it goes for the ceasefire, but it will rejoin the government if and when the war resumes.

I'm sorry but the Biden Admin's failure to achieve a ceasefire for 15 months was so much larger and more consequential than whoever managed to get it done today. Regardless of who is credited with a ceasefire, Netanyahu and Biden deserve full credit for genocide.

"Ending Israel's genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza is of course a long-overdue welcome development but without guarantees that Israel can never again carry out such atrocities, it is but a single gulp of fresh air," said DAWN's Israeli-Palestine research director @omerman.bsky.social.

Of course Netanyahu is the one who put Ben Gvir in charge of the prisons. And of course Israel doesn't even have a law explicitly criminalizing torture. Scapegoating the extremist he himself empowered allows Netanyahu to make a systemic issue seem like the non-systemic work of a bad apple.

"Israel Bonds are one of the most significant sources of financing for illicit Israeli activities in Palestine, from the violent expansion of West Bank settlements to offsetting the enormous costs of the genocidal campaign in Gaza," said DAWN's @omerman.bsky.social.

Hot take: Netanyahu will throw Ben Gvir under the bus for turning Israeli prisons into full-on torture camps, both to hold off int'l accountability (complementarity) and making himself seem like the responsible adult in the room to mainstream Israelis ("he's the sadist, not me").

Millions in bonds for Israel put US states at odds with investment policies US states spend millions on Israeli investments but risk non-compliance with their own policies.

Israeli bond profits “get handed out largely to [Israeli] government coalition agreements, which oftentimes are where budgets for settlements come from”, said DAWN's @omerman.bsky.social. For that reason, “Anybody investing in Israel bonds is risking violating the settler sanctions.”

The lawsuit, supported by DAWN, documents how the State Department has created unique, insurmountable processes to evade the Leahy Law requirement to sanction abusive Israeli units.

United States: Palestinian Families Sue State Department to Suspend U.S. Military Assistance to Abusive Israeli Security Forces (Washington DC, December 17, 2024) - Palestinian families devastated by Israeli human rights violations in Gaza and the West Bank filed a federal lawsuit today under the Administrative Procedure Act (...

Palestinian Families Sue State Department To Suspend U.S. Military Assistance To Abusive Israeli Security Forces

dawnmena.org/united-state...

Gaza v. Blinken: Palestinians Sue Secretary of State Over 'Failure' to Follow US Law on Sending Military Aid to Israel "For too long, the State Department has acted as if there’s an ‘Israel exemption' from the Leahy Law,” says group supporting the lawsuit.

Gaza vs Blinken

Our latest at @dawnmenaorg.bsky.social

open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/...

Imagine a time traveler going back to January 7th, 2021, and telling you that this would happen less than four years later.