Yair Wallach

Highly recommended listen.

Delighted to have Emile on. Nobody better to discuss all the implications of this war.

Arnon Degani wrote a version of this some years ago that got many people angry archive.is/NnyoZ

join me!!!!!!

But this does not imply a specific vision for the future. And that conversation is not for now, when the risk of mass ethnic cleansing and the resumption of Gaza's destruction are very real, unlike the fantasies/nightmare of the "Algerian option" of driving Israelis out.

6/6

For me, the urgency is to get Israel to end its "settlement phase" - the decades-long phase of active expansionism and dispossession within and without - Israel has not even defined its borders!

5/

You need a political vision, a political movement to pursue it, and a strategy to get there - and "settler colonialism" doesn't give you these things.
That's Bishara - paraphrased, not quoted verbatim.

4/

Considering that there are dozens of countries around the world established through settler colonialism, the idea that acknowledgment of that history leads to the dissolution of the "settler state" is patently unconvincing.
3/

Let me quote Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bishara, General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Qatar. He said in his latest lecture on Palestine that settler colonialism is a good way to analyse Zionism, but that it doesn't say anything on the way forward.

2/

One problem with "settler colonialism" in regards to Zionism is that many supporters and opponents of the terminology believe it points to radical solutions and visions for the future - that "decolonisation" here necessarily means one-state solution or maybe even the "Algerian scenario".
1/

He’s literally trying to use this war to *checks notes*...

Make us forget about the Epstein files, bait us into funding DHS without any guardrails on ICE’s lawless behavior...and now let Netanyahu off the hook.

No, no, and no.

His court testimony is an unmitigated disaster. If this ever get to a verdict - he will be convicted

He may do it!

This is what this war is really about. A way for Netanyahu to stop his trial and to survive the next election.

Idit Silman: 7:28 PM · Mar 5, 2026 · Mr. President @realDonaldTrump , Your pressure regarding a pardon in the fake cases that were stitched up against Prime Minister Netanyahu is welcome. But it is important to understand who is blocking even a discussion of that request. Israel’s Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara, is preventing any discussion of the pardon, while Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit is backing her and preventing her dismissal, while also striking down laws passed by Israel’s elected legislature. Since the United States stands for democracy in Israel, it is time to impose serious personal sanctions against both of them. Thank you, Mr. President, for standing with the State of Israel and the free world. https://x.com/iditsilman/status/2029640283277734066

Israeli minister and a Netanyahu bootlicker calls on Trump to impose personal sanctions agains Israeli's Attorney General and the chief justice of the Supreme court, as they are the stumbling blocks preventing the a pardon for Netanyahu in his corruption trial.

It must be really hard working in a professional kitchen what with all the spies and secret agents in hot pursuit of bad guys constantly running through smashing up all your shit.

The Upside and the Downside of Israel’s Extraordinary Relationship With Trump Israel has gotten from the U.S. what it has craved for decades in a joint war against Iran, neutralizing its greatest security threat. At the same time, it may directly lead to the end of Israel’s gre...

Michael Koplow warns that Bibi's cultivation of Trump might ultimately alienate the American public, and lose Israel its "greatest security asset", the relationship with the US.
Netanyahu has always been a master tactician, but mediocre strategist. israelpolicyforum.org/2026/03/04/t...

Israel has just issued a demand that all of Beirut’s southern suburbs, an area roughly the size of central Berlin or lower Manhattan, run for their lives. Tens of thousands are forced to flee- again. Real fears that they will level much of southern Beirut- an area where more than 500,000 live.

Stopping this descent requires facing some hard truths: the realisation that the violent and expansionist takeover of land resonates deep within Zionism. That realisation does not provide ready-made solutions; those don't really exist. But it's a starting point.

7/7

And if you object to the terminology because it hurts your feelings, while avowing your opposition to those "Extremists", you won't be able to see this for what it is, and you let them drag down the entire Israeli society - and much of the Jewish diaspora - further into the abyss.

6/

If we are unable to call it for what it is, we won't be able to stop it. Because it's so embedded in Israeli state institutions, because the people leading the charge are so committed to this and they know to speak the language of "settlement" that resonates with early Zionism.

5/

And the question of ancient historical ties is beside the point. "Jewish Settlement is a national value" says the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People (2018). Jewish settlement is about non-Jews out and giving their land to Jews.

4/

This is more than bigotry or zeal. There's an entire state infrastructure behind these hoodlums, multiple state mechanisms which plan and facilitate the takeover of land and the dispossession of those currently living there. That's settler colonialism.

3/

"Fanatics" is not a good enough explanation. The West Bank Pogroms, like all pogroms, are violence with the backing of the state, and it is violence not "to keep Palestinians in their place" but rather the opposite, to make them leave their place, to take over their land.

2/

The reason the category of settler colonialism is so vital to the Palestine/Israel discussion is that you simply cannot understand contemporary Israeli policies without it, e.g. in West Bank. Otherwise people resort to talking about the problem as one of "fanatics" - and that's just unconvincing.
1/

And that stepbrother is terrible. A good enough reason not to vote for him

What I want to know is why is not every Labour MP on board with this simple and obvious policy.
OK, I don't expect Luke Akehurst to agree. But literally everyone else should.

Given that the UK's position in the last 50 years is that settlements are illegal and Israel cannot annex the West Bank, banning trade with West Bank settlements is really the absolutely minimal ask. It's pathetic that it hasn't happened.

When you grow up hearing things like this on the radio they sound normal. Takes a long time to understand they're not

This has been an explicit and publicly advertised Israeli modus operandi in Lebanon since the early 1990s at least