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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Israel has been asking the UN to send the trucks in, it is the UN who has been refusing to do so as long as the Israelis are the ones distributing it.

Please forward me a link to that. I'm hearing that the Israelis do things like deliberately route aid convoys the long way round and into territory where they will be ambushed and robbed, and similar fun things like that. Oh those wacky Zionist boys, such a sense of humour!

What I'm hearing is the Israeli ambassador claiming this, and at this point I don't believe one word out of any Israeli officials, not even "water is wet". They pulled their ambassador out because apparently us here in Ireland are so anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, maybe that's why their army is shooting at our diplomats. And our peacekeeping troops.

Okay, maybe I believe the words of the likes of this Israeli minister, because he's not pretending about what's going on:

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu said Thursday that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza, and that the Strip will be made totally Jewish, drawing outcry among opposition politicians and eventually from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

“The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told Haredi radio station Kol Barama. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.'”

Eliyahu said that Gaza will be cleared for Jewish settlement and that Jewish towns won’t be “fenced in inside cantons.”

“All Gaza will be Jewish,” he said, though he clarified that Arabs who are loyal to Israel will be tolerated.

“We aren’t racists,” the far-right Otzma Yehudit politician added. “We are fighting those who fight us.”

Eliyahu also denied that Gazans are not getting enough food, calling it a campaign against Israel, but noted that the country was at war and trying to kill “these monsters.”

“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.

The AP:

Israel says it doesn’t limit the truckloads of aid coming into Gaza and that assessments of roads in Gaza are conducted weekly where it looks for the best ways to provide access for the international community.

Col. Abdullah Halaby, a top official in COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to the territory, said there are several crossings open.

“We encourage our friends and our colleagues from the international community to do the collection, and to distribute the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” he said.

An Israeli security official who was not allowed to be named in line with military procedures told reporters this week that the U.N. wanted to use roads that were not approved.

He said the army offered to escort the aid groups but they refused.

The U.N. says being escorted by Israel’s army could bring harm to civilians, citing shootings and killings by Israeli troops surrounding aid operations.

MSN:

Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy ultimately accused the UN of “unforgivable negligence” in its actions preventing food from reaching Gaza.

“The failure of the UN aid mechanism in Gaza is truly catastrophic. 600 trucks’ worth of food the IDF is urging the UN to pick up. I saw mountains of pasta, lentils, hummus, cooking oil, sugar, and flour,” he wrote on X, accompanying a video of him walking among aid supplies.

For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said trucks traversing Gaza have to contend with traveling through an active war zone, along with hoards of desperate people rushing to get the supplies, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Criminal gangs have also previously attempted to ransack the vehicles as they enter the Strip.

“Taken together, these factors have put people and humanitarian staff at grave risk and forced aid agencies on many occasions to pause the collection of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities,” OCHA said in a statement last week.

Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.

I don't believe the Israelis. After all this time, I don't trust them, I don't think they're honest, and how they are cracking down (not) on the [settlers](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c776x78517po0 who are literally and not metaphorically shooting people reveals their actual preferences, not what they're saying.

I'm going to light my hair on fire here, but Israel is imitating how Germany decided to deal with its 'Jewish problem': can we get any foreign country to take them off our hands? No, nobody wants a bunch of these guys because they are trash? Okay, let's solve this by taking their property, confining them in sequestered areas, and then shipping them off to camps - for their own protection, of course.

Yeah, I can’t blame you: after all, I don’t believe the UN or Hamas. This war is one of those situations where we won’t really know the truth of what’s going on until it’s a decade or so later and people have had time to investigate. Maybe three decades later, wait for enough people to die who would otherwise be embarrassed.

Hamas are shit, and they're making things worse, but I can understand why Palestinians might consider them "better the devil you know".

And now Netanyahu is talking about seizing Gaza. Well, well, I'm sure all the people telling me Israel only wants to treat the Palestinians like fellow-citizens will be making sure that no war crimes happen. Gosh, what a totally surprising decision, nobody could have seen this as a possibility: Israel occupies the last piece of territory it wanted.

There are no settlers in Gaza.

I'm going to light my hair on fire here, but Israel is imitating how Germany decided to deal with its 'Jewish problem': can we get any foreign country to take them off our hands?

The Gaza Palestinians are not Israelis. Israel has never incorporated the territory they now occupy, though it has (and does) hold it under occupation. They tried, in 2005, leaving the territory entirely to the Palestinans. The result is that the Palestinians made war on them. Your stubborn refusal to acknowledge this does not make it not-so. If you care to make an analogy to Germany and its Jews, the analogs to the Jews are Israeli Arabs. Who, you may note, are not being expelled.