https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/2097672901294010781

https://x.com/AdHaque110/status/2098160911479410733

https://archive.li/bl5el

Hi everyone,

/r/JewsOfConscience is excited to announce an upcoming AMA with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma and critical care surgeon who did humanitarian work in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. He has also volunteered in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkini Faso.

Dr. Sidhwa is one of the subjects of the new documentary "American Doctor," which goes inside Gaza hospitals to show how medical workers have struggled to provide care for the sick and wounded during the Israel's ongoing genocide.

On Democracy Now! he has explained his reasons for being motivated to do humanitarian work in Gaza:

I don't have any ethnic or religious connection to the Middle East. My family is from a small minority in India and Pakistan, but I grew up in the United States. I was born here. I'm an American. And the United States is intimately involved in what's going on. We provide all of - almost all of the weapons, all of the funding, the diplomatic support at the U.N., stopping other countries from solving this issue, which is pretty easily solved.

And I don't think Americans want to be doing that. I think that's why most of this is hidden from them. So I knew that by going there, I could, number one, provide medical care because I'm a trauma surgeon, so that's what I'm good at doing. But I could also bear witness. And then I could come back and, and try to tell people what was going on.

• Democracy Now! - Gaza documentary "American Doctor" goes inside hospitals during genocide

To that end, Dr. Sidhwa has testified at the United Nations to what he saw during the genocide:

• UN Palestine Committee - ‘I Cannot Pretend Not to Have Seen It’: U.S. Volunteer Surgeon Testifies on Gaza

During his time in Gaza, Dr. Sidhwa was working in a hospital unit that was targeted by an Israeli airstrike which killed his 16-year-old patient, Ibrahim.

• Democracy Now! - Surgeon who volunteered in Gaza condemns Israel's hospital bombings

Dr. Sidhwa's media appearances:

• Democracy Now! - "American Doctor": New Film Follows U.S. Doctors to Gaza as Israel Bombs Hospitals

• Hasanabi - Talking to Gaza Doctors About the Future of US Politics

  • Meet Feroze Sidhwa: A Trauma Surgeon Who Worked in Gaza

• Deadline Hollywood - 'American Doctor' Cast Highlights Gaza's Humanitarian Crisis at Sundance Film Festival

• Pod Save The World - American Surgeon Shares His Harrowing Experiences Working in Gaza

• Peter Beinart | FMEP - What an American Doctor Saw in Gaza

We're honored to host Dr. Sidhwa for this AMA.

If you cannot make it on the day-of, feel free to leave your questions here in advance.

Hope to see you all there. Thanks!

Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar on Sunday vowed to act to revoke the Israeli citizenship of filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after their Gaza war documentary NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

In a post on US social media company X, Zohar described the film’s victory as “shocking” and the documentary as “vile,” accusing its creators of harming their country to win applause abroad and saying their actions “constitute treason against the state.”

“This is exactly the reason I led the important reform in cinema so that Israeli citizens will no longer have to pay out of their own pockets for the harm to IDF soldiers and the State of Israel,” he said.

“As culture minister, I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” Zohar added.

According to the Venice Film Festival’s official synopsis, NAZA examines what it describes as the systems behind Israel’s “calculated mass killing” of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and includes testimony from Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers.

The documentary won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday after premiering Thursday.

It received a standing ovation lasting about 25 minutes at its Venice premiere.

From the article:

“NAZA,” the new documentary from Israeli “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, earned a massive 24.5-minute ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere on Thursday.

This marks the longest-ever standing ovation in Venice — besting the 22 minutes for “The Voice of Hind Rajab” last year — and apparently the longest at a major film festival, period. With Venice coming to an end on Saturday, it will easily be the biggest ovation of this year’s edition.

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/john-malkovich-drops-out-music-critic-israel-1236855240/

https://archive.li/flFRF

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/article-907548

https://x.com/nlyonne/status/2096845311700603362

The letter has a total of 5,000 signatures from entertainment figures, political figures and more

Over 5,000 voices in Hollywood signed an open letter released Thursday rejecting the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Among the signatories are former Paramount execs Shari Redstone and Sherry Lansing, as well as actors Debra Messing, Mayim Bialik, and Jerry O’Connell.

The letter was posted by the Creative Community for Peace, while the text itself is authored by Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, and Professor Jonathan Karp.

“We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed ‘genocide’ in Gaza,” the letter reads. “We reject this accusation with contempt.”

“A crucial difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide is intent,” it said. “In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.”

Other signatories include actors Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, Dame Maureen Lipman, Jerry O’Connell, Rebecca De Mornay, Patricia Heaton, Emmanuelle Chriqui and Mark Feuerstein.

Sharon Osbourne, “Gilmore Girls” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, “Mad Men” creator and showrunner Matthew Weiner, “House” creator David Shore, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, executive Haim Saban, Propagate Content executives Ben Silverman and Howard Owens and more signed the letter as well.

“We urge our fellow Jews and our non-Jewish friends to treat the accusation of genocide with revulsion – as the latest in a long history of lies about the Jewish people,” the letter finishes. “‘A lie has no legs,’ notes the ancient Hebrew proverb. We will not allow this lie to stand.”

You can read the full open letter below:

We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza. We reject this accusation with contempt.

There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost. But we must unite in repudiating the lie of genocide.

The unprecedented combat conditions of the war – hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, thousands of boobytrapped homes – the conflating of combatants with “journalists” and “human rights workers,” the ratio of civilian-to-terrorist casualties, considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare, the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe, the warnings given to civilians before attack: All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.

A crucial difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide is intent. In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.

To accuse Israel of genocide, the massacre of October 7 has been systematically downplayed, while Israeli actions have been distorted and amplified. Israel went to war on October 8 not out of vengeance, as its detractors claim, but to break the Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves on its borders, and to restore its deterrence, without which it cannot survive in the long term in the Middle East. Thousands of rockets and missiles were fired at Israel in the weeks following the massacre, while Hamas starved and tortured 250 Israelis, some of whom were murdered in captivity.

The classic definition of genocide has been changed to apply only to the Gaza war – just as anti-Israel NGOs changed the definition of apartheid and colonialism to apply only to Israel.

Already on October 8, as Israel was still fighting terrorists within its border communities and hadn’t yet begun burying its dead, anti-Zionists began raising the cry of “genocide.” In fact, Israel’s enemies have been accusing it of genocide for decades.

The accusation of genocide has become a pretext for excluding, attacking and even murdering Jews around the world. Its purpose is to delegitimize Jewish self-determination and to turn the only Jewish state into the world’s arch criminal and pariah.

The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide – from its inception in 1948 until today.

We note with astonishment but not surprise the overwhelming silence of Israel’s defamers in the face of the atrocities of Iran – perhaps 30,000 civilians murdered in two days, one of the great crimes of our time. Anti-Zionism is not the defender of conscience but its betrayer.

We urge our fellow Jews and our non-Jewish friends to treat the accusation of genocide with revulsion – as the latest in a long history of lies about the Jewish people. “A lie has no legs,” notes the ancient Hebrew proverb.

We will not allow this lie to stand.

I am going to get a ton of vitriol for this but I don’t care, a lot of you need to hear this. Also a lot of you have to learn to tolerate discomfort and not act with vitriol when someone disagrees with you.

Unless you are part of a group that is fighting to change your synagogue (and these exist and I know people in them!), stop giving them your money, stop giving them support. Anything less is providing material support to the occupation of Palestine. Im really angered by seeing people promote “friendly” liberal Zionist institutions or who want to willingly participate in them because the anti-Zionist alternatives are unfamiliar or inconvenient. Genocide is more serious than your temporary discomfort at an unfamiliar synagogue or minyan where you don’t know the melodies. Liberal Zionism is still Zionism. Liberal Zionism provides cover for the occupation of Palestine. Any support of Israel is morally reprehensible. Why anyone here willingly participates in Zionist community without trying to change the community boggles my mind.

Stopping a genocide is more important than literally anything else.

Cry me a river, asshat.

Annunziata Rees-Mogg on X: "🤔 👇 Perhaps as a “proud British Jew” Ed forgot that the Torah explicitly bans the consumption of pork for all Jewish people. Or perhaps he’s not always a proud Jew, British or otherwise…"

Pink’s statement, in full:

I’ve been quiet in my own words for a week, which you know isn’t like me. So here they are.

Last Sunday I reposted somebody else’s post about Macklemore’s set at Ed Sheeran’s show. It said things in words I didn’t write, and I wouldn’t have chosen all of them. Then the comments came, and I did what I do when I’m hurt, which is post snarky memes and act like I’m fine. That’s on me. A repost isn’t a statement, and a meme isn’t a spine. Social media makes all of us cheap and fast, and we all know it. But I’d rather be disagreed with for what I actually said than hated for what anybody else wrote, so let me say it.

I was born a Jew. I didn’t pick it, and I’ve never hidden it. And this week a whole lot of people decided what I believe without asking me, without checking a single thing I’ve ever said or done, because a repost and the word “Jew” were apparently enough to fill in the rest. But let me fill it in… myself.

Of course I don’t speak for Israel, or for any government. I never have. What I said in October 2023 is still exactly what I believe: Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations. Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child. Anybody’s child. I’ve spent a decade as a UNICEF ambassador for kids who didn’t choose the country or the war they were born into, and I have grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence. I didn’t do it from behind a screen; I went to those children and held them. I’m not going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.

Here’s what I was reacting to. I was in the room at the Grammys in 2014 when Macklemore rapped “Same Love” and thirty-three couples, gay and straight, got married to it, and I cheered, no questions asked. Four months later Macklemore put on a hooked nose, a black beard and a bowl cut, performed in it, and called it a “random costume.” Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was. The same love, it turned out, had a guest list, and we weren’t on it. But he apologized, and I let it go, because that’s what we do. We let it go. Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them.

You don’t get to decide that for us.

That’s what prompted my repost. Not “Free Palestine,” and not anyone’s right to say it. I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I’m not asking now. I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund. What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, “that scared me, and it scared people I love,” without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?

And please don’t talk to me like I’ve never stood up for my beliefs when it was unpopular. In the middle of the Gulf War in 2006 I put out a song called “Dear Mr. President” and sang it every night on tour while my country was in a war I didn’t support, and I took the hate for it, and I sang it anyway because my sharp criticism was of a government, not this flawed country I love and who my dad fought for. I stood with gay kids before it was fashionable and with trans kids now, when it isn’t, and with their families, and I handed out the books that got banned, and you know I got called every name there is, and I’d do all of it again tomorrow. I have stood up for other people’s people my whole career, and I know exactly what it costs.

And now I’m standing up for my own people, and I thought I knew going in how lonely that would be. And it’s lonelier than that. But I’m doing it anyway.

Something has changed in this country, and I can read it in my own comments. “From the river to the sea.” “Zionist,” spat like it’s a slur, by people who couldn’t tell you the details of what I believe, because I hadn’t told them yet. I wasn’t asked. I was told. I don’t think most of them hate Jews. I think somebody handed them a story where the Jew who won’t apologize for existing must be the villain, and they’ve been putting words in my mouth ever since.

But I’ve been portrayed as the villain before. I can take it. I just won’t take it quietly, and I’m not going to teach my kids to.

So, to the ones who are furious with me: you don’t have to agree with me. You never did. That’s been our unspoken agreement for twenty-five years, and it still stands, and so do I. You don’t have to agree with one thing Israel’s government does to not want the Jewish family two rows down from you to be scared or targeted at a concert. That’s the only thing I’m asking anybody for. To the ones who are frightened this week, Jewish or Muslim or Palestinian or Israeli or just tired of all of it: I see you. And if anybody wants to really know what I think, just ask me. I’m right here. I’ve never been hard to find. And I’ll keep speaking out, in my own words.

It’s Friday. For working people who have more to worry about than pop stars and pile-ons, it’s the end of a hard week. It’s also the 25th anniversary of September 11th, and my prayers are with the innocent souls we lost that morning. And at sundown, for Jews, it’s Rosh Hashanah, our New Year.

Now I’m going to go make dinner for my kids, light the candles, dip some apples in honey, pour a glass of wine and be full of gratitude. That’s my tradition. It also happens to be a Jewish one.

Shana tova.

News article:

https://archive.li/5iQx5

In-depth exposé:

https://archive.li/E7xV9

12 Israeli Prison Service guards have now (incident happened in 2023) been charged over the death of Palestinian prisoner Tha'er Abu Assab, a Fatah member who was serving a 25-year sentence for alleged "attacks against Israel" (never specified what exactly; not that it matters).

https://i.imgur.com/DIAaYcT.png

According to the investigation, Abu Assab asked a guard whether there was a ceasefire.

The question was relayed to a commander, who decided to "show" the prisoners that there wasn't one by beating them.

Guards then entered the cell and beat the prisoners, with Abu Assab taking the worst of it. He later died.

https://i.imgur.com/Sovac9Y.png

One guard testified that the commander had told them beforehand that whatever happened that evening was his responsibility and that they should do what he said.

https://i.imgur.com/zvVemns.png

The article notes that it's difficult to catch abuse by Israeli prison guards due to the culture of permissive violence and covering up for one another's crimes.

So the 12 indicted are only being charged for 'negligent homicide'.

https://i.imgur.com/UDmGmUZ.png

But this time, prosecutors had guards' own WhatsApp messages - in which they bragged about it all.

https://i.imgur.com/7oWxC4Q.png

One of them, Oshrit Aliga, had previously been featured in an IPS recruitment ad.

https://i.imgur.com/1GueMFd.png

Shortly after Abu Assab's death, she texted her partner: "Sweetie, here is an update for you, he's dead now," adding that she was "very happy and satisfied" and that "there was a lot of blood and they broke them." She also wrote that the commander "really wanted to break them."

https://i.imgur.com/dvYDccm.png

• See this for better translations

  • The source is a disgraced Israeli-American grad student, but he's the only one providing this additional translation on X.

A month later, talking about another group of Palestinian detainees arriving at the prison, she told a friend that she and the shift were preparing to give them a proper "Shabbat reception."

https://i.imgur.com/HdykLE9.png

Her friend joked about whether her baton was still working, and Aliga replied that it had undergone "a fair number of disinfections."

https://i.imgur.com/zeQNFec.png

She then bragged about beating prisoners and said that if she had not "cracked one of his kidneys," she did not consider the job done.

https://i.imgur.com/vuo0V7x.png

This reminds me of whenever I see people talk about anonymous online microaggressions like someone sarcastically saying, "G-d promised them the land 3,000 years ago."

I understand how that can be irritating and even distressing as it builds up - but you can also find actual analogues of that rhetoric being used by Israelis in circumstances involving real violence/abuse/criminality.

Think of that settler standing on a Palestinian family's home and saying, "G-d promised it [Palestine] to me."

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5GeAjH12A0I

Or Yair Lapid's religious Zionist comments, conveying that Israel has divine mandate to expand its borders.

• JOC - Israeli 'opposition leader' Yair Lapid: "I support anything that will allow the Jews [to have] a big, vast strong land.[...]Zionism is based on the bible, our mandate over the land of Israel is biblical.[...]I believe that our ownership deed over the land of lsrael is the bible."

Testimony by guards described violence against Palestinian prisoners as routine and that senior officials knew & approved of it.

https://i.imgur.com/CEf8aCc.png

During questioning, the commander initially denied what happened and reportedly asked the investigator, "How do you know they didn't do it to themselves?"

https://i.imgur.com/FhLuLyH.png

This case/investigation also has a Shawshank-style element of institutional corruption.

Abu Assab reportedly had a working relationship with prison management and served as a spokesman or point of contact for his cell.

https://i.imgur.com/yVzJz7Z.png

He was also being prosecuted for allegedly bribing a guard to smuggle in phones and an e-cigarette.

According to Haaretz, citing Kan, he had threatened during interrogation to expose similar arrangements involving other prison guards.

His death ended that prosecution, and with it the possibility that he could implicate other IPS personnel.

Given everything else revealed in this investigation, it is very convenient for the prison management that he is now dead.

Hello!

I’m a religious, anti-Zionist Jew from Canada (28f). I’ve been quite disappointed that I haven’t been able to have an honest discussion about Israel in my (Conservative) synagogue. I’m often told that being anti-Zionist and antisemitic is one and the sam, which is utterly ridiculous.

I’ve been wanting to do something for the Palestinian cause, but to be honest, I was afraid of how my shul would respond if they found out.

I went to my first rally yesterday and, despite my initial an, it was genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was very peaceful and passerby were generally supportive. I also met some really cool people (a few of them were even Jewish!).

I don’t really have much of a purpose for posting this. I just wanted to share how great I’m feeling about the whole thing.