Commentaries on Gaza, on Twitter

Over the weekend, I became intrigued and impressed by some very substantial commentaries on the Gaza crisis that the super-smart Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani has been posting on Twitter. Today, he has two more. I invite you all to read them, which even if you’re not on Twitter you can do in these downloadable PDFs:

• Dec. 2 Commentary on status and prospects for Israel’s resumed assault against Gaza
• Dec 3 On the history of Hamas
• Dec 4 On the relevance of the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Bab el-Mandab
• Dec 4 On the ICC prosecutor’s scandalous behavior on the Gaza Crisis

Each of these threads is very well worth reading.

I confess that for a few years until recently I’d spent little time on Twitter. Just World Educational’s Twitter acco0unt (@justworlded) and my own personal one (@helenacobban) had both for a long time been subjected to the pernicious treatment known as shadow-banning—a form of discourse suppression that leaves the suppressed person/entity with no clear evidence of that suppression. So I’d just largely stopped paying much time on Twitter.

Evidently, though, a lot of interesting things have been happening there since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company—and also since the revelation at his urging of numerous details about the widespread use of shadow-banning and other forms of discourse suppression by his predecessors, as well as those previous owners’ close, years-long cooperation with various oppressive government agencies in Washington and perhaps elsewhere. (Hello, the First Amendment!)

Since the beginning of the current Israeli assault on Gaza, it has been clear that rights activists in Gaza and worldwide have been far more able to get their voices heard via Twitter then they were during Israel’s numerous previous assaults (all in the pre-Musk era.) The near-live video testimonies of the suffering in Gaza have been very powerful, as have been vdieos of solidarity actions all around the world.

I guess what I had not understood until a couple days ago was that people like Mouin Rabbani were also well able to use Twitter to get their important text-based commentary well-distributed by using the “threading” feature of Twitter… and those threads can then be compiled together and preserved, as I know, by using a tool like the Thread Reader app. Which was what I used to produce the PDFs of Mouin’s four most recent threads, presented above.

… So I also got a bit inspired by him to try to post a substantive thread of my own on Twitter, on a topic I’d been planning to write about here at Globalities, anyway: that is “End-of-Empire Derangement Sydrome” (EEDS.) This is the diagnosis I have started giving for the unhingedly violent and apolitical way the Israelis are behaving in Gaza—and also, for the similarly apolitical, irrational, and actually hate-filled way in which Pres. Joe Biden has chosen to support them.

You can now download the PDF of the Twitter thread I wrote yesterday on EEDS here. (I realize it’s not quite as elegantly presented as Mouin’s threads.)

You can use the Comments box below to comment on the substance in any of those five Twittered PDFs I link to here. Or to provide your $0.02 on whether you think I should persist in trying to communicate in that way. Thanks for any feedback you can offer!