Hamas attacks southern Israel

[Ludicus]

their desert cult largely displaced and replaced thousands of years of Mediterranean civilization through ethnic cleansing.

There are provocative statements that aren't always necessarily ignorant, and there are others that are ignorant without being provocative. Yours is not only profoundly ignorant, it is above all childishly provocative.
Get some history books that aren't written by Trump and try to learn the history of the Mediterranean you're talking about without ever having studied it. Start, for example, by reading Davd's Abulafia's The Great Sea, if that's not too much for you. As for the rest, there's no point in commenting.

[Jozam]

The most indigenous populations are Samaritans, Levantine Jews, Druze, and Levantine Christians (including Palestinian Christians), if indigeneity is defined by ancestry dating back to the Levant during the Bronze Age. The reason these groups are more indigenous by ancestry is that they have been mostly isolated from inward geneflow, through endogamy for the first three, and by semi-isolation for the Christians.

Muslim Palestinians are a lot more diverse in ancestry than the aforementioned groups, because they weren’t socially isolated from other North African and Middle Eastern Muslims. Some have Circassian ancestry and/or Egyptian ancestry, etc. They also have about 10% sub-Saharan African ancestry on average from the sex slave trade, because the offspring of a Muslim and a slave was considered free. They tend to cluster more with Saudis, Jordanians, and Yemeni Jews, which suggests they have a fair amount of Arabian ancestry, but Arabia was largely populated by migrations from the Levant during the Neolithic, so we’re already talking about similar populations. By their uniparental markers, it can be determined that they are also descended from local Christians, Samaritans, and Jews who converted to Islam. Unsurprisingly, you can be descended from both Arab invaders and indigenous Levantines, among others.

Palestinians often get misidentified as having small amounts of Ashkenazi ancestry when they take a 23andMe test. The best explanation for this is that they share very small IBD segments with Ashkenazi Jews dating back to before the diaspora. The 23andMe system just labels those segments as Ashkenazi because the vast majority of people in their database who have them are Ashkenazi.

Palestinian Muslim ancestry is more diverse for sure but it's still mostly indigenous Levantine, right? In other words, based on the genetic studies you've posted, it would be inaccurate to describe Palestinian and other Levantine Muslims as not native to the region but merely recent invaders who "replaced" the indigenous Levantine population.

[Siblesz]

Citing an mtDNA (Mitochondrial DNA) study on this issue is a good way to demonstrate that you don’t know anything about it. Mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from one’s mother. Therefore, unique mtDNA markers are useful for tracing direct mother to daughter lineages only, not genome-wide ancestry. Similarly, unique Y-chromosome markers are only useful for tracking direct father to son lineages, and the paternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews are from the Levant. Genome-wide, Ashkenazi Jews are about half Levantine and half (mostly Southern) European. At this point, the genetic evidence is clear that the founders of the Ashkenazi population were male Jews from the Levant, who mostly took Southern European wives in the first generation, and thereafter married fairly strictly within their own community.

Genome-wide, Ashkenazi Jews form a fairly tight cluster with other Jewish groups, Samaritans, and Druze:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Some Ashkenazi Jews are pulled a bit toward the Caucasus populations due to small amounts of Eastern European admixture.

Here are some of the most important studies:

Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry

The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people

No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews

North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters

And this:

The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant

In Figure SG.1 of the supplements PDF of that study, you can see that Ashkenazi Jews have a ~54% affinity with the samples from Bronze Age Megiddo.

The estimation that Israeli Jews are 45% Ashkenazi is based on surnames and immigration records not genetics, and that’s somewhat misleading because there are a lot of mixed marriages and on average non-Ashkenazi Jewish women have a lot more children, so over a few generations Ashkenazi ancestry probably makes up less than that. In any case, Ashkenazi Jews obviously aren’t “fake Jews” and the term “Arab Jews” is kind of silly, considering Jewish identity predates the concept of Arab as an ethnic identity. In Semitic languages, it originally just referred to anyone who lives in the wilderness/desert.

Dude... I took a genetic test. Even I have around 5% Ashkenazi DNA. I have 12% Sub-Saharan African as well. Does that make me a Jew? A lot of these tests show that there is a genetic connection to Ashkenazis in the Middle East. They also show that there is a huge amount of DNA in most Ashkenazis that is NOT from the Middle East... If you want to argue the case that Ashkenazis are Jewish, then I can argue the same case based on my DNA. In the end, all of this is quite politicized. Ashkenazis have a political motive to prove that they are the chosen people. Most Ashkenazis I met don't really fit the bill of the common black eyed, black hair, tanned Semitic though... actually quite the contrary... most are blonde, red-haired, most have blue/light eyes, really white skin... that skin was not made to resist the Middle Eastern sun....

Point being, if we are to go along with the idea that 2,000 years ago, the Ashkenazis had some ancestors that came from the Middle East, and that that's why they are Jewish, then basically you can argue that case for nearly half of the people in Western Europe as well. Also another point in counter: isn't Jewish ancestry traced through the mother, and not the father? I thought it was the mother's line that was considered genuine. So in that case it's mitochondrial DNA that is important (which is over 80% Western European according to genetic tests)... which again, shows that the whole idea that the Ashkenazis are the chosen people of Abraham to be around 80+% based on faulty premises...

IN the end, that's the issue when an ancient belief system faces off against genetics or the scientific method. Usually it's the ancient belief system that doesn't really hold up to its own argument... and then you have pseudo-scientific arguments all trying to prove something that is and has always been more subtle, more complicated than the simplistic narrative of a cohesive Jewish people that all came from the Levant and are all descended to Abraham.

[Ludicus]

Read, Myth: Palestinians are Arabs that arrived in the 7th century

A frequently recurring theme when discussing the history of Palestine, is the question of “who was there first?”. The implication being, whoever was there first deserves ownership of the land. I have lost count of how many times I have encountered the argument that “The Jewish people have been in Palestine before the Muslims/Arabs,” or a variation thereof. This has always struck me as an interesting example of how people learn just enough history to support their world view, separating it completely from any historical context or the larger picture of the region.

Since this question is so widespread, and since I see it answered in different, and in my opinion, unhelpful ways, I would like to open up the topic for wider discussion.
The argument is simple to follow: Palestinians today are mostly Arabs. The Arabs came to the Levant with the Muslim conquest of the region. Therefore, Arabs -and as an extension Palestinians- have only been in Palestine and the Levant since the seventh century AD.

There are a couple of glaring problems with this line of thought. First of all, there is a clear conflation of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. None of these are interchangeable. Arabs have had a long history in the Levant before the advent of Islam. For example, The Nabataean kingdom ruled over Jordan, southern Palestine and Sinai a whole millennium before Muslims ever set foot in the area. Another example would be the Ghassanid kingdom, which was a Christian Arab kingdom that extended over vast areas of the region. As a matter of fact, many prominent Christian families in Palestine today, such as Maalouf, Haddad and Khoury, can trace their lineage back to the Ghassanid kingdom.
The second problem with this is that there is a misunderstanding of the process that is the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa. Once again, we must view the Islamization of newly conquered lands and their Arabization as two distinct phenomena. The Islamization process began instantly, albeit slowly. Persia, for example took over 2 centuries to become a majority Muslim province. The Levant, much longer.

The Arabization of conquered provinces though, began later than their Islamization. The beginning of this process can be traced back to the Marwanid dynasty of the Ummayad Caliphate. Until that point, each province was ruled mostly with its own language, laws and currency. The process of the Arabization of the state united all these under Arabic speaking officials, and made it law that the language of state and of commerce would become Arabic. Thus, it became advantageous to assimilate into this identity, as many government positions and trade deals were offered only to Muslim Arabs.

So although the vast majority of the population of these lands were not ethnically Arab, they came to identify as such over a millennium. Arab stopped being a purely ethnic identity, and morphed into a mainly cultural and linguistic one. In contrast to European colonialism of the new world, where the native population was mostly eradicated to make place for the invaders, the process in MENA is one of the conquered peoples mixing with and coming to identify as their conquerors without being physically removed, if not as Arabs, then as Muslims.

Following from this, the Palestinian Arabs of today did not suddenly appear from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century to settle in Palestine, but are the same indigenous peoples living there who changed how they identified over time. This includes the descendants of every group that has ever called Palestine their home. When regions change rulers, they don’t normally change populations. Throughout history, peoples have often changed how they identified politically. The Sardinians eventually became Italians, Prussians became Germans. It would be laughable to suggest that the Sardinians were kicked out and replaced by a distinct foreign Italian people. We must separate the political nationalist identity of people from their personhood as human beings, as nationalism is a relatively modern concept, especially in the Middle East.
Naturally, no region is a closed container. Trade, immigration, invasion and intermarriage all played a role in creating the current buildup of Palestinian society. There were many additions to the people of the land over the millennia. However, the fact remains that there was never a process where Arab or Muslim conquerors completely replaced the native population living there, only added to them.

THE TRAP

So, what does this all mean for Palestine?
Absolutely nothing.

Although the argument has many ahistorical assumptions and claims, it is not these which form its greatest weakness. The whole argument is a trap. The basic implication of this line of argumentation is as follows:
If the Jewish people were in Palestine before the Arabs, then the land belongs to them. Therefore, the creation of Israel would be justified.
From my experience, whenever this argument is used, the automatic response of Palestinians is to say that their ancestors were there first. These ancestors being the Canaanites. The idea that Palestinians are the descendants of only one particular group in a region with mass migrations and dozens of different empires and peoples is not only ahistorical, but this line of thought indirectly legitimizes the original argument they are fighting against.
This is because it implies that the only reason Israel’s creation is unjustified is because their Palestinian ancestors were there first. It implies that the problem with the argument lies in the details, not that the argument as a whole is absolute nonsense and shouldn’t even be entertained.
The ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first. It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years.

If we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been.

These positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism. After all, this ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed, well defined, unchanging homogenous group having exclusive ownership over lands corresponding to modern day borders has nothing to do with the actual history of the area, and everything to do with modern notions of ethnic nationalism and colonialism.

All of this doesn't seem at all relevant to this topic, not because studying the genetics of the region isn't interesting and useful, in many and varied ways (that's what genetics is there for, eg. in Medicine), but because the intention is to try to justify that Israel is the "legitimate" owner of Palestine.
The Muslims were here for 700 years, the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Umayyad Caliphate took place between around 710/720s. So we're going to hand them the territories that they think and say belong to them? Palestine belongs to those with the "a,b,c"genes ? it doesn't make sense.

[Siblesz]

Read, Myth: Palestinians are Arabs that arrived in the 7th century


All of this doesn't seem at all relevant to this topic, not because studying the genetics of the region isn't interesting and useful, in many and varied ways (that's what genetics is there for, eg. in Medicine), but because the intention is to try to justify that Israel is the "legitimate" owner of Palestine.
The Muslims were here for 700 years, the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Umayyad Caliphate took place between around 710/720s. So we're going to hand them the territories that they think and say belong to them? Palestine belongs to those with the "a,b,c"genes ? it doesn't make sense.

Pretty much... the craziest irony of this whole conflict is that the Palestinians have much more ancestral claim to actually being real Jews than most Ashkenazis, based on the DNA evidence. I have also read some accounts saying that a large chunk of Palestinians are actually former Jews that converted to Islam and never left Palestine in the first place... which would mean that Israelis are bombing and killing people who are more genuinely Jewish than they could ever be because they never left in the first place. It's a bit like my story... I left Venezuela when I was 12 years old, now living in China. Imagine if my ancestors lived in China, mixed with the locals, and then after 2,000 years returned to Venezuela and started killing people indiscriminately because "it's my land!" None of them look Venezuelan anymore, but they are the chosen Venezuelan people... The whole insanity of this religious cult is quite of depressingly hilarious if you ask me...

And on that note, did you know China has descendants of Jewish people that settled in China more than a thousand years ago? Similar to my story above, none of them look Semitic anymore...
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/art...ish-community/

[Ludicus]

Exactly. On the other hand, I confess that I get a little annoyed when I hear about the "desert culture that destroyed the civilised world of the Mediterranean". It's unbelievable. I confess that I have a special fascination with Arab and Jewish cultures, particularly in certain areas that attract my interest - after all, I come from a country that owes a lot to these two cultures.
It must be said that the significant centers of learning and medicine in the Middle Ages, from the 8^th to the 16^th centuries were Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and later Cordoba, Spain. Avicenna's “Canon of Medicine”, written in Arabic, was the standard textbook in medicine in Europe until the 18th century. Al Zahraw was considered the greatest surgeon in the Middle Ages and the father of modern surgery.
The surgery section of Kitab-Al-Tasrif (a 30-volume medical encyclopedia) was translated from Arabic to Latin, Hebrew, and Turkish, and was the standard surgery textbook for the next 500 years, the standard text in Salerno and of Montpellier. He even described neurosurgical instruments,cranial drills that avoided puncture of the dura mater!!

Many people don't seem to know that general health care under Islam outshone Christian society in one relevant aspect, the hospital system. In fact, during the Golden Age of Islam the Muslim world was clearly more advanced than its Christian counterpart with magnificent hospitals in various countries. Bimaristans in the Arab/Muslim world offered what was at the time world-class healthcare, and without charge to the patient.

Do you know that no patient was to be turned away, regardless of their race, religion, gender or type of illness, including mental illnesses and contagious diseases? and that patients suffering from anxiety or psychological distress were treated with the same urgency as patients with physical illnesses?
Foe the first time in history, Islamic hospitals brought about the idea of separate wards for different illnesses. Convalescents had separate sections within them!

Just out of curiosity, do you know that in Muslim hospitals, healthy people are said to have feigned illness to enjoy its cuisine? And btw, clinical records of the cases were collected and preserved for teaching.

In fact, Christian hospitals in the west were few, rudimentary, and greatly inferior in term of sanitation, care, facilities, and medication to the centers in Muslim cities. (as we know, Christians emphasized salvation of soul rather than restoration of body)
And of course, Jewish translators occupied a special place in bridging Arabic and Latin learning; and the contributions of non-Muslims to learning were eagerly absorbed and incorporated into the rich cultural heritage of Islam,its common knowledge.
It was the familiarity of the Jews with Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic that gave them the opportunity to bring Greek writings into Arabic orbit. (much of which had been translated into Syriac by Nestorian Christians). Later, as we now, Jewish writers were instrumental in returning Greek works to the Christian west. When Jews fled at the time of Maimonides fled persecution, they dispersed to European centers of learning, among them Salerno and Montpellier, to which they brough Arabic science and medicine.

Where is my friend ThiudareiksGunthigg, a great medievalist, when I need him?

[Siblesz]

Exactly. On the other hand, I confess that I get a little annoyed when I hear about the "desert culture that destroyed the civilised world of the Mediterranean". It's unbelievable. I confess that I have a special fascination with Arab and Jewish cultures, particularly in certain areas that attract my interest - after all, I come from a country that owes a lot to these two cultures.
It must be said that the significant centers of learning and medicine in the Middle Ages, from the 8^th to the 16^th centuries were Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and later Cordoba, Spain. Avicenna's “Canon of Medicine”, written in Arabic, was the standard textbook in medicine in Europe until the 18th century. Al Zahraw was considered the greatest surgeon in the Middle Ages and the father of modern surgery.
The surgery section of Kitab-Al-Tasrif (a 30-volume medical encyclopedia) was translated from Arabic to Latin, Hebrew, and Turkish, and was the standard surgery textbook for the next 500 years, the standard text in Salerno and of Montpellier. He even described neurosurgical instruments,cranial drills that avoided puncture of the dura mater!!

Many people don't seem to know that general health care under Islam outshone Christian society in one relevant aspect, the hospital system. In fact, during the Golden Age of Islam the Muslim world was clearly more advanced than its Christian counterpart with magnificent hospitals in various countries. Bimaristans in the Arab/Muslim world offered what was at the time world-class healthcare, and without charge to the patient.

Do you know that no patient was to be turned away, regardless of their race, religion, gender or type of illness, including mental illnesses and contagious diseases? and that patients suffering from anxiety or psychological distress were treated with the same urgency as patients with physical illnesses?
Foe the first time in history, Islamic hospitals brought about the idea of separate wards for different illnesses. Convalescents had separate sections within them!

Just out of curiosity, do you know that in Muslim hospitals, healthy people are said to have feigned illness to enjoy its cuisine? And btw, clinical records of the cases were collected and preserved for teaching.

In fact, Christian hospitals in the west were few, rudimentary, and greatly inferior in term of sanitation, care, facilities, and medication to the centers in Muslim cities. (as we know, Christians emphasized salvation of soul rather than restoration of body)
And of course, Jewish translators occupied a special place in bridging Arabic and Latin learning; and the contributions of non-Muslims to learning were eagerly absorbed and incorporated into the rich cultural heritage of Islam,its common knowledge.
It was the familiarity of the Jews with Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic that gave them the opportunity to bring Greek writings into Arabic orbit. (much of which had been translated into Syriac by Nestorian Christians). Later, as we now, Jewish writers were instrumental in returning Greek works to the Christian west. When Jews fled at the time of Maimonides fled persecution, they dispersed to European centers of learning, among them Salerno and Montpellier, to which they brough Arabic science and medicine.

Where is my friend ThiudareiksGunthigg, a great medievalist, when I need him?

You bring a lot of good points... the issue of course is Euro-centrism... it's the generally held belief system that most Europeans and Americans hold that blinds people to the delusion that the entire world was built by Europeans, when actually if you analyze the facts, and if you unravel the narrative, you realize that without Middle Eastern/Indian/Chinese medicine and science, the West would stlll be stuck in the Dark Ages... and that Europe's last five hundred years of domination is an anomaly to the rule... most of human civilization has always been centered East of Athens, not West or North of it... Having lived in China for the last twenty years, I also resent this euro-centrism... the Chinese owe more to human civilization than most people know or would care to admit.

Also pertinent is the reality that Israel is a Western state that is lead mostly by radicalized Ashkenazis... a great many of people who are descendants of Ashkenazi Jews, I have heard, are quite racist to Sephardic Jews, and they hold a lot of these euro-centric beliefs that they learned from their original countries in North/Eastern Europe and brought with them to Israel. So it's no wonder why many Israelis have a psychology that is more typical of Slavic people than it is of the Middle East. In the end, we are products of our environment. Most Israelis settled only recently to the Middle East, so they haven't really adapted to their local environment and are still mostly acting and thinking like Central/Eastern Europeans.

[Legio_Italica]

There are provocative statements that aren't always necessarily ignorant, and there are others that are ignorant without being provocative. Yours is not only profoundly ignorant, it is above all childishly provocative.
Get some history books that aren't written by Trump and try to learn the history of the Mediterranean you're talking about without ever having studied it. Start, for example, by reading Davd's Abulafia's The Great Sea, if that's not too much for you. As for the rest, there's no point in commenting.

I’d be very interested to learn about this alternate history of the world where the conquest of the Middle East by Arab armies was in fact a medical symposium where everyone volunteered to become Arab Muslims because their hospitals were state of the art, antiracist and LGBTQ+ friendly. If “genocide is when Israel” were a more compelling argument, there might be less of a need to overcompensate for it by extolling the virtues of the Arab Muslim conquests at length. The only reason it is necessary in the first place to point out that Jews are native to the Levant and the Arab Muslims conquered it later on is to counter modern Arab nationalist narratives insisting Israelis are “fake” and “foreign:”

Also pertinent is the reality that Israel is a Western state that is lead mostly by radicalized Ashkenazis... a great many of people who are descendants of Ashkenazi Jews, I have heard, are quite racist to Sephardic Jews, and they hold a lot of these euro-centric beliefs that they learned from their original countries in North/Eastern Europe and brought with them to Israel. So it's no wonder why many Israelis have a psychology that is more typical of Slavic people than it is of the Middle East. In the end, we are products of our environment. Most Israelis settled only recently to the Middle East, so they haven't really adapted to their local environment and are still mostly acting and thinking like Central/Eastern Europeans.

[Siblesz]

I’d be very interested to learn about this alternate history of the world where the conquest of the Middle East by Arab armies was in fact a medical symposium where everyone volunteered to become Arab Muslims because their hospitals were state of the art, antiracist and LGBTQ+ friendly. If “genocide is when Israel” were a more compelling argument, there might be less of a need to overcompensate for it by extolling the virtues of the Arab Muslim conquests at length. The only reason it is necessary in the first place to point out that Jews are native to the Levant and the Arab Muslims conquered it later on is to counter modern Arab nationalist narratives insisting Israelis are “fake” and “foreign:”

There is nothing alternative about this history. And there is no historical controversy in pointing out the fact that Islam was more tolerant and much more open-minded and progressive, in the first half of its rule over the Middle East, than in the latter half, nor that it was much more open and progressive and more hygienic than Europe til at least the early 1700s. As for the pro-LGBT part, no one said in this thread anything about LGBT rights in the Islamic world. We're just pointing out that the Euro-centric, anti-Muslim narrative has a lot of gaping holes in it and is full of hypocrisy.

As for Israel's history, Israel as a country is quite young... the narrative that there is a cohesive Jewish people that have maintained themselves completely intact and that are the inheritors of the land of Palestine has alot of gaping holes in it. The more you question the foundations of it through the scientific method, modern genetics, and the historical account, the more the foundations of that myth unravel. Every nation has a myth going for it. It's not like I am for one nation's myth and against another one... I am against all religious and nationalist myths... it's just a bit sad to see that some myths are believed more earnestly than others, and some myths are more negative for the prospects of mankind's survival than others. Perhaps this is an opportunity for the collective Western mind to realize that they've been had... Islam, Chritianity, Judaism are retarded systems based on a dualistic view of the world that will end up destroying the world as we know it in the next few decades... If the last two thousand years of history of Europe's and the Middle East's bloody history is not enough proof of the inherent violence of these religions, then nothing is... now add a few thousand nuclear bombs to this nasty ideological soup, and it's just a matter of time before everyone who drank the soup dies of poisoning... unfortunately the soup has gone global and this radioactive non-coherent soup of madness has infiltrated the minds of at least half of the world already. The scariest thing about this sickness is that most people don't even realize that they're sick... until it's too late and they go around shooting children and destroying their own chances for peace and stability out of a necessity to defend a non-existent concept that exists only within the confines of their own deluded heads.

There are a few bright lights in the dark prospects that mankind is facing of course... Mysticism and psychedelic-based spiritualityn has seen a big come back. Eastern beliefs such as Taoism/Buddhism/Hinduism offer alternatives to the suicidal, bi-polar, dualistic idiocy of mono-theism, and science, secularism has gained a large following in much of the world, especially in those that are interested in a simple persuit of the truth rather than in confirming some self-professed ideological cultural conditioning.... but the war that humanity is facing is inherently psychological, and the Jewish people, with their "chosen people" mentality, are at the heart of it, for they are the ones with the most stubborn conditioning. At the end of the day, if we collectively manage to unravel the delusion of Judaism and expose it to the light of truth for what it is, it will be a big win for humanity. If we don't, and their ideological ego-driven religious/ethno-nationalist madness persists, then I'm afraid that we will either become extinct or at the very least go through a few centuries of pretty bad times.

[Legio_Italica]

There is nothing alternative about this history. And there is no historical controversy in pointing out the fact that Islam was more tolerant and much more open-minded and progressive, in the first half of its rule over the Middle East, than in the latter half, nor that it was much more open and progressive and more hygienic than Europe til at least the early 1700s. As for the pro-LGBT part, no one said in this thread anything about LGBT rights in the Islamic world. We're just pointing out that the Euro-centric, anti-Muslim narrative has a lot of gaping holes in it and is full of hypocrisy.

As for Israel's history, Israel as a country is quite young... the narrative that there is a cohesive Jewish people that have maintained themselves completely intact and that are the inheritors of the land of Palestine has alot of gaping holes in it. The more you question the foundations of it through the scientific method, modern genetics, and the historical account, the more the foundations of that myth unravel. Every nation has a myth going for it. It's not like I am for one nation's myth and against another one... I am against all religious and nationalist myths... it's just a bit sad to see that some myths are believed more earnestly than others, and some myths are more negative for the prospects of mankind's survival than others. Perhaps this is an opportunity for the collective Western mind to realize that they've been had... Islam, Chritianity, Judaism are retarded systems based on a dualistic view of the world that will end up destroying the world as we know it in the next few decades... If the last two thousand years of history of Europe's and the Middle East's bloody history is not enough proof of the inherent violence of these religions, then nothing is... now add a few thousand nuclear bombs to this nasty ideological soup, and it's just a matter of time before everyone who drank the soup dies of poisoning... unfortunately the soup has gone global and this radioactive non-coherent soup of madness has infiltrated the minds of at least half of the world already. The scariest thing about this sickness is that most people don't even realize that they're sick... until it's too late and they go around shooting children and destroying their own chances for peace and stability out of a necessity to defend a non-existent concept that exists only within the confines of their own deluded heads.

There are a few bright lights in the dark prospects that mankind is facing of course... Mysticism and psychedelic-based spiritualityn has seen a big come back. Eastern beliefs such as Taoism/Buddhism/Hinduism offer alternatives to the suicidal, bi-polar, dualistic idiocy of mono-theism, and science, secularism has gained a large following in much of the world, especially in those that are interested in a simple persuit of the truth rather than in confirming some self-professed ideological cultural conditioning.... but the war that humanity is facing is inherently psychological, and the Jewish people, with their "chosen people" mentality, are at the heart of it, for they are the ones with the most stubborn conditioning. At the end of the day, if we collectively manage to unravel the delusion of Judaism and expose it to the light of truth for what it is, it will be a big win for humanity. If we don't, and their ideological ego-driven religious/ethno-nationalist madness persists, then I'm afraid that we will either become extinct or at the very least go through a few centuries of pretty bad times.

There’s nothing inherently Euro-centric or anti-Muslim about acknowledging that Jews originally come from the Levant. Currently, the most serious flashpoints for global conflict and nuclear war are in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea, where powerful secular or atheistic regimes are just as committed to accomplish their nationalist objectives by any means necessary, regardless of any perceived risks to humanity, but maybe that’s just my opinion.

I suppose based on my sig, people might be under the impression that I have some kind of faith in the God of Abraham or special affinity for his chosen people, but that isn’t the case. I’m just grateful my corner of the world had a good run while it lasted. Atheistic regimes have butchered tens of millions in the last century, and their only god is themselves. I am convinced most of humanity’s problems are baked in, and impending demographic collapse in many societies will do away with as many of us going forward as would a nuclear war. All we can do is buckle up and hope for the best, because life on Earth is likely to continue getting worse for most people within our lifetime, in inevitable ways that have knock on effects. Hopefully you are right to an extent and there are philosophies and experiences that can help us all cope on an individual level.

[Siblesz]

There’s nothing inherently Euro-centric or anti-Muslim about acknowledging that Jews originally come from the Levant. Currently, the most serious flashpoints for global conflict and nuclear war are in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea, where powerful secular or atheistic regimes are just as committed to accomplish their nationalist objectives by any means necessary, regardless of any perceived risks to humanity, but maybe that’s just my opinion.

Most people in Western Europe have a few percentage of DNA from people who came from the Levant.... so according to this logic, even though most of my ancestors are European, I can, with my 12% Sub-Saharan Semitic DNA, claim to be Semitic as well and then go around and conquer some piece of land in Lebanon or what not and kill some innocent women and children there. In any case, it is and has always been completely ludicrous to use some ancestral link to a piece of land as a means to justify the conquest of a nation. The whole idea is ludicrous to begin with and based on an ideological fixation.

I suppose based on my sig, people might be under the impression that I have some kind of faith in the God of Abraham or special affinity for his chosen people, but that isn’t the case. I’m just grateful my corner of the world had a good run while it lasted. Atheistic regimes have butchered tens of millions in the last century, and their only god is themselves. I am convinced most of humanity’s problems are baked in, and impending demographic collapse in many societies will do away with as many of us going forward as would a nuclear war. All we can do is buckle up and hope for the best, because life on Earth is likely to continue getting worse for most people within our lifetime, in inevitable ways that have knock on effects. Hopefully you are right to an extent and there are philosophies and experiences that can help us all cope on an individual level.

Putin's Russia is far from secular... so not sure what your argument there is... if anything, it proves my argument that mono-theism is at the heart of the violence in the world.

As for China... China hasn't invaded a single foreign country since the Yuan dynasty.. and that you can blame on the Mongolians more than on China. Modern-day China is situated in and control of a bit less territory actually than what they already had like seven centuries ago. There was some expansions in the Qing dynasty, with the annexation of Mongolia and parts of Russia, but by the early 1900s they had lost most of those territories.

TBH I find that the Chinese government has been exceedingly patient and forthcoming in dealing with these unruly barbarians (AKA the Americans/Brits/Germans/Russians/French/Portuguese) who have been messing up and interfering with the politics of Asia for over two centuries. After two centuries of meddling in their own affairs, purposefully making the Chinese into opium addicts, partitioning China into pieces, fomenting revolutions that eventually ended up with the destruction of the Qing dynasty, training the Japanese in Western military tactics which they in turn used to go around butchering Chinese, infiltrating the Chinese with Western ideologies and radical politics (AKA communism)... if anything the Chinese government has been but too pliant and pleasing towards the West and deserve a commendable award in how civilized people should act in the face of grievous injustice.

As for Chinese imperial ambitions... You very rarely see the Chinese government acting militarily, unless they are maintaining the territorial integrity of the lands that they own, or unless there is some outside political forces that aim to unravel the status quo of the lands that they have historically held influence over (aka Korean War). In any case, most of Chinese imperial ambitions are based on the perimeter of the lands that they have historically controlled or have had political influence over in the last few dynasties (which includes the Koreas, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia), and as opposed to the idiotic militancy of Western imperialism, Chinese imperialism rarely uses the military option to achieve their goals... they are smarter than that... the Chinese conquer the world through trade.

[Kyriakos]

It's not that unlikely that in a future borders will collapse physically - due to tech. Similar to how the internet made security borders collapse, for firms that operate on the web. As usual we are living in the interim era, and also as usual are in the interwar period.

[sumskilz]

Palestinian Muslim ancestry is more diverse for sure but it's still mostly indigenous Levantine, right?

Yes, at least half on average it seems, much more than that for Lebanese Muslims. The issue with Palestinian Muslims is a little bit ambiguous at this point, because none of the Bronze Age and Iron Age DNA from the Levant has been recovered from southern inland sites. This makes it hard to distinguish pre-Muslim conquest southern inland Levantine ancestry from ancient Arabian ancestry.

If you know that Lebanese Christians and Carmel Druze are over 90% identical to the ancient samples from their respective regions, and look at this, you might think Palestinian Muslims and Jordanians are mostly Arabian because of how close they are to Saudis:


Source

But this analysis is likely failing to capture some of the north to south structure of ancient Levantine populations. With Bronze/Iron Age DNA from southern inland sites, it’s likely that could be better understood. It’s not like with Ashkenazi Jews where it’s easy to separate the Levantine component from the European component. Note in that PCA above that a few of the Ashkenazi samples are much more European than the others. Unambiguously Arabian ancestry is mostly from the Levant if you go all the way back to the Neolithic, so it will require more information to accurately separate southern inland pre-Muslim conquest Levantine ancestry from Arabian ancestry.

In Ashkenazi Jews it’s safe to assume that the portion of their ancestry with affinity to both Bronze Age Megiddo/Hazor/Ashkelon and to Samaritans is Bronze Age Levantine ancestry. If you do the same with Palestinian Muslims’ affinity to both Bronze Age Megiddo/Hazor/Ashkelon and to Christian Palestinians, for example, their Bronze Age Levantine ancestry looks surprisingly low. If you simply assume that affinity to Bronze Age Megiddo/Hazor/Ashkelon alone is indicative of indigenous Levantine ancestry then Saudis appear more indigenous than Muslim Palestinians, which is obviously wrong. This suggests both that Bronze Age Megiddo/Hazor/Ashkelon ancestry when used alone can only detect the common Neolithic ancestry shared by the Levant and Arabia and that Palestinian Muslims have some percentage of southern inland pre-Muslim conquest Levantine ancestry that is not present in the ethnoreligious minorities, which I assume is Idumean and Nabatean. According to historical evidence, by the late Roman period Idumeans had migrated in large numbers from the Negev Highlands into the Beersheba-Arad Valleys and the southern Judean Highlands around Hebron.

If you want to argue the case that Ashkenazis are Jewish, then I can argue the same case based on my DNA.

You could, but such an argument would be akin to arguing that Obama is not black because his mother was white.

Most Ashkenazis I met don't really fit the bill of the common black eyed, black hair, tanned Semitic though... actually quite the contrary... most are blonde, red-haired, most have blue/light eyes, really white skin... that skin was not made to resist the Middle Eastern sun....

I doubt that, but I suspect that you’re ignorant about both how fast selection can operate on preexisting alleles in a population as well as what the most indigenous Levantine people look like.

These are all Samaritans:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Samaritans are of course the descendants of the Iron Age people of Samaria, which was the heartland of the Kingdom of Israel.

In my opinion, Father Gabriel Naddaf has a typical Palestinian Christian look, which is quite similar to some Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

He looks more Levantine to me than Netanyahu does, but he’s no darker than Netanyahu:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Ashkenazi Jews do tend to have more European-type pigmentation alleles than what you’d expect based on their overall ancestry composition alone, but this is evidence of positive selection, and of course many also have typical Mediterranean/Middle Eastern pigmentation:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Although among those examples, Sacha Baron Cohen is half Ashkenazi half Mizrahi.

All that said, subjective impressions of phenotypes are certainly much less accurate predicters of ancestry than population genetics.

Very interesting, I don't want to be rude, but I don't think the genetic history of the Middle East adds anything to the political discussion, unless I'm missing something.

It’s certainly not going to solve any land disputes, and the evidence hasn’t really changed either side’s narrative, but it’s a reasonable way to address claims about “fake Jews”.

[Kyriakos]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/w...n-finance.html

"Israel will not transfer much-needed funds to the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the decision by three European countries to recognize a Palestinian state, the country’s finance minister said on Wednesday, as its foreign minister denounced the European moves as giving “a gold medal to Hamas terrorists.”
The decision by the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right leader who opposes Palestinian sovereignty, threatened to push the Palestinian government into a deeper fiscal crisis. He said in a statement that he had informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would no longer send tax revenues to the authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank in close cooperation with Israel.
Mr. Smotrich’s office signaled that the decision was at least partly a response to Spain, Norway and Ireland recognizing Palestinian statehood, and that the Palestinian leadership bore responsibility for campaigning for the move.
“They are acting against Israel legally, diplomatically and for unilateral recognition,” said Eytan Fuld, a spokesman for Mr. Smotrich, referring to the authority. “When they act against the state of Israel, there must be a response.”

The Israeli move drew a rebuke from the White House, but no threat of action in response.
“I think it’s wrong on a strategic basis, because withholding funds destabilizes the West Bank. It undermines the search for security and prosperity for the Palestinian people, which is in Israel’s interests,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said at a news conference. “And I think it’s wrong to withhold funds that provide basic goods and services to innocent people.”"

Classy move.
It's also pretty bizarre to try to intimidate Norway, literally the richest/most self-sufficient country in Europe.

[PointOfViewGun]

Israel Responds to Move to Recognize Palestinian State by Withholding Funds

Israel will not transfer much-needed funds to the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the decision by three European countries to recognize a Palestinian state, the country’s finance minister said on Wednesday, as its foreign minister denounced the European moves as giving “a gold medal to Hamas terrorists.”
The decision by the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right leader who opposes Palestinian sovereignty, threatened to push the Palestinian government into a deeper fiscal crisis. He said in a statement that he had informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would no longer send tax revenues to the authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank in close cooperation with Israel.
Mr. Smotrich’s office signaled that the decision was at least partly a response to Spain, Norway and Ireland recognizing Palestinian statehood, and that the Palestinian leadership bore responsibility for campaigning for the move.
“They are acting against Israel legally, diplomatically and for unilateral recognition,” said Eytan Fuld, a spokesman for Mr. Smotrich, referring to the authority. “When they act against the state of Israel, there must be a response.”

What some don't realize is that this money is tax revenue generated from Palestinians themselves. Also, no one undermines the legitimacy of recognition of Israel more than Israel itself.

[Ludicus]

The good news,

A few minutes ago ICJ orders

1-Israel to halt Rafah offensive
2-open Rafah border crossing for humanitarian assistance
3- also ordered Israel to allow access to the Gaza Strip for investigators.

All western judges voted for these measures, including the American judge.

All EU donors have now resumed support for for Unrwa

The bad news,
Humanitarian operations 'near collapse' in Gaza
ICC prosecutor threatened: Court 'built for Africa and thugs like Putin'

------

As the ICC seeks arrests, I ask those who facilitated the Gaza slaughter: what were you thinking?
Excerpts,

…But there is a distinction to be made.
For while Hamas’s crimes were obscene and indefensible, the prosecutor’s proposed charges against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, describe atrocities that were directly facilitated by cheerleader politicians, most notably in the US, UK and Germany, and legitimised by multiple media outlets.
…It was obvious – as the prosecutor details – that Israel was intentionally and systematically depriving the civilian population of the essentials of life, and that it sought to “collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza, whom they perceived as a threat to Israel”.
(…) Rarely has a state been so open about its criminally murderous intentions. The statements of Israeli government ministers, politicians, generals, soldiers, journalists and other public figures in support of mass slaughter and indiscriminate destruction would fill a book.
that impunity is disintegrating in real time. This is a crime scene, covered in so many fingerprints. Unless all the guilty men and women and their cheerleaders are held to account, we are doomed to a future of escalating horror and suffering.

Booking.com faces criminal complaint for money laundering from illegal Israeli settlements.
More than 200 EU staff sign letter expressing concerns over Gaza crisis.
British directors resign as patrons of London cinema over Israeli film screening.

By benefiting from money from the Israeli state, the cinemas become silent accomplices to the violence inflicted on the Palestinian people.

US 'concerned' by Israel's isolation among countries that have traditionally supported it

we certainly have seen a growing chorus of voices, including voices that had previously been in support of Israel, drift in another direction.

---

There is nothing alternative about this history. And there is no historical controversy in pointing out the fact that Islam was more tolerant and much more open-minded and progressive, in the first half of its rule over the Middle East, than in the latter half, nor that it was much more open and progressive and more hygienic than Europe til at least the early 1700s.

Indeed. Everything I've described is written in the two-volume treatise "Medicine: An Illustrated History”. The "Cambridge History of Medicine” also mentions that,

(…) The Mongol invasions of the early thirteenth century devastated the eastern half of the Islamic world, and civil war, and the increasing success of the Christians, pressed hard on the Islamic communities of Spain and North Africa. The openness to Hellenism of ninth-century Baghdad was replaced by a more fundamentalist Islam, in which adherence to tradition, both religious and medical, was enjoined on the community of the faithful. Even so, medicine in thirteenth-century Cordoba or Cairo had arguably reached a higher level of sophistication and effectiveness than anywhere in the Western world (…)
(…) The Arabic basis of Latin medicine was further strengthened by a series of translations made in Spain by Gerard of Cremona and others of such texts as Ibn Sina’s Canon, and On the Grades of Drug Action by al-Kindi. By 1190 many texts of Galen had been translated, largely from the Arabic, along with most of the major Arabic works of medicine: by 1350, thanks to the South Italian Greek Niccolo da Reggio, many minor Galenic works became available in Latin, although few bothered to read them. There were three consequences of this translation movement. First, the amount of learned medical material suddenly burgeoned beyond all recognition. Second, the language of medicine was heavily arabized (for example, siphac for peritoneum), and its therapeutics depended heavily on Arabic sources, especially in pharmacology and surgery.”
And much more.

Not bad at all for a barbaric culture, desert rats, destroyers of civilizations.
---
Edit,

New evidence of Saudi gov't role in 9/11 should halt security pact talk..

Yet the Biden administration is for some unknown reason moving full steam ahead…Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Biden wishes to outdo Trump in doing favors for Israel.
The 71-page document, released in redacted form earlier this month, New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity- The Atlantic

--------
Yellen Warns Israel Against Cutting Off Palestinian Banks

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned Israel on Thursday against cutting off ties between Palestinian and Israeli banks, arguing that such a move would further destabilize the economy of the West Bank when Palestinians were already facing dire economic conditions.
Ms. Yellen’s comments came in the wake of Israel’s decision on Wednesday to withhold tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority in retaliation for three European countries’ unilaterally agreeing to recognize a Palestinian state.
Ms. Yellen said on Thursday that the plight of the Palestinians would be a topic of discussion with her counterparts and that a move to cut Palestinians off from the international financial system could fuel a “humanitarian crisis.”
I would expect other countries to express concern about the impact such a decision on the West Bank economy,” Ms. Yellen said.

[Siblesz]

At this point, I feel the clock is ticking and the Israelis are feeling nervous. It has become perfectly clear to see that Israel is a criminal state that is committing genocide, they can no longer cover up their crimes with the propaganda (even the NYT, which used to be spreading the pro-Israel narrative a few months ago, changed tone like two months ago). It also seems more and more inevitable that the U.S. and Britain will pay a biiiig price for being complicit in Israel's crimes.

But for some reason I don't see the U.S. or Britain backing down... It doesn't take a genius to see that Israel is a fast sinking ship. They have lost global credibility on a scale never before seen, their economy has taken a big hit with much investment fleeing, 500,000 Israelis have left Israel, immigrant labor has dwindled, and the N. part of Israel (close to Lebanon), is abandoned... For sure this situation is unsustainable... but as far as I can tell, the right-wing regime of Israel has dug its head so far into the sand that they cannot see the dire reality of their situation. They have become their own worst enemies and are determined to continue placing Israel's very security at risk in order to "win" the genocide that they are committing. It is also more and more interesting to see the dwindling numbers of Israeli genocide supporters, both on this platform or on others I have seen... it's as if they have been exposed, as if the blood of a Palestinian child finally stained their white and noble shirts, and they are left in wonderment if this is actually what they really wanted, or is it that they were brainwashed and misled to murder a hundred innocent civilians in order to destroy one "terrorist". It does remind me of those brainwashed Nazis in Berlin in 1944/45 who were so deep inside of their own deluded psyche that they couldn't admit that they had already lost. Someone should make a video of that famous Hitler scene where he gets super angry, but replace Hitler's head with Netanyahu's.

[Siblesz]

This is a chronicled conversation I have with a hippie Israeli friend I have... this just shows you how deluded these people are. She's a hippie btw... so she's supposed to be the most open-minded, peace-loving Israeli out there.

[Stario]

This is a chronicled conversation I have with a hippie Israeli friend I have... this just shows you how deluded these people are. She's a hippie btw... so she's supposed to be the most open-minded, peace-loving Israeli out there.

The US supported Kurds are failing in Syria, the US supported Ukranian clown is failing in ukraine, and the US supported psychopath Netanyahu is failing in Israel...all we need now is the CCP to go to US supported Taiwan.
There's a pattern here...

[Ludicus]

Yesterday, the BBC published an article titled "No sign Israel will change course after Gaza ruling," where Paul Adams, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, reports: "The government’s former spokesman, Eylon Levy, noted that the presiding judge, Nawaf Salam, was Lebanese and 'couldn’t return home safely"

This scandalous and thinly veiled death threat (in the best Al Capone style), made by an Israeli official and directed at the President of ICJ, certainly did not go unnoticed by anyone, but was conveniently ignored by many.
----

Following the decision on the ICC's request for warrants, the panel of legal experts published this text in the Financial Times, Why we support ICC prosecutions for crimes in Israel and and Gaza -Financial Times.

The attacks by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the military response by Israeli forces in Gaza have tested the system of international law to its limits. This is why, as international lawyers, we felt compelled to assist when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, asked us to advise whether there was sufficient evidence to lay charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Today, the prosecutor has taken a historic step to ensure justice for the victims in Israel and Palestine by issuing applications for five arrest warrants alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity by senior Hamas and Israeli leaders. These include applications for a warrant of arrest against the political and military commanders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

For months, we have engaged in an extensive process of review and analysis. We have carefully examined each of the applications for arrest warrants, as well as underlying material produced by the prosecution team in support of the applications. This has included witness statements, expert evidence, official communications, videos and photographs. In our legal report published today, we unanimously agree that the prosecutor’s work was rigorous, fair and grounded in the law and the facts. And we unanimously agree that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects he identifies have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

It is not unusual for the prosecutor to invite external experts to participate in an evidence-review, under appropriate confidentiality arrangements, during the course of an investigation or trial. And this is not the first time an international prosecutor has formed a Panel of Experts to advise on potential charges related to a conflict. But this conflict is perhaps unprecedented in the extent to which it has given rise to misunderstandings about the ICC’s role and jurisdiction, a particularly fractured discourse and, in some contexts, even antisemitism and Islamophobia. It is against this backdrop that, as lawyers specialised in international law hailing from diverse personal backgrounds, we felt we had a duty to accept the invitation to provide an impartial and independent legal opinion based on evidence. We were selected because of our expertise in public international law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law, and, in the case of two of us, experience as former judges of international criminal tribunals. Our common goal is advancing accountability and we have reached our conclusions based on an assessment of the warrant applications against an objective legal standard. We have reached these conclusions unanimously. And we believe it is important to publish them given the extent to which discourse has been politicised, disinformation has been rife and international media has been denied access to the front lines.

The Panel unanimously agrees with the prosecutor’s conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe that three of Hamas’s most senior leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity for the killing of hundreds of civilians, the taking of at least 245 hostages and acts of sexual violence committed against Israeli hostages. The Panel also unanimously agrees that the evidence presented by the prosecutor provides reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Israel’s minister of defence Yoav Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. This includes the war crime of intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the murder and persecution of Palestinians as crimes against humanity. Our reasons for reaching these conclusions are set out in our legal report.

It is important to understand that the charges have nothing to do with the reasons for the conflict. The charges concern waging war in a manner that violates the long-established rules of international law that apply to armed groups and the armed forces in every state in the world. And, of course, the warrant applications announced today are just the first step. We hope that the prosecutor will continue to conduct focused investigations including in relation to the extensive harm suffered by civilians as a result of the bombing campaign in Gaza and evidence of sexual violence committed against Israelis on October 7.

There is no doubt that the step taken today by the prosecutor is a milestone in the history of international criminal law. There is no conflict that should be excluded from the reach of the law; no child’s life valued less than another’s. The law we apply is humanity’s law, not the law of any given side. It must protect all the victims of this conflict; and all civilians in conflicts to come.
The judges of the ICC will ultimately determine which warrants, if any, should be issued. And as investigations continue, we hope that state authorities, witnesses and survivors will engage with the judicial process. Ultimately, we hope that this process will contribute to increased protections for civilians and sustainable peace in a region that has already endured too much.

Lord Justice Fulford, retired lord justice of appeal, former vice-president of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and former judge at the International Criminal Court
Judge Theodor Meron CMG, visiting professor at the University of Oxford, honorary fellow, Trinity College, and former judge and former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Amal Clooney, barrister, adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice
Danny Friedman KC, barrister, expert in criminal law, international law and human rights
Baroness Helena Kennedy LT KC, barrister, member of the House of Lords and director of the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute
Elizabeth Wilmshurst CMG KC, former deputy legal adviser at the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office and distinguished fellow of international law at Chatham House

Germany would implement ICC arrest warrants against Israel

France supports Netanyahu arrest warrant.

Spanish defence minister says Gaza war is 'real genocide'

Josep Borrell: EU has to choose between supporting international rule of law institutions or Israel.