Palestine

I think that a good thing to mention is the Great March of Return, how a large segment of the population of Gaza was dedicated to pursuing peaceful protest to reclaim their old homes and free prisoners, and they were met not just with rubber bullets and tear gas, but live ammunition, notoriously snipers aiming for kneecaps and essentially competing seeing how many they could shoot, like American settlers gunning down buffalo.

But really, what they are asking for is why you are anti-zionist. Unless you think you've been groomed by hexbear (since that's the popular allegation, or so I've heard), there's no way any of us know the answer to that better than you do. I have nothing against sharing resources with them (maybe spare them the gore if you can), but I think it'd be most effective to give a personal history of your beliefs and what persuaded you. You believe it for good reason, don't you? Then talk about that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

You can mention how the initial agreement to settle was a collab between Germanys upper class (some of who happened to be jewish zionists) and the Nazi party, and how they sold out the Jewish people

And how Jewish leftists warned against this

https://youtu.be/tQMRwk8WDd4

If they're Brazilian, we have a few comrades doing really great comms on youtube: Jones Manoel, Ian Neves, João Carvalho, Humberto Matos, to name a few.

https://youtu.be/-QYhViVpavg

This is a 2h30 long lecture for web on the topic. With almos 600k views.

https://youtu.be/JwDDPwGT7UQ?t=3m33s Or this, in 20 minutes, hot from today.

Theres also the podcast xadrez verbal. Two historians discussing international politics weekly, adding a lot of historical context to current event. Not revolutionary, but it brought me much closer to the lemmygrad line. Their coverage after Oct 7 was almost 8 hours long. https://youtu.be/gDaChPREsd8?t=13m54s

Uhm. Maybe they don't need that much, but if conversation open up, there's a few sources there. All of them really great at explaining the historical context around everything.

We also have c/Brazil, here... For later. Best of luck!

1. Michael Brooks - "It's not complicated": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62I61kBahNY

2. Francesa Albanese - UN special rapporteur, Anatomy of a Genocide: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/

3. South Africa's case on Israel's crime of Genocide at the ICJ with remarks by Craig Morkhiber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkE4VtkWdo

4. Palestine - A Critique of Crisis Theory: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/palestine/

Abby Martin and Empire Files have a bunch of videos about Palestine. The most impactful for me is the documentary Gaza Fights For Freedom, about the 2018 March of Return. There's also the interviews she did with Israelis on the street, asking what they think about Palestinians. In fact, this whole playlist is worth watching.

This travel documentary filmed by a Japanese tourist who visited the West Bank in 2022 shows the daily reality for Palestinians dealing with checkpoints, settler violence, etc.

I've heard good things about The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, but I haven't read it myself.

Not sure if going after specific crimes of Israel would be the best approach. Even if all you arguments stick, your friend might still remain positive to Zionism as a concept. Thinking a government change or something like that would be enough to put Israel "back on the right track". They might even think that a Jewish state elsewhere might be a good idea, that true Zionism was never tried, etc...

What I'm meaning to say, is that you have to discredit Zionism as an idea. I believe another commenter already mentioned it, but Zionism is anti-Semitic, even in the conventional sense of the word. Anti-semites across time and space (including the fucking nazis) have promoted Zionism. A Jewish state gave them an excuse to not give any rights to local jewish populations, even to the point of expelling them back "home". A Jewish state transformed a genocidal rethoric into an anti-immigrant one.

There are more things to say about Zionism of course, but this comment is already long enough.

You can use the book Ten Myths About Israel if you wanna supplement your points. Or if they read books you can ask them to read it themselves. It is written in an easy to understand style.

There's 3 great resources.

One is Abby Martin's Empire Files. It shows raw the attrocities of Israelis.

The other is Max Blumenthall from the Grayzone. He is very good at speaking about Israel's oppression.

There's also the Electronic Intifada, which is very good at analyzing Palestinian misery.

I have this essay https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/zionism-is-antisemitism-and-palestine

The empire files - how Palestine became colonized, is the best short video introduction.

These all sound like solid points.

If they still cling to any both sides bullshit after this idk what would change their mind.

Make sure you emphasise that there is a big difference between Judaism and Zionism. A lot of the time people can be swayed to be "pro-zionist" because they don't want to be anti-Semitic. So teaching them that the two are very different and most Jewish people around the world abhor Israel's actions is important.

Just start with history of settler genocide since 1948 and explain difference between Judaism and zionism for starters, there's no way they won't become anti-zionist after knowing everything.

Maybe go back to the Nakba, but I'm not sure of a good resource on it offhand. I think it fast becomes pretty evident if you skip past the both sides narrative and go to how the zionists acted from the start, how murderously violent. I think before I understood it, that part was left out in what I'd heard about the "conflict." I would tend to hear about it as something that had been going on for a long time between "both sides" rather than as something that one side started (the zionists) and that required violence displacement in order to begin and further its (the zionist) project. That there was never a real interest in peace or coexistence from the zionists and never has been; quite the opposite.

When you strip away the veneer of it being portrayed as a longstanding both sides dispute, it's naked colonialism and empire.

But anyway yeah, anything and everything you can show them, that helps demonstrate the brutality of zionists may help. Just remember, the more you ground it in fundamentals about this kind of stuff (like colonization) the harder it is for counter narratives to sway them in another direction. Understanding, for example, that israel pathologically lies about what it does and the western empire and its tendrils pathologically lies for them as well, so most things they say on the subject are suspect at best. People need to know that it's not an isolated incident of settler aggression, but an arm of something much larger and more destructive in various forms across hundreds of years, through the British empire, through French colonialism, through the US. Which could be a lot to try to explain to someone right away, but I think is important for being as grounded as possible and being able to understand what's happening with Palestine in the broader anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle. Partly because even if the zionist project were to fall apart tomorrow, that would not mean imperialism and colonialism as a whole are now over and a thing of the past.

Hasan had an (Israeli?) guest on twice who debunked a ton of nonsense about Israel in response to an Israeli youtuber:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnVtpgCNLA8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtWRoj1r7w (this might be the same as the above clip but fuller, at 3 hours)

Among the stuff he mentions is also how welcoming the Arabs in the areas had been to zionists who were showing up (to their detriment).

Zachary Foster is actually great for history on the horrors of Israel.