Sleepless Dreamer > Recent Status Updates

“While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods.”

Yuck. This is why militaries will always be immoral.

I'm learning more about his genitalia than I've ever wanted know, what is this book

“I didn’t know that Paki was a slur. Growing up, I’d heard many people use that word and never saw anyone flinch or cringe, never suspected them of being racist”

Doesn't this raise concerns over where he heard this be so commonly used?

The imposter syndrome while grading students' papers doesn't go away. I'm a politics, art, philosophy kind of guy, what the fuck am i doing with business papers? who let this happen?

and yet, we all know that I will be extraordinarily insulted if they decide to go with someone else next year like excuse me??? no one is better than me in these courses, i was ranked the highest in both of the classes, how dare you

Me, to my friends and family: pfft, this covid is nothing, I've had worse colds.

Me, to my bosses: you see, I'm at risk and covid could kill me so I need to prioritize my health in these moments, any other prior obligation is cancelled.

Me, to my friends and family: pfft, this covid is nothing, I've had worse colds.

Me, to my bosses: you see, I'm at risk and covid could kill me so I need to prioritize my health in these moments, any other prior obligation is cancelled.

Refering to the cameras in the old city without mentioning the terror attacks that predated them is misleading and moreover, shows me that Teller didn't speak to enough Jews.

It feels like my country is starting to wage war on people like me, on my political, sexual, religious and gender identity. Suddenly, questioning whether doctors can refuse to treat gay people or if leftists can be banned from becoming teachers is a public debate and my god, what a sobering moment.

I feel sick constantly.

TA adventures:

writing to a student, “listen, I’d love to give you permission for this but I’m technically not allowed to. Could you write me a sob story? Something really tragic, something that’ll give me an excuse to approve this? Come on, help me help you, has anyone in your family died recently? Are you supporting a household?"

Sometimes, being an Israeli means staring at a Palestinian anti-Zionist anti-queer party that seeks to dismantle Israel and muttering "please, pass the threshold, you have 0.25% more to go, you can do it".

Five elections in 3 years and we haven't changed at all.

Uni adventures:
"Welcome to campus! Is this your first year?"

It's my first year as an MBA student, my third year studying for this degree, I'm in my second (and last!) year in terms of credits, it's my fourth year on this campus, technically I'm not in any degree cause I've procrastinated the beurocracy and this is bound to blow up in my face soon.

"Yup, thanks!"

Me: all voices are welcome in the Israeli democracy, i support freedom of speech for people i disagree with


Also me: oh no, did I just spill some water on your radical right wing flyers? How terribly clumsy of me, I guess I was too busy thinking about where I'll immigrate to once your party lives up to its promise of revoking the citizenships of people who think like me.

Jewish microaggressions abroad:

"I'm from Israel"
"Ohh, have you been to our synagogue?"

No, I have no intention of visiting your teeny tiny Jewish community after you trapped them in a ghetto for hundreds of years under dozens of discriminatory laws, then did nothing as they were sent to their deaths and now they barely have enough people for a minyan, let alone any Jews younger than 70.

Just war theory absolutely says that we must discriminate between combatant property and civilian property. That's where we get ethical dilemmas about harmimg property with dual civilian and military usage such as electricity sources.

Do better research.

Israeli politics be like, great, the radical right wing party that wants to take away LGBT+ rights is likely going to crash and burn in our coming elections but the radical right wing party that's all about racism has managed to normalize a conversation in Israel about expelling "non-loyal" citizens. What the fuck?

The urge to become a radical leftist grows.

Me: my mental health during my birthday is fine, I've outgrown the doom and angst

Also me: spends 20 minutes crying about causing the small lizard I found in my sink to detach its tail

Oh my god, I was trying to help it go outside and it must have been so frightened and now it'll take months for its tail to grow, it only wanted to live in my sink, what have I done?? Am I a bad person???

Find the differences:

writing a politics dissertation-spending hours emailing random British offices, rabbit holes about the police, swiftly writing up my results chapter after organizing my data, crying about stata

writing a philosophy dissertation-spending hours staring into space, often with an anguished expression, rereading three pages from philosophy books, struggling to figure out what my conclusion is

Goddammit, another fucking war.

If you haven't found yourself discussing which route is best to drive through in order to avoid potentially being hit by a missile, now is the time to shut up about your brilliant conflict analysis and listen to the civilians here.

Uni adventures:
I wrote my final Politics essay about the very subject that made me want to study Politics in the first place; Israeli civil-military relations. This feels right.

"The mosque backs on to the Wailing Wall and the Israelis would like to demolish the mosque and erect in its place a new Temple."

Aburish is educated and yet, this showed up. How pathetic.

anyways, if Israelis wanted to demolish that mosque, they would have done so by now (see: Mughrabi Quarter). Citing Judaism without understanding it is embarrassing. The temple is meant to fall from the sky so you can calm down.

Uni adventures:

We've reached that part of exam season in which I start to have very vivid dreams about failing classes and going through the emotional process of accepting it. I wake up with "It's okay that I failed this class, I can hand in an appeal. My appeal will include...". It takes me ages to remember this was a dream. There's no grade. I didn't fail.

Oh, why does my brain feel the urge to do this?

"Arafat... was uncomfortable in the company of thinking people." So much snark.

It's also remarkable to see that the Palestinian dictatorship was built this way from the start, intentionally. Arafat was also double-dealing constantly.

And we're used to thinking about Arab countries united against Israel but damn, they probably killed more Palestinians than Israel at certain points (War of Camps, what).

uni adventures:

me, when it comes to writing thousands of words for politics essays:
this is so much fun, i'm learning so much!!

me, when it comes to a take-home multiple choice exam with open books and a class average of 96:
I can't do this. This is so hard, I'm not enjoying myself, I think I'm going to fail.

Oh, to be a foreigner writing about "Zionist settler colonialism" without mentioning pan-Arabism at all.

Like yeah, no, the Zionists definitely were to blame for viewing Palestinians as Arabs, totally not relevant that basically all Palestinians had a portrait of Nasser in their home, who cares that Eygpt tried to destroy Israel in the name of Palestine being Arab (and not Palestinian) land?

uni adventures:

a fly fell into my coffee. I dutifully got it out and then, while mourning the loss of the coffee, spent a solid 25 minutes reading about whether flies can survive after their wings get wet as I needed to know if I have acted immorally by dooming it to a slow death.

The answer is that the fly will likely be okay. The same cannot be said for my essay which is due tomorrow.

“one could argue that the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew is in Israel-Palestine"

This guy is so far from understanding anything about the Israeli perspective. If these are our choices, I prefer fighting dozens of wars over being a persecuted minority in the diaspora, no matter the danger.

Uni adventures:
half of my brain is going, "LAST DAY OF MY DEGREE OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE IT" and the other half is like, "I have a two month exam season ahead of me so my life will not change in any significant way now that I'm officially done with lectures."

I am exhausted from this debate.

What Ali Abunimah is offering sounds like this:

"Join us, the people who've tried to kill you for decades, in one state. Best case scenario, you lose your self determination, which you fought to get for 2000 years. Worst case scenario, a civil war breaks out and you get expelled. Refuse and I'll claim you're racist."

My, how surprising that Israelis don't agree. Only risk, very little reward.

“You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.”

How absolutely horrific that the people who were meant to be community leaders (pastors, priests and mayors) were so involved in this genocide. I hadn't known how systematic it was.

1. Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews do not call themselves "Arab Jews".

2. Being happily accepted by Israel does not mitigate the trauma and injustice of being expelled.

3. No Mizrahi Jew wants to return to Yemen (and such) but that doesn't mean return is the only compensation, just because that's what Palestinians want. Mizrahi Jews deserve what (some) Ashkenazi Jews got- recognition and financial compensation.

Ugh, Ali.