Ishaan Tharoor
@ishaantharoor
"We're rolling out Nakba 2023" — Israeli minister just flatly says it, while many in the West tie themselves up in knots to avoid seeing things as they are

https://x.com/ishaantharoor/status/1723712055021105388?s=20

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https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-12/ty-article/israeli-s...

'We're Rolling Out Nakba 2023,' Israeli Minister Says on Northern Gaza Strip Evacuation
Likud Minister Avi Dichter says that 'war is impossible to wage when there are masses between the tanks and the soldiers.' While Netanyahu does not support resettling the Gaza Strip, he says will not give up security control over it 'under any circumstances'

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter (Likud) was asked in a news interview on Saturday whether the images of northern Gaza Strip residents evacuating south on the IDF’s orders are comparable to images of the Nakba. He replied: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war – as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza – with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.”

When asked again whether this was the “Gaza Nakba”, Dichter – a member of the security cabinet and former Shin Bet director – said “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

When later asked if this means Gaza City residents won’t be allowed to return, he replied: “I don’t know how it’ll end up happening since Gaza City is one-third of the Strip – half the land’s population but a third of the territory.”

The Gaza Strip’s settlements were evacuated by Israel in 2005 during a unilateral disengagement helmed by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. Following coalition members’ declarations regarding reversing this move,

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked on Friday if he supports Israeli resettlement in the Gaza Strip after the war. “No, I don’t think so,” he answered, “I said I want full security control. Gaza must be demilitarized. I don’t think (resettlement) is a realistic goal, I’m saying it plainly.”

Netanyahu, who spoke at a press conference alongside Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and minister Benny Gantz, added that he won’t give up control over security in Gaza “under any circumstances.”

In response to a question about the war’s aftermath and the possibility of the Palestinian Authority controlling the Strip, he said: "I repeat, we will have total security control, with the ability to enter whenever we want to eliminate any terrorists who re-emerge. I can say what won’t happen – there will be no Hamas."

"I can say what else will not happen – there will not be a civil authority there that educates its children to hate the State of Israel, to kill Israelis, to eliminate the State of Israel. There cannot be an authority there that pays the families of murderers. There cannot be an authority there whose leader has not yet condemned the terrible massacre more than 30 days after it occurred," added Netanyahu.

From Ahmad Faruqui:

FIVE ISRAELI ANALYSTS CRITIQUE ISRAEL FOR THE CURRENT CRISIS AND A PUBLIC OPINION POLL SHOWS THAT ISRAELIS ARE FED UP WITH NETANYAHU

ONE

In an interview with POLITICO, Ehud Olmert argued Netanyahu suffered a “nervous breakdown,” as he sought to avoid being thrown out of office for failing to safeguard national security in the murderous Hamas attacks of October 7. Olmert added, “Bibi has been working all his life on the false pretense that he is Mr. Security. He’s ‘Mr. Bullshit.’

TWO

Professor Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian who teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK, states that despite claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel is only a democracy for its Jewish citizens and not for its Palestinian citizens.

THREE

Professor Avi Shlaim, an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, says: “There is no denying that the establishment of the state of Israel involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three-fourths of a million Palestinians, more than half of the Arab population, became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map."

Turning to recent events, in another conversation, he said: “Israelis claim that they gave the Palestinians a chance to turn Gaza into the Singapore of the Middle East. But they did nothing of the sort. They turned Gaza into an open air prison. The media attention has been on the Hamas attack and on Israel’s response, which is out of all proportion. I condemn both. I condemn the Hamas attack because it was against civilians. And killing civilians is wrong, period. But the Israeli response has been brutal and savage and out of all proportion. And revenge is not a policy. And what Israel is doing is state-sponsored terrorism. Or state terrorism. It’s on a much more serious scale than the attack on Israel.

“The point I really want to emphasize is that the conflict didn’t start on October 7. People don’t ask why did Hamas launch this attack. And the answer is to be found in the context. And the context is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967.”

FOUR

In 2015, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy and said Israel’s right wing extremists had perfected the art of playing victim. In their eyes, they were God’s chosen people and could only do good. That gave them the right to dehumanize the people whose land they were now living on (and this was reconfirmed recently by the Israeli defense minister when he called them “human animals”). They could kill them at will without a pang of guilt.

Levy said he asked Ehud Barak, later prime minister, what he would have done if he had been born into a Palestinian family. The truth came out when he said that he would have grown up to be a terrorist. On November 9, Levy wrote in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that he edits, that unless Israel examines its failings, soon it will be fighting another war.

FIVE

A former Israeli general, Noam Tibon, told NPR: “Benjamin Netanyahu cannot stay even one more day on the chair of the prime minister.  He is a failure and he must go.”

Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
I grew up in a Zionist household, spent 12 years in a Zionist youth movement, lived 4 years in Israel, and have friends and family who served in the IDF.

When that is your world, it's hard to see apartheid when it's happening.

1/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
I grew up in France, in a Jewish community where the norm was unconditional love and support for Israel. Zionism wasn't even named because that's all we knew. Jews were nearly wiped by pogroms and repeated holocausts, and a Jewish state was the only way to keep us safe.

2/16

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aphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
All Zionism is rooted in trauma and fear. It is first and foremost an ideology of self-liberation. It's about love Jewish people, survival for Jewish people. But Zionism is like any other ethnic nationalism, it's about prioritizing *our* safety and well-being.

3/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
Like all nationalisms, we were fed a historical narrative completely divorced from reality: that Palestine was a largely uninhabited piece of desert before we settled it; that in 1948 Palestinians willingly left because they were making room for Arab armies to...

4/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
..."throw Jews to the sea"; that Arab leaders turned down all Israeli and US peace offers and were unwilling to share the land; that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle-East; that despite terrorism, the IDF upholds the highest moral standards; so on and so on.

5/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
So the first reason that Israelis will never willingly make peace with Palestinians is that Israelis (and Zionist Jews around the world) live in a parallel world. They know alternate historical facts that feed more nationalism, militarism, and extremism.

6/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
So when the IDF bombs Gaza and kills children, the average Israelis thinks that 1) it is the Palestinians' fault--for not agreeing to peace, for continuing to threaten and attack Israel, etc 2) Israel is merely defending itself and that there is simply no alternative.

8/16

Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
The same rationale justifies Gaza's open-air prison; military checkpoints in the West Bank; bulldozing homes; etc. Israelis even made up the term "Pallywood", because for them, it's all a show to turn the world against Israel. The suffering is either fake or self-inflicted.

9/16


https://x.com/RaphMim/status/1392323085718589443?s=20

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
Of course, there are some Israeli leftists and anti-Zionists who fight for Palestinian liberation. But it's a tiny, and shrinking, minority. Most Israelis don't consider what it means for Palestinian freedom, dignity, and physical well-being to be systematically erased.

10/16


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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
Israel is, by every definition, an apartheid state: if a Jew and an Arab commit the exact same crime in the West Bank, they will face two different legal systems. The Jew will face a civil court, the Arab will face a military court. Two legal systems for two ethnic groups.

11/16


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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
But Israelis can't fathom that this is unjust. When they fight against people calling the occupation of the West Bank "apartheid", it's because Israelis genuinely believe that it's all self-defense and needed and legitimate.

12/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
These two factors (alternate history and dehumanization) mean that it is *physically impossible*--and I mean that in the most literal way--for Israel to willingly end the occupation and agree to a just solution to the conflict. Peace cannot come from within Israel.

13/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
Israeli society is getting more extreme, more nationalistic, more violent, and more entrenched in its own historical narrative & its own self-victimization. At this point, it is simply delusional to expect that things change will come from Israel.

14/16

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Raphael Mimoun
@RaphMim
That means consumer boycott of Israeli goods, corporate boycott of Israeli technology, and sanctions by Israel's main trade partner and political supporters, the US and EU. Those are the only measures that can meaningfully push Israel toward ending the occupation.

16/16

William Dalrymple
@DalrympleWill
Few know the history of the violent explusion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948: it is not taught in schools, and instead many- myself included- were taught outright lies about Palestine being an empty desert, "a land without a people for a people without a land." As ideas for a second Nakba are being drawn up right and discussed right now, as you read this post, it is vitally important we remember this terrible history, and Britain’s role in it, and do everything in our power to stop it being repeated, with the full support of our ignorant, bigoted, cowardly and sometimes outrightly Islamophobic leaders.

https://x.com/DalrympleWill/status/1719597794322006502?s=20

S.L. Kanthan
@Kanthan2030
Israel's propaganda ("hasbara") rests upon two fake logic:

🔹"Israel is defending itself"

🔹"Genocide in Gaza is justified because Hamas is using civilians as a human shield"

First, no country has a right to self-defense when it's occupying others and depriving them of basic rights. In fact, it's Palestinians -- the victims -- who have the right to use force as self-defense.

Second, Israel needs to show proof for each case of destruction of civilian infrastructure. Otherwise, wantonly bombing schools and hospitals is just genocidal and murderous.

https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1724454149579026883?s=20

John Oliver on Israel-Hamas war: ‘Any conversation around this has to begin with empathy’ | John Oliver | The Guardian


https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/13/john-oliver-on...

Oliver sought to zero in on “one of the biggest misconceptions” bandied about over the last month: “The tendency to collapse leaders and citizens when discussing this. To assume that Netanyahu speaks for all Israelis, or that Hamas speaks for all Palestinians, because that is emphatically not the case.”

Oliver started with Hamas, which was founded in 1987 and has been in charge of Gaza for 17 years. Many commentators in Israel and the US have dismissed all Gazans as supportive of Hamas with the claim that Gazans elected them to power. “It is true that at one point, Gazans did elect Hamas,” Oliver noted, “But if you think that makes them all complicit in war crimes their government commits, then boy do I have some bad news for you about decades of US foreign policy.”


And Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to play them off their more organized and legitimate rival, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Netanyahu took the risk of betting that he could control Hamas, and use them to his own ends, and he was horribly wrong about that,” Oliver explained.


In sum, “Palestinians and Israelis have both been relentlessly let down by their leaders and the result has been a decades-long cycle of extremism, violence, retaliation and more extremism,” Oliver said. Palestinians have experienced that twice over – “subject to the inadequacies and cruelties of a Hamas government and the punishing isolation and daily miseries of an Israeli one”, trapping them in what has been called an “open air prison” by many humanitarian groups.



——-



And the US has “emphatically picked a side” with $3.8bn in annual aid to Israel, including many, many weapons used to bomb Gaza. Oliver refused to show any footage of the atrocities in Gaza, and instead played clips of displaced Palestinian children expressing their confusion in a refugee camp. “It should be impossible to see those kids and not feel shattered,” he said. “There is a natural human impulse to protect children – to grab a toddler you don’t know if you see them running into traffic. And if that impulse is broken or dis-incentivized by a government, then there is absolutely a humanitarian crisis no matter what any asshole has to say about it.”

Oliver didn’t have a solution for peace in the Middle East, and acknowledged that even if he did, “this really would be the worst voice in which to relay that message. But it does seem to me personally that a ceasefire has to be the first step,” he said. “Continuing down this path only creates more extremists, which is the last thing that anybody needs.


“Any conversation around this has to begin with empathy, or we’re just fucked,” he concluded. “We know that dehumanizing people leads to violence. We know that violence leads to even more brutality and destruction, and we know that crucially, breaking that cycle is unfortunately going to require leadership significantly different than the ones currently in place.”

John Oliver on Netanyahu and Hamas:

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/tv-series/israel-hamas-war-last-week-...

the truth is, Netanyahu has been struggling to hold office in the last half-decade. Voters there actually endured five elections in just four years, because neither Netanyahu nor anyone else could form a stable majority. He only made it back into power last year, by forming a coalition with those on the furthest right wing of Israeli politics — leading to the most right-wing government in the country’s history. His cabinet is stocked with extremists. Take Itamar Ben-Gvir. He’s been convicted on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. He was once considered so fringe, the Israeli army rejected him from mandatory service. But he’s now Netanyahu’s minister of national security. Meanwhile, his current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has said, “Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” He’s also advocated for “victory through settlement,” very basically seizing land in the West Bank, and driving Palestinians from their homes to the point where, quote, “I abort their hopes of establishing a state.” Settlements are widely understood to be against international law, yet Smotrich wants a massive expansion of them, and Netanyahu gave him a special role in charge of settlement affairs. But perhaps the most surprising way Netanyahu has jeopardized Israel’s safety is that, for years, he deliberately used Hamas as a way to undermine the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas, which administers parts of the West Bank and has much more legitimacy on the world stage. Experts say the idea was basically divide and conquer — if Palestinian leadership remains split, and one of the main parties at the table has a terrorism label on it, it’s going to be much easier for Netanyahu to refuse to engage with them, and say he has “no partner for peace.” Here’s Smotrich explaining that strategy out loud in 2015.

The Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is a terrorist organization that no one will recognize, and no one will give it status in the ICC. No one will let them lead a decision in the security council. The main pitch we are playing now is international delegitimization. Hamas at this point, in my opinion, will be an asset.

John: “Hamas is an asset.” If you’re calling the group that has repeatedly killed your people an asset, it shows pretty clearly that what you care about isn’t safety, but total control. And for years, Netanyahu’s government was actually allowing suitcases of cash to be delivered to Hamas, something by the way that earned suitcases of cash the title “most morally disreputable way to transfer money” for the nine hundredth year in a row. When the scandal broke, Netanyahu insisted that that money was for humanitarian aid. Which still doesn’t explain why it had to be delivered in luggage in the back of a fucking car. The point is, Netanyahu took the risk of betting that he could control Hamas, and use them to his own ends. And he was horribly wrong about that, to the point that his ministers are now getting screamed out of hospitals. So, to recap so far: Palestinians and Israelis have both been relentlessly let down by their leaders, and the result has been a decades-long cycle of extremism, violence, retaliation, and more extremism. And Palestinians have been on the receiving end of that extremism twice over — subject to the inadequacies and cruelties of a Hamas government and the punishing isolation and daily misery of an Israeli one. Because Israel’s approach to Gaza has been truly punishing — fencing people in, limiting exits, and trapping them inside of what has been called an open-air prison by many human rights organizations. Life under a blockade there has been hard for a long time, even when there aren’t bombs flying.

Al Jazeera English
@AJEnglish
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, says that Israel cannot claim the right of ‘self-defence’ under international law because Gaza is a territory which it occupies


https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/1724872397801902304?s=20

From Ahmad F:

I COULD HARDLY BELIEVE WHAT ISRAEL'S FOUNDERS AND RULERS HAD TO SAY ABOUT PALESTINIANS, ARABS AND MUSLIMS -- Each quote one is more shocking than the previous quote

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.
--David Ben-Gurion, 1956

We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.
—Moshe Dayan, April 1956

As soon as we have a big settlement here, we’ll seize the land, we’ll become strong, and then we’ll take care of the Left Bank [of the Jordan River]. We’ll expel them from there, too. Let them go back to the Arab countries.
—Jewish settler, 1891

[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to hate us.
—Israel Zangwill, 1905

Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America is American.
—Chaim Weizmann, 1919

I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral.
—David Ben-Gurion, 1938

Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.
—Benny Morris, 2004

Maybe England will chance upon an empty piece of land in need
of a white population, and perhaps the Jews will happen to be these whites . . .
—Chaim Weizmann, 1914

We welcome the friendship of Christian Zionists.
—Theodore Herzl, 1897

The entire Christian church, in its variety of branches . . . will be
compelled . . . to teach the history and development of the nascent Jewish state. No commonwealth on earth will start with such propaganda for its exploitation in world thought, or with such eager and minute scrutiny, by millions of people, of its slightest detail.
—A. A. Berle, 1918

Christian Zionists favor Jewish Zionism as a step leading not to the
perpetuation but to the disappearance of the Jews.
—Morris Jastrow, 1919

Zionism has but brought to light and given practical form and a
recognized position to a principle which had long consciously or
unconsciously guided English opinion.
—Nahum Sokolow, 1919

Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism have combined to create an
international alliance superseding anything that NATO or UN has to
offer.
—Daniel Lazare, 2003

Put positively: Other than Israel’s Defense Forces, American Christian Zionists may be the Jewish state’s ultimate strategic asset.
—Daniel Pipes, 2003

US prestige in the Muslim world has suffered a severe blow, and US
strategic interests in the Mediterranean and Near East have been seriously prejudiced.
—George F. Kennan, January 1948

An Israeli minister (Gila Gamliel) reveals one rationale for destroying so much of Gaza. By rendering large parts of it inhabitable, Israel can "promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip."


https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-773713


One of the issues on which my office has been working diligently is how to proceed the day after Hamas has been defeated and annihilated.

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying: “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.”

The State of Israel is in the midst of one of its greatest crises, certainly for at least two generations.
More than 1,200 of our people were viciously murdered, 239 brutally kidnapped, thousands more injured, and 240,000 made homeless by the Nazi-like regime in Gaza.
Women were raped. The elderly were abused and taken hostage. Children were beheaded. Families were tortured in front of each other for the entertainment of their captors before being burned alive while bound to each other.These inhuman atrocities changed everything.

It is clear that much has to change, as many conceptions were proven wrong on the day of the pogrom on October 7.

What should be just as clear is that many more conceptions must be addressed, challenged, and possibly destroyed in the weeks and months ahead.
One of the issues on which my office has been working diligently is how to proceed the day after Hamas has been defeated and annihilated.
We will still have around two million people in Gaza, many of whom voted for Hamas and celebrated the massacre of innocent men, women, and children.

Gaza is a breeding ground for extremism. It is a small area, by no means the most populated on earth, but one where for too long, its rulers have prioritized war against the Jews over a better life for their people.
It is a place devoid of hope, stolen by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.
This situation has already led to a large exodus of youths from Gaza. It has been estimated that since Hamas violently took over the Strip in 2007, between 250,000 and 350,000 mostly young adults have left Gaza to make a new life abroad.

As we consider our options for the day after, the international community appears to be pushing to bring the Palestinian Authority back to rule Gaza. This has obvious structural flaws, as it was tried in 2005 after the disaster of the Disengagement when all 8,600 Jewish residents were forcibly evicted from the Gaza Strip. It took only two years for Hamas to seize power, largely by throwing PA leaders off high roofs.
Furthermore, as we are witnessing at this very moment, the PA does not have a markedly different ideology from Hamas. Recently, for example, the PA Ministry of Religious Affairs distributed instructions to preachers in mosques throughout Judea and Samaria to deliver a teaching about the requirement to kill Jews and the wider goal to exterminate all Jews.
So, this option – bringing the PA back to rule Gaza – has failed in the past and will fail again. It is an option that is seen as illegitimate by the Israeli public and one that would put us back to square one within a short amount of time.

Other options for Gaza's future
ANOTHER OPTION is to promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.

It is important that those who seek a life elsewhere be provided with that opportunity. Some world leaders are already discussing a worldwide refugee resettlement scheme and saying they would welcome Gazans to their countries. This could be supported by many nations around the world, especially those that claim to be friends of the Palestinians.
This is an opportunity for those who say they support the Palestinian people to show these are not just empty words.

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand

This is a must-read by Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor who is one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians and genocide experts:

https://cgcinternational.co.in/the-hamas-attack-and-israels-war-in-...

"On October 7 the repressed reality of Palestinians under direct or indirect Israeli rule literally exploded in the country’s face. From this perspective, while I was shocked and horrified by the brutality of the Hamas attack, I was not surprised at all that it occurred. This was an event waiting to happen. If you keep over two million people under siege for 16 years, cramped in a narrow strip of land, without enough work, proper sanitation, food, water, energy, education, with no hope or future prospects, you cannot but expect outbreaks of ever more desperate and brutal violence."

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1728998212424601967?s=20

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
This has got to be a first in France's history. A former Prime Minister saying that France is becoming "a very diminished nation" ("un très petit pays"), notably due to the country's reduction in freedom of thought and speech with regard to Israel.

This was Dominique de Villepin, who was responding to accusations of antisemitism made against him, because he'd been very critical of Israel and of the censorship of Israel's critics. Here's a complete translation of what he said, as always extraordinarily well expressed:

"All roads lead to Rome, but not all paths of criticism lead to antisemitism. It is possible to criticize the United States without being necessarily antisemitic. One can criticize the messianic Zionism of a part of the Israeli government without being antisemitic. One can support the idea of justice for the Palestinian people without being antisemitic. One can question an economic, cultural, financial system... As far as I know, a former [french] president of the republic campaigned denouncing the power of finance, he was not antisemitic!

Essentially, in all the questions you ask me, what is the goal? What is the purpose behind you and those who prepare this kind of questioning? It is to make sure that I remain silent... By constantly wanting to limit our ability to express ourselves, by no longer being able to say anything in the media under the pretext that it might mean [this or that] or be inconvenient, by tracking all forms of thought that can overshadow a strategy or policy, we are becoming what we are turning into, that is, a very diminished nation.

Look at the United States, what is happening there? In the United States, within the Democratic Party, which is not known for its antisemitism, a major revolt is taking place regarding Israel. A generational revolt, a political revolt. And within the Jewish community itself, linked to the relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, there is also a revolt organizing.

You know, what I think about first and foremost by telling you this is the interests of Israel, the interest of the Jewish community: it is necessary to help oneself, that is, not to put oneself in a situation where one risks fueling criticism. So I believe it takes a lot of lucidity, a great deal of rigor, a little bit of courage, to try to assert one's ideas and convictions."

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1728952543349498202?s=20

The Invention of the Land of Israel by (Jewish History Professor) Shlomo Sand (Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University) – review | History books | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/18/invention-land-israel...

The "Land of Israel" is barely mentioned in the Old Testament: the more common expression is the Land of Canaan. When it is mentioned, it does not include Jerusalem, Hebron, or Bethlehem. Biblical "Israel" is only northern Israel (Samaria) and there never was a united kingdom including both ancient Judea and Samaria.

Even had such a kingdom ever existed and been promised by God to the Jews, it is hardly a clinching argument for claiming statehood after more than 2,000 years. It is an irony of history that so many past Zionists, most of whom were secular Jews, often socialist, used religious arguments to buttress their case. Besides, the biblical account makes it quite clear (insofar as such accounts are ever clear) that the Jews, led by Moses and then by Joshua, were colonisers themselves and were commanded by God to exterminate "anything that breathes". "Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you." Imagine if the Amorites came back and claimed their ancient land. If they did, this is what Deuteronomy 20 has to say: "Put to the sword all the men ... As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else ... you may take these as plunder for yourselves." Today, such an injunction would take you straight to the international criminal court.

The uncertainty as to what exactly constitutes the "Land of Israel" endures to this day. There is an internationally recognised state of Israel with clearly defined boundaries (the Green Line of 1967, itself the result of the enlargement following the 1948 war) and then there is the "Land of Israel" whose boundaries depend on who is talking: for some, it includes the whole of the West Bank, for others it extends to Jordan. It could be worse: God promised Abraham and his descendants "this land, from the river of Egypt unto the Euphrates", which would include also bits of Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

In traditional Judaism there is no injunction to "return" to the "land of Israel". The ritual "next year in Jerusalem" that is part of the Passover Seder prayer was never a call to action, or to reconstitute a state.

By the 19th century, those who wanted Jews to "return" to the Holy Land were more likely to be Christian Zionists than Jews. Lord Shaftesbury, a compassionate Tory who contributed to improving the conditions of lunatics in asylums and children in factories (The Ten Hours Act, 1833), agitated endlessly for promoting a Jewish presence in Palestine. Sand describes him as an Anglican Theodor Herzl before Herzl; and with reason, since Shaftesbury appears to have even coined the famous line: "A country without a nation for a nation without a country." He hoped, of course, the Jews would also convert to Christianity. Lord Palmerston, on the Liberal side, warmed to the idea, not because he cared in the slightest about Jews (or Christians), but because he thought that British Jews colonising a part of the Ottoman Empire would increase British influence.

More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent...


COLD SPRING HARBOR, NEW YORK--As fighting continues in the Middle East, a new genetic study shows that many Arabs and Jews are closely related. More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.

The results match historical accounts that some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai. They were descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times. And in a recent study of 1371 men from around the world, geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews.

Intrigued by the genetic similarities between the two populations, geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who collaborated on the earlier study, focused on Arab and Jewish men. Her team examined the Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. Many of the Jewish subjects were descended from ancestors who presumably originated in the Levant but dispersed throughout the world before returning to Israel in the past few generations; most of the Arab subjects could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer. The Y chromosomes of many of the men had key segments of DNA that were so similar that they clustered into just three of many groups known as haplogroups. Other short segments of DNA called microsatellites were similar enough to reveal that the men must have had common ancestors within the past several thousand years. The study, reported here at a Human Origins and Disease conference, will appear in an upcoming issue of Human Genetics.

Hammer praises the new study for "focusing in detail on the Jewish and Palestinian populations." Oppenheim's team found, for example, that Jews have mixed more with European populations, which makes sense because some of them lived in Europe during the last millennium.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


When Ariel Sharon​ withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.

The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree. Over the last eight months, Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. An untold number remain under the debris and still more will die of hunger and disease. Eighty thousand Palestinians have been injured, many of them permanently maimed. Children whose parents – whose entire families – have been killed constitute a new population sub-group. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s housing infrastructure, its hospitals and all its universities. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced, some of them repeatedly; many have fled to ‘safe’ areas only to be bombed there. No one has been spared: aid workers, journalists and medics have been killed in record numbers. And as levels of starvation have risen, Israel has created one obstacle after another to the provision of food, all while insisting that its army is the ‘most moral’ in the world. The images from Gaza – widely available on TikTok, which Israel’s supporters in the US have tried to ban, and on Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem office was shut down by the Israeli government – tell a different story, one of famished Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.

The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UNconvention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch.

The charge of genocide isn’t new among Palestinians. I remember hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it’s a ruthless, pitiless siege. The use of the word ‘genocide’ struck me then as typical of the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in Israel-Palestine. The game had been rigged against Palestinians because of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’ and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.

This time it’s different, however, not only because of the wanton killing of thousands of women and children, but because the sheer scale of the devastation has rendered life itself all but impossible for those who have survived Israel’s bombardment. The war was provoked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack, but the desire to inflict suffering on Gaza, not just on Hamas, didn’t arise on 7 October. Here is Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad in 2012: ‘We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.’ Today this reads like a prophecy.

Exterminationist violence is almost always preceded by other forms of persecution, which aim to render the victims as miserable as possible, including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation. All of these have been features of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people since its founding. What causes persecution to slide into mass killing is usually war, in particular a war defined as an existential battle for survival – as we have seen in the war on Gaza. The statements of Israel’s leaders (the defence minister, Yoav Gallant: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly’; President Isaac Herzog: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible’) have not disguised their intentions but provided a precise guide. So have the gleeful selfies taken by Israeli soldiers amid the ruins of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a source of pleasure.

Israel’s methods may bear a closer resemblance to those of the French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the Nazis in Treblinka or the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda, but this doesn’t mean they do not constitute genocide. Nor does the fact that Israel has killed ‘only’ a portion of Gaza’s population. What, after all, is left for those who survive? Bare life, as Giorgio Agamben calls it: an existence menaced by hunger, destitution and the ever present threat of the next airstrike (or ‘tragic accident’, as Netanyahu described the incineration of 45 civilians in Rafah). Israel’s supporters might argue that this is not the Shoah, but the belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent



In Israel, this belief amounts to an article of faith. Netanyahu may be despised by half the population but his war on Gaza is not, and according to recent polls, a substantial majority of Israelis think either that his response has been appropriate or that it hasn’t gone far enough. Unable or unwilling to look beyond the atrocities of 7 October, most of Israel’s Jews regard themselves as fully justified in waging war until Hamas is destroyed, even – or especially – if this means the total destruction of Gaza. They reject the idea that Israel’s own conduct – its suffocation of Gaza, its colonisation of the West Bank, its use of apartheid, its provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque, its continuing denial of Palestinian self-determination – might have led to the furies of 7 October. Instead, they insist that they are once again the victims of antisemitism, of ‘Amalek’, the enemy nation of the Israelites. That Israelis cannot see, or refuse to see, their own responsibility in the making of 7 October is a testament to their ancestral fears and terrors, which have been rekindled by the massacres. But it also reveals the extent to which Israeli Jews inhabit what Jean Daniel called ‘the Jewish prison’.

Zionism’s original ambition was to transform Jews into historical actors: sovereign, legitimate, endowed with a sense of power and agency. But the tendency of Israeli Jews to see themselves as eternal victims, among other habits of the diaspora, has proved stronger than Zionism itself, and Israel’s leaders have found a powerful ideological armour, and source of cohesion, in this reflex. It is hardly surprising that Israelis have interpreted 7 October as a sequel to the Holocaust, or that their leaders have encouraged this interpretation: both adhere to a theological reading of history based on mythic repetition, in which any violence against Jews, regardless of the context, is understood within a continuum of persecution; they are incapable of distinguishing between violence against Jews as Jews, and violence against Jews in connection with the practices of the Jewish state. (Ironically, this vision of history renders the industrialised killing of the Shoah less exceptional, since it appears simply to be a big pogrom.) What this means, in practice, is that anyone who faults Israel for its policies before 7 October, or for its slaughter in Gaza, can be dismissed as an antisemite, a friend of Hamas, Iran and Hizbullah, of Amalek.

It also means that almost anything is justified on the battlefield, where a growing number of soldiers in combat units are extremist settlers. It is not uncommon to hear Israeli Jews defending the killing of children, since they would grow up to be terrorists (an argument no different from the claim by some Palestinians that to kill an Israeli Jewish child is to kill a future IDF soldier). The question is how many Palestinian children must die before Israelis feel safe – or whether Israeli Jews regard the removal of the Palestinian population as a necessary condition of their security.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


The Zionist idea of ‘transfer’ – the expulsion of the Arab population – is older than Israel itself. It was embraced both by Ben-Gurion and by his rival Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist who was a mentor to Netanyahu’s father, and it fed directly into the expulsions of the 1948 war. But until the 1980s, and the rise of the New Historians, Israel strenuously denied that it had committed ethnic cleansing, claiming that Palestinians had left or ‘fled’ because the invading Arab armies had encouraged them to do so; when the expulsion of the Palestinians and the destruction of their villages were evoked, as in S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh and A.B.Yehoshua’s 1963 story ‘Facing the Forests’, it was with anguish and guilt-laden rationalisation. But, as the French journalist Sylvain Cypel points out in The State of Israel v. the Jews, the ‘secret shame underlying the denial’ has evaporated. Today the catastrophe of 1948 is brazenly defended in Israel as a necessity – and viewed as an uncompleted, even heroic, project. Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, are both unabashed advocates of transfer. What we are witnessing in Gaza is something more than the most murderous chapter in the history of Israel-Palestine: it is the culmination of the 1948 Nakba and the transformation of Israel, a state that once provided a sanctuary for survivors of the death camps, into a nation guilty of genocide.

There are decades​ where nothing happens,’ Lenin wrote, ‘and there are weeks where decades happen.’ The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise? Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid conviction for fraud and bribery (his trial has been running intermittently since early 2020). But he is also Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens. Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’ What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


It isn’t surprising that on the student left the word ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet for those who oppose equal rights and freedom for Palestinians, or who, even if they claim to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state, persist in thinking that the desires of Israeli Jews, by virtue of their ancestors’ persecution in Europe, outweigh those of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs. But, as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land. And, as Ben-Gurion put it, ‘we don’t want Israelis to be Arabs. It’s our duty to fight against the Levantine mentality that destroys individuals and societies.’ In 1933, Brit Shalom folded; a year later, Kohn left Palestine in despair, convinced that the Zionist movement was on a collision course with the Palestinians and the region.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


Ben-Gurion’s movement was also on a collision course with those who, like Kohn and Arendt, sympathised with the idea of a Jewish cultural sanctuary in Palestine, but rejected the maximalist, exclusionary, territorial vision of the state associated with Israel’s creation in 1948. Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the decades following the state’s formation. After the 1948 war, the American Jewish press featured extensive, and largely sympathetic, coverage of the plight of Palestinian refugees: Israel had not yet declared that it would not readmit a single refugee. ‘The question of the Arab refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy,’ William Zukerman, the editor of the Jewish Newsletter, wrote in 1950. ‘The land now called Israel belongs to the Arab Refugees no less than to any Israeli. They have lived on that soil and worked on it ... for twelve hundred years ... The fact that they fled in panic is no excuse for depriving them of their homes.’ Under Israeli pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.

Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, declaring ‘we have sinned’ and calling for the immediate repatriation of a hundred thousand refugees: as members of the ‘tribe of the wandering feet’, he said, Jews should stand with Palestine’s refugees. The leading expert in the US on the Palestinian refugees, Don Peretz, was employed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). After the 1948 war, he worked with a Quaker group that distributed food and clothing to displaced Palestinians living under Israel’s military government. Horrified to discover ‘an attitude towards the Arabs which resembles that of American racists’, Peretz wrote a pamphlet on the refugees for the AJC. Israeli officials responded by trying to have him fired; Esther Herlitz, Israel’s consul in New York, recommended that the embassy ‘consider digging him a grave’ at the Jewish college in Pennsylvania where he taught. Peretz was not a radical: he simply wanted to create what he called ‘a platform from which to voice not only eulogies of Israel, but a critical concern about many of the problems with which the new state has become involved’, above all the ‘Arab refugee problem, the condition of Israel’s Arab minority’. Instead, he encountered an ‘emotional environment’ that made it ‘as difficult to create an atmosphere for free discussion as it is in the South today to discuss interracial relations’.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


Among the most illuminating episodes recounted in Levin’s book is the campaign to smear the reputation of Fayez Sayegh, the leading Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. A native of Tiberias, ‘Sayegh understood acutely that any Arab flirtation with antisemites tarnished their cause,’ Levin writes, and so steered clear of neo-Nazis and other anti-Jewish activists who turned up at his door. He joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, A Partisan History of Judaism, in which he assailed the movement for embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying Judaism’s universalist message. Described by a pro-Israel activist as ‘one of the most competent polemicists that American Jewry has ever had to counteract’, Sayegh was considered especially dangerous because he could not easily be painted as an antisemite. In their efforts to combat this Arab ally of a prominent, if controversial, rabbi who never succumbed to antisemitic rhetoric, Zionist activists were forced to invent a novel charge: that anti-Zionism was itself a form of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League developed this argument into a book in 1974, but, as Levin shows, it was already in circulation twenty years earlier.

Sayegh eventually moved to Beirut, where he joined the PLO. And in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, the American Jewish community underwent what Norman Podhoretz called a ‘complete Zionisation’. As Joshua Leifer argues in his new book, Tablets Shattered, the Jewish establishment became increasingly ‘particularist, their rhetoric blunter in its defence of Jewish self-interest’. That establishment continues to exert influence in American institutions of power and higher learning: the downfall of Claudine Gay, the Harvard president, engineered by the Zionist billionaire Bill Ackman, is just one illustration. As Leifer writes, the uncritical embrace of Zionism has ‘engendered a moral myopia’ with respect to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The far left’s denial that Hamas committed any atrocities on 7 October is mirrored by the genocide denialism of American Jews who claim there is plenty of food in Gaza and that Palestinian starvation is simply a form of theatre.

This moral myopia has always been resisted by a minority of American Jews. There have been successive waves of resistance, provoked by previous episodes of Israeli brutality: the Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada. But the most consequential wave of resistance may be the one we are seeing now from a generation of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’

The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In 1967, I.F. Stone wrote:

Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalised, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews must fight elsewhere for their very security and existence – against principles and practices they find themselves defending in Israel.

Among many young American Jewish liberals, this contradiction has proved intolerable: Jewish students have made up an unusually high number of the protesters on campus.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent

They have also tried to develop what Leifer calls ‘new expressions of Jewish identity and community ... untethered to Israeli militarism’. Some, like Leifer, express an affinity for traditional, even Orthodox Judaism, because of its distance from the anything-goes liberalism of American Judaism, even as they deplore Israel’s human rights abuses. The most radical among them have espoused a ‘soft diaspora nationalism’, disavowing any ties to Israel, proclaiming their support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and embracing the symbols of the Palestinian struggle. Leifer is troubled by the failure of some Jews to criticise the 7 October attacks. He accuses them of ‘callousness towards the lives of other Jews, whose ancestors happened to flee to the embattled, fledgling Jewish state, instead of the United States’.

The cool response to the events of 7 October that critics such as Leifer find so disturbing, particularly when expressed by left-wing Jews, may not reflect callousness so much as a conscious act of disaffiliation, bred by shame and a sense of unwanted complicity with a state that insists on loyalty from Jews throughout the world – as well as a repudiation of the Zionist movement’s claim that Jews comprise a single, united people with a shared destiny. Leifer’s book is a critique of the Jewish prison, written from within its walls: ‘renunciation’ of Israel, he insists, is impossible because it will soon contain the majority of the world’s Jews, ‘a revolution in the basic conditions of Jewish existence’. Those who prioritise their membership of a larger secular community seek to liberate themselves from the prison altogether, even at the risk of being excommunicated as ‘un-Jews’. For these writers and activists, many of them gathered around the revived journal Jewish Currents and the activist organisation Jewish Voice for Peace, fidelity with the principles of ethical Judaism requires them to adopt what Krakotzkin calls ‘the perspective of the expelled’ – who, since 1948, have been Palestinian, not Jewish.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


‘We have​ no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubinstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements,’ Edward Said wrote of the Palestinians in 1986. ‘We have had no Holocaust to protect us with the world’s compassion. We are “other”, and opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement and exodus.’ Palestinians are still ‘others’ in the moral calculus of the US and Western powers, without whose support Israel could not have carried out its assault on Gaza. But they can now invoke a genocide of their own, and though it may not yet offer them protection, it has done much to diminish Israel’s already eroded moral capital. Palestinian claims to the land and to justice, already embedded in the conscience of the Global South, have made extraordinary inroads into that of the liberal West, as well as that of American Jewry, in no small part thanks to Said and other Palestinian writers and activists. The birth of a global movement in opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, and in defence of Palestinian rights, is, if nothing else, a sign that Israel has lost the moral war among people of conscience. While the Palestinian cause is wedded to international justice, to solidarity among oppressed peoples, and to the preservation of a rules-based order, Israel’s appeal is largely confined to religious Jews, the far right, white nationalists and Democratic politicians of an older generation such as Joe Biden, who warned of a ‘ferocious surge’ in antisemitism in America following the protests, and Nancy Pelosi, who claimed to detect a ‘Russian tinge’ to them. When the Proud Boys’ founder, Gavin McInnes, and the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, descended on Columbia’s New York campus to defend Jewish students from ‘antisemitic’ protesters (among them Jews holding liberation seders), they looked as though they’d convened a 6 January reunion. For all their claims to isolation in a sea of sympathy for Palestine, Jewish supporters of Israel, like the state itself, have powerful allies in Washington, in the administration and on university boards.

The excessive, militarised reactions to the encampments at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, along with the furious responses of the British, German and French governments to demonstrations in London, Paris and Berlin, are a measure of the movement’s growing influence. As Régis Debray put it, ‘the revolution revolutionises the counterrevolution.’ A worrying development for anyone who cares about free speech and freedom of assembly, the clearing of the solidarity encampments by the police was a reminder that the rhetoric of ‘safe spaces’ can easily lend itself to right-wing capture. The antisemitism bill recently passed in the House of Representatives threatens to stifle pro-Palestinian speech on American campuses, since university administrations could become liable for failing to enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Like the anti-BDSmeasures adopted by more than thirty states, the Antisemitism Awareness Act is an expression of what Susan Neiman, writing about Germany’s suppression of support for Palestinian rights, has called ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’, and will almost certainly lead to more antisemitism, since it treats Jewish students as a privileged minority whose feelings of safety require special legal protection. It only adds to the unreal quality of the debate in the US that the threat of antisemitism is being weaponised by right-wing Evangelicals who have otherwise made common cause with white nationalists and actual antisemites, while liberal Democratic politicians acquiesce.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


After a New York City police officer took down a Palestinian flag at City College and replaced it with an American flag, Mayor Eric Adams said: ‘Blame me for being proud to be an American ... We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone.’ This was, of course, a ludicrous expression of xenophobia – and it’s hard to imagine Adams, or any American politician, making such a remark about those who wave the Ukrainian flag. (The NYPDfilmed the clearing of the Columbia campus for a promotional video, as if it were an anti-terrorism raid.) But it’s indicative of the casual racism, often laced with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice, that has long been directed against Palestinians. Said was called the ‘professor of terror’, Columbia’s Middle East Studies Department ‘Birzeit on the Hudson’. Bari Weiss, the former New York Times columnist who sees herself as a ‘free speech warrior’, cut her teeth as an undergraduate at Columbia trying to have members of the Middle East faculty fired. The campaign against Palestinian scholars, which helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the attack on the encampments, is instructive. Arafat was wrong when he said the Palestinians’ greatest weapon is the womb of the Palestinian woman: it is the knowledge and documentation of what Israel has done, and is doing, to the Palestinian people. Hence Israel’s looting of the Palestine Research Centre during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the attacks on professors who might shed light on a history some would prefer to suppress.

Has some of the rhetoric on US campuses slid into antisemitism? Have some Jewish supporters of Israel been bullied, physically or verbally? Yes, though the extent of anti-Jewish harassment remains unknown and contested. There is also the question, as Shaul Magid writes in The Necessity of Exile, of whether ‘the single umbrella of antisemitism’ best describes all these incidents. ‘What is antisemitism if it is no longer accompanied by oppression?’ Magid asks. ‘What constitutes antisemitism when Jews are in fact the oppressors?’

Amid all the attention on heightened Jewish vulnerability, there has been little discussion of the vulnerability of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, much less an academic commission or political bill to address it. Unlike Jews, they have to prove their right simply to be on campus. Palestinians – particularly if they take part in protests – risk being seen as ‘trespassers’, infiltrators from a foreign land. Last November, three Palestinian students visiting relatives in Vermont were shot by a racist fanatic; one of them will be paralysed for life. Biden did not respond to this or other attacks on Muslims by saying that ‘silence is complicity,’ as he did about antisemitism.

It was, in fact, the refusal of silence, the refusal of complicity, that led students of every background into the streets in protest, at far greater risk to their futures than during the 2020 protests against police killings. Opposition to anti-black racism is embraced by elite liberals; opposition to Israel’s wars against Palestine is not. They braved doxxing, the contempt of their university administrations, police violence and in some cases expulsion. Prominent law firms have announced that they will not hire students who took part in the encampments.

dam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


The political establishment and the mainstream press were largely disdainful. Liberal commentators belittled the students as ‘privileged’, although many of them, particularly at state colleges, came from poor and working-class backgrounds; the protests, some claimed, were ultimately about America, not about the Middle East. (They were about both.) The protesters were also accused of making Jews feel unsafe with their ritualised denunciations of Zionism, of grandstanding, of engaging in a fantasy of 1968-style rebellion, of ignoring Hamas’s cruelties or even justifying them, of romanticising armed struggle in their calls to ‘globalise the intifada,’ of being possessed by a Manichean fervour that blinded them to the complexities of a war that involved multiple parties, not just Israel and Gaza.

There is, of course, a grain of truth to these criticisms. Like ‘defund the police,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ is appealing in its absolutism, but also dangerously ambiguous, fuel for right-wing adversaries looking for evidence of calls for ‘genocide’ against Jews. And there was, as there always is, a theatrical dimension to the protests, with some students imagining themselves to be part of the same drama unfolding in Gaza, confusing the rough clearing of an encampment (‘liberated zones’) with the violent destruction of a refugee camp. But the attacks on the demonstrators – whether for ‘privilege’, supposed hostility to Jews or fanaticism – weren’t a fair portrayal of a broad-based movement that includes Palestinians and Jews, African Americans and Latinos, Christians and atheists.

For all their missteps, the students drew attention to matters that seemed to elude their detractors: the obscenity of Israel’s war on Gaza; the complicity of their government in arming Israel and facilitating the slaughter; the hypocrisy of America’s claim to defend human rights and a rules-based international order while giving Israel carte blanche; and the urgent need for a ceasefire. Nor were they cowed by Netanyahu’s grotesque comparison of the protests to anti-Jewish mobilisations in German universities in the 1930s (where no one was holding seders). If Trump wins they will be blamed, along with Arab and Muslim voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for a president who armed Bibi, but they deserve credit for mobilising support for a ceasefire and for helping to shift the narrative on Palestine.

The destruction of Gaza will be as formative for them as the struggles against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the Iraq War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of solidarity that led students in 1968 to chant ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’ after the German-Jewish student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France. These are emotions of which no group of victims can forever remain the privileged beneficiary, not even the descendants of the European Jews who perished in the death camps

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent

As the historian​ Enzo Traverso has argued, a particular version of Holocaust remembrance, centred on Jewish suffering and the ‘miraculous’ founding of Israel, has been a ‘civil religion’ in the West since the 1970s. People in the Global South have never been parishioners of this church, not least because it has been linked to a reflexive defence of the state of Israel, described in Germany as a Staatsräson. For many Jews, steeped in Zionism’s narrative of Jewish persecution and Israeli redemption, and encouraged to think that 1939 might be just around the corner, the fact that Palestinians, not Israelis, are seen by most people as Jews themselves once were – as victims of oppression and persecution, as stateless refugees – no doubt comes as a shock. Their reaction, naturally, is to steer the conversation back to the Holocaust, or to the events of 7 October. These anxieties shouldn’t be dismissed. But, as James Baldwin wrote in the late 1960s, ‘one does not wish ... to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.’

The question is how, if at all, these movements can help to end the war in Gaza, to end the occupation and the repressive matrix of control that affects all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a fifth of the population. While the justice of the Palestinian cause has never enjoyed wider or more universal recognition, and the BDSmovement (vilified as ‘antisemitic’ and ‘terrorist’ by Israel’s defenders) has never attracted comparable support, the Palestinian national movement itself is in almost complete disarray. The Palestinian Authority is an authority only in name, a virtual gendarme of Israel, reviled and mocked by those who live under it. It has been unable to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from the wave of settler attacks and military violence that has killed five hundred Palestinians in the last eight months and resulted in the theft of more than 37,000 acres of land, a creeping Gaza-fication. Palestinians inside Israel are under intense surveillance, ever at risk of being accused of treason, and left to the mercy of the criminal gangs that increasingly tyrannise Arab towns.

The future of Gaza looks still more bleak, even in the event of a long-term truce or ceasefire. ‘Gaza 2035’, a proposal circulated by Netanyahu’s office, envisages it as a Gulf-style free-trade zone. Jared Kushner has his eye on beachfront developments and the Israeli right is determined to re-establish settlements. As for the survivors of Israel’s assault, the political scientist Nathan Brown predicts that they will be living in a ‘supercamp’, where, as he writes in Deluge, a collection of essays on the current war, ‘law and order ... will likely be handled – if they are handled at all – by camp committees and self-appointed gangs.’ He adds: ‘This seems less like the day after a conflict than a long twilight of disintegration and despair.’

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


Disintegration and despair are, of course, the conditions that encourage the ‘terrorism’ that Israel claims to be fighting. And it would be easy for Gaza’s survivors to succumb to this temptation, particularly since they have been given no hope for a better life, much less a state, only lectures on the reason they ought to turn the Strip into the next Dubai rather than build tunnels.

Over the last eight months, Palestine has become to the American and UK student left what Ukraine is to liberals: the symbol of a pure struggle against aggression. But just as Zelensky’s admirers ignore the illiberal elements in the national movement, so Palestine’s supporters tend to overlook the brutality of Hamas, not only against Israeli Jews but against its Palestinian critics. As Isaac Deutscher wrote, while ‘the nationalism of the exploited and oppressed’ cannot be ‘put on the same moral-political level as the nationalism of conquerors and oppressors’, it ‘should not be viewed uncritically’.

In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), Rashid Khalidi writes that when the Pakistani activist Eqbal Ahmad visited the PLO’s bases in southern Lebanon, ‘he returned with a critique that disconcerted those who had asked his advice. While in principle a supporter of armed struggle against colonial regimes such as that in Algeria ... he questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel.’ As Ahmad saw it, ‘the use of force only strengthened a pre-existing and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism and bolstered the support of external actors.’ Ahmad did not deny the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance, but he believed it should be practised intelligently – to create divisions among the Israeli Jews with whom a settlement, a liberating new dispensation based on coexistence, mutual recognition and justice, would ultimately have to be reached.

Today it is difficult to imagine an alliance between Palestinians and progressive Israeli Jews of the kind that flickered during the First Intifada. Groups pursuing joint action between Palestinians and Israelis still exist, but they are fewer than ever and deeply embattled: advocates for the binationalism sketched out by figures as various as Judah Magnes and Edward Said, Tony Judt and Azmi Bishara, have all but vanished. Nonetheless, one wonders what Ahmad would have made of Hamas’s spectacular raid on 7 October, a daring assault on Israeli bases that devolved into hideous massacres at a rave and in kibbutzes. Its short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel’s invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision. ‘Tomorrow will be different,’ Deif promised in his 7 October communiqué. He was correct. But that difference – after the initial exuberance brought about by the prison breakout – can now be seen in the ruins of Gaza.

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent



Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever more committed to its colonisation project and contemptuous of international criticism, ruling over a people who have been transformed into strangers in their own land or helpless survivors, awaiting the next delivery of rations. The self-styled ‘start-up’ nation has leveraged its surveillance weapons into lucrative deals with Arab dictatorships and offers counterinsurgency training to visiting police squads, but its instinctive militarism leaves no room for new initiatives. Israel cannot imagine a future with its neighbours or its own Palestinian citizens in which it would no longer rely on force.

The ‘Iron Wall’ is not simply a defence strategy: it is Israel’s comfort zone. Netanyahu’s brinkmanship with Iran and Hizbullah is more than a bid to remain in power; it is a classical extension of Moshe Dayan’s policy of ‘active defence’. The violence will not cease unless the US cuts off the delivery of arms and forces Israel’s hand. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: Netanyahu is due to address Congress on 24 July, after receiving an unctuous, bipartisan invitation to share his ‘vision for defending democracy, combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region’. Biden’s call for a ceasefire has been met with another humiliating rejection by Netanyahu, who knows that the administration isn’t about to suspend military aid or observe any of its own ‘red lines’. But the encampment movement, and the growing dissent among progressive Democratic leaders from Rashida Tlaib to Bernie Sanders, foreshadows a future in which Washington will no longer provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes. Whether Palestinians will be able to hold onto their lands until that day, in the face of the settler zealots and ethnic cleansers who have captured the Israeli state, remains to be seen.

An influential rabbi (Sharon Brous) with a fast-growing congregation in Los Angeles, Brous, 50, has spent much of her career advocating for human rights, including for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This past September on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, she used her sermon to publicly warn that the future of “our beloved Israel” was under threat from within. She argued that by denying the “basic rights, dignities and dreams” of millions of Palestinians for decades, Israel’s increasingly “extremist” leaders were undermining the country’s Jewish and democratic ideals. “The existential threat to the state of Israel is internal,” she said. “The call is coming from inside the house.”

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/on-gaza-an-american-rabbi-dec...

American rabbis often avoid criticizing Israel from the pulpit. Particularly at a time of uncertainty and threat for Israelis and Jews around the world, many spiritual leaders worry they will alienate congregants and empower antisemitism if their view of Israel’s policies sounds disloyal. Rabbi Sharon Brous understands such reticence, but she argues that staying silent is irresponsible.

An influential rabbi with a fast-growing congregation in Los Angeles, Brous, 50, has spent much of her career advocating for human rights, including for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This past September on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, she used her sermon to publicly warn that the future of “our beloved Israel” was under threat from within. She argued that by denying the “basic rights, dignities and dreams” of millions of Palestinians for decades, Israel’s increasingly “extremist” leaders were undermining the country’s Jewish and democratic ideals. “The existential threat to the state of Israel is internal,” she said. “The call is coming from inside the house.”

Even after Hamas’s attack on Israel two weeks later on Oct. 7, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, her sermons have expressed concern for both Jewish pain and Palestinian suffering. She has railed against Hamas’s campaign of “brutality and terror” against civilians, including many Israeli peace activists, but argues that the real fault line is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between those who embrace violence as an answer and those who don’t. “You either believe that every single person is an image of God, or you don’t actually care about human life,” she said on Oct. 28.

Yet as someone who has lost friends and received death threats for calling for compassion across faiths and races, Brous admits that she has been horrified by efforts to defend Hamas among groups she had thought were allies. That a “retrograde, totalitarian, misogynistic terror regime” has become “a hero of the left” has rudely awakened her to the “very deep roots of antisemitism,” she says. She points to reports in October of protesters screaming “gas the Jews” in Sydney, Australia, and of rioters torching a synagogue in Tunisia. She has been alarmed by cases of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses that have threatened Jewish students, including at Columbia University, her alma mater.

“Every time somebody finds themselves tongue-tied when asked to condemn the rape of Israelis on Oct. 7, I find myself thinking this is not hard,” she says over video from Los Angeles. “You should be able to simply say that under no circumstances do we condone acts of abduction, rape and murder of innocent civilians, and we must work toward a just future for Palestinians who suffer terribly under the status quo.” She adds that it is not possible to “build a society that is free of racism while holding on to one of the oldest racisms, which is against Jews.”

Christiane Amanpour
@amanpour
“If we shall not end the occupation, we shall not have security,” warns Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, “and if we shall not end this occupation, we shall not have democracy.”

In an extraordinarily candid interview, Israel’s former internal security chief condemns what he calls Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “toxic leadership,” and argues that as the war continues, “we are losing our identity as people, as Jews, and as human beings.”

Watch our full conversation here.

https://x.com/amanpour/status/1805295431355973645

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In January 2024, Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's internal security force, the Shin Bet, said that Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state. Ayalon also called for Israeli authorities to release Marwan Barghouti, the jailed leader of the second intifada, to help negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state. Ayalon also said that Israel is not at war with the Palestinians.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/shin-bet-ami-ayalon-c...

Ami Ayalon, a retired admiral who also commanded Israel’s navy and was wounded in battle and decorated for his service, also said destroying Hamas was not a realistic military goal, and the current operation in Gaza risked entrenching support for the group.

“We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation,” he said in an interview at his home. “To say the same in military language: you cannot deter anyone, a person or a group, if he believes he has nothing to lose.”

He said Israel’s war in Gaza was a just one, after the horrors of the 7 October attack, in which Hamas slaughtered at least 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage. But too many Israelis could not accept that Hamas did not represent all Palestinians, or that they had a legitimate claim to their own state, he said.

Ayalon said most Israelis believed that “all Palestinians are Hamas or supporters of Hamas”, and they did not accept the concept of a Palestinian identity. “We see them as people, not ‘a people’, a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept [the idea of a Palestinian people] because if we do, it creates a huge obstacle in the concept of the state of Israel.”

He believes releasing Barghouti, a Palestinian who has been jailed since 2002, serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada, would be a vital step towards meaningful negotiations. According to recent polls he would beat senior Hamas figure Ismail Haniyeh in open elections.

Christiane Amanpour
@amanpour
“If we shall not end the occupation, we shall not have security,” warns Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, “and if we shall not end this occupation, we shall not have democracy.”

In an extraordinarily candid interview, Israel’s former internal security chief condemns what he calls Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “toxic leadership,” and argues that as the war continues, “we are losing our identity as people, as Jews, and as human beings.”

Watch our full conversation here.

https://x.com/amanpour/status/1805295431355973645

-------------

In January 2024, Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's internal security force, the Shin Bet, said that Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state. Ayalon also called for Israeli authorities to release Marwan Barghouti, the jailed leader of the second intifada, to help negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state. Ayalon also said that Israel is not at war with the Palestinians.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/shin-bet-ami-ayalon-c...

Ami Ayalon, a retired admiral who also commanded Israel’s navy and was wounded in battle and decorated for his service, also said destroying Hamas was not a realistic military goal, and the current operation in Gaza risked entrenching support for the group.

“We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation,” he said in an interview at his home. “To say the same in military language: you cannot deter anyone, a person or a group, if he believes he has nothing to lose.”

He said Israel’s war in Gaza was a just one, after the horrors of the 7 October attack, in which Hamas slaughtered at least 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage. But too many Israelis could not accept that Hamas did not represent all Palestinians, or that they had a legitimate claim to their own state, he said.

Ayalon said most Israelis believed that “all Palestinians are Hamas or supporters of Hamas”, and they did not accept the concept of a Palestinian identity. “We see them as people, not ‘a people’, a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept [the idea of a Palestinian people] because if we do, it creates a huge obstacle in the concept of the state of Israel.”

He believes releasing Barghouti, a Palestinian who has been jailed since 2002, serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada, would be a vital step towards meaningful negotiations. According to recent polls he would beat senior Hamas figure Ismail Haniyeh in open elections.

Zachary Foster
@_ZachFoster
Zionism was initially a Christian phenomenon before it was a Jewish phenomenon.

→ Anthony Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) (1801-1885) published a tract in 1838 claiming that Jewish “restoration” in Palestine would benefit Great Britain’s geopolitical position and would hasten the second coming of Jesus.

→ Charles Henry Churchill (1807-1867) proposed a plan for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine in the 1840s as British Consul in Damascus.

→ James Finn (1806-1872), British Consul in Jerusalem, member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, bought land in the 1850s in the Palestinian village of Artas for the purpose of employing destitute Jews there.

→ James Bicheno’s (1880) “The restoration of the Jews, the crisis of all nations”: purpose to “stir up public attention to the prophecies which relate to the restoration of this singular people in the latter days.”

→ William Hechler an Anglican clergyman in 1884 wrote "The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine" in which he argued that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a precondition for the return of Jesus.

Maybe the more sensible question is, why did Jews hijack the idea of Zionism from non-Jews?

Sources:
Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism
Masalha, The Zionist Bible

https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/1825533334669160655

David Miller
@Tracking_Power
Surprise! The 'Arabs' were right all along about a 'Greater Israel'.

It's always been the plan.

In his Complete Diaries, Vol. II. p. 711, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, says that the area of
the Jewish State stretches: 'From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.'

Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared in his testimony to the U.N.
Special Committee of Enquiry on 9 July 1947: 'The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up
to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.'

It was even codified and published in the 1980s as the Yinon Plan.

https://x.com/Tracking_Power/status/1844692111477641684

Chris Menahan 🇺🇸
@infolibnews
Facebook's "Jewish Diaspora" chief Jordana Cutler explains how she uses her position to censor "hate speech" that "makes Jewish people feel unsafe."

She says Meta banned "harmful stereotypes like 'Jews run the world'" as "hate speech" after consulting w/ World Jewish Congress.

https://x.com/infolibnews/status/1848587365800976534

A Review of Alan Hart's "Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.
Volume 1 The False Messiah" by Kim Petersen

https://yazour.com/admin/uploads/product/A-Review-Alan-Hart.pdf

That the morality of Zionism is challengeable was keenly illustrated by an exchange between (BBC’s Alan) Hart and erstwhile Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Hart queried Meir on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger
of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?” Meir’s prompt response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Jewish-American author/journalist called it "The Samson Option"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Samson_Option:_Israel%27s_Nuclear...


The Samson Option

Author Seymour Hersh
Language English
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Random House
Publication date 1991
Publication place United States
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 362 pp
ISBN 0-394-57006-5
OCLC 24609770
Dewey Decimal 355.8/25119/095694 20
LC Class UA853.I8 H47 1991
The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy is a 1991 book by Seymour Hersh. It details the history of Israel's nuclear weapons programand its effects on Israel-American relations. The "Samson Option" of the book's title refers to the nuclear strategy whereby Israel would launch a massive nuclear retaliatory strike if the state itself was being overrun, just as the Biblical figure Samson is said to have pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated.

According to The New York Times, Hersh relied on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli government employee who says he worked for Israeli intelligence, for much of his information on the state of the Israeli nuclear program.[1] Hersh did not travel to Israel to conduct interviews for the book, believing that he might have been subject to the Israeli Military Censor. Nevertheless, he did interview Israelis in the United States and Europe during his three years of research.[1]

Haaretz.com
@haaretzcom
The extremism in the Israeli army disgusts him, he views settlers as the epitome of anti-Israeliness, and when he sees kids in war-torn Gaza he thinks of his own grandchildren | An interview with former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz

https://x.com/haaretzcom/status/1852678291188273579

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The Israeli Army Chief (Dan Halutz) Who Became a Road-blocking Anti-government Protester - Israel News - Haaretz.com


https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-31/ty-article-magazine/...

The extremism in the Israeli army disgusts him, he views settlers as the epitome of anti-Israeliness, and when he sees kids in war-torn Gaza he thinks of his own grandchildren, (although he still believes the IDF is moral). An interview with former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who warns that if Netanyahu is re-elected, many citizens will have a major decision to make


"The phrase 'When the cannons roar, the muses are silent' is no longer valid," Dan Halutz declared at the October 6 demonstration in Caesarea, then adding, "The muses must shout out." It's precisely these words, a variation on a stale catchphrase, that reflect the depth of the change the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff has undergone over the ...

Sony Thang
@nxt888
🇺🇸JOHN MEARSHEIMER:

"I think once you get outside of the West, almost everybody thinks that the United States and the Europeans are morally bankrupt.

I mean, we are supporting—and I'm choosing my words carefully here—we are supporting a genocide in Gaza.

It's a genocide that people see on their computers and on their TVs on a daily basis.

So they know exactly what's going on here, and the hypocrisy is just quite stunning.

Because the West makes a big deal of the fact that it is morally virtuous, that we are, you know, an exceptional Nation—we stand taller, we see further.

And when you think about the fact that we're complicit in a genocide, I mean, it looks like hypocrisy in the extreme.

So I think outside the West, people understand full well that we are morally bankrupt.

And I think even inside the West, there are lots of people who have just begun to lose hope that we have our moral gyroscopes in place when it comes to dealing with the Middle East."

https://x.com/nxt888/status/1876218966496207177

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Al Jazeera English
@AJEnglish
US documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has accused powerful propaganda campaigns of concealing what human rights groups describe as genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, following Israel’s attacks on the besieged territory.

🔴 LIVE updates: http://aje.io/m1e3s5

https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/1876677193373565188

James Li
@5149jamesli
The TikTok ban has nothing to do with China, and everything to do with Israel.

Don’t believe me? Just watch. ⬇️

https://x.com/5149jamesli/status/1880888299080098163

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CAIR National
@CAIRNational
The latest sign that anti-Palestinian politicians and lobby groups in America have lost the argument: last night on #SNL, the audience loudly applauded Dave Chappelle as he celebrated Jimmy Carter's solidarity with the Palestinian people and called on President-Elect Trump to show empathy for displaced people, from the Palisades to Palestine.

https://x.com/5149jamesli/status/1880888299080098163