Journalists working at CNN have varied explanations.
Some say the problem is rooted in years of pressure from the Israeli government and allied groups in the US combined with a fear of losing advertising.
During the battle for narrative through the second Palestinian intifada in the early 2000s, Israel’s then communications minister, Reuven Rivlin, called CNN ‘‘evil, biased and unbalanced”. The Jerusalem Post likened the network’s correspondent in the city, Sheila MacVicar, to “the woman who refilled the toilet paper in the Goebbels’ commode”.
CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, caused a storm when he told the Guardian in 2002 that Israel was engaging in terrorism against the Palestinians.
“The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have. The Israelis … they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism,” said Turner, who was then the vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner, which owned CNN.
The resulting storm of protest resulted in threats to the network’s revenue, including moves by Israeli cable television companies to supplant the network with Fox News.
CNN’s chair, Walter Isaacson, appeared on Israeli television to denounce Turner but that did not stem the criticism. The network’s then chief news executive, Eason Jordan, imposed a new rule that CNN would no longer show statements by suicide bombers or interview their relatives, and flew to Israel to quell the political storm.
CNN also began broadcasting a series about the victims of Palestinian suicide bombers. The network insisted that the move was not a response to pressure but some of its journalists were sceptical. CNN did not produce a similar series with the relatives of innocent Palestinians killed by Israel in bombings.
Thompson has his own battle scars from dealing with Israeli officials when he was director general of the BBC two decades ago.
In the spring of 2005, the BBC was embroiled in a very public row over an interview with the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who was released from prison the year before.
The Israeli authorities barred Vanunu from giving interviews. When a BBC documentary team spoke to him and then smuggled the footage out of Israel, the authorities reacted by effectively expelling the acting head of the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau, Simon Wilson, who was not involved in the interview.
The dispute rolled on for months before the BBC eventually bowed to an Israeli demand that Wilson write a letter of apology before he could return to Jerusalem. The letter, which included a commitment to “obey the regulations in the future”, was to have remained confidential but the BBC unintentionally posted details online before removing them a few hours later. The climbdown angered some BBC journalists who were enduring persistent pressure and abuse for their coverage.
Later that year, Thompson visited Jerusalem and met the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in an effort to improve relations after other incidents.
The Israeli government was particularly unhappy with the BBC’s highly experienced Jerusalem correspondent, Orla Guerin. The Israeli minister for diaspora affairs at the time, Natan Sharansky, accused her of antisemitism and “total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups” after a report by Guerin about the arrest of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy carrying explosives. She accused Israeli officials of turning the arrest into a propaganda opportunity because they “paraded the child in front of the international media” after forcing him to wait at a checkpoint for the arrival of photographers.
Within days of Thompson’s meeting with Sharon, the BBC announced that Guerin would be leaving Jerusalem. At the time, Thompson’s office denied he acted under pressure from Israel and said that Guerin had completed a longer than usual posting. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.
There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.
The funding cut – which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland – was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. The World Court judges quoted at length UN officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.
The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff – out of 13,000 – are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.
The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region – in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.
They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.
According to law professor Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
Israel’s creature
The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
1 The agency was created in 1949 – decades before Israel’s current military slaughter in Gaza – to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948. That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Their lands were turned into what Israel’s leaders described as an exclusively “Jewish state”. The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians’ towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.
Prison camp
3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there. The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.
That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies. The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.
There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:
By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks – or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”. The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.
At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.
Mask ripped off
4. On October 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership’s shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel’s entire security concept – one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region’s other resistance groups hopeless. Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
The judges’ near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before. Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba – Israel’s mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 – never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the October 7 break-out.
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side – and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world. It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”
Divide and rule
But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.
In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return – a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by western states.
Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstable that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA. Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally. But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.
But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide. The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides. Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action – and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.
The ruling by the International Court of Justice was a legal victory for South Africa and the Palestinians, but it will not halt the slaughter.
SCHEERPOST, By Chris Hedges 26 Jan 24
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refused to implement the most crucial demand made by South African jurists: “the State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.” But at the same time, it delivered a devastating blow to the foundational myth of Israel. Israel, which paints itself as eternally persecuted, has been credibly accused of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinians are the victims, not the perpetrators, of the “crime of crimes.” A people, once in need of protection from genocide, are now potentially committing it. The court’s ruling questions the very raison d’être of the “Jewish State” and challenges the impunity Israel has enjoyed since its founding 75 years ago.
The ICJ ordered Israel to take six provisional measures to prevent acts of genocide, measures that will be very difficult if not impossible to fulfill if Israel continues its saturation bombing of Gaza and wholesale targeting of vital infrastructure.
The court called on Israel “to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” It demanded Israel “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.” It ordered Israel to protect Palestinian civilians. It called on Israel to protect the some 50,000 women giving birth in Gaza. It ordered Israel to take “effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.”
The court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent the crimes which amount to genocide such as “killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
Israel was ordered to report back in one month to explain what it had done to implement the provisional measures.
Gaza was pounded with bombs, missiles and artillery shells as the ruling was read in The Hague — at least 183 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours. Since Oct. 7, more than 26,000 Palestinians have been killed. Almost 65,000 have been wounded, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Thousands more are missing. The carnage continues. This is the cold reality.
Translated into the vernacular, the court is saying Israel must feed and provide medical care for the victims, cease public statements advocating genocide, preserve evidence of genocide and stop killing Palestinian civilians. Come back and report in a month.
It is hard to see how these provisional measures can be achieved if the carnage in Gaza continues.
“Without a ceasefire, the order doesn’t actually work,” Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations, stated bluntly after the ruling.
Time is not on the side of the Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians will die within a month. Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the United Nations. The entire population of Gaza by early February is projected to lack sufficient food, with half a million people suffering from starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, drawing on data from U.N. agencies and NGOs. The famine is engineered by Israel.
At best, the court — while it will not rule for a few years on whether Israel is
committing genocide — has given legal license to use the word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza. This is very significant, but it is not enough, given the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Israel has dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza — eight times more bombs than the U.S. dropped on Iraq during six years of war. It has used hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs to obliterate densely populated areas, including refugee camps. These “bunker buster” bombs have a kill radius of a thousand feet. The Israeli aerial assault is unlike anything seen since Vietnam. Gaza, only 20 miles long and five miles wide, is rapidly becoming, by design, uninhabitable.
Israel will no doubt continue its assault arguing that it is not in violation of the court’s directives. In addition, the Biden administration will undoubtedly veto the resolution at the Security Council demanding Israel implement the provisional measures. The General Assembly, if the Security Council does not endorse the measures, can vote again calling for a ceasefire, but has no power to enforce it.
Defense for Children International – Palestine v. Biden was filed in November by the Center for Constitutional Rights against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The case challenges the U.S. government’s failure to prevent complicity in Israel’s unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people. It asks the court to order the Biden administration to cease diplomatic and military support and comply with its legal obligations under international and federal law.
The only active resistance to halt the Gaza genocide is provided by Yemen’s Red Sea blockade. ………………………………………………………………….
The ICJ was founded in 1945 following the Nazi Holocaust. The first case it heard was submitted to the court in 1947.
“Decisions that endanger the continued existence of the State of Israel must not be listened to,” Ben-Gvir added. “We must continue defeating the enemy until complete victory.”……………………………………………………
It is clear from the ruling that the court is fully aware of the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. This makes the decision not to call for the immediate suspension of Israeli military activity in and against Gaza all the more distressing.
Israel’s far-right Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu today renewed his call for striking the Gaza Strip with a “nuclear bomb.”
“Even in The Hague they know my position,” the Times of Israel newspaper quoted Eliyahu as saying during a tour of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, in reference to his previous call for using nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip.
In November, Eliyahu said dropping a “nuclear bomb” on the Gaza Strip is “an option.”
The hardline minister also called for encouraging Gaza’s population to leave the enclave.
During the two-day public hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 11-12 January, South Africa quoted extremist Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have time and again called for erraticating Palestinians, resettling Gaza and blocking the establishment of a Palestinian state, as evidence that Tel Aviv is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has been given enormous license to control the security narrative in the Middle East for decades. This is not to say it is always in control of it – the attacks of October 7 by Hamas show that such control is rickety and bound, at stages, to come undone. What matters for Israeli security is that certain neighbours always understand that they are never to do certain things, lest they risk existential oblivion.
For instance, no Middle Eastern state will be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons on the Jewish State’s watch. Nuclear reactors and facilities will be struck, infected, or pulverised altogether (Osirak at Tuwaitha, Iraq; the Natanz site in Iran), with, or without knowledge, approval or participation of the United States.
This is a signature mark of Israeli foreign and defence policy: the nuclear option remains the greatest, single affirmation of sovereignty in international relations. To possess it, precisely because of its destructive and shielding potential, is to proclaim to the community of nation states that you have lethal insurance against invasion and regime change. Best, then, to make sure others do not possess it.
Israel, on the other hand, will be permitted to develop its own cataclysmic inventory of weapons, platforms, and doomsday options, all the while claiming strategic ambiguity about the whole matter. In that strangulating way, Israeli policy resembles the thornily disingenuous former US President Bill Clinton’s approach to taking drugs and oral sex: he did not inhale, and oral pleasuring by one by another is simply not sex.
The latest remarks from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 18 suggest that the license also extends to ensuring that Palestinians will never be permitted a sovereign homeland, that they will be, in a perverse biblical echo, kept in a form of bondage, downtrodden, oppressed and, given what happened on October 7 last year, suppressed. This is to ensure that, whatever the grievance, that they never err, never threaten, and never cause grief to the Israeli State. To that end, it is axiomatic that their political authorities are kept incipient, inchoate, corrupt and permanently on life support, the tolerated beggars and charity seekers of the Middle East.
At the press conference in question, held at the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu claimedthat, “Whoever is talking about the ‘day after Netanyahu’ is essentially talking about the establishment of the Palestinian state with the Palestinian Authority.” (How very like the Israeli PM to make it all about him.) The Israel-Palestinian conflict, he wanted to clarify, was “not about the absence of a state, a Palestinian state, but rather about the existence of a state, a Jewish state.”
With monumental gall, he complained that “All territory we evacuate, we get terror, terrible terror against us.” His examples, enumerated much like sins at a confessional, were instances where Israel, as an occupying force, had left or reduced their presence: Gaza, southern Lebanon, parts of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). It followed that “any future arrangement, or in the absence of any future arrangement,” Israel would continue to maintain “security control” of all lands west of the Jordan River. “That is a vital condition.”
As such lands comprise Israeli territory, Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian sovereignty can be assuredly ignored as a tenable outcome in Netanyahu’s policed paradise. He even went so far as to acknowledge that this “contradicts the idea of sovereignty” as far as the Palestinians are concerned. “What can you do? I tell this truth to our American friends.”
As to sceptical mutterings in the Israeli press about the country’s prospects of defeating Hamas decisively, Netanyahu was all foamy with indignation. “We will continue to fight at full strength until we achieve our goals: the return of all our hostages – and I say again, only military pressure will lead to their release; the elimination of Hamas; the certainty that Gaza will never again represent a threat to Israel. There won’t be any party that educates for terror, funds terror, sends terrorists against us.”
This hairbrained policy of ethno-religious lunacy masquerading as sane military strategy ensures that permanent war nourished by the poison of blood-rich hatred and revenge will continue unabated. In keeping such a powder keg stocked, there is always the risk that other powers and antagonists willing to have a say through bombs, rockets and drones will light it. Should this or that state be permitted to exist or come into being? The answer is bound to be convulsively violent.
It is of minor interest that officials in the United States found Netanyahu’s comments a touch off-putting. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had, it is reported, dangled a proposal before the Israeli PM that would see Saudi Arabia normalise relations with Israel in exchange for an agreement to facilitate the pathway to Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu did not bite, insisting that he would not be a party to any agreement that would see the creation of a Palestinian state.
Blinken, if one is to rely on the veracity of the account, suggested that the removal of Hamas could never be achieved in purely military terms; a failure on the part of Israel’s leadership to recognise that fact would lead to a continuation of violence and history repeating itself.
In Washington, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated in the daily press briefingthat “Israel faces some very difficult choices in the months ahead.” The conflict in Gaza would eventually end; reconstruction would follow; agreement from various countries in the region to aid in that effort had been secured – all on the proviso that a “tangible path to the establishment of a Palestinian state” could be agreed upon.
For decades, administrations in Washington have fantasised about castles in the skies, the outlandish notion that Palestinians and Israelis might exist in cosy accord upon lands stolen and manured by brutal death. Washington, playing the Hegemonic Father, could then perch above the fray, gaze paternally upon the scrapping disputants, and suggest what was best for both. But the two-state solution was always encumbered and heavily conditioned to take place on Israeli terms, leaving all mediation and interventions by outsiders flitting gestures lacking substance.
Now, no one can claim otherwise that Palestinian statehood is anything other than spectral, fantastic, and doomed – at least under the current warring regime. Netanyahu’s own political survival, profanely linked to Israel’s own existence, depends on not just stifling pregnancies in Gaza but preventing the birth of a nationally recognised Palestinian state.
As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.
What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?
Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia’s First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.
The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.
Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.
The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical. They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – “Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn” (“You Foolish Little Zionist”).
Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began.
By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is “our deed to the land.”
For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct.7
As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.
Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.
Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees’ had the right to return “at the earliest practicable date.”
On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.
In Gaza, even before Israel’s invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.
Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.
In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.
One brigade member laughs as he recalls, “Of course we killed them, without remorse… If you killed, you did a good thing.” An old woman says matter-of-factly, “Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also.”
Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel’s atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:
“I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People’ (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification…(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem… You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”
Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.
Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.’s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:
“The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution
After 75 years of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel’s apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.
Obviously, it won’t happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.
Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:
“The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”
More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:
“The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state.”
But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:
“Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. … It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. … but rather through people’s natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors.”
If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.
In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.
A ruling by the court could be years away. But South Africa is asking for provisional measures that would demand Israel cease its military assault – in essence a permanent ceasefire. This decision could come within two or three weeks.
The International Court of Justice may be all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and genocide.
The exhaustive 84-page brief submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide is hard to refute. Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate killing, wholesale destruction of infrastructure, including housing, hospitals and water treatment plants, along with its use of starvation as a weapon, accompanied by genocidal rhetoric from its political and military leaders who speak of destroying Gaza and ethnically cleansing the 2.3 million Palestinians, makes a strong case against Israel for genocide.
Israel’s smearing of South Africa as “the legal arm” of Hamas exemplifies the bankruptcy of its defense, a smear replicated by those who claim that demonstrations held to call for a ceasefire and protect Palestinian human rights are “anti-Semitic.” Israel, its genocide live streamed to the world, has no substantial counter argument.
But that does not mean the judges on the court will rule in South Africa’s favor. The pressure the U.S. will bring – Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called the South African charges “meritless” – on the judges, drawn from the member states of the U.N., will be intense.
A ruling of genocide is a stain that Israel – which weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its brutalization of the Palestinians – would find hard to remove. It would undercut Israel’s insistence that Jews are eternal victims. It would shatter the justification for Israel’s indiscriminate killing of unarmed Palestinians and construction of the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza, along with the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would sweep away the immunity to criticism enjoyed by the Israel lobby and its Zionist supporters in the U.S., who have successfully equated criticisms of the “Jewish State” and support for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.
Over 23,700 Palestinians, including over 10,000 children, have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas and other resistance fighters breached the security barriers around Gaza. Some 1,200 people were killed – there is strong evidence that some of the victims were killed by Israeli tank crews and helicopter pilots that intentionally targeted the some 200 hostages along with their captors. Thousands more Palestinians are missing, presumed buried under the rubble. Israeli attacks have left over 60,000 Palestinians wounded and maimed, the majority of them women and children. Thousands more Palestinian civilians, including children, have been arrested, blindfolded, numbered, beaten, forced to strip to their underwear, loaded onto trucks and transported to unknown locations.
A ruling by the court could be years away. But South Africa is asking for provisional measures that would demand Israel cease its military assault – in essence a permanent ceasefire. This decision could come within two or three weeks. It is a decision that is not based on the final ruling by the court, but on the merits of the case brought by South Africa. The court would not, by demanding Israel end its hostilities in Gaza, define the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocide. It would confirm that there is the possibility of genocide, what the South African lawyers call acts that are “genocidal in character.”
The case will not be determined by the documentation of specific crimes, even those defined as war crimes. It will be determined by genocidal intent – the intent to eradicate in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group – as defined in the Genocide Convention.
These acts collectively include the targeting of refugee camps and other densely packed civilian areas with 2,000-pound bombs, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the destruction of the health care system and its effects on children and pregnant women – the U.N. estimates there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and that more than 160 babies are delivered every day – as well as repeated genocidal statements by leading Israeli politicians and generals.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu equated Gaza with Amalek, a nation hostile to the Israelites in the Bible, and cited the Biblical injunction to kill every Amalek man, woman, child or animal. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated, as the South African lawyers told the court, that everybody in Gaza is responsible for what happened on Oct. 7 because they voted for Hamas, although half the population in Gaza are children who are too young to vote. But even if the entire population of Gaza did vote for Hamas this does not make them a legitimate military target. They are still, under the rules of war, civilians, and entitled to protection. They are also entitled under international law to resist their occupation via armed struggle.
The South African lawyers, who compared Israel’s crimes with those carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa, showed the court a video of Israeli soldiers celebrating and calling for the death of Palestinians – they sang as they danced “There are no uninvolved civilians” – as evidence that genocidal intent descends from the top to the bottom of the Israeli war machine and political system. They provided the court with photos of mass graves where bodies were buried “often unidentified.” No one – including newborns – was spared, the South African lawyer Adila Hassim, Senior Counsel, explained to the court.
The South African lawyers told the court the “first genocidal act is mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza.” The second genocidal act, they stated, is the serious bodily or mental harm inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza in violation of Article 2B of the Genocide Convention. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, another lawyer and legal scholar representing South Africa, argued that “Israel’s political leaders, military commanders and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent.”
Lior Haiat, spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Thursday’s three hour hearing one of the “greatest shows of hypocrisy in history, compounded by a series of false and baseless claims.” He accused South Africa of seeking to allow Hamas to return to Israel to “commit war crimes.”
Israeli jurists, in their response on Friday, called the South African charges “unfounded, “absurd” and amounting to “libel.” Israel’s legal team said it had – despite U.N. reports of widespread starvation and infectious diseases from a breakdown in sanitation and shortage of clean water – not impeded humanitarian assistance. Israel defended attacks on hospitals, calling them “Hamas command centers.” It told the court it was acting in self-defense. “The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent,” said Christopher Staker, a barrister for Israel.
Israeli leaders accuse Hamas with carrying out genocide, although legally if you are the victims of genocide you are not permitted to commit genocide. Hamas is also not a state. It is not, therefore, a party to the Genocide Convention. The Hague, for this reason, has no jurisdiction over the organization. Israel also claims the Palestinians are warned to evacuate areas that will come under attack and provided with “safe areas,” although as the South African lawyers documented, “safe areas” are routinely bombed by Israel with numerous civilian casualties.
Israel and the Biden administration intend to prevent any temporary injunction by the court, not because the court can force Israel to halt its military assaults, but because of the optics, which are already disastrous. The ICJ’s ruling depends on the Security Council for enforcement – which given the veto power by the U.S., renders any ruling against Israel moot. The second objective of the Biden administration is to make sure Israel is not found guilty of committing genocide. It will be unrelenting in this campaign, heavily pressuring the governments that have jurists on the court not to find Israel guilty. Russia and China, who have jurists in The Hague, are battling their own charges of genocide and may decide it is not in their interests to find Israel guilty.
The Biden administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt what, by its own admission, is Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including “dumb” bombs. It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. It insists it upholds the rule of law while it subverts the legal mechanism that can halt the genocide.
Cynicism pervades every word Biden and Blinken utter. This cynicism extends to us. Our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office. On any other issue this might be the case. But it cannot be the case with genocide.
Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand unequivocally with Palestinians and the jurists from South Africa. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
More probably, however, Israel will resist such pressure and threat to resort to the Samson Option, i.e., a nuclear attack on the countries endangering “Israel’s right to exist”. In this worst-case scenario, Israel would be annihilated, but those who put pressure on it would also suffer enormous casualties. Obviously, no country in the world will run the risk of a nuclear attack to free the Palestinians.
Palestinians in Gaza are being decimated. Over 20,000 have been killed, mostly women and children. Three times more have been wounded. Some experts qualify it as genocide, others as massacre. Two million people have been displaced, many more than during the entire history of displacement of the Palestinians since the start of the Zionist settlement at the turn of the 20th century.
As Israel takes out hospitals and civilian infrastructure, infectious diseases and famine threaten to kill many more people. Several Israeli soldiers have been reported infected during the ground operations, one has died. General Giora Eiland suggests relying on the weapon of imminent epidemics in lieu of endangering the lives of Israeli soldiers in real warfare. Gaza is violently demodernized, bombed into stone age: hospitals, schools, power stations are bombed to rubble. What is happening appears unprecedented.
The number of victims is, indeed, unprecedented. Yet the unfolding tragedy follows the old script of the Zionist project, which is European in more than one sense. It is rooted in ethnic nationalisms of Eastern and Central Europe. Nations must live in their “natural” environment where those not of the titular nationality would be at best tolerated. According to an Iraqi journalist writing in 1945, the Zionists’ goal was “to expel the British and the Arabs from Palestine so that it will be a pure Zionist state. … Terrorism [was] the only means that can bring the Zionist aspirations to fruition.” Significantly, the journalist did not consider the future state Jewish but Zionist. He must have known that Jews from countries other than those of Europe and European colonization constituted a miniscule part of the Zionist movement.
Zionism is also European because it is a settler colonial project, the most recent of all. The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association was among several agencies devoted to turning the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Palestine into “the Jewish homeland”. The Jewish Colonial Trust, the predecessor of Bank Leumi, today Israel’s largest bank, financed the segregated economic development of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. In the usual colonial manner, the early Zionist settlers were eager to establish a separate colony rather than integrate in the existing Palestinian society.
Zionism is not only the most recent case of settler colonialism. Israel is unique in that, unlike Algeria or Kenya, it is not populated by migrants from the colonial metropolis. But this distinction matters little to the indigenous Palestinians who, just like in many other such situations, are being displaced, dispossessed, and massacred by the settlers. Displacement is enacted not only in Gaza, where it is massive and indiscriminate, but also in the West Bank where it is more focused.
To attain its objectives Zionism has had to rely on major powers, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, France and, nowadays, the United States. The Zionists, committed to the success of their project, have been pragmatic and ideologically promiscuous. They would enjoy the support of the Socialist International during most of of the 20th century and then switch to become the darlings of White supremacists and the extreme-right.
Zionism is a nationalist response to anti-Jewish discrimination and violence in Europe. It deems antisemitism endemic and ineradicable, explicitly rejecting long-term viability of Jewish life anywhere except in “the Jewish state” in Palestine. The Nazi genocide in Europe reinforced this conviction and offered legitimacy to the fledgling colonial project while such projects were crumbling elsewhere in the world. The Zionist project, ignoring the opposition of the Palestinians and other Arabs, simply exported Europe’s “Jewish question” to Palestine.
Palestinians gradually understood that the Zionist project would deprive them of their land and resisted it. This is why the early Zionist settlers, most of them from the Russian Empire, formed militias to fight local population. They perfected their terrorist experience gained during the Russian revolution of 1905 with colonial counterinsurgency measures learned from the vast experience of the British. Established against the will of the entire Arab world, including the local Palestinians, the state of Israel has had to live by the sword. The army and the police have worked hard to keep the Palestinians down (the British used to call it “pacification of the natives”). Their task has been to conquer as much land as possible with as few Palestinians remaining on it as possible.
Many Palestinians now in Gaza had been expelled from the very area in what is now Israel that experienced the Hamas attack in October. They are mostly refugees or descendants of refugees. The high density of the population in an enclosed area (some called it “the largest open-air prison) makes them particularly vulnerable. When Israel did not like the election of Hamas in 2006, it laid siege to Gaza, limiting access to food, medicines, work etc. Israeli officials were openly admitting they were putting the Gazans “on a diet” while having to “mow the lawn” from time to time, subjecting the Gazans to violent “pacification”.
The 16 years of siege intensified anger, frustration and despair leading to the Hamas attack. In response, Israeli used drones, missiles, and aircraft to continue what used to be done with rifles and machine-guns. The death rate has increased, but the goal of terrorizing Palestinians into submission has remained the same. The name of the current onslaught on Gaza is “Iron Swords”, aptly reflects the Zionists’ century-old choice to live by the sword rather than coexist with the Palestinians on equal terms. Ein berera, “we have no choice”, the common Israeli excuse for unleashing violence, is therefore misleading.
Impunity and Impotence
Israel has enjoyed a large degree of impunity, with dozens of UN resolutions simply ignored. Only once, in the wake of the 1956 Suez War, was Israel forced to give up territorial conquest. This happened under a threat coming from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, Israel has relied on firm U.S. diplomatic and military support, which has become more brazen with the advent of America’s unipolar moment after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This support is now embodied in the supply of American munitions for the war on Gaza, in the presence of U.S. Navy vessels protecting Israel from third parties and in the U.S. vetoes at the Security Council. Israel and the United States are joined at the hip. Europe, while being more critical of Israel rhetorically, closely follows the U.S. line just as it does in the Ukraine conflict. In both conflicts, European chanceries appear to have abdicated independence and, possibly, ability of action.
Israel’s impunity also reflects impotence of the rest of the world. While Muslim and Arab governments decry and protest Israel’s assault on Gaza, none has imposed or even proposed economic, let alone military, sanctions. Fewer than a dozen of countries has suspended diplomatic relations or withdrawn diplomatic personnel from Israel. None has broken relations. Russia and China, along with most of the Global South, express their dismay at civilian casualties in Gaza but they too stop short of going beyond words.
The double standard of the Western reactions is obvious. Drastic economic sanctions imposed on Russia contrast with the generous supply of arms and at best verbal pleas for moderation in response to the Israeli actions in Gaza. In just a few months, the IDF surpassed Russia’s almost two-year record in the Ukraine with respect to the volume of explosives dropped, the number of people killed and wounded, and the civilian/military ratio among the casualties. Western sermons about inclusion and democracy are unlikely to carry much weight in the rest of the world. Palestinian lives do not really matter to Western governments.
This lackadaisical reaction to the massacres in Gaza contrasts with the indignation they provoke in the population in much of the world. Massive demonstrations call on governments to stop the violence. In response, most Western governments have strengthened measures to restrict freedom of speech. Opposition to Zionism has been declared antisemitic, the most recent such measure is the equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism decided by the U.S. Congress in December 2023. Accusations of antisemitism are leveled at students, often Jewish, who organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Televised debates as to what constitutes “genocidal antisemitism” on elite university campuses divert attention from what looks like a real genocide in Gaza. Antisemitism serves as Israel’s Wunderwaffe, its ultimate weapon of mass distraction.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been banned in several European capitals where commercial or cultural boycott of Israel has been made illegal. This pressure from the ruling class, including courts, police, corporate media, employers, and university administrations, creates a powerful sense of frustration among the rank-and-file. Shortly after attacking Gaza in 2009, and over sharp criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel was unanimously accepted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), made up of some 30 countries that boast democratic structures of governance. Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, while still in office, placed solidarity with Israel above Canada’s interests to the point of claiming that his government would support Israel “whatever the cost.”
Support for Israel, tending to increase with income, has become a class issue. It serves as another reminder of the growing estrangement between the rulers and the ruled, the proverbial One Per Cent and the rest. It remains to be seen if popular frustration with the hypocrisy of governments in their support for the war on Gaza may one day result in political change that would begin to dent Israel’s impunity.
Israel is a state without borders. Geographically, it has expanded with military conquest or colonization. The Zionist movement and successive Israeli governments have taken great pains never to define the borders they envisage for their state. Israeli secret services and the army pay no heed to borders, striking targets in its neighboring countries at will. This borderless character is also embodied in Israel’s claim that it belongs to the world’s Jews rather than to its citizens. This leads to the overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli agents. This is particularly the case in the United States. Israeli agents, such AIPAC, ensure Israel’s interests in elections on all levels, from school boards to the White House. Israel has even played the legislative against the executive branch in Washington. Yet this unabashed political interference attracts a lot less criticism in mainstream media that the alleged meddling of China or Russia. Israel also intervenes in the political process of other countries.
Conflict Between Jewish and Zionist Values
Zionism has provoked controversy among Jews from its very inception. The first Zionist congress in 1897 had to be moved from Germany to Switzerland because German Jewish organizations objected to holding a Zionist event in their country. The Zionist argument that the homeland of the Jews is not the country, where they have lived for centuries and for which many have spilled their blood in wars, but in a land in Western Asia. For many Jews, this message bears disconcerting resemblance to that of the antisemites who resent their social integration.
Initially irreligious, Zionism transforms spiritual terms into political ones. Thus, ‘am Israel, “the people of Israel”, defined by their relationship to the Torah, becomes ethnicity or nationality in the Zionist vocabulary. This prompted the prominent European rabbi Jechiel Weinberg (1884-1966) to emphasize that “Jewish nationality is different from that of all nations in the sense that it is uniquely spiritual, and that its spirituality is nothing but the Torah. […] In this respect we are different from all other nations, and whoever does not recognize it, denies the fundamental principle of Judaism.”
Another reason for Jewish opposition to Zionism has been moral and religious. While prayers for the return to the Holy Land is part of the daily Judaic ritual, it is not a political, let alone a military objective. Moreover, the Talmud spells out specific prohibitions of a mass move to Palestine before Messianic times, even “with the accord of the nations”. This is why the Zionist project with its addiction to armed violence continues to repel many Jews causing them embarrassment and even revulsion.
True, the Pentateuch and several of the books of the Prophets, such as Joshua and Judges, teem with violent images. But far from glorifying war, Jewish tradition identifies allegiance to God, and not military prowess, as the principal reason for the victories mentioned in the Bible. Jewish tradition abhors violence and reinterprets war episodes, plentiful in the Hebrew Bible, in a pacifist mode. Tradition clearly privileges compromise and accommodation. Albert Einstein was among the Jewish humanists who denounced Beitar, the paramilitary Zionist youth movement, today affiliated with the ruling Likud. He deemed it to be“ as much of a danger to our youth as Hitlerism is to German youth”.
Zionism vigorously rejects this “exilic” tradition, which it deems “consolation of the weak”. Generations of Israelis have been brought up on the values of martial courage, proud of serving in the military. Zionists regularly refer to their state as a continuation of biblical history. The idea of the Greater Israel is rooted in the literal reading of the Pentateuch. Zionism demands total commitment and brooks little opposition or criticism. The passion of the Zionist commitment has led to assassination of opponents, pitched fathers against sons, splitting Jewish families and communities. The historian Eli Barnavi, former Israeli ambassador in Paris, warns that “the dream of a ‘Third Kingdom of Israel’ could only lead to totalitarianism”. Indeed, many Jewish community leaders, undisturbed by the specter of “dual loyalty”, insist that allegiance to the state of Israel must prevail over all others, including allegiance toward their own country.
The Zionists, whether in Israel or elsewhere, have long claimed to be “the vanguard of the Jewish people” with Zionism replacing Judaism for quite a few Jews. Their identity, initially religious, has become political: they are supporters and patriots of Israel, “my country right or wrong” rather than adherents of Judaism.
Generationally, Israel appears an exception among the wealthy countries. With every generation Israelis become more combative and anti-Arab. While in other countries young Jews are usually less conservative than their parents and embrace ideas of social and political justice, young Israeli Jews defy this trend. Israeli education inculcates martial values and the belief that, had the state of Israel existed before World War II, the Nazi genocide would never have taken place. What sustains the fragile unity of the non-Arab majority is fear: a siege mentality that most frequently takes the self-image of a virtuous victim determined to prevent a repetition of the Nazi genocide. The memory of that European tragedy has become a tool of mobilizing Jews to the Zionist cause. Its political utility is still far from exhausted.
Use of the genocide to foster Israeli patriotism has been unflagging since the early 1960s. After an air show in Poland in 2008, three Israeli F-15 fighter jets bearing the Star of David and piloted by descendants of genocide survivors overflew the former Nazi extermination camp while two hundred Israeli soldiers observed the flyover from the Birkenau death camp adjacent to Auschwitz. The remarks of one of the Israeli pilots stressed confidence in the armed forces: “This is triumph for us. Sixty years ago, we had nothing. No country, no army, nothing.”
State schools promote the model of a fighter against “the Arabs” (the word “Palestinian” is usually avoided), glorifies military service turning it into an aspiration and a rite of passage to adulthood. No wonder that Hamas and, by extension, all the Gazans, are often referred to as Nazis. Dozens of Israeli officials and public figures have openly incited genocide of Palestinians: dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, flattening it into a parking lot, etc. Israeli political scientists have pointed out that civic religion provides no answers to questions of ultimate meaning, while at the same time it obliges its practitioners to accept the ultimate sacrifice. Civic space in Israel has become associated above all with “death for the fatherland.”
Elsewhere in the world, the Hamas attack has galvanized the Zionist commitment under the slogan “We stand with Israel!”. Massive and organized efforts are made to fight the information war. Israeli officials rely on a network of powerful supporters, including executives of high-tech companies, who make sure that the internet amplifies pro-Israel voices and muffles or cancels pro-Palestinian discourse. Censorship leads to self-censorship because pro-Palestinian involvement impedes job prospects and threatens careers.
However, unlike Israelis, diaspora Jews become less and less committed to Jewish nationalism with every generation. Growing numbers of young Jews refuse to be associated with Israel and choose to support the Palestinians. The systematic AI assisted massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has swollen their ranks, particularly in North America. Most spectacular protests against Israel’s ferocity have been organized by Jewish organizations, such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, Independent Jewish Voices in Canada, and Union juive française pour la paix in France. Prominent Jewish intellectuals denounce Israel and are found among the most consistent opponents of Zionism.
Albeit incongruently, these Jews are accused of antisemitism. Even more incongruently, the same accusation is hurled at ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. While Israel’s claim to be the state of all Jews exposes them to disgrace and danger, many Jews who support the Palestinians rehabilitate Judaism in the eyes of the world.
The Samson Option
Since its beginning, critics of Zionism have insisted that the Zionist state would become a death trap for both the colonizers and the colonized. In the wake of the ongoing tragedy triggered by the Hamas attack, these words of an ultra-Orthodox activist spoken decades ago sound prescient:
“Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths … it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends…. And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews, must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death.”
The fate of the colonized is, of course, incomparably more tragic than that of the colonizer. Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination while their kin in the West Bank are subject to repression from both the Israeli military and their subcontractors in the Palestinian Authority. Arbitrary detention without trial, dispossession, checkpoints, segregated roads, house searches without warrant and more and more frequent death at the hands of soldiers and settler vigilantes have become routine on the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, even prior to the operation Iron Swords, lived isolated on a small territory, with their access to food and medicine strictly rationed by Israel. Even peaceful protest would be met by lethal fire from Israeli soldiers sitting on the other side of the barrier. There was little work and no prospects for the future. The pressure cooker was ready to explode as it did on October 7.
Since then, thousands of Gazans have been killed and wounded by one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. This provokes more anger and hatred among the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis find themselves in a vicious circle: chronic insecurity inevitable in a settler colony reinforces the Zionist postulate that a Jew must rely on force to survive, which in turn provokes hostility and creates insecurity.
Over two decades ago David Grossman, one of the best-known Israeli authors, addressed the then prime minister Ariel Sharon known for his bellicosity:
“We start to wonder whether, for the sake of your goals, you have made a strategic decision to move the battlefield not into enemy territory, as is normally done, but into a completely different dimension of reality — into the realm of utter absurdity, into the realm of utter self-obliteration, in which we will get nothing, and neither will they. A big fat zero….”
Critical voices within and particularly outside Israel call on the Israelis to recognize that “the Zionist experiment was a tragic error. The sooner it is put to rest, the better it will be for all mankind.” In practice this would mean ensuring equality for all the inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and a transformation of the existing ethnocracy into a state of all its citizens. However, Israeli society is conditioned to see in such calls an existential threat and a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”.
The settler colonial logic radicalizes society in the direction of ethnic cleansing and even genocide. No Israeli government would be capable of evacuating hundreds of thousands of settlers to free space for a separate Palestinian state; the chances of giving up Zionist supremacy in the entire land are even lower. Only strong-armed international pressure may make Israel consider such a reform.
More probably, however, Israel will resist such pressure and threat to resort to the Samson Option, i.e., a nuclear attack on the countries endangering “Israel’s right to exist”. In this worst-case scenario, Israel would be annihilated, but those who put pressure on it would also suffer enormous casualties. Obviously, no country in the world will run the risk of a nuclear attack to free the Palestinians.
Pressure is more likely to come from the public but largely misdirected at local Jewish communities, almost all of them associated in the public mind with Israel. While these Jews, even the most Zionist, have never influenced Israel’s policies towards the Arabs, they have become easy scapegoats for Israel’s misdeeds.
American politicians seem to agree. President Trump referred to Israel as “your state” when addressing a Jewish audience in the United States. President Biden said that “without Israel, no Jew anywhere is safe.” Israeli leaders appreciate such conflations between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Israelis. These conflations boost Zionism, feed antisemitism and push Jews to migrate to Israel. This is a welcome prospect for the country, which these new Israelis will strengthen with their intellectual, entrepreneurial, and financial resources as well as supply more soldiers for the IDF.
Despite the opprobrium and public denunciations, Israel appears immune to pressure from the rest of the world. Israeli disdain for international law, the United Nations and, a fortiori, to moral arguments is proverbial. “What matters is what the Jews do, not what the gentiles say”, was Ben-Gurion’s favorite quip. His successors, a lot more radical than Israel’s founding father, will make sure that the tragedy of Gaza does not lead to any compromise with the Palestinians. The Israeli mainstream mocks or simply ignores well-intentioned pleas of liberal Zionists, an endangered species, to “save Israel from itself”. However counterintuitive today, only changes within Israeli society may shake the usual hubris. In the meantime, Israel will continue to defy the world.
About the Author: Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Science between Superpowers, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism,What is Modern Israel?,Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. E-mail: yakov.rabkin@umontreal.ca. Website: www.yakovrabkin.ca
Ethnic cleansing or “transfer” is an intrinsic part of Zionism’s early history, and has remained an essential feature of Israeli political life. More recently, “transfer” has been mainstreamed by billing it as encouraging “voluntary emigration.”
SCHEERPOST, By Mouin Rabbani / Mondoweiss, December 29, 2023
Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.
Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.” Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.
Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has a long pedigree that goes back to the late-nineteenth-century beginnings of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” the evidence demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is for the simple reason that, to them, a “Jewish state” denotes one in which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.
Enter “transfer.” As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement, identified the necessity of removing the inhabitants of Palestine in the following terms: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country … expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” David Ben-Gurion (née Grün), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later Israel’s first prime minister, was more blunt. In a 1937 letter to his son, he wrote: “We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”
Writing in his diary in 1940, Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the Architect of Transfer, put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.” His diaries are littered with similar sentiments.
The point of the above is not to demonstrate that individual Zionist leaders held such views, but that the senior leadership of the Zionist movement consistently considered the ethnic cleansing of Palestine an objective and priority. Initiatives such as the Transfer Committee, and Plan Dalet, initially formulated in 1944 and described by the pre-eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as the “Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” additionally demonstrate that the Zionist movement actively planned for it.
The 1948 Nakba, during which more than four-fifths of Palestinians residing in territory that came under Israeli rule were ethnically cleansed, should, therefore, be seen as the fulfillment of a longstanding ambition and implementation of a key policy. A product of design, not of war (historical Christmas footnote: the Palestinian town of Nazareth was spared a similar fate only because the commander of Israeli forces that seized the city, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed orders to expel the population, and was relieved of his command the following day).
That the Nakba was a product of design is further substantiated by the Transfer Committee’s terms of reference. These comprised not only proposals for the expulsion of the Palestinians but, just as importantly, active measures to prevent their return, destroy their homes and villages, expropriate their property, and resettle those territories with Jewish immigrants. Weitz, together with fellow Committee members Eliahu Sassoon and Ezra Danin, on June 5, 1948, presented a three-page blueprint, entitled “Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Problem in the State of Israel,” to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to achieve these goals. According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris, “there is no doubt Ben-Gurion agreed to Weitz’s scheme,” which included “what amounted to an enormous project of destruction” that saw more than 450 Palestinian villages razed to the ground.
The understandable focus on the expulsions of 1948 often overlooks the fact that ethnic cleansing remains incomplete unless its victims are barred from returning to their homes by a combination of armed force and legislation, and thereafter replaced by others. It is Israel’s determination to make Palestinian dispossession permanent that distinguishes Palestinian refugees from many other war refugees.
After 1948, Israel put out a whole series of fabrications to shift responsibility for the transformation of the Palestinians into dispossessed and stateless refugees onto the Arab states and the refugees themselves. These included claims that the refugees voluntarily left (they were either expelled or fled in justified terror); that Arab radio broadcasts ordered the Palestinians to flee (in fact, they were encouraged to stay put); that Israel conducted a population exchange with Arab states (there was nothing of the sort); and the bizarre argument that because they’re Arabs, Palestinians had numerous other states while Jews have only Israel (by the same logic, Sikhs would be entitled to seize British Columbia and deport its population to either the rest of Canada or the United States). More importantly, even if uniformly substantiated, none of these pretexts entitles Israel to prohibit the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes at the conclusion of hostilities. It is, furthermore, a right that was consecrated in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which has been reaffirmed repeatedly since.
Ethnic cleansing after 1967
In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine — the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Depopulation in these territories operated differently than in 1948. Most importantly, Israel, in addition to prohibiting the return of Palestinians who fled hostilities during the 1967 June War, and encouraging others to leave (by, for example, providing a daily bus service from Gaza City to the Allenby Bridge connecting the West Bank to Jordan), conducted a census during the summer of 1967 . Any resident who was not present during the census was ineligible for an Israeli identity document and automatically lost their right of residency.
As a result, the population of these territories declined by more than twenty percent overnight. Many of those thus displaced were already refugees from 1948. Aqbat Jabr Refugee Camp near Jericho, for example — until 1967, the West Bank’s largest — became a virtual ghost town after almost all its inhabitants became refugees once again in Jordan. So many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip ended up in Jordan that a new refugee camp, Gaza Camp, was established on the outskirts of Jerash. The occupied Palestinian territories would not recover their 1967 population levels until the early 1980s.
Within the West Bank, there were also cases of mass expulsion………………………………………………….
Depopulation through administrative rule
In subsequent years, Israel employed all kinds of administrative shenanigans to further reduce the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, an exit permit from Israel’s military government was required to leave the occupied territory. It was valid for only three years and thereafter renewable annually for a maximum of three additional years (for a fee) at an Israeli consulate. If a Palestinian lost an exit permit or failed to renew an exit permit prior to its expiration for any reason (including bureaucratic foot-dragging), or couldn’t pay the renewal fee, or failed to return to Palestine prior to its expiration, that Palestinian automatically lost residency rights………………………………………………..
………………………………………. the mass expulsion was, as always in such matters, approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice after minor modifications. It ruled, among other things, that this was not a collective deportation but rather a collection of individual deportations……………………………………………….
Israel’s strategies to ‘thin’ Gaza’s population
With the focus in recent years on the intensified campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, it is often forgotten that, for decades, the primary target for depopulation was the Gaza Strip, particularly its refugee population, which accounts for approximately three-quarters of the territory’s residents. Even before it occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel regularly promoted initiatives to achieve the “thinning” of its refugee population, with destinations as far afield as Libya and Iraq………………………………………………………………………………….
‘Transfer’ and Gaza today
In the decades since, “transfer,” often presented as the encouragement of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed in Israeli political life. In 2019, for example, a “senior government official,” quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, expressed a willingness to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip.
Mass expulsion has been gaining its share of adherents as well, and it is a position that is today represented within Israel’s coalition government. As has the idea that “transfer” should include Palestinian citizens of Israel — Avigdor Lieberman, for example, who was Israel’s Minister of Defense several years ago, is an advocate of not only emptying the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians but of getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. As one might expect from a minister who was in charge of the Israeli military, he is also an advocate of “beheading” disloyal Palestinian citizens of Israel with “an axe.”
Against this background, Israel saw the attacks of October 7 as not only a threat but also as an opportunity. Fortified with unconditional U.S. and European support, Israeli political and military leaders immediately began promoting the transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the Sinai desert.
The proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the United States and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular. As ever hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to the Middle East, he appears to have genuinely believed he could recruit or pressure Washington’s Arab client regimes to make Israel’s wish a reality. Given Egyptian strongman Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi’s economic troubles, the fallout of the Menendez scandal, and the looming Egyptian presidential elections, it was suggested to him by the Washington echo chamber that it would take only an IMF loan, debt relief, and a promise to file away Menendez to bring Cairo on board. As so often when it comes to the Middle East, Blinken, armed only with Israel’s latest wish list, didn’t have a clue his indecent proposal would be categorically rejected, first and foremost by Egypt.
‘Transfer’ as ‘voluntary immigration’
The fallback position is opposition to “forcible displacement” at the point of a gun, while anything else is fair game. This includes reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble in what may well be the most intensive bombing campaign in history; a genocidal assault on an entire society that has killed civilians at an unprecedentedly rapid pace; the deliberate destruction of an entire civilian infrastructure, including the targeted obliteration of its health and education sectors; the highest proportion of households in hunger crisis ever recorded globally and the real prospect of pre-meditated famine; severance of the water and electricity supply leading to acute thirst, widespread consumption of non-potable water, and termination of sewage treatment; and promotion of a sharp rise in infectious disease. …………………………………………………..
In other words, if desperate Palestinians seek to flee this seventh circle of hell to save their skins, that’s considered voluntary emigration — their choice……………………………………………………………….
As an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it on December 27: “Israeli lawmakers keep pushing for transfer under the guise of humanitarian aid.”………………………………………………
Not individual Gazans, but “the people of Gaza.” Notably, such proposals consistently take it as a given that those departing will never return. ………………………………………….
While ethnic cleansing has been intrinsic to Zionist/Israeli ideology and practice from the very outset, it also has a flip side: the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians expanded what had been a conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinians into a regional, Arab-Israeli one. The second Nakba Israel is currently inflicting on the Gaza Strip similarly appears well on its way to instigating the renewal of hostilities across the Middle East.
Make no mistake. Israel has committed massive crimes in Gaza and in the West Bank against the Palestinians. When will the thousands killed get justice? Or are we all supposed to just go on with our lives and pretend that it’s all the pursuit of “the right of self-defense?” Who are these IDF snipers who anonymously shoot children, and no one is even curious to know who these killers are? Is this the way of war now, according to the “international rules based order” that we should be so proud of in the West, which is supposedly the hallmark of our “civilization?”
A day of reckoning will come. There are good men and women who are wokring to make that a reality.
And what are we to make of our politcal class that utters not a peep about the slaughter that Netanyahu is doing, but who earlier could not get the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, because Putin was assumed to have “kidnapped” Ukrainian orphans that they might have a decent life in Russia. But Netanyahu can kill as many children as he wants, since that is not a crime according to the “rule of law,” so the “jurists” at the ICC stay busy identifying “Russian crimes” that might be spotted at the backs of their cereal boxes.
Kurt Tucholsky was paraphrasing a French joke when he observed that “the death of one person: that’s a catastrophe. One hundred thousand dead: that’s a statistic!”
What Israel has done for over a month in Gaza is now a matter of statistics, for they have killed over 15,000 so far, more than 4000 of them children. It is the Palestinian Holocaust, because there are many more thousands buried under all those pancaked buildings where people once lived. And now that the Israeli assault continues, many thousands more will die.
Given these grim statistics, it becomes more and more important to remember the one person, rather than mention in passing the vast number of the now faceless thousands dead.
One such person was Elham Farah, a Christian Palestinian, living in Gaza, where she had taught music all her life. She was 84 years old and was the daughter of the Palestinian poet, Hannah Farah.
On November 12, 2023, an Israeli sniper shot her in the leg, as she came out of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where she had been sheltering to escape the bombing. She wanted to make sure that her home had not been hit. A sniper was waiting who are trained to shoot in the leg.
Those inside the church tried to rescue her, as she cried out for help, but people were afraid of Israeli snipers who long have had a reputation for being merciless. Elham Farah bled to death over several days. No one came to help her because of the sniping. She had just survived the bombing of Saint Porphyrios, the 850-year-old church in Gaza, which took the lives of 18 other Christians. Is such a death for a gentle old lady acceptable to those who see themselves as “civilized?” And why no one even knows about the crimes of Israeli snipers is unimaginable.
The hell unleashed by the Herod of our time in the Holy Land escapes the mind’s ability to describe horror—to see little children torn apart by bombs, dropped by pilots in their sophisticated flying machines is beyond the reach of words…
Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying:
A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not (Matthew 2:16-18).
Rama” or “Ramah” is the name of several Palestinian towns, and “Rachel” stands in for all mothers whose children have been slaughtered by the powerful. Such killing was “righteous revenge” because the Hamas razzia of October 7th was fabricated as brutal, with beheaded babies and babies in ovens, when it was the IDF that did most of the slaughter of Israelis that day. Why the need to lie by Israel? The full truth about what really happened on October 7th is now coming out: Hamas killed IDF soldiers in combat. It was not a “terrorist” attack:
Thus on October 7th:
The IDF killed anything that moved;
Many Israeli captives were still alive, two days after October 7;
Israelis were killed by the IDF with heavy shelling of houses and cars;
Most of the civilian deaths happened because of the IDF;
It was a razzia by Hamas because most of the captives taken were IDF officers.
And in the West, we have the war enthusiasts, eagerly cheering on Netanyahu and his ilk to kill more, to kill without compunction, for there will be no red lines drawn, because Israel is for “civilization,” because that is how you fight wars, by killing as many babies as you can with bombs.
Perhaps in the months or even years ahead, there will come a time for a “Nuremberg Trial” for the murderers that are now in power in Israel—and for the IDF soldiers snipers who shot down Elham Farah and the two liitle Christian Palestinian boys, and also for the many “journalists” and “scholars” who justified and whitewashed the crimes against humanity now permanently recorded for the world to see. Remember, they did hang Julius Streicher, even though he perosnally had killed no one.
Antinuclear 