When it comes to antisemitism, politicians in Australia are often quick to jump on the claim without waiting for evidence.

With notable and laudable exceptions like the Greens and independents such as Tasmanian federal MP Andrew Wilkie, it seems any allegation will do when it comes to the opportunity to imply Arab Australians, the Muslim community and Palestinian supporters are trying to destroy the lives of the Jewish community.

A case in point. The discovery in January this year of a caravan found in Dural, New South Wales, filled with explosives and a note that referenced the Great Synagogue in Sydney led to a frenzy of clearly uninformed and dangerous rhetoric from politicians and the media about an imminent terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community.

• READ MORE: A Sydney caravan laden with explosives was a ‘fake terrorism plot’. Here’s what we know
• Other terror plot reports

It was nothing of the sort as we now know with the revelation by police that this was a “fabricated terrorist plot”.

As the ABC reported on March 10: “Police have said an explosives-laden caravan discovered in January at Dural in Sydney’s north-west was a ‘fake terrorism plot’ with ties to organised crime”, and that “the Australian Federal Police said they were confident this was a ‘fabricated terrorist plot’,” adding the belief was held “very early on after the caravan was located”.

One would have thought the political and media class would know that it is critical in a society supposedly underpinned by the rule of law that police be allowed to get on with the job of investigating allegations without comment.

Particularly so in the hot-house atmosphere that exists in this nation today.

Opportunistic Dutton
But not the ever opportunistic and divisive federal opposition leader Peter Dutton.

After the Daily Telegraph reported the Dural caravan story on January 29,  Dutton was quick to say that this “was potentially the biggest terrorist attack in our country’s history”. To his credit, Prime Anthony Albanese said in response he does not “talk about operational matters for an ongoing investigation”.

Dutton’s language was clearly designed to whip up fear and hysteria among the Jewish community and to demonise Palestinian supporters.

He was not Robinson Crusoe sadly. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns told the media on January 29 that the Dural caravan discovery had the potential to have led to a “mass casualty event”.

The Zionist Federation of Australia, an organisation that is an unwavering supporter of Israel despite the horror that nation has inflicted on Gaza, was even more overblown in its claims.

It issued a statement that claimed: “This is undoubtedly the most severe threat to the Jewish community in Australia to date. The plot, if executed, would likely have resulted in the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil.”

Note the word “undoubtedly”.

Uncritical Israeli claims
Then there was another uncritical Israel barracker, Sky News’ Sharri Markson, who claimed; “To think perpetrators would have potentially targeted a museum commemorating the Holocaust — a time when six million Jews were killed — is truly horrifying.”

And naturally, Jilian Segal, the highly partisan so-called “Antisemitism Envoy” said the discovery of the caravan was a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”.

In short, the response to the Dural caravan incident was simply an exercise in jumping on the antisemitism issue without any regard to the consequences for our community, including the fear it spread among Jewish Australians and the further demonising of the Arab Australian community.

No circumspection. No leadership. No insistence that the matter had not been investigated fully.

As the only Jewish organisation that represents humanity, the Jewish Council of Australia, said in a statement from its director Sarah Schwartz on March 10 the “statement from the AFP [Australian Federal Police] should prompt reflection from every politician, journalist and community leader who has sought to manipulate and weaponise fears within the Jewish community.

‘Irresponsible and dangerous’
“The attempt to link these events to the support of Palestinians — whether at protests, universities, conferences or writers’ festivals — has been irresponsible and dangerous.” Truth in spades.

And ask yourself this question. Let’s say the Dural caravan contained notes about mosques and Arab Australian community centres. Would the media, politicians and others have whipped up the same level of hysteria and divisive rhetoric?

The answer is no.

One assumes Dutton, Segal, the Zionist Federation and others who frothed at the mouth in January will now offer a collective mea culpa. Sadly, they won’t because there will be no demands to do so.

The damage to our legal system has been done because political opportunism and milking antisemitism for political ends comes first for those who should know better.

Greg Barns SC is national criminal justice spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations social policy journal and is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Two independent Jewish Voices groups in Aotearoa New Zealand have written an open letter to the government condemning the Zionist “colonisation” project leading to genocide and criticising the role of the NZ Jewish Council for its “unelected” and “uncritical support” for Israel.

The groups, Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation, have also criticised a scheduled meeting this week between Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and other ministers and the NZJC.

“The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa,” the open letter said.

• READ MORE: Not in My Name: One of the leading Jewish voices supporting Gaza
• Other War on Gaza reports

“We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.”

The alternative voices also appealed to be consulted along with representatives of the Muslim and Palestinian communities “who have lost the most to racism in recent years”.

“Hear us out before you act,” the open letter said.

The full letter (dated 16 February 2025):

We are Jewish New Zealanders, members of Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation. We understand that your office has scheduled a meeting this week with the NZ Jewish Council (NZJC) and additional ministers. We object in the strongest terms. The NZJC is unelected coterie, forever uncritically aligned with Israel. That is not the Jewish community.

We have documented in depth that the NZJC is not representative. They are not elected. Their constitution outlines a regional structure for indirect democracy, but much of that structure does not seem to exist.

They are not accountable to the community. Their president has broadcast her intention to “disempower as much as possible” Jews like Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV) members who “raise their voices”.

Several of us attended the Wellington Regional Jewish Council’s last community meeting, in 2021. The meeting roundly disavowed the Jewish Council’s tone and their relentless focus on Israel.

Indeed, the NZJC’s constitution does not even mention Israel or Zionism. The Wellington Regional Jewish Council dissolved itself after that meeting, acknowledging that they have no community mandate. They haven’t been heard from since. So much for regional representation.

Through public and private channels, members of the Jewish community have repeatedly asked the NZJC to embrace some positive, rights-based vision of the future.

Instead, through Israel’s 15-month “plausible genocide” in Gaza, the NZJC’s militarism has only become more overt. Juliet Moses was to share a platform with IDF’s head of infantry doctrine Yaron Simsolo at an Auckland event in March, until Jewish objections drove Simsolo’s session offsite.

This is not solely an issue for the Jewish community. For years, we have protested that the Jewish Council’s related Community Security Group shares politically slanted information about New Zealanders with Israel’s embassy.

They interpret objections to Israel’s occupation as a security threat to the New Zealand Jewish community, and they share their views of individual Palestinian, Muslim and other New Zealanders with a regime accused of genocide against Palestinians. This creates particular risk for Palestinian New Zealanders, should they ever travel to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories to visit family and whānau.

Let us say this clearly: there is nothing essentially Jewish about Zionism. Zionism is a project of colonisation, erasure, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — finally, of genocide. Institutions that wrap their nationalism in our Jewishness are shielding the brutality that we witness daily.

In this country, the NZJC has been a leading voice in the campaign to confuse Jewish with Zionist, enabling decades of oppression in our names.

The NZJC does not serve, represent or account to the Jewish community. How many Jewish New Zealanders would choose a representative who, like NZJC president Juliet Moses, retweets defences of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute?

The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa. We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.

It’s not hard to guess what the NZJC will be asking for: some special “antisemitism regime” that uses our Jewish identity to shield Israel from the directives of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). They will be asking to divorce the Jewish community from our shared mahi of antiracism and our human rights framework. They will be seeking some exceptional status, suppressing principled protest for Palestinian rights and the criminal accountability of Israeli leaders.

That conversation should not take place without representation from the Muslim and Palestinian communities. They are the New Zealanders whose voices are being silenced, and frankly they are the communities who have lost the most to racism in recent years.

Prime Minister, any meeting with the NZJC ought to be recorded in the ministerial diaries as a session with Israel’s ambassadors. And damn it, they will be doing it in our name. We are also the New Zealand Jewish community, and we are so tired of being used this way.

We would like to join your meeting with the NZJC, bringing Jewish diversity into the room. If you will not open this meeting to the real breadth of the Jewish community, then we wish to schedule a second meeting which includes Muslim and Palestinian representation.

We work closely with the Muslim and Palestinian communities in Aotearoa, modelling the change that we would like to see in the Middle East.

Hear us out before you act.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Should I mention our two party, one genocide political system that pays for these horrors? Or the tens of millions that our weapons makers use to bribe our elected representatives? Or the even greater amounts that the Israel Lobby stuffs in each Congressional pocket? Or the Zionist media that helps us look the other way?

Or should I focus on you who have read this far? Yes, we have a system that only serves the rich, be they political leaders, weapons manufacturers, or billion dollar religious fanatics. Most people like you want to end the Israel/American genocide. Most can’t believe our national leaders are acting like members of another murderous regime that killed six million in their ovens. Is our political class criminally insane?

And am I absolved by writing this short letter? Or am I still that “good German” who knew something was happening, but did nothing to end the continuous slaughter of the innocents?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Fred Nagel.

To be Jewish does not mean an automatic identification with the rogue state of Israel. Nor does it mean that Jews are automatically threatened by criticism of Israel, yet our media and Labor and Liberal politicians would have you believe this is the case.

We are seeing a debate in Australia about the so-called rise of antisemitism which includes rally chants for Gaza at a time when we are witnessing the most horrific Israeli genocide of Palestinians in which our government is complicit.

Jewish peak bodies here and internationally have continually linked their identity to that of Israel.

• READ MORE: Attorney-General Dreyfus’ trip to Israel makes a mockery of Labor’s foreign policy
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

Why? Can generations of Jews in this country still believe that Israel represents anything like the myths that were perpetrated at its inception?

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Jewish Board of Deputies and others, all staunchly defend this apartheid state that is accused of plausible genocide by the UN International Court of Justice and confirmed by dozens of human rights and legal NGOs, UN Rapporteurs, medical organisations and holocaust scholars.

Israel’s Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have been charged as war criminals by the International Criminal Court and must be arrested and tried in the Hague, yet Australia maintains a cosy relationship with Israel and our media dutifully repeats its outright lies verbatim.

Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has been the main focus of the Israeli state and its defenders for decades. With the emergence of the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005, Israel’s narrative was countered, leading to a persistent Israeli directed campaign to link BDS with antisemitism.

Colonial, occupying power
BDS focuses on the actions of Israel as a colonial, occupying power violating international law against the indigenous people of Palestine. It is anti-racist and human rights-centred.

On December 11, we heard Prime Minister Albanese at the Jewish Museum in Sydney combining his support for Jewish people with his ongoing condemnation and active campaigning against BDS.

He referred to the Marrickville Council BDS motion, (which I proposed back in 2010 along with my Greens councillor colleague, Marika Kontellis), and again repeated the bald-faced mistruths that were spread back then about BDS and the intent and focus of the Marrickville motion.

“I was part of a campaign against BDS in my own local government area. At the time I argued that if you start targeting businesses because they happen to be owned by Jewish people, you’ll end up with the Star of David above shops.

“And that ended in World War II, during the Holocaust, with six million lives lost, murdered. We need an end to antisemitism.”

In one sentence we see Albanese’s extremely offensive equation of the horror of the Holocaust and antisemitism, directly linked to BDS. Why would a prime minister and local federal member deliberately mischaracterise BDS, given the movement has always been clear that its targets are global companies and corporations that are complicit in the Israeli state’s apartheid and genocidal actions, as well as Israeli government bodies and arms companies?

What is in it for Albanese, Wong, Plibersek or Dutton and all of the politicians back in 2010/2011 who appeared to think there was political advantage in scapegoating BDS by jumping on the frenzied anti-BDS campaign?

Fawning support for Israel
It was obvious back then, as it is now, that their fawning support for the rogue Israeli state knows no bounds. Lock step in line with the United States outlier position, Australia has maintained its repugnant inaction in the face of 15 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza despite continued condemnation by the UN and a majority of states.

But Australia has, however, appointed a public supporter of Zionism and the Israeli state, as its special envoy on antisemitism.

The inaction by all states since 1948 to apply sanctions has gifted Israel the impunity that’s led to its industrial scale slaughter of innocents in Gaza and its continuing violence and killing of civilians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All governments must bear responsibility for this.

Albanese has been described as an opportunist, liar and a bully.

At the time of the Marrickville BDS, he used the situation to attempt to discredit the Greens who were challenging the incumbent Labor state member, Carmel Tebbutt (his former wife). He fanned the national media frenzy that was fed by pro-Israel Jewish lobbyists who were the long-time custodians of the “reputation” of Israel.

Marrickville Council and the Greens were characterised as antisemites who would be pulling Jewish books out of the local library.

This insanity was akin to what is happening today. The legitimate opposition to the worst, most egregious, brutality of the Israeli state has somehow been cleverly morphed into so-called expressions of antisemitism.

Absurd claims on protest
In the media conference of December 11, Albanese also made absurd claims that the peaceful 24-hour protest outside his electorate office in Marrickville was displaying Hamas symbols in a vile attempt to discredit the constituents he had refused to meet for more than eight months.

He and his colleagues in Canberra continue to appease the powerful Israel lobby at the expense of our rights and the rights and visibility of the whole Palestinian population here and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are now literally on death row.

Back then, we heard locally that he and the party had bullied the four Labor councillors to vote to rescind the Marrickville BDS motion that they had all previously wholeheartedly supported. Some months earlier these same councillors had also supported a motion condemning the latest Israeli strike against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The meaning of BDS was no secret to them — they appreciated that it was important for a council to check its ethical purchasing guidelines to ensure that it was not supporting companies that were in violation of international human rights law by operating in the illegal Israeli settlements or by providing technology or services that maintained Israel’s apartheid and dispossession of Palestinians.

They knew then, as we know now, that this is not antisemitic. They knew then that no Jewish businesses per se were the target of this peaceful civil rights movement. And they knew then that the Labor Party was lying for political gain.

Now, as for far too many decades, political parties in power in this country have failed Palestinians for political gain and at the behest of Israel lobby groups which dare to speak on behalf of anti-Zionist Jews like me.

Despite all the gratuitous rhetoric, these politicians have failed to uphold the basic precepts of human rights law — rights they regularly give lip service to, but rights they will never defend by taking the action required of them as signatories to numerous UN conventions.

Australia must sanction Israel
To act with humanity and to act as required by international law, Australia must sanction and end all economic and military ties with the Israeli state.

We must expel the Israeli ambassador and bring our ambassador back and we must prosecute any Australian citizen or resident who has joined the IDF to kill Palestinians. We must also support Palestinian refugees and take all action necessary to assist those in Gaza for as long as it takes.

But as we have seen so clearly this year, most governments have not acted to pressure Israel to end its barbaric colonial project. To protest as allies and to call out the hypocrisy of governments and politicians that speak of a rules-based order while enabling a state that has continually breached fundamental human rights laws, is to be called antisemitic.

The pressure applied to governments, universities and the like in recent years to adopt the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism is precisely because it equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

It’s the perfect tool for shutting down condemnation of Israel’s grave human rights violations. We’ve seen some universities and parliaments endorse it in deference to this pressure, despite the serious flaws that have been identified, including from Jewish Israeli experts.

Now more than ever BDS is imperative.

BDS campaigns will work to isolate Israel as it should be isolated until it complies with international law. Multinational companies are increasingly loath to be associated with this terror state.

Major pension funds are divesting from companies that are complicit in Israel’s human rights violations and local councils, unions and universities are taking steps to ensure they divest from any partnerships or investments that would make them part of the chain of complicity and liable for prosecution by the International Court of Justice as enabling Israel’s genocide.

The facts are indisputable. Australia’s complicity with Israel’s genocide and colonisation of Palestine can be countered by individuals, churches, unions, councils and students taking immediate and urgent BDS action.

Do not wait for Labor or Liberal politicians in this country to act, as they are doing their best to shut us down and to appease Israel. Their complicity will never be forgotten.

Cathy Peters is a former Greens councillor on the Marrickville Council from 2008-2011 and the co-founder of BDS Australia. She worked as a radio producer and executive producer for the ABC for 30 years making some documentaries on the Israeli occupation. She is Jewish and her grandparents and other relatives perished in the Holocaust. She has travelled to Gaza and throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories on a number of occasions and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights and justice. First published in the Australia social policy journal Pearls and Irritations and republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The New York Times (11/8/24), like other corporate media, framed the Amsterdam violence in terms of antisemitism—treating anti-Arab violence as an ancillary detail at best.

When violence broke out in Amsterdam last week involving Israeli soccer fans, Western media headlines told the story as one of attacks that could only be explained by antisemitism. This is the story right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants them to tell: “On the streets of Amsterdam, antisemitic rioters attacked Jews, Israeli citizens, just because they were Jews” (Fox News, 11/10/24).

Yet buried deep within their reports, some of these outlets revealed a more complicated reality: that many fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club had spent the previous night tearing down and burning Palestinian flags, attacking a taxi and shouting murderous anti-Arab chants, including “Death to the Arabs” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there” (Defector, 11/8/24).

As Marc Owen Jacobs of Zeteo (11/9/24) wrote, the media coverage revealed

troubling patterns in how racial violence is reported; not only is anti-Arab violence and racism marginalized and minimized, but violence against Israelis is amplified and reduced to antisemitism.

Buried context

James North (Mondoweiss, 11/10/24): “You had to jump to paragraph 7, buried on an inside page, to learn that the Israeli fans had, in fact, been violent and provocative the night before.”

“Israeli Soccer Fans Attacked in Amsterdam,” announced NBC News (11/8/24). That piece didn’t mention until the 25th paragraph the Maccabi fans’ Palestinian flag-burning and taxi destruction, as if these were minor details rather than precipitating events.

Similarly, the Washington Post (11/8/24)—“Israeli Soccer Fans Were Attacked in Amsterdam. The Violence Was Condemned as Antisemitic”—didn’t mention Maccabi anti-Arab chants until paragraph 22, and didn’t mention any Maccabi fan violence.

James North on Mondoweiss (11/10/24) summed up the New York Times article’s (11/8/24) similar one-sided framing:

The Times report, which started on page 1, used the word “antisemitic” six times, beginning in the headline. The first six paragraphs uniformly described the “Israeli soccer fans” as the victims, recounting their injuries, and dwelling on the Israeli government’s chartering of “at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home,” insinuating that innocent people had to completely flee the country for their lives.

Also at Mondoweiss (11/9/24), Sana Saeed explained:

Emerging video evidence and testimonies from Amsterdam residents (here, here and here, for instance) indicate that the initial violence came from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also disrupted a moment of silence for the Valencia flood victims.

But despite that footage and Amsterdammer testimonies, coverage—across international media, especially in the United States—has failed to contextualize the counter-attacks against the anti-Arab Israeli mob.

Misrepresented video

Image from Annet de Graaf’s video showing violence by Israeli soccer fans—widely misrepresented as an example of antisemitic violence.

Several news outlets outright misrepresented video from local Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf. De Graaf’s video depicts Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdam locals, yet CNN World News (11/9/24) and BBC (11/8/24) and other outlets initially labeled it as Maccabi fans getting attacked.

De Graaf has demanded apologies from the news outlets and acknowledgement that the video was used to push false information. CNN World News‘ video now notes that an earlier version was accompanied by details from Reuters that CNN could not independently verify. BBC’s caption of De Graaf’s footage reads “Footage of some of the violence in Amsterdam—the BBC has not been able to verify the identity of those involved.”

Message to news outlets:

Today I received an apology from Tagesschau for abusing my footage of the incident which took place after the soccer game in Amsterdam between Ajax and M. Tel Aviv. I refer also to the footage of reporter @OmeBender who covered that same fight with more… pic.twitter.com/9QyEezb8tL

— iAnnet (@iAnnetnl) November 9, 2024

The New York Times (11/8/24) corrected its misuse of the footage in an article about the violence:

An earlier version of this article included a video distributed by Reuters with a script about Israeli fans being attacked. Reuters has since issued a correction saying it is unclear who is depicted in the footage. The video’s author told the New York Times it shows a group of Maccabi fans chasing a man on the street—a description the Times independently confirmed with other verified footage from the scene. The video has been removed.

‘Historically illiterate conflation’

Jacobin (11/12/24): “Far from acting like tsarist authorities during a pogrom, the police in Amsterdam seem to have cracked down far harder on those who attacked Maccabi fans than the overtly racist Maccabi hooligans who started the first phase of the riot.”

It is undoubtedly true that antisemitism was involved in Amsterdam alongside Israeli fans’ anti-Arab actions; the Wall Street Journal (11/10/24) verified reports of a group chat that called for a “Jew hunt.” But rather than acknowledging that there was ethnic animosity on both sides, some articles about the melee (Bret Stephens, New York Times, 11/12/24; Fox News, 11/10/24; Free Press, 10/11/24) elevated the violence to the level of a “pogrom.”

Jacobin (11/12/24) put the attacks in the context of European soccer riots:

There were assaults on Israeli fans, including hit-and-run attacks by perpetrators on bicycles. Some of the victims were Maccabi fans who hadn’t participated in the earlier hooliganism. In other words, this played out like a classical nationalistic football riot—the thuggish element of one group of fans engages in violence, and the ugly intercommunal dynamics lead to not just the perpetrators but the entire group of fans (or even random people wrongly assumed to share their background or nationality) being attacked.

But Jacobin pushed back against media using the word “pogrom” in reference to the soccer riots:

Pogroms were not isolated incidents of violence. They were calculated assaults to keep Jews locked firmly in their social place…. Pogroms cannot occur outside the framework of a society that systematically denies rights to a minority, ensuring that it remains vulnerable to the violence of the majority. What happened in Amsterdam, however, bears no resemblance to this structure. These were not attacks predicated on religious or racial oppression. They were incidents fueled by political discord between different groups of nationalists….

Furthermore, using that designation to opportunistically smear global dissent against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as classically antisemitic only serves to trivialize genuine horrors. This historically illiterate conflation should be rejected by all who truly care about antisemitism.

Breaking with the Netanyahu government’s spin, former Israeli President Ehud Olmert said that the riots in Amsterdam were “not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries.” Olmert, unlike Western media coverage of the event, seemed to be able to connect the violence in Amsterdam to anti-Arab sentiment in his own country. In a more thoughtful piece than his paper’s news coverage of the event, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (11/13/24) quoted Olmert extensively:

The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age—as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank—the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?

The events in Amsterdam called for nuanced media coverage that contextualized events and condemned both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab violence. Instead, per usual, world leaders and media alike painted Arabs and Pro-Palestine protesters as aggressors and Israelis as innocent victims.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Elsie Carson-Holt.

Before the formation of the Israel Defence Forces in 1948, there were three underground Zionist militias — The Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi.

Their methods and tactics have been unpacked in a new Middle East Eye “The Big Picture” podcast this week by New Zealand journalist Mohamed Hassan.

The IDF, which critics brand as the IOF (“Israel Offensive Forces”), claims to be the “most moral army in the world”, but it has killed almost 43,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — in a year-long war on Gaza and now more than 3000 people in the deadly attacks on Lebanon.

• READ MORE: At least 55 people killed in Gaza as Israel resumes attacks on health workers in Lebanon
• Other Israeli War in Gaza reports

It has also been widely accused of committing atrocities, war crimes, and genocide.

The three Zionist militias differed in tactics and beliefs, and at times fought with each other — but together they terrorised Palestinian villages and executed attacks and bombings against the British to force them to give up control of the land.

They blew up hotels in Jerusalem, embassies in Europe and assassinated a UN mediator in the lead up to what is called the Nakba — the “Catastrophe” — in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their towns, villages and countryside.

After Israel declared its independence as a state — the three militias would combine to create the IDF, called Tzahal in the Hebrew-language acronym. The militia leaders would go on to form Israel’s government, become politicians, ambassadors and prime ministers.

And their dark history would be forgotten.

This week “The Big Picture” unpacks that history.

The untold history of the Israel Defence Forces.  Podcast: Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Image by Emad El Byed.

The most significant recent escalation in the ongoing Zionist real estate project, enabled by apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people, occurred on October 7^th, 2023, when Hamas fighters broke through Gaza’s prison fence, carrying out a bloody incursion on Israeli military installations and border towns. Since, the Israel “Defense” Forces (IDF) have engaged in the offensive flattening of Gaza, destruction of its infrastructure, extensive land seizure and elimination, torture and expulsion of its Palestinian population.

Meanwhile, liberal Zionists have been whitewashing these events, regurgitating fantasies of a “two-state solution” and ignoring widespread use of the Hannibal Directive while scapegoating Netanyahu as a bug rather than a feature. Undeniably, Zionism remains a colonialist, white supremacist movement aimed at capitalist resource acquisition while appropriating Judaism.

Viewing this dynamic through a behavioral neuroscientific lens, which studies violence as an expression of defensive and offensive aggression, provides insight into the mechanisms of a deadly, escalating cycle of eliminatory force, its underlying motivations and associated propaganda. The genocidal imperial practices in Gaza constitute a blueprint for future aggressive actions in the Global South and for suppressing dissent within the imperial core. Thus, such an analysis may assist in identifying state criminality, fostering an improved process of truth and accountability en route to reconciliation, peace, and justice.

Defensive versus Offensive Aggression

Vertebrates, including humans, exhibit defensive reactions to mitigate danger and ensure survival. These behaviors involve the activation of similar brain structures and associated neurotransmitters, leading to the consensus that they are species-typical and consistent across species in form, function and triggers.

Defensive responsivity is influenced by several factors. Context plays a crucial role; an animal will typically flee a threat if escape is possible yet will freeze when trapped. The intensity of the stimulus is also important. Ambiguous stimuli trigger risk assessment behaviors, while clear and immediate threats trigger flight, avoidance, defensive threat and/or attack. The distance to the threat further influences defensive strategies; longer distances prompt avoidance, while shorter distances and contact lead to defensive threat and attack postures, collectively termed defensive aggression.

The primary objective of offensive aggression, as opposed to defensive aggression, is resource acquisition. Offensive aggression targets competitors and typically involves disputes over territory and access to assets crucial for evolutionary success. Notably, in many mammalian and primate groups, offensive aggression is employed to establish authority within a social hierarchy, where both dominant and subordinate roles are crucial for collective survival, making it typically non-lethal.

In contrast, defensive aggression, or ‘self-defense,’ is driven by the perceived intensity of the threat and can escalate to lethal force. Indeed, an analysis of fighting patterns in animals reveals offensive aggression targets protected body areas to convey dominance, while defensive aggression targets vulnerable body sites.

An extrapolation to human social behavior reveals interesting parallels. Collective offensive aggression, aka war, a far later, explicitly human development, as expressed by the acquisition and annexation of territory through conquest, is prohibited by the UN charter and establishment and expansion of settlements on such land is a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. In contrast, Article 51 of the UN Charter explicitly recognizes self-defense, including defensive aggression, as a right.

Jewish Defense

The 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II, carried out by the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), triggered a surge in antisemitic sentiment and widespread pogroms.

In response to this onslaught of violence by antisemites, Jewish people defended themselves via the above outlined patterns. First, those who had the means and ability chose to escape, leaving for Western Europe, the Americas, Australia and other destinations. Second, many opted for avoidance, further self-segregating in Jewish communities – shtetls. Third, a minority chose defensive aggression, forming organized self-defense units aimed at repelling antisemitic attacks.

During this period, many Jewish inhabitants had become secular yet were not emancipated. Consequently, their understanding of antisemitism and its associated violence and trauma was modern, contrasting with the traditional Jewish belief that viewed oppression and hardship as divine punishment for sins.

Zionism, emerging amidst the rise of European colonial and nationalist movements and the imposition of the restrictive “May Laws” on land ownership in Jewish communities in the Russian Empire, recognized the potential in this dynamic. It presented an empowering vision of a “new Jew,” rejecting outdated beliefs perceived as passive and weak, including sole reliance on defense. Instead, Zionists advocated for an offensive response to oppression and adopted the antisemitic notion that Jews were responsible for their own suffering, promoting segregation and land acquisition in a new homeland as a solution.

Zionist Propaganda

Nationalistic propaganda merges the perception of ‘self’ with that of ‘nation’ into a cohesive identity loyal to the ruling class. Zionist propaganda fused Jewish longing for safety with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies aimed at land theft.

Settler colonialism often relies on depicting targeted territories as inhabited by dehumanized, primitive barbarians unworthy of land. Contrary to the reality of an historically continuous Palestinian society with an educated and politically engaged urban elite and a flourishing web of rural communities, this portrayal allowed Zionists to displace Indigenous Palestinian people without moral qualms, framing the establishment of ‘Jewish only’ settlements as a divine right.

In this context, any threat to the manufactured Zionist collective became existential, used to justify an often-brutal, so-called ‘defensive’ response, which involved genocide of the Indigenous, Palestinian “other”.

In the movement’s early days, Zionists employed various settlement tactics in Palestine, leading to frequent clashes with Palestinian people. The causes of tension were typically land disputes, quarrels over pastureland, the use of spring water and wells, thefts and robberies. Consequently, Zionist self-defense militias were formed with the aim of protecting settlements on acquired lands.

The tangible rewards from Zionist offensive aggression – power and resources – in conjunction with increased Jewish migration encouraged by Zionists, the rise of antisemitism in Europe and the British Passfield White Paper (1930), which attempted to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine and increased frequency of Arab rebellions, encouraged the various Zionist militias to transition increasingly to openly offensive tactics, such as the “wall and watchtower” doctrine.

Their goal was to secure as much land with as few Palestinians as possible, using offensive tactics in concert with propagandized Jewish victimhood, so-called deterrence and dehumanization of Palestinian people to justify the brutality afforded by defensive aggression, i.e. self-defense – the ability to respond to threat by any means necessary, including lethal force.

The concept of ‘self-defense’ carries entirely different meanings for the colonized and the colonizer. For the colonized, self is rooted in ancestral land, identity and resources. In contrast, the colonizer’s self is built on expansionism, a manufactured identity and stolen resources.

Indeed, the foremost Zionist militia which later transformed into the IDF was called “Haganah” – “defense” in Hebrew – and the settlers’ mission was outlined in three stages: ‘from survival to defense to struggle to war.’

This strategy culminated in the Palestinian Nakba, sanitized as the Israeli “war of independence” during which Israel, under the guise of ‘defense’, carried out mass expulsions, genocide and land grabs.

Atrocity Propaganda and Genocide

While the events on October 7^th were still unfolding, Zionist leaders within political, military and media echelons launched a propaganda campaign serving their established pattern of colonial genocide.

The campaign targeted Israeli citizenry with Zionist tropes aimed at fortifying a united front against Palestinian people, including their dehumanization by reinstatement of fear-conditioning with Jim Crow-style rape allegations and other fictitious horrors. This deliberate, malicious embroidery served to garner support for wide-scale eliminatory aggression branded as ‘self-defense,’ transforming the Israeli public’s shock into genocidal tribalism, diverting attention from Israel’s political, intelligence and military failures that enabled Hamas’s attack. Additionally, the campaign helped the government secure crucial public support for the mass mobilization of reserve units, paving the way for the subsequent full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip accompanied by a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While the underlying aim was consistent with historical Zionist criminality – the acquisition of the land of Gaza with as few Palestinian people as possible – the Israeli campaign sought to circumvent legal barriers to conquest by portraying the October 7^th attacks as an existential threat and defense of hostages which warranted defensive aggression. In this manner, and throughout much of Zionist history, Jewish victimhood was used as a tool of oppression, apartheid and genocide of Palestinians, while enriching Zionist leaders and their benefactor in Washington.

What began as an appeal to ‘self-defense’ has morphed into a military adventure with openly offensive aims and associated propaganda, including potential annexation of Gaza and possibly elsewhere, into Lebanon, whilst wallpapering over concurrent settler attacks and massive land heists in the occupied West Bank. ‘Self-defense’ has even been used as an excuse for torture.

Similarly, the state of Israel was instituted under the propagandized premise of ‘self-defense’, yet now as then, as its leaders threaten nuclear war in the Middle East and by extension the world, its offensive aggression is clear and criminal. In contrast, Palestinian people have the full right to defend themselves against Zionist aggression by any means necessary.

The post From ‘Defense’ to Destruction: The Evolution of Zionist Aggression appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yoav Litvin.

We have all seen films and read books about Nazis and the holocaust. Sometimes they went too far, such as the fanciful stories of human skin lampshades and victims made into soap, but the long (semi-permanent) and extensive public awareness campaign was immensely successful in creating not only a widely shared awareness, but also a strong revulsion against genocide. To that end, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide committed nearly all of the world’s nations to the pledge “Never Again”, on the assumption that the Nazi holocaust was and should be an exceptional aberration in human history.

Of course, genocide is unfortunately not exceptional. It has happened again and again, both before and after the Nazi holocaust and the creation of the Genocide Convention and throughout human history (and probably prehistory). In fact, the coiner of the term, Raphael Lemkin, originally created it in 1943 to describe what happened to the Armenians in the early 20th century, not to the Nazi holocaust. Since WWII, we have had genocides in Guatemala, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Myanmar, as well as the current Palestinian genocide. Some are disputed and others are possibly eligible, but the point is that genocide is hardly exceptional.

But neither is revulsion to genocide nor the attempt to make the crime accountable. Long before the Genocide Convention, the Hamurabi code and many religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and the Abrahamic religions, incorporated many of the same laws, principles and prohibitions. Nevertheless, it is proper to credit the mainly Zionist holocaust remembrance efforts with a profoundly successful mobilization to instill horror of genocide in the minds of the public through a wide array of media and public commemorations, including museums and monuments of the holocaust.

It was, however, neither the United Nations nor other international bodies that hunted down the Nazis who fled or escaped in order to avoid the fate of those brought before the Nuremberg trials. By and large, this task was left to Zionist individuals and organizations, including the state of Israel and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, as well as the center which bears his name. Wiesenthal’s most celebrated success was to find Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi administrator of the extermination project, whom the Mossad then captured and brought to Israel for trial and execution.

Oddly enough, the successful effort to publicize the Nazi genocide has not necessarily carried over to other genocides, presumably for lack of organization and influence among the survivors. Furthermore, the Nazi holocaust is largely remembered as being directed only against Jews, even though a total of roughly 17 million noncombatants were  systematically exterminated, mainly Slavs but also Roma (“gypsies”), and other populations. Jews were a major target, of course, but the fact that they are often remembered as the only one is a tribute to the success of the Zionist narrative. It is a lesson and an example to other populations targeted for genocide.

Palestinians are clearly learning this lesson, although they are handicapped by having to overcome the biases created by the Zionists, the experts par excellence in creating a narrative, one which is unfortunately and for obvious reasons in stark contrast to that of the Palestinians. Sadly, the same Zionists that taught us to be horrified of genocide are now using their capabilities and organization to justify and enable Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

But those Zionists also taught us that it is possible to make the criminals who commit the “crime of crimes” pay the price. The Nazis paid the price at Nuremberg, and they continued paying long afterward, thanks to the Nazi hunters. So too did the criminals of the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide and many others. Do the Zionist criminals murdering and starving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as their complicit enablers in Washington, London and yes, Berlin, not realize that they will be in the crosshairs of their victims for the rest of their lives?

If they delude themselves otherwise, I advise them to read the following, which is only a small taste of what is to come.

https://en.mdn.tv/7yef

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

Bari Weiss on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Youtube screengrab.

In a recent article in the New York Times titled “Bari Weiss Knows Exactly What She’s Doing,” Matt Flegenheimer writes:

As the founder, public face and heat-seeking curator of The Free Press, a new media company with ambitions to overtake the old media, Ms. Weiss, 40, has identified a mélange of reliable foils: the illiberal left; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; opponents of Israel; The New York Times, where Ms. Weiss worked until 2020…For her sins against groupthink, Ms. Weiss has suggested, she faced eviction from the media “cool kids’ table,” without regret. 

Despite her posturing, Weiss is not unique; her stances have served as a defence of and contributor to the collapse of the liberal humanitarian façade which has long veiled global white supremacy and imperialist crony capitalism.

This system has enriched the Global North at the expense of the Global South and BIPOC communities within the imperial core.

Stripping away the neoliberal veneer has inflamed anti-immigrant, racist, right-wing fascist movements, accelerating the planet’s pillage and drawing in opportunists, charlatans and toxic trolls who exploit a confused, beleaguered public drowning in misinformation. Shamelessly, these operators market themselves for amusement, clicks and cash.

Is Bari Weiss a troll?

Inspired by the act of trolling, in which one fishes by trailing a baited line behind a boat waiting for a bite, provocateurs like Bari Weiss — also known as ‘trolls’ — comment to evoke an argument, often using irony as a means to avoid culpability.

Once they hook a mark, toxic trolls can manipulate their opponents’ emotions by using gaslighting, passive aggression and socially unacceptable means to win arguments, such as cyberbullying and coordinated assaults, sometimes with tragic consequences.

When Israel disseminated atrocity propaganda, Bari Weiss accepted it as fact, trolling Palestinians who challenged it, including the late poet Refaat Alareer. Alareer held Weiss responsible for the massive online harassment he faced and warned of its potentially deadly consequences. Tragically, Alareer was later targeted and killed by Israeli forces in a precision attack.

Trolling is not necessarily toxic. Journalists often use it to provoke a response as part of their investigative process, aiming to uncover uncomfortable truths and/or as a means to propagate information. In this context, trolling is a professional tool in the pursuit of accurate reporting.

For toxic trolls, however, truth and professionalism are secondary to attention, monetary benefits or a subjective agenda — whether personal, political or otherwise. The risks of confronting taboos directly and subsequent ostracisation are outweighed by potential tangible rewards. Former President Donald Trump has made a career of trolling, recently galvanising a sexist, racist ‘troll army’ which spreads misinformation to promote his agenda.

In addition to self-aggrandising and enriching themselves, toxic trolls infiltrate public discourse by presenting racism, prejudice, historical revisionism and fascistic politics, as legitimate ‘opinions’ worthy of ‘free expression’ and even support.

During these times of fear and unrest, Weiss and others like Ben Shapiro have engaged in toxic trolling behaviours, effectively capitalising on the climate of public frustration with the corruption of government, media and other cultural institutions to present their opinions as provocative, edgy, and even anti-establishment. Shapiro frequently trolls audiences on a wide range of issues, including abortion, so-called ‘cultural Marxism,’ critical race theory, LGBTQ rights, racism, and more.

Bari Weiss, with her media outlet The Free Press, proffers a version of trolling in which reactionary politics and viewpoints are presented as “courageous.”

Irresponsibly, Weiss has deployed a conflated identity as a privileged white Jewish Zionist lesbian to target anti-racist, anti-Zionist activists, peddle anti-transgender extremism, engage in character assassination, promote debunked atrocity propaganda and smear academics and BIPOC.

The reascension of former US President Donald Trump has fuelled this corrupt trolling phenomenon, while Democratic strategists in the Harris campaign are emulating it instead of substantially addressing valid critique of government policies and systemic malaise.

Psychological profile

It is revealing to consider the type of personality involved in toxic trolling behaviour. Research uncovers that men are more likely than women to engage in trolling. Furthermore, trolls exhibit a profile of high levels of trait psychopathy and sadism alongside abnormal empathy.

Empathy is defined by two variables: cognitive empathy is the ability to recognise and understand another’s emotions and affective empathy is the ability to experience, internalise and respond to the emotions of others.

Professional toxic trolls show high levels of cognitive empathy, with abnormally low levels of affective empathy. They are skilled at recognising and understanding emotions in others, yet do not feel, absorb or react to those emotions. Donald Trump is an excellent example in this regard.

Alongside high levels of trait psychopathy and sadism, toxic trolls are skilled at, prioritise and even enjoy manipulating environments and emotions to instigate controversy, which in turn promotes their self-serving agendas.

Social media, “influencers” and Aristotle

As social animals, humans naturally gravitate to one another and form collective units. Groups of people are typically composed of individuals who hold similar views or have shared interests.

Nowadays, virtual spaces make up a significant portion of the contexts wherein people congregate, share and discuss ideas. Today’s social media landscape has a central role in shaping culture and politics, even inspiring revolutions, and by extension affecting the future of the human race and our planet.

Research shows that politically engaged social media users can tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers which reinforce their own views. Such insular environments reward popular “influencers” with easy, instantaneous attention and fame, even to the point of celebrity status.

Demagogic politicians like Trump troll by releasing trial balloons, which are meant to assess public opinion before implementing contentious or otherwise divisive policies.

In fact, trolling has been a very effective tool for infecting the mainstream with fringe, anti-democratic and downright fascistic ideas from within and outside of the political spectrum.

Trolling is often a behavioural pattern which manipulates empathy and capitalises on internet culture, including cyberbullying.

Whereas in print media a physical product is limited by time and space, the uniquely fast-paced and homogenous online context serves as a springboard for trolling to effectively infiltrate and virally promote ideas and agendas, regardless of motivation, validity or moral compass.

Influencers with a wide reach can issue statements that quickly spark controversy with serious, sometimes deadly consequences, as exemplified by Weiss’s targeting of Refaat Alareer. Populist, opportunistic incitement amplifies influence across social and mainstream media. When faced with significant public outcry, trolls may issue limited retractions, though these receive far less attention and do little to undo the damage caused by the initial attack.

Understanding the dynamics of trolling behaviour and susceptibility to trolling is an important step towards minimising and reversing its personal and societal damage. Though social media platforms tend to be inherently reactionary, toxic trolls can be deflated through public protest and collective action.

During her TED Talk, Weiss quotes Aristotle on the primacy of courage as a foundation for all virtues. Aristotle also said, “The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.” Perhaps Bari Weiss can embrace these principles, finding the courage to prioritise truth over base propaganda and ambition.

This piece first appeared on The New Arab.

The post Bari Weiss, Zionist Crusaders, and The Era of The Toxic Troll appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yoav Litvin.

The United States, Qatar and Egypt are urging Israel and Hamas to hold a new round of negotiations to finalize a ceasefire deal in Gaza. However, Hamas is urging mediators to enforce the ceasefire terms proposed by President Biden in May that Hamas already agreed to and that Israel rejected. Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, says U.S.-led efforts for a ceasefire are likely to fail as long as the Biden administration remains unwilling to pressure Israel. “It’s quite clear Netanyahu does not want a ceasefire deal,” says Levy, who adds that the Washington playbook of unlimited support for Israel and threats to keep other regional actors in line could pull the U.S. into a wider Middle East war. “America is playing the role as a member of the axis of Zionist extremism.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In this era of internet and instant communication, information on the monstrous crimes of Zionism is available for people who make an effort to be aware. Take that information and apply open-minded skepticism. Ask whether the evidence substantiates the information and its narrative.

Israeli Jews are carrying out genocide against Palestinians (something that has been ongoing for decades). Eliminating a grouping of people from existence is heinous enough, but there is also the horrific matter of what happens to the victims of Zionists before they are killed.

Redacted interviewed Dan Cohen of Uncaptured Media to report a bloodlust where Israelis are torturing and raping Palestinian prisoners, and that Israeli protestors are in the streets claiming Israelis have a right to rape these prisoners.

Cohen is in Israel telling of “the shock and trauma and hate and racism pulsing through the veins of Israeli society ….” This is exemplified by the fact that the Israeli military-run prison with its Palestinian captives:

…is not about gaining intelligence, at all. It is not about finding Israeli captives in Gaza, at all. What happens there [in the prisons] is about the most cruel punishment. It is torture with electric shock, beating, severe beatings, where if you talk to someone you are beaten until your teeth break, until your bones break, if you fall asleep, these kinds of things. People are, as we know, anally raped. Prisoners are killed. There are many who are murdered. They just never come out…. These are just [Palestinian] civilians, cause all their fighters are underground. So they take civilians from the neighborhoods, and just take them there and torture them and kill them, even top doctors. I think it is 39 medical professionals from Gaza have ah, I believe, been killed in there… (5:30 to 7:15)

Non-Zionist Jews, Jews opposed to the crimes of Zionists, must speak out against the evil, otherwise their silence may be criticised as complicity. The non-Zionist Jews are faced with the challenge of how to get their humanist message widely disseminated in opposition to Zionism.

One grouping of Jews that opposes Zionism and supports Palestinian rights is Jewish Voices for Peace. Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise, two leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have written Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing (Haymarket Books, 14 May 2024), which covers the period from 2010-2020.

Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights, wrote the foreword to the book. Barghouti notes the difference of JVP from other progressivist Jewish organizations:

Instead of the typical Jewish American PEP (progressive except on Palestine) culture, JVP has helped a PIP culture—progressive including on Palestine …

In the face of overwhelming Jewish American support for Zionism and Israeli apartheid, JVP has insisted on growing the anti-Zionist movement to dismantle the myth of Israel’s representation of all Jews and, along with it, the complicity of the Jewish Zionist establishment in securing mainstream support in the US for funding, arming, and enabling Israel’s regime of oppression.

As Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love relates, JVP has grown and morphed over time from the “first mass Jewish civil disobedience in the Rotunda of the US Congress” to later “large-scale protests at a level none of us can remember.” (p 2) “JVP grew larger as it shifted to the left and altered the public narrative about Palestinian liberation while creating a space for Judaism beyond Zionism.” (p 2-3) JVP did not declare itself anti-Zionist until early in 2019; however, it was noted that the proportion of anti-Zionist members and staff has grown over time. (p 13)

When Haymarket Books shared the e-galley, I was informed that the authors are available for interviews. With that in mind, seven days ago I sent some questions.

The first question was based on Vilkomerson and Wise’s definition of solidarity: “as when people outside a specific community dedicate themselves to supporting the rights and aspirations of that community, taking direction on what actions to take from the community itself.” (9) Since solidarity is the leitmotif for the book, why is it that JVP identifies as Jewish voices rather than, for example, Human Voices for Peace? The name seems to set limits on solidarizing with non-Jews within its organization?

However, there is something of a work around in the book: “What did it mean to be a member if you weren’t Jewish? … So, we relied on people self-identifying as members and didn’t spend time gatekeeping peoples’ Jewishness.” (p 55) “We believe movement building is the only way to realize the world all people deserve.” (p 80)

I also asked about the propriety of donating to JVP as opposed to donating to Palestinian movements.

The Zionist NGO Monitor complains that “JVP’s funding sources are not transparent.” NGO Monitor further criticizes JVP, saying that the JVP “regards the organized Jewish community as its ‘enemy’ and ‘opponent,’ …. The strategy, as stated by JVP’s executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson, is to create ‘a wedge’ within the American Jewish community to generate the impression of polarization over Israel.” For those who are opposed to Zionist oppression of Palestinians such criticism ought to be considered as a badge of honor by the JVP.

Moreover, JVP criticizes

Israel’s ongoing apartheid policies of administrative detention—holding Palestinians without charge or trial—left Palestinians stranded in prison indefinitely. At the same time, home demolitions are a daily occurrence, with more than nine thousand structures destroyed since 2009.1 In addition to the daily indignities faced by Palestinians at checkpoints, Jewish-only settlements proliferated in the West Bank, siphoning water, developing a network of Jewish-only roads connecting the settlements to Israel, and bringing into Palestinian communities thousands of armed settler vigilantes, who regularly harassed and violently attacked Palestinians, vandalizing their property with the blessing of the Israeli army, felling ancient olive trees, and shooting at Palestinians that need to cross Jewish-only roads to reach their farms or graze their flocks. In Gaza, the situation became even more dire for Palestinians after Jewish settlers were removed in 2005, when Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, maintaining an illegal siege by controlling what goes in and out by air, land, and sea. (p 6)

Sounds good, sounds progressivist.

I wondered about the JVP stance on two-state vs one-state. The authors wrote, “… as a group of people in the US it was not JVP’s place to determine the number of states at all, but instead to do what we could to support a liberatory future.” (p 14)

That’s fine. But what about whether Palestine should be recognized as a state, something Israel is vehemently opposed to? An online search reveals that JVP often refers to the “state of Palestine.” This earned JVP further scorn from the NGO Monitor.

JVP takes many progressivist positions.

JVP acknowledges overwhelming Jewish communal support for Israel but sees its role as “just one prong in a multifaceted movement, led by Palestinians in the US and Palestine.” (p 16)

JVP questions its own Jewish composition: “Ashkenazi Jews colluded with and assimilated into whiteness, Jewish voices (whether Ashkenazi or not) were routinely privileged above Palestinian voices” (p 40) and its hierarchical structure. (p 61)

JVP recognizes “the weaponization of antisemitism, specifically in connection with anti-Zionism,” (p 99) and sees solidarity as the key to overcoming the Zionism that Palestinians endure drives them into isolation from violent domination. (p 102) “JVP, from the very start, has been guided by the exact opposite principle, that writ large we live in an interdependent world, that we all deserve safety, and that the way to gain safety is through solidarity.” (p 103)

Paradoxically, solidarity in a worthy cause might require splittism. Vilkomerson and Wise write, “Decoupling Jews from Israel and Jewishness from Zionism are therefore essential to the struggle against real antisemitism, toward realizing Jewish safety, and, of course, for Palestinian liberation.” (p 108)

The authors see solidarity as an expression of love:

Whatever your version of solidarity, may you practice it as an expression of love. A love that manifests as raging at the world as it is, and at the same time developing smart, intentional plans to realize the world as it should be. (p 215)

The ways in which Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza exceeds the horror of nearly all wars in recent memory are too long to list: more children killed, more journalists killed, more bombs dropped, more homes destroyed, more internally displaced people, more targeting of hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and refugee camps. That’s because it’s simply not a war – it’s a genocide. (p 218)

The genocide of 186,000 Palestinians (likeliest a depressingly higher number in the three-and-a-half weeks since the Lancet article was published), requires an utmost expression of love through solidarity with the entirety of humanity. This comes through clearly and forthrightly in Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love.

There are few (or none) sizeable groupings of people who form a monolith. JVP is one Jewish grouping that deviates from Zionist Jews by upholding morality in solidarity with a shared humanity.

Israel is not alone in its evil. It is backed by governments in the West. The US is a staunch supporter of Zionism, funding it, arming it, and providing media and diplomatic cover for Israel. It points to the sine qua non of a monolith of humans united by love for fellow humans. This guiding principle would elevate humanity to the stratosphere.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Since 7 October 2023, across every profession and social realm in Australia — teachers, students, doctors, nurses, academics, public servants, lawyers, journalists, artists, food and hospitality workers, protesters and politicians — speaking out against Israel’s genocide and the Zionist political project has been met with blatant anti-Palestinian racism.

This has manifested in repressive silencing campaigns, disciplinary processes and lawfare.

As coercive repression of anti-Zionist voices escalates at a frenzied pace in Western society, what is at stake extends beyond individuals’ livelihoods and mental health, for these ultimately constitute collateral damage.

• READ MORE: Democracy Now!, Diana Buttu analyse ICJ ruling over illegal and ‘rapid end’ to Israel occupation of Palestine
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

The real target and objective of anti-Palestinian racism is discursive disarmament, specifically, disarming the Palestinian movement of its capacity to critique and resist Zionism and hold Israel to account.

This disarmament campaign — the immobilising of our discursive and explanatory frameworks, our analysis and commentary, our slogans, protest language and chants — is emboldened and empowered by the collusion and complicity of institutions, media outlets and employers.

The past fortnight alone has seen a frenzy of Zionist McCarthyism. Both I and Special Broadcasting Service veteran journalist, Mary Kostakidis, were defamed as “7 October deniers” and rape apologists, and as being on a par with Holocaust deniers.

Complaint lodged
A week later, the Zionist Federation of Australia announced it had lodged a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) against Kostakidis, alleging racial vilification for her social media posts on Gaza.

On July 11, Australian-Palestinian activist and businessman Hash Tayeh was notified of arrest for allegedly inciting hatred of Jewish people over protest chants including “all Zionists are terrorists” and other statements equating Zionism with terrorism.

The same day, right-wing shock jock radio host Ray Hadley interrogated the AHRC about Australian-Palestinian Sara Saleh, employed as legal and research adviser to the AHRC’s president.

In violation of Saleh’s privacy, the AHRC went on the defensive and revealed that Saleh had resigned. Saleh had been subjected to months of anti-Palestinian racism and marginalisation at the commission.

On July 15, documents released under a freedom of information request revealed that the State Library of Victoria was actively surveilling the social media activity of four writers and poets — Arab and Muslim poet Omar Sakr, Jinghua Qian, Alison Evans and Ariel Slamet Ries, specifically around Palestine.

The documents provided more evidence that the writers’ pro-Palestine social media posts were the likely reason for the State Library cancelling a series of online creative writing workshops for teens which the writers had been contracted to host — corroborating what library staff whistleblowers had revealed earlier this year.

Political ideology
It is impossible to overstate how the repression we are witnessing is occurring because governments, media, institutions and employers are legitimating disingenuous complaints and blatant hit-jobs by acquiescing to the egregious and false equivalence between Zionism and Judaism.

Despite pro-Palestine voices explicitly critiquing and targeting Zionist ideology and practice in clear distinction to Judaism and Jewish identity, and despite standing alongside anti-Zionist Jews, we are accused of antisemitism.

Zionism is a political ideology that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century. It explicitly argued for settler colonialism to replace the majority indigenous population of Palestine.

Zionism is not a religious, racial, ethnic or cultural identity. It is a political doctrine that a member of any culture, religion, race or ethnic category can subscribe to.

Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. Jews and Judaism existed for thousands of years before Zionism. These are not controversial contentions. They are borne out by almost a century of academic scholarship and have been adopted by anti-Zionist Jewish scholars, lawyers, human rights organisations and clerics.

They are supported by facts. Consider, for example, that the largest pro-Israel organisation in the United States is Christians United for Israel.

A Zionist can be an adherent of any religion and come from any ethnic or racial background. US President Joe Biden is an Irish-American Catholic and a Zionist.

Australia’s former prime minister, Scott Morrison, is an evangelical Christian and a Zionist. Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong is an Australian-Malay Christian and a Zionist.

Inherently racist
Zionist ideology is recognised as inherently racist because it denies the inalienable right of indigenous Palestinian people to self-determination, and the right to live free of genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism and domination.

Palestinian subjugation is an existential necessity for the supremacist goal of Israel’s political project. This is not even contested.

Israel’s 2018 nation-state law explicitly states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people” and established “Jewish settlement as a national value”, mandating that the state “will labour to encourage and promote its establishment and development”.

Anti-Zionism is directed at a state-building project and a political regime. Rather than protect people’s right to subject Zionism to normative interrogation, as is the case with all political ideologies, institutions panic at complaints and uncritically legitimate the false claim that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism.

Protected cultural identity
Indulging vexatious claims and dishonest conflations is why we are seeing extraordinary coercive repression and anti-Palestinian racism across institutions.

To posit Zionism as a religious or ethnic identity is like saying white supremacy, Marxism, socialism or settler colonialism are all categories of identity. The perverse logic we are being asked to indulge is essentially this: Zionism equals Judaism therefore a white Christian Zionist is a protected cultural identity category.

Indulging the notion that the ideology of Zionism is a protected cultural identity sets a precedent that would be absurd if it were not so dangerous.

By this logic, communists can claim the status of a protected category of identity on the basis that there are Chinese communists who feel threatened by critiques of communism.

Adherents of doctrines and ideologies including white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, socialism, liberalism and communism could claim to be protected identities.

Adherents of doctrines and ideologies including white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, socialism, liberalism and communism could claim to be protected identities

Further, if Zionism is a protected cultural identity, what does this mean for anti-Zionist Jews? And what is Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, as Edward Said famously said?

Genocide in name of Zionism
What does it mean for Palestinians whose lives are marked by dispossession, exile, refugee camps, land theft and now, as I write, genocide explicitly enacted in the name of Zionism?

In the context of a genocide that has so far, on a recent conservative by The Lancet, one of the world’s highest-impact academic journals, caused an estimated 186,000 deaths and counting, governments, institutions and mainstream media are prepared to effectively destroy any vestige of democratic principles, fundamental rights and intellectual rigour in order to exceptionalise Zionism and Israel and shield a political ideology and a state from critique.

While institutions stand with Israel, the vast majority of the public, witnessing the massacres, are daring to question Israel’s actions. This includes questioning the Zionist ideology that underpins that state.

Institutions and employers may choose to discipline and sack those calling out Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in this moment, but will be held to account for their complicity in the political suppression of our collective protest against crimes against humanity.

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah is a Future Fellow at Macquarie University. Her research areas cover Islamophobia, race, Palestine, the war on terror, youth identities and social movement activism. She is also a lawyer and the multi-award-winning author of 12 books for children and young adults. This article was republished from Middle East Eye.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

We speak with renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé about his recent trip to the United States, when he was interrogated for two hours by federal agents upon arrival at Detroit airport about his political views on Gaza, Hamas and Israel, as well as demanding to know whom he knew in U.S. Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities. Pappé was only allowed to enter the country after agents copied the contents of his phone. “They refused to tell me why they stopped me,” he says. Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, also discusses the Nakba, growing support for Palestinian rights, and why he believes “the collapse of the Zionist project” is imminent.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

An open letter to The New Zealand Herald has challenged a full page Zionist advertisement this week for failing to acknowledge the “terrible injustices” suffered by the Palestinian people in Israel’s seven-month genocidal war on Gaza.

In the latest of several international reports that have condemned genocide against the people of Gaza while the International Court of Justice continues to investigate Israel for a plausible case for genocide, a human rights legal network of US universities has concluded that “Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing” and sought to “bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza”.

• READ MORE: Israeli forces target residential buildings, ambulance in Jabalia

The University Network for Human Rights, along with the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School, conducted a legal analysis and the 100-page damning report, “Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of International Law and its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023.”

The Israeli military have killed more than 35,000 people — mostly women and children — and more than 78,000 people and the UN General Assembly voted by an overwhelming 134-9 votes to back Palestinian statehood on May 11.

In the full page Zionist advertisement in The New Zealand Herald on Tuesday, senior pastor Nigel Woodley of the Flaxmere Christian Fellowship Church in Hastings claimed “the current painful war is another episode in Israel’s history for survival” with no acknowledgement of the massive human cost on Palestinians.

The open letter by Reverend Chris Sullivan in response — dated the same day but not published by The Herald — says:

An advertisement in the Herald supports the creation of the State of Israel.

For the same reasons we should also support the creation of a Palestinian state; don’t Palestinians also deserve their own nation state?

Just as we decry Hitler’s Holocaust, so too must we raise our voices against the killing of 35,000 people in Gaza (most of them innocent civilians), the destruction of 70 percent of the housing, and imminent famine.

It is disingenuous to focus solely on the Arab invasions of Israel, without looking at their cause — the killing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which accompanied the creation of the modern state of Israel.

It is never too late for both sides to turn away from violence and war and build a lasting peace, based on mutual respect and a just solution to the terrible injustices the Palestinian people have suffered.

Rev Chris Sullivan
Auckland

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

(1).  “Israeli” is falsely used  when “Jewish Israeli” would be correct. 99% of the Israeli perpetrators  of the killing in this latest Gaza Massacre are actually “Jewish Israelis” because 99% of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) is Jewish and 21% of Israelis are Palestinians.

(2). Re the current Gaza Massacre “terrorist” is vastly more applicable to Jewish Israeli and US killers than to  Hamas. Terrorism is as terrorism does and the killers of about 40,000 Palestinians  including  about 15,000 children to date in the Gaza Genocide  are vastly more  deserving of the descriptive “terrorist” than Hamas that allegedly killed 1,200 Israelis on  7 October (with possibly most actually killed by overwhelming IDF shelling and missile fire-power).

(3). Google Searches reveal massive English-speaking  World lying by omission in ignoring  Palestinian exclusion from human rights. The fundamental problem in Apartheid Israel-ruled Palestine  has been egregious exclusion of Indigenous  Palestinian from human rights. 7 million Exiled Palestinians are excluded from the basic right to live in their own country. 5.6 million Occupied Palestinians are excluded from all the human rights  set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2.1 million Palestinian Israelis can vote for the government ruling them, albeit as Third Class citizens under  65 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws. 7.1 million Indigenous Palestinians are 50% of the Subjects of Apartheid Israel.

(4). The Gaza Massacre has increased anti-Jewish sentiment globally but has also led to massive false Zionist claims of “antisemitism” in response to condemnation of the Gaza Genocide and other Apartheid Israeli crimes. The all-European and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has a definition of anti-Semitism  that has been used to falsely defame critics of Jewish Israeli crimes. The IHRA is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic and anti-Arab anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel as anti-Semites) and holocaust-denying (by ignoring all WW2 holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust).

(5). Massive Western concern over 250 Israeli hostages while ignoring 5.6 million Occupied Palestinian hostages under highly abusive military rule with 10,000 in military prisons (egregious Zionist lying by omission). A glaring example of current Western anti-Arab anti-Semitism is massive Western coverage of the 250 Israeli hostages that routinely “balances” or indeed displaces reportage of the destruction and mass murder in Gaza (about 40,000 killed so far).

(6). The West falsely  accuses Hamas of “hostage taking” war crimes and also “human shield” war crimes because it operates in one of the world’s most  densely populated  urban areas. Hamas’ 250 Israeli hostages are numerically negligible in relation to 5.6 million Occupied Palestinian hostages under violent and deadly military rule (now for 56 years), 10,000  of whom are highly abusively imprisoned in Israeli military prisons. As for “human shields”, if Hamas would gather above or below ground in uninhabited  areas they would be immediately totally destroyed by Israeli bombing.

(7). The West overwhelmingly ignores the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio – yet in the Gaza Genocide it is 65 versus the 10 ordered by Hitler. Conservatively assuming that the IDF caused 50% of the 1,200 Israeli deaths on 7 October, the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio is presently 39,178/ 600 = 65.3, 6.5 times greater than the 10 ordered by Nazi mass murderer Hitler and subsequently effected in the 1944 Ardeatine Massacre. Nazi is as Nazi does.

(8). Mainstream Western journalists are  too cowardly to report that Jewish Israelis in the Gaza Massacre lead the world in annual per capita killing of journalists. In May 2022 the “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” was Occupied Palestine, 2.77;  Mexico, 0.75; Colombia, 0.37; the World, 0.084. Since 7 October  Israelis have killed 132 journalists over 5 months in Gaza, a territory with a population of 2.3 million. The “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” in Gaza over the last 5 months has been 1,377, or 3,722 times more than for cartel-dominated Colombia and 16,393 times more than for the World.

(9). The Zionists and pro-Zionists falsely assert that  “Israel has the right to  defend itself in Gaza” and that brutally subjugated Occupied Palestinians do not. Eminent International law expert and UN Rapporteur for Palestinians, Francesca  Albanese: “Israel cannot claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies, from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation.” Conversely, the Occupied Palestinians have the right, like any other Occupied and subjugated people, to take up arms against tyranny as set out in the  Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by Article 51 of the UN Charter.

(10). Jewish Israelis in Gaza lead the World by far for annual per capita killing of children – 17 times greater than for Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe. 14,622 Gaza children killed by Jewish Israelis in the 151-day period of  7 October 2023- 5 March 2024 converts to (14,622 children killed /151 days) x (365.25 days/ year)/ (2.3 million people in Gaza) = 15,378 children killed per year per million of total territory population, this being 203 times bigger than the previous World’s worst, Honduras (75.7). 1,500,000 Jewish children killed /6 years) / (280 million people in Nazi-occupied Europe) = 893 children killed per year per million of total territory population, 17 times less than for children in Gaza.

This ongoing Jewish Israeli atrocity in Gaza and the attendant tsunami of Western-propagated Zionist falsehood is a horrible violation not just of Kindness, Truth and Humanity but also of the wonderful  humanitarian Jewish tradition from the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ “love thy neighbour”, through Baruch Spinoza and the Enlightenment to the great  Jewish humanitarian scholars of the present era from Hannah Arendt to Howard Zinn.

Decent people around the world must (a) inform everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts,  Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries supporting this genocidal neo-Nazi state and its horrendous and unforgivable atrocities. The World must forcibly demand immediate cessation of the killing, and an immediate end to the Occupation so that the now starving and horribly deprived Gazans can be immediately given water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine, medical care, commencement of gigantic reconstruction – and then forensically-informed  international war crimes trials of genocidal Jewish Israelis for one of the world’s worst atrocities.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

We all understand that, shamefully, a number of Zionist Jews and non-Jews identify so completely with Israel that they are not only willing to excuse the mass slaughter and starvation of civilians in Gaza but think others should not even be allowed to express disquiet at the slaughter.

Hardline Zionists tell us they find concern for the welfare of Palestinians “offensive”, and that they feel “unsafe” when others raise such concerns or call for a ceasefire to end the bloodshed.

The question for the rest of us is: How do we deal with those “sensitivities”, and how much do we prioritise the “offence” taken by hardline Zionists?

Not unreasonably, most ordinary people place very little weight on the “sensitivities” of those who believe mass slaughter and the starvation of children should be allowed to proceed, at least when weighed against the sensitivities of those opposed to mass death.

What’s so weird is the way, as far as official bodies and the western media are concerned, those priorities have been turned upside down.

Here, in typical fashion, the Guardian falls over backwards to indulge the “feelings” of a few Jewish Arsenal fans because they “felt unsafe” and “betrayed” by their club for not more aggressively stopping protests last weekend at a Women’s Super League game by other fans over the complicity of the UK government in Gaza’s genocide.

No evidence is produced by either the fans or the Guardian that any Jewish fan was in any danger whatsoever. Just that a few Palestinian flags were smuggled into the stadium, that leaflets and stickers were handed out, and that some protesters tried to “engage” with fans as they arrived at the stadium – presumably in that dangerous tradition of trying to persuade others of the validity of one’s position.

But the Guardian sympathetically dedicates a great deal of space to relaying the concerns of the handful of Jewish fans who “believe their safety was compromised by security staff not curtailing the protest” – that is, those who wanted to prevent an entirely peaceful demonstration taking place in a public space outside the ground.

The story is risible. It is news as therapy for Zionists and gaslighting for the rest of us.

But it is decades of nonsense journalism about Israel and its apologists of precisely this kind that has led us to the dismal place we are today.

The constant indulgence by the political and media class, the constant elevation of these kinds of ugly, ignoble “feelings” – feelings that dehumanise and vilify Palestinians, as well as anyone acting in solidarity with their suffering – the constant treatment of Zionist bigotry as warranted, as justified, as normal, that has gotten us to a position where Israel can commit genocide and its western allies and parts of their Jewish populations can treat it as “offensive” to raise the matter.

If we had not got so entirely used to it, we would immediately understand how completely nuts – and catastrophically inhumane – the coverage is.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, is contemplating stricter rules around discussing Israeli nationalism on its platforms, a major policy change that could stifle criticism and free expression about the war in Gaza and beyond, five civil society sources who were briefed on the potential change told The Intercept.

“Meta is currently revisiting its hate speech policy, specifically in relation to the term ‘Zionist,’” reads a January 30 email sent to civil society groups by Meta policy personnel and reviewed by The Intercept. While the email says Meta has not made a final determination, it is soliciting feedback on a potential policy change from civil society and digital rights groups, according to the sources. The email notes that “Meta is reviewing this policy in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported” but does not detail the content in question or name any stakeholders.

“As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’ — a political ideology — as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’ — an ethno-religious identity,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the groups Meta has contacted to discuss the possible change. Noble added that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”

For years, Meta has allowed its 3 billion users around the world to employ the term “Zionist,” which refers to supporters of the historical movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, as well as backers of modern-day nationalism in support of that state and its policies.

Meta’s internal rules around the word “Zionist,” first reported by The Intercept in 2021, show that company moderators are only supposed to delete posts using the term if it’s determined to be a proxy for “Jewish” or “Israeli,” both protected classes under company speech rules. The policy change Meta is now considering would enable the platform’s moderators to more aggressively and expansively enforce this rule, a move that could dramatically increase deletions of posts critical of Israeli nationalism.

“We don’t allow people to attack others based on their protected characteristics, such as their nationality or religion. Enforcing this policy requires an understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics,” Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told The Intercept. “While the term Zionist often refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people. Given the increase in polarized public discourse due to events in the Middle East, we believe it’s important to assess our guidance for reviewing posts that use the term Zionist.”

In the months since October 7, staunchly pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League have openly called for treating anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, pointing out that the word is often used by antisemites as a stand-in for “Jew.” The ADL and American Jewish Committee, another pro-Israel, Zionist advocacy group in the U.S., have both been lobbying Meta to restrict use of the word “Zionist,” according to Yasmine Taeb, legislative and political director at the Muslim grassroots advocacy group MPower Change. In his statement, Chambliss responded, “We did not initiate this policy development at the behest of any outside group.”

Taeb, who spoke to a Meta employee closely involved with the proposed policy change, said it would result in mass censorship of critical mentions of Zionism, restricting, for example, non-hateful, non-violent speech about the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza.

While a statement as general as “I don’t like Zionists” could be uttered by an antisemitic Instagram user as a means of expressing dislike for Jews, civil society advocates point out that there is nothing inherently or necessarily anti-Jewish about the statement. Indeed, much of the fiercest political activism against Israel’s war in Gaza has been organized by anti-Zionist Jews, while American evangelical Christian Zionists are some of Israel’s most hardcore supporters.

“The suppression of pro-Palestinian speech critical of Israel is happening specifically during the genocide in Gaza,” Taeb said in an interview. “Meta should instead be working on implementing policies to make sure political speech is not being suppressed, and they’re doing the exact opposite.”

According to presentation materials reviewed by The Intercept, Meta has been sharing with stakeholders a series of hypothetical posts that could be deleted under a stricter policy, and soliciting feedback as to whether they should be. While one example seemed like a clear case of conspiratorial antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of the news media, others were critical of Israeli state policy or supporters of that policy, not Judaism, said Nadim Nashif, executive director of the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh, who was briefed this week by Meta via video conference. Meta plans to brief U.S. stakeholder groups on Friday morning, according to its outreach email.

Examples of posts Meta could censor under a new policy included the statements: “Zionists are war criminals, just look at what’s happening in Gaza”; “I don’t like Zionists”; and “No Zionists allowed at tonight’s meeting of the Progressive Student Association.” Nashif said that one example — “Just read the news every day. A coalition of Zionists, Americans and Europeans tries to rule the world.” — was described by Peter Stern, Meta’s director of content policy stakeholder engagement, as possibly hateful because it engaged in conspiratorial thinking about Jews.

In an interview with The Intercept, Nashif disagreed, arguing that criticism of the strategic alliance and foreign policy alignment between the U.S., European states, and Israel should not be conflated with conspiratorial bigotry against Judaism, or collapsed into bigoted delusions of global Jewish influence. In their meeting, Nashif says Stern acknowledged that Zionism is a political ideology, not an ethnic group, despite the prospect of enforcement that would treat it more like the latter. “I think it may actually harm the fight against antisemitism, conflating Zionism and the Israeli government with Judaism,” Nashif told The Intercept.

It will be difficult or impossible to determine whether someone says they “don’t like” Zionists with a hateful intent, Nashif said, adding: “You’d need telepathy.” Meta has yet to share with those it has briefed any kind of general principles, rules, or definitions that would guide this revised policy or help moderators enforce it, Nashif said. But given the company’s systematic censorship of Palestinian and other Arab users of its platforms, Nashif and others familiar with the potential change fear it would make free expression in the Arab world even more perilous.

“As anti-Zionist Jews, we have seen how the Israeli government and its supporters have pushed an agenda that falsely claims that equating ‘Zionist’ with ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ will somehow keep Jews safe,” added Noble of Jewish Voice for Peace. “Not only does conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism harm all people who fight for human rights in the world by stifling legitimate criticism of a state and military, it also does nothing to actually keep our community safe while undermining our collective efforts to dismantle real antisemitism and all forms of racism, extremism and oppression.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

The Israeli regime is currently committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, not only indiscriminately bombing Palestinians but actively targeting critical civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, universities, refugee camps, and residential buildings.Those who survive the bombings are far from safe, with severely limited access to clean water, food, electricity, and critical medical supplies. 

Alongside efforts to starve and slaughter Palestinians, the Israeli regime is likewise working to expel Palestinians from their land altogether. This has been made clear by the many statements made from Israeli officials and politicians, as well as through leaked documents that demonstrate intentions to “transfer” (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing) Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt or beyond—almost three-quarters of whom are already refugees from previous wars Israel waged on the Palestinians. This initiative is part of Israel’s continuing collective punishment of a people who dare to resist their colonization and express their Indigenous sovereignty with the land.

This commentary anchors the Israeli regime’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza as a continuation of the Zionist settler colonial project. Importantly, it insists that while the Israeli regime’s present slaughter and expulsion of Palestinians is certainly abhorrent, it is not an aberration in the context of over 75 years of Zionist colonization. It does so by outlining three key features of Zionist settler colonialism: 1) its nature as an ongoing structure; 2) its aims to eliminate the Palestinian people; 3) its use of fragmentation—both of land and of people—as a key strategy through which it pursues this elimination. It is through these tactics, the commentary asserts, that the Zionist project seeks to ultimately extinguish Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty.

Zionist Settler Colonialism

Zionism has always been a settler-colonial ideology—a fact that was declared explicitly by the architects of Zionism. For example, Russian Zionist leader Ze’ev (then Vladimir) Jabotinsky, who played a key role in the colonization of Palestine, wrote in 1923:

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of 'Palestine' into the 'Land of Israel.'

[...] Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.

The settler-colonial ideology of Zionism is steeped in European racism, holding many similarities with the white settler fantasy of “manifest destiny.” In discussing whether Argentina or Palestine ought to be the location of Zionist colonization, the founder of the Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, claimed the Jewish state in Palestine would be “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Such white supremacist discourse is deployed to justify the colonization of Palestinian land and the untold violence that it entails.

Zionist settler colonialism must be understood as an ongoing structure aiming to eliminate the Palestinians through the fragmentation of the people and land
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Palestinians have long understood the settler colonial nature of Zionism. In his 1965 book Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Fayez Sayegh deftly dissects Zionist colonialism as an ideology and political project. Later, in 1976, Jamil Hilal concisely articulated the logic of settler colonialism as distinct from extractive colonialism: “Zionists strove not to exploit the indigenous Palestinian population but to displace it.” Building on such Palestinian theorizing, Zionist settler colonialism must be understood as an ongoing structure aiming to eliminate the Palestinians through the fragmentation of the people and land, as indicated by three key characteristics. 

First, Zionist settler colonialism, like all other settler colonial projects, must be understood as an ongoing structure, rather than a singular event. In other words, the fundamental goal of settler colonialism is to entrench the settler community on the colonized land permanently. While this idea has been articulated in some detail in the academic discipline of settler colonial studies, the sentiment has long been understood through the everyday Palestinian notion of the Nakba as ongoing. On the one hand, this everyday theorizing stresses that the effects of the 1948 Nakba—whereby over 780,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land—continue to be felt today. At a fundamental level, all Palestinians forcibly expelled by Zionist militias during the 1948 Nakba continue to be denied their right to return to their homes in Palestine. On the other hand, and interrelated, the notion of the ongoing Nakba signals that the Zionist project of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Palestine is a process that continues today: Since 1948, some two-thirds (9.17 million) of the fourteen million Palestinians worldwide are now forcibly displaced persons, all denied their right to return home.

Second, the central aim of Zionist settler colonialism is to eliminate the Palestinian people from the land of Palestine. This elimination takes a wide range of forms, including but not limited to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Perhaps most egregiously, Zionist settler colonial elimination often takes the form of physically annihilating Palestinians. This is evident, for example, in the massacres of Palestinians by Zionist militias during the 1948 Nakba, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, the current and four preceding major Israeli assaults on Gaza, as well as in the frequent executions of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and paramilitary police (which occur most often in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem). 

Zionist settler colonial elimination also takes countless more insidious forms. As just one example, the Israeli regime has attempted to erase the very identity of Palestinians living in 1948 territories—those who live as third-class citizens of Israel on Palestinian land occupied in 1948. Israel seeks to de-Palestinianize this community through a wide range of policies, including criminalizing expressions of Palestinian identity, such as displaying the Palestinian flag or commemorating the Nakba. These policies function alongside decades of attempted Zionist indoctrination in school and university curriculums, as well as countless other ways of obscuring and rewriting the history of Palestine. Such policies are comparable to those of other settler colonies, including the residential school systems in so-called Canada and the US as well as the Stolen Generations in the colony of Australia. 

Third, a key colonial strategy through which Israel pursues this elimination is fragmenting Palestine and Palestinians. This fragmentation ultimately drives towards elimination—working to fracture Palestinians to then pry them from the land. Like elimination, fragmentation takes a wide range of different forms. It functions, for example, to splinter Palestinian land, fracture bodies, destroy families, dismantle institutions, rupture Palestinian space, time, and memory, shatter selves, and break the will to resist. These are not distinct forms of fragmentation but are all intimately connected, with cracks and tears extending through Palestinian lives.

The 1948 Nakba was a founding moment in the fragmentation of Palestine. Israel’s colonization of 78% of Palestinian land served to sever this land from the remaining area of Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, which are geographically isolated from one another. During the Naksa (Setback) of 1967, Israel then militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza (alongside territories in Syria and Egypt)—colonial occupations that continue until today. In turn, the Palestinian people have been fragmented across these three distinct territories and in exile, with each fragment of Palestinians living vastly different realities, facing diverse forms of Israeli colonial violence.

Bringing together the described three key features of Zionist settler colonialism, through its ongoing elimination and fragmentation, the Zionist settler colonial project ultimately aims to extinguish Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. This sovereignty is an embodied claim to land that was never ceded and is grounded in ongoing Indigenous Palestinian presence that both precedes and endures the Israeli settler state. Indigenous sovereignty inevitably takes distinct forms for different Indigenous peoples. But what these forms of Indigenous sovereignty share is that they all index an enduring Indigenous claim to the land, refusing the state sovereignty of the settler colony.¹ Meanwhile, Palestinian indigeneity does not rely on “proving” the continuation of particular cultural practices or a certain measure of “Indigenous blood.” Contrary to the way it is defined under international law, indigeneity is not a set of criteria to fulfill, but rather a political relationship to the structure of settler colonialism. Insofar as the settler state of Israel seeks to eliminate Palestinians from their land, Palestinians are an Indigenous people resisting such elimination.

The Settler Colonial Present

Indeed, we hear echoes of the racist discourse of early Zionists in the genocidal language of Israeli leaders today. As the Israeli regime began its current genocide in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu posted from the official Prime Minister of Israel account on X (before later deleting the post): “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” Israeli President Issac Herzog likewise warned that the war on Gaza was “intended to save Western civilization” and that if it weren’t for Israel, “Europe would be next.” Such rhetoric is a regurgitation of colonial ideology, seeking to justify genocide as a battle of “Good versus Evil.” In announcing Israel’s plan to collectively punish Palestinians in Gaza by completely cutting off all resources necessary for life, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Such racist, dehumanizing language paves the way for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

The reality of the Nakba as an ongoing process has never been clearer than it is now.
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The reality of the Nakba as an ongoing process has never been clearer than it is now. Since the Israeli military began its current onslaught on Gaza, it has killed over 26,000 Palestinians and expelled 1.9 million people (over 80% of Gaza’s population) from their homes. The images coming out of Gaza are appalling – a father clutching his child burned alive by white phosphorus, a child digging through the rubble of her home in the hope of finding one single surviving relative. The human impact of the genocide is incomprehensible. Footage of streams of Palestinians fleeing their homes under Israeli gunfire calls up images of the 1948 Nakba, as well as other major expulsions of Palestinians. Many of those currently fleeing Zionist violence are descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948.

This is Zionist settler colonial elimination in its most brutal form. Just as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians in 1948 worked in tandem with its ethnic cleansing, so today Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing are tandem strategies in the Zionist project of eliminating the Palestinian people. Having expelled the majority of Palestinians from their homes within Gaza, Israel is now actively attempting to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza entirely. In a document leaked on October 28, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence recommended ethnically cleansing all 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza from their homes, expelling them permanently to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Despite the Egyptian government’s repeated refusals to accept such a plan, the actions taken by the IOF in Gaza so far mirror the steps laid out in the document. The IOF has expelled Palestinians from northern Gaza to the south, their bombing and shooting of Palestinians along the way making a mockery of their claim that they are evacuating civilians for humanitarian purposes. They have now begun to expel Palestinians from their homes in southern Gaza, raising grave and credible concerns that they will be forced to amass at the Rafah border putting further pressure on Egypt. This ethnic cleansing is advocated not only by government ministries, but by prominent politicians, academics, and everyday Israeli citizens alike. This is, after all, the fundamental goal of Zionism and the Israeli state: expel the Palestinian people and take their land.

It is important to note that Israel is also currently escalating its decades-long ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. Emboldened by Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and international impunity to Israeli war crimes during this assault, we are seeing a sharp increase in the violence of Israeli colonial settlers in the West Bank, who function with the full backing of the Israeli military to terrorize Palestinians and expel them from their homes. A key way that Israel pursues this ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is through the aforementioned colonial strategy of fragmentation. Israel has effectively divided the West Bank into 227 separate enclaves, while entirely isolating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. This is achieved in part via the 730 km-long Apartheid Wall, which snakes through the West Bank well beyond the 1967 Green Line, cutting Palestinian cities and villages in two, separating farmers from their land and Palestinian communities from one another. Functioning alongside countless other Israeli technologies of fragmentation, these colonial tools ultimately aim to make life unliveable for Palestinians in the West Bank, to drive them out of their homes so Israeli settlers can appropriate them.

In Gaza, we see an even more extreme form of settler colonial fragmentation, where Israel has sought to isolate Palestinians from the rest of Palestine systematically. This geographic, social, and political isolation was intensified with the Israeli blockade imposed on Gaza following Hamas’s 2006 election victory. Alongside raining death on Palestinians in Gaza through intermittent bombing campaigns, as well as heavily restricting the movement of people in and out of Gaza, this blockade entails severely restricting countless everyday items needed by Palestinians, from baby wipes to plant seeds. Following Hamas’s operation on October 7 and the bombardment on Gaza that ensued, the Israeli regime largely cut off water, food, electricity, fuel, and other bare necessities for life in Gaza—something described by various experts as a genocidal act. In short, Israel laid the groundwork for the current genocide in Gaza with 17 years of brutal blockade, on top of 56 years of military occupation, which have together served to severely isolate Gaza from the rest of Palestine. 

Advocacy for Palestine that is limited to ending Israeli occupation and/or apartheid fails to acknowledge the root cause of the violence—Zionist settler colonialism
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By politically, socially, and geographically isolating Gaza from the rest of Palestine, Israel seeks to carve out further Palestinian land that it can ethnically cleanse and appropriate into the settler state. This is not a new strategy, but rather one entirely consistent with the Zionist project and with settler colonial projects more broadly, which work to divide and conquer Indigenous peoples, to seize the land, and eliminate the native community.

Conclusion

For Palestinians to live in freedom and dignity, we must understand Israel’s current assault on Gaza as a continuation of the Zionist settler colonial project. This means doing away with the still-dominant framework of a “conflict” involving “two sides.” Propagated through the so-called “peace” process and its various afterlives, this framing not only conceals but actively upholds the colonial power relations between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. Perhaps most obviously, Israel has consistently used peace negotiations as a veil behind which it can escalate its theft of Palestinian land. For example, between 1993 and 2000—the height of the “peace” process—Israel doubled the population of Israeli settlers on the very land that was purportedly to become a Palestinian state. At its core, the Zionist project is expansionist, and Israel does not even make great efforts to hide this fact.

Since the onset of Israel’s current genocidal assault on Gaza, the global Palestine solidarity movement has grown exponentially, with record numbers turning out to protest for Palestine in cities around the world. While it is inspiring to see people across the globe waking up to the brutal reality faced by Palestinians, solidarity organizers at times reproduce the problematic framing described above that ultimately serves to uphold Israel’s colonization. More specifically, advocacy for Palestine that is limited to ending Israeli occupation and/or apartheid fails to acknowledge the root cause of the violence—Zionist settler colonialism. In settler colonies such as the US, Canada, and Australia, as well as in colonial metropoles such as the UK, the failure to recognize this fact likely stems from activists’ own complicity in related forms of colonization. To achieve justice and liberation for Palestinians, it is imperative to dismantle the Zionist settler colonial project, which, as has been demonstrated, is fundamentally concerned with eliminating the Palestinian people and extinguishing their Indigenous sovereignty with the land of Palestine.

In the face of this devastating colonization, we can take inspiration from those effectively demonstrating what it means to stand in solidarity. South Africa has brought Israel to the International Court of Justice, charging them with the crime of genocide. Yemen’s Houthis have seized Israel-linked ships in the Red Sea, refusing to back down in the face of US-led aggression against them. Palestine solidarity activists have blocked Israeli ships from entering ports around the world, from San Francisco to Sydney. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement is stronger than ever before. These are but a few of the examples we may draw on that advocate for Palestinian liberation and recognize the root cause of its hindrance: Zionist settler colonialism. We must continue to stand in such solidarity until Palestinians, alongside all colonized and Indigenous peoples, are truly free.

The post The Continuation of Zionist Settler Colonialism appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Jamal Nabulsi.

Image by Taylor Brandon.

On October 7, Hamas fighters breached the Gaza prison fence, launching a coordinated attack on at least seven Israeli military installations and more than 20 surrounding residential communities. Over 1000 Israeli citizens, both civilian and military, as well as dozens of foreign nationals, were killed in the attack. Some 240 others were taken captive. Caught off guard and in disarray, the Israeli military responded to the attack in a frenzy, firing indiscriminately on breached localities, slaying Israeli captives alongside Hamas fighters in the process. It took the Israeli forces nearly a day to recapture all lost territory and secure the Gaza perimeter.

Following Hamas’s unprecedented incursion, Israel’s public relations apparatus launched a misinformation campaign aimed at inciting fear and fury and began to spread unverified atrocity propaganda. The campaign, involving tales of babies being “beheaded en masse”, “burned” and “hung on a clothesline”, helped transform the Israeli public’s shock into genocidal tribalism and diverted attention from Israel’s political, intelligence and military blunders that paved the way for the attack in the first place. The campaign also helped the government garner crucial public support for mass mobilisation of reserve units which made the consequent full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip possible.

After securing unconditional military, political and diplomatic backing of its imperial sponsors in the West, most notably in Washington,  and under the pretext of countering Hamas and rescuing captives, Israel then initiated what has since been accurately described as an AI-guided “mass assassination campaign” in Gaza.

Ten weeks on, most of Gaza is now destroyed, nearly 20,000 Palestinians are dead with many more still under the rubble, and the world continues to watch a genocide unfold in real time. Examining these events through a behavioural-neuroscientific lens could offer insights into the Zionist settler colonialist dynamic in general and the particular motivations behind Israel’s current genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as potential paths forward.

The pillars of Zionist propaganda

In response to historical trauma, Jewish people have a deep fear of anti-Semitism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this fear, along with disdain for oppressors, led to the formation of autonomous Jewish self-defence groups in various geographies.

Zionism, a European colonial movement, recognised the potential of this dynamic. It syncretised Jewish longing for safety and self-defence with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies. This synthesis birthed a new, nationalist Jewish identity that equates Jewish safety with the construction of an exclusivist homeland in Palestine through the displacement of the region’s Indigenous populations.

Settler colonial endeavours typically depend on depicting the targeted territory as “uninhabited”, and its existing inhabitants as inhuman barbarians unworthy of any land.

This portrayal allowed Zionists to displace the Indigenous population of Palestine without moral qualms, portraying the establishment of Israel not as the destruction of a people but as the construction of a “villa in the jungle”.

Within the Israeli society grounded in land and resource theft, offensive aggression under the guise of “self-defence” (as in “Israel Defence Force”) has been rewarded and reinforced from the very beginning and consequently became a routine part of life. By reinstating fear and hijacking trauma associated with past and present negative experiences of Jewish people, Zionist leaders ensured the settler population’s continued support for aggressive, expansionist, hegemonic, genocidal policies and shielded their corruption and other criminal endeavours from public scrutiny.

To maintain Israel’s violently oppressive status quo and expand the territory of the settler colony, Zionists opportunistically conflated their colonial ideology with Judaism.

Citing divine dispensation, radical, far-right settlers have been encouraged to seize hilltops on Palestinian land, expel those living there, and form illegal outposts. These outposts are later fortified by the Israeli military and eventually “legalised” by the Zionist state.

Beyond justifying violent land theft, the conflation of Zionism and Judaism serves to delegitimise Indigenous resistance by equating any criticism of Zionism or Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians as an attack on Jews. Further, it hinders anticolonial resistance by portraying a political struggle over land and resources between occupying settlers backed by imperial forces and an Indigenous-occupied people as a supposed ancient religious “conflict” between equals.

This conflation encourages Zionist appropriation and exceptionalisation of Jewish victimhood. Israeli hasbara presents the Holocaust as an unparalleled genocide, granting Jews special victim status. This narrative justifies privileges, discounts and allowances for Israel as the “Jewish state” constructed to ensure the safety of Jews, at the expense of Indigenous Palestinians. Notably, Zionist revisionism often neglects and downplays Nazi crimes against other oppressed groups, including communists, socialists, Roma, disabled individuals, LGBTQI and African Germans.

The liberal wing of Zionism serves to whitewash the reactionary core of the movement and conceal its true objectives – expansionism and apartheid. Misleadingly, Liberal Zionists portray Zionism as an ideology aligned with democratic, progressive values and human rights, falsely projecting a genuine commitment to peace, justice and full integration into the Middle East.

Fear and genocidal fervour

Until October 7, Israel upheld its founding aspiration, enforcing a doctrine of endless occupation while oscillating between implicit and explicit forms of genocide, the latter often described as “mowing the lawn” in reference to Israel’s periodical attacks on Gaza since its 2005 “withdrawal” from the besieged Palestinian enclave.  During this time, Israeli Zionists reaped the benefits of Palestinian land and its resources in a modern, affluent, supposedly democratic consumer paradise, fostering robust connections and identification with white US and Europe and oil/cash-rich Gulf monarchies, rather than its immediate neighbours.

On October 7, intense fear and shock gripped Israeli society, presenting Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government with a golden opportunity to quash rising dissent against corruption, and please his coalition membe rs with a genocidal land grab.

Fear in Israel is sustained through militarisation, anti-Palestinian narratives, reframing resistance as “terrorism,” remembering past atrocities, focusing on perceived threats and promoting segregation, ie, apartheid. Chronic fear induces symptoms akin to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), making the Israeli population prone to aggression masked as “self-defence”.

The toxic mix of fear, dehumanising propaganda, rewards for aggression and intense apartheid has bred a lack of empathy in Israelis toward Palestinians. Despite claiming the Gaza conflict as “self-defence”, Israeli leaders openly blame Palestinian society as a whole, essentially sanctioning collective punishment of civilians. Daily, Israeli institutional leaders mock Palestinian culture and cheerlead the torture, displacement and annihilation of Palestinians, revealing a disturbing genocidal mindset.

The path forward

On October 7, the carefully constructed Zionist facade of incremental genocide within a liberal/democratic framework collapsed, exposing Israel’s genocidal and fascistic core. Zionists in Israel and beyond did not mourn the end of this charade, and instead celebrated their newfound freedom to kill and destroy Palestinians without any restraint or pretence. This development not only poses a threat of elimination to the Palestinian people but since the Occupied Territories are used as a laboratory for the development and testing of new military technology and strategies, it could also set the stage for similar violent escalations against oppressed communities in the Global South as well as against BIPOC and immigrant communities within the Global North.

Israel’s genocidal behaviour in Gaza and elsewhere in historic Palestine resonates with patterns seen in the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience study. In the latter, individuals, swayed by authority, had administered potentially lethal shocks to other participants.

For Israelis to break their addiction to aggression, they would need to go through a process of deprogramming and decolonisation. This would require them to embrace the truth about the history and nature of their country, commit to sincere accountability, recognise the humanity of Palestinians, and empathise with their suffering and plight. Once the oppressive structure, Zionism, is disassembled, it can be effectively dismantled, paving the way for a process of rehumanisation and reconciliation through the use of empathy. Liberation, reconciliation and an end to Israel’s genocidal violence can only be achieved within a steadfast and unwavering anti-Zionist framework that aligns with wider leftist, antiracist, anticolonial values.

Dedicated to the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer.

This piece first appeared on AlJazeera.

The post The Anatomy of Zionist Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yves Engler.

In his short time in office, Kennedy changed US foreign policy in significant ways. As documented in the book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it still matters, JFK resisted the CIA and military industrial complex in the policies he set regarding the Third World and Soviet Union. The Vietnam War, assassination of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, and continued hostility to Cuba and the Soviet Union would not have happened had Kennedy lived and won a second term.

Less well known, Kennedy’s policies also challenged and opposed the military and political ambitions of  Zionist Israel. At the time, Israel had only existed for thirteen years. It was still evolving and the course was not totally set. There was significant international resolve to find a compromise solution regarding Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba. When Israel attacked Egypt and seized the Sinai peninsula in 1956, the Eisenhower administration demanded Israel withdraw from the captured territory.  They complied.

At this time, in the early 1960’s,  prominent Jewish voices criticized the racism and discrimination of the Israeli government. Israelis like Martin Buber assailed Ben-Gurion and noted that “At the inception of the state, complete equality with the Jewish citizens was promised to the Arab population.” Many influential Israelis realized their long term security and well-being depended on finding a just settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population.

In the United States, the Jewish community was divided and many were anti-Zionist. The American Council for Judaism was influential and anti-nationalist. The racist and militaristic character of Israel was not yet set in stone. Nor was American Jewish support for Israel. When Menachim Begin came to the United States in 1948 he was denounced by prominent Jewish leaders including Albert Einstein. They said Begin, who later became Israeli Prime Minister, was a “terrorist”  who preached  “an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.” Many American Jews had mixed feelings and did not  identify with Israel. Others supported Israel but on the basis of there being peace with the indigenous Palestinians.

There are four key areas where the Kennedy policy was substantially different from what followed after his death.

Kennedy was not biased in favor of Israel 

The Kennedy administration sought good relations with both Israel and the Arab nations.  Kennedy aimed to extend US influence throughout the Middle East, including with nations friendly with the Soviet Union and at odds with NATO partners.

JFK personally supported Arab and African nationalism. As a senator in 1957, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting and sending weapons to France in their war against the Algerian independence movement. In a 9,000 word presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he criticized “western imperialism” and called for the US to support Algerian independence. Algerian President Ben Bella, who France had tried to assassinate and considered far too radical by many in NATO, was given a huge and impressive welcome to the White House.

Kennedy changed the previous frosty relations with the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. For the first time, the US approved loans to them. Kennedy wrote respectful letters to the Arab presidents before he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion to Washington.  The Arab leaders could see the difference and responded with appreciation. Those who claim there was no difference with Kennedy ignore the fact that Egypt’s Nasser, Algeria’s Ben Bella and other nationalist leaders saw a big difference.

In 1960, when Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he spoke at the Zionists of America Convention. He made complimentary remarks about Israel but also expressed the need for friendship with all the people of the Middle East. He said the US should “act promptly and decisively against any nation in the Middle East which attacks its neighbor” and “The Middle East needs water, not war; tractors, not tanks; bread, not bombs.”

Kennedy frankly told the Zionists, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.”  By maintaining objectivity and neutrality on the Israeli Arab conflict, Kennedy wanted to steer the  Jewish Zionists away from the racist, militaristic and ultra-nationalistic impulses which have led to where we are today.

Kennedy wanted the Zionist Lobby to follow the rules

The second difference in Kennedy’s policy is regarding Zionist lobbying on behalf of Israel. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), organizations that promote or  lobby on behalf of a foreign government are required to register and account for their finances and activities. Under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Department of Justice (DOJ)  instructed the American Zionist Council (AZC) to register as agents of a foreign country. AZC is the parent organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).

As documented in detail here, on 21 November 1962,  the Assistant Attorney General wrote to them “the receipt of such funds from the American sections of the Jewish Agency for Israel constitutes the (American Zionist) Council an agent of a foreign principal…. the Council’s registration is requested.”

The emergence of Israeli  political influence was also scrutinized in the Senate. Under Senator William Fulbright, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings in May and August 1963. They revealed that tax free donations to the United Jewish Appeal, supposedly for humanitarian relief in Israel, were being channeled back to the US where the money was used for lobbying and Israeli public relations.

Attorneys for AZC stalled for time. On August 16, 1963, a DOJ  analyst reviewed the case and concluded, “Department should insist on the immediate registration of the American Zionist Council under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

On October 11  the DOJ demanded that AZC register and  “Department expects a response from you within 72 hours.”

On October 17, a DOJ memorandum  reports that attorneys for AZC pleaded for not being required to register as foreign agents. They offered to provide the required financial disclosures but that registering as a foreign agent “would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement.”  As indicated in this discussion, political zionism was not yet dominant in the American Jewish community and was actively opposed by the American Council on Judaism.and other Jewish groups.

Kennedy supported Palestinian Rights

A third difference is regarding Palestinian rights. Although he was only 44 when he became president, Kennedy had more international experience than most US presidents. In 1939 he spent two weeks in Palestine. In a lengthy letter to his father, he described the situation and difficulties. He wrote, “The sympathy of the people on the spot seems to be with the Arabs. This is not only because the Jews have had, at least some of their leaders, an unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude, but they feel that after all, the country has been Arabic for the last few hundred years …. Palestine was hardly Britain’s to give away.”

In comments that are still true, Kennedy remarks how the Jewish residents are divided between “strongly Orthodox Jewish group, unwilling to make any compromise” and a “liberal Jewish element composed of the younger group who fear these reactionaries”.  His analysis is sympathetic to both Jewish and Arab peoples and addresses the difficulty but necessity to find a compromise solution.

In the early 1960’s, the US State Department was not locked into a biased acceptance or approval of Israeli policies. The US supported UN Resolution 194  resolving (in paragraph 11) that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”  This has become known as the “right of return”.

On November 21, 1963, the day before Kennedy’s assassination, the New York Times has two news stories which exemplify the discord  between Washington and Tel Aviv.  A report from the United Nations is titled “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees”.   It begins, “A United States resolution calling for continued efforts to resolve the predicament of the Palestinian Arab refugees was approved tonight 83 to 1… Israel cast the single negative vote….The issue centers on a 1948 resolution whose key section, paragraph 11, concerns the future of the Arabs who were displaced from their homes by the Palestine conflict. They have been living in the lands bordering Israel …. The revised United States text calls on the Palestine Conciliation Commission to ‘continue its efforts for the implementation of Paragraph 11’.”

The second NYT story is titled “U.S. Stand Angers Israel”. It reports from Jerusalem that “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestine refugee debate….Israel’s anger was conveyed ‘in the strongest terms’ to the US Ambassador …. The Israeli Government is upset about the American resolution before the UN Political Committee and by American maneuvers over the issue.” Israel was angered and objecting because the Kennedy administration was trying to resolve the Palestinian refugee situation including the right of return.

Kennedy tried to stop the Israeli nuclear weapons program

The fourth and biggest contention between Kennedy and the Israeli leadership was regarding their developing nuclear weapons. This issue was kept so secret that crucial documents and letters have only been released in recent years.

President Kennedy was a strong advocate for stopping nuclear proliferation.  After the 1962 Cuba missile crisis,  he realized how easy it would be to intentionally or accidentally trigger a catastrophic nuclear war. If nuclear weapons were allowed to spread to more countries, the risks of global catastrophe would be all the greater. It was also predicted that if Israel acquired nuclear weapons capability, they would become more aggressive and less likely to reach  a compromise agreement regarding Palestinian refugees.

When intelligence indicated that Israel might be trying to build a nuclear weapon at Dimona in 1962, Kennedy was determined to find out if this was true, and if so to stop it. This caused an intense diplomatic confrontation between JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.  The proof of this has recently been revealed in the exchange of letters between President Kennedy and  Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his successor Levy Eshkol.  They are all labeled “Top Secret” or “Eyes Only”.

It is important to see the sequence and some details to understand how intense this showdown was. These communications are all from 1963. (Note to reader: skip ahead to the next section if you become tired of the detail in the following exchanges.)

In March  the US State Department instructed the US Ambassador to inform the government of Israel (GOI) that for “compelling reasons” the “USG seeks GOI assent to semi-annual repeat semi-annual visits to Dimona, perhaps May and November, with full access to all parts and instruments in the facility, by qualified US scientists.” (underline added)

On April 19 the State Department instructed the US Ambassador to Israel to “press” for an “affirmative reply” to the earlier request for semi-annual inspections of Dimona.

On April 26, Israeli PM Ben Gurion replied to President Kennedy.  He evaded the issue of nuclear facility inspections and instead expressed his concern regarding a recent proclamation from Egypt, Syria and Iraq. He compared Egyptian President Nasser to Germany’s Hitler.

On May 4  JFK responded to Ben Gurion’s concerns and underscored the US commitment to Israel and peace in the Middle East. He told the Israeli leader he is much less worried about an “early Arab attack”  than the “successful development of advanced offensive systems”.

On May 8  a Special National Intelligence Estimate concluded, “Israel intends at least to put itself in a position to be able to produce a limited number of weapons” and that “unless deterred by outside pressure [the Israelis] will attempt to produce a weapon sometime in the next several years.”  The analysis predicted that if Israelis had the bomb it would “encourage them to be bolder in their use of the conventional resources both diplomatic and military in their confrontation with the Arabs.”

On May 10  US State Department sent an “Eyes Only Ambassador” telegram to the US Ambassador to Israel. The ambassador was instructed to remind the Israeli leadership that they have previously agreed to the bi-annual inspections. The telegram also says Israeli concerns about Arab development of a nuclear bomb “are not valid” because there is nothing comparable to the “advanced Israeli program.”

The tensions between the Kennedy administration and Tel Aviv caused the Israel lobby to escalate pressure on the White House. This is revealed in a May 11 TOP SECRET State Department memo regarding “White House Concern with Arab-Israeli Matters”.  It begins, “In recent weeks, as you are aware, it has become increasingly clear that the White House is under steadily mounting domestic political pressure to adopt a foreign policy in the Near East more consonant with Israeli desires. The Israelis are determined to use the period between now and the 1964 Presidential election to secure a closer, more public security relationship with the Unites States, notably through a public security guarantee and a cooler, more antagonistic relationship beween the United States and the UAR [United Arab Republic].”  This is a highly interesting memo showing Israeli influence in US foreign policy and electoral politics. It further shows Kennedy’s effort to mitigate this influence while standing firm on the goal to stop nuclear proliferation.

On May 12, 1963 Ben Gurion wrote another long letter to President Kennedy.  Again evading the US request, Ben Gurion gives a distorted history including the claim that Palestinian refugees left Palestine “at the demand of Arab leaders” . He again compares Nasser to Hitler and suggests the danger of a new Holocaust.  He says, “Mr, President, my people have the right to exist … and this existence is in danger.”

On May 19 Kennedy responded to Ben Gurion emphasizing the importance he placed on not allowing the spread of nuclear weapons. “We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel.”  Kennedy underscores the “deep commitment to the security of Israel” but says the commitment and support “would be seriously jeopardized” if the US is unable to obtain reliable information about “Israel’s efforts in the nuclear field.”

On May 27 Ben Gurion responded to Kennedy saying that the nuclear reactor at Dimona “will be devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes”. He counters Kennedy’s request for bi-annual visits starting in June  by suggesting annual visits “such as have already taken place” starting at the end of the year. The condition is significant because the previous “visit” to Dimona was restricted in time and space.

On June 15 Kennedy wrote to Ben Gurion after he had  received a scientific evaluation of the minimum requirements for a nuclear site inspection, After welcoming Ben Gurion’s assurances that Dimona will only be devoted to peaceful purposes, Kennedy issued a polite ultimatum. “If Israel’s purposes are to be clear to world beyond reasonable doubt, I believe the schedule which would best serve our common purpose would be a visit early this summer, another visit in June 1964, thereafter at intervals of six months.”  He specifies that the “visit” must include access to all areas and “sufficient time be allotted for thorough examination.”

On June 16,  the US Embassy in Israel reported that Ben Gurion resigned as Israel’s Prime Minister. This was a huge surprise; the explanation was that it was for “personal reasons”. It is likely that Ben-Gurion knew the contents of the forthcoming letter from Washington (received at the embassy the day before). The impact of his resignation was to stall for time. US Ambassador Barbour suggested waiting until the “cabinet problem is worked out” before sending JFK’s near ultimatum to the next Prime Minister.

Kennedy did not wait long. On July 4, he wrote to new Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol. After congratulating Eshkol on becoming new Prime Minister, he goes straight to the point “concerning American visits to Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona.” Kennedy says, “I regret having to add to your burdens to soon after your assumption of  office, but …” He then goes on to request inspections as was requested in the letter to Ben-Gurion and that “support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized” if this is not done.

On July 17, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy that he needed to study the issue more before responding to Kennedy’s request for visits to Dimona.  US Ambassador Barbour added that Eshkol verbally conveyed that he was “surprised” at Kennedy’s statement that US commitment to Israel might be jeopardized. Indicating Israeli defiance, Eshkol told the US Ambassador “Israel would do what it had to do for its national security and to safeguard its sovereign rights.”

On August 19, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy re-iterating the “peaceful purpose” of Dimona and ignoring the request for a summer inspection.  He proposed the inspection take place “toward the end of 1963”.

On August 26 Kennedy wrote to Eshkol accepting the visit at year end but emphasizing it needs to be done “when the reactor’s core is being loaded and before internal radiation hazards have developed.”  Kennedy set these conditions because they were essential for determining whether the facility could be used for developing a nuclear weapon.

On September 16 State Department prepared a Memorandum of Conversation with a counselor from the British Embassy. There was joint concern but agreement that Dimona would be visited and inspected “prior to the activation of the reactor.”

After the Assassination of JFK on November 22

After Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) became president, US mideast policy changed significantly. From the start, LBJ told  an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend. But you have found a better one.”   The Israeli publication Haaretz says, “Historians generally regard Johnson as the president most uniformly friendly to Israel.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy with Israel’s Policies” and “Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his.”

On the crucial issue of  Dimona inspection, the Israelis ignored JFK’s condition and the reactor went critical on December 26. When the inspection occurred three weeks later, they could not inspect the areas that had been irradiated.  A handwritten comment on the report says, “We were supposed to see this first!”  We do not know what would have happened it JFK had been in the White House but given the intensity of his effort, and deep convictions regarding the dangers of nuclear proliferation, it would not have been ignored as it was under LBJ.

Under LBJ, relations with Egypt deteriorated. The US stopped providing direct assistance loans and grants to Egypt. The US became increasingly antagonistic to President Nasser, as desired by the Israel lobby.

US support for a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue decreased and then stopped.

The Department of Justice efforts to require the American Zionist Council to register as foreign agents became increasingly weak until they were dropped under LBJ’s new Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The sequence of exchanges includes:

On December 11, 1963, the AZC attorney wrote to the DOJ saying, “Our client is not prepared to register as an agent of a foreign government.” Instead, he proposed to provide “voluntarily” the required financial information.

In January and February 1964, there were more exchange between AZC and the DOJ. AZC expressed concern because the American Council on Judaism publicly said that AZC was acting as “propaganda agents for the state of Israel and that the Jewish Agency was being used as a conduit  for funds for the Zionist organization in the United States.”

In summer 1964 Nicholas Katzenbach becomes Attorney General.  Negotiations continued. DOJ staff noted that AZC was “stalling” and not providing acceptable information despite the increasingly special and favorable treatment. In spring of 1965 the DOJ accepted that AZC was NOT required to register as foreign agent. Their financial information was kept in a unique expandable folder. In November 1967 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) applied for a federal tax exemption. The US Treasury Department granted it, backdated to 1953.

 Increasingly aggressive and uncompromisingZionist Israel

The successful development of nuclear weapons  added to Israel’s aggressive actions and unwillingness to resolve the Palestinian refugee crisis.

With intelligence information provided by Washington, Israel made a surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967. The “Six Day war” was a crucial turning point in Middle East history. Israel quickly defeated the unprepared combined armies.  In the West, public perception of Israel changed overnight. The  mythology of Israeli military (and general) superiority was created. Among the American Jewish population, doubts and concerns about Israel evaporated and support skyrocketed.

Israeli leaders arrogance and deceit is exemplified by the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. The communications navy vessel was monitoring the air waves in the eastern Mediterranean when it was attacked by Israeli aircraft and boats. Thirty four US sailors were killed and 172 injured. Amazingly, the ship managed to stay afloat. The plan was evidently to sink the ship, blame it on Egypt and consolidate US support and hostility to Egypt and the Soviet Union.

Lyndon Johnson over-ruled the calls for help from the vessel, saying “I will not have my ally embarrassed.”

The deadly incident was covered up for decades.

We do not know for sure what might have happened had JFK not been assassinated. It is possible that Israel would have been stopped from acquiring the bomb.  Without that, they may not have had the audacity to launch the 1967 attacks on their neighbors, seizing the Golan, West Bank and Gaza Strip. If the Zionist lobby had been required to register as foreign agents, their influence would have been moderated. Perhaps Israel could have found a reasonable accommodation with Palestinians in one or two states.

Instead, Israel hardened into an apartheid regime committing increasingly outrageous massacres. As Kennedy warned in 1960, Israel has become a “garrison state” surrounded by “hate and fear”.  The assassination of John F Kennedy ensured Zionist control of Israel, suffering for Palestinians and permanent instability.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

The statement is an endorsement of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which has been “catastrophic”, according to the WHO, for its healthcare system and killed 200 medical workers.

The opening declaration is: “We affirm the right of TFOM faculty to be openly Zionist and to support the right of Israel to exist and defend itself as a Jewish state and for those faculty to be free of public ostracism, recrimination, exclusion, and discrimination in the TFOM.”

In plain language, the doctors want to promote Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and not be challenged by (disproportionately) racialized and younger students and colleagues.

The statement effectively brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. It declares “that accusations against Israel as ‘apartheid’, ‘colonialist’, or ‘white supremacist’ or committing genocide are mendacious and aim to promote the argument that Israel should be dismantled as a Jewish state, making such accusations themselves antisemitic.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al Haq, B’tselem and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinians have all labeled Israel an apartheid state. Many Zionist pioneers described their aims as “colonial” and hundreds of experts in the field believe Israel is currently committing genocide in Gaza.

While framing themselves as victims, the letter threatens colleagues. “We believe that academic freedom is not absolute. In particular, leaders in academic medicine with power over learners and faculty, who in some cases are the sole leader responsible for thousands of learners and faculty, should not be issuing statements which collide with equity, diversity and inclusion for Jews or which make Jews feel unsafe and unwelcome in the TFOM and which are unrelated or unessential to their core academic role, research, and publishing of results.”

But it’s the many openly racist signatories who have authority over students, as Ghada Sasa’s followers showed on X. The new medical collective Combat Online Harassment concluded, “1 in 5 signatories to the University of Toronto medical school’s proud Zionist letter with active Twitter accounts have posted racist, hateful, or harmful materials!”

This includes Sandy Buchman justifying massacres against Palestinians since Gaza is a “sociopathic society full of murderers”. Another Zionist letter signatory Gideon Hirschfield liked a tweet threatening all Palestinians in Gaza with “immediate and complete destruction” and Dr. Leslie Shulman called for deporting darker skinned teenagers who protested against genocide in Toronto. “Expel. Them. Now. Reason…failure to show evidence of being human.”

Combat Online Harassment, a group of North American healthcare workers, says it was formed in response to “increasing amounts of racist anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic behavior from our colleagues. Simultaneously, we’ve observed an unsettling trend where physicians expressing pro-Palestinian views find themselves unjustly targeted with baseless accusations of antisemitism, resulting in detrimental consequences for their careers. Our work aims to highlight the double standard in the policing of voices; clearly racist and hateful views (ones we post), if coming from Zionists, face little to no repercussions.”

Jewish Zionist doctors have succeeded in punishing anti-genocide voices for making them “feel” uncomfortable. The most high-profile and egregious case is University of Ottawa doctor Yoni Freedhoff who targeted resident Yipeng Ge, leading to his suspension. Over 95,000 people have signed a petition calling for Ge to be reinstated. Toronto Star columnist Shree Paradkar noted, “Several Ontario doctors tell me they are being hauled up for supporting Palestinian rights including for signing a ‘don’t bomb hospitals’ petition. Higher-ups have told them there were complaints and accused them of making Jewish colleagues feel unsafe.”

The Zionist letter highlights the power dynamic in medicine and TFOM. A year ago I wrote about a big Israel lobby and media brouhaha over a ‘report’ on purported antisemitism at TFOM. It concluded: “As Black and Indigenous — and to a lesser extent Latin American, South Asian and Arab — communities struggle for positions within the elite institution, many Jewish and politically Zionist faculty members complain that expressing solidarity with Palestinians discriminates against them. Their pressure led to the appointment of a Special Adviser on Anti-Semitism who published a spurious ‘report’, which outside groups amplified and the dominant media covered widely. This reflects power, not oppression.”

When 555 Jewish doctors openly support Israel’s killing of 17,000 Palestinians this confirms that analysis.

And it makes one wonder what sort of education the ‘caring professions’ at U of T are receiving.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Photograph Source: Raph_PH – CC BY 2.0

Jonathan Freedland is a senior columnist for the Guardian, and its point-person in providing commentary and reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Freedland gives every impression of being fair-minded and “objective” in this commentary, unlike the less-knowledgeable and far-from-impartial US commentator Thomas Friedman, who is little more than a fan-boy of Likud and its political allies (aside from the occasional muted demurral when Israel turns its overwhelming military might on hapless Palestinians, though in the end Friedman always finds ways to exculpate Israel).

Freedland went to Israel to cover its current conflict with Gaza. In a Guardian piece from there he enjoined his readers to “listen to the phone call made by one of the Hamas murderers of 7 October to his parents back in Gaza. Hear his pride, his ecstatic joy as he tells them he has “killed Jews” with his own hands, including a husband and wife and eight others. “Dad, 10 with my own hands!”.

The Guardian invited readers of this article to submit a response to what Freedland’s wrote. Here is what I sent in (it did not get published):

“This unspeakable bloodlust [referred to by Freedland] called to mind a parallel episode during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp two decades ago:

Moshe Nissim, IDF Bulldozer Operator in Jenin: “Before we went in [to Jenin] I asked some guys to teach me [how to operate a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer]. They taught me how to drive forward and make a flat surface… For three days I just erased and erased… I kept drinking whisky to fight off fatigue. I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp! I didn’t see dead bodies under the blade of the D-9… But if there were any I don’t care”. Originally published in a report by Tsadok Yeheskeli, Yediot Aharonot, May 31 2002.

Unlike Mr Freedland I’m not sure what lessons are precisely to be drawn from such cases of untramelled bloodlust”.

International law requires these war-criminal berserkers (on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides) to be brought to account, and it is not unreasonable to expect fair-minded journalists to acknowledge both such situations accordingly.

In a later article from Israel Freedland says:

“There is, in fact, a terrible price to pay as long as Israel keeps fighting in Gaza, in the form of the deaths of thousands of innocents. And there is a terrible price to pay if Israel stops fighting in Gaza, leaving intact a murderous, eliminationist threat. Neither option is bearable. It is a tragic choice. We cannot do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice, but we can at least admit that we see it”.

But: is Israel not also “a murderous, eliminationist threat” for Gazans since it imposed its draconian siege on that territory in 2007? So why not point this out, instead of pointing this accusatory finger solely at one of the parties involved? And why can’t we “do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice”? There is a clear way out of this supposed tragedy. But first another contention in this article requires attention.

Freedland says “responsibility for a death toll estimated to be in excess of 15,000 – in less than two months – rests squarely with a Hamas enemy that deliberately embeds itself in population centres, including in schools and hospitals”.

Freedland is right to say that Hamas blurs the line between its combatants and non-combatant Gazan civilians—this of course is a prima facie violation of international law, though the application of this law in asymmetrical warfare lacks the clear-cut applicability present in wars of a more regular and standard character.

Freedland’s claim however occludes the fact that Israel also blurs the line between its active-duty combatants and those of its civilians who are designated as “reservists”.

In Israel, military service is compulsory for most citizens, with men serving for two and a half years and women for two years, starting at the age of 18. After completing their required service, these men and women typically become part of the Israeli Defence Force’s (sic) Reserves. That is to say, these individuals, usually up to the age of 40 (50 in certain specialist fields), can be summoned back to active duty at the behest of their government.

So is an Israeli aged 18-40 in civvies really and routinely to be regarded as a non-combatant civilian? After all, reservists are allowed to take their weapons home with them when they finish their service in the regular military, and the media is replete with images of Israelis in civvies shouldering guns in the middle of towns and cities.

Soon after the October 7 attack by Hamas, Israel expanded its mobilization of reservists to 360,000.

Any Jewish person anywhere in the world is a citizen of Israel by virtue of this fact, regardless of their place of birth. As a result, many “Israelis” possess dual-nationality, and can be called-up to serve in Israel’s military while living abroad. According to the Washington Post,  about 10,000 people living in the United States alone have reported for Israeli military duty after receiving draft notices that were part of the mass mobilization after Hamas’s attack in October (incidentally, this includes someone who lives and works as a financier in Los Angeles— hence a likely case of making money in one country and killing Palestinians in another).

Israeli airlines El Al, Israir and Arkia added more flights to bring “home” these reservists, according to their websites and Israel’s airports authority.

The demarcation between combatants and noncombatant civilians is thus blurred indisputably by both sides in this conflict.

As mentioned above, Freedland contends we can’t “do much for the two peoples trapped” in what he regards as an inexorable tragedy. But of course we can! Freedland scarcely mentions Israel’s countless illegalities in its dealings with the Palestinian people. A start can be made by addressing some of these.

Every international legal body regards the siege/blockade of Gaza as contravening the law prohibiting the use of collective punishments against civilians. International law permits an occupied people to engage in armed resistance against the occupier. As long as Israel maintains its illegal siege, there will be justified resistance against the blockader/illegal occupier (with the caveat that noncombatant civilians are not to be targetted). Israel– so far shielded and abetted by its US paymaster– has to be brought to an acknowledgement of this situation.

At the same time, Freedland and others maintain that this step will not be a practical proposition for Israel as long as Hamas maintains its “eliminationist” stance towards Israel.

While Hamas pledged to “eliminate the Zionist entity” in its 1988 founding charter, which called for the creation of an Islamic state over the entirety of the land of historic Palestine, its May 2017 “Document of general principles and policies” abandoned eliminationism in favour of a long-term truce in which Israel exists within its 1967 borders as a condition of further negotiations leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Neither the exact nature of this putative Palestinian state nor that of a future Israel was specified in the May 2017 document, leading Hamas doubters to maintain that this was merely a playing-for-time diplomatic smokescreen employed by Hamas while it pursued its longer-term eliminationist goals. But in any event, contra Freedland and others, Hamas has not been committed publicly to the elimination of Israel since 2017.

Zionists such as Freedland have of course a visceral distrust of Hamas.

Hamas is however in no position to destroy Israel militarily, so why not create an internationally supervised framework, in the context of a long-term ceasefire or truce, in which Hamas is held accountable for each and every one of its policy declarations and subsequent actions? The same of course would apply to Israel.

Will anyone take bets that a principled procedure of this kind is unacceptable to Israel and its supporters in the western media?

Meanwhile, in Gaza Hamas will doubtless be crippled by Israel’s brutal techno-militarism, but in the longer-term Hamas or one of its approximations or proxies will almost certainly find ways to continue the resistance.

An American state, New Hampshire, uses “Live free or die” as its official motto.

What if the long-suffering Palestinian people insist on joining New Hampshire in adhering to this simple motto? Saying this in the knowledge that 75% of Gazans are now internally displaced,  and 400,000 have lost their jobs since Israel began its retaliation after October 7.

The post Zionist Jonathan Freedland, the UK’s Nuanced Version of Thomas Friedman appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Chatham House – CC BY 2.0

“I support Zionism without qualification”.

– Keir Starmer, statement to Jewish News, February 2020

“Israel must always have the right to defend her people”.

– Keir Starmer, October 2023

To use a Britishism, the Labour party leader Keir Starmer has got his knickers in a twist over the Israel-Hamas conflict.

At the end of the recent Labour Party annual conference, Starmer gave a round of media interviews. On LBC radio the politician who had been a human rights lawyer said something that would have landed him in the proverbial soup with his teachers in an Intro to Law class: “Hamas’ actions are terrorism and Israel has the right to defend herself”. He added: “Israel has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians. “Obviously, everything should be done within international law”.

Withholding power and water from noncombatant civilians amounts to a collective punishment forbidden by international law, so Starmer’s rider that “everything should be done within international law” was moot and downright contradictory.

As his own party began to protest at the Zionist Starmer’s dishonesty, it took him several days to come up with a lame clarification: ‘It is not and never has been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”.

Meanwhile, Israel was bombing Gaza to smithereens, and posters went up in Labour areas with significant Muslim electorates, naming Labour councillors who were toeing Starmer’s line on Gaza and calling on local voters not to vote for these Starmerites in forthcoming elections.

Starmer has not called for a ceasefire or truce (as the UN has done), instead backing humanitarian “pauses” to help aid reach Gaza. He said through a spokesperson that such “pauses” would make humanitarian support possible “without stopping Israel taking action to disable the terrorists who attacked them in the first place”.

This ”softly softly” approach towards Israel has split Labour down the middle. Around 20 town and city councilors have left the party in protest at Starmer’s failure to call for a formal ceasefire. In Oxford, Labour lost control of the city council when 9 of its councilors resigned from the party. Three senior Labour figures—Sadiq Khan (London mayor), Andy Burnham (Manchester mayor), and Anas Sarwar (Scottish Labour leader)– called for a ceasefire.

In Westminster, 39 Labour MPs, including shadow minister Imran Hussain, signed a parliamentary petition calling for an “immediate de-escalation and cessation of hostilities”, while dozens of Labour MPs have said publicly they want a ceasefire. Starmer toeing the line taken by the US, EU, and the Tory government may be too much to stomach.

Starmer, renowned for his tin-ear when it comes to politics, attempted to defuse the situation by holding a virtual meeting between his leadership team and Labour council leaders.  He also went to a mosque in South Wales, where he tweeted a demand for the return of hostages. Stung by this evidence of Starmer’s real priorities, the mosque issued a statement repudiating his views on Gaza. Starmer then made his third U-turn after an ITV interview, in which he denied supporting Israel’s right to cut off water and food (a lie), and by issuing an open letter to councilors in which he said with palpable insincerity how much he felt the plight of the Palestinian people, before repeating his call for a “humanitarian pause” in the bombing, something which the prime minister Rishi Sunak had already done a few hours before.

Starmer is in something of a dilemma.

Nearly all the above-mentioned Labour politicians represent areas of the “red wall” with large Muslim electorates that Labour needs to win back in the next election if it is to beat the Tories. Starmer has shed a boatload of members (over 200,000 of them and their fees) since becoming leader, and has attempted to overcome the ensuing financial shortfall by pandering instead to wealthy donors, many of them Zionists. Several of his colleagues have followed suit. Pleasing Zionist donors does not go down well with Muslim voters, while condemning Israel in order to retain the Muslim vote alienates Starmer’s Zionist donors.

Starmer, like Biden, insists that “Israel has the right to defend itself”. On the specific matter of international law, this is not a legal right. Israel, an aggressor because of its two-decade-long siege/blockade of Gaza, cannot claim “self-defense” to justify its violence against armed resistance to this illegal siege/blockade. When a Nazi claimed that Germany attacked Russia in “self-defense” during WW2, a judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal said:

“One of the most amazing phenomena of this case which does not lack in startling features is the manner in which the aggressive war conducted by Germany against Russia has been treated by the defense as if it were the other way around. …If it is assumed that some of the resistance units in Russia or members of the population did commit acts that were in themselves unlawful under the rules of war, it would still have to be shown that these acts were not in legitimate defense against wrongs perpetrated upon them by the invader. Under International Law, as in Domestic Law, there can be no reprisal against reprisal. The assassin who is being repulsed by his intended victim may not slay him and then, in turn, plead self-defense”. (Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and others, Military Tribunal II-A, April 8, 1948)

This principle– an aggressor can’t legally claim “self-defense” as a justification when it exacts reprisals on those who resist the aggressor– is central to international law.

Starmer’s problem over Gaza blends into a wider predicament—opinion polls indicate consistently that voters loathe the Tories, but don’t at the same time love Starmer and his party. Equivocating over Palestine-Gaza is not likely to help his cause.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

While many base Pakistan’s enmity towards Israel on the latter’s post-1948 transgressions such as occupying Gaza and West Bank, military incursions in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Arabs, building unlawful Israeli settlements, and innumerable other events, this is an incomplete story. Pakistan’s opposition to Israel can be traced back to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, two of Pakistan’s founders, when the two nations were nonexistent.

Mr. Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, and their political party worked selflessly toward the cause of Palestine after World War I, despite chasing the dream of Pakistan. They sent Indian Muslim delegations to aid with the Palestine question, built anti-British/Zionist momentum through scathing letters and speeches, passed countless resolutions for Palestine, organized Palestine Days, and started a Palestine Fund for Arab victims et cetera. They did so much, that on several occasions even the Grand Mufti of Palestine acknowledged their efforts.

Pakistan’s Current Situation

After the Abraham Accords in 2020, the Middle East’s already waning anger toward Israel dissolved further. In a shock move Oman, UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, recognized Israel. There were similar murmurings of Saudi Arabia being next as it was not possible for UAE, Bahrain, and Oman to recognize Israel without big brother Saudi Arabia’s blessing.

While in office, Pakistan’s ex-PM Imran Khan verified that he was fighting enormous exogenous pressures to recognize Israel. One of the nations placing such pressures, he asserted, was America, yet he abstained from referencing the other countries. However, he did note that they were close allies of Pakistan, which many perceived as Saudi Arabia and UAE. Imran Khan’s position on the Palestine issue, aptly, reflected that of Pakistan’s founders as evidenced by his statement that Pakistan cannot make any decisions on a matter which has been refused by the Palestinians.

Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa: A Semi-Closeted Zionist

In April 2022, Imran Khan was ousted through a no-confidence motion. Many in Pakistan, including the former PM, assert that the then-army chief Bajwa was behind this – this is no surprise as the military establishment has ruled for 33 years directly; and always indirectly. After Imran’s removal, information regarding how Bajwa was undermining the ex-PM became public knowledge. While the mainstream media remains largely muzzled, journalists, analysts, and even ex-army officers began unveiling Bajwa’s obfuscated plots via YouTube and Twitter. From ousting Imran Khan to jailing and even torturing critics (politicians and journalists alike), everything was exposed. Videos such as “Woh Kaun Tha?” (Who was he?) by investigative journalist Arshad Shareef, who was later murdered in Kenya under suspicious circumstances, went viral. The video (the original deleted) implied culpability towards Bajwa on his copious behind-the-scene ploys.

One specific area where Bajwa’s manoeuvrings were exposed was vis-à-vis recognizing Israel which Imran Khan was clearly against. This assertion grew more substantial when senior journalists revealed more information. For example, senior anchor Imran Riaz Khan, (unrelated to ex-PM Imran Khan), expressed that when Bajwa met journalists, he would state that Pakistan ought to soften its stance on Israel. Bajwa would express his bafflement in front of the journalists regarding how Arab states were normalizing relations but Pakistan persisted with a stringent anti-recognition of Israel policy. Imran Riaz also noted that while meeting journalists in a one-on-one environment, General Bajwa would push them to start a discussion on the potential of Pakistan-Israel relations on TV and/or social media.

Another senior anchor Hamid Mir expressed that General Bajwa was constantly undermining Imran Khan and was pushing him toward the recognition of Israel. Bajwa’s romance with Israel was additionally established when Hamid Mir wrote in an article, “Gen Bajwa also wanted to engage Israel but Imran Khan was reluctant.” On another anchor’s show on TV, Hamid Mir asserted that Imran Khan should take the name of the person who was pushing his administration to recognize Israel – signifying Bajwa. Due to this and various other conspiracies coming to light, Imran Khan’s popularity has peaked while Bajwa has become one of the most detested figures in Pakistan’s history.

Pakistani-American Delegations Visit Israel

When the new PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement) government sponsored by and beholden to the army chief and the military establishment took charge, Bajwa’s pro-Israel policies seemed to manifest. In May 2022, a group of Pakistani-Americans visited Israel which set off tremors across Pakistan. Pakistanis were infuriated as this delegation, sponsored by Sharaka (a pro-Israel civil group), met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog. More concerning was that an anchor from PTV (Pakistan’s state telecaster), Ahmed Qureshi, was part of this group. Anila Ali, the head of the delegation gave the Israeli president a book on Pakistan’s founder, Mr. Jinnah – the irony being Mr. Jinnah’s feverish opposition to Zionism. Facing heavy reaction from the public, the PDM government declared that it did not send the group to Israel and that the delegates were dual nationals. They were forced to fire the PTV anchor, however.

A couple of months after this, a second Pakistani-American group sponsored again by Sharaka met the Israeli president. This designation was shockingly headed by Nasim Ashraf, a previous Pakistani minister (and another dual national). These two delegations touted that they were working for the cause of interfaith harmony but many analysts exclaimed conversely. For instance, Electronic Intifada notes “… the real purpose of these visits – typically led by Muslim Zionists – is to open a path to formal diplomatic and even military relations between Islamabad and Tel Aviv.” This is further proven by Sharaka and other like-minded groups’ ties to US government institutes as well as Zionist organizations – the implication being that such groups can be and are used surreptitiously by US-Israel agencies.

Raza Rumi of the Pakistani publication Naya Daur notes: “There must be some debate going on, and this visit was just a testing-the-waters-type visit.” Such delegations are utilized to measure public perception as well as influence it. For instance, in 2017 an interfaith group of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and Hindus from Bahrain visited Jerusalem, three years before Bahrain began diplomatic relations with Israel.

Lastly, the timing of these delegations visiting Israel is suspect as they occurred shortly after the pro-Palestine PM Imran Khan was removed from office, and Bajwa, then chief and still a Zionist could pull strings freely.

Will Pakistan Accept Israel?

Pakistan is nearing economic default, industries are shutting down, terrorism is rising once more, and inflation is wreaking havoc. Perhaps the Israel-US nexus could offer monetary relief and perhaps later military aid in exchange for recognition – this might sway the government to build a pro-Israel narrative to sell to the public. Since most of the debilitated PDM government is indebted to Bajwa because of their myriad corruption charges magically evaporating after they assumed power, this might be plausible. Furthermore, the PDM government has realigned towards the US, as Bajwa wanted, which was under threat when Imran Khan was PM. For Israel to attain nuclear Pakistan’s recognition would be a political masterstroke. Netanyahu is on record as claiming that Pakistan is the biggest threat to Israel behind Iran.

Although Bajwa is no longer the army chief, Asim Muneer, his replacement, is accused of being Bajwa’s veritable arm and vehemently anti-Imran Khan as well. Recognizing Israel would be an affront to Pakistan’s revered founders, to the resilient Palestinians, and to the Muslim world. Pakistan’s founding fathers drew a glaring line in the sand when it came to Israel – to cross beyond this pale would be an outright moral catastrophe for the country.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matildo Khan.

While many base Pakistan’s enmity towards Israel on the latter’s post-1948 transgressions such as occupying Gaza and West Bank, military incursions in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Arabs, building unlawful Israeli settlements, and innumerable other events, this is an incomplete story. Pakistan’s opposition to Israel can be traced back to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, two of Pakistan’s founders, when the two nations were nonexistent.

Mr. Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, and their political party worked selflessly toward the cause of Palestine after World War I, despite chasing the dream of Pakistan. They sent Indian Muslim delegations to aid with the Palestine question, built anti-British/Zionist momentum through scathing letters and speeches, passed countless resolutions for Palestine, organized Palestine Days, and started a Palestine Fund for Arab victims et cetera. They did so much, that on several occasions even the Grand Mufti of Palestine acknowledged their efforts.

Pakistan’s Current Situation

After the Abraham Accords in 2020, the Middle East’s already waning anger toward Israel dissolved further. In a shock move Oman, UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, recognized Israel. There were similar murmurings of Saudi Arabia being next as it was not possible for UAE, Bahrain, and Oman to recognize Israel without big brother Saudi Arabia’s blessing.

While in office, Pakistan’s ex-PM Imran Khan verified that he was fighting enormous exogenous pressures to recognize Israel. One of the nations placing such pressures, he asserted, was America, yet he abstained from referencing the other countries. However, he did note that they were close allies of Pakistan, which many perceived as Saudi Arabia and UAE. Imran Khan’s position on the Palestine issue, aptly, reflected that of Pakistan’s founders as evidenced by his statement that Pakistan cannot make any decisions on a matter which has been refused by the Palestinians.

Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa: A Semi-Closeted Zionist

In April 2022, Imran Khan was ousted through a no-confidence motion. Many in Pakistan, including the former PM, assert that the then-army chief Bajwa was behind this – this is no surprise as the military establishment has ruled for 33 years directly; and always indirectly. After Imran’s removal, information regarding how Bajwa was undermining the ex-PM became public knowledge. While the mainstream media remains largely muzzled, journalists, analysts, and even ex-army officers began unveiling Bajwa’s obfuscated plots via YouTube and Twitter. From ousting Imran Khan to jailing and even torturing critics (politicians and journalists alike), everything was exposed. Videos such as “Woh Kaun Tha?” (Who was he?) by investigative journalist Arshad Shareef, who was later murdered in Kenya under suspicious circumstances, went viral. The video (the original deleted) implied culpability towards Bajwa on his copious behind-the-scene ploys.

One specific area where Bajwa’s manoeuvrings were exposed was vis-à-vis recognizing Israel which Imran Khan was clearly against. This assertion grew more substantial when senior journalists revealed more information. For example, senior anchor Imran Riaz Khan, (unrelated to ex-PM Imran Khan), expressed that when Bajwa met journalists, he would state that Pakistan ought to soften its stance on Israel. Bajwa would express his bafflement in front of the journalists regarding how Arab states were normalizing relations but Pakistan persisted with a stringent anti-recognition of Israel policy. Imran Riaz also noted that while meeting journalists in a one-on-one environment, General Bajwa would push them to start a discussion on the potential of Pakistan-Israel relations on TV and/or social media.

Another senior anchor Hamid Mir expressed that General Bajwa was constantly undermining Imran Khan and was pushing him toward the recognition of Israel. Bajwa’s romance with Israel was additionally established when Hamid Mir wrote in an article, “Gen Bajwa also wanted to engage Israel but Imran Khan was reluctant.” On another anchor’s show on TV, Hamid Mir asserted that Imran Khan should take the name of the person who was pushing his administration to recognize Israel – signifying Bajwa. Due to this and various other conspiracies coming to light, Imran Khan’s popularity has peaked while Bajwa has become one of the most detested figures in Pakistan’s history.

Pakistani-American Delegations Visit Israel

When the new PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement) government sponsored by and beholden to the army chief and the military establishment took charge, Bajwa’s pro-Israel policies seemed to manifest. In May 2022, a group of Pakistani-Americans visited Israel which set off tremors across Pakistan. Pakistanis were infuriated as this delegation, sponsored by Sharaka (a pro-Israel civil group), met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog. More concerning was that an anchor from PTV (Pakistan’s state telecaster), Ahmed Qureshi, was part of this group. Anila Ali, the head of the delegation gave the Israeli president a book on Pakistan’s founder, Mr. Jinnah – the irony being Mr. Jinnah’s feverish opposition to Zionism. Facing heavy reaction from the public, the PDM government declared that it did not send the group to Israel and that the delegates were dual nationals. They were forced to fire the PTV anchor, however.

A couple of months after this, a second Pakistani-American group sponsored again by Sharaka met the Israeli president. This designation was shockingly headed by Nasim Ashraf, a previous Pakistani minister (and another dual national). These two delegations touted that they were working for the cause of interfaith harmony but many analysts exclaimed conversely. For instance, Electronic Intifada notes “… the real purpose of these visits – typically led by Muslim Zionists – is to open a path to formal diplomatic and even military relations between Islamabad and Tel Aviv.” This is further proven by Sharaka and other like-minded groups’ ties to US government institutes as well as Zionist organizations – the implication being that such groups can be and are used surreptitiously by US-Israel agencies.

Raza Rumi of the Pakistani publication Naya Daur notes: “There must be some debate going on, and this visit was just a testing-the-waters-type visit.” Such delegations are utilized to measure public perception as well as influence it. For instance, in 2017 an interfaith group of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and Hindus from Bahrain visited Jerusalem, three years before Bahrain began diplomatic relations with Israel.

Lastly, the timing of these delegations visiting Israel is suspect as they occurred shortly after the pro-Palestine PM Imran Khan was removed from office, and Bajwa, then chief and still a Zionist could pull strings freely.

Will Pakistan Accept Israel?

Pakistan is nearing economic default, industries are shutting down, terrorism is rising once more, and inflation is wreaking havoc. Perhaps the Israel-US nexus could offer monetary relief and perhaps later military aid in exchange for recognition – this might sway the government to build a pro-Israel narrative to sell to the public. Since most of the debilitated PDM government is indebted to Bajwa because of their myriad corruption charges magically evaporating after they assumed power, this might be plausible. Furthermore, the PDM government has realigned towards the US, as Bajwa wanted, which was under threat when Imran Khan was PM. For Israel to attain nuclear Pakistan’s recognition would be a political masterstroke. Netanyahu is on record as claiming that Pakistan is the biggest threat to Israel behind Iran.

Although Bajwa is no longer the army chief, Asim Muneer, his replacement, is accused of being Bajwa’s veritable arm and vehemently anti-Imran Khan as well. Recognizing Israel would be an affront to Pakistan’s revered founders, to the resilient Palestinians, and to the Muslim world. Pakistan’s founding fathers drew a glaring line in the sand when it came to Israel – to cross beyond this pale would be an outright moral catastrophe for the country.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matildo Khan.

What would the United States be like if it was like Israel?

After the most recent election is held, the president comes out and says that settling North America is the exclusive privilege of white Christians. He is determined to make some parts of the U.S. whiter and more Christian by giving incentives for people to move there. He names Detroit and the south side of Chicago, the state of Hawaii, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole oil-rich lands in Oklahoma.

Both inside the U.S. and in its occupied territory in the northwest, 33 million settlers, ten percent of the population, will be mobilized to establish apartment complexes in these places. Only white Christians will be allowed to live in them.

Only white Christians are allowed to be cabinet secretaries and congressional majority and minority leaders. Non-white non-Christians like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are expelled from the House for their inflammatory speeches questioning white privilege. The citizenship rights of all Native Americans outside the original 13 colonies are revoked and they are put under martial law.

In this future Christian Zionist America, the U.S. has invaded Canada and occupied British Columbia, including Vancouver and the Great Bear Rainforest, a First Nations reserve. That is another place the president says there have to be more white Christian people, displacing the Wuikinuxv Nation, the Heiltsuk Nation, the Haida Nation and other first nations tribes. Vancouver residents from Hong Kong have their citizenship revoked and are expelled back to China. Washington State is now connected to Alaska, which the president maintains is necessary to the security of the U.S., given that you can see Russia from there. The U.S. army goes back to using conscription to have enough troops to patrol Vancouver and the rest of the province.

The new president then announces that ultimately British Columbia will be formally annexed to the United States, making the fifty-first state and renamed White Columbia. He says, however, that Washington only wants the land and real estate, and that British Columbians will never be given U.S. citizenship.

Ottawa’s vehement protests against this Yankee land grab are disregarded, and Canada is reminded of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Washington vows that Canada will never be allowed to have a nuclear program of its own.

When armed gangs from Vancouver manage to fire some rockets at Seattle, the U.S. Air Force scrambles F-18s and bombs the city, bringing down apartment buildings. People in Kitsilano are called and given an hour to get out of their homes before they are bombed. The U.S. also bombs the airport and stops any flights out of Vancouver, and forbids people in British Columbia to go out in fishing boats since they pose a security hazard. What with being able to see Russia and all.

The president appoints the head of the Southern Baptist Convention to oversee Christianity in the United States, and to decide who is a white Christian. Only Southern Baptists are considered Christians. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics are declared ineligible to have “Christian” written on their identity cards. They can be American citizens, just as non-whites can, but they are second-class citizens.

The new president declares that white Christian businesses don’t have to serve gay people or trans people or single women who are dressed indecently and in the company of unrelated men. One of his cabinet secretaries suggests that white Christian physicians shouldn’t have to treat gays, either.

The president of Christian Zionist America declares that all oppressed white Christians around the world, such as the Afrikaaners in South Africa and the Germans in Brazil, are free to come to the United States and will be given citizenship immediately. They would be wise to become Southern Baptists and get properly baptized on arrival, though. They will be given government help to appropriate resources from non-whites and non-Christians, especially in First Nation reserves in British Columbia and in Asian-majority neighborhoods in Hawaii and Los Angeles.

Stamps are issued honoring Dylann Roof (who shot down African-Americans) and Wade Michael Page (who shot down U.S. Sikhs),

Both inside the U.S. and in its occupied territory in the northwest, 33 million settlers, ten percent of the population, will be mobilized to establish apartment complexes in these places. Only white Christians will be allowed to live in them. They will be built on land confiscated from its present owners. The white Christian settlers will be allowed to walk around with assault rifles and defend themselves from any attacks from the angry owners of the land and other resources that the settlers have just helped themselves to.

Any local non-white person who makes a fuss about all these outsiders moving in and taking their land and petroleum will be put in federal penitentiary and kept in solitary, without charge or trial, for as long as the local white Christian sheriff wants. This includes children and minors. Sometimes to teach them a lesson, bulldozers will be brought in and their family homes will be destroyed. If they try to rebuild, the home will be demolished again, hundreds of times if necessary.

These African-Americans, Latinx people, Asian-Americans and indigenous North Americans will be reminded that settling North America is an exclusively white Christian right.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

Image credit: mondoweiss.net

Joe Biden once proclaimed “I am a Zionist.” Here’s what he meant pic.twitter.com/Z04NPUhL96

— TRT World (@trtworld) May 28, 2021

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos Latuff.