Photograph Source: Paul Searle

(This is a transcript of the speech I gave on December 22nd at a vigil  for the overwhelming number of journalists who have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. It was held in front of The Oregonian headquarters, a publication that, like many mainstream media outlets, has chosen to remain silent amid the unprecedented targeting of their colleagues. At the time of the speech, 96 journalists had been confirmed dead, and tragically, that number has now surpassed 100. Each loss represents a grievous violation of international law and is morally reprehensible.)

My name is Nathaniel St. Clair, and I’ve worked for CounterPunch, an independent media publication, for over a decade. And though I hesitate to call myself a journalist, I have had the privilege of editing and publishing the work of hundreds, from all over the U.S. and the world. So I’m very familiar with the kind of people who commit themselves to this indispensable profession. And wow, the gravity of their work feels more powerful than ever. It certainly seems more dangerous.

Nearly 100 journalists have been killed in less than three months in Palestine. And that’s not by accident. They aren’t collateral damage. They weren’t human shields. Most were targeted deliberately. Their offense: exposing the deceit behind the propaganda flushed out by the Israeli government, and our own government, our president, and the mainstream media, many of whom don’t function as journalists. Instead, they act like stenographers for the state, for the military-industrial complex. Which is profiting massively off of this slaughter, banking on people being uninformed and indifferent to it.

Well, real journalists are preventing that, because the real journalists are standing in defiance of power, standing in the face of the war machine, and are bravely documenting its crimes. Documenting the daily horror raining down on millions of civilians trapped on a small slice of land.

So the powerful want these journalists silenced, by any means necessary, because they are proving to be very powerful themselves. I’ve gone to many rallies for Palestine over the years, and I’ve never seen the groundswell like we are witnessing now.

I have friends who rarely want to talk about politics, now asking me all about Israel and Palestine and Gaza and the West Bank, and I ask them back “Why? Why do you care now?” It’s almost always because of a Palestinian journalist that they discovered on social media, that they liked, and who gave them their first glimpse of what is really going on.

And that’s why the Israeli military, with the blessing of the United States, has killed nearly 100 journalists. Because those snapshots of reality are gaining momentum and are reshaping public perception of this awful humanitarian crisis in ways that the powerful are unfamiliar with, and are frightened of.

So we must demand accountability for the deaths of these journalists, alongside those of countless innocents, not just as a legal obligation; but as a moral imperative.

And we must carry their work forward, to continue in their fight, wielding their pen, their keyboard, their camera, their microphone and their fearlessness in our ongoing pursuit of truth and accountability.

I’m going to finish now with a quote from a journalistic giant, I.F. Stone, who said:

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose… until someday, somebody who believes as you do… wins.”

And I think that day, for Palestinians, is on the horizon. In large part because of the work that these brave journalists have done.

Cease Fire now. End the occupation. And never forget the people who were killed for giving us a glimpse of the truth.

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In front of the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso, Texas, a few blocks from the border. Photo: Todd Miller.

I am at the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where one year ago I watched groups of people wade through the shallow water to “pedir posada,” the Spanish-language term used for Joseph and Mary asking for refuge in Bethlehem 2,023 years ago. This year, there are no people below me, at least not right now, and the Rio Grande is a greenish, contaminated trickle that will dry up completely just east of El Paso, and then be replenished by the Rio Conchos 200 miles downriver in Presidio, Texas. On the other side of the bridge, you can see that the holiday season is in full gear as the line of people entering the United States coming from Ciudad Juárez extends up to the top of the bridge, exactly above the river. Surrounding the river are the props of the modern-day nativity scene: coiling razor wire, 30-foot walls, Texas Army National Guard troops and their armored jeeps, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped trucks, drone surveillance, camera surveillance, biometric systems. Partially, this is the result of the most money ever put toward federal border and immigration enforcement (as we reported this year, 2023 was $29.8 billion, a record number, which adds to the more than $400 billion since 2003). Partially, this is because Texas’s spending on Operation Lone Star, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott and his right-wing, un-Christian justification machine, which has added up to $4.5 billion over the last two years. And this has been the response of the United States for people “pidiendo posada” for 30 years since Operation Blockade/Hold the Line began a border-building spree that has not ceased: there is no room at the inn.

From the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in December 2022 of people asking for refuge at the border wall. Photo: Todd Miller.

I think of that cold night on the ground in a stable that is depicted in so many places this time of year as I walk past shivering refugees in heavy coats sitting outside against the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso a few blocks from the border. I am reminded of the hundreds upon hundreds of people arriving to the Arizona border, as Melissa reported on earlier this week. I am reminded of the young Guatemalan mother I met myself at the border wall in late November as she tended to her two-month-old under the 30-foot border wall. They had been waiting there for two days. The infant was sick, and the nights were cold. The rest of the group, from the coast of Guatemala, built a fire to keep warm. When were the wise men going to arrive, the kings, the angels? The humanitarians did arrive, as they do, day after day (see Melissa’s reporting on that). I am reminded of being in Bethlehem myself a few years back, visiting the Aida refugee camp of Palestinians, which was surrounded by a tall concrete wall that had an embedded “pill box,” or a tower where snipers could point their assault rifles located mere miles from that stable where Mary gave birth on the cold ground. The Christmas story is playing out all around us, as lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar pointed out for us just yesterday. Where Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus had to flee Bethlehem when King Herod started to wield authoritarian power, the long trek to Egypt fleeing persecution is happening right now, throughout the world, such as in the Darién Gap in Colombia and Panama, as discussed in Melissa’s two interviews with anthropologist Caitlyn Yates—one podcast in December, one in August. Or the equivalent might be in the Mediterranean, as we discussed with Lauren Markham last June after a ship capsized near Greece, killing 600 people, or the countless places across the world where people struggle with a huge enforcement apparatus, which Anna Lekas Miller wrote about in her book Love Across Borders. We have spent the year doing our best to give you insight into what is happening on our borders.

I love this time of year, December, because things start to slow down, the frenetic pace starts to wane. For me, this becomes a more reflective period. Yet this modern Christmas story is anything but reflective. On television sets, commercials remind us of the holiday spirit (and to buy as much as we can), and movies have heartwarming tales of people coming together. Yet hospitality is scoffed at in words and policy, no matter what president, no matter what political party. Melissa has reported time and time again about the dehumanizing rhetoric; earlier this week, she wrote about a Fox News reporter talking about invaders and invasions and “credible fear thresholds.” This discourse abounds, with stories of people “taking advantage of our asylum system,” and claims that the United States can’t absorb any more people. Did Mary and Joseph hear similar soundbites on their journeys?

In these stories, we rarely hear about U.S. foreign policy, both historical and current. Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine’s effect in Latin America: the centuries of upholding dictatorships, training generals, arming militaries—and, lately, creating border guards—and influencing politics, as well as the economic domination, in which corporate power and extractive industries enjoy a borderless world and can travel anywhere and take anything they want (see NAFTA, see CAFTA), from precious resources to cheap labor. Meanwhile, regular people—sometimes the very people displaced by corporate power—face harsher and harsher border regimes that extend throughout the continent. The same thing the Greg Abbotts of the world accuse undocumented people of doing here, corporate power is doing there. Studies have continually shown how a migrant labor force bolsters the U.S. economy in myriad, even critical ways (see, for example, the film A Day without a Mexican), yet border crossers get blamed for the big societal problems as if they had the power to set policy in corporate board rooms and in Washington. In the halls of power, debates stagnate over whether people are refugees or economic migrants—creating more divisions between the people most affected by the entrenched borders.

At the height of her pregnancy, Mary and Joseph walked for days, fleeing a Caesar Augustus’s occupying force—a story that resonates with more than 184 million people on the move today. I am reminded of my dear friend Irene Morales, a nun with the Madres of the Eucaristia, who I worked with two decades ago and who told me day after day—as we traveled through northern Mexico and the U.S. borderlands—that she saw Christ in the faces of people on the move. In the early 2000s, thousands of people were arriving to Altar, Sonora, to cross through the Arizona deserts. The people I talked to and interviewed were mostly from southern Mexico, and in many cases they were migrating because they could no longer make ends meet. From about 2002 to 2005, I talked to hundreds of people, and often it was parents thinking about their children, parents who talked about skipping meals for their children, wanting their children to get an education, or sometimes it was children on the move for a sick parent. So often it was a story of sacrifice at a time in a post-9/11 era characterized by a massive ramp-up on the border, with terrorism and migration blurring into each other at a policy level. “El rostro de Cristo,” Irene told me.

Stanton Street Bridge at sunset with a long line of people crossing from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso as is typical during the holidays. Photo: Todd Miller.

As I stand on the bridge in Juárez, where everything seems basically the same, I know a lot has happened over the last year, and we have covered much of it at The Border Chronicle. I, for one, have been following that contaminated river and have gone into Chihuahua to report on border water struggles for a forthcoming book, and I have shared some photo essays here. Melissa also wrote about Chihuahua earlier this year for The New Yorker, focusing on the epidemic of journalists assassinated in Mexico, which she summarized in The Border Chronicle. I feel so fortunate to work alongside Melissa, who not only wrote (and talked to experts) about the innards of this massive border fortification, whether it be the surge of wall building, deadly vehicle chases, Operation Lone Star, or Florida cops patrolling the border—and the right-wing rhetoric that so often propels it (not to mention the Elon Musk circus)—but also about people in border communities for inspiration and solutions such as border artists, a brilliant sidewalk school, or a doctor who spends his time treating border crossers (Doctor Brian Elmore also penned an op-ed for us). And that’s just a taste. This year, I had the opportunity to go to Yale and debate border enforcement, a humbling and educational experience, to say the least. As I wrote about my losing effort, some of the dynamics we constantly struggle with in this sort of border journalism were clearly revealed.

Much has changed over the last year, but—from what I can tell suspended between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—much has remained the same. The border policy is the same, there is more money in the budgets, there is more money in as-of-yet-unpassed supplemental funding bills, there are more and more contracts for private industry. And now we have an election year. And, as we all know, during an election year, the border is a politician’s sacrificial lamb. So be prepared for a good dose of border theater, and we’ll be here with our coverage, commentary, interviews, and podcasts. The last thing I want to do is stand on that bridge a year from now and watch people wade through the trickling Rio Grande to “pedir posada” at a large gate at an even more fortified border wall in El Paso. That is, however, the likely outcome of 2024, and we will cover all of it. But we will also find the spaces where people are trying to make change, we will listen to the border communities, and we will document the humanitarian efforts. And trust me you, we will be looking in the places where there is generosity toward the stranger.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicle. Subscribe here.

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Photograph Source: Paola Breizh – CC BY 2.0

Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.  For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant.  “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition.  Gather outside the court at 8.30 am on both days. It’s now or never.”

Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.”  (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)  Were that to take place, the organization’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917.  Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years.

The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals.  It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years.  That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information.

Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it.  As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”

In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.

The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offense and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty.  The defense team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request”.  History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.

On June 30, 2022, came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons.  While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system.  The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty.  A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.

What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks.  The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).

Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution.  The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”

An agonizing wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favored by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practicing barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favorite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.  Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.”  Good grief.

In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication.  “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.”  The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”

Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn.  Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing.  They did, though requesting that Assange’s defense team trim the appeal to 20 pages.

How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen.  Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner.  Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously.  For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.

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Guernica by Pablo Picasso. 1937. Oil on canvas. Guernica is in the collection of Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid. 

To say that I was awed is an understatement.

Standing in front of Picasso’s 11.5 ft. x 25.5 ft. celebrated painting Guernicais one of the most sobering encounters  I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing. Displeasure because the massive composition’s theme is revoltingly gruesome. Since that dastardly first-of-its-kind-waging-of-wars, nations have not learned to abide by and practice peaceful and harmonious existence.

WWII was followed by wars in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Near East/Palestine (8 wars), Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza, to name but a few. And in each of these wars massive bombings and aerial bombardment have been the weapon of choice, resulting in the death of millions of human beings.

Aerial bombardment is brutal, heinous, and vicious. Aerial bombardment is the cowardly weapon of arrogant, fascistic, hegemonic, and egotistical maniacs. Aerial bombardment is the screen behind which  powerful thugs hide to absolve themselves of crimes against humanity. Aerial wars’ indiscriminate annihilation of mostly innocent civilians, reducing them to paupers and beggars, goes against every decent norm.

For well over 35 years I’d been showing Guernica to my students, expounding on the painting’s blending of a heinously ghoulish theme executed in the cubist style on a-never-seen-before massive scale.  One of the world’s most prominent museums, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia, is finally home to this one-of-a-kind artistic expression bearing witness to ghastly human depravity.

On my last visit to Spain some 12 years back, I spent well over an hour studying Picasso’s ingenious blending of form and theme in monochromatic colors. Standing in front of the composition, I viewed it from every angle, and I relived years of lecture terms, phrases, descriptions, questions, answers, student responses/opinions, and so much more.

On April 27, 1937, mostly German and Italian warplanes conducted the first large-scale aerial bombardment on the town of Guernica. Nestled in northern Spain and with the complicity of Franscico Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator, the Germans wanted to test their newly fabricated war machinery – the Nazi Luftwaffe’s planes and their newly designed bombs – produced solely for destruction on a massive scale. Because of its remoteness, Guernica was chosen as the perfect out-of-sight out-of-mind target.

Like today’s Gaza, Guernica was reduced to massive rubble shrouding innocent civilians whose flesh, blood, bones, and sinews cloaked the bleak landscape of rubble, rebar, and crater-size pocked apocalyptic destruction where once high-rise structures, streets, and alleyways existed. And hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches, and schools are being targeted – deliberately and mercilessly.

In response to this nightmarish bombing, Picasso isolated himself in his studio for a lengthy time and vented his fury by working long hours and in isolation on what is perhaps the world’s foremost artistic political statement.

Here is what I see today in Picassos’ composition: to the far right is a Gaza woman holding her arms to high heaven; she is screaming, pleading, imploring the gods for deliverance. At the top is a light, accompanied by a hand holding a lamp as though to shed light on the unfolding carnage. Call this the 90 plus journalists killed by Israeli snipers and drones so as to draw a curtain on what God’s chosen are doing in Gaza, today’s “graveyard of children.” In addition to its military strength, Israel is adept at conducting its carnage under the cover of dark. And its powerful choking of US media is adept at portraying it as the victim. To the top left Netanyahu and Co., along with Biden and Co., prance bullishly over the devastation as they squash the emaciated mother holding on to her dead infant. How many white shrouds have to be buried to appease the Hebraic God of revenge? And how many corpses have to be pulled out, with bare hands, from under the rubble? And how many tattered remains have to be placed in makeshift bags? Careful scrutiny of the foreground depicts newsprint, Picasso’s manner of telling the world “I am Guernica: Remember Me, Remember What Heinous Crimes You’ve committed.”  And the crushed supine figure holding onto a broken weapon represents trampled, crushed justice under the weight of brute force.

It is worth noting that while Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and scores of mostly European artists have produced a massive volume of compositions under the title Massacre of the Innocents, a theme associated with Herod (the Not so Great), King of Judea, and around the time of Christ’s birth, Picasso’s Guernica stands in a class of its own.

And is it not ironic that right around the time Christendom is about to celebrate the birth of its Savior, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer, the Israelis are raining down 2000-pound bombs, some of them the awful phosphorus kind that vaporize their victims? To date the equivalent of three Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs have been dropped on a starved, thirsty, disoriented 2.3 million displaced citizenry.

And could we say that to date, timed with Christmas 2023, Israel has massacred over 8,000 thousand innocent children – and counting.  And the West, today’s bastion of Christianity, is abhorrently supportive and silent?

Yes, in the last few years Fascism has slowly sneaked into our halls of justice, our public spaces, our airwaves, and our digital formats. Joe “I am a Zionist to the Core,” Netanyahu’s puppet and apologist, has draped himself in the Israeli flag and has fashioned and emblazoned his tie, his shirt, his suit, and his rhetoric in the same style and rhetoric of Netanyahu, his alter ego and master.

On December 10, 2023, Spain, the only Western nation with the moral fortitude to express its outrage at the Gaza carnage, held a solidarity event in the Basque city of Guernica’s market square, the same square that was bombed by the Nazis and Fascist forces way back in 1937. An aerial view depicts a massive Palestinian flag (the size of the entire square) in mosaic form the tesserae of which were held by citizens, trade unionists, artists, anti-war and anti-fascist groups, along with a large depiction of Picasso’s image depicting the mother, her child in her arms, crying to the high heavens.

And for a whole minute the sirens blazed in solidarity with Gaza’s mothers and children.

Viva Espana. Viva Palestina.

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Movement protest sign from FestivalesSolidarios, @festivalesgt.

It was on the streets of Guatemala City in 1987 when I began awakening to Israel’s partnership with the USA in facilitating genocide.

Mayan land and rights defender Lolita Chávez sent a message of support to Palestinian people, denouncing Israel for what it is doing now in Palestine, what it did in Guatemala during the years of genocide.

I knew something of Israel’s history of war and repression in Palestine, but I did not know then, in 1987, of its connections to supplying police and military equipment as well as advisors in technology and surveillance to Guatemala. The nation’s police institutions were networked with military and surveillance agencies. These armed agents of state became fearsome threats to its citizens and brutal actors, especially after the 1954 CIA orchestrated coup against Guatemala’s last democratically-elected government.

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Photograph Source: Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs – GODL-India

On December 18 and 19, 141 members of the two houses of India’s Parliament were suspended, as of December 19, by the Speaker of the lower house, Om Birla. Each of these members belongs to the parties that oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government said that these elected members were suspended for “unruly behavior.” The opposition had shaped itself into the INDIA bloc, which included almost every party not affiliated with the BJP. They responded to this action by calling it the “murder of democracy” and alleging that the BJP government has installed an “extreme level of dictatorship” in India. This act comes after a range of attempts to undermine India’s elected opposition.

Meanwhile, on December 18, the popular Indian news website Newsclick announced that India’s Income Tax (IT) department “has virtually frozen our accounts.” Newsclick can no longer make payments to its employees, which means that this news media portal is now close to being silenced. The editors at Newsclick said that this action by the IT department is “a continuation of the administrative-legal siege” that began with the Enforcement Directorate raids in February 2021, was deepened by the IT department survey in September 2021, and the large-scale raids of October 3, 2023, that resulted in the arrest of Newsclick’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and its administrative officer Amit Chakraborty. Both remain in prison.

Organs of Indian Democracy

In February 2022, the Economist noted that “the organs of India’s democracy are decaying.” Two years before that assessment, India’s leading economist and Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen said that “democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes. And that is massively true now. People are afraid now. I have never seen this before.” India’s most respected journalist, N. Ram (former editor of the Hindu), wrote in the Prospect in August 2023 about this “decaying” of Indian democracy and the fear of discussion in the context of the attack on Newsclick. This attack, he wrote, “marks a new low for press freedom in my country, which has been caught-up in a decade-long trend of uninterrupted down sliding in the ‘new India’ of Narendra Modi. We have witnessed a state-engineered McCarthyite campaign of disinformation, scaremongering, and vilification against Newsclick.” The world, he wrote, “should be watching in horror.”

In May 2022, 10 organizations—including Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders—released a strong statement, saying that the Indian “authorities should stop targeting, prosecuting journalists and online critics.” This statement documented how the Indian government has used laws against counterterrorism and sedition to silence the media, when it has been critical of government policies. Use of technology—such as Pegasus—has allowed the government to spy on reporters and to use their private communications for legal action against them. Journalists have been physically attacked and intimidated (with special focus on Muslim journalists, journalists who cover Jammu and Kashmir, and journalists who covered the farmer protests of 2021-22). When the government began to target Newsclick, it was part of this broad assault on the media. That broader attack prepared the journalist associations to respond clearly when the Delhi Police arrested Purkayastha and Chakraborty. The Press Club of India noted that its reporters were “deeply concerned” about the events, while the Editor’s Guild of India said that the government must “not create a general atmosphere of intimidation under the shadow of draconian laws.”

Role of the New York Times

In April 2020, the New York Times ran a story with a strong headline about the situation of press freedom in India: “Under Modi, India’s Press Is Not So Free Anymore.” In that story, the reporters showed how Modi met with owners of the major media houses in March 2020 to tell them to publish “inspiring and positive stories.” When the Indian media began to report the government’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Modi’s government went to the Supreme Court to argue that all Indian media must “publish the official version.” The Court denied the government’s request that the media must only publish the government’s view but instead said that the media must publish the government’s view alongside other interpretations. Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of the Wire, said that the court’s order was “unfortunate,” and that it could be seen as “giving sanction for prior censorship of content in the media.”

The Indian government’s “administrative-legal siege” on Newsclick began a few months later because the website had offered independent reporting not only on the COVID-19 pandemic but also on the movement to defend India’s constitution and on the movement of the farmers. Despite repeated searches and interrogations, the various agencies of the Indian government could not find any illegality in the operations of Newsclick. Vague suggestions about the impropriety of funding from overseas fell flat since Newsclick said that it followed Indian law in its receipt of funds.

When the case against Newsclick appeared to go cold, the New York Times—in August 2023—published an enormously speculative and disparaging articleagainst the foundations that provided some of Newsclick’s funds. The day after the story appeared, high officials of the Indian government went on a rampage against Newsclick, using the story as “evidence” of a crime. The New York Times had been warned previously that this kind of story would be used by the Indian government to suppress press freedom. Indeed, the story by the New York Times provided the Indian government with the credibility to try and shut down Newsclick, which is what they are now doing with the IT department’s decision.

Upside Down World

The 141 members of Parliament are accused of trying to justify a breach of the parliament building that took place on December 13. Two men jumped from the press gallery into the hall and released smoke canisters to protestthe failure of the elected officials to debate issues of inflation, unemployment, and ethnic violence in Manipur. The men received passes to enter parliament from Pratap Simha, a parliamentarian of the BJP. He has not been suspended. The BJP used this incident to suspend the opposition parliamentarians because they either did not condemn the incident, or they came out in defense of colleagues who were suspended.

Neither of the people who threw the smoke bombs into parliament nor those who planned that action have a political background, let alone any linkage to the opposition. Manoranjan D lost his job in an internet firm and had to return to assist his family work their farm; Sagar Sharma drove a taxi after he had to drop out of school due to financial problems at home. Azad had an MA, an MEd, and an MPhil, but could not find a job. These are young people frustrated with Modi’s India, but with no political connections. They tried to use normal democratic means to be heard but were not successful. Their act is one of desperation, a symptom of a broader social crisis; the suspension of the parliamentarians and the attack at Newsclick’s finances are also symptoms of that crisis: the suffocation of democracy in India.

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By the time the war was over, some 700,000 Palestinians left or were expelled from their homes. Image: Eldan David/Pressebüro der Regierung Israels/picture alliance /dpa

When Zionist militias, using advanced Western arms, conquered historic Palestine in 1947-48, they expressed their victory through the deliberate humiliation of Palestinians.

Much of that humiliation targeted women, in particular, knowing how the dishonor of Palestinian females represents, according to Arab culture, a sense of dishonor to the whole community.

This strategy remains in use to this day.

When scores of Palestinian women were released following prisoner exchanges between Palestinian Resistance and Israel, starting on November 24, there was very little room to hide the facts.

Unlike the 75-year-ago Palestinian community, this current generation no longer internalizes Israel’s intentional humiliation of women and men alike, as if an act of collective dishonor.

This has allowed many newly released female prisoners to speak openly, often on live TV, about the kind of humiliation that they were exposed to while in Israeli military detention.

The Israeli army, however, continues to act with the same old mindset, perceiving the humiliation of Palestinians as an expression of dominance, power and supremacy.

Over the years, Israel has perfected the politics of humiliation – a notion which is predicated on the psychological power of shaming whole collectives to emphasize the asymmetrical relationship between two groups of people: in this case, the occupier and the occupied.

This is precisely why, in the early days of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel detained all Palestinian workers from the Strip who happened to be working inside Israel as cheap laborers, at the time of the October 7 operation.

The dehumanization they experienced at the hands of Israeli soldiers demonstrated a growing trend among Israelis to degrade Palestinians for no reason whatsoever.

One of the worst documented episodes took place on October 12, when a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers assaulted three Palestinian activists in the West Bank. Israeli newspapers Haaretz and The Times of Israel described how the three were assaulted, stripped naked, bound, photographed, tortured and urinated upon.

Those images were still fresh in the minds of Palestinians when new images emerged from northern Gaza.

Photos and videos published in Israeli media showed men stripped down to their underwear, being placed in large numbers on the streets of Gaza, while surrounded by well-equipped and supposedly menacing Israeli soldiers.

The men were handcuffed, tied together, forced to hunch down and then, eventually, thrown into military trucks to be taken to an unknown location.

Some of the men were eventually released to tell horror stories, which often had bloody endings.

But why is Israel doing this?

Throughout its history – violent birth and equally violent existence – Israel has purposely humiliated Palestinians as an expression of its disproportionately greater military power over a hapless, confined and mostly refugee population.

This tactic was infused more during certain periods of history when Palestinians felt empowered, as a way to break their collective spirit.

The First Intifada, 1987-93, was rife with this kind of humiliation. Children and men between the ages of 15 to 55 would be habitually dragged into schoolyards, stripped naked, forced to kneel down for endless hours, beaten, and insulted by Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers.

Those insults would cover everything that Palestinians hold dear – their religions, their God, their mothers, their holy places and more.

Then, boys and men would be forced to perform certain acts, for example spitting in each other’s faces, shouting certain profanities, slapping themselves or each other. Those who refused would be immediately overpowered, beaten and arrested.

These methods continue to be applied in Israeli prisons, especially during times of hunger strikes, but also during periods of interrogations. In the latter cases, men would be threatened with the rape of their wives or sisters; women would be threatened with sexual violence.

These episodes are often met with collective Palestinian defiance, which directly feeds into Palestinian popular resistance.

The image of the Palestinian fighter, dressed in military fatigue, brandishing an automatic rifle, while proudly walking the streets of Nablus, Jenin or Gaza, in itself does not serve an actual military purpose. It is, however, a direct response to the psychological impact of the kind of humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian society by the Israeli occupation army.

But what is the function of a Palestinian military parade? To answer this question, we must examine the sequence of the event.

When Israel arrests Palestinian activists, they attempt to create the perfect scenario of a humiliated and defeated community: the terror felt by the people when nightly raids begin, the beating of the family of the detained, the shouts of insults along with other well-choreographed horror scenes.

Hours later, Palestinian youth emerge on the streets of their neighborhoods, proudly parading with their guns, amid the ululation of women and the excited looks of children. This is precisely how Palestinians respond to humiliation.

Palestinian armed Resistance has grown much stronger in recent years, with Gaza currently serving as a case in point.

As the Israeli military is failing to reoccupy Gaza and to subdue its population, utilizing the politics of humiliation on a mass scale is simply impossible.

To the contrary, it is the Israelis who do feel humiliated, and not only because of what has taken place on October 7, but everything else that has taken place since then.

Unable to operate freely in the heart of Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah or any other major population centers in the Strip, the Israeli army is forced to humiliate Palestinians in whatever little margins they can control, Beit Lahia, for example.

Frustrated by their military failure to deliver on their promises of subduing Gazans, ordinary Israelis have taken to social media to taunt Palestinians in their own way.

Israeli women, often along with their own children, would dress up in ways that would convey a racist representation of Arab women crying over the bodies of their dead children.

This type of social media mockery seems to have appealed to the imagination of Israeli society, which still insists on its sense of superiority even at a time when they are still paying the price of their own violence and political arrogance.

This time around, however, Israel’s politics of humiliation is proving ineffective, because the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is on its way to be fundamentally altered.

One is only humiliated if he or she internalizes that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. To the contrary, their ongoing sumud, and unity, have generated a sense of collective pride unequaled in history.

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Photo by Sean Ferigan

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Image by Karl Magnuson.

It’s not your imagination. Life is definitely getting harder for almost all Americans, whether we are speaking of those tightrope walking as they balance escalating costs of living and stagnant wages or for those who have fallen off the rope completely, descending into an ever-widening homeless population. The very subjective nature of “it’s just so much more difficult now” is met with media and governmental sales pitches that deceptively frame single issues in a positive light, a policy of gas-lighting rather than righting failed policies. It’s the American way to allow the “Is it just me?”method of dealing with issues, avoiding the obvious need for an ethical overhaul in basically all civic arenas. It’s certainly what happens when the worst inclinations are rewarded on a short-term basis for the politicians and CEOs who benefit from the very problems they create.

Sometimes cold hard facts show up that aren’t amenable to the gas-lighting, however.

A recent report from the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit research organization, has clear numbers that indicate just how utterly the United States has failed in terms of protecting the well-being of its citizens, in this case, Millennial and Gen Z women.

They looked specifically at the lives being led (and lost) by women 25-34 years old during the 2019-2021 time frame. Key takeaways include a suicide rate jumping from 4.4 out of 100,000 in the Gen X population (when they were the same age range) to a current 7 out of 100,000 for the Millennial/Gen Z studied group. The homicide rate has even inched up slightly for this group of young women, (up to 4.5 out of 100,000 overall from 4.3 for Gen X during their time at these same ages). Even more astounding is the increase for black women of this age group. They have a 60% increase in the homicide rate from the already enormous 9 out of 100,000 to 14 currently.

The most terrifying and telling stat is probably the maternal mortality rate. This rate has always lagged in the United States compared with other nations that have universal healthcare and other obvious measures of concern for citizens. But now this rate is up to a sickening 30.4 from 19 per 100,000 live births. This, in the nation that carries slogans such as “Care for them Both” in the anti-abortion state campaigns of late, obviously words not reflecting any type of practice. The World Health Organization puts the United States at 55th world-wide in maternal mortality, just behind Russia, a nation certainly not known for tremendous current expenditure in advancing women’s health.

Another frightening consideration is that the onerous state laws now in place affecting pregnancy termination aren’t fully steeped in those statistics yet. Forced births for underage girls and the mandated carry to term or else environment will likely create an increase in life-threatening maternal situations. Old fashioned sepsis and other shamefully preventable styles of death for women of child-bearing age will likely become more common. These will be the consequences of removing bodily autonomy from women and handing these rights to politicians who often have the same level of understanding of female reproductive anatomy as their forefathers had of the correlation between drowning and/or swimming with witchcraft practice prowess.

The new restrictive state laws tellingly did not accompany any type of large-scale resource mobilization and allocation to care for pregnant women or their offspring. Simply a demand to produce a product that will be available as war fodder or resource production material. It seems unwise to believe the current powers feel any more strongly about the populace than in these terms. The lack of concrete and non-controversial ways to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 (air purification in schools etc.) shows that we are considered expendable even when relatively little is needed to achieve marked positive health effects. Arms to Israel and Ukraine are done with a wink, nod and a complementary Lockheed Martin blowjob, but health promotion for our nation is seemingly far too difficult to attempt.

Women in particular seem to be treated as a more and more disposable commodity, having been at the forefront of the service economy that had to go forward whether she and her kids were sick or not during COVID-19 (and this is not to say COVID isn’t still here, truly it is). Kroger, Walmart, McDonalds… these “Citizens United” need profits. And they always will, the way a malignant cell keeps needing to dominate even to the detriment of its host. The numbers are coming in and this lack of concern is showing casualties.

The descent towards fascism generally requires women to be reduced to breeding stock. It seems to always go in that direction in a reliable manner, be it Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany, or Duggar’s Arkansas. The bizarre breeder-ism type fetish is on display in the Tradwife weirdness or promiscuous breeding practices of a resource hog like Elon Musk. How many kids has he fathered? It has to rival Dr. Donald Cline, that fertility doctor in the 70’s and 80’s who secretly used his own sperm for artificial insemination. This is a fact (like the events in Fargo are based on true stories): If you were born in the 70’s or 80’s there is a very good chance Dr. Cline is your dad. If you were born in the last 20 years, Elon Musk is probably your father. So between Dr. Cline, Elon Musk and Genghis Khan we are really in a bad place here on Earth.

But back to the matter at hand: there really is a message being telegraphed by these dismal and decaying numbers from the Population Reference Bureau report. They indicate Millennial and Gen Z women are set to be treated as commodities without the inherent right to pursue lives of meaning and self-direction. A completely objective measure of their declining health status is to be accepted as the price of doing business in modern America. And these women are simply the canaries in a coal mine– barring a radical transformation of our nation,this will bode ill for the health and well-being of us all, men and women, old and young. Simply allowing for and accepting a worse life for the generations coming after us is the mark of a deeply sick society. It lacks fortitude, bravery and perhaps most tragically, it lacks the imagination to imagine something better is possible.

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The Battle of Solferino, by Adolphe Yvon

When Swiss businessman Henri Dunant witnessed the bloody outcome of the Battle of Solferino in 1859, he was struck by the unaided suffering of the wounded. His observations, recounted in his 1862 A Memory of Solferino led to the founding of the International Red Cross.  Thereafter, the 1864 Geneva Convention marked the beginning of an international legal process that governs not only duties toward the wounded but also the protection of civilians in the conduct of war.

When we in the public viewed recorded episodes of the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians, we were all Henri Dunant; appalled by the barbarous atrocities committed by Hamas militants.  International Humanitarian Law, as codified in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, protects civilians in times of war and treats as war crimes the murder of civilians, torture, rape, and hostage-taking. The individual militants and Hamas leadership should be prosecuted for such beastly crimes.

In the more than two months after Israel’s declaration of war on Hamas, we are also appalled by the killing of Palestinian civilians.  The death and destruction unfolding before us on TV screens and reported in the print media are more shocking than the battle scenes at Solferino.

Israel’s declared war of retribution against Hamas has become instead a war against all Palestinians in Gaza. Not counting the bodies that lie beneath the rubble, the death toll now exceeds 18,000, mostly women and children.

While the laws of war allow combatants to target enemy soldiers found in the proximity of civilians, such attacks must be carefully limited in scope to minimize the risk of “collateral damage.” Despite IDF protestations to the contrary, its indiscriminate bombing and shelling of residences, mosques, churches, schools, and hospitals; its forced evacuations of residents; and its Strip-wide siege to cut off water, food, and other life necessities, constitute not only war crimes and ethnic-cleansing, but also genocide.  How could such actions be otherwise given the population density?

As defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide means specified acts committed with intent to destroy “a national ethnical, racial or religious group.”  Such acts include “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Article IV provides that  “persons committing genocide …shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”  Prime Minister Netanyahu, his war cabinet, and individual IDF soldiers and commanders should be held accountable for genocide.

In his provision of offensive weapons to Israel and in his steadfast refusal to join other nations in calling for a ceasefire, President Biden has made the U.S. complicit in Israel’s genocide.  He has also made himself a potential subject for prosecution by his “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.”

Referring to a  U.S. war crime charge against Russia for the torture of an American in Ukraine, F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray said “We’re resolved to hold war criminals accountable no matter where they are or how long it takes.”

Will Wray’s remarks be applied to Israel’s war on Gaza? Not likely, but nations around the world are outraged by America’s sole veto of a Security Council resolution on December 8. That resolution would have demanded “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.” Will any of the U.N. member states (Russia included)  bring charges against Biden for aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide?

Israel currently receives $3.8 billion a year for U.S. weaponry (often battle-tested in wars against Gazans).  Yet Biden seeks to provide an additional $ 14.3 billion in arms to Israel, weapons that would likely be used to kill more Palestinians in the Strip.  Now the State Department has approved a $106 million sale of tank ammo to Israel.  Will voters accept that such transfers make them more secure?  Or will they begin to doubt the wisdom of our intelligence “experts.”

A December 3 news article by The Intercept, quoting “a bombshell new report” in the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom describes a Netanyahu proposal to “thin” the Palestinian population in Gaza “to a minimum” by relocating the Palestinians to other Arab countries and/or opening up sea routes to allow a mass escape to European and African countries. Israel Today has reported a plan being pushed by members of Congress that would condition U.S. aid to Arab countries on their willingness to accept Palestinian refugees.  Given the inhospitable conditions of the devasted Gaza Strip, such plans seem not as farfetched and immoral as they should be.

If Henri Dunant were alive today, looking down on a devasted and bloodied Gaza, he would certainly lament the failure of law to protect civilians.  Only accountability can redeem such a failure and restore respect for international law.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The nation’s biggest investment in the past decade to fix police abuses has failed. The New York Times, in collaboration with ProPublica conducted an extensive 6-month-long investigation into the use of body cameras on police officers and found that it has done little to stop police killings. Reformists ought to be shocked—however, they may be too busy concocting yet another expensive scheme to pour money into policing rather than out—but abolitionists are hoarse from saying, “We told you it wouldn’t work.”

When 18-year-old Mike Brown, newly graduated from high school, was gunned down in 2014 in cold blood by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, his killing sparked one of the early waves of the Black Lives Matter movement. The New York Times rightly faced protest as well for referring to Brown as “no angel,” a familiar media post-mortem of Black police victims that paints them as deserving of death.

And, as Ferguson burned with rage, academics and politicians declared the staid solution to such killings: body cameras worn by police officers to capture them in the act of killing.

Well, okay, police reformists hoped that the body cameras would dissuade police officers from killing rather than merely catching them in the act of doing so. Or, if the cameras failed to restrain police, they would capture evidence to hold police accountable. But such faith in the armed enforcers of racial capitalism was naive at best. At worst, it was a measure of the ardent belief that officers are actually trying to keep people safe. Liberals have been as guilty as conservatives in their unquestioning belief in the sanctity of policing. It was a Democrat, President Barack Obama, who in 2014 asked Congress to authorize spending $263 million of taxpayer funds to outfit cops with cameras.

The price of liberal naivete was on full display in 2020 when Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin slowly and brutally choked George Floyd to death in full view of bystander Darnella Frazier’s phone camera while he knelt on Floyd’s neck. Chauvin had been outfitted with a body camera that fell off him while he killed Floyd. In 2017, Chauvin had been caught at least twice using the same tactic of kneeling on top of a person’s neck while wearing a body camera. The city paid out more than $1 million to settle with the victims, who were lucky enough to survive. Chauvin then went on to kill Floyd three years later.

When Chauvin was ultimately convicted, it was no thanks to his body camera. Massive public pressure from the largest protests in the nation’s history, and Frazier’s testimony and recording, helped to indict him for Floyd’s murder.

The fact that police departments themselves supported the use of body cameras when they were initially proposed ought to have warned us that the project was doomed to failure. What the New York Times/ProPublica investigation found is that police have used body camera footage to actually justify their killings. In the 2017 fatal shooting of a man named Miguel Richards, the New York Police Department used selective footage from officers’ cameras to absolve them, not hold them accountable. It is frequently the police themselves, depending on the city, who get to decide whether or not to release body camera footage. Body cameras did not deliver accountability; they were just new weapons to help police in the war they have been waging on the public.

Decades of police reforms have sucked up hundreds of millions of dollars, and have kicked the can of accountability down the road, maintained police dominance of city budgets, and ultimately failed to curb the killings. Even the Washington Post called it “an ongoing exercise in reform that never ends.”

The police kill at least 1,000 people a year, with 2022 being the deadliest year ever recorded. And it appears as though 2023 may surpass it. In other words, police fatalities rose after body cameras were deployed (it’s true, correlation does not necessarily mean causation). A deeper look at the data shows that Black people are the most likely to die at the hands of police and are twice as likely to be killed than whites, despite being a much smaller racial group. And, younger Black people are the most vulnerable to bloodthirsty cops.

So, what would actually keep police from killing? The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), in conjunction with GenForward at the University of Chicago, asked the group most victimized by violent police—Black Americans—what their opinions were on moving money out of policing and into the things that have been proven to foster safety (housing, health care, education, and other social services). The extensive survey, called Perspectives on Community Safety from Black America, found high levels of fear toward police among Black Americans. Younger Black people were the most fearful. This is not surprising given that they are the most targeted by police.

More importantly, the survey found broad support for an “Invest/Divest” approach to public safety. Specifically, this means, “86 [percent] of Black people support creating a new agency of first responders who specialize in de-escalating violence and providing mental-health support and other social services that would take over these responsibilities from police.” The survey also found that “78 [percent] support a process whereby city officials promote public safety by investing in solutions that do not rely on incarceration.”

Dr. Amara Enyia, M4BL’s Policy and Research Director, told me in an interview on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, “When people say reform, so often it’s this tweaking around the edges of police and policing. It’s things that we know don’t really get to the root causes of harm that come from the policing system.”

Enyia questions the reliance on policing altogether, especially in scenarios where the presence of armed officers often makes things worse. “Why should armed police be pulling people over for traffic violations?” she asks. “Or why should police be giving bicyclists tickets for riding their bike on the sidewalk, for example? Why should individuals who are having a mental health crisis, why should armed police be called to the scene?”

There are no good answers to these questions. And body cameras do nothing to discourage police from killing in such scenarios because they merely validate policing as a tool for safety. Police are enforcers of order, not safety.

Safety does not enter the equation except for those members of society who rely on the strict maintenance of the existing order: well-off white Americans for example, who enjoy the greatest economic benefits from generational wealth and, not coincidentally, experience the least harm from police. Rethinking the role of policing in society needs to go hand in hand with rethinking our economy as a whole.

M4BL asks a stark question in the report on its survey results that ought to form the basis of any changes to policing: “Can you imagine a world where policing is obsolete and everyone has what they need to thrive?”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: lienyuan lee – CC BY 3.0

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains committed to using overwhelming and indiscriminate military force to vanquish the Palestinian community in Gaza.  For the past two decades, Netanyahu has engaged in the total humiliation of the Palestinian people.  At the same time, he is humiliating and embarrassing the only nation that provides Israel with political, military, and diplomatic cover—the United States.  The fact that Netanyahu is bombarding Gaza with U.S.-supplied weaponry makes the United States complicit with regard to Israeli ethnic cleansing, particularly the killing and maiming of children.

The Biden administration has been critical of the so-called “bunker buster” bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds and are capable of penetrating concrete shelters where Palestinians are hiding; the United States supplies these weapons.  One of these bombs was dropped on the Jabalia refugee camp, killing 100 people.  The Biden administration has been critical of Israel’s use of Mk82 unguided or “dumb bombs”; the United States has provided 5,000 of these weapons since the start of the war.  These bombs are airlifted on C-17 military cargo planes directly from the United States to Israel.

Department of State spokesman Matt Miller, when asked about the use of “dumb bombs,” said that he wasn’t in a position to provide “judgment” on the matter.  He added that “there are different ways you can use any number of munitions.”  Israel has the most technologically advanced weapons in the world, and has no excuse in relying on bombs that are so inaccurate.

President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have publicly called on Israel to avoid civilian casualties, but have demonstrated no interest in enforcing their pleas.  Biden has been critical of Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza, but he asked the Congress to remove key restrictions on Israel’s ability to gain access to U.S. weapons stockpiles.  Biden told Netanyahu that the war wouldn’t end until a two-state solution was reached.  But Netanyahu has never accepted the idea of a two-state solution, and has been caught on tape taking credit for “stopping the Oslo accords.”

Last week, Blinken invoked a rarely used “emergency authority” to deliver 14,000 tank munition cartridges to Israel without honoring the standard 15-day period for congressional review.  These deliveries conflict with President Biden’s policies on civilian protection and human rights.  Blinken’s Department of State has ignored its own Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, which was designed to investigate reports of civilian harm by governments using U.S. weaponry.  [On many policy matters, the Department of State under Blinken’s tutelage has been mostly moribund, which I will address in a future column.]

Secretary of Defense Austin has warned Israel that it risks “strategic defeat” if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll.  Meanwhile, his Pentagon is expediting weapons exports to Israel by deploying a so-called Tiger Team to facilitate transfers of weaponry.  The transfer of arms to Ukraine is an open process; the transfer to Israel is relatively covert.   Austin, moreover, has been on record as stating that the United States will do “everything we can” to support Israel.

National Security Adviser Sullivan was in Israel last week to urge Israel to adopt a more precise strategy in its war against Hamas that would mean using smaller elite forces to rescue hostages, kill Hamas leaders and destroy tunnels.  But Sullivan provided no timetable for Israel to reduce its tactics and, before leaving Israel, he played down any differences with Israeli tactics and acknowledged that the Israeli offensive  would continue for “months.”  President Biden has given the Israelis until the end of the year to change its operational regime, but this is a particularly feckless gesture.  Netanyahu was dismissive of both the president, and the national security adviser, who ultimately sided with the Israeli prime minister and dismissed any suggest of differences with Israel as a “misunderstanding.”

In addition to dismissing the advice of U.S. leaders, Netanyahu and his “war cabinet” blocked Mossad chief David Barnea’s efforts to return to Qatar with CIA director William Burns to restart negotiations on a further hostage deal.  According to Israeli news media, the war cabinet decided that Israel would not propose an outline for a deal or enter talks because the war would make it difficult for the Hamas leaders in Qatar to contact their counterparts in Gaza.  Presumably Netanyahu is disdainful of the ability of Barnea and CIA director Burns to successfully arrange the release of hostages in return for a cease fire, and resents the favorable press coverage that their efforts have engendered.  The Israeli press acknowledges that Biden demonstrates much more empathy toward the plight of the hostages than does Netanyahu.

Biden is no stranger to Netanyahu’s efforts to manipulate the United States.  Netanyahu has always opposed the so-called peace process and took credit for destroying the Oslo process.  He has embarrassed recent U.S. administrations, typically timing the announcement of new settlements on the West Bank when U.S. leaders, including Vice President Biden and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, were in Israel on official visits.  The low point of Netanyahu’s deviousness occurred in 2015, when Netanyahu accepted an invitation to address a joint session of Congress in an effort to embarrass President Barack Obama and to block the signing of the Iran nuclear accord.  Netanyahu should have paid a political price for that stunt, but instead he received the most generous offer of military aid the United States has ever extended to Israel.

Netanyahu and his war cabinet are making the key U.S. leaders, including Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan, look particularly weak as they make a public case for temporizing the military campaign against Hamas while Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, emphasize that the heavy bombardment will continue for months.  As long as the Biden administration does Israel’s bidding by blocking any attempt at a cease fire and by rushing delivery of military aid, there is no reason for Netanyahu to temper his policies.

As a result, the violence continues in both Gaza and the West Bank.  More Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank during the past year than in any year since the Second Intifada of the early 2000s.  There will not be an answer to the savagery of Hamas and Israel, let alone Israeli policies of apartheid and occupation, as long as the United States ignores the humanitarian crisis that is worsening with each and every day.

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Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0

“Yes, there are too many civilian casualties in Gaza.  And yes, we continue to urge the Israelis to be as careful and cautious as possible.  But Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map.  Israel’s not trying to wipe Gaza off the map.  Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat.  If we’re going to start using the word—fine.  Let’s use it appropriately.”

– John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman.

“More Palestinian children have been killed in the past several weeks than the 3,000 children killed in all the world’s major conflicts—involving two dozen countries—during the year 2022.”

– The New York Times, November 30, 2023.

Rear Admiral John Kirby seems to have no trouble sympathizing with the Ukrainian civilians killed in the Russian invasion.  But he is downplaying the Palestinians killed in Israel’s invasion.  Kirby has criticized the claims for a Palestine from “the river to the sea,” but ignores the fact that the 1977 Likud Party platform called for Jews to have sovereignty “between the sea and the Jordan.”  Kirby ignores Israel’s “quite explicit, open and unashamed” genocidal assault in Gaza, according to several Israeli scholars, as well as Israel’s creation of conditions in Gaza that will lead to its physical destruction.  Is Kirby aware that the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, General Gior Eiland, has stated that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

The Biden administration has been supportive of—indeed, complicit in—Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza’s Palestinian community since the start of the war on October 7th. Soon after the war began, President Biden flew to Israel and embraced Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a meeting of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, and returned to Washington to announce billions of dollars in weaponry to “sharpen Israel’s qualitative military edge.”  Is there any question regarding Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the Middle East?

For the past two months, the United States has been rushing military assistance to Israel, often bypassing the congressional review process that is supposed to accompany arms deliveries to foreign countries.  This week the Department of State approved the transfer of 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.”  The combination of the U.S. veto of a cease-fire resolution at the United Nations and the expedited shipment of lethal weaponry calls into question the Biden administration’s so-called warnings to Israel to minimize civilian casualties.  [It’s ironic that three university presidents are being vilified for making notional comments regarding genocide while actual genocidal acts are taking place with no one being forced to step aside.]

Netanyahu remains committed to the goal of destroying Hamas without any idea of what comes next; Biden appears committed to his goal of supporting Netanyahu.  Neither leader appears capable of changing the direction of a military policy that is strengthening—and not weakening—the ideological goals of Hamas.  Meanwhile, the instability in the Middle East worsens with U.S. policies and military forces unable to deter settler violence against Palestinians on the West Bank; Houthi use of drones and rockets against Israel and even U.S. naval forces; increased violence on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon; and the greater instability in Jordan where Palestinians are the majority of the population.  Israel is becoming increasingly isolated, and the United States is increasingly isolated in its support of Israel.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu becomes an increasingly unlikely ally of the United States.  Biden supports a two-state solution; Netanyahu rejects a two-state solution.  Biden supports negotiations with the Palestinian Authority; Netanyahu rejects negotiations of any kind.  Two things are increasingly clear: Biden appears increasingly unsure of himself in his public discussion of the war; Netanyahu appears increasingly nervous and distracted in his public appearances.

The notion that there is an Israeli military solution to the Palestinian problem and the occupied territories is simply wrong.  Hamas is waging an ideological battle that is winning the Arab street; it can’t be defeated militarily.  Biden believes that as long as the United States stands by Israel and provides endless rounds of military assistance, then Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders will have the confidence to negotiate with the Palestinians and to seek compromise.  Instead, Israeli leaders, particularly Netanyahu, have pocketed U.S. military weaponry and have remained committed to the military defeat of the Palestinian opposition and the humiliation of the Palestinian people.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have issued the appropriate warnings regarding Israel’s misuse of force, but widespread hunger, lack of uncontaminated water, and spread of infectious diseases have not affected the U.S. delivery of weapons or even the use of that lethal weaponry against the Gaza population.  The 75 years of displaced Palestinians; 56 years of illegal occupation, and 16 years of blockade that have turned Gaza into an outdoor prison demand a change of course.  There has never been a time when an Israeli government has seriously discussed any alternatives to a policy of militancy that has produced one war after another.  As The Nation argues, there needs to be an end to “Israel’s regime of apartheid, occupation, and siege” or the predictable violence will continue.

Thirty years ago, the world was moving in the direction of democracy and decency.  The Berlin Wall came down; the Warsaw Pact dissolved; the Soviet Union disappeared; apartheid ended in South Africa; and the Oslo Accords promised some compromise between Israelis and Palestinians.  Now we live in an age of violence and disarray with mindless wars between Russians and Ukrainians as well as between Israelis and Palestinians; a new round of a strategic arms race; the growth of far-right movements in Europe; and the return of dynasties in Southeast Asia.  Netanyahu will not survive the military and intelligence failure that marked October 7th, but it is quite possible that a centrist and decent leader, Joe Biden will face a similar fate.

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Ariel Sharon greeting Bill Clinton on his visit to Israel in 1998. Photo: US State Department.

Note: We can see how the Biden administration will attempt to wash its hands of the Israeli genocide in Gaza it financed, armed and propagandized: blame it on the “rogue” government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the man Biden rushed to Tel Aviv to give a full-frontal embrace only weeks ago. Netanyahu will eventually be condemned for all of the excesses in Gaza and the West Bank. He will be portrayed as an extremist, an outlier, who has sullied the reputation of Israel before the world. A man who refused to listen to Biden’s counsel. This is, of course, nonsense. You couldn’t find a living figure more deeply embedded in the history of modern Israel than Netanyahu. He’s been at the center of Israeli policy-making since the early 1970s. He was mentored by the likes of Menachem Begin, Moshe Arens and, most decisively, Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila. As such, he’s also been a creature of US policy toward Israel, nurtured and empowered by US largesse and weapons. Netanyahu and his government are no aberration. They represent the logical continuum from the exterminationist policies of Sharon. There’s a direct line from Sabra and Shatila to Gaza and the US has never wavered in helping finance the slaughter. To understand Netanyahu, you must understand where he came from, the political model Sharon established for him, a model of ruthless expansionism and extreme violence.  During the fateful Israeli elections in 2001, Alexander Cockburn and I wrote a long profile of the sinister career of Ariel Sharon, the man some admirers went so far as to label the “Israeli Moses.” — JSC

Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel on February
 6, 2001. Some incorrigible optimists then suggested that only a right-wing extremist
 of Sharon’s notoriety would boast the credentials to broker lasting peace
 with the Palestinians.

Maybe so. History
is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon’s record was not encouraging.
 His crucial role in provoking Palestinian uprisings through his excursions under heavy military protection to holy sites in Jerusalem is well known. A l
ittle more faintly perhaps people recall the verdict of an Israeli commission
of inquiry finding that Sharon bore some responsibility for the dreadful Phalangist massacres in Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut.

But in fact
 Sharon’s history as a terrorist, with documented participation in what can be fairly stigmatized as war crimes, goes back to the early 1950s. Here’s a brief resume, culled in part from a two-part series on Sharon in
 the well-respected Hebrew-language Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Sharon was 
born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground military organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he was given command of
 Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation against Arab a
ttacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known, Unit 101’s purpose was that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able-bodied 
fighters but on the young, the old, the helpless.

Sharon’s
 first documented sortie as a terrorist was in August of 1953 on the refugee
 camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the unit records 50
refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General
 Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that “bombs were thrown”
 by Sharon’s men “through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic
 weapons.”

In October
 of 1953 came the attack by Sharon’s Unit 101 on the Jordanian village of
 Qibya, whose “stain” Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Moshe
 Sharett, confided to his diary, “would stick to us and not be washed away
for many years.”

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, cited in a petition demanding
retribution against Sharon for war crimes, describes the massacre thus:

Sharon’s
order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on
its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations.
 The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during
 the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five
 houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two-thirds of them women
 and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed
 that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone
 was hiding inside the houses.

The UN
 observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: ‘One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled
 across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy f
ire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.’ The slaughter i Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the
 United Nations Security Council dated October 16, 1953…from the Envoy Extraordinary 
and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 
a 2:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack
 on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the
 West Bank was annexed to Jordan).

“According
to the diplomat’s account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically
 murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries.
On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies had been still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and 
a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel
 army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to
 cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighboring
 villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. The U.S. Department
 of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its ‘deepest
 sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives’ in the Qibya attack
as well as the conviction that those responsible ‘should be brought to
 account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents i the future.’”

Let us move
 next to Sharon’s conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel’s
 Defense Forces in the early 1970s. The Gaza “clearances” were vividly 
described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January
 21, 2001:

Thirty
 years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon was the head of the Israel Defence Forces’ southern command,
charged with the task of ‘pacifying’ the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well. Especially the old men
 on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had’d, Street wasn’t
 street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza
 City’s Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting 
o the international community to settle their future. The street acquired
 its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon’s soldiers. 
Ter orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street.
 This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily
 through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation
 Army.

They
 came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red
paint,’ said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. ‘In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting
t people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone’s belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the
street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat 
people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little kids?’

By the
 time the Israeli army’s work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed,
 not only in Wreckage Street but through the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid
 of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed
 into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually
those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel.

The devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. As Reeves reported:

In August 1971
 alone, troops under Mr Sharon’s command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the
 Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds
of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six
 hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second
half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. ‘The policy at that time
 was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them,’ said Raji Sourani,
 director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City.

As defense
 minister in Menachem Begin’s second government, Sharon was the commander
 who stunned his colleagues by instigating the full-dress 1982 assault on Lebanon,
 with the express design of dispatching all Palestinians to Jordan and making
Lebanon an Israeli client state. From the vantage point of  20 years, we can see it was a war plan that cost untold suffering, many thousands of Palestinian a
nd Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over 1000 Israeli soldiers.

Sharon also
 engendered the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The slaughter
 in the two contiguous camps took place from 6 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8 in the morning on September 18, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense
 Forces (IDF). The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants,
 children, women (including pregnant women) and the elderly, some of whom were 
mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.

To cite only 
one post-massacre eyewitness account, that of  pro-Israeli  journalist Thomas Friedman
 of The New York Times: “Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands
 and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun
fire.”

An official
 Israeli commission of inquiry–chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel’s
 Supreme Court–investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly
 released its findings (without Appendix B, which remained secret). The Kahan
 Commission found that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had direct responsibility
for the massacre. The commission’s report stated:

“It is our view
 that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded
 the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the
population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition,
 responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering
 appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a
 condition for the Phalangists’ entry into the camps. These blunders constitute
the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.”

Sharon refused
to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.

Sharon’s career
 was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish his bloody credentials as a Likud ultra.
 Sharon was always against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely 
impossible for Palestinians to accept. In 1979, as a member of Begin’s cabinet, he voted
 against a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to the so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he
 opposed Israel’s participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993
 he voted no in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained
in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against the
 Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Sharon believed
 in establishing “facts on the ground.” As Begin’s Minister of
 Agriculture in the late 1970s, he established many of the West Bank settlements
 that are now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His unwavering position? Not
 another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He would agree
 to a Palestinian state on the existing areas of either total or partial Palestinian control, 42 percent of the West Bank. Israel would retain control of the highways
 across the West Bank and, most crucially, the water sources. Jerusalem would remain under Israeli sovereignty and he pushed to continue building around the city. The Golan Heights would remain
 under Israel’s control.

It can be argued
 that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. Ben-Gurion was complicit in the terror
 missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned or overtly supported
 settlements and new buildings around Jerusalem. But that doesn’t begin to confront
 Sharon’s sinister, violent shadow across the past half-century.

That shadow 
is, perhaps,  best evoked by a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Ariel Sharon when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheva on the eve of the elections.
 The scene was aired on Israeli television. The teenage girl whose father suffered
 shell shock during the Lebanon war stood and pointed her finger at the 72-year-old
 Sharon. “I think you sent my father into Lebanon,” Ilil said. “Ariel
 Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16-some-odd years. I accuse
 you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot
 of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don’t think that you can now be elected as prime minister.”

Sadly, Ilil
 was wrong. Sharon was elected, not in spite of his savage resumé but because of it. That’s the grim truth of the
 situation.

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Henny Youngman, Place, and date of performance unknown, (c. 1970), screen grab.

Shame and guilt

Israel’s war against Hamas has been so cruel as to invite the question: “Have you no shame?” But given that Israel is a Jewish state, the inquiry might be rephrased, “Have you no guilt?” Isn’t guilt supposed to be deeply ingrained in Jewish culture and psychology — the Jewish mother’s secret weapon? If so, it failed to constrain leaders of the Jewish state from dropping 2,000-pound bombs on apartment buildings, blowing up hospitals and killing almost 20,000 people so far – a third of them children.

I’m reminded of the Summer of 1977. After the serial killer, David Berkowitz, (aka Son of Sam), was finally arrested, Simon Weber, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, described the general feeling of relief, but added: “The Jewish population, however, received news of the arrest of the suspected murderer with feelings of shame due to the arrestee being a Jewish young man.” That’s what my family felt: “A Jewish serial killer? With a gun, no less? A real shonda.” Because of his psychopathology, Berkowitz was incapable of shame; because he had no moral compass, he felt no guilt either. He killed six and wounded seven others. Benjamin Netanyahu is like the Son of Sam, but with vastly more victims.

Shame can be distinguished from guilt. The former is imposed on someone who breaks a cultural taboo, while the latter is generated from within, the consequence of violating a personal conviction. According to some anthropologists and sociologists, shame is more likely to predominate in the Mideast, Africa and Asia, and guilt in Europe and North America. The locus classicus of this perspective is Ruth Benedict’s once popular, book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946). According to her, Japan was a shame culture, and the U.S. a guilt culture. The book was written during World War II for the U.S. Office of War Information, and so was clearly intended to uphold American values of individualism (guilt) against supposed Japanese conformism (shame). Benedict never traveled to Japan, didn’t know the language, and mostly interviewed captured Japanese soldiers who were trained to follow orders, so her conclusions should be doubted. (Many post-war Japanese embraced Benedict’s thesis because it suggested they had a unique and coherent national character of which they could be proud.) The grotesque irony of Benedict’s book is that mere months before its publication, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, undermining its thesis: U.S. political leaders admitted no guilt for their wholesale killing of civilians in wartime.

So, if cultures can’t easily be situated on the shame/guilt gradient, where does that leave the matter of Jewish guilt? The most plausible answer is that Jews are no more prone to feelings of guilt than anybody else, and that the shamelessness – or guiltlessness — of the current regime in Israel is typical of far-right, ultra-nationalist or falangist parties. Interwar fascist states including Italy, German and Spain (1922-45), the Greek military junta (1967-‘74), Chile under Pinochet (1973-’90), Guatemala under Rios Montt (1982-83), Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) and India under Modi (2014-present) all claimed legitimacy based upon myths of national or ethnic unity and infallibility, and all freely deployed violence to advance their visions. None ever expressed feeling of guilt. Israel has grasped its chief ally’s mantle of “exceptionalism,” the idea that the nation was born immaculately, and its destiny charted by God. In fact, both the U.S. and Israel were the product of catastrophe: the genocide of Native Americans in the one case (plus the traffic in slaves); and the killing and displacement of Palestinians (the Nakba) in the other.

The sooner we are rid of distracting stereotypes of guilt and shame the better. They only serve to blur insight, hinder dialogue, and make resolution of the conflict in Palestine more difficult. On October 8, a day after Hamas attacked and killed about a thousand Israeli children, teens and other civilians, a pro-Israel demonstrator in New York condemned pro-Palestinian activists: “In their place, I would be very ashamed to show my face here today….I would be ashamed and stay home. I would also say ‘I’m sorry.’” After denying Israeli responsibility for the bombing of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, “Shame on the media who swallow the lies of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — broadcasting a 21st-century blood libel around the globe. Shame on the vile terrorists in Gaza who willfully spill the blood of the innocent.” Following a resolution by the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Palestine, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, called the American veto “a mark of shame that will follow the United States for many years.” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told a packed hall in Istanbul: “Israel has carried out atrocities and massacres that will shame the whole of humanity.” And last week, Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called U. Penn President Liz Magill’s failure to clearly reject (hypothetical) calls for genocide against Jews, “shameful and unacceptable.”

The grilling of the presidents

I feel considerable sympathy for the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania for the public chastisement they received following their congressional testimony last week. They were in a tough spot. Already convicted in the court of public opinion for not adequately condemning the attacks of October 7, and failing to constrain pro-Palestinian demonstrators, they were called to testify before hostile members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The Republicans wanted to make the ostensibly liberal university presidents look as if they turned a blind eye to antisemitism. A few days before, the House voted in support of a resolution “condemning the drastic rise of antisemitism around the world.” Among the many philo-semites voting in favor were Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who attends white nationalist conferences, and last April promoted a website that denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler as a “man of valor.” Another “aye” vote was cast by Marjorie Taylor Greene who regularly spouts antisemitic conspiracy theories and has compared Covid protection measures to the Holocaust.

The presidents were in a tight spot, but they also had a great opportunity to explain to the nation why anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism, and why pro-Palestinian students on campuses should have the same right to express their views as Zionist (or pro-Israel) students. They also could have discussed the legal difference between free speech at public versus private colleges and universities. (In the former, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution governs; in the latter, it doesn’t.) And they could have described the history and function of speech codes on private campuses, like their own.

But they didn’t do those things, or at least not well enough to distract from their failure to answer the simple question posed by fourth-ranking House Republican Rep. Elaine Stefanik of New York: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [Harvard’s, Penn’s, MIT’s] Code of Conduct?” Their answers were legalistic at best, with weasels about “context,” “targeted individuals,” and “severe and pervasive.” Admittedly, the three were tricked. Stefanik, who herself has endorsed white nationalist “replacement theory,” first softened them up by challenging them to label as antisemitic and genocidal calls for “intifada.” Since the word means “uprising,” the presidents sensibly demurred while still condemning its use. Near the end of the five-hour-long flogging, however, Stefanik posed the genocide question and demanded a yes or no answer. That’s when the three presidents screwed up.

Stefanik is a liar and a hypocrite but still deserves her due. She’s right that speech codes on private colleges have been used to ban even the vaguest expressions of harassment or intolerance, so why not the genocide of Jews? At my own (former) campus, Northwestern University, the Student Handbook proscribes “any act of conduct, speech, or expression to which a bias motive is evident as a contributing factor.” Faculty speech prohibitions are similarly vague, and all sorts of professors have been caught in their dragnet, including – most notoriously – the feminist writer Laura Kipnis, and me when, as Faculty Senate President, I spoke up to defend her. (The charges against Kipnis and me were eventually dropped.) Harvard’s policy is less sweeping than Northwestern’s, but still expansive:

“Discriminatory harassment is unwelcome and offensive conduct that is based on an individual or group’s protected status. Discriminatory harassment may be considered to violate this policy when it is so severe or pervasive, and objectively offensive, that it creates a work, educational, or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution’s programs and activities.”

It seems fair, or at least plausible, to conclude that calling for the genocide of Jews is “objectively offensive” and “intimidating.” But when presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn and Sally Kornbuth of MIT answered Stefanik’s hypothetical question they retreated to the legalese they’d been tutored on by the law firm of WilmerHale. But why? If the question had been “Does calling for the genocide of [Native Americans or Blacks] violate your Code of Conduct” would the answer have been the same? I’d never want to agree with Rep. Stefanik, but I have my doubts. Antisemitism exists, even in the Ivy League, and the three presidents were caught in a waffle. Worst of all however, was their failure to correct the premise of the Republican House member’s question. There have been no calls on any campus anywhere for “the genocide of Jews”. That idea was mooted only by Stefanik herself.

Me and Woody Allen

In the mid 1980s, I used to frequent a bar in Pasadena, California where Johnny Otis was a regular performer. He sang his old hits, like “Hand Jive,” played boogie woogie piano, and told stories. I usually sat close to the piano, at a long table with other customers. It was great. But this isn’t an anecdote about the late, great, Rhythm and Blues pioneer.

One night, in between sets, a tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s leaned across the table and said to my (then) wife, Mary: “Hey, is that Woody Allen you’re sitting next to?” Mary, confused, said “Huh? Who?” He replied: “You heard me, Woody Allen!” I quickly realized the man was drunk and suggesting that I either looked or sounded Jewish. In fact, I bear no resemblance to Woody Allen (I swear!), but I have a detectable Queens accent (“newspapah”) and an ample nose. For an antisemite, that’s enough. I started to stand up to challenge the drunk to repeat his comments to me, but Mary – who understood my triggers — pulled me back to my seat and told me to ignore the bigger man. As my grandmother would have said, “Gott sei dank.”

Later that night, and for weeks after, however, I was upset that I didn’t fight back. I grew up in a family that admired tough Jews, not self-victimizing ones, and I felt I’d let down the team. My father, Bert, who served in Europe in World War II, frequently said he’d have “taken plenty of Nazis with me,” if he’d been a Jew in Germany in the 1930s. My mother was more likely to shake her head and tear-up at the thought of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but she’d been a communist in her youth, and was no pushover. And my grandpa Phil was a tough old SOB in the years I knew him, shaking off illness after debilitating illness, and working into his 80s as a messenger on Wall Street. (The messages couldn’t have been urgent.) His version of dementia, age 85, was accusing his wife, 80-year-old Bess, of having an affair with the 30 y.o. Puerto Rican building superintendent. Phil shuffled down to confront the younger man, but my dad was alerted and intercepted him.

Though I loved Woody Allen, I didn’t want to be anything like him. In films like Take the Money and Run, Bananas, and Annie Hall, Woody’s character is a nebbish, though clever and heroic in his way, like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, upon whom he’s partly modeled. In Love and Death for example, Allen’s Boris Grushenko is challenged to a duel by Anton Ivanovich, played by Harold Gould. But Boris is a coward by inclination and a conscientious objector by necessity, so he fires in the air when he has the chance to kill Anton. (Boris is wounded by the falling bullet.) Anton is so moved by his adversary’s gesture, that he refuses the chance to shoot again, and in fact renounces violence. Boris thereby wins the right to marry his beloved cousin, Sonja (Diane Keaton).

Today, age 67, I understand as I didn’t in Pasadena at age 30, the practical and political value of victimhood. Victims are morally unimpeachable; indeed, they are considered virtuous by dint of their suffering, more so if they foreswear vengeance, (or fight back stealthily), and make light of their predicament. That last capacity, of course, was the pride of American Jewish comics, including Woody Allen, which is why his fall from grace was so great. Though officially exonerated of the charge of abusing his daughter Dylan, the accusation destroyed forever the image of Allen as the schlimazel. “When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action,” Allen joked in one of his early routines, “they rented out my room.” At times, Allen sounded like the biblical Job: “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering,” Allen wrote, “and it’s all over much too soon.”

For at least 50 years after its creation, Israel maintained its image of virtuous victimhood – not quite Woody Allen, but plucky, resourceful, and smart. For American Jews especially, the Nakba, military occupation, and nuclear arsenal were overlooked. Even after the Six-Day War in 1967, it was possible to joke about Israeli assassinations without disturbing that image of innocence. In 1969, the Jewish comedian, Henny Youngman, told the following joke:

A pair of Israelis hate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, so much, they decide to kill him. So, they find the restaurant where he eats lunch every day and stake it out. They bring with them guns, bazookas, and hand grenades – and they wait. On day one, no Nassar; day two, no Nassar; day three, still no Nassar. Same thing on the fourth day, so finally one Israeli looks at the other and says “Geez, I hope nothing happened to him.”

That joke would be impossible today because Israel has now become a symbol of state sanctioned violence and indifference to the suffering of others. It’s a country of bullies – of Jews who are too tough. The image of Jews in the diaspora has also changed, making antisemitic speech and acts more likely. Where’s Woody Allen when we need him?

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Photograph Source: Senator Bob Menendez – Public Domain

New Jersey Senator Bob “Googling Gold Ingots” Menendez is in hot water. He’s been in hot water ever since September, when federal investigators brought bribery charges against him. The bribes were allegedly paid by Wael Hanna and two others to Menendez and his wife, Nadine, for benefits to Egypt, including continued military aid. Democrat Menendez had the good sense to step down from his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but as of December, he still defies those in Congress and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who have urged him to resign from the Senate altogether.

So the 17-year Senator Menendez has not yet had the decency to retire from public life. Senator Al Franken made an off-color joke and was booted from the senate chamber by ferociously offended #Me-Too-ers. Menendez, who reportedly took furnishings, a luxury convertible, gold bars, checks and cash from foreign businessmen in exchange for allegedly betraying his country still not only dares to show his face in the Senate but brazenly refuses to leave.

Then on December 1, Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman renewed his call for the Senate to expel Menendez. This exhortation came in the wake of the ejection from Congress of New York GOP representative George Santos, with Fetterman insisting convincingly that the allegations against Menendez are “more sinister” than those facing Santos. “He needs to go,” Fetterman said of Menendez on ABC’s “The View.” “And if you are going to expel Santos, how can you allow somebody like Menendez to remain in the Senate?” Arguably Santos should not have been expelled for infractions like claiming to have landed on the moon. Santos was the House GOPS’s well-deserved booby-prize. The same is not true of Menendez. His alleged crimes are serious and dangerous. So is this whole corruption scandal. No matter how accustomed they are to deferring to senior senator Menendez, the chamber’s Dems need to wake up and ditch him.

This was brought to the public’s attention again, December 4, when the New York Post reported that gold bars found in Menendez’s home were linked to a 2013 armed robbery. They had been stolen from Fred Daibes, then returned by police. How fitting that Daibes later reportedly saw fit to gift that gold to a sitting senator as part of an alleged bribery scheme.

“Prosecutors allege that in March 2022, Daibes gave Nadine two gold bars of a kilogram each – when gold went for $60,000 per kilogram. Daibes’ driver’s fingerprints were later discovered on an envelope containing thousands of dollars in cash that was recovered from the [Menendez’s] home. In total, 13 gold bars and $566,000 in cash, some stuffed into the pockets of the senator’s jackets, were found by the FBI during its investigation into the alleged bribery scheme.” The Post notes that if he’s convicted, “Menendez faces up to 45 years in prison.” Maybe Menendez figures he’ll get off easy and wind up the first senator in the history of the republic to show up for votes wearing an ankle monitor.

Just so you know exactly what Menendez allegedly did: he has been charged with using his “official position to benefit Wael Hana, Jose Uribe, Fred Daibes and the Government of Egypt in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes…” announced the Department of Justice press release September 22. “Among other things, Menendez…sought to pressure a senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in an effort to protect a business monopoly granted to Hana by Egypt, disrupt a criminal case…related to associates of Uribe” and a federal case against Daibes.

On October 23, Menendez pleaded not guilty to yet another, a foreign agent charge. “We are innocent. We are going to prove it,” the New Jersey senator asserted after the court hearing. This new, late October criminal charge alleges that Menendez, his wife and Hana “willfully and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated…” to have Menendez illegally “act as an agent of a foreign principal.” Earlier, by September 26, over half of all Dem senators had already called for Menendez’s resignation. He wasn’t listening then, and he wasn’t listening after the October charge, either.

That may be because Menendez has a slim reason to consider himself invulnerable. What reason, you ask? Well, back in November 2017 Menendez’s federal corruption case ended in a mistrial, because the jurors couldn’t reach a verdict. According to the New York Times November 16, 2017, Menendez was defiant, declaring, “the way this case started was wrong, the way it was investigated was wrong, the way it was prosecuted was wrong and the way it was tried was wrong as well.” No doubt the sleazy senator figures what he did once – his Houdini-like escape from the clutches of the criminal justice system – he can replicate with this latest fiasco.

Emboldened by this 2017 mistrial, Menendez remained in the Senate. But “with every conceivable advantage going into the 2018 Democratic Senate primary,” according to the New Jersey Globe September 29, 2023, “he had 12 years of incumbency, unified Democratic support…[and]federal charges…dropped following a mistrial” –still Menendez received only 62 percent of the vote. “Nearly 160,000 votes went to his opponent, a total unknown…” But he then went on to beat his GOP adversary, Bob Hugin – naturally, as New Jersey is a very blue state. This is despite Hugin’s constant attack ads reminding the public of Menendez’s questionable ethics.

So, two contradictory lessons emerged for the senator from his last campaign: the whiff of corruption alienated Dem voters, but had little impact in the general election. Menendez, who insists he will run in 2024 for his fourth full term, appears to have concluded he can weather a storm of bribery, lying and financial chicanery charges and even possibly whispered allegations of treason. He emerged from the first hullaballoo about his shady ethics with his narcissism intact. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s convinced no new indictment can dent him, despite the very serious nature of this case.

How serious? To repeat, charges like selling his senate influence to a foreign nation to the tune of 13 gold bars, over half a million dollars in cash, a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible and more. That stinks to high heaven. Even for a bigwig who previously beat a corruption rap. Whether he lands in jail or no, Menendez remaining in Congress is a disgrace. The Senate’s failure to expel him is repulsive, especially when it has tossed out others for less. Menendez’s continued tenure erodes the Senate’s already dilapidated reputation and constantly reminds an extremely disillusioned public that most people in Congress are for sale.

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The UN General Assembly has now voted on the resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Gaza conflict which the United States vetoed in the Security Council.

The result: YES: 153; NO: 10; ABSTENTIONS: 23

Joining Israel and the United States in voting “no” were Austria, Czech Republic, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay.

The 23 abstainers were Argentina, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malawi, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Romania, Slovakia, South Sudan, Togo, Tonga, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uruguay.

It is noteworthy that only two European countries voted with Israel and the United States and that only eight members of the European Union abstained, which suggests that the unconditional support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” manifested in Europe until recently is starting to melt away. Indeed, even Ukraine abstained.

Also noteworthy is that no country in Asia other than Israel itself either voted “no” or abstained on this resolution, which suggests that the U.S. government’s hopes of enlisting loyal Asian support for confronting, containing and countering its perceived primary adversary, China, will not be easily achieved.

Even the Marshall Islands and Palau, two of the three (with Micronesia) “Freely Associated States” of the United States, quasi-colonies with U.S. Zip/postal codes, bound by their Compacts of Free Association to be guided by the United States in their foreign policies and usually faithful camp followers in filling out the minimal numbers of anti-Palestine votes on UN resolutions, dared to abstain in this vote. Even for them, some bridges of moral bankruptcy, inhumanity and depravity in American foreign policy are too far to cross.

This vote was held at an “emergency special session” of the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” resolution, applicable when the Security Council fails to exercise its primary responsibility for international peace and security due to the veto of a permanent member, and there is precedent for such votes being deemed, like Security Council votes, legally binding (https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/ufp/ufp.html).

Of course, that fine legal distinction may be viewed as irrelevant, since Israel has rarely if ever complied with any UN resolution that it did not like, whether “binding” or not, and since Israel’s effective control of the U.S. government has ensured that its defiance has not given rise to any adverse consequences.

However, there is one respect in which the potential binding nature of such a “Uniting for Peace” resolution could become relevant.

If the State of Palestine were to follow up on this overwhelming General Assembly vote by applying to the Security Council for a status upgrade from non-member observer state to full member state and if the United States were to veto that application, could the same issue be brought to the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” resolution, with the result of that vote being treated by the UN secretariat, guided by a Secretary-General who is clearly not suffering Israeli defiance, extaordinary public rudeness and personal insults gladly, as binding?

American international law professor Francis Boyle thinks that this could and should be possible (https://accuracy.org/release/palestinian-un-bid-and-uniting-for-peace).

There is reason to hope that, if President Biden were to be tested in the days immediately ahead, Professor Boyle’s legal theory might not need to be.

Even while airlifting massive amounts of weapons to Israel and providing diplomatic cover for it, the U.S. government has been publicly insisting, with a level of sincerity that has yet to be tested, that a “two-state solution” is now essential for peace and security in the Middle East.

In light of this public stance and in the wake of its having disgusted most of mankind with its latest Security Council veto, would the U.S. government really dare to disgust most of mankind again with a second anti-Palestinian veto in rapid succession, one which would simultaneously lay bare the cynical insincerity of its purported support for Palestinian statehood, which is already recognized diplomatically by the UN, by 138 UN member states and by the Holy See/Vatican City? Exceptionally, right now, it might not.

If there is anything left of international law and the UN system, the occupation of the entire territory of a UN member state by another UN member state, as in the case of Kuwait for seven months, cannot be permitted to persist indefinitely and without consequences.

With global sympathy and support for Palestine and its people at an all-time high, Palestine has nothing to lose — and potentially a great deal to gain — from putting the United States to the test.

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Photograph Source: Peter van der Sluijs – CC BY-SA 4.0, Vox España – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020 and Jair Bolsonaro’s loss to Lula in Brazil in 2022, along with Rodrigo Duterte’s leaving the presidency of the Philippines last year, gave some quarters hope that the far-right or fascist wave had crested globally.

Two political earthquakes, taking place just in the last two weeks, have shattered this illusion. In Argentina, Javier Milei, a Trump-like, self-described anarcho-capitalist who brazenly denies that human rights abuses took place in that country during the so-called dirty war waged by the army in the late 1970s was overwhelmingly elected president. Two days later, in the elections in traditionally liberal Netherlands, the Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders emerged as the country’s biggest party. A Trumpist long before Trump showed up, Wilders wants to ban the Koran, describes Islam as the “ideology of a retarded culture,” and calls Moroccans “scum.”

When far-right personalities and movements started popping up during the last two decades, there was, in some quarters, strong hesitation to use the “f” word to describe them.  Indeed, as late as less than three years ago, I had to defend the use of the word fascist in the Cambridge Union debate against academics who were squeamish about employing it to describe far-right movements in Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. What Donald Trump and the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection have shown, however, is that the distinction between “far right” and “fascist” is academic. Or one can say that a “far-rightist” is a fascist who has not yet seized power, for it is only once they are in power that fascists fully reveal their political propensities.

A movement or person must be regarded as fascist when they fuse all or most of the following five features: 1) they show a disdain or hatred for democratic principles and procedures; 2) they tolerate or promote violence; 3) they have a heated mass base that supports their anti-democratic thinking and behavior; 4) they scapegoat and support the persecution of certain social groups; and 5) they are led by a charismatic individual who exhibits and normalizes all of the above.

I would like to focus on some people, aside from Trump, who fit the “f” word.  In the Philippines, after warning before the 2016 elections that Rodrigo Duterte would be “another Marcos,” I wrote two months into Duterte’s presidency that he was a “fascist original.” I was criticized by many opinion-makers, academics, and even progressives for using the “f” word.  Over seven years and 27,000 extra-judicial executions of alleged drug users later, the “f” word is one of the milder terms used for Rodrigo Duterte, with many preferring “mass murderer” or “serial killer.”

Narendra Modi has made the secular and diverse India of Gandhi and Nehru a thing of the past with his Hindu nationalist project, which relegates the country’s large Muslim minority to second class citizens.  Currently, he is carrying out the most sustained attack on the freedom of the press by putting progressive journalists in jail and bringing charges against noted writers like Arundhati Roy.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have almost completed their neutering of democracy.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential elections to Lula da Silva by a slight margin, but his followers refused to accept the verdict, and thousands of people from the right invaded the capital Brasilia in an attempt to overthrow the new government, in a remarkable replication of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington.

Europe is the region where fascist or radical right parties have made the most inroads. From having no radical right-wing regime in the 2000s, except occasionally and briefly as junior partners in unstable governing coalitions as in Austria, the region now has three in power—one in Hungary, the government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and the Law and Justice Party in Poland, which is trying to hold on to power despite having lost the October 2023 parliamentary elections. The far right is part of ruling coalitions in Sweden and Finland. The region has four more countries where a party of the far right is the main opposition party. And it has seven where the far right has become a major presence both in parliament and in the streets.

Social Conditions that Breed Fascism

Leaders are critical in fascist movements, but social conditions create the opportunities for the ascent of those leaders. Here one cannot overemphasize the role that neoliberalism and globalization have played in spawning movements of the radical right. The worsening living standards and great inequalities spawned by neoliberal policies created disillusionment among people who felt the liberal democracy had been captured by the rich and distrust in center-right and center-left parties that promoted those policies. These resentful, discontented masses are the base of fascist parties. It is this heated base motivated by a mix of economic insecurity, resentment, or hatred that accounts for the fact that although Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Trump are no longer in power, they can stage a comeback or be replaced by a new leader of the same type.

Take the United States. The 2016 election of Joe Biden drew a sigh of relief from quarters concerned with the health of democracy in the United States. But 11 million more Americans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, while 70 percent of the Republican Party believed against all evidence that he won the election. Today, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. Yet he’s left all his Republican rivals in the dust in the drive to challenge Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024, and he’s leading Biden in the polls in the swing states that will determine who will win next year’s elections. Indeed, his competitors for the Republican presidential nomination are trying to project an image of being more Trumpist than Trump.

Economic conditions, however, cannot fully account for the emergence of fascist movements.  Racism, ethnocentrism, and anti-immigrant sentiment also fuel them. In fact, these behavioral or ideological drives are central to the fascist project, which is to create a cross-class solidarity based on skin color, religion, language, or culture by defining as the Enemy or the Big Other those who are perceived to be different. It is not accidental that Hitler’s project was called national socialism—that is, it was “equality” but only for those of the same race and not for the Other. This Big Other is said to be the source of the crisis or the problems of one’s imagined community. In the United States today, white nationalism or white supremacy is the ideological expression of the fascist project, and in both Europe and the United States, strong feelings against non-white migrants are a key feature of fascist consciousness.

Fascism cannot be reduced to a conspiracy by Big Capital to repressively stabilize society and promote its interests, as traditional Marxists saw it. Fascists are not mere instruments of the elite. In fact, their rhetoric is not only anti-democratic or anti-liberal but also often anti-capitalist or anti-Big Business. Witness how Trump and his followers claim that they are anti-Big Tech or against the “plutocrats.” Fascists, however, do not seek to overthrow Big Business; they merely want an accommodation with Capital to serve their movement’s own interests, but with them in the driver’s seat.

During “normal times,” fascists and Big Capital can sometimes have different stands on some issues, as, for instance, in the case of “woke capitalism,” where corporations piously assert that corporate policies should be “pro-environment” or politically correct in hiring practices when it comes to race and gender. However, these differences are transient and minor, and when Capital is threatened by movements that cut into their profits or threaten their economic hegemony, it welcomes efforts by fascists to stabilize or “sanitize” the social order.

Fascists can come to power through elections, as Hitler, Trump, and Bolsonaro did. In fact, the closer they come to power, the more they try to project a constitutionalist or moderate image, as Giorgia Meloni did in Italy in the run-up to the 2022 parliamentary elections and Geert Wilders did more recently in the Netherlands. But once in power, they often seek to remain there through the use of force or violence. Violence is the main instrument by which fascists want to carry out their revolution or counterrevolution to “purify” society to assert or reassert the supremacy of the traditionally dominant majority defined by skin color, ethnic identity, or culture. Thus, in India, while they are reshaping the institutions of the country via their parliamentary majority, the Hindu nationalists see their power as based in the final analysis on their capacity for violence, which they periodically unleash to remind subordinate communities like the Muslims, as they did in the Gujarat massacre of 2002.

How to Counter Fascism

Let me end by proposing several moves we can take to deal with the fascist threat.

First, we need to stop resorting to easy explanations about the rise of far right, like the claim that trolls are responsible for it, and acknowledge that far-right personalities and movements have a critical mass of popular support.

Next, we need to find ways of stopping the extreme right from coming to power in the first place, like building broad united electoral fronts, even with non-fascist groups we may have differences with. It’s much harder to remove the far right once they’re in power.

Third, we need to make sure we have at the leading edge of our resistance those movements which have a great deal of resonance among broad sectors of the population including the middle classes, such as the movements to stop climate change, promote gender equality, and advance racial justice.

Fourth, we must fiercely defend human rights and democratic values, even where–or especially where–they have become unpopular. This will involve aggressively championing people and groups that are currently persecuted, with majority opinion being whipped up against them, like Muslims in India and non-white immigrants in both the United States and Europe. International solidarity with the persecuted is an essential element of the anti-fascist project.

Also, let’s not fear to see what we can learn from the extreme right, especially when it comes to the politics of passion or the politics of charisma, and see how our values can be advanced or promoted in passionate and charismatic ways. We must unite reason to passion and not see them as being in contradiction, though, of course, we must not violate our commitments to truth, justice, and fair play in the process.

Sixth, if history, especially of the United States, is any indication, one must not preclude the possibility of violent civil war, and should that become a real threat, to take the appropriate steps to counter it.

But, probably most important, we need to have a transformative vision that can compete with that of the far right, one based on genuine equality and genuine democratic empowerment that goes beyond the now discredited liberal democracy. Some call this vision socialism. Others would prefer another term, but the important thing is its message of radical, real equality beyond class, gender, and race.

There is no guarantee that fascism will not triumph, but it will certainly win unless we put ourselves, body and soul, fully and smartly, on the line to stop it.

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Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

Gaza was among the main topics on the agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrived in the Middle East region on Wednesday, December 6.

Some news reports referred to the trip as ‘rare’, especially since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022.

We know that the situation in Gaza, namely the Israeli war and the subsequent genocide, is a major objective in Putin’s visit, based on press statements from Russia’s official media.

But we do not know, yet, exactly how Gaza factored in, in Putin’s one-day visit.

Putin’s visit included the UAE and Saudi Arabia, two of the richest and most economically influential Arab countries, which are, like Russia, members of OPEC+ – the larger and most influential group of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

Oil prices, energy supplies and the fractious security of the Red Sea waterways are reportedly also part of Putin’s agenda. However, it is unlikely that the Russian president has initiated such an important visit to discuss any of these issues.

Indeed, fluctuating oil prices and achieving OPEC+ consensus regarding production levels have been ongoing issues linking Russia to the Middle East for years, especially since the start of the Ukraine war, which invited unprecedented US-Western sanctions.

But what does Putin have to say about Gaza, in particular?

In the early phase of the Israeli war with the Palestinian Resistance in the besieged Gaza Strip, Russia had taken a guarded position, condemning the targeting of civilians, while calling for a comprehensive political solution.

But, days later, Moscow’s position began evolving into a stronger stance, namely condemning the Israeli war on Gaza, Washington’s blind support for Tel Aviv and the US’ intransigence during UN Security Council meetings.

President Putin, on October 13, compared Israel’s besiegement of the Gaza Strip to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1941. “In my view it is unacceptable, more than two million people live there. Far from all of them support Hamas, by the way, far from all. But all of them have to suffer, including women and children,” he said.

Moscow’s UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzia, has repeatedly attempted, to no avail, to pass a UNSC resolution demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. His efforts culminated to nil due to US refusal, backed by equally strong rejection of other Western allies of Israel.

Despite his unsuccessful efforts, Nebenzia has used the UNSC as a platform to declare Russia’s progressively strong stances against the Israeli war, going as far as questioning Israel’s long-touted ‘right to defend itself’.

“All they (the West) can do is to keep (talking) about Israel’s alleged right for self-defense, which, as an occupying state, it does not have, as was confirmed by the (UN) International Court consultative ruling in 2004,” Nebenzia said on November 2.

Following the US shameful use of the veto power to block the passing of a UNSC resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the Russian representative Dmitry Polyanskiy stated: “Our American colleagues have condemned thousands – if not tens of thousands – more civilians (..) including women and children, to death, along with the UN workers who are trying to help them.”

But for various reasons, the Russian position did not evolve beyond political rhetoric, however strong, into any tangible strategies.

The typical explanation for Russia’s inability to formulate a practical strategy regarding Gaza is its lack of any serious diplomatic or political capital beyond the current war on Ukraine; and that Moscow was fully aware of the Middle East’s delicate geopolitical balances.

But things began to change – not in Moscow, but in Gaza itself.

Over two months into a war that has resulted in the killing of more than 17,000 civilians, so far, Tel Aviv is finally discovering the limits of its military power.

Moreover, the war gradually began to destabilize the Middle East, involving state and powerful non-state actors, many of whom are close allies to Moscow and protectors of Russian interests in the region.

They include Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansarallah in Yemen, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and, of course, Hamas itself.

As a sign of closer relationship between Hamas and Russia, the Palestinian movement has released all Israeli captives with dual Israeli-Russian citizenship.

It has done so without a formal prisoner swap agreement, like the ones that have been mediated through Qatar and Egypt, resulting in the release of scores of Israelis and hundreds of Palestinians, starting on November 24.

Surely, Putin’s visit to the Middle East carries greater meaning than the mere ‘emphasis on the strong relationships’ between Russia and a few Arab countries. This meaning is compounded by the immediate visit to Moscow by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on December 7, also with the sole purpose of discussing the situation in Gaza.

Is it possible that Russia has finally found a geostrategic opportunity in the Middle East that would allow it to expand, in terms of its strategic alliances and political role, beyond Syria?

This expansion must appear as an attractive opportunity for Moscow, especially as early signs of Israeli military failure and, by extent, American failure, in Gaza are becoming unmistakably clear.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is expected to deliver an important speech at the 21st Doha Forum in Qatar on December 10.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, was quoted by the TASS news agency on December 6 as confirming that Lavrov will be discussing the war in Gaza and the overall situation in Palestine and in the Middle East.

“The minister will pay special attention to the problem of Palestinian-Israeli settlement, of course, and security issues in the Middle East,” she said.

None of this, including the potential new Russian ‘vision’ in the Middle East, would have been possible if it were not for the Israeli-US inability to defeat small Resistance groups in a tiny, besieged region like Gaza.

Aside from the setback of the Israeli military machine, which has been financed and sustained by Washington, the genocide in Gaza has cost the US whatever little political credibility it still enjoyed in the Middle East.

Time will tell whether Russia will be able to stake a claim and help define a new Middle East in the post-Gaza war.

However, one of the most important factors that Russia will consider before making any major moves is the tangible outcome of the Israeli war on Gaza.

And, unlike most Israeli wars against Palestinians and Arabs in the past, this time around it seems that Palestinian Resistance – despite its very limited capabilities in the face of a powerful Israel-US military machine – is the one most likely to control the outcomes.

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Aerial View of Haifa oil refineries. Photo: Meronim, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed.

It was the sign that got to me. I was standing with protesters outside the Burlington (VT) City Hall at a rally organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. To my left I spotted a man, grim-faced and silent, holding aloft a piece of cardboard with these words scratched in black:

“Jews against Genocide.”

“So it has finally come to this,” I said to myself.

Why, I wondered, would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Biden administration risk their standing in the world and ignore calls for a ceasefire? Did they have an unspoken agenda?

As  a chronicler of the endless post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, I concluded that the end game was likely connected to oil and natural gas, discovered off the coast of Gaza, Israel and Lebanon in 2000 and 2010 and estimated to be worth $500 billion. The discovery promised to fuel massive development schemes involving the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Also at stake was the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean into a heavily militarized energy corridor that could supply Europe with its energy needs as the war in Ukraine dragged on.

Here was the tinderbox waiting to explode that I had predicted in 2022. Now it was exploding before our very eyes. And at what cost in human lives?

Map of the Eastern Mediterranean region showing the area included in the USGS Levant Basin Province assessment. Photo credit: USGS.

Reflections on the Israeli War on Gaza

The year 1975 was my last in beautiful, cosmopolitan Beirut, Lebanon, before it descended into 15 years of brutal civil war, killing 100,000 people.

As a journalist for the Beirut Daily Star, I began reporting on the escalating tensions among the ruling Maronite Christians, Shiite Muslims — located primarily in southern Lebanon not far from the border with Israel — and the Palestinians caught in between. The presence of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon was not appreciated by Lebanon’s Maronite Christian ruling elite.

The PLO had been forced out of Jordan by King Hussein during what became known as Black September (1970). In that conflict Arafat’s forces fought to prevent Jordanians from regaining control of the once-Jordanian-controlled West Bank, after Israeli forces had pulled out following the Six Day War of 1967. Defeated by King Hussein’s forces, Palestinian refugees poured into Lebanon. In their desperation to be heard by the international community, Palestinian militants began hijacking planes in 1968 to express their grievances against Israeli occupation.

Those three years of reporting in the Middle East gave me a rare lesson in how oil was turning desert sheikhdoms into modern city states, and Beirut into a refuge for the rich — but also a refuge for displaced Palestinians, which ultimately would not be tolerated.

From the rooftop of my apartment I witnessed French Mirage jets supplied to the Maronites roaring overhead to drop bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. Days later, I spent an afternoon on my belly, hiding under a desk as bullets flew around a Christian school where I had taken refuge during a sudden outbreak of fighting.

I began writing about parents dodging bullets to rescue their children. I did not know who was fighting whom, and as dusk descended on the school, I happily accepted a parent’s offer to rush me to safety. As we dashed to his car, his hand tightened on mine as we narrowly escaped a sniper’s bullet. He was a Palestinian Christian, and he likely saved my life.

Shortly afterwards, I returned to the States, not keen on covering a war that made no sense to me. It would take another seven years before I would figure out that this ongoing “civil war” was really about ridding Lebanon of radicalized Palestinians.

In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon and coordinated with right-wing Lebanese Phalangist forces to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Arafat and his PLO got the message. They departed Lebanon for exile in Tunisia that year, and the Palestinian resistance, once secular and leftist, gave way to the rise of the Islamist Hezbollah fighters who resisted future Israeli incursions into Shiite-dominated southern Lebanon, and ended up earning the respect of Lebanon’s large Shiite population.

Public opinion in the US and the world began to shift against Israel in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, but the American media and members of Congress equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism and invariably reminded the world of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Censorship of anyone who showed sympathy for the Palestinians was pervasive, so I took a hiatus from writing about the Middle East during this time, and ended up joining my future husband, author and investigative journalist Gerard Colby, in investigating the genocide of Amazonian Indians during the 1960s and ’70s. The result of our 18-year investigation was Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil(HarperCollins, 1994). That work became my primer for understanding oil and power at the highest level.

Death of a Master Spy — and Oil

By the mid-1990s, I was drawn back to writing about the Middle East, which was always in my heart, having been born in Beirut and having attended high school there — which was the beginning of my political awakening. But this time I was on a personal mission. I decided to investigate the circumstances behind the plane crash that killed my father. I was six weeks old at the time. Daniel Dennett had just completed a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia in March 1947.

As head of counterintelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its successor, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), his assignment was to determine the route of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (aka Tapline) and whether it would terminate in Haifa, Palestine, soon to be Israel, or nearby Lebanon.

His last report stated that US oil executives were upset with anti-Zionist Syria, which was refusing to let the pipeline cross Syrian territory.

This was remedied in 1949, when the CIA removed Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri al-Quwatli, and replaced him with a Lebanese army officer who gave the green light to the pipeline crossing over Syria’s Golan Heights and terminating near the southern Lebanese port of Sidon.

Saudi oil, and the Trans-Arabian Pipeline which carried it to the Mediterranean Sea, was important to American ambitions in the Middle East. The New York Times, on March 2, 1947, carried a full page story about it entitled: “Pipeline for US Adds to Middle East Issues: Oil Concession Raises Questions Involving the Position of Russia.”

The article, written by President Harry S. Truman’s future son-in-law, Clifton Daniel, was a treatise on the “Great Game for Oil.” “Protection of that investment,” Daniel wrote, “and the military and economic security that it represents, inevitably will become one of the prime objectives of American foreign policy in this area, which already has become a pivot of world politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and West.”

The East, of course, was the Soviet Union. And the US’s exclusive concession in Saudi oil would soon elevate it into becoming a world power, much to the consternation of not only the Soviets, but also the British and the French. Our erstwhile wartime allies were all quietly trying to undermine US interests in the Middle East.

In 1944, my father wrote in a declassified document that his mission for the OSS was “to protect the oil at all costs.” Three years later, as he left Saudi Arabia for Ethiopia on another oil mission, his plane mysteriously crashed, killing all six Americans on board. A CIA official confessed to me, “We always thought it was sabotage, but we couldn’t prove it.” Feeling validated in my quest for the truth, I began digging into history for more context.

After World War II, the US would replace a much-weakened Britain as the overseer of what was to become Israel. And Israel, following its war for independence in 1948 and its expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, would rapidly become a heavily militarized outpost hitched to US interests, with pro-Western European Jews who had survived the Holocaust settling there to protect their lives — and unwittingly to most — to protect Saudi oil “at all costs.”

Seizing Iraq: A ‘First Class War Aim’

My search for oil connections sent me even further back to World War I, when seizing the oil of Iraq became a “first class war aim” for the British admiralty under Winston Churchill. He had decided in 1911 that the British navy would have to replace its fuel source (coal, of which Britain had plenty) with cheaper and more efficient oil (of which Britain had none), hence requiring Churchill to fight “on a sea of troubles” to get oil for his Navy.

Britain succeeded, with the help of Lawrence of Arabia and Arabs who were promised independence in return for helping to drive the Turks (the tottering Ottoman Empire) out of the Middle East. Instead, by 1917, Britain’s foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, penned the Balfour Declaration signaling British approval of a Jewish home in Palestine.

Less known is the fact that the declaration was actually a letter written to Walter Rothschild, a scion of Europe’s powerful oil and banking family. Both men understood the stakes were high for protecting a pipeline planned to bring oil from Iraq (which was seen as an especially promising source) to the West, through the port of Haifa. Establishing a colony of European Jews in and around the pipeline’s terminal point in Haifa would assuage their security concerns.

Netanyahu: ‘Soon the Oil Will Be Flowing to Haifa’

In 1927 oil exploration yielded a major strike near Kirkuk, Iraq; the long-planned pipeline was completed in 1934 and oil flowed through it to the West until 1948, when it was closed by the Iraqis during the First Arab–Israeli War. Some five decades later, reopening it became a rallying cry of then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the US invasion of Iraq. Netanyahu envisioned Saddam Hussein being overthrown and replaced by a pro-Israel Iraqi dissident named Ahmad Chalabi. “Soon the oil will be flowing to Haifa!” Netanyahu proclaimed. “It’s not a pipe dream.”

But Chalabi was soon ousted and discredited as the creator of the US government’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) pretext for invading Iraq, and Netanyahu’s pipe dream had to be put on hold.

In 2000, significant natural gas fields were discovered off the coast of Gaza and Israel. The Palestinians claimed that the gas fields off its coast, known as Gaza Marine, belonged to them. Arafat, now settled in the West Bank, hired British Gas (now the biggest energy supplier in the UK) to explore the fields. He learned they could provide $1 billion in badly needed revenue. “This is a Gift of God for our people,” Arafat proclaimed, “and a strong foundation for a Palestinian state.”

The Israelis thought otherwise. In 2007, Moshe Yaalon, a military hardliner (who would become Israel’s defense minister from 2013 to 2016) rejected claims by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the development of Gaza’s offshore gas by British Gas would bring badly needed economic development to the area. Although proceeds of a Palestinian gas deal could amount up to $1 billion, Yaalon asserted in a paper for Jerusalem Issue Briefs that the revenue “would not likely trickle down to an impoverished Palestinian people.” He insisted that the proceeds would “likely serve to fund terror attacks against Israel.” It is clear, he added, that, “without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas’s control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”

One year later, on December 27, 2008, Israeli forces launched Operation Cast Lead with the aim, Haaretz reported, of sending Gaza “decades into the past,” killing nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. But it did not result in Israel gaining sovereignty over the Gaza gas fields.

In December 2010, prospectors discovered a much larger gas field off the Israeli coast, dubbed Leviathan. The field offered enough energy to supply Israel’s needs, but also presented Israel, according to the Hazar Strategy Institute, “with one of its greatest challenges: protecting the new offshore gas infrastructure in the Eastern Mediterranean which is vital to its energy security and therefore to its economic security.”

I was reminded of the 1947 New York Times piece on the Saudi Tapline pipeline, emphasizing the need for protecting this large American investment, hence the need for military and economic security.

In the summer of 2014, Netanyahu launched a massive invasion of Gaza with the aim of uprooting Hamas and ensuring Israeli monopoly over the Gazan gas fields, killing 2,100 Palestinians, three-quarters of them civilians. Journalist Nafeez Ahmed, writing for The Guardian, claimed “resource competition has increasingly been at the heart of the conflict [in Gaza], motivated largely by Israel’s increasing domestic energy woes.” He continued, “In an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels is increasingly influencing the critical decision that can inflame war.”

After the 2014 invasion, the Gazan economy went into a free fall, exacerbating concerns about growing unrest.

October 7 and the End Game

Netanyahu has succeeded so far in averting questions about how Israel’s much vaunted security apparatus could have been taken by surprise by the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.

He insists on calling October 7 “Israel’s 9/11,” even comparing how the Bush administration, like Israel, was “caught by surprise” by the terrorist attacks that day (in fact, Bush had been forewarned of an impending attack). Now Netanyahu had a pretext for justifying Israel’s latest and most brutal invasion of Gaza.

News has seeped out, however, that he was forewarned by Egyptian intelligence that Hamas was on the verge of orchestrating attacks in Israel. In fact, he was repeatedly warned by Israeli intelligence that the political turmoil surrounding his advocacy for changing the Israeli judiciary threatened Israeli national security.

Which raises the unavoidable question: Did Netanyahu let October 7 happen to achieve his ambitions: silencing his critics, fighting corruption charges, staying out of jail, and rallying the country around a wartime president bent on destroying Hamas?

Much of northern Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and it is his goal to obliterate southern Gaza as well. Perhaps he is thinking that only then, after destroying Hamas and forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, can he convince international lenders to support his long-held scheme of turning Israel into an energy corridor.

Netanyahu — and possibly President Joe Biden — are likely taking the “long view,” convincing themselves that the world will forget what happened once economic development takes off in the region, powered by Israel’s abundant offshore natural gas in the Leviathan Field and Gaza Marine. Work has already begun on another infrastructure project: building the so-called Ben Gurion Canal, from the tip of northern Gaza south into the Gulf of Aqaba, connecting Israel to the Red Sea and providing a competitor to Egypt’s Suez Canal.

Ben Gurion Canal Project

The Canal Project will also connect Israel to Saudi Arabia’s $500 billion futuristic Neom tech city. One plan envisioned by the Abraham Accords involved normalizing relations with Israel, and tying the signatories — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco — into vast development projects in the name of peace.

Ironically, at least for me, this involves a revival of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, only with its terminal point in Haifa, instead of Lebanon.

On the positive side, much of the world is now recognizing that there can be no development project, no peace process, that does not guarantee the military security of Palestine as well as Israel, and recognize the right of Palestinians to live free of occupation, with the same rights, dignity, and peace as their Israeli neighbors.

Even more encouraging are the stands being taken by American Jews who realize that Netanyahu’s siege of Gaza has only increased antisemitism worldwide. As Rabbi Alissa Wise noted recently, “All of this is making Jews less safe in the world. Israel’s actions in Gaza, but also not just now but for generations — when Palestinians are not free, Jews are less safe in the world. And that is the crux of the matter.”

Peter Beinart, editor of Jewish Currents, clearly sees the folly of Netanyahu’s war against Hamas: “You can’t defeat Hamas militarily, because even if you depose it in Gaza, you will be laying the seeds for the next group of people who will be fighting Israel.”

This originally appeared on WhoWhatWhy.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In a post on the California Public Agency Labor and Employment Blog, David Urban explained in 2018 how:

At a public college or university, students and employees can assert First Amendment claims against the institution if it tries to discipline or censor them for speech activities.

However, students, faculty and staff at a private institution, according to Urban, “do not have that option, because the institution is not bound by the First Amendment” because private universities are not government entities.

This explains why the most extreme clampdowns on vocal critics of the Israeli genocide unfolding in Gaza since Oct 8, have occurred on campuses of elite private colleges and universities, among them Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis, Columbia. When members of these campus communities who support justice for Palestinians point out in rallies and social media posts and during teach-ins and in classes, the inhuman disproportionality of Israeli attacks on the civilian population of Gaza, which have claimed 15,000 lives to date, over 6,000 of these being children, contrasted with 1200 lives and 250 hostages taken by Hamas during their Oct 7th attack, which precipitated what can only be termed as Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign– well, these supporters of Palestinian human rights are quick to be branded by many including university authorities as anti-semites.

The chants by student, staff and faculty protestors to “free Palestine from the river to the sea” are weaponized by Israeli supporters as damning evidence calling for the annihilation of the Jewish citizens of Israel, the use of words like “intifada” (which literally means to rise up)–depicted as a call to arms to commit genocide on Israeli Jews. Clearly, such tactics are designed to obfuscate the actual genocide of Palestinian children, women and men unfolding before the world’s eyes in real-time on a daily basis over these past eight weeks.

In several cases, these virulent campaigns to tarnish Palestinian human rights advocates have led to calls for the firing of tenured distinguished scholars (a prominent case in point being Joseph Massad of Columbia University)–whilst many faculty without the protection of tenure have been fired, student activists have been doxxed by pro-Israeli donors and their acolytes and hired thugs (in several cases leading to a withdrawal of job offers) and some elite universities have banned Palestinian student organizations such as SJP (Brandeis was the first to do so)–as well as progressive Jewish organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace who also have been chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” This ubiquitous chant for freedom indicates the true meaning of this phrase. Rather than calling for genocide or removal of the Jewish population of Israel, it is calling, quite simply, for the creation of one indivisible secular and democratic state where ALL of its inhabitants can enjoy the same rights and privileges, and live in peace and dignity, together.

The belief that, at public universities such as the one where I am employed, faculty are comparatively secure in our ability to exercise our First Amendment rights, so that we may educate and debate civilly on contentious issues such as those triggered by this latest chapter on the Palestine/Israel conflict (an extension of the war on Palestine that started 100 years ago, according to Columbia University’s preeminent historian of Palestine, Rashid Khalidi), was punctured last week.

A respected colleague, who along with myself and a couple of others, has been unflagging in his attempts to get pro-Zionist faculty on our campus Discuss listserv to confront their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (an overwhelming number of whom are children), has been publicly silenced.

I woke Thursday morning to an email from this colleague informing me that he had been charged with violating the university’s Title IX code in a complaint filed against him by someone on the campus listserv. As a result, while the complaint winds its way through the system, he is not permitted to post or participate in any further discussions on this forum.

Title IX is a federal law that was passed in 1972 to ensure that male and female students and employees in educational settings are treated equally and fairly. It protects against discrimination based on sex (including sexual harassment). It also protects employees and students from discrimination on the basis of religion, race, disability or sexual orientation.

On the face of it, the allegation of any such harassment by my colleague against anyone on our campus faculty listserv is so absurd as to be laughable and one hopes, easily dismissed.

My colleague after all, is not the employer harassing an employee! All views expressed in this public forum are exchanged voluntarily between faculty colleagues who are all equal participants on a level playing field (despite differences in professorial rank.)

If anything, it is we who have been critiquing the apartheid Israeli state’s actions that have unleashed a murderous assault on thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, who are being harassed on this listserv, as we are accused of antisemitism by several of our pro-Zionist colleagues.

Yet, I suspect that one of the latter who is unable to defend her views in any coherent or rational way in response to my colleague’s repeated questions about her moral stance on the genocide of Palestinians, has decided that because she cant hide from the ethical implications of his arguments which she has failed to challenge– well, then, the next best thing is to find a way to remove campus-wide access to his voice of reason and humanity.

Orwell would have understood our current landscape only too well. The Zionist propaganda machine is in overdrive creating all manner of diversions, false narratives, and attempts to convince the world that up is down and wrong is right. While indeed these are scary times for any and everyone trying to speak truth to power, the irrefutable fact is: the court of public opinion has already ruled in favor of justice and liberation for Palestine from the chokehold of zionist imperialism backed by the US and former colonial western powers.

My colleague and scores of others like us are the vanguard of a new day; our voices can not be silenced. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

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Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY-SA 4.0

Thirty years ago, Philip Roth wrote a profound, funny, disturbing novel about Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism called Operation Shylock. In this story an American Jewish writer named Philip Roth discovers that another writer who also calls himself Philip Roth is giving people in Israel fits by preaching “Diasporism” – a doctrine calling on Israel’s Jews to return to the mostly European lands from which they or their parents originally came. Roth #2 considers Europe and America to be the Jews’ true homelands: places where a humane, creative Jewish culture once flourished, and which are now needed as sanctuaries because of Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians and the Islamic world’s hostility to Israel. The heretical idea given voice by the Roth doppelganger and discussed pro and con by a galaxy of other characters in the novel is that the Zionist experiment – the attempt to establish a just and secure Jewish State – has failed.

Operation Shylock, which I assigned to graduate students in a course called “Conflict and Literature,” was clearly more than a joke – but not even Roth expected it to be prophetic. One wonders what the novelist, who died five years ago, would say about the current war in Gaza, which began with an attack by Hamas fighters who murdered, raped, and wounded some 900 Jewish civilians and 350 soldiers and took more than 240 people hostage, provoking a series of retaliatory bombings and ground assaults by Israeli forces that have so far killed more than 16,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and at least 5,000 of them children. That war continues at a hellish pace, threatening to kill and wound tens of thousands more, and tempting other nations to intervene to stop the slaughter.

Philip Roth would certainly understand the terror among Israeli Jews generated by the vile Hamas attacks and their desire to eliminate the threat of repeated assaults by conducting a campaign of righteous destruction. In the novel, Roth #1 attends the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American accused of being a famously cruel concentration camp guard, and reflects on the hold that the trauma of the Holocaust still has on the consciousness of Israelis. But there are always at least two “Roths” – two dialogists in the author and in each of us – to complicate matters by asking hard questions.  Questions like these:

+ What, aside from sheer malice, drove Hamas to “break out” of Gaza on October 7? Does the structural violence of occupation, i.e., the effective imprisonment of 2.5 million Palestinians for 17 years in an impoverished strip of urban territory, help to explain (even if it does not justify) the vengeful violence of the escapees?

+ Assuming that Hamas fighters do hide among civilians, how many innocent Palestinians must die or be maimed for life so that Israel can destroy that organization? Isn’t a ratio of more than 5:1 civilian to military casualties (if not more) clearly excessive? And isn’t the analogy with World War II drawn by those who equate the Hamas attack with the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, or the Holocaust itself wildly exaggerated?

+ Furthermore, don’t these disproportionate civilian casualties and exaggerated analogies suggest that the real motives for the continuing slaughter of Palestinians are a combination of fear and revenge, supported by a tribal sentiment that one of “us” is worth ten, a hundred, or a thousand of “them”?

+ And finally, isn’t the alternative to seeking the utter destruction of one’s enemy a concerted effort to find elements among them with whom can negotiate and to make peace with? The Israelis do not wish to negotiate with “terrorists”nor the Palestinians with “war criminals,” but in the end, unless the killing reaches genocidal levels, they must both do so.

Such questions lead finally to the existential doubt voiced by Roth #2 – the question of the Jewish State’s legitimacy. The war in Gaza is obviously a tragedy for Israelis who have lost family and friends due to Hamas atrocities, and for Palestinians whose relatives and friends are dying en masse in the most intensive bombing and ground battles of the twenty-first century. In important ways, however, the struggle is more destructive for Israel than for Palestine. While millions rally in support of the people of Gaza, the Jewish State is in the process of losing its claim to be a state embodying Jewish values, not just “a centralized political organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population within a territory”(Wikipedia) or “an organ for the oppression of one class by another” (Karl Marx). In Gaza, Israel acts exactly like every other collection of ethno-nationalists with guns. In doing so, it forfeits both the international sympathy that helped to create it and the support of many Jews and others outside Israel that helped to sustain it.

The state as a security zone vs. the state as a sponsor and avatar of communal values: there was always this duality at the heart of Zionism. Activists like those who founded Netanyahu’s Likud party believed that the Jews should have a state, any state: a place, regardless of other characteristics, where they would be entitled to live, and an army that would protect them against enemies. Should the state be democratic? Pluralistic? Peace-loving? Maybe, maybe not. Nationalists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky were entirely devoted to the value of security and the Jewish people’s right to occupy a territory like those controlled by certain other ethnic or religious communities. (This thinking, based on a supposed right of ethnic self-determination, led to the spurious equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.)

For other Zionists, however, collective security was linked and in certain cases might be qualified by other values, such as the importance of labor solidarity, democratic politics, and cultural pluralism. Orthodox Jewish religious practices and ideas were bowed to in Israel, but religious parties were not admitted to the inner circle of power until after the 1967 “Six Days War.” Even so, when push came to shove, security tended to trump other values, with the result that well before Netanyahu and company came to power, the Jewish State had become in essential respects an ordinary state, armed to the teeth, expanding its influence whenever possible, and systematically privileging capitalists over workers, political insiders over the masses, Europeanized Jews over Mizrahim, and Jews over Palestinians and other non-Jews.

“Don’t you understand?” one of my Israeli Jewish friends said with great annoyance when I questioned this obsession with security and noted the crimes against humanity that seemed to be unfolding in Gaza. “It is Jewish survival that is at stake. We did not survive the Holocaust to be murdered by Hamas terrorists.”

I began to reply that Israel is a nuclear-armed state, that the Jews are now one of the world’s most empowered groups, and that Hamas is more than a terrorist organization, however crazed some of its members clearly are. But what I recalled at that moment was the remembered voice of a man called Israel Shahak – an Israeli chemist and political activist who visited Washington D.C. in the sixties. Along with the theologian Martin Buber, Judah Magnes of Hebrew University, and a few other notables, Israel was an advocate of a bi-national state – two communities with collective rights sharing power in one polity – and was clearly not a Zionist. I said something to him about the threat to Jewish survival that many people thought was posed by the Arab states, and he replied, “Richard! Whoever told you that survival was a Jewish value?”

That shocked me. Isn’t survival – the right to life – both a Jewish and a universal value? Wasn’t the failure of European Jewry to assert and defend that right a contributing cause of the Holocaust? But after a while, I understood what Israel was driving at. Our right, he was saying, is not superior to theirs. Whatever Joshua’s followers may have done to the Canaanites in the 15^th century B.C.E., Jews are not authorized to purchase their survival by exterminating other groups. So far from being morally superior to others, as the Prophets taught, our failures to act righteously and to achieve social justice would incite a just God to punish us.

Israel Shahak might have added that, in any case, the modern State of Israel has very little to do with the survival of the Jewish people. Without the support of European and American Jewry, it would probably not exist – certainly not in its present form. At this point, the apparent craziness of Roth #2 in Operation Shylock becomes creepily prescient, since what mainly jeopardizes the security of Israeli Jews today is the horribly dysfunctional relationship between Israel and the Palestinian population, exacerbated by the inflammatory role of the United States acting as the successor to the British and French empire-builders who formerly dominated the region. Neither nukes nor walls nor bombs raining down on Gaza will make Israel secure. That hoped-for security will depend upon its leaders’ ability to make peace with the Palestinians at home and stop acting as U.S. imperial agents abroad. And, until these needs are satisfied, the state cannot claim to be a homeland in which Jews will be protected.

The absence of peace, then, generates a crisis of Zionism. Why should Jews in the so-called diaspora continue to support the Jewish State if it serves neither as a sanctuary or an embodiment of Jewish values?  If Zionism means simply a state controlled by Jews, there is no more reason for Jews to support it financially or politically than for the Italian “diaspora” to make contributions to Rome. On the other hand, if Israel/Palestine were to become a state dedicated not to Jewish supremacy but to bi-national community, there would be compelling reasons for both Jews, Palestinians, and others to give it massive moral and material support.

In the end, what we are dealing with in Israel-Palestine is a fratricidal conflict – a struggle between siblings related by history, language, religion, customs, and, if one goes back far enough in time, by blood. Such conflicts are particularly difficult to resolve; as Lewis Coser put it in his classic study of social conflict, “the closer the group, the more intense the conflict.”

Palestinians and Israeli Jews resemble each other in profound ways. They are passionate about family and education, at home in urban settings, and love to argue and to trade. Like Cain and Abel, they have the same parents; their histories overlap, but one is the favored child and the other the disfavored. Cain’s violence is a sin because he ignores God’s advice and wills his brother’s death, but there is a preferential structure that is equally potent and fundamental as a cause of violence. What generates such bitter conflict is not just the parties’ closeness but an explosive mixture of intimacy and inequality.

So it is in the case of Israel and Palestine, now engaged in a murderous warfare. This conflict will end, finally, when the modern Cain and Abel recognize that they are members of the same family and pledge that neither group will be preferred over the other.  And when their imperial “parent,” the United States of America, stops using them and their neighbors to maintain its own supremacy, which it mistakenly calls security. With casualties in Gaza mounting uncontrollably, we need to do more at this point than prescribe policies that leaders will probably ignore. We need to mourn the dead and wounded, embrace the living, and pray and act for peace.

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The massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It is not a thing to be easily forgotten. It is our duty to cherish their memory.

– Mahatma Gandhi

Introduction: Morality Divorced Politics

War breeds depravity and vague appeals to morality give way to a politics soaked in blood and destruction.[1] Too often it is the most innocent who pay the price. The most recent and tragic example is the death and violence that has been waged on the children of Israel and Gaza. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, when violence first erupted on October 7th with Hamas’s brutal and heinous attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, 29 Israeli children were killed.[2] The killing of innocent children continued in shockingly accelerated numbers with Israel’s policy of collective punishment. By November 26^th, a staggering 5500 Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza, an additional 1800 are missing, and nine thousand were injured.[3]  About half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are children.

For the children killed in both Israel and Gaza, history did not begin on October 7^th. History makes clear that the creation of graveyards for children has a long legacy and is deeply rooted in the language of war, militarism, forced detentions, occupation, blockades, and violence.[4] It is a language that pushes aside the rhetoric and value of human dignity, social responsibility, compassion for the other, and democracy itself. The killing of children in war is overlooked when human dignity succumbs to nationalistic passions and militarized machineries of violence.

Amid the current Israel-Hamas war, images of children covered in blood, limbs missing, bodies robbed of life are forgotten amidst the calls for security and revenge “created and maintained by planes and weapons of war.”[5] This is especially true for the children of Gaza. Under such circumstances, memory fails, and history no longer serves as a warning and moral witness to the depravity of sacrificing children to the cruelty of prioritizing war over peace. When history, ethics, and respect for human dignity disappear in the framing of violence, especially with regard to the killing of children, silence becomes both a form of betrayal and an accessory to ignorance and violence.[6] Whether by Hamas or Israel,  And the killing and wounding of children will continue, and must be condemned.

As Martin Luther King Jr. stated in his famous 1967 Riverside Church speech condemning the Vietnam War, times of violence and war make it even more necessary to raise the question regarding who is going to speak for the children.[7]King’s moving words are as relevant today in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war as they were in 1967. For King, the burden of conscience, justice, and compassion demands a notion of social responsibility that enables one “to speak for the weak, the voiceless [and the] suffering and helpless outcast children.”[8]

Children are innocent. They do not create the conditions for war; nor do they wage war on others. The deaths of all children in this conflict are tragic and as Judith Butler has argued “There can be no inequality here.”[9] How might we understand the Israel-Hamas war at a time in history when massive machineries of death not only engage in the slaughter of children, but as David Theo Goldberg has argued, such actions are “predicated on accepting that there is some self-defending legitimacy to killing almost at random women, children and men” in order to provide security through bombs, tanks, planes, and indiscriminate killing of civilians.[10] Of course, inflated emphases on security and fear are not the only major legitimating arguments for war but are connected to Rebecca Gordon’s observation that “War may not be healthy for children and other living things, but it’s great for the arms industry.”[11]

How might history, morality and politics be theorized to provide a language for opposing the actions of the leadership of both Hamas and right-wing Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu. This is an especially crucial issue, especially regarding Netanyahu whose war policies get relentlessly legitimated in the ethically eviscerated vocabulary of authoritarian double-speak of “collateral damage,” “military necessity,” “self-defense,” “human shields,” and “forces of barbarism.” As Jason Stanely observes, the killing of civilians cannot be vindicated in the name of self-protection by either side in this war. What must be acknowledged is that Israel’s desire for revenge, coupled with its overwhelming powerful military advantage over Hamas, makes it unacceptable to justify the fact that it is engaging in the [disproportionate] mass killing of innocent civilians, largely children.”[12]

 In these violent though greatly asymmetrical war machines waged by Hamas and the Israeli state, “justice equals injustice” and for children who are caught in this overwhelming assault by the Israeli Defense Forces, there is no world of play, justice, or joy. Instead, they live in a world in which there is only the intolerable reality of bloodletting, the destruction of hospitals and housing, and no life beyond militarized policies of revenge.[13] How else to explain two young children, one 15-year-old and another 8-year-old, being killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank? It gets worse.

Surely, given that over 15,000 civilians are dead, many of them women and children, as a result of Netanyahu’s war of reprisal, it is reasonable to break the silence and ask whether the staggering amount of destruction and death in Gaza “add up to a reasonable response to the nightmare of Hamas’s October 7^th attack.”[14]  Judith Butler goes further and argues that targeting civilians, but especially children, amounts to what she calls a “genocidal set of policies.”[15] In making this claim, she defends the right to criticize the Israeli state by claiming it is “not antisemitic to criticize the state of Israel if the state of Israel is a settler colonial state that’s doing violence of an extraordinary kind. One objects to injustice. Indeed, as a Jew, you’re obligated to object to injustice. You would not be a good Jew if you were not objecting to injustice. To be in solidarity with Palestine is not necessarily to agree with all the military actions of Hamas, but it is to stand with the people who are being targeted in a genocidal manner.”[16]

The death-dealing zones of tranquilization both haunt and shape the mainstream media and other educational institutions regarding their coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Militarism merged with power produces a suppression of history, dissent, and civic courage. Truth is sacrificed to propaganda and the workings of a massive disimagination machine that has no memory, ethics, sense of justice, or future. The reach of violence and death in Israel by Hamas is shocking in its depravity and has been well publicized in the mainstream media and in other cultural apparatuses. The same publicity is not afforded to  the suffering experienced by the children and civilians in Gaza inflicted by the Israeli state, which gets too little coverage as the media reinforces a massive degree of historical and social amnesia.

Morality and politics appear to have negligible effects from those calling for peace on both sides of the conflict. Moreover, the fixation on morality with regard to the atrocities suffered by the Israeli civilians has a depoliticizing effect because it obscures “the massive power imbalance, which shapes the current crisis.”[17] The unacknowledged asymmetry of power, violence, and repression in the dominant media works to shut down a fruitful and truthful dialogue among Israelis and Palestinians regarding the history,  roots, and evolving context of the war and a recognition of the long-standing suffering of the Palestinian people.  Moreover, the often-one-sided emphasis on Israeli victims and hostages runs the risk of offering what Noura Erakat terms an “unquestioned support for Israeli militarism” and in doing so subordinates any talk of a possible political solution to a moral problem.[18]

Netanyahu’s eliminationist language is echoed in his claim that  “I will never allow a Palestinian state….We will ensure Gaza never poses a threat again.” [19] This extremist rhetoric provides a glimpse into the far-political calculus driving the massive bombing of Gaza and the staggering levels of suffering it has caused.  The Jewish historian, Seth Anziska notes in an essay in The New York Review of Books that there is more at work here than the sickening and visceral devastation caused by Israel’s military overreach. He writes:

The scholar Raz Segal has called the wrath currently being unleashed in Gaza a ‘textbook case of genocide, while the historian Omer Bartov has warned that ‘the danger of genocide is right there’—shocking turns of phrase for all of us who made sense of that term through the experience of European Jewry in the twentieth century. But Palestinian and Arab writers have long warned against the current attempt to eviscerate the Palestinian people, as have prophetic critics within the Jewish tradition and dissenting voices inside Israel itself. By disavowing the moral consequences of state power and sovereignty, Israel’s leaders and many within Israeli society—as well as staunch supporters abroad—refuse to admit that they can be both victims and perpetrators.[20]

The long-standing grip of colonial rule on the part of Israel points to the need to get beyond morality to examine and resist the politics, power relations, and conditions that led to the current conflict. In this case, there is a need to get beyond the language of moral condemnation, which overrides what it might mean to both provide security for Israelis and liberation and freedom for Palestinians.[21] James Baldwin insightfully stated that political freedom in the end is more about power than morality; it is about power in the service of collective resistance. Following Frederick Douglass’ admonition that “power concedes nothing without a demand,” he argued that “For power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power — or, more accurately, an energy — which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control.” [22] This is the power of critical thought, provocation, and resistance.

History and Context

The Israel-Hamas war has seen the weaponization of education as part of a massive tool of propaganda and erasure. Any call for analyzing both the history and evolving context of Israeli-Palestinian relations is largely dismissed by many Western states, right-wing politicians, contemporary media, social media, and educational institutions as either a form of antisemitism or an apology for Hamas’s atrocious acts of violence. Even more egregious is the claim that Hamas and the Palestinian people are synonymous. In this instance, Israel uses Hamas’s terrorist crimes to punish all Palestinians. As Fintan O’Toole argues in the New York Review of Books:

This long-established logic continues to play out in Israel now. Those who commit terrorist crimes are identified (as they wish to be) with the people they claim to represent. That people is then reduced to the atrocities committed in its name and must pay the price for these outrages. It is a logic that simultaneously inflates the standing of the terrorists and shrinks almost to invisibility the individuality of the civilians who belong to the criminalized group. It is a logic that has been used, time and again throughout history.[23]

Central to the claim that Hamas’s actions offer the only narrative for understanding the Israel-Hamas war is a one-sided condemnation that “requires a refusal to understand…and undermine[s] [the] capacity to judge.”[24] As Nicholas J. Davies observes, “Missing from this view has been a recognition of any of the history that led to it.”[25] This reductionist narrative too easily provides a wholesale justification for Israeli violence against children, women, and civilians. It is crucial for any analysis of the current Israel-Hamas conflict to be situated and addressed through the history and root causes that have shaped it; otherwise, the search for peace is annihilated in the militarized calls for war. For example, Tal Schneider reported in the Times of Israel that any condemnation of Hamas would be incomplete without engaging the history of how Netanyahu “took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and West Bank—Bringing Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”[26] In other words, Netanyahu played a decisive role in bringing Hamas to power and making sure that they remained in control of Gaza.

It is not enough to exclusively condemn Hamas’s atrocious violence as a violation of human rights. Turning a critical eye on the violence waged by Israel on Gaza is crucial, especially at a time when such violence may be in violation of international law, especially since October 7. For example, Israel’s bombing operations in Gaza included air strikes against the Jabalia refugee camp, which the U.K.-based watchdog Airwars claimed resulted “in the death of multiple family members, three of which reportedly involved entire families being wiped out. The estimated civilian death toll [of] 126-136, include[d] 69 children.”[27] In addition, and as Brett Wilkins reports  “as many as 1.7 million people—or about 70% of Gaza’s population—have been forcibly displaced in a war that numerous experts have called “genocidal.”[28]

Equating all Palestinians with Hamas is a formula for the globalization of Islamophobia and hate. At the same time, a similar reductionism works for equating Netanyahu’s brutalizing domestic and foreign policies with all Jews collectively. The latter notion of collective blame feeds antisemitism. What is missing in both accounts are the complex ways in which the horrors of war are embraced by a variety of right-wing states, groups and individuals and what they share in their support of Netanyahu’s policy of collective punishment. Put simply, all Jews cannot be held responsible for Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and Palestinians cannot be “held collectively and individually responsible for the actions of Hamas.”[29]

Refusing to hold all sides in this war to the standards of international law is a violation of human dignity, justice, and democratic principles. As theorists such as Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn, Amia Srinivasan, and Nancy Fraser have argued, there is little discussion of violations of international law in the current discourse. Atrocities against civilians and children on both sides must be condemned under the principles of international law. When they are not, the killing of children no longer becomes unthinkable, it becomes an atrocity that remains unaccountable. Tooze Mony, Fraser, et. al. are worth quoting. They write:

We are concerned that there is no mention of upholding international law, which also prohibits war crimes and crimes against humanity such as collective punishment, persecution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Being guided by principles of international legal standards, solidarity and human dignity compels us to hold all participants in the conflict to this higher standard. We cannot allow the atrocities to force us to abandon these principles.

Israel has engaged in the saturated bombing of one of the most densely populated areas on the earth; it has bombed hospitals, killed journalists, cut off water, electricity and food crucial to the survival of 2.3 million Palestinians, reproducing what many international agencies and commentators have referred to as an “open grave.” [30]  In the midst of the present assault by the Israeli military, “the Secretary-General of the U.N., António Guterres, emphasized that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children.”[31] The violence that is being waged against Gaza has a long history and apprehending that history is crucial to any viable understanding of the moral use of power and its relationship to the principles of justice and freedom. Unlimited destruction, suffering and murderous rage are at the roots of the Israel-Hamas war and are rooted in a history that must be addressed if the question of peace and freedom are to replace the death-dealing practices of war. Judith Butler is right in arguing that one’s moral position on the war should not be threatened by learning about history. She writes:

It need not threaten our moral positions to take some time to learn about the history of colonial violence and to examine the language, narratives and frameworks now operating to report and explain – and interpret in advance – what is happening in this region. That kind of knowledge is critical, but not for the purposes of rationalising existing violence or authorising further violence. Its aim is to furnish a truer understanding of the situation than an uncontested framing of the present alone can provide.[32]

Demonizing Language and the Suppression of Dissent

Any talk about peace between Jews and Palestinians and what it means to prevent the tragic killing of children and civilians has to address how language has been used in this conflict to utterly demonize Palestinians and those Jewish groups and individuals who speak out for ending the war and for Palestinian freedom. Much of the contemporary media has either reported or given airtime to a language of dehumanization, which feeds the far-right’s pathological hunger for revenge, war, and violence. For instance, in response to the horrifying attack by Hamas on October 7, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant stated that “‘we are fighting against human animals and we will act accordingly’.”[33] The Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin called for a Dresden on Gaza, referring to the World War II firebombing of the German city of Dresden, killing some 25,000 people. When asked about the killing of Palestinian civilians, “the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said to a reporter on Sky News. ‘What is wrong with you? We’re fighting Nazis.’”[34]Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly uses the language of demonization, evident in his claim that “Hamas are the new Nazis” and that the war against them represented “a battle of civilization against barbarism.”[35]  These comments are not simply moral and intellectual failings on the part of political leaders, they use this absolutist language to portray anyone who criticizes the Israeli state as hardened anti-Semites, if not terrorist collaborators.

Since the attack by Hamas, the language of extermination and disposability has reached a fever pitch. In Israel, much of it is aired by hardline, right-wing extremists in Netanyahu’s circle of support. Ishaan Tharoor, a writer for The Washington Post, provides a startling example of this discourse of dehumanization, violence, and ethnic cleansing. He writes:

Consider the remarks of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who, while inciting new rounds of violence in the West Bank, also suggested anyone who sympathizes with Hamas should be “eliminated.” Or those of Amihai Eliyahu, a far-right coalition partner of Netanyahu and Israel’s heritage minister, who said dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza could be an option. Or the call from Galit Distel Atbaryan, recently (but no longer) Israel’s information minister, to erase “all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and drive its Palestinians into exile in Egypt.[36]

The language of dehumanization whether it comes from Israelis or Hamas is profoundly disturbing. Hamas followers calling all Israeli’s neo-Nazis shred human dignity and politics in the discourse of unbounded hate. What is crucial to address is that power in this conflict is on the side of the right-wing Israeli state whose propaganda machine and discourse of dehumanization dominates global politics in the United States and many of the Western nations. As a number of Holocaust scholars noted in The New York Review of Books, such rhetoric promotes “racist narratives about Palestinians…separate[s] this current crisis from the context out of which it has arisen [and erases] seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade.”[37] In the end, the language of demonization and absolutes, further generates “an ever-deteriorating spiral of violence [and a] narrative in which an “evil” must be vanquished by force will only perpetuate an oppressive state of affairs that has already lasted far too long.”[38] Not only does such language, no matter the source, make violence the organizing principle of communication, but also elevates war as the only solution to the 70-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 For instance, the high degree of pro-Israeli propaganda and disinformation is a powerful force in portraying Palestinians as less than human, unworthy of human dignity, and subject to a racist framing that recapitulates a colonial logic. Evidence abounds at how this discourse exists in Israel at the highest levels of power. For instance, an Israeli government minister, Bezalel Smotrich (who calls himself a proud homophobe) referred to Palestinians as mosquitoes, amplifying his derogatory remark with the comment “That is the problem with mosquitoes. If you swat mosquitoes and hit maybe 99, it will be the 100th one, which you didn’t swat, which will kill you. The genuine solution is to dry out the swamp.”[39] Victor Grossman points out that “When asked if that could mean eradicating whole families with women and children,  Smotrich replied: ‘War is war.’”[40]

The language of dehumanization becomes both a cover for the brutal treatment of Palestinians while offering an easy escape from the task of learning from history, providing a comprehensive context for understanding the conditions that led to the war, and courageously engaging the struggle for peace. Moreover, such a language is not limited to right-wing extremists, it also has the power to shape popular culture, engulfing the minds of a generation of young people with hateful racist stereotypes. In this instance, popular culture further normalizes the policy of collective punishment and collective rage for which there are no limits, regardless of the suffering inflicted. How else to explain, as the war was unfolding, an incident in which a video appeared on Israeli state TV channel Kan News in which children sang: “Within a year we will eliminate everyone…. In another year there will be nothing there. And we will safely return to our homes…The IDF crosses the border to eliminate the bearers of the swastika…We’ll wipe them all out…We’ll show the world how we destroy our enemies.”[41] Indoctrination fueled by the rhetoric of dehumanization produces a politics of disposability in which, in this case, Palestinian lives are viewed as worthless, excess, and worthy of destruction. It also reinforces and accelerates the suppression of critics calling, in the face of Israel’s staggering onslaught against Gaza, for either peace or a cease-fire.[42]

Militarized McCarthyism

Speaking for the suffering, oppressed, helpless, and innocent children who are under attack and brutally killed in this war has become increasingly dangerous. Individuals and groups both in Israel and abroad who either oppose Netanyahu’s policies of Palestinian dispossession, and brutal ground and air assaults, or who call for a cease-fire, are subject to a widespread campaign of harassment, censorship, and arrests. Marsha Gessen writing in The New Yorker states that people are being arrested in Israel on charges of inciting terrorism for posts calling for a cease fire. She claims that opposition to the war is met with a “crackdown on speech, which involves arrests, police interrogations, and so-called warning talks conducted by the Shabak, the security services.”[43] Israel has passed repressive legislation that enables and legitimates expansive use of surveillance, censorship, and arrests of opposition voices, especially Palestinian Jerusalemites, though capable of being used against all dissenters in Israel. Writing in +972 Magazine, Sophia Goodfriend reveals the draconian nature of the law. She writes:

 On Nov. 8, the Knesset passed an amendment to the Counterterrorism Law, introducing a new criminal offense — “consumption of terrorist materials” — that carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. Its proponents promise that the measure will combat “brainwashing that may produce a desire or motive to commit terror,” but human rights advocates and legal experts are describing it as a bid to “penalize thoughts and feelings” and one of the most intrusive and draconian measures ever passed by the Israeli parliament. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) warned that the legislation has no precedent in any democracy elsewhere in the world.[44]

In the United States, attempts to suppress opposition and criticism of the war have been fast and furious.[45] Under the inflated and indiscriminate charge of a hardened antisemitism, there has been a widespread campaign among universities, workplaces, and in social media to silence dissenters who call for a cease-fire or defend Palestinians’ rights.[46] Some universities, including Brandeis and Columbia, have taken steps to suppress protests against Israel, and have abolished student organizations such as –Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. Ron DeSantis, the right-wing extremist governor of Florida “directed schools to disband campus chapters of a pro-Palestinian student group he alleges are aligned in support of terrorists.”[47]   In other cases of outright repression, academics have been fired or face punitive measures for protesting for Palestinian freedom. In addition, journalists and academics alike have argued that the reach of the Israeli lobby and public relations institutions is so powerful that it has been instrumental in getting major conferences canceled, publications and media interviews pulled, [and that] support for Palestine has invited a distributed, stochastic reprisal, severe to the point that it can, without exaggeration, be compared to a ‘McCarthyite backlash’.”[48] Doxing, censorship, intimidation, and the criminalizing of dissent have gained enormous power in drowning out the call for justice and Palestinian freedom.

This intense wave of repression is also driven by the influence of powerful right-wing billionaires who head prestigious law firms, rescinding job offers to law students who signed petitions advocating for Palestinian rights. One case that attained national attention focused on Ryna Workman a student at NYU who lost her job offer at a prestigious law form because of her opposition to the war.[49] The rich and powerful have also used their control over media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, and X to censor pro-Palestinian narratives. They have also threatened to rescind their donations to universities that have allowed dissent to the war to take place on their campuses. The billionaire class supporting Netanyahu’s militarism has also fired writers and editors who opposed Israel’s assault on Gaza. This also includes David Velasco, the editor-in-chief of Artforum, who was fired by Jay Penske, the CEO of Penske Media Corporation, for printing a letter in which he opposed Israel’s scorched earth war policy.[50]

Netanyahu’s war culture thrives in the U.S. and among many Western nations in repressing dissent. Central to a militarized culture is the squashing of oppositional voices in order to produce a carefully managed ignorance. Under such circumstances, wars waged in the name of security, revenge, and hatred take on the overtones of a religious crusade. Culture industries, educational institutions and other cultural apparatuses such as mainstream social media are politically driven by their billionaire owners and patrons to create the political, educational, and cultural foundations for not only suppressing dissent but undermining the fundamental rights crucial to any viable democracy.

Conclusion

Children have become both the pawns and innocent victims in the Israel-Hamas war and symbols of needless suffering, death, and collapse of ethics when war and its machineries of violence dominate politics. Hamas killed twenty-nine children on October 7, 2023. As a result of Israeli airstrikes and bombing raids more than 5500 Palestinian children have been killed since the start of the war. According to the United Nations, 1.7 million of the 2.3 million residents in Gaza have been displaced, many of them children.[51] As the Holocaust historian Omer Bartov notes, both “sides in this war have focused on the deaths and kidnapping of children sharing images and videos of the children as a testament to the other side’s cruelty.”[52] However, it must be noted that the Israeli state has killed a much larger number of children than Hamas.

What connects both Hamas and Israel is that the violence done against children is used simply as a prop to legitimate and continue the war and the ongoing death and suffering of children, women, and civilians. Children have become not only victims in this war, but they have also been weaponized to fuel calls for revenge, retribution, and violence, on both sides of the conflict.

Surely the role of universities should be subversive in a world plagued by the growing tyranny of authoritarianism. What should be the role of academics, intellectuals, artists, educators, and other progressives in a time of war fed by rampant Islamophobia, antisemitism, and mass violence? The Israel-Hamas war is rooted in a history of colonialism, racist stereotypes, and a culture of fear, and is situated in a larger embrace of the madness of militarism. The language, politics and toxic racism that informs this war must be revealed through its history, and the efforts on the part of authoritarian governments such as the Israeli state to shut down the power of critical analysis in pursuit of social justice must be resisted.

Institutions that shut down the protective spaces where dialogue, debate, and informed exchange can take place, for instance, among Jews and Muslims must be challenged. Ethics must be put back into politics in order to recognize and condemn the killing and maiming of innocent children and civilians. Policies that deprive people of their land, sanction discourses of extermination, legislate the language of collective guilt, and demonize an entire people must be opposed in all public and educational spaces in which the values of free speech and democracy can flourish as well as through the growth of grassroots movements calling for peace, equality and freedom.

Academics and others must raise the question with their students and the larger public of what peace, true equality and freedom would look like in the region. Judith Butler provides an important insight in addressing these questions. She is worth quoting at length:

 I deplore the violence unequivocally at the same time as I, like so many others, want to be part of imagining and struggling for true equality and justice in the region, the kind that would compel groups like Hamas to disappear, the occupation to end, and new forms of political freedom and justice to flourish. Without equality and justice, without an end to the state violence conducted by a state, Israel, that was itself founded in violence, no future can be imagined, no future of true peace – not, that is, ‘peace’ as a euphemism for normalization, which means keeping structures of inequality, rightlessness and racism in place. But such a future cannot come about without remaining free to name, describe and oppose all the violence, including Israeli state violence in all its forms, and to do so without fear of censorship, criminalisation, or of being maliciously accused of antisemitism…. For this, we need our poets and our dreamers, the untamed fools, the kind who know how to organize.[53]

The erasure of history, the ongoing repression of dissent, the collapse of morality, and the embrace of war and militarism as the governing principles of state politics have removed the Palestinian people from the discourse of solidarity and human dignity. Under such circumstances, the long-term suffering of the Palestinian people is erased, demeaned, or misrepresented. With the omission of key historical contexts, the Israel-Hamas war gets presented through vast propaganda apparatuses that call for revenge, collective punishment, militarism, and war. The repression of dissent regarding Palestinian freedom is not innocent; it maligns human dignity, weakens the demands of conscience, and strips democracy of any value. It also works to prevent uncomfortable questions about the role of the Israeli state, settler violence, and the killing of children. Adam Shatz raises one of the more discerning questions regarding the contradiction that undermines Israel’s claim to democracy. He writes, “In the words of Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist who spent many years reporting from Gaza, ‘Gaza embodies the central contradiction of the state of Israel – democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve. Israelis don’t say ‘go to hell,’ they say, ‘go to Gaza.’”[54]

The Israel-Hamas war is a dreadful example of a militarized colonial past resurrecting itself in the language of violence and expulsion and threatens humanity with the prospect of perpetual war, one that has the potential to spread like wildfire across the Middle East. What this past suggests is that as welcome as a cease-fire is, it is not enough. Israel cannot wipe out Palestinian resistance and their call to freedom; nor can Palestinians eliminate the state of Israel. Adam Shatz is correct in arguing that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are stuck with each other, and that the only political solution is one “that recognizes both as equal citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.”

We live in a time to echo the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. when “silence is betrayal.”   Against such silence, he argued that there is a need for a revolution of values, a rejection of the interlocking forces of “racism, extreme materialism and militarism.”[55] King was clear that there is no democracy without genuinely opposing critical power. Speaking out in a time of tyranny is the foundation for challenging the underlying forces that give momentum, life, and breath to killing machines and the states that embrace them. We have no other choice but to raise consciousness in order to act against tyranny in the name of social responsibility, human dignity, and justice. Michelle Alexander is right in stating that we must speak out in the name of the oppressed. She writes:

We must speak. When the oppressed, the poor, the weak are under attack, when their homes are stolen or demolished, when they are forced to migrate and to live in unspeakable conditions, in open-air prisons, and concentration camps, perpetually as refugees under occupation, we must speak. We must speak when Jewish children are brutally killed in the name of liberation, when antisemitism and Islamophobia slip in through the back door of supposedly progressive spaces. When Palestinian children in refugee camps are bombed and killed, when schools and hospitals and entire neighborhoods are laid waste, we must speak. When international law is treated like a naive suggestion, we must speak. Yes, it may be difficult. Yes, we will make mistakes. We are human. And yes, we may be afraid. But we must speak. Countless lives and the liberation of all of us depend on us breaking our silences.[56]

Higher education may be one of the few sites left where important issues can be analyzed, engaged, and subject to the rigors of history, a comprehensive analysis, and relevant evidence. It should be a place where students are given the knowledge to make informed judgments, deal with unsettling knowledge, and engage in pedagogical practices in which the search for truth is matched by a sense of ethical and social responsibility. Put simply, it should be a place where the habits of citizenship and critical agency should be allowed to bloom.  As pointed out in a letter signed by 150 University of California professors, education in a time of crisis should reject attempts at censorship and refuse to run away from topics that are controversial, especially in a moment of crisis, war, and mass suffering. Instead of refusing to address such topics in the classroom, they called upon educators to be engaged intellectuals who provide the best elements of critical pedagogy. They write:

As historians, we maintain that among our contributions to a democratic society and a more peaceful world is to teach students the skills to evaluate different points of view based on evidence, rigorous inquiry, best pedagogical practices, and peer-reviewed scholarship free from external interference and political pressure. Indeed, this is the very foundation of our collective craft and a core principle of academic freedom.[57]

If we remain silent in the face of this war and refuse to act individually and collectively to bring it to an end, more children will die, and the bombs and violence that define the politics of right-wing racists, antisemites, and Islamophobes will prevail. Before long, the scourge and darkness of authoritarian politics will drown out whatever hope lies in the promise of a strong democracy and the calls for peace. The morally reprehensible killing of children in Israel and Gaza is part of a larger problem that haunts the modern period:  the merging of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. Regardless of the diverse forms it takes in various parts of the world, it is a dehumanizing politics of greed, disposability, and extermination. Its allegiance is not to human dignity but to the rewards of militarism, war, state violence, dispossession, and the repression of dissent and broader struggles for economic and social justice. Pressing the claims for such forms justice is no longer simply a political objective; it is a necessity at a time in which democracy across the globe is struggling to survive.

Notes.

[1] Chris Hedges, The Greatest Evil is War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022).

[2] Saranac Hale Spencer, “Dozens of Children Died in Hamas’ Oct. 7 Attack on Israel, Contrary to Online Claim,” Factcheck.org (November 16, 2023). Online: https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/dozens-of-children-died-in-hamas-oct-7-attack-on-israel-contrary-to-online-claim/

[3] Mohammed Haddad, “World Children’s Day tragedy: Gaza 5,500 lives lost to Israel’s attacks,” Aljazeera(November 20, 2023). Online:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/20/world-childrens-day-tragedy-gazas-5500-lives-lost-to-israels-attacks

[4] On the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what has been done to Gaza, see Chris Hedges, “‘No Sanctuary’: Israel’s Long War on Gaza  Scheer Post,” (October 21, 2023). Online: https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/21/the-chris-hedges-report-no-sanctuary-israels-long-war-on-gaza/; see also, Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest Into It’s Martyrdom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).

[5] Fintan O’Toole, “No Endgame in Gaza.” The New York Review [October 31, 2023]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/31/no-endgame-in-gaza

[6] Linda Dayan and Maya Lecker, “How Haaretz Is Counting Israel’s Dead From the October 7 Hamas Attack,” Haaretz (November 23, 2023). Online: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-23/ty-article-magazine/.premium/how-haaretz-is-counting-israels-dead-from-the-october-7-hamas-attack/0000018b-d42c-d423-affb-f7afe1a70000?lts=1701031597083

[7] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A time to Break Silence,” American Rhetoric (Delivered April 4, 1967). Online: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

[8] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A time to Break Silence,” American Rhetoric (Delivered April 4, 1967). Online: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

[9] Judith Butler, The Radical Equality of Lives,” Boston Review (January 2020). https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/brandon-m-terry-butler-int/

[10] David Theo Goldberg, “In our collective name,” Truthout (July 15,2014). Online: https://truthout.org/articles/in-our-collective-name/

[11] Rebecca Gordon, “Is it Time (Once Again) for Nonviolent Rebellion? On ending dreams of revenge in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere,” TomDispatch (November 28, 2023). Online: https://mailchi.mp/tomdispatch/tomgram-rebecca-gordon-the-hamster-wheel-of-war?e=5101a5c41c

[12] Jason Stanley, “My life has been defined by genocide of Jewish people. I look on Gaza with concern.” The Guardian [November 11, 2023]. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/11/my-life-has-been-defined-by-genocide-of-jewish-people-i-look-on-gaza-with-concern

[13] Fintan O’Toole, “No Endgame in Gaza.” The New York Review [October 31, 2023]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/31/no-endgame-in-gaza

[14] Thom Hartmann, “Rebecca Gordon, the Hamster Wheel of War,” TomDispatch (November 28, 2023). Online: https://mailchi.mp/tomdispatch/tomgram-rebecca-gordon-the-hamster-wheel-of-war?e=5101a5c41c

[15] Amy Goodman, “Palestinian Lives Matter Too: Jewish Scholar Judith Butler Condemns Israel’s “Genocide” in Gaza.”  Democracy Now [October 26, 2023]. Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/26/judith_butler_ceasefire_gaza_israel

[16] Amy Goodman “Judith Butler on Hamas, Israel’s Collective Punishment of Gaza & Why Biden Must Push for Ceasefire.” Democracy Now [October 26, 2023]. Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/26/judith_butler_on_hamas_israels_collective

[17] Deborah Chasman and Noura Erakat, “The Crimes Are Plenty” Boston Review [October 13, 2023]. Online: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-crimes-are-plenty/.

[18]   Deborah Chasman and Noura Erakat, “The Crimes Are Plenty” Boston Review [October 13, 2023]. Online: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-crimes-are-plenty/

[19] Cited in Alon Pinkas, “Israel-Gaza War Enters a New Phase: Saving Private Netanyahu,” Haaretz (November 23, 2023). Online: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-30/ty-article/.premium/how-do-you-gaslight-an-entire-nation-ask-netanyahu/0000018c-1f93-db78-adcc-bfffdcbf0000

[20] Seth Anziska, “Let Us Not Hurry to Our Doom,” The New York Review of Books, (November 9, 2023). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/11/09/let-us-not-hurry-to-our-doom-israel-gaza/

[21] Ibid. Deborah Chasman and Noura Erakat.

[22] Cited in Blair McClendon, “To James Baldwin, the Struggle for Black Liberation Was a Struggle for Democracy,” Jacobin, [06.19.2021]

Online: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/06/james-baldwin-civil-rights-struggle-democracy

[23] Fintan O’Toole, “The Many and the Few.” The New York Review [October 21, 2023]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/21/the-many-and-the-few-israel-gaza/

[24] Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning.” London Review of Books [October 19, 2023]. Online:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning

[25] Nicolas J.S. Davies, “Israeli War Crimes and Propaganda Follow US Blueprint.” Counter Punch [November 16, 2023]. Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/16/israeli-war-crimes-and-propaganda-follow-us-blueprint/

[26] Tal Schneider, “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces,” Times of Israel(October 8, 2023). Online: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/; Adam Raz, “A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance,” Haaretz (October 20, 2023). Online: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000

[27] Jessica Corbett, “Probe Shows 126+ Civilians Killed by Israeli Airstrike Targeting ‘Just One Guy’.” Common Dreams [November 16, 2023]. Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-bomb-refugee-camp-

[28] Brett Wikins, “Intensified Israeli Airstrikes Push Gaza Death Toll Over 13,000,” CommonDreams (November 19, 2023). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/jabalia-

[29] Rowan Wolf, Editor’s Note,” Uncommon Thought (November 28, 2023). Online: https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2023/11/28/authoritarianism-anti-jewish-racism-and-the-israel-hamas-war-an-open-letter-to-the-left.php

[30] Adam Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies.” London Review of Books [October 19, 2023]. Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies

[31] Steve Coll, “Hostage-Taking and the Use of Children and the Vulnerable in War.” The New Yorker [November 15, 2023]. Online: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/hostage-taking-and-the-use-of-children-and-the-vulnerable-in-war

[32] Ibid. Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning.”

[33] Cited in Fintan O’Toole, “Eyeless in Gaza.” The New York Review [October 10, 2023]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/10/eyeless-in-gaza/

[34] Adam Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies.” London Review of Books [October 19, 2023]. Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies

[35] Lazar Berman, Netanyahu to Dutch leader: This war is civilization vs. barbarism,” The Times of Israel (October 23, 2023). Online: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-to-dutch-leader-this-war-is-civilization-vs-barbarism/

[36] Ishaan Tharoor, “The Israeli right hopes not just for victory in Gaza, but also conquest.” The Washington Post[November 17, 2023]. Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/17/israel-government-right-gaza-endgame-conquest/

[37] Omer Bartov, Christopher R. Browning, Jane Caplan, Deborah Dwork, Michael Rothberg, et al., “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory,” The New York Review of Books (November 20, 2023). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/11/20/an-open-letter-on-the-misuse-of-holocaust-memory/

[38] Ibid.

[39] Victor Grossman’ “Gaza and the World,” Berlin Bulletin  No 216 (November 3, 2023). Online: https://victorgrossmansberlinbulletin.wordpress.com/2023/11/01/gaza-and-the-world/

[40] Ibid. Grossman.

[41] See Sophia Khatsenkova, “Fact-check: Did Israeli children really sing about ‘annihilating everyone in Gaza’?” Euronews (November 27, 2023). Online: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/11/27/fact-check-did-israeli-children-really-sing-about-annihilating-everyone-in-gaza

[42] See, for instance, Radhika Sainath, “The Free Speech Exception.” Boston Review [October 30, 2023]. Online: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-free-speech-exception/;Tyler Walicek, “Advocacy for Palestinians Has Been Outright Criminalized, Warns Academic.” Truthout [November 2, 2023]. Online: https://truthout.org/articles/advocacy-for-palestinians-has-been-outright-criminalized-warns-academic.

[43] Masha Gessen, “Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech.” The New Yorker [November 8, 2023]. Online:https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech

[44] Sophia Goodfriend, “Israel’s ‘thought police’ law ramps up dangers for Palestinian social media users,” +972 Magazine (November 24, 2023). Online: https://www.972mag.com/israel-thought-police-surveillance-palestinians/

[45] See, for instance, Chris Hedges, “The dirty tactics of Zionist censorship against pro-Palestine voices,” The Real News Network (November 27, 2023). Online: https://therealnews.com/the-dirty-tactics-of-zionist-censorship-against-pro-palestine-voices

[46] Tyler Walicek, “Advocacy for Palestinians Has Been Outright Criminalized, Warns Academic.” Truthout [November 2, 2023]. Online: https://truthout.org/articles/advocacy-for-palestinians-has-been-outright-criminalized-warns-academic/

[47] Divya Kumar, Ian Hodgson, “Florida orders pro-Palestinian student group off its university campuses.” Tampa Bay Times [October 26, 2023]. Online: https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/10/25/florida-orders-pro-palestinian-student-group-off-its-university-campuses/

[48] Ibid. Tyler Walicek.

[49] Amy Goodman, “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: Censorship, Harassment Intensifies on Campus Amid Gaza War.” Democracy Now [October 27, 2023]. Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/27/palestine_legal_campus_censorship_ryna_workman

[50] Alex N. Press, “Artforum’s Editor Just Got Axed After Printing a Letter Opposing Israel’s Assault on Gaza.” Jacobin [October 27, 2023]. Online: https://jacobin.com/2023/10/artforum-editor-david-velasco-jay-penske-media-israel-assault-gaza-letter

[51] Yara Bayoumy, Samar Abu Elouf and Iyad Abuheweila, “Fearful, Humiliated and Desperate: Gazans Heading South Face Horrors,” New York Times (November 28, 2023). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/world/middleeast/gaza-evacuation-israel.html

[52] Omer Bartov, “In the Israel-Hamas war, children are the ultimate pawns – and ultimate victims,” The Conversation(November 28, 2023). Online: https://theconversation.com/in-the-israel-hamas-war-children-are-the-ultimate-pawns-and-ultimate-victims-216411

[53] Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning.” London Review of Books [October 19, 2023]. Online:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning

[54] Adam Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies.” London Review of Books [October 19, 2023]. Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies

[55] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A time to Break Silence,” American Rhetoric (Delivered April 4, 1967). Online: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

[56] Michelle Alexander, “‘The Mandates of Conscience’: on Israel, Gaza, MLK & Speaking Out in a Time of War,” Democracy Now (November 24, 2023). Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/24/the_mandates_of_conscience_michelle_alexander

[57] Eric Levenson, “University of California professors push back on UC president’s call for ‘viewpoint-neutral’ history of Middle East,” CNN.Com (November 30, 2023). Online: https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/30/us/university-california-israel-gaza/index.html

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Over the past 80 years, there have been costly intelligence failures in the United States and Israel despite sufficient intelligence collection and the presence of classic warning signals.  For the United States, the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 could have been prevented or ameliorated because we had deciphered Japanese diplomatic codes that revealed the Japanese instructions to their embassy in Washington to destroy coded materials and to break relations with the United States.  These are classic warning signals.

The failure to warn of the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in 1973 was particularly shocking because the Israelis had a high-level Egyptian spy who provided his Israeli handlers with detailed information on the attack.  The spy was the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and one of President Anwar Sadat’s closest advisers. Moreover, the CIA learned on October 4, two days before the attack, that Antonov-22 aircraft had arrived in Cairo and Damascus to withdraw the families of Soviet advisor and technicians, an indicator of imminent hostilities.  This information was shared with Mossad.

In the case of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, there was sufficient information for several years on al Qaeda’s interest in attacking the United States but, with the single exception of an article in the President’s Daily Brief in August, there was no attempt to rigorously or systematically analyze this information.  President George W. Bush was right when he dismissed the August briefing as a “cover your ass” exercise.  When a female FBI agent, Colleen Rowley, provided warning to FBI headquarters of a possible al Qaeda attack, her supervisor respond with “Well, that ain’t going to happen, Honey.”

Israel had a 40-page Hamas attack plan for more than a year before the invasion, but Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed it as aspirational and far too difficult for Hamas to employ.  The plan called for 60 openings in the Israeli wall, but senior Israeli officials said that only two were vulnerable.  The plan called for 2,000 invaders; senior Israeli officials said Hamas could deploy no more than 70.  When a female Israeli analyst referred to a Hamas “invasion,” she was told that it could be no more than a “raid,” and that it was aspirational and imaginative.  Egyptian intelligence provided additional strategic warning several months later.

In July 2023, Israeli intelligence analysts noted that a Hamas training exercise closely followed the invasion plan.  A high-level official in Israeli military intelligence dismissed the exercise as part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication that Hamas was actually planning to carry it off.  When the invasion took place in October, according to the New York Times, it “followed the blueprint with shocking precision.”  It is not known whether Prime Minister Netanyahu was aware of the plan, but for the past several years he had dismissed Hamas as a threat, stating that Hamas was comfortable with the status quo.  (It is also unknown whether Israel shared this intelligence information with the CIA, which was customary in the run-up to the October War.)

In every one of these examples, there was evidence of cultural bias, with too many U.S. and Israeli intelligence analysts and policymakers convinced that their powers were, if not invincible, much too superior for their adversaries to challenge.  The conventional wisdom was that these adversaries would not be able to strike the United States or Israel directly.  U.S. decision makers believed that the Japanese could not develop the necessary technology to reach Pearl Harbor let alone modify weapons for the shallow waters there.

In the October War in 1973, CIA  and Mossad intelligence analysts completely underestimated the Arabs, refusing to believe that Egyptians and Syrians could cooperate at the highest level to plan and conduct an attack or that they would have the courage to take on an overwhelmingly powerful Israeli state.  CIA and Mossad analysts were guilty of a cultural arrogance that refused to accept that Arab states had the courage and ability to conduct a joint operation against Israel’s superior military forces.

As a result, after the October War, the major Israeli intelligence agency–Mossad–was given greater responsibility for both political and military intelligence.  And Israeli military intelligence established a “devil’s advocate” department to challenge conventional wisdom inside the intelligence establishment.  The devil’s advocate over the past year was apparently AWOL.  In any event, civilians in the intelligence world are just as vulnerable to cultural bias and “group think” as their military counterparts. For example, both CIA and Mossad believed that Egyptian President Sadat’s ouster of Soviet military forces meant that he had taken the military option against Israel off the table.

The CIA’s failure to provide strategic warning to the Carter administration on the political and social upheaval in Iran in the late 1970s was an additional example of cultural bias.  The failure was a corporate one that contributed to Carter’s election defeat in 1980.  The CIA totally misunderstood the emergence of Islamic Fundamentalism in the 1970s, despite the presence of the movement in Iran, Egypt, and Turkey.  The situation at the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was no better; INR had no full-time analyst on the problem of Iran.

The 9/11 failure was waiting to happen because the best intelligence analysts were not interested in the issue of counterterrorism, and the best operational officers considered non-state terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda to be impenetrable.  The failure was particularly stunning because intelligence analysts had access to the infamous Bojinka plot, which pointed to aerial attacks against Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.  Even when the Philippines intelligence service provided evidence linking Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and drafted the Bojinka plot, to a terrorist plot to hijack and destroy U.S. airliners in the Pacific, there was no reexamination of intelligence assumptions regarding terrorism.

Regarding the Hamas invasion, Israeli intelligence simply could not accept the notion that Hamas had the capability to attack, let alone the courage to do so.  The intelligence failure was a classic example of the failure of analysis and imagination.  Instead of using the invasion plan to inform or direct intelligence collection of Hamas’ capabilities and intentions, senior Israeli officials debated the reliability of the source and his seemingly incredible information.

Overall, preconceived notions based on cultural bias played a major role in the failures dealing with Pearl Harbor; the October War; 9/11; and the Hamas invasion.  Flawed assumptions played a primary role in all of these failures, and there was no mechanism for challenging conventional wisdom.  In each case, the intelligence collection was sufficient to prevent, or at least mitigate, the impending disaster, but the intelligence analysis was flawed and inadequate.  With the exception of Pearl Harbor, these intelligence failures took place in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, which points to serious problems of collection and analysis in a region that has become a briar patch for the United States and a war-torn hellscape for Israel.

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