It's a good, short piece showing Gazan children impacted by this war. Guess we gotta kill them, their parents, siblings, et al. to finally get rid of Hamas because they killed Israeli children, parents, siblings on Oct 7th. We will bomb them flat, bomb them as we have for 15 days ... 15 days and they say they havent started yet!
Ive recently returned to CNN for its pretty decent (mainstream) Israel War coverage, esp during wee hrs of the night (Brits mostly host it, report on the ground too). It does seem more sober, more balanced (eg, Ive seen reporters get ripped by a bullying IDF spokeman and an incensed West Bank protester, both accusing them of bias). It seems more journalistic, more "European" in its coverage than it was in its insufferable Trump Era phase - all that useless garbage they were encouraged to toss out to the TDSed viewer - smug, opinionated anti Trump rants, palace intrigue, Trump-Russia obsession, clubby table talk... (like MSNBC)
A dire warning to fellow Israelis from the pen of a deeply-rooted Zionist, now former Zionist & ex Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg. This piece was published 20 years ago. I read it then with awe and great respect, as I do today. His prescient warning was not heeded. His words are even more relevant today because they were not heeded.
Avraham Burg
The End of Zionism
"Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy"
"It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."
Why can’t they just live peacefully beside their Jewish neighbors?
From the mountain of examples that show why they find that hard to do - a segment from the ongoing documentary project,
BREAKING the SILENCE.
You will witness IDF & SETTLER ATROCITIES perpetrated against Palestinians. Not a rarity, but a ‘normal’ everyday occurrence
Don’t take it from me, but from the mouths of former IDF SOLDIERS who were there, who participated in these inhumane acts. Take it from the video clips that show what they describe, what they & the settlers, as oppressors, do to the oppressed.
As you watch, perhaps, like me, the slimy words of Netanyahu & his ilk, including American PRO Israel gaslighters (and also some ignorant true believers) will come to mind: Claims like: Israel is The One in this conflict, these wars, that has morality on its side. Our military is the most moral on earth. We do not ever target innocent civilians. Etc.
How hideous they sound, as they waft across the consciousness, across this film.
If you had asked me on Oct 7th, I would have had sympathetic Israel-centered things to say about the Hamas attack: horrendous, shocking, brutal. Israel must defend itself, of course. Those poor hostages, all those victims of unspeakable cruelty in the kibbutzes and elsewhere...
Anyway, those things still live in me, but Israel has put focus and sympathy for itself on low, on the back burner. I have moved on because Israel has moved us on.
GAZA
Heartbreaking collective punishment, worse than ever before, raining down on Gazans for 2 weeks. I am seeing rage killing. Mass murder. Deprivation of survival basics: food, water, medicine. A child is killed every 15 minutes (heard on CNN) So many children now without a mother or father, sisters, brothers. I see war crimes. It is insane. We are paying for it. And Biden has given Israel a green light to do this, even if with whispered cautions for restraint. Do you see restraint?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
I came upon a link on X (twitter) to a recent podcast (w video), The Katie Halper Show, where she talks this week w Norman Finkelstein about the assault on Gaza. It's 2+ hrs (!!!) but I found it very listenable.
"Norman Finkelstein on Israel's BRUTAL Assault On Gaza"
He said, starting in 2020 he'd turned away from 40 yrs of focusing like a hawk on Israel-Palestine, but that this WAR, what is happening now, brought him RAGING back into the fray. His summarizing of past events and facts, up to now, is helpful, especially since I, too, had stopped paying attention, in my case over the past 6 years or so, not nearly as engaged as I once was... the situation just seemed so redundantly awful with no change on the horizon.
BREAKING the SILENCE
In this podcast, Norman mentioned, and reminded me of, an Israeli activist documentary, BREAKING the SILENCE, made by former IDF soldiers. (The full collection of videos compiled since 2004 is linked below.) They are heartbreaking - comprised of interviews w IDF soldiers, and video clips that show the atrocities they describe: their encounters with Palestinians, their feelings and behaviors, their lack of feeling, their violence, settler violence, the dehumanization. It is raw and brutally honest, which, as with many other revelations out there, puts the lie to Israel's self-serving claims that they, unlike the Palestinians, operate on the moral high ground.
It's a film that keeps growing - there is no “The End" because there is no end in sight for this inhumane occupation and land theft. It is breathtakingly painful, but is important to help understand more fully the reality of occupied Palestine, beyond US-Israeli propaganda. And it is especially important now, as this hideous massacre, this war of deprivation of basics while constantly bombing civilians is waged with our US dollars.
I saw one portion of Breaking the Silence yrs ago. The official full collection is linked below. I can only take so much at a time. I googled it and started in anew on YouTube with one segment that is presented within a very good group presentation. Below is its text intro & link
"Join us for a conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Breaking the Silence leaders. The evening will open with a screening of Mission Hebron, a short documentary by Rona Segal based on the testimony of Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank.
Note, in the video linked above, the awful behaviors of “deeply religious” settlers. Imagine your land, your home, is suddenly snatched from you - because they can - with no right to reclaim it, no consequences for the thieves. Then imagine, as if this weren’t bad enough, the thieves are protected from you but you are punished by them, that the authorities defer to these insane bullies as they harass & attack you & your loved ones. You have just imagined yourself as a Palestinian in the West Bank. No need to imagine it though - the proof is clearly shown in the videos.
Israel has its horror show for survival---brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a Jewish state.
"The One hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017.
Mar 6, 2020 WATSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of: Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013); Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East (2009); The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006); Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004); Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1996); Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War (1986); British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 (1980); and co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf (1982), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City (2020).”
Sometimes there are no good guys. Hamas are assassins, not soldiers. They will kill Jews or Muslims and let. aAllah sort out the afterlife. Netanyahu is trying to escape legal consequences and in doing so failed to protect Israeli citizens.
Palestinians in Gaza have limited control of their lives. Note an outside entity can turn off electricity and water. The unemployment rate for young people is said to be 50%. Some Black Americans can look back in time and remember slave revolts by people like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Thus there is a reason that connections can be made between enslaved Blacks and Palestinians in what could be called a concentration camp.
It is. 2023, how can we view the murderous attack by Hamas? Hamas says tgat its warriors are ready to die for their cause. They also .appear to believe that Jews should not exist. Genocide cannot be condoned. Palestinian suffering cannot be condoned. Hamas appears willing to murder every one who does not support Jewish eradication, thus they cannot be supported. That does not mean that random killings of Palestinians cannot be criticized. Palestinians have been called animals by government officials. Dehumanizing all Palestinians will be a green light to slaughter.
Israel has the military might to destroy Gaza. Fighting an urban ground war in Gaza will result in more death. Given the anger on both sides, Imdo not see a nonviolent solution.mGaza will be crushed and then the US will help built it back up.
Edit to add
The best comparison may be how the old ANC approached apartheid with necklacing, etc. to the tactics of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr to Hamas. Malcolm X suggested self defense, but not overt slaughter. Killing innocents is not going to free Palestinians.
2nd Edit to add:
Telling college students that they should not support Hamas will likely fall on deaf ears. They view the Netanyahu government as corrupt. Netanyahu was attempting to change the Israeli judicial system so that his legal woes would disappear.
Many college students hear of the suffering in Gaza from fellow students who are Palestinian. They trust those source much more than they trust mainstream media or even their own professors. Many students are not surprised by the attack on Israel. The students also know there is no easy exit from Gaza. They Israelis attack them. Jordan and Egypt refuse refuge. If Hamas hides among the Palestinian population, they will simply follow the population if it moves south. Most Palestinians realize that Jim they abandon the north, they will never be able to go back to their homes in the north.
Palestinian comedian Bassem Youssef gave a darkl humorous take on the situation.
From my perspective, I can only see this conflict, historically, in the context of the international balance of powers. Locally, between Israel and the Palestinians, it is a matter of actual rights and wrongs, of the aspirations of two peoples who come into conflict. But since the start, Palestine has become a symbol of the much broader conflicts of powers in the region and in the world. This is why it is so hard for people to disengage from ideology about it and see the actual people involved.
Israel is a very complex society. The Palestinian society is -- has been, in many respects, much more complex than what it seems as well, even if the state of conflict has flattened it into uniformity at least at surface level.
But nothing of this matters because, in the eyes of the world, the Palestine question has become a symbol that completely overshadows the parties actually involved, their human motivations.
Since the very start... a peculiar strand of antisemitism that never existed in the same cultural terms in Islam was planted among Palestinian Arabs by a kind of antisemitism of European descent -- there was opposition to the immigration of Jews and their buying lands in Mandatory Palestine, there was a nationalist Arab movement born as a consequence of the fall of the Ottoman empire after WWI, when a concept of nation states began to take shape in the Middle East also under the influences of Western culture -- but Nazi ideology played a huge part in fomenting antisemitic hatred in Palestine, as is evidenced by any study of the many declarations of the Grand Mufti al-Husseini, of al-Qassam of the Black Hand, and of al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; all these declarations make reference to global Jewish domination conspiracy theories that draw directly from the Protocols of Zion.
The dream of the early Zionists on the other hand was of an Eretz Yisrael that included the whole of Palestine.
The partition into two states was proposed first a few years before the start of WWII by the Peel Commission and rejected by the Arab leaders, while the Zionist leaders accepted it (though we know, by internal documents, that they did not accept it without reservation of further action).
After WWII, the Soviet Union and the entirety of the Western Left strongly supported the State of Israel in the beginning. But it happened that the Communist parties in Israel did not seize power, but rather a labour coalition, which positioned Israel in alignment with the West -- and the Soviet Union dropped its support for what could not become a satellite state, and looked elsewhere.
Since then, the conflict in Palestine became one of the theatres of confrontation of the Cold War, and the actual issues on the table took backstage relevance. I have a strong perception that the entire problem of Islamism has grown and festered in consequence of bad choices of both main actors in the Cold War. How things could have developed if the allies of the Palestinians and the allies of Israel had pushed towards reason and compromise rather than using the conflict for their own propaganda, we will never know.
But things are as they are. The conflict has wrought havoc on Palestinian society, pushing Palestinian Arabs to support more and more fundamentalist positions. And it has soured and twisted Israeli society to a much lesser but still painful extent.
How it will end it is difficult to say now. I see more hope among the Israeli Left than what is expressed by Mr Hugues. What I see in the country, what I hear from the part of my family that is there and from my son who was visiting when this horror happened and flew back to fight, is a strong determination to destroy the perpetrators of this crime and extirpate them from among the Palestinian people -- which will be far from bloodless (it was far from bloodless to extirpate the Nazis from among the German people, after all) -- after which, to turn around and try to solve this decades old conflict in a reasonable way, because to continue like this is impossible (like Ami Ayalon says, like Ehud Olmert, like say so many of the kibbutznikim who were attacked and survived on the Gaza border and are now fighting in the IDF or civil support).
Yes, there are a number in Israel that do not feel like this. But they are not the majority and war, oddly, has always tended to unite the country towards more hope.
Will this succeed? I do not know. There are too many other players involved, too many other interests at play. But I do hope and so does the part of Israel that has learned from the experience of the Diaspora the values of democracy, tolerance, peace and compromise.
As for the unqualified hostility of a certain Left to Israel, a hostility that bleeds strongly into hostility towards the Jews, most of whom are Zionist in the sense of believing in the desirability of a state of the Jewish people (beyond which Zionism has many bents and denominations) -- there are deep and longstanding reasons for it. It goes far beyond the disturbing dogmas of Critical Social Justice about colonialism, it is rooted in the old, antisemitic identification of the Jews with money, with the rich and powerful, with capitalism, with oppression and privilege, and with a readiness to betray because irredeemably Other. The same kind of tropes come up every times Jews are attacked as dissenters from orthodoxy... be it in Stalinist Soviet Union or in social justice groups.
I suggest to you three gentlemen to read this article of a young writer who has focused his research on totalitarian thought. I, in my old age, have been deeply enlightened by it, because I never saw the connections so clearly.
I am confused about where to comment on what with this. I already posted this comment in response to an earlier link to this conversation or some part of it. But what I wrote there is still what is on my mind now, so I am pasting it in again here:
I appreciate the even-handed discussion of the Israeli situation. I am glad there is no question about the utterly barbaric pogrom Hamas carried out. I do have reservations about the way you all discussed two issues -- the possibility of an "overreaction" by Israel and the place of the settlements in the whole conflict.
Daniel Pipes has for a long time argued that no settling with the Palestinians will be possible until they experience total defeat - a la Germany and Japan after WWII. Maybe he's right or wrong, but in any case, I think Israel has no viable option other than the total defeat and annihilation of Hamas. Hamas is not in the least interested in governing Gaza or for that matter in winning a Palestinian state. It is openly and avowedly purely genocidal. It cares not a whit for the people of Gaza, who will have no hope of a decent life until Hamas is eliminated. Whatever war Israel conducts, therefore, will not be an "overreaction" if it achieves this objective of total victory.
As for settlements, I am not a big fan of them, nor are I believe most Israelis. But I think you all vastly overrate the significance of the conflict over the settlements. For one thing, Gaza has no Jewish settlements, in fact no Jews at all. Israel took all of them out in 2005, even though the Jews there resisted that. It was an extreme right-wing prime minister who did that, by the way. The departing Jews left a viable economy in place, which Hamas proceeded to trash. It then turned what is falsely labeled the "open air prison" of Gaza into what is in truth a "medieval fortress," from which it sallies forth every so often to kill Jews. What the critics of the settlements need to do is explain why Israel should have any doubts about what would happen in the West Bank if it were to do what it already did in Gaza. The example of Gaza tells Israelis why it is futile to think an abandonment of the settlements would make a bit of difference.
The Palestinians are in the grip of an ideology that is in fact a fusion of Nazi and Islamist thinking that was brought to full fruition during World War II especially. It is genocidal, and its ultimate goal has nothing to do with a Palestinian state -- which Israel has offered several times to no avail. Unlike you all, however, I do not think this will go on another 75 years. The rest of the Middle East (except Iran) is already moving toward ever more substantial reproachment with Israel. Once the genocidal dreams of the Palestinians die, they will move that way as well. A total defeat of Hamas could put an end to the massive aid the UN, Europe and America have provided and that keeps the Palestinian leadership in power, and this would force the people of Gaza to embrace pragmatic and economically motivated leaders. TOTAL defeat of Hamas is what I believe to be the only hope for Gaza as well as for Israel.
Before we dive into Gaze, there are many people who worry about what we did to both German and Japanese civilians during World War II. "Slaughterhouse 5" anyone? And that is just one, popular example.
There is a lot of ignorance in this short discussion. Israel pulled out of Gaza. Israel sent in their army and forcefully removed Israelis but left all the infrastructure they'd built intact. Hamas razed anything the Israelis left behind.
Then came the terror campaign known as the First Intifada. Hamas revealed their innovation, the suicide bomber, which is what led Israel to built their fence.
Even with the fence Israel has tried to send food and medicine into Gaza for years. Hamas has deliberately limited what is allowed in to keep their boot on the neck of the people of Gaza.
As there were limited opportunities for employment Israel opened their border and allowed Palestinians to cross and work. This allowed Palestinians to gather information about where and when to strike.
Look at a map. Gaza has miles of beaches on the Mediterranean. Any other country in the world - Egypt, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, etc. would build resorts and become a fantastic tourist destination. But Hamas spent all their time and energy and hundreds of millions of dollars on wiping out all the Jews in Israel.
And then there is Egypt... but I'm tired of writing.
It's disappointing how little you seem to have prepared for this discussion.
I'll make myself scarce again... (I havent commented here in ages...)
Peace. Out.
What Is at Stake in Israel?
Also, What Is at Stake in Gaza?
Watch this from CNN
It's a good, short piece showing Gazan children impacted by this war. Guess we gotta kill them, their parents, siblings, et al. to finally get rid of Hamas because they killed Israeli children, parents, siblings on Oct 7th. We will bomb them flat, bomb them as we have for 15 days ... 15 days and they say they havent started yet!
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/10/12/exp-gaza-children-pkg-fst-101203pseg2-cnni-world.cnn
CNN
Ive recently returned to CNN for its pretty decent (mainstream) Israel War coverage, esp during wee hrs of the night (Brits mostly host it, report on the ground too). It does seem more sober, more balanced (eg, Ive seen reporters get ripped by a bullying IDF spokeman and an incensed West Bank protester, both accusing them of bias). It seems more journalistic, more "European" in its coverage than it was in its insufferable Trump Era phase - all that useless garbage they were encouraged to toss out to the TDSed viewer - smug, opinionated anti Trump rants, palace intrigue, Trump-Russia obsession, clubby table talk... (like MSNBC)
May it only get better...
A dire warning to fellow Israelis from the pen of a deeply-rooted Zionist, now former Zionist & ex Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg. This piece was published 20 years ago. I read it then with awe and great respect, as I do today. His prescient warning was not heeded. His words are even more relevant today because they were not heeded.
Avraham Burg
The End of Zionism
"Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/15/comment
An excerpt:
"It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."
Break the Silence. Can you?
What’s wrong with those Palestinians!!!
Why can’t they just live peacefully beside their Jewish neighbors?
From the mountain of examples that show why they find that hard to do - a segment from the ongoing documentary project,
BREAKING the SILENCE.
You will witness IDF & SETTLER ATROCITIES perpetrated against Palestinians. Not a rarity, but a ‘normal’ everyday occurrence
Don’t take it from me, but from the mouths of former IDF SOLDIERS who were there, who participated in these inhumane acts. Take it from the video clips that show what they describe, what they & the settlers, as oppressors, do to the oppressed.
As you watch, perhaps, like me, the slimy words of Netanyahu & his ilk, including American PRO Israel gaslighters (and also some ignorant true believers) will come to mind: Claims like: Israel is The One in this conflict, these wars, that has morality on its side. Our military is the most moral on earth. We do not ever target innocent civilians. Etc.
How hideous they sound, as they waft across the consciousness, across this film.
WATCH IT
https://youtu.be/0Mj4OpHEmzk?si=A-fizollaEtjbzv8
If you had asked me on Oct 7th, I would have had sympathetic Israel-centered things to say about the Hamas attack: horrendous, shocking, brutal. Israel must defend itself, of course. Those poor hostages, all those victims of unspeakable cruelty in the kibbutzes and elsewhere...
Anyway, those things still live in me, but Israel has put focus and sympathy for itself on low, on the back burner. I have moved on because Israel has moved us on.
GAZA
Heartbreaking collective punishment, worse than ever before, raining down on Gazans for 2 weeks. I am seeing rage killing. Mass murder. Deprivation of survival basics: food, water, medicine. A child is killed every 15 minutes (heard on CNN) So many children now without a mother or father, sisters, brothers. I see war crimes. It is insane. We are paying for it. And Biden has given Israel a green light to do this, even if with whispered cautions for restraint. Do you see restraint?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
I came upon a link on X (twitter) to a recent podcast (w video), The Katie Halper Show, where she talks this week w Norman Finkelstein about the assault on Gaza. It's 2+ hrs (!!!) but I found it very listenable.
"Norman Finkelstein on Israel's BRUTAL Assault On Gaza"
https://www.youtube.com/live/m36CUGA1Ucw?si=-iZBIKKkwP8JneKG
He said, starting in 2020 he'd turned away from 40 yrs of focusing like a hawk on Israel-Palestine, but that this WAR, what is happening now, brought him RAGING back into the fray. His summarizing of past events and facts, up to now, is helpful, especially since I, too, had stopped paying attention, in my case over the past 6 years or so, not nearly as engaged as I once was... the situation just seemed so redundantly awful with no change on the horizon.
BREAKING the SILENCE
In this podcast, Norman mentioned, and reminded me of, an Israeli activist documentary, BREAKING the SILENCE, made by former IDF soldiers. (The full collection of videos compiled since 2004 is linked below.) They are heartbreaking - comprised of interviews w IDF soldiers, and video clips that show the atrocities they describe: their encounters with Palestinians, their feelings and behaviors, their lack of feeling, their violence, settler violence, the dehumanization. It is raw and brutally honest, which, as with many other revelations out there, puts the lie to Israel's self-serving claims that they, unlike the Palestinians, operate on the moral high ground.
It's a film that keeps growing - there is no “The End" because there is no end in sight for this inhumane occupation and land theft. It is breathtakingly painful, but is important to help understand more fully the reality of occupied Palestine, beyond US-Israeli propaganda. And it is especially important now, as this hideous massacre, this war of deprivation of basics while constantly bombing civilians is waged with our US dollars.
I saw one portion of Breaking the Silence yrs ago. The official full collection is linked below. I can only take so much at a time. I googled it and started in anew on YouTube with one segment that is presented within a very good group presentation. Below is its text intro & link
"Join us for a conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Breaking the Silence leaders. The evening will open with a screening of Mission Hebron, a short documentary by Rona Segal based on the testimony of Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank.
https://youtu.be/0Mj4OpHEmzk?si=OmjREv6IJ5ofVXRi
SETTLERS & OTHER ATROCITIES
Note, in the video linked above, the awful behaviors of “deeply religious” settlers. Imagine your land, your home, is suddenly snatched from you - because they can - with no right to reclaim it, no consequences for the thieves. Then imagine, as if this weren’t bad enough, the thieves are protected from you but you are punished by them, that the authorities defer to these insane bullies as they harass & attack you & your loved ones. You have just imagined yourself as a Palestinian in the West Bank. No need to imagine it though - the proof is clearly shown in the videos.
More links:
Article abt Breaking the Silence https://theintercept.com/2019/03/03/breaking-the-silence-israel-idf/
Breaking the Silence video archive: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos
There was an interesting interchange between a Saudi news anchor and a Hamas official.
The Saudi news anchor asked the Hamas official
1. Why would he not expect the Israeli government to overreact in punishing Gaza
2. Why he didn’t give Arab nations in the area a head’s up so they could be ready for the blowback
3. How he thought this would benefit the Palestinians in Gaza
4 Why he gave Israel the upper hand in the public opinion battle. Israel would be the victim, rather than the Palestinians
https://x.com/hxhassan/status/1715404424326074443?s=57&t=l8XxLtAy7PR0pMVSwGllUQ
It should be kept in mind that the Saudi government was trying to work on a peace treaty with Israel.
Hamas did not want to see the peace become a reality.
Israel has its horror show for survival---brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a Jewish state.
"The One hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017.
Mar 6, 2020 WATSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of: Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013); Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East (2009); The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006); Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004); Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1996); Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War (1986); British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 (1980); and co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf (1982), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City (2020).”
https://youtu.be/wH8Ip1cvlRY?si=kxHi6nDl0aNJQANm
Sometimes there are no good guys. Hamas are assassins, not soldiers. They will kill Jews or Muslims and let. aAllah sort out the afterlife. Netanyahu is trying to escape legal consequences and in doing so failed to protect Israeli citizens.
Palestinians in Gaza have limited control of their lives. Note an outside entity can turn off electricity and water. The unemployment rate for young people is said to be 50%. Some Black Americans can look back in time and remember slave revolts by people like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Thus there is a reason that connections can be made between enslaved Blacks and Palestinians in what could be called a concentration camp.
It is. 2023, how can we view the murderous attack by Hamas? Hamas says tgat its warriors are ready to die for their cause. They also .appear to believe that Jews should not exist. Genocide cannot be condoned. Palestinian suffering cannot be condoned. Hamas appears willing to murder every one who does not support Jewish eradication, thus they cannot be supported. That does not mean that random killings of Palestinians cannot be criticized. Palestinians have been called animals by government officials. Dehumanizing all Palestinians will be a green light to slaughter.
Israel has the military might to destroy Gaza. Fighting an urban ground war in Gaza will result in more death. Given the anger on both sides, Imdo not see a nonviolent solution.mGaza will be crushed and then the US will help built it back up.
Edit to add
The best comparison may be how the old ANC approached apartheid with necklacing, etc. to the tactics of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr to Hamas. Malcolm X suggested self defense, but not overt slaughter. Killing innocents is not going to free Palestinians.
2nd Edit to add:
Telling college students that they should not support Hamas will likely fall on deaf ears. They view the Netanyahu government as corrupt. Netanyahu was attempting to change the Israeli judicial system so that his legal woes would disappear.
Many college students hear of the suffering in Gaza from fellow students who are Palestinian. They trust those source much more than they trust mainstream media or even their own professors. Many students are not surprised by the attack on Israel. The students also know there is no easy exit from Gaza. They Israelis attack them. Jordan and Egypt refuse refuge. If Hamas hides among the Palestinian population, they will simply follow the population if it moves south. Most Palestinians realize that Jim they abandon the north, they will never be able to go back to their homes in the north.
Palestinian comedian Bassem Youssef gave a darkl humorous take on the situation.
https://youtu.be/4idQbwsvtUo?feature=shared
None of that is relevant to the linked text. Did you read it?
From my perspective, I can only see this conflict, historically, in the context of the international balance of powers. Locally, between Israel and the Palestinians, it is a matter of actual rights and wrongs, of the aspirations of two peoples who come into conflict. But since the start, Palestine has become a symbol of the much broader conflicts of powers in the region and in the world. This is why it is so hard for people to disengage from ideology about it and see the actual people involved.
Israel is a very complex society. The Palestinian society is -- has been, in many respects, much more complex than what it seems as well, even if the state of conflict has flattened it into uniformity at least at surface level.
But nothing of this matters because, in the eyes of the world, the Palestine question has become a symbol that completely overshadows the parties actually involved, their human motivations.
Since the very start... a peculiar strand of antisemitism that never existed in the same cultural terms in Islam was planted among Palestinian Arabs by a kind of antisemitism of European descent -- there was opposition to the immigration of Jews and their buying lands in Mandatory Palestine, there was a nationalist Arab movement born as a consequence of the fall of the Ottoman empire after WWI, when a concept of nation states began to take shape in the Middle East also under the influences of Western culture -- but Nazi ideology played a huge part in fomenting antisemitic hatred in Palestine, as is evidenced by any study of the many declarations of the Grand Mufti al-Husseini, of al-Qassam of the Black Hand, and of al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; all these declarations make reference to global Jewish domination conspiracy theories that draw directly from the Protocols of Zion.
The dream of the early Zionists on the other hand was of an Eretz Yisrael that included the whole of Palestine.
The partition into two states was proposed first a few years before the start of WWII by the Peel Commission and rejected by the Arab leaders, while the Zionist leaders accepted it (though we know, by internal documents, that they did not accept it without reservation of further action).
After WWII, the Soviet Union and the entirety of the Western Left strongly supported the State of Israel in the beginning. But it happened that the Communist parties in Israel did not seize power, but rather a labour coalition, which positioned Israel in alignment with the West -- and the Soviet Union dropped its support for what could not become a satellite state, and looked elsewhere.
Since then, the conflict in Palestine became one of the theatres of confrontation of the Cold War, and the actual issues on the table took backstage relevance. I have a strong perception that the entire problem of Islamism has grown and festered in consequence of bad choices of both main actors in the Cold War. How things could have developed if the allies of the Palestinians and the allies of Israel had pushed towards reason and compromise rather than using the conflict for their own propaganda, we will never know.
But things are as they are. The conflict has wrought havoc on Palestinian society, pushing Palestinian Arabs to support more and more fundamentalist positions. And it has soured and twisted Israeli society to a much lesser but still painful extent.
How it will end it is difficult to say now. I see more hope among the Israeli Left than what is expressed by Mr Hugues. What I see in the country, what I hear from the part of my family that is there and from my son who was visiting when this horror happened and flew back to fight, is a strong determination to destroy the perpetrators of this crime and extirpate them from among the Palestinian people -- which will be far from bloodless (it was far from bloodless to extirpate the Nazis from among the German people, after all) -- after which, to turn around and try to solve this decades old conflict in a reasonable way, because to continue like this is impossible (like Ami Ayalon says, like Ehud Olmert, like say so many of the kibbutznikim who were attacked and survived on the Gaza border and are now fighting in the IDF or civil support).
Yes, there are a number in Israel that do not feel like this. But they are not the majority and war, oddly, has always tended to unite the country towards more hope.
Will this succeed? I do not know. There are too many other players involved, too many other interests at play. But I do hope and so does the part of Israel that has learned from the experience of the Diaspora the values of democracy, tolerance, peace and compromise.
As for the unqualified hostility of a certain Left to Israel, a hostility that bleeds strongly into hostility towards the Jews, most of whom are Zionist in the sense of believing in the desirability of a state of the Jewish people (beyond which Zionism has many bents and denominations) -- there are deep and longstanding reasons for it. It goes far beyond the disturbing dogmas of Critical Social Justice about colonialism, it is rooted in the old, antisemitic identification of the Jews with money, with the rich and powerful, with capitalism, with oppression and privilege, and with a readiness to betray because irredeemably Other. The same kind of tropes come up every times Jews are attacked as dissenters from orthodoxy... be it in Stalinist Soviet Union or in social justice groups.
I suggest to you three gentlemen to read this article of a young writer who has focused his research on totalitarian thought. I, in my old age, have been deeply enlightened by it, because I never saw the connections so clearly.
https://forward.com/opinion/393107/how-anti-semitisms-true-origin-makes-it-invisible-to-the-left/
I am confused about where to comment on what with this. I already posted this comment in response to an earlier link to this conversation or some part of it. But what I wrote there is still what is on my mind now, so I am pasting it in again here:
I appreciate the even-handed discussion of the Israeli situation. I am glad there is no question about the utterly barbaric pogrom Hamas carried out. I do have reservations about the way you all discussed two issues -- the possibility of an "overreaction" by Israel and the place of the settlements in the whole conflict.
Daniel Pipes has for a long time argued that no settling with the Palestinians will be possible until they experience total defeat - a la Germany and Japan after WWII. Maybe he's right or wrong, but in any case, I think Israel has no viable option other than the total defeat and annihilation of Hamas. Hamas is not in the least interested in governing Gaza or for that matter in winning a Palestinian state. It is openly and avowedly purely genocidal. It cares not a whit for the people of Gaza, who will have no hope of a decent life until Hamas is eliminated. Whatever war Israel conducts, therefore, will not be an "overreaction" if it achieves this objective of total victory.
As for settlements, I am not a big fan of them, nor are I believe most Israelis. But I think you all vastly overrate the significance of the conflict over the settlements. For one thing, Gaza has no Jewish settlements, in fact no Jews at all. Israel took all of them out in 2005, even though the Jews there resisted that. It was an extreme right-wing prime minister who did that, by the way. The departing Jews left a viable economy in place, which Hamas proceeded to trash. It then turned what is falsely labeled the "open air prison" of Gaza into what is in truth a "medieval fortress," from which it sallies forth every so often to kill Jews. What the critics of the settlements need to do is explain why Israel should have any doubts about what would happen in the West Bank if it were to do what it already did in Gaza. The example of Gaza tells Israelis why it is futile to think an abandonment of the settlements would make a bit of difference.
The Palestinians are in the grip of an ideology that is in fact a fusion of Nazi and Islamist thinking that was brought to full fruition during World War II especially. It is genocidal, and its ultimate goal has nothing to do with a Palestinian state -- which Israel has offered several times to no avail. Unlike you all, however, I do not think this will go on another 75 years. The rest of the Middle East (except Iran) is already moving toward ever more substantial reproachment with Israel. Once the genocidal dreams of the Palestinians die, they will move that way as well. A total defeat of Hamas could put an end to the massive aid the UN, Europe and America have provided and that keeps the Palestinian leadership in power, and this would force the people of Gaza to embrace pragmatic and economically motivated leaders. TOTAL defeat of Hamas is what I believe to be the only hope for Gaza as well as for Israel.
From an American Jew who has lived in Gaza:
https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/the-slave-revolt-in-gaza-and-bernie
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
Bibi has long supported Hamas because both Bibi and Hamas agree on one thing: no peace, no two state solution.
This is blowback text book. Way to go everyone!
The website of the Council on Foreign Relations says that Hamas "governs more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip".
The last time there was an election (mre than 15 years ago), Hamas won.
Hamas receives money from foreigners on behlf of the Gazans, and Hamas taxes the people of Gaza.
So I don't know if you can insulate the Gazan peope from the hatefull malice of Hamas?
Have you ever spoken with onesuch?
We should be checking up to date sources -still available- "Breakthrough News- plus other sources -but removed from Israel media-
i.e israel survivor/hostage who witnessed the slaughter of hostages - in crossfire-mainly by the massive weaponary of the Israel
She states the Hamas did not mistreat them -then the army came -guns blazing. Blasting everything and everyone in sight
Before we dive into Gaze, there are many people who worry about what we did to both German and Japanese civilians during World War II. "Slaughterhouse 5" anyone? And that is just one, popular example.
There is a lot of ignorance in this short discussion. Israel pulled out of Gaza. Israel sent in their army and forcefully removed Israelis but left all the infrastructure they'd built intact. Hamas razed anything the Israelis left behind.
Then came the terror campaign known as the First Intifada. Hamas revealed their innovation, the suicide bomber, which is what led Israel to built their fence.
Even with the fence Israel has tried to send food and medicine into Gaza for years. Hamas has deliberately limited what is allowed in to keep their boot on the neck of the people of Gaza.
As there were limited opportunities for employment Israel opened their border and allowed Palestinians to cross and work. This allowed Palestinians to gather information about where and when to strike.
Look at a map. Gaza has miles of beaches on the Mediterranean. Any other country in the world - Egypt, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, etc. would build resorts and become a fantastic tourist destination. But Hamas spent all their time and energy and hundreds of millions of dollars on wiping out all the Jews in Israel.
And then there is Egypt... but I'm tired of writing.
It's disappointing how little you seem to have prepared for this discussion.