Israeli Authors Quotes

Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year. Like a subservient colony, the United States provides hundreds of thousands of young men and women to fight and die as mercenaries in Zionist-planned wars in the Middle East.

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky.

In the words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was in effect second-class citizenship.” Most significantly, the martial regime under which the Palestinians lived granted the Israeli military near-unlimited authority to control the minutiae of their lives.57

in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly.

President Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of constructing a new Israel-Palestine peace plan. Kushner had no experience authoring international treaties of any kind, so the announcement was met with skepticism. When Kushner released his plan at the beginning of 2020, he proudly announced that he had “read twenty-five books” on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date, Israel and Palestine have not achieved peace.

In light of the decades-long failure by Israeli authorities to rein in serious abuses, the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor should investigate and prosecute individuals credibly implicated in the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution.

Every day a person is born in Gaza into an open-air prison, in the West Bank without civil rights, in Israel with an inferior status by law, and in neighboring countries effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish.

Legitimate security concerns can be present among policies that amount to apartheid, just as they can be present in a policy that sanctions the use of excessive force or torture.

Arabs and Jews, in terms of the thief-ocracy, worked hand in hand, and it's too bad that in politics they don't find a way to get along just as well! Even politicians got into debating why the Israeli and Palestinian mafias got along like brothers.

80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer’s water recharge area lies beneath the West Bank, Israel directly extracts about 90 percent of the water that is withdrawn from the aquifer annually, leaving Palestinians only the remaining 10 percent or so to exploit directly.

In the Negev in Israel, Israeli authorities have refused to legally recognize 35 Palestinian Bedouin communities, making it impossible for their 90,000 or so residents to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. Instead, authorities have sought to concentrate Bedouin communities in larger recognized townships in order, as expressed in governmental plans and statements by officials, to maximize the land available for Jewish communities. Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal, and authorities have refused to connect most to the national electricity or water grids or to provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads or sewage systems. The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities, and residents live under constant threat of having their homes demolished. Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed one unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times.

Israeli authorities also maintain primary control over water resources in the West Bank and allocate water in a discriminatory fashion to Palestinians. [...] Military orders established in the first 18 months of the occupation in 1967 and 1968 granted the army full authority over water-related issues in the West Bank, declared water resources state property, and barred Palestinians from establishing or using water installations without a permit. In 1982, Israeli authorities transferred ownership of water resources and supply from the Civil Administration to the national Israeli water company, Mekorot, while continuing to vest the Civil Administration with regulatory control.

These policies create a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there or to a West Bank settlement and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian refugee expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country cannot move to either Israel or the OPT.

States should [...] vet agreements, cooperation schemes, and all forms of trade and dealing with Israel to screen for those directly contributing to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians, mitigate the human rights impacts, and, where not possible, end the activities and funding found to facilitate these serious crimes.

This provision meant that dispossessed Arab owners could neither buy back nor lease what had once been their property, nor could any other non-Jew. Such moves were crucial to the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a Jewish state, since only about 6 percent of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948. The Arab population inside Israel, isolated by military travel restrictions, was also cut off from other Palestinians and from the rest of the Arab world. Accustomed to being a substantial majority in their own country and region, they suddenly had to learn to make their way as a despised minority in a hostile environment as subjects of a Jewish polity that never defined itself as a state of all its citizens. In the words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was in effect second-class citizenship.” Most significantly, the martial regime under which the Palestinians lived granted the Israeli military near-unlimited authority to control the minutiae of their lives.

While states are sometimes associated with a religious or ethnic identity, a states’ prerogative to define its own identity and promote it is not unlimited; it is not a license to violate the fundamental rights of others. Laws and policies adopted by the Israeli government to preserve a Jewish majority have afforded benefits to Jews at the expense of the fundamental rights of Palestinians.

Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has pursued an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians throughout the territory it controls. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

According to B’Tselem, there are more than 40 kilometers of West Bank roads that authorities prohibit Palestinians from traveling on and another 19 kilometers of West Bank roads, not including in Hebron, on which Palestinian travel is restricted. 291 Israeli forces in Hebron prohibit Palestinians from walking on large sections of what used to be the central thoroughfare of the city as part of a policy of making those areas “sterile” of Palestinians, as per the parlance of the Israeli army.

Particularly conducive to this end are debates across boundaries—cultural, religious, political, and so forth. When Jews discuss with Jews, Christians with Christians, secular citizens with secular citizens, Palestinians with Palestinians, Israelis with Israelis, or Mohawks with Mohawks, they will likely only scratch the surface of the historical, religious, and political narratives they were brought up with. If, on the other hand, we engage others who do not share our cultural narratives, we cannot rely on their authority, but are compelled to argue for our views—as

In a 1990 interview with an Israeli newspaper, Teddy Kollek (mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993) said: "For Jewish Jerusalem, I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing. Sidewalks? Nothing. Cultural institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewerage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system against cholera.

Secular Israelis often complain bitterly that the ultra-Orthodox don’t contribute enough to society and live off other people’s hard work. Secular Israelis also tend to argue that the ultra-Orthodox way of life is unsustainable, especially as ultra-Orthodox families have seven children on average.32 Sooner or later, the state will not be able to support so many unemployed people, and the ultra-Orthodox will have to go to work. Yet it might be just the reverse. As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job. If we manage to combine a universal economic safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing. Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario. Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.

The First Intifada, as it became known, erupted spontaneously all over the Occupied Territories, ignited when an Israeli army vehicle struck a truck in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing four Palestinians. The uprising spread very quickly, although Gaza was the crucible and remained the most difficult area for Israel to bring under control. The intifada generated extensive local organization in the villages, towns, cities, and refugee camps, and came to be led by a secret Unified National Leadership. The flexible and clandestine grassroots networks formed during the intifada proved impossible for the military occupation authorities to suppress.

On July 7, 1967, exactly one month after the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of the Labor Party said, “The security and the land are in Israeli hands.” 182 In a party meeting that year, Eshkol clarified that authorities “covet the dowry, not the bride,” 183 an apparent reference to wanting the West Bank without the Palestinians who live there. Fifty-two years later, on July 10, 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu of the Likud said, “Israeli military and security forces will continue to rule the entire territory, up to the Jordan [River].” 184 He added on May 28, 2020, that “we are the ones dictating security rules over the entire territory,” describing West Bank Palestinians as “subjects.

In every quarter of the city, as in every community in Israel, there are armed civilian patrols that include students. Daily, before schools open in the morning, they are examined by parents for bombs. Arab students were asked to participate on the campus of the Hebrew University but refused. In my opinion it was a mistake to ask that they be part of such patrols. They are trying to avoid a charge of “collaboration.” The status of the Israeli Arabs is ambiguous anyway. They do and do not enjoy equal rights. They cause great uneasiness. More than once I have been told that the Palestine Liberation Organization would like to provoke riots in the Old City and the authorities fear that explosions like the one the other night in which six adolescents were killed may provoke them.

Some regard the settlement enterprise as vital for security. 189 Whatever the motive, it is unacceptable to pursue this aim through a strategy of seeking to dominate Palestinians, maintaining a discriminatory system, and engaging in tactics that either have an insufficient security justification or otherwise violate international law. An intent to ensure security neither negates an intent to dominate, nor grants a carte blanche to undertake policies that go beyond what international law permits. While security grounds can justify a range of restrictive measures under international humanitarian and human rights law, a strategy that seeks to promote security by ensuring the demographic advantage of one group of people through discrimination or oppression has no basis under international law.

Norenzayan distinguishes between private and communal religiosity in surveying support for suicide bombers among Palestinians.17 In a refutation of “Islam = terrorism” idiocy, people’s personal religiosity (as assessed by how often they prayed) didn’t predict support for terrorism. However, frequently attending services at a mosque did. The author then polled Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox adherents, Israeli Jews, Indonesian Muslims, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics as to whether they’d die for their religion and whether people of other religions caused the world’s troubles. In all cases frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds. This is hugely important.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield.

The obstacles posed by Israel were of a completely different nature. While Shamir was prime minister, there was constant squabbling over procedure and a painful dialogue of the deaf as far as substance was concerned. In particular, Israel was wedded to Begin’s vision, enunciated at Camp David in 1978, of autonomy for the people but not the land. This was in keeping with the Israeli right’s view—indeed the core of the Zionist doctrine—that only one people, the Jewish people, had a legitimate right to existence and sovereignty in the entirety of the land, which was called Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, not Palestine. The Palestinians were, at best, interlopers. In practice, this meant that when the Palestinians argued for broad legal and territorial jurisdiction for the future self-governing authority, they were met with a firm refusal from Israeli negotiators. Similarly, there was a refusal to limit settlement activity in any way. This was not surprising. Famously, Shamir was reported as saying that he would have dragged out the talks for ten more years while “vastly increasing the number of Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territory.”44

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

called in Boogie Yaalon, whom I had recently appointed as defense minister, to hear the American proposal with me. Allen laid out a presentation of US technological monitors that would be placed along the border. He said this would obviate the need for permanently stationed Israeli forces along the Jordan. As for the internal policing against terrorism within the Palestinian areas, the US would train the Palestinian security forces to do the job. I responded that shortly after Israel left Gaza, those same Palestinian Authority security forces caved to Hamas terrorists. “This is different,” Kerry said. “These forces would be trained by us.” He then made an extraordinary proposal. “Bibi, I want to arrange a clandestine visit for you to Afghanistan. You’ll see with your own eyes what a great job we did there to prepare the Afghan army to take over the country once we leave.” Yaalon and I looked at each other. Our glances said everything. “John,” I said, “the minute you leave Afghanistan the Taliban will mop up the force you trained in no time.” Boogie concurred completely. In 2021, that is exactly what happened. Once the US withdrew its last forces, the US-trained Afghan military crumbled into dust in a matter of days. I remembered a similar discussion with another secretary of state, George Shultz, who made the same argument to encourage our withdrawal from Lebanon. The US was training the Lebanese Army to take over the country. I argued that once we left Lebanon, radical forces would grab control. Lacking the cohesive zealotry of the radicals, the American-trained forces would collapse or become irrelevant. That’s exactly what happened when we withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000. Hezbollah took over the country in no time.

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.

The Pakistani film International Gorillay (International guerillas), produced by Sajjad Gul, told the story of a group of local heroes - of the type that would, in the language of a later age, come to be known as jihadis, or terrorists - who vowed to find and kill an author called "Salman Rushdie" . The quest for "Rushdie" formed the main action of the film and "his" death was the film's version of happy ending. "Rushdie" himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli Army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim "leader" Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. "Rushdie" was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously coloured safari suits - vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits - and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned [sic] with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film's popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing "Rushdie" became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding. At a certain point in the film one of the international gorillay was captured by the Israeli Army and tied to a tree in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that "Rushdie" could have his evil way with him. Once "Rushdie" had finished drinking form his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man's body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli soldiers and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. "Take him away," he cried, "and read to him from The Satanic Verses all night!" Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely. Not that, anything but that, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away. At the end of the film "Rushdie" was indeed killed - not by the international gorillay, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed by three large Qurans hanging in the sky over his head, which reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: there was dignity in that.

As Hamas’s rocket stockpiles dwindled, it reduced the number of rockets launched nightly but increased the range to Tel Aviv and beyond. Several of my conversations with Obama were interrupted by sirens. “Sorry, Barack,” I’d say. “I’m afraid we’ll have to resume our conversation in a few minutes.” With the rest of the staff I had forty-five seconds to go into underground shelters, returning after getting the all-clear sign. These live interruptions strengthened my argument for taking increasingly powerful actions against Hamas. And so we did. The IAF destroyed more and more enemy targets. Hamas panicked and became careless. Our intelligence identified the locations of their commanders. We targeted them and delivered painful blows to their hierarchy. Hamas then shifted their command posts to high-rises, believing they would be immune to our strikes. Using a technique called “knock on roof,” the air force fired nonlethal warning shots on the roofs of the buildings. Along with phone calls to the building occupants, these warnings enabled them to leave the premises unharmed. The IDF flattened several high-rise buildings with no civilian casualties. The sight of these collapsing towers sent Hamas a powerful message of demoralization and fear. This was literally “you can climb but you can’t hide.” Desperation was seeping through Hamas ranks. Arguments began to flare between Mashal in Qatar and the ground command in Gaza, which was suffering the brunt of our attacks. Eventually they caved. In the talks with Egypt they rescinded all their demands and agreed to an unconditional cease-fire that went into effect on August 26, 2014. After fifty days, Protective Edge was over. Sixty-seven IDF soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and a Thai civilian working in Israel lost their lives in the war. There were 4,564 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza, nearly all from civilian neighborhoods. The Iron Dome system intercepted 86 percent of them.4 The IDF killed 2,125 Gazans,5 roughly two-thirds of whom were members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups. A third were civilians who were often used by the terrorists as human shields. Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “the IDF took measures to limit civilian casualties never taken by any Western army in similar situations.” At least twenty-three Palestinian civilians were executed by Hamas over false accusations of colluding with Israel. In reality many had simply criticized the devastation of Gaza brought about by Hamas’s aggression against Israel.6 Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers. Surveying the rubble, they predictably declared victory. This is what all dictatorships do. They are not accountable to the facts or to their people. Less predictably, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted that Hamas was severely weakened and achieved none of its demands.7 With the

Odigo, an Israeli-owned company, had its U.S. headquarters two blocks from the World Trade Center, but the forewarned Odigo employees did not pass the terror warning on to the authorities in New York, an act that would have saved thousands of lives.

The august international organizations charged with preserving peace and human dignity in the world—the UN, the EU, among others—would have preferred that terrorist atrocities be limited to Israel. However, once the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians was legitimized against Israel, it was legitimized everywhere, constrained by nothing more than the strongly held beliefs of those who would become the mass murderers. Because the Palestinians were encouraged by most of the world to believe that the murder of innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic to advance the Palestinian nationalist cause, the Islamists believe that they may commit mass murder anywhere in the world to advance their holy cause. As a result, we suffer from a plague of Islamic terrorism, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan, from Nairobi to New York, authored and perfected by the Palestinians. Israel and the United States are not separate targets of Islamic terrorism. The whole world is its target. Israel and the United States share the bull’s-eye.

A favorite Palestinian tactic was to set up a couple of cannons or rocket launchers in a Christian village, fire a few rounds into Israel, and then quickly withdraw, knowing that Israel’s return fire would fall on innocent Christian civilians. This created a double benefit in the eyes of the Palestinians: Lebanese Christians would die, and the Israelis would be vilified and hated even more. This has become a public relations ploy that has been authored and perfected by the Palestinians ever since.

Though demonized by his Jewish and British enemies, Hajj Amin al-Husayni in fact cooperated well enough with the mandate administration. Only gradually did he use his religious authority to achieve a position of significant political influence contrary to British interests. It was a potent mix. The key event in this transformation was the so-called ‘Western Wall riots’ in 1929. The Western Wall was the only revealed section of what remained from the massive retaining wall built by Herod. This wall allowed Herod to enlarge the platform on which the Second Temple stood before being destroyed in 70 CE. Given this association, the wall became Judaism’s most important place of pilgrimage and prayer. The wall also was part of a Muslim religious trust (waqf): Muslim attachment to the wall and to the al-Haram al-Sharif (or ‘Noble Sanctuary’, as the Temple Mount is known in Arabic) is due to their association with the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. The wall is known to Muslims as al-Buraq, because Muhammad tethered his horse there, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century, are two of Islam’s most revered buildings.

When Palestinian prisoners are released, Israeli authorities typically drop them off at a checkpoint, where their families excitedly wait to greet them and bring them home.

As my family and I were preparing to embark on our European trip, we got word from a Palestinian Authority committee that liaises with Israeli counterparts that Israel planned to ban me from traveling. There was no legal basis for it to ban me; this was just its latest method of political harassment, an attempt to suppress me and to keep me from continuing to tell my story—their story. A large international media campaign blasting Israel for banning me from travel became just the latest public relations nightmare for the Zionist state. After a heavy backlash and the threat of my family suing, Israel eventually announced that it had not banned us from traveling abroad, but that I was banned from entering the 1948 territories because I posed a security threat to the state. As soon as we heard this news, my father told us all to hurry up and pack what we could, because he wanted to put their statement to the test immediately.

Israel, of course, was not a transit country due to its geographical location, but due to its designation as the default destination for Eastern European Jews—not all of whom planned on staying there. In fact, some of them never made it to the Jewish state at all. The logistics of transporting migrants to Israel were more complicated than to Germany; hence, it was more likely that people “got lost” on the way. Organized Jewish migrants used routes that were determined by Jewish Agency travel arrangements. An important relay in this migration arrangement was the port of Naples, where the streams of Eastern European and North African migrants to Israel converged. Naples had replaced Marseilles as the transit station for Jews from the Maghreb by the early 1960s due to the high concentration of North African Arabs in southern France and the resulting fear of friction this caused among the Israeli authorities.

Much to Israel’s concern, in Vienna migrants could quite easily redirect their journey, and there is evidence that some had already tried to do so in the late 1950s.19 Some of those who sought to change their final destination in Vienna contacted the West German embassy with the goal of traveling on to the FRG. However, at that point, the embassy refused to assist them, because the Federal Republic wanted to avoid trouble with Israel, especially given that Israeli representatives tried to prevent such contact.20 Although the available documentation does not reveal how the migrants to Germany who followed this path managed to enter the country, it is clear that some did. Some migrants even asked the expellee authorities to refund their travel expenses, though mostly without success.21

Hamas was an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt in 1928 with reformist aims, but which turned to violence in the 1940s and 1950s, only to reconcile with the Egyptian regime under Sadat in the 1970s. Hamas was begun in Gaza by militants who felt that the Brotherhood had been too accommodating toward the Israeli occupier in return for lenient treatment. Indeed, in the first two decades of the occupation, when the military authorities severely repressed all other Palestinian political, social, cultural, professional, and academic groups, they had allowed the Brotherhood to operate freely. Because of its utility to the occupation in splitting the Palestinian national movement, Israeli indulgence of the Brotherhood was extended to Hamas, notwithstanding its uncompromising and anti-Semitic program and commitment to violence.8

Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to entirely block the story or partially redact it.3 What’s deemed valid is highly questionable, since the priorities of the national security establishment will be very different to what’s required for a healthy, democratic state. This contradiction was clear when Israel’s chief censor, Ariella Ben Avraham, left her position in 2020 and took a job with the country’s leading cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group.

But if you happen to come across an incident of a riot or a law being broken by Israelis (settlers), such as people who throw stones on cars, what is your authority? I think I can maybe catch them or remove them. I think it wasn’t our responsibility, we didn’t have that power.

the Israelis and Palestinians were at a demographic tipping point, with more-or-less parity in the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The century-long struggle over the land was only becoming more intractable. The Israeli Zionist left had long warned that the dream was at stake and that Israel could not have it both ways: Without partition into two separate homelands for Jews and Palestinians, Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, however compromised those terms were, could not be sustained and Israel would inevitably become a binational country. If all the Palestinians were given equal rights and the vote in Israel, it would not have a Jewish majority. Without partition and without allowing Palestinians to vote for the government that controlled fundamental aspects of their lives, Israel’s claim to be a democracy would eventually implode. The temporary occupation had gone on so long that many critics were already describing the separate statuses of Israel and the occupied territories as a fiction meant to obscure what was already a binational, one-state reality. Instead of a light unto the nations, Israel was being cast by its harshest liberal-left critics and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as a single-state entity and territory that had already veered into a system of varying degrees of “Jewish supremacy” or racial “domination” over the Palestinians in different geographical areas that, they asserted, fit international definitions of apartheid and crimes against humanity. With a weak Palestinian leadership split between the increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza, and after years without any semblance of a peace process, Israel, more than seventy years after its founding, was more divided over its endgame than it was on the eve of its independence. Esh Kodesh and a rash of other settlement outposts had stepped into the void to try to determine the outcome and doom Israel to victory, or at least to deepen the entanglement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Several years ago, Tal Nitzan, then a doctoral student at Hebrew University, authored an award-winning paper that examined the incidence of rape as perpetrated by Israeli Defense Forces on Palestinian women. Undoubtedly, the goal was to uncover an epidemic of rape to demonstrate how diabolical those evil Jews truly were. When no such empirical reality was found, it was concluded (you might need to sit down for this) that this was proof of the extent to which the Israelis dehumanized the Palestinians.59 They were so hateful that they did not even consider the Palestinian women worthy of rape! If rapes are uncovered or if none are discovered, the same conclusion is reached: the Israelis are diabolical. All roads lead to self-flagellation and self-loathing. It’s the hallmark of a true “progressive.

Sir Michael Howard suggested, in “width, depth, and context.”3 Leader development and education should promote an organizational culture in which higher-level commanders are comfortable with relinquishing control and authority to junior commanders while setting conditions for effective decentralized operations consistent with the doctrine of mission command. Junior leaders must possess a bias toward action and accept necessary risks associated with leading and fighting in complex and uncertain environments against determined and adaptive enemies.

It was essentially a civil war, conducted under the watchful eye and occasional intervention of the British Mandatory authorities, in which the Palestinian Arab community, assisted by a sizeable pan-Arab irregular force, sought to prevent its Jewish counterpart from laying the foundation of statehood in line with the UN resolution.

attitudes toward America. Vainly, I scoured Dreams from My Father for some expression of reverence, even respect, for the country its author would someday lead. Instead, the book criticizes Americans for their capitalism and consumer culture, for despoiling their environment and maintaining antiquated power structures. Traveling abroad, they exhibited “ignorance and arrogance”—the very shortcomings the president’s critics assigned to him.

Today, Israel has no producing oil wells. However, a huge natural gas deposit was discovered in January, 2009 a few kilometers off of the Israeli coast near Haifa, estimated at $15 billion in value, making it one of the largest natural gas finds in history, and potentially making Israel energy independent.  Drilling for oil continues in other areas of Israel. Author Joel Rosenberg speculates that Deuteronomy 33:24 (Asher will “dip his foot in oil”) will mean that Israel will discover massive quantities of oil, which will entice Russia and the listed Muslim nations to invade, to seize the sp(oil).

I had taken office during a raging intifada, with Yasser Arafat running the Palestinian Authority, Israeli leaders committed to a Greater Israel policy, and Arab nations complaining from the sidelines. By the time I left, the Palestinians had a president and prime minister who rejected terrorism. The Israelis had withdrawn from some settlements and supported a two-state solution. And Arab nations were playing an active role in the peace process.

When Carlson and Stone first burst into Rebecca Schayes’s studio, Dimonte had not been happy to see them. There had been the usual local-cops-versus-feds macho-turf posturing. Few things unify the FBI and the local authorities, especially in a big city like New York. But Hester Crimstein was one of those things. Both sides knew that Crimstein was a master obscurer and publicity hound. The world would be watching. No one wanted to screw up. That was the driving force here. So they forged an alliance with all the trust of a Palestinian-Israeli handshake, because in the end, both sides knew that they needed to gather and nail down the evidence fast—before Crimstein mucked up the waters. The

May 14, 1948. Within a day of proclaiming its statehood, Israel was invaded by neighboring Arab states with the help of Arab Palestinians who were already fighting Jewish Palestinians.243 This began the First Arab-Israeli War.244 By 1949, Israel had defeated the Arab coalition, and the resulting armistices gave Israel control over most of the land of the Mandate.245 Only the Gaza Strip and so-called West Bank remained in Arab hands. The West Bank was occupied by Jordanian military forces, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces until the Six-Day War in 1967, when those territories also came under Israeli control.246 Jordan continued to formally claim control over the West Bank until 1988, when King Hussein granted the request of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to renounce any Jordanian claims to the West Bank, after which the PLO became the sole Arab claimant of that territory.247 It is important to note that from 1967 until today, neither the PLO, the current Palestinian Authority (PA), nor any other Arab Palestinian political entity has exercised sovereign control over the West Bank. Further, prior to Israel’s acquisition of the territory in 1967, dating back to the rule of the Ottoman Turks, there had never been a lawfully recognized Arab Palestinian sovereign over the territory in the former Mandate for Palestine.248 Today, one can hardly talk about the Middle East without bringing up war, terror, and unrest. The region has become synonymous with geopolitical instability and territorial conflicts, specifically with regard to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue. Despite the fact that Arab Palestinians have no greater historical claim to the territories for which they are fighting than do Jewish inhabitants of the land of Palestine, the majority of the international community continues to demand that Israel relinquish control of these territories to allow the establishment of an independent Arab state ruled by a political entity whose ultimate goal is the utter destruction of Israel.249

Islam divides the world into two parts: dar al-Islam (house of Islam), places where Sharia is the highest authority, and dar al-harb (house of war), places where Sharia is not the highest authority and must be brought within the fold of Islam.73 The distinction between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb proves that the Muslim ummah (community) is not limited by national boundaries or identities. Rather it is unified by Islam. That is why Muslim individuals from around the world leave their home countries to join ISIS and other terrorist groups to participate in jihad against the infidels. From the radical Muslim’s perspective, the jihad to transform dar al-harb into dar al-Islam does not end until the mission is fully accomplished. Although most Islamic jurists agree that only the head of state or the caliph (head of the Islamic ummah) has the authority to wage a holy war (jihad),74 radical Muslims argue that when the head of the state fails to faithfully perform his duties (one of which is to proclaim Sharia everywhere), it becomes incumbent on individual Muslims (members of the ummah) to carry out Allah’s commands.75 Only Allah is the legislator, and the prophet and his successors are vicegerents who enforce his law. Hence, peace occurs only when everything is either subject to Allah’s law or, for temporary periods, when Muslims regroup and prepare for the next campaign. Until then, a constant state of war between the ummah and nonbelievers exists. Israeli author and scholar of Arabic literature Mordechai Kedar said: Peace in their mind is not between Muslims and infidels. Peace is when infidels live under the umbrella of Islam. The conquest brings peace in their minds. Theoretically there cannot be [peace] between Islamic State, the Caliphate state, and other infidel states. Eternal war should be between them. Peace can reign only when everybody comes under the umbrella of Islam.76 Accordingly, the people who live in dar al-harb and do not accept Sharia are not considered innocent and can be killed or subdued. The Western mind views suicide bombing as an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people. To the radical Muslim mind, however, Western victims of suicide bombings are not innocent because they have not surrendered to Sharia and Muslim rule. They are still part of the house of war (dar al-harb). As a result, they have not acquired protected status under Islam, and accordingly, they are morally complicit in their own destruction. So the distinction between combatant and noncombatant status, as defined by international law, has no meaning to the Islamic radical’s mind.

According to the World Monuments Fund, “The present state of the church is worrying. Many roof timbers are rotting, and have not been replaced since the 19th century. The rainwater that seeps into the building not only accelerates the rotting of the wood and damages the structural integrity of the building, but also damages the 12th-century wall mosaics and paintings. The influx of water also means that there is an ever-present chance of an electrical fire. If another earthquake were to occur on the scale of the one of 1834, the result would most likely be catastrophic. ... It is hoped that the listing will encourage its preservation, including getting the three custodians of the church – the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Orthodox Church, and the Franciscan order – to work together, which has not happened for hundreds of years. The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority would also have to work together to protect it.

The translation of these European notions of racial superiority into the Israeli context became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government’s plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled as they agreed that the policy should involve the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership, that is all the members of the Palestinian Authority—about 40,000 people.

[Hamas firing a few dozen rockets at Israel in December 2008 does] not explain the disproportionality of the Israel attack [Operation Cast Lead], especially against the history of severe sanctions and attacks in the preceding months and years. While no one disputes a nation's right to self-defense, the record demonstrates that Israel was the far greater aggressor. [...] In fact, Hamas rockets had very little if anything to do with Israel's attack. […] This was an attack against the Palestinian people and their continued resistance—be it by Hamas or by the people of Gaza—and their consistent refusal to accede to Israeli demands and conditions.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield. Facing the colossus that is the Israeli state is a colonized people denied equal rights and the ability to exercise their right of national self-determination, a continuous condition since the idea of self-determination took hold globally after World War I.

Despite Israel’s prowess, some worried about an industry bubble. By 2019, a decade after the publication of Start-Up Nation, there were signs of a slowdown. Israeli high-tech export had reached an all-time annual record of $45.8 billion, representing about 46 percent of the country’s exports, consisting mainly of R&D and software, according to the annual report of the governmental Israel Innovation Authority.

In some ways the beginnings of Israeli high-tech could be traced to one particular failure. In the 1980s, as young people around the world were logging on to their first desktop computers, Israel brought together some of its best engineers to work on an ambitious project: the Lavi fighter jet, a made-in-Israel aircraft and part of the doctrine of self-reliance. A catalyst for groundbreaking technology in avionics and electronics, it proved to be a spectacularly expensive escapade and was shut down in 1987 under intense pressure from the Americans, who preferred Israel to spend their military aid on American aircraft. Hundreds of highly specialized scientists and engineers were released into the Israeli civilian market. The injection of the aforementioned Soviet immigrant engineers in the 1990s boosted the genesis of the start-up phenomenon, encouraged by prescient government support and incentives. The country’s new moniker and brand was minted with the publication in 2009 of a proud, blue-and-white-covered volume titled Start-Up Nation that chronicled what its authors, Dan Senor and Saul Singer, called the story of Israel’s economic miracle. It fast became a bestseller.

On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.

After the Oslo peace process dissolved into violence and hopelessness, the Israeli left and center-left had increasingly moved their focus from the quest for a land-for-peace settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a more social, civic agenda, promoting issues such as gender equality, civil marriage, LGBTQ rights, public transport on the Sabbath, and accommodation toward the more liberal, progressive streams of Judaism with which the vast majority of affiliated Jews in North America were identified, and which were repudiated by Israel’s Orthodox religious authorities.

the FMF program normally requires recipients of U.S. military assistance to spend all of the money here in the United States, to help keep American defense workers employed. Congress grants Israel a special exemption in the annual appropriations bill, however, authorizing it to use about one out of every four U.S. military aid dollars to subsidize its own defense industry. “No other recipient of U.S. military assistance has been granted this benefit,” notes a recent CRS report, and “the proceeds to Israeli defense firms from purchases with U.S. funds have allowed the Israeli defense industry to achieve necessary economies of scale and become highly sophisticated.” By 2004, in fact, Israel, a comparatively small country, had become the world’s eighth largest arms supplier.

Other factors depend on the Israeli people, including whether the highly personalized Israeli political landscape allows the sincere pursuit and eventual approval of an agreement. Progress also depends on the United States’ ability to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority or mediate between the two, an ability dependent on whether both sides view the United States as an honest broker.

Like the Egyptian authorities, the Iraqi Government was implacable in its opposition both to Israel and to any Jews who might try–as did tens of thousands–to fulfil the ancient Jewish longing for a return to the Jewish homeland. Babylon (Iraq) had been the first Jewish place of exile 2,534 years earlier. But more than three hundred Jews were arrested in the first days of the Arab–Israeli war. They were brought to trial before military courts martial and fined or imprisoned. The charge against them was that they had given support to Israel.

The following chapters will explore some of the more formalized “content cartels” in further detail, but in seeking to illustrate how backdoor agreements further increase the existing repression, one example stands out: the close relationship between Facebook and the Israeli government. For Palestinians, many of whom are physically cut off from the world by occupation and border controls, the internet is—in the words of author Miriyam Aouragh—“a mediating space through which the Palestinian nation is globally ‘imagined’ and shaped,” bringing together a dispersed diaspora along with a geographically fragmented nation.24 Social media has not only enabled long-lost relatives and friends to come together virtually, but has also provided space for organizing and the development of an alternate narrative to that provided by the mainstream media, which has long privileged the Israeli political position over that of the Palestinian one. But just as Palestinian activist voices have been historically devalued and silenced by mainstream media, so too have they been censored by social media platforms—while Israeli hate speech on the same platforms often goes ignored. In the summer of 2014, a few months after US-brokered peace talks faltered, three Israeli youth were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank. In retaliation, three Israeli men abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager, leading to increased tensions, violent clashes, and an increase in rockets fired by Hamas into Israeli territory. Israel responded with airstrikes, raining rockets into Gaza and killing more than two thousand Palestinians and injuring more than ten thousand more—a majority of whom were civilians. As the violence played out on the ground, social media became a secondary battlefield for both sides, as well as their supporters and detractors.

Israel’s claim to be a thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East is challenged by the facts. All media outlets in Israel, along with publishers and authors, must submit stories related to foreign affairs and security to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief military censor before publication. No other Western country has such a system. It’s an archaic regulation that began soon after Israel was born. The censor has the power to entirely block the story or partially redact it.

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

OPERATION FLAG BEARER WAS a particularly thorny case. At least twice, according to Shin Bet records, authorization for a hit on Flag Bearer was withheld for fear of harming innocents. The first time was on March 6, 2002. Shehade had been placed with a high degree of certainty in a south Gaza apartment, but because of the presence of a large number of civilians in the same building, along with the knowledge that his wife, Leila, and possibly also his fifteen-year-old daughter, Iman, were with him, the attack was called off. Three days later, a suicide bomber sent by Shehade blew himself up in Café Moment, near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, killing eleven civilians. On June 6, another attempt on Shehade was called off, for similar reasons. Twelve days after that, a suicide bomber from the Hamas military wing killed nineteen passengers on a bus in Jerusalem. The frustration in the Israeli security establishment was palpable. As IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon said, “I told my American counterparts about this business, and it exasperated them. I told them that at first we held back because his wife was with him, that he never moved without her. From their angle, that was insane. ‘What,’ they asked me, ‘because of his wife you didn’t attack?’ Their criteria regarding collateral damage was very different from the suspenders that we’d tied our own hands with.

The leaderships on both sides have everyone in a trap. They too are trapped. If Palestine Authority leaders repeatedly made statements strongly condemning all violence, many of those subject to checkpoint humiliations, night raids and house demolitions might switch support to Hamas. An Israeli government ending all repression might be accused of betrayal of Zionism. Two peoples, two leaderships, a four-way entrapment. I hope there are political scientists and game theorists working out escape strategies. Meanwhile some pessimism seems hard to avoid.

A special committee was established to give Hebraized versions of the original Arab names to the new settlements-thus, Lubya became Lavi and Safuria was turned into Zipori. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, explained that this was part of an attempt to prevent future claims to these villages. This process was supported also by the Israeli archeologists who authorized the names, not so much as a takeover of a title, but rather as a form of poetic justice that restored to "ancient Israel" its ancestral map. Place names were taken from the Bible and attached to the destroyed villages.

And why am I supposed to trust that you’re going to translate it honestly?” “Excuse me,” he scoffed, looking terribly offended. “We’re the Israeli police here, not the Palestinian Authority, which you can guarantee would deal with you dishonestly.” “Excuse me,” I replied. “So, I’m just supposed to trust you’re being honest with me and sign this paper?” “Exactly.” “Well, I’m not going to sign something I don’t understand. What are you going to do about that?” “Don’t sign it, then! You think you’re dealing with the Palestinian Authority? We have integrity here, and your people need another hundred years to get where we are!

I’m letting you know that we have begun to interrogate your daughter,” he said and hung up. He was speaking to my mother. She had come to attend my interrogation, which was her legal right as the parent of a minor under arrest. But as is commonly the case, the Israeli authorities didn’t allow her to do so.

Islamists’ criticism [of the PLO leadership for signing the Oslo Accords] was completely in line with other non-Islamist critics (except for the reproach of having been paid to sign). Edward Said suggested that according to sources from the PLO Executive Committee, Arafat only took an interest in the sections of the agreement being negotiated in Oslo which concerned him and his future role. All Arafat wanted, according to Said, was "acceptance" by the Israeli and American side: "They weren’t interested in fighting, or being equal, they just wanted the white man to say they were okay." All Arafat got in Said’s eyes from the Israelis was a mandate "to enforce what they call their security". His resumé was that the PLO succeeded in "being the first national liberation movement in history to sign an agreement to keep an occupying power in place." He called for a boycott of and non-cooperation with the Palestine National Authority (PNA). "So I think the preeminent responsibility of every Palestinian is not to cooperate with the authority that is a surrogate to the Israeli occupation and an incompetent one at that." Said and Ḥamās called for the return to the Intifāḍa: Said in the sense that local needs be taken care of by the community in parallel institutions as during the Intifāḍa, Ḥamās furthermore in terms of military struggle.

political conditions in Romania.”57 At the end of this multilevel dialogue between authorities, courts, and the plaintiff, Valentina Colien had successfully performed her German Volkszugehörigkeit. She was recognized as an ethnic German after convincing two courts that her entire life in Romania had revolved around her Germanness and that she had left Romania because of this ethnic identity. Even her opposition to the communist regime was supposedly derived from her being German, which for the German court had to be the prime motivation for all her actions. Remarkably, however, Colien’s Jewish background was not discussed or even referred to at any point in this court matter. The only way that it can be understood from the ruling that Colien was Jewish is from the fact that she received Israeli citizenship while in Tel Aviv. As will be discussed below, as the number of Jewish applicants for expellee cards increased, the Jewish faith and its implications for German Volkszugehörigkeit became the object of more explicit controversy.

Once again thanks to the ill-fated Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into three noncontiguous areas: A, B, and C. Area A, which today constitutes 18 percent of the West Bank, falls under the control of the Palestinian Authority. That means the PA is in charge of education, health, the economy, and policing there. In Area B, which constitutes 22 percent of the West Bank, the PA is similarly in charge of civil affairs, but its police presence exists only in coordination with the Israeli army. In both Areas A and B, the Israeli army can enter whenever it wants to carry out raids and arrests, and it does so frequently. Finally, there’s Area C, which makes up an overwhelming 60 percent of the West Bank and is fully under Israel’s civil and security control. This includes all matters related to land allocation, planning and construction, and infrastructure. Area C is where all of Israel’s illegal settlements are located, in addition to the accompanying bypass roads built exclusively for the settlers to use. Area C is also richly endowed with natural resources, like the main water aquifer for the entire country, which Israel controls.

In November 2005, shortly after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, an agreement regarding the Rafah crossing, which connects the Gaza Strip with Egypt, was brokered by the United States and the European Union and signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

In June 2007, about a year and a half after the Israeli disengagement, amās conducted a violent coup in the Gaza Strip against the rule of the Palestinian Authority.

The first was in Jordan (1968–1970); the second, in Lebanon (1970–1982); the third, the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza (1994–present); and the fourth, the Hamas regime in Gaza (2007–present).

Ferran was not as mad the next day; he even cracked a smile and seemed to be normal. Nice to Martina. He had brought a pair of glasses for Adam, made in Israel, and asked me to make sure that I gave them into his hands. He said he would not be able to see without them. I wish I had known that I was supposed to break those glasses. Interestingly, Ferran also handed me Adam's brand new Israeli passport, although Adam had not been in Israel for over 10 years. The signature in Adam Maraudin's Israeli passport was the same signature as the letter “L” in Tom Titelany's French passport, which I had photocopy of. How did they do that without Adam entering Israel or sitting in a jail in Israel? It must be: “Magic.” Martina was reading a book, George Orwell's 1984, in the store. One of my favorite books of all time. One of my favorite authors of all time. The strange thing was only that Martina should have read it before in high school. In Hungary, it was part of the curriculum, being a crucial piece. To recognize the Evil and terror in all its forms and shapes. She was so cute, reading in wintertime Barcelona, in Urgell, that I couldn’t just watch her; I had to interrupt her and kiss her from time to time, as I checked up on her while working in the office and the storage during the day when I stopped by. Poor baby, she was bored. Somehow like Sabrina had been, arriving in the same rhythm at the end of summer, with not much to do in wintertime Barcelona. But. Drugs. And. For. Some. Reason. In. Secret. Behind. My. Back. With. Strangers. I didn't consider how it would sound when I told Martina Sabrina's story - how she had fallen so low, becoming unemployed, sleeping with strangers, and indulging in drugs and alcohol. It didn't come across as a success story at all. I thought. “The Dream of Venus” by Salvador Dali. Also, Martina had come from the Southern hemisphere at the end of winter there, and had arrived in the Northern hemisphere when winter started here. She was in the middle of her personal year-long winter, reading so cutely with her cute glasses in the dark Urgell store upstairs with Pinto cat. Martina was wearing glasses for reading only; they had a cute frame. She seemed like she was just waiting for something to happen, almost as if she was waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. And I should have been listening to my instincts, because that was precisely what was happening, what she was doing - waiting for Santa to appear.

My father’s hopes were high for his return to Jaffa when the Swedish nobleman Count Folke Bernadotte was appointed on May 20, 1948 as the UN mediator in Palestine, the first official mediation in the UN’s history. He seemed the best choice for the mission. During the Second World War Bernadotte had helped save many Jews from the Nazis and was committed to bringing justice to the Palestinians. His first proposal of June 28 was unsuccessful, but on September 16 he submitted his second proposal. This included the right of Palestinians to return home and compensation for those who chose not to do so. Any hope was short-lived. Just one day after his submission he was assassinated by the Israeli Stern Gang. Bernadotte’s death was a terrible blow to my father and other Palestinians, who had placed their hopes in the success of his mission. Three months later, on December 11, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which states that: refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Congress was enthusiastic about its defense of Israeli actions, with strong bipartisan statements of support for Israel as well as authorization for $225 million in missile defense aid in addition to the annual aid already allotted to Israel.104 The pro votes in Congress were, again, overwhelming.

In the United States, however, the response to Eichmann’s capture was not celebration but outrage. Joseph Proskauer, a former president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), urged Prime Minister Ben-Gurion not to try Eichmann in Jerusalem but to turn him over to an international tribunal. Proskauer, who had been at the helm of the AJC’s anti-Zionist wing and had explicitly objected to the creation of a Jewish state, had said years earlier that he viewed Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as nothing less than a “Jewish catastrophe.”* He might have softened in the interim, but Proskauer was still appalled by Israel’s move. To try Eichmann in Jerusalem would be to acknowledge that Israel spoke for and acted in the name of world Jewry, and the AJC had long been on record as taking the position that the small Jewish state was anything but the center of the Jewish world. Nor did Proskauer, a member of a generation of American Jews deeply conscious of how they were seen by “ordinary” Americans, seem comfortable having the spotlight on Jews alone. Eichmann, he reminded Ben-Gurion, had committed “unspeakable crimes against humanity, not only against Jews.” Proskauer actually clipped a Washington Post editorial that insisted, “Although there are a great many Jews in Israel, the Israeli government has no authority . . . to act in the name of some imaginary Jewish ethnic entity,” and sent it to Ben Gurion.

that the entire Temple Mount is under the control of the Muslim Waqf. This site has been under such control since it was allowed by Israeli General Moshe Dayan to go into Jordanian hands following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War. It is still a mystery to many why Dayan agreed to such a thing.

As to answers, the only one I managed to come up with was a cliché, the one having to do with the way Germans view authority and personal responsibility. Which is not to say it is invalid. Beyond question, certain traits do tend to predominate in certain cultures. Most are neither good nor bad by definition: The same brooding romanticism routinely observed in Hitler helped shape Beethoven and Goethe; the same veneration for efficiency that made it possible for the Nazis to slaughter on so massive a scale has given rise to five generations of automotive engineers. There is little doubt that the particular brand of cruelty that flourished in the Third Reich, and the broad, unswerving allegiance to a madman that made it possible, were at least as much a matter of German as of human nature.

Today, about 85 percent of Israel’s wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

Israel has been described as “God’s time clock,” “God’s barometer,” “God’s prophetic clock,” “the powder keg fuse for the final world conflict,” “the touchstone of world politics,” and “the evidence that God is the God of history.” In 1948, with the establishment of Israel as a nation, the prophetic clock began ticking. In the final chapters of The Last Hour, the author turns our attention to the 36th through 39th chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel. Reading these ancient words against the backdrop of what is happening today in Israel gives me the chills. What God has promised to His people, He is fulfilling, and you and I have been privileged to be alive to witness it. As I finished reading this book, I thought of individuals I want to send it to. Some are believers who are very confused about the future and seem

After seizing the West Bank in 1967, Israel unilaterally annexed 72 square kilometers, including the eastern part of Jerusalem and land that belonged to 28 surrounding West Bank villages, to the Jerusalem municipality. Human Rights Watch is not aware of any other country, with the recent exception of the United States under President Donald Trump, that recognizes Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, which remains occupied territory under international law.

The discriminatory allocation of resources contributes to the starkly different realities faced by Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem. Seventy-two percent of Palestinian families live below the poverty line, as compared to 26 percent of Jewish families. Despite this, the Israeli government maintains 6 welfare offices, or offices that provide information to residents looking to receive government aid or other services, in Palestinian neighborhoods, but 19 in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. 32% of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem do not complete 12 years of education, as compared to 1.5% of Jewish students in Jerusalem.

There is also a simmering Islamist movement in Jordan, especially in the town of Zarqa, in the north-east towards the Syrian and Iraqi borders, which is home to some of the several thousand supporters of groups such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State. The authorities are fearful of a jihadist group in Iraq or Syria reaching the now fragile borders in strength and crossing into Jordan. The British-trained Jordanian Army is thought to be one of the most robust in the Middle East, but it might struggle to cope if local Islamists and foreign fighters took to the streets in guerrilla warfare. If the Palestinian Jordanians declined to defend the country it is not unrealistic to believe that it would descend into the sort of chaos we now see in Syria. This is the last thing the Hashemite rulers want – and it’s the last thing the Israelis want as well.

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein reached a deal with the French to construct a nuclear reactor at Osirak, near Baghdad. Israeli intelligence reported that Saddam intended to use the nuclear material to build a bomb. It also estimated that an attack on Tel Aviv with such a weapon could lead to three hundred thousand casualties. Prime Minister Begin therefore authorized an air strike on the Iraqi reactor. It

Sharon’s push to Judaize the Negev, as well as the Galilee, developed against the backdrop of the government’s decision to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza. After ending Jewish settlement there, Israel began to treat Gaza effectively as a territorial jurisdiction whose population it could consider as outside the demographic calculus of Jews and Palestinians who live in Israel and in the vast majority of the OPT—the West Bank including East Jerusalem—that Israel intends to retain. Israeli officials at the time acknowledged the demographic objectives behind the move. Amid the push to withdraw settlers from Gaza, Sharon said in an August 2005 address to Israelis, “Gaza cannot be held onto forever. Over one million Palestinians live there and they double their numbers with every generation.” Peres said the same month, “We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography.

The finding of crimes against humanity should prompt the international community to reevaluate its approach to Israel and Palestine.

Crimes against humanity can serve as the basis for individual criminal liability in international fora, as well as in domestic courts outside of Israel and the OPT under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

States should impose individual sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of these serious crimes and condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Helpless Palestinians made homeless and denied food and water by the Israeli authorities can no more assent to exile from their homeland of millennia than an enslaved woman can assent to sex with her master.

It would be fair to conclude, then, that successive Israeli governments did all they could to leave the Palestinians with no option but to trust, and vote for, the one group prepared to resist an occupation described by the renowned American author Michael Chabon as 'the most grievous injustice I have seen in my life.