Israeli Government Quotes

If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.

That was the real reason abuse was so common, Isra thought for the first time. Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them.

The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honor its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.

international community”—a technical term referring to the U.S. government and whoever goes along with it.

Why can’t they tell the difference between being Jewish and what the Israeli government did?” I asked Su. “Some people don’t think clearly when they’re angry,

We demand that Palestinians produce Gandhis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees. No matter what strategy Palestinians employ in their fight for freedom, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies work to ensure that it fails.

Although 9-11 is disguised and interpreted by the government and media as an act of terrorism carried out by Islamic fanatics, the evidence indicates that it was a carefully planned false-flag attack carried out by the Israeli military after years of planning and preparation.

Bringing up wrongdoings of the Israeli government is therefore about as relevant to the Holocaust as mentioning the warmongering decisions of recent US administrations in relation to the slaughter of Native Americans when America was first colonized centuries ago. In other words, whatever your opinion of Israel’s handling of the Middle East conflict – and we ourselves have some misgivings on that matter – that is in no way shape or form related to the facts of the Holocaust.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution.

There are ways of disagreeing with the policies of the Israeli government without sounding antisemitic. And blaming all Jews for something wrong that Israel has done—that’s antisemitic.

While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

To move beyond the current limits, we must be willing to hold the Israeli government—not just right-wing extremists, religious zealots, or neighboring regimes—accountable for its actions in the region, and especially for its denial of basic rights to Palestinians.

Acts of terror committed by a government is still terrorism.

Leftist university professors in Western Europe and the United States have also been agitated about one other country’s wars—Israel’s. Hence the numerous attempts by Leftist professors at Western universities to boycott Israeli professors and universities. But, of course, Chinese professors and universities are not only exempt from boycotts; they are enthusiastically sought after despite the lack of elementary freedoms in China, the Chinese government’s incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the decimation of much of Tibetan culture, and the increasing Chinese occupation of that ancient country.

In Vietnam, we staged nonviolent action and brought down a government—not with guns or bullets. We must rely on ourselves and organize ourselves so that we can perform the peace work of transformation and healing within our family, group, and community. Then such action can be taken. When the whole world focuses its attention on you, that action is very powerful. If Gandhi was able to succeed, you will also succeed.

Namely, the Bedouin issue could well transform itself into the “Second Coming” of the “Palestinian Rights” religion. Various Israeli governments have known this and they have all acted erratically on this issue. If history is any guide, no final Knesset vote on it will take place before both Jesus and Muhammad have arrived on the same camel at the gates of Jerusalem. But don’t tell this to anybody here, for they will be very offended.

How could she make Sarah understand what it was like back home, where no woman would think to call the cops if her husband beat her? And even if she somehow found the strength to stand up for herself, what good would it do when she had no money, no education, no job to fall back on? That was the real reason abuse was so common, Isra thought for the first time. Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them. Isra wanted to cry at the thought. She was ashamed to be a woman, ashamed for herself and for her daughters.

The Israeli government publicly claims that this extraordinary violence - its army fired over a million bullets in the first few days of the intifada alone - was directed against what it called "the terrorist Infrastructure." But, again, various Israeli officials privately acknowledged what was really at stake in dealing with the intifada, and that Israel's response to the uprising was directed not at armed groups but rather against the entire population.

The custom to put others in the line of fire is a recurring theme in Judaism. It boils down to the Levite Korahites’ willingness to sacrifice their ordinary Jewish subjects in order to ensure their own survival. This should be a historic warning to modern-day Israelites: their orthodox government would not hesitate to risk the lives of the many for the sake of the survival of the few in the orthodox elite. The citizens of Israel will have to think about how to remove the systemic threat that comes from within their own ranks.

As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing. At the start of this campaign, one oft-parroted justification was the nonsensical contrivance that Palestinians in Gaza were subject to a collective guilt on account of their voting for Hamas. It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren’t a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government’s disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas. It is pointless, even, to make the obvious analogies, to imagine the response had almost any other country on earth killed hundreds or thousands of civilians on a hostage rescue mission, or flattened every hospital in a city on the hunt for a terror group, and then bragged about its success. Pointless because such things assume a conversation anchored in facts or reason or even the thinnest presupposition that the people being killed, like those killed on October 7, are human beings, their loss an utter indictment of the systems and leaders and world that allowed

There is, and has been for decades, a version of this phantom reality imposed on the Palestinian people, one in which they left their land willingly and were never expelled, never terrorized into movement. One in which, as Golda Meir stated and so many Israeli politicians have echoed since, there was no such thing as Palestinians. One in which Palestinian identity, if it did exist, was meaningless, and certainly conferred no rights. One in which these nonpeople were nonetheless treated well by the government and institutions that now rule over them, given good laborer jobs and sometimes even afforded free passage on the roads they’re allowed to drive on and the buses they’re allowed to board and behind the walls that are there purely to keep everyone safe. One in which every failed peace agreement is the fault of these intransigent, unreasonable people and not the state whose officials to this day gloat openly about never allowing a Palestinian state to exist. One in which every round of violence is the sole consequence of the last Palestinian act of violence. One in which tens of thousands of dead children have only their support of Hamas to blame—an organization that last won an election before those kids were born. There’s safety in this story, safety from one’s own conscience. Because in this story the weight of indictment shifts onto the dispossessed, the disappeared, the dead, and one can continue as is, comfortable in the knowledge that history, narrative, language itself demands the killing continue. Or, better yet, has nothing to say at all.

think in terms of Iran, our differences with Iran stem from policies and actions of its government, and we've talked about that for some time, specifically the support for international terrorist groups, the opposition to Arab-Israeli peace process, their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missile systems with which to deliver such weapons, and their poor human rights record.

This definition matched everything I saw on the ground during my trip. Perhaps more importantly, Israel’s own leaders have long seen apartheid as well within the range of possibilities for its government. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned that without a “two-state solution” Israel would “face a South African–style struggle for equal voting rights.” The result of that struggle in Olmert’s mind would be grim—“the state of Israel [would be] finished.” Three years later, Ehud Barak, then serving as Netanyahu’s defense minister, issued a warning: As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

One of those prominent Jewish dissidents was Ronnie Kasrils, who served as the minister for intelligence between 2004 and 2008 under an ANC government. He told the Guardian that the comparison between the two nations wasn’t accidental. “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said. “This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

He laughed. “Neither do I,” he said. “But I’m going to need you for Iran.” We were entering the homestretch of negotiations with the Iranians, and the ferocity of opposition to the agreement—which didn’t even exist—was building. In late January, Speaker Boehner put out a press release announcing that Netanyahu would be traveling to the United States at his invitation to address a joint session of Congress. We received no advance notice of this visit from either Boehner or the Israeli government. This type of interference in American foreign policy—a foreign leader invited to lobby the U.S. Congress against the policy of a sitting president—would have been unthinkable in 2009. But by 2015, Netanyahu had become almost a de facto member of the Republican caucus, and Republicans had abandoned any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president.

East Germany brought down their wall in 1989 as a sign of surrender. The Soviet experiment had failed, and the Eastern bloc realized they couldn't win the Cold War. The falling Berlin Wall was their white flag. The walls I'd visited, though, expressed the opposite. The rising of these walls was the surrender. The walls stood as evidence that their conflicts were unwinnable and permanent. When diplomacy and negotiation crumbles, when the motivation to find solutions wanes and dies, when governments resign themselves to failure, the walls go up. Instead of trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we build a wall. Instead of finding a way for Catholics and Protestants to live together in Belfast, we build a wall. Instead of addressing the despair that leads migrants across our borders, we build a wall. The walls admit our defeat. We throw up a wall right after we throw up our hands.

I rushed down to meet my father, expecting him to explain why the council had agreed to allow another two hours of delay. Goldberg wanted to consult with his government, my father told me flatly. I was incredulous. How much consultation was needed to impose a cease-fire resolution? With a strange, bitter smile, my father responded dispassionately in Arabic. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “The Americans are giving the Israelis a little more time.

So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.

On December 20, Denis Healey asked Eden in the House of Commons whether Britain had had any foreknowledge of the Israeli attack. “There were no plans got together [with Israel] to attack Egypt,” he replied. Commenting in 1994, Healey remembered: “He told a straight lie.”59 Cabinet members continued to insist that there had been no conspiracy. “The wild accusations of collusion between the British, French, and Israeli Governments which were hurled by the Labour Party had absolutely no foundation in fact,” lied Lord Kilmuir in his 1964 memoirs.60 That afternoon, Eden told the cabinet secretary Sir Norman Brook to destroy all records of Britain’s collusion with Israel. Brook apparently did so the same day.61 The attempt to cleanse the historical record did not work: far too many people knew the truth. As with most cases of the destruction of documents, all it did was make the perpetrators look even more guilty.

Notwithstanding the Jerusalem Declaration, conflation of criticism of Israeli policy, or criticism of Zionism, with antisemitism remains the rule for Western governments, mainstream media and academic institutions. This has resulted in the democratic paradox that to criticize a government comprising far-right ministers, which promotes religious supremacism, fashions discriminatory legislation, rejects international law, and carries out massacres of civilian populations, is to expose oneself to the accusation of iniquity.

What few knew at the beginning, but many of us know now, is that this was a typical response on the part of this intensely individualistic man, who had attended Waseda in the late 1960s, at the height of the student riots in Tokyo, and joined in the violence but strictly as an independent; he refused to join any political group or faction but hurled stones at the police in his own right. Today we know Murakami as the man who went to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize from the Israeli government and in his acceptance speech criticized the Israeli state for its military actions against civilians in Gaza, declaring to his hosts, in effect, that if they chose to bring their massive military and political power against the individuals protesting in the Gaza Strip, then, right or wrong, he would stand against them. This was his now famous declaration of the “wall and eggs” metaphor, in which powerful political systems are seen as a great stone wall, and individuals as eggs, hopelessly and rather suicidally hurling themselves against its implacable strength.

By Friday June 9, the fifth day of the war, Israeli forces had decisively defeated the Egyptian and Jordanian armies and occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Arab East Jerusalem. Early that morning Israel had begun storming the Golan Heights, routing the Syrian army, and was advancing rapidly along the main road toward Damascus. The council had ordered comprehensive cease-fires on June 6 and 7, but Israeli forces entering Syria ignored these resolutions, even as their government loudly proclaimed its adherence to them.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Memo to The States of Earth All through time, the conquerors have been writing history. But no more! The conquerors are no longer the supreme emperor of the narrative, even if all the spineless governments take their side. Because guess what - society is no longer a property of the state. You ask us to vaccinate, we shall vaccinate - you ask us to follow traffic rules, we shall follow traffic rules - you ask us to file our taxes, we shall file our taxes - because that's the civilized thing to do. But if you ask us to support your rich moron of a friend in his exploits of conquest and domination, you shall not have a government to begin with. Remember that.

Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.

For ‘terrorists’, read ‘guerrillas’ or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – ‘freedom fighters’. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always ‘terrorists’. In the seventeenth century, governments used ‘heretic’ in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience.

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

Why do Americans pay billions of tax dollars annually to a foreign war machine, deployed on a captive civilian population? If the United States and the United Kingdom both voted against the Palestinian right to self-­determination should we interpret this to mean that the most powerful nations in the Anglosphere if not the Global North at large believe that Palestinians must remain a colonized and dispersed people forever? That Palestine must never be free, but must remain subject to Israeli apartheid from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea? That Palestinians must remain subjected to daily violence, impoverishment in refugee camps, and permanent political alienation? The powers and principles that govern the world, hardly in hiding, reveal themselves now in three dimensions and technicolor.

Israel is one of the most multiracial and multicultural countries in the world. More than a hundred different countries are represented in its population of 6 million. Consider how the Israeli government spent tens of millions of dollars airlifting more than forty thousand black Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984 and 1991. Since 2001 Israel has reached out to help others, taking in non-Jewish refugees from Lebanon, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Liberia, and Congo, and even Bosnian Muslims. How many such refugees have the twenty-two states in the Arab League taken in? The Arab world won’t even give Palestinian refugees citizenship in their host countries. Remember, Jews can’t live in the neighboring Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But Arabs are living as citizens in Israel. What does that tell you about their respect for other cultures? Over 1 million Arabs are full Israeli citizens. An Arab sits on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are Arab political parties expressing views inimical to the State of Israel sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Women are equal partners in Israel and have complete human rights, as do gays and minorities. Show me an Arab nation with a Jew in its government. Show me an Arab country with half as many Jewish citizens as Israel has Arab citizens. Show me freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and human rights in any Arabic country in the Middle East the way they exist and are practiced in Israel. It is those same freedoms that the Muslims resent as a threat to Islam and that they are fighting against, be it in Israel, Europe, or the United States.

This unusual television moment received much international attention, as did another CNN interview in which I displayed a large map of the Middle East. I “walked” through the Arab countries from Morocco to the Indian Ocean with the open palms of my hands. Then I covered Israel with my thumb.10 For many used to seeing the map of Israel alone on a full screen, a great Israeli Goliath “oppressing” the small Palestinian David, this demonstration came as a shock. It was Israel that was David. This was the best way I could think of to convey that the Arab world was hundreds of times the size of Israel. These interviews may have been seen by some unlikely viewers. When visiting Japan that year, singer Perry Como was asked by the Japanese government how to improve Japan’s image in the United States. He suggested they hire my services.

Peace cannot require Palestinians to acquiesce to the denial of what was done to them. Neither can it require Israeli Jews to view their own presence in Palestine as illegitimate or to change their belief in their right to live there because of ancient historical and spiritual ties. Peace, rather, must be based on how we act toward each other now. It is unacceptable for a Palestinian to draw on his history of oppression and suffering to justify harming innocent Israeli civilians. It is equally unacceptable for an Israeli to invoke his belief in an ancient covenant between God and Abraham to justify bulldozing the home and seizing the land of a Palestinian farmer. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which proposes a political framework for a resolution to the conflict in Ireland, and which was overwhelmingly endorsed in referendums, sets out two principles from which Palestinians and Israelis could learn. First “[i]t is recognized that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.” Second, whatever political arrangements are freely and democratically chosen for the governance of Northern Ireland, the power of the government “shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of civil, political, social, and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.” Northern Ireland is still a long way from achieving this ideal, but life has vastly improved since the worst days of “the Troubles” and it is a paradise on earth compared to Palestine/Israel.

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.

Gazans hypothesized that the brutality of the offensive was a tactic to force them to turn against Hamas. In many instances this worked, particularly when Hamas showed its own merciless face. Under the heavy toll of bombing, Hamas used the chaotic environment of war to settle its own political scores and carry out extrajudicial assassinations of its domestic enemies, including members of Fatah who were held in its jails, as well as suspected collaborators or informants for Israel.40 More disturbingly, in the early days of Operation Protective Edge, Hamas’s Ministry of Interior called on citizens not to respond to evacuation orders by the Israeli army, asserting that these were only issued as a form of psychological warfare to create panic.41 Many in Gaza criticized Hamas, not least for its role in dragging the coastal enclave into another conflagration. Others were critical of Hamas’s governance record and its authoritarian streak.

Israel’s constant drone surveillance over Gaza also impressed President Vladimir Putin. Moscow needed reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia. Tbilisi had used Israeli drones, and years later Moscow decided to follow suit. Having seen Israeli operations over Gaza, Russia licensed the Israeli Aerospace Industries Searcher II, renamed “Forpost” by its new owners, and it became a key asset in Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.33 Israel trained Russian pilots to operate the drones. Russia and Israel maintained a close relationship during the Syrian civil war despite the former supporting Assad and the latter worrying about the growing presence of Russian allies Iran and Hizbollah in the country. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Naftali Bennett) to routinely attack Iranian and Syrian military positions in Syria to stop the transfer of weapons to Hizbollah. However, Moscow usually turned a blind eye to these attacks, assisted by a de-escalation hotline between the two governments.

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.

* In 2012 fatah and Hamas forged unity agreement and accepted all of the demands of the quartet. Obama administration also approved this agreement threatened the long-term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank. Something had to be done, three Israeli boys were murdered in the West Bank the Netanyahu government had strong evidence that once they were dead but use the opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank. During the 18 day rampage Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians and killed six, Hamas finally reacted with its first rocket strikes in 19 months. This provided the pretext for operation protective edge on July 8 by the end of July 15 hundred Palestinians had been killed 70% of them were civilians including hundreds of women and children. Three civilians in Israel were killed. Large areas of Gaza were turned into rubble. Gauzes main power plant was attacked, which is a war crime rescue teams and ambulances were repeatedly attacked for hospitals were attacked another war crime. Are you in school was attacked harbouring 3300 refugees who had fled the ruins of their neighbourhoods on the orders of the Israeli army

After the Hebron Agreement there was the briefest of honeymoons with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent me a letter commending me for my “courage” for making a tough decision. He sent Arafat a similar letter. I thought that was peculiar since the only courage Arafat displayed was the courage to receive the Palestinian neighborhoods we had transferred to his control. But this was clearly as good as it was going to get. “Netanyahu and Arafat are both allies of the United States,” the White House briefed Israeli reporters.3 This was incredible. The democratically elected leader of the staunchest ally of the US and the leader of a terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of Americans were put on equal footing. But such was the diplomatic mind-set of Washington in those days. The administration suffered from double-barreled myopia. First, it refused to see that the core of our conflict with the Palestinians was the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. Second, it refused to really internalize that Israel’s government was dependent on a parliamentary system in which the prime minister could be toppled at any moment by the slimmest of majorities.

The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.

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.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

Eichmann remembered this because it was unusual for him to receive social invitations from members of governments; it was an honor. Mach, as Eichmann recalled, was a nice, easygoing fellow who invited him to bowl with him. Did he really have no other business in Bratislava in the middle of the war than to go bowling with the Minister of the Interior? No, absolutely no other business; he remembered it all very well, how they bowled, and how drinks were served just before the news of the attempt on Heydrich’s life arrived. Four months and fifty-five tapes later, Captain Less, the Israeli examiner, came back to this point, and Eichmann told the same story in nearly identical words, adding that this day had been “unforgettable,” because his “superior had been assassinated.” This time, however, he was confronted with a document that said he had been sent to Bratislava to talk over “the current evacuation action against Jews from Slovakia.” He admitted his error at once: “Clear, clear, that was an order from Berlin, they did not send me there to go bowling.” Had he lied twice, with great consistency? Hardly. To evacuate and deport Jews had become routine business; what stuck in his mind was bowling, being the guest of a Minister, and hearing of the attack on Heydrich. And it was characteristic of his kind of memory that he could absolutely not recall the year in which this memorable day fell, on which “the hangman” was shot by Czech patriots.

Practical as ever, Clinton invited me to the White House a mere three weeks after the election. During the election campaign I had of course strongly criticized the Oslo agreements. This created an obvious dilemma for me. On the one hand, governments are guided by the continuity of international agreements. On the other, this agreement was seriously flawed and compromised Israel’s security. I resolved the issue by saying that despite my grave reservations, I would honor the agreements under two conditions: Palestinian reciprocity and Israeli security. As Oslo was to be carried out in stages, I would proceed to the next stage, known as the Hebron Agreement, only if the Palestinians kept their side of the bargain, foremost on matters relating to security. I insisted that the Palestinians live up to their pledge to rein in terrorism and to jail Hamas terrorists. If they did their part, I would do mine. “If they’ll give, they’ll get” was the way I put it, along with a corollary: “If they won’t give, they won’t get.”2 With the exception of the hard right who wanted me to tear up the Oslo agreement outright, most right-of-center and centrist opinion agreed with my policy. Israelis were tired of voluntarily ceding things to the Palestinians and receiving terror in return. I explained all this to Clinton when we met in the White House. He asked me if I would honor the Hebron Agreement. I said that under the twin principles of reciprocity and security I would.

The answer is… nothing, except the force of deterrence. Peace with a dictatorship, or at least nonbelligerence with it, is achieved not by debilitating concessions but by powerful deterrence—not by weakness but by strength. The dictatorship that I was most concerned with was actually not Syria but Iran. On February 19, 1993, I published an article titled “The Great Danger.” “The greatest danger to Israel’s existence is not found in the Arab countries, but in Iran,”3 I wrote. I consistently argued that we must take action to prevent Iran from realizing its nuclear ambitions. All these arguments, based on history and common sense, were dismissed by the foreign policy elites in both Israel and Washington. The election of Rabin was seen as an opportunity to break the logjam and make a historic peace, beginning with Syria. But first one obstacle had to be removed. The Ford administration had given Israel a commitment that the Golan Heights would effectively remain in Israel’s hands. President Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was dispatched to Israel to change that. Christopher devised a new secret agreement by which the US would receive from Israel “a deposit”—an advanced promise to cede the Golan Heights in exchange for a future peace deal. This was required because Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator, insisted on first receiving such an Israeli commitment before he would even consider moving forward with any political negotiations with Israel. As would later become evident, Assad actually had no intention of making a formal peace, but the Rabin government nonetheless agreed to a full withdrawal from the Heights in exchange for a peace agreement.

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.

This fundamental “brotherhood” was expressed by Amos Oz while meeting with the settlers of Ofra, a settlement between Ramallah and Nablus, deep within the West Bank. It is considered the “Jewel of the Crown” of the “ideological” settlement movement, as opposed to the “quality of life” settlements, whose members mainly join for the high level of housing and social services subsidized by the Israeli government. Oz’s report on the meeting at Ofra is included in his book Journey in Israel, Autumn 1982, which discusses meetings with representatives of different sectors of “Israeli society” on both sides of the Green Line.

Bernadotte succeeded in focusing international pressure of some kind on Israel, or he had at least produced the potential for such pressure. In order to counteract this, the Israeli architects of the ethnic cleansing programme realised they would need to involve the state’s diplomats and the Foreign Ministry more directly. By July the political apparatus, the diplomatic corps and the military organisations within the new State of Israel were already working harmoniously together. Prior to July, it is not clear how much of the ethnic cleansing plan had been shared with Israeli diplomats and senior officials. However, when the results gradually became visible the government needed a public relations campaign to stymie adverse international responses, and began to involve and inform those officials responsible for producing the right image abroad – that of a liberal democracy in the making. Officials in the Foreign Ministry worked closely with the country’s intelligence officers, who would warn them in advance of the next stages in the cleansing operation, so as to ensure they would be kept hidden from the public eye.

The United States and Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas preempted the coup in 2007, the siege of Gaza became far more severe, along with regular Israeli military attacks.

Israeli technology was sold as the solution to unwanted populations at the US–Mexico border where the Israeli company Elbit was a major player in repelling migrants. European governments also wanted to monitor refugees, so Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) drones were employed for the task.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

Citizen Lab, which tracks state-backed efforts to hack and surveil journalists, had recently reported that NSO Group’s Pegasus software compromised an iPhone belonging to a friend of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not long before Saudi operatives cut Khashoggi to pieces with a bone saw. The investigation had prompted sharp criticism of NSO Group, which denied that its software was used to target Khashoggi but also refused to answer questions about whether the software had been sold to the Saudi government. Lambert wanted to know about Citizen Lab’s work on NSO Group. He asked whether there was any “racist element” to the focus on an Israeli group. He pressed Scott-Railton about his views on the Holocaust. As they spoke, Lambert took out a black pen with a silver clip and a chrome ring on its barrel. He laid it just so on a legal pad in front of him, tip pointed at Scott-Railton.

even though his appearance in Germany occurred at a time when the 1951–52 retribution debate had only barely receded from public view:5 at that time not a few Israelis were opposed to the idea of accepting monetary retribution from the federal government, insisting that this would bestow an undeserved sense of redemption on West Germany.

Without doubt, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank have increased Palestinian militancy and motivation to fight Zionism and add a further layer of obstruction to any possibility of partitioning the land into two viable states—though the example and precedent of Israel’s uprooting of all its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005 indicates that the majority of West Bank settlements, too, could be removed should the Israeli government and public come to believe that such a course would assure Israel peace and future prosperity. But given Palestinian behavior and discourse—and this must include the observation that the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip did nothing to moderate Palestinian behavior and attitudes toward Israel; rather the opposite—there is little chance that Israelis will come to feel and believe this in the foreseeable future.

And as we followed the news, we learned that the Israeli government was debating the controversial and racist “Basic” or Nation-State Law, which it ended up passing in July 2018. The law declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It establishes Hebrew as the official language of the country, with Arabic downgraded to “special status.” Finally, the law mandates that the state regard “Jewish settlement as a national value” and to “act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Israeli apartheid was now more official than ever.

Is Israel really the biggest, baddest wolf on the block? Heck no. Even if you put every single one of Israel’s mistakes under a microscope, they still wouldn’t come close to those of many other countries around the world. In Saudi Arabia, Chop Square is literally a place for weekly public decapitations. In Dubai, the working class are literal slaves. In China, disappearances are normal and Muslims are being tracked and put into camps. In Turkey, journalists and activists are imprisoned and killed. In Iran, LGBTQ+ people are executed. In Syria, the government uses chemical weapons against its own people. In Russia, there is arbitrary detention, and worse. In Myanmar, the army is massacring the Rohingya Muslim population. In Brunei, Sharia law was just enacted. In North Korea—no description needed. All over the world, millions of people are dying because of tyrannical leaders, civil wars, and unimaginable atrocities. But you don’t see passionate picket lines against Dubai or Turkey or even Russia. The one country that’s consistently singled out is… Israel. The UN has stated values of human dignity, equal rights, and economic and social advancement that are indeed fantastic, and they are the values upon which Israel was established and is operating. The sting is it that countries that certainly do not adhere to some or any of these values are often the ones who criticize Israel while keeping a straight face. “Look over there!” those leaders say, so the world will not look at their backyards and see their own gross human rights violations. All this led to a disproportionate number of UN resolutions against the only Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an easy punching bag, but this obsession over one country only is being used to deflect time and energy away from any real discussion of human rights in the world’s actual murderous regimes. And Israelis aren’t the only ones who have noticed this disproportionate censorship. The United States uses its veto power to shut down almost every Security Council resolution against Israel, and it does this not because of “powerful lobbies” (sorry to burst your bubble). The reason the US shuts down most of these resolutions is because the US gets it. In a closed-door meeting of the Security Council in 2002, former US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte is said to have stated that the US will oppose every UN resolution against Israel that does not also include: condemnation of terrorism and incitement to terrorism, condemnation of various terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and a demand for improvement of security for Israel as a condition for Israeli withdrawal from territories. If a resolution doesn’t include this basic and rational language, the US will veto it. And it did and it does, thank the good Lord, in what we know today as the Negroponte Doctrine.

Our daughters, and later our son, were born in Beirut in the midst of the war, and by virtue of the fact of having parents who were politically involved (as were almost all of the 300,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon), they were seen as terrorists by the Israeli government and some others, as were Mona and I.

Many Ultra-Orthodox women did work outside the home, but given the neglect of secular studies in schools for girls and young women, they lacked many skills necessary for even low-level jobs in the modernizing Israeli economy. As a result, a significant number of Ultra-Orthodox families lived on welfare payments from the government. At the same time, Ultra-Orthodox men did not serve in the military (unlike the Orthodox Zionists.) When Ben-Gurion agreed, before the formation of the state, that men studying in the Ultra-Orthodox yeshivot would be exempt from the draft, there were only several hundred such students; by the turn of the twenty-first century the number had grown to sixty thousand, and these exemptions were strenuously defended at all costs by the Ultra-Orthodox political parties, who most often played a crucial role in the formation of coalition governments.

The growth of Israeli influence in Europe presents a curious historical milestone and an unresolved contradiction. After the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, Germany has become the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in October 2021 on one of her final overseas visits before leaving office; it was her eighth trip during her sixteen years in power. She did not travel to the West Bank or Gaza. She praised the Jewish state, despite acknowledging that Israel did not embrace her favored two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, but this did not matter because “the topic of Israel’s security will always be of central importance and a central topic of every German government.

The role of Israeli surveillance globally is empowering anti-democratic and fascist governments, Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack told me, and it’s not just targeting journalists and human rights.

Sonnet of Occupation With just weeks of lockdown, You all feel restless and bland. That is how everyday life is, For people in occupied land. Imagine living your whole life, Subject to restriction and suspicion. Ask a Palestinian or a Kashmiri, They'll reveal the face of occupation. Life, liberty and happiness, Are the rights of every being. Whenever a government violates them, Civilized humanity must intervene. I call to all humans far and near, Rest not till statehood is declared.

And once, during an Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, Trump divulged highly classified intelligence supplied by a close ally in the Middle East—intelligence that was so sensitive it was not shared widely within the US government. That Middle Eastern ally was Israel, and the breach reportedly put at risk an operation that had given Israeli intelligence a window on the inner workings of the Islamic State in Syria.

Ezekiel 38 tells us of the evil intentions of Russia when it describes how Ros will be led down to Israel as if a hook were put into its jaw. Ros will come down not for the purpose of peace, but plunder. Today, the Russians are the number one player in the Syrian civil war, and they don’t even try to hide the fact that they are there primarily for the gas and oil. Russia’s only warm-water seaport giving access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East is in Syria. That’s why Russia backs the government of Bashar al-Assad.

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.

As we touched on earlier, this causes a dramatic underestimate of the true rate of ownership in Israel and Switzerland. Both the Israeli and Swiss governments issue guns to civilians, while the government still technically owns the guns. In Israel, the government owns most guns, and people apply to have them issued. In Switzerland, all able-bodied Swiss males between the ages of 18 and 34 keep military weapons in their homes.46 After age 34, they can apply for permission to keep their military weapons, and the majority opts to do so.

But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than at any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967.

Indeed, the Israeli government and most Israelis are currently more preoccupied with this threat than with Israel’s ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. Iran is now their biggest concern, not the Palestinians or the Arab states.

Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world, having sold a range of equipment to nations including India, Azerbaijan, and Turkey that worsened conflicts in their own regions. The Israeli government approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007, according to details uncovered in 2022 by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack.

Yehoshua Verbin, commander of the military government that ruled over Arab citizens between 1948 and 1966, admitted that ethnic cleansing occurred in 1948. “We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt homes, we looted their land—from their point of view—we didn’t give it back, we took land …” he said. The “solution” offered, then and now, was eerily similar to Kimmerling’s thesis; either make the Arabs disappear, and if that was not possible render them unequal in the hope that they might emigrate by choice for a better life elsewhere. Kimmerling could have added that politicide became a marketable tool around the world for nations and officials that wanted to emulate Israeli “success.

The growth of Israeli influence in Europe presents a curious historical milestone and an unresolved contradiction. After the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, Germany has become the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in October 2021 on one of her final overseas visits before leaving office; it was her eighth trip during her sixteen years in power. She did not travel to the West Bank or Gaza. She praised the Jewish state, despite acknowledging that Israel did not embrace her favored two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, but this did not matter because “the topic of Israel’s security will always be of central importance and a central topic of every German government.” It was an emotional connection, Merkel stressed, and one rooted in historical reconciliation and forgiveness. “The fact that Jewish life has found a home again in Germany after the crimes of humanity of the Shoah is an immeasurable sign of trust, for which we are grateful,” she wrote in the guest book at Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial

Thirteen giant companies are leading contractors with US Customs and Borders Protection (CPB), including Elbit, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. These firms are all weapons manufacturers, and for them it mattered little if their clients were the US military in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the Israeli government in its occupation.60 Between 2006 and 2018, CBP, the US Coast Guard, and ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) released more than 344,000 contracts for immigration services worth US$80.5 billion. The first drones tested and used by CBP over the US–Mexico border in 2004 were made by Elbit.61 This Israeli company liked the Trump administration and donated to his re-election campaign in the 2020 presidential election.

Israel’s status as an ethnonationalist state was there from its birth in 1948, but it’s been turbo-charged in the twenty-first century. The Israeli leader who most successfully pursued this policy was Benyamin Netanyahu, a fervent believer in the endless occupation of Palestinian lands. He was the longest serving prime minister in the country’s history, though finally lost office in 2021 after more than twelve years leading the government. He won re-election in November 2022 with the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history. His vision itself has won, since he convinced many other countries to use Israel as a model. Netanyahuism is an ideology that will outlive him.

The world is listening. Israeli arms sales in 2021 were the highest on record, surging 55 percent over the previous two years to US$11.3 billion. Europe was the biggest recipient of these weapons, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by Asia and the Pacific. Rockets, aerial defense systems, missiles, cyberweapons, and radar were just some of the equipment sold by the Jewish state. The result is that Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world, having sold a range of equipment to nations including India, Azerbaijan, and Turkey that worsened conflicts in their own regions. The Israeli government approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007, according to details uncovered in 2022 by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack.

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.

The relationship became so close by the mid-1970s that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster to visit, including a tour of Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Vorster had been a Nazi sympathizer and member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War II. In 1942, he proudly expressed his admiration for Nazi Germany. Yet when Vorster arrived in Israel in 1976, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence.” Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” A few months after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same challenge: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”6 The relationship between the nations was broad but also sworn to secrecy. In April 1975, a security agreement was signed that defined the relationship for the next twenty years. A clause within the deal stated that both parties pledged to keep its existence concealed.

Shireen Baraka Barghouti lives in a cauldron of hate that often boils over. She’s never been outside the Gaza Strip even though it’s only twenty-five miles long and three miles wide at the narrowest borders, seven miles at the widest. Qasem Soleimani, until his death in 2020, was the major general over Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who invested monstrous sums of Iranian money in the youth of Gaza. In fact, Hamas simply could not exist without the Iranian money he supplied. And to make sure he covered all the bases, Soleimani also funded the rival Islamic Jihad. Shireen doesn’t hold back when speaking about the climate of death and destruction that has helped create. “In Gaza, terrorism is our number-one export,” she said. “How sad that whenever the Gaza Strip is mentioned, people automatically think of radical Islamic terrorists. But how could they not? Our Gaza government is run by them. Iran gives Hamas thirty million dollars a month. “At different times we’ve had al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in charge, to name just a few. New groups form every year, and our young Gaza boys see these ‘freedom fighters’ as heroes to emulate. “In Europe, people idolize soccer players. But not in Gaza. Here, men dressed in green uniforms, toting AK-47s, and shouting ‘death to Israel’ are featured on billboards. “The explosions are enough to cause you a nervous breakdown. A few years ago Hamas fired over ten thousand rockets into Israel in one extended attack over several months. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Israelis responded, and once we heard the drones humming over Gaza, we took cover. “Hamas has done nothing for the people of Gaza. While they line their pockets with millions of dollars, the people go without eating. They are cruel and intentionally keep us in this senseless war with Israel. “You might think because I live in Gaza and grew up Muslim that I hate Israel. But I don’t. I do detest Hamas, however—and all the other terrorist groups that make life unbearable in the Strip.

By Friday June 9, the fifth day of the war, Israeli forces had decisively defeated the Egyptian and Jordanian armies and occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Arab East Jerusalem. Early that morning Israel had begun storming the Golan Heights, routing the Syrian army, and was advancing rapidly along the main road toward Damascus. The council had ordered comprehensive cease-fires on June 6 and 7, but Israeli forces entering Syria ignored these resolutions, even as their government loudly proclaimed its adherence to them. By that night in the Middle East (still afternoon in New York) Israel’s forces were approaching the key provincial capital of Quneitra, beyond which stood only the flat Hauran plain between their armored columns and the Syrian capital, just forty miles away.

As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.

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.

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 idea was for the government to invest $100 million to create ten new venture capital funds. Each fund had to be represented by three parties: Israeli venture capitalists in training, a foreign venture capital firm, and an Israeli investment company or bank. There was also one Yozma fund of $20 million that would invest directly in technology companies. The Yozma program initially offered an almost one-and-a-half-to-one match. If the Israeli partners could raise $12 million to invest in new Israeli technologies, the government would give the fund $8 million. There was a line around the corner. So the government raised the bar. It required VC firms to raise $16 million in order to get the government’s $8 million. The real allure for foreign VCs, however, was the potential upside built into this program. The government would retain a 40 percent equity stake in the new fund but would offer the partners the option to cheaply buy out that equity stake—plus annual interest—after five years, if the fund was successful. This meant that while the government shared the risk, it offered investors all of the reward. From an investor’s perspective, it was an unusually good deal.

...The UN granted the Jews a return to their ancestral homeland after the Jewish people were nearly destroyed in the Holocaust; that Israel agreed to the UN Partition Plan for Statehood; that the Arabs refused it and ATTACKED THE NEW JEWISH STATE IN ORDER TO DESTROY IT. There was literally zero systematic ethnic cleansing, then or now, as proven by the fact that Israeli Arabs constitute 21 percent of Israel’s population (and hold high levels of employment in public service, the IDF, government, etc.)

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.

Two years later, the Israeli government announced that it had formalized a collaboration with Facebook’s Tel Aviv office, which—according to Palestinian activists who have regular contact with the company—has jurisdiction over both Israel and the Palestinian territories. They were thus replicating, in virtual space, the occupation of Palestinian land. In a statement about the partnership, Facebook said that “online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies, and this is true in Israel and around the world.”27 Facebook’s actions, however, speak louder than its words. When it comes to Palestinian speech, it is only Israelis who have a real say—no matter whether the Israelis involved even believe that Palestinians should have rights. Ayelet Shaked, who served as Israeli justice minister at the time the agreement was formed and was directly involved in dealings with Facebook, has herself engaged in hate speech on the platform. Of Palestinian mothers, she once wrote: “They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.”28 A paper published by the Haifa-based Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh documented the disparities in how hate speech from Israelis and Palestinians is treated, noting that “Facebook is the main source of violence and incitement online” stemming from Israel.29

Another former staffer told me under the condition of anonymity that it was a “constant discussion,” and that the company was under pressure from the Israeli government. As Maria tried to point out to her superiors, Zionism is an ideology or a political doctrine, akin to “communism” or “liberalism”—not an immutable characteristic. Treating it as such is not merely a mockery of actual characteristics that make a person or group vulnerable, but elevating it—and not Palestinians—to such a level also fails to take into account the power imbalance that exists between occupied and occupier. But, Maria told me, “Palestine and Israel has always been the toughest topic at Facebook. In the beginning, it was a bit discreet,” with the Arabic-language team mainly in charge of tough calls, but after the 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza, the company moved closer to the Israeli government. Somewhat notably, one of the first twenty members of Facebook’s new External Oversight Board is Emi Palmor, under whose direction the Israeli Ministry of Justice petitioned Facebook to censor legitimate speech of human rights defenders, according to 7amleh.

Today’s rebel groups rely on guerrilla warfare and organized terror: a sniper firing from a rooftop; a homemade bomb delivered in a package, detonated in a truck, or concealed on the side of a road. Groups are more likely to try to assassinate opposition leaders, journalists, or police recruits than government soldiers. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, masterminded the use of suicide bombings to kill anyone cooperating with the Shia-controlled government during Iraq’s civil war. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, perfected the use of massive car bombs to attack the same government. Hamas’s main tactic against Israel has been to target average Israeli citizens going about their daily business. Most Americans cannot imagine another civil war in their country. They assume our democracy is too resilient, too robust to devolve into conflict. Or they assume that our country is too wealthy and advanced to turn on itself. Or they assume that any rebellion would quickly be stamped out by our powerful government, giving the rebels no chance. They see the Whitmer kidnapping plot, or even the storming of the U.S. Capitol, as isolated incidents: the frustrated acts of a small group of violent extremists. But this is because they don’t know how civil wars start.

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.

The reason behind Israel’s engagement with Lebanon was justified at the time as based on national security grounds, with other nations admiring the Jewish state’s actions and wanting to learn from them, but there was something more existential at work. In his 1998 book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman gave an anecdote from 1982 about the real, less acknowledged mission of Israeli forces: Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)56 It is not hard to see why this attitude was and remains so appealing to some governments. It is a desire to militarily destroy an opponent but also erase its history and ability to remember what has been lost. When surveillance technology is added to the mix, tested on unwilling subjects, it’s even harder to successfully resist.

One of the enduring myths about NSO, and many of its competitors, is that it’s a private company looking to make a profit with no formal ties to the Israeli state. It’s a message that’s constantly pushed by the Israeli government, and a lot of the Western media has gone along for the ride, unwilling or unable to investigate what a state-backed spyware outfit means for global relations, privacy, and free speech. It’s easy to condemn Chinese-or Russian-backed hackers, opponents of Western governments, but what if these corporations are supported and used by a Western-favored nation like Israel?

AnyVision was not the only company implementing such AI technologies. Biometric facial recognition is a growth industry estimated to be worth US$11.6 billion globally by 2026. Cor-sight AI is a part Israeli-owned facial recognition company that works with the notoriously brutal police departments in Mexico and Brazil and the Israeli government.46 A former Israeli army colonel, Dany Tirza, partnered with Corsight AI to develop a police body camera that could immediately identify an individual in crowds, even if their face was covered, and match the person to photographs from years before. Tirza lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of Kfar Adumim and is one of the key architects of the Israeli separation wall that creeps through the West Bank. He supports facial recognition technology at Israeli checkpoints because it reduces “friction” between the IDF and Palestinians.47 The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes.

The people. Israel has extraordinary people. Israeli human capital is absolutely unique. The challenges facing any Israeli business are enormous—a dysfunctional government, an inefficient bureaucracy, wars. Israel’s permanent uncertainty is a real drawback. But what compensates for all these obstacles are the Israelis themselves. I’ve been around the world. There are no such people anywhere else. Israelis are exceptionally quick, creative, and audacious. They are sexy even in the way they work. They are hardworking and tireless. They are endowed with a competitive spirit—with the need to be the first at the finish line. And they are willing to do whatever it takes to be the first at the finish line. They never take no for an answer. They never accept failure or acknowledge defeat.

There are eight major public Israeli universities. They are all directly governed by the Israeli Council for Higher Education and largely funded by its Planning and Budgeting Committee.48 As this book will show, all eight universities operate in direct service of the state and serve critical functions in sustaining its policies, and thereby constitute central pillars of Israeli settler colonialism.

Michael Milshtein, who heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Dayan Center, also served as the Advisor on Palestinian Affairs in the Israeli Civil Administration governing the OPT and as the head of the Department for Palestinians Affairs in the Intelligence Corps as a retired colonel.

The Settler University Settler-colonial states are founded through foreign invasion, with the objective of eliminating Native inhabitants and establishing a settler nation on Native land. Settlers seek to replace the Natives and claim the territory as their own.49 Settler colonialism is therefore understood as a distinct form of colonial governance, because it centers domination over land, which, in effect, becomes domination over life. To maintain their settler state and make the place their home, settlers must continually reassert their exclusive claim to the land, making the violent campaign to disappear the land’s Indigenous peoples into an ongoing process of invasion and dispossession rather than a single or historical event.50 As Audra Simpson illuminates, this settling of land and of consciousness continually builds “moral and political worlds,” as well as physical ones, “atop the worlds of others.

As for the myth of the extended hand of peace, the documents show clearly an intransigent Israeli leadership that refused to open up negotiations over the future of post-Mandatory Palestine or consider the return of the people who had been expelled or fled. While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

Magical thinking was intrinsic to Israel’s settlement enterprise. It had long gotten by on the government’s marketing of its decades-old occupation of the West Bank to the world as temporary, along with its settlement project, pending a negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while simultaneously striving for permanence.

The mind tricks began in the first decade after the territorial conquests of 1967. The Labor governments set their sights on settling the Jordan Valley as Israel’s eastern security border, as well as building a Greater Jerusalem. But Moshe Levinger, a firebrand rabbi who viewed the victory of 1967 as a sign of redemption, moved a group of settlers into the Park Hotel in the newly conquered holy city of Hebron to celebrate the Passover holiday the following year and refused to leave. The government caved. The group remained in an Israeli military compound in the city until the adjacent settlement of Kiryat Arba was established with government approval.

Behind these draconian measures on the part of the Israeli government to prevent any discussion of the Right of Return lies a deep-seated fear vis-à-vis any debate over 1948, as Israel’s ‘treatment’ of the Palestinians in that year is bound to raise troubling questions about the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole.

Take Jordan—arguably the friendliest government to Israel in the region. Jordan provides that citizenship is open to any person who is not Jewish.’ Jews once lived in the area that became Jordan, but they are not allowed to live there now-—and this on land that the international community had once set aside to form a Jewish state. Ever wonder why there is never a call to divest assets from Jordan? It is not in the political interest of the leaders of great economies to upset the Arabs.

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.

In 2008 an official website commemorating Sharon’s life and achievements was established, in which, rather than hiding his role in Gaza in those days, it proudly lauded it: Sharon participates in these searches himself. He orders the soldiers to perform a full body search on all males and sometimes imposes curfews on refugee camps in order to conduct a search. The clear goal of the mission is finding terrorists and killing them. The soldiers have orders not to try and capture the terrorists alive. Sharon instructs them to be rough with the local population, to perform searches in the streets and even to strip suspects naked if necessary; to shoot to kill any Arab who holds a gun; to shoot to kill any Arab who does not obey a Stop! call; and to diminish the risk to their lives by employing a big volume of fire, by uprooting trees from orchards which makes it difficult to capture terrorists, by demolishing houses and driving out their owners to other houses in order to pave secure roads. Haider Abd al-Shafi, Senior Palestinian leader, says: ‘Sharon took a decision to open roads in Al Shateya camp and in Rafah for security. That led to removing houses, the houses of refugees, which is an action not to be taken lightly, but there was no objection neither from Dayan nor from the Israeli government. They let Sharon realize his aim and he really destroyed a lot of refugees’ houses.’ Eli Landau, political ally and a friend of Ariel Sharon, says: ‘He was a very senior officer going with the troops from house to house, from bunker to bunker, from orange grove to orange grove, to explain what he meant. Three months later, Gaza was quiet. The terror was crushed with an iron fist, with a vicious hand. He cast fear in Gaza, he was feared.’9 The manner and detail of the retaliation were based on British military counter-insurgency methods employed against the Palestinians during the Arab revolt in the 1930s; it seems that the new rulers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were highly impressed by this ruthless methodology. In the case of the British this pattern of inhumanity was in place for three years; in the case of the Palestinians it has lasted for more than fifty years.

in the summer of 2018, when he promoted and passed one of the most controversial—and arguably superfluous—laws on Israel’s books under pressure from ultra-right-wingers in his government. Named “Basic Law: Israel—The Nation State of the Jewish People,” it was an addition to the body of basic laws that together formed the closest thing to an Israeli constitution and dealt a blow to the Arab Israeli psyche, despite the largely symbolic nature of most of its provisions.

The United States has also undertaken policies in the broader Middle East that reflected Israel’s preferences. Since the early 1990s, for example, American policy toward Iran has been heavily influenced by the wishes of successive Israeli governments. Tehran has made several attempts in recent years to improve relations with Washington and settle outstanding differences, but Israel and its American supporters have been able to stymie any détente between Iran and the United States, and to keep the two countries far apart. Another example is the Bush administration’s behavior during Israel’s war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Almost every country in the world harshly criticized Israel’s bombing campaign—a campaign that killed more than one thousand Lebanese, most of them civilians—but the United States did not. Instead, it helped Israel prosecute the war, with prominent members of both political parties openly defending Israel’s behavior.

Even in the equations that had been formulated to describe electromagnetism, there is no natural directionality to the interactions of particles; the equations look the same going both directions. If you looked at a video of atoms interacting, you could play it backward and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was correct. It is only in the macroworld of objects, people, planets, and so on, the world governed by entropy, that causation appears to unfold in a single direction. The second law of thermodynamics describes the increasing disorder in the universe at macroscales and is often seen as equivalent to the one-way arrow of time. More and more physicists over the past few decades, sensitive to the nondirectionality that seems to rule at the micro or quantum level, have begun to question the no-teleology rule. Recall that the tiny particles making up the matter and energy of the physical universe are really like worms or strings snaking through the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. Their interactions, which look to us a bit like tiny balls colliding on a billiard table, are from a four-dimensional perspective more like threads intertwining; the twists and turns where they wrap around each other are what we see as collisions, interactions, and “measurements” (in the physicists’ preferred idiom). Each interaction changes information associated with those threads—their trajectory through the block universe (position and momentum) as well as qualities like “spin” that influence that trajectory. According to some recent theories, a portion of the information particles carry with them actually might propagate backward rather than forward across their world lines. For instance, an experiment at the University of Rochester in 2009 found that photons in a laser beam could be amplified in their past when interacted with a certain way during a subsequent measurement—true backward causation, in other words.8 The Israeli-American physicist Yakir Aharonov and some of his students are now arguing that the famous uncertainty principle—the extent to which the outcome of an interaction is random and unpredictable—may actually be a measure of the portion of future influence on a particle’s behavior.9 In other words, the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics—those statistical laws that captured Jung’s imagination—may be where retrocausation was hiding all along. And it would mean Einstein was right: God doesn’t play dice.*23 If the new physics of retrocausation is correct, past and future cocreate the pattern of reality built up from the threads of the material world. The world is really woven like a tapestry on a four-dimensional loom. It makes little sense to think of a tapestry as caused by one side only;

What did we really achieve by replacing the orange-haired orangutan with a better alternative, if that better alternative ultimately fails as horribly as his predecessor, when things get really desperate. I may not be a US citizen, but I am a US taxpayer, and when tax dollars from my books on peace and justice are used to aid and fund genocide and war, I find it difficult to maintain respect for such new administration. Citizens of earth could end all wars in a year - boycott all tax-filing unless your governments cease all defense activities for good.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid.

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.

As long as Israel, therefore, continues its blockade of the general Gaza population, it is no less in contravention of the United Nations Security Council instructions than Saddam Hussein was with regard to his weapons programs in the early 1990s. While gathering the details of how some humanitarian aid activists were killed and dozens were wounded by Israeli soldiers is important, above all for the sake of justice toward the idealistic persons mown down, it is far more important that the episode produce an end to the lockdown of the 1.5 million Gazans, who have been placed by the Israeli government in a sort of open-air penitentiary.

The major issues any Israeli government has to promote are education, welfare, nurturing the outlying areas, fighting political corruption, striving for peace with our enemies, fighting terrorism and preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities.

At least US and Iranian leaders agree on something: Assad's downfall would tremendously weaken Iran's regional influence. From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Iran worried that “if the Assad government fell, the replacement would have much stronger ties with the US government and Israeli government,” according to Professor Foad Izadi, an assistant professor at the University of Tehran's Faculty of World Studies. He told me, “that was the dilemma that Iran had.”9

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.

But in northern Sinai, there is hardly any tourism. Tourist villages built by the Egyptian government along the northern coast are effectively ghost towns, and the small Al-Arish industrial zone and the airport are not enough to support the Bedouin families. Promises of new projects and financial aid for housing or employment have, as the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz put it in an October 2007 article, "turned into a joke." As ever in Egypt, there were grand plans and feasibility studies, but in reality no large factories have been built since 2001, and the total number of people employed in the factories that already exist is reported to be less than five thousand.

who were not driven away in 1948 have been oppressed by Zionism for decades. The Jewish state confiscated much of their land, trampled many of their rights, and did not accord them real equality. In recent years, oppression lessened, but it was not replaced by a genuine civil covenant that will give Arab Israelis their full rights. To this day there is no definition of the commitments of the Jewish democratic state to its Arab minority, and that of the Arab minority to the Jewish democratic state. On the one hand, there is no real equality for Arabs in Israel, but on the other hand the government does not always enforce the law in their domain and allows their towns and villages to live in partial anarchy. What emerges is a dangerous situation of lawlessness. Many Palestinian Israelis don’t respect central government, but they also don’t feel they belong. Their affinity to the Palestinians outside Israel and the

One of the biggest obstacles on the path of peace, or even peaceful coexistence, between Israelis and Palestinians was placed by the international community and media when it redefined Hamas as an "organization." One result is that outsiders try to reach a solution based on the assumption that Hamas has structure and leaders. It does not. It has no "political wing" or "militant wing." Hamas is a loosely-knit band of terrorists. Its leaders are whoever has weapons, plans, and influence. Hamas is thuggish and cowardly. Those who fly the green flag are not military combatants. Nor do they represent, or care a whit, for the Palestinian people, as evidenced by their strategy of hiding in and fighting from schools, clinics, hospitals, and people's homes. After what passed for an election some Hamas terrorists were further redefined as politicians and diplomats, though they were neither politic nor diplomatic, evidenced by the fact that many "govern" from Israeli prisons. Prior to the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Hamas had been emasculated and nearly eradicated by Yassir Arafat, who rounded up, disarmed, and imprisoned the terrorist "leaders," leaving its remaining members to return to their homes. Arafat ensured that members of Hamas had no place to hide among the Palestinian people. And that is the only way the terrorist cancer in Gaza will be excised today. In the absence of Arafat, the task falls by default to Israel, which would do better to enable the citizens of Gaza to purge themselves of Hamas and reward them for doing so than try to get rid of the bad apples by blowing up the barrel, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor.

Being an ally, for example, means not insisting that Israel, a sovereign country with a globally renowned judicial system, conduct “swift and transparent investigations” of security incidents. Americans would surely be offended if such demands were leveled at them by a foreign government, yet the United States routinely makes them of Israel. But being an ally also means that Israel should not repay America for supporting it in the Security Council by building in isolated settlements. Being an ally, on the one hand, means releasing Jonathan Pollard and recognizing Israel’s capital in Jerusalem, and on the other, respecting American Jewish pluralism and the prerogatives of the world’s mightiest power. Allies respect the decisions of one another’s democratically chosen leaders, even when they disagree. They back one another on principle and not merely to placate domestic constituents. Their bonds are elemental, meaningful, and mutually, enduringly beneficial.

Iran has launched nuclear-tipped missiles at Israel. It’s been reported that some of those that were launched, exploded shortly after being fired, while others have reportedly gone way off target. One missile seems to have accidently nuked the city of Mosul in Iraq, killing thousands of that cities’ citizens. Some of the missiles seemed to have been duds and fell harmlessly to the ground near the borders of Israel, but none of them have breached Israel’s border. We have yet to hear a reaction from the Israeli government, so stay tuned for more updates. We now return to your regularly scheduled program.

It is interesting to note that on June 19, 1967, the Israeli government passed a resolution offering a return of the captured territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. The response came three months later, when the Khartoum Arab Summit issued its famous three No’s: “No peace, no recognition, and no negotiation with Israel.” The closure of that small window of opportunity seems tragic in retrospect. My

the very same day that the American embassy in Jerusalem officially opened), some sixty Palestinians were killed trying to approach the fence. It was a grim day for Israelis, who were saddened by the loss of life. Nonetheless, even among Israel’s left, there were no mass demonstrations, no widespread calls for investigations of the army’s policy or its execution, and no calls for a change in government as a result of what had happened. Israel’s left understood what was at stake. When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had said in March, a few months prior, that the protests along the Gaza border were the beginning of the Palestinian return to “all of Palestine,” Israeli leftists believed him. They similarly understood that if Haniyeh was cynically going to send dozens of young Palestinians to trample a border that Israel has always defended with lethal force (while he sat comfortably many kilometers away), he was knowingly sending his own citizens directly into harm’s way. The Israeli left remained saddened and frustrated but, for the most part, quiet.

The truth is that war is useful to governments. In wartime, all the attention is on that and not on the government. Corruption is easiest during wartime. In reality, the people in power don’t want a solution, because they are the ones benefiting from war. We Palestinians need peace, the Israelis merely ask for it. That’s a big difference. That’s why it never happens

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.

During the years of military government, Israeli Arabs manifested adherence to their Arab national identity parallel to preserving their local and traditional attachments, and were bound to strike a fine balance between their Israeli citizenship and Arab political and cultural identity. They developed a particular perspective by which they “simultaneously treated the state as present and absent in their lives while emphasizing the traumas they had to endure in the aftermath of the war, and the steadfastness they had to employ in order to sustain their dignity and survive.

When journalist Christiane Amanpour asked him if the United States still supported a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Friedman stated matter-of-factly: “We believe in Palestinian autonomy, we believe in Palestinian self-governance. We believe that autonomy should be extended up until the point where it interferes with Israeli security.” 45 This hierarchy of rights is both the result and a perpetuator of the framing that the struggle for Palestinian rights is an attack on Israel. It also leads to a view of all supporters of Palestinian rights as being essentially of the same stripe.

successive Israeli governments have built new settlements in the West Bank to provide homes for Israeli Jews. These settlements are illegal under international law and, while the United States has routinely tolerated their presence in practice, official U.S. policy prior to November 2019 was that they were “inconsistent” with international law and “an obstacle to peace.

But I have been stressing that there are other underlying species-regularities involved. First, that women leaders do not inspire ‘followership’ chiefly because they are women and not only because of the consequences of those factors noted above ; secondly, even if they want to, women cannot become political leaders because males are strongly predisposed to form and maintain all-male groups, particularly when matters of moment for the community are involved. The suggestion is that a combination of these two factors has been the basis for the hostility and difficulty those females have faced who have aspired to political leadership. This has been the basis of the tradition of female non-involvement in high politics, and not the tradition itself. Cultural forms originally express the underlying ‘genetically programmed behavioural propensities’. In their turn, such cultural forms maintain – as tradition – an enduring solution to the recurrent problem of assigning of leadership and followership roles. In this connection, Margaret Mead writes about ‘zoomorphizing Man’. ‘Culture in the sense of man's species-characteristic method of meeting problems of maintenance, transformation, and transcendance of the past is an abstraction from our observations on particular cultures.’? This is then another way of looking at how broad political patterns may predictably emerge from the more detailed and programmed patterns of different behaviour of males and females. Some females may indeed penetrate some high councils. They become ministers of governments, ambassadors, and so on. A few may receive assignments which are not ‘feminine’ in their implication, such as Golda Meir, former Israeli Foreign Minister, and Barbara Castle, U.K. Secretary of Productivity and Employment. It is important to know what happens to the ‘backroom boys’ under such circumstances. Do they retire to an even more secluded chamber? Does the lady become ‘one of the boys’?

Sharon told the officer than they had demolished forty-two buildings and inflicted ten or twelve casualties among the Arab home guard and the two soldiers in the jeep. But Sharon was wrong. A total of sixty-nine Jordanians died at Kibbiya, including women and children. Sharon denied any deliberate killing, stating that the Arab families must have hid in the attics and cellars of the stone buildings and were killed in the demolitions. With the world in an uproar over the action, the Israeli government distanced itself from the raid. According to Sharon, Kibbiya was a tragedy, but also a turning point. The army and public now knew they had the ability to strike back. They would be helpless victims no more. Ben-Gurion agreed. “This is going to give us the possibility of living here,” he told Sharon.10

Zeira’s confidence was rooted in the protocols of meetings at the highest levels of the Egyptian government. The protocols were provided by Dr. Ashraf Marwan, Nasser’s son-in-law. Marwan had approached Israeli intelligence after the Six-Day War and offered his services. He provided Israel with a large number of internal Egyptian documents. Two documents in particular stood out to Israeli intelligence analysts. The first was a transcript from a meeting held in Moscow on January 22, 1970, between Nasser and the Russian general staff. Nasser explained that to regain the Sinai, two preconditions must be met. First, he needed Scud missiles to attack Israel’s cities. Second, his air force needed long-range fighter bombers capable of striking deep into enemy territory and destroying their fortified command centers. The second document was a letter written by Sadat to the Soviet premier on August 30, 1972, reiterating Nasser’s position that without bombers and missiles, Egypt could not retake the Sinai. When these requests were denied, Israeli intelligence concluded that the possibility of an Egyptian attack was close to zero. Intelligence also concluded that Syria would not go to war without Egypt. Zeira maintained that war was not to be expected because the Arabs did not have enough air power to allow them to strike deep into Israel and challenge the Israel Air Force and did not possess long-range ground-to-ground missiles to deter—by threat of retaliation—deep Israeli air strikes.

And although it may seem that governments and citizens (in the form of NGOs or civil society organizations) are given somewhat equal access, the truth is that no citizen, not even a director of a powerful NGO, can simply pick up the phone and dial Mark Zuckerberg to complain about a policy decision the way that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has been known to do.62

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.

Moreover, Kissinger was thinking ahead: he knew that if an entire Egyptian division were wiped out, Sadat would never negotiate for a permanent peace with Israel. The Israeli government accepted the deal, and the war was finally over. It had cost the Jewish state 2,800 dead and 8,800 wounded, but a complete disaster had been avoided. The IDF had crawled back from the dead.

Children of Babylon Early Marxists and Communists understood that to gain the hearts of a generation, seeds must be planted during childhood and early youth. The family of my Jewish-Israeli tour guide, Gideon Shor, originally lived in the Soviet Union. Gideon told me that prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Russia was a strong Christian nation. Communism needed to defeat the ideas of Christianity. His grandparents remember attending a public school where there were numerous Christian children. When the time came for lunch, the teacher asked the children to pray to God for food to appear. When they did, no food appeared. They were then asked to pray to “Father Stalin.” Those who did were amazed to see a cart of food, fruits, nuts, and candy roll through the classroom door. This was repeated daily, brainwashing the children into believing that Stalin and the Communist regime were the sole providers of their food. The youth living today are accepting radical ideologies that have totally failed. Multitudes who migrated to America from former Communist and Socialist nations are against both systems as they witnessed first-hand the oppression, government control, loss of freedoms, and hatred toward religion. Personal poverty, oppression, and a basic, simple life eventually rule in the majority of Socialist-Communist countries.

As the doubly vaccinated overwhelmed Israeli hospitals, the government announced in August a new plan for coping with its “Pandemic of the Vaccinated.” Israel said it will “update” its definition of “full vaccination” to require three, or even four, injections. “We are updating what it means to be vaccinated,” said Israel’s COVID czar, Salman Zarka.

Page 221: Between 1950 and 1985, U.S. government grants to Israel totaled approximately $21 billion, a level of aid far exceeding that provided to most other countries. … Over the same period, financial contributions from world Jewry totaled roughly $9.4 billion. Meanwhile, between 1950 and 1965, West Germany paid the government of Israel $780 million in Holocaust reparations. In addition, between 1950 and 1985 it paid Israeli citizens $7 billion in personal reparations

Nevertheless, the noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister—even one who presided over a fragile coalition government—exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.

After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. Meanwhile, one day in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam’s holiest sites, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a stunt designed to assert Israel’s claim over the wider territory, one that challenged the leadership of Ehud Barak and enraged Arabs near and far. Four months later, Sharon became Israel’s next prime minister, governing throughout what became known as the Second Intifada: four years of violence between the two sides, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by U.S.-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods. Approximately a thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died during this period—including scores of children—and by the time the violence subsided, in 2005, the prospects for resolving the underlying conflict had fundamentally changed. The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror left it little bandwidth to worry about Middle East peace, and while Bush remained officially supportive of a two-state solution, he was reluctant to press Sharon on the issue. Publicly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states continued to offer support to the Palestinian cause, but they were increasingly more concerned with limiting Iranian influence and rooting out extremist threats to their own regimes.

In the wake of the 2015 protest, the government formed a commission to stamp out racism; it was led by Emi Palmor, the director general of the Justice Ministry. Its conclusions, submitted in the summer of 2016, were quite damning, finding discriminatory policies and practices that distinguished Ethiopian Israelis from other citizens in fields including education, medical treatment, employment, and army enlistment, as well as policing. In 2015, it said, the percentage of indictments against Ethiopian Israelis was twice as high as that for the general population and four times as high among minors, while the percentage of Ethiopian Israeli minors in detention was almost ten times that of the rest of the population.

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.

Israel talks of the 1948 war as its war of independence. This is strange, because by doing so the country is suggesting that it gained its independence from the British. But it was the British who, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – over a century ago – promised the land, with its majority of Palestinian Arabs, to the Jews. The declaration stated that ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people …’ And it was the British who worked throughout the British Mandate over Palestine from 1922 to 1948 to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state there in accordance with the terms of that mandate. I would suggest that the real reason why it makes this claim is that Israel was anxious to position itself within the group of decolonised nations. The new country proceeded without delay to reinvent history in such a way as to exclude any recognition of the presence of the original non-Jewish inhabitants, not only forcing most of them out but also removing any sign of their former presence and history in the land. In support of this, Israel treated the Bible as a historical document and used it to back up the claim that the land had belonged to Jews from time immemorial, having been promised to them by the Almighty. In other words, in 1948 there was an attempt to rewrite the entire history of Palestine: this was year zero, after which a new history would begin with the in-gathering of Jews to their historic homeland, Israel. The towns and villages from which the Palestinians were forced out were quickly demolished and a worldwide campaign was waged to seek contributions for planting trees in the forests that were established where these villages had once stood, in order to completely conceal their prior existence. In some cases new Israeli towns and kibbutzim were constructed over these ruins and Hebrew names were given to them. The National Naming Committee was a public body appointed by the government of Israel to replace Arabic names that had existed until 1948 with Hebrew ones, although traces of the Arabic names haunted the process. [...] A new geography was in the making, transforming the country where Palestinians had once lived.

Writing in 1982, the French Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, whose parents were murdered during the war, had already seen what was only now becoming obvious to me (and still remains concealed from many): that for successive Israeli governments, ‘it is not a question and it never seriously has been a question of letting Israel and Palestine coexist. Instead, these governments have posed an alternative: Israel or Palestine.

He promptly commanded Sidqi Mahmud to provide air cover for the conquest of Israel’s coast (Operation Leopard) and to deploy Egypt’s newest Sukhoi jets, if necessary with their Russian instructors. ‘Amer then called Damascus and Baghdad and requested that they execute Operation Rashid—the bombing of Israeli airfields—at once. The Iraqis consented, but then complained of “technical delays.” The Syrians claimed that their planes were presently engaged in a training exercise. Such disappointments did little to dampen the mood in Egypt’s Supreme Headquarters which seemed to the Soviet attaché S. Tarasenko, “tranquil, almost indifferent, the officers merely listening to the radio and drinking coffee.” Throughout the capital, however, the citizenry was celebrating. “The streets were overflowing with demonstrators,” remembered Eric Rouleau, Middle East correspondent for Le Monde. “Anti-aircraft guns were firing. Hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, ‘Down with Israel! We will win the war!’” But Rouleau, together with other foreign journalists, was not allowed near the front. All international phone lines were cut. The sole source of information was the government’s communiqué: “With an aerial strike against Cairo and across the UAR, Israel began its attack today at 9:00. Our planes scrambled and held off the attack.

Another Brick in the Wall Part 2” was banned by the apartheid government of South Africa, Waters wrote, “Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa’s Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes—and it surely will come—when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice, and dignity that they all deserve.

In the Israeli constitution...oh yeah, Israel has no constitution. And there is a simple reason for that. Israel does not want to codify into a sacred document what she truly believes: the only people who should receive the full protection of the government and its laws are Jews and Jews only. Creating a constitution would either force Israel to join the civilized world and declare all of her citizens as equals or oblige her to actually engrave her discriminatory beliefs onto tablets of stone for all humanity to see. but why make that choice when you don't have to?

This had been made clear months before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, when the US had rejected Iraq’s offer of negotiations over weapons of mass destruction. In the offer, Iraq proposed to destroy all such chemical and biological weapons, if other countries in the region also destroyed their weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was then Bush’s friend and ally, so he received a response, which was instructive. Washington said it welcomed Iraq’s proposal to destroy its own weapons, but didn’t want this linked to “other issues or weapons systems.” There was no mention of the “other weapons systems,” and there’s a reason for that. Israel not only may have chemical and biological weapons—it’s also the only country in the Mideast with nuclear weapons (probably about 200 of them). But “Israeli nuclear weapons” is a phrase that can’t be written or uttered by any official US government source. That phrase would raise the question of why all aid to Israel is not illegal, since foreign aid legislation from 1977 bars funds to any country that secretly develops nuclear weapons.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday abruptly shelved a pilot project that prohibited Palestinians from riding home to the West Bank on the same buses as Israelis headed to Jewish settlements.

The country now has a consensual government that enjoys wide public support, and wants to determine by force the future of the remaining 20 percent. It has, as have all its predecessors, from Labor and Likud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means for doing this. This entails the destruction of an independent Palestinian infrastructure. These politicians sense—and they may not be wrong in this—that the public mood in Israel would allow them to go even further, should they wish to do so. They could emulate the ethnic cleansing of 1948, this time not only by driving the Palestinians out of the occupied territories, but, if necessary, also driving out the one million Palestinians living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. In such an atmosphere, then, the Nakbah is not so much denied in Israel as cherished.

Significant numbers of American evangelicals reject the way some have distorted biblical passages as their rationale for uncritical support for every policy and action of the Israeli government instead of judging all actions—of both Israelis and Palestinians—on the basis of biblical standards of justice.

In 1956, the Egyptian government ordered her parents, along with about 25,000 other Egyptian Jews, to leave the country after signing declarations “donating” their property to the Egyptian government.

These tactics are not new. They have been used against Israeli speakers in the past and are part of the broader effort known as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS. Founded in 2005 by Palestinian organizations, it advocates for the following: (1) boycotting Israeli-made products and services, as well as public events in which Israelis participate; (2) the divestment by governments and private institutions of investments in Israeli companies; and (3) the establishment of international sanctions against Israel. Its goal is to punish Israel for what it terms Israel’s “apartheid” policies toward Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.

In 2015 the American Jewish pop star Matisyahu was disinvited from appearing at Rototom Sunsplash, an annual international reggae music festival held in Spain that was, ironically, devoted to “the promotion of peace, equality, human rights and social justice.”12 He was told by festival organizers that the pressure to disinvite him came from BDS members, and that if he made a public statement in support of Palestinian statehood and against Israeli “war crimes,” he would be able to perform.13 When he refused to do so, his performance was canceled and Rototom Sunsplash issued the following statement: Rototom Sunsplash, after having repeatedly sought dialogue in the face of the artist’s unavailability to give a clear statement against war and on the right of the Palestinian people to their own state, has decided to cancel [his] concert. Even though Rototom Sunsplash’s other goals included examining the “rise in Islamophobia in Western countries, as well as the situation of the prisoners in Guantánamo,” no European performers were required to denounce expressions of Islamophobia in their countries, and American performers were not required to share their views on the United States policy toward prisoners in Guantánamo. After an international outcry at the festival’s assertion that an American Jewish musician was answerable for Israeli government policy, the invitation was reinstated.

In 2002, Mona Baker, a professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the publisher of two scholarly journals—Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts—dismissed Gideon Toury, a professor at Tel Aviv University, from the advisory board of Translator. She also dismissed Miriam Shlesinger, a lecturer in translation studies at Bar-Ilan University, from the advisory board of Translation Studies Abstracts. Ironically, both Toury and Shlesinger oppose the Israeli government’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

The difficulty Corbyn and his associates have in recognizing and acknowledging antisemitism on the left seems to be rooted in their foundational claim that because being a progressive means being opposed to any form of racism, oppression, or group hate—including antisemitism—therefore, by definition, a true progressive cannot be an antisemite. Their claim runs into trouble when they are confronted by progressive compatriots who include blanket statements about Jews in their excoriation of wealthy capitalists who oppress and exploit the poor, who imply that Jews exert undue influence on the media, who deny that Jews can be the victims of race-based hatred in the same way that people of color are, and who include offensive, hate-filled Jewish stereotyping in their criticism of Israeli government policies regarding the Palestinians.

Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid.

Overcoming cognitive dissonance is hard work. This is why The New York Times described Gaza as being under Israeli military occupation for years, long after the Israeli army withdrew. This is why Amnesty International described Israel as an apartheid state at a time in which an Arab political party was part of Israel’s coalition government. And this is why numerous left-wing media outlets and politicians denied that Hamas terrorists committed rape on October 7, even as those same terrorists admitted on tape that they did.

Israel’s declaration of independence hailed the rebirth of the Jewish people in its ancient homeland, and promised equality for all citizens. But the state had been born in war and moulded by Arab hostility throughout the Mandate era. Security was the main prism through which the government viewed the Arab minority. Jewish immigration and economic development were its most urgent priorities. Building this new nation meant primarily the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ (kibbutz galuyot) in fulfilment of Zionist ideology. British restrictions on immigration had been lifted immediately. In July 1950 the Law of Return, a key piece of legislation, granted Jews the world over the automatic right to live in Israel, privileging their rights over native non-Jews. With the gates now wide open, the Jewish population rapidly swelled to 1.5 million by 1951, most of the first newcomers arriving from Arab countries such as Iraq and Yemen, where animosity towards Jews and levels of persecution had grown because of the Palestine disaster. The absorption of Holocaust survivors and the memory of the recent war, with over 6,000 Israeli dead and thousands injured, served as an unshakeable justification for Israel’s independence and the priority and privileges given to Jews.

Some writers have claimed that the Israeli government was so desperate for people that it indicated that it would welcome the Jews even without their property. One, Avraham Shama, claims that ‘sometime in the spring of 1950, the Iraqi authorities reached an agreement with Jewish Agency representatives to allow Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq on a one-way visa to Israel, provided that they give up their Iraqi citizenship and leave their assets to the Iraqi government.’25 Karkoukli

This includes enormous sums of money funneled to bodies that appear to support conflict resolution and fundamental rights. The problem is that far too much of this money goes to bodies that fight for the opposite. Below are just a few prominent examples. The Dutch government funds Electronic Intifada.[813] Ali Abunimah is one of its heads. Abunimah considers Mahmoud Abbas to be a “collaborator” with Israelis (the Palestinian term for a traitor who deserves death).[814] Abunimah is also a virulent opponent to the peace process and an open supporter of the “one-state solution”[815] whose real meaning—in the eyes of Europe, as well as Israel—is an end to the Jewish state. Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, and Holland have supported the NGO al-Haq over the last decade.[816] A Palestinian organization based in Ramallah, al-Haq is supposedly a neutral human rights organization. The problem? It supports both BDS and the right of return.[817] Could someone explain how funding such an organization promotes genuine peace? The Development Center (NDC) transfers millions of dollars to Israeli and Palestinian organizations. The fund is supported by the World Bank, France, and other European countries.[818] Formally, the fund supports human rights as such, but a check of the organizations it funds shows that most of them either support the right of return or are involved in BDS. Among the dozens of organizations backed by the European Union is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), headed by Jeff Halper. Halper has made a name for himself giving lecture tours attacking not just Israel but also global capitalism. He even views the Saudi Peace Plan as nothing more than a ploy “intended more to placate the Arab Street than as an actual political position.”[819] In his opinion, Western leaders are practically begging Israel to become a regional power so that the West can continue to oppress the Arab masses. ICAHD also publicly supports BDS and Return.[820] Despite all this, this openly radical organization was supported by the European Union to the tune of €169,661 between February 2010 and June 2012.[821] We could go on like this forever to cover the ever-growing list of organizations which are funded by the European Union, and European countries.[822] Organization after organization sells the West a bill of goods about supporting human rights—and then goes on to support the campaign against the very existence of Israel, for a right of return,

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it sometimes does not act like a loyal ally. Like most states, Israel looks first and foremost to its own interests, and it has been willing to do things contrary to American interests when it believed (rightly or wrongly) that doing so would advance its own national goals. In the notorious “Lavon affair” in 1954, for example, Israeli agents tried to bomb several U.S. government offices in Egypt, in a bungled attempt to sow discord between Washington and Cairo. Israel sold military supplies to Iran while U.S. diplomats were being held hostage there in 1979–80, and it was one of Iran’s main military suppliers during the Iran-Iraq War, even though the United States was worried about Iran and tacitly backing Iraq. Israel later purchased $36 million worth of Iranian oil in 1989 in an attempt to obtain the release of Israeli hostages in Lebanon. All of these acts made sense from Israel’s point of view, but they were contrary to American policy and harmful to overall U.S. interests.90

The Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that 57 percent of Israel’s Jews “think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate.” A 2004 survey conducted by Haifa University’s Center for the Study of National Security found that the number had increased to 63.7 percent. One year later, in 2005, the Palestinian Center for Israel Studies found that 42 percent of Israeli Jews believed that their government should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave, while another 17 percent tended to agree with the idea. The following year, the Center for Combating Racism found that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews wanted their leaders to encourage the Arab population to emigrate, while the Israel Democracy Institute found the number to be 62 percent.49 If 40 percent or more of white Americans declared that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians “should be encouraged” to leave the United States, it would surely prompt vehement criticism.

On September 21, 2005, the Israeli government declared Disengagement complete…crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel required an international passport. The Israeli army no longer exercised any jurisdiction inside Gaza. It was a foreign country. For better or worse, the vaunted two-state solution had finally been realized. Under international humanitarian law, an occupying power must assume responsibility for the health, safety, and well-being of the local population…. But any responsibility to a local population disappears the moment the occupying army marches out of the territory…The trouble for Palestinians in Gaza was that they depended on Israel for everything…Israel’s most strident critics were also thrown into turmoil. The whole thesis of their argument was that Israel was a racist-apartheid-colonizer because it was an occupier.

Però mentre existeixi una autopercepció occidental que exigeix una constant aparença de puresa, s’haurà de saber que el que xoca més no és la crueltat o la indiferència. Els governs de molts pobles són cruels, els governs de molts pobles són indiferents. És aquest bombardeig implacable de virtut. Són aquests discursos i declaracions que exhibeixen una eloqüent preocupació per la llibertat i els drets humans i l’exigència que els que abusen dels drets humans o escatimen la llibertat se’n responsabilitzin. I és la manera com cada ideal s’esfuma quan amenaça de sobrepassar els límits dels discursos; les declaracions, quan amenaça fins i tot la parcel·la més frívola de l’interès propi.

Vull viure en un món on el pitjor imaginable sigui una manifestació a prop d’un hospital. Vull la capacitat narcotitzant de no veure cossos destrossats, cirurgians morts d’un tret al quiròfan, un presoner emmanillat a qui ordenen que entri en un hospital per demanar a tothom que se’n vagi i després, quan surt, l’executen, perquè jo també pugui calibrar les meves condemnes adequadament. Seria magnífic viure en un món així. En realitat, és poc important el que jo condemni i la vehemència amb què ho faci. En l’ordre de castes del món occidental pertanyo a una ètnia, una religió i un lloc per als quals no hi ha cap límit a l’hora de condemnar-nos. Vet aquí el que hem de fer sempre, exculpent tota la resta: condemnar, disculpar-nos, refugiar-nos en el silenci davant de qualsevol atrocitat comesa per algú que no sigui aquell a qui se’ns suposa eternament lleials. No n’hi ha prou amb dir que menyspreo Hamàs per les mateixes raons per les quals menyspreo gairebé totes les entitats governants de l’Orient Mitjà, entitats obsessionades per la violència com a escala de valors, brutals en el tracte dels grups minoritaris que, segons la seva opinió, no haurien d’existir, i que es proclamen els autèntics defensors de tota una religió.

As we got closer to the date of the speech, the lobbying grew more intense. I was asked to sit down with Lee Rosenberg, one of the leaders of AIPAC, who had been a fundraiser for Obama’s campaign. Rosy, as he was called, wanted to make sure we weren’t breaking new ground in our support for the Palestinians, or indicating that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the root of all problems in the Middle East. He then implored me to call on the Muslim world to recognize Israel “as a Jewish state.” This was a formal position that the United States had not yet taken, as it would be a signal that millions of Palestinian refugees will not have the right to return to Israel as part of a peace agreement. I sat there and took his request on board, assuring him that we were breaking no new ground in our support for the Palestinians. The Israelis were by far the stronger party in the conflict, but we were acting as if it was the reverse. One final decision was whether Obama should travel to Israel after going to Cairo. Given the concern about not wanting the speech to be seen solely through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we decided not to go. Ironically, we would be criticized for years by Netanyahu’s supporters for that decision, even though it was responsive to their concerns. Indeed, this established a pattern—a post facto criticism of Obama for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, which ignored the fact that he wasn’t doing anything tangible for the Palestinians and which absolved Israel’s own government for its failure to take any meaningful steps toward peace.

In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers. The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals.37 In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel). None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.38 Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.

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.

This is especially true in a place as overcrowded as the Gaza Strip, where people have nowhere to flee even if they are given prior notice that their homes are about to be destroyed. Beyond the horrific injuries they inflict on human flesh, air bombardment and artillery fire on this scale cause unimaginable destruction to property: in the 2014 assault, over 16,000 buildings were rendered uninhabitable, including entire neighborhoods. A total of 277 UN and government schools, seventeen hospitals and clinics, and all six of Gaza’s universities were damaged, as were over 40,000 other buildings. Perhaps 450,000 Gazans, about a quarter of the population, were forced to leave their homes, and many of them no longer had homes to go back to afterward. These were not random occurrences, nor was this the regrettable collateral damage often lamented during a war. The weapons chosen were lethal, meant for employment on an open battlefield, not in a heavily populated urban environment. Moreover, the scale of the onslaught was entirely in keeping with Israeli military doctrine. The killing and mangling in 2014 of some 13,000 people, most of them civilians, and the destruction of the homes and property of hundreds of thousands, was intentional, the fruit of an explicit strategy adopted by the Israeli military at least since 2006, when it used such tactics in Lebanon. The Dahiya doctrine, as it is called, is named for the southern suburb of Beirut—al-Dahiya—which was destroyed by Israel’s air force using 2,000-pound bombs and other ordnance. This strategy was explained in 2008 by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, then head of Northern Command (and thereafter Israeli chief of staff): What happened in the Dahiya quarter … will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on.… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.34

All that said, Sara was viscerally opposed to the occupation. She rarely spoke about politics with her father. Invariably, it turned into a subtle attack on who he was, although that was never her intention. She saw him as a good man carrying out a morally indefensible job that was also essential to protecting the lives of Israeli citizens. Her real anger was at the government.

- [ ] The Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. Of its 1.8 million residents, a majority are under the age of 18. Most have never left the 360 square kilometers where they were born, raised and confined. There is no discernible future for them beyond the Israeli military occupation that has endured nearly 50 years and a siege that was officially proclaimed in 2007. The formative years of these young people have been marked by three major military assaults. These are their rites of passage. The Palestinians of Gaza have no reason or experience to believe that a fourth war will not arrive soon. The violence in Gaza has become a ritual that has confounded many outsiders, leading to the rise of simplistic explanations for the bloodshed as the product of religious extremism, endemic anti-Semitism and intractable conflict. But a brief look at the history leading up to the 51 Day War of 2014 presents a different reality. Eighty percent of Gaza's residents are refugees from the State of Israel. Their families were among the 750,000 indigenous Palestinians who fled or were forcibly expelled in the period from November 1947 to late 1948 known to them as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. Since Israel was founded, every one of its governments has identified these refugees as a demographic threat whose repatriation would threaten Israel’s Jewish majority and the Zionist project itself. Palestinians in Gaza are ultimately confined and excluded from Israel for one simple reason: They are not Jews. There is simply no place for them in an Israel that defines itself as an exclusive Jewish state, and that will not grant equal rights to these people. That is why Gaza has become a warehouse for a surplus population that the Israeli-American scholar Martin Kramer described as “superfluous young men.” And that is why Gaza resists.

But are there some things that happen in life to make other things, which once seemed unforgivable, forgivable? Does my surrogate father's grief and suffering make forgiveable what he did to Mrs. Thornton? Has what happened to my Thandi - dammit - has what happened to my Thandi not made my Uncle Zacchaeus's vices forgivable? Because I know how my Thandi's death must have hurt him so! How he must have wept! How it drove him to near madness! Did he not, in the mid-'80s, right after her death, begin to scribble anti-establishment tracts that cut the government to the quick? Incisive, precise pieces that were so unlike his former, literary, wispy self... And can Abednego ever forgive Black Jesus? As Dumo used to say, one can't just exist passively in the twenty-first century. One has to be, actively, an ethical citizen of our global village, seeing in others the mirror of what he sees in himself - humanity - and in himself what he presupposes to be in others - inhumanity. This was one of his sweetest sermons! The loftiest of his speeches, designed to elevate! And yet he, himself, despite admitting that our current oppressors, too, had been, also, once upon a time, victims of oppression under the fascist state of Rhodesia, from which they had learned well and whose lessons they were now applying full force in the jingoistic state of Zimbabwe, in spite of being able to realize all of this, he could not bring himself to recognize Black Jesus's humanity. 'There's nothing human about that man!' he exclaimed, tears streaming down his face. And I don't blame him! I don't blame him for being unable to transcend this, and yet whenever I look in the mirror and see this face of mine which is as black as a velvet night, with my kissable lips and my finely sloping cheekbones, I can't help but think what this, then, makes me.

Malkiel often considered telling his father about her. But Elhanan would have taken it badly. He would have cried “What? You, a Jew, with a Muslim woman? I'm sure she hates Israel….” And indeed she did. Leila, a future follower of the PLO, was already anti-Israel. Between her and Malkiel, argument followed endless and sometimes violent argument. Yes, yes, Israel has suffered, she would say; but does that give them the right to make Palestinians suffer? Malkiel: You know very well it isn't Israel making them suffer! You can blame the Arab governments for their tragedy; why did they exhort them to flee their homes in 1948? And then let them live in refugee camps? Leila: You Jews did all you could to uproot those people and drive them from their land, and now you blame the Arabs? If you hadn't come along, there would have been no tragedy! He: We didn't come along, We came back. Easy enough for you to forget! She: I'm not forgetting anything, but you forget that the Palestinians have been living on that land for centuries, and you abandoned it two thousand years ago! Malkia lost his temper: Abandoned? You dare say we abandoned the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? And shown to Moses? And conquered by Joshua? Aren't you ashamed to falsify history? They expelled us from that land, but we never repudiated it, or forgot it, or abandoned it! Since King David there have always been Jews in Jerusalem, and Galilee, and Gaza. She: Oh yes? And the big cities? He: The big cities? Do you mean Haifa, Netanya and Tel Aviv? Do you want to tell me who built them? You, maybe? You were a smattering of people in the desert—do you dare deny that? She: That's the Afrikaner argument in South Africa. He: I forbid you to compare us to those racists and their apartheid! Racism and Judaism are incompatible! We suffered too much from racism to use it against others. She: There you go again with your suffering! As if you were the only people who ever knew hardship!

Israel basically demands absolute security for itself, which means absolute insecurity for everyone else. There are of course two ways to deal with threats. The more efficient, least costly way is through diplomacy: by eliminating the cause of the threat or by modulating it or moderating it. Israel does not practice diplomacy in that sense. It's very Trumpian in its bluster, belligerance and bullying. And it does not persuade, despite the fact that Israeli business people by and large in my experience are very personable and persuasive but their government is not. The idea of Israeli diplomacy is an oxymoron. [...] If you don't practice diplomacy you are left with nothing but military action, and not just deterrence which is often the American version of this. Because the Israelis don't believe in deterrence; they believe in destruction of the capabilities of the other side. So this makes Israel the most dangerous state on the planet in terms of its neighbors and in terms of predicting its actions. Because it will do things that, in the long run, guarantee hatred and enmity by others without regard to that. Everything it does is tactical, but it fits into a strategic context of leveling the entire neighborhood. And I very well remember in 1993 as assistant secretary of defense going to Israel and sitting through a briefing by most unfortunate, unhappy Israeli colonel about why Iran was a monster and had to be destroyed. This was of course after the essential destruction of Iraq as a potential enemy of Israel. And it was perfectly obvious that he didn't believe a word he was saying. But Israel suffered from enemy deprivation syndrome, and it had to find a new enemy, and it did in in Iran. (Excerpt from interview "Amb. Chas Freeman & Trita Parsi: The Next Israel-Iran War Is Coming")

The Israeli government would like to destroy Palestine, but they are mistaken if they think this is really possible. Palestine is in Haifa. Palestine is in Jerusalem. Palestine is in Gaza and Palestine is in the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine is alive in the refugee camps, from Shatila to Yarmouk. Palestine is even alive and well in New York. Do they really believe they can obliterate the Palestinian will to life?

The Hannibal Directive was established in 1986 following the Jibril Agreement, a prisoner exchange in which Israel traded 1,150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. Amidst the political backlash, the Israeli military drafted a secret field procedure to prevent future kidnappings. The proposed operation was named after the Carthaginian general who chose to poison himself rather than be held captive by the enemy. Among those who drafted the doctrine were Asa Kasher, a Tel Aviv University philosophy professor who serves as a house “ethicist” for the Israeli military and developed the army’s so-called “purity of arms” doctrine, which governs its policies on attacking civilian targets. Kasher denied knowledge of the policy in a 2003 exchange with one of his students but now admits its existence and has even defended Ofer Winter’s decision to implement it.

Funding for the Iron Dome system was subsidized by US taxpayers to the tune of $200 million, beginning in 2011. In mid-July, at the onset of the 51 Day War, the US Senate authorized another $351 million subsidy to support the Israeli government request for more Iron Dome systems.

According to Arad, the Hannibal Directive represented “a radical change from this way of thinking that propped up the value of human life.” It was a disturbing sign of the dominance of a ruthlessly authoritarian right wing, he argued. “Now, in place of the government serving its citizens,” Arad wrote in the Israeli daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, "it is the citizens who are forced to pay with their lives in order to serve the interests of government. This is simply called fascism.

As of July 2024, at least 108 Palestinian journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. There is nowhere else on earth with an even remotely comparable death toll. For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day. That most every major Western journalism prize that emerges from the coverage of this onslaught will overlook or at best offer glancing recognition of the work of men and women like Dahdouh for fear of being labeled biased is as clear an indictment of the industry’s cracked moral compass as exists anywhere.

myself, for example, find the stubborn implacability with which Israel insists on its ownership of the Old City of Jerusalem bewildering; indeed, as a theological if not theocratic form of obsession, it makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I believe, and am hardly alone in doing so, that the various governments of the state of Israel have committed grave sins of omission by not developing a thought-out, humane, and progressive policy in relation to the Arabs when it was still possible. Neither do I agree with every repressive Israeli measure nor do I consider it a healthy state of affairs that the Israelis are turning themselves into a “master race” by importing Arab guest workers to support their economic and industrial expansion. To be sure, these workers are better off in material terms than they ever were back home and under their traditional leaders, but their circumstances are nevertheless disgraceful.

The Christians continue to see themselves as guardians of the law and order, in a country sacrificed to its powerful neighbours. They are as eager to condemn Israeli incursions as are the Western correspondents; but they are also apt to point out that, unlike the Syrians, the Israelis have withdrawn from most occupied territory, and have never shown any permanent intention of conquest. Some argue that the Israelis look now with wry satisfaction on a country rendered impotent by sectarian conflict. But there is no doubt that, in their negotiations with the government of President Gemayel, the Israelis sincerely wished for a peace treaty that would guarantee their Northern border, and which would draw that border exactly where it is drawn by international law.

Sharon could not have been more chillingly explicit. Unbeknown to Draper or the US government, at that very moment the LF militias that Sharon’s forces had sent into the refugee camps were carrying out the killing of which he spoke—but of unarmed old people, women, and children, not supposed terrorists. If Sharon’s forces did not carry out the actual slaughter, they had nonetheless armed the LF to the tune of $118.5 million, trained them, sent them to do the job, and illuminated and facilitated their bloody task with flares. That Sharon’s intention to use the LF in this way was premeditated stands out in scores of pages of the secret appendices to the commission’s report. Sharon; the army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Rafael Eitan; the chief of military intelligence, Major General Yehoshua Saguy; the head of the Mossad, Yitzhak Yofi; and Yofi’s deputy and successor, Nahum Admoni—all knew full well of the atrocities perpetrated by the LF earlier in the Lebanese war.53 They also knew of the lethal intentions of Bashir Gemayel and his followers toward the Palestinians.54 While those named vigorously denied such knowledge to the Kahan Commission, the evidence that it collected and kept secret is damning, and it informed the commission’s decisions. Nonetheless, the killings in Sabra and Shatila were not just the result of the LF militias’ thirst for revenge or even of these Israeli commanders’ premeditation. As with the war itself, these deaths were also the direct responsibility of the US government.

Most of those named lost their posts as a result of both the inquiry and the general revulsion in Israel over the massacres. However, documents released by the Israel State Archives in 201246 and the unpublished secret appendices to the Kahan Commission47 reveal even more damning evidence of these individuals’ culpability, which was far greater than the original 1983 report lays out. The documents expose long-deliberated decisions by Sharon and others to send the practiced Phalangist killers into the Palestinian refugee camps, with the aim of massacring and driving away their populations. They also show how American diplomats were repeatedly browbeaten by their Israeli interlocutors and failed to stop the slaughter that the US government had promised to prevent. According to these documents, after the entire PLO military contingent had left Beirut at the end of August 1982, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and other Israeli officials falsely asserted that some two thousand Palestinian fighters and heavy weaponry remained in the city, in violation of the evacuation accords.

Shamir made the claim in a meeting with an American diplomat on September 17,49 even though the United States government knew for certain that this was not the case—Sharon himself told the Israeli cabinet a day earlier that

In highly emotive scenes, many Jews who had lived in Gaza all their lives refused to leave their homes. The Israeli government sent in soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to remove these families and tore them from their houses. The Israeli government knew—and the Palestinian Authority had always made clear—that no Palestinian state could have Jews in it.

....that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren't a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government's disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas.

Later that night, I passed through a public garden [in Córdoba] that was displaying hundreds of small multi-coloured flags. They were part of a protest against the Israeli government’s military action in Gaza and were accompanied by a prominent list of the names of those who had been killed. I was heartened to see that in a provincial city like this one there were people who were well aware of events a long way outside their own area. The continuing existence of this display in a public place was an example of local government tolerance towards left-wing causes, and I wondered if the same attitude would be shown by the town hall in conservative Madrid, 400 kilometres away.

Planet Palestine (Sonnet 1503) Whole world is my promised land, Which part will you invade! When the entire planet is Palestine, It is Israel that will fade. Gone are the days of unchallenged tyranny, Gone are the days of exploiting native trust. In the past you got away with many Rushmores; Try it today, you'll end up another Liz Truss. You can have your puny guns and bombs, I have an arsenal far mightier than thee. Colonial apes may fund your homicidalism, I have the entire humankind backing me. When governments are on one side, and humankind on the other, that's the first sign of democracy, and curtain call for the occupier. We the people promise our planet to Palestine. What'll you do now - call us all anti-semite!

Sinai. This was the meaning of the principle of exchanging land for peace. The Israeli government’s argument was that by returning Sinai to Egypt, it

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

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.

These assurances were taken by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it agreed to leave Beirut. On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38 This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.

Target killing of Palestinian leaders, including moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. Israel began this policy with the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, a poet and writer, who could have led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was targeted, a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it ‘regretted’ later for not being there as partners for peace. In May 2001 President George Bush Jr appointed Senator George J. Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East conflict. Mitchell produced a report about the causes for the second Intifada. He concluded: ‘We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.’13 On the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam. In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but also would have strengthened, as he knew too well, those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the exclusive way to liberate Palestine.

Sharon participates in these searches himself. He orders the soldiers to perform a full body search on all males and sometimes imposes curfews on refugee camps in order to conduct a search. The clear goal of the mission is finding terrorists and killing them. The soldiers have orders not to try and capture the terrorists alive. Sharon instructs them to be rough with the local population, to perform searches in the streets and even to strip suspects naked if necessary; to shoot to kill any Arab who holds a gun; to shoot to kill any Arab who does not obey a Stop! call; and to diminish the risk to their lives by employing a big volume of fire, by uprooting trees from orchards which makes it difficult to capture terrorists, by demolishing houses and driving out their owners to other houses in order to pave secure roads. Haider Abd al-Shafi, Senior Palestinian leader, says: ‘Sharon took a decision to open roads in Al Shateya camp and in Rafah for security. That led to removing houses, the houses of refugees, which is an action not to be taken lightly, but there was no objection neither from Dayan nor from the Israeli government. They let Sharon realize his aim and he really destroyed a lot of refugees’ houses.