Israel and genocide
Brian D'Agostino
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Howard Stein
“Holocaust” is the English term and “Shoah” the Hebrew term used to describe the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II.Both terms have a theological or cosmic dimension. “Holocaust” is derived from the Greek for burnt offering and is generally defined as a vast destruction caused by fire or other non-human forces. “Shoah,” meanwhile, has its biblical root in the term “shoah u-meshoah” (wasteness and desolation) that appears in both the Book of Zephaniah (1:15) and the Book of Job (30:3).
https://aboutholocaust.org/en/facts/what-is-the-difference-between-holocaust-and-shoah. Accessed 9-5-2025. World Jewish Congress/ UNESCO
In my admittedly limited reading, the term Holocaust (Hebrew Shoah) has been both claimed by many Jewish people as the distinct, unique horror of the Nazi period 1933-1945. The largely mass-produced and industrialized murder of Jews, Roma, Soviet war prisoners, is claimed by many Jews as a history-and culture-bound horrific phenomena that cannot and must never be used for comparative purposes. The same is true for the term genocide. It is as if to say: "However horrible mass murders have been for other human groups, nothing can be compared with the genocide and Holocaust committed, in Lucy Dawidowitz' felicitious phrase, "the war against the Jews" (if I remeber the title of her book accurately). It is not an outright claim that "ours was worse, more terrible," but I believe this idea and feeling are implicit.
In the late 1970's John Mack coined the term "egoism of victimization," and around the same time, I developed the notion of "narcissism of victimization." Vamik Volkan and his colleagues have developed much further these notions of entitlement to revenge, in an effort to reverse or undo historic wrongs. Volkan's notion of "Chosen Trauma" directs our attention to the unconscious elaboration, re-writing, distortion, mythologization, selective use of historical data in the service of current unconscious and political needs. The role of often-charismatic leadership in exploiting collective hurts and vulnerabilities is essential to the social mobilization of people to commit mass atrocities.
Repetition compulsion/re-enactment in the service of turning passive victimization to active victimization is implicit in Brian's astute parenthetical wondering at the end of his description of how "The Netanyahu government has reduced the food distribution sites in Gaza from 400 to 4, creating a grotesque "Hunger Games" situation of starving people scrambling over one another for a piece of bread. (Ask yourself what historical intergenerational trauma this policy could be re-enacting)."
We come, I believe, to the widely asked question: How could a group of people (Jewish Israelis) who have been so terribly victimized over centuries turn into such brutal victimizers, rather than have empathy for the people they harm? To my mind, the first issue is why is this so incomprehensible? At least part of the answer lies in generations and centuries of Jewish sages and writers describing Jews as the "martyr people," for whom periodic mass exile and slaughter is expected. Another part is the expectation of many Christian (and other?) groups that this is the historical role of the Jewish people (sometimes as eternal punishment for the accusation that "the Jews killed Christ').
After World War II and the Jewish Shoah, many Jews, including many in Israel, vowed "Never Again!" would they allow this to happen to them. Many para-military and pre-national armed forces formed to try to prevent this: e.g., Haganah, Palmach, Irgun. The attack from all sides immediately after the declaration of Statehood in 1948 helped consolidate the "Never Again!" vow and slogan. Largely through the military support of Israel by the US (and other European countries?), and the implicit American use/exploitation of Israel as an extension of its power in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel became armed to the hilt and became the mighty (nuclear?) power that it is now.
In recent years, Palestinian/Gazan/Hamas slogans and calls for "From the [Jordan] River to the Sea" both confronted Israeli Jews with current annihilation wishes and threats, and reactivated historical wounds. After Hamas' terrorist attacks, especially October 3rd 2023, and rocket inundations, Israeli political and military policy quickly escalated into the relentless destruction of Gazan people, cities, and culture itself. The idea that this might in fact be an act of genocide gained credence. When the IDF (I believe) declared that there are no Gaza innocent women and children, ordinary citizens, but that everyone was a terrorist, all Gazans became vulnerable to many IDF members' brutality and shooting of people waiting in lines for distribution of food.
As a result, what in Israeli Jewish ideology could not and must not be called genocide, in fact became in action what genocide is. Victims can become victimizers. Comparative history and psychohistory is not only possible, but essential. The power to control language has found its limits; reality confronts denial and rationalization. Ideological exceptionalism has more and more cracks in its concrete edifice.
I have written this as commentary and extension of Brian's outstanding essay. I may err in some details, but the integrity of Brian's contribution is irrefutable. Thank you, my friend, Brian.
Warmest regards,
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Benny Beit-Hallahmi
Howard Stern asks: “How could a group of people (Jewish Israelis) who have been so terribly victimized over centuries turn into such brutal victimizers, rather than have empathy for the people they harm?”
May I offer a correction. Jewish Israelis have not been victimized over centuries. That’s impossible.
Let me inject a bit of reality.
Jewish Israelis have always been victimizers, because the State of Israel was created through the dispossession of the indigenous population. Most Israeli men have some military experience. The military has one goal, and that is keeping down the Palestinians.
Zionism did not start after 1945. It started in the 19th century.
Let me introduce a quotation I often refer to.
David Millard, an American preacher who visited Palestine in 1842, left us this prophetic warning:
“Should the time ever take place when the Jews shall again possess the land of their fathers, a very important overturn must first take place with the nations and tribes that surround it. The land is at present inhabited by native Arabs, who till the soil and mainly people the towns and villages. The question arises, how are these inhabitants to be dispossessed of the land? Is a purchase contemplated? Who, or what power is to enforce such a purchase, and where would the present inhabitants emigrate to? Or is it contemplated that they are to be driven out by the sword? This, I am convinced, is the only means by which the land can be cleared of its present population. But in this case, the native inhabitants would, of course, be driven back upon Arabia, which bends like a crescent round the south and east of the Holy Land. The present inhabitants would not thus be driven out without obstinacy and bloodshed, carrying with them at the same time, the most malignant inveteracy. From Arabia, aided by other tribes, they would sally from time to time, to ravage and lay waste the whole land” (Millard, 1843, p. 348).
This was 100 years before the Holocaust.
Benny
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Esa Palosaari
' “Humanitarian aid war” is a strange way to put it, but hear me out. Hamas’s fundamental plan for survival—their main strategic weapon against Israel—is Gaza’s humanitarian suffering. It’s the catalyst for international pressure on Israel that Hamas argues will yet be its salvation.’(— —)''The whole concept of the strategy to use aid as pressure on Hamas was flawed at its very core. Why would Hamas blink first? Has the Israeli government met Hamas? Why did they think this was going to work with a group whose foundational strategy is Gaza’s destruction?'
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<Bartov.docx>
Brian D'Agostino
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Hi all,
Here it is, (automatic translation) :
Elie Barnavi and Vincent Lemire: "Mr. President, if immediate sanctions are not imposed on Israel, you will end up recognizing a cemetery"
After the diplomatic momentum generated by the announcement of France's recognition of the State of Palestine, the two historians ask Emmanuel Macron, in an op-ed in Le Monde, to put pressure on the Netanyahu government to put an end to the famine in Gaza and obtain the release of all hostages.
Mr. President
It is as historians that we address you. As historians aware of the tragedy of history and the extreme peril that threatens today. On Thursday, July 24, you took a courageous and useful decision by announcing the recognition of the State of Palestine by France at the next United Nations General Assembly on September 21. Thanks to your initiative, the United Kingdom, Canada and soon other Western powers will join this collective effort. Thanks to this diplomatic momentum, the legal capacities of Palestinian citizens will be strengthened before international bodies, which they need more than ever. Since your announcement, international mobilization has been growing for a ceasefire to put an end to the unbearable ordeal of the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. This, too, should be credited to you.
Your initiative is part of a long history of promises, acknowledgements and denials, which has always been done through exchanges of letters. On November 2, 1917, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Balfour, gave his support in writing to the project of “establishing in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people,”promising that “nothing shall be done which may infringe upon the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities existing in Palestine.”. At the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, on 24 January 1949, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman recognised in writing “the provisional government of Israel”, adding that “this decision does not prejudge the definitive delimitation by the United Nations of the territory over which it will exercise its authority”.
Orally on May 2, 1989 with his famous formula on the now “obsolete” PLO charter, then in writing on September 9, 1993, Yasser Arafat recognized “Israel's right to an existence in peace and security” as well as “Security Council resolutions 242 and 238”, i.e. the borders resulting from the ceasefire line effective between 1949 and 1967. The next day, the Israeli government led by Yitzhak Rabin recognized “the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people” but did not recognize the Palestinians' right to a state. It is this lack of reciprocity, this denial of dignity and legitimacy, the original sin of the Oslo Accords, that your letter to Mahmoud Abbas tries to repair: a prior recognition, intended to create the conditions for its effectiveness. Your decision of 24 July is therefore, in the literal sense, historic.
But neither the Palestinians in Gaza nor the Israeli hostages read the international press. They know nothing of your gesture. Nor do they know that the Israeli writer David Grossman described the situation in Gaza as “genocide” on August 1 in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. They don't know that the Israeli NGO B'Tselem has just published a report that rigorously documents the Israeli government's genocidal strategy, joining many NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International as well as many Israeli historians like Daniel Blatman, Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and other experts. They don't know that photos of emaciated children in Gaza are circulating on Fox News and that even Donald Trump is beginning to be moved by them. They don't know that his envoy Steve Witkoff is increasingly openly advocating for a “final” agreement, i.e. the release of all hostages in exchange for a definitive end to the war, which Hamas is ready to accept.
Digging your own grave
They don't know it, and if they did, it wouldn't change anything for them. Because they have other, much more urgent concerns. They are starving. They are dying of thirst. They die of infections or dysentery. They are being shot dead by mercenary snipers from the misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. They also die of our cowardice and renunciation. Some 60,000 deaths in twenty months in Gaza, probably more, two-thirds of them women and children. One hundred and eighty deaths from starvation have been reported to date, including 93 children, according to the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip. One thousand four hundred killed in recent weeks while going to look for food, according to the UN. A “wave of famine” that will engulf Gaza according to the World Food Programme, stressing that at this stage the inhabitants no longer need only food but also targeted nutrients, care and specialized doctors to contain the disaster. Doctors are not dropped by plane, Mr. President.
The 49 hostages still locked up in the Gaza tunnels do not read the international press either. Among them are probably 20 survivors and at least 27 corpses. All of them have already spent 668 days in captivity, almost two years. How can we imagine the abyssal depth of their despair, the absolute overwhelm of their families? They too are dying of hunger and thirst, like Evyatar David, 24, and Rom Braslavski, 21, whose images, abominably staged by Hamas, were broadcast on July 31. They are skeletal and have only skin on bones. In one of the videos, Evyatar David is seen digging his own grave under a tunnel. Horrifying images, produced to terrorize, like those that Hamas terrorists filmed on October 7, 2023, while intoxicated by their own cruelty.
As for the Palestinians in the West Bank, they may have learned that you are going to “recognize” them, but that does not protect them from the unbridled violence of the settlers, nor from the call for the annexation of their land that the Israeli Parliament voted on July 23 by a vote of 71 to 13. A thousand Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed since October 7, almost as many as in all of Palestine during the five years of the first intifada. Palestinian educator Awdah Hathaleen, who had participated in the film No Other Land, was murdered at point-blank range on July 28 by settler Yinon Levi, who has since been under house arrest. For all these dead and all these living dead, the Western media and diplomatic noise will not change anything. As you know, only sanctions will have an effect.
Mr. President, if immediate sanctions are not imposed on Israel, you will end up recognizing a cemetery. Action must be taken now so that food and health care can enter Gaza en masse. On August 1, France airdropped 40 tons of food. Forty tons, the equivalent of a single truck, when 500 tons would be needed every day for several weeks to break the exponential dynamic of famine. These airdrops are derisory, humiliating and dangerous.
As you know, only immediate and concrete sanctions will weigh on Israeli public opinion and therefore on the Israeli government, to really change the situation. To stop the starvation, for a permanent ceasefire, for the release of all hostages, for the protection of Palestinians in the West Bank, to save Israel from itself.
In the Guardian of 29 July, 31 Israeli personalities (former attorney general, former president of the Jewish Agency, several Israel Prize winners, etc.) call for immediate and “paralyzing” sanctions on Israel. “Paralyzing” sanctions, the word is strong. Are they “anti-Semitic”? Are they even “anti-Zionist”? No, they are patriots, but they know that diplomatic posturing is useless in the face of a fascist government that only understands force.
Double standards
What are the sanctions? The Netherlands has declared supremacist ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich persona non grata on its soil. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who on Sunday, August 3, came to pray loudly on the Esplanade of the Mosques/Temple Mount, in defiance of the status quo governing the holy sites of Jerusalem, no doubt hoping to torpedo the chances of a ceasefire by inflaming the situation even more. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who assumed in December 2023 his wish that "there will be only 100,000 inhabitants left in Gaza at the end of the war", compared to 2.3 million today. But we must go further and impose a European travel ban on all Israeli ministers, because all of them are in solidarity with this criminal and despotic cabinet.
Slovenia has declared a unilateral arms embargo. Sweden is calling for the immediate suspension of the trade agreement between Israel and the European Union, which accounts for almost a third of its foreign trade. Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovenia and Spain have publicly confirmed that they will strictly execute the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. To date, France has neither asked for nor, a fortiori, put in place any concrete sanctions to really have an immediate impact.
The European Union has just decided on an eighteenth package of sanctions against Russia to punish it for its misdeeds in Ukraine. Eighteen packages of sanctions against Russia, largely ineffective against this country on a subcontinental scale; sanctions against Israel, while its geographical isolation would make them immediately effective and perceptible, in all the shops of the country. How can we dispute that this is a double standard? International law cannot be variable, its consistency and its very credibility are at stake. However, Europe is nothing more than international law, negotiated, agreed and applied. If this principle collapses, Europe disappears from the international scene, definitively.
Ethnic cleansing plan
The excuse of the lack of European consensus no longer holds. On the strength of the diplomatic momentum that you created on 24 July, you can initiate and train a coalition of the willing among the European states. You must act now, because there is an absolute emergency. On July 24, the very day of your historic decision, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said on the radio that “the government is in a race against time to annihilate Gaza. We are in the process of eliminating its inhabitants. Gaza will be entirely Jewish.” He is telling the truth, it is indeed a race against time, because the ethnic cleansing plan, which has been drawn up for a long time, has now entered the operational phase.
In December 2023, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said that “voluntary emigration must sometimes be imposed before it is consented”. On March 21, 2025, an “Administration for the Voluntary Transit of Gazans” was established. In early April, the Israeli prime minister declared: “We are not hiding, this is our plan.” On May 5, members of the Israeli security cabinet approved "the plan for the voluntary departure [sic] of the Gazans," who are already concentrated in 12 percent of the enclave. They have a plan, Mr. President. A credible, solid, financed plan, and the organized famine in Gaza is obviously part of the plan. What is yours?
Mr President, do not confuse diplomatic noise with the reality on the ground. Since your announcement on 24 July, everything has changed diplomatically, but nothing has changed in Gaza. The promise of recognition has never nourished anyone. Be consistent, if you want to preserve the possibility of a future state of Palestine, start by saving its future citizens. The last week of July was the week of diplomatic mobilization. The first week of August must be the week of sanctions. Otherwise, your courageous decision will ultimately result in posthumous recognition.
Elie Barnavi is a historian and diplomat. Former Israeli ambassador to France from 2000 to 2002, professor emeritus of the history of the modern West at Tel Aviv University, scientific advisor to the Museum of Europe in Brussels, he has published “Letter from an Israeli friend to the Palestinian friend” (Flammarion, 1992), “Ten theses on war” (Flammarion, 2014) and "Israel. A historical portrait" (Flammarion, 2015).
Vincent Lemire is a professor of history at the University of Paris-Est Gustave-Eiffel. He directed the French Research Center in Jerusalem from 2019 to August 2023 and now leads the European project www.openjerusalem.org. He has published "Au pied du Mur. Life and Death of the Maghreb Quarter of Jerusalem 1187-1967" (Le Seuil, 2022) and, with Christophe Gaultier, the comic book “History of Jerusalem” (Les Arènes, 2022).
Elie Barnavi (Historian) and Vincent Lemire (Historian)
envoyé : 6 août 2025 à 13:26
de : Esa Palosaari <esa.pa...@gmail.com>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
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Benny Beit-Hallahmi
I don’t think that terminology matters.
Whether you want to use the term genocide or not, the people in Gaza are being tortured and killed every day.
For months, the IDF has been telling people there to move to safe zones, and such orders were issued again today.
This is supposedly to protect civilians. Why does the world accept the reality in which hundreds of thousands of homeless people are told to move around, and then are attacked in these safe zones, which are never safe?
Over the past year, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank have been expelled from the homes which had been destroyed. Why is the world ignoring this?
Israel is still enjoying an immunity from criticism, because of historical anti-Semitism, or current anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is real but cannot serve as an excuse for current crimes.
These are being committed because of the support offered by the United States and other Western countries. The memory of the Holocaust has been used by Israel and its supporters since 1945 to great advantage.
Crimes against Jews cannot justify crimes against the Palestinians.
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Esa Palosaari
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dlo...@nycap.rr.com
I think this discussion about the Gaza situation and the question of genocide has been excellent. I would add that I believe that virtually all of the many scholars of Holocaust Studies and Genocide are in agreement that what is happening now in Gaza is genocide. This is independent of the issue of intention which is always s difficult to know.
I have tried to approach this from the point of view of a Jew who was raised in an ethical Judaism, far from what we are seeing. My contribution to this discussion is to enclose a letter I recently co-authored and distributed in the Berkshires,
An Open Letter to the Jewish People of Berkshire County
We write this as a plea for sanity and to speak for the Judaism that I know and love.
From the commandment in the Torah, told and retold every year at the Seder: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21); the obligation to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18); the precept that “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger as for the home-born” (Leviticus 24:22) to the collective wisdom expressed in the moral principles of the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) which places “show kindness to others” at the head of the list of ethical principles, Jewish ethics has always been one of compassion toward others. In Hillel’s famous words: “That which is hateful to you do not do to your fellow: this is the entire Torah, the rest is the explanation, go now and learn it.”
For more than 3,000 years Jewish ethics have been universal, not tribal. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The same principles, specifying what is moral and what is not, apply equally to you and me; to friends as well as strangers; to Jews and Gentiles. It is just as wrong for me to harm another as it is for them to harm me. It is just as wrong for Israelis to kill Palestinian children as it is for Palestinians to kill Israeli children. To speak of crimes and hatred of others toward Israel and say nothing of the crimes and hatred of the Israelis toward Palestinians is not what is required of those who adhere to Jewish ethics.
On Yom Kippur, we are required to look to our own sins, not to those of others.
We are not asking us to look at what has been done to us now or through the centuries in which we have been victims of murderous acts, forced expulsions, and much else. We are asking that we look at what we are doing to others now.
Since October 8, 2023 Israeli Armed Forces have killed large numbers of children, women, medical personnel, aid workers, and journalists all of whom were civilian noncombatants in Gaza. UNICEF reports that as of May 31, 2025 nearly 14,000 children have been killed and over 34,000 injured. According to The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) there have been more than 50,000 fatalities and 124,000 injuries since October 2023.
While all wars result in horrific loss of life, many reliable sources including MSF (Doctors Without Borders), the Associated Press, the BBC, HRW (Human Rights Watch), and NPR, report disturbingly high numbers of civilian casualties. There is extensive photographic evidence of the physical destruction.
In light of Judaism’s well-known position that the actions of any Jew, good or bad, impact the entire Jewish community, how can we not feel a profound sense of shame about what the IDF has been doing in Gaza in our name. There is no moral ambiguity here. It is not complicated. It is wrong to kill children, irrespective of what has been done to you previously.
How can we expect the world to not hate Jews if it sees Jews as either in support of or complicit in the actions of the IDF? The recent rise in antisemitism is primarily, although not exclusively, an expression of so many people’s revulsion over what Israel is doing.
There is much agonizing along with disagreements and many open questions about what should happen in Gaza. Despite our differences of opinion on how we view the situation, all of the people who have signed on to this letter agree that Jewish values and ethics require doing something to stop the ongoing horror.
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Sheila Levi
I have been following the compelling discussion regarding the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, and I would like to contribute some reflections that may warrant our collective consideration.
I find myself returning to the Talmudic principle found in Tractate Sanhedrin 72a: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first" (Ba l'hargecha, hashkem largo). This ancient formulation of preemptive self-defense seems particularly relevant to our contemporary analysis.
It bears emphasizing that this conflict's current phase began with the events of October 7th—what many scholars have characterized as the most systematic and brutal mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, involving not only sadistic murder of civilians (including children and elederly) but also the taking of hostages who have endured torture and deprivation. The ideological framework driving these actions appears rooted in an eliminationist narrative that explicitly calls for the eradication of Israel and, by extension, Jewish presence globally.
What presents a particularly challenging analytical framework is the asymmetrical nature of this conflict, wherein we observe an adversary that appears to instrumentalize the suffering of its own population as a strategic asset. This represents a fundamental departure from conventional warfare paradigms, where combatants typically seek to minimize civilian casualties among their own people. Here, we encounter what might be characterized as a thanatopolitical strategy—a deliberate cultivation of martyrdom that transforms civilian death into political capital for international sympathy.
The tactical deployment of civilian infrastructure—schools, hospitals, residential buildings—as military installations while simultaneously denying protective shelters to the general population suggests a calculated inversion of the protective function typically associated with governance. This creates a psychological warfare dynamic wherein the adversary's civilian casualties serve dual purposes: eliminating perceived collaborators while generating international pressure against the opposing force.
Given this unprecedented strategic paradigm, I believe a comprehensive humanitarian response is essential—one that involves flooding Gaza with food and medical supplies to prevent famine and address civilian suffering. This approach aligns with the fundamental Jewish ethical principle that we bear responsibility for alleviating suffering even among those who consider themselves our enemies. Such humanitarian intervention serves both moral imperatives and strategic purposes by undermining the adversary's ability to weaponize civilian deprivation.
It is crucial to acknowledge that this represents an entirely novel form of warfare, one for which existing military and diplomatic frameworks offer limited precedent. Israel, like any democracy confronting such tactics, is necessarily engaged in a learning process—adapting its responses to an enemy that operates according to fundamentally different moral and strategic calculations than those underlying conventional interstate conflict.
What concerns me from a psychoanalytic perspective is the extent to which generational transmission of this eliminationist ideology has become embedded within certain segments of Palestinian society, manifesting in what can only be described as a celebration of Jewish death. This presents us with a profound challenge: how do we, as analysts committed to understanding the human psyche, grapple with the reality of such systematic dehumanization operating within what might be termed a necropolitical framework?
I wonder if there might be a defensive mechanism at work in some of our discourse—a tendency to focus criticism on Israel's military responses rather than directly confronting the nature of the force it confronts. This is not to suggest that military actions should be beyond critique, but rather to question whether our analytical frameworks adequately account for the existential threat posed by movements that explicitly embrace both genocidal objectives and the strategic sacrifice of their own populations.
From this vantage point, I would argue that the preservation of liberal democratic values—including our ability to engage in this very discussion—may depend upon our capacity to make crucial distinctions about the nature of the conflicts we analyze, particularly when confronting adversaries whose operational logic fundamentally inverts the relationship between state power and civilian protection.
I welcome your thoughts on these complex dynamics.
Sheila
Sheila Levi
Senior Child, Adolescent, Adult
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Daniel Yachia
Hi Sheila,
First of all, there is no an “Arab Palestinian” society.
There are Arab tribes living in the Middle-East areas. Like there is not a Syrian, Jordanian, Lebanese or Iraq’ian nations. They are countries artificially created by the Western countries which drew lines to create “Countries” composed of local Arab tribes of Sunni or Shia Moslems, local Christians, Alawites, Druze and Kurds.
That today they are calling Palestine is the land of Philistines centuries before Islam.
Living in desert areas as tribes do not make people a nation.
Jews who came to Istanbul and lived for hundreds of years in Balat, Haskoy, Kuzguncuk under the Ottoman Empire and then by TC cannot claim these land as their lands.
The “Palestinian Arabs” never claimed “Palestine” as their countries, neither under the centuries long Ottoman years nor during the British mandate
.
“Palestinian Arabs” did not leave any historical things in these lands. Whatever Moslem in these lands is built by non-Arabic Moslems over the ruins of the Jewish and Christian lands.
If you ask the Arabs living in Israel as citizens, not one of them will agree to turn their land to become Palestine. They may dream to get Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba etc. as they are now, but not the deserts as they were before the Jews returned to their lands.
Danny
Rachel Youdelman
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Susanne Seperson
Representative to the United Nations
Vice-Chair NGO Committee on Intergenerational Solidarity
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Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman
Having said all that, because you have said things that I don’t want to hear I must certainly need to hear them. And I do. Your words are a call, however flawed — to rise to the highest level of humanity. And I accept your words in that spirit.
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Brian D'Agostino
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dlo...@nycap.rr.com
Sheila,
While researching “"If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first". I came across the following: “Given that 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank in 15 years, and that Israeli forces had killed at least 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank as of August 22, 2023, I suppose the passage you cite is indisputable justification for Hamas' defensive actions on October 7th?
The usual interpretation of Sanhedrin 72a’s reference to the phrase "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first" is that it is about self-defense against an imminent threat. At this time, Hamas does not have the military capability to threaten Israel. Using this passage from the Talmud as a justification for what the IDF has been and is doing in Gaza is a serious distortion of the meaning. The Talmud does not say that taking 50 fold revenge on your enemies for what they have done is permissible.
David
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Benny Beit-Hallahmi
Just a note about the Red Cross.
The Red Cross can only act when it is allowed or invited.
Do you know that Israel does not allow the Red Cross to visit any Palestinian prisoners?
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Esa Palosaari
Hi all,
Are these some baselines we could share:
- Intentionally targeting civilians not directly participating in hostilities is never lawful or ethical. [1]
- Proportionality is an attack-by-attack legal test: expected civilian harm must not be excessive relative to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated (not a tally of total deaths). [2]
- Attackers must take all feasible precautions to spare civilians. [3]
The Israeli Supreme Court’s Targeted Killings decision rejects blanket bans or blanket permission and requires case-specific proof of target status, least harmful means, and proportionality [4]. Does that framework help us evaluate today’s claims on any side?
In practice, what public evidence should decide hard cases (lawful target, anticipated advantage, feasible precautions) that would make it less likely for us to not talk past each other? Are there public, verifiable sources we should require before treating a protected site (e.g., a hospital or school) as used for military purposes? Declassified imagery or independent on-site documentation?
Best,
Esa
[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-51
[2] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
[3] https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/05/19/feasible-precautions-urban-attacks
[4]
https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/opinions/public-committee-against-torture-v-government
https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/israel-targeted-killings-case
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Benny Beit-Hallahmi
There is a taboo indeed, and it is about discussing the real history of the Palestinians, which does not start with October 7, 2023, or with suicide bombings.
The history of the Palestinians is one chapter in the history of European colonialism.
Those opposing the colonizers are always a “death cult”.
“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner… We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.”
William Westmoreland, Commander of US forces in Vietnam, 1964-1968.
The Mau Mau in Kenya was also a “death cult”.
I suggest reading Mbunga, H. M. (2024). Who Deserves to Die? The Moral Logic of Mau Mau Killings in Colonial Kenya, 1952–56. The Journal of African History, 65, 432-451.
Benny
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Esa Palosaari
"Those who consider Zionism a form of colonialism are sometimes willing to admit the differences that exist between it and the usual model of European colonialism. However, they hold that none of these differences are of decisive importance for defining the nature of the phenomenon."
”Zionism has been a settler movement, and Israel a settler state, whose territory was previously inhabited by Palestinian-Arabs. Despite notable differences with other colonial movements, the actual process of European settlement classifies (both before and after 1948) as 'pure' colonial settler movement. [23]”
”The differences from ’typical’ European settler movements include Zionism’s nature as an ethno-national and not an economic project, the status of most Jews as refugees, the loose organization of diasporic Jewish communities as opposed to the well-organized metropolitan countries, and the notion of ’return’ to Zion enshrined in Jewish traditions”
"In other words, Zionism was a colonialist phenomenon in all respects and fully resembled other examples of modern colonialism – apart from the fact that it was a national movement, that it was not motivated by a desire for economic gain, that it arose out of Jewish suffering and was realized by people who may be defined as refugees, that the settlers had no colonial mother country, and that the bond with the Land of Israel was part of the traditional historical identity of the Jewish people.”
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Brian D'Agostino
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Rachel Youdelman
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Esa Palosaari
Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com> kirjoitti 12.8.2025 kello 21.10:
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Brian D'Agostino
Date: Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
Brigitte DEMEURE
de : Esa Palosaari <esa.pa...@gmail.com>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
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Ken Fuchsman
There are two major wars now. One between Israel and the Palestinians, and the other involving Russia and Ukraine. According to the highly respected scientific journal, Nature, reporting on June 27, 2025, 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and January 2025. More than half killed were women between 18 and 64.
In the Ukraine-Russia war beginning in February 2022, the BBC on May 5, 2025 identified the names of 106,745 Russians who died in the Ukraine War, but says “the true number is clearly much higher.” The Economist at the end of November 2024 estimated Ukraine deaths at between 60,000 and 100,000. The number then of likely Ukraine-Russian war deaths may be between 166,000 and 206,000. But this does not include that Russian deaths are far higher than the BBC has been able to verify.
Brian D'Agostino
Esa Palosaari
We estimate that women, children (<18) and elderly (65+) make up 56.2% (95% CI: 40.4%–61.9%) of the violent deaths during the study period
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Ken Fuchsman
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Howard F. SteinE-mail: hfs...@gmail.com ;Cell Phone: 405-226-2484Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology;Psychohistorical Poet Laureate
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Esa Palosaari
Do you think a reputable scientific journal like Nature would print something in their news section without first fact checking it for accuracy and reliability?
Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.
As you likely know, historians do not find polls to be as solid evidence as documentations such as the BBC did with finding evidence of Russian soldiers’ actual death.
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Brian D'Agostino
Esa Palosaari
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Anna Geifman
Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 4:46 PM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com <clios...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [cliospsyche] An open letter to Macron by 2 historians, one of whom former Israeli ambassador in Paris
Hi all,
Here it is, (automatic translation) :
Elie Barnavi and Vincent Lemire: "Mr. President, if immediate sanctions are not imposed on Israel, you will end up recognizing a cemetery"
After the diplomatic momentum generated by the announcement of France's recognition of the State of Palestine, the two historians ask Emmanuel Macron, in an op-ed in Le Monde, to put pressure on the Netanyahu government to put an end to the famine in Gaza and obtain the release of all hostages.
Mr. President
It is as historians that we address you. As historians aware of the tragedy of history and the extreme peril that threatens today. On Thursday, July 24, you took a courageous and useful decision by announcing the recognition of the State of Palestine by France at the next United Nations General Assembly on September 21. Thanks to your initiative, the United Kingdom, Canada and soon other Western powers will join this collective effort. Thanks to this diplomatic momentum, the legal capacities of Palestinian citizens will be strengthened before international bodies, which they need more than ever. Since your announcement, international mobilization has been growing for a ceasefire to put an end to the unbearable ordeal of the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. This, too, should be credited to you.
Your initiative is part of a long history of promises, acknowledgements and denials, which has always been done through exchanges of letters. On November 2, 1917, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Balfour, gave his support in writing to the project of “establishing in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people,”promising that “nothing shall be done which may infringe upon the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities existing in Palestine.”. At the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, on 24 January 1949, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman recognised in writing “the provisional government of Israel”, adding that “this decision does not prejudge the definitive delimitation by the United Nations of the territory over which it will exercise its authority”.
Orally on May 2, 1989 with his famous formula on the now “obsolete” PLO charter, then in writing on September 9, 1993, Yasser Arafat recognized “Israel's right to an existence in peace and security” as well as “Security Council resolutions 242 and 238”, i.e. the borders resulting from the ceasefire line effective between 1949 and 1967. The next day, the Israeli government led by Yitzhak Rabin recognized “the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people” but did not recognize the Palestinians' right to a state. It is this lack of reciprocity, this denial of dignity and legitimacy, the original sin of the Oslo Accords, that your letter to Mahmoud Abbas tries to repair: a prior recognition, intended to create the conditions for its effectiveness. Your decision of 24 July is therefore, in the literal sense, historic.
But neither the Palestinians in Gaza nor the Israeli hostages read the international press. They know nothing of your gesture. Nor do they know that the Israeli writer David Grossman described the situation in Gaza as “genocide” on August 1 in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. They don't know that the Israeli NGO B'Tselem has just published a report that rigorously documents the Israeli government's genocidal strategy, joining many NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International as well as many Israeli historians like Daniel Blatman, Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and other experts. They don't know that photos of emaciated children in Gaza are circulating on Fox News and that even Donald Trump is beginning to be moved by them. They don't know that his envoy Steve Witkoff is increasingly openly advocating for a “final” agreement, i.e. the release of all hostages in exchange for a definitive end to the war, which Hamas is ready to accept.
Digging your own grave
They don't know it, and if they did, it wouldn't change anything for them. Because they have other, much more urgent concerns. They are starving. They are dying of thirst. They die of infections or dysentery. They are being shot dead by mercenary snipers from the misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. They also die of our cowardice and renunciation. Some 60,000 deaths in twenty months in Gaza, probably more, two-thirds of them women and children. One hundred and eighty deaths from starvation have been reported to date, including 93 children, according to the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip. One thousand four hundred killed in recent weeks while going to look for food, according to the UN. A “wave of famine” that will engulf Gaza according to the World Food Programme, stressing that at this stage the inhabitants no longer need only food but also targeted nutrients, care and specialized doctors to contain the disaster. Doctors are not dropped by plane, Mr. President.
The 49 hostages still locked up in the Gaza tunnels do not read the international press either. Among them are probably 20 survivors and at least 27 corpses. All of them have already spent 668 days in captivity, almost two years. How can we imagine the abyssal depth of their despair, the absolute overwhelm of their families? They too are dying of hunger and thirst, like Evyatar David, 24, and Rom Braslavski, 21, whose images, abominably staged by Hamas, were broadcast on July 31. They are skeletal and have only skin on bones. In one of the videos, Evyatar David is seen digging his own grave under a tunnel. Horrifying images, produced to terrorize, like those that Hamas terrorists filmed on October 7, 2023, while intoxicated by their own cruelty.
As for the Palestinians in the West Bank, they may have learned that you are going to “recognize” them, but that does not protect them from the unbridled violence of the settlers, nor from the call for the annexation of their land that the Israeli Parliament voted on July 23 by a vote of 71 to 13. A thousand Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed since October 7, almost as many as in all of Palestine during the five years of the first intifada. Palestinian educator Awdah Hathaleen, who had participated in the film No Other Land, was murdered at point-blank range on July 28 by settler Yinon Levi, who has since been under house arrest. For all these dead and all these living dead, the Western media and diplomatic noise will not change anything. As you know, only sanctions will have an effect.
Mr. President, if immediate sanctions are not imposed on Israel, you will end up recognizing a cemetery. Action must be taken now so that food and health care can enter Gaza en masse. On August 1, France airdropped 40 tons of food. Forty tons, the equivalent of a single truck, when 500 tons would be needed every day for several weeks to break the exponential dynamic of famine. These airdrops are derisory, humiliating and dangerous.
As you know, only immediate and concrete sanctions will weigh on Israeli public opinion and therefore on the Israeli government, to really change the situation. To stop the starvation, for a permanent ceasefire, for the release of all hostages, for the protection of Palestinians in the West Bank, to save Israel from itself.
In the Guardian of 29 July, 31 Israeli personalities (former attorney general, former president of the Jewish Agency, several Israel Prize winners, etc.) call for immediate and “paralyzing” sanctions on Israel. “Paralyzing” sanctions, the word is strong. Are they “anti-Semitic”? Are they even “anti-Zionist”? No, they are patriots, but they know that diplomatic posturing is useless in the face of a fascist government that only understands force.
Double standards
What are the sanctions? The Netherlands has declared supremacist ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich persona non grata on its soil. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who on Sunday, August 3, came to pray loudly on the Esplanade of the Mosques/Temple Mount, in defiance of the status quo governing the holy sites of Jerusalem, no doubt hoping to torpedo the chances of a ceasefire by inflaming the situation even more. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who assumed in December 2023 his wish that "there will be only 100,000 inhabitants left in Gaza at the end of the war", compared to 2.3 million today. But we must go further and impose a European travel ban on all Israeli ministers, because all of them are in solidarity with this criminal and despotic cabinet.
Slovenia has declared a unilateral arms embargo. Sweden is calling for the immediate suspension of the trade agreement between Israel and the European Union, which accounts for almost a third of its foreign trade. Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovenia and Spain have publicly confirmed that they will strictly execute the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. To date, France has neither asked for nor, a fortiori, put in place any concrete sanctions to really have an immediate impact.
The European Union has just decided on an eighteenth package of sanctions against Russia to punish it for its misdeeds in Ukraine. Eighteen packages of sanctions against Russia, largely ineffective against this country on a subcontinental scale; sanctions against Israel, while its geographical isolation would make them immediately effective and perceptible, in all the shops of the country. How can we dispute that this is a double standard? International law cannot be variable, its consistency and its very credibility are at stake. However, Europe is nothing more than international law, negotiated, agreed and applied. If this principle collapses, Europe disappears from the international scene, definitively.
Ethnic cleansing plan
The excuse of the lack of European consensus no longer holds. On the strength of the diplomatic momentum that you created on 24 July, you can initiate and train a coalition of the willing among the European states. You must act now, because there is an absolute emergency. On July 24, the very day of your historic decision, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said on the radio that “the government is in a race against time to annihilate Gaza. We are in the process of eliminating its inhabitants. Gaza will be entirely Jewish.” He is telling the truth, it is indeed a race against time, because the ethnic cleansing plan, which has been drawn up for a long time, has now entered the operational phase.
In December 2023, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said that “voluntary emigration must sometimes be imposed before it is consented”. On March 21, 2025, an “Administration for the Voluntary Transit of Gazans” was established. In early April, the Israeli prime minister declared: “We are not hiding, this is our plan.” On May 5, members of the Israeli security cabinet approved "the plan for the voluntary departure [sic] of the Gazans," who are already concentrated in 12 percent of the enclave. They have a plan, Mr. President. A credible, solid, financed plan, and the organized famine in Gaza is obviously part of the plan. What is yours?
Mr President, do not confuse diplomatic noise with the reality on the ground. Since your announcement on 24 July, everything has changed diplomatically, but nothing has changed in Gaza. The promise of recognition has never nourished anyone. Be consistent, if you want to preserve the possibility of a future state of Palestine, start by saving its future citizens. The last week of July was the week of diplomatic mobilization. The first week of August must be the week of sanctions. Otherwise, your courageous decision will ultimately result in posthumous recognition.
Elie Barnavi is a historian and diplomat. Former Israeli ambassador to France from 2000 to 2002, professor emeritus of the history of the modern West at Tel Aviv University, scientific advisor to the Museum of Europe in Brussels, he has published “Letter from an Israeli friend to the Palestinian friend” (Flammarion, 1992), “Ten theses on war” (Flammarion, 2014) and "Israel. A historical portrait" (Flammarion, 2015).
Vincent Lemire is a professor of history at the University of Paris-Est Gustave-Eiffel. He directed the French Research Center in Jerusalem from 2019 to August 2023 and now leads the European project www.openjerusalem.org. He has published "Au pied du Mur. Life and Death of the Maghreb Quarter of Jerusalem 1187-1967" (Le Seuil, 2022) and, with Christophe Gaultier, the comic book “History of Jerusalem” (Les Arènes, 2022).
Elie Barnavi (Historian) and Vincent Lemire (Historian)
envoyé : 6 août 2025 à 13:26
de : Esa Palosaari <esa.pa...@gmail.com>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
Hi,
I don’t think there is an intentional genocide in Gaza. Not yet, at least. I have conducted war trauma research among children and families in Gaza, and I do believe the suffering there now is something they have not previously experienced. At the same time, I have some experiences of academics, journalists, and politicians, especially leftists, who seem to be distorting the truly bad situation into a lying demonization of Israel. The current New York Times errors about images of sick emaciated children and the misquotations of politicians seem to be always in one direction [1]. Organizations like Amnesty appear to change the definition of genocide cited below by Brian just for Israel. The cries of genocide and starvation have been there for a long time not just in this latest war but also before. At the same time, Israeli government seems to have given much ammunition for those attacks against it, especially the far right politicians in the government coalition whose words do speak of intent for genocide and ethnic cleansing, even if they are not making the decisions about the war.
My understanding is that there is now widespread hunger if not official starvation in Gaza, and it is a result of a miscalculation on the part of the Israeli government last winter and spring. Before breaking the ceasefire, they had just sent food into Gaza enough to feed everyone for six months. Then they started to play a game of chicken with Hamas by withholding the aid while at the same time signaling that the aid would resume eventually (https://www.timesofisrael.com/defense-minister-aid-will-enter-gaza-only-once-civilian-mechanism-built-to-bypass-hamas/). There was no way that Hamas could lose there. The food ran out before the Israeli government thought it would because it was unevenly distributed and stockpiled, and now there has been real hunger, benefitting Hamas in every way. Hamas is getting pauses in fighting without any concessions when it previously had to earn them. And France is rewarding Hamas with the recognition of the state. Britain is incentivizing Hamas to refuse any ceasefire by making its recognition of the state conditional on there not being a ceasefire by September (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgp5z1vvj5o). A very bad miscalculation by the Israeli government.
The journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has been analysing this situation for some time and, to my non-expert eyes, he has given the most insight into what has been going on (https://www.thefp.com/p/haviv-rettig-gur-israels-winning; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Ug9HAnUB4). According to him, there seems to be political game within and between Israeli government and military of appearing strong against Hamas while actually providing aid. That is, the government politicians are playing politics to their right-wing base rather than doing serious war strategy or policy. There also seems to be a fatal misunderstanding about Hamas and its methods, still, after all these years. Haviv Rettig Gur:
' “Humanitarian aid war” is a strange way to put it, but hear me out. Hamas’s fundamental plan for survival—their main strategic weapon against Israel—is Gaza’s humanitarian suffering. It’s the catalyst for international pressure on Israel that Hamas argues will yet be its salvation.’(— —)''The whole concept of the strategy to use aid as pressure on Hamas was flawed at its very core. Why would Hamas blink first? Has the Israeli government met Hamas? Why did they think this was going to work with a group whose foundational strategy is Gaza’s destruction?'
Rettig Gur has suggested flooding Gaza with aid so that the food prices would drop which would both help Israel internationally with reputation and political pressure, and in Gaza politically and militarily by depriving Hamas the source of its revenue for its war efforts and its political power in aid distribution. Another suggestion by him has been to bring the civilians into refugee camps in Israel, Negev, which the Palestinians and many of their supporters already consider to be a part of Palestine. No Arab country will have the civilians, Israel will be accused with Holocaust vocabulary whatever they do, the civilians would be safe and fed, and the war against Hamas in their tunnels could be fought more efficiently and brought to a quicker end.
Esa
What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza? Journalists and jurists point to damning quotes from Israel’s war cabinet as evidence of genocidal intent. But the citations are not what they seem.By Yair Rosenberg(— —)“Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video. The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.
And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.
Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over “There will be no Hamas” in its translation. (Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time. After this article was published, it removed the original video and issued a corrected version that includes the excised sentence about Hamas. Bloomberg's mistaken translation originated with the Associated Press, which also corrected the error. The New York Times corrected both articles containing the same error, as did The Guardian and NPR.)
Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.
Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com> kirjoitti 3.8.2025 kello 11.55:
Dear colleagues,
As we all know from press reports, Israel is starving the civilian population of Gaza (largely children). The Netanyahu government has reduced the food distribution sites in Gaza from 400 to 4, creating a grotesque "Hunger Games" situation of starving people scrambling over one another for a piece of bread. (Ask yourself what historical intergenerational trauma this policy could be re-enacting).
In addition, in the nearly two years since the horrific and evil events of 7 October 2023, Israel has essentially bombed Gaza back to the stone age. In both public and "expert" opinion, more and more people are describing these policies as "genocide." Others claim that, however reprensible, these policies should not be called genocide because the analogy with the Nazi Holocaust that this term suggests is both false and anti-Semitic. This argument seems to assume that "genocide," on the model of the Final Solution, is any largely successful effort to murder every member of a religious or ethnically defined group.
In an effort to shed light on these questions, I looked up in Wikipedia the Genocide Convention, which provides the authoritative definition of genocide under international law. According to this 1948 treaty, genocide is any of five acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:"
"(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
In the case of Gaza, it would appear that primarily (b) and (c) are the forms that genocide is taking (committed with the genocidal intent indicated), including starvation and the systematic destruction of Gaza's infrastructure. Apropos this, Holocaust historian Omer Bartov recently published an Op Ed in the New York Times (see attached), followed by an interview in the Times responding to his critics (also included in the attached). Bartov wrote:
"I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group."
As just one of many examples of genocidal intent expressed by Israel's leaders, Bartov cites Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament, who said on X that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Bartov concluded back in May 2024 that Israel was committing genocide, and he cites a number of other genocide scholars who have since come that conclusion. I believe his attached article and interview constitute as good a starting point as any for a needed discussion on this internet forum of this urgent and painful topic.
Brian D'Agostino, Ph.D.
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Rachel Youdelman
Brian D'Agostino
Ken Fuchsman
Below is a timely article by Sorbonne historian Francoise Thom, who is a specialist in post-Soviet Russia. It is one historically informed perspective. There are other views.
'Faced with Putin, Europeans are in a position of strength without realizing it'
Recently, the “fog of war” has morphed into the "fog of diplomacy." There is no point trying to untangle the confused impulses of the Trump administration. We must stand on the only solid ground available: Russia's objectives – especially since it is always on that side that the American president ends up. Here, the situation is clear. The Russian economy has been plunging at an accelerated pace.
Militarily, Russia is making progress, but not quickly enough to win the race against economic collapse. The Kremlin's men have a long memory. They remember that most of the Russian Empire's territorial expansions were achieved with the complicity and help of one or more foreign powers: in the wake of Prussia and Austria for the partition of Poland in 1772; by coming to an agreement with Turkey to reconquer the Caucasian states in 1920-1921; by relying on Germany for the reconquest of the Baltic States and the annexation of Galicia (the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, signed in 1939). So why not turn to Donald Trump to bring Ukraine to heel?
Military force is always a last resort in the eyes of those in the Kremlin. They prefer manipulation and subversion. And this is where they excel, thanks to Western ignorance of Russian methods of projecting power, which remain unchanged. In addition to co-opting a foreign accomplice, the second hallmark of Russian expansion is the salami tactic. Russia slices up its victim (as we saw with Ukraine: First Crimea, then the Donbas). Once the first slice is taken, it moves on to the second, then the third.
The Russian proposals made to Steve Witkoff [special envoy of the US president, who visited Russia on August 6] illustrate this approach. Vladimir Putin demanded that the United States, as a prerequisite for hypothetical negotiations toward a ceasefire, force the Ukrainians to evacuate the parts of the Donetsk region they still control, which are the strongest fortified lines on the Ukrainian front, in exchange for a symbolic piece of territory in the Sumy region.
If Trump goes along with this maneuver, Russia wins on every front. It would effortlessly gain strategic footholds for conquering central and southern Ukraine. It would demoralize Ukrainians by parading Americans who are aligned with the Kremlin's demands. It would discredit the pro-Western party in Ukraine, paving the way for a Moscow-backed oligarch to take power in Kyiv, campaigning on a “peace” platform (as Bidzina Ivanishvili is doing in Georgia).
To secure this alignment, Moscow is counting on Trump's vanity, ignorance and foolishness. But that's not all. The mousetrap is baited with an appetizing piece of cheese. Russia is dangling before Trump a dazzling "deal." In exchange for helping in Ukraine, lifting sanctions and renewed access to Western technology, Russia would entrust the management and resale of its gas destined for Europe to an American company.
American betrayal
Presumably, Trump will receive his share of this windfall. Here again, history is instructive. It teaches us what happens to such concessions granted by the Kremlin when the Russian economy is on the ropes: As soon as Westerners have invested and launched production, the Russian government despoils its foreign partner, who is lucky if he can salvage anything at all. Russia uses the promise of business as a tool of power. Today, it needs to restore its ailing economy, it needs cash cows and it is not China – a predator like itself – that will provide what is needed.
With Trump, the Kremlin has found its dream partner who, like itself, reduces foreign policy to racketeering and extortion. It remains to be seen whether Trump will dare to defy American public opinion by committing an unprecedented act of treason, abandoning an ally to an enemy who has sworn to destroy it.
What can Europe do in the face of the Russian-American axis? First, remain clear-eyed. Europeans must constantly bear in mind the relentless effort with which Russia has destroyed Ukraine for decades – the blend of brutality and diabolical Machiavellianism it has displayed to break Ukrainian morale, fracture the Western front, split the US from Europe and undermine the European Union, all while destroying its own prosperity for the sole pleasure of crushing a neighbor that wanted to be free. Russia is a vast engine of destruction which, after subjugating Ukraine, will turn on Europe. It will do so not necessarily through military invasion, but by sowing demoralization and spreading hatred, stupidity, suicidal national egoism and nihilism.
Europe must clearly distance itself from the American betrayal. It must demand security guarantees for Kyiv, insist on the deployment of European forces in Ukraine and not leave the country alone to face Russia. Europe must realize it holds significant cards. Trump's America will not be enough to revive the Russian economy. Without realizing it, Europeans are in a position of strength. Historically, the Russian Empire survived only through Europeans co-opted by Russian power. Today, after its disastrous experience with autarky and a pivot toward China, the Russians are keenly aware of their dependence on Europe.
Consequently, Europeans must make it clear from now that business (including gas purchases) will not resume with Russia until it has withdrawn from the occupied territories. The Trump administration is currently rescuing Putin's regime, which it needs to extort money from Europe. Europe's interest, on the contrary, lies in Russia ridding itself of autocracy. We must not give the Russian regime the means to bribe its population and to maintain a gigantic military and police apparatus directed against us. It would be disastrous if our hard-won economic independence from Russia were sacrificed to short-sighted interests.
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Brian D'Agostino
Brian D'Agostino
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Ken Fuchsman
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Brian D'Agostino
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dlo...@nycap.rr.com
Regarding “no expropriation’ of Arab land by Jews consider the following from Baruch Kimmerling’s 1983 book Zionism and Territory :
“. . .from1882 to 1948 all of the Jewish companies and private individuals. . .succeeded in buying only about 7% of the total land in British Palestine. All of the rest was taken by sword and nationalized during the 1948 war and after. . .”
I am very familiar with regard to the rest of the brief account given of the 1948 war. I was told the same things for many years in Hebrew School. Below is a passage from a paper that, hopefully, will be published in the next addition of the Psychohistory News. It is an account that is largely accepted by historians of the period, including Benny Morris.:
In November 1947 British mandatory Palestine was partitioned into Jewish and Arab sections by the UN. The area was under British military control. British troops did not leave until Israeli Independence Day in May of 1948. Starting just after the partition date there was low intensity fighting between local Palestinian Arab and Jewish militias. In April 1948 the Haganah (the main Jewish militia) launched plan Dalet in which somewhere between 400 and 531 Arab villages were destroyed. It also involved emptying 11 urban neighborhoods of their Arab residents. The Haganah took complete control of the previously majority Arab cities and towns of Tiberius, Haifa, Safed, Jaffa, and Acre. [Wikipedia “Operation Dalet”] This was before any Arab armies were involved. The Palestinian Arabs had only a few poorly armed militias. The Haganah had a significant military advantage.
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Brian D'Agostino
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Esa Palosaari
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Brian D'Agostino
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Susanne Seperson
Representative to the United Nations
Vice-Chair NGO Committee on Intergenerational Solidarity
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Hi all,
These episodes about the history of Palestine and Israel have been published in the newspaper Le Monde in January/February 2024 - here is the first episode (automatic translation) :
Palestine, a land twice promised
Narrative
"Israel-Palestine, the endless war" (1/5). In 1917, when he supported the demand for a Jewish national home in Palestine, the British Lord Balfour chose Zionism, a movement born in reaction to European anti-Semitism, ignoring the aspirations for independence of the Arabs, in struggle against the Ottoman Empire.
The scene takes place on a beautiful night in 1916, in the Westminster district of London. Two elegantly dressed gentlemen wander under the pale light of the moon. They discuss the future of Palestine, the province of the Ottoman Empire that His Majesty's army is preparing to conquer, in the wake of the Arab revolt galvanized by Thomas Edward Lawrence, known as “Lawrence of Arabia”.
The man with a goatee and moustache leading the conversation is Chaim Weizmann, 42, a renowned Jewish chemist and professor at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom). Haunted by the pogroms of Tsarist Russia where he was born, the man who would become the first president of the State of Israel then headed the British branch of the World Zionist Organization.
This movement, launched at the end of the nineteenth century by an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, militated for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The ancestral homeland of this phantom nation, scattered to the four winds, was inhabited by 500,000 Arabs and less than 40,000 Jews.
The man who listened, with shiny hair and graying bacchantes, was the former Conservative Prime Minister (1902-1905), Lord Arthur James Balfour, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Ironically, in 1905, he had passed a very restrictive law, intended to stem the flow of victims of anti-Semitic persecution from Eastern Europe, which was pouring in across the Channel at that time. Like many of his peers, Balfour was prejudiced against Jews, whom he distrusted as much as he idealized them.
Thanks to a journalist friend, Weizmann penetrated British ruling circles. His sesame? A process that makes it possible to manufacture synthetic acetone, a compound essential for the production of explosives. In the midst of a conflict with Germany, the main exporter of this solvent in Europe, the discovery comes at the right time. In exchange for his contribution to the war effort, Professor Weizmann gained the ear of the Crown's highest officials.
Centuries of persecution
That night in 1916, as he walked the streets of London in the company of Lord Balfour, with whom he had dined, the Zionist leader hammered home his main argument: the interests of his movement and the United Kingdom were aligned. The man of science may operate from a small, dark apartment in Piccadilly Circus, but he has forged the image of a “king of the Jews” through his charisma and interpersonal skills. As good Protestants, Balfour and Prime Minister David Lloyd George are steeped in the romantic mythology of the return to Zion, presented as the prelude to the final redemption, the second coming of Christ on earth.
Parallel to this biblical philo-Semitism, the two men are inclined to think, as a tenacious anti-Semitic cliché would have it, that the “Jewish race” enjoys a power of occult influence. They thus convinced themselves that Weizmann and his people could be useful to the United Kingdom. That they could hasten the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Entente powers and that by settling in Palestine, not far from the Suez Canal, they could help them secure the route to India. Some time after this nocturnal walk, the Foreign Secretary declared before the cabinet: “I am a Zionist.”
The movement emerged in the 1880s, in response to the increase in anti-Jewish riots in Russia. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by an anarchist group. Immediately, the rumour spread throughout the empire that the murder had been committed by Jews, and soon the rumour was added that in retaliation the new tsar, Alexander III, authorized the beating of the Israelites... The massacres, tolerated, even encouraged by the authorities, began, and this “first wave” lasted until 1884. Others followed him, particularly in the 1890s and in 1903-1907, claiming tens of thousands of victims and scandalizing Western public opinion.
In reaction to this violence, which echoed the centuries of opprobrium and persecution experienced in Europe by the Jewish diaspora, Léon Pinsker, a Jewish doctor from Odessa (now in Ukraine), published a pamphlet entitled Self-Emancipation in 1882. Convinced that anti-Semitism was an incurable pathology, that the Jew would always be a stateless person, the “chosen people of universal hatred”, he called on his co-religionists to renounce the two strategies of emancipation that were dominant at the time: the gamble of assimilation, in vogue in Western Europe, and the quest for cultural autonomy, which was progressing in the socialist circles of Eastern Europe and which would soon be called "Bundism " ». Instead, Pinsker advocates the creation of a “national home”: "A land of our own, (...) a large piece of land for our poor brethren, a piece of land of which we would have the property and from which no stranger could drive us. »
Palestine, the land of the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, is the natural outlet for this aspiration. Many Jews were expelled from it nearly two millennia ago, following the crushing by the Romans of the Bar-Kokhba revolt in 135 AD. The province, ruled from Istanbul by the Ottoman sultan, is more than 90% populated by Arabs. But the memory of the “Promised Land” still irrigates the Jewish diaspora, as evidenced by the ritual formula “next year in Jerusalem”.
This nostalgia and the dissemination of the first Zionist writings led to the creation of the network of the Lovers of Zion, the matrix of the first aliyah, the “ascent” to Israel. Between 1881 and 1890, 10,000 migrants founded agricultural settlements along the coastal plain and in the Galilee Hills. These pioneers, supported by Jewish philanthropists, are in addition to the estimated 25,000 Palestinian Jews who have lived for centuries between Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron. But the Jewish presence in Palestine remained weak and the choice of aliyah marginal: two million people in all fled tsarist persecution between 1880 and 1914. Three-quarters of them will leave for North America.
The publication in 1896 of The State of the Jews, the manifesto of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), breathed new life into Zionism. The Viennese bourgeois, a fervent assimilationist until then, converted to this ideology after having covered, in Paris, the first trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus and his infamous public degradation in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, on January 5, 1895. Herzl advocated a state Zionism, convinced that hatred of Jews would promote his enterprise. "The governments in whose countries anti-Semitism is rife will be very interested in procuring sovereignty for us," he predicted, in an icy realistic tone.
Rejection of the “Uganda” option
The following year, Herzl convened the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In his diary, dated September 3, 1897, he wrote: "In Basel I founded the Jewish State... In five years perhaps, in fifty certainly, everyone will see it.
At that time, another man showed prescience: the Palestinian Youssef Diya Al-Khalidi, former mayor of Jerusalem. This polyglot fifty-year-old has followed the rise of Zionist thought through foreign newspapers. He also observed the early friction between the new arrivals and the local fellahs (peasants), who were forcibly displaced to make way for the creation of settlements. So, on March 1, 1899, Youssef Diya Al-Khalidi sent a seven-page letter to the Chief Rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, asking him to pass it on to Herzl.
After expressing his respect for the founder of Zionism, a “true Jewish patriot”, and acknowledging the ancestral ties of the Jews with Palestine – "My God, historically, this is your country!" – the former mayor became serious: it was “pure madness” to want to build a sovereign Jewish state in this country which“is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, is inhabited by others than Israelites,” warns Al-Khalidi, who fears that this project will sow discord.“In the name of God, leave Palestine in peace,” he concluded, imploring Herzl to find another refuge for his people.
A few days later, the interested party replied to him. He presented the Jews as friends of Turkey and Muslims, whose entrepreneurial spirit would benefit the Ottoman Empire. "Who could think of making the non-Jewish population leave," asks the prophet of Zionism. It is his well-being, his individual wealth, that we are going to increase by bringing our own. »
A Jewish state in an Arab country? Lord Balfour was not unaware of this contradiction, inherent in the Zionist project. In 1903, when he was a tenant at 10 Downing Street, he suggested that the movement shift its ambitions to Uganda, in East Africa. A scenario rejected by the delegates of the Jewish Congress, for whom Zionism without Zion makes no sense. “If Moses had been offered Uganda instead of Palestine, he would have broken the Tablets of the Law,” Herzl told Balfour.
For the Viennese intellectual, imbued with an idea of European superiority that was very common at the time, Zionism was part of the Old Continent's expansion movement in Africa and Asia. In The State of the Jews, he wrote that this state would be the“vanguard of civilization against barbarism.” In his diary, in 1895, he even put forward a solution to the Palestinian puzzle. “We must try to make the penniless population disappear on the other side of the border, by providing them with jobs in transit countries,”he said, much more frankly than in his response to Youssef Diya Al-Khalidi.
A leverage for London
The secession of the Arab provinces from the Ottoman Empire, symbolized by the capture of Aqaba in July 1917 by Lawrence of Arabia and the forces of Emir Faisal, accelerated the course of history. The Zionist gamble became a lever for London to appropriate the remains of the “sick man of Europe”. It was then, on October 31, 1917, that the British War Cabinet supported the famous Balfour Declaration, addressed to Sir Walter Rothschild, a former Conservative MP.
"His Majesty's Government look favourably upon the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jews, and will do all in their power to facilitate the attainment of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice either the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities existing in Palestine, or the rights and political status that Jews have in any other country. »
Text of the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917. UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES
A single sentence, fifteen typed lines, but a masterpiece of circumlocutions. It is a question of giving guarantees to communities in Europe, which are still very much won over to assimilationist and Bundist ideals, and of lull the vigilance of the Palestinians.
But the latter, reduced to the rank of “non-Jewish collectivities”, even though they form the overwhelming majority of the population, are not fooled. "Zionism is the danger that threatens our homeland. It announces our exile and our expulsion from our homes and properties," predicts reformist Suleiman Al-Farouqi. “One nation has solemnly promised a second the territory of a third,”summarized the Hungarian-born Jewish writer Arthur Koestler.
In doing so, the United Kingdom flouted two commitments: the promise made in 1915 to Sharif Hussein of Mecca, Faisal's father, to erect a great Arab kingdom in the “Bilad El-Sham”, the Levant; and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, sealed the following year, an Anglo-French plan for the partition of the Middle East, which provided for the internationalisation of Palestine. To these two secret pacts, London preferred the Zionist option.
British diplomacy hoped to detach the Jews from their governments in Germany and Austria-Hungary and dissuade the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who had many Jews in their ranks, from signing a separate peace with Berlin – a calculation that would fail. Above all, the alliance with the Zionists, combined with General Allenby's entry into Jerusalem at the end of 1917, enabled the British to oust their French rivals from Palestine. In 1922, it was to them alone that the League of Nations entrusted the mandate for this country. It is up to London to implement the Balfour Declaration.
Second aliyah, third, fourth... Under the long-benevolent gaze of His Majesty's officers, the number of Jews in Palestine rose from 80,000 in the early 1920s to more than 600,000 in 1948, the date of Israel's creation. That is to say from 12% to 32% of the country's total population. A simple outgrowth of the Arab port of Jaffa when it was founded in 1909, Tel Aviv had more than 150,000 inhabitants in 1937. This demographic dynamism was fuelled by the Great Depression in 1929, which closed the road to the United States for European Jews, and by Hitler's accession to power in Germany in January 1933.
A few months later, the World Zionist Organization signed the so-called “Haavara” (“transfer”) agreement with the Nazi government, which allowed German Jews going to Palestine to recover part of their capital in the form of products exported by the Reich. At that time, the Hitler regime was not yet planning the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and many Western officials thought that it was possible to negotiate with the Führer.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF), which is responsible for acquiring land, also excels at finding absentee effendis (owners), who live in Damascus or Beirut, and do not hesitate to sell. The British ceded state land to him, and others were confiscated from Bedouins who did not have title deeds. In twenty-five years, the area of land cultivated by Jews tripled.
Impoverishment of the Arabs
The conquest of the land is coupled with a conquest of work. Palestinian peasants employed on land acquired by the JNF were sent back to Jewish sharecroppers. The Histadrut, the trade union centre established by immigrants, decided in 1920 to exclude non-Jewish workers from its ranks. Posters are popping up on walls in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, calling for a boycott of Arab businesses.
Officially, these measures were aimed at bringing manual labor, especially land labor, back to the forefront, which had long been forbidden to Jews in European countries. In practice, they impoverish the Arab population.
The gap between the two communities is widening, especially since the Palestinian leadership practices the policy of the empty chair. It opposed the establishment of a “unified legislative council”, composed of Jews and Arabs, and an “Arab agency”, equivalent to the Jewish Agency, which Chaim Weizmann had taken over and which had become the executive arm of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine. There is no question of giving the slightest sign of acceptance of the Balfour Declaration.
In 1929, in an editorial entitled “Foreigners in our own country”, the Palestinian daily Falastin, based in Jaffa, sounded the alarm. The article reports on a ceremony organized by the British High Commission on the occasion of the opening of a train line, in which only Jews participated. "There was only one tarbouch [the traditional headgear of the Arabs of the Levant], in the middle of many hats," observes Issa Al-Issa, the newspaper's editor, who worries about the Palestinians' “drowsiness”.
At regular intervals, the anger of the Arab population degenerates into inter-communal violence. A first peak occurred in 1929. In Hebron, about sixty Jews were massacred by extremists – some were also saved by Arab families. On the scale of the whole of Palestine, the riots of 1929 and their repression by British forces caused the death of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs.
The United Kingdom is not learning the lessons of this first conflagration. London's policy in Palestine continued to be marked by the colonial presuppositions of Lord Balfour, who considered in a 1919 memo that "Zionism, whether right or wrong (...), is of far greater importance than the desires and prejudices" of the Arabs.
While the author of the most famous declaration in the Middle East died in 1930, the pace of migrant arrivals in the ports of Tel Aviv and Haifa accelerated. After building institutions, schools, banks and factories, the Zionists equipped themselves with a clandestine army, the Haganah. Slowly but surely, the Yishuv is being transformed into a state, under the paralyzed gaze of the Palestinians, who see their country slipping away from under their feet.
envoyé : 16 août 2025 à 17:51
de : Susanne Seperson <susanne...@gmail.com>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] Israel's "Genocide"
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/CAOhFiCcZ3h7DiOpbrcD8fEWTaL-ZWby_PwO5bq6aqwXNsqAxkw%40mail.gmail.com.
Benny Beit-Hallahmi
David refers here to a personal experience which isn’t unique and should be of interest to all.
“I was told the same things for many years in Hebrew School” Jewish kids have been sent to Hebrew school and received there the standard Zionist indoctrination. Then, later in life, they learned more of the history of Palestine and their views changed.
This explains the over-representation of Jewish students among the organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the US after 10/7/2023.
There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth among Zionist propagandists about how 7/10 was a turning point in attitudes towards Israel and Jews, and how the massacre of 10/7 caused hidden anti-Semitism to resurface.
I would like to suggest that the rise of pro-Palestinian views has been less dramatic and more gradual. It did not happen over one night and involved not only Jewish individuals.
The evidence is not only anecdotal.
I would like to draw your attention to the phenomenon of volunteering in kibbutzim. This was a remarkable movement among mostly European and fewer US youth between 1960 and 2005. According to published reports, it involved 350,000 individuals who came to experience life in a socialist commune. We can understand why the kibbutzim were viewed as a miracle in the midst of the capitalist economy and idealistic young people wanted to share this reality.
Among those who spent time volunteering were Peter Green (founder of Fleetwood Mac(), Heinz Fischer (president of Austria 2004-2016), Boris Johnson (PM of Britain 2019-2022),, Helen Mirren, Sigourney Weaver, Debra Winger, and Bernie Sanders.
In the 1970s, there were as many as 12,000 volunteers in one year.
In the 1980s, the numbers started slowly declining, reaching a low point in 2001, with 100 volunteers.
The explanations offered for the decline mention the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the First Intifada (1987-1993) as factors which made European public opinion sour on Israel.
The idealized view of the kibbutzim changed when more people realized that they were created through the dispossession of the indigenous population. There are published first-person accounts of this process.
We have another piece of historical information which illuminates the transformation among young people and the public.
As the numbers of kibbutz volunteers were declining, a new movement appeared, that of volunteers coming to aid the Palestinians.
The Israeli government does not take very kindly to this movement, and its members are likely to be deported if they manage to gain entry to Israel at all.
(Disillusionment with Israel is related, of course, to the appearance of many academic studies appearing in the age of decolonization. In Israel itself there were the so-called New Historians starting in the 1980s, but historians elsewhere have been writing about periods in Palestinian history, such as the Great Revolt of 1936-1939, which used to be examined only through the Zionist gaze, and referred to as the Riots. These materials are routinely used in history classes today and were non-existent before the 1990s).
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/06db01dc0e51%24e1ac2f50%24a5048df0%24%40nycap.rr.com.
dlo...@nycap.rr.com
Dear Anna and psychohistorians,
I too am Jewish and live in Western Massachusetts. The account of the Gaza situation below is pure Hasbara – here’s AI’s definition: Hasbara, derived from the Hebrew word for "explanation," is a term used to describe Israel's public diplomacy and strategic communication efforts, particularly aimed at shaping international perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It involves explaining Israel's actions, narratives, and policies to a global audience, often with the goal of gaining support and minimizing criticism. However, it has also been described as a form of propaganda, especially when it involves presenting a one-sided narrative or downplaying Israeli actions.
The two sentences highlighted in red below are considered to be false by the overwhelming number of the many who have knowledge of the situation in Gaza. It is acknowledged by all, including the Israeli government, that for 2 1/2 months starting in March of 2025, Israel did not allow any food into Gaza. The hasbara account of this was that there was more than enough foodstuffs in Gaza to last the 2 1/2 months bur Hamas was stealing it. There are still some who think Hamas is hoarding food in the tunnels while their relatives and friends above starve. Other Israelis say it was just a miscalculation, there just wasn’t as much food as they thought.
The information about the destruction and atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza comes from many, many, different sources – are they all either ignorant or enemies of the Jews?
The claim that Israel is supplying food, water, electricity, and gasoline is a bit ironic since Israeli bombing devasted the water, sanitation, food delivery, and electricity generation capacity – along with hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, and mosques. Hasbara has it that there were Hamas operatives at all of these site - although why Hamas would do this when they have all those secure tunnels to operate from.
Unfortunately, the lines below convey an attitude that is all too common among Israelis, and the mainstream Jewish community in North America, which has two parts, one that Hamas is totally evil, that they and all their supporters just want to kill Jewish Israelis; and that the world is full of latent antisemites who are using Gaza as an opportunity to manifest their antisemitism.
Speaking as a Jew, there was a time that I thought of Israel in a much different way; before they transformed into a fascist ethno-nationalist state that exists at the moment. I also have a problem with those Jews who put loyalty to the state of Israel ahead of the ethics, wisdom, and values of Judaism.
Fortunately there may somewhat of a shift among North American Jews. As an example, below is the text of a recent statement signed by the authors and over 150 other rabbis:
From: clios...@googlegroups.com <clios...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Anna Geifman
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2025 11:12 PM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [cliospsyche] Re: Israel's "Genocide"
A few lines in connection with the ongoing debate as to whether Israel’s policies in Gaza constitute genocide. To whom it may concern: I am Jewish, Israeli, and live in Jerusalem.
To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and it is manufactured by Hamas. Terrorists in power have provoked and sustained a devastating war by butchering Israeli civilians and by sabotaging hostage deals. The war-related suffering of Gaza civilians Hamas persistently employed for propaganda purposes and aggravated their misery by stealing meagre resources.
For its part, since the onset of the war, Israel has sent around 2 million tons of aid to Gaza. To counteract Hamas’ lootings, Israel created “safety corridors” and employed independent suppliers and humanitarian foundations to transport food. Its air force monitors aid deliveries.
At genocide Israel has failed indeed - supplying Gazans with food, water, electricity, and gasoline. A few days without water would have done the job, but while fighting on enemy territory, Israel opts to behave with humanity unrivaled in world’s history of wars. (I welcome examples to the contrary.) And this is after scores of Gaza civilians, having elected the terrorists to rule over them, joined Hamas to carry out most horrific acts against the Israelis on October 7.
Scholars who choose to engage in or be victimized by intellectual machinations to reveal Israel’s supposed effort to starve the Gazans are not ignorant. They know how to do fact-based research. Anyone who so chooses can see ample evidence of Hamas fabricating “hunger videos” and photographs. It is easy to verify that all information that vilifies Israel comes from enemy sources.
Wouldn’t it be appropriate to ask why many choose not to look? Are they simply into the postmodernist trend to ignore the facts and rather go with how one feels about the “settlers”? “If the United States was not enabling Israel, we would not be having this conversation,” notes one colleague of ours; so, is bashing Israel part of a new-way-nonconformist political activism in the US? Shouldn’t psychohistorians ask themselves what motivates their obsession with Israel supposedly turning Nazi Germany? And our Jewish colleagues, must they not question their passion for maligning the Israelis, as if they were the ones to take selfies when burning babies on October 7. As if there are no problems in the world, except that the Jews are doing it again, you know, the genocide, like they used to poison wells, spread vermin, murder (Christian) children…
Wouldn’t it be vital to confront ourselves and discuss why intellectuals choose lies and libels?
Anna Geifman
University of Bar Ilan, Israel
The Jewish People face a grave moral crisis, threatening the very basis of Judaism as the ethical voice that it has been since the age of Israel’s prophets. We cannot remain silent in confronting it.
As rabbis and Jewish leaders from across the world, including the State of Israel, we are deeply committed to the wellbeing of Israel and the Jewish People.
We admire Israel’s many and remarkable achievements. We recognise, and many of us endure, the huge challenges the State of Israel relentlessly confronts, surrounded for so long by enemies and facing existential threats from many quarters. We abhor the violence of such nihilistic terrorist organizations as Hezbollah and Hamas. We call on them immediately to release all the hostages, held for so long captive in tunnels in horrendous conditions with no access to medical aid. We unequivocally support the legitimacy of Israel’s battle against these evil forces of destruction. We understand the Israeli army’s prioritization of protecting the lives of its soldiers in this ongoing battle, and we mourn the loss of every soldier’s life.
But we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians, including a great many women, children and elderly, or the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Repeated statements of intention and actions by ministers in the Israeli government, by some officers in the Israeli army, and the behaviour of criminally violent settler groups in the West Bank, often with police and military support, have been major factors in bringing us to this crisis.
The killing of huge numbers of Palestinians in Gaza, including those desperately seeking food, has been widely reported across respectable media and cannot reasonably be denied. The severe limitation placed on humanitarian relief in Gaza, and the policy of withholding of food, water, and medical supplies from a needy civilian population contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it. Ongoing unprovoked attacks, including murder and theft, against Arab populations in the West Bank, have been documented over and over again.
We cannot keep silent.
In the name of the sanctity of life, of the core Torah values that every person is created in God’s image, that we are commanded to treat every human being justly, and that, wherever possible, we are required to exercise mercy and compassion;
In the name of what the Jewish People has learnt bitterly from history as the victim, time and again, of marginalisation, persecution and attempted annihilation;
In the name of the moral reputation not just of Israel, but of Judaism itself, the Judaism to which our lives are devoted,
We call upon the Prime Minister and the Government of Israel
To respect all innocent life;
To stop at once the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war;
To allow extensive humanitarian aid, under international supervision, while guarding against control or theft by Hamas;
To work urgently by all routes possible to bring home all the hostages and end the fighting; To use the forces of law and order to end settler violence on the West Bank and vigorously investigate and prosecute settlers who harass and assault Palestinians;
To open channels of dialogue together with international partners to lead toward a just settlement, ensuring security for Israel, dignity and hope for Palestinians, and a viable peaceful future for all the region.
‘I am a Jew because our ancestors were the first to see that the world is driven by a moral purpose, that reality is not a ceaseless war of the elements, to be worshipped as gods, nor history in a battle in which might is right and power is to be appeased. The Judaic tradition shaped the moral civilization of the West, teaching for the first time that human life is sacred, that the individual may not be sacrificed for the mass, and that rich and poor, great and small, are all equal before God.’ Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now (London 2000).
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, London
Rabbi Arthur Green, Boston
Rabbi Ariel Pollak, Tel Aviv
Brigitte DEMEURE
Here it is, (automatic translation) :
In 1947, two years after the discovery of the Nazi extermination camps, the UN General Assembly adopted a partition plan for Palestine that offered Jews from all over the world a land. This is the starting point of a geopolitical escalation that will lead to an Arab-Israeli war and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
It was 10:30 a.m. on April 21, 1948, when Captain Amin Ezzedine, in charge of the defense of the Arab neighborhoods of Haifa, entered the office of General Hugh Stockwell, commander of the British forces in northern Palestine, with fear in his stomach. The Lebanese officer, a member of the Arab Liberation Army, an irregular force that has come to fight alongside the Palestinians, fears that this meeting will seal the fate of the port city, which has been the target of a five-month campaign of terror orchestrated by Zionist militias.
On his way, Amin Ezzedine heard loudspeakers from the city's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy (1876-1956), begging the Arab population, just under half of the 150,000 inhabitants, to stay. But he also heard messages from the Haganah, the future Israeli army, urging women and children in the Palestinian community to flee “before it is too late.” And he knows that trucks crisscross the Arab neighborhoods broadcasting a soundtrack of screams, tears and two words that strike the terror of passers-by: “Deir Yassin”.
Two weeks earlier, on April 9, about 100 residents of this village on the outskirts of Jerusalem were executed by militiamen from the Irgun, an armed Zionist far-right group. Blood calls for blood, and a bus of Jewish doctors and nurses was attacked four days later on its way to Hadassah Hospital in eastern Jerusalem. The result: 77 dead.
Palestine plunged into civil war in the aftermath of November 29, 1947, the date of the adoption by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly of the plan to partition this country into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab.
It was a day of celebration for the Zionists, who numbered 600,000 on this land at the time, the result of a slow immigration process that began at the end of the nineteenth century following the pogroms perpetrated in Tsarist Russia. The UN vote validates their lifelong aspiration, the creation of a state of refuge in the land of their distant ancestors. A fight to which the six million victims of the Holocaust have brought tragic legitimacy in the eyes of Western public opinion.
Quickly overwhelmed
But for the Palestinians, who rejected the UN plan, this November 29, 1947 is a day of rage. They feel dispossessed of the homeland where they have lived for centuries. Their disappointment is all the stronger because the state granted to them by the UN covers only 44% of the surface area of Palestine, while they represent two-thirds (1.2 million) of its population. The Jews obtained 56% of the territory, excluding the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area, which was supposed to be internationalized.
In Haifa, where a fragile ideal of Jewish-Arab cooperation remained, clashes broke out on 30 December. Six Arab workers at the refinery perished in the explosion of a bomb thrown by the Irgun. In retaliation, thirty-nine of their Jewish colleagues were beaten to death. The next day, the Haganah took revenge on the nearby village of Balad Al-Sheikh, where it left about sixty corpses.
Quickly overtaken by their opponents, abandoned by their political and commercial elite, who had taken refuge in Lebanon, the Palestinians entrenched themselves in the lower city, around the port. They are regularly attacked from Jewish areas, located overhanging: mortar shelling, sniper fire, dropping of barrel bombs, rivers of flaming fuel oil rushing down the slopes, etc. Those who tried to extinguish them were mowed down with machine guns.
Debacle
On April 21, 1948, General Stockwell confirmed the worst fears of the leader of the Arab Liberation Army. The representative of the British mandate, whose term was set for 14 May, announced the immediate withdrawal of his troops, which had until then served as a buffer with the Jewish forces. Panic immediately took hold of the Arab neighborhoods. A crowd rushes to the quays, under the crash of mortars, in the hope of fleeing by sea.
“Men stepped on their friends, women on their own children,” says a report of the time. The boats in the harbor were soon filled with a living cargo. The overload was horrible. Many capsized and sank with all their passengers. In the space of a few days, the city was emptied of tens of thousands of people. When the exodus ended, only 5,000 Palestinians remained in Haifa.
Military harassment, occupation and expulsion: this scenario was repeated during the spring in Tiberias, Safed, Jerusalem, Acre and Jaffa, the main Palestinian urban centres along with Haifa. Meanwhile, the Haganah lifted the siege imposed for a few weeks on the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the only time when the situation was critical for the Jewish camp. When the creation of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, by David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), the head of the Jewish Agency – the executive of the world Zionist organization in Palestine – 350,000 Palestinians had already been driven from their land. This was the first phase of the Nakba (“catastrophe”), a term coined in the summer of 1948 by the Syrian intellectual Konstantin Zureik (1909-2000), to designate the destruction of Palestine.
In this debacle, the Palestinians are paying the arrears of the previous war: the great revolt of 1936-1939 crushed by the British. Parties and unions dissolved, armed groups crushed, political leaders deported: the defeat dealt a terrible blow to the Palestinian camp, already weakened by the rivalry between the Husseini clan, followers of an intransigent nationalism, and that of the Nashashibi, close to Abdullah I (1882-1951), the king of Transjordan.
Muslim SS Legions
More seriously, forced into exile by the British, the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini (1895-1974), gave in to the sirens of the Nazi regime, which was then banking on the Arabs' resentment of the British to establish itself in the Middle East. He took refuge in Berlin in 1941, helping Hitler to set up two Muslim SS legions, mainly composed of Bosnian soldiers. “The Arabs are the natural friends of Germany because they have the same enemies, the British, the Jews and the Communists,”the mufti declared during a meeting with Hitler in November 1941.
In addition to this personal shipwreck, there were tactical errors: in 1947, when the United Nations took up the burning Palestinian issue, at the request of London, which no longer had the means to maintain its empire and which was overwhelmed by the Irgun attacks (explosion of the King David Hotel, in July 1946), the Palestinians boycotted the debates. The Jewish Agency's emissaries, who were the only ones to speak to the delegations, won the favor of the United States and the USSR, which voted yes to the partition plan on November 29.
It was a time when hundreds of thousands of survivors of the death camps saw Palestine as their only chance of salvation. In a vast area of Eastern Europe stretching from Poland to Soviet Russia, passing through the Baltic countries, Hungary, the Balkans and Romania, Jewish communities were exterminated. The whole of Yiddishland was wiped out. How can we continue to live after this genocide? The United States only issues visas in dribs and drabs and the idea of returning to its country of origin, sometimes a former auxiliary of Nazi barbarism, is unbearable to many of them.
Those who nevertheless try to return to where they lived before the Holocaust face hostility from their former neighbors, especially in Poland, where three million Jews, or 90 percent of the local Jewish population, have disappeared, and the survivors have been dispossessed of everything. In Kielce, on July 4, 1946, forty-two Jews were killed after a riot provoked by rumors of child abductions and ritual crimes.
These accusations, based on centuries-old anti-Jewish fantasies, led many survivors, who until then had been far from the Zionist ideal, to the observation made by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) half a century earlier: anti-Semitism was an incurable disease, and only a state could ensure the security of the Jewish people.
Calvary
In Palestine, the British crown tried to cling to its 1939 White Paper, which aimed to contain Jewish immigration to maintain a semblance of civil peace. But at the end of the war, this policy became untenable. The ordeal endured by the 4,500 Holocaust survivors crammed aboard the Exodus, a steamboat that left Sète (Hérault) on July 11, 1947, then turned back from the port of Haifa and sent back to Hamburg in Germany, shocked public opinion.
"Who wants and can guarantee that what happened to us in Europe will not happen again?David Ben-Gurion exclaimed shortly afterwards to the UN investigators who had come to Palestine. There is only one safeguard: a homeland and a state. »
But on what territory and with what borders? The declaration of independence of May 14 that year did not specify this. Head of government, David Ben-Gurion wanted to take advantage of the fog of war, which thickened the next day, with the entry into Palestine of troops from five Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq), to continue to expand the area of his state.
Poker move? Not so much. A few days before the UN vote, the Jewish Agency had concluded a secret pact with Abdullah I: his army, the Arab Legion, the only force in the Middle East capable of standing up to the Zionists, would not attack the territory reserved for Israel. In return, the Hashemite monarch will be able to annex the West Bank.
On the strength of this commitment, in July 1948 the young Israeli army attacked Ramleh and Lydda, two towns allocated by the UN to the Palestinians, as was Jaffa. The attackers give no quarter. “Virtually everything in their path died,”wrote Keith Wheeler, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. After a few days, Lydda hoisted the white flag and Ramleh, already a victim of the Irgun attacks, surrendered shortly afterwards.
An endless column of women, children, men and old men immediately forms up, which makes its way to the West Bank, where the Arab Legion has deployed as planned. A march without water or food, fatal to many displaced people.
The operations of Tihour (purification), the term used by the Israeli General Staff, continue during the summer and autumn in the Galilee Hills. Commanded by a former Ottoman officer, Fawzi Al-Qawuqji, the Arab Liberation Army was unable to oppose the depopulation of Arab villages. The biblical city of Nazareth was spared at the request of David Ben-Gurion, who was worried about the reactions of the Western Christian world.
The last wave of expulsions, in the autumn of 1948, targeted the Negev desert. The rout of the Egyptian army, surrounded in the Faluzah pocket, facilitated the conquest of Beersheba. During the first six months of 1949, Israel signed armistices with each of its Arab neighbors. In a year and a half, 15,000 Palestinians have been killed and 700,000, more than half of the pre-war population, uprooted. More than 500 villages have been destroyed and eleven towns and neighbourhoods purged of their inhabitants.
In response, anti-Jewish riots broke out in the Maghreb and in countries in the Middle East. This violence, coupled with the power of attraction of the new Jewish state and the recruitment work carried out by the emissaries of the Jewish Agency, would lead, in the space of fifteen years, to the departure of almost all the Jews of the Arab world – about 800,000 people, three-quarters of whom settled in Israel.
The young state had lost 6,000 men in the fighting, but its victory was overwhelming. Its area has increased from 56% to 78% of Mandatory Palestine. He now controls West Jerusalem, the entire Galilee and the entire coastline, with the exception of the Gaza Strip. Some 150,000 Palestinians reside on its territory, while the UN plan provided for Jews to cohabit with a very large Arab minority of 400,000 people. To James Grover McDonald, the first American ambassador to Tel Aviv, Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), who was about to become president of the country, welcomed "a miraculous simplification of Israel's tasks".
For more than thirty years, this thesis has prevailed in the Western world. The Palestinians left of their own free will, it was said at the time, obeying the calls of the Arab leaders, promising them a quick return after victory. Their flight would be the simple result of the vagaries of the war: a tragic combination of circumstances, in which the betrayal of the Palestinian leaders and the unexpected victory of the Israeli David over the Arab Goliath are mixed. The work of the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, who spoke as early as the 1960s of a planned eviction, has been ignored.
'Ethnic cleansing'
It was not until the end of the 1980s and the emergence of the current of “new Israeli historians” that this thesis took hold. With the support of archives, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaïm and Ilan Pappé have debunked four myths: that of the military superiority of the pro-Arab camp, which has in fact never been able to compete; that of the famous radio calls to be evacuated, which never existed; that of the defection of the Palestinian elites, which played a secondary role; and perhaps most important of all, that of accidental expulsion.
In this respect, a meeting plays a key role. It took place on March 10, 1948, at the Red House, an elegant building in the north of Tel Aviv, the headquarters of the Haganah. A dozen historical Zionist leaders and young officers were gathered around David Ben-Gurion. They are putting the finishing touches to a secret military document, dubbed the "Daleth Plan," which will be distributed to combat units. In particular, the text calls, in order to “consolidate the defence apparatus”, to take control of “enemy population centres” either "by setting them on fire, dynamiting them and depositing mines in their debris", as regards the most hostile areas, or “by mounting combing and control operations”. “In the event of resistance,”the document states, "the armed force must be annihilated and the population expelled from the borders of the state."
The troops also had a file for each village they were responsible for investing, listing a multitude of crucial information: the design of access roads, the political affiliation of the inhabitants, their sources of income, the number of weapons at their disposal and, above all, the names of people deemed hostile, especially those who had participated in the great revolt of 1936. Once the locality has been conquered, they are often slaughtered on the spot.
In addition to Deir Yassin, many villages are the scene of massacres. This was the case in two now-defunct localities, Tantoura, in May 1948, and Dawaimeh in October of that year, where, according to Benny Morris, cases of children with smashed skulls and women raped and burned alive were reported by Israeli soldiers themselves. Atrocities such that in November the Minister of Agriculture, Aharon Zisling, complained to David Ben-Gurion: "I couldn't sleep all night. Now the Jews also behave like Nazis and my whole being is shaken by it. »
For Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian committed to the far left, as well as for his colleague Benny Morris, who gradually shifted to the right in the early 2000s, all these elements constitute an “ethnic cleansing”. The idea germinated very quickly among the theoreticians of Zionism. They understood, intuitively, that it would not be possible to build a Jewish-majority state in a country with an Arab majority, without getting rid of a large part of this population. “We believe that the colonization of Palestine must go in two directions: the settlement of the Jews in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel outside the country,” wrote Aryeh Yehuda Leo Motzkin, one of the most liberal thinkers of the Zionist movement, in 1917.
“Drive them out”
As the process was considered morally dubious, the Zionist leaders only spoke of it in a closed circle, using the euphemism “transference”. “The Jewish strength is growing and it will also strengthen our possibilities of carrying out the transfer on a large scale,” David Ben-Gurion rejoiced in 1937 in a speech that was later “redacted”. He himself did not leave a written order to this effect, says Benny Morris, who, at the beginning of his research, minimized the centralized nature of the expulsion policy and the importance of the Dalet Plan. But, as he confided in 2004 to the Israeli daily Haaretz, in 1948, “the idea of transfer is in the air. The officer corps understands what is expected of them.”
The most striking example is the attitude of the prime minister in Ramleh. When the commander of the attack, Yigal Allon (1918-1980), asked him what to do with the inhabitants, David Ben-Gurion replied with a hand gesture signifying: "Drive them out." Yigal Allon's deputy at the time, Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), the future Israeli prime minister, recounted the scene in a censored passage from his memoirs, unveiled in 1979 by the New York Times.
In the course of 1948, dozens of canvas camps were built to shelter the Palestinian refugees who were pouring into the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. The following year, the administration of these places was entrusted to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. It was there that the Nakba generation grew up, nostalgic for a lost world and the will to fight to win it back.
Benny Beit-Hallahmi
Pete Buttigieg shifts tone on Israel following backlash over supportive comments
Buttigieg’s hard left turn reflects the trend in the Democratic Party
Then-Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg speaks to voters in Cedar Falls, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2020. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By Grace GilsonAugust 15, 2025
(JTA) — Pete Buttigieg said he would support halting U.S. arms sales to Israel and U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state, in a dramatic about-face following backlash over a podcast interview where he expressed cautious support for Israel.
The dramatic shift for the 43-year-old former transportation secretary, who is seen as a possible contender for president in 2028, marks the latest evidence of how past norms on Israel are evaporating within the Democratic Party.
The backlash followed Buttigieg’s conversation earlier this week with Jon Favreau, the host of the popular liberal “Pod Save America” podcast. There, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, echoed his stance from his 2019 presidential bid: He sees Israel as a “friend” in need of support during a difficult time.
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“I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together,” Buttigieg told Favreau when asked how the next administration should handle its relationship with Israel.
Buttigieg also shied from giving Favreau a definitive answer on the future of U.S. recognition of Palestinian statehood, telling the host that it was a “profound question.”
The answers appeared to be poorly calibrated for a potential party leader in the current moment. In recent weeks, Israel’s ongoing and widening offensive in Gaza has transformed into a political litmus test for Democrats, with approval from within the party for Israel’s actions in Gaza at just 8% according to a recent Gallup poll and record numbers of Democratic senators supporting resolutions to block U.S. military sales to Israel.
In the wake of the podcast appearance, Buttigieg drew backlash from several top Democrats, including California Rep. Ro Khanna, who wrote, “We need moral clarity, not status quo,” in a post on X.
“Pete is a smart guy and I admire a lot of what he’s done, but I have absolutely no idea what he thinks based on these answers,” wrote Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security advisor during the Obama administration, in a post on X. “Just tell us what you believe.”
Buttigieg revised his comments in a subsequent interview with Politico, telling the outlet that he understood the criticism he had faced.
“I get it,” Buttigieg said of the negative reactions to that interview. “It’s important to be clear about something this enormous and this painful. It’s just that it’s so enormous and it’s so painful that sometimes words can fail.”
In a sharp reversal of his previous comments, Buttigieg told Politico he would have signed on to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposed arms embargo against Israel, which received record support from Democrats.
Buttigieg also said he would recognize a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, and thought that the United States should not necessarily negotiate another 10-year memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel on weapons sales.
“Democrats — like all Americans, but certainly Democrats — are sickened by what’s happening and trying to hold several things in mind at the same time, all of which can be true: that what has to happen next is the killing has to end,” Buttigieg told Playbook. “The hostages have to come home. And the people of Gaza need aid unimpeded, and all of that should be happening immediately.”
From: Benny Beit-Hallahmi <be...@psy.haifa.ac.il>
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2025 11:27 PM
To: 'clios...@googlegroups.com' <clios...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Disillusionment with Israel- a psychohistorical analysis
David refers here to a personal experience which isn’t unique and should be of interest to all.
“I was told the same things for many years in Hebrew School” Jewish kids have been sent to Hebrew school and received there the standard Zionist indoctrination. Then, later in life, they learned more of the history of Palestine and their views changed.
This explains the over-representation of Jewish students among the organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the US after 10/7/2023.
There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth among Zionist propagandists about how 7/10 was a turning point in attitudes towards Israel and Jews, and how the massacre of 10/7 caused hidden anti-Semitism to resurface.
I would like to suggest that the rise of pro-Palestinian views has been less dramatic and more gradual. It did not happen over one night and involved not only Jewish individuals.
The evidence is not only anecdotal.
I would like to draw your attention to the phenomenon of volunteering in kibbutzim. This was a remarkable movement among mostly European and fewer US youth between 1960 and 2005. According to published reports, it involved 350,000 individuals who came to experience life in a socialist commune. We can understand why the kibbutzim were viewed as a miracle in the midst of the capitalist economy and idealistic young people wanted to share this reality.
Among those who spent time volunteering were Peter Green (founder of Fleetwood Mac(), Heinz Fischer (president of Austria 2004-2016), Boris Johnson (PM of Britain 2019-2022),, Helen Mirren, Sigourney Weaver, Debra Winger, and Bernie Sanders.
In the 1970s, there were as many as 12,000 volunteers in one year.
In the 1980s, the numbers started slowly declining, reaching a low point in 2001, with 100 volunteers.
The explanations offered for the decline mention the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the First Intifada (1987-1993) as factors which made European public opinion sour on Israel.
The idealized view of the kibbutzim changed when more people realized that they were created through the dispossession of the indigenous population. There are published first-person accounts of this process.
We have another piece of historical information which illuminates the transformation among young people and the public.
As the numbers of kibbutz volunteers were declining, a new movement appeared, that of volunteers coming to aid the Palestinians.
The Israeli government does not take very kindly to this movement, and its members are likely to be deported if they manage to gain entry to Israel at all.
(Disillusionment with Israel is related, of course, to the appearance of many academic studies appearing in the age of decolonization. In Israel itself there were the so-called New Historians starting in the 1980s, but historians elsewhere have been writing about periods in Palestinian history, such as the Great Revolt of 1936-1939, which used to be examined only through the Zionist gaze, and referred to as the Riots. These materials are routinely used in history classes today and were non-existent before the 1990s).
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2025 5:03 AM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
Regarding “no expropriation’ of Arab land by Jews consider the following from Baruch Kimmerling’s 1983 book Zionism and Territory :
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/06db01dc0e51%24e1ac2f50%24a5048df0%24%40nycap.rr.com.
Brigitte DEMEURE
Here it is - automatic translation :
In Jerusalem, in 1967, the return of religion
On June 7, 1967, in the early afternoon, the Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lions' Gate, located to the east, facing the Mount of Olives. The second Arab-Israeli war is only two days old, but already the Egyptian army has been swept away in the Sinai by the surprise offensive of the Jewish state. As for the Jordanian army, it is retreating on all sides. Two more days, and Israel will turn to the Syrian Golan to rout the Damascus forces.
Hurriedly arriving from Tel Aviv by helicopter, Moshe Dayan advanced through the narrow streets, accompanied by the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, before turning left. A few moments later, he found himself in front of the “Western Wall” or “Western Wall” (the Kotel in Hebrew), which Israeli paratroopers had taken control of without much fighting, in the morning at 10 a.m.
No doubt the Israeli photographer David Rubinger has already captured on his film the exuberance of Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the highest religious leader in the army (he has the rank of general), blowing his ram's horn, perched on the shoulders of a soldier. Above all, he immortalized three ecstatic soldiers in front of the wall forbidden since the division of Jerusalem in 1949, and gave a negative of this photo to an army spokesman, who immediately released it. The image went around the world.
When his back is against the wall, Moshe Dayan speaks briefly. “This morning, the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem. We have unified Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to be separated from it again,”he says in front of the impressive blocks of blond stone which, according to Jewish tradition, constitute the only remains of the second temple destroyed by Titus' legions in the year 70 AD.
Rabbi Shlomo Goren led the first Jewish prayers there in two decades. He also fuelled the project, quickly blocked by Moshe Dayan, to dynamite the Dome of the Rock, one of the two mosques (along with that of Al-Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam), erected on the esplanade overlooking the wall.
The Maghreb quarter razed to the ground
Israel has just swept away the certainties that still prevailed on the eve of the conflict. Two days later, the Jewish state literally made a clean slate, by making the Maghreb neighborhood, next to the esplanade, disappear, whose brutal obliteration the historian Vincent Lemire recounted, in the manner of an investigator (Au pied du Mur, Seuil, 2022). In twenty-four hours, without the slightest official announcement, a hundred houses were razed to the ground and their rubble evacuated. Tens of thousands of Israelis flocked to what had become, in a few hours, a vast square.
The war will produce many more ruins, this time geopolitical. The “green line” that separated the Jewish state from the Palestinian territories controlled by Egypt and Jordan since 1949, namely Gaza and the West Bank, has been swept away. Soon it will disappear from Israeli maps. The pan-Arabism embodied in Cairo by Gamal Abdel Nasser will not recover from humiliation. When the guns fell silent on 10 June, it was a time for euphoria. The Israelis, who feared for the very existence of their state, can be intoxicated by this victory by a wide margin.
Already on June 6, on the eve of the capture of the Old City, the Israeli cabinet met to draw the first lessons of the war. While the discussions preceding the Israeli attack had focused mainly on Egypt and the attitude of the indispensable American ally, the course of the fighting offered the prospect of a divine surprise: the completion of the conquest of the biblical land of Israel, from the sea to the river, the Jordan.
Two camps were opposed: the politicians, led by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, David Ben-Gurion's successor and a member of Mapai, the secularist left that forged Israel, and the military. The latter are supported by Menachem Begin, the still very minority leader of the nationalist Herut party, heir to Vladimir Jabotinsky's revisionist party, a virulent advocate of a Greater Israel. He was invited to join a government of national unity before the first shot was fired.
The clash was described by Israeli historian Mordechai Bar-On as a “revolt of the generals,” who wanted to take action as Levi Eshkol and other ministers advocated a wait-and-see approach. On June 2, Levi Eshkol had said to the warmongers: “A military victory will not end the problem because the Arabs are not going to disappear.”
But as soon as the Palestinian cities of the West Bank fell one after the other, with little or no fighting, the generals, led by Moshe Dayan, intended to push their advantage and take advantage of a windfall: Jordan's hasty entry into the war, which would prove tragic for King Hussein.
On June 6, the two camps are not of the same strength. According to historian Tom Segev's account, Levi Eshkol's own military adviser, Israel Lior, believes that“it was clear to all the ministers and generals that the wheel of war could no longer be reversed.”Moshe Dayan delayed the conquest because he didn't know what to do with it, but it is clear that the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem is only a matter of hours. Problem: nothing has been planned for the next day.
The government overtaken by the conquests of the army
According to historian Avi Shlaim, on May 26, during a meeting of the General Staff, Yitzhak Rabin had ruled out any expansionist inclination, if the war turned to Israel's advantage. The government's position, he recalled, is to consider possible territorial gains as a bargaining chip for a future peace agreement, as would be the case a decade later with Sinai and Egypt, in accordance with United Nations Resolution 242, adopted in November 1967, which underlines “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for the “withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied during the recent conflict”.
In June 1967, the dynamics of the war shook up Levi Eshkol's government. As the military official of the central region, Uzi Narkiss, later confided, “we acted so quickly that the Israeli government did not have time to determine the national objectives of this war.” “The government could have ordered us not to take Ramallah. He could have ordered us not to take Jericho, or to stop before Bethlehem, or before Hebron, or before Nablus. They didn't do it because I think they were overwhelmed by the situation and they didn't have time to say stop,”he said. The mistrust of the prime minister shown by Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, who, according to Tom Segev, sometimes dispensed with obtaining a prior green light before certain actions, could only complicate the situation.
On the evening of 7 June, the Israeli chief of staff suddenly took the measure of the implications of this runaway. According to journalist Abraham Rabinovitch, Yitzhak Rabin asks the question that has been carefully avoided so far: “How can we control a million Arabs?“ ”One million two hundred and fifty thousand,” corrects a deputy. In the weeks following the victory, Avi Shlaim reports, the Israeli prime minister wore a Churchillian “V”. To his wife, Levi Eshkol replied with humor: "No, it's not a V sign in English, it's a V sign in Yiddish! Vi krikht men aroys? which can be translated as "how to get out of it? (The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Until then, the Israeli authorities had followed the principles of David Ben-Gurion, who preferred “a little Israel with peace” to “a great Israel without peace”. Its concrete translation is the formula of “land for peace”, recalled by Yitzhak Rabin. If the conquest of the Palestinian territories takes Mapai by surprise, it electrifies the National Religious Party (PNR), a long-standing auxiliary force whose positions have so far been quite moderate.
The PNR has thus adopted the model of the kibbutz, a sign of the cultural hegemony of the left, by simply adding a religious dimension. In foreign policy, he also supports the formula of land for peace. In the weeks leading up to the war, one of its leaders, Haim-Moshe Shapira, the permanent minister in charge of internal affairs at the time, had long pleaded for caution, as did Prime Minister Levi Eskhol. “I recognize that I have been a coward,” he confessed at the crucial meeting on June 6 that preceded the conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem.
“Territorial messianism”
At this moment, the National Religious Party is the embodiment of“an attempt to go beyond itself,” according to researcher David Khalfa, in a note published in 2005 by the French Research Center in Jerusalem. This party rejects both “the traditional quietism of religious ultra-orthodoxy and its radical condemnation of Zionism as an impious work” and “the Promethean ideology of the socialist Zionist left which intended to make a clean sweep of the 'diasporic' past and favor the emergence of a new 'Hebrew' detached from Jewish tradition and the Torah”. The triumph of 1967 and the soldier-kibbutznik testifies to the power of this Zionist left. But the latter remains speechless in the face of the consequences it has for the West Bank.
On the contrary, this triumph initiates "a slow but real mutation of religious Zionism with the rise of activists within the PNR who have been marginalized until now, a young generation inhabited by a territorial messianism," according to religious Zionism specialist Alain Dieckhoff, director of the Center for International Research at Sciences Po. Less than a month after the victory, an ultranationalist current was formed within the party. It gave itself the name of the Young Guard ("Ha Tzeirim") and relied on the powerful patronage of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982).
The son of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Yishuv, the “Jewish homeland” of Palestine at the time of the British Mandate, Zvi Yehuda Kook is convinced that non-religious Zionists, through their political project, are unwittingly precipitating the march towards redemption and messianic deliverance. He heads the Merkaz HaRav yeshiva founded by his father, which has become the ideological melting pot, according to Alain Dieckhoff, of an irredentist messianism electrified by the 1967 war. He recalls that a few days before the start of the war, "Rabbi Kook gave a kind of sermon in which he regretted the fact that Judea and Samaria [the biblical name for the West Bank] was not under Israel's control because it would have a strong religious significance."
Three months later, at the end of September, a dozen Israelis settled in the West Bank, south of Jerusalem, on the site of Kfar-Etzion, a former Jewish settlement erected a few years before the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-1949 and destroyed in blood during the fighting. Still full of its intoxication with the victory in June, the Israeli press is celebrating this “return”, at the very moment when the Jewish state is banning the return of Palestinians who fled the fighting in Jordan.
“Beyond this simple repossession, there is the conviction that something miraculous happened with the Six-Day War. It did not only appear to this young religious Zionist generation as a military victory, but it also had a religious dimension in their eyes with the recovery of the high places of Jewish memory. This is why it is imperative for them to develop a Jewish presence in 'Judea and Samaria',”explains Alain Dieckhoff.
These new “pioneers” were supported by the ministers of the National Religious Party and by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Among them were students from the Merkaz HaRav yeshiva, including Rabbis Hanan Porat and Moshe Levinger, who became the spearheads of a colonization that was still advancing in disguise. Kfar-Etzion is in fact falsely presented as a simple military post.
Seven more years passed, and a new religious Zionist movement was created by another Merkaz HaRav alumnus, Rabbi Chaim Druckman. The Gush Emunim (“Bloc of Faith”) made the colonization of the territories occupied in 1967 an obligation that would be imposed on all Israeli government coalitions, from the right as well as the left, whether they supported peace negotiations with the Palestinians or opposed them, and this until today. Religious Zionism has definitively broken with its pragmatism, and its program is now reduced to the claim of Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of the land, starting with the eastern part of Jerusalem, the object of a silent battle of reappropriation, house by house. A page is turning. The last Arab-Israeli war in 1973, which took the Israeli authorities by surprise, marked the decline of the left. In 1977, she was defeated for the first time at the ballot box by the nationalist right of Menachem Begin, which was immediately rallied to the PNR.
A holy place, a thermometer of tensions
These Israeli changes initiated in 1967 are echoed by those working on the Palestinian side. The rout of the Arab regimes gave free rein to a nationalist current embodied by Yasser Arafat and Fatah, initially on the margins of the Palestine Liberation Organization formed in 1964 in the eastern part of Jerusalem, under the auspices of the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian powers. Its Charter, published in the same year, bears witness to a vision of the earth as integral as that of the most radical religious Zionists. Yasser Arafat took control of the Palestinian power plant in 1969 by waving The Olive Branch and the Combatant's Rifle alternately, according to the title of volume IV (Fayard, 2011) of Henry Laurens' monumental history of The Question of Palestine, which refers to the post-1967 period.
By regaining a foothold in the Sinai by surprise in 1973 during the last Arab-Israeli war, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, obtained a revenge that was not cancelled by the violent Israeli counterattack. But times have changed, and his only objective is to restore Egypt's image in order to prepare for a separate peace with Israel. The Arab front has lived. Of course, the fate of the Palestinians is specifically mentioned in the Camp David Accords in 1978. Nevertheless, it has been written off.
The return of the cleric, who had been involved in Israel since 1967, did not spare the Palestinian camp. At the end of the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood renounced quietism and gradually became involved in political combat, in Egypt and elsewhere. In Jerusalem, the Esplanade of the Mosques – the Temple Mount for Jews – becomes a thermometer of tensions. In 1990, it was the target of messianic Jews who wanted, like Rabbi Shlomo Goren in 1967, to raze the two mosques to build the Third Temple in their place.
In 1996, the digging of an archaeological tunnel near the Esplanade of the Mosques triggered bloody riots in the Palestinian territories. After the failure of the Camp David negotiations in July, particularly on the issue of the Esplanade of the Mosques, a visit to the site by Ariel Sharon, leader of the nationalist right now represented by the Likud, marked the beginning of the second intifada in 2000. Itamar Ben Gvir, the leader of a religious Zionism now at the heart of the Israeli government, visited the island three times before the war triggered by Hamas's mass massacres on October 7, dubbed the " Al-Aqsa Flood ".
There is no longer an Israeli-Palestinian war that does not have its roots in Jerusalem.
e
Carol jaxson-jager
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Here it is (automatic translation)
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: from the hope of Oslo to the realities of Hebron
The conclusion of the Oslo Accords in 1993, after months of secret negotiations and under American patronage, gave substance to the hope of a two-state solution. But this progress is not enough to build trust between the two communities and the obstacles will multiply on the ground, to the point of reducing the efforts of diplomats to nothing.
On a rainy morning in January 1997, a small team of American diplomats was walking down Al-Shuhada Street ("Martyrs' Street") in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. It is led by Aaron David Miller – the permanent deputy of the United States' special coordinator for the Middle East, Dennis Ross – who suddenly stops and squats. “I was there, on all fours, with a tape measure, calculating the differences in the width of a small street that had become a central point of friction in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,”the diplomat recounts in his memoirs.
Thus the American team tried to find a compromise that would remove a seemingly tiny obstacle, but on which the entire peace process opened by the Oslo Accords a little more than three years earlier had stumbled.
A historian by training, Aaron David Miller knows better than anyone the painful weight of Hebron in Israeli-Palestinian history. The large West Bank city that bears the name of Al-Khalil, “the Friend” in Arabic, was the scene in 1929 of anti-Jewish massacres that put an end to a centuries-old presence around the tomb of the Patriarchs of the Bible, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. This holy place, at once Jewish, Christian and Muslim, houses their cenotaphs as well as those of their wives. The riots were sparked by rumors of Jewish attacks on Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
In March 1968, a group of religious Zionists led by a messianic rabbi, Moshe Levinger, took advantage of the conquest of the West Bank a year earlier, during the Six-Day War, to initiate a Jewish return to Hebron.“The Jewish national renaissance is more important than democracy... No government has the authority or the right to tell a Jew that he cannot settle on any piece of the land of Israel,”claims this student of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, the crucible of an integral religious Zionism. He established a bridgehead in a disused military base located at the gates of Hebron, which became the settlement of Kiryat Arba, and multiplied the seizures of houses in the heart of the old city, sources of permanent and often bloody tensions.
On February 25, 1994, only five months after the signing of the Oslo Accords in the White House Rose Garden, an extremist settler from Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein, shot dead twenty-nine Palestinians praying in the Muslim part of the Cave of the Patriarchs with a machine gun and wounded 125 others. The tragedy is the first major test for Norway's secretly negotiated peace process, which has suspended war after decades of fury. The stakes are therefore high.
After the Arab rout of 1967, the Palestinians took their destiny into their own hands. Their national movement, forged by those who were forced into exile by the Nakba (the “catastrophe”) in 1948, imposed its autonomy and its representative, Yasser Arafat, leader of Fatah – founded in Kuwait in 1959 – and became the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a decade later. He was able to plead his case at the United Nations on November 13, 1974. But it has continued to suffer setbacks on the ground, and its image has suffered from the use of attacks and hijackings, which have become the signature of the armed groups that make up the PLO, within which ideologically distinct factions coexist.
Deemed too invasive, its fighters, the fedayeen, were driven out of Jordan in September 1970. Ten years later, under Israeli military pressure from Operation Peace in Galilee, which stretched back to Beirut, history repeated itself in Lebanon, ravaged by a civil war that the Palestinians were accused of stoking.
The 1973 war, although won by the Israeli army, allowed the vanquished of 1967 to wash away part of the affront. But the Arab front was shattered in 1978, when Egypt signed, at Camp David, after years of patient work by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a separate peace with the Israeli nationalist right of Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The decade that followed was not to Yasser Arafat's advantage either. The man, who presented himself before the UN as a “revolutionary” fighting against imperialism and Zionist colonialism – despite the financial support of the conservative Gulf monarchies – is camped in the heart of a declining Soviet bloc.
Pragmatic turn
Within the PLO itself, dissension was strong. The organization's maximalist charter, adopted in 1964, conceives of a Palestinian state only on the entire territory for which the United Kingdom had obtained the mandate in 1920. But an “intermediate” objective is slowly taking shape: the establishment of an independent power over any part of this land from which Israel has withdrawn. Palestinian communists have long defended this perspective, in line with the USSR's vote in favor of the UN partition plan in 1947.
This pragmatic turn was formalized in Algiers at the Palestinian National Council (PNC) of November 1988, where the Palestinian national movement resigned itself to accepting United Nations resolutions 242 and 338. These resolutions call only for Israeli withdrawal from the territories conquered by war in 1967, i.e., in the Palestinian case, from Gaza and the West Bank. The PNC thus implicitly recognises a division of the land, and therefore Israel's legitimacy over the part that was then its own.
A month later, in Geneva, Yasser Arafat announced that the PLO was renouncing terrorism, the last condition set by the United States to open a dialogue with the Palestinian leadership. On 2 May, during a meeting at the Elysée Palace with François Mitterrand, Yasser Arafat assured that the 1964 Charter was now “null and void”. The linguistic discovery materializes this rupture.
An event precipitated this transformation. In December 1987, the outbreak of the first intifada in Gaza, which spread very quickly to the West Bank, took the PLO by surprise. For the first time, the Palestinians “from within” are on the front line, and win the battle of images against a powerful occupying army, reversing the biblical parable of the fight between David and Goliath to their advantage. They are forcing the Jewish state to recognize the vanity of the status quo.
The “revolt of the stones” swept away the illusion of a normalized occupation, after the unsuccessful attempts to break the Palestinian national movement by relying on notables or Islamist movements that were still mainly quietist, such as the one from which Hamas was born, a few days after the beginning of the uprising.
Washington is following these developments closely. Its intervention in the Gulf in 1991 to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi invasion, under a UN mandate and after the constitution of a vast coalition extended to Arab countries, had the effect of cutting off the PLO, Saddam Hussein's supporter, from his Gulf backers, who took up the cause of the attacked emirate. President George H. W. Bush seized the opportunity and set up an international conference to “end the Arab-Israeli conflict”, which was held in Madrid from October 30 to November 1, 1991.
The conference did not lead to any diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians, but the victory in Israel of the Labor Party, led by Yitzhak Rabin in the 1992 legislative elections, reopened the game. The new majority decided to secretly engage in direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.
Two deep misunderstandings
On September 13, 1993, diplomat Aaron David Miller was one of the witnesses to the historic handshake exchanged between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat under the eyes of Democratic American President Bill Clinton. An Israeli prime minister still crowned with a brilliant military career, an undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement, a president of an unrivalled “hyperpower” determined to make history with a peace agreement in the Middle East, like his Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter: everything seems to be in place for the five-year interim period that is opening up to lead to the creation of a Palestine alongside Israel.
The Oslo process is rejected by the Israeli nationalist and religious Zionist right as well as by powerful Palestinian factions of Marxist and Islamist inspiration, such as Hamas. It is mainly based on two profound misunderstandings. By recognising Israel, first implicitly in 1988 and then explicitly in 1993, Yasser Arafat has resigned himself to establishing a state on only 22% of Mandatory Palestine, but he intends to recover 100% of Gaza and the West Bank. After all, Israel ceded the whole of Sinai for the price of peace with Egypt, and the negotiations that are opening at the same time with Hafez Al-Assad's Syria are also based on the principle of a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Syrian Golan Heights. The icon of the Palestinian national movement can accept no less regarding the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967.
It is quite different from the Israeli point of view. The continuation of colonization in Gaza and especially in the West Bank, including in the eastern part of Jerusalem, suggests that this 22% is also a matter of discussion. Another misunderstanding concerns the role of Yasser Arafat, at the head of the Palestinian Authority, created in the territories occupied since 1967.
Israel intends to repress with an iron fist the Palestinians opposed to Oslo, starting with Hamas. But the PLO leader has always ruled over Palestinian factions by co-optation and individual poaching, never by force. While now rejecting violence, it continues to consider that it can be useful to it from time to time. Finally, he notes that his Israeli interlocutors seem to be in a greater hurry to conclude a peace agreement with Jordan, as was the case in 1994, or with Syria than with him, which increases mistrust.
Two years after the Washington ceremony, a first progress report highlights weaknesses. Delays continue to accumulate for the planned Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank, after those concerning Gaza and the main Palestinian cities (with the exception of Hebron, frozen after the 1994 massacre). Hamas' bloody attacks have cast doubt on the Israeli “peace camp”, on which Yitzhak Rabin relies. It was then that a Jewish extremist assassinated the Labour Prime Minister on November 4, 1995. The Oslo process will never quite recover.
The mechanism painstakingly put in place came to a halt all the more when the Israeli nationalist right, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to power in 1996. Washington is doing everything possible to save this diplomatic enterprise, as evidenced by Aaron David Miller's Hebronite team. It is in itself a revelation. “Once on their turf, powerful America wasn't so powerful. Regardless of what we wanted, our interlocutors had their own agendas, agendas and interests. We could squeeze them, cajole them, even threaten them with giving up, but if we wanted to negotiate agreements, we had to get their cooperation. And sometimes, in order to achieve this, we had to put up with the indignities and machinations of small powers that were particularly adept at manipulating the big ones,”he wrote a few years later.
Dividing Hebron into two zones
An agreement was finally reached in Hebron by forceps, with the division of the city into two zones. The first (H1), which concentrates the majority of Palestinians, i.e. 115,000 people, is placed under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Israel retains its own on the second (H2), where 35,000 Palestinians reside under severe restrictions due to the presence of 500 extremist settlers, all under the watchful eye of international observers. The facts on which religious Zionism built its messianic project continue to prevail.
Another interim agreement providing for additional Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank was concluded in 1998 in Wye River, Maryland, but it remained a dead letter. The process is now running on empty.
The return of a Labour Party to power in Israel sounds like a last opportunity. Israel's most decorated soldier, Ehud Barak intends to take advantage of the last months of Bill Clinton's second term to revive Oslo. In his own way. As chief of staff of the Israeli army in 1993, he expressed his reservations at the time about the first agreements which, according to him, “have more holes than Swiss cheese”.
In a position of strength when he came to power in July 1999, he nevertheless muddied his message by first seeking an agreement with Hafez Al-Assad weakened by illness, without taking into account the territorial red lines formulated by Syria. He pushed for the organisation of a meeting with the Syrian dictator in Geneva in March 2000, which ended in a bitter and predictable failure.
Losing ground in Israeli opinion, Ehud Barak is taking up the path of an agreement with the Palestinians, but on his own terms, that is to say without establishing a relationship of trust with Yasser Arafat, or carrying out the Israeli withdrawals that have already been pending for years, and for which he nevertheless committed himself in Sharm El-Sheikh (Egypt), in December 1999. Once again, he is forcing Washington's hand by precipitating negotiations on the most delicate issues that have been left unresolved: borders, the fate of Palestinian refugees and that of Jerusalem.
The Israeli and Palestinian delegations met once again in Maryland, at Camp David, on July 11, 2000, in the company of Bill Clinton. One scene says everything about the state of mind of its protagonists. After a brief walk in the undergrowth and a pose for the photographers, the trio arrives in front of the entrance of the building where they are to engage in the first discussions. Each one fades in front of the other, until Ehud Barak literally pushes Yasser Arafat inside despite his resistance.
The PLO leader went to Camp David reluctantly, exasperated by the manners of his Israeli interlocutor. The lack of preparation and especially the absence of a framework text very quickly plunged the negotiators into an impasse, accentuated by Yasser Arafat's inaction. The blockages crystallized over the fate of Jerusalem, and more specifically sovereignty over the Old City. In the absence of prior contacts with the main Arab capitals, the Palestinian leader refuses to make the slightest concession. The efforts made by the President of the United States, alternately playing on pressure and charm, do not change anything. "Empathy wasn't enough," says Aaron David Miller in retrospect. Clinton didn't have the slyness of Kissinger, or the missionary spirit of Carter, or the unsentimental firmness of Baker. »
On 24 July 2000, the failure was confirmed by a laconic communiqué. The Israelis and Americans quickly blamed Yasser Arafat. The hope born with Oslo has lived.
A second intifada, much bloodier than the first, broke out after the visit in September of the leader of the Israeli nationalist right, Ariel Sharon, to the Esplanade of the Mosques in Jerusalem. Bill Clinton left the White House in January 2001, and Ehud Barak was defeated at the polls two months later. Besieged for more than two years in Ramallah, Yasser Arafat died of illness in France, where he had been evacuated in November 2004.
Tired of war, Aaron David Miller had left diplomacy a year earlier.
Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman
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Benny Beit-Hallahmi
Thanks for this piece of Hasbara.
I thought this list was about history, not journalism. His version of history (and journalism) is the standard Zionist spiel.
History is indeed a problem, as Donald Trump recently discovered.
Trump escalates attacks against Smithsonian museums, says there’s too much focus on ‘how bad slavery was’
Kit Maher, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN
Tue, August 19, 2025 at 11:27 PM GMT+3
3 min read
5
An exhibit of a slave cabin is seen at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, on April 4. - Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images/File
President Donald Trump escalated his campaign to purge cultural institutions of materials that conflict with his political directives on Tuesday, alleging museums were too focused on highlighting negative aspects of American history, including “how bad slavery was.”
In a Truth Social post, Trump directed his attorneys to conduct a review of museums, comparing the effort to his crackdown on universities across the country.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump wrote.
Advertisement
Trump’s comments come days after the White House announced an unprecedented, sweeping review of the Smithsonian Institution, which runs the nation’s major public museums. The initiative, a trio of top Trump aides wrote in a letter to Smithsonian Institution secretary Lonnie Bunch III last week, “aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
The letter said the review would focus on public-facing content, the curatorial process to understand how work is selected for exhibits, current and future exhibition planning, the use of existing materials and collections and guidelines for narrative standards.
Exhibits at the Smithsonian take years of planning and are heavily evaluated by teams of scholars and curatorial experts before they make their debut. Janet Marstine, a museum ethics expert, said that the demands laid out by the Trump administration “set the Smithsonian up for failure.”
“Nobody could provide those kinds of materials in such a comprehensive way, in that short amount of time, and so it’s just an impossible task,” she said. The White House has asked the Smithsonian to provide an array of materials, from internal emails and memos to digital copies of all placards and gallery labels currently on display.
The Smithsonian declined to comment on Trump’s latest remarks. A White House official, asked about the attorney review process Trump described, said the president “will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable.”
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order that put Vice President JD Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, in charge of stopping government spending on exhibits that don’t align with the administration’s agenda. He also tasked a former member of his legal team, attorney Lindsey Halligan, with helping to root out “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian.
“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to divisive narratives,” the executive order said.
The Smithsonian began a review of its own in June, and has repeatedly stressed its commitment to being nonpartisan. The institution told CNN in July that it was committed to an “unbiased presentation of facts and history” and that it would “make any necessary changes to ensure our content meets our standards.”
Slavery is looking bad, and the dispossession of the Palestinians, starting in the 1880s, is looking bad.
Benny
From: clios...@googlegroups.com <clios...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2025 10:12 PM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com
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Esa Palosaari
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
In 2023, the Palestinian Authority made minimal advancement in efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in the areas of the West Bank under its control. The Palestinian Authority amended the child law to prohibit forced labor, child trafficking, and the commercial sexual exploitation of children. However, there are no criminal penalties for recruitment of children by non-state armed groups. Labor investigators also cannot inspect worksites at night, when they suspect child labor occurs, because of insufficient funding for overtime. In addition, it is unknown whether investigations into suspected cases of the worst forms of child labor were conducted, prosecutions were initiated, or perpetrators were convicted.
Benny Beit-Hallahmi <be...@psy.haifa.ac.il> kirjoitti 20.8.2025 kello 1.26:
Trump escalates attacks against Smithsonian museums, says there’s too much focus on ‘how bad slavery was’Kit Maher, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNNTue, August 19, 2025 at 11:27 PM GMT+33 min read5
<image002.jpg>
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Brian D'Agostino
Esa, if we are going to contrast the illiberal character of political culture in the Middle East with the liberalism of the US, we need to confront some fundamental contradictions that have plagued the US and continue to. First, there has always been a contradiction between professed ideals (e.g. all men are created equal) and reality. In the real world, only propertied white Christian males had full rights of citizenship in 18th century America. Equality was expanded to other groups gradually over the course of US history, but it is still a work in progress (and was even before Trump).
Secondly, the practice of the US has always been (especially since the 20th century) equal rights for the privileged ones at home and oppression for subject populations abroad. As for the Middle East, for example, the US has a long history of supporting corrupt monarchies and dictatorships in the region including the Saudis, Hosni Mubarak (and now Abdel El-Sisi) in Egypt, Shah Reza Pahlavi, etc., etc., etc. It is a consistent pattern, explained by the fact that human rights rhetoric is a legitimizing façade and promotion of corporate interests (best served by authoritarian rulers, not democracy) is the substance of US foreign policy.
So if you want to know why the Middle East is illiberal today, look to the global hegemon most responsible for the state of the world. (Before the US, it was the British). When democracy breaks out somewhere (say under Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1952), count on the iron fist of American power to crush it. If this sounds unduly harsh, I respectfully request that you familiarize yourself with the historical record. See, for example, William Blum’s Killing Hope, Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
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Brigitte DEMEURE
What about Western corporations abroad ? For example I have been in African fruit plantations, in this case one co-owned by a French and US company. Slavery like working conditions. Land and water grabbing. Pesticides spread over the farmer's rivers, even though the company had said it would not.
What about working conditions in mines where the minerals are produced needed for electronics (another example) ? So when we buy something we should be all aware about the workers producing this for us - far away - in slavery like conditions in companies owned by the West or where the West closes its eyes.
What about a French telephone company where the CEO wanted to get rid of employees 'by the window or by the door " and quite a few chose the window ?
There are multiple examples, the list would be too long.
Brigitte
envoyé : 20 août 2025 à 09:52
de : Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com>
à : Clio's Psyche Forum <clios...@googlegroups.com>
objet : Re: [cliospsyche] Israel's "Genocide" - some history - episode four - Oslo- Hébron
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Esa Palosaari
”The elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were supposed to take place in July 2005, but Abu Mazen postponed them for six months in the hope that circumstances would improve for Fatah. As the new date for elections loomed and Hamas appeared set to win a significant proportion of the seats, Abu Mazen considered a further postponement. Sharon was willing to cooperate in this effort to deny Hamas a victory at the ballot box. They reached an understanding that Sharon would ban Hamas candidates from running in East Jerusalem and Abu Mazen would then declare that the elections could not proceed. Sharon was ready to do his part, provided Bush did not criticize him for disrupting a democratic process. Israeli and Palestinian envoys were dispatched to Washington and returned with a very clear message: the president himself had decided that the elections should go ahead as planned. According to two of the senior American officials who discussed the issue with Bush, the president believed that it would be good for Hamas to participate in the elections because it would make them accountable to the people."The rest is history. Hamas won an upset victory in what was by all free and fair election. George W. Bush’s application of democratic principles had succeeded in bringing an Islamist party with its own militia and terrorist cadres to power. This was not the first time that his insistence on the “purple thumb” principle of using elections to promote democracy had advantaged extremist parties. In Iraq, Shiite parties entered the democratically elected government with their militias intact. Similarly, in Lebanon, despite the passage of the American-sponsored U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which called on Hezbollah to disarm, Bush chose elections over fulfillment of the Security Council’s requirements.”Innocent Abroad by Martin Indyk, p 398
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Brian, I have sent it to the group, and this times, it does not arrive on the list serve. Do you mind sending it for me ?
Thanks
Brigitte
envoyé : 20 août 2025 à 10:35
de : Brigitte DEMEURE <brigitt...@wanadoo.fr>
à : clios...@googlegroups.com, Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com>
Brian D'Agostino
Thank you, Brigitte. From what you say, it is clear that corporate power is about profits, not democracy or human rights. If it seems that corporations just do what they want, note that the existence of pro-corporate political regimes is a precondition for such freedom, and these regimes are typically secured with military power or the threat of military intervention. The reason is simple: if democracy prevailed, the freedom of corporations to exploit ordinary people would be in jeopardy. It is impossible to understand the absence of democracy in much of the world except in the context of global capitalism and the global political-economic system.
Someone asked me offline to define liberalism. I was responding to Esa, and I thought it was clear from the context that I was talking about universal civil liberties and equality of citizenship, not liberalism in the sense of liberalism vs. conservatism or some other meaning.
Ken Fuchsman
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Esa Palosaari
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Brian D'Agostino
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Brigitte DEMEURE
Here it is (automatic translation) :
The guests were asked not to explain why they were coming. In vain. This is the least well-preserved secret of the moment. Official cars follow one another in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It is 4 p.m. One must hurry before the beginning of Shabbat. As the British Mandate in Palestine was about to expire, on Friday, May 14, 1948, several hundred people gathered at the foot of the building, holding their breath.
Inside, the faces are serious. Under an intimidating portrait of the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) reads the declaration of independence of the new state in front of representatives of all components of the Jewish community.
Its terms were the subject of bitter negotiations. In particular the reference to God. Too present for the laity, then expurgated from the text to the anger of the religious, and finally reintroduced in a discreet form. Tzur Yisrael – “the rock of Israel” – is a convenient expression because it is ambivalent. It can be understood as a reference to the creator in Judaism but also to the Jewish people, from a political point of view. David Ben-Gurion's voice does not tremble. She is nevertheless swollen with emotion when she reads the statement in front of the microphones.
It is a voluntarist promise in very uncertain times, made in the name of the dead of the Shoah, in response to two thousand years of exile and for generations to come. The text proclaims “the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel.” Based on "freedom, justice and peace", it enshrined the country's development “for the benefit of all its inhabitants” and ensured "the most complete social and political equality", "without distinction of religion, race or sex". Equality, absence of any discrimination: the socialist roots of the state are clearly visible.
Here we are seventy years later. Israel is coming of age, but that doesn't stop existential crises. It's 4 a.m. on July 19, 2018, and the lights are still not out in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It's time for a selfie. This is a far cry from the black and white that immortalized David Ben-Gurion. This photo brings together elected representatives of the Likud, the main right-wing party, around their leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What are they celebrating in this way? The adoption of a historic and controversial text, by 62 votes to 55, defining Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people”. A common expression. The context is not.
Confetti
The deputy who holds the phone at arm's length, laughing, is called Oren Hazan. He wears a white short-sleeved shirt and jeans. We see his belly and his boxer shorts. Selfies are one of his specialties. In May 2017, he caused a scandal on the tarmac of Ben-Gurion Airport at the foot of Air Force One, the American presidential plane, by collecting a photo alongside Donald Trump on his arrival in Israel.
Since entering the Knesset in 2015, Oren Hazan has been regularly reprimanded, suspended, and expelled. The press revealed his past as a casino owner in Bulgaria, encouraging drugs and prostitution.
But, on this July 19, who cares about the eccentricities of Oren Hazan? According to Benjamin Netanyahu, it was a “pivotal moment in the annals of Zionism and the State of Israel”. In the opposition aisles, anger and fear dominate. "I declare with astonishment and sadness the death of democracy," says Ahmad Tibi, while his colleague from the Joint List, Jamal Zahalka, confetti with the text.
The head of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, and even the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, had expressed serious concerns about the first draft. According to the head of state, an article could cause serious damage to Israel's reputation. It offered the possibility for a group, representing a specific population or religion, to establish a separate housing community. In other words, a carte blanche to discrimination, in the name of a sought-after and assumed homogeneity.
According to the Israeli president, the text, devoid of limitations, would have made it possible to establish "a community without Mizrahi Jews, without ultra-Orthodox, without Druze, without LGBT members". During final negotiations, Netanyahu and his education minister, Naftali Bennett, representing the messianic Jewish Home party, decided to drop the clause. The formula adopted considers the development of Jewish communities as a “national value”, without specifying whether it is in Israel itself or in the occupied West Bank. A calculated vagueness.
For the past seven years, the idea of enshrining the definition of Israel as a Jewish state in a Basic Law – the highest legal value there is, in the absence of a constitution – has been regularly raised on the right. At the end of November 2014, Benjamin Netanyahu was already speaking at the Knesset to defend his own version of the project, which has often been revisited. "Over the years," he explained, "a clear imbalance has been created between the Jewish and democratic character [of the state]. There is an imbalance between individual and national rights in Israel. »
Symbolic message
An identity peril would therefore weigh on Israel because its Jewish national dimension would not be cultivated and celebrated. Four years later, the debate has resurfaced, still as vigorous as ever. This time, the Prime Minister decided to promote the bill just before the end of the parliamentary session. The elections are approaching. “Bibi” wants to offer a major gift to the nationalists and the far right. He is a little feverish: over the past year and a half, he has been questioned ten times by the police in several judicial investigations that question his integrity.
Is the final text voted in the Knesset purely symbolic and declarative, or does it reveal something deeper about the evolution of the country? Although watered down compared to the initial ambitions of the nationalist camp, the 14th Fundamental Law adopted on this day in July 2018 is an identity marker. It recalls many elements already included in the Declaration of Independence and sets out the attributes of sovereignty, such as the flag, the national anthem, the Jewish calendar.
It also defines Jerusalem as the “complete and unified” capital of Israel, while the status of the Holy City should only be decided after peace negotiations with the Palestinians, in accordance with international consensus. The text grants only Jews the right to self-determination.
This insistence is accompanied by a degradation, that of the Arabic language. It ceases to be an official language in the same way as Hebrew, and is henceforth given a “special status”. Does this change anything in practice? The problem lies in the symbolic message, the implicit threat to the Arab minority. These citizens, who in principle have full civil rights, pay taxes and vote in elections, may question their place in Israeli society.
A breach of equality – a principle at the heart of the 1948 promise, forgotten in the new law – is clearly apparent. But it already exists in practice. Aren't ultra-Orthodox men, for example, exempt from compulsory military service, offering their time to God rather than to the defense of the homeland? Are not young couples subject, at the time of marriage, to the religious monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate, while civil marriage does not exist?
Roots coiled on the stones
The 2018 law actually reveals Israel's identity torments and the elusive definition of its state. The permanence of external threats on its borders cannot be the only glue. First, its borders are uncertain. In the north, the annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights is not internationally recognized. In the east, the occupation of the West Bank – a supposedly temporary regime since the Six-Day War in 1967, which has morphed into creeping annexation – is creating an existential blur. Where does Israel end? The issue is not only territorial but also demographic.
By not defining its territory, Israel exposes itself to threatening projections. As of April 2023, the Central Bureau of Statistics estimated that the total population in the country stands at 9.7 million people, including 7.1 million Jews (73.5%) and 2.04 million Arabs (21%). But if we add the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, the Jewish majority becomes stunted, if not non-existent.
The dilemma is clear. How can it remain both a Jewish and democratic state while maintaining control over the territories obtained in 1967? Domination or law? The earth or the soul? The plasticity of identity is at the very heart of Judaism, through its thousand possible nuances. But what if a restrictive reading is necessary, placing God at the head of a new cadastral map?
This identity rift has been the common thread in Israel's history since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist in November 1995, followed by the campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings during the second intifada (2000-2005). These two sequences extinguished the promise of Oslo, the peace agreements concluded in 1993, which paved the way for the two-state solution. Rabin's assassination revealed that the battle for Israel's soul, by definition, was a matter of life and death.
At that time, there were about 140,000 settlers in the West Bank, compared to nearly 500,000 today, living in 146 settlements and 144 outposts, according to the organization Peace Now. They won over time. Their roots wrap around the stones, from hill to hill. To imagine that they can be dislodged, by financial incentive or force, is an illusion.
Submit or leave
Since the early 1970s, the messianic settlers have been carrying a narrative, that of a reconquest of “Judea and Samaria”, of a return to biblical lands. Initially marginal and sectarian, it has continued to gain legitimacy and centrality. Especially since the Labour left has become sluggish. This can be explained first of all by the shock wave of the second Intifada. This has imposed a deep pessimism within society, well beyond partisan lines, about the possibility of peace. In short, there would be no one to negotiate with.
From then on, the Jewish state alone assumes all the strategic choices. This is how the management of the conflict began, with a reduced but permanent fire. It is not a question of finding a solution, but of dominating the adversary, of preventing or punishing his outbursts of violence.
The first step was the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. A historic decision, taken by the then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, without consultation with the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Several thousand Israeli soldiers protected some 8,500 settlers in the enclave, some of whom fiercely resisted the evacuation. Sharon was a hawk with complex calculations. In a letter to then-US President George W. Bush, he noted the “impasse” in relations with the PA. Yasser Arafat, its leader, had died a year earlier and his party, Fatah, seemed weakened. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza opened the door to power for Hamas, which obtained unexpected results in the 2006 elections, then settled its accounts with Fatah by force of arms and monopolized all power in the enclave from 2007 onwards. Gaza is gradually turning into a cell with thick bars.
The logical conclusion of this sequence should have been, for Israel, that no progress can be made toward peace and security without a partnership with the PA. Instead, a bitterness of withdrawal will set in, over the course of the following cycles of confrontation with the armed factions in Gaza (2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023). The Israeli right has learned that this withdrawal was too costly a gift to the Palestinians. In the face of them, only force or denial become accepted positions.
The question of their political rights disappears to give way to the conditional promise of simple economic incentives. A twofold movement, apparently contradictory, is taking place on the right: this neighboring people is essentialized, in an openly racist impulse, while denying its own existence. As simple Arabs among Arabs, the Palestinians must submit or leave.
Trump, accelerator of drift
The election of Donald Trump in the United States subsequently acted as a powerful accelerator of the drift towards Israeli identity, beyond the Jewish state's own national springs and the traditional fragmentation of society between Eastern and European Jews, center and periphery, left and right.
The businessman-turned-president, who knows the importance of the Holy Land for the American evangelical electorate, shatters all international consensuses. He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel at the end of 2017, then the annexation of the Golan Heights. He proposed a peace plan in February 2020 that fulfilled the extremists' wildest dreams, without going so far as to suggest the expulsion of all Palestinians to Arab countries.
There is no longer a reasonable American administration to hold back the Israeli right and justify compromises, since Donald Trump himself is piloting the bulldozer. The intoxication of identity is becoming commonplace.
Bezalel Smotrich's career alone sums up the transformation of this camp. In 2005, then a young extremist opposed to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, he was arrested and held for three weeks by the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, on suspicion of wanting to block roads.
Ten years later, he entered the Knesset. Since December 2022, he has been finance minister in the new Netanyahu government, dominated by the far right. A proud homophobe, opposed to the presence of women in the army, defending the superiority of the Torah over civil law and the annexation of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich is no longer a marginal figure of the Israeli right. It is its new version.
At the Knesset in October 2021, he was booed by Arab MPs. The elected official replied: “You are here by mistake, it was a mistake of Ben-Gurion not to have finished the job and not to have fired you in 1948.”Smotrich also uses the pivotal word in the lexicon of the new Israeli right: "enemies." From 2014 onwards, the stigmatisation of a fantasised fifth column has taken a decisive place in political rhetoric.
Breaking the Resistance
First of all, there are the Arab citizens of Israel, whom Netanyahu accuses of voting“en masse” and “by bus” during the 2015 legislative elections. There are their supposed accomplices, the so-called “left-wing” non-governmental organizations, such as Breaking the Silence, B'Tselem or the New Israel Fund, which document the occupation and wars in Gaza or are moved by discrimination in Israeli society.
Finally, there are the journalists. These intruders who turn Netanyahu's legal torments into a soap opera, who tell of his acquaintances with billionaires, his taste for cigars and champagne, his arrangements with ethics.
The agenda is clear. Break Palestinian resistance. Break down internal oppositions. Break down checks and balances, such as the Supreme Court, as proposed in the judicial reform project put forward by the government in early 2023. A historic mobilization of civil society in the streets thwarted this ambition. The October 7 attack carried out by Hamas changed priorities. Grief, grief, disarray, anger, rage, revenge: the whole range of these feelings gripped Israelis. Sacred union? It is difficult to distinguish from the sacred. As for the union, who still evokes this ambition?
In 2015, in a speech of rare scope, President Reuven Rivlin described a “new Israeli order”. Defending himself from any “apocalyptic prophecy”, he invited us to look at "reality", that of tribes of equivalent size – ultra-Orthodox, religious nationalists, secularists and Arabs – living “in mutual ignorance and an absence of a common language”. Reuven Rivlin, the embodiment of a reasonable classical Israeli right, called for building a “partnership” between these communities.
He said:“We are not condemned to be punished by the development of the Israeli mosaic.”Then he added:“We must not let the 'new Israeli order' push us into sectarianism and separation.” A premonitory warning, unfortunately ignored.
Ken Fuchsman
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Brian D'Agostino
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Ken Fuchsman
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Brian D'Agostino
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Ken Fuchsman
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Brian D'Agostino
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Ken Fuchsman
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dlo...@nycap.rr.com
Ken & Brian
Just because there has been much wealth created starting with the industrial revolution, it is logical fallacy to say that because this wealth was created under a capitalist system that it was caused by the capitalist system. It’s certainly possible that the wealth, innovation, and creativity could have developed in a system other than a capitalist plutocracy.
David
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Ken Fuchsman
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Ken Fuchsman
dlo...@nycap.rr.com
Ken,
Indeed, all you say is true. Not driven by economics, but all of it happened within an economic system. That system, be it capitalist, communist, or whatever can be characterized by something like the GINI coefficient, a measure of wealth equality, or inequality. I agree with Brian, that under our current system the parallels to the game of monopoly where the goal is solely to accumulate as much wealth as you can, with its inevitable consequence of the GINI moving toward the inequality side, is an accurate characterization of our present system – all of which is independent of any cultural or technological gains.
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Brian D'Agostino
Thank you Ken and David. Ken, I am confused about what, exactly, you are saying. Are you saying that, due to advances in technology, the standard of living of ordinary people has improved in absolute terms over the period of modern industrial capitalism? Well that is certainly true, and Marx himself noted that capitalism—compared with what came before it (feudalism)—unleashed the productive powers of humanity to an unprecedented degree. On this, you and I (and Marx) are all in agreement.
However, Marx went much further than this, and it is not clear to me whether you agree or disagree with his further conclusions. Marx held that, compared with its predecessor (feudalism), capitalism has been a force for human progress. But we also have to inquire about where capitalism is taking us, in other words, what further evolution of human affairs we can now envision based on the technological progress that capitalism has enabled.
Here again Marx broke new ground. He noted that the owners of capital, who were innovators compared with their feudal predecessors, were also “a shackle upon production” from the perspective of future evolution. The technology unleashed by capitalism can create universal abundance, but the increasing concentration of wealth that is also the result of capitalism prevents the deployment of resources toward such a future society. In their single-minded pursuit of profit, capitalist owners apply their profits to new production that yields the highest rate of return, not necessarily that meets human needs.
Here is a simple illustration. Many millions of people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water. But addressing this problem is not profitable, because the same people who don’t have clean drinking water are poor and cannot pay for new technologies that can address the problem. Dean Kamen, a NASA engineer, invented a simple water purification system that could provide clean water to people. But neither he nor anyone else is making money manufacturing these systems. Instead, we get a new generation of flat screen TVs, smart phones with new features, cars with new designs, etc. From a utilitarian point of view, these uses of resources are irrational (they do not serve the greatest good for the greatest number). Meeting the unmet needs of the poor for clean drinking water and other basic necessities provides more utility than marginal improvements of technology to serve relatively affluent consumers.
I don’t want to discuss the details of this argument here; the case was made by Moshe Adler in Economics for the Rest of Us. I also don’t want to defend in detail the notion that worker owned enterprises are more efficient than capitalist owned enterprises. Evidence for this can be found in Gregory Dow’s book Governing the Firm. Suffice it to say here that Marx thought a further evolution of the market system involving worker control replacing control by capitalist owners could further unleash the forces of production and create a world in which abundance serves the needs of the many, rather than accumulation of wealth by the few.
I will read whatever response you may have to this email, but need to turn my attention to other things now and probably will not have much more to say for my part.
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Ken Fuchsman
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Brian D'Agostino
Brigitte DEMEURE
Thanks Brian, but I have never done business in Africa. I was there as an activist for an international NGO protecting worker's rights...
Brigitte
envoyé : 21 août 2025 à 00:22
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