𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐭, 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬

This text I wrote on January 28, 2022, which I am publishing for the first time.

—Nasir Khan

For most people, the Holocaust under the Nazis means only the killing of Jews. As a result, for the rulers of Israel, it has been the only thing that matters and is still used as a defence to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their land.

The Israeli arguments and response run along such lines: If we have got rid of the Palestinians, then don’t forget, we are the victims of the Holocaust! But why did you destroy Gaza in 2014? Oh, to ask this question is anti-Semitism! Don’t forget what happened to us under the Germans. Thus, the Holocaust is a catch-all defence to every crime Israel has committed and is committing against the Palestinians.

Why are you still illegally expanding in the occupied areas? We can expand wherever we want because this is ‘our land’ that God gave us. But why did the same God create thousands of years ago a people who have lived in Palestine for thousands of years and are called Palestinians? You see, you are anti-Semitic to say a thing like that. You hate us. Why don’t you shut up and mind your own business? Go away, you bloody anti-Semitic scoundrel!

The Holocaust narrative by Israeli Zionists barely mentions what the Nazis did to the Roma, the Poles, and the millions of Soviet citizens during the Second World War.

Antonio Negri on Lenin’s The State and Revolution

Antonio Negri argues that The State and Revolution by Lenin is the best introduction to Marxism as it places bodies within the daily revolutionary struggle. 

Antonio Negri, 25 January 2024

When asked which book offers the best introduction to Marxism, I answer: The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Why? Because, if Marx is the brains of Marxism, Lenin is its body; and, for materialists, the brain too is located in the body. Marxism is not an economic theory, but a critique of political economy, where critique, first of all, signifies one’s capacity for analysis by immersion in a chaotic, conflict-ridden world, materially dominated by bosses who exploit you and a sovereign who commands you.

These relations – ‘exploits you’, ‘commands you’ – mean that such control involves your body: that is, the bodies, energy, passions and values of those who live and work on our planet. With The State and Revolution, Lenin places bodies within the daily struggle where economic demands and political passion, emancipatory effort and emancipatory power, are conjoined. In this initial approach, The State and Revolution signifies bodies in struggle against the materiality of capitalist control.

This connection reveals an initial meaning of Marxism as critique: it signifies being within political economy, remaining inside the complex of acts of exploitation and means of power (of capitalism and sovereignty), inside the indissoluble bond that makes of them a state. The state is the exploitation of the bodies of labourers and command over the brains of subjects. Revolution is the critique exercised by bodies against this exploitation and sovereign power.

Emerging from the inside, critique, at the same time, induces the power of the against. ‘Against’ signifies understanding how bodies can proceed against capital; hence it invites translating Capital – the inexhaustible book of Marxist critique – into the materialist experiment of a possible revolution. Because the ‘within-against’ conjugation follows, and determines, the materialist mutation of the set of bodies into classes and thus constitutes the red thread of subjectivation into class struggle. The pedagogy of Marxism, which is only science qua critique and only critique qua subjectivation, is planted on this peak of Lenin’s discourse. It is not possible to be Marxist other than within the Leninist paradox of the totality and the partial viewpoint. And notice then how Capital comes, so to speak, to be subjectivated – which does 

not mean abandoned to the pleasures of a philology that is invariably curious and sometimes dissolute, or to the ceremonies of a rebellious dogmatism. Rather, it means re-articulated in its historical relationship with struggles, in the different technical and political compositions of the two classes. As Roman Rosdolsky noted, the initial plan of Capital envisaged a chapter on the state. Marx was unable to write it as the continuation of the great chapters of economic critique he had already composed. But, in his historical writings and interventions in the International, the people and parties it comprised, he sketched a theoretical framework.

There Lenin adopted it, and imparted to it a musculature, with the experience of a victorious class struggle taking the place of unclear incidents and occasional volcanic party polemics. Here, ‘subjectivation’ assumes its true meaning, as pedagogy and also as the apex of the operative synthesis of the ‘within and against’ we have registered in the pages of The State and Revolution.

Within and against possibly suffice to put both Capital and Marx’s historical writings into prose. But The State and Revolution goes much further. The revolution, Lenin says, has begun. Where are we going? What is the beyond we are striving towards? And, here, Lenin’s subjective action twists towards reality, from utopia to science, from science to the concreteness of revolutionary force.

It seems that we have returned to the beginning, and that enthusiasm for being located within and struggling against capital has matured as such in a perpetual motion. Such is not the case: here subjectivation makes it possible positively to itemize the transitions that ‘revolutionary deeds’ must accomplish in order to construct the beyond, in order to go beyond the beyond, from socialism to communism. And the road is mapped out with the intelligence and power of constituent praxis.

Utopia is connected with reality and takes shape in conjunction with the attack on current class domination. Thus, the utopian ‘withering away of the state ’ is understood in materialist terms as a constituent process. And we see this process completed, because it is no longer an ideal but a test for the subjectivity that transforms the real: Marx and Lenin are definitively recomposed – and with what force! Destroying the state and reconstructing the set of institutions that make a free existence possible become tasks accomplished in common. When we finish reading The State and Revolution, our bodies are engaged in that task.

— An edited excerpt from The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution by V. I. Lenin, Introduction by Antonio Negri.

John Mearsheimer on Israeli war on Gaza, America and ethni clensing

Prof. John Mearsheimer provides his perspectives in this video regarding the Israeli war in Gaza and its broader implications for Israel and occupied Palestinians. He also discusses the role of the United States in its resolute support for Israel, regardless of the actions of Israeli rulers in the present and the future.

This is a must-watch video by one of America’s leading political scientists.

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Paradigm Shift: A Time of Universal Lunacy and Deceit

Paul Edwards, Clarion India, Jan 20, 2024

An astonishing thing has happened in America that has never occurred in the lifetime of anyone now living.  No, it’s not the crushing win of Trump in Iowa, nor the absurd determination of Democrats to run the senile ninny who has made a joke of our Presidency for another term.  These, in their way astonishing, are mere trivialities in this time of universal lunacy and deceit.  

I mean an honest to god paradigm shift everyone can see that official wise men with public platforms and megaphones have not announced, or perhaps even noticed.  I’m talking about the first clear, undeniable instance of the failure of the American Empire’s Propaganda Machine.

It has been clear for decades, generations, that the American political elite has no regard for, and no sense of responsibility to,  the actual needs and desires of the ignorant, disorganized public.  It has always dealt with their inchoate hopes by indoctrination, by arousing and enlisting their imbecile enthusiasms in a mythology of tawdry, tribal patriotism based on the premise that they are a glorious, superior people whose leaders courageously embody and implement their magnificence all over the world.

The techniques of propaganda are refined, but their effect is entirely due to grotesque pandering to the worst susceptibilities of the human ego: the desire to assert one’s superlative worth as a  member of a powerful, violent, conquering nation.  The force of that tactic, endlessly repeated, rendered American citizenry, with rare exceptions, one solid, deluded, unthinking mass, devoted to whatever vicious, imperial ends the political elite intended.

Their trained mass response, sure as that of performing seals, has, for the first time ever, failed in regard to the Gaza genocide.

Both parties in Congress are solidly behind their putative leaders in full support of whatever violence Nazi Zionist Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people.  This is true across the spectrum, from the pathetic halfwits and defectives in the MAGA sump to mock-noble, self-declared moral poseurs such as Bernie and AOL.  Tlaib is the one outcast who has dared to affirm the humanity of Palestinians, while the rest join solemnly to prevent a ceasefire, which would, they say, balk the Zionist’s “right of self-defence”. 

With this level of unanimity, solid from the addled, babbling, derelict President down, presented forcefully, continually, to the nation from every organ in the Propaganda Machine, the certain positive response was confidently awaited.  It has not come.

In spite of all our corrupt, Zionist-owned government has done to enlist its support for the wholesale murder of a people, the American public has not bought it, and is not coming around.   By an overwhelming majority Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the Israeli genocide.

Try to recall a single moment when the diktat of the Machine was not ingested and regurgitated by the whole American public.  It took years and thousands of body bags to sour them on the Viet Nam horror.  The whole country was galvanized behind the lies that led to wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and its nonexistent WMDs, and it embraced the obscene “War on Terror” with all its follies.  

Recall the wildly dishonest demonization of Qaddafi, Assad and Iran that Americans swallowed.  When Putin was Hitlerized for exposing U.S. treachery in expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, and defending ethnic Russian Ukrainians from attacks by rabid Ukronazi Banderites, Americans ate it up and roared approval.

Xi of China is the next candidate for diabolization, but this first failure of the Machine will create doubt as to the ability of our rotten government to manage its victim people.  The question now is whether The Empire’s iron grip on their minds has been permanently impaired by its total, and totally despicable, support for the criminal brutality of an evil and illegitimate state.

It will be a delicious irony if the billionaire Zionists who bought our Congress find that the felon state it has supported against American interests has destroyed itself, and broken the death grip its money has exerted in subverting and betraying us all.

Depending on the endgame of the Zionist genocide—chiefly, on whether their murderous barbarity results in a deadly regional war—the effect on The Empire will be either crippling international infamy, or perilous, punishing engagement in a war that has the potential to utterly destroy many nations, including ours.

The American Empire has not represented the interests of its people for decades, if it ever did, and has only kept them in a kind of mental and emotional lockdown through controlling their perception of reality.  Nothing has been done for the generality of Americans since the last great threat to Capitalism in the Great Depression, which resulted in Social Security and Medicare.  

It is intriguing to wonder what grand advancements might come  for The People if the state were to be run for their benefit.  That, of course, will never happen under Imperial Capitalism which will fight to the end for its absolute rule by any means possible until it self destructs from massive and insoluble financial fraud, or is hammered and obliterated in an intentionally provoked war.

T.S. Elliot predicted long ago that the world would not end “in a bang, but a whimper”.  This seems unlikely now when the likely ends are implosion or explosion.  How profoundly sad it will be if the American people have thrown off the terrible strait jacket of imperial mind control just when it doesn’t matter any more.

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How Israel indoctrinates its population

Three months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the atrocities the IDF has committed against Palestinians are too numerous to name. Israel is staging a prolonged assault on the Palestinian people’s very means of existence—destroying homes, hospitals, sanitation infrastructure, food and water sources, schools, and more. To understand the genocidal campaign unfolding before our eyes, we must examine the roots of Israeli society. Israel is a settler colonial state whose existence depends on the elimination of Palestinians. Accordingly, Israel is a deeply militarized society whose citizens are raised in an environment of historical revisionism and indoctrination that whitewashes Israel’s crimes while cultivating deep-seated racism against Palestinians.

Miko Peled, former IDF Special Forces and author of The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a frank conversation on the distortions of history and reality at the foundations of Israeli identity.

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Richard Falk: In Gaza, the West Is Enabling the Most Transparent Genocide in Human History

This is extraordinary because the states supporting Israel, above all the United States, have claimed the high moral and legal ground and lectured the states of the Global South about the importance of the rule of law.

Richard Falk, Common Dreams, Jan 17, 2024

Recall Samuel Huntington’s controversial, yet influential, 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” which ends with the provocative phrase, “The West against the rest.” Although the article seemed far-fetched 30 years ago, it now seems prophetic in its discernment of a post-Cold War pattern of inter-civilizational rivalry. It is rather pronounced in relation to the heightened Israel/Palestine conflict initiated by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli territory with the killing and abusing of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers, as well as the seizure of some 200 hostages.

Clearly this attack has been accompanied by some suspicious circumstances such as Israel’s foreknowledge, slow reaction time to the penetration of its borders, and, perhaps most problematic, the quickness with which Israeli adopted a genocidal approach with a clear ethnic cleansing message. At the very least the Hamas attack, itself including serious war crimes, served almost too conveniently as the needed pretext for the 100 days of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence, sadistic atrocities, and the enactment of a scenario that looked toward making Gaza unlivable and its Palestinian residents dispossessed and unwanted.

Despite the transparency of the Israeli tactics, partly attributable to ongoing TV coverage of the devastating and heartbreaking Palestinian ordeal, what was notable was the way external state actors aligned with the antagonists. The Global West (white settler colonial states and former European colonial powers) lined up with Israel, while the most active pro-Palestinian governments and movements were initially exclusively Muslim, with support coming more broadly from the Global South. This racialization of alignments seems to take precedence over efforts to regulate violence of this intensity by the norms and procedures of international law, often mediated through the United Nations.

Liberal democracies failed not only by their refusal to make active efforts to prevent genocide, which is a central obligation of the Genocide Convention, but more brazenly by openly facilitating the continuation of the genocidal onslaught.

This pattern is quite extraordinary because the states supporting Israel, above all the United States, have claimed the high moral and legal ground for themselves and have long lectured the states of the Global South about the importance of the rule of law, human rights, and respect for international law. This is instead of urging compliance with international law and morality by both sides in the face of the most transparent genocide in all of human history. In the numerous pre-Gaza genocides, the existential horrors that occurred were largely known after the fact and through statistics and abstractions, occasionally vivified by the tales told by survivors. The events, although historically reconstructed, were not as immediately real as these events in Gaza with the daily reports from journalists on the scene for more than three months.

Liberal democracies failed not only by their refusal to make active efforts to prevent genocide, which is a central obligation of the Genocide Convention, but more brazenly by openly facilitating continuation of the genocidal onslaught. Israel’s frontline supporters have contributed weapons and munitions, as well as providing intelligence and assurance of active engagement by ground forces if requested, as well as providing diplomatic support at the U.N. and elsewhere throughout this crisis.

These performative elements that describe Israel’s recourse to genocide are undeniable, while the complicity crimes enabling Israel to continue with genocide remain indistinct, being situated in the shadowland of genocide. For instance, the complicity crimes are noted but remain on the periphery of South Africa’s laudable application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that includes a request for Provisional Measures crafted to stop the genocide pending a decision on the substance of the charges of genocide. The evidence of genocide is overwhelmingly documented in the 84-page South African submission, but the failure to address the organic link to the crimes of complicity is a weakness that could be reflected in what the court decides.

Even if the ICJ does impose these Provisional Measures, including ordering Israel to desist from further violence in Gaza, it may not achieve the desired result, at least not before the substantive decision is reached some three to five years from now. It seems unlikely that Israel will obey Provisional Measures. It has a record of consistently defying international law. It is likely that a favorable decision on these preliminary matters will give rise to a crisis of implementation.

The law is persuasively present, but the political will to enforce is lacking or even resistant, as here in certain parts of the Global West.

The degree to which the U.S. has supplied weaponry with U.S. taxpayer money would be an important supplement to rethinking the U.S. relationship to Israel that is so important and which is underway among the American people—even in the Washington think tanks that the foreign policy elites fund and rely upon. Proposing an arms embargo would be accepted as a timely and appropriate initiative in many sectors of U.S. public opinion. I hope that such proposals may be brought before the General Assembly and perhaps the Security Council. Even if not formally endorsed, such initiatives would have considerable symbolic and possibly even substantive impacts on further delegitimizing Israel’s behavior.

A third specific initiative worth carefully considering would be timely establishment of a People’s Tribunal on the Question of Genocide initiated by global persons of conscience. Such tribunals were established in relation to many issues that the formal governance structures failed to address in satisfactory ways. Important examples are the Russell Tribunal convened in 1965-66 to assess legal responsibilities of the U.S. in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War Tribunal of 2005 in response to the U.S. and U.K. attack and occupation of Iraq commencing in 2003.

Such a tribunal on Gaza could clarify and document what happened on and subsequently to October 7. By taking testimony of witnesses, it could provide an opportunity for the people of the world to speak and to feel represented in ways that governments and international procedures are unable to given their entanglement with geopolitical hegemony in relation to international criminal law and structures of global governance.

The South African World Court Case, Pariah State, and Popular Mobilization

The South African initiative is important as a welcome effort to enlist international law and procedures for its assessment and authority in a context of severe alleged criminality. If the ICJ, the highest tribunal on a supranational level, responds favorably to South Africa’s highly reasonable and morally imperative request for Provisional Measures to stop the ongoing Gaza onslaught, it will increase pressure on Israel and its supporters to comply. And if Israel refuses to do so, it will escalate pro-Palestinian solidarity efforts throughout the world and cast Israel into the darkest regions of pariah statehood.

In such an atmosphere, nonviolent activism and pressure for the imposition of an arms embargo and trade boycotts as well as sports, culture, and touristic boycotts will become more viable policy options. This approach by way of civil society activism proved very effective in the Euro-American peace efforts during the Vietnam War and in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, and elsewhere.

Israel is becoming a pariah state due to its behavior and defiance exhibited toward legal and moral norms. It has made itself notorious by its outrageously forthright acknowledgement of genocidal intent with respect to Palestinian civilians whom they are under a special obligation to protect as the occupying power.

We know what we should be doing.to make amends, yet well-entrenched special interests preclude such rational adjustments, and the military malfunctions and accompanying geopolitical alignments persist, ignoring costly failures along the way.

Being a pariah country or rogue state makes Israel politically and economically vulnerable as never before. At this moment, a mobilized civil society can contribute to producing a new balance of forces in the world that has the potential to neutralize Western post-colonial imperial geopolitics.

It is also relevant to take note of the startling fact that the anti-colonial wars of the last century were in the end won by the weaker side militarily. This is an important lesson, as is the realization that anti-colonial struggle does not end with the attainment of political independence. It needs to continue to achieve control of national security and economic resources as the recent anti-French coups in former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa illustrate.

In the 21st century weapons alone rarely control political outcomes. The U.S. should have learned this decades ago in Vietnam, having controlled the battlefield and dominated the military dimensions of the war, and yet having failed to achieve control over its political outcome.

The U.S. is disabled from learning lessons from such defeats. Such learning would weaken the leverage of the military-industrial-government complex, including the private sector arms industry. This would subvert the domestic balance in the U.S. and substantially discredit the global geopolitical role being played by the U.S. throughout the entire world.

So, it is a dilemma. We know what we should be doing to make amends, yet well-entrenched special interests preclude such rational adjustments, and the military malfunctions and accompanying geopolitical alignments persist, ignoring costly failures along the way.

We know what should be done, but do not have the political clout to get it done. But global public opinion is shifting, and demonstrations globally are building opposition to continuing the war.

Iran

There is a huge U.S./Israel propaganda effort to tie Iran to everything that is regarded as anti-West or anti-Israeli. It has intensified during this crisis, starting with the October 7 attack by Iran’s supposed proxy Hamas. You notice even the most influential mainstream print media as TheNew York Times routinely refers to what Hezbollah or the Houthis do as “Iran-backed.” Such actors are reduced misleadingly to being proxies of Iran.

This way of denying agency to pro-Palestinian actors and attributing behavior to Iran is a matter of state propaganda trying to promote belligerent attitudes toward Iran to the effect that Iran is our major enemy in the region, while Israel is our loyal friend. At the same time, it suppresses the reality that If Iran is backing countries and political movements, it obscures what the U.S. is doing more overtly and multiple times over.

It is largely unknown what Iran has been doing in the region to protect its interests. Without doubt, Iran has strong sympathies with the Palestinian struggle. Those sympathies coincide with its own political self interest in not being attacked and minimizing the U.S. role in the region. Additionally, Iran has lots of problems arising from opposition forces within its own society.

But I think dangerous state propaganda is building up this hostility toward Iran. It is highly misleading to regard Iran as the real enemy standing behind all anti-Israeli actions in the region. It is important to understand as accurately as possible the complexity and unknown elements present in this crisis situation that contains dangers of wider war in the region and beyond. As far as is publicly known, Iran has had an extremely limited degree of involvement in the direct shaping of the war and Israel’s all-out attack on the civilian population of Gaza.

Hamas and a Second Nakba

While I was special rapporteur for the U.N. on Israeli violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, I had the opportunity to meet and talk in detail with several of the Hamas leaders who are living either in Doha or Cairo and also in Gaza. In the period between 2010 and 2014, Hamas was publicly and by back channels pushing for a 50-year cease-fire with Israel. It was conditioned on Israel carrying out the unanimous 1967 Security Council mandate in SC Res 242 to withdraw its forces to the pre-war boundaries of “the green line.” Hamas had also sought a long-range cease-fire with Israel after its 2006 electoral victory for up to 50 years.

Neither Israel nor the U.S. would respond to those diplomatic initiatives. Hamas, Machel particularly who was perhaps the most intellectual of the Hamas leaders, told me that he warned Washington of the tragic consequences for both peoples if the conflict was allowed to go on without a cease-fire, which was confirmed by independent sources.

Where can Palestinians go as the population suffers from famine and continued bombing? What is Israel’s goal?

All indications are that Israel used the October 7 attack as a pretext for the preexisting master plan to get rid of the Palestinians whose presence blocks the establishment of Greater Israel with sovereign control over the West Bank and at least portions of Gaza.

I see the so-called commitment to thinning the Palestinian presence in Gaza and to a functional second Nakba. This is a criminal policy. I don’t know that it has to have a formal name. It is not a policy designed to achieve anything but the decapitation of the Palestinian population. Israel seeks to move Gazans to the Egyptian Sinai, and the Egyptians have already indicated that they don’t welcome this.

This is not a policy. This is some kind of a threat of elimination. The Israeli campaign after October 7 was not directed toward Hamas’ terrorism nearly as much as it was directed toward the forced evacuation of the Palestinians from Gaza and for the related dispossession of Palestine in the West Bank.

If Israel really wanted to deal with its security in an effective way, much more efficient and effective methods would have been relied upon. There was no reason to treat the entire civilian population of Gaza as if it were implicated in the Hamas attack, and there was certainly no justification for the genocidal response. The Israeli motivations seem more related to completing the Zionist Project than to restoring territorial security. All indications are that Israel used the October 7 attack as a pretext for the preexisting master plan to get rid of the Palestinians whose presence blocks the establishment of Greater Israel with sovereign control over the West Bank and at least portions of Gaza.

For a proper perspective we should remember that before October 7, the Netanyahu coalition government that took power at the start of 2023 was known as the most extreme government ever to govern the country since its establishment in 1948. The new Netanyahu government in Israel immediately gave a green light to settler violence in the Occupied West Bank and appointed overtly racist religious leaders to administer the parts of Palestine still occupied.

This was part of the end game of the whole Zionist project of claiming territorial sovereignty over the whole of the so-called promised land, enabling Greater Israel to come into existence.

The Need for a Different Context

We need to establish a different context than the one that exists now. That means a different outlook on the part of the Western supporters of Israel. And a different internal Israeli sense of their own interests, their own future. And it’s only when substantive pressure is brought to bear on an elite that has gone to these lengths that it can shake commitments to this orientation.

The lengths that the Israeli government has gone to are characteristic of settler colonial states. All of them, including the U.S. and Canada, have acted violently to neutralize or exterminate the resident Indigenous people. That is what this genocidal interlude is all about. It is an effort to realize the goals of maximal versions of Zionism, which can only succeed by eliminating the Palestinians as rightful claimants. It should not be forgotten that in the weeks before the Hamas attack, including at the U.N., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was waving a map of “the new Middle East” that had erased the existence of Palestine.

Undoubtedly, one of Hamas’ motivations was to negate the view that Palestine had given up its right to self-determination, and that Palestine could be erased. Recall the old delusional pre-Balfour Zionist slogan: “A people without land for a land without people.” Such utterances of this early Zionist utopian phase literally erased the Palestinians who for generations lived in Palestine as an entitled Indigenous population. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, this settler colonial vision became a political project with the blessings of the leading European colonial power.

Given post-colonial realities, the Israeli project is historically discordant and extreme. It exposes the reality of Israel’s policies and the inevitable resistance response to Israel as a supremacist state. Israeli state propaganda and management of the public discourse has obscured the maximalist agenda of Zionism over the years, and we are yet to know whether this was a deliberate tactic or just reflected the phases of Israel’s development.

This may turn out to be a moment of clarity with respect not only to Gaza, but to the overall prospects for sustainable peace and justice between these two embattled peoples.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Richard Falk

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine and is currently co-convener of SHAPE (Save Humanity and Planet Earth).

Full Bio >

How Israel’s war on Gaza exposed Zionism as a genocidal cult

Joseph Massad, Middle East Eye, Published date: 11 January 2024

The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal, but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fits this description

Protesters wave Israeli flags during a demonstration against the hearing at the International Court of Justice on a genocide complaint by South Africa against Israel, in The Hague, Netherlands, on 11 January 2024 (Robin Utrecht/AFP)

Ever since the current Israeli cabinet, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, came to power in December 2022, there has been a consensus, even in the western mainstream and among the Israeli political opposition, that it is a Jewish supremacist, racist government.

Characterisations of the government, which clearly expressed the preferences of a majority of the Israeli Jewish electorate, as “the most extreme”, “the most fundamentalist”, and “the most racist” in Israel’s history, became common. Other descriptions deemed it Israel’s “first fascist” government.

This is aside from the fact that two years before the rise of the current government, historically pro-Israel mainstream western human rights organisations had adjudged Israel a racist “apartheid” state since its founding. Palestinians and their supporters have also used this label to describe Israel since at least the 1960s.

It is the same government, which was the object of international condemnation, that has launched the ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people, which has so far killed and injured upwards of 100,000 Palestinians and displaced more than two million.

Yet this very same racist government and its genocidal war are supported, armed, and financed by the US and its European allies, who, forgetting their earlier criticisms, have not flinched from justifying Israeli crimes, just as they previously defended the Jewish settler colony against accusations of apartheid.

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Increasingly, however, the question being debated is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist, fascist, or genocidal, but whether a majority of Israeli Jews also fit those descriptions and that this government is, indeed, no more than a manifestation of Israeli Jewish political culture.

‘No longer fringe’

Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst recently observed that those expressing genocidal racism among Israeli Jews – including soldiers, singers, artists, and politicians – “are no longer a fringe. They represent what mainstream Israel thinks. They have become genocidal, racist and fascist when talking about Palestinians – unashamedly so. They are proud of and joke about their racism and do little to disguise it.”

Since its inception, the Zionist movement has always set out to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the country’s indigenous Palestinian population

According to the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index polls taken more than a month after the beginning of the massive Israeli bombing of Gaza, which by then had killed thousands, “57.5 percent of Israeli Jews said that they believed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were using too little firepower in Gaza, 36.6 percent said the IDF was using an appropriate amount of firepower, while just 1.8 percent said they believed the IDF was using too much firepower.”

Commenting on the genocidal views of a majority of Israeli Jews and their support of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy appears to be at a loss: “Either that’s the real face of Israel, and the attack on the 7th legitimised it to be above the surface, or that the 7th really changed things,” he said, adding: “I don’t know which one is true.”

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Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war

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Levy’s response is surprising, however, given the documented racism of the Zionist movement since its inception and the well-known fact that it has always set out to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the country’s indigenous Palestinian population.

The Israeli press has published seemingly “reasonable” articles, which frame Israel’s planned ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza and their potential expulsion to the Egyptian Sinai as something wonderful, describing it as “one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future.”

Yet one could presumably and just as reasonably counter that proposal with one suggesting that Israel’s Jewish colonists voluntarily move to the US and Europe, particularly Germany, where their rights and privileges are safeguarded. Indeed, these are among “the most suitable places on Earth to provide [Israeli Jews] with hope and a peaceful future”.

War on Gaza: The fate of global justice hangs on South Africa’s ICJ case

David Hearst

Read More »

This is especially true since Israeli officials and intellectuals often claim that they live in a “bad” or “tough” neighbourhood, or even in the “jungle”. Europe and the US are clearly far superior neighbourhoods with very low security concerns. After all, Europe is a “garden”, while “most of the rest of the world is a jungle”, as European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell infamously declared last year.  

The EU’s German President Ursula von der Leyen has also emphasised that “Jewish culture is European culture” and that “Europe must value its own Jewish-ness. So that Jewish life in Europe can thrive again.”

Such a voluntary move on the part of Israeli Jews, more than one million of whom already hold European and US passports, would spare the Palestinian people (and the Middle East more widely) the violence and wars that Zionist colonisation since the 1880s and especially after 1948, has visited on the people of the region.

Perhaps, rather than having Israel and its western sponsors secretly negotiate with “Congo” or Canada to take in expelled Palestinians, as was recently reported, the United Nations and Arab states should most enthusiastically urge western countries to welcome Israeli Jews in their midst.

A violent cult

With recent polls and analyses revealing the hatred and genocidal attitudes of the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens towards Palestinians, their relocation to Europe and the US should bring them more happiness and peace of mind.

In addition, those who justify the annihilation of Palestinians in order to “save” western civilisation and values with which Israel identifies, would find themselves better off saving western civilisation from the heart of it, far from the colonial frontier and the anti-colonial Palestinian resistance.

Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza began seven decades ago

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In this vein, the European Commission coordinator on combatting antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, the German Katharina von Schnurbein, recently affirmed that “Europe would not be Europe without its Jewish heritage.” She added: “Jewish heritage is part of Europe’s DNA. And as European institutions, we want to protect Jewish heritage, to safeguard and cherish it. This is a key aspect of fostering Jewish life, which is the ultimate goal of the EU strategy on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life.”

One might expect, as a result of such affirmation, that Europe’s doors this time would open for Jews, unlike in the 1930s and 1940s, or that the US, which refused to admit Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis and sent back a ship filled with them in 1939 to Europe where many of them perished in Hitler’s death camps, would welcome Israeli Jews to their better neighbourhood with open arms.

A large number of Israeli psychiatrists have already left the country for greener pastures in the United Kingdom, citing a high workload that has only increased since 7 October and a mental health system on the brink of collapse.

This is unsurprising, as support for the slaughter of Palestinians in untold massacres and wars since 1948 has evidently become a veritable genocidal cult in Israel across all segments of society and government. Like all members of violent cults, the only way to save them from themselves is to deprogram them. This will undoubtedly be a lengthy and complicated process that, in the case of many Israeli Jews, will require undoing decades of brainwashing.

Perhaps those same psychiatrists who left could help deprogram Israeli Jews in a safe European environment to rid them of their attachment to ethnic cleansing and genocidal wars.

A peaceful future

Meanwhile, the case South Africa has brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide is raising alarms in the White House and Western European capitals. This is only the latest case that the ICJ received accusing Israel of crimes.

A year ago, the United Nations General Assembly approved a request for an advisory opinion from the ICJ on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories with 87 votes in favour and 26 against – the opponents mostly are the same countries that today support Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

The ICJ is set to hold public hearings about the case next month. As for the more recent case that South Africa brought, the ICJ is looking into it in an emergency hearing on 11 January.

The ICJ has faced similar requests in the context of settler-colonialism since the Second World War. Most notably, in July 1966, the ICJ dismissed a petition put forth in 1962 by Liberia and Ethiopia concerning the South African settler colony of Namibia, on the basis that neither of them had legal standing to bring the petition. Both countries had been former members of the League of Nations, which had selected South Africa as the mandatory power over Namibia after World War One.

Liberia and Ethiopia’s 1962 petition called on the court to adjudicate the legal status of Namibia. The president of the court, Sir Percy Spender, himself from the settler colony of Australia, cast the deciding vote in the seven-to-seven decision in favour of South Africa. That decision launched the armed struggle by the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) against the South African apartheid occupiers. That year, the General Assembly revoked South Africa’s mandate but to no avail.

In 1969, the UN Security Council finally endorsed the General Assembly’s 1966 revocation of South Africa’s mandate. When South Africa defied the UN and refused to withdraw, the matter was referred in July 1970 to the ICJ for an advisory opinion.

It was the 1971 ICJ decision that led to international recognition of the anti-colonial Swapo and the right of the Namibian people to self-determination

Unlike in 1966, this time the ICJ’s opinion, issued on 21 June 1971, completely vindicated the UN position, ruling that the UN was the lawful governing authority in Namibia and that South Africa must withdraw.

In contrast with the 1966 pro-colonial ICJ decision, the 1971 decision removed the last vestige of legitimacy the white supremacist regime still had. Not that South Africa abided by the decision; it did not. South Africa’s western Nato sponsors continued unabashedly to support its delay tactics masquerading as a “peace process” and vetoed UN resolutions that called for sanctions on the white supremacist state.  

Nonetheless, it was the 1971 ICJ decision that led to international recognition of Swapo and the right of the Namibian people to self-determination. It would take a war of liberation for Namibia to finally obtain independence in 1990.

This is to say that an ICJ decision that condemns Israel’s war as a genocide will augur well for the Palestinian people’s struggle against their cruel and bloodthirsty colonisers.  

While it will not bring about immediate liberation and decolonisation, it will accelerate that process measurably until it dismantles Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy and saves both Palestinians and Israeli Jews from the genocidal cult of Zionism.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

Netanyahu pledges to defy International Court of Justice as Gaza death toll mounts

@Andre__Damon, WSWS. Org, January 15, 2024

In a speech Saturday marking 100 days of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the massacre in defiance of international law.

“We will restore security to both the south and the north,” Netanyahu vowed. “No one will stop us—not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anyone else.”

Netanyahu pledged “to fight on to the end—until complete victory.” He continued, adding, “We will not stop until we achieve victory.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, speaks with Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich during the weekly cabinet meeting at the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday Jan. 7, 2024. [AP Photo/Ronen Zvulun]

Netanyahu angrily denounced the genocide case against Israel brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Netherlands, by South Africa.

He called the case a “hypocritical attack in The Hague on the Jewish state that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust,” and “a moral low in the history of nations.” He vowed, “This international defamation campaign will not weaken our hands or weaken our determination to fight to the end.”

In the most explicit terms to date, Netanyahu sought to directly implicate the United States in the war crimes of the Israeli military, saying that he told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “this is not only our war, this is also your war.”

Indeed, the genocide in Gaza is “America’s war.” The United States has provided over 10,000 tons of military equipment to Israel since October 7, transported in 244 cargo plane flights and over 20 ships.

On January 12, the New York Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency is collecting “information on senior Hamas leaders” and relaying it to Israel, meaning the United States is providing targeting information for Israeli strikes that have to date killed over 30,000 civilians in Gaza.

Last week, the US massively expanded its involvement in the war throughout the Middle East, striking over 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday, followed by more strikes on Friday.

In his own statement marking the 100th day of the war, President Joe Biden did not mention, much less express sympathy with, the Gazans who have been killed or the 1.9 million Gazans who are facing starvation and displacement. Instead, the entirety of the three-paragraph statement was directed toward Israelis held hostage by Hamas, whose captivity the Netanyahu regime is using as a pretext to carry out its genocide.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed these statements, declaring, “The United States will not rest until all remaining hostages, including six Americans, are reunited with their loved ones.”

In its statement marking the 100th day of the attack, the Euro-Med monitor reported that approximately 100,000 Gazans have been killed, reported missing or wounded since October 7.

A Palestinian looks at the destruction after an Israel bombs a residential building in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024. [AP Photo/Adel Hana]

It noted that 31,497 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed to date by Israeli bombings. It estimated that a staggering 28,961, or 92 percent, were civilians “including 12,345 children, 6,471 women, 295 health personnel, 41 civil defense personnel, and 113 journalists.”

These statistics include both those whose bodies have been identified and over 7,000 people who have been missing for more than 14 days and are presumed dead. The monitor noted that “Hundreds of bodies that cannot be recovered due to the ongoing Israeli violence remain on the roads… particularly in areas where Israel’s army has conducted ground incursions.”

A further 1.955 million Palestinians, approximately 85 percent of the total population of the Strip, have been displaced from their homes.

Nearly 70,000 housing units have been completely destroyed, and a further 187,300 units have been damaged. These include “320 schools; 1,671 industrial facilities; 183 health facilities, including 23 hospitals, 59 clinics and 92 ambulances; 239 mosques; three churches; and 170 press offices.”

Summarizing the massive level of destruction, Euro-Med reported that “Israel is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in order to cause as many casualties, material losses, and as much general destruction as possible as a form of retaliation and collective punishment. This is against international humanitarian law, the 1949 Geneva Convention, and amounts to war crimes according to the Rome Statute, which governs the International Criminal Court.”

In its update on the state of the offensive, the United Nations wrote: “One hundred days into the conflict, intense Israeli bombardments from air, land, and sea continued across much of the Gaza Strip on 14 January, resulting in further civilian casualties and destruction.”

In a statement on Sunday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini declared, “The crisis in Gaza is a man-made disaster compounded by dehumanizing language and the use of food, water, and fuel as instruments of war.”

In a statement to Al Jazeera, Lazzarini continued, “Whenever you go to a school, the kids are looking at your eyes begging for a sip of water or a loaf of bread… This 100 days feels to be an eternity.”

“Bertrand Russell’s Last Message” on Israel and Palestine

M S Siddiqui, Heritagre Times, May 23, 2021

This statement on the Middle East was dated 31st January, 1970, and was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo.

“The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment.

The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination.

For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world.

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Matiel Moghannam, “The Palestinian Gandhi”

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The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”.

This is the traditional role of the imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.

The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.”

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German Jewish Doctors in India, Refuge, Opposition and Success

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Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements. The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless.

With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.

No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering.

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What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery; not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June, 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long-suffering people of the Middle East.”

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M S Siddiqui

Dr. Mohammad Siddiqui is a UK based Medical doctor. Apart from Medicine he is interested in history, culture, art and architecture. He is an avid collector of rare photographs, postcards, maps, artefacts, rare books and magazines on different themes like ‘Hajj pilgrimage’, ‘Delhi’, ‘Islam in Britain’ and ‘The role of Indian soldiers in WWI.’

Every U.S. Senator Has Taken AIPAC Money

Incremental Genocide and Displacement and Replacement in Gaza

Bill Astore, Bracing Views, 7 Jan. 2024

Courtesy of OpenSecrets.org, I saw a chart on AIPAC contributions to U.S. senators that showed that all 100 senators have taken AIPAC money. Leading the way are senate “giants” like Mitch McConnell (nearly two million dollars) and Chuck Schumer (roughly $1.7 million). Talk about bipartisanship! I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the U.S. Senate is so strongly pro-Israel. It obviously has nothing to do with the power of AIPAC and all that money.

Bipartisanship and no divisiveness. Who says we have a dysfunctional and divided Congress? Nonsense!

Here’s how AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) describes itself on its own web site:

The Largest Pro-Israel PAC in America

WE STAND with those who stand with Israel. The AIPAC PAC is a bipartisan, pro-Israel political action committee. It is the largest pro-Israel PAC in America and contributed more resources directly to candidates than any other PAC. 98% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general election races in 2022.

That last sentence is a killer. AIPAC is reminding Members of Congress that if you want to be elected, or win reelection, you very much want AIPAC on your side. And if you don’t kowtow to their agenda, they will do everything in their power to defeat you.

Imagine if there was an American Palestine Public Affairs Committee, an APPAC, that contributed hundreds of thousands if not millions to every U.S. senator and that boasted of a 98% success rate in getting APPAC-anointed candidates elected or reelected. Do you think maybe the U.S. Senate would have a different position on Gaza and the West Bank?

Speaking of Gaza, I watched Chris Hedges interview Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian. Pappé put it simply and clearly: Israel is engaged in “incremental genocide” against the Palestinian people, a genocide in slow motion, a strategy of “displacement and replacement.” The “displacement” of the Palestinians is done by mass bombing, mass destruction, mass death, and (hopefully for the Israelis) mass migration, and the “replacement” will come when Jewish settlers take possession of Gaza (after a lot of munitions cleanup and infrastructure redevelopment, I suppose, probably paid for by the U.S. taxpayer).

There’s an Orwellian term for this. For mass death followed by forced expulsion, Israel is using the term “voluntary migration” (or “voluntary” emigration). But of course there is nothing “voluntary” about any of this.

If U.S. government officials appear clueless about what’s happening in Gaza, they’re not. They’re just bought and paid for.