[ Editor’s note: This letter is addressed to US Congressional Representatives Moskowitz, Gottheimer, Wilson, Lawler and Miller to address their joint June 24 legislation, an amendment to H.R. 8771, the 2025 Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill, barred the State Department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) accounting of the Israeli massacre. It was submitted to Boom Town Press in October of 2024, and provides a detailed survey of media coverage of the on-going and historical genocide of Palestinian people, and also the inner workings between the Pro-Israel NGO/non-profit entities and government agencies. Do note that the acceleration of atrocities all take place during the Biden Administration. This letter is a Part 2, follow up to Robert Sandgrund’s previous primer from May, 2024 – The U.S./Israeli Genocide in Palestine: a constituent report outlining its origins and trajectory. The topics of this Part 2 include: The Undermining of Civil Right in the United States / The Unfoding Domestic Terror against Muslims and Arabs / The Underreporting of Jewish Anti-Zionist resistance / Yes, the savagery has a name: Genocide, ever expanding / Christian Zionism and the authoritarian moment: a parasitic bond]
And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. – Ninety-Eighty Four, George Orwell
‘The scenes from Saturday afternoon in Gaza show “as many as necessary”: horror. Combat jets and drones bombed Mawasi, which the army had declared to be the only safe haven for Gaza’s residents. For Israelis who are bloated by their media with a sense of fake victory: this is an area equal to that of Heathrow Airport in London, 6.5 square kilometers (about 2.5 square miles), packed with 1.8 million people who have lost everything…
‘100 dead is certainly permitted. What about 1,000? I assume that most Israelis would nod in agreement. 10,000? 50,000? Just say how many is Israel allowed to kill until it’s considered a crime in its own eyes? Where does the massacre stop? The answer is predetermined: “As many as necessary.” In other words: there’s no limit.
-Gideon Levy, ‘How Many Dead Children in Gaza Is Mohammed Deif Worth?’, Haaretz, 7/13/24
Dear Representatives Moskowitz, Gottheimer, Wilson, Lawler and Miller,
I am a Jewish U.S. citizen.
Your June 24 legislation, an amendment to H.R. 8771, the 2025 Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill, barred the State Department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) accounting of the Israeli massacre. note 1
Rep. Tlaib aptly terms your amendment, ‘genocide denial.’
Epochal extermination of the Indigenous Palestinians continues in the confined Israeli/ U.S. principality of Gaza. The U.S./Israeli Genocide now engulfs the West Bank as Israel’s regional provocations explode in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. note 2
Indeed, Gaza is now judged ‘gone,’ hundreds of thousands expelled and fled. Physically destroyed. Gaza, uninhabitable, the outcome of the murderous year. note 3
Having obliterated Gaza, Israel, backed by 40,000 U.S. troops, is on a victory lap in Lebanon, where the IDF has murdered over 1300, displaced over 1.2 million, uprooting twenty towns. Destroying Gaza, Lebanon, the next most populace area of Palestinian refugees displaced by the IDF in 1948, is a logical next destination for Israel’s genocide-fueled program.
As the lives are snuffed, your amendment hurries to legislate they are also forgotten.
On August 8, President Biden joined the heads of state of Egypt and Qatar, issuing: ‘Joint Statement from the Leaders of the United States, Egypt, and Qatar.’
Just as the State Department was releasing $3.8 billion of a $14 billion weapons procurement approved in May that was being fast tracked to Israel. As the U.S. Central Command was deploying ‘two thousand U.S. troops, two aircraft carriers, a large number of battleships and hundreds of fighter planes,’ in preparation for a regional assault on Israel in response to its own region wide provocation. note 4
The ‘Joint Statement’ is also remarkable in not identifying addressees, only that it is based on ‘principles outlined by President Biden on May 31, and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2735.’ Its anonymity is telling. Yelling into an abyss. Where it would die.
Your amendment, legislating forgetfulness, is in the spirit of the President’s insistence on ‘ceasefire,’ while enflaming Genocide with several new billions.
The issue, then, is not ‘ceasefire’ or ‘peace process’ or ‘negotiations,’ fictions all.
It is the unmentionable: ending Occupation, Annexation, Genocide. There is no ‘disproportion’ in the IDF retaliation to Hamas criminality. It is in precisely deadly proportionality to the territorial theft. Hamas was the gruesome occasion. Annihilation the longstanding goal. note 5
That’s on the colonial side.
Then the deeper unmentionable: the imperial side = ending U.S. aid to its sub-fascist client, State Zionist Israel.
State/colonial Zionist Israel is, in fact, proxy white European colonial cover in the dessert oil fields, its contemporary imperial overlord, the U.S.
This is why it has been made so dangerous to dissent against State Zionism: with encompassing witness to the Genocide ongoing and building, the ideological and moral cover for U.S. ‘interests’ in the Middle East has collapsed. The ‘interests’ stand starkly exposed: petroleum and land, throughout the region. As always, making life cheap and expendable.
Forgetting is, therefore, the order of the day. As the genocide and our domestic authoritarian specter, together, unfold, intimately entwined.
This is Haaretz columnist Hagai El-Ad, August 6, describing the regime whose war our President and many legislators sponsor:
‘It’s not easy to commit crimes and get off scot-free. It requires legal expertise and a degree of sophistication, especially when you simultaneously have to contend with public opinion, both local and international.
‘And no, I’m not talking about the reservists suspected of raping a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman army base. I’m talking about the State of Israel and its sophisticated whitewashing mechanisms. These mechanisms have loyally served the Israeli system for generations. But it seems they have finally reached their expiration date and are now collapsing under the weight of the internal contradictions they had previously managed to contain.
‘For decades, the Israeli system perfected its ability to use brutal violence against Palestinians without having to pay any price for it. This is a critical issue. After all, it’s impossible to oppress millions of people for decades without violence on a horrifying scale. But it’s also impossible to keep putting those who employ such violence on trial, because who would agree to rule via force if they will later be denounced as criminals?’ note 6
The ‘whitewashing mechanisms’ in the U.S. – including legislatively dictated ‘forgetting’ – have reached expiration, too, the lid on their moral cover blown. Exposing and ending ‘violence on a horrifying scale,’ that we reimburse and export. Enabling long suppressed witness and mourning and justice for our victims.
If it isn’t a Genocide, what in the world is it?
You would be WRONG if you guessed this report concerned an IDF raid following October 8:
‘Residents of the Jenin refugee camp have been left stunned by the sheer extent of the destruction left in the wake of the Israeli raid which struck the occupied West Bank neighbourhood in the past few days.
‘Muhammad Abu Talal, a resident of the camp, told Middle East Eye said that Israeli bulldozers levelled [sic] most of the streets surrounding the camp from the moment they first stormed it on Monday morning.
‘Piles of rubble were left mounted around the edges of the roads after the bulldozers were finished, in addition to the destruction of the camp’s infrastructure, with water and electricity networks left ruined.
‘“Most of our homes were cut off from electricity at the beginning of the invasion, and we saw many water pipes exploded from under the streets, which were bulldozed and destroyed,” he added.’
July 4, 2023. Three months before October 7 and October 8.
The following concerns events since October 8:
It is fascinating and disturbing that your amendment’s challenge to the GHM casualty estimates came as GHM revised lower the proportion of women and children massacred, from 70% to 50%. note 7
Under conventional judgment, such a correction would actually support GHM’s credibility and integrity.
Similarly, on September 10 The Times of Israel reported GHM lowered its estimate of killings in an attack on Khan Younis from 40 to 19 in response to IDF protest concerning the earlier reported higher number. That GHM would accommodate objections by the assaulting military attests, once again, to its stunning credibility and good faith. note 8
WHO replied to your amendment:
‘”Nothing wrong with the data, the overall data (more than 35,000) are still the same,” said WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier at a Geneva press briefing in response to questions about the toll. “The fact we now have 25,000 identified people is a step forward,” he added.
‘Based on his own extrapolation of the latest Palestinian data, he said that around 60% of victims were women and children, but many bodies buried beneath rubble were likely to fall into these categories when they were eventually identified.’ note 9
A resonant December glimpse of the unfolding extinction was conveyed by this report: ‘”We now just wish to be killed”: the Palestinians under fire in southern Gaza.’ note 10
On March 12, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that ‘three Gazan university presidents have been killed in the Israeli attacks, along with more than 95 university deans and professors; 68 of whom held professor’s degrees.’ Citing the Palestinian Ministry of Education,
it reported, ‘4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 others have been injured during the ongoing attacks, while 231 teachers and administrators have been killed and 756 injured.’
Three universities were destroyed and three partially destroyed within 100 days of October 7. Over one hundred European academics signed a petition denouncing the destruction, ‘Annihilation of Gaza Education: Israel is systematically erasing the entire educational system’. note 11
On March 18, UN Secretary-General António Guterres reported:
‘1.1 million people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger – the highest number of people ever recorded – anywhere, anytime. This is an entirely manmade disaster. And it can – and must – be halted.’ note 12
On May 2, 2024, the United Nations Development Program reported:
‘The level of destruction in Gaza is such that rebuilding public infrastructure would require external assistance on an a scale not seen since 1948.
‘Even with an optimistic scenario in which a five-fold increase of construction materials are allowed into Gaza, it would take until 2040 to reconstruct the destroyed housing units.’ note 13
On June 3, 2024, the United Nations report, ’Promotion and protection of the rights of children and armed conflict Report of the Secretary-General,’ asserted, ’Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory presents an unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children.’ note 14
On June 17, 2024, The New York Times described, ‘‘A Hellscape’: Dire Conditions in Gaza Leave a Multitude of Amputees.’ note 15
A July 5, 2024 letter to the The Lancet estimated up to 186,000 dead, ‘or more,’ in Gaza since October 8. GHM numbers, therefore, appears vast underreporting. note 16
On July 9, 2024, the UN announced ‘famine has spread throughout the Gaza strip.’ note 17
On July 19, the UN began reporting concerning the spread of polio in Gaza. note 18
A July 24 letter addressed to President Biden and Vice President Harris and Dr. Jill Biden, signed by 45 U.S. health workers who have administered care in Gaza, estimated a minimum of 98,000 dead. The letter from this courageous network of medical providers provides nightmarish witness to the atrocities. note 19
On July 31, the UN published ‘Detention in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza (October 2023-June 2024),’ documenting the abuse in Israeli prisons of over 9,000 Palestinians, including children, inflicting ‘disappearances,’ torture and death. note 20
At the beginning of August, ‘an assessment of satellite imagery by UN-Habitat and the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP),’ demonstrated ‘Israel’s genocide has created approximately 42 million metric tonnes, or about 46 million tons, of debris…14 times the total amount of debris created in all other conflicts across the globe in the last 16 years, all
concentrated in a region one sixteenth the size of New York City with one of the densest populations on Earth.’ note 21
On August 4, Haaretz reported, ‘Israel at War, Day 303: Over 100,000 Cases of Hepatitis B Recorded in Gaza,’ 85 cases reported last year. note 22
On August 5, the UN issued the report, ‘Israel’s escalating use of torture against Palestinians in custody a preventable crime against humanity: UN experts.’ The Special Rapporteurs asserted, “Israel’s genocidal destruction in Gaza, which is spreading across the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, serves as the backdrop to its abusive detention programme today.”’
They observed, ‘“Decrying the silence by Member States following the emergence of testimonies and reports of alleged maltreatment and torture, the experts called for pressure on Israel with a view to implementing a cogent system of access, monitoring and protection of Palestinian detainees. The Human Rights Council, in particular, must urgently demand the deployment of special procedures mandate holders and the Commission of Inquiry to facilities holding Palestinians,” they said.’ note 23
On August 12, Haaretz reported, illustrating the Gazan horror and Israeli detachment, ‘On Saturday, Gazans Collected Body Parts in Plastic Bags. Israelis Stayed Unbothered’. note 24
On August 14, Haaretz reported and analyzed IDF destruction, concluding it is one of the bloodiest of the 21st century. note 25
On August 23, 2024, Haaretz reported, ‘Successive Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza, including 12 just in August, have displaced 90 percent of its 2.1 million residents since the war began, the UN said.’ [emphasis added] note 26
On September 17, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, accused:
‘Israel in a new report of carrying out a deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza. “What we are witnessing in Gaza is the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians. We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely.”’ note 27
On October 4, U.S. health workers were reported to estimate the IDF murder toll in Gaza at 119,000, having wiped out, ‘at a minimum,’ 902 families. note 28
On October 5, Truthout reported, ‘Unprecedented Israeli Airstrike in West Bank Kills 20, Wiping Out Entire Family.’ note 29
On October 7, Dropsite News reported, ‘Israel Bombs Mosque in Deir al-Balah, Gaza’s Last Standing City.’ note 30
Lady MacBeth pled, ‘Out, damned spot: out, I say. One; two. Why then ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeared? What need we fear? Who knows it when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’
In the murderous guilt of own forgetful sleepwalk, the rivers of blood in which all of us now drown, swimming upstream against complicity as good Germans, can’t be wished away either.
In the cumulative, still accumulating, devastation, it is readily understood: the issue of your legislation isn’t the accuracy of the Genocide death toll. It is a warning to the State Department workers and other principled government bureaucrats who cite the data, many resigning publicly, ending complicity in the criminal Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon/Syria/Iran/ Middle East programming. Twenty year State Department veteran senior military advisor Stacy Gilbert resigned in May over a report to Congress falsely denying Israeli obstruction of humanitarian aid to Gaza:
‘“That is not the view of subject matter experts at the State Department, at USAID, nor among the humanitarian community. And that was known. That was absolutely known to the administration for a very long time.” Gilbert says there is a clear pattern by Israel “of arbitrarily limiting, restricting or just outright blocking assistance going in that has caused the very grave situation in Gaza.”’ note 31
Ms. Gilbert’s resignation anticipated by four months the full exposure of U.S. complicity in Israel’s interference in aid delivery, and Secretary Blinker’s lying to Congress about it. (Source: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/26/propublica_blinken_israel_aid_weapons)
Foreign affairs officer Annelle Sheline at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor described her March resignation:
‘“At the end of the day, many people inside [the State Department] know that this is a horrific policy, and can’t believe that the United States government is engaged in such actions that contravene American values so directly, but the leadership is not listening,” says Sheline. “I’m trying to speak on behalf of those many, many people who feel so betrayed by our government’s stance.” Sheline describes being moved by the words of Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty U.S. airman who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in protest of the war on Gaza, who implored everyone to take a stand against genocide. “I have a young daughter, and I thought about, in the future, if she were to ask me, ‘What were you doing when this was happening? You were at the State Department.’ I want to be able to tell her that I didn’t stay silent.”’ note 32
Your legislation attempts to silence the courageous bureaucrats: a warning to the morally devastated workers who remain, freshly intimidated, writhing in moral injury.
The legislative censorship inflects our nation’s unfolding fascist moment. The erasure of history, including ongoing history, is a key tactic of tyranny. Stalin exercised it as a building block in the defense and perpetuation of his totalitarian authority, rewriting Soviet history books to suit his current need, excising his enemies and failures and crimes from the written record and civic discussion. Our contemporary book banning is symptomatic in our authoritarian climate, a model for the many legislative interventions now underway, proscribing speech and debate, abrogating sober, factual reporting, chipping away at our democratic-republican institutions, their wholesale destruction potentially moments away.
The destruction of history – collective forgetting – is core to the maintenance of systems of lies and sabotage and terror and aggression.
Another prominent legislative instance in the suppression is H. Res. 883, introduced November 21, 2023, ’Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the slogan,
“from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is antisemitic and its use must be condemned’. note 33
Please note: this repudiated rhetoric originated, not with Hamas, but rather the 1977 Likud Party Platform – the Party of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s fascist governing coalition:
‘The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel)
a. The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea [the West Bank] and Samaria [the West Bank] will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.
b. A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a “Palestinian State,” jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel. and frustrates any prospect of peace.’ (emphasis added) note 34
Haaretz columnist Donna Scheindlin, reported September 5 on Netanyahu’s announcement of his decision ‘to avoid a hostage release and cease-fire deal,’ with his now familiar prop: a map of Israel and Gaza, Palestine missing. Scheindlin commented:
‘Another new aspect is the astonishing hypocrisy in the global conversation about Israel. How many of the alarming reports about rising antisemitism on campuses are related to the chant “From the river to the sea”?’ note 35
Netanyahu’s map is a literally graphic Genocide declaration, as a fait accompli.
One will search vainly in the historical Congressional Record to uncover debate, let alone legislatively authoritative denunciation, concerning fascist Likud, or Apartheid Israel, as ‘anti-Palestinian.’
To the contrary. Senator Joseph Biden addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1984, arguing to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, boldly asserted:
‘I don’t know why we just don’t simply move it to the western sector of Jerusalem and be done with it… If the Arabs can sustain and understand and swallow our policy in Lebanon, they can take about anything.’ (emphasis added) note 36
By ‘our policy in Lebanon,’ our future President, advocating the illegal embassy move, referred to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the unprovoked slaughter of 15,000-50,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. It anticipated President Biden’s $14 billion Executive Order (October 8, 2023) in unconditional aid in what promptly unfolded as the U.S./Israel genocide of 2023/2024.
BBC reports as of October 9: ‘Israel’s prime minister has urged the Lebanese people to throw out Hezbollah and avoid “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”.’ Having been explicit in Genocidal intent in his October 8 Palestinian extermination order, the Prime Minister now explicitly declares Genocide in Lebanon. note 37
The President’s current ‘policy in Lebanon’ thus promises to rival or surpass the carnage of 1982, as war explodes on every side of the Middle Eastern map, demonstrating, once again, Western plundering as a continuous project, since Columbus.
So much for concerns about ‘anti-Palestinian’ in the halls of U.S. legislative power. ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is objectionable — ‘antisemitic’ — according to the November ‘sense of the House of Representatives’, in the mouths of activists in the midst of Genocide.
Not so much for Likud and the IDF, when they are perpetrating it, in genocide, in real time. Freedom of speech is a positive good in their ethnic cleansing task, to which strong man Israeli Prime Minister, adjudicated war criminal, was privileged in addressing the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in July – the representative of a political party proclaiming in its Platform of 1977, ‘between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,’ and now so implementing.
Indeed, the contested ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ slogan pinpoints freedom. It humanely corrects the domination asserted by Likud, ‘there will only be Israeli sovereignty,’ an explicit colonial declaration of subjugation and ethnic cleansing.
Hamas criminality of October 7 is documented authoritatively by Human Rights Watch in its 236 page report published July 17, 2024: ’I Can’t Erase All the Blood from my Mind.’ note 38
Arrest warrants for Hamas leaders are sought by The International Criminal Court. Wanton murder of six helpless Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Gaza on September 2 is criminal depravity. The carnage of October 7 included Israelis who were outspoken Palestinian allies, Leftists and pacifists. note 39
On September 30, New York Times reporter Emma Goldberg reported on the Hamas murder of Kibbutz Be’eri peace activist Vivian Silver:
‘Vivian believed that ordinary people could help bring peace to the region. If more Jews could understand the distress of their Arab neighbors, she thought, the next generation would be more willing to exchange land for peace. In 2000, she helped create the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation, and later became its co-executive director, with her Bedouin colleague Amal Elsana Alh’jooj. It grew to be one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Israel devoted to equal rights. It created jobs in impoverished Arab communities and brought Arab and Jewish young people together to volunteer.’
Goldman interviewed Silver’s son, Yonaton:
‘What Yonatan calls his “political coma” lasted until the day Vivian was killed. Right after his mother’s shiva, the seven-day Jewish ritual of mourning, Yonatan quit his job as a social worker. He announced to family and friends that he would become a full-time activist for peace. He didn’t know how he would financially support his family, but with Maayan’s encouragement he gave himself a window to experiment: at least one year, which in Judaism is the official period of mourning for children who have lost their parents.
‘Becoming a peace activist after Oct. 7 was, in some ways, an absurd undertaking. The hope for peaceful coexistence that had animated Vivian’s work was shattered. Yonatan knew that many of his Israeli friends saw his calls to stop the bombardment in Gaza as naïve, though neighbors from Be’eri didn’t criticize him directly, because they were sensitive to his loss.
‘The charred remains of books found in what was once Silver’s living room. “Another person could come here and say this is the reason to kill Palestinians,” Yonatan said. “I stand here and say this is the reason to fight for peace.”
‘“Israelis always tell me that when the hostages were brought into Gaza, people cheered,” he said. “I think the same people will cheer when we bring peace.” If the very militants who destroyed his kibbutz came to him now saying they were ready to negotiate for peace, Yonatan told me he would listen openly. “Come,” he said. “Even if you killed my mother before.”’ note 40
The predatory Hamas assault remains just and tragic cause for widely publicized expression of public mourning for the 1200 and rightful condemnation and prosecution of the perpetrators, as desperate anxiety for the Israeli hostages continues.
When, however, the IDF, without provocation, massacred 15,000-50,000 in 1982, Sen. Biden was privileged, in his free speech, in his august legislative body, to uphold the crime, noting the Arab capacity to ‘sustain and understand and swallow our policy…,’ with his poignant lesson, ‘they can take about anything.’
So it has been in every IDF and settler terror episode, massacre, murder, death squad action, house destruction, torture, sexual violence, unjust imprisonment, expulsion, in accord with Sen. Biden’s dictum. It includes periodic assaults in Gaza referred to by IDF, in its detached, cynical criminality, as ‘mowing the lawn.’ Mowing the lawn episodes are massacres, in the thousands.
By contrast with 1200 Israeli civilians and soldiers Hamas is estimated to have massacred October 7, serial massacres committed by Israel have never occasioned widely publicized expressions of mourning by any U.S. President or Congressional decree. The PLO and Hamas have never been awarded dozens of billions of dollars by the United States or any other major power to retaliate against IDF massacres. note 41
Always presuming of the Palestinians, in each of the IDF massacres, in unbreakable Occupation, ’they can take about anything’. note 42
The 9000 Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails, without charges or trials or publicity – commonly accepted touchstones of law based democratic states – are institutional hostages. In their invisibility and expendability, they are forgotten, shorn of justice. On the operational principle: ’they can take about anything’.
As to publicity, by August the IDF murdered at least 170 journalists reporting the Genocide, more than in World War II or Vietnam, one approximately every other day since October 7. To witness the Genocide journalistically is to gamble one’s life, with poor odds. note 43
On the brutal foundational Western premise, so well articulated by Sen. Biden, as always: ’…they can take about anything,’ forgetting to add: in invisibility to the wider world, your legislation, now, attempting to bind invisibility in law.
Meanwhile, the U.S. press, serving its corporate masters, is complicit in the sacrifice of colleagues in the field, lying about student ‘violence’ in their principled dissent. This Fox ‘news’ report (see link, below) September 3 on the resumption of protest on the first day of school at Columbia is remarkable and typical, studio anchors insisting ‘Protesters are fighting with the NYPD – they would create chaos: once again…’ Their film footage depicts the police tackling helpless, non-resisting protesters in arrest. The scene replays throughout the studio discussion, invalidating its idiotic banter. The film includes a nearby vigil in which a woman draped in an Israeli flag hovers over the fence where demonstrators picketed in opposition to the Genocide. The picketers include three Hasidic men, carrying signs, ‘Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism,’ approaching and scolding the woman with the flag, who shortly leaves, sadder, hopefully wiser.
The moronic studio discussion, repeating all of the cliches about student violence and hatred of the Jews, also fails to remark on the Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionist protesters, so beautifully captured in the accompanying film: disregarding their own news footage, also replaying in a loop!
To view: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6361456847112
You can’t make it up. Except that these reporters spend their working lives doing so.
Indeed, at least $22 billion in total U.S. aid to the Genocide has so far materialized. Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, in response to $15 billion in new funding in April, thanked Mr. Biden for signing the legislation, asserting, “Our alliance is ironclad.” note 44
By contrast with ‘the Arabs,’ Israel is not expected by its U.S. allies and its media servants to ‘understand’ or ‘swallow’ such a ‘policy.’ Israel, it is understood, is not expected to ‘take about anything’ – the U.S. so ensures.
Not only not expected to ‘take about anything,’ Israel is permitted the latitude of retaliating, without condition, and, indeed, in this historic moment, explicitly, uncensored, emphatically stated genocidal intent:
‘Israeli officials have vowed that the raid will be devastating for the Palestinians trapped there. On Monday, Israeli Finance Minister and security cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich promised that there would be nothing left of Rafah afterward.
“There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation,” Smotrich said.
‘“You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven,” Smotrich continued, referencing a Bible verse in which God commands the death of everyone in Amalek, a nation which opposed the ancient Israelites. References to this verse have been used to justify many massacres throughout history, and Israeli officials’ invocation of it now has been cited by South Africa in its recent ICJ case to demonstrate Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza. (emphasis added) note 45
While planning its Final Solution at the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis were in private huddle. For the Israeli Ministers, however, unchecked genocidal publicity is their privilege, certainly not taking ‘about anything.’ Certainly not expected to by U.S. patrons.
The Genocide was openly presaged in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s October 8 extermination order, articulating: ’The enemy will pay an unprecedented price.’ So it has been. ‘The enemy’ being Indigenous Palestine. Golda Meir explained long ago: ‘It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.’
Once ‘non-existent,’ they are now ‘the enemy,’ non-existence threatening. note 46
Privately sickened, however, by IDF’s 1948 massacre at Deir Yasmin, Meir is reported to have ‘compared the Zionist offensive to Russian pogroms in Jewish villages.’ (Source: https://truthout.org/articles/decades-of-us-arms-deals-with-israel-paved-the-way-to genocide-in-gaza/?)
In the various historical IDF massacres, in incalculable suffering, ‘taking about anything,’ the Palestinians have never, in seventy-five years, retaliated with anything approximating Israeli fury. Nor could it. Michael Moore (July 4) observes of the Genocide:
‘…if it’s a “war,” don’t there have to be things like armies, tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and the threat of nuclear annihilation on both sides? If only one side has these things, and the other side has none of them, is it really a war?’
‘Rule by sheer violence comes into play when power is being lost…’ note 47
Sheer violence is political disintegration. Hamas supporters and Prime Minister Netanyahu are both wrong that the depravity of October 7 represented the attacker’s ‘power,’ for P.M., ‘an existential threat.’ IDF’s unpreparedness for the attack, though repeatedly informed of Hamas planning over the course of a year, failing to respond for almost a day as slaughter unfolded, found shattering violence. But the attack wasn’t ‘power.’ While humanly devastating, Hamas did not penetrate Israel territorially and fled when confronted, now in a ‘war’ in which those they supposedly lead have been in daily annihilation for one year.
The progression toward catastrophic Hamas violence includes: Israel’s repudiation of Hamas truce offers (14 times rebuffed by Israel between 1988-2017); the IDF mass carnage perpetrated during the Great March of Return, March 30, 2018; legislative retaliation for the Great March on July 19, 2018 with passage of The Nation State Law, institutionalizing territorial and racial supremacy; the May, 2021 mowing the lawn episode, displacing and uprooting 58,000 Palestinians, in a week of airstrikes. Note 48
All toward Occupation-wide Annexation: unchallengeable Apartheid.
Finding Hamas in ‘sheer violence…’, ‘when power is being lost…’ It’s not a justification. It’s not a plea. It’s not an excuse. It is simply the reality.
Palestinian power was crushed in international consensus with the Great British Mandate (1922) and, with UN Partition, annulled, in 1948. The blue print stripping Indigenous Palestine of sovereignty and political right was set in motion by imperial decree in 1917, the Balfour Declaration, one short paragraph announcing Indigenous Palestine’s political erasure.
Hamas’ ‘sheer violence’ was traumatic devastation. But sovereign power is under colonial and imperial monopoly, wielded by Israel and the U.S. The ‘existential threat’ to Israel is the one Israel gambles in genocide-fueled war, now Occupation-wide, and launching regionally, tinder for global cataclysm. With unconditional support offered by the U.S. in supposed ‘partnership,’ ‘iron clad,’ the poison that could be Israel’s immolation, as the U.S. gambles with its pet.
The cat smiles, allowing its mouse to believe it is another cat.
The Undermining of Civil Right in the United States
For now, the physical terror is focal in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon.
But it threatens, of course, domestically, in our Truman/McCarthy/Cohn Great Fear moment, reminiscent of 1950s America. Suppression of the students with police violence and gratuitous arrests, mob violence, doxing, suspension, expulsion, threats of long term imprisonment, firings and legislatively pressured resignations of university Presidents and administrators and professors, along with abrogation of scholarship, are demonstrations and foreshadowings of much worse to come — not alone on the question of the Middle East. The restrictive and oppressive gestures concerning Gaza are not separable from the larger, looming threat to our civil liberties and the First Amendment as such. They are, indeed, a dress rehearsal, in our palpably dying democracy. note 49
Premised as just response to racial hatred, the suppressions claim to uphold sacred protections.
It is unquestionable that Jewish students have been targeted by fellow students and by University professors and visiting scholars. A legal filing of January 21, 2024 by Alexander Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc. against Harvard University filed in U.S. District Court D, documented the university’s failure to intervene in the face of an alleged antisemitic cascade, over years, committed by students and professors. The lawsuit was partially upheld. note 50
A similar accounting of antisemitic University conduct has been compiled by Rep. Virginia Foxx, Chairwoman, Committee on Education and the Workforce of the House of Representatives, ‘Foxx Letter to Columbia University.’ note 51
The shock of October 7 evolved promptly into a vast enlargement of the challenge to the Zionist project of the State of Israel for this suddenly exposed group, many Jewish students identifying it as their religious and ethnic homeland, a protective bulwark against pogrom and holocaust. Witness to the Genocide launched October 8 posed widespread insecurity.
Defenders of Israel don’t concede Apartheid and some pro-Palestinians won’t concede the priority and sanctity of Jewish identity of those identified with Israel.
Neither grasps that two things can be true: that racist targeting can unfold simultaneously with a colonial Genocide and neither can be tolerated. The incomprehension of those acting in resistance to the Genocide destroys their credibility, as they retaliate with racism against racism. The incomprehension of State Zionism advocates, under the strong arm of AIPAC and ADL, degenerates into McCarthyism, dissent identified as ‘antisemitism.’ Its most ironic and pathetic demonstration concerns the pro-Israel targeting of Jewish opponents of the Genocide. It illustrates with transparency how the sensitivities and struggles of those students who identify with Israel in relation to statements of ‘anti-Zionism’ reflects their political sensitivity, and not alone racial vulnerability. How do Jews pose a racial threat to other Jews?
They don’t, although they are named as racially culpable in Rep. Foxx’s report and in a January 2, 2024 statement by Columbia Jewish Alumni Association (CJAA), holding the Columbia Administration at fault in failing to bar Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) from activity. The political myopia is spelled out thus: ‘JVP hosted an event, purportedly for the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, in which they celebrated “solidarity and resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds,” a reference to the Hamas massacre of October 7. JVP boasted about the event on their social media channels and disseminated pamphlets all around the campus.’ To extrapolate from ‘solidarity and resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds’ to an embrace of October 7 terror is bizarre. It extracts malignant innuendo from an emphatic statement of principle and solidarity. Namely, in this instance, that
Indigenous Palestinians are victim to Israeli Apartheid, militarized terror and governance, discrimination, and ethnic cleansing and Genocide, in a fight for individual and communal survival which demands from its victims everything: ‘seemingly insurmountable odds,’ indeed! note 52
Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism and Rep. Foxx’s findings and reporting are prompts for searching discussion and intervention, sadly, however, obstructive ideologically: suppressing the larger politics and history in which the crisis afflicting the Israel identified Jewish students and their universities has now unfolded; i.e., Annexation and Genocide.
A chasm of understanding and experience unfolds. Those uncritically committed to Israel will not admit that violation of Indigenous sovereignty is, definitionally, colonial or neocolonial. The Genocide in Gaza is, for many, a ‘war of defense.’ Militarily enforced settler terror in the West Bank is minimized, dismissed as ’mistaken’ or ‘stupid.’ Trailing far behind is simple acknowledgment of past and ongoing expulsion and terror and eventual territorial confinement as Apartheid, Gaza ‘the largest prison on earth.’ Now the largest execution chamber.
And Rep. Foxx now accuses Columbia University of a ‘surrender’ to the protestors, substituting her asserted legislative authority over that of a private university, overriding and aborting internal review, pressuring action against protestors for direct referral to the University Judicial Board, toward discipline or expulsion for exercising constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment assembly and redress. note 53
An action outside the Harvard Business School October 18, 2023 followed an explosion at the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, killing hundreds. An Israeli Jewish man intrusively photographing participants during the solemn student action, a ‘die-in,’ was ushered away. According to the Harvard Crimson, two of those students, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo — a student at the Harvard Divinity School — and Ibrahim I. Bharmal — a student jointly enrolled at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School — now stand accused of assault and battery and violating the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act in their confrontation with the Jewish graduate student. A viral video of the episode led to a firestorm of national condemnation of the ‘antisemitism’ demonstrated by the encounter, demanding the students be disciplined or charged. Protesters attested:
“This student was masked/covered to hide his identity and was taking photos two inches from our faces as we were lying unprotected,” one social media user said on X. “He was close to stepping on us, and we were afraid he would.”
Another wrote: “A man was weaving across us as we were laying down peacefully mourning lives lost in Gaza, getting close to our faces and taking invasive pics. The safety marshals asked him to leave and escorted him.” note 54
The man in the video is not masked, but clearly documented invasively photographing the mass of students, on the ground in corpse pose. While ushered away from the solemn gathering, he momentarily stopped photographing and shortly resumed, the point of the physical encounter, again, discouraging his surveillance.
While ushered, students yelled at him, ‘shame, shame, shame,’ in reply to his behavior. The videos do not document ‘hate speech’ or any reference to his identity or ethnicity.
Were the students entitled to the solemn occasion without surveillance as their civil right?
This question is omitted in the firestorm of condemnation of ‘antisemitism,’ preposterous on the basis of the video documentation.
The Foxx report and the Kestenbaum brief expose a plurality of disturbing episodes of racial targeting, and a few highly disturbing, but still isolated episodes of physical harassment and assault. The episodes of prejudicial speech also happen to fall under First Amendment guarantees, now fraying and threatening to break, demanding and necessitating discussion and censure, not legislation and prosecution.
As usual, the documents, condemning protest, make short shrift of the protesting Jewish students. The Jewish protagonists referenced in the documents are glossed over, their Judaism sometimes not mentioned. Paragraph 72 of Kestenbaum cites this episode:
‘On September 21, 2023, Harvard Divinity invited former Palestine Liberation Organization spokeswoman Diana Buttu to speak in Harvard Divinity’s main building at a screening of Israelism, a film that argues American Jews raise their children with pro-Israel indoctrination. Buttu claimed that Jews are trained to mistreat Palestinians, a behavior she said they learned facing Nazi extermination at Auschwitz. Antisemitic tropes displayed during that screening drew applause rather than denunciation. Kestenbaum, who attended the screening along with Harvard Divinity Interim Dean David Holland and nearly all of Harvard Divinity’s Religion and Public Life Department faculty, was caused to have anxiety and gross discomfort as a result of that Harvard sponsored antisemitic event.’ note 55
The Times of Israel reported August 13, 2023, a few weeks before October 7, former IDF General Amaram Levin describing ‘processes in Israel were similar to some in Europe in the years leading up to the Holocaust’:
‘“We find it difficult to say it, but that’s the truth,” Levin responded. “Look around Hebron, look at streets, streets that Arabs can’t use, only Jews, that’s exactly what happened in countries like that.”
‘Pressed on whether he saw specific similarities with Nazi Germany, Levin said: “Of course. It hurts, it’s not nice, but that’s the reality. It’s better to deal with it, even if it is hard, than to ignore it.”’ note 56
Haaretz reported in 2010 of explicit Nazi identification among IDF. ‘…Haaretz correspondent Dan Sagir interviewed a deputy company commander in the armored corps whose unit served in Jenin at the start of the intifada,’ disclosing:
‘”The battalion knew we were a company of ‘killers,'” the officer – the son of Holocaust survivors – related. “We were for an aggressive solution. We tried to shoot using all means, we injected gas into schools from which stones were thrown at us. In the battalion we were known as the ‘Auschwitz company’ or the ‘Demjanjuks’ because we made such extensive use of gas.”’ note 57
Would the warnings from highly placed Jewish officers of the Israeli armed forces pose such ‘anxiety and gross discomfort,’ prompting a law suit? Or, perhaps, prompting action, and dissent, as they should. On the foundation of searching intergenerational trauma work, extirpating the shadows enlisting Jews into identification with their past exterminators.
The drafters of the Kestenbaum legal brief appear to have overlooked of the film, Israelism (2023), prompting the discussion that its directors, Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen,
are Jewish artists ‘who share a similar story to the film’s protagonists.’ The film web site explains the plot:
‘Two young American Jews – Simone Zimmerman and Eitan – are raised to defend the state of Israel at all costs. Eitan joins the Israeli military. Simone supports Israel on ‘the other battlefield:’ America’s college campuses. When they witness Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian people with their own eyes, they are horrified and heartbroken.
‘They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.’ note 58
Anti-nationalist Jewish students, exemplifying the film, described their commanding, dissident role, as Jews:
‘On the first night of Passover, Jewish students from Columbia University and Barnard College led a “Gaza liberation seder” inside their encampment. Some participants wore kippot made to look like watermelon, which symbolizes the Palestinians flag, while others donned Keffiyehs. Alongside the traditional items on the seder plate, watermelon was also included. As Jewish students led around 100 of their peers in song and prayer, they spoke of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
‘At encampments across the country, Jewish students led similar Passover seders. At Yale, hundreds attended a seder organized by the Yale group Jews for Ceasefire and the New Haven Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. As protesters gathered around a sheet painted to look like a seder table, they spoke of Palestinians’ suffering in Gaza. Others held banners that read: “Our Seder plates are empty, stop starving Gaza” and “Another Jew for a free Palestine.”’ note 59
Only in its entirety can encompassing discussion be ensured, including both deplorable racial targeting and political and physical annihilation. Why one and not the other? Embracing both, in an enlightened, humanistic university setting, would allow for the overcoming of the personalization of politics which has sometimes poisoned the protest.
On August 30, 2024, Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism released an excellent guide supporting wholistic academic discussion: ‘Report #2: Columbia University Student Experiences of Antisemitism and Recommendations for Promoting Shared Values and Inclusion’. The work of this task force is a key link surmounting the personalization that infects rhetoric, and the subjugation of speech that infiltrates legislative maneuvering, in suppression of discussion and protest. The delicate line between legislating acceptable political speech and prejudicial speech is one best left to the corrective forces of rigorous debate and social self regulation, rather than political authority, crossing into authoritarianism. Institutional laxity, where prejudice infiltrates, can and must be corrected, through the forces of publicity as opposed to narrowing of permissible speech to the point of its suffocation.
The Antisemitism Task Force document provides a model. The document insists on the capacity and clarifies the true responsibility of the University to address and redress unacceptable speech in the promotion of civil discussion and debate, leaving the legislators to conduct the nation’s business. note 60
A Jewish student at the University of Rochester, Gabe Hart, wrote in the student newspaper of his experience of ‘antisemitism’ in an encampment. He pled, ‘I am not advocating for externally imposed censorship; I am upset that people decline to change their own speech when they are told it is hurtful.’ A comment movingly validated his plea, and the necessity and possibility, as Mr. Hart insisted, on respectful listening, not censorship, demonstrating the necessary and possible dialog:
‘Hi Gabe,
‘This is a very important point. As an Arab student who routinely participates in SJP’s protests, I think that some of the slogans and messaging have to be updated, and the voice of Jewish students should be taken into account. Dismissal is exactly what brought us to this point (where the lives of thousands do not matter), and it is in no one’s interest that when Arab/Palestinian voices rise, they dismiss Jewish ones.
Thanks for writing this. Mohammad Y. Abdelshafy’ note 61
On May 9, the Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) Canada Student presented ‘Submission to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights Re: Study of Antisemitism – More Repression Will Not Make Jewish Students Safer,’ in response to Parliamentary Hearings launched by MP Anthony Housefather, modeled on Rep. Foxx’s U.S. congressional intervention, passionately and eloquently pleading:
‘We see a concerning trend across the US and Canada where claims of antisemitism, and policy adopted in the name of preventing antisemitism, are used as an excuse to suppress or criminalize student protests, Palestinian solidarity movements, and even the right to express certain political views in public. They have been used as justification for calling in extreme police violence to break up otherwise peaceful solidarity encampments.
‘If we are afraid for Jewish student safety on campuses with Palestinian solidarity encampments, it is because we have seen the police violence that students, including Jewish students, face when administrators call in militarized police forces. It is because we have seen the way particular factions of pro-Israel counter-protesters have violently attacked many peaceful encampments already.
‘We are afraid that this trend will escalate to McCarthy-era levels of repression in the US, affecting society well beyond the university campus, and with these hearings on antisemitism we are worried that Canada may be considering a similarly disastrous path.
‘Many of us have witnessed first-hand the discrepancies between the actions of aggressive pro-Israel counter-protesters on our campuses, and the way those experiences are later depicted online as experiences of antisemitism.
‘It’s also frightening to face that kind of aggression and intimidation ourselves, on our own campus grounds. Many of us have experienced being yelled at, physically intimidated, pushed, threatened with doxing, and more, simply for holding signs or otherwise expressing our views. Many of us have been targeted by other Jews specifically because we are Jewish and supporting Palestinian solidarity.’ note 62
An IJP ‘Submission to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights Re: Study of Antisemitism,’ by Sheryl Nestel, PhD (sheryl.nestel@utoronto.ca) rebuked claims of antisemitism in the protests:
‘Statistical reports on levels of antisemitism should be interpreted with caution. While evidence that antisemitism is a significant threat is indisputable, statistical reports on antisemitism which equate Jew hatred with criticism of Israel exaggerate this threat. Attempts to rank marginalized groups according to reported incidents of hate crimes are likely inaccurate given that marginalized groups consistently under-report hate crimes to police and other authorities. Reports on hate crimes or incidents of antisemitism frequently mis-attribute the growth of antisemitism to the movement for Palestinian human rights. There are serious criticisms that can be leveled, for example, against the widely-cited B’nai Brith Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents and against B’nai Brith’s specific claims about antisemitism in Canada. Chief among these are: inclusion of expressions of criticism of Israel as incidents of antisemitism; complete lack of methodological transparency; obfuscation of evidence of low levels of antisemitic sentiment among the Canadian public; and disregard of evidence of the attitudes about antisemitism of Canadian Jews themselves.2 Similar critiques have been articulated about the antisemitism statistics published by Jewish organizations in the U.S.3 Professor Robert Brym, noted University of Toronto sociologist and one of the leading scholars of contemporary Canadian Jewish life, concludes that the recent reported rise in incidents by B’nai Brith can probably be attributed to some degree to the conflation of “antisemitic and anti-Israel acts.”’ note 63
Dr. Nestel continued:
‘Claims that opposition to political Zionism, including anti-Zionism, is equivalent to antisemitism are not substantiated by recent academic research in Canada. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, a document endorsed by 350 of the world’s most respected Holocaust and Jewish Studies scholars, has deemed that the following action is not antisemitic:
Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.
In a study conducted in February 2024, University of Toronto Professor Robert Brym concluded that “negative attitudes toward Israel are more widespread than negative attitudes toward Jews among all segments of Canada’s non-Jewish population” thus disproving the argument that Canadian critics of Israel necessarily harbour antisemitic sentiment. note 64
and the Unfolding Domestic Terror…
Meanwhile, with attention focused on the campuses, attention to demonstrable lethal domestic community threat, including the campuses, is inadequate. In November, Paul Kessler, 69, a Jewish man, died from injuries sustained during skirmishing at parallel actions for Israel and for Palestine in Thousand Oaks, Ca. Mr. Kessler fell when he was struck in the head by a proPalestine protester and further injured when his head struck the ground, dying within a day. His assailant, charged with murder, has not been charged with a hate crime. A proIsrael Jewish student, Rebecca, was knocked down and kicked in her head at the UCLA encampment, necessitating emergency care. note 65
Harm to Muslims and pro-Palestinians has included multiple episodes of lethality and near lethality.
It includes the October murder of the six year old Palestinian-American child in Chicago. The child was stabbed 26 times. His surviving mother, a West Bank native, was stabbed 10 times. Their landlord, having challenged his tenant about events in the Middle East and seeking her eviction, was being investigated for a hate crime. It includes the November shooting of the three Palestinian men in Vermont, all survivors of settler violence in the West Bank. In November at Stanford University, an Arab Muslim man was struck by a car driven by a white man, yelling, ‘fuck you and your people.’ Police in Austin, Texas called the February stabbing of a 23 year old Palestinian American man a ‘bias motivated incident.’ The man was returning from a pro-Palestine rally when he was stabbed. It includes the June episode in which a Jewish woman at a swimming pool in Texas challenged the Muslim Palestinian woman wearing a hijab about her country of origin and then attempted to drown her three year old and grabbed at her six year old who fled. The perpetrator is charged with attempted capital murder. A seven year old Yemeni American Muslim wearing a hijab was cut in the throat at a park in Dearborn on October 8 by a seventy-three year old man. The child was provided emergency care. The man, suffering severe mental illness and vulnerable to the racist panic, is jailed, charged with intent to murder and felonious assault.
It includes the masked proIsrael mob attacking the UCLA Encampment over a period of hours as the IDF-trained LAPD, along with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol and UC Police Department, stood by, eventually engaging in their own mob assault on the helpless students, in riot gear. note 66
Journalist Isabelle Friedman reported May 3 of the experience of student reporters attempting to cover the UCLA encampment, ‘Our reporters were gassed, assaulted and threatened with arrest. Myself and others were forced to vacate a building near the encampment after having been assured access by a vice chancellor so we could cover events safely. The same building was later used by police in their raid.’ note 67
The Nation reported May 8 on repression and harassment of student reporters, faithful as they are to the reality of the actions they are courageously attempting to document. note 62
The tragic episode September 12 of the attacking proPalestine protester who was shot by the non-Jewish proIsrael actor Scott Hayes has been widely judged self-defense. Video of the shooting demonstrates two of Hayes’ proteges supporting him as he subdues and guns his attacker. ProPalestine reports include frustrated efforts to warn Newton police of Mr. Hayes’ gun wielding and persistent provocations, including proPalestine Jewish protesters. Concerns also included Mr. Hayes’ social media activity. A May 19 post was a close-up photo of a gun, with the hashtag, ‘”Hey Jew haters. Bring it.” note 68
The violence includes the poison assault of eight Encampment students at Columbia in a ‘skunking,’ a substance employed by the IDF in its terror regime in the Occupation. Three victims were hospitalized.
Columbia University Professor Katherine Franke is under threat of termination for remarks in an interview January 25, 2024 concerning the skunking episode:
‘So, the students were protesting in the main quad of the university last Friday. And we’ve had a series of protests. Our students are outraged at what’s going on, in our name and with our tax dollars, in Gaza. And while they were protesting — and, I will say, peacefully — last Friday, as your recording of Layla’s recounting of what happened, they all of the sudden smelled this horrible stench. And I’ve smelled skunk water when I’ve been in the West Bank at protests. It is horrible.
‘And what the students were able to do is examine video from that protest and identify, I think, three older students. We have a — Columbia has a program. It’s a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel. And it’s something that many of us were concerned about, because so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military
service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past. But we’ve never seen anything like this. And the students were able to identify three of these exchange students, basically, from Israel, who had just come out of military service, who were spraying the pro-Palestinian students with this skunk water. And they were
disguised in keffiyehs so that they could mix in with the students who were demanding that the university divest from companies that are supporting the occupation and the war, and were protesting and demanding a ceasefire. So we know who they were. The university waited three or four days to actually even say anything about it. They have not reached out to the students who were sick, as you noted, some of whom are still in the hospital. I spoke to one student last night in the hopes that we could get one of them on your show this morning, and he was so mentally and physically disabled from this attack that he said, “I haven’t left my dorm room in a week.” So, our students are in terrible distress about this, both those who were sprayed and those who weren’t. There was another protest yesterday, and the students were actually quite afraid to come back onto the campus.’ note 69
Prof. Franke’s factual and soberly framed remarks are occasion by Columbia to accuse her of recommending ‘Israelis’ be excluded from the University’s exchange program. Her statement reportedly made Jewish students feel ‘uncomfortable.’
Indeed, many remarkable and necessary extrapolations from Prof. Franke’s account are thus overlooked, very much including the University’s pattern of disregarding the threat to Palestinian students, over a period of years. It is instead, once more, the Israel-identified Jewish students said to be endangered. A pattern culminating in the skunking assault on the eight proPalestine students is deflected, and, by omission, justified and reinforced. The authorities ignore the stated concern, and its messenger is made the target on the basis of a fiction. Professor Franke is accused of non-existent racism while exposing a real, lethal victimization and its precedents. Her threat to a brittle, politically subjugated order is evident, and her courage is monumental, exposing and challenging.
Kathleen Paratis is the attorney representing Prof. Franke. Her law firm, Outten & Golden Law Firm, with a specialty in representing clients falsely accused by their employers, dropped Prof. Franke as a client because of the ‘controversy’ surrounding her activism. Ms. Paratis resigned from the firm, and now represents Prof. Franke under the auspices of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Prof. Franke’s attorney, Ms. Paratis, is Jewish. note 70
On September 5, Prof. Franke described the academically subjugated atmosphere that has transformed Columbia, noting the University’s interference in professors’ authority over course readings, restricted from assigning readings discussing Israel’s settler and colonial agency. Prof. Franke relates, ‘Almost all of these professors are Jewish professors, experts in things like the Holocaust and collective trauma.’
Zakiriya H. Gladney, a double concentrator in Statistics and Social Studies, reported similarly of Harvard’s repression on October 10:
‘The punishments for pro-Palestine activism are harsher than for anyone else, and rules are applied strictly to anyone who dares mention Palestine across the University. ‘These disparities aren’t just coincidences, they reflect a long history of denying the ‘very existence of Palestine and Palestinians — a lie central to anti-Palestinian racism.’ note 71
The students, often dismissed for their ‘youth’ and their inexperience, under the tutelage of engaged professors and corresponding life experience, are actually the best informed contingent of our citizenry.
Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism paid due regard to concerns over Islamophobia. The University authorities would do well to adhere to its guidelines in deferring to Prof. Franke’s advocacy, and by no means to punish her for it. Meanwhile, the legislators are notably unconcerned with the danger to Muslim students, acting as if the Jewish advocates and scholars don’t exist, let alone concerned with executing their constitutionally sworn duty to protecting the free speech of the dissident students.
The anti-nationalist Jewish students cited May 9 in Haaretz are another excellent source for University guidance:
‘“While campuses may be riddled with hateful rhetoric and simplistic binaries now, it is never too late to start repairing the fractures and begin developing meaningful relationships across political and religious divides,” the students write.’ note 72
This is the paramount responsibility of the Universities in the unfolding crisis: to ensure and facilitate and insist upon such dialog. Never, under any circumstances, to threaten its possibility.
Sen. Eugene McCarthy was of the moment and also prophetic in his preface (1970) to The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel, a history of the 1968 Columbia University student uprising:
‘Of most serious concern to students is the militarization of American life as well as the militarization of academic life. Universities are in trouble which is to a large extent of their own making, either because of what they have done or permitted to happen, or because of what they have not done or what they have not prevented from happening.’ note 73
This is Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) today, affirming Sen. McCarthy’s vision of the committed students, fifty-fours years later:
‘We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.’ note 74
Here is historical context concerning the threat to dissent. Noam Chomsky in 2016 responded to Secretary Clinton recounting her husband’s 1996 Camp David effort:
‘Some of what she said is quite accurate. I’m strongly, I’m very happy that she has agreed that one should not shut down debate on this issue on campus. She’s about 40 years too late. Over the past decades I have plenty of experience with the few other people who talk about this issue have similar experience of trying to give talks on the topic on university campuses – with police protection, with meetings broken up, violently, with airport style security at entrances. Even at my own university [MIT], until not long ago, not only did there have to be a police presence, but the police insisted on walking me back to my car. Just because of the threat of violence. So, that’s been going on for decades, and it’s very nice that Miss Clinton has decided, yes, that maybe it would be nice to have free and open debate on campus: as there is now, for the first time, and it’s a good thing that there is – that there is now a possibility of free and open debate on campuses. You can find, if you search, marginal cases of excesses. It reminds of, back around 1970, when people like Seymour Martin Lipset, were desperately searching through local Black newspapers to see if they could find antisemitic comments somewhere so they could then condemn the Black movements as antisemitic. You know, you can understand the game… But the fact of the matter is now there is for the first time free, open, extensive discussion and debate on campus. Not perfect, by any means. You can find things on all sides. But radically different from before.’
“It reminds of, back around 1970, when people like Seymour Martin Lipset, were desperately searching through local Black newspapers to see if they could find antisemitic comments somewhere so they could then condemn the Black movements as antisemitic. You know, you can understand the game… But the fact of the matter is now there is for the first time free, open, extensive discussion and debate on campus. Not perfect, by any means. You can find things on all sides. But radically different from before.”
– Noam Chomsky
Chomsky then filled in the historical record concerning ‘the peace process’ in the years following Camp David, until sabotage by Israel in 2001, adhering to Likud’s principle: ‘between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty’:
‘As to Clinton’s famous offer, alas, at Camp David, Mrs. Clinton may remember that Clinton himself recognized that it was inadequate. A couple months later, in December, he—after Camp David, he issued what he called his parameters for a settlement. Both sides accepted them. Both sides had reservations. Israel had extremely severe reservations. They were to negotiate these in Taba in January 2001. Negotiations took place. They were called off by Israel at a point where the negotiators, at least, say they were coming pretty close to an agreement, an agreement which was much less extreme on the pro-Israel side than the Clinton proposals. Well, Prime Minister Barak himself has said, informally, that—maybe, I presume, correctly—that the Israeli negotiators at Taba had no authority to negotiate anything, so it was kind of a show.
The sequence precipitated the Second Intifada, at the end of 2001, ‘when power is being lost…’ Chomsky continued:
‘…But one part [of Secretary Clinton’s comments] was correct. Namely, it’s a good idea to protect the right of free discussion and debate on campus. It’s a shame that that never occurred to her for the past 40 years, when it was impossible to have debate and discussion without violence, police protection and so on.’ note 75
Susan Akram validated Chomsky as long ago as 2002:
‘Through a campaign primarily on college campuses organized against groups and individuals on these lists, AIPAC and ADL harassed and intimidated academics and activists for years.’ note 77
Akram elaborated:
‘Although the direct connection between ADL and Israeli and South African intelligence only became public as a result of the ADL 1993 lawsuit, ADL’s intelligence-gathering in cooperation with Israel apparently began years before. In a July 7, 1961 letter, ADL national director Benjamin Epstein asked Saul Joftes, a senior official of the B’nai B’rith for $25,000 help fund spying operations against Arabs. “As you know… the Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda… In the course of our work, we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular Offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Office, an the Organization of Arab Students. In order to obtain complete and thorough data on these activities, we must follow the Arab diplomatic corps in the political efforts, lobbying activities and propaganda programs emanating from their embassies… [as well as] Arab relations with organizations like the American Friends of the Middle East and all their professional publicity efforts. Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli Government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each that we were the source…” Quoted in Robert Friedman “How the Anti-Defamation League Censors Books, Intimidates Librarians, and Spies on Citizens,” The Village Voice, July 27, 1993, p. 38 note 78
“As you know… the Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda… In the course of our work, we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular Offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Office, an the Organization of Arab Students. In order to obtain complete and thorough data on these activities, we must follow the Arab diplomatic corps in the political efforts, lobbying activities and propaganda programs emanating from their embassies… [as well as] Arab relations with organizations like the American Friends of the Middle East and all their professional publicity efforts. Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli Government.”
In a July 7, 1961 letter, ADL national director Benjamin Epstein asked Saul Joftes, a senior official of the B’nai B’rith for $25,000 help fund spying operations against Arabs.
In 2023 and 2024, violence, and its threat, to the dissidents exposing Israel’s criminal regime, including the journalistic documentation of political action against that regime, has, of course, resumed. Henry A. Giroux reported May 9, 2024, ‘Campus Protests Are Fighting Militarism and Corporatization at Home and Abroad’:
‘Historian Rick Perlstein astutely observes that military-like responses to campus protests today would have been unimaginable in the 1960s. He highlights some of the most egregious abuses against faculty members, underscoring their significance. In a piece for The American Prospect he writes:
‘“At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream “What are you doing?” at cops being taken down with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended by her university for her trouble.) At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old professor, a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was “lucky to be alive” after absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp.”’ note 79
Police repression and violence against protesters at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions included targeting journalists. note 80
Several bills have been proposed in the California State Legislature suppressing Genocide protest. note 81
The Underreporting of Jewish Anti-Zionist resistance
The repression includes the arrest of Samuel Seligson on charges of criminal mischief and ‘hate crimes’ for ‘allegedly filming pro-Palestinian activists hurling red paint at the homes of top officials of the Brooklyn Museum, part of a campaign by activists demanding the institution divest from Israel.’ Seligson’s home has been raided twice.
Seligson is a Jewish journalist whose state intimidation and repression is another terrifying harbinger. note 82
Meanwhile, community action against the Genocide is denounced as ‘antisemitic violence.’ A promotional event for sales of West Bank homes was held March 10 in Teaneck, NJ at Congregation Keter Torah synagogue. A demonstration exposing the synagogue’s complicity in the real estate promotion ‘occasioned “some Israel supporters”’ to ‘[criticize] the protest, calling it a pro-Hamas event. The demonstration is a “cynical attempt to target a religious institution under false pretenses as part of a coordinated and malicious campaign to harass Teaneck’s Jewish community,” said Yigal Gross, a spokesman for the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee.’ note 83
But this is the origin of the synagogue actions, in the words of Rich Seigel, on X:
‘My name is Rich Seigel. I’m a twenty-five year home owner here in Teaneck. I’m Jewish. The reason that I’m telling you I’m Jewish is because I have a concern about something that is going on in the Jewish community. On March 10 there is scheduled to be an Israeli sales event at the Keter Torah Synagogue. That event violates both domestic law and international law. It violates domestic law because we had a Civil Rights Act in 1965 and a Fair Housing Act in 1968. We don’t allow real estate events to be for whites only or Jews only or anybody only. Now, as Jews, we don’t to get to fly under the radar and break the law and hide it in a synagogue. It violates international law because West Bank settlement homes are going to be available for sale at this real estate event. On the web site it lists three different West Bank settlements. Those settlements are, in and of themselves, illegal by international law. If we allow this sale to go through we are enabling a local synagogue to violate both domestic anti-discrimination laws and international law. Now, there’s other reasons. There’s a genocide going on right now. I don’t care how that offends. More than 35,000 people have been killed. More than 13,000 children have been killed. People in this community are in deep mourning. People in this community are angry. I’m angry. What this real estate event is going to do is it’s going to fan the flames. If it goes forward there will be a demonstration.’
‘I know there’s going to be a demonstration, because I am going to organize it. It will be very well attended. What I’m saying needs to be done is I don’t know how much power this Mayor and this Council have to actually shut down the event. But I know you have the power to recommend that it be shut down and I’m asking you to please do it. We don’t need to have more divisiveness in this community. Ok? We don’t need to have Jewish privilege rule the day by saying, “we’re entitled to break the law and have this real estate event and not care about how so many people in this community feel about it.” Thank you for letting me speak.’ note 84
The action organized by Mr. Seigel was the prototype of a June 23 protest at Adas Torah Synagogue in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles protest drew denunciations from President Biden, Gov. Newsom, and Mayor Karen Bass for its ‘violence’ and ‘antisemitism.’
‘Politicians and Jewish community groups condemned the violence at Adas Torah as an act of antisemitism. There was criticism of police tactics from both groups, and U.S. Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland said his office would investigate. The clash was widely referred to as a “pogrom.”’ note 85
By contrast, the Jewish Forward reported:
‘The scene recalled a fracas at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA the night of April 30 which began when a pro-Israel mob arriving after the conclusion of Passover lobbed fireworks, poles and other items at the encampment and tried to tear down its makeshift walls. That incident was condemned by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and UCLA’s Hillel, who said the agitators did not represent the community or the pro-Israel cause.’ note 86
The National Review reported, ‘Anti-Israel Mob Beats Woman in Riot Outside Los Angeles Synagogue.’ Video (see link) of the alleged attack is posted on X, picturing a furious take down of a helpless person. note 87
On June 29, Glen Sacks contributed a sophisticated critique of the protest for Salon, disassembling the ‘attack on a House of Worship’ narrative, correcting the National Review, ’No, the L.A. synagogue protest wasn’t a “pogrom” – that’s a gross misuse of history’. He disputes the ‘Anti-Israel Mob,’ as had the Forward:
‘The regrettable violence at Adas Torah protests involved clashes between protesters rather than antisemitic attacks.’
‘In a widely-circulated post, British journalist Nioh Berg claimed, ‘They’re beating up Jewish women in broad daylight now,’ and others posted this photo [see link] of the “Jewish woman.” In fact, the pro-Israeli counter-protester in question is a young man named Naftoli Sherman, who had a pro-Palestinian protester in a headlock and ended up bloodied.’ [emphasis added] note 88
The assailing actor, a bald, burley man, identified by Sacks as a pro-Israeli counter protester, would appear not to be Naftoli Sherman, depicted in various videos, including his own Instagram, as a bloodied, slight blond man. The large man appears to upset everyone surrounding his takedown. Departing by himself as he ends the take down, pro-Palestine protesters are seen photographing and yelling at him, as he leaves the scene. Seemingly by himself, the question is raised whether he is a provocateur, without any political allegiance, and certainly not a pro-Palestine protester ‘beating up a Jewish woman.’ as reported by the National Review. (The credibility of the National Review has since been destroyed with its republication of a cartoon of Rep. Tlaib with a pager exploding on her desk. The cartoon was part of a slanderous campaign falsely alleging Tlaib had targeted a DA prosecuting protesting students on the basis of her Jewish identity.) note 89
Mr. Sacks included this personal testimony in his critique:
‘Both of my grandfathers escaped the antisemitic pogroms of early 20th century Russia —massacres perpetrated by the ultra-nationalist ‘Black Hundreds’ thugs egged on by Tsar Nicholas II, known as ‘Bloody Nicholas.’ For American leaders today, Jewish and otherwise, to draw an analogy between last Sunday’s legitimate protest and the murderous pogroms of that era demonstrates how unreasonable the American reaction to Pro-Palestinian protests has become.’
Further demystifying ‘antisemitic violence,’ Sack’s article is illustrated by a photograph of the real estate action, with signs reading, ‘Israeli Jew Against Land Theft’ and ‘Jews against Genocide.’ note 90
A photo illustrating MSN’s report, ‘Organizers of Israeli Real Estate Event in LA Under Investigation in NJ,’ shows protesters in front of the synagogue holding signs, ’Jews Against Land Theft’ and ‘Buying Stolen Land is not a Jewish Value.’ note 91
Video (see link) depicts pro-Israel actor Sherman, bloodied, wielding a stick, reported as an instigator, the videographer himself eventually struck by another pro-Israel actor: https://x.com/doloresquintana/status/1805842046047207804
This video also documented the bloodied pro-Israeli, this videographer also struck and chased by pro-Israel proteges:
— Sean Beckner-Carmitchel (@ACatWithNews) June 24, 2024
An ABC news report condemned ‘the violence,’ and ‘the antisemitism,’ and ‘people being wrestled to the ground,’ depicting the proPalestinian protester tackled the ground, also reporting ‘no injuries’ or hospitalizations. It further reported, ’…one arrest, a proIsraeli protester who had a flag with a spike on the end of it seen as a weapon here in LA but only one arrest.’ note 92
The Forward described this video (see link) as ‘protesters blocking the synagogue.’ Careful, repeated viewing reveals a handful of peaceful protesters (including a jovial middle aged man in a Yarmulke), peacefully assembled, holding hands, surrounded by police: https://x.com/TodayisAmerica/status/1804954592612110371
The scene appears to capture the contained action, before the pro-Israeli actors descended.
In short, there was no ‘pogrom’ at Adas Torah Synagogue. To the contrary, and as usual: a pro-Palestine Jewish contingent was conspicuous, invalidating ‘pogrom.’
Jewish action against the West Bank real estate marketing also occurred at a Toronto synagogue: ‘…Chelsey Lichtman, a member of advocacy group Jews Say No to Genocide, said it’s “sacrilegious” to use synagogues as places to hold real estate events. The synagogues are holding events that [are] trying to get Canadians to invest in stolen Palestinian land in Israel,” said Lichtman, who works as a real estate agent. Selling stolen Palestinian land contributes to the ongoing colonization of Palestinian people.” note 93
For the illegal West Bank real estate event schedule: https://realestateisrael.org/
Meanwhile, another Congressional bill, the Anti-BDS Labeling Act (H.R. 5179), would permit products made in the Occupied West Bank to read ‘Made in Israel,’ marking direct Congressional complicity in the Genocide as it engulfs the West Bank. note 94
See these sites for documentation of the massive, sustained Jewish resistance: Extensive video documenting mass Jewish action for Palestine: https://x.com/JVP_LA And: ’thousands of orthodox Jews came out against #israel saying free #Palaestine and #Zionist Doest [sic] represent Jews’: https://x.com/Imt_Tahir/status/1715098818050765004 And: ’Hundreds arrested as US Jews protest against Israel’s Gaza assault,’ October 19, 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/19/jewish-protest-israel-gaza-washington-dc
Jewish anti-zionism is intentionally buried amidst the false reporting and the inquisitorial investigations and the suppressive laws.
Purporting to ‘protect’ Jews, the laws are the state protecting itself from the perceived interference of the popular will, including principled Jewish will.
With emphasis on ‘antisemitic violence,’ one hears little of proIsrael violence and antiPalestinian violence, no denunciation by mainstream politicians, no new laws to regulate it.
The real threat is not antisemitism. The threat is its weaponization, suppressing all of the dissidents, in the advancing inquisition. The danger to Jews is our eventual scapegoating for escalating U.S./Israeli Genocide, as it expands regionally, perhaps globally.
Yes, the savagery has a name: Genocide, ever expanding
Israel’s West Bank annexation is attested by Haaretz columnist Michael Sfard, ‘Smotrich Has Completed Israel’s Annexation of the West Bank,’ Jul 11, 2024. note 95
Israel Foreign Minister Betzalel Smotrich asserts:
‘“We will establish sovereignty … first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements,” Smotrich said last week during a meeting, according to Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”’ note 96
Itamar Ben Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security is an agent in the West Bank Genocide:
‘Itamar Ben Gvir is another extremist settler who finds himself in one of the most powerful positions in Israel. The leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, Ben Gvir has been convicted at least eight times for crimes including incitement to racism, and was even exempted from military duty when he was 18 on account of his extremist politics. Fast-forward three decades, Ben Gvir is now the minister responsible for the Israeli police and has notably been responsible for handing out assault weapons without criteria to violent settlers.5 He has also continued and deepened the Israeli Police’s non-enforcement against settler violence, including against individuals who have been sanctioned.’ note 97
Gideon Levy and Alex Levak reported settler violence on August 9, ‘Theft, Beatings and Ceaseless Harassment: Who Will Be These Israeli Settlers’ Next Victim?’:
‘His masked friend is seen in one of Nawaj’ah’s clips, speaking into his phone. “They stole 10 of my cows,” he says, apparently to police officers. That’s the method here, according to the Palestinian shepherds: The settlers freely trespass with their herds or flocks – and then claim that the shepherds stole the livestock they themselves brought in. Sometimes the settlers mix their flocks with the Palestinians’ and steal sheep. Anything goes in this no-man’s land.
‘”Thank God, you took the cows, but I brought them back,” the settler is heard saying in another clip. And he adds, “Sde Teiman” – referring to the notorious detention center, where Israel Defense Forces soldiers have been accused of extreme sexual violence against Gazan prisoners – “that was great fun. I can only imagine what you and I could do there in a small cell, how much we would enjoy ourselves,” he says to Nawaj’ah, who retorts, “Do you know that it’s sexual harassment – what you you’re doing?” The settler: “Sexual harassment? In Tel Aviv it’s called love. It’s Pride Month now.” “Yallah, get out of here,” Nawaj’ah shouts back at him. “Don’t you want to be a normal human being?”
‘On Sunday, the settler was filmed by Nawaj’ah again, speaking Hebrew punctuated with bits of broken English. “Next time I won’t be nice. This is ‘second’ territory [meaning Area B of the West Bank, under Israeli military control]. This is my land. I dare you.” “Are you threatening me in my home?” Nawaj’ah asks. The settler: “I want to dance with you. You look so fresh, so sweet. Shimon, take his picture. You know Sde Teiman? Rape for the sake of heaven, as it’s said.”’ note 98
Levy and Levak reported February 17, 2024, ‘Palestinian Teens Are Writing Wills, and for a Good Reason: As Abdel Rahman Hamad, a high-school senior, walked home from school, an Israeli soldier shot him in the stomach, killing him. After his death a letter he wrote half a year earlier to his family turned up. He’s one of many teens in the West Bank who are writing their wills…’ note 93
Levy reported September 1, 2024: ’Under the shadow of war, the air force has started firing into the densely populated West Bank. According to UN figures, 630 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war began, 140 of them in 50 airstrikes. What is permitted in Gaza is now permitted in the West Bank.’ note 99
The White House is ‘deeply disturbed’ by the IDF murder on September 6 of American Ayşenur Eygi, 26, while participating in a peaceful protest against settler violence on the West Bank. But the American bullet fired by the IDF soldier killing the American citizen acting in the of midst of expanding Genocide poses only momentary public relations crisis for the White
House – until the IDF investigates for four days, as Levy explains:
‘Nothing is easier than labeling the American tourist an inciter: She was in favor of justice for Palestinians. Procedures will be honed and the soldiers will be sent to the shooting range for further practice. Please check passports before the next execution. It’s best not to hit Americans. No one will investigate the killing of a 13-year old Palestinian girl the same day, in a neighboring village. No one is troubled over that one. Maybe she too was inciting while standing at her window?’
Levy continues:
‘But our colleague Jonathan Pollak, who was in the village during the shooting, says that the soldiers shot the activist 20 minutes after the clashes had subsided. If that is the case, it was a cold-blooded killing. This was Aysenur’s first and last protest. ‘But what should really be of concern is the subtext of the IDF spokesman’s announcement: Incitement is a cause for execution. But incitement has many faces. If a call for Palestinian freedom is incitement carrying a death sentence, one is galloping down a slippery slope. Why won’t the police be permitted to kill inciters at the Kaplan Street demonstrations? And what about the greatest inciters in the government and the media, calling for the “flattening” of Gaza of for [sic] “mowing the lawn,” believing that the people there all deserve to die. Snipers, open fire. You have been authorized to do so by Hagari.’ note 100
A classic IDF ‘investigation.’ Akin to the town Sheriff in the deep American south in 1950 (or 2024) investigating a lynching. The White House ‘deep disturbance’ is quite relieved, in imperial contentment. As the ethnic cleansing witnessed by, and consuming, Aysenur explodes. What would happen if each of the murdered 630 Palestinians were the source of the White House’s ‘deep disturbance’? What if their names appeared in U.S. headlines with every IDF and settler murder? Now martyred in their cause, Ms. Aysenur would insist on it. note 101
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) describe the expansion of the Genocide throughout the Occupation – witnessed for the occasion by and the martyred Ms. Eygi – in its video ‘Conquer and Divide: the Shattering of Palestinian Space by Israel’:
‘In order to expand and consolidate control over the lands it occupied, Israel has applied myriad military, civilian, legal and administrative measured [sic] through which it has torn apart Palestinian space, divided the Palestinian population into dozens of disconnected enclaves and unraveled its social, cultural and economic fabric.’ note 102
It is the notorious two day Tulsa, Oklahoma race massacre of 1921 in the West Bank, or the Greensboro, NC Klan massacre in 1979, daily, supplemented with bombardment by air.
‘Israel is cutting off the northern West Bank, destroying roads, surrounding hospitals and implementing curfews there.’ note 103
On April 14, Gaia Dann, a female ex-IDF resister, asserted:
‘It is not about individual soldiers or units in the West Bank or Gaza and how they treat the Palestinians, it is the fact that there are soldiers there in the first place. The whole Israeli military is responsible for systematic oppression, occupation, massacre in Gaza and ethnic cleansing.’ note 104
Regarding the now international concern over Israel’s prison abuse, The Guardian reported August 5:
‘In a months-long investigation, B’Tselem interviewed 55 former prisoners housed in 16 Israeli prison service jails and detention centres run by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), mapping the scale and nature of abuse. The highly respected Jerusalem-based group concluded that Israel’s prisons should now be labelled “torture camps”.’ note 105
These are among the daily unfolding dynamics of Occupation, Annexation and Genocide, against which the protesters are acting and reacting and resisting.
Middle Eastern Violence, one tip of the dimming of U.S. Democracy
Your legislative gesture prohibiting State Department citation of GHM massacre statistics, passed with a majority of your House colleagues, including my own Democratic House Representative Joseph Morelle (copied), is a frightening suppression. Our unfolding authoritarian incursion is widely understood to be uniquely symptomatic of the openly fascist Republican U.S. Presidential candidate.
The understanding is a dangerous misunderstanding.
Tyrants and dictators do not originate in political and cultural vacuum. Small and large acts of cooperation and complicity by innumerable agents, and over long periods of time, are the imperative constituents of their eventual rule. That two of you are Democrats and that 60 of the supposedly democracy-, election-friendly party acclaimed your suppressive legislation demonstrates an advance of political censorship without which a Trump and a Plan 2025 itemizing his intended ‘unitary executive’ vision are not conceivable.
The Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Charles Schumer, called for P.M.’s resignation and new Israeli elections in March. Six weeks later, Sen. Schumer joined the invitation to the adjudicated war criminal to address a joint session of Congress. The Senator had not, certainly, denounced the Genocide. Perhaps the Senator concluded, with Haaretz columnist and activist Levy, Netanyahu’s resignation would not matter. Levy attested August 25:
‘Of all the possible candidates to replace Netanyahu – Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Yossi Cohen and Yair Golan – there is not a single one who is willing to release all the Palestinian prisoners and withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip. In other words, there is no one who is genuinely in favor of ending the war and freeing the hostages. There is also no one who intends ever to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders…
‘…For this, for the immortalization of apartheid, no leader of a Zionist party can attack Netanyahu: from Itamar Ben-Gvir to Yair Golan, they all agree with him. And that is the true cause for despair, it is the greatest of all reasons for hopelessness.’ note 106
The Majority Leader’s eventual capitulation to AIPAC ($1,725,324), welcoming (albeit coldly) the criminal leader to his august legislative body, is another harbinger. note 107
The progression anticipated the July 1 Supreme Court decision granting ex-President Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for his role attempting to violently subvert the results of the 2020 election. In its democracy-ending decision, the Supreme Court of the United States of America concurred with a disgraced, violent former President. The celebrated democratic transfer of U.S. Presidential power from Washington to Obama was repudiated by the nation’s highest judicial body.
Justice Sotomayor’s emphatic dissent provided decisive warning and serves as the counter-authority to those who persist in the belief in a rights based government, anchored in separate powers:
‘Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. The majority today endorses an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now. Settled understandings of the Constitution are of little use to the majority in this case, and so it ignores them.’ note 108
How is this relevant to the invitation of Israeli P.M. to address Congress? As backdrop to Mr. Netanyahu’s annihilatory campaign, he long sought control of his Supreme Court. Ex President Trump acquired such control during his Administration, in concert with the billionaires whose relationships with his appointees corruptly occasioned their July 1 decision, paving the way to the ex-President’s potential dictatorship.
Just as the billionaires thwarted the Constitutional rule of law in corrupt partnership with Trump’s Supreme Court appointees, Israeli lawmakers attempted to subvert the Israeli Supreme Court, delegating judicial authority to fascist Netanyahu.
Israeli pretensions to democracy again sabotaged, its lawmakers enabled the political basis of his fascist program: Annexation of the Occupied territories. Netanyahu’s consolidation of power did not unfold in a vacuum defined by his personal psychopathology alone. The method in his madness: Annexation (now greatly surpassed in frank annihilation).
On July 25, 2023 – two months prior to October 7 – Time Magazine carried the story, ‘What Israel’s Controversial Judicial Overhaul Means for Palestinians.’ Reporting the devastation to the Court’s authority, citing a variety of authorities, it explained, ’But perhaps the clearest statement of intent came from Netanyahu, who in December [2022] declared that the Jewish people have “an exclusive and indisputable right to all areas of the Land of Israel,” including the West Bank.’ The story continued:
“‘The whole notion of weakening the Supreme Court has a huge element of moving forward with Israeli annexation and with providing impunity to soldiers and settlers,’ says Mairav Zonszein, an Israel-based senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.” note 109
In a narrowly ruled decision January 1, 8-7, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down the July 25 Judicial Overhaul, reasserting its autonomy – just. While its fascist trend, like ours, hangs in the balance. note 110
Again, please note: this is July 25, 2023. 44 days prior to October 7 and October 8.
And on March 4, Haaretz’s Ido Baum contributed an exhaustive analysis of the persisting threat to an independent judiciary, ‘Israel’s Democracy Hasn’t Been Saved — How the Judicial Coup Eventually Prevailed.’ note 111
Against his Supreme Court, Netanyahu thus continues to carry forward his unitary executive aspirations to bring to completion the vision definitively asserted at the 7th Convention of the World Zionist Organization in 1944: its unanimous passage of a resolution proclaiming, ‘a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth… shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.’ The resolution was the policy statement outlining the principle of the Nakba, implemented four years later, against the backdrop of cumulative political degradation of the Palestinians, from 1917, and now, with Netanyahu’s unitary authority asserted by a complicit legislature, and at a height of his popularity, in its final, annihilatory phase, as, again, articulated by Likud in 1977: ‘between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty…’
That American commitment to Western-styled colonial State Zionism – by contrast with Homeland Zionism – also embraces censorship, repression, and violence, in authoritarian motion, is understandable.
The Christian Zionist backdrop
While Israel is the direct military agent of the genocide, the United States, footing the bill for Occupation, is a co-perpetrator, economically and militarily. The Congressional Research Service reported ‘U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel’ in 2020:
‘Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. Successive Administrations, working with Congress, have provided Israel with significant assistance in light of robust domestic U.S. support for Israel and its security; shared strategic goals in the Middle East; a mutual commitment to democratic values; and historical ties dating from U.S. support for the creation of Israel in 1948. To date, the United States has provided Israel $146 billion (current, or noninflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. At present, almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance, although from 1971 to 2007, Israel also received significant economic assistance. In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid, covering FY2019 to FY2028. Under the terms of the MOU, the United States pledged to provide—subject to congressional appropriation—$38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing grants plus $5 billion in missile defense appropriations) to Israel. This MOU followed a previous $30 billion 10-year agreement, which ran through FY2018.’ note 112
Such privileged commitment in the West has advanced from the beginning of Christian Zionism, while extending its imperial program into the Eastern world, from Napoleon.
In 1923, anti-Semite Winston Churchill explained the imperial rationale:
‘Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a center of national life. Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system.’ note 113
In 1948, advising President Truman on U.N. Partition, Special Counsel Clark Clifford, recapitulated Churchill:
‘At the outset, let me say that the Palestine problem should not be approached as a Jewish question, or an Arab question, or a United Nations question. The sole question is what is best for the United States of America.
‘…the United States appears in the ridiculous role of trembling before threats of a few nomadic desert tribes. This has done us irreparable damage. Why should Russia or Yugoslavia, or any other nation treat us with anything but contempt in light of our shilly-shallying appeasement of the Arabs. After all, the only successful opposition to the Russian advance has been in Greece and Turkey. You proclaimed a bold policy and stood your ground. The Truman Doctrine, so far, has been the one outstanding success in a disintegrating situation.’ (emphasis added)
(Memorandum by the Presidents Special Counsel (Clifford) to President Truman, March 8, 1948) note 114
In 1986, Senator Biden carried Clifford’s echo from 1948 explicitly, on ‘what is best for the United States of America,’ explaining, ‘naked self-interest of the U.S.’ should always guide Middle East policy, supporting Israel founded on such ‘self-interest.’ Sen. Biden drove the point, ‘Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.’ note 115
This was Senator Biden’s full statement:
‘I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel, in this body, for apologizing for our support of Israel. There’s no apology to be made! None. It is the best $3 billion investment that we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her [U.S.] interests in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel. I am with my colleagues here on the floor of the Foreign Relations Committee and we worry at length about NATO. And we worry about the Eastern flank of NATO: Greece and Turkey and how important it is. They pale by comparison… In terms of the benefit that accrues to the United States of America.’ (emphasis added) note 116
Note Sen. Biden’s identical geo-political coordinates, again an echo of Prime Minister Churchill and Special Counsel Clark: Greece and Turkey, axis with ‘Armageddon,’ the U.S.S.R.
Almost forty years apart.
And still today, a remarkably stable geo-political reference. In NATO’s lethal current expansionism, Russia again serves as the appointed Eastern European ‘enemy.’ Roger Alper commented August 12 on Netanyahu’s psychopathology in relation to Russia:
‘The world is breaking up around him [Netanyahu]. His actions are keeping Vladimir Putin too from his slumber. He is more relevant than ever on the global stage. Netanyahu prevents the end of the war in Gaza in order to ignite a world war. In his megalomaniacal hallucinations, this world war, the victory of civilization over the barbarians, shall be his legacy.’ note 117
As the U.S. Central Command deploys ‘ten thousand U.S. troops, two aircraft carriers, a large number of battleships and hundreds of fighter planes,’ with more on the way, in preparation for a regional assault on Israel in response to the genocide and its accompanying region wide provocations – the U.S. in absolute complicity and command of a pending regional war, perhaps the World War Netanyahu – and our own Democratic Administration – appear to seek, coinciding with President Biden’s recent strategic calculation: coordinated nuclear targeting of China, Russia and North Korea. note 118
From P.M.’s July Congressional address:
‘This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.’ note 119
Not even mentioning Isaeli hostages rotting in Gaza – !!!! – in his address, murdering the Indigenous without end, claiming the mantle of ‘civilization.’ With Congressional validation. Indeed: the victory of ‘civilization,’ on these terms, barbarism itself.
Echoing Special Counsel Clark for this moment, the P.M. reasserts the Western imperial narrative: he will not ‘[tremble] before threats of a few nomadic desert tribes. This has done us irreparable damage.’ Netanyahu’s ancestor, Theodore Herzl, ‘father of [State] Zionism,’ certainly didn’t tremble in his devastating formula of future disaster for Indigenous Palestine — 1895 — establishing the terms of ‘civilization’ so long ago:
‘If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey [already invoking the later geo-political coordinates]. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations.’ (emphasis added) note 120
Things have not altered much since Great Britain conquered the Middle East in 1917 – the ‘Middle East’ a Great British coinage, actually naming it – anticipating a century of Mediterranean plunder by the West, implementing Herzl’s vision, ‘an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’ As to the Christian Zionist ‘love’ of Jews: it’s a lie. As the great statesman explained: Israel, the Jewish ‘homeland,’ is cover for Western ‘naked self interest’ (Sen. Biden). Precisely foreseen by Herzl: ‘The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations.’
The imperial/colonial quid pro quo.
In 1904, Zionist fascist Ze’ev Jabotinsky eulogized Herzl, celebrating his antisemitism:
‘Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite … Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is despised by all and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to charm all. The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command. The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: “I am a Hebrew!”’ note 121
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe described the military installation where the IDF hatched notorious ‘Plan D’, the Nakba plan, forty-four years after Jabotinsky, with posters bearing slogans, “‘Brothers in Arms’ and ‘The Fist of Steel’, and showed ‘new’ Jews—muscular, healthy and tanned—aiming their rifles from behind protective barriers in the ‘brave fight’ against ‘hostile Arab invaders’,” fulfilling Herzl’s and Jabotinsky’s vision, later on, Churchill, Clark, and Biden. note 122
Jabotinsky was clear: the Western European Jew, the ‘Hebrew,’ would reign supreme in the ‘Greater Land of Israel,’ over the Eastern European pogrom victims, ‘Yids,’ workers and socialists, and later on, camp survivors, Sephardic and Arab and African Jews, etc. World War 1 was the West’s declaration of permanent war on the Middle East and South Asia. Implanting the State Zionists in Palestine, the ‘Hebrew’ – Western European Ashkenazi Jews – has been imperially beloved by the Christian Zionists, for absorbing the shock waves of unending Western war in the oil fields, providing false moral and ideological cover.
Imperial cats and colonial mice. The Christian Zionist lie is the flip side of the Jewish Nationalist lie. An antisemitic lie. Serving markets, resources (oil), and the land grabs.
And their ever escalating war on Islam…
With the unraveling of the U.S.S.R. and requiring a new rationale for the U.S./NATO war machine, the universal imperial ‘enemy’ transferred from ‘the Communist’ to ‘violent Islam,’ from ‘defense of the Free World’ to ‘clash of civilizations.’
It began with Reagan’s partnership with the nationalists fighting the Soviet government in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, fostering Mujahadeen/Al-Qaeda and Taliban. It continued, as the answer to the collapse of the Soviet empire, with Bush’s war on Iraq. Permitting Sadam to invade Kuwait, Bush invaded Iraq. Allied with the U.S. in ten years of war with Iran, its military exhausted, Bush’s war was a ‘turkey shoot.’ Vanquishing Iraq in several days, Bush abandoned the Kurds who were massacred by Hussein. Clinton’s trade embargo on Iraq killed 500,000 children. Clinton and Blair were unable to martial the U.N. for ‘regime change’ in Iraq. The World Trade Center disaster proved the opportunity for fresh wars against the two non-existent threats, Iraq and Afghanistan, under Bush2. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and the Taliban in a negotiating posture. They were overrun in endless U.S. war, already depleted by the US for decades. The wars of election and opportunity fractured the long victimized societies.
Senator Joseph Biden led the 2002 Senate Floor vote approving the fraudulent wars, again, on the enduring premise, regarding ’the Arabs’, now in Iraq and Afghanistan: ’they can take about anything.’ The genocide unfolded for twenty years, until President Biden disastrously withdrew from destroyed Afghanistan in 2021. Taliban reassumed power in expectably and vastly greater destructiveness, demonstrating in the vicious takeover they would not ‘take about anything.’ note 123
Backlash against Muslims in the West followed. Boston University Law professor Susan Akram recounted in 2002:
‘The demonizing of Arabs and Muslims in America began well before the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. It can be traced to deliberate myth making by film and media, stereotyping as part of conscious strategy of ‘experts’ and polemicists on the Middle East, the selling of a foreign policy agenda by US government officials and groups seeking to affect that agenda, and a public susceptible to images identifying the unwelcome ‘other* in its midst. [Think the mentally ill 73 year old cutting the throat
of the seven year old American Yemeni child in Dearborn October 8] Bearing the brunt of these factors are Arab and Muslim non-citizens in this country. A series of government laws and policies since the 1970’s have steadily targeted Arab and Muslim non-citizens for selective interrogation, detention, harassment, presumption of terrorist involvement, and removal from this country. The Patriot Act, recent round-up and detention of over 1,000 and list of interrogation targets of 5,000 individuals, and the Presidential Order to establish quasi-military ‘tribunals’ exacerbate the selective targeting of Arab and Muslim non-citizens in a climate of fear that completely sanctions blanket profiling.’ note 124
The standing ‘terror’ principle explains the 130 page USA Patriot Act, miraculously presented to Congress 45 days following 9/11. Its surveillance principles had been long unfolding as the U.S. and Britain strategized regime change in Iraq following the first Gulf War. The political and legislative opportunity: 9/11.
Sen. Biden was USAPA’s fierce advocate, asserting on the Senate floor, ‘the FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What’s good for the mob should be good for terrorists.’ (Cong. Rec., 10/25/01) note 125
During the Cold War, the identified enemy was the “Communist.’ Its successor war, the ‘War on Terror,’ defined the enemy as ’terror’ or ‘the terrorist.’ Short for ‘Muslim,’ ‘Islam,’ or, in a frank, imperial declaration, ‘Islamic terrorist’. ’Palestinian’ will also do. The myth and distortion is captured in the meaningless, ’war on terror,’ the premise of our forever wars and of vast repression. In chilling remarks, Masha Gessen observed terror is a ‘tactic.’ A tactic is not an enemy. But ‘terror’ is vague and frightening sounding enough to invade Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis, yes, of ‘terror.’ Not their terror, never yet having threatened the U.S. Rather, ‘terror.’ The President said so. note 126
Not this terrorist. No specific terrorist. ‘Terrorists.’
Sen. Biden seems to have overlooked there had been no problem investigating the 9/11 conspirators. CIA analyst Gina Bennett had been investigating bin Laden and his network for thirteen years, without obstruction. In the midst of her efforts, in 2001, it was understood in the intelligence world:
‘On April 20, a report titled “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations” was circulated by the CIA, followed by another report on May 3, “Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack.” And on August 3, the CIA issued a warning titled, “Threat of Impending al- Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely.”’
Bennett’s warnings, based on her legitimately approved and scrupulous thirteen year investigation, were deflected in her bureaucracy and the worst came about. Administrative and institutional neglect was responsible for the failure to prevent the devastating crime. Not inability to ‘get a wiretap.’ Investigation was definitive well before USAPA, all necessary tools in place. President Bush’s bumbling response to the famous daily security briefing clearly announcing the immanent threat of the Saudis engaged in the suspicious flight training was far beyond ‘a wiretap.’ note 127
The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF, 9/18/01), the legislative vehicle declaring the forever ‘War Against Terror,’ the fraudulent wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, served on the international front as companion to the USAPA, militarizing domestic law enforcement and ‘immigration.’
They are the twin international and national roadmaps targeting ‘violent Islam,’ in endless war and repression. They updated for ‘the war on terror’ what National Security Memorandum-68 (1950) and McCarren/Walter (1952) accomplished for the Cold War, in the international and domestic war on labor (‘communism’). Plan 2025 provides their update in our authoritarian moment, envisioning the destruction of any remaining barriers posed by elections to our unfiltered domination by the military state.
Following 9/11, the U.S./Israeli partnership crystalized in a common U.S. police training project with the IDF, expert from generations violating Indigenous Palestine in ‘fighting extremism and terror.’ Under the direction of the Anti-Defamation League, police departments throughout the U.S. partnered in IDF trainings in Israel.
ADL has publicly denied the partnership, but a leaked memo in 2022 confirmed it, documenting the hesitation of two of its executives in the face of avowed police violence in the U.S.:
‘“In light of the very real police brutality at the hands of militarized police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions, like whether we are contributing to the problem,” wrote George Selim, an ADL senior vice-president, and Greg Ehrie, VP for law enforcement and analysis, on 9 June in the draft memo. “We must ask ourselves why it is necessary for American police, enforcing American laws, would need to meet with members of the Israeli military. We must ask ourselves if, upon returning home, those we train are more likely to use force. We hope that that is not accurate.”’
note 128
Ex-IDF soldier, Eran Erfati, founding Executive Director of Researching the American Israeli Alliance (RAIA), initiated investigation of the IDF training of U.S. police, issuing the 2018 report, ’Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of US-Israel Law Enforcement Exchanges.’ Erfati asserted:
‘The dangers of U.S. law enforcement training in Israel for communities across the United States make clear that U.S. policy on Israel is not just a foreign policy issue, but one of civil rights. This unholy alliance between the U.S. and Israeli governments and American military industries is creating an injustice that we must urgently address.’
note 129
The notorious ‘Cop City,’ the 85-acre Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, is heavily funded by top donors of AIPAC. Its linkage to IDF through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) adds to the menacing specter of an enlarging police state network between Israel and the U.S. A similar ‘training center’ is now underway in Brooklyn. note 130
The arrests of six Muslims in Lackawanna, New York in September, 2002 was one inflection point domestically for terror against Muslim communities in the U.S. In response to the arrests, without evidence of a terror campaign, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advocated declaring the six ‘enemy combatants’ and military occupation of Lackawanna, terrorizing its large Yemeni Muslim community. Secretary Rice counseled President Bush to overrule the hysterical Vice President and Defense Secretary, concluding with individual prosecutions, and no further (publicized) dragnet. note 131
In his early proclamation as President, January 27, 2017, Donald Trump issued Executive Orders 13779 and 13780, ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry,’ his scandalous ‘Muslim ban.’ During his reelection campaign, Trump has committed to the deportation of 20 million ‘illegal’ immigrants. He has identified, among other non-existent threats, Palestinian nationals, as part of his large commitment to the IDF annihilation in Gaza, pledging to P.M. Netanyahu, to ‘finish the job.’
A week of rioting in Northern England in late July resulted when three children were killed at a Taylor Swift concert. The rioting led to the arrests of 400 right wing actors who, on social media misinformation, terrorized Muslim communities in the belief the children had been murdered by a Muslim foreign national. The murderer was a Christian man born in Wales to Rwandan parents. note 132
The unfolding annihilation in Gaza deserves to be understood as one culmination of the Western demonization of the ‘Arab’ since WW1, and a key spark igniting international Muslim persecution, by law enforcement and by popular mobs.
The Likud promise, in Finance Minister Smotrich’s words, ‘there are no half measures… total annihilation,’ is transparently grounded, not on strategic war aims, but on territorial aims, as spelled out in the 1977 party program, ‘between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,’ and Sen. Biden’s axiom: ‘they can take about anything.’
There is no rational basis for the ugly phenomenon, aside from subduing the ‘few nomadic tribes’. Journalist Levy posed this snapshot:
‘What exactly did that “terrorist” do? And why was he even in prison? Was it because his salary is paid by the government in the Gaza Strip? These are questions that shouldn’t be asked. But the picture of his body that was trembling from the pains of the penetration, which flickered for an instant while the rapists hid behind their defenders, should have tortured every conscience.
‘Not the conscience of most Israelis, it turns out. On Tuesday, once again, a High Court of Justice hearing discussing the petition to close the torture facility Sde Teiman was interrupted, due to the shouts of the audience. “The people are sovereign,” shouted the rabble at the High Court justices. Soon to come are the lynchings in the city squares, carried out by the sovereign and supported by the media. On the morning TV programs there will be discussions of the legitimacy of lynching. There will be a speaker in favor and a speaker who is opposed, in our balanced media.
‘An abusive husband can be charming, impressive, beloved by everyone who knows him and talented; if he beats his wife or his children – he’s an abusive husband. This definition overshadows all other descriptions of him, his violence defines his identity. All his other characteristics are forgotten due to his violence.
‘Sde Teiman also defines Israel, more than its other characteristics. Israel is Sde Teiman. Sde Teiman is Israel. That’s also how they treated those suspected of sexual harassment in the Israeli #MeToo movement, which destroyed the careers and the lives of men who were only suspects. But the rapists from Sde Teiman? That’s not an issue for #MeToo – they raped a “terrorist.”
‘When you read the 94 pages of the B’Tselem report, which causes you to lose sleep, you understand that it wasn’t an exceptional incident, it’s the routine of torture, which has become a policy. As opposed to the torture by the Shin Bet, which presumably had a security-minded purpose – to extract information – here it’s solely to satisfy the darkest and sickest sadistic urges. Look how calmly the soldiers approach to carry out their malevolent intention. There are dozens of other soldiers too, who saw and knew and remained silent. Apparently they also participated in similar orgies, based on the dozens of testimonies cited in the B’Tselem report. That’s the routine.
‘The indifference to all these things defines Israel. The public legitimization defines Israel. In the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that was opened by the United States
after the 9/11 attacks, nine prisoners were killed in 20 years; here it’s 60 detainees in 10 months. Need anything more be said?’ note 133
The unfolding domestic authoritarianism, jolted by the Genocide
Our authoritarian moment, and the specter of a dictatorial presidency, is the domestic culmination of the War on Terror. With the genocides committed over decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, fear and hatred have infiltrated the citizenry. An economic crash was managed by a President who chose the banks over the underwater mortgage holders and the unemployed. Craving for a leader who promised safety and stability under unchallenged authority resulted.
The Israel Genocide, a zenith in the terror war, has been supervised by a Democratic Administration. While funding without condition and backing it militarily with tens of thousands of troops, the President waffles about it in his public statements. The Democratic candidate expresses her ‘suffering’ in the face of the decimation.
The authoritarian candidate, however, unashamed, embraces Genocide explicitly, promising to ‘finish the job.’
The war parties are in rigorous partnership in the War on Terror. In its authoritarian spark, they are now pitted against each other in a crisis over the peaceful transfer of power. Its electoral outcome could be determined by their difference in tone over an annihilation to which they are committed in common. Vice President Harris can lose the Uncommitted. Candidate Trump can lay claim to the racists he draws in his explicit marginalizing of Islam. His Muslim Ban as President and his commitment to mass deportations seize on the decades of fear and hatred sewn by both parties. The racist hysteria created by Democrats and Republicans.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ‘How Netanyahu Is Trying to Save Himself, Elect Trump and Defeat Harris,’ warned September 3 of Netanyahu’s threat to Vice President Harris’s candidacy. Friedman argues that the Democratic candidate should be ‘afraid’: Netanyahu’s refractoriness will lead to DJT.
Similarly, Haaretz reported August 22, ‘Washington’ is ‘vexed’ by P.M.’s ‘foot dragging.’ And columnist Nicholas Kristoff October 5: ‘Biden Sought Peace but Facilitated War’
‘Washington’ thus appears confused by its own endless cash supply for the Genocide, a foreign leader mysteriously commandeering the U.S. Treasury, with absolutely no incentive for ‘ceasefire,’ as his U.S. patrons in the Administration and Congress message clearly, ‘do as I fund, not as I say.’ note 134
A foreign prime minister controls a U.S. election? Preposterous.
‘Foot dragging.’ None. ‘Vexed?’ Absurd.
‘Sought peace’? Delusional.
Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, Dearborn, Michigan, refused the mysticism. On the killings of his town’s Lebanese family members in Israel’s latest war crimes, Mayor Hammoud:
‘I am so tired of Biden expressing his grief in private. It is tiresome. Be an adult. You are the president of the greatest country in the world, of the most powerful country in the world. That speaks volumes about your character and about who you are. And
somebody who’s unwilling—all this grief he’s expressing in private is a bunch of bullshit. I am tired of rhetoric and talking points. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. And you can quote me for that. I think this is all theatrics. You know, they think that if they leak Biden expressed grief or said he’s an asshole behind the scenes that we’re going to see that Biden is actually trying.
‘He’s not trying. We see it every time they want to advocate for millions in aid and billions in bombs. Well, here’s the problem: The billions in bombs only amplify the aid that you need. You can’t sign off on the invasion, sign off on the incursion, and then say you’re going to try to provide some level of—some semblance of—support and aid to people.’ note 135
By contrast with Friedman and Kristoff and Haaretz, whose mysticism rationalizes exploding war. That is, more Genocide denial. Inviting the dictatorial regime they repudiate.
They dodge the only basis for fear: U.S. funding, the backbone of the Genocide. The obliteration of Palestine. Now Lebanon. As the U.S. engages combat with Yemen. Along with Israel’s saber rattling with Iran, toward global conflagration.
Biden and Harris appear weak and passive in the appearance of subjugation to a foreign leader in a conflagration they supervise, Trump appears strong in open cheer leading.
The only way Biden and Harris could present strength and confidently avert democratic catastrophe in the approaching election is to end aid. Immediately.
As a hedge against this catastrophic election gamble, the Administration issued an edict outlining a thirty day grace period to end the extermination. An arms embargo will follow non-compliance. So asserts Secretary Blinken, who lied to Congress about allowing aid convoys to Gaza.
The liberal thus plays Russian Roulette with our Democracy.
Even as the Administration funds and abets ever widening war.
Levy captured with ruthless precision the regime embraced with no condition:
‘In the six hours that Caspit enjoyed, Israel killed two of its enemies, one a Hezbollah military man, the second a Hamas statesman. Combining the words “Hamas statesman” grates Israelis’ ears – there is no such thing in the pages of propaganda – but Haniyeh was the chairman of the Hamas’ Political Bureau. It is doubtful he ever held a weapon, despite Israel’s whitewashing, and it is doubtful he knew about October 7 in advance.
‘This is not a song of praise for Haniyeh, nor a lamentation for his death, but a country that murders the man it is negotiating a cease-fire and release of the hostages with has crossed its line of legitimacy. A country that does so on Iranian soil, the day after their new president is sworn in, wants a war with Iran. A country that cheers this is a stupid country: it cheers disasters that are liable to literally land on its head.’ note 136
The candidates and columnists have no basis to be puzzled. For instance, this October 15 BBC headline: ‘Witnesses to Israeli strike on Gaza hospital compound saw ‘so many people burning’: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y5d33dmepo Or the New York Times, October 15: How Israel’s Army Uses Palestinians as Human Shields in Gaza – https:// www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-human-shields.html? campaign_id=190
Vice President Harris: ”The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent,” said the Vice-President. “So to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire, and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.”
The Vice President’s text will be fitting preface to her congratulatory phone call to DJT after the polls close November 5.
Christian Zionism and the authoritarian moment: a parasitic bond
Hannah Arendt’s long ago observations illuminate the parasitic entanglement she described as a ‘deadly sickness.’
In 1951, Hannah Arendt commented on Jewish sovereignty in founding the State of Israel on the back of Palestinian conquest (Nakba):
‘After the war it turned out that the [European] Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of the twentieth century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.’
Arendt continued:
‘…the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. ‘For these new states this curse bears the germ of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. …The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for the states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.’ (emphasis added) note 137
What clear, stark vision, as Fascist and Genocidal Israel advances.
The ‘solution’ to persecution and holocaust thus invited the new ‘Jewish question’: the question concerning Jewish nationalism and supremacism, i.e., State Zionism. Not Homeland Zionism, as envisioned by Arendt and Einstein and Levi and Magnes and their radical cohort.
In 1948, Arendt pondered:
‘What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery—the role of the Jewish people in world politics—and their chief interest—persecution of Jews all over the world —have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.
‘The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is comprehensible enough. There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been
this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.’ note 138
The ‘small and unimportant Jewish problem,’ igniting the totalitarian machine, corresponds now to the grave and central problem of Jewish nationalism, with its unfolding contribution to another wave of authoritarianism, astonishingly, with the U.S. its vehicle: President Biden’s support for and perpetuation of the Genocide, and the insidious gamble of reelecting the dictatorial ex-President Trump in its racist wake.
Observed Arendt: ‘The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is comprehensible enough.’ Under the specter of the Jewish nationalism question, it is the failure to take what Smotrich and Ben-Gvir Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett,
Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Yossi Cohen and Yair Golan and Netanyahu have said, now inviting dictatorial Trump, ‘to finish the job’ in Gaza, regional war, global war, and universal annihilation.
This from Haaretz, August 22, 2024:
‘Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned PM Netanyahu, ministers and the attorney general that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank is endangering Israel’s existence, according to a letter published by Israel’s Channel 12 News. In the letter, Bar wrote that Jewish terrorist leaders “want to cause the system to lose control, causing indescribable damage to Israel,” adding that police incompetence in the face of these acts and “perhaps a sense of hidden support” for them are increasing considerably, reflected in “the significant expansion” of those taking part in these acts.
‘Bar noted that the perpetrators of Jewish terror have lost all fear of administrative detention “due to the conditions they get in prison and the funds they receive after their release from Knesset members as well as legitimacy and praise, alongside a delegitimization campaign against the defense officials.” The letter also mentioned far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s recent visit to the Temple Mount, when hundreds of Jews prayed with him in violation of the status quo, adding that such acts could drag Israel “to profuse bloodshed and change the state’s face unrecognizably.”’ note 139
Hannah Arendt, stark and clear as usual, envisioned already in 1948 Israel ‘degenerat[ing] into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta… [which] in its isolation would develop into an entirely new people.’ note 140
In catastrophic irony, the Zionist nationalist cult, ‘an entirely new people,’ supposed to have ‘solved’ the Jewish question, sews, with its patron, cataclysmic backlash for World Jewry and Islam, and our Democracy itself.
The ‘Jewish question’ will fully return in the imaginable backlash, Jewish nationalism consumed. Israel will be a thing of history as Jews are conjoined with Palestinians and Muslims and Blacks and the other minorities in the deportations and in the camps of the readily imaginable outcome.
Apocalypse will have been achieved. Not biblical. Modern Jewish Zionism has existed for only one hundred and forty years. In Western conquest, from Columbus and de la Vasquez, completely manmade, i.e., preventable, stoppable. That is, the modern epoch which spawned Christian, and then Jewish, State Zionism.
Again, in Arendt’s chilling 1951 vision, now fully realized: ‘For these new states this curse bears the germ of a deadly sickness.’
And, one adds, the germ of deadly sickness in the states, too, of their imperial patrons. Forgetting and Remembering
Your legislation, along with several other current Congressional bills and police campaigns against dissent foreshadow a shock wave of efforts against bureaucratic and academic and popular exercise of speech and assembly, with 2025 its master plan, should DJT prevail.
Many of your Congressional colleagues, along with Governors and legislators throughout the states, are fully aware the obligatory forgetting cannot be accomplished without restricting speech and assembly on a vast scale. Discussion and action must be eliminated, certainly, if forgetting is to be ensured. The Orwellian principles are well established by history and already at a considerable advance in this moment.
Endless war is at odds, in the very long run – and the run has been very long – with a free and open democracy.
At least in obscure hope, one can recall – while memory is still possible – a key moment bringing to an end the witch hunts of the 1950s: U.S. Army Counsel Joseph Welch’s confrontation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the legislative leader of the Great Fear. Having persecuted Universities, Hollywood, and the professions, McCarthy now took his witch hunt to the Army. Continuing with his stereotyped allegation, ‘softness’ on communism, it was his final gesture, June 9, 1954, soon censured by his Senate:
Mr. Welch to Senator McCarthy: ’I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, Sir? At long last? Have you have no decency?’
In shame, Sen. McCarthy, and at long last, replies helplessly.
Mr. Welch resumes: ‘I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me. You could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have not seen fit to bring it out… and if there is a God in heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it any further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more questions. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.’
Wide applause in the Senate Hearing Room, as Sen. McCarthy shrinks, at last, in shame, after years of his unchallenged tyranny in mindless campaign of political and personal destruction. note 141
Sadly, we may be at only the beginning of a parallel campaign of political intimidation, our Joseph Welch not yet in evidence, and hoping decency may somehow prevail.
“American Embassy in Israel,” Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 98th Congress, Second Session on S.2031, (February 23, 1984), pp. 69-73. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-once-called-for-israel-to-defend-itself-including killing-women-and-children-report/
43. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_the_Israel–Hamas_war https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2024/1/8/what-international-solidarity-exists with-journalists-under-israeli-attack#:~:text=Inside Story-,What international solidarity exists with journalists under Israeli attack?,War II or Vietnam War.
44. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/world/middleeast/israel-us-aid.html https://thehill.com/opinion/4937327-biden-administration-military-aid-israel/ 45. ‘Amnesty International: Israel Repeatedly Committed War Crimes With US Weapons,’ Truthout, April 30, 2024
73. The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel, William Morrow & Co., NY, p. 12 74. https://cuad.org/#:~:text=
75. Democracy Now! Chomsky: Hillary Clinton Fears BDS Because It Counters Decades of US Support for Israeli Aggression, May 16, 2016
76. THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: THE TARGETING OF ARABS AND MUSLIMS IN AMERICA, by Susan M. Akram, p. 63
Arab Studies Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2002, Vol. 24, No. 2/3, SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: Terrorism: State Practice and Freedom Struggles (Spring/Summer 2002), pp. 61-118 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41858412
77. THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: THE TARGETING OF ARABS AND MUSLIMS IN AMERICA, by Susan M. Akram, p. 93
See also: https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2023-08-03/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-and trump-two-criminal-defendants-two-coups-against-democracy/00000189-bb8c-ddac-a3cd bffde7db0000
123. https://inthesetimes.com/features/joe-biden-iraq-war-vote-democratic-primary-2020.html 96. THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: THE TARGETING OF ARABS AND MUSLIMS IN AMERICA, by Susan M. Akram
Arab Studies Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2002, Vol. 24, No. 2/3, SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: Terrorism: State Practice and Freedom Struggles (Spring/Summer 2002), pp. 61-118 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41858412
124. A NATION CHALLENGED: DRAGNET IN EUROPE; Spain Pursues Terrorists Among Its Muslim Immigrants, By Sam Dillon With Emma Daly Dec. 4, 2001
137. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace & Javonovich, 1951, p. 368 138. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, Schocken, 2004 (1948), p. 11 139. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-22/ty-article/.premium/shin-bet-chief warns-pm-and-ministers-jewish-terror-is-jeopardizing-israels-existence/00000191-7b9a-de04- af9b-7b9b38070000
140. ’To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time’ (1948), in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Grove Press/NY, 1978 p. 187
June 18, 2025
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