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[a letter by Rochester constituent Robert Sandgrund to his representative US Senator Chuck Schumer of NY. Sandgrund is a social worker and writer, and was one of the signers of A Dangerous Conflation – an Open Letter from Jewish Writers published in N+1, Nov. 2, 2023.]

Editor’s Note: The letter is a festidiously annotated text, covering a tremendous amount of ground from the origins of zionism in the late 19th century, historical flashpoints in the US and European colonial project in the Arab world since then, all to provide context for the current atrocities in Palestine.

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                                                                                                            March 29, 2024

Dear Majority Leader Senator Schumer and Community Friends,

I am a Jewish constituent. 

Judging Terror, War and Genocide

Announcing IDF action, Netanyahu stated, October 8, ’the enemy will pay an unprecedented price.’  (note 1.)

Who is this ‘enemy’? 

The fascist Hamas party, an imperial/colonial aberration, with its backdrop in Israel and Qatar?  Whose cynical war crimes have provided the rationale for Israel’s retaliatory and escalated ethnic cleansing? 

Or the people of Gaza, in their entirety? 

In deference to the trauma on Israel, the critic is advised against ‘context’ of the Hamas crimes of October 7.  In fact, those crimes cannot be justified, rationalized, or forgiven.  Their abomination is demonic savagery of incalculable harm.  The victims, their witnesses, their families, their friends, and the community of Israel have been emotionally pulverized.  Jews everywhere mourn.  The world mourns. 

Nothing human, however, is without historical context.  The assailants are described as nonhuman or inhuman, ‘animals.’ 

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (‘Understanding the Middle East through the Animal Kingdom,’ February 2, 2024) spelled out imperial-racist justification for the imperial/colonial U.S./Israeli retaliatory slaughter.  (note 2.)

The atrocities of October 7 do not overcome one hundred years of Indigenous Palestinian erasure.  Rather, they necessitate overdue and definitive refusal. 

Exploding ‘clash of civilizations,’ embraced by Friedman and the basis of contemporary Western imperial ideology, the Oriental peoples must be recovered for world recognition, ending Western empire and its war system. 

What is the ‘Context’?

The aim of annexation of Gaza is asserted explicitly and with intense publicity by Israeli state authorities. (note 3.) 

Nations are entitled to war and defense. ‘Collective punishment,’ as underway, operates at an entirely different magnification.  Its target: Indigenous Palestine, and in its entirety.  Prolonged aerial bombardment and enforced hunger and famine does away the justification, ‘human shield.’  The civilian populace is defenseless against total assault and terrorized dispersion. 

CBS reported November 1, 2023, ‘An Israeli think-tank, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, released a paper inferring the situation presented “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in co-ordination with the Egyptian government.”’  (note 4.)

In the encompassing losses, of life, shelter, safety, health, non-governmental care, and security, with starvation and famine threatening 2.3 million, the land in rubble, dispersal and annihilation has been underway.  Gaza is judged uninhabitable.  An ultimate ‘transfer,’ envisioned from October 8, may define of ‘the day after.’  Its essence is foundational to the Zionist project, envisioned from 1917. 

This project did not begin with Netanyahu. The project will not end with Netanyahu. Or with Biden.  Uprooting the imperial War State is its only possibility.  

Imperial/Christian Zionism: Consorting with Empire

The progression, as outlined, points to October 7 as an opportunity to finalize the long unfolding Indigenous Palestinian erasure. 

The European vision of Jewish settlement in Palestine began with Napoleon in 1799 during his brief occupation of Gaza, killing thousands.  He originated European modernity and its claim of the Oriental world. 

Napoleon’s vision germinated in Great Britain in the 1840s.  The goal was secure trade routes to India and control of the Suez Canal, with Jews their buffer. 

German Labor pioneer and early Zionist Moses Hess in Rome and Jerusalem (1860) admonished his fellow propertied Jews:

‘A great calling is reserved for you: to be a living channel of communication between three continents. You should be the bearers of civilization to the primitive people of Asia…You should be the mediators between Europe and far Asia, open the roads that lead to India and China – those unknown regions which must ultimately be thrown open to civilization.’

Holbrook explained:

 ‘”Civilization,” in fact, was a euphemism for European domination by force. The inhabitants of the regions concerned, those “wild Arabian hordes and the African peoples” living in a land which “no one should inherit but the Jews” would not be consulted beforehand, and the settlers would need to be imposed upon them: “a police system must be established by this [Colonizing] Society, to protect the colonists from the attacks of the Bedouins…”’  (Note 5.)

Theodore Herzl followed Hess in the imperial/Zionist quest, first seeking out the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulhamid II.  (note 6.)  Herzl offered to promote the Sultan’s rehabilitation following his Armenian genocide (1894-1896, 300,000 extinguished), in exchange for a Zionist land grant in Palestine.  The Sultan finally rejected Herzl’s proposal in 1902.  Bernard Lazare, Alfred Dreyfus’ incorruptible attorney during the antisemitic French military purge, partnered briefly with Herzl.  An ethically scrupulous opponent of imperialism, Lazare broke with Herzl, appalled over his efforts with the murderous Sultan. 

Herzl played all ends of Empire toward his Jewish State, including Cecil Rhodes, the Great British imperialist and genocidal madman, in an appeal of 1902:

‘You are being invited to help make history..[I]t doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? Because it is something colonial… [Y]ou, Mr. Rhodes, are a visionary politician or a practical visionary… I want you to… put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable. It is a plan full of culture, excellent for the group of people for whom it is directly designed, and quite good for England, for Greater Britain….’  (emphasis added) (note 7.)

As a motto for his exterminations, Rhodes explained, ‘The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise.  We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa.’  His vision was “the whole uncivilised world under British rule.’ 

Rhodes, ‘established the paramilitary private army, the British South-Africa Company’s Police (BSACP). That army was responsible for the systematic murder of ten to hundreds of thousands of the native people of present-day South Africa.

His hateful amendment of the Masters and Servants Act (1890) reintroduced conditions of torture for native and indigenous laborers. His monstrous racist “land grabs” set up a system in which the unlawful and illegitimate acquisition of land through armed force was routine for Europeans.’  (note 8.)

Herzl’s efforts to affiliate with Rhodes’ led him to British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.  Chamberlain introduced Herzl to David Lloyd George whose law firm Herzl retained in 1903.  Other members of Rhodes’s circle enlisted in Herzl’s cause included Leopoldo Amery, Lord Rothschild and none other than Arthur Balfour.  The British ‘Mandate’ of Palestine for a ‘Jewish Homeland,’ came fourteen years later with the Balfour Declaration, in 1917.  Upon Herzl’s death in 1904, his followers, Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, and Herbert Samuel, persisted with the Rhodes circle, with the League of Nations ratifying the British Palestine Jewish Homeland Mandate in 1922. 

The Indigenous Palestinian erasure was now international Western consensus. 

The Erasure of a People

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir defined the Zionist/Israeli colonial erasure in 1969:

‘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.’  (emphasis added)  (note 9.)

The Great-British/Imperial erasure was already asserted in 1876 by Lord Shaftesbury, decades prior to Zionist immigration and forty-four years before the Balfour Declaration:

‘Syria and Palestine will before long become very important … The country needs capital and population (ed: they already had populations!). The Jews can give it both. And has not England a special interest in promoting such restoration?  It would be a blow to England if either of her two rivals should get hold of Syria … Does not policy there … exhort England to foster the nationality of the Jews and aid them to return? …To England then naturally belongs the role of favoring the settlement of Jews in Palestine.’ (emphasis added)  (note 10.)

Shaftesbury’s imperial priority: England, not Jews, its imperial buffer in the envisioned conquest.  The conquest did follow, in World War 1, and opportunity to put into place the settlement plan, as the Balfour Declaration.  Balfour addressed to Lord Rothschild November 2, 2017, after long deliberated drafting:

‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish [actually: 92 per cent Arab] communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’  (emphasis added)  (note 11.)

The Declaration proclaimed the ‘political rights’ of the Jewish people, and the ‘religious and cultural rights’ of the Indigenous Palestinians, not political rights, as Great Britain expropriated Palestine from its Indigenous people.  It was articulated in stark racial terms one month later, on December 2, 1917, when:

‘[British Undersecretary] Lord Robert [Cecil – Lord Balfour’s maternal Uncle] declared that the cause of Zionism was close to his heart and that “Our wish is that Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs… Judea for the Jews.”’  (note 12.)

Lord Curzon (Foreign Secretary and formerly Viceroy of India and Lord President of the Council) remarked instructively to Balfour:

‘I feel tolerably sure therefor [sic] that while Weizmann may say one thing to you, or while you may mean one thing by a national home, he is out for something quite different. He contemplates a Jewish State, a Jewish nation, a subordinate population of Arabs, etc. ruled by Jews; the Jews in possession of the fat of the land, and directing the Administration.‘ He is trying to effect this behind the screen and under the shelter of British trusteeship. ‘I do not envy those who wield the latter, when they realize the pressure to which they are certain to be exposed. …’  (note 13.)  (emphasis added)

Lord Curzon was fully validated when the Mandate began to totter in the late 1930’s, and collapsing in 1947.  Zionist ‘pressure’ on the Mandate was graphic, unfolded promptly, with this 1919 proposal for Palestinian territorial distribution:

‘The Mandate provided for no body to serve the interests of the Palestinian people, similar to the Jewish Agency given official status. Nor were the Palestinians ever consulted in the choice of the mandatory, as required by article 22 of the Covenant. The only move towards consultation had been the American King-Crane Commission, whose views were ignored. Zionist ambitions for the national home had sought considerably more territory, extending into Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Egypt, than was actually assigned to the Mandatory Power. The Zionist Organization’s initial proposal asked that the Jewish national home be established within the following borders:

“… In the north, the northern and southern banks of the Litany River, as far north as latitude 33° 45′. Thence in a south-easterly direction to a point just south of the Damascus territory and close and west of the Hedjaz Railway.

“In the east, a line close to and west of the Hedjaz Railway.

“In the south, a line from a point in the neighbourhood of Akaba to El Arish.

“In the west, the Mediterranean Sea.

“The details of the delimitation should be decided by a Boundary Commission, one of the members of which should be a representative of the Jewish Council for Palestine hereinafter mentioned.

“There should be a right of free access to and from the Red Sea, through Akaba, by arrangement with the Arab Government …”  (note 14.)

The ‘Greater Land of Israel,’ as of June 28, 1919, was thus envisioned: ‘Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs… Judea for the Jews.’  The Mandate restricted the Jewish Agency’s territory claim, but the blueprint of its territorial vision was in place. 

‘Pressure’ on the Mandate was reflected with precision in this prophetic interchange:

‘When the question of the British Mandate over Palestine was discussed in Parliament, it became clear that opinion in the House of Lords was strongly opposed to the Balfour policy, as illustrated by the words of Lord Sydenham in reply to Lord Balfour:

“… the harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country – Arab all around in the hinterland – may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”                           (emphasis added)  (note 15.)

Historian Priya Satia recounted the Great British lies to the Arab leaders in the process of its conquest of the Ottoman Middle East:

To get the region’s Arab population on their side, they promised the Sharifian rulers of the Hejaz, in the Arabian Peninsula, an independent kingdom stretching through Palestine to Damascus. At the same time, in secret negotiations with the French and the Russians to divide the region, they promised to make Palestine an international territory. When Russia withdrew from the war in October 1917, they saw an urgent need to secure the British position in the Middle East with a fresh promise, this time to the Zionist movement. Palestine thus became a thrice-promised land – reason enough to doubt the sacredness of any one of the promises.

After the war, the British reneged on all wartime promises about the Middle East:                               

They first betrayed the arrangements with the French by letting the Sharifian Prince Faisal set up a government in Damascus, but then let the French push Faisal out, in exchange for a free hand in oil-rich Mosul. Faisal was instead crowned king of Iraq under British rule – despite wartime promises of independence to Iraqis. Britain took direct control of Palestine (no international territory) – confirming that the Balfour Declaration’s ambiguous promise about a national home implied nothing about Jewish political control. In 1921, Britain also carved Jordan out of Palestine without any sense of having violated the Jewish national home. A White Paper of 1930 backed away from the very idea of a Jewish national home. A Zionist outcry forced the British government to withdraw the paper.  (emphasis added)  (note 16.)

European fracturing of the Middle East was underway.  The Palestinians and the Jews were now fatally pitted. Historians Ken Grossi, Maren Milligan, Ted Waddelow described the fracture:

‘…the British had encouraged the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) against Ottoman rule, promising to support the emergence of an independent Arab state through the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, it made parallel and conflicting agreements with France, particularly the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. This largely secret treaty delineated zones of French influence and control in Syria, Lebanon, and southern Anatolia, with the British gaining influence over territory stretching from Palestine to Iraq. British policies complicated matters further with potentially conflicting stances toward Zionism and Arab nationalism.’ (emphasis added)  (note 17.)

Stork observed of the fracture:

‘The record of the negotiations between Britain and the Arabs in [sic] contained in the letters between Sherif Hussein of Mecca and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry MacMahon, exchanged in 1915-1916. Hussein sought the independence of all the Arab countries, including what is now Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Britain tried to evade the matter but finally, caught up in the details of the war, agreed that “Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca.” Palestine had not been mentioned specifically in the negotiations, but the Arabs assumed it would be included, since they saw it as part of Syria. On July 6, 1916, Prince Feisal of the Hashemite family of Mecca led the Arab revolt against the Turks, a nationalist struggle for independence guaranteed by Britain.’ (emphasis added)  (note 18.)

Stork concluded:

‘For all this the Zionists might have been left standing up against a blank wall at the end   of the War had their movement not won the favor of Sir Mark Sykes, the British expert on the Middle East who had lent his name to the Agreement with France.  Sykes’ Interest in Zionism began just after he had completed the secret negotiations with his French counterpart, Picot.  Sykes was attracted to the Zionists partly from his strong dislike of “the hybrid type of assimilating Jew”, and he was impressed by the strong pro-British sympathies of the Zionist leaders.  Basically he understood how the establishment of Zionist settlements could favor British strategic interests in the area.’  (emphasis added)  (note 19.)

The British seduced and abandoned the Arab powers, staking out their newly expanded empire, assigning one parcel, Palestine, to propertied, white Europeans, i.e., the Zionists. 

President Wilson endorsed the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and 1918 as World War 1 was ending.  He did so, in part, on the basis of his commitment to national self-determination for the countries no longer under the Ottoman yoke. But the contradiction of ‘self-determination’ for the Arabian peoples, while imposing a British dominated Zionist ‘mandate’ in Palestine, became stark in debate at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. President Wilson therefore appointed a special Commission to discuss concerns with the affected peoples. The Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, was led by Henry Churchill King, Oberlin College President, and wealthy American businessman and Arabist, Charles R. Crane. 

The Commission was to study and ‘consult’ with the Arab peoples concerning self-determination and its realization.  France and Great Britain, contending for the newly conquered Middle East, without regard to the political and cultural autonomy of the newly emancipated peoples, already intended new domination. 

The Commission was a solely American effort.  France and Great Britain refused to join. Initially well-disposed to the Zionist project, the Commission found in its ‘consultation’:

‘…that the only way to establish a viable Jewish state would be with armed force to enforce it. This was precisely what the Commission wanted to avoid, so they dismissed the idea, saying that Zionists anticipated “a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants to Palestine, by various forms of purchase”. That said, there would be nothing wrong with Jews coming to “Israel” and simply living as Jewish Syrian citizens, but noted “nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish [actually: 92 per cent Arab] communities in Palestine”. The latter statement was based on the assumption that an army of at least 50,000 would be required to establish Jewish ownership by force. In respect to the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East, the report cautioned “Not only you as president [Wilson] but the American people as a whole should realize that if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.” (emphasis added)  (note 20.)

The Commission was also visionary: the war for a Jewish State, 29 years later, was as disastrous for the Indigenous Palestinians as it foresaw.  About the international importance of Palestine, the Commission envisioned the disaster for the Arabs of an eventual Jewish theocracy:

‘The fact that the Arabic-speaking portion of the Turkish Empire has been the birthplace of the three great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and that Palestine contains places sacred to all three, makes inevitably a center of interest and concern for the whole civilised world. No solution which is merely local or has only a single people in mind can avail.’  (note 21.)

King-Crane findings were ignored, and the British and the French prevailed in their Middle Eastern conquest.  Ignored during the 1919 Paris Versailles Peace Conference, the report was also suppressed by the U.S. State Department.  The Commission’s findings and recommendations were revealed to the public by the New York Times, three years later, December 3, 1922, under the headline: ‘Crane and King’s Long-Hid Report On the Near East – American Mandate Recommended in Document Sent to Wilson – Disliked French, Distrusted British, and Opposed the Zionist Plan…’  The reporter, William T. Ellis, wrote that President Wilson himself conveyed the King-Crane text to the Times.  The release occurred four months after the League of Nations approved the British Jewish Homeland mandate (1922), just as at the Peace Conference three years before (1919), its findings suppressed.  (note 22.) 

Historians Ken Grossi, Maren Milligan, Ted Waddelow again recounted of King-Crane:

‘Their mission was to determine the wishes of the people of the region as their future was being determined by the major powers at the Paris Peace Conference.’ (emphasis added)  (note 23.)

Balfour dismissed any Indigenous role, in August, 1919:

’For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…  The four great powers [Great Britain, France, the United States and the Vatican] are committed to Zionism and Zionism [sic], be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present conditions, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit the ancient land…’ (emphasis added)  (note 24.) 

Balfour elaborated in 1920:

‘The second difficulty, on which I shall only say a word, arises from the fact that the critics of this movement shelter themselves behind the phrase—but it is more than a phrase—behind the principle of self-determination, and say that, if you apply that principle logically and honestly, it is to the majority of the existing population of Palestine that the future destinies of Palestine should be committed. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, there is a technical ingenuity in that plea, and on technical grounds I neither can nor desire to provide the answer; but, looking back upon the history of the world, upon the history more particularly of all the most civilized portions of the world, I say that the case of Jewry in all countries is absolutely exceptional, falls outside all the ordinary rules and maxims, cannot be contained in a formula or explained in a             sentence. The deep, underlying principle of self-determination really points to a Zionist policy, however little in its strict technical interpretation it may seem to favor it. I am convinced that none but pedants or people who are prejudiced by religious or racial bigotry, none but those who are blinded by one of these causes would deny for one instant that the case of the Jews is absolutely exceptional, and must be treated by exceptional methods.”’ (emphasis added)  (note 25.) 

Imperialist Balfour thus defined erasure: justice is an ingenious ‘technique’.  Concerned, as he claimed, by ‘pedants and people who are prejudiced by religious or racial bigotry,’ such was not his concern fifteen years previously when, as Prime Minister, he drove passage of the Aliens Act of 1905, prohibiting entry to Great Britain of the Jewish emigres of the East European pogroms.

In its adherence to President Wilson’s self-determination doctrine, King-Crane:

‘…recommended to include Palestine in a united Syrian State, the holy places being cared for by an International and Inter-religious Commission, in which also the Jews would have representation. All Syria should become under a single Mandate, led by a        Power desired by the people, with America as first choice.’  (note 26.)

The fatal contradiction was insisted upon by the Great British bureaucracy:

‘The official memorandum handed to the cabinet by the [British] Foreign Office came solidly to grips with the paradox of self-determination and the Balfour Declaration. The Foreign Office advised that because of special Jewish interest in the land, they should be given more influence than their numbers warranted.’  (emphasis added) (note 27.)

Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, testified at the Paris Conference, strategizing Indigenous erasure shoehorning the contradiction according to ultimate Zionist aims, thus:

‘….as to the meaning of of a Jewish National Home.  Did it mean autonomy? Immediately?  Weizmann, recognizing the trap on self-determination, answered that the Jews would build up a majority and then in the fulness of time, hope that the government would reflect the changed status of the population.’  (emphasis added) (note 28.)

The first High Commissioner over the new British Mandate for the ‘Jewish national home,’ was Herbert Samuel.  A Jewish Cabinet Minister, he was placed by the Mandate into this position in 1920, two years before the Mandate was ratified by the League of Nations, 1922.  Under the authority of the British Mandate, his appointment to the arbitrarily created position of authority was the beginning of administrative Indigenous erasure. 

In 1915, in his previous role as Cabinet minister, Samuel began lobbying Cabinet colleagues toward a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  He envisioned ethnic cleansing in a 1915 memo:

‘Printed for the use of the Cabinet.  January 1915.  Secret.  The Future of Palestine. 

‘I am assured that the solution of the problem of Palestine which would be much the most welcome to the leaders of and supporters of the Zionist movement throughout the world would be the annexation of the country to the British Empire.  I believe that this solution would be cordially welcome also to the greater number of Jews who have not hitherto been interested in the Zionist movement.  It is hoped that under the British rule facilities would be given to Jewish organizations to purchase land, to found colonies, to establish educational and religious institutions, and to spend usefully the funds that would be contributed for promoting the economic development of the country.  It is hoped also that the Jewish immigration, carefully regulated, would be given preference so that in the course of time the Jewish people, grown into a majority and settled in the land, may be conceded such a degree of self-government as the conditions of that day may justify.  

‘From the standpoint of British interests there are several arguments for this policy, if wider considerations should allow it to be pursued:

‘1. It would allow England to fulfill in yet another sphere her historic part of civilizer of the backward countries. Under the Turk, Palestine has been blighted.  For hundreds of years she has produced neither men nor things useful to the world.  Her native population is sunk in squalor.  Roads, harbors, irrigation, sanitation, are neglected. Almost the only signs of agricultural or industrial vitality are to be found in the Jewish, and on a smaller scale, in the German colonies.  Corruption is universal in the administration and in the judiciary.  The Governors, who follow one another in rapid succession, are concerned only with the amount of money they can squeeze out of the country, to send to Constantinople.  Under British Administration all this will quickly be changed.  The country will be redeemed.’  (note 29.)

As High Commissioner of Zionist Palestine, from 1920-1925, Samuel is often portrayed as a ‘moderating’ influence in relations with the Indigenous population.  His vision of conquest in 1915 contradicts this, as does the historical record.

‘There is little doubt that Arabs sold land to the Jews primarily because they needed money. Both British administrators and Jewish land purchasers knew about the perennial economic distress of the Palestinian fellaheen. Prior to World War 1, the economic viability of the Palestinian fellaheen was precarious at best, and the war severely damaged Palestine’s rural economy.’  (note 30.)

As the Balfour Declaration was deliberated at the Paris Conference, American Consul Otis Glazebrook struck alarm, echoing King-Crane.  Samuel was about to become High Commissioner and Glazebrook observed:

‘Palestine…. is in constant danger of conflagration.  Sparks are flying over its borders all the time and it may be that on some unsuspected day a fire will be started that will sweep ruthlessly over this land. Dispatch from Otis Glazebrook, U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, December 1919.’  (note 31.)

(Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy, March 7, 2024 echoed Glazebrook as the ‘unsuspected day’ arrived: ‘The West Bank is threatening to explode, and nothing can hide the bottomless hate that we have managed to sow in Gaza, the West Bank and the Arab world.’  (note 32.)

As Samuel’s reign unfolded, the Great British Jewish homeland Mandate occasioned its first violence:

‘The arrival of more than 18,000 Jewish immigrants between 1919 and 1921 and land purchases in 1921 by the Jewish National Fund (established in 1901), which led to the eviction of Arab peasants (fellahin), further aroused Arab opposition that was expressed throughout the region through the Christian-Muslim associations.’  (note 33.)

In the aftermath of the 1921 expulsion, Winston Churchill drafted a White Paper reaffirming the Mandate. Sahar Honeidi drew out the persisting ‘paradox’:

‘The White Paper asserted that Jews were in Palestine ‘as of right and not on sufferance’, and added that the British government ‘did not contemplate the subordination or disappearance of the Arab population, language or culture’. This confirmed the ambiguity of the Balfour Declaration, since it did not resolve the question as to how the Jews could be in Palestine by right, without infringing on the rights of the local inhabitants.’  (note 34.)

Churchill upheld Balfour’s principle political rights to a Jewish homeland and its dominance over the Indigenous and explained his imperial rationale for supporting the creation of a Zionist state:

‘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 35.)

The Jews were imagined by the Great British to be critical to their war effort against Germany, after Russia withdrew and established the USSR.  Having won the war, and rewarded the Jews with political settlement in Palestine, the Jews were now Great Britain’s hedge against the USSR.  The Western power struggle with Russia (its ‘revolution’ already corrupted and collapsed) was underway, Zionism one of its excuses.  Under this system, a ‘good Jew’ was a committed Zionist, and a compliant subject of the imperial order.

The twenty-eight Articles of the Mandate, approved by the League of Nations July 24, 1922, the basis of Samuel’s rule, further clarify the unfolding cleansing: codifying political right for the Jews and only religious and cultural rights of the Indigenous Palestinians.  This excerpt is snapshot:

‘ARTICLE 4. An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co­operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration to assist and take part in the development of the country.

‘The Zionist organization, so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to secure the co­operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.’  (emphasis added)  (note 36.)

Future British governments acknowledged the Indigenous dispossession:

‘…in particular the 1939 committee led by the Lord Chancellor, Frederic Maugham, which concluded that the government had not been “free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine”, and the April 2017 statement by British Foreign Office minister of state Baroness Anelay that the government acknowledged that “the Declaration should have called for the protection of political rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, particularly their right to self-determination.”’  (note. 37.) 

The ‘Jewish Homeland,’ buffering the Great British ‘Mandate,’ was secure, with its imperial sponsor, in colonizing Palestine until the Arab resistance of the late 1930’s, when the Zionists themselves now became the butt of its arbitrary and reckless authority. 

After Balfour: Zionist Intrusion in Palestine

Today, Lord Sydenham (note 18.) would be appalled by his clear-sightedness, already in 1917, Palestine dishonored by the Zionists, then the Israelis, and, sequentially, by the three great power patrons, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the United States.

            ‘…no one can tell how far that sore will extend.’ 

The unfolding Palestinian cultural scene was tragically evident as the impact of dispossession unfolded through the decade:

‘The American journalist Vincent Sheean… arrived in Palestine in 1929 as an avid Zionist sympathizer, and left a few months later as a harsh critic of the Zionist enterprise.  He found that the Jewish settlers ‘had contempt [for the Arabs] as an ‘‘uncivilized race,” to whom some of them referred as “Red Indians” and others as “savages,”’ and felt that “We don’t have to worry about the Arabs” who “will do anything for money.”  They looked upon the indigenous population as “mere squatters for thirteen centuries” so that it should be feasible for the Zionists, by purchase, persuasion and pressure, to get the Arabs out sooner or later and convert Palestine into a national home,” an attitude that the Arabs of Palestine were so different from other Arabs that they would welcome the attempt to create a Jewish nation in their country.”                                   (note 38.)

The Imperial Palestinian erasure institutionalized, as Lord Passfield’s Cabinet Paper of March held, thirteen years following Balfour, in 1930:

‘Zionist leaders have not concealed and do not conceal their opposition to the grant of any measure of self-government to the people of Palestine either now or for many years to come.  Some of them even go so far as to claim that that provision of Article 2 of the Mandate constitutes a bar to compliance with the demand of the Arabs for any measure of self-government.  In view of the provisions of Article XXII of the Covenant and of the promises made to the Arabs on several occasions that claim is inadmissible.’  (emphasis added)  (note 39.)

Of the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939, Ben-Gurion acknowledged, ‘in our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us,’ adding, ‘let us not ignore the truth among ourselves,’ that ‘politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.’  The revolt ‘is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews…. Behind the terrorism is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.’ (note 40.)

During the Revolt:

‘…as Ghassan Kanafani noted, “Britain sentenced about 2,000 Palestinian Arabs to long terms of imprisonment, demolished more than 5,000 houses and executed by hanging 148 persons in Acre prison, and there were more than 5,000 in prison for varying terms.”  (note 41.)

The progression toward Indigenous erasure and elimination deepened in the 1940’s:

‘Another important advocate of removal of the indigenous population was Yosef Weitz, a high official of the Jewish National Fund.  When he held this position in the early 1940s, he explained that the proper solution ‘is the land of Israel, at least the Western Land of Israel [cis-Jordan] without Arabs, because there is no room for compromise.’  They must be completely removed, leaving ‘not one village, not one tribe,’ with the possible exception of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Old City of Jerusalem.  They must be removed to Trans-Jordan, Syria or Iraq.  This plan was widely discussed in the Palestinian Jewish community and was authorized by the top leadership…’  (emphasis added)  (note 42.)

The progression toward erasure as a policy of expulsion was codified as a Zionist movement principle:

‘At the 7th Convention of the World Zionist Organization in 1944, a unanimously passed resolution proclaimed, ‘a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth… shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.’  (note 43.)

The Great British Mandate carelessly and malignantly pitted the two peoples against one another.  As the Holocaust approached, the population influx of traumatized and uprooted Jews applied new pressure on the Mandate, and on the Indigenous Palestinians. The Mandate prohibited Jewish entry into the Mandate and imprisoned Jews in two concentration camps, the Cyprus Internment Camp and the Atlit Detention Camp.  Zionist militias fought Great Britain.  In the face of the Holocaust, the ‘paradox’ – its tragedy – of the Mandate was exposed. The Mandate collapsed under its own weight in 1947, and the United Nations stepped in. 

The U.N.’s 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine took erasure of indigenous Palestine in a policy of expropriation. While, because the U.N. had not granted Palestine in its entirety to Israel, Zionist leadership was in conflict.  Ben-Gurion, however, saw clearly:

‘When the Zionist Congress had rejected partition on the grounds that the Jews had an inalienable right to settle anywhere in Palestine, Ben Gurion had argued in favor of acceptance, “I see in the realisation of this plan practically the decisive stage in the beginning of full redemption and the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine.”’  (note 44.)

Indigenous Palestine could not be persuaded to yield once more to an international plan favoring the Zionists and rejected the U.N. Partition, and war threatened.  A formal plan for Indigenous expulsion from Palestine was drawn up in preparation, IDF’s Plan Dalet (March 10, 1948):

‘Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

‘Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously. ‘Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.’  (note 45.)

Precisely as implemented, beginning May 14: Nakba.  An estimated 531 Palestinian villages were razed by the Israeli army, for prompt occupation by the victorious settlers.  800,000 Palestinians were expelled.  Their destroyed villages were rebuilt by the Zionist, now Israeli, settlers. The victorious Israeli state now claimed 77 percent of the territory of mandate Palestine.  (note 46.) 

Half the Indigenous were expelled or fled in the face of IDF terror.  (note 47.)

Chaim Weizmann celebrated, ‘It was a miraculous cleaning of the land; the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.’  (note 48.)

Albert Einstein, aware of unfolding Zionist terror (April 16, 1948), one month before the War for Independence (May 14, 1948), was appalled:

‘When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the [Zionist] Terrorist organizations build [sic] up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.’ (note 49.)

Indeed, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe attests, validating Einstein’s trepidation:

‘Palestinian sources show clearly how months before the entry of Arab forces into Palestine, and while the British were still responsible for law and order in the country – namely before 15 May – the Jewish forces had already succeeded in forcibly expelling almost a quarter of a million Palestinians.’  (note 50.)

Nakba before Nakba, and with Einstein, somehow, very well informed. 

Nakba unfolded as persisting terror.  Six months after, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt were signatories to the famous December 4, 1948 letter to the New York Times, condemning Begin’s Freedom Party terror (now Netanyahu’s Likud), noting the resemblance to Nazism and Fascism.  It reads in part:

• • ‘…A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.’  (note 51.)

Sound familiar? 

1948 Never Ended: Nakba as a Way of Life

Irgun’s terrorism is cited as a self-contained, if horrific, episode.  It is, in fact, consistent with the terror framework laid down by the IDF in Plan Dalet, its Nakba plan. 

During the 1956 war against Egypt, with France and the U.S., Israel occupied Gaza.  The brief conquest led the IDF to plan for eventual military rule over the West Bank, which congealed in 1963 as ‘The Organization of Military Rule in the Occupied Territories.’  Pappe details this next critical strategic movement in the direction of the ‘Greater Land of Israel,’ and additional control over the Indigenous Palestinians.  The 1956 IDF massacre at Kafr Qasem led to a trial against the alleged perpetrators, staged as a coverup to protect military elites from exposure of a broader plan to ‘transfer’ Israeli’s Arabs.  (note 52.) 

In the war, Israel partnering with Britain and France to seize the Canal, just nationalized by Egypt’s President Nassr.  The 1956 assault on Egypt was denounced by the U.S. and the U.N.

Chaim Weizmann peered darkly into the imperial glass in a 1914 letter: 

‘… should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews out there – perhaps more; they would … form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.’  (note 53.) 

The imperial/colonial Zionist premise could hardly have been envisioned more clearly.

The Six Day War 1967, with Israel seizing Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Sinai Peninsula, saw the further displacement of approximately 300,000 Palestinians remaining from 1948.  It was the next decisive advance to the envisioned ‘Greater Land of Israel.’  In November, 1967, the well-known U.N. Resolution 242 called for Israel’s withdrawal from the conquered territories.  Israel remains in contempt of the Resolution, against repeated U.N. reaffirmations of the original Resolution, refusing to relinquish its supposed ancestral claim. 

This second Nakba was later terrifyingly affirmed as an Israeli achievement by Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Meir Cohen.  Cohen remarked, ’…Israel had made a grave mistake by not expelling 200,000 to 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank’ [in 1967].  (note 31)  Similarly, Amnon Kapeliouk commented, ’the hint is clear,’ in reaction to Defense Minister Sharon’s warning, ‘the Palestinians should not forget 1948.’  (note 54.)

That ‘hint’ validated the atrocities committed during the War for Independence, against the usual denial, minimizing and apologetics concerning the historic episode.  For Sharon, in his frankness, the second Nakba was not wrong: rather, it was inadequate, not having expelled a larger population. 

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, saw the IDF massacre 15,000-20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.  Lebanon was refuge to about 110,000 Palestinians following the 1948 Nakba.  This later savage assault added further injury to the victims of the earlier expulsion, in their destination of refuge.  The Israeli aggression and massacre at Sabra and Shatila in the City of Beirut was denounced by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1982 as an act of genocide.  (note 55.)

In its aftermath, in 1983, the 38th Session of the United Nations General Assembly and the Question of Palestine determined several resolutions affirming the rights and authority of the Indigenous people to their ancestral home and the right of return and denounced Israeli expropriation.  Joseph Schechla, recounted:

‘The Israeli policies of expropriation of Palestinian land in the occupied territory, construction of new settlements and improvement and “thickening” of the existing ones went on unabated from 1984 to 1988.  To acquire Palestinian land the Israeli authorities and the settlement movement continued to resort to various techniques.  These include the long-established practice of confiscating land and declaring it “closed” for military training purposes, declaring Palestinian land as “State land”, expropriating land for “public (Jewish) use” or confiscating it for “nature preserves”’  (note 56.)

The United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (UNCEIRPP] documented IDF extra-judicial killings in Occupied Palestine during the early 1990’s:

‘In a letter to the Secretary-General of 13 July 1993 (A/48/263-S/26078), the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations stated:

‘“Following up on my letter, dated 6 July 1993 (A/48/253-S/26045), concerning the report by the human rights group Middle East Watch, which affirmed that the Israeli army, through the use of undercover units, is pursuing a policy of summary executions of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, I should like to bring to your attention the findings of Amnesty International in its 1993 annual report on human rights.  Amnesty International reported that, among the many human rights violations committed by Israel, “at least 120 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces, often in circumstances suggesting extrajudicial executions or other unjustifiable killings”.  The figure of 120 for the total amount of those killed by undercover units represents one of the more conservative tallies prepared by human rights organizations.  Some groups, such as Al-Haq and Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC), have arrived at figures as high as 160 killings, with many of the victims 16 years of age or younger.” (note 57.)

In the late 1990’s, the UNCEIRPP,

‘…condemning all acts of violence against civilians, the Committee expressed its   alarm at the position and illegal actions of the Government of Israel with regard to Jerusalem, the construction of settlements, land confiscation and punitive collective measures, which had a devastating effect on the Palestinian people and their living conditions and seriously undermined the peace efforts.’  (note 58.)

From the early 2000’s, the Committee noted,

‘The events surrounding the outbreak of the second intifada at the end of September 2000, following the visit of then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Al-Haram Al-Sharif accompanied by hundreds of Israeli security and police personnel, dealt a further serious blow to the peace process.  Israeli forces moved back into parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory where they had not been present for some years, Area A around Palestinian population centres, at times using unprecedented methods such as air bombardments and the massive use of snipers against the Palestinian people.’  (note 59.)

Historian Avi Shlaim observed the ‘“labyrinthine negotiations” at Taba had to bridge a basic conceptual divide, with one side intent to “repackage rather than end Israel’s military occupation”.’  (note 60.)  The U.N. reported:

‘In 2002, the Security Council affirmed a vision of two States, Israel and Palestine. In 2002 the Arab League adopted the Arab Peace Initiative. In 2003, the Quartet (US, EU, Russia, and the UN) released a Road Map to a two-State solution. An unofficial Geneva peace accord was promulgated by prominent Israelis and Palestinians in 2003. In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers and troops from Gaza while retaining control over its borders, seashore and airspace.’  (emphasis added)  (note 61.)

‘Occupation,’ thus, simply, by another name: ‘ending occupation’ defined now by total surveillance, and enforced by repeated military incursions. 

Jonathan Cook reported in The National, 7/17/10: ‘Netanyahu admits on video he deceived US to destroy Oslo accord’:

‘In the film, Mr Netanyahu says Israel must inflict “blows [on the Palestinians] that are so         painful the price will be too heavy to be borne. A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority, to bring them to the point of being afraid that everything is collapsing”. When asked if the US will object, he responds: “America is something that can be easily moved. Moved to the right direction. They won’t get in our way? Eighty per cent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd.”’  (emphasis added)  (note 62.)

In light of the ‘Peace Process,’ as described above, under the Likud Regime and the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, please, reader, consider the 1977 Likud Party Platform, its political thrust and its wording:

‘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 63.)

And note the Platform’s narrative concerning the P.L.O., at that time, late 1970’s, involved in tenacious peace efforts, lethally sabotaged by the IDF incursion into Lebanon:

‘The PLO is no national liberation organization but an organization of assassins, which the Arab countries use as a political and military tool, while also serving the interests of Soviet imperialism, to stir up the area. Its aim is to liquidate the State of Israel, set up an Arab country instead and make the Land of Israel part of the Arab world. The Likud government will strive to eliminate these murderous organizations in order to prevent them from carrying out their bloody deeds.’  (note 64.)

The 1999 Likud Party platform affirmed:

‘The Jewish communities in Judea [the West Bank], Samaria [the West Bank], and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.’ (note 65.)

The ‘Peace & Security’ chapter of the 1999 Likud Party platform rejects a Palestinian state:

‘The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration, and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel’s existence, security and national needs.’  (note 66.)

The October 7 criminality of Hamas is fully matched and outdone by historically cumulative Israeli criminality.  Netanyahu rebuffed Hamas truce and ceasefire offers repeatedly over a period of decades, enforcing Likud’s Party program, refuting the political rights of the Palestinians, just as Balfour, just as U.N. Partition. 

The Likud platforms are thus explicit in colonizing mission, traceable to its Zionist origins and vividly demonstrated in ever expanding dispossession and disenfranchisement. 

Israel launched several notorious smaller scale wars on Gaza through the 2000’s, including Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective edge in 2014.  All included large Palestinian civilian casualties. 

The assaults are referred to as ‘mowing the lawn,’ Israel’s periodic military assaults in Gaza, to continue to assert its hegemony in the occupied territories through terror. 

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon judged Operation Protective Edge, which included the killing of civilians sheltering in UN schools, ‘a moral outrage and a criminal act’. (note 68.)

The Business Insider reported the most recent mowing the lawn episode, May 18, 2021, in article entitled ‘UN says at least 58,000 Palestinians have been internally displaced and made homeless in Gaza after a week of Israeli airstrikes.’  (note 69.)

And compare October 7 to the 2015 IDF veterans’ testimony project conducted by the Breaking the Silence organization.  The organization is criticized for the anonymity of some of the testimony it has published.  It includes the testimony of about 950 IDF veterans.  A 2022 exhibition of the organization’s work included completely open, self-identified testimonials.  Two follow, as reported by The Guardian:

‘Sgt Gil Hillel flinches, awareness written across her face, as she looks to the camera and describes how the power of life and death over another human being changed her. ‘Over time I became more and more violent. I went through a crazy transformation in that job. From a very calm and relaxed person to a very violent and aggressive person who takes their frustrations out on the object they can take it out on, which was the Palestinians and the detainees,” said the former Israeli military police officer.

‘“I hit more, I was more abusive. I didn’t really see them at all. They’re invisible people you don’t see.”

‘As Hillel speaks, the voices of other Israel Defence Forces (IDF) veterans bubble away in the background on screens scattered around a New York city exhibition space. Each monitor speaks to a theme of the brutal reality of how Israel maintains its 55-year occupation and domination of the Palestinians.

‘The destruction of Arab homes as collective punishments. The physical abuse of arrested Palestinians. The humiliation of families at roadblocks because a soldier is having a bad day. Some of the hardest testimony comes about the abuse of children and the torture of detainees.

‘Physical abuse was not limited to adults. A parade of soldiers in one of the videos give accounts of violence against children. One soldier describes his commander pushing the barrel of his M-16 into the mouth of an eight year-old boy who had been throwing stones at their patrol.

‘Some of the most disturbing testimony comes from Lt David Zonsheine, who served in a reconnaissance unit operating in the West Bank. He described the arrest of a 14 year-old boy suspected of hiding a weapon or of knowing where it was.

‘“What took place there was shocking torture including things like finding a thick wooden board in a field, sitting him on it and smashing his balls for several minutes. And then telling him, ‘Look, we like you,’ and kicking his balls. And then telling him, ‘Come on, just tell us, get it over with, tell us where it is and we’ll finish this,’” he said. (note 70.)

An August, 2023 article in The Nation, by Anne Irfan, documenting ongoing and recently escalating settler violence, foresaw the dynamics of what she referred to as an impending ‘second Nakba.’  (With the expulsion resulting in 1967, including an estimated 300,000 Palestinians, another mass expulsion can be counted as a third Nakba, precisely what is unfolding in the extermination and dispersal practices currently underway in Gaza.)  The timing of Irfan’s documentation, seven weeks before the Hamas assault, and the resulting retaliation, resonates.  Unable to envision the impending Hamas action, and the IDF response, Irfan’s interpretation strikes to the heart of the Prime Minister’s extermination order.  (note 71.)

This is Irfan’s glimpse into the Gaza slaughter as it plays out on the West Bank:

‘The reason is that the IDF has in recent months started firing from the air to kill in the West Bank, like in Gaza. On January 7, for example, the army killed seven youngsters who were standing on a traffic island near Jenin, after one of them apparently threw an explosive charge at a jeep and missed.’

‘It was a massacre. The seven youngsters were members of one family, four brothers, two more brothers and a cousin. That doesn’t interest Israel. Now the IDF is moving forces from Gaza to the West Bank. The unit is already there, the Kfir Brigade is on its way. They’ll return to the West Bank stoked with the indiscriminate killing in Gaza and will want to continue the great work there as well. Israel wants an intifada. Maybe it will even get one. It should just not feign surprise when this happens.’  (emphasis added)

Irfan describes a combination of Israeli authoritarianism, soldier/settler partnering in increasing campaigns of violence and terror against the West Bank Palestinians, and a vacuum and splintering in Palestinian leadership as the basis for concerns about the Nakba she correctly foresaw.  The British role in crushing Palestinian leadership during the 1936-39 uprising is paralleled now by the role played by the U.S., throughout the region, ensuring its domination over oil, with Israel its public relations vehicle.  It is rule by violence.  The December 2021 State Department amendment to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) in its oversight of relations with Israel is telling:

‘Reaffirming the strategic partnership between the State of Israel and the United States of America and their shared and enduring commitment to the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law,

‘Reiterating the unwavering commitment of the United States to Israel’s security and inherent right to self-defense, and the importance of continued United State military assistance to Israel in a way that enhances Israel’s security and strengthens the bilateral relationship between the two countries, including through Foreign Military Financing.

‘Acknowledging that Israel has a robust, independent and effective legal system, including its military justice system…’  (note 72.)

Irfan’s documentation of ‘military justice’ in April, 2023 has been documented in the abyss of brutality on the West Bank unfolding since October.  The 2021 amendment to FAA points to embrace by the U.S. of Israel’s Apartheid.  It sheds light on the refusal by the President and Congress to hold Israel accountable for its use of U.S. military aid, as the remainder of the FAA text dictates, and as Senator Sanders attempted to affirm in his ill-fated vote to enforce it. 

Legal scholar Cruz Rodriguez states, ‘there are over 65 Israeli laws that directly and indirectly discriminate against Palestinians within Israel, and the Palestinian territories under military occupation.’ This ‘robust’ legal system includes:

‘The Basic Law: Israel Lands establishes 93% of the land in Israel as public, owned by the state of Israel, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and the Development Authority. Only these entities are permitted to transfer land and lease it out to residents. The JNF controlling 13% of the land and leasing it only to Jews. Palestinians are banned from leasing about 80% of the land controlled by the state of Israel. The Law of Return gives Jews only, anywhere in the world, automatic Israeli citizenship, while Palestinian refugees are barred to return to their land under the Absentees’ Property Law. The Residency Revocation Law establish “permanent” residency for Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, making their residency a revocable privilege rather than an inherent right. Nearly 15,000 Palestinians have been deported from East Jerusalem after having their residency revoked. The Ban on Family Unification Law bans family reunification between Israeli citizens and residents of an occupied territory. The Nakba Law financially punishes institutions that commemorate Israel’s Independence Day as a day of the mourning of the 700,000 Palestinians who were expulsed after the establishment of Israel in 1958 [sic – 1948).’  (note 73.)

Now standard far right Israeli declarations, as Irfan documents, were also openly broadcast before October 7:

‘Ultraconservative and ultrareligious members of the Israeli government have been calling for Palestinians to be relocated out of Gaza into neighboring Arab states. Supporters of this idea say they only want to move Palestinians who want to leave; critics and legal experts say it’s not a voluntary choice if war has made their home uninhabitable.

‘Chief among proponents of this view is Ben-Gvir, the country’s national security minister, who told a party meeting last week that the war was an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” according to The Times of Israel and other local media.’ (note 74.)

Palestinians ‘who want to leave’ is a replay of the fictional narrative of the first Nakba when the Israeli’s spoke of ‘voluntary flight.’  The euphemisms and the obfuscations recall the practice of ‘counter-insurgency’ in the French and U.S. genocide in Vietnam and its program of ‘strategic hamlet,’ isolating the civilian population from the militias, and its appeal to ‘hearts and minds’ of the victimized, defenseless population.  Nothing ‘voluntary’ about it. 

The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem) reported December 7, 2023 – ‘The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not a side effect. It is the policy’ –  concerning Israeli’s withholding of food from the Gaza strip, remarking, ‘Israel has used this policy before when it imposed the closure on Gaza in 2007 after Hamas took power. In October 2010, following a Freedom of Information petition submitted by Israeli human rights NGO Gisha, it came to light that for years, Israel had employed a deliberately restrictive policy that relied on intricate calculations of the minimal caloric intake Gaza residents need to survive. It was illegal and cruel then. It is illegal and cruel now. The war crimes committed by Hamas in its horrific attack on October 7th, in the illegal holding of hostages and with the firing of rockets at Israelis throughout the war, cannot serve as a reasoning or justification for the denial of food, water, medicines and fuel to more than 2 million human beings.’  (note 75.)

B’Tselem’s April, 2023 report, six months prior to October 7, supported Irfan’s anticipation of a further Nakba – ‘Israel’s Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank’ – exposing the programmatic, and not simply reactive or occasional, basis of Israel’s use of withholding nutrition, specifically, water deprivation, in population control of Palestinians residing on the West Bank.  (note 76.)

Confusion over the moral criminality of the unfolding IDF civilian rampage, and the accompanying settler rampage, is reserved for leaders in the U.S. and Israel.  The rest of the world sees clearly.  (note 77.)

The U.S. and Oil Imperialism in the Middle East

Israel functions as a U.S. principality, long menacing its immediate neighbors, as the U.S. seeks authority over the region as a whole.  Israel is the recipient of more U.S. aid than any developing country.  The CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected Syrian government was 1949; Israeli statehood 1948. Israel’s colonial practice is validated on the basis of U.S. modeling and conditioning. U.S. imperial practice in the Middle East next included the 1953 CIA overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian President Mosaddegh.  His misdeed: nationalizing oil.  With his overthrow, Iranian Oil was promptly re-privatized, under British and U.S. authority.  Placing the Shah in charge, the U.S. was complicit in his murders and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, until his overthrow by the Revolutionary Army in 1979.  The U.S. propped up its enemy, Iraq, in the resulting eight year war with its new enemy, Iran.  The Iraq/Iran war, ending as the Cold War came to a close, found Bush 1 requiring a new war.  Through U.S. Ambassador Ann Glaspie, ally Hussein was green lighted to invade Kuwait.  Glaspie told Hussein: 

‘I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country.  But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait …’  (note 78.)

Supporting, or deferring to, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on July 25, 1990, the U.S. switched gears on August 2, cried foul against its supposed ally, invaded, and crushed the exhausted Iraqi forces in days.  ‘A United Nations report in March 1991 described the effect on Iraq of the US-led bombing campaign as “near apocalyptic”, bringing back Iraq to the “pre-industrial age.”  (note 79.)  Bush’s invasion was described as a ‘turkey shoot,’ the now abandoned U.S. proxy exhausted from eight years of battle with Iran. 

Consider, in relation to U.S. destruction of Iraq in 1991, IDF’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014: Israeli Resilience Party leader Benny Gantz bragged, ‘parts of Gaza were sent back to the stone age.’  ‘The IDF reported that they supplied 5,000 tons of munitions to the Israeli fighting forces.’  More than two thousand Palestinians were killed.  Six Israeli civilians were killed.  (note 80.)

President Bush, opting against Saddam’s overthrow, found President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair in regime-change mode, imposing an embargo when global consensus could not be achieved for a new direct war.  Clinton’s and Blair’s embargo caused the deaths of 500,000 children.  Everyone remembers, of course, Secretary Albright’s reply to CBS reporter Leslie Stahl about the genocide – the Secretary, noting the ‘hard choice’ entailed in the deaths of a half million children, explained, ‘…it was worth it.’  (Note 81.)  (Cf. Albright’s Israeli role model, Golda Meir: ‘When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.’  (Note 82.)

Bush 2 persisted in regime change mode, now under the salesmanship of ‘the War on Terror’ in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, lying about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and Hussein’s alleged alliance with Osama Bin Laden as pretext.  It built its case on fabricated evidence, against scrupulously acquire evidence provided by its distinguished and prestigious sources on the ground, Hans Blix leading the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and Mohammed El Baradei leading the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  They oversaw 900 inspectors at 500 inspection sites over the length and breadth of Iraq, and ultimately rejected the Administration’s WMD allegations against Iraq.  The inspectors worked from November, 2002-March, 2003.  (Note 83.)  The Administration shut down inspections, and, insisting upon war, invaded.  Bush 2’s genocides in Iraq (500,000 dead, 1 million refugees), and Afghanistan, were unremitting under President Obama.  The Costs of War project estimates nearly 5 million deaths in the U.S. ‘war on terror,’ in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, 38 million displaced.  (note 84.) 

ISIS was the regional terror outcome of the vast Western genocide and territorial plundering, just as Hamas is the local terror outcome in the confinement of the Palestinian in what Ilan Papa refers in his book title as The Biggest Prison on Earth. 

The parallel – imperial ‘blowback,’ or the famous ‘boomerang effect’ – between the World Trade Center catastrophe and the Hamas assault is striking: President Reagan’s Operation Cyclone (1979-1992), created the Mujahedeen to battle the Soviet Afghanistan state, with several billions to the terror force in proxy war against the Soviet Afghanistan government.  Mujahedeen was led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose “followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.” (note 85.)  Mujahedeen evolved into the Taliban and Osama’s al Qaeda, going rogue in the WTC assault, just as Hamas on October 7. 

It is a case for Pogo, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ 

The supposed conflicts are manufactured, and then crushed, in the sequence of wars of election and opportunity.  ‘Conflict’ is nothing more than Imperial mirage, propaganda ploy.  The States scratch each other’s backs.  Did Israel ‘miscalculate’ in its cynical delegation of supreme authority to a terror force on its neighboring territory?  It condemned Hamas for an ideology of destruction to ‘all Jews,’ withholding recognition from Israel, and marginalizes the PLO, which does offer recognition.  All toward buying time toward the justification of encompassing ethnic cleansing, now, at last, toward finality.  That is, Likud, 1977, ‘between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.’

Harvard professor Noah Feldman, in the current Time Magazine, February 27, 2024, explains: ’Israel’s approach [in Gaza] resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul.’  (note 86.)

Holding recent U.S. exterminations as Israel’s model, Feldman inadvertently brings attention to the principle of extermination inevitably shared by the master and client.  It is a mutuality of military principle in their shared pursuit of Asian domination. 

U.S. Complicity in Never Ending Nakba

In response to public pressure, President Biden’s criticizes ‘disproportion’ in Gaza.  He calls for ‘sanctioning’ West Bank settlers for their redoubled pillaging.  He reiterates a ‘two state solution.’  

All with no fundamental alteration in his commitment to the IDF scourge, and the unfolding usurpation of Gaza.  What use is ‘sanction’ of the settlers as the Likud government, not budging, cheers on West Bank settler terror with openness and passion?  It recalls Chaim Barman’s 1982 observation that Menachem Begin, ‘has shown that whatever protest this or that American Administration might make of Jewish settlement of the infringement of human rights, in the West Bank, he has been able to strengthen his grip on the area without any diminution of American aid.  Indeed, he is even anticipating an increase…  Indeed the American Government has been financing the very policies it denounces with such consistency that one doesn’t have to be an Arab to wonder if the the denunciation is sincere.’  (note 87.)

In the face of the Israeli government’s military law system, the futility of demanding ‘sanctioning’ West Bank ‘settlers’ is an embarrassment.  The law system occasions a terror regime legitimizing settler violence, home destruction, Indigenous flight and death, and under which minor infractions (e.g., stone throwing) lead to arrests, imprisonment, and torture as a common prison practice, convictions occurring with near certainty.  This now includes approximately 7,000 detainees, including thousands of women and children and about 2,900 confined without charges, in indefinite detention without trial.  It has deteriorated markedly since October 7, the settlers with no meaningful containment and, if anything, under both tacit and explicit state authority to enlarge the terror and dispersion of its victims. 

The dreadful conditions in the West Bank, attested by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and widely reported.  (note 88.) 

Similarly, the defunding of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations that workers colluded with Hamas, demonstrates U.S. and Israeli priorities: vacating Gaza.  Detained UNRWA staffers attest to IDF torture to compel them to confess ties to Hamas.  (note 89.)  Defunding the NGO on the basis of unproven allegations against a tiny fraction of its 30,000 workers in the midst of famine and rubble is gross and depraved facilitation of genocide.  The campaign to shutter UNRWA coincided with the ICJ referral.  The campaign to shutter UNRWA unfolds in the face of mass starvation as IDF’s chief current weapon, following the early carnage. 

Greater Israel has been the plan for well over a century, and it is now taking form, with massive U.S. aid, U.S. regional intervention, and institutional subversion.

From Erasure to Elimination

On September 27, 2023 – ten days before the Hamas butchery – Netanyahu stood at a lectern, simpering, demonstrating a map illustrating the then unfolding Abraham Accord: with no Palestine on that map.  (note 90.)

The Prime Minister’s map pictures long envisioned Greater Israel, uncannily anticipating the extermination campaign that shortly followed.  As early as 1979, Edward Said remarked on ‘what has been referred to in the press by Israeli and U.S. officials as a potential war of annihilation waged by Israel against the Arabs.’  (note 91.)  Chomsky, similarly, in 1983, ‘…if U.S. policy does not change course, the primary objective for Americans concerned with peace and justice will no longer be to try bring the U.S. in line with international consensus, now irrelevant, but to block American support for the next step: expulsion of a substantial part the Arab population on some pretext.’  (note 92.) 

Hannah Arendt 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 93.)  Forty years later, Chomsky also invoked Sparta.  What Arendt prophetically saw of a state in the making, and Chomsky recognized in the accomplished state, has long come to pass.  (note 94.) 

This Sparta was brought into being by an indifferent empire, and in denial of what it is: a theocracy in which Judaism is subordinated to power, inside, now in a fascist degeneration, and outside in an apartheid framework. The ‘new people’ are imperial assimilationists who, yet, seek their own identity, and never find it, in the abyss of their divided house.

Is Anti-Zionism an Antisemitism? Why this Distraction?

Ninety-five of your Democratic House colleagues voted for the craven ‘Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism’ Bill. 

The predominant question is international power, not identity. 

The conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism, on the right, corresponds to the conflation of zionism and Jew, on the left.  Both are antisemitic, tying the Jew to the U.S. imperial project, on the right, and, on the left, to the Israeli colonial project. 

The one claims it is impossible for the Jew not to be a nationalist. The other that it is impossible for the Jew not to be an imperial lackey.  The Jew, in these constructions, does not think for himself.  In the one instance, he unquestioningly follows a cult.  In the other, he must identify and subjugate to a remote patron.  

The ZIonists’ insistence on its cosmopolitan state is the essence of the betrayal by those holding the equivalence of Jew and Zion.  A federated homeland, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, is unthinkable on this set of equivalences.  It was historically nullified by the nationalism that founds zionism, in toxic collusion with a series of empires, and a world body dominated by one of them. 

The House Bill demonstrates anew, in Israel’s entanglement with the U.S., how in criticizing Israel and repudiating zionism, the underlying ploy is suppressing and diverting criticism from its Imperial patron.  Advising President Truman on U.N. Partition, Special Counsel Clark Clifford (Memorandum by the Presidents Special Counsel (Clifford) to President Truman, March 8, 1948), rigorously defined the framework:

‘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.’  (emphasis added)  (note 95.)

Clifford’s rationale:

‘America’s security and its oil interests in the Middle East depend upon effective enforcement of the United Nations decision on Palestine.  In terms of military necessity, political and economic self-preservation will compel the Arabs to sell their oil to the United States.  Their need of the United States is greater than our need of them.

In terms of military necessity, political and economic self-preservation will compel the Arabs to sell their oil to the United States. Their need of the United States is greater than our need of them.’  (emphasis added)

And Clifford made clear who was in charge: 

‘Collapse of a UN decision taken at the insistence of the United States would cause serious loss of American prestige and moral leadership all over the world.  Arab league negation of partition is not only open defiance of UN, but also deliberate and insolent defiance of the United States which vigorously espoused partition.’  (emphasis added)

Finally, Clifford made clear the racist imperial backdrop:

‘There are those who say that partition will not work and that another solution must be found.  This comes from those who never wanted partition to succeed and who have been determined to sabotage it.  If anything has been omitted that could help kill partition, I do not know what it would be.  First, Britain, the Mandatory Power, not only publicly declared she would have no part of it, but she has done everything possible to prevent effective action by the Palestine Commission.  Next, we have placed an embargo on arms to Palestine, while Britain fulfills her “contract obligations” to supply arms to the Arabs.  Thirdly, our State Department has made no attempt to conceal their dislike for partition.  Fourthly, 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)

Clifford’s policy articulation thus laid the blueprint for the contemporary declaration, ‘anti-zionism is anti-semitism.’  In our own ‘disintegrating situation,’ sixty-six years later, the legislation proclaiming a supposed protective commitment for ‘the Jews,’ is a cover and evasion for the genocidal proceedings. 

‘The sole question is what is best for the United States of America.’

The genocide is, in fact, a United States genocide-by-proxy.  It is what U.S. taxpaying citizens are sponsoring, involuntarily.  With over 32,000 Palestinians killed – considered a vast underestimate – mass starvation is immanent and happening.  An expensive taxpayer burden, and crushing morally. And consider some of the imperial calculation:

Hamas is a delegated enemy of Israel, its intent to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization.  (note 96.) 

Hamas is sponsored and funded by Qatar.  (note 97.)

Following the U.S. genocides in Iraq (1991, 1990’s, 2000’s), the U.S. stationed several military bases in Qatar.  (note 98.)

And Qatar was the delegated broker of the so-called ‘humanitarian truce,’ as the brief, late November pause in the extermination was termed.  It maintains this role in supposed ongoing negotiations. 

Hamas, a fascist party, elected once, seventeen years ago, thus operates at the pleasure of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his own fascist Cabinet and Knesset – the Palestinian and the Israeli people pay the price = under two fascistic forces – with 1200 Israelis butchered and now over 32,000 Palestinians dead six months into the extermination unleashed by the concerted murder committed by both authoritarian regimes, in concert with an international community.  (note 99.)

Dozens of reporters and news hosts and academics are fired for exposing the murderous dynamics underlying the Imperial mirage, and numerous murders of reporters on scene.  (note 100.)

Protesting students – including Jewish students – are intimidated and silenced. 

And then the U.S. Congress weighs in with legislation specifically prescribing and ordaining the censorship.  Not because it cares about ‘the Jews.’  This should never be a source of confusion.  But because of its Imperial investment in the world’s main Oil repository, the famous Middle East, ensuring that its standby economic vehicles, Armaments and War, remain sacrosanct, as Special Counsel Clifford enunciated, so long ago.  Oil remains, of course, the global economy’s chief lubricant, now obsolete, along with its wars, in the age of Climate Catastrophe, in our global suicide.  War is considered a leading cause.  (note 78.)

While the Bill does not prescribe criminal penalty for violations, it provides legitimacy to news outlets and universities and other employers in the purge of principled opposition.  And what of ex-President Trump?  He has committed, upon his reelection, to the declaration of martial law and to a deportation scheme for Palestinians. 

My explicitly antisemitic enemy thus denounces me as Jew.  My ideological imperialist foe denounces me – an emphatic anti-Zionist – an antisemite.  And under the antisemite and explicitly Nazi-inflecting President Trump, I could thus be detained for being both an anti-Zionist and, in a separate and accompanying action, as a Jew.  And my solidarity with American Palestinians will certainly merit a jail sentence, under yet a third petition, alleging lending aid and comfort to an enemy. 

And does anyone seriously think under such a regime there would be hesititation in  imprisoning American Zionists for conspiring with a foreign power? 

It is a plague for the imagination of Pastor Niemoller, visionary of moral courage that he was – (‘first they came for…and I said nothing…’).

The suppression of freedom of speech, now widespread in the face of Hamas butchery and the retaliatory IDF extermination, foreshadows and nourishes the dictatorial threat.  The various petitions alleging my incitement and/or my ethnically repulsive and traitorous conduct, will be resolved, with no waste of tax payer dollars on a show trial, when Trump’s police ushers me to the appropriate Camp. 

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck has spoken passionately in response to the Hamas assault toward the protection of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.  (note 102.)  However, his protective intent for the Jewish citizenry of Germany and of Israel is in evident tension with his warnings to the Palestinian population of Germany.  Habeck holds some Palestinians have spoken out against antisemitism.  ’Muslims,’ however, he instructs, risk prosecution for their vociferous statements against Israel and praise for Hamas terror.  Those without legal residency, he declares, risk deportation. 

Habeck seems oblivious to the resonance of a deportation threat with the Holocaust.  It must be asked, in reference to a minority population: where is the line between the freedom of principled speech, which Habeck emphatically endorses, and suspicions that could lead in a racist or biased direction down the road to summary prosecutions for non-residents and deportation?  Given the history Habeck is so determined to avoid repeating against Jews, it must be asked where such a process could lead?  Beginning with Muslims or Palestinians, which population will next be nominated as potential suspects? 

The profiling that seems to be hauntingly suggested by invoking the threat of deportation is magnified by his observation that while some ‘Muslim associations’ have been vociferous in their denunciations, others have not spoken, and ‘too few over all.’ 

This raises the further question: is not speaking also a crime?  Habeck is explicit that it is the basis for suspicion – the silent Palestinian or Muslim agent would, then, seem to be the basis for believing his wishes are implicitly the destruction of Israel and hatred of Jews.  The Palestinian as such becomes, seemingly, the object of suspicion, as a Palestinian.  As the Jew, as such, was considered enemy to the Nazi state. 

A further question: in openly upholding the necessity of criticizing Israel, in Habeck’s framework, does this privilege include the Muslim or the Palestinian in Germany in this moment? 

It can be readily seen the Palestinian who voices criticism, no matter in what good faith, is gravely endangered in this regime of ‘safety.’ 

Such is the delicate circumstance in the ‘protection’ of the Jew and of Israel in Habeck’s framework.  The parallel with Trump’s deportation threat is haunting.  Habeck voices passionate defense of the right to criticize.  Israel, he holds, must be criticized.  His demarcation is the calling to end the Israeli state.  But allegations will inescapably be subject to interpretation.  Is it possible to establish an unambiguous line between ‘criticism,’ and protection of speech and person, and ‘opposition’ that leads to allegations and enforcement and the cancellation of residency for the the suspect Palestinian, suspect as he now is, on principle, as Palestinian? 

All the while a forceful neo-Nazi movement in Germany declares its plan, upon hoped for power, for mass deportations of minorities.  Vice Chancellor Habeck is clear in his denunciation of this threatening fascism, while, tragically, sharing with it deportation as a rational state tool, in its state policy of defense of Israel.  (note 103.)

It’s worthwhile to recall Hitler’s annihilation of 12 million, six million in addition to the six million Jews.  One state ‘enemy’ readily leads to the next.  And the next.

Habeck also notes the disruption of the historic Abraham Accords unfolding between Israel and the Middle Eastern states just as Hamas savaged the Kibbutzim.  Habeck did not pause to reflect the Palestine was not party to the Accords.  The sense is how Hamas interrupted a grand party, albeit one to which they were not invited, and would never be invited. 

The Palestinians were not a party to Accords which, by way of historic erasure, not only by the Zionists and the Israelis, and the Middle Eastern states, but on the basis of the European world system.  This is the plight of the Indigenous throughout the world whose territories are important as new markets and whose peoples are important as cheap or enslaved labor, or simply expulsion from their lands. for the purposes of ‘development.’ 

In her controversial December 2023 New Yorker article, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, Masha Gessen detailed the contradictions of Germany’s commitment to the survival of Israel as a ‘Reason of State.’  Gessen illuminates exploitation of the Holocaust by the contemporary European powers that provides justification, both for Israeli conduct with Indigenous Palestine, and European collusion.  (note 104.) 

In 1948, under the gathering consensus for a nation state, under urgency of the Shoah, the anti-zionist was marginalized.  Similarly, now, under Hamas butchery, the anti-zionist is dangerously erased, and needed more than ever, just as in 1948, under the ‘totalitarian’ (Arendt’s characterization of the ‘unanimity’) conditions of the moment, and the war state it spawned, owning the Jew for zionism.

Arendt observed:

‘Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenon, and characteristic of our modern mass age.  It destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact that we are different by nature and by conviction.  To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from that god-like certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap.  A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria. In contrast to agreement, unanimity spreads like an infection into every related issue.’  (note 105.)

Gessen, a celebrated journalist and author, about to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize, was challenged for asserting in her New Yorker article a parallel between the IDF incursion in Gaza and the Nazi incursion into the Warsaw ghetto.  Breaching ‘unanimity,’ Gessen’s article should have been the basis for her nomination and receipt of the Arendt Prize, not its retraction.  Against wide protest, the award committee did finally honor Gessen, at a ceremony including only a fraction of its originally planned attendance. 

The silence is deafening: ‘unanimity spreads like an infection into every related issue.’ 

The antisemitism among a small coterie of American young is symptomatic of this surrender of a faith and of a people to power politics.  Instead of properly educating the young, correcting their reflexive expressions of Jew hatred – it is not in fact ideological, Hitlerian antisemitism – and the gaping, actual differentiation of Jew and Zionist, the students are stigmatized and marginalized and purged.  Arendt cited the imperative of the ‘loyal opposition’ in an open dialog.  The students must be taught so.  Their professors must not be destroyed. 

Everyone must be entitled to speak and to be heard and to be listened to. 

The old lies and a new silence are ordained, in the sacrifice of careers and degrees and, indeed, understanding and community – the teaching moment is violently suppressed and squandered.  Class discussion or campus wide teach-ins could begin with a dissection of Thomas Friedman’s February NYT column, ‘Understanding the Middle East through the Animal Kingdom.’  The understanding could be nurtured that Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is a mere symptom in the grand scheme of U.S./European imperial aims and domination throughout Asia and Latin America. 

The U.S. is no longer ‘leader of the free world’ – the status lost when it lost in Vietnam/Indo-China.  Instead, the imperial stakes are now explained on the basis of ‘the clash of civilizations.’  Samuel Huntington is its post-Cold War imperial ideologist, Thomas Friedman’s thought guide.  The ’clash’ is the contemporary rationalization of unprovoked imperial aggression, in the face of the ungovernable Asian and Latin American ‘hordes.’  Defending against the unprovoked aggression, they are seen as ungrateful and their barbarity now demonstrated beyond argument.  Undefeated, they are regarded as the provocateurs.  Failed imperial aggression becomes the basis of its sacrificial superiority, if, increasingly, defeat, repulsion and default surrender.  The barbarian resistance itself demonstrates the lack of civility, the refusal to be rescued by the superior imperial power. 

There is never any question about the ‘civility’ of unprovoked aggression.  ‘Clash’ means, operationally, refusal to subjugate and insistence on sovereignty.  In the face of empire, this is forbidden, by definition. 

Promoting his Middle East genocide, Bush 1 proclaimed a ‘New World Order,’ pronounced an end to the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’ and the ‘clash’ went into high gear. 

In relation to the Middle Eastern corner of empire, as early as 1943, Arendt was, again, prophetic:

‘If, in the present situation, the powers should be willing to help the establishment of a Jewish homeland, they could do so only on the basis of a broad understanding that takes into account the whole region and the needs of all its peoples. On the other hand, the Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests.’  (note 106.)

Arendt, visionary that she was, was only partly informed concerning the accomplished dispossession and expulsion.  The problem therefore was not, and is not, that the Zionists would be blamed for profiteering, but that its imperial backdrop and history is hardly known.  In her Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt referred to such oblivion as ‘provincial isolation’: the authorities are to be trusted and maintained in political ignorance; what occurs beyond, often within, our borders is unseen, unreported, not taught, never discussed.  The sum of common understanding: the ‘hordes’ are ‘the enemy.’ 

The Zionists are, in fact, both imperial victims, buffer and humane face, and colonial agents, fully responsible.  They are not responsible alone.  President Biden’s reflexive $14 billion, October 8, is symptomatic.  As journalist Gideon Levy frames it: Israel is ‘addicted’ to U.S. aid.  Its addiction rationalizes the imperial projection of ultimate evil onto the ‘hordes’ of Islam.  There must be a justification for endless blood-for-oil.  Huntington wrote its promotional copy.  Friedman consults it vigorously.  They are the enforcers of ‘provincial oblivion.’ 

In a kind of ultimate ethical and moral perversion, the Jewish Shoah is advanced as a rationalization and justification and explanation for the unfolding Palestinian Nakba, its own Shoah in the making.  This ethically mangled exercise is the long end of Herzl’s cringing subjugation, at the beginning of the enterprise, to the ghastly Empires.  Frustrated in his assimilationist ambitions in the ranks of the antisemitic European intelligentsia, Herzl took Zionism to the marauders, found his way around, and thus forged Jewish imperial assimilation, submerging Judaism beyond recognition into the brutal European expansionist project.  In the Middle Eastern corner of empire, Jews are its vehicles and its shock absorbers.  As Arendt put it, ‘into an entirely new people.’

‘Hannah Arendt wrote that the formation of Israel solved the Jewish question in Europe, but “merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless”.  She criticized the way that Jewish historians had portrayed Jews “not [as] history-makers but history-sufferers, preserving a kind of eternal identity of goodness whose monotony was disturbed only by the equally monotonous chronicle of persecutions and pogroms”. In her view, this perception of Jewish history allowed the Holocaust and the Arab–Israeli conflict to be presented as parts of a continuum of persecution of Jews.’  (note 107.)

Anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism.  The false declaration is a hiding place for Empire and colony.

The U.S. and Oil Imperialism in the Global South: the Middle East is not Special

On another current imperial front, the U.S. has been aggressing in Venezuelan affairs, e.g., for over twenty years, including several coup attempts and, as in Iraq in the 90’s, and a lethal embargo.  Seven million Venezuelans are uprooted and homeless, in flight from their imperially destroyed country.  The supposed U.S. ‘border crisis’ is the outcome.  The uprooted Venezuelans are in ironic flight for the hoped for safety of the U.S., which is responsible for the economic and political destruction in theirs that necessitates their flight.  It is simply another misunderstood and censored global Imperial disaster.  The resulting ‘immigration crisis’ is simply population control and an extension of U.S. aggression directly against the Venezuelans Biden’s and several previous Administrations have perpetrated.  The entire sequence serves the multi-national oil interests, to which the U.S. itself is subjugated.  Border ‘enforcement’ and ‘asylum’ restriction are domestic political distractions, as the Democrats and Republicans contend over who will command the agreed program for endless oil and bottomless unprovoked international destabilization and aggression.  The ‘immigration debate’ and the unending call for ‘reform’ distracts and eclipses the real and ongoing victimization of the Venezuelan people, in their country, in their fight, and in our country.  There is no ‘immigration crisis.’  It is war.  Blood and homelessness, for oil. 

Venezuela’s nationalized oil occasions the targeting.  Just as in the Middle Eastern principalities, whose democratically elected heads of state have been repeatedly deposed by the CIA and the U.S. military since the late 1940’s.

The stream of Venezuelans desperate for entry at our Southern border is a lynchpin of the fascist right.  Texas Gov. Abbott, with the support of twenty five governors, has led the fascist charge.  The governors threaten to unleash their state militias in support of Governor Abbott, against the authority of U.S. Border Patrol, in protest of the current ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding Federal authority.  If the Administration deferred to Venezuelan sovereignty, making reparations for destroying its economy, facilitating safe return and recovery for the uprooted in their national home, Venezuelan flight would stabilize. 

The threat of civil war would ease. 

Clifford’s assertion – ‘The sole question is what is best for the United States of America’ – acquires irony. 

Empire and Nationalism? Or Democracy?

The imperial campaigns are in crisis.  Democracy is the willing sacrifice of even our clearly democratically committed leaders, in the oil drive, in the Middle East, and in our hemisphere.  A point has been reached in our own country where the pursuit of empire is practically incompatible with formal democracy.  Zionism, similarly, was conceived as a greater European project of Mediterranean ethnic cleansing.  The Israeli state has devolved, unsurprisingly, into authoritarianism – as has the U.S. 

In now seeking a wider Mid-East war, the U.S. is in denial of the dying petroleum resource it seeks, at any cost, political and ecological.  Israel’s crisis is its pretext to pursue one final climb for the lost cause.  The implicit imperial despair, banking all on several now definitively failed projects, is homicidal and suicidal. 

The Senate voted 70-29 on February 13, 2024 to approve $14 billion to the extermination, legislatively validated the imperial crisis. 

Endless territorial expansion with even the appearance of democracy are ultimately incompatible, for states large and small. 

The great Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, sounded this prophetic note in 2015:

‘And this set of beliefs: that they [Palestinians] are not human beings like us enable us Israelis to live in so much peace with those crimes – ongoing crimes – for so many years with losing any kind of humanity.  Values?  I heard today people talk about what are Jewish values.  I must be frank with you…  I don’t know what are Jewish values.  I know what are universal values…  There are very clear universal laws.  And there is a very, very clear international law.  But for most of the Israelis international law is very important.  But not for Israel: Israel is a special case.  Why is it a special case?  And again you get with all this set of values, with this living in denial.  Is it good for Israel?  No.  It’s very corrupting.  For as long as the United States enable Israel to continue… obviously the Palestinians are the first and direct unbelievable victim of it.  But by the end of the day, what will Israel be after all those years?  What is it already today?  Where does it direct to?  And things are getting worse and worse.  And therefore I have so little hope for hope from within for the Israeli society.  Because things are getting more and more to the nationistic, militaristic, religious direction with very little hope that change will come from within.  Why would Israelis go for a change?  What incentive?’ (note 108.)

In 1966, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre organized the International War Crimes Tribunal on the U.S. wars in Indo-China.  Sartre drafted its findings; the Tribunal concurred with his statement.  Sartre observed: 

‘America is guilty of continuing and intensifying the war despite the fact that everyday its leaders realize more acutely, from the reports of the military commanders, that the only way to win is “to free Vietnam from the Vietnamese.”’ (note 109.)

The American commanders cited by Sartre, possibly in irony about the Vietnamese, is the literal truth of the unfolding Israeli war.  What will be accomplished, should it play out to the end, will not, of course, be ‘peace’ for the Palestinians in Gaza, but for the Israelis who are envisioned to replace them, when the time comes, ‘the day after.’

In his report of February 7, 1968, Vietnam war reporter Peter Arnett cited a Major whose explaination of the U.S. obliteration of the South Vietnamese town of Ben Tre – “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” – conveyed no irony.  The Stanford Daily reported, ‘Col. James Dare of Chicago, commander of U.S. Advisory Team 93, said, “we will never know for sure” the number of civilians who died.  “Many families are buried permanently under the rubble,” he said.’  (note 110.)

The unidentified Major quoted by Arnett was pilloried in 1968.  But the fiftieth anniversary of his genocidal formula has been occasion to pause for sentimentality about the visionary Major.  In 2018, The Modern War Institute at West Point posted two articles defending Arnett’s hapless Major: ‘Why Militaries Must Destroy Cities to Save Them,’by John Spencer, and, ‘Yes, Unfortunately, Sometimes Militaries Must Destroy Towns to Save Them,’ by M.L. Cavanaugh.  (note 111.) 

The articles treat the Major on the basis of the strategic considerations of war.  They do not refer to U.S. aggression.  They do not reference the two-three million IndoChinese extinguished in the aggression.  Long forgotten, never really known, there is no public memorial.  Vietnam has not become what Israel has for Germany: ‘a Reason of State.’  They are the sacrificial subjects as ‘clashing civilization’ dashed ahead, awaiting many future opportunities to demonstrate the Major’s eternal truth whose insight is now celebrated. 

Genocide is normalized.  Recently asked about Gaza, Candidate Trump replied, without wincing, ‘You’ve got to finish the problem,’ an echo of the unknown Major of 1968, and in keeping with his earlier Palestinian deportation threat.  Now, indeed, his son-in-law is announcing complicity in the relocation of the surviving Palestinians, while establishing a Mar-A-Lago in Palestine, reserved for the ZIonists and their wealthy patrons.  (note 112.)

The U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1973; the War ended in 1975.  The gun killing epidemic in the U.S. began in 1974.  It approaches two million dead, to date.  It can be thought of as self-genocide, a historical reflex to the horrors of the useless war.  ‘Endless war’ haunts our own generation, ’clashing of civilizations’ their justification.  Invading his former ally, Iraq, Bush 1 announced the ‘end of the Vietnam syndrome,’ his diagnosis for the collective aversion to wars of election and opportunity in the face of the monstrosities of Indo-China.  But our collective mind will not be soothed by the denial and excuses.  We continue to kill and conquer reflexively, or to kill our own and each other’s souls and bodies as an outlet for the persisting madness of Empire. 

In the face of the normalization of numerical madness and routine of mercenary, imperial massacre, Chomsky has questioned the meaningfulness of ‘genocide’ as a useful judgment.  Mass murder defines the war state.  ‘Genocide’ may serve as a legal abstraction.  It fails to capture imperial massacres as expectable and unquestioned, in military practice and in our helpless, depersonalized witness.  The allegation or the judgment is not a deterrent and it is not the basis for meaningful prosecution.  Secretary Blinken, for instance, voices his emphatic concern for Israel’s ‘reputation,’ deep into the future.  As his aid keeps flowing, unabated. 

An estimated 93% of Gazans is facing crisis levels of hunger, now without non-governmental institutional provision.  (note 113.)  The mass starvation is described as historically with no precedent. 

It is, and nakedly so, should famine materialize on its current path, Palestinian Shoah. 

Providing the seedbed for Greater Israel, Netanyahu repeats over and over, ‘the war will continue for many more months.’  (note 114.) 

The so-called ‘people without a land in search of a land without a people,’ is under realization – Hannah Arendt insisted it could only occur ‘“on the moon” or in a “fairy tale”’ (note 115.) – in an accelerated ethnic cleansing/genocide.

Hamas, simultaneously an imperial aberration and perversion and a terror prone colonial symptom, opened the gates on October 7 to opportunity and rationalization to complete the long unfolding Nakba.  The Indigenous civilians are victim from every side.  The perspective of psychology, with the indispensable political perspective concerning empires, offers a framework for conceptualizing the history.  The Zionist enactment reflects the entirety of Jewish history of displacement/diaspora, not the Holocaust alone.  Displacing a standing population is a traumatic repetition, attempting to correct our history of serial involuntary uprooting over three thousand years – dozens of times. 

Gideon Levy, commented on March 10, ‘When Israel Becomes Like Hamas’:

‘Terrible news: Another 27 captives have died in the tunnels of evil; some of illnesses and injuries that went untreated, others from beatings and the horrific conditions in which they were held. For months they have been kept in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, 24 hours a day. Some are old, many are manual laborers. One was paralyzed, and even when the death rattle began, witnesses reported, he received no medical care.

‘Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have not been allowed to visit them even once, and their captors have not released their names, so that their families could be informed. The latter know nothing about their fate; perhaps they have lost hope. Their exact number is unknown; their captors provide no information about them. There are an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 detainees, if not more. Of these, 27 have died, and they will not be the last to die in their cages.  (note 116.)

Psychological trauma theory distinguishes catastrophic and cumulative/complex trauma.  October 7 was pulverizing, catastrophic trauma for the Israeli community.  The world weeps for the terror and the extremity of loss inflicted by Hamas. 

While the Palestinian has endured systematic, cumulative/complex trauma for over a century.  We must begin to weep for the gauging of their rights, in the incessant assault on their political sovereignty, their ancestral home, and their security.  That global mourning has hardly even begun, leaving a long overdue debt of grief.  The Hamas brutalization poses a further challenge to meeting that debt, when its necessity and challenge is now greater than ever. 

A rough accounting of cumulative casualties on both sides provides a snapshot: since 1920, roughly 20,000 Zionists and then Israelis killed in fighting with Palestine, and on the Palestinian side, 72,000 (not including the unfolding genocide).  (note 117.)  One hundred twenty years of the supposed faith of Zionism was a betrayal of Judaism as a religion and an ethnicity from the moment of Herzl’s inspiration.  The Hamas leadership demands the harshest judgment.  Unfortunately, that judgement is not well delegated to an Israeli leadership whose commitment to ethnic cleansing has never been more explicit, and whose implementation of that commitment as a genocide is presumed by the world’s highest Court.  As The Hague has adopted proceedings against Israel, the international community must similarly commit to action regarding Hamas crimes, as their victims’ families now rightly and justly also proceed to The Hague.  (note 118.) 

The theocratic veil the Zionist leadership of Israel wraps around its ethnic cleansing project must yield to a universalist leadership which embraces its many neighbors and currently annexed and occupied subjects, Christian and Muslim, Bedouin. 

Ben-Gurion commented in 1938 at a meeting of the Jewish Agency, ‘I support compulsory transfer [of the Indigenous Palestinians).  I don’t see anything immoral in it.’  (note 119.)

The echo is not that of the Prophets.  One hears instead the genocidal inflection of Cecil Rhodes, Balfour, Churchill, the Dulles brothers, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld.  It is a characteristic Western voice since Napoleon.  Authorizing the ‘clash of civilization’ framework of ‘regime change,’ and, with it, the mangling of native culture.  Wherever it is to be found.   

Where will the healing originate, on all sides?  

Imperialism must be vanquished.  A stupendous current model: House Resolution 943 was introduced December 19, annulling the Monroe Doctrine, the basis of U.S. militarism through our hemisphere.  It must be adopted into law, along with a parallel bill annulling unprovoked U.S. aggression, or facilitating it by another power, anywhere. 

For the Independent Jew four actions are forbidden: dispossession, expulsion, mass confinement of an entire people, and extermination.  We all know why. 

Nationalism stigmatizes and marginalizes the non-citizen as an ‘alien.’ It is estranged at its core from the Independent Jew’s ethic of embrace of the stranger.  The New Testament insists:

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?  So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. (James, 2:4-2:17).

To reiterate Levy: not ‘Jewish values’, nor, I add, ‘American values.’

Universal values.

The Hague’s judgment is clear: its order to end the killing includes the U.S., whose military aid and armaments and alliance makes the killing fields in Gaza possible.  How many more thousands of civilians are to be permitted to be murdered, starved, cleansed? 

As our very own ghettoes and schools and hospitals rot, youth suicide and depression explodes, child labor balloons, the rich break all records of wealth concentration, Congress rewards the Pentagon with unsolicited aid beyond its wildest perverse imaginings, democracy dies, as we are boiled and drowned and swept away (petroleum…), moment by ignorant moment. 

Your decisive and unstinting intervention for return (the Palestinian people), a trans-national state (Israel), and for what remains of our own teetering, imperial Republic, will be indispensable in the days and years ahead.  Transformational efforts must, of course, coincide with the abandonment of oil as the chief lubricant of the world’s economy and of the war industry.

Respectfully.

Robert Sandgrund, LCSW

---

End Notes

Source of Albert Einstein Letter: https://promisedlandmuseum.org/albert-einstein-letter/

1. https:/ /www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/what-does-israels-declaration-of-war-mean-for-palestinians-in-gaza

2. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/30/opinion/thepoint#friedman-middle-east-animals

3.   https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-29/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-people-of-israel-will-settle-gaza-netanyahu-ministers-urge-palestinians-expulsion/0000018d-5495-d1b6-aded-5fdd570c0000?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=Content&utm_campaign=haaretz-today&utm_content=57840effd3

4.  https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-gaza-palestinians-concept-paper-1.7015576

5.  See Moses Hess, Rome And Jerusalem (NY: Bloch Pub. Co., “The Jewish Book Concern,” 1918 and 1945), pp. 20-21.

In: The Class Origins of Zionist Ideology, Stephen Halbrook, Journal of Palestine Studies

Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 86-110 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2535975.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default:6afe46cf62bd67194350aa69aa5483dd&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

6.  Abdulhamid II – https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9892/why-did-herzls-attempt-to-come-to-a-political-agreement-with-the-ottoman-rulers

7.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2535975

In: The Class Origins of Zionist Ideology, Stephen Halbrook, Journal of Palestine Studies

Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 86-110 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2535975.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default:6afe46cf62bd67194350aa69aa5483dd&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

also see: Hatem Bazian, Palestine: …it is something colonial (Decolonizing the mind), Amrit Publishers, 2016

8.  https://libertywritersafrica.com/african-history/how-cecil-rhodes-killed-millions-of-southern-africans-for-diamonds-and-lands/

9.  The Fateful Triangle, p. 57, citing from the London Sunday Times, June 15, 1969

10.  https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/15184/frontmatter/9780521515184_frontmatter.pdf

https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/30753/goldman-lewis-origins-christian-zionism-lord-shaftesbury-and

https://www2.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king-crane/intro.html

11. Understanding the Balfour Declaration, Joe Stork MERIP Reports, No. 13 (Nov., 1972),               p. 9

12.  pp. 309-310, The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era, Selig Adler, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, (Oct., 1948), pp. 303-334

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4615334?read-now=1&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents

13.  https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/

14.  https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/

15.  https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/

16.  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/16/reckoning-with-the-history-of-colonialism

17.  https://www2.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king-crane/intro.html

18.  11. Understanding the Balfour Declaration, Joe Stork MERIP Reports, No. 13 (Nov., 1972),                         p. 9

19.  see Stork, op. cit., p. 11

20.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King–Crane_Commission

21.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King–Crane_Commission

22.  https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1922/12/03/issue.html

23.  https://www2.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king-crane/intro.html

24.  quoted in Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, Vintage, p.16-17 1979

25.  https://www.jta.org/archive/case-of-jews-absolutely-exceptional-and-must-be-treated-by-unusual-methods-said-balfour-discussing

26.  http://www.hri.org/docs/king-crane/syria-recomm.html

27.  pp. 319-320, The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era, Selig Adler, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, (Oct., 1948)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4615334?read-now=1&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents

Citing Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Vol. ii, p. 744

28.  pp. 320-321, The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era, Selig Adler, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, (Oct., 1948)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4615334?read-now=1&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents

29.  https://www.un.org/unispal/document/future-of-palestine-by-herbert-samuel-government-of-united-kingdom-memorandum/

30.  LAND QUESTION IN PALESTINE: 1917-1939 Chapter 7 “Conclusions” (University of North Carolina Press:1984) by Kenneth W. Stein

https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/stein-publications/lqpconclusion.pdf

31.  The Balfour Lens: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/9780815731559_ch1.pdf

32.  https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-03-07/ty-article-opinion/.premium/after-150-days-of-death-and-destruction-in-gaza-israel-is-neither-stronger-nor-safer/0000018e-14d7-d7d3-abce-74ff8b640000)

33.  https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/The-Crusades

34.  https://balfourproject.org/facts-on-the-ground-herbert-samuel-and-the-balfour-declaration-1914-1925/

35.  https://www.liberationnews.org/balfour-declaration-dispossession-palestinian-people/

36.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/text-of-the-british-mandate-for-palestine

37.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

38.  Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Haymarket Books, 1983/1989, p. 69

39.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine

40.  The Fateful Triangle, p. 98, citing Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, B&N, 1979, pp. 141-142

41.  https://www.redlabor.org/articles/palestine-a-struggle-against-zionism-and-imperialism

42.  The Fateful Triangle, pp. 131-32, citing Israel Shahak, ‘They should leave and empty out the region,’ letter, Koteret Rashid, March 16, 1983

43.  https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/bbh/1944/10/27/01/article/1/?e=——-en-20–1–img-txIN|txTI————–1 and cited in Susie Linefield, The Lion’s Den, Yale, 2019, p. 32

44.  David McDowall (1990). Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond. I.B. Tauris. p. 193 

45.  Paragraph 6, Item B at http://www.jmcc.org/Documentsandmaps.aspx?id=755 See also: https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/attachments/jps-articles/Plan dalet.pdf

46.  quoted in The Question of Palestine, Edward Said, Vintage, 1979, p. 22

47.  https://www.un.org/unispal/history/

48.  quoted in The Question of Palestine, Edward Said, Vintage, 1979, p. 22

49.  https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/83341/has-any-elected-jewish-politician-of-israel-expressed-support-for-a-single-state

50.  p. xv, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, Oneworld Publications

51.  https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/83341/has-any-elected-jewish-politician-of-israel-expressed-support-for-a-single-state

52.  David K. Shipler, New York Times, April 4, 1983 

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-10-13/ty-article-magazine/.premium/generals-confession-links-massacre-to-israels-secret-plan-to-expel-arabs/0000017f-e653-d97e-a37f-f777910f0000

Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth, One World, pp. xiii-xiv, pp. 9-44 2017

53.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King–Crane_Commission

54.  David K. Shipler, New York Times, April 4, 1983 

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-10-13/ty-article-magazine/.premium/generals-confession-links-massacre-to-israels-secret-plan-to-expel-arabs/0000017f-e653-d97e-a37f-f777910f0000

55.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War#Investigation_into_violation_of_international_law

56.  https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-iv-1984-1988/

Joseph Schechla, “The Past as Prologue to the Intifadah“, in Without Prejudice, vol. I, No. 2, 1988, p. 73., at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-210229/

57.  https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-209471/

58.  https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-209471/

59.  181/ [United States and European Union “letters of assurance” on settlements – e.g., see Clayton E. Swisher, The truth about Camp David, New York 2004, at p. 387f.]

60.  See Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, New York/London, 2000

61.  https://www.un.org/unispal/history/

62.  https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/netanyahu-admits-on-video-he-deceived-us-to-destroy-oslo-accord-1.557322

63.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party#google_vignette

64.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party#google_vignette

65.  https://web.archive.org/web/20070930181442/https://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/elikud_m.htm

66.  https://web.archive.org/web/20070930181442/https://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/elikud_m.htm

67.  https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/22/how-israel-has-repeatedly-rejected-hamas-truce-offers

68  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/07/ten-years-first-war-gaza-operation-cast-lead-israel-brute-force

69.  https://www.businessinsider.com/un-says-58000-palestinians-displaced-in-gaza-by-israels-bombing-2021-5?utm_source=reddit.com

70.  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/dec/15/idf-exhibition-breaking-the-silence

see also: https://www.businessinsider.com/un-says-58000-palestinians-displaced-in-gaza-by-israels-bombing-2021-5?utm_source=reddit.com 

see also:  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-11-04/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/account-from-56-describes-slaughter-and-rape-by-idf-troops-in-gaza-is-it-true/0000017f-eef4-da6f-a77f-fefee9740000?lts=1705018044652

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/former-israeli-soldiers-read-out-public-testimonies-against-army

71.  https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestine-second-nakba/

72.  https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/21-1230.1-Israel-Foreign-Assistance-1.pdf

73.  Cruz Rodriguez, The Legal and Constitutional Consequences of U.S. Police Departments Collaborating with Israeli Security Forces, 26 Pub. Interest L. Rptr. 8 (2022). Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/pilr/vol26/iss1/3

74.  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/south-africa-israel-genocide-case-icj-gaza-displacement-rcna132021

75.  https://www.btselem.org/  This is the full report: https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20231207_humanitarian_catastrophe_as_policy

76.  https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202305_parched_eng.pdf

Gaza is starving – Only remaining hospital under Attack in Khan Younisi

https://www.change.org/p/official-gaza-healthcare-workers-nobel-peace-prize-nomination-2024/u/32264893?

77.  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2023-11-28/ty-article-podcast/with-all-eyes-on-gaza-west-bank-palestinians-are-facing-unprecedented-violence/0000018c-11e4-dd2e-a5ae-d3ef0ac20000?

78.  “CONFRONTATION IN THE GULF; Excerpts From Iraqi Document on Meeting With U.S. Envoy” Archived 11 January 2017 at the Wayback Machine New York Times, 23 September 1990

79.  New York Times, 22 March 1991 “After the War; U.N. Survey Calls Iraq’s War Damage Near-Apocalyptic Archived 18 November 2018 at the Wayback Machine“

80.  https://www.ochaopt.org/content/key-figures-2014-hostilities

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191107-ready-for-execution-the-former-israeli-general-and-his-quest-for-a-new-gaza-war/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/only-the-strong-survive-gantzs-new-campaign-videos-laud-his-idf-bona-fides/

81.  5/12/96, CBS News interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE

And see The Invisible War, by Joy Gordon (Harvard U. Pr.), an unparalleled itinerary of                                  the war criminality of Bush1, Clinton, and Bush2 in Iraq) 

82.  A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography – https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/664790-when-peace-comes-we-will-perhaps-in-time-be-able)

83.  https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/iraqchron https://www.sipri.org/commentary/essay/2023/twenty-years-ago-iraq-ignoring-expert-weapons-inspectors-proved-be-fatal-mistake

84.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costs_of_War_Project

85.  https://www.socialistalternative.org/no-to-bushs-war-on-iraq/a-brief-history-of-us-interventions-in-the-middle-east-1949-2002/

86.  The New Antisemitism,’ https://time.com/6763293/antisemitism/

87.  The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, p. 121 citing Chaim Bermont, Financial Influence, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 19, 1982

88.  https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/ 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/29/why-does-israel-have-so-many-palestinians-detention-and-available-swap

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/02/1216715999/how-israels-judicial-system-handles-the-estimated-7000-palestinians-in-its-priso

89.  https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/unrwa-report-says-israel-coerced-some-agency-employees-falsely-admit-hamas-links-2024-03-08/

90.  https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map

91.  Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 81, 1979, Vintage

92.  Fateful Triangle, pp. 45-46 (1983/99)

93.  ’To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time’, p. 187 1948

94.  Fateful Triangle, p. 47.

95.  https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v05p2/d79

96.  https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-right-hamas-gaza-palestinians/

https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/22/hamas-israels-useful-enemy/

97.  https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-does-qatar-support-hamas/

98.  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-quietly-reaches-agreement-with-qatar-to-keep-operating-largest-military-base-in-middle-east/ar-AA1mnjQ8

99.  https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/11/middleeast/qatar-hamas-funds-israel-backing-intl/index.html#

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

100.  https://cpj.org/2024/01/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/ 

101.  https://ceobs.org/how-does-war-contribute-to-climate-change/

102.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECSMNncuADw

103.  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/21/2218668/-Germans-showing-the-way-in-facing-down-right-wing-authoritarians?detail=emaildkdp&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email

104.  Masha Gessen, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, The New Yorker, Dec. 9, 2023 https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust

105.  Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, Part II: Zionism and the Jewish State, p. 182 (1948)

106.  ‘Zionism Reconsidered,’ p. 155, 1943, in The Jew as Pariah, Essays, 1942-1966

107.  Khoury, Nadim (2020). “Postnational memory: Narrating the Holocaust and the Nakba”. Philosophy & Social Criticism. 46 (1): 91–110. doi:10.1177/0191453719839448. S2CID 150483968

Stav, Shira (2012). “Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination”. Jewish Social Studies. 18 (3): 85. doi:10.2979/jewisocistud.18.3.85. S2CID 144892781.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_and_the_Nakba

108.  National Press Club, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQS-_9K5-Dk

109.  On Genocide, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1968, p. 83, The International War Crimes Tribunal

110.  The Stanford Daily, U.S. Destroys City to Oust the Vietcong, Feb. 8, 1968

https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1968/02/08?page=1

111.  https://mwi.westpoint.edu/militaries-must-destroy-cities-save/

WHY MILITARIES MUST DESTROY CITIES TO SAVE THEM

M.L. Cavanaugh, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/yes-unfortunately-sometimes-militaries-must-destroy-town-save/

112.  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-israel-gaza-finish-problem-rcna141905

113.  https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/01/03/food-shortages-gaza 

https://www.reuters.com/world/what-is-unrwa-un-palestinian-refugee-agency-2024-01-29/

114.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-01/israel-says-war-in-gaza-will-continue-for-  months/103276386 

115.  Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, Shocken Books, in Preface, Jerome Kohn, ed., p. xxx

116.  https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-03-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-israel-becomes-like-hamas/0000018e-2439-dbcf-abee-3df999d20000

117.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_casualties_of_war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_casualties_of_war

118.

https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=9b6462faf4&u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&id=94410ba11f

119.  https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654742