From Ian:
Andrew Pessin:
The Failed Practice of “Jew-Washing”
The Jew-washer might naturally object here that it is not because those individuals are Jewish that he dislikes them. The proof is that there are many other Jews, the good Jews, that he likes perfectly well. It is because they are Zionists that he does not like them. It is not them personally—it is their ideas, their ideology, their behaviors in support of that ideology. His attitude and behavior reflect anti-Zionism, then, not antisemitism. And of course (many agree) it is acceptable to object to, be hostile toward, even to hate, an ideology, and that ideology’s concomitant behaviors.
But now, let us note, this response only succeeds if we endorse the Generality Assumption, i.e. if we assume that antisemitism requires hating all (or at least most) Jews. For if Jews come in many types—if there are many different ways in which individuals manifest or express or conceive their Jewishness—then it is perfectly conceivable that someone legitimately characterizable as an antisemite might not hate all or even most Jews.
The crucial question should not be whether he hates all or most Jews, in other words.
It is whether the people he hates, he hates for their Jewishness.
To see this, imagine officials of the medieval Church rejecting the charge of antisemitism. “We do not hate all Jews,” they might say, “only those Jews with a certain ideology and behavior. When Jewish people change these—and convert to Christianity—they are A-1 by us!”[11]
The flaw in this defense is obvious: the ideology and behavior these officials rejected was the very essence of those individuals’ Jewishness. They may not have hated the individual people who were Jews (once they converted), but they hated Jewishness. They then absurdly claim not to hate Jews because they do not hate those people who are no longer Jewish by the relevant criteria—namely people who reject Jewishness.
But now Zionism, too, is intimately or essentially related to many Jews’ self-conception and identity. Not every Jew’s, obviously—many Jews claim to derive their anti-Israelism from their Jewishness (as we shall discuss below), and often express their anti-Israel sentiments prefaced with “As a Jew…” But there are in fact many more Jews for whom their Zionism, their connection to and support for the State of Israel, grounded in three-plus millennia of Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, is an essential part of their Jewishness.[12] To hate them for their Zionism just is to hate them for their Jewishness. A person may have a lot of anti-Israel, A-1 Jews among his friends, then, but that itself does not exonerate him from hating the Jews he does hate for their Jewishness.
This account is coarse, clearly, and needs to be refined. As currently formulated, for example, it may turn many of the divisions within the Jewish people into antisemites against each other: if it counts as antisemitic to hate Zionist Jews for their Zionist Jewishness, it would also count as antisemitic to hate the “As a Jew”s who ground their anti-Israelism in their form of Jewishness. Similarly, when generalized this account may classify almost any objection to any group’s ideology or practices as a form of racism or bias. To hate members of ISIS for their ideology might have to count as a form of Islamophobia, since presumably their form of Islam is essential to their ideology and identity, and so on.
To prevent these serious consequences at least two things are needed:
(1) Articulation of just when and where certain beliefs and practices become essential to or part of individuals’ identities. This would yield a distinction between ideologies (toward which it is generally acceptable to be hostile) as opposed to people and their identities (toward whom it is generally not acceptable to be hostile).
(2) A close look at the specific contents of the beliefs and practices that compose people’s identities to see which, if any, it might be legitimate (i.e. not a form of “bias”) to oppose.
These are large projects beyond the scope of this essay, but a start may be made at least with respect to Jew-washing. We shall begin in the next part of this essay by getting a little clearer on just how Jew-washing works.
The Holocaust as Jew-Haters’ ‘Gotcha’
Curious, isn’t it? Leftists as a rule recognize the right to national self-determination. Jones, for instance, has written for Catalonia’s right to form a new nation, calling it an expression of that “basic democratic principle.” The tenet is enshrined in yellowing volumes of Lenin and honored by progressives with respect to countries around the world. Only when it comes to the Jews is national sovereignty regarded as uniquely wicked, to the point that a trendy word exists — anti-Zionist — to convey opposition to a state’s very existence. Leftists really should ask themselves the question I once did, setting myself on the path from Trotskyism to Zionism: Since our tradition supports the right to self-determination absolutely everywhere, why is Zionism considered shorthand for evil? The question answers itself.
Another way of considering the issue of Holocaust guilt, by the way, is to see it as a source of never-ending hostility against the Jews — for burdening non-Jews with guilt over what was done to the Jewish people. As Howard Jacobson writes in a brilliant essay, “When Will Jews Be Forgiven the Holocaust?” the answer to his titular question is “Never.” “Those we harm, we blame,” he observes, “mobilizing dislike and even hatred in order to justify, after the event, the harm we did. From which it must follow that those we harm the most—we blame the most.”
And while Germany is the most immediate bearer of this guilt, Jacobson suggests the feeling is universal. Jews prick the world’s conscience, and the world resents it. This includes the left, which nurtures itself on gratifying myths about its part in that seemingly Manichean era known as World War II. Our people were the bravest and best fighters against the Nazis, they say; how dare anyone say we have a problem with Jews?
But this legend has a disturbing way of falling apart. A glance at history reveals that those fighting under the red flag demanded that Jews reject “particularism,” including Zionism, and remain in Europe to fight for socialist revolution. Revolution did not come; the industrialized slaughter of the Jews did. Jews paid the price for the failure of the socialist vision.
This genocide should have prompted not only a deep rethink on the left, but a plumbing of its soul. A hint of it came after the war by Polish Jewish Trotskyist intellectual Isaac Deutscher, who wrote that “of course” he’d abandoned his anti-Zionism. “If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine,” he wrote, “I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.”
But how many of Deutscher’s comrades, and their ideological descendants, have shown themselves willing to reflect on their program and actions in the early 20th century — about how their dogmatic insistence that Jews rely on universalism and the solidarity of their proletarian brothers ended with Auschwitz? So fourscore years after history established the legitimacy of Zionism, anti-Zionism is more popular than ever. The last genocide of the Jews is hurled against the Jews, in support of those pursuing a new extermination campaign against the Jews, by those whose tradition regarding the Jews isn’t as irreproachable as they want to believe.
“Get over it!” a member of my former party once yelled at our German comrades, who were seen as harboring neurotic, crippling shame over the Holocaust. So Jones would like Germany to get over it, and rejoin the war on the Jews, absolved and free at last of that nasty, pesky guilt.
Silence is acquiescence
And where were our elites? University professors celebrate murder. Women’s groups ignore rape. Newspapers publish cartoons that trade on anti-Semitic tropes. Our government will not condemn a specious allegation by a corrupt regime that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and not only supports a UN resolution that calls for a ceasefire without the return of the hostages as a precondition, but would even deny Israel the means to defend herself against an avowedly genocidal terrorist organization (if it could, but thankfully cannot).
The incinerated bodies of October 7 awoke the generational trauma of the ovens of the Holocaust; now rampant anti-Semitism here awakes memories its precursor, Germany in the 1930s. Prospects of a government-sponsored genocide in Canada remain remote. But public expression of Jew-hatred has become normalized in six short months. Escalation of the violence we have already seen seems likely. Many of our Jewish neighbours are terrified, and so should we be too.
Have you ever wondered what you would have done in Germany in the 1930s? Would you have stood against the gathering storm? Would you have fought to save the sophisticated, civilized society that Germany was? Would you have hidden Jews or helped them escape? Or would you have stayed silent and inactive, distanced yourself, looked the other way, avoided your Jewish friends out of fear? Or worse, would you have reported them to the Gestapo?
Well, now you know.
If you are a bystander now, then you would have been then too.
If you are (God forbid) one of those parroting the new anti-Semitic tropes, chanting “from the river to the sea,” accusing Israel of genocide, or ripping down posters of the hostages, then you might have been one of those betraying Jewish neighbours to the Gestapo.
We are now called upon to make good on the pledge the world made after the Holocaust: never again. Never again is now. Not just for the sake of our Jewish neighbours, although that is reason enough. But for the sake of our own society.
We cannot sit this out. If we remain silent, if we do not stand up to this tsunami of hate here in Canada, then haters are exactly what we will become. To be silent is to acquiesce; to remain neutral is to become complicit in a vile refashioning of our society.
Perhaps, once Israel achieves its aims in Gaza, the tsunami will recede and the acts of hate will decrease. But a cancer of hatred has metastasized within our body politic. If we do not act now to cut it out, it will spread further, and one day we will look back and wish we had acted, because those few decent people left will not recognize what we will have become.
From Ian:
UK Statistics Authority urged to review fabricated Gaza casualty figures
The UK Statistics Authority has been urged to review the Palestinian Casualty figures in the Gaza War after several analyses indicated that the figures have been fabricated.
UKLFI Charitable Trust (“UKLFI CT”) has written to Sir Robert Chote, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, inviting it to assess the quality of the Palestinian casualty statistics. These statistics are produced by the Hamas controlled Ministry of Health, and then circulated by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) as well as other UN bodies.
Several analyses show that the Hamas produced figures have been fabricated, regarding both the totals and the breakdowns into men, women and children.[1]
UKLFI CT is concerned that these unreliable statistics are invoked and relied upon to support allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law and genocide by Israel.
Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UKLFI commented: “Credence given to these allegations is fuelling antisemitism on a major scale and is also liable to lead to incorrect decisions by public authorities on important issues.”
The Palestinian statistics are also deployed in a way that implies wrongly that all the Palestinian Arabs killed were civilians, as there is no reference to the number of Palestinian Arab combatants killed. The ratio of civilians to combatants killed is particularly relevant when assessing the proportionality of Israeli military actions and hence whether they are likely to have violated international humanitarian law.
The Israel Defence Forces estimated that 13,000 Palestinian Arab combatants had been killed by the end of February 2024. This indicates a ratio of civilian to combatant deaths of less than 1.5:1, even if the apparently fabricated total figures produced by the Gaza Health Ministry are used. This ratio is much lower than the usual ratio of civilian to combatant casualties in urban warfare, as indicated by a Report by the UN Secretary General which found that in urban armed conflicts worldwide in 2021, 89% of the casualties were civilians.
Furthermore, the Gaza Ministry of Health statistics do not distinguish the many Palestinians killed by Palestinian munitions (such as their own rockets that fall short in the Gaza Strip, as well as ground fire and explosive devices). These are included in the total deaths that are attributed to Israel.
FDD:
Hamas-Run Gaza Health Ministry Admits to Flaws in Casualty Data
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 — a decrease of more than 900 records.
Prior to its admissions of incomplete data, the health ministry asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from “reliable media sources.” However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.
Hamas is at war with the Jews and Judaism
There are only two things you need to know to understand what is happening in the Middle East, and they both appear in the 1988 Hamas Charter.
First, Hamas is fighting for Islam and its war against Israel is a religious war. The charter states: “It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Muslim generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem and should be dealt with on this basis.”
Hamas asserts Islam’s claim to the territory of the Land of Israel; not the claim of any political organization, the Palestinians or anything else. “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day,” the charter states.
“This,” Hamas explains, “is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Muslims have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations till the Day of Judgement.”
Hamas also clearly states that its war for Islam is a war against Judaism: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.”
In the eyes of Hamas, Jews are permitted to live only under Islamic oppression. This is what Hamas means when it says that it “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.”
Under Islamic law, that “coexistence” is a system of religious apartheid in which all minorities are subjugated by the Muslim majority.
Thus, Hamas has an essential problem with Zionism: Zionism is the demand, the insistence, that Jews will not live under anyone. It is the insistence on Jewish independence and the maintenance of Jewish power to defend that independence.
Iran and Hezbollah responsible for AMIA and Israel embassy bombings, Argentina says
Iran and Hezbollah committed crimes against humanity and are responsible for the 1994 Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) and the 1992 Israeli embassy bombings, the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation said on Thursday in a ruling on an appeal of a 2019 decision on cases of corruption and cover-ups by law enforcement and intelligence officials.
The court said that the AMIA bombing "was organized, planned, financed and executed under the direction of the authorities of the Islamic State of Iran, within the framework of Islamic jihad, and with the main intervention of the political and military organization Hezbollah."
High-level Iranian officials and members of the diplomatic mission in Argentina were involved in the ordering of boths attacks, which according to the court fall under the Rome Statute as crimes against humanity for being widespread or systematic attacks against a civilian population.
The court reminded that Former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian, former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohsen Rezaee, former IRGC Quds Force commander Ahmad Vadidi, former cultural affairs officer at the Iranian embassy in Argentina Moshen Rabbani, former diplomatic secretary Ahnmad Reza Ashgari, and alleged Hezbollah operatives Hussein Mounir Mouzannar, Salman Raouf Salman, and Farouk Abdul Hay Omairi have standing Interpol arrest warrants for suspected involvement in the bombing.
The court said that Former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati former Iranian ambassador Hadi Soleimpenpour were also suspected of involvement but had immunity from the issuance Interpol warrants because they hold public office, and additional suspects fromer Hezbollah foreign intelligence chief Imad Fayez Moughnieh, Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi, and alleged Hezbollah operative Alí Hussein Abdallah are dead.
The court said that Iran and its proxy Hezbollah were motivated by Islamic jihad against the west and its democratic values, and suggested possible political motivations to punish Argentina for not trading agreed upon materials and technology that could be used in its nuclear program.
As crimes against humanity, double jeopardy did not apply in the petition filed by friends and families of the victims of the attacks, AMIA, the Justice Ministry, and police officers who were wrongly detained by the suspects who were falsely implicated by the officials involved in the cover-up.
Former AMIA investigator Judge Juan Jose Galeano, former State Intelligence Secretariat director (SIDE) Hugo Alfredo Anzorreguy, SIDE deputy director Juan Carlos Anchezar, Department for the Protection of Constitutional Order (DPOC) Police chief Carlos Antonio Castaneda were found to have tampered with evidence and covered up the true culprits of the crime. Galeano was given four years prison, Anzorreguy 4 years and 6 months, and Anchezar and Castaneda three years prison.
From Ian:
Douglas Murray: 'One truth can puncture a thousand lies'
Author and journalist Douglas Murray, who received an award of appreciation from the president of Israel and the Minister of Diaspora Affairs on Wednesday, visited the Arutz Sheva - Israel National News studio in Jerusalem to discuss the event.
“I was deeply moved and honored. I don't do it for awards or anything. It was enormously moving to be honored for my work. I don't see myself as a PR soldier, just as a writer and as a journalist. I think it's very important to see things with your own eyes, and that's always been my policy as a writer. That's all I've tried to do. I guessed early on that the world would spend very little time concentrating on the massacre. The next day people were celebrating the massacre in Times Square in New York. I thought right then that I've got to get there as soon as I can because I thought they'll move on to Israel's response.”
He discussed how that has happened in the USA: “I think Biden has been really supportive, even when he has said things that are critical. He has continued arms supplies, for instance. As the IDF has been more and more successful in ridding Gaza of Hamas, the narrative has changed.”
Although advocacy is difficult, he doesn’t see himself quitting. “I think I would do what I do even if I didn't think I was making a difference, but as it happens, I think I am. My belief has always been that one truth can puncture a thousand lies. In the age of social media, that theory is being put to the test in real-time. A lot of the media has an agenda now. That's their right. I'd like Israel to win this conflict, some of them would like Hamas to win, some of them would just like Israel to lose.”
Murray denounces the focus on Israel. “None of these newspapers covered the far greater death toll that has been going on for the last decade in Yemen and Syria. Why are they so obsessed with this one? It's their opportunity to hold on to something that gives a feeling of crisis, but they have arsonist and firefighter reversed here. Many may talk about the history of the conflict, but that only proves it more.”
He notes other oddities about the war: “It's a very uncommon situation for one side to be fighting and also nourishing their opponents. It's an extraordinary testament to this country, but it's highly unusual. I can think of no other conflicts that I've covered or seen or read about in which that's the case. It's also an uncommon situation in war for one side to not only want the death of its enemies but also wish that its enemies should kill its own people. Israel must both fight this enemy and supply them. There's no doubting the appalling suffering of many of the citizens in Gaza, but that's what happens if you start a war.”
Melanie Phillips:
The surreal echo chamber of lies
It is the people of Israel, not just Netanyahu, who are demanding that the IDF defeat Hamas. It is the people of Israel, not just Netanyahu, to whom the American proposal for the Palestinian Authority to run post-war Gaza is unthinkable. Because it’s the people of Israel who have now seen, in the most horrific way possible, that there is no Palestinian Arab entity that can be trusted not to slaughter them again and again.
The West’s second major error is failing to realize that this is not just Israel against Hamas or Iran. Israel is on the front line of the war being waged by the Islamic world against the West.
The West doesn’t get this because it doesn’t understand Islam. Nor, astonishing as this may seem, do the Israelis. Their failure to grasp Hamas’s true intentions lies in their failure to understand the implacable nature of Islamic Jew-hatred.
In a notable interview in Israel Hayom, Professor Moshe Sharon, an adviser on Arab affairs to several Israeli governments, observed that Islam has abhorred the Jews from the time of Islam’s creation, an animosity that is “a continuing sentiment stretching across time from that period until the ‘end of days.’” Islam’s overall objective, he said, is to take over the world. It is enjoying a considerable degree of success in pursuing this goal—in Europe, Canada and America.
None of these countries, however, is prepared even to admit this, let alone do anything about it.
With the IDF pulling most of its troops out of Gaza, commentators both inside and outside Israel are claiming that the Rafah offensive has been abandoned, the war is effectively over and Israel has lost. Netanyahu and top military brass insist that, on the contrary, Rafah will indeed be taken and the war will be won.
Israelis are braced for whatever is to come. Despite the Greek chorus of doom from the Israeli media and despite the despicable manipulation of some of the desperate families of hostages by activists determined to bring Netanyahu down at the expense of Israel losing the war, the spirit of the vast majority of Israelis remains heroically unbowed.
Israel will survive. At its current rate, the West will not.
But in these terrible times, what is very hard indeed for Jews to take is the devastating feeling of being so mercilessly abandoned by a world that has become a surreal echo chamber of murderous lies.
America’s elite universities failing Jewish students, per ADL report
America’s elite universities are failing to address Jew-hatred on campus, according to a new tracker released by the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday.
The ADL’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card awarded nine of America’s 10 top-ranked universities an “F” or “D” grade, including failing marks for Harvard University, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duke University was the lone top-10 school to earn a respectable “B” for “better than most.”
Many of America’s best universities are not doing enough for their Jewish students, said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national president of the ADL.
“Every campus should get an ‘A.’ That’s not grade inflation. That’s the minimum that every group on every campus expects,” Greenblatt stated. “Like all students, Jewish students deserve to feel safe and supported on campus. They deserve a learning environment free from antisemitism and hate, but that hasn’t been the experience with antisemitism running rampant on campus since even before Oct. 7.”
The ADL selected the 85 public and private schools to rank both from Hillel International’s list of campuses with the highest percentages of Jewish students and from the top-ranked schools in U.S. News & World Report.
It then assessed the universities by reviewing administrative policies on antisemitism; cataloging antisemitic and anti-Zionist activity; and measuring the extent to which they foster Jewish life on campus.
The nonprofit then surveyed 160 Jewish college students about how they would weigh criteria, including whether or not the college offered kosher dining options or had taken an official position against the BDS movement to boycott Israel. The ADL gave the colleges a chance to respond both pre- and post-assessment.
Only two of the 85 schools graded got an “A”: Waltham, Mass.-based Brandeis University and Elon University, in North Carolina. A dozen schools received an “F.”
Several university leaders begin cracking down on anti-Israel disruptions on campus
Six months after anti-Israel activity began to dominate many college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — with minimal action taken by college presidents to quell rising levels of antisemitism — administrators at schools such as Pomona, Columbia and Vanderbilt have taken a harder line in recent weeks. As a result, Jewish leaders are wondering whether these three schools’ tougher responses could represent the leading edge of a trend that takes root across the country.
Jacob Baime, CEO of the Israel on Campus Coalition, told Jewish Insider that other universities will only take similar action if they are pressured to do so. “The suspension of anti-Israel activists at schools like Vanderbilt University is a step in the right direction in addressing the campus climate,” Baime said.
In a statement to Pomona College on Friday, the school’s president, Gabrielle Starr, warned that “any participants in today’s events… who turn out to be Pomona students, are subject to immediate suspension. Students from the other Claremont Colleges will be banned from Pomona’s campus and subject to discipline on their own campuses.”
“I don’t see this as a victory and I don’t know if it’s going to change anything in the future,” Ayelet Kleinerman, a fourth-year Pomona student from Israel who founded the group Haverim Claremont in 2022, told JI. “There is a lot of backlash here from students, faculty and community members on the outside,” she continued. “So we will have to wait and see how things unfold, but when people are arrested I don’t see it as a victory — it’s sad that we got to a situation in the first place where police needed to be called. We shouldn’t have gotten to this in the first place.”
Kleinerman, who started Haverim as a way for Jewish and non-Jewish students to connect and learn about antisemitism — something she felt was missing from on-campus groups in the past — said the climate on campus for Jewish students since Oct. 7 “has been hard and intimidating, [filled] with a lot of [anti-Israel] protests.”
For months, Jewish students and alumni from the Claremont Consortium— Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, and Pitzer College (known as the 5Cs), have urged administrators to take action in response to what they called in a Nov. 6 email “harassment of Jewish Students at Pomona College.”
“We are particularly alarmed by the administration’s acquiescence in the face of gross violations of College policy and applicable law,” the letter, signed by a group of 5C alumni said, pointing to several incidents at Pomona, including a demonstration on Oct. 20 when “Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace held a rally at Pomona’s Smith Campus Center with several hundred attendees. At that rally, SJP and JVP members assembled, at the Smith Campus Center (a shared space intended for use by all College students), a display honoring the Hamas terrorists responsible for the genocidal attacks of October 7.”
From Ian:
New video showing Hamas capturing IDF women ‘worse than what we imagined’
Newly emerged video shot by Hamas terrorists showing the capture of female Israeli soldiers on the Gaza border has been described as “hard to watch” by Israeli media.
In the video, parts of which have not been shared with the public, Hamas terrorists are initially seen with five female IDF spotters, with two more later added.
“We will exchange you for our people,” the terrorists say.
Another terrorist forces one of the soldiers to show him how to dial a Gaza number from her cell phone. The terrorists later put the soldiers into stolen Israel Defense Forces vehicles for transport to Gaza.
Shira Albag, the mother of the kidnapped soldier Liri Albag, 19, watched it several weeks ago.
“I watched the video. They showed it to us three weeks ago. The IDF spokesman called us and showed us a video from the day of the kidnapping, something we had not seen and did not know about.
“We all only imagined what happened to the girls on Oct. 7, and unfortunately this video proved to us that it was even worse than we imagined,” she said.
According to a recent report by the Times, a number of new female IDF recruits have refused to serve as observer soldiers out of fear that “what happened to them could happen to me,” as one young Israeli recruit, Romi Fisher, told the Times.
At least 15 female soldiers were killed at Gaza border army bases on October 7 with roughly six others taken as hostages by Hamas, including Liri, who was reportedly working her third shift as an observer soldier when she was kidnapped.
Israel to normalise relations with Indonesia
Israel is set to normalise relations with Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, Ynet reported on Thursday.
The move comes after three months of secret talks between Jerusalem and Jakarta. In exchange for establishing diplomatic ties with the Jewish state, Jerusalem will reportedly lift its opposition to Indonesia becoming the 39th member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann sent a letter to Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz around two weeks ago, with Jakarta approving the wording.
“I am happy to announce that the Council has officially agreed to the early, clear and explicit condition that Indonesia maintain diplomatic relations with all members of the organisation before any decision to accept [it in] the OECD,” the letter states.
“Moreover, any future decision to accept Indonesia as a member of the organisation will require unanimous agreement among all the members, including Israel. I am convinced that this provides you with security on this important point,” the letter continues.
In a reply letter that Katz sent on Wednesday night and which was seen by Ynet, the minister wrote that “I share your expectation that this process will be a change for Indonesia, as I expect a positive change in its policy towards Israel, and in particular a renunciation of the discriminatory policy towards Israel, towards the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the parties.”
Indonesia has spoken out against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and supported South Africa’s lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. However, on Tuesday an Indonesian aircraft participated in an airdrop of humanitarian aid into Gaza, marking the first time that an Indonesian aircraft has flown through Israeli airspace.
Indonesia was one of the Muslim-majority countries that Jerusalem was working to add to the Abraham Accords in the months before the Hamas-led invasion of October 7.
Stephen Pollard:
How Israel secured diplomatic relations with Indonesia
The Jewish Insider report was clearly correct. But the principal reason for Indonesia’s change of heart since 2020 is based almost entirely on Indonesia’s self-interest – and is far more prosaic than the era-changing vision of the Abraham Accords and. Indonesia is set to begin formal diplomatic relations with Israel because of one acronym: OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
Indonesia has been trying to join the OECD for the past few years but in recent months, as its progress towards membership has speeded up, an obstacle emerged. New members require the approval of all 38 existing members – one of which is Israel.
Israel appears to have used this requirement to secure something of a diplomatic triumph. It has been reported that OECD secretary general Mathias Cormann had initially made clear to Israel that it expected it "not to object" to Indonesia’s application to join, but Israel refused – a stance hardened by Indonesia’s criticism of the Gaza war and its moves against Israel at the ICJ in The Hague.
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz is said in response to the OECD to have demanded that Indonesia show a “gesture of goodwill”. Fearing that the long-planned membership of Indonesia would be blocked by Israel, the OECD secretary general agreed to insist that diplomatic relations were established.
This was not quite the demand it might seem, however, as negotiations towards such an agreement had been proceeding for some months, with both sides anticipating a successful outcome before October 7 derailed everything.
Reports suggest that this normalisation of relations would have been agreed last autumn. A Memorandum of Understanding which is said to have included a commitment towards Indonesia joining the Abraham Accords process was signed in September.
But whilst this new diplomatic process has come as a surprise to many, there have been long been economic ties. The exact amount of trade is impossible to quantify as much of it is via third countries, but it is estimated by one analyst as “the high end of hundreds of millions of dollars a year”, most of which is said to be Indonesian agri-tech exports - and there has been an Israel-Indonesia Chamber of Commerce in Tel Aviv since 2009.
From Ian:
Phyllis Chesler:
Will the world admit it was wrong?
The dense fog of war will clear after Israel has finally destroyed every last Hamas tunnel loaded with weaponry and the fact-based truth about Hamas and Iran’s war against Israel becomes transparent. When that happens, I wonder about those people who believe that Israel deserved Oct. 7 because they have swallowed the lie that Israel is not only an “oppressor, apartheid entity” but a nation that thirsted for “revenge” and allegedly went on to deliberately target women and children, cause famine and commit a “genocide”? Will they finally admit they were wrong?
I doubt it. They are unlikely to accept that the crimes attributed to Israel are Hamas and Iran’s crimes. Nor that diabolic paranoids and indoctrinated haters are essentially confessing their own crimes when they project them onto their victims.
People may always refuse to understand that accidents happen in war and most other countries—Muslim armies, American armies, British armies, Russian and Chinese armies—have caused far more civilian deaths in a single war than Israel has caused over 80 years of war.
In Hitler’s era, it was only the Nazis, the preexisting Jew-haters in Europe and Muslim lands, who brayed for the death of the Jews or minimized and denied what was happening to the Jews.
Now almost the entire world has spewed that bloodthirsty cry. Mobs are in the streets everywhere, cheering Hamas’s barbarism. Never has Israel been in such danger before.
What will the world say, if it says anything, when its allegations have been proven completely false? Will they still insist that they did not know, that no one told them?
Many, of course, will claim that they were right all along. Like Holocaust deniers, they will assert that whatever facts Israel presents are lies and disinformation.
Once again, Israel stands almost alone, accused of crimes it never committed. At this point, no matter how much Israel tries to do the right thing, it will never be credited for it. Thus, Israel must do whatever it takes to survive against the most fiendish odds.
Seth Mandel:
The New Rednecks
Also in 2021, academics John Bitzan and Clay Routledge surveyed a thousand students at more than 70 U.S. colleges and found that a third had a positive view of socialism while only a quarter said the same about capitalism. But don’t worry—the students apparently don’t know what socialism is. So it’s not that they’re evil gulag goons, it’s that they are idiots who will blindly follow the crowd to save themselves the trouble of having to think. Reminder: That’s the good news.
All that should put the eruption of anti-Semitism on campuses in context. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage started the current war, college students were polled on how to characterize the attacks. More than ten percent said they were justified resistance. But I don’t know if that’s better or worse than the one in five who “describe it as something else other than an act of terrorism or resistance.” Perhaps they see it as interpretive dance?
My personal favorite was what happened when Berkeley political-science professor Ron Hassner hired a firm to survey U.S. college students on the genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Most of those polled said they supported the slogan, but fewer than half could name the river and the sea referenced in the line. “Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic,” Hassner reported.
That’s not all these sparkling young minds didn’t know. About 10 percent of those who supported the chant thought Yasser Arafat was the first president of Israel. A quarter of them denied the existence of the Oslo Accords, one of the most thoroughly documented signing ceremonies in modern times, the photos and videos of which are harder to avoid than they are to find.
Of course, these students are young. They’ll have their whole lives after college to get an education. Meantime, once you’ve seen a third billboard for the Ivies, might be time to turn around and go home.
From Stalin to Hamas: The Return of the Left that Doesn’t Learn?
An Interview with Mitchell Cohen
Mitchell Cohen is co-editor emeritus of Dissent in New York and professor emeritus of political science at Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York. His books include Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel and The Politics of Opera. He was interviewed in late February. A version of this interview is to appear in Spanish.
The Western Left, the Israeli Right and the Delegitimisation of the Jewish State
Question: Efforts to delegitimise the Jewish state are at full and loud throttle since Israel’s response to the October 7 massacres. This is taking place both the diplomatic and the intellectual worlds. In 2007 you seem to have perceived an earlier phase of this phenomenon in “Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn,” your widely discussed article in Dissent. In it you pointed to a particular problem coming from the “liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe.” Are we now seeing the same thing in 2024? Are there new dimensions to it?
Mitchell Cohen: The attack on Israel’s legitimacy has intensified but it is part of a larger story. Opposition to Zionism within the left goes back to the founding of Zionism, although there has been real sympathy too. The current situation has long and short-term contexts. I wrote that article a few years after the UN’s Durban conference of 2001, which unleashed a wave of attacks on Israel for racism. But the problem also descends from decades of political developments, one of which was the assassination of Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing Jewish zealot in 1995.
That murder also targeted the Oslo Accords, the best chance since 1949 for an Israeli-Palestinian peace and the signing of which put anti-Zionism on the defensive. Oslo’s foes gained mounting strength in the later 1990s. One was the Israeli right-wing led by Netanyahu, which always sought to blur reckless, ultra-nationalist goals with real security questions. The other was Hamas, whose bombing campaign in the spring after Rabin‘s murder played an essential role in electing Netanyahu. Hamas has always opposed compromise and its ultimate purposes have been to displace secular Palestinian nationalists with Islamists and to replace Israel with a Muslim state including the West Bank, Gaza and what is now Israel proper. In 2000, at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered a far-reaching compromise to Palestinians but Arafat did not accept it and the Second Intifada began. In this context an anti-Zionist campaign in the intellectual world was ushered along from Durban.
Israeli foreign policy has been dominated for almost three decades – with some interludes – by Netanyahu. One, and it is only one, staggering bungle was to allow Hamas to be strengthened in Gaza in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby to thwart Israeli-Palestinian compromise. It played, finally, into Hamas’s already blood-stained hands, as 7 October showed. This wasn’t just shortsightedness but fits into a long-standing pattern in the history of the Zionist rightwing, which I explored in my book Zion and State (Columbia University Press). That pattern consists in very consequential errors of political judgement based on a resentment-filled, misbegotten ideological orientation. It contrasts sharply to the social democrats of Mapai (Israel Workers’ Party) which, led by David Ben Gurion, dominated the struggle for Israeli statehood. Crucial decisions made by Ben-Gurion and Mapai were almost always measured and perceptive. Nowadays anti-Zionists seek to rewrite Israel’s history, demonising the Jewish state as a creation of Western imperialism – this is an historically spurious charge – by excising the role of the left in creating Israel. At the same time they dance around or excuse the fact that Palestinian nationalists allied themselves to Hitler and Mussolini.
To answer your question more fully, we must take into account what has happened within a highly visible part of the intelligentsia in recent decades. There has been in the university and intellectual worlds a rise in what is called ‘post-modernism’ and the like, which made it a point of turning many things upside down through selective use of history and ideological language games. Ironically, this even includes part of this intelligentsia’s own history. Edward Said complained that he could not convince Jean-Paul Sartre, who was not a post-modernist but an intellectual hero of the left and Michel Foucault, who was a seminal post-modern influence, of his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They understood something he didn’t – or didn’t want to understand.
Anti-Zionism is part of a larger intellectual crack-up on the left with distant roots. There is now a kind of meeting point between simplistic post-modernism and simplistic anti-imperialism. This conjuncture can be called ‘the anti-imperialism of fools,’ a phrase that echoes the famous criticism of antisemitism on the left in the late 19th century by socialist August Bebel. When some on the left tried to blame ‘Jewish capitalists’ for Europe’s woes, he called it ‘the antisemitism of fools.’ Formulations of both the antisemitism of fools and anti-imperialism of fools depend on intellectual twisting and turning until somehow, no matter what, blame is ascribed to, respectively, Jews and Zionists. Ominously, that ascription is often there before the twisting and turning.
Matti Friedman:
Why I Got a Gun
The decision to expand private gun ownership is certain to have unintended consequences, and not just because the number of guns will mean more accidents, homicides, and armed extremists. At the shooting range where I got my license, it was clear that some of the new owners were hardly competent to use a weapon in the sterile condition of the range, let alone in an actual attack where we would have to make life-or-death decisions in a matter of seconds while beset by adrenaline and fear. Those with combat training have a chance, though no guarantee of success. When I came home with my new license and a Glock 43X, I told my kids that if they’re ever near a shooting attack they need to lie down flat and wait until it’s over—the main danger being less the terrorist than other Israelis who will open fire and hit something other than their target.
One incident in particular has become a case in point. On November 30, two Palestinians from Sur Baher, a Jerusalem neighborhood near mine, began shooting Jews waiting at a bus stop, murdering three of them before a lawyer named Yuval Castelman, who happened to be passing by, jumped out of his car with his handgun. He engaged the terrorists with admirable bravery—only to be mistaken for a terrorist himself and killed by an army reservist exercising something between bad judgment and criminal negligence. Guns solve some problems and create many others. It’s hard to say how we’ll remember all of this in a decade or two.
But even in the weeks of my work on this essay, an Israeli with a handgun managed to kill a terrorist, another Palestinian from Jerusalem, who was shooting innocent people on a road in southern Israel, two of whom died. That was on February 16. On March 14, a noncommissioned officer waiting in line at an Aroma café didn’t notice the Palestinian kid in a black sweatshirt who lunged at his neck with a knife—but did manage to draw his handgun and shoot the assailant, preventing more fatalities, before he bled to death.
A friend from America told me recently that every Jewish person he knows has a contingency plan, sometimes secret or scarcely admitted even to themselves, for where to hide or escape if things get really bad in the diaspora—the kind of thought borne of a good education in Jewish history mixed with a close read of current events, like aggressive protests outside synagogues, shots fired at Jewish schools, and the growing fever about “Zionists.”
Mulling this, I asked friends here in Israel if they had a similar plan. No one did. Zionism has clearly failed to change everything in the Jewish condition, but it seems to have changed that, for what it’s worth. I don’t know anyone preparing a hideout. But I do know a remarkable number of people with a new Glock.
From Ian:
The West’s cowardice over Israel is nothing short of abominable
Defeating Hamas is not merely technically possible but existentially vital – for both Israel but the wider West. Hamas is not just some small-time gang of thugs that is best ignored. Since taking over the Gaza Strip in 2007, it has upgraded from a guerrilla ragtag force primarily engaged in hit-and-run attacks to a modern terror army skilled in asymmetric urban warfare that has been prepared to plunge the entire Middle East into chaos in order to seize power from the Palestinian Authority.
A perceived victory for Hamas would spell the normalisation of a terrorist government as a viable alternative to peaceful democracy in the Middle East. It would plunge Israel into a nasty power struggle between orthodox hardliners and moderates and leave it vulnerable to further incursions by bordering terror groups. This risks distracting Israel from its intelligence and diplomatic work in partnership with the West to tackle by far the biggest security challenge facing the Middle East – Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
Moreover, the West’s prevarications risk fuelling the Gaza “PR disaster”. Israel’s global status as an avatar for oppression backed by the imperialist West epitomises the inability of leaders in Europe and America to counter anti-Western worldviews that are both fundamentally misguided and feverishly popular, in part because they do contain sparse grains of truth.
The view, passionately held from the university campuses of London to the townships of Johannesburg, that Israel is an expansionist colonial-apartheid regime draws on the undeniable reality that the Israeli authorities routinely restrict the movements of Palestinians and deny them the same rights as their Jewish counterparts.
Proponents of this view point, also to the established fact that Israelis have illegally built settlements on occupied land beyond their internationally recognised borders, with some Orthodox communities declaring a religious claim to the land. But what Israel’s critics overlook is that it is not the result of an elaborate colonial plot, but rather a messy multi-generational struggle to shore up security in a hostile region.
If Israel’s political class has pursued a settlement programme with gusto, it is as a security buffer rather than an imperialistic project. Many of the repressive restrictions in the West Bank came into force after the Second Intifada. If anything Israel is not an grotesque ode to imperialism but a cautionary tale on the compromises on freedom and human rights that a country will make when it is threatened by perma-terrorism.
Perhaps the world would be more open to such a perspective if the West were more assertive about Israel’s right to defend itself. Instead, it has chosen moral cowardice. In suddenly threatening to withdraw arms support after aid workers are killed, it indulges the myth that it is somehow possible for Israel to take on Hamas without heavy Palestinian casualties. And in urging Israel to negotiate a ceasefire before Hamas has been neutralised, the West legitimises the view that Israel is a bully, using monstrously disproportionate force in Gaza, that must be reigned in for the sake of the world’s conscience.
Instead of acting like the leader of the free world, the West is behaving like a civilisation under siege. The world is a darker place for it.
Lahav Harkov:
How much influence does the US really have over Israel?
The Biden administration’s influence over the war effort in Gaza is apparent: the President and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, have taken part in Israeli war cabinet meetings and this week’s increased aid is not the first time Israel has changed its plans after meetings and conversations with White House officials.
The danger is that if this withdrawal is part of a mini-ceasefire or a brief pause, the US will try to make it permanent, as Biden administration officials have said they hoped to do in the past. Then, Israel will be faced with the choice of either going it alone, without American support, or giving in, thus allowing for Hamas’s remaining brigades in Rafah to continue posing a threat.
But it should also be noted that the US continues to supply weapons to Israel, and the Biden administration has yet to set additional conditions on its military aid, despite unprecedented backing for such a policy from within the Democratic Party. The President has not backed down from his support for the war aims of eliminating the Hamas threat and bringing home the more than 130 hostages remaining in Gaza.
What’s more, influence does not mean omnipotence. Biden also demanded that Netanyahu “empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home” — yet the deal still fell through.
The question, then, is whether this influence is such that Israel will make any major changes due to US influence, such as backing down from eliminating the final Hamas battalions in Rafah.
Recent remarks from Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, someone so close to Netanyahu that he has been nicknamed “Bibi’s brain”, indicate that Jerusalem is determined to push forward regardless of the pressure from Washington.
“If Israel does not take care of Hamas in Gaza after what it did on October 7th,” Dermer said, “I truly believe that this country has no future because all the buzzards circling around this country are going to think that you can pick apart this carcass […] That’s why the determination to take them out is so strong, even if it leads to a potential breach with the United States.”
In Eid greetings, Blinken mentions West Bank Palestinians alongside world’s most oppressed Muslims
In a statement marking Eid Al-Fitr, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken highlights the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank alongside Muslims suffering in some of the world’s worst conflicts.
“Our thoughts turn to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, civilians in Syria, women suffering under the Taliban in Afghanistan, Uyghurs in the People’s Republic of China, Rohingya in Burma and Bangladesh and far too many others,” Blinken says.
The decision to lump Palestinians in the West Bank along with those enduring war crimes and genocide highlights the severity with which the Biden administration views the Palestinian plight in the West Bank, where they live under Israeli military control.
“Far too many have lost loved ones over the past year and many more are concerned for the safety and security of their families today. I hope that this year’s Eid al-Fitr marks a moment on a path to more hopeful, free, and peaceful times ahead,” Blinken says.
“The United States is committed to standing up for human rights for people around the world, to providing humanitarian aid where it is desperately needed, and to working to bring about enduring peace, dignity, and safety of all communities,” he adds, wishing Muslim communities around the world an Eid Mubarak and praying for a more peaceful year ahead.
From Ian:
Surprised at anti-Israel hatred?
I cannot ignore the similarity between the smear campaign reaching new heights in the last four years against Israel abroad compared with the demonization of the Kohelet Policy Forum here in the past and still ongoing today. On a 16-hour break I had from fighting in Gaza, I got messages from people threatening to “settle accounts after the war” and accusing me of having the blood of the Oct. 7 victims on my hands. The people writing such things have not read a single Kohelet policy paper. One of the “Brothers in Arms” members attempting to scare voters in municipal elections about Kohelet influence repeated the lie about the “Kohelet civics textbook,” and another member affirmed in a TV interview that he does not regret their invasion and blockage of our offices. The fact that many of my Kohelet colleagues and I have been called up to serve in the war has not moved such haters to so much as wait for our return home.
Both the State of Israel and Kohelet Forum could have done more to fight for an image that aligns with reality. In both cases, however, a well-organized and well-funded smear campaign has succeeded in pushing decent people to take too firm a stance and avoid dialogue. Just this week, a lecture by a well-known, leftist Jewish-American professor who wanted to discuss “the two-state solution” was canceled in California, and a talk by center-left former Knesset member Tzipi Livni was transferred to Zoom for fear of disturbances. Even having a dialogue with someone defined as a “Zionist” is off the table.
And here?
In the past year, an established high school canceled a lecture by a law professor after discovering that he participated in a doctoral program at Kohelet Forum around eight years ago.
Perhaps we should be a little less impervious to other opinions and stop attributing ill intentions to the other side before we complain about the treatment Israel is getting on the world stage.
Horror and Humiliation in Gaza
Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”
The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”
All too well have the Western-educated, multilingual leaders of Hamas gauged the spiritual state of the West, and invented an atrocious way of conducting war in order to psychically paralyze it. Hamas cannot win a war against Israel, but it has sufficient power to force Israel to fight a war that cost many civilian lives. Whether the civilian death toll is the 32,000 that Hamas claims or the 18,000 estimated by pro-Israeli analysts is of minor importance.
During the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah 20 years ago, I wrote that the battle for that city brought into focus the vulnerabilities of both the Americans and the Sunni resistance. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West, which cannot endure without faith in a loving Heavenly Father. For the Islamic world, meanwhile, humiliation—the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.
The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.
This toxic combination of horror and humiliation poisons world opinion against Israel. There is no near-term remedy. Horror elicits irrational responses. Never mind that Hamas forced an urban war upon Israel through unspeakable acts of brutality against Israeli civilians, and that it embeds terrorists in hospitals, schools, and other civilian installations to maximize casualties among its own civilians. Never mind that Israel’s response has occasioned fewer civilian casualties in urban combat than any other fighting force on record. As West Point urban warfare expert John Spencer wrote in Newsweek:
The UN, EU, and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world’s most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists.
Russia and China denounce Israel simply because it is an ally of the United States, and many former colonies of the West, prominently South Africa, shoehorn the Gaza war into their own traumatic narrative of national liberation. That’s to be expected.
What’s new and dangerous is the extent to which the Hamas theater of horror has demoralized the remnants of the Christian world. Support for Israel in the United States has dropped to 36% in March from 50% in November, according to the Gallup Poll.
The Prophet of October 7?
In America and Western Europe, the progressive left’s response to the October 7 attacks has largely been one of hostility toward Israel. There are many reasons why this is so, but among them is the malign and outsized influence in intellectual circles of Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique 1925, Fanon wrote extensively on race and the evils of colonialism, and did much to shape how both topics are thought about in universities. Fanon spent the last years of his life collaborating with the terrorists who liberated Algeria from French rule. He died in 1961, just before his comrades drove the Jews out of the country.
Reviewing a new biography of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz, Leon Hadar writes:
The fighting in Algeria radicalized Fanon. His writing about the colony and the meaning and utility of political violence was militant. “At the individual level,” he wrote, “violence is cleansing. It rids the colonized of his inferiority complex, of his passive and despairing attitude.” In other words, killing colonizers was not only tactically expedient, it was also therapeutic for the colonized. “The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence,” he wrote. What the colonized needed was not concessions granted by the master but “quite literally the death of his master.” . . . And readers of Fanon are left in no doubt that he believed attacks on civilians to be the “logical consequence” of colonial oppression.
Nor did Fanon express much interest in limiting what forms redemptive violence takes. Hadar observes that in a different work he posed the question: “Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?”
Shatz, Hadar notes, is an editor for the virulently anti-Israel London Review of Books, and is “an anti-Zionist polemicist who believes that Israel is ‘the world’s last settler-colonial state.’” And that may not be unrelated to Shatz’s “sympathetic” treatment of his subject:
Shatz has told a Ha’aretz journalist that he doesn’t know if Fanon would have supported the October 7 massacre. The point is moot, but since Fanon never met a murderous militant he didn’t like, it’s plausible that Shatz is simply being coy in his judgment. He does, after all, remark that Hamas’s terror operation on October 7 was a “classic example of Fanonian struggle.”
There can be little doubt that Fanon’s writing influenced and radicalized Palestinian nationalism. Shatz reminds us that the first Arabic translations of Fanon’s work, which appeared in Beirut’s bookshops in 1963, helped to shape the emerging Palestinian nationalist movement.
Daniel Greenfield:
Swastikas Are Progressive Now
Flying a progressive swastika is the climax of making antisemitism into “something honorable”.
The path to the progressive swastika and the “honorable antisemitism” had plenty of stops that all involved mainstreaming antisemitism while swearing up and down that it was only anti-Zionism. The media mainstreamed hate sites like Mondoweiss where editors and contributors admitted that, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but I can understand why some are” and “Liberals like to deceive themselves about Jewish power.”
The DSA, which has led the campaign for Hamas, had invited a representative of Melenchon’s Communist allied party from France, who claimed that when a “man of the left” is “called an anti-Semite, it means he’s not far from power.” That same party became the only one to refuse to condemn Oct 7 and political figures from the party accused Israel of killing its own children.
In 2014, academia and the media were justifying antisemitism. By 2024, they’re rehabilitating the swastika as a progressive symbol. And this change is about more than the Jews.
Jews tend to be the canaries in the coal mine. Fanatics and totalitarian movements may start with the Jews, but they never end there. The Jews are just a convenient inciting incident.
Both the Nazis and Communists understood that the persecution of Jews would legitimize the worse crimes they intended to commit. When the Nazis began rounding up and killing Jews with no protest, it became easier to justify the killing of the German disabled and mentally ill, and later the larger eugenics program that would have wiped out the Slavs and many other peoples. And when the Communists began shutting down synagogues and executing rabbis, it became easier to justify the takeover of the church and to build a cult of personality around Stalin.
While there are single-issue antisemites out there, major movements that start waving fascist or progressive swastikas don’t intend to limit their plans to just killing Jews. The Jews are a symbol of the power they want, as Melenchon put it, and the justification for it, as Islamists contend.
Hamas, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, originally financed by the Nazis, claims that it just wants to destroy Israel. But other arms of the Brotherhood tried to seize control of the entire Middle East during the Arab Spring, have been integrated into Al Qaeda, and operate in America and Europe to aid Islamic terrorists around the world. When they brandish the swastika, it’s not cautionary, it’s aspirational. And the same is true of their leftist allies.
By defining the Jews as the new Nazis, leftist movements like the DSA justify the mass murder of the Jews, and the violent tactics they use to seize power to fight the Jews. But the DSA’s vision of totalitarian socialism, National Socialism one might say, will not end with the Jews.
The swastika, whether used as a banner or a symbol of reversal, mainstreams antisemitism, not just to call for the murder of Jews, but for the killing of all those who stand in their way.
The progressive swastika is a symbol of death for Jews and for everyone else.
From Ian:
Western Democracy's Future Depends on Israel's Victory
If the Biden administration forces a "ceasefire" that leaves our closest ally in the region short of victory over an enemy that seeks to destroy it, sooner or later we shall all pay the price.
Israel is battling, above all else, for its own survival. In a hostile region, it is also the sole standard-bearer of individual freedom, tolerant pluralism and self-rule. Contrast the condition of ethnic minorities, women, gays and dissidents in Israel with that of their counterparts anywhere else in the Middle East. We should give thanks every day for the sacrifices Israelis make at the fragile frontier of freedom.
Every Islamist terrorist Israel kills is one fewer threat to the rest of us. Every setback Israel can deal to the Iranian puppet masters of Hamas, Hizbullah and others inflicts a loss on the regime that is sworn to eliminate us, the "Great Satan."
There is no historical evidence that appeasing enemies committed to our extinction ever keeps us safe.
If Israel can somehow be bullied into forgoing victory over this enemy, our own capacity to wage wars inflicted on us will be dramatically diminished, setting a standard no nation taking necessary measures to protect itself would ever be able to meet, a standard to which our enemies will certainly never hold themselves.
If this is the way we fight modern wars, our enemies will have freedom to commit acts of bestial savagery on us, knowing that our own scruples will give them an insuperable advantage.
In World War II, the British political and military leadership decided on a strategy called "dehousing" German civilians: bombing cities to a level of destruction that would demoralize their inhabitants and make them turn on their Nazi government. The British people tolerated this morally doubtful approach because they had fresh in their minds the memory of the Blitz, when the Nazis successfully "dehoused" many British citizens.
Israel suffered an atrocity on Oct. 7 comparable to the Blitz, yet has worked with restraint to limit inevitable civilian losses. If it can't even be allowed to do that, we are placing impossible shackles on the fighting ability of democratic nations.
WSJ: Denying weapons to Israel in the middle of a war is betrayal
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board slammed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in an editorial on Tuesday for their signing of a letter urging President Joe Biden to stop the transfer of weapons to Israel.
"Denying weapons to an ally in the middle of a war is the definition of betrayal," the newspaper's editorial board wrote, labeling Pelosi a "sunshine ally."
The letter was signed by dozens of Democrats after Israel mistakenly killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers last week.
American hypocrisy?
In the editorial, the WSJ noted that the US was holding Israel to a standard that it, itself, had failed to meet.
"They ignore the Hellfire missile attack that killed seven children as the US sought to avenge the deaths of 13 Americans in Kabul as Mr. Biden pulled US forces from Afghanistan in 2021," the editorial said, adding that, unlike the US in that instance, "Israel has a history of accountability for such mistakes."
Are the American Hostages American Enough for Biden?
Joe Biden knows something about accusations of dual loyalty. In 2016, then-Vice President Biden delivered a speech at Dublin Castle heralding the “progress” Catholic Americans have made since John F. Kennedy made the trek to Ireland 50 years ago and was “attacked for being too close to a pope.”
Now, as five American-Israelis languish in Hamas captivity, Biden is turning his back on that progress.
This Sunday marked a grim milestone—six months since Hamas terrorists took hundreds of Israelis hostage on Oct. 7, including six American citizens—hopefully five still living—who remain in Gaza. But Americans can’t be blamed for forgetting. Joe Biden is more likely to call on Israel to accept an immediate ceasefire than to call on Hamas and Qatar to release our own citizens. We hear more about humanitarian aid for Gazans than about American citizens being killed and tortured in Gaza.
At a time when the president’s party insists we “Say his name!” or “Say her name!” Biden has not mentioned dual citizens Edan Alexander, Omer Neutra, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Sagui Dekel-Chen, or Keith Siegel. The president released a statement about Itay Chen on March 12, five months after the attack. This was only after his murder was announced, which supports Dara Horn’s poignant observation that dead Jews are more beloved than living ones.
The White House talks regularly about Evan Gershkovich (70-plus hits on the White House website), the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter being held on false charges in Russia, as it did about Brittney Griner (more than 200 hits), a basketball player imprisoned by Russia until she was released in a controversial prisoner swap.
The six Jews whom Hamas kidnapped are as American as Gershkovich and Griner are, which raises the question: Why does the White House ignore these Jewish U.S. citizens?
It seems that Alexander, Neutra, Goldberg-Polin, Dekel-Chen, Siegel, and Chen are only half-American. One of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in history is that Jews are only in business for themselves and their homeland. They just pass through countries without any sense of loyalty. They weren’t European enough in the Middle Ages, not German enough to the Nazis, and not American enough for the Biden administration to “say their names” and move heaven and earth to secure their release.
In today’s society, we like to pretend these disgusting sentiments are a relic of a less enlightened time. Stop pretending. The accusation of dual loyalty is a go-to attack on both the left and the right.
“They forgot what country they represent,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote on Jan. 6, 2019 of those opposing the anti-Semitic boycott-Israel movement. Less than two months later, Tlaib’s sister-in-hate Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said about AIPAC, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
From Ian:
Biden would rather Israel surrender than defend itself
President Joe Biden has tried to pretend that he supports Israel since the terrorist attack against it on Oct. 7, but he has made it clear he would rather Israel surrender than win its war against Hamas.
Biden is now telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “we won’t be able to support you” if Israel continues its war against Hamas, a terrorist group that slaughtered 1,200 civilians in Israel, is dedicated to destroying Israel completely, and is holding Israelis and Americans hostage. This comes after National Security Council spokesman John Kirby tried to claim that America’s support of Israel is “rock-solid and unwavering” even as Biden threatens to change U.S. policy toward Israel.
Meanwhile, Hamas has rejected yet another ceasefire deal. That makes at least three occasions since February that Hamas has rejected a ceasefire. In the meantime, Biden is calling on Israel to cease its plans to go into Rafah, where Hamas terrorists are again using Palestinian civilians as human shields to avoid being wiped out completely.
So Biden wants Israel to stop fighting and let Hamas survive, all while Hamas continues to refuse to stop fighting by rejecting ceasefire deals. What Biden is asking of Israel is to surrender, to let Hamas survive and regroup and continue to slaughter civilians and try to destroy the country. Biden is putting more pressure on Israel for trying to kill genocidal terrorists than he is on the terrorists who continue to hold Americans hostage.
Recognition of a Palestinian State Will Be a Victory for Iran and a Reward for Islamist Terrorism
The recognition of virtual Palestine is a victory for Iran’s ayatollahs and a reward for Islamist terrorism. A scourge controlled by the Iranian regime, which will soon have a nuclear arsenal, translates into a terrible calamity that will befall all the nations of Europe tomorrow.
In this tragic context, an official French confirmation to unilaterally recognize the State of Palestine will also confirm that France is no longer Israel’s ally and undoubtedly not a friendly country.
Biden’s America has the capability of preventing the creation of an Islamist terrorist state. The United States should stop publicly berating Israeli strategy and intervening in Israel’s political affairs. The American president should support Israel in its legitimate and existential fight against Hamas and Hizbullah and avoid, by all means, the creation of a Palestinian satellite of the ayatollahs in the heart of the Middle East.
Otherwise, the support of the United States for the European Palestine initiative will go down in the annals of modern political history as a great debacle of the West and a disgraceful cowardice about the Jewish State. It proves once again that Israel must rely only on itself and act according to its own national security interests.
A paradigm for peace: Jordan as Palestine
Recognizing Jordan as a Palestinian state, while maintaining its status as a monarchy, reflects the national identity of a majority of its population. Highly popular Queen Rania is considered to be a Palestinian (via her parents). Palestinians are a growing segment of Jordan’s political life and its parliament. The country east of Israel is viable with a relatively stable economic and political structure. And it has vast areas of unused land, but lacks sufficient people and water.
Jordan/Palestine can become an oasis. It needs water, which would allow it to extend its population centers eastward. Utilizing abundant water sources in Turkey and/or the Caspian Sea – the largest body of fresh water in the world – would enable it to provide agricultural products, develop business and industrial centers, and create regional stability.
Another population source to help develop its huge and basically empty eastern portion – besides its current citizens – would be those Palestinians who would either come from the West Bank voluntarily, or be sent there because, as mentioned above, they choose not to live under Israeli sovereignty or abide by its laws and ethos as a Jewish state.
This would also include any Palestinians wherever they may live, including those in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, as well as Arab residents of Israel proper. All of them would rightfully be citizens of this newly realized Jordanian/Palestinian state: the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine.
The possibility that Jordan could become an economic trade center was recently given a boost when Israel proposed a rail link between it and Haifa, which would connect it to European markets, Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. The recently rebuilt rail line between Haifa and Beit She’an is the beginning of this plan.
Jordan is a strategic partner of Israel and, hopefully, will continue to be. The Jordanians, however, have a responsibility to Arab Palestinians, and Israel should not be expected to bear the burden of providing them with a national homeland.
Recognizing Jordan as the Palestinian state is in the national interests of both countries. It will bring them peace and prosperity, and ensure their security and stability and the entire region. A Jordanian-Israeli confederation will replace failure and despair with opportunity and hope, and it will inspire creativity, cooperation and freedom – the raison d’être of nation-states.
From Ian:
In Six Months, Everything Has Changed for Israel
On Oct. 6, Israel appeared on the cusp of a new era of recognition from the Muslim world, close to a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that would move it to the center of a realigned Middle East after years on its fringes. The historic conflict with the Palestinians that had defined its existence for most of its 75-year history appeared to have finally receded into the background.
It all changed on Oct. 7.
Today, after a bloody attack that might have brought it the world’s sympathy, Israel is closer to being a global pariah than ever before. Its Saudi peace deal is on hold. The Palestinian question is again roiling its Arab neighbors. It is in open argument with its main ally, the U.S. And its physical living space has been shrunk by dangers on its northern and southern borders.
In six months, the world has turned upside down for this small nation. On Oct. 7—or Black Sabbath, as Israelis now call it—the Jewish state experienced a fundamental shock that upended its sense of security and belief in the strength of its military. It responded with a heavy-handed invasion of Gaza that in much of the world’s eyes left it the aggressor and its attackers the victims. The resulting isolation could be more of a threat to its future than the attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7.
“Israel’s longevity is in question for the first time since its birth,” said Benny Morris, an Israeli historian. The only time Israel faced a similar existential threat, he said, was in its war for independence in 1948, when it battled five Arab countries and local Palestinian militias.
The outpouring of global sympathy on display after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust has dwindled, having been replaced by images of starving and dead Palestinians in Gaza. Images projected across the world show swaths of the Gaza Strip turned into rubble. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities, whose numbers don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.
This week, the killing of seven aid workers trying to feed desperate Gazans appears to have punctured the notion for much of the world that the Israeli military isn’t running amok in Gaza and has caused a rethink by the U.S. about its support for Israel.
Normalization with Saudi Arabia is on hold, while ties with Arab allies such as Egypt and Jordan have frayed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have thronged the streets of Western capitals, at times calling for Israel’s demise. A surge in antisemitism has shocked and alarmed not only Israelis but Jews across the globe. It is all strengthening a feeling inside Israel that the country can only rely on itself.
Israel faces a dilemma where it wants to be loved by the West, but needs to be feared by its enemies in the Middle East to ensure its long-term existence, said Micah Goodman, an Israeli author and philosopher.
“That’s the catch-22 we’re in,” he said.
Melanie Phillips:
The Right Dishonourable Foreign Secretary
Is Britain’s Foreign Secretary unaware that Israel has again agreed terms for a ceasefire that Hamas has again rejected? Can he really not understand that the only conditions under which Hamas would release the hostages would be Israel’s total surrender and the release of all its Hamas prisoners?
Does he really fail to grasp that the hostages with whom Yahya Sinwar has reportedly surrounded himself are the Hamas leader’s ultimate bargaining counter to protect his life, and so he will never voluntarily give them up? Is Cameron really so badly informed that he thinks a man like Sinwar would choose to go into exile rather than die the “martyr’s” death he craves if he is defeated, taking the hostages with him? Does he really imagine that the unconscionable threat posed by the psychopathic, religious fanatics of Hamas and its equally fanatical patron, Iran, can be solved by political means?
Surely Cameron, with his first-class degree from Oxford and reputedly stellar intellect, cannot possibly be so stupid and ignorant as to think like this? But the only alternative to that is that he is driven by profound malice towards Israel. And Cameron is an honourable man.
Then comes the article’s zinger. For it turns out that Cameron is indeed well aware that Hamas has refused a deal that releases the remaining hostages. So he says:
We all want to see an end to the fighting, but we must face up to the difficult question: what should we do if Hamas refuses a deal and if the conflict continues?
What indeed. And then he comes up with this astonishing answer:
We cannot stand by with our head in our hands, wishing for an end to the fighting that may well not come — and that means ensuring the protection of people in all of Gaza including Rafah.
As an occupying power, Israel has a responsibility to the people of Gaza. But it also means that the international community must work with Israel on humanitarian efforts to keep people safe and provide them with what they need.
Ordinary civilians must be safe and able to access food, water and medical care. We need the UN, with the support of the international community, to work with Israel to make practical, deliverable plans to achieve this in Rafah and across Gaza.
He doesn’t want a solution that ensures the protection of all the people of Israel. He want instead a solution to protect all the people of Gaza — while Israel, the victim of the monster born from the people of Gaza, has to produce it. The absolute and overriding requirement to protect Israel against further genocidal attack from Gaza is nowhere in Cameron's vision. His only gesture is a meaningless bromide about wanting
the people of Israel and the people of Gaza to be able to live their lives in peace and security.
Yes, Gaza’s civilians should be protected as far as possible from the war — but this cannot take precedence over the requirement to stop Hamas once and for all. It is Israel that is threatened with being wiped out, not the people of Gaza. They are the unfortunate casualties of the Hamas strategy to maximise the numbers who die in order to turn the west against Israel — an infernal manipulation of gullible westerners that has worked to the letter — plus the refusal by Egypt to open its border to the Gazan refugees, and indeed the refusal by every other Muslim state to allow any of them in.
Moreover, the majority of Gazans voted for Hamas, still support Hamas, and exulted over the October 7 pogrom. Untold numbers of “ordinary” Gazans took part in that pogrom, murdered Israelis, took them hostage and are currently keeping some of them locked up in their homes where they are reportedly using them as slaves. And the vast majority of Gazans, when asked, say they support the further killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
These are the people whose welfare Cameron is more concerned to protect than the lives of the Israelis who would continue to be subjected to genocidal attack if he had his way.
This is presumably what he means by Britain aiming to “exercise leadership in the region and at the United Nations”.
For Cameron is an honourable man.
Kurt Schlichter:
Israel Is Risking Losing This War by Caring What People Who Hate It Think
Israel is risking losing this war because it is focusing more on avoiding criticism from its enemies than winning. I blame Benjamin Netanyahu in large part, but also our incompetent and loathsome alleged president. Now, I’m not one of those reflexive Bibi haters, and while I certainly don’t think the United States should have a say in who Israel chooses to lead it, I do believe in accountability. The disaster of October 7 happened on his watch, and he should’ve resigned the day after, but that’s not up to me or up to any American. What is up to me as an American is who our president will be next year, and it can’t be Biden again. But the desiccated old zombie aside, Bibi needs to go. He screwed up on October 7, and now he appears to be screwing up this war.
The problem is not that Netanyahu has been too harsh, as our idiot president claims. It’s that Netanyahu has been too gentle (Yes, I understand a war cabinet is leading Israel, but he is still the face of it.). And too slow. Joe Biden has betrayed every ally America has had, from South Vietnam to Afghanistan and Bibi somehow imagined that creep would not sell-out Israel? Speed was of the essence. Why was Rafah not glass months ago? Netanyahu waited, and that gave Biden the time to sell out Israel.
Restraining was a mistake. The fact is that Israel has, to a far too great extent, tried to fight this war on terms that would satisfy its leftist enemies in the United States and other anti-Semites around the world. That was an error from the beginning. Israel’s strategy should have focused on victory, not on trying to mollify its critics. They will cry no matter what. Let them cry over defeated terrorists. Do you know what mollifies critics most effectively? Winning. Israel should’ve done that, and fast. But it didn’t. Despite the courage and skill of the IDF, who are a credit to their great nation, Israel’s leadership chose to fight this war and is still fighting this war in a manner that allows others who do not have Israel’s best interest at heart to dictate its strategic and tactical prerogatives. That is a grave error. That is putting Israel in danger.
Israel has three main related strategic military objectives at the moment. First, Israel needs to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Second, Israel must eliminate Hezbollah on its northern border. This Jihadi militia is dug in inside Lebanon with enough Iranian-supplied rockets to devastate Israel’s infrastructure, as well as having the ability to launch October 7-style attacks. And third, Israel must destroy Hamas in Gaza. A surviving Hamas can launch more October 7-style attacks and has promised to do so if able.
Friday, April 12, 2024
