legitimately insane how to some people, "we should wipe out this ethnic group that we've violently constrained to a ghetto because they're just genetically more violent and dangerous" is a reasonable and justifiable statement but it's Nazi Rhetoric to say something like, "it's bad that Israeli civilians are being killed but acknowledging that as tragic includes acknowledging that the almost daily state-sanctioned murder of civilians by the Israeli government is also tragic and unacceptable"

btw guys speaking of Nazi shit - can we check in, alongside what's been done to Palestinians in the last 75 years, what's the Israeli government's take on the Azerbaijani government's newest round of ethnic cleansing of Armenians? oh are the Israeli government's actions maybe not determined by Jewish identity, but by a commitment to colonial supremacy which puts them on the same page as other violently genocidal states like Azerbaijan, the US, and the UK? god can you Even Imagine?

(framing speaking against Israeli war crimes as inherently antisemitic requires understanding the Israeli state as representing all Jewish people, when it doesn't even represent all Israelis.

framing Israeli war crimes as synonymous with Jewish identity is pretty fucked up if we're being honest. I don't think that controlling water and power and movement for a captive population and shooting children dead for throwing stones is an inherent value of Judaism, any more than I think the torture carried out at Guantanamo Bay is an inherent value of Christianity - in both cases they're atrocities carried out by a far right genocidal government using religious identity as a shield.

Calling statements like "Israel is committing genocide against the people it's displaced" inherently antisemitic is doing more to further the idea that all Jewish people are associated with Israel than saying "the Israeli government is doing war crimes," which is a statement of fact about a country that exists and does war crimes. Is criticism of Israel as a nation often used as cover for antisemitism? Absolutely. Does that mean the Israeli government isn't doing literal war crimes repeatedly, on record, while talking publicly about scrubbing an ethnic group off the map? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well in the last 48 hours they've definitely cut off water and power to almost 600,000 civilians and allegedly used white phosphorus against civilians so in an extremely factual and unambiguous way yeah man those are Literal War Crimes whoever does them.)

Glass House Cleaning

Anecdotally, the Israeli attack on WFK humanitarian aid workers delivering food in Gaza appears to be a tipping point for some people. On some of the (ostensibly) liberal Zionist forums I frequent, I saw people who just last week were arguing that the entire concept of "proportionality" shouldn't constrain Israel's military response now are shocked and appalled, and they aren't buying Israeli excuses about "maybe we thought a Hamas operative was in the area." Query why this event triggered the shift, but change is change. The JTA has a story on the reaction of various Jewish institutions to the strike. It breaks down pretty much exactly as you'd expect: the liberals being clear-eyed in condemning the killing, the leftists condemning the killing and situating as part of the broader allegation of Israeli genocide, the centrists expressing sadness for the deaths while obscuring responsibility. And then there's ZOA: Morton Klein, the president of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, said that he did not know about the incident before being informed of it by JTA on Tuesday in the early afternoon. He said, “Now that you’ve made me aware of it, obviously I’m devastated that totally innocent people trying to do humanitarian work have lost their lives, I’m sure unintentionally.” He also said the ultimate responsibility for the aid workers’ death belongs to Hamas. “I blame Hamas. Every single fatality is blamed on Hamas for launching this war,” Klein said. “In any war you’ll have deaths of civilians that are unintentional. In a war, mistakes are made, targets are missed. if one takes the position that one doesn’t go to war if any innocents will be killed, you won’t go to war and Hamas tyrants will win.” I happened to read this right at the same time as I read Bret Stephens' latest column on "the appalling tactics of the 'free Palestine' movement." The thesis of his article is that "the mark of a morally serious movement lies in its determination to weed out its worst members and stamp out its worst ideas"; among his examples of the worst members/worst ideas was the infamous statement by a coalition of Harvard student groups, immediately after October 7, which held "the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." One notices, of course, that this is exactly -- exactly -- the formulation that Mort Klein adopted vis-a-vis Israel killing the WFK workers: "I blame Hamas. Every single fatality is blamed on Hamas for launching this war." So one might ask if this "member" of the pro-Israel will be weeded out, and if his ideas will be stamped out. As someone who has watched repeated endeavors try and fail to hold ZOA accountable, I can tell you the answer: they're not. Stephens isn't wrong, exactly, when highlighting some of the repellant extremism that sits largely unchallenged in the pro-Palestine movement. But if the mark of a morally serious movement is its determination to weed out one's worst members and worst ideas, the pro-Israel movement is sitting in a terribly fragile glass house. The Israeli attack on humanitarian aid workers is about more than just the seven innocents Israel killed. It is another boulder on the scale of evidence which overwhelmingly suggests that -- "most moral army in the world" protests notwithstanding -- Israel's orientation towards innocent life in this conflict has been one of cavalier indifference at best, malicious destruction at worst. Protestations that "war is hell" and "don't second-guess the generals" are ringing increasingly hollow as against the near-uniform conclusion of media, eyewitness accounts, NGOs, international observers -- you name it. Some may be biased (but then, so are Israeli government figures and their apologists). But people are entitled to draw conclusions from the reality before their eyes. (Oh, and you should read the op-ed Jose Andres published simultaneously in the New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth). via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/Uvsl8oY

I have been observing the whole mess down in Israel right now over the past few weeks and have been reluctant to share my thoughts here considering how my thoughts will likely get me branded as pro genocide by the internet hive mind, but I feel I need to get this off my chest now.

Do I acknowledge Bibi is a piece of garbage who played a large part in sparking this conflict and making things worse? Yes.

Do I recognize that Hamas is a terrorist group that is basically the reason why its practically impossible for there to be any true peace between Israel and Palestine? Also yes.

Calling out Hamas for the shit they have done does not make one pro genocide. It's frankly been infuriating seeing how people seem to gloss over the fact that Hamas has no issue with using their own civilians as literal meat shields or how they have been hording stockpiles of fuel and supplies in their underground tunnels. There are people who really want to leave but can't simply because Hamas won't allow it.

The problem is a lot of these people you see online screaming free Palestine probably never even heard of Gaza up until now nor would they be able to actually locate it on a map if they tried. It's basically East Palestine all over again with bad faith actors capitalizing on the conflict for easy clout or closet right wingers looking for a convenient excuse to bash Biden only it's 100x worse.

It's been quite depressing really how this conflict has ended up exposing a lot of people on the left as raging anti semites. People can scream how this will haunt Biden in 2024 all they want but frankly I would say this has probably done more damage to the left wing movement than Biden's reelection prospects. The hard truth is a majority of Americans think Biden is doing the right thing with Israel and see Hamas as the one most to blame. There is a reason why supporting Israel often falls within America's own interests especially considering they are our closest ally in the middle east. Tearing down posters of Jewish kidnapping victims doesn't make one pro Palestine. It's also quite telling how a lot of these anti-Israel protesters apparently get mad very quick when you point out that Hamas are in fact terrorists.

Those who demand a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza are not serious about actual peace in the middle east and/or are woefully ignorant of the reality of the situation. If you honestly expect Israel after suffering one of the worst terror attacks it has seen in decades to suddenly agree to a ceasefire with a Terrorist group that has openly called for the eradication of all Jews which they will likely violate just like they did with the last ceasefire that was brokered by Egypt, then I got a magic bridge to sell you. A ceasefire at this point is basically the equivalent of slapping a band aid on an open wound and the only one who really benefits from it is Hamas since it grants them time to rearm and regroup.

Just suddenly barging into a neighboring country and indiscriminately kidnapping, killing and beheading adults, children, and babies is not liberation. Mind you it was not just jews but also Arabs, Muslims, Ethiopians, African Guest Workers among others that were among the 1400 needlessly executed by Hamas on that day. I also will remind people there are innocent nationals including Americans that are being held hostage right now so no it's not just Jews that are suffering.

And I just would like to give a shout out to Biden here. I don't he is getting nearly enough credit for the fact that he might be the one person that is seriously preventing this conflict from spilling out into the rest of the Middle East. And this is on top of pushing for more humanitarian assistance to Gaza residents as well as pressuring Israel to hold off on a ground invasion and working to open humanitarian corridors. I find it ironic how people can scream Joe Biden is pro Genocide when he has probably been one of the most pro Palestine presidents seen in decades.

War sucks all around that's a fact and its even more frustrating in this day and age with places like Twitter having become certified disinformation cesspits. As the old saying goes truth is often the first casualty in war.

And perhaps a bit of advice if you are looking for reliable news sources right now on Israel and Palestine. I would probably avoid Twitter and TikTok like the plague.

Passover 5784, 1. Talking About Israel

(Originally posted this to Facebook, realized I could also share it meaningfully here, so catching up with this post)

Disclaimer: This is part of a series of posts on the topic of Israel and Palestine. You are welcome to engage with or share the thoughts expressed herein, however they are ultimately my own personal thoughts and lived experiences and not the word of an expert on this, or really any matter. I speak as a Jew, but neither I nor anyone else can speak on behalf of all Jews. All pictures used as headers are my own, taken in Israel in 2015.

Hello friends, here I am doing another series of posts, I guess this is just how I express myself these days. Passover is upon us and it just feels right to take it as the opportunity to attempt to get out everything that’s been bottled inside under increasing pressure. Part of the struggle in articulating my own thoughts is that they aren’t that cohesive, making a weeklong series of posts on separate but related topics ideal. Passover is also arguably (as most Jewish things are definitively arguable) the most important Jewish holiday, explicitly concerned with identity and liberation and I am sure my voice won’t be the only one peaking up for the occasion.

For the first topic, and the one I’m using as a warm up, I’ve decided that to start talking about Israel, I need to talk about talking about Israel.

A facet of the Jewish experience you rarely hear about is how much people want to talk to you about Israel, even as a small child. You would think this might generally pull one towards being very knowledgeable on the subject, or at least adept in fielding such questions, but for me it was quite the opposite. I think it has to do with context. People don’t ask me about Israel the way they do, say, about languages.

When people asked me about languages it’s because they know I have a degree in linguistics, or are otherwise aware it’s a special interest. The decision is based on knowledge of me as a person, and I can tell when the intent is to either seek my input or to delight me in the telling.

Conversely, when people, especially strangers, ask me about Israel they do it because of a label, an assumption based on my ancestry that I have any insight or interest in uncomfortable questions of a geopolitical and humanitarian nature about a foreign country (I’ll save the topic of heritage and nationhood for another post). They are almost always obviously someone either using me as an excuse to voice an opinion or someone trying to gauge me as a friend or foe.

Not only did these questions make me uncomfortable but, as it turns out, a 12 year old boy from Texas who had barely formed his own political opinions had very little to say on the matter anyways. I didn’t really have much more to say to random kids in high school or when I was 21 in a night club in England and some strangers noticed I was wearing a brimmed hat and have a beard (neither of which had or have anything to do with my Judaism). To date, I can think of only one larger faux pas; when a man, who was my boss at the time, immediately asked me about Jews for Jesus, an appropriative Christian Evangelical missionary movement.

This disinclination hasn’t been helped much by the fact that across the American political spectrum there is now a demand for Jews to pass Israeli loyalty tests. I’ll leave this, as well, to be fleshed out in another more dedicated post, but I’ll end this particular thread with this: it’s not that it’s somehow wrong to ever talk to Jews about Israel, in fact I do think it would be much more wrong to try talking about it without ever seeking a Jewish angle. But it is wrong to assume that someone can, or even wants to talk about Israel just because they are Jewish. It is outright anti-Semitic to demand that Jew tell you their thoughts and allegiances to Israel in any circumstance you would not earnestly demand it of a non-Jew.

Now, if you’ve ever attempted to avoid something most of your life, be it something small or larger, or be it something you do consciously or unconsciously, then you probably already know that this actually results in new and exciting ways for that exact thing to become unavoidable. And so here we are, a lifetime of frustration burst by the pressing weight of ethical need against the therapeutic requirements of my aging psyche. The subsequent articles will probably be more topical, though I can't guarantee they'll all have a cohesive thesis or narrative. As it says in the disclaimer, these are, ultimately, just my thoughts.

How the international community sought to create an endless Israel-Palestinian war

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

One of the remarkable outcomes of the recent Hamas war on Israel was the use of terminology that illustrates a larger goal designed to create conditions that justify Hamas “resistance” and claim Israel is a “settler” state. These terms, similar to the chants of “from the river to the sea” that span the far-left and far-right Hamas supporters are designed to assert that Israel should be destroyed as a country. They have origins in the international community’s attempt to undermine Israel from the first days of the state.

In no other place in the world has the international community worked so hard to try to erode the foundations of an internationally recognized state. It’s worth looking at the broader context of this. For instance when Israel was created in 1948 it was immediately attacked by several other countries. This was an illegal invasion and attack on a state whose creation had been backed by the United Nations. When Israel succeeded in defeating these countries the immediate response from the international community was not to help broker peace and aid the refugees that fled, but rather to create a situation in which Israel’s borders were called into question so as to create the conditions of excusing war against Israel.

There would be “cease fire agreements” which by their nature meant the war was not over, just waiting for the next round. At the same time the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had fled the fighting were housed in refugee camps and a narrative created telling them they would soon return to their homes. This “right of return” which does not apply to other refugees everywhere, of which there have been hundreds of millions in the last century, was created to force Israel to take back refugees. If Israel didn’t, international organizations would create numerous groups to support the refugees until such time this took place.

Next began the terrorism against Israel, no condemnation by the UN or others for countries hosting “armed struggle” against Israel which provoked wars in 1956, 1982 and at other times. Israel was subjected to an illegal military blockade at this time to and non-recognition by most states in the region. 

When that had largely failed to destroy Israel the next step was arming of Egypt, Syria and other countries to fight Israel. The same countries arming these states also claimed that the “conflict” and solving it would solve all the region’s problems, but pouring arms into the region for endless wars against Israel was not seen as a problem. Israel’s defensive actions were condemned, including the raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, a reactor supplied by France. Instead of preventing countries like Iraq from pursuing existential threats to Israel, it was encouraged. 

At the same time the Palestinian “liberation” organizations that vowed to reconquer all of Israel were given praise at the UN even as Israel was routinely subjected to one sided critique and barred from various regional bodies, isolated and then its national movement called “racist.” Countries in the region were encouraged to use the excuse of fighting Israel to roll back democracy, crush dissidents and minorities, develop and import weapons and start various wars. At each turn whichever extremist regime, from Iran to Nasser’s Egypt, was able to use the Israel excuse as a crutch. The most outlandish comments from Saddam’s regime, firing Scuds illegally at Israel in 1991, to Iran’s comments about Israel go uncondemned in the international community. 

What is extraordinary is how at each juncture the international community did not play a positive role trying to foster peace. Instead when there were peace talks there were. Purposeful roadblocks put up to derail them. Talks always said that the “refugees” and “right of return” would be the last issue on the agenda, guaranteeing failure. Also Jerusalem would need to be divided. Meanwhile everything that came to Israel always was removed from international norms. Countries like Iran could target Jews in South America, terrorists targeted Israelis at the Olympics, Hamas was permitted to produce and stockpile missiles illegally and so was Hezbollah. At each turn it was always an excuse that so long as these groups targeted Israel their illegal arsenals could increase. The Palestinian Authority wasn’t even expected to have elections. Israel was kept out of CENTCOM and regional bodies to appease the regional states up until recently. 

Ridiculous obsession with Israel at the UN led everything to be warped just to attack Israel from the WHO to Women and Human Rights groups, to UNESCO. Every rule that applies to every country in the world was shifted regarding Israel being singled out. And now human rights groups have done the same regarding accusations of “apartheid.” There is no commonality between Israel’s system and apartheid, but the term had to be changed just to attack Israel. The term “settler state” was shifted from its original meaning relating to the New World states to apply to Israel, a country that is not made up of “settlers.” The supposed “two state” solution has now been tossed aside in favor of what the anti-Israel voices call “one state” and “from the river to the sea.” The accusations that all of Israel is “apartheid” is designed to cater to this alliance of Hamas and the progressive left against Israel. It doesn’t matter what Israel does, just defending itself with Iron Dome is now considered a reason to attack it. Similarly the use of the term “settler” to describe Israel, asserting that this gives it less rights, when numerous other states in North America and other places were created by “settlers.” Only in Israel’s case are migrants and refugees called “settlers.” 

Even when Israel tried to do what the international community has asked, withdraw from Gaza, the same community that made sure that failed chaotic Palestinian Authority elections would enable Hamas to take over Gaza. Then they say that Israel still “occupies” Gaza, when Israel left. Hamas is said to have a “right” to “resist occupation” and attack Israel with rockets, and if Israel blockades Hamas then it is said to be evidence of “occupation.” Similarly even though Israel left Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah is permitted to claim it must keep a massive arsenal to “resist” Israel because Israel “occupies” Lebanon, even though it doesn’t. This shows no matter how much Israel withdraws from the “occupation” will never end and the need for “resistance” will never end. The doctrine is “one state” and a “binational” state. Under no circumstance to international organizations say they won’t fund Palestinian groups that use maps showing all of historic Palestine as theirs, and no Israel. Even terms like “’48 Arabs” or “48 lands” are used. To deny the existence of Israel. No other country is subjected to this. No one says that India is “48 lands”. 

Only Israel is subjected to non-recognition by numerous countries, based often on religious hatred. Even as the Cold War ended and other disputes ended there was no push by the international community to recognize Israel. It is a conflict that began in 1948 and which many in the international community will use forever. Iran’s regime uses the conflict to excuse spreading chaos in the region and arming illegal extrajudicial groups. Why does Iran threaten Israel? That question is never asked. Why does the regime get to continually use the Palestinian issue to threaten? No other country randomly adopts a cause far away to threaten to destroy some other other country. For instance Burma may be accused of suppressing Rohingya, but Iran or Turkey don’t threaten the country’s destruction. Only with Israel. 

The international community has done nothing to try to create peace in the Middle East and prevent the stockpiling of rockets by Hezbollah, Iran’s brazen nuclear program and other issues. As long as these countries say they will “destroy” Israel, they get a pass. If they threaten any other country they are held to account. Even Jewish history is neatly removed, UNESCO declaring Hebron a heritage site but purposely focusing on the Mamluk and Ottoman period to remove any need to mention Jewish heritage in Hebron. The whole of world history changed just to ignore Jewish rights and role in historic Israel. 

This is not about Palestinian rights and a state. Because the nature of the argument, the “river to the sea” talk now said at western Universities, it all about ethnic cleansing of Israel. It is the only state in the world the western left leaning progressive will seek to ethnically-cleanse of its diverse population. It’s the only state they say that it has to provide full and equal rights to “all its citizens” and change its flag and anthem, but no other state in the Middle East must do so. It’s the only state where 4,000 rockets can be fired at it without condemnation or even mention of Hamas. It’s the only state where when there is a war there is a huge rise in attacks on Jews all around the world by the same people who claim “anti-Zionism” is not antisemitism. This is the reality in the wake of the Hamas war. 

Regardless of Israel’s mistakes, the international community’s failure to rein in extremist groups and to continue to enable the excuses about why there is a war is one of the root problems. Had the international community done more to say that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah shouldn’t have a de facto “right to resist” there might have been more peace long ago. 

On Monday, in an interview with The Intercept, Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat who in November became the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress, went public with her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to use economic pressure on Israel to secure Palestinian rights. That made her the second incoming member of Congress to publicly back B.D.S., after Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar, who revealed her support last month.

No current member of Congress supports B.D.S., a movement that is deeply taboo in American politics for several reasons. Opponents argue that singling out Israel for economic punishment is unfair and discriminatory, since the country is far from the world’s worst violator of human rights. Further, the movement calls for the right of Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendants to return to Israel, which could end Israel as a majority-Jewish state. (Many B.D.S. supporters champion a single, binational state for both peoples.) Naturally, conservatives in the United States — though not only conservatives — have denounced Tlaib and Omar’s stance as anti-Semitic.

It is not. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that depends on treating Israel as the embodiment of the Jewish people everywhere. Certainly, some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but it’s entirely possible to oppose Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot. Indeed, it’s increasingly absurd to treat the Israeli state as a stand-in for Jews writ large, given the way the current Israeli government has aligned itself with far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

The interests of the State of Israel and of Jews in the diaspora may at times coincide, but they’ve never been identical. Right-wing anti-Semites have sometimes supported Zionism because they don’t want Jews in their own countries — a notable example is the Polish government in the 1930s.

Conversely, there’s a long history of Jewish anti-Zionism or non-Zionism, both secular and religious. In 1950 Jacob Blaustein, the president of the American Jewish Committee, one of the country’s most important Jewish organizations, reached an agreement with Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in which Ben-Gurion essentially promised not to claim to speak for American Jews. “Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have no political attachment to Israel,” said Blaustein at the time.

Decades later, such a statement from the committee — or any major, mainstream Jewish organization — would be unthinkable. A consensus set in “that Jewish identity can be reduced to Israelism,” Eliyahu Stern, an associate professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, told me. “That’s something that takes place over the second half of the 20th century in America.”

The centrality of Israel to American Jewish identity has at times put liberal American Jews in an awkward position, defending multiethnic pluralism here, where they’re in the minority, while treating it as unspeakable in Israel, where Jews are the majority. (American white nationalists, some of whom liken their project to Zionism, love to poke at this contradiction.)

Until fairly recently, it was easy enough for many liberals to dismiss consistency on Israel as a hobgoblin of little minds. A binational state might sound nice in theory, but in practice is probably a recipe for civil war. (Even the Belgians have trouble managing it.) The two-state solution appeared to offer a route to both satisfying Palestinian national aspirations and preserving Israel’s Jewish, democratic character.

Now, however, Israel has foreclosed the possibility of two states, relentlessly expanding into the West Bank and signaling to the world that the Palestinians will never have a capital in East Jerusalem. As long as the de facto policy of the Israeli government is that there should be only one state in historic Palestine, it’s unreasonable to regard Palestinian demands for equal rights in that state as anti-Semitic. If the Israeli government is going to treat a Palestinian state as a ridiculous pipe dream, the rest of us can’t act as if such a state is the only legitimate goal of Palestinian activism.

At times, I’ve agreed with those who see something disproportionate in the left’s fixation on Israel. But the oft-heard argument that other peoples are suffering more than the Palestinians can be a form of weaponized whataboutism, meant to elide the unique role America plays as Israel’s protector.

In an op-ed essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listed Saudi Arabia’s growing ties to Israel as a reason not to downgrade America’s relationship with the kingdom, despite the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. If the Trump administration is going to use our alliance with Israel as an excuse for abandoning fundamental values, surely Americans are justified in subjecting that alliance to special scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Israel is ever more willing to ally itself with foreign leaders who share its illiberal nationalism, even when they’re hostile to Jews. “In the past, Israel has always adhered to a clear policy that it will not engage with political parties ostracized by the local Jewish community,” Anshel Pfeffer wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, wrote Pfeffer, “has abandoned this policy.”

Netanyahu has nurtured a particularly close relationship with the Hungarian right-wing populist Viktor Orban, whose government is waging a demonization campaign against the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros. Just this week Soros’s Central European University announced it has been forced out of Hungary. And Netanyahu’s office is trying to negotiate a compromise with Hungary over the contents of a museum that many fear will whitewash Hungary’s role in the Nazi genocide of the Jews, essentially putting Israel’s imprimatur on a modified form of Holocaust revisionism. 

Netanyahu, then, seems to understand that being pro-Israel and pro-Jewish are not the same thing. Liberal American Jews, particularly younger ones, are learning that lesson as well. Some staunch Zionists are bad for the Jews — witness Steve King, the Republican congressman from Iowa who invokes his support for Israel when he’s called out for his blatant white nationalism.

At the same time, people with an uncompromising commitment to pluralistic democracy will necessarily be critics of contemporary Israel. That commitment, however, makes them the natural allies of Jews everywhere else.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.  @michelleinbklyn

Corbyn's democratic deficit: Will the Labour leader stick to democratic norms?

By Colin Talbot

Is Jeremy Corbyn a democrat? His fan-base will obviously reject such a question out of hand. Even those who aren't quite so besotted with the Labour leader might still think it a bit provocative. But actually, it turns out to be more difficult to answer than you might suppose.

One reason it's hard to answer is that Corbyn rarely, if ever, talks about democracy – except as applied to Labour party internal affairs. He has also deleted from his personal website links to most of the articles and speeches he has given since he was first elected as an MP in 1983 – over three decades' worth.

But we can come up with a fair analysis. A useful place to start is Labour's 2017 Manifesto. A section entitled Extending Democracy states that the party "will establish a Constitutional Convention to examine and advise on reforming of the way Britain works at a fundamental level".

This potentially very radical proposal received virtually no attention during the general election or since. The BBC summary didn't even mention it. But its importance can hardly be understated.

The UK has virtually zero history with constitutional conventions – a device usually invoked when a country faces a major crisis or change, such as a revolution, independence or well, an authoritarian power grab.

It's interesting that just when Corbyn was unveiling his idea for a constitutional convention, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro – with whom he has close ties - was doing the same. Following a large-scale protests, he tried to bypass Venezuela's 1999 constitution and its National Assembly by appointing an assembly loyal to himself. He did this on May 1st 2017, just as Labour's manifesto was being finalised.

Labour's constitutional convention, on the other hand, would be "about where power and sovereignty lies". Yet there is nothing in the manifesto about how it would be constituted, very little about what it would consider and no description of what its limits would be. A search of Labour's 'policy forum' website returns zero results.

So it could be nothing or it could be… something. Labour's proposal – and its general attitude to democracy - deserves much greater attention.

There's a good starting point for judging this type of thing in one of the most interesting political books of last year: How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The central message of their book is that modern democracies are less often overthrown through military coups than they are eroded by authoritarian populist leaders using the rhetoric of giving 'power back to the people'.

One very interesting section of their book sets out a handy guide to "key indicators of authoritarian behavior". It is worth applying them to Corbyn's Labour.

The list is:

Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game

Denial of legitimacy of political opponents

Toleration or encouragement of violence

Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media

Let's take them in turn.

Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game

There is some evidence of this in the recent past. A video released on Twitter recently showed that in 2011 Corbyn attacked voters for rejecting his preferred candidate. "I condemn the people of Milton Keynes for the mistakes that they made in the May election," he says.

There is also the treatment of MPs. In representative democratic systems, MPs are elected to represent the whole country, not the party. Unlike parties which are influenced by Communist traditions, like South Africa's ANC, they are not considered 'deployees'.

But there are disturbing signs that Labour sees its MPs as just that – 'deployees' who should be completely under the control of their local party members, with any deviation punished by deselection. Labour MP Chris Leslie pointed out in September last year, after facing a vote of no confidence himself, how a wave of such threats was spreading across the party. Several MPs have fought similar battles against left-wing activists in their local organisation.

This is a clear break with UK constitutional norms. MPs are representatives of their constituents not of their local party memberships, which is a very small slice of the electorate.

Denial of legitimacy of political opponents

Levitsky and Ziblatt also ask: "Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents … secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of) a foreign government".

Many of Corbyn's supporters do frequently attack their own internal Labour party critics, as well as other parties, in intemperate terms. Internal critics have been denounced as 'Tories', 'Blairites', and more recently 'centrists', which in this context is derogatory and often implies a wish to undermine the leadership. Some Jewish Labour MPs have been subjected to anti-semitic abuse and many on social media are told that they are agents of Israel. This sort of abusive politics is operating at a level of intensity we've not seen in recent decades. But it is happening, it has to be said, across the political spectrum. And it's not yet at the level seen in the US under Donald Trump or Hungary under Viktor Orban.

Toleration or encouragement of violence

Despite attempts to hide his past, Corbyn's support for, or excusing of, violence by 'national liberation' movements in Israel/Palestine, Ireland and elsewhere is well documented. Only two weeks after an Brighton bomb, he invited convicted IRA volunteers Linda Quigley and Gerry MacLochlainn to the House of Commons.

In 2011, McDonnell told a 'Unite the Resistance' rally that he wanted to see a situation where "no Tory MP can travel anywhere in the country or show their face in public without being challenged by direct action". He also said: "Any institution or any individual that attacks our class, we will come for you with direct action."

In June 2017, immediately after a general election which Labour lost, McDonnell said "a million people should take to the streets to force Theresa May from power".

Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media

There is no evidence that a Corbyn government would curtail civil liberties in general, or specifically those of their political opponents. Corbyn's hostility to the hated "mainstream media' is obvious but there is, as yet, little evidence that would translate into restrictive measures against it.

The track record of socialist governments in power is not so positive, however. Corbyn has been strangely silent about the repressive and clearly authoritarian Maduro regime in Venezuela. He continues to back other repressive socialist governments like Cuba, and has had links to other authoritarian regimes in Iran and Russia as well as the Hamas rulers of Gaza.

In that he is of course no different from many Western democratic politicians of the left, right and centre who have frequently befriended or supported repressive regimes overseas for a variety of motives – some legitimate, others less savoury. It doesn't make him an incipient authoritarian himself.

So, is Corbyn a democrat or an incipient authoritarian? There is something troubling about the casual way the constitutional convention was thrown into the 2017 Labour manifesto, especially when you think of the way he, his frontbenchers, and his supporters sometimes behave. It certainly raises questions about how far they really respect, or even understand, democratic norms. There is plenty of evidence that they are willing to bend, if not break, them.

At the very least the UK electorate deserve to be told how Corbyn would like to change the way Britain works "at a fundamental level". His record raises enough questions to demand that we be given more answers.

YOU WANNA SEE THE MOST IRRATIONAL BLOG EVER..

You know what maybe I should do what you guys do, most of you and start leaning centrist and to the right, even you pretend ass bitch liberals who pretend to be anti Trump are categorized in this because speaking out against Israel or calling out systemic evil hasn’t gotten anywhere, and even my people in my life have made deals with the devil so they can partake in systemic orgies while pretending to be male feminists, or try to be woke. Maybe I should start making deals with the devil too then; maybe I should be Pro Israel, pro racism, pro misogyny and actually be out in the open with it. Watch how fast these bitch ass media outlets will then start paying attention because you refuse to pay attention when I have reached out numerous times, and you can’t because powerful people locally who take orders from the Zionists have controlled my growth and once were socially conscious type but now suck up to the inner white supremacy so you can have your wrestling, sports, comedy, hip hop connection etc so maybe I should cheer on when white supremacy rises or some shit. Watch out how much you bitch ass shit fucks start paying attention then. I would rather die than ever make peace with any of you or ever break bread with any of you.

Maybe I should sell my fucking soul and become a Pro Israel person and actually be treated like I am a good guy and maybe then you fuck tards who pretend to be a part of resistance will pay attention and suddenly need to stop me, while you sit back and take that Zionist dick from Stern behind the scenes and he rams his fucking tiny cock in your mouths and the semen stains the back of your fucking bootlicking subservient mouth.

I will never be happy until your bitch ass bootlicking cunts kill me. Maybe I should attack the Me Too movement and blow the cover that this is probably all staged and scripted and you all are fucking each other behind the scenes and now it is just the men in charge allowed to now get traction and they are probably all long gone and dead, and their fucking clones are around to deal with the mess while all of you think you got some justice when everything you cheer for is fucking symbolism and it doesn’t mean shit in the end. And anyone in the wrestling business or covers it has a problem, you are no better, you are supporting a white supremacist company like the WWE who supports Trump, you can pretend to be outraged by Saudi Arabia etc but you still take that Vince McMahon dick in your mouth. In my opinion he runs everything, even the independent circuit you cling onto as something about being anti WWE, and you are still supporting them. The evil never runs out, it is just designed as something else.

I would rather die than ever serve that evil. Fuck everyone who does, but maybe I need to if it means getting traction since you fucking woke people are so woke about everything and anything but never once call out the real evil of the system and just pick on the characters that prop up in mainstream. A lot of my people support fucking evil systemic shit, and pretend they are good people. They sacrificed me so they can get all the orgies, perks, access they want and none of them have the fucking balls to say anything about it because it would mean they have to be subservient to me for hooking it up because I was the asshole who took all the fucking harassment and lumps from being prostituted on the Stern Show.

The funny thing is these people pretended they fucking cared about my status and cared about me progressing when it was all about them, it has become clear when they invite me out but still show me some disrespect while dick riding me and telling me I am a fucking legend while simultaneously shitting on me with your bitch ass subtle ways, and just because I didn’t compromise my sexuality like you guys did because you guys wanted to be down, and you were forced into marriages, which don’t even mean shit because most of you fuck other girls and guys on the fucking side. Nothing has any meaning, it is all pretentious. I feel sorry for all of your fucking kids who have to grow up and realize what kind of evil people run the world and what their parents had to do to survive.

Don’t worry once I post this, they will all try to root for my death, which is the point. I want you all to kill me. So if I say I support white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia etc, then will you pay attention and call me out and then put a fucking bullet in my head, since none of you fucking assholes care about my mental health and pretend to preach about mental health awareness, while the faces of mental health on the surface are the biggest fucking cowards because they won’t ever fucking tell you why this happens and how it is designed and they think they are really doing something about it. You aren’t doing shit. You are doing less than me, and I do fucking nothing for a living and I sit here every fucking day and wish for my demise so I never have to see anyone ever again.

I am waiting for the shit heads on Reddit to post this and not even see the point of this irrational anger. “HANZI IS LEANING RIGHT THESE DAYS, HE IS GOING EXTREME AND HE MIGHT KILL SOMEONE” Yeah a guy with no fucking weapons or no desire to hurt anyone is going to do something, what fucking shit heads. Maybe if I say I am going right, maybe they will support me, because everyone else behind the scenes is rooting for Trump. If they wanted him out they would have had him out, but most of these fucking celebrities that are going after him are going after him because Trump fucked some chicks they used to like. Someone inside showbiz told me that and I know you will say he isn’t credible, but none of these people are really against Trump because they support white supremacy beneath the surface, even the ones who seem to be the most staunch liberals.

None of these women actually care about the Me Too movement; I wonder what excuse they will come up with when it is Stern’s turn. They will pretend Stern forced them to keep quiet, but had no problem going to his Hamptons parties and the females that still hype him up are going to look stupid and that is why no one will ever take your fucking movements seriously because you still make deals with the devil because you love those access journalism, and systemic orgies that you pretend you don’t do because you are trying to convince people you made it because of your talent, when the talent is only 4th down the list of what you need to make it. It is because you have to fuck someone to get in position, and then later you can claim you were raped. MAYBE THIS WILL GET TRACTION BECAUSE I JUST SHIT ON THE PRECIOUS ME TOO MOVEMEMNT, YET YOU WILL FUCKING ALIGN YOURSELVES AND DEFEND PEOPLE WHO HAVE DONE WAY WORSE. Any female who claims to be about this movement and you are still cool with Howard Stern, you have no fucking credibility, you have less credibility than I fucking do. That is why no one is going to believe shit.

Maybe I should start waving an Israeli flag and shit on Palestine like everyone of you “GOOD OLD LIBERALS” You call out Trump because it is easy to fucking do, you won’t ever admit that your bitch ass support for Hilary or any other corporate democrat is still supporting white supremacy but you just want to seem half woke You just call out the bare minimum of what is really corrupt and that is why it makes you look good to kind of call out Trump but you will find out that these good socially conscious types are also in the same fucking bed with all of these guys. At least Kanye had the balls to admit it, the rest of you just pretend and it will help you with not having to pay taxes, but still pretend that you are these staunch liberals, especially all of you fucking comedians and Hollywood type, who were busy laughing at the Whack Pack, instead of calling out Stern, maybe someone like me wouldn’t have bought into him being a good person since respectable people gave him props and associated with him. How the fuck is Jimmy Kimmel is bastion of liberalism when he has partook in shit with Howard Stern to mock the mentally disabled on his show and say its all in good fun and then gets on television like the pretentious twat he is and cries his little eyes out because a fucking lion died. Fuck you, you are probably a fucking Trump supporter too, but this is just for show.

Howard Stern runs his dick through all of you mother fuckers and you will keep pretending he is irrelevant which is why you are all afraid to call him out and you will then pretend to act shocked when something about him is revealed and I will be there to call you all out for the lying sacks of shit you are. If people in my life want to do business with filth and evil just so they can pimp out people they know to be down with those then fuck you too. I don’t want to be associated with any of you mother fuckers. All of you in this world have compromised your fucking sexuality to make it, remember it is never because of your talent, the talent doesn’t mean shit, and you can keep pretending because you all have pretend journalist write think pieces and act like their opinions are not biased at all and then anyone who says anything remotely related to a conspiracy, you lump them in with Alex Jones because deep down all of you support Alex Jones, otherwise he wouldn’t have never caught traction, you did that on purpose to make it seem like there was someone speaking some sort of truth and now you use it to spew vile hatred on conspiracy theorists. I rather be a conspiracy theorist then ever be a part of any of your fucking clubs. They are all filth. I wish every fucking day someone would fucking murder me, because I am  not going to do it on my own, I will remain here for as long they allow me. One day they will have to kill me, especially if I am trolling and telling you I am going to hype up white supremacy and support Israel, then one of you SJW’s will have to fucking kill me and you will be cheered on for it. Come on and do it. I have nothing to live for, no one wants me and I don’t want them. I just want to die as soon as fucking possible.

If you are stupid enough to think I am actually a white supremacist, maybe I should just pretend to be one and support all the wrong things since you all actually do support the wrong things behind the fucking scenes. Look at the irrational anger you fucking no good shit heads. Discuss this amongst your shitty little private groups and dissect it while you laugh it off but when you are alone you are crying because I hurt your little bitch ass feelings. Just like you have no respect for me, for my erratic behavior and irrational attitude to piss people off, I have no respect for any of you. I have no respect for anything you say or you do because it is all limited and none of you have the real power and the ones that do will do whatever it takes to maintain it.

None of you will even say anything until the day I am dead so then you can pretend you gave a fuck about mentally ill people, but allowed a sea of targeted harassment to come my way and make me feel like utter shit. You will probably frame me for something and fuck me over. I wish you would just be men and just fucking kill me. I have no desire to be here and as long as I am breathing I will be online causing shit and calling people out even if it means I get more blacklisted. What is the point, you already gave all my friends and connections to other people in my life, so why would you even need me, you have the better version of me that you can pretend to like.

I wish all of you who take pleasure in my misery and my behavior that this shit happens to everyone you fucking love and you have to deal with this. I hope you are haunted at night and can’t sleep because you shook hands with the devil and had to compromise your sexuality and beliefs to make it anywhere in this world and I will be in my fucking parents basement where it has been designed to happen, so bitch ass tricks can get ahead of me and make their lane and did it solely because I didn’t want to sell my soul, so you did it behind my back and joined up with evil shit heads. Now you get to pretend you are a good person. None of you are. You are all fucking evil and I wish the worst shit to happen to every single one of you for even fucking with me.

You allow sexual predators online to make waves as personalities and then pretend you are against it but you will never fucking admit that you support this kind of behavior and let it go on. That is why you let Woody Allen parade around, and you let Bill Cosby, or R Kelly makes waves and when their careers were done, then you decided to call them out for it because it became easy and convenient for you. None of you actually care and this women empowerment in 30 years will be exposed when some of these women are exposed as doing something fucked up and then pretending they could do it because they are women and they are allowed to get away with it.

DO YOU LIKE THAT IRRATIONAL ANGER? DO YOU TAKE PLEASURE OR DID IT PISS YOU THE FUCK OFF. I HOPE IT DID BECAUSE NOW YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW THE FUCK I FEEL EVERY FUCKING DAY WHILE YOU MOTHER FUCKERS HAVE PROFITED OFF ME, WHILE I HAVE TO CONSTANT INCREASE MY MEDICATION BECAUSE NONE OF YOU HAVE THE BALLS TO BE HONEST ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE FUCKING DONE TO FUCK ME OVER. I WISH YOU ALL NOTHING BUT THE WORST AND I HOPE WHEN YOU DIE YOUR SOULS ALL ROT IN HELL. FUCK YOU ALL FOR ALLOWING THIS TO KEEP HAPPENING AND I WILL SIT HERE AND WAIT UNTIL SOMEONE FUCKING COMES AND MURDERS ME. I Won’t do it myself, I am a peaceful person who is trolling you all right now with some irrational fucking anger to prove a point but it will go over all your fucking heads because you will somehow pretend not to understand irony or say I am shit at explaining it. Fuck you all.

Again anything I said in here is just my opinion backed up with no facts. It is still fuck you though 

Liberal Zionist C*** Icon Yitzhak Rabin, Now Staying, Resting, Rotting and Burning in Hell, Was a Mass-Murderer Until the Very End

Yitzhak Rabin never evolved into a peacemaker, he retained his “warrior” attitude of openly resorting to the mass killing of civilians to serve his political aims throughout his entire career.

— BY DAVID SAMEL | OCTOBER 13, 2020 | Mondoweiss.Net

YITZHAK RABIN DURING HIS SECOND TERM AS ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER, JULY 1994 (PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA/GOVERMENT PRESS OFFICE)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to withdraw from an event sponsored by Americans for Peace Now honoring the legacy of the late Yitzhak Rabin has been condemned by the usual suspects. The “Liberal Zionist” crew acknowledges that Rabin had some messy things on his resume, principally the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Lydda and Ramle and his brutal response as Defense Minister to the first Intifada that killed many hundreds of protesters against the Occupation and “broke the bones” of many thousands more. But, the story goes, Rabin later evolved from warrior to peacemaker, a courageous statesman who attempted to forge a lasting agreement with his enemies and paid with his life. Roger Cohen put it succinctly in his recent NY Times op-ed:

Rabin was a warrior who fought ruthlessly to safeguard Israel before realizing that war could not achieve this. He learned and changed. Late in life, with immense political courage, he embarked, through the Oslo Accords, on a quest to end the cycle of wars. . .. He gave his life for the idea of ending Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.

Cohen echoes the liberal Zionist consensus: AOC has no business dishonoring Rabin’s memory.

There are two aspects to this Rabin hagiography. Yossi Gurvitz and Amjad Iraqi and others have thoroughly debunked the Rabin as Oslo peacemaker myth. As Alan Dershowitz recently reaffirmed, in a highly uncharacteristic display of honesty and accuracy, Rabin did not propose an actual Palestinian “state” but something “less than a state” ultimately controlled by Israel. While a genuine two-state solution of two independent states for two peoples still has moral and practical flaws in comparison to one state of equal citizens, Rabin attempted to force desperate Palestinians into something far worse: one state for Jews and another state-minus for Palestinians, both controlled by Israeli Jews.

Rabin laid the groundwork for blaming Palestinians for Israel’s refusal to end the occupation. Five years later, Ehud Barak would try the same gambit at Camp David, scripting a public relations spectacle of making the Palestinians an unacceptable offer he knew they’d refuse.

“Operation Accountability”

NEW YORK TIMES COVERAGE OF “OPERATION ACCOUNTABILITY,” A WEEK-LONG ISRAELI ATTACK ON LEBANON IN JULY 1993

Even worse than Rabin doing nothing of substance to bring about a lasting peace, he never renounced or abandoned his appetite for murderous violence. His actions in 1948 and the late 1980’s were not hardline positions from which he had evolved but an essential part of his character even during the 1993 Oslo negotiations for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In late July of that year, Rabin embarked upon what was arguably the deadliest campaign of his career. Earlier that month, there were several attacks by Hezbollah on Israeli military positions in an area of southern Lebanon that Israel had been illegally occupying for over a decade. Seven IDF soldiers were killed.

On July 25, Rabin launched his response, dubbed Operation Accountability, a week-long bombing campaign against the residents of south Lebanon. Under Rabin’s orders, the IDF deliberately killed over 100 innocent civilians in Lebanon, destroying thousands of homes, all with the reprehensible motivation of triggering a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians. Early in the operation, Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, broadcasted “warnings urging the residents of more than 30 villages, including three Palestinian refugee camps, to leave ‘because your villages are going to be bombarded.’” According to a New York Times report at the time Rabin himself unequivocally acknowledged that he was targeting civilians: “If there will be no quiet and safety for the northern settlements, there will be no quiet and safety for south Lebanon residents north of the security zone.” The NY Times also reported that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed to “swamp Beirut with refugees in an effort to pressure the Lebanese Government to stop the rocket assaults.”

The end result was that Israel “turned many southern Lebanese villages into ghost towns, displaced some 300,000 people[Lebanese estimates were higher], left more than 130 people dead, including three Israelis and three Syrians, and some 500 people, many of them Lebanese civilians, wounded.” Rabin explained: “In order to deal with the Hezbollah terror, we had to cause the movement of the Lebanese residents of south Lebanon.” Rabin “caused” that “movement” by ordering the IDF to rain death and destruction on ordinary Lebanese civilians in south Lebanon. When you want to force hundreds of thousands to flee in terror, you have to show you mean business. It is hard to conceive of a more brazen act of mass murder and a better dictionary definition of terrorism.

Remembering Rabin

If Rabin is not condemned by history for this savagery, the obvious reason is that Israeli leaders enjoy automatic immunity from accurate, descriptive labels like “mass murder” and “terrorism.” And if Operation Accountability has mostly disappeared down the memory hole, it is probably because it is only one of many many such attacks Israel has perpetrated against civilians in Palestine and Lebanon over its seven decades of experience. Israel has frequently exacted harsh retribution for attacks on its soldiers and civilians by killing a far greater number of “Arab” civilians (Qibya 1953, Lebanon and Syria refugee camps in 1972, Tunis in 1985, and Gaza in 2009, 2012 and 2014). In the context of its savagery in Lebanon alone, Operation Accountability competes for historical attention with Israel’s large-scale attacks in 1978, 1996 and 2006 and the deadliest bombing/invasion of all in 1982. The sheer number of mass civilian casualty events perpetrated by Israel has reduced Rabin’s horrific 1993 episode to “meh” status.

Why do liberal Zionists like Americans for Peace Now and J Street and Roger Cohen forgive and forget these events? Because they view the Zionist experiment as an essentially noble one that has sometimes been partially derailed by the unfortunate election of extremists like Sharon and especially Netanyahu. Liberals Zionists cling to a rosy alternate history that still might be achievable when the Israeli electorate comes to its senses. It is essential that they remain willfully ignorant that the “best” of Israeli leaders – Ben-Gurion, Meir, Rabin, and Peres – also participated in these wholesale massacres of innocents.

Then there is the enormously emotional factor that Rabin was assassinated by an even more right-wing fanatic. Rabin’s death did not diminish the evil of his crimes but the often inappropriate convention to not speak ill of the dead has a tendency to extend for decades in such circumstances. Ehud Barak no doubt angered many with his disingenuous gestures toward conciliation but avoided the same fate by a combination of dumb luck or better security. Perhaps there was wider recognition among his right-wing detractors that he, like Rabin, was never a genuine threat to the status quo.

While an honest appraisal of the career of Yitzhak Rabin would not overlook his perpetration of large-scale murder over nearly a half-century, there are a number of reasons to be grateful to him. First, there is his relative honesty. Rarely are Israeli leaders so clumsy as to openly admit their nefarious actions and motivations as Rabin did in the above quotes. Since at least Ariel Sharon’s 1982 NY Times op-ed during his brutal months-long foray in Lebanon (“Our soldiers were welcomed despite the casualties that were the inevitable result of fighting against P.L.O. terrorists who used civilians as human shields and who deliberately placed their weapons and ammunition in the midst of apartment houses, schools, refugee camps and hospitals”), other leaders have whitewashed their crimes with absurd excuses, the most prominent of which is they reluctantly bomb civilian areas because the terrorists hide themselves and their weapons among them.

Rabin’s relative honesty was also on display in 1979 when he submitted for publication a memoir in which he acknowledged following Ben-Gurion’s order to forcibly evacuate the residents of Lydda and Ramle. Rabin’s original text was not terribly explicit and focused more on his soldiers’ difficulty in carrying out his and B-G’s orders rather than the misery of the true victims:

“Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles …

Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action. Soldiers of the Yiftach Brigade included youth‐movement graduates, who had been inculcated with values such as international brotherhood and humaneness. The eviction action went beyond the concepts they were used to.

There were some fellows who refused to take part in the expulsion action. Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these youth‐movement groups, and explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action.”

Israeli censors swooped in to protect the false narrative that Palestinians left “voluntarily,” but the admission came to light when the English language translator of the book, Peretz Kidron, revealed the censored account to the New York Times.

Then there is Rabin’s clarity in inviting South African Prime Minister John Vorster to Israel in 1976, openly celebrating and entering into “security” agreements with the apartheid leader held in such contempt throughout the truly civilized world. While there is no shortage of answers to the apoplectic hasbara whining that poor Israel is victimized by defamation associating it with a loathsome ideology and regime, the invitation to Vorster (not to mention Israel’s close security and weapons cooperation with SA) is surely the best reply, demonstrating that Israel eagerly associated itself with apartheid. Even more shockingly, Vorster had spent the War years cheerleading the Nazis and was later imprisoned by the British for his pro-Nazi activities. But by 1976, Rabin excused Vorster’s inconvenient past, finding him a kindred spirit, a gentleman of European lineage forced to exercise harsh rule over darker-skinned natives in a tough neighborhood.

Finally, Rabin may possibly be Israel’s most progressive PM from the standpoint of considering accommodations with the Palestinian population victimized by the success of the Zionist project. However, “most progressive” is a term of comparison with other Israeli leaders. Considering Rabin’s blood-soaked record of brutality, his status in some circles as an icon of peace says volumes about Israeli leaders and does nothing to support Rabin’s undeserved reverence as a man who gave his life bravely fighting for reconciliation.

No doubt AOC herself was unaware of the worst aspects of Rabin’s career, but she learned enough to make the right decision. She knew she’d be attacked as at best naive and ignorant and at worst as antisemitic. That’s genuine courage. Good for her.

I first met Orde Wingate in James Barr’s A Line in the Sand (Bloomsbury, 2011), where he’s introduced as a “young, well-connected and faintly unhinged army officer” who had just been assigned to Palestine:

He admired the Jews’ industry (a Jew was ‘worth twenty, thirty or even a hundred’ Arabs, he believed) and he instinctively sympathised with their predicament because he had been an outsider all his life. The son of Plymouth Brethren, he had been ostracised at boarding school where, as a day-boy who disliked team sports, he acquired the nickname ‘Stinker’. It was only after he scraped into officer training that he realised he could turn his unsettling, cadaverous looks to his advantage – when he was challenged to run the gauntlet of his fellow cadets naked, Wingate walked up to each in turn and dared them to strike him, and thus made it through untouched. ‘He had fiery, searching, unsmiling eyes – extraordinary deep-set eyes that penetrated into your inner being in such a way that you could not conceal the slightest of your facial movements or say a single superfluous word,’ said David Hacohen, the man who had built Tegart’s fence. ‘He was fanatical,’ recalled the man who had shared an office with him in Jerusalem. ‘I liked him very much. I got on very well with him. But I must admit he was a fanatic.’

He requested permission to set up ‘Special Night Squads’ with British soldiers and Jewish auxiliaries to police the rebellious Arabs:

Fit, working in silence and trained in ambush tactics, they would try ‘to persuade the gangs that, in their predatory raids, there is every chance of their running into a Government gang which is determined to destroy them, not by an exchange of shots at a distance, but by bodily assault with bayonet and bomb’.

Wingate did not think it would take long to persuade the Arab gang-leaders to stay in at night. ‘In person they are feeble and their whole theory of war is to cut and run. Like all ignorant and primitive people they are especially liable to panic.’ Once the threat of the gangs had gone, the villagers would have no excuse for silence. At that point, Wingate argued, the British could more reasonably put the villages under pressure, because non-cooperation could only imply complicity with the gangs.

In 1938, the first Special Night Squads were set up. One of the Jewish recruits was the young Moshe Dayan, who thought Wingate -- who was now teaching himself Hebrew using the Bible -- rather strange:

[Dayan] was both inspired and intimidated by Wingate, who initially addressed his recruits in broken Hebrew, revolver in one hand, Bible in the other. ‘After a while we asked him to switch to English,’ said Dayan, ‘since we had difficulty in following his strange Hebrew accent and could understand only the recognisable biblical quotations in our language.’

In June 1938, the Squads began their raids, and Wingate went with them:

He struck one member of his squad across the face with a stick when the man failed to shoot an Arab horseman silhouetted against the skyline. On another occasion he interrogated one of four captured Arabs by choking him with a handful of grit and sand he had scooped up from the ground. When his prisoner still refused to talk, he turned to one of the Jewish recruits. ‘Shoot this man,’ he ordered, but the recruit hesitated. ‘Did you hear? Shoot him.’ The recruit did as he was told. Wingate turned to the three surviving detainees. ‘Now speak!’ he bellowed. Back at camp, Wingate’s men were bemused by his behaviour. He would sit in his tent naked, reading the Bible and scrubbing himself with a brush, or eating a raw onion as if it were an apple.

After a failed attack on an Arab gang in July 1938 -- Wingate had set up ambushes around the wrong village -- the Squads were disbanded. At this point, Wingate disappears from Barr’s narrative. He does not reappear. 

Today, however, Wingate returned to me, in Artemis Cooper’s Cairo in the War (Hamish Hamilton, 1989): 

In the summer of 1941, a remarkable soldier mounted a campaign against the formidable bureaucracy of GHQ, a campaign that nearly culminated in his own death. The imperfect instrument of a severe Puritan God, who had marked him for great things, Charles Orde Wingate had first come to Wavell’s attention in Palestine in 1936. The latter thought him brilliant but dangerous, with his passionate Zionist opinions which echoed the thunder of the Old Testament; and, like all fanatics, Wingate was short on both tact and humour.

In 1940, to increase pressure on the Italians in Abyssinia, Wavell asked Orde Wingate to organise assistance to the supporters of Haile Selassie. From a base in Khartoum, Wingate managed to form his unit, with little help from an obstinate and sluggish military administration. He was a difficult man whose eccentricities were famous: he carried an alarm clock rather than a watch so as to time appointments, and instead of taking baths to keep clean he brushed himself all over with a hairbrush.

By January 1941, his mixed band of Sudanese, Ethiopian and British troops named ‘Gideon Force’ was ready; and, accompanied by Haile Selassie, they crossed the frontier into Abyssinia. As Gideon Force made its way over the mountains, Italian garrisons fell and patriots flocked to the Emperor. It was a brilliant military operation, which enabled Haile Selassie to return to Addis Ababa in triumph at the head of his troops.

[Wingate had wanted to call his Palestinian Special Night Squads ‘Gideon Force’ too -- he even set himself up in Ein Harod, where Gideon had picked the three hundred men who would scatter the Midianites -- but the higher-ups hadn’t allowed it.]

Apart from the addition of a bar to the DSO he had won in Palestine, the congratulations of Wingate’s superiors were brief. In Harar, he was told that Gideon Force was to be disbanded. He appeared to take the news calmly, and said he would return to Cairo to lobby for permission to raise a Jewish army in Palestine.

In June 1941, GHQ was still recovering from the three defeats of Cyrenaica, Greece and Crete. No one had time for the guerilla hero of Abyssinia. He was ordered to revert to the rank of major; and, when he tried to get the allowances due to his volunteer soldiers in Gideon Force, he was informed that this was not possible because the claims had not been submitted at the correct time. The final straw was to be told that, because his men fought behind enemy lines, they did not qualify as ‘a unit in the field’.

What happened next was gracefully passed over by Wavell, when he came to write up Wingate’s life for the Dictionary of National Biography; but the incident is described at length in Christopher Sykes’s book. Sykes was well-placed to find out about it, for one of those involved in the story was his old boss Colonel Thornhill, for whom he had worked in SOE. Thornhill was an amiable, indiscreet man who was often to be found propping up the bar in Shepheard’s or the Continental, and who had been so disastrously involved in the Aziz el Masri affair.

Wingate took a room in the Continental Hotel. There he wrote a blistering report on the treatment of Gideon Force, and how it had been hampered and obstructed by those he chose to call the ‘military apes’. It did not make him any friends at GHQ, and Wavell – though he sided with Wingate on the subject of allowances – was heard to say that the report might almost justify placing him under arrest for insubordination.

Wingate was now seriously ill with malaria, but would not see an army doctor for fear of being relegated to a staff job. However, he did manage to visit a local doctor, who prescribed a drug called atabrine to reduce his temperature. He over-dosed himself liberally which inflamed his nerves, already ragged from brooding alone in his room. In the struggles he had had to set up Gideon Force, and the way the military administration had dealt with it, he saw a plot to absorb Ethiopia into the British Empire. It was too late to do anything. He had failed himself, his men, the Emperor Haile Selassie, and God.

On the afternoon of 4 July Wingate’s temperature stood at 104° and he had run out of pills. He made his way out of the hotel in an effort to find the doctor and get some more atabrine, but so feverish was he that he could not remember the way, and thought he was going mad. He went back to the Continental, and decided to kill himself. On the way to his room, Wingate met the floor steward who brought him his food; and rather than arouse the man’s suspicions, he closed but did not lock the door to his room. He had already stabbed his throat once with his hunting knife when he staggered back to the door, locked it, and then returned to the bathroom to try again. He plunged the knife into what he hoped was the jugular, and then collapsed on the floor.

As luck would have it, the next door room was occupied by the inquisitive Colonel Thornhill. Having heard a number of very strange noises coming through the wall, Thornhill knocked on Wingate’s door. There was no answer. Thornhill alerted the manager. With the master key they got in, and Wingate was rushed to the 15th Scottish Hospital. He was operated on immediately and, thanks to Thornhill and the surgeon’s skill, his life was saved.

The story provoked mixed reactions at GHQ; but as one brigadier put it, whether he was court-martialled or put in a lunatic asylum the career of the troublesome Major Wingate was over. Major Simonds, who had been part of Gideon Force, visited Wingate in hospital and asked the reason for his attempted suicide. The reply was: ‘I did it to call attention to our wrongs.’

There was a verandah at the end of the ward and, as Wingate became stronger, he walked up and down it of an evening. Once, he heard a woman call him by name from the private wing. It was Pistol-Packing Mary Newall, whose No. 11 Convoy was soon to be amalgamated into the ATS. She was in hospital with duodenal ulcers.

In her straightforward, no-nonsense way, she told him that there had been a suicide in her own family; and that if he wanted to talk, he should talk to her. From then on Orde Wingate spent many hours sitting with Mrs Newall, talking and reading his Bible aloud. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ said Wingate, as he finished reading the Book of Job. ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Newall. ‘I’ve been asleep for the last half hour.’ Since she had many visitors, Wingate began to meet people again. His spirits lightened, and he began to feel that God had forgiven him. One visitor was rather taken aback, however, when Wingate remarked that anyone who wanted to slit their own throat should have a hot bath first, otherwise – as he had found – the muscles would be too tense to cut.

What a character! What a lunatic!

The Inequality of Human Races This chapter talks about many concepts that I am learning about in my social theory class. Gobineau begins with describing the concept of scientific racism by stating that it is not undeveloped intellect that restrained the Huron Indian from inventing things. Instead, it was because of the "predominating influence of environment." This reminds me of the Enlightenment Era and how the Western Europeans introduced the idea of a democratic society in which all men were equal. While the Europeans continued the Transatlantic Slave Trade on the side and the justification that they gave at that time was scientific: the superior race and the inferior race. Later in the article, the author discusses how institutions no matter how damaged always look good on paper, which seems to be a perfect example of a camera obscure. Marx defined the capitalist society as a camera obscura. In other words, what we see a capitalist society to be things are the exact opposite, which is very similar to the point that Gobineau made.  Johann Gottfried Fichte Addresses to the German Nation (1808) Fichte discusses how unequal distribution of power is the reason behind the oppression of one state by the other. But is it not power that is the culprit in this situation? Also, Fichte talks a lot about the interference of foreign countries and how that leads to the destruction of one's nation. Does he think that each country should be on its own?  Adolf Hitler's first letter on the Jewry Hitler's letter to Gemlich mainly discusses how the Jews were strategic with preserving their race by the use of wealth, material possessions and power. What I don't understand is that he could've just exiled them from Germany, just like the Zionist partially did to the Palestinians. Why did he have to commit an ethnic cleansing of Jews? Program of the NSDAp, 24 Feb 1920 If someone read this without knowing that these are Hitler's words -minus the no Jew is a German part- he/she would think of it to be a plan that works for the people of their country. For others this a right nationalist movement just like the one that is going on in France at present where they want to cleanse France of any minorities. Also, many Americans would perceive them to be the words of Pres. Donald Trump.  Goebbels at Nuremberg- 1934 I cannot believe that Goebbels is using what happened to Germany as an excuse for what Germany did to the Jews. On a more contemporary level, if Israel uses the Holocaust to justify what it is doing to Palestine that would not make any sense. It makes them no better than the Germans. Also, I like when he discusses how propaganda can work as a tool for social change but it is a gradual process and it will take its time.  Benito Mussolini: What is Fascism, 1932 It is a little surprising that Mussolini converted from being a passionate socialist to becoming a fascist dictator. I cannot grasp this paradigm shift that took place in his life. In class, we learned that the end game of capitalism is fascism but how can it become the end game of socialism? Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism (1932) Mussolini's explanation of fascism is in close relation to nationalism. Similarly, Hitler used the same grounds for the creation of a Nationalist Republic, and he used the nation- which is in our heart- to emotionally get people involved in the genocide of Jews. Also, this article describes all the things that are used to support fascist administration; religion, ethno nationalism, lack of individualism. The best part about these readings is that they make way more sense because of their relation to today's world.  From Caligari to Hitler This was an impressive montage to watch but as is mentioned that it is a psychological history of the German Film makes me think about the psychological explanation behind the sense of nationalism or is it the process of hypnotizing that drives people to be dictated by an individual?  M The beginning of this movie was tragic. The fact that kids would be singing songs like these were standard makes me think of all the atrocities that happen in Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and how they darken the lives of the kids in those countries. Also, in one shot "M" was captured in the camera with a circle of knives surrounding him, and it seemed as if he fear his weapons of destruction. If we try and fix this into today's world, we can see that people that are involved in the creation of a capitalist society are very much scared of the end game of this economic system. Just like Malcolm X said in response to the assassination of President Kennedy: "chickens coming home to roost." That is what I felt that M was experiencing at that moment.  Rome, Open City Pt 1 & 2 This movie is a perfect example of what we call resistance. In a carceral state, we are aware that whoever tries to challenge the Social Dominant Paradigm he/she are either murdered or are held as political prisoners. But in Rome, Open City each character symbolizes the unity that comes with the resistance. Also, Marina should have never been trusted! Karl Polanyi- The Great Transformation In the introduction, on page 38 Polanyi mentions that "that human should use instruments of democratic governance to control and direct the economy to meet our individual and collective needs." Does this mean that Polanyi has somewhat similar views to Bernie Sanders? Gramsci on Fascism Gramsci makes an excellent point in his article, Sovietize. He states that the peasants and the working people need to make sure that if and when they combine with the liberal bourgeoisie to bring down the fascist they should step away and take hold of the government before the bourgeoisie. But this confuses me when I try to identify him with any one of the Social-Political Theories.

Our Marx Gramsci understands the importance of history in the life of Marx. Also, the fact that we are all are a bit Marxist does not make sense to me because you cannot be a Marxist and talk about the oppression and not do anything about it. His theory was about working as a collective to benefit each other, but if you're a Marxist who realizes his privilege but fails to speak up about the oppression of others, then I refuse to believe that you are a Marxist.   At one point in the Conquest of State, Gramsci mentions that "the existence of private property places the social minority in a privileged position and makes the struggle uneven." But is that the case? By social minority does he mean white individuals? Ezra Pounds Canto In XLV, it seems like Pounds had a difficult time accepting "usury" in the modern world. In this part, he focuses on comparing the past with the contemporary world, which highlights the fact that he realizes the impact of capital on peoples' lives. He gives an example of an artist and mentions how he would never have been able to survive in a world that valued money more than the beauty of art. This poem evidently depicts Pounds fascination with history. 

The Futurist Manifesto After this, I was just angry. I understand that technological progress has been beneficial for us, but if this progress is to happen at the expense of the lives of others and the Earth then that is not progress! I was disgusted by what they mentioned in point 9, " We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman." This will not get Marinetti a future. Instead, he will end up destroying his chance at an actual life.

Cultural Criticism and Society Theodor Adorno did an impressive job with explaining the concept of critical theory. The criticism styles; transcendent and immanent as he describes are styles critiquing culture from within and outside. Adorno also discusses how "professional critics were first of all "reporters": they oriented people in the market for intellectual products." This to me seemed fascinating because it appears that such exposure led the critics to have insights on society in a different manner.

Paul Celan As mentioned in class, Celan's work is difficult to understand because of the deep symbolic value of each and every word that he has used to describe the conditions in which the Jews were living. Death Fugue gave me goosebumps. He describes drinking "black milk," which at first I thought symbolized the lives of the mothers that had been murdered and who could no longer feed their children milk but then it also made me think he might be talking about the un-nourishing life that he lived in the concentration camps. Celan's work has torn me, and it brings back the feelings that one gets when they see Chemical Bombs thrown at Syrian civilians.

The Beach Beneath the Street Wark's work was refreshing to read. In other words, this book was more like a biography of people, but the one thing that connected them all was the Situational Internationalist Movement.