The latest U.N. report chronicles Israel’s advances in its genocidal assault in Gaza. Israel is intent, the report warns, on expelling the Palestinians, recolonizing Gaza and turning on the West Bank.
Jets do not fly by themselves, yet. And they do not drop bombs without human participation, yet. The involvement of the American government (which is comprised of human beings who are responsible for their own actions) is evil. The whole thing is evil. And now Netanyahu is being hunted in his own "country". It is essential this pariah state be completely shunned and isolated. Eventually, after it collapses in on itself, the rest of the world will have to decide what to do with its survivors as they flee. Do we welcome them here? That would be very hard for me to do, even though many of them were born here.
More to the point, the President-Elect is taking his orders from Zionist billionaires in the U.S. regarding who to appoint to his Cabinet. The most direct action we can take is recovering our government from the influence of private money. If that is possible. And perhaps those among us who support Israel need to be shunned and boycotted as well.
It's been obvious since 1967 what they were going to do with the Occupied Territories. The occupation was found to be illegal by the UN when I was in elementary school. There's no excuse for this. Fortunately not all Palestinians live in Palestine. One day, soon, they will return to the entirety of Palestine. But I cannot forget the remarkable beauty and genius of a people that used to be in evidence throughout Gaza,
We cannot allow our country do the same thing to the rest of the Middle East, as the current deep state wishes to do.
I share your rage at this evil that our government is directly facilitating. And my rage at Israel's government, and the harm of Zionist indoctrination, weaponizing Jewish fear. I think it is important, however, to remember not all Israelis are indoctrinated-- there are many, both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, doing courageous work against this hideous system, and they are doing it at great risk to themselves in a society that still, as a majority, does not support them. It is important not to repeat the "them/evil" versus "us/good" dynamics that are used to justify the evil we are witnessing. The "rest of the world" is deeply flawed, and a location of many genocides. The true enemy is within us all, and the better we know that, the wiser and braver for work for humanity we will be.
One of the Israeli intellectuals for whom I have great admiration is Ilan Pappe. He taught at the University of Haifa. He has written several books about Palestine, and because of his great sympathy for the Palestinians and the horrors they have been and are now again being forced to go through, he has had to relocate to England, where he teaches at the University of Exeter. And there are others Israelis, Gideon Levy for example, who have spoken and written in support of the Palestinian cause. Indeed there are many Israelis and Jews in the diaspora who support the Palestinians. It is a very sad situation when a rampantly murderous form of nationalism takes hold of a population. This is what the Jews in Germany were exposed to under Nazi rule, and sadly, in what Freud called the repetition compulsion, similar genocide is being imposed on Palestinians living in the Jewish state. This must stop. The US must stop using our taxpayers' money to aid in the atrocious genocidal slaughter.
Well, I like Ilan Pappe but I am disappointed that he thinks Israel could last another 30 years and that it is maybe okay for Ashkenazis to live in Israel. I don't. I also don't think this psychotic behavior is recent. It's not. I've been watching this since I was an infant living north of Israel proper and socializing with Palestinian refugees. Grew up with Ashkenazi-indoctrinated Mizrahi (Iraqi-Arab) in Iran also. None of this behavior and ethnosuperiority and aggressiveness and lying--the works--NONE of this is new. And I am not saying they ALL are like Netanyahu. I'm sure there are a minority of Israelis who are not nut jobs but most of them have already emigrated (or never considered going to Israel in the first place). Those people are no longer Israelis, no longer part of the problem. The numbers thrown around are also problematic. Before the Pandemic they claimed to have 9 million citizens but that did not include the couple million who had already emigrated elsewhere. At the end of the Pandemic--so maybe two years ago--they said Jewish Israelis were 6.5 million (same as Palestinians). And since then at least 1 million left. That was months and months ago. And they keep leaving. So the number is probably more like 2 million. Which leaves, according to my math, 4.5 million, not including the excessive death rate from taking the COVID vaccines which every Israeli had 4 or 5 times, which the government never publishes. Now the haredi are talking about leaving if they are forced to enlist. That's 13% of the population (though one that gets allowances so maybe short-term that's a plus). So the population is easily down to only 4 million. That's not very many people. I think Tehran alone is close to 9 million. I don't know what the population of Lebanon is. But Israeli Jews, with the exception of the haredi, do not even replicate themselves. And that was before the COVID vaccines caused widespread infertility. (Don't want to argue--maybe it's just the chemical soup we're all swimming in.)
Many people have been traumatized in many different ways. But we each individually have to take responsibility (not blame but RESPONSIBILITY) for our own healing. If we don't, we have to take responsibility for the damage we incur on others. I belong to a group (first cousins) on whom several atomic bombs were dropped and who (the branches of the family in the West at the time) were rounded up and put in concentration camps, during which time our land was stolen from us, and we were not allowed back to our land for an addition 15 years. Racist laws restricting my father's career options in the U.S. are the reason I was born and raised in the Middle East. I regret the pain my grandparents and uncle went through. But at some point you have to move on. I don't know about the trauma my Japanese cousins experienced DURING WWII in Japan. We've only discussed what happened AFTER the war, interestingly. The stories I heard growing up of what my (unrelated so ethnically different) elders in the Middle East went through between 1900 and 1979 were intense. Most of them couldn't bear to talk about it very often. The turmoil of WWI and WWII was not just about Germany and the Nazis. It was a time of huge social, economic, and political change throughout the "Old" world. My family didn't suffer nearly as much as the families of most people I grew up with.
A lot of people were horribly traumatized during WWII--not just Ashkenazi Jews. Enough already. Eh voy.
Pappe, Hass, Levy, et al. are admirable, but they are in a distinct minority. Most Jewish Israelis are going to have to leave. They do not know how to adapt to a new social environment. More's the pity.
"Pope Francis has called for an investigation to determine whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, tackling the issue for the first time in excerpts from an upcoming book."
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pope said in excerpts published on Sunday by the Italian daily La Stampa.
"Israel’s embassy to the Vatican responded later on Sunday with a post on X, quoting its Ambassador, Yaron Sideman."
“There was a genocidal massacre on 7 October 2023 of Israeli citizens, and since then, Israel has exercised its right of self-defence against attempts from seven different fronts to kill its citizens,” said the statement.
“Any attempt to call it by any other name is singling out the Jewish State.”
He actually has the nerve to say to the world the killings that happened on Oct 7, by Hamas, was a genocidal massacre, absurd, and then dismiss the actual massacre the Israeli's are carrying out in Gaza which reflects his absolute disdain for Palestinian life and his contempt for the Pope and the intelligence of people on a world wide level. I hope the Pope kicks his ass out, since he is too loathsome for his job.
True, but almost unbearable to listen to. Not only unbearable to listen to the horrors Israel is implementing on Gaza, but the US's complicity in it, and the relative indifference of the world, as well as the people of Israel. Where are they?
I agree. I may go further and say everything CH writes is almost unbearable to listen to or read. He is relentless and I wouldn’t have it any other way. EW is really good at reminding us to breath when reside to engage in the gravity of CH’s work. They make a good team.
It’s also worth remembering that genocide was the path through which Washington established what we now know as the U.S. in the first place. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/indigenous-lives-matter-from-north People hoping for accountability will need to look beyond the U.S. government to find it. Last year, I proposed that organized labor could play a vital role in forcing accountability on military industrial corruption and reflected on a few labor leaders across the U.S. who have recently battled capital and emerged victorious after inspiring struggles revealing their understanding of solidarity. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/we-the-people-can-unplug-the-war
After the first few paragraphs of this comprehensive and detailed report, I felt sick, outraged, and helpless, and and had to force myself to read to the bitter end, but it seemed vital to me to read it, that reading it is a kind of witness, a miniscule way of living through what the Palestinians are living through, and a kind of spiritual presence with them. As for the state of Israel, it has gone deep into the heart of darkness, and cannot get out without USA and international limits--especially USA stopping the funding.
Here are a few of my recent double-sided, ad-hoc, focus-group tested, and most favorable Protest/Demonstration signs, which simply say:
GENOCIDAL
TWINS
NUTANYAHU
& TRUMP
(and on the other side)
WEALTH REFORM
JUBILEE CAPPED
AT $20 MILLION +
REVOLUTION NOW
FUCK BOTH THE
DEMOCRATIC &
REPUBLICAN PARTIES
(and on the other side)
THE FIRST
REAL GLOBAL
REVOLUTION
BEGINS NOW
BTW, Chris, I noted that Enzo Traverso, the Professor of Intellectual History at Cornell University, who appeared on Amy Goodman's FREE SPEECH TV, last week and talked about his "GAZA FACES HISTORY", as "a reversal of logic to exculpate Germans", and as "a sort of totem of Zionists".
Which struck me as being related to what Norbert Wiener might have had in mind in his 1964 brilliant "GOD & GOLEM, Inc.", at least in the sense that Crony Corporate Capitalism is the Golem of GOD.
I'll try to reach out to Prof. Traverso, and suggest that if he has not read Wiener's "GOD & GOLEM Inc." that now in 2024, Prof. Traverso's modern global kinship with the Ultra Nationalist Zinonism of both Trump and Nutanyahu.
In any case, Chris, as the old 60's song says --- "We gotta get out of this place"
The genocide might, might, be about religion in Israel, but for the U.S. it is about oil, and the control of the area that has a lot of it. The stuff that armies run on, BTW, is OIL.
Jets do not fly by themselves, yet. And they do not drop bombs without human participation, yet. The involvement of the American government (which is comprised of human beings who are responsible for their own actions) is evil. The whole thing is evil. And now Netanyahu is being hunted in his own "country". It is essential this pariah state be completely shunned and isolated. Eventually, after it collapses in on itself, the rest of the world will have to decide what to do with its survivors as they flee. Do we welcome them here? That would be very hard for me to do, even though many of them were born here.
More to the point, the President-Elect is taking his orders from Zionist billionaires in the U.S. regarding who to appoint to his Cabinet. The most direct action we can take is recovering our government from the influence of private money. If that is possible. And perhaps those among us who support Israel need to be shunned and boycotted as well.
It's been obvious since 1967 what they were going to do with the Occupied Territories. The occupation was found to be illegal by the UN when I was in elementary school. There's no excuse for this. Fortunately not all Palestinians live in Palestine. One day, soon, they will return to the entirety of Palestine. But I cannot forget the remarkable beauty and genius of a people that used to be in evidence throughout Gaza,
We cannot allow our country do the same thing to the rest of the Middle East, as the current deep state wishes to do.
Amen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I share your rage at this evil that our government is directly facilitating. And my rage at Israel's government, and the harm of Zionist indoctrination, weaponizing Jewish fear. I think it is important, however, to remember not all Israelis are indoctrinated-- there are many, both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, doing courageous work against this hideous system, and they are doing it at great risk to themselves in a society that still, as a majority, does not support them. It is important not to repeat the "them/evil" versus "us/good" dynamics that are used to justify the evil we are witnessing. The "rest of the world" is deeply flawed, and a location of many genocides. The true enemy is within us all, and the better we know that, the wiser and braver for work for humanity we will be.
One of the Israeli intellectuals for whom I have great admiration is Ilan Pappe. He taught at the University of Haifa. He has written several books about Palestine, and because of his great sympathy for the Palestinians and the horrors they have been and are now again being forced to go through, he has had to relocate to England, where he teaches at the University of Exeter. And there are others Israelis, Gideon Levy for example, who have spoken and written in support of the Palestinian cause. Indeed there are many Israelis and Jews in the diaspora who support the Palestinians. It is a very sad situation when a rampantly murderous form of nationalism takes hold of a population. This is what the Jews in Germany were exposed to under Nazi rule, and sadly, in what Freud called the repetition compulsion, similar genocide is being imposed on Palestinians living in the Jewish state. This must stop. The US must stop using our taxpayers' money to aid in the atrocious genocidal slaughter.
Well, I like Ilan Pappe but I am disappointed that he thinks Israel could last another 30 years and that it is maybe okay for Ashkenazis to live in Israel. I don't. I also don't think this psychotic behavior is recent. It's not. I've been watching this since I was an infant living north of Israel proper and socializing with Palestinian refugees. Grew up with Ashkenazi-indoctrinated Mizrahi (Iraqi-Arab) in Iran also. None of this behavior and ethnosuperiority and aggressiveness and lying--the works--NONE of this is new. And I am not saying they ALL are like Netanyahu. I'm sure there are a minority of Israelis who are not nut jobs but most of them have already emigrated (or never considered going to Israel in the first place). Those people are no longer Israelis, no longer part of the problem. The numbers thrown around are also problematic. Before the Pandemic they claimed to have 9 million citizens but that did not include the couple million who had already emigrated elsewhere. At the end of the Pandemic--so maybe two years ago--they said Jewish Israelis were 6.5 million (same as Palestinians). And since then at least 1 million left. That was months and months ago. And they keep leaving. So the number is probably more like 2 million. Which leaves, according to my math, 4.5 million, not including the excessive death rate from taking the COVID vaccines which every Israeli had 4 or 5 times, which the government never publishes. Now the haredi are talking about leaving if they are forced to enlist. That's 13% of the population (though one that gets allowances so maybe short-term that's a plus). So the population is easily down to only 4 million. That's not very many people. I think Tehran alone is close to 9 million. I don't know what the population of Lebanon is. But Israeli Jews, with the exception of the haredi, do not even replicate themselves. And that was before the COVID vaccines caused widespread infertility. (Don't want to argue--maybe it's just the chemical soup we're all swimming in.)
Many people have been traumatized in many different ways. But we each individually have to take responsibility (not blame but RESPONSIBILITY) for our own healing. If we don't, we have to take responsibility for the damage we incur on others. I belong to a group (first cousins) on whom several atomic bombs were dropped and who (the branches of the family in the West at the time) were rounded up and put in concentration camps, during which time our land was stolen from us, and we were not allowed back to our land for an addition 15 years. Racist laws restricting my father's career options in the U.S. are the reason I was born and raised in the Middle East. I regret the pain my grandparents and uncle went through. But at some point you have to move on. I don't know about the trauma my Japanese cousins experienced DURING WWII in Japan. We've only discussed what happened AFTER the war, interestingly. The stories I heard growing up of what my (unrelated so ethnically different) elders in the Middle East went through between 1900 and 1979 were intense. Most of them couldn't bear to talk about it very often. The turmoil of WWI and WWII was not just about Germany and the Nazis. It was a time of huge social, economic, and political change throughout the "Old" world. My family didn't suffer nearly as much as the families of most people I grew up with.
A lot of people were horribly traumatized during WWII--not just Ashkenazi Jews. Enough already. Eh voy.
Pappe, Hass, Levy, et al. are admirable, but they are in a distinct minority. Most Jewish Israelis are going to have to leave. They do not know how to adapt to a new social environment. More's the pity.
"Pope Francis has called for an investigation to determine whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, tackling the issue for the first time in excerpts from an upcoming book."
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pope said in excerpts published on Sunday by the Italian daily La Stampa.
"Israel’s embassy to the Vatican responded later on Sunday with a post on X, quoting its Ambassador, Yaron Sideman."
“There was a genocidal massacre on 7 October 2023 of Israeli citizens, and since then, Israel has exercised its right of self-defence against attempts from seven different fronts to kill its citizens,” said the statement.
“Any attempt to call it by any other name is singling out the Jewish State.”
He actually has the nerve to say to the world the killings that happened on Oct 7, by Hamas, was a genocidal massacre, absurd, and then dismiss the actual massacre the Israeli's are carrying out in Gaza which reflects his absolute disdain for Palestinian life and his contempt for the Pope and the intelligence of people on a world wide level. I hope the Pope kicks his ass out, since he is too loathsome for his job.
q
Eunice Wong reading Chris Hedges is riveting
True, but almost unbearable to listen to. Not only unbearable to listen to the horrors Israel is implementing on Gaza, but the US's complicity in it, and the relative indifference of the world, as well as the people of Israel. Where are they?
I agree. I may go further and say everything CH writes is almost unbearable to listen to or read. He is relentless and I wouldn’t have it any other way. EW is really good at reminding us to breath when reside to engage in the gravity of CH’s work. They make a good team.
I agree, but unfortunately people, countries, are all too willing to provide them with horror stories to tell.
Thank you for such fearless journalism exposing international crimes that too many seem willing to accept!
I wrote about the crucial history of the Nakba recently (at https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/the-first-year-of-world-war-iii) and more recently explored Netanyahu’s corruption in a post noting that “attacks by states targeting civilian populations….are international crimes, rising to the level of terrorism when they aim to strike fear into those populations, for instance, in order to drive them off of land they have historically inhabited.” https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/netanyahu-embraces-terrorism
It’s also worth remembering that genocide was the path through which Washington established what we now know as the U.S. in the first place. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/indigenous-lives-matter-from-north People hoping for accountability will need to look beyond the U.S. government to find it. Last year, I proposed that organized labor could play a vital role in forcing accountability on military industrial corruption and reflected on a few labor leaders across the U.S. who have recently battled capital and emerged victorious after inspiring struggles revealing their understanding of solidarity. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/we-the-people-can-unplug-the-war
After the first few paragraphs of this comprehensive and detailed report, I felt sick, outraged, and helpless, and and had to force myself to read to the bitter end, but it seemed vital to me to read it, that reading it is a kind of witness, a miniscule way of living through what the Palestinians are living through, and a kind of spiritual presence with them. As for the state of Israel, it has gone deep into the heart of darkness, and cannot get out without USA and international limits--especially USA stopping the funding.
Why do we let Israelis hide their unprecedented crime against humanity by using words like:
Zionism. We should call it Colonialism.
Self Defense. We should call it The Second Holocaust.
Our response to Condemn October 7 and Hamas: Are you saying we should condemn the Jews that fought the Nazis such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Dear Chris,
Here are a few of my recent double-sided, ad-hoc, focus-group tested, and most favorable Protest/Demonstration signs, which simply say:
GENOCIDAL
TWINS
NUTANYAHU
& TRUMP
(and on the other side)
WEALTH REFORM
JUBILEE CAPPED
AT $20 MILLION +
REVOLUTION NOW
FUCK BOTH THE
DEMOCRATIC &
REPUBLICAN PARTIES
(and on the other side)
THE FIRST
REAL GLOBAL
REVOLUTION
BEGINS NOW
BTW, Chris, I noted that Enzo Traverso, the Professor of Intellectual History at Cornell University, who appeared on Amy Goodman's FREE SPEECH TV, last week and talked about his "GAZA FACES HISTORY", as "a reversal of logic to exculpate Germans", and as "a sort of totem of Zionists".
Which struck me as being related to what Norbert Wiener might have had in mind in his 1964 brilliant "GOD & GOLEM, Inc.", at least in the sense that Crony Corporate Capitalism is the Golem of GOD.
I'll try to reach out to Prof. Traverso, and suggest that if he has not read Wiener's "GOD & GOLEM Inc." that now in 2024, Prof. Traverso's modern global kinship with the Ultra Nationalist Zinonism of both Trump and Nutanyahu.
In any case, Chris, as the old 60's song says --- "We gotta get out of this place"
You make it sound like Israel is doing this on thier own.
Who makes it sound like Israel is doing this on her own?
The genocide might, might, be about religion in Israel, but for the U.S. it is about oil, and the control of the area that has a lot of it. The stuff that armies run on, BTW, is OIL.