Yves here. This post looks at the deep historical roots of the Israel’s campaign against Palestinians, back to open acknowledgements by Moshe Dayan and other founding fathers of the nation and analogies to long-running political disputes in the US. It argues that an Israeli secular state is a solution.
The problem is that horse left the barn and is in the next county. As Alastair Crooke has described long-form, the Mizrahim, who were formerly an underclass in Israel relative to the European (and for the most part less intensely religious) Ashkenazi, now dominate numerically and in representation in the Knesset. From Wikipedia:
Today, the Ashkenazi vote is associated with left-wing, secular and centrist parties (especially Blue and White, Meretz, Kadima and historically Labour), and the majority of Mizrahim vote for right-wing parties, especially Likud, as well as the Mizrahi-oriented splinter party Shas…
Whereas Ashkenazi prominence on the left has historically been associated with socialist ideals that had emerged in Central Europe and the kibbutz and Labor Zionist movement, the Mizrahim, as they rose in society and they developed their political ideals, often rejected ideologies they associated with an “Ashkenazi elite” that had marginalized them. Although these tensions were initially based on economic rivalries, the distinction remained strong even as Mizrahim increasingly moved up the socioeconomic latter around 1990, entering the middle class, and the disparity between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim diminished (but did not completely disappear), with Mizrahi political expression becoming increasingly linked to the Likud and Shas parties. Likud, the largest right-wing party in Israel, became increasingly influenced by Mizrahi political articulation, with the Mizrahi middle class’ political coming-of-age held by political science commentators to be embodied by the rise of Mizrahi Likud politicians such as Moshe Kahlon and Miri Regev….
The Mizrahi turn to the right has been analyzed from many viewpoints. Some consider it a result of the failure of Ashkenazi progressive elites to adequately tackle racism against Mizrahim within their organizations. On the other hand, many Mizrahim came to credit Likud with their socioeconomic advancement, with Likud centers serving as hiring halls. Some models have also emphasized economic competition between Arabs and Mizrahim. However, other analysts partially or mainly reject the economic explanation, arguing that instead cultural and ideological factors play a key role. Whereas Ashkenazi Israelis tend to support left-wing politics, secularism, and peace with Arab peoples, the Mizrahim tend on average to be more conservative, and tend toward being “traditionally” religious with fewer secular or ultra-religious (Haredi) individuals; they are also more skeptical of prospects for peace with Palestinian Arabs. The skepticism towards the peace process among Mizrahim may be tied to a history of mistreatment by Muslim and Christian Arabs from when they were in diaspora in Arab countries, though many doubt that this alone is sufficiently explanatory.
The greater support among Mizrahim compared to Ashkenazim (48% versus 35% as measured by Pew in 2016) for the settlements in the West Bank has also been attributed to economic incentives and the fact that many working-class Mizrahim live there, often in subsidized housing.Another contributing factor is religious views among some Mizrahim who join the settlements. Although Mizrahim form a considerable portion of the settler population, with a particular concentration in and around Gush Katif, they often are ignored by public discourse about the settlements which tends to incorrectly paint all or most settlers as having North American origins, which a disproportionately large but still minority portion do.
And as David in Friday Harbor noted:
I find it endlessly fascinating that the two savage conflicts which currently threaten us with nuclear annihilation stem from the psychology of ethnic cleansing as practiced in Central Europe during the 20th century. I’ve been struggling to understand why Kiev feels entitled to “kick-out” the Russians of Donetsk and Luhansk and why Tel Aviv feels entitled to “kick-out” the Palestinians. I find myself returning to European ethno-nationalism, antisemitism, and the mindset of 1914-1945, which culminated in the infliction of so much suffering.
These motivations are important for us to understand because Climate Change threatens us with a mass-migration of 1.5 Billion people by 2050. The struggle over who “gets” to inhabit a certain patch of land will become existential for all of humanity.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
I want to point to the intersection of two ideas and see what thoughts they lead to.
Moshe Dayan and the Creation of Israel
The first is this now-forgotten set of observations by Israeli Defense Minister (and Zionist “freedom fighter”) Moshe Dayan.
He has a strongly pro-Zionist past, a fighting past:
At the age of 14, Dayan joined the Jewish defence force Haganah. In 1938, he joined the British-organised irregular Supernumerary Police and led a small motorized patrol.
Haganah was “the main Zionist paramilitary organization that operated for the Yishuv in the British Mandate for Palestine. It was founded in 1920 to defend the Yishuv’s presence in the region, and was formally disbanded in 1948, when it became the core force integrated into the Israel Defense Forces shortly after the Israeli Declaration of Independence.”
In other words, a fighting Zionist true-believer.
Dayan had very strong opinions about the defense of Israel and what it would take to achieve it. One thing it would take is an unblinking acknowledgement of what Israel had done to acquire the land for its own.
Dayan recognized what had been done to create the state of Israel. He understood, therefore, what it would take to defend it.
An Undoable Act
This theft of land is, in Arab eyes, an act that cannot be undone. It should be seen that way in Israeli eyes as well, because of its consequences.
In many ways, this is like Henry VIII’s theft of the wealth of the Catholic Church in England. Once taken and distributed, the act could not be undone, much like a murdered man cannot be brought back. In the time of Shakespeare, England was as Catholic as France; only the government and its dependents were Protestant. It took war to settle the dispute, several in fact.
So with this. It seems to me there must a war, or barring that, a return to the status quo ante, in which people in the occupied land are continuously tortured until they die or decide to leave.
There are only three ways this can go:
- One side will win, with Israelis or Arabs driven out.
- The torture regime will restart, each side afflicting the other as much as it can.
- A single, secular state will be created.
A secular state — not the vaunted two-state solution — is the only humane solution. That solution, if you’re not a religionist, seems certainly fair. The other outcomes lead only to rights abuse and war.
But a secular state — often called a “one-state” solution — is also unacceptable to Zionists. For them, it’s “Greater Israel or bust.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map showing the occupied West Bank and Gaza as part of Israel during his speech at the UN General Assembly, 22 September 2023 (Reuters)
How to get past this problem? Consider the following.
Like the Abortion Battle
The battle for Palestine/Israel is like the US abortion fight in a single, crucial way. Until it’s completely won by one side or the other, the torture can last forever.
Americans seemed complacent, willing to see abortion limited in one cruel way after another, in one state and the next, so long as it was legal somewhere. They seemed content, in the aggregate, with a slowly eroding status quo.
My wife and I marveled at this, but it’s been true since the battle against Roe was first enjoined. The movement against the so-called ‘pro-lifers’ was small and ineffective; where we expected mass insurgency, we saw complaints and protests. There were victories, but it seemed that the most Americans were content to stand by, so long as the losses came in small enough doses that each one unremarkable compared to the last.
What the “pro-life” movement never should have done, was won completely.
Pro-choice people are now aflame with desire to reinstate Roe. We’ve seen this in the past few elections at the regional level. That new-found insurgence may, if the stars are aligned for the Democrats, re-elect Biden against a resurgent Trump.
To make the comparison clear, if the Right had not achieved total victory over abortion, had not repealed all of Roe, the pro-choice movement might never have grown this strong. Sad that is, but true.
The Road to Lasting Peace
Is the same thing true of Israel/Palestine? If the only alternative to war is a secular state, perhaps the only way to get there is for world opinion, face with a total war, to force on both parties.
What will a painful “peace,” a return to the status quo ante where hundreds are murdered, slowly and by both sides, actually achieve? And what’s the cost of achieving it?
The hatred on both sides had already reached the youngest pre-October 7. It’s now metastatic. It will take 50 years to clear all of that out. And worse, the world may tolerate another half-century’s hate, since it’s tolerated the last.
In contrast, what would a “blowout battle” accomplish compared to its cost? Deaths will be horribly high. But faced with that, will the world finally force an end? Force a secular state, in which none have the upper hand?
I have no answers to this. But I strongly hope for peace, however achieved, and fear I’ll never see it.
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In the end, especially European powers, will come to realize and regret that their creation turned into a Frankenstein bully with nukes governed by religious nuts with utter disdain for human life. Everything has within itself their own seeds of self destruction, all you have to do is nurture them. And nemesis always shows up to punish hubris in the end.
One of my favorite quotes:
“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it’s going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”
Mary Midgley
Ghost in the Machine: Thanks for the intro to Mary Midgley. What a remarkable thinker she was.
From the same book, The Myths We Live By: lifted from her Wiki entry: >
She also argues that the world’s religions should not simply be ignored: “It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of.”[17]
That observation seems suitable today.
“Not as punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started”: Sophocles is the great teacher here. In the Oedipus plays, Oedipus sets in motion a pattern, of unknowing, that destroys him, and it is only at Colonus, at the end of his life, that the gods call for him. Likewise, Antigone, which in any well-done production is almost unbearable, because Antigone has done her duty to her brother.
We see this in Ukraine: 300,000 dead. 500,000 wounded. And the pattern of subservience by the Ukrainians to Anglo-America goes on, stitched together as promises and admonitions from London and Washington, even as the the Earth is gaping with graves.
Sarcasm alert in this comment of mine (or maybe not), be warned.
DJD, Reality Czar,
>We see this in Ukraine: 300,000 dead. 500,000 wounded. And the pattern of subservience by the Ukrainians to Anglo-America goes on, stitched together as promises and admonitions from London and Washington, even as the the Earth is gaping with graves.
Yesterday, posted on the Drudge Report website…
https://www.the-sun.com/news/9622743/putin-troops-russia-failing-war-ukraine/
https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/118349/russia-troops-wiped-out-putin-ukraine-war
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1834702/ukraine-war-live-vladimir-putin-russia-warships-destroyed
This was yesterday, 11/14/23, and as far as my feeble mind is concerned a serious, if not a last ditch attempt at propaganda for the western allies/NATO supporting the war in Ukraine and for what, I don’t know. Distractions from a genocide perpetrated somewhere else perhaps?
Your words, “even as the Earth is gaping with graves”, pretty much a description of now, and more devastatingly, what’s to come. Thank you for putting it like that.
When Netanyahu defends Hitler and his close friend and prominent Likud member glorifies the Holocaust, the comparison between Israel and Ukraine is entirely appropriate. Yes, the “Jews can’t be Nazis” mantra is meaningless here, too. Just as it was Russian military intervention that saved the Donbass from ethnic cleansing by the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, the liberation of Palestine will not be achieved without the “de-Nazification” of Israel.
People’s identities are locked in, the mechanisms of bernaysian propaganda controlled by the few that achieve dominance in one interest or another all increasingly drive in the same direction. I wonder what’s going to happen as the “secular nation” of America starts to fragment. The common myths that provided some glue to hold things sort of together, with notable excursions mitigated by external threats, exist only in the minds and memories of older people like myself. The neoliberal managers have prevailed; there’s not much holding that chimaerical “center” together now.
People in Israel who identify as Jewish once again have fortuitously been provided a common enemy, and the experience of the successful domination by diaspora and dual citizens of many political economies in the West, to feed their sense of superiority, entitlement and hubris/chutzpah. Likud and farther “right” sneer at “Uncle Sucker” and servile Starmers. Netanyahu loves that Israelis have been “martyred” (in relatively small numbers) to feed the Narrative and subsume the fractiousness of a Jewish population where success in cheating and tricking each other is a badge of honor — the Eleventh Commandment is acknowledged to be “Thou shalt not be a freier,” Yiddish for “supreme sucker,” https://www.haaretz.com/2007-01-28/ty-article/thou-shalt-not-be-a-freier/0000017f-e3ad-d38f-a57f-e7ffa5630000 And the correlative duty to take advantage of and dominate everyone else.
(Interesting that there’s a “peace movement” in Israel at all. Too bad that what I would personally characterize as “bad” tends, over time, bury all the stuff that I personally would consider “good.”)
The US has its afflictions too, of xtians, e.g., with their push to “take dominion of” all creation including women as chattels per the Jewish part of the Bible. And the armies of “woke” beneficiaries, and now millions of detached and anomic “migrants” looking for MORE! and not too chary about how to get it. In line with the mindset of the oligarchs, some of whom are, dare I mention it, Jewish, looking to increase their store by any means and at the expense of the mopery and oh well, the biosphere.
And one observes that the Arabs and Muslims don’t seem inclined to seriously make common cause to assert and protect in-group interests. Which of course empowers further the Netanyahus and Adelsons and Blinkens and the like to keep on marching toward the goal of an Eretz Israe l. Where some people who have proved time and again that they accept no limits and have between 200 and maybe 600 thermonuclear weapons that they coyly remind the rest of us are mounted on missiles that can reach, so far, all of Europe, North Africa, Western Asia, most of Russia. And in the event, have proven by all the intervening increments of colonial imperial ambitions, to be ready to shoot them off.
More on the subject of distractive centrifugality: https://open.substack.com/pub/duedissidence/p/its-alive-social-justice-movement?r=19kis&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
This is not going to end well.
I think “the Arabs and Muslims don’t seem to make common cause” because (a) they’re numerouse, and (b) they have oil. I think they regard Israel as a pathetic case, like the weak kid in the locker room who sucks up to the bully in the locker room while he beats up other weak kids.
If it were up to me, I’d bulldoze every religious site in Israel and replace them with food courts. Then those of all faiths could put down their weapons and spend their time arguing about who invented falafel.
Yves, it should be “ladder” rather than “latter” in your intro.
Haha, thanks for the catch, but that’s a cut and paste from Wikipedia!
Maybe instead what the world needs to do is walk away and force Israel to accept the fact that they are a tiny country of 9 million with 7.5 million of those being Jews. It is the United States and its allies who enable the slaughter and not just tolerate it.
In Links this morning Patrick Lawrence suggests that a “hinge of history” may be at hand and he’s talking about world history, not Mideast history.
https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/14/patrick-lawrence-the-hinge-of-history/
Take away the bombs and missiles and all other forms of support and the slaughter on both sides would end. Because no country is an island either even if the Israelis seem to think they are.
Well put, Carolinian. For those of you that follow Roger Waters, I find him amazing.
https://youtu.be/PPjLhpZBteI
Thank you for posting this link, Sue. I do follow Roger but hadn’t seen this yet. He expressed perfectly how I feel, and I really don’t have anyone to talk to about this.
I am so grateful for Roger and his very clear love for humanity.
Thank you for the article, Carolinian. It was well worth the read.
Central Europe post 1914, closer 1935 in Germany are object of socialization to compare.
The Nazi thing applies for Kiev regime aka Bandaraists, but Likud is much more German Bolshevist, without the Brownshirts beating them out of existence. Royal Army in Palestine was not motivated, and Palestinians too fragmented, like the Jews in CentralEurope.
Haganah morphed to IDF, similar to Nazi party militia became Waffen SS….
More Mao than Nazi!
“What cause have we to complain about their hatred of us.”
I first saw that quote from Ritter on one of his many podcasts when he read off most of the speech, and it looks like Dayan was very clearsighted and honest about the settler project; a great contrast to their present day leaders who would have us all believe that they are victims of some unaccountable tragedy.
Also per Ritter, he says that eighty percent of those killed on Oct, 7th were killed by Israel, itself. I have been trying to work out the numbers, and to keep them consistent I have been using Ritter as a resource.
First there were fourteen hundred, then 1250 and finally 1200. Of those 1200, Ritter says a third were pure military and were, thus, fair targets under the laws of war (400). He says that those Kibbutzim were militarized, and that Hamas was likely going to have to kill those trained to protect them as well. No clue as to how many of those there were, but lets say 20% of the deaths in the kibbutzes were also fair game (200). So, of the six hundred left, if eighty percent of them were killed by the IDF (480) in various ways, that would leave 120 civilians actually killed by Hamas.
Present count of Palestinians killed are around 12,000 with 2,500 missing. Given every one of those missing is still alive (unlikely), that would be a ratio of six hundred Palestinians killed for every one Israeli non-combatant. No figures are available for how many Hamas fighters Israel has killed, so you cannot even make the same kind of projections as to how effective Israel has been relative to Hamas over the past month, but since Oct. 7th, Hamas has killed another forty or so IDF who are also fair game.
Seems like Israel, for all of its’ weeping and gnashing of teeth, got off light compared to the Palestinians, and one has to wonder what Dayan would have thought of that. I doubt he would have spent much time playing the victim over a number that prolly compares nicely to the number of traffic deaths incurred in Israel over a month (est. at 333 PY by the WHO in 2019, the last year figures were available; presumably it has gone up since then).
Aside from the obvious atrocities angle, we are not going to come off any better for having backed a bunch of weenies. Something I suspect that Dayan would have easily foreseen and could have advised them against if this settler project is to continue. Not that I would want it to, but really. Starting an existential war over a guesstimated hundred twenty people just does not sound rational.
I remember that speech (from 1956 btw) mentioned in Ritter’s post as well, noted here: https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/why-i-no-longer-stand-with-israel
Ritter said the speech “is also unapologetic about the righteousness of the Israeli cause, regardless of the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. Israel, Dyan said, cannot be settled without the ‘steel helmet and canon’s maw.’ War, he said, was Israel’s ‘life choice,’ and as such Israel was condemned to a life of militarized diligence, ‘lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.'”
So it’s a speech neither “side” can take much from. It acknowledges Palestinian anger but also says vigilant militarization must be Israel’s policy.
It is a very muscular, very “damn the torpedoes” kind of speech that leaves little to the imagination. You may not like it, but you can respect it. If the whining over 120 (not twelve hundred) people is getting to me, I can only imagine how it would have grated on him. For him that would have just been a part of the price of admission.
Also, no figures are available for how many Israeli fighters Hamas has killed. According to Scott Ritter the zionists have suffered badly in clashes with Hamas, losing quite a large proportion of their tanks and soldiers. However, the Israeli government don’t seem to like to admit to this.
Starting a war rarely sounds rational, until one asks, cui bono?
The supposed answer is “everybody”, but lately, people been missing from ‘everybody’, most visibly BRICS, and Washington is struggling to understand why. Unfortunately, for rationality, Washingtonians’ salaries depend upon not understanding.
But Ritter’s math is an amusing reductio ad absurdum.
Well, my math gleaned from his podcasts. I wouldn’t blame him for any faults found in my reading of it. Those would surely be my own.
I could not resist this, page 378 of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari:
“…Last but not least, a tectonic shift has taken place in global political culture. Many elites in history – Hun chieftains, Viking noblemen and Aztec priests, for example – viewed war as a positive good. Others viewed it as evil, but an inevitable one, which we had better turn to our own advantage. Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite – politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable…”
Hitler loved peace, too, as long as the world was rid of “undesirables.”
This type of talk is, I think, the fundamental weasel talk: no one is against peace and for war (to paraphrase Goering), except for this, that, or some other reason. Some people have a lot more reason than others for “making an exception.” In fact, many of these people are eager to make “peace” the reason for choosing against peace…because peace isn’t really “peace” except the peace of slavery where they are the masters over all and no one dares talk back to them. (I’m still shaking with fury whenever I think of that spawn of Satan Richard Holbrook)
“Don’t we really all want the same thing?”
No, actually, we don’t.
Ssuk up much, Mr. Hariri?
Tectonic. Thank you, Oldtimer!
I don’t see how Israel driving the Arabs out could result in a stable solution for two reasons:
1/ Most Zionist Israelis believe they should reclaim biblical Israel, which they claim goes from the Nile to the Euphrates, including the Sinai and parts of Turkey. That means absorbing Lebanon, Syria, parts of Turkey, parts of Iraq, parts of Egypt and probably parts of Saudi Arabia, and expelling those people too, many of whom aren’t even Arabs.
2/ There are 13 million Jews on the planet, and 2 billion Muslims. Al Aqsa mosque is the 3rd holiest site in Islam. If it is destroyed to restore the Temple on the Mount, as many Zionists want, a large majority of these 2 billion Muslims will be very angry and many will sign up to destroy Israel.
The problem is that those on the Israeli side seem unable to think through these long term consequences. Alastair Crooke said on Monday on Judging Freedom that 86% of Israelis support expelling the Gazans, up from 80% last Monday. Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone says his liberal friends are laying low because their houses have been attacked for expressing the “wrong” opinions, reducing the chance of a change of heart on the Israeli side. https://nitter.net/djuric_zlatko/status/1724870426214486240#m
It seems the long term consequences might not be in the distant future. Turkey’s Erdogan stated today that Israel’s end is near, whether it has nukes or not. Turkey has the 2cd largest NATO army. It has been promised nukes by Pakistan to rebalance the playing field against Israel’s nukes. Lavrov says that although the regional powers don’t want war, not responding could dangerously convey the impression that they are weaker than they are (as happened with Russia in Ukraine). This is all becoming very dangerous. https://nitter.net/upholdreality/status/1724809838301958607#m
I think you missed one of the major causes of the right-wing orientation that is so common among Mizrahi Jews in Israel: many of them are from families of Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries after the formation of Israel and from Iran after the formation of the Islamic Republic. They harbor the same grudge against Arabs and Iranians that Palestinians hold against Israelis, and for exactly the same reason.
Is this true? More information please.
About 900,000 expelled from various Muslim countries pursuant to the founding of Israel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world
Many of these Jewish communities, particularly in Syria and Iraq, predate the founding of Islam.
A couple of examples:
In the early 20th Century, Jews were the second largest religious group in Iraq (after Muslims, of course). They made up 40% of the population of Baghdad in the 1917 Ottoman census (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_vilayet). In 1947, the year Iraq made “Zionism” a capital offense (with a minimum sentence of 7 years imprisonment), there were 160,000 Jews in Iraq. In 1948, Jews were banned from banking and foreign currency transactions, and were prohibited from most government employment. This was followed by a campaign of expropriation, bombing, and lynching which led to a mass emigration (some forced, some voluntary) of Jews. By 2022, the number of Jews remaining Iraq was believed to be three. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Iraq). The Iraqi Jewish community was over 2000 years old, predating both Islam and Christianity.
In 1948, there were 80,000 Jews in Egypt. The number of Jews remaining in Egypt is now also believed to be three. The Egyptian Jewish community was over 3000 years old, not only predating Islam and Christianity but Alexander the Great as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Egypt).
More complicated than you present “The forgotten history of Arab Jews,” an interview with Avi Shlaim.
Wikipedia entries are not reliable on this subject, especially from 1948 on.
Iran has a thriving community of Jews and they have special voting rights in Iran. Many have refused offers to entice them into Israel as they are content and respected in Iran.
Oh good, then my former colleague Elad can get the family home in Tehran back?
Just a statistical FYI on Iranian Jews: prior to the Islamic Revolution, there were over 100,000 Jews in Iran. Now there are barely 9,000.
This Wikipedia quote in the post above stated that a disproportionately large but still minority portion of settlers have North American origins. This is confirmed in this Times of Israel story. I thought this was very interesting and may explain U.S. toleration of Israel’s carve-up of the Settlements. The West Bank is the location of much of Israel’s low cost housing. Many U.S. Jews with dual U.S.-Israel citizenship emigrate to Israel and end up in cheap West Bank housing . In terms of percentages, the U.S. is #1 followed by France, Russia and Ukraine. Could this explain defacto (albeit unspoken) U.S. policy for decades –and that of other countries — tolerating these settlements contrary to International Law?
A bigger question is where will the many children (~ 5 per household on average) of the ultra-orthodox Jewish population in the West Bank go in the next few decades but on Palestinian land elsewhere in the West Bank? It seems to me that Israel’s population is facing its own “border wall”, i.e. territorial constraint to growth. Half the Palestinian population is below the age of 15, and this population will grow rapidly also. Where will they go?
If Jews in Israel think “greater Israel” is destined to be the homeland for the world’s Jews, something has got to give. It seems to me that our government knows full well what Israel is doing, but is content to kick the can…. Will Israel have to threaten to use its nukes for governments to pay attention? Oh, wait….
Insofar as Israel, itself, is concerned, the US doesn’t care if it kicks the can off a cliff.
Even Prominent Wall Street Friends of Israel, don’t really care what happens to Israel. Insofar as they’re Americans First, for them Israel is just a virtual asset, an IP asset. A trademark. Whatever good befalls them DBI Israel is just retribution for the horror of the Holocaust, and whatever ill befalls Israel, Inc. has had the silver lining of more remuneration for good American arms merchants and their good American money launderers.
Win-win.
And those U.S. emigrants stranded in the West Bank? IBGYBG.
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin – Nonsocial cultures will decay.
Neuberger’s formulation for how a secular state might be imposed appears to be nothing more than a hand-wave. It would entail the destruction of the state of Israel and thus falls under the new definition of antisemitism.
The fundamental problem is that when the UN, in 1947 reeling from the very present horrors of the European Shoah, decreed the partition of Palestine into a state for Ashkenazi Zionist settlers, they were buying into the same thinking that was violently driving millions from their homes in British India and Central Europe.
If the West buys into this apartheid thinking in 2023, what does it portend for the ethnic and religious divisions in their own societies, as places like California and Texas fill up with climate refugees from Latin America and North Africans in Europe?
Wall-to-wall small-scale ethnic civil wars and warlords = gang warfare?
Finally brought under control by an utterly ruthless Khmer Rouge type “Green” dictatorship that liquidates anyone whose lifetime environmental footprint is judged too large?