Digest – 1 Selected Additional Reading

JVL Introduction

There is now a large amount of good material of interest to our readers available on the internet and we have to be selective in what we choose to carry or repost so as not to overwhelm you or us!

We’ll supplement our daily posts from time to time with occasional digests of additional material we’d like to draw your attention to. We’ll include a short summary or extracts from each article (or video) and link through to the original.

Here is the first such compilation.

RK

1. After Nasrallah, Adam Shatz

A sober assessment of the nature of Hizbullah as an organisation and of Nasrallah’s assassinationby one of the best analysts of the conflict.

2. Must the Sword Devour Forever?, Seth Anziska

With lessons from past deadly invasions of Lebanon shoved aside, the US and Israel are escalating toward endless war.

3. How Joe Biden Became America’s Top Israel Hawk, Noah Lanard

4. American Jews Have Long Questioned Zionism, Marty Blatt & Marjorie Feld

5. Lessons of a Weimar Anti-Fascist in Palestine, Barry Yourgrau

6. Damning Report Reveals How Antony Blinken Lied to Congress on Israel, Hafiz Rashid

7. Bombs fall, armies move, Des Freedman

On media reporting of the invasion of Lebanon and their reluctance to describe it for what it is.

8. After the Encampments, Aparna Gopalan

Reflections on the successes and failures of the US campus encampments

After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz,London Review of Books, 10 Oct 2024

Some extracts:

“Netanyahu’s American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to which Netanyahu had privately given his approval. Never mind the Americans’ frequent warnings about the dangers of escalation, and their stated desire to avoid a confrontation with Iran… But ‘Arab blood’ does not have the same value as American or Israeli in the moral calculus of the West.”

“Hizbullah is not a personality-driven organisation, or claims not to be, but in Nasrallah it had a leader of unusual gifts, and his death is an enormous, if not a mortal, blow; it is also a huge setback for Iran. Iranian leaders have promised a ‘decisive reaction’ to the killing, and this can hardly be ruled out… Netanyahu’s popularity in Israel, already buoyed by the pager attacks, is soaring. But Israel’s euphoria may prove short-lived. Like other secondary wars carried out in times of quagmire – the French bombing of Tunisia in the late 1950s, the American bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70 – the assault on Lebanon is unlikely to provide more than a fleeting consolation: a dazzling victory on the battlefield in a much larger, unwinnable war. Killing Nasrallah isn’t likely to hasten the defeat of Hamas in Gaza, or the return of the remaining hostages (in whose fate Netanyahu appears to have lost all interest, except as a talking point), much less the surrender of the Palestinian people to Zionist aspirations. Hizbullah will slowly rebuild, and Nasrallah and his cadres will be replaced by a new and no less embittered generation of leaders who will remember the furies unleashed by Israel in Lebanon: the killings, maimings and displacement caused by one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in the 21st century. Nasrallah’s death is as humiliating a setback for his movement as Nasser’s defeat in 1967 was for the Arab cause. But nothing feeds resistance like humiliation.”

Must the Sword Devour Forever?

Seth Anziska, Jewish Currents, 2 Oct 2024

Some extracts:

“In a context where violence has long replaced politics and diplomacy, Washington insiders have themselves presented Israel’s escalations as not merely logical, but hopeful—“a new day ahead for the Middle East,” according to a trio of State Department veterans writing in Time. The loss of civilian life goes unremarked, a strategic cost worth paying. In a post on X, Jared Kushner, a self-proclaimed regional expert “who has spent countless hours studying Hezbollah,” celebrated a Middle East at last ripe for Western interests—the agency of its real human inhabitants be damned: “The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited.”

“The current inhabitants of the White House appear to share this assessment… Before Nasrallah’s assassination, [Biden]  mused on the potential for an “all out war” in the Middle East, sounding more like a weatherman reporting scattered showers than a primary agent of such swelling catastrophe. Despite his lip service to the need for a ceasefire, he now proffers the green light either as a cynical political display of pre-election fealty to Israel or an enthusiastic vote of confidence in this deadly regional transformation…

“These wars have pushed the limits of international humanitarian law, creating dangerous new precedents. The violation of national sovereignty and territorial integrity in now an unremarkable phenomenon. Extrajudicial executions masquerading as targeted assassinations in densely populated neighborhoods claim large numbers of civilian lives […]; no one is held accountable…”

“Israel is now a rogue state consumed by a forever war—weak where it appears strong, and dragging a constellation of Western powers with it into a battle of folly. “They say that the most wretched dealer is the one who is addicted to his own drugs,” the Israeli political analyst Orly Noy wrote recently. “Israel has become addicted to the drug of death, which it has been forcefully injecting into Palestinians for years, and now is injecting itself unconsciously. The next dose will fix us for sure, just wait.””

How Joe Biden Became America’s Top Israel Hawk

Noah Lanard ,Mother Jones, 22 Dec 20234

The president once said “Israel could get into a fistfight with this country and we’d still defend” it. That is now clearer than ever.

Written in Dec 2023, nothing in this article seems out-of-date as we see unconditional support for Israel’s war on Hizbullah despite forthright opposition to it from the Biden administration before it began.

Some extracts:

“This article is based on conversations with former members of the Obama and Biden administrations, interviews with leading experts on Israel and Palestine, and a review of hundreds of mostly forgotten congressional hearings, speeches, and articles in which the president has explained how he sees the conflict. Together, they reveal instinctive sympathy for Israel contrasted by incuriosity about Palestinians; an increasingly outdated view of the domestic politics on the issue; and a deep commitment to a repeatedly disproven belief that peace will only come from there being “no daylight” between Israel and the United States…

“The result is that Biden has prioritized providing Israel largely unconditional support and the space to continue fighting in the face of intense international opposition.”

American Jews Have Long Questioned Zionism

In the name of Jewish and global sustainability and safety, American Jews must end their long standing, unquestioned allegiance to Zionism and Israel.

Marty Blatt & Marjorie Feld, Common Dreams, 23 Sep 2024

“[T]here has always been a small, vocal, articulate American Jewish minority—many with direct ties to the devastation of the Holocaust—who fundamentally questioned the role of Zionism and Israel in American Jewish life”

They were hounded:

• “American Jewish critics of Zionism have long observed that Israel does not ensure Jewish safety. Yiddish and English-language journalist William Zukerman, based in New York City, wrote in his Jewish Newsletter in the 1950s that Israel and Zionism contributed to hostility toward Jews around the world. Together with Israeli diplomats, Jewish leaders forced him out of journalist jobs and removed his communal funding.”
• “[I]n 1973, Marty [Blatt]taught a course in Tufts University’s Experimental College titled “Zionism Reconsidered,” which cast a critical eye on Israel’s history, teaching students about the Nakba (the forced dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians at Israel’s founding) and about U.S. support for Israel’s brutalities. The Jewish Defense League (JDL) and the mainstream Jewish community each attacked him and the course. The JDL called the course “an anti-Jewish outrage” and distributed a flyer that declared: “Not since Germany in the days of Hitler has any university dared to offer a course presenting a one-sided view of any national movement.”

See Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Israel

Lessons of a Weimar Anti-Fascist in Palestine

After my father fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he witnessed a toxic new nationalism rising among Jews in Palestine—and was silenced for trying to warn of its dangers.

Barry Yourgrau, the Nation 27 Aug 2024

“After my father fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he witnessed a toxic new nationalism rising among Jews in Palestine—and was silenced for trying to warn of its dangers.”

Wolfgang Yourgrau found refuge from Nazi Germany in Palestine under the British Mandate—not as a Zionist but as a political exile.

• “I’ve come to the acute realization that the story of my father’s exile and his milieu is a cautionary tale, one that evokes a dark, internecine version of the currents swirling toward Israel’s birth, currents that have swept through the decades to today’s horrors in Gaza and the West Bank. And it undercuts any consoling narrative that nationalist Zionism’s embrace of—even devotion to—ruthless force became visible to Jews only recently, or that Palestine’s Jews were united behind the brand of Zionism that was bent on establishing a Jewish nation-state; on the contrary, there were dissenters from the earliest days, and they were not just scorned but too often viciously punished.”
• By early 1943, my father was again vehemently warning that fascism was not exclusive to Germany and Italy. “The totalitarian specter is…wreaking havoc in the Jewish camp,” he wrote in what was to be Orient’s penultimate issue. “Grab it by the throat wherever you meet it…. Otherwise we in this country could be witnesses to the tragicomedy that is causing amusement among other peoples, that fascism would mature in Palestine at a time when the liberated nations would bury it.”

Damning Report Reveals How Antony Blinken Lied to Congress on Israel

Hafiz Rashid, The New Republic, 24 Sep 2024

Leaked documents show that the secretary of state received two explosive reports on Israel blocking aid to Gaza—right before he told Congress the exact opposite.

“Earlier this year, two U.S. government authorities determined that Israel was deliberately blocking food and medicine deliveries into Gaza during its brutal massacre in the territory.

But even after the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau shared their findings with senior diplomats in late April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress almost the exact opposite days later, ProPublica reported Tuesday, citing leaked reports. “

Bombs fall, armies move

Des Freedman, London Review of Books, 2 Oct 2024

On media reporting of the invasion of Lebanon and their reluctance to describe it as such.

Some extracts:

“When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’”

And again,

“Yet despite this asymmetry of media coverage, it’s never enough for some supporters of Israel, who seem to think that any pro-Palestinian voice on the airwaves is evidence of underlying antisemitism across the media. The Jewish Chronicle, looking to regain credibility after it published made-up stories about Israeli intelligence, went on the attack. Stephen Pollard, its former editor who once described the JC as ‘Israel’s candid friend’, fumed that the BBC’s Today programme gave airtime to an ‘Iranian government apologist, Prof Seyed Mohammad Marandi of Tehran University, to broadcast a series of grotesque antisemitic slurs’.

“Obviously having an Iranian government apologist on Today meant less time for Israeli government apologists to appear on the programme, such as Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, or the spokesperson David Mencer, who claimed – against all evidence – that ‘we don’t want to harm ordinary Gazans’ and that the IDF was taking ‘all possible steps’ to avoid harming civilians.”

After the Encampments

Aparna Gopalan, Jewish Currents, 26 Sep 2024

“In hindsight, it is clear that—with few exceptions—neither negotiation nor escalation managed to secure real commitments to divestment last spring. Instead, both the deals that came from negotiations and the sweeps that followed escalations seemed to have hastened the end of the encampments, and thus the dissipation of students’ leverage.”

The author suggests learning form the South African experience:

“This is far from the first student movement to be set back over summer break. Here, the South Africa divestment fight may prove instructive. In that struggle, too, students repeatedly found themselves demobilized by overt repression, “fig-leaf negotiated offers from the administration,” and “the natural segmentations in the school year,” the historian Wranovics said. But from semester to semester and from year to year, students managed to overcome these roadblocks, first and foremost by refusing to be bound by the outcomes of the previous term where it did not suit them.”