Digest 4 – Selected Additional Reading
JVL Introduction
Another roundup of interesting and informative articles which we have not chosen to foreground in individual posts for various reasons, but all of which we’d like to draw to our readers’ attention.
This digest links to articles on a variety of topics
1. Israel’s US-backed starvation policy in Gaza – on the sheer hypocrisy of Biden’s humanitarian “ultimatum” to Israel
2. Protest made easy as shown by a simple, inspiring idea implemented outside Hastings.
3. The Antisemitism Scare: Guide for the Perplexed on the ever-increasing weaponisation of antisemitism, particularly in the USA, in order to close down discussion and dissent
4. The almost unbelievable arrogance/ignorance/racism of Israel’s Defence Minster Israel Katz
5. Left responses to understanding Oct 7th.
6. Grappling with Jewish fears in a just Palestinian struggle
7. Toward a Judaism of Love over Land, People over Profit – what an ethical Judaism might mean
8. Oil’s history: dissecting the many-headed hydra
9. The weaponisation of antisemitism – a view from South Africa
10. Fred Sparks’s Bequest, an interesting, oblique take on the conflict
11. Archaeology as a tool for dispossessing the Palestinians
12. The film Lyd and its reception in Israel
13. Starmer lied in saying Israel isn’t carrying out genocide in Gaza…
15. Moral Suicide: on the exaltation of the Jews of Israel and the matching dehumanisation of Palestine’s Muslims.
RK
1. Israel’s US-backed starvation policy in Gaza
Assessing Biden Administration’s Failed Humanitarian Ultimatum to Israel
Stephen Semler, Security Context, 25 Nov 2024
“The paper finds that Israel allowed less humanitarian aid into Gaza after the Biden administration’s ultimatum than before it. Additionally, Israel would still be able to starve Gaza even if it met US demands… The paper concludes that the 30-day ultimatum was a public relations stunt; a cynical attempt by the Biden administration to obfuscate the realities of its own existing policy, which has pushed Gaza to the brink of mass starvation”.
2. Video: simple roadside Gaza protest in Hastings goes viral, sparks copycats
Skwawkbox, 30 Nov 2024
A simple but unusual roadside protest in the Sussex town of Hastings has gone viral, attracting millions of views worldwide and sparking similar actions in towns and cities across Europe. The series of ‘drive-by’ placards on the side of the A21 spelled out a powerful message of the appalling cost of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – one that resounded around the world:
It read:
In the Last Year
Israel has killed
16,000 children in Gaza.
There are 16,000 children
In Hastings. Imagine
This town
With no children.
Stand up
Speak out
Stop the genocide.
A drive-by video of the protest is embedded in the post.
3. The Antisemitism Scare: Guide for the Perplexed
Alan Wald, Against the Current, Nov 2024 (to appear in print in the January-February 2025 issue, ATC 234)
Based on a talk by ATC editor Alan Wald at a 29 October 2024 symposium “Academic Freedom in a Time of Genocide” at the University of Michigan (U-M) in defense of Professor Maura Finkelstein of Muhlenberg College, the first tenured faculty fired for anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian speech. (See the full report on the case by Natasha Leonard in the 26 September 2024 issue of The Intercept.)
“What I’m calling a 2.0 political repression, against pro-Palestinian speech and activism, is perhaps distinct from 1.0 McCarthyism by the way it aspires to con the university community as well as the public. Administrators use the rubric of protecting free speech and the right to protest, and especially the “safety” of Jewish students.
“This last is engineered under Civil Rights Act Title VI by treating outspoken anti-Zionist opinions — especially certain slogans, phrases, and ideas — as antisemitic discrimination against a supposed “protected class” due to race, color, or national origin.
4. Israel Katz’s Apartheid Axiom: Jews Are Worth More Than Palestinians
Roger Alpher, Haaretz, 28 Nov 2024
Israel Katz, Israel’s Defence Minster, on a Meet the Press TV interview was astonishingly ignorant, arrogant and racist. He had come to rebut the claim that no longer submitting Jews to detention without charges while continuing with it for Palestinians stems from an apartheid worldview:
“…Katz was frankly amazed. He really has no idea why. “I’ve heard claims that it’s apartheid,” he remarked, adding: “Anyone who comes to compare settlers with Palestinian terrorists who must be stopped by any means is guilty of a terrible injustice.” They asked him simply, what about “settlers” who are terrorists who must be stopped by any means, and he replied simply, that “settlers” are subject to a different law. Because they have more rights than the Palestinians in the West Bank, only because they’re Jewish. “For Jews there are different methods,” he declared.”
“Different methods for different populations, based on racial, ethnic or national identity. He also declared that “Now during this period, when Palestinian terror is threatening and operating against the settlers … when in the outside world they’re unjustly imposing sanctions against the settlers … when the members of the settlement movement … are fighting and making sacrifices, the State of Israel shouldn’t operate against them with those methods.”
5. The Gaza Solidarity Debates
Ran Greenstein, Academia, 5 Nov 2024
A magisterial survey and evaluation of left and solidarity movement responses to the Hamas attack on 7th Oct and its aftermath
In this long (c.16k words) wide-ranging analytical appraisal of responses to Oct 7th Greenstein engages with the writings of many including Judith Butler, the letter of a group of” Israel-based academics, thought leaders and progressive activists” and criticism of it by those who found the “global left’s reaction disturbing in its indifference to the horrific events of the day”, Yuval Harari, Eva Illouz, Adam Shatz, Naomi Klein, Jodi Dean (who called for an explicit support for Hamas as the vanguard of global anti-imperialist resistance) Hamas’s own perspective published in Jan (whose rhetoric, says Greenstein, “is more subtle than that of radical protesters at US universities”), Rashid Khalidi and others.
Here are two statements from Greenstein worth pondering over:
“The democratic alternative to Jewish domination in apartheid or colonial Israel/Palestine is power sharing, equal rights for all, justice, and redress. This goal can be realized only on the basis of rejection of ethnic and religious privileges that establish the supremacy of one group of people over others. Defining Israel as a Jewish state is a violation of the principle of political equality, of course, but that is also the case for defining Palestine as an Arab or Islamic country. There is nothing progressive about replacing one type of ethnic domination with another, even when such domination is to be exercised by an indigenous movement.”
and
“The key question then is how to reconcile an analytical focus on colonialism and its legacies, which is essential for an understanding of the conflict on all its dimensions, and a political focus on nationalism, which is essential for beginning to make progress on a practical solution for it. We need both. In the debate over the Gaza war and solidarity, the Israeli participants tend to see only the national dimension, and solidarity activists tend to see only the colonial dimension. An integrated approach, such as Khalidi’s, may emphasize one or the other of these at different times for different purposes, but it must keep both of them at play in an attempt at a balance that may never be reached to the satisfaction of all sides.”
6. Grappling with Jewish fears in a just Palestinian struggle
Haggai Matar, +972 Magazine, 26 Nov 2024
“Recognizing Zionism’s settler-colonial nature shouldn’t prevent us from reimagining a collective Jewish existence in this land, or taking seriously the fears that are weaponized to justify Palestinian subjugation.”
Matar’s essay does not make easy or fashionable reading at a time when, faced with Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, many solidarity activists simply refuse to think of how any even moderately acceptable short-term truce may finally emerge from the wreckage that doesn’t come to terms with the almost 8 million Israeli Jews also living in the land between the river and the sea.
Matar builds on Naomi Klein’s insight in her recent book Doppelganger about “how the political right has been strengthened by the left’s neglect of certain issues or fields of discourse that directly affect many people’s lives. By simply dismissing those areas of discussion as “right-wing” without offering an alternative ideological approach, the left, Klein argues, allows the right to frame the conversation entirely on its own terms.”
And Matar includes himself in the left that is “not doing more to address the fears of my own people [a fear that is deeply entrenched in Jewish identity stemming] from millennia of persecution and pogroms, leading up to and including the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, which has created intergenerational trauma that continues to be felt today. In Israel, this trauma is sustained and narrated in the public discourse in ways that aim to justify what we do to Palestinians, preserving it at the center of how we see ourselves and the world around us.”
7. Toward a Judaism of Love over Land, People over Profit
Rabbi Brant Rosen, Shalom Rav, 22 Nov 24
Brandt contrasts ways of reading the Bible story of Abraham’s purchase of land to bury his wife Sarah: “Abraham is not motivated to purchase this land in order to claim exclusive entitlement to it: he is driven by his desire to honor his beloved wife Sarah, and to ensure that she and his extended family will have a permanent resting place. “He reminds us that when Abraham died he was buried beside Sarah by his two sons Ismael and Isaac…
“[But today] It’s becoming ominously clear that the end game of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the end of game of Zionism itself: namely, settlement.”
…
“Even more ominously, there is every reason to expect these plans will be aided and abetted by the American Jewish communal establishment. One week after Donald Trump’s reelection, Karen Paikin Barall, the Jewish Federation’s VP of government relations, remarked to a group of local Jewish community relations councils, “We should all look forward to the day we can hope to buy townhouses in the West Bank and Gaza.”…
8. Oil’s history: dissecting the many-headed hydra
Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh (Verso 2024), reviewed by Simon Pirani, People and Nature, 19(?) Nov 2024
A guide to the complex story of oil, petrochemicals and their role in global warming and more, touching also on the current conflict in Gaza – and much else besides.
“The first part of the story Hanieh tells, of oil’s initial growth, plays out in the early twentieth century, in the US, and to a lesser extent in Iran, Azerbaijan and in Latin America. In the second part, from the mid twentieth century onwards, Middle Eastern oil resources and the battles for control of them loom large. And this is part of the background to the deluge of war crimes now being committed against Palestinians.
“The connections are not direct. Regimes centred on vicious ethnic cleansing, like Netanyahu’s, are produced by capitalism; capitalism thrives on oil. But there are multiple mediations. Hanieh’s approach to these is an antidote to the simplifications that all too often circulate in radical political circles.”
9. History of anti-Semitism is being invoked by Zionism to justify genocide of Palestinians
Mervyn Bennun, Daily Maverick, 19 Nov 24
Mervyn Bennun was a member of the Congress of Democrats and went into exile in 1965. He and his father, Tolly Bennun, joined the ANC the moment its ranks were opened to all South Africans. He returned to South Africa in 2000, and resigned his ANC membership at the age of 86 in June 2022 in an open letter published by Daily Maverick.
“Let us be clear about anti-Semitism in the world. It is real and it exists. But if one asserts that it is anti-Semitic to criticise Zionism, then one legitimises what is happening to Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
10. Fred Sparks’s Bequest
David Margolick, London Review of Books, 21 Nov 2024
Margolick tells the curious and fascinating story of why a renowned American Jewish reporter, born Fred Siegelstein in New York in 1915, made a peculiar bequest when he died. Third of thirteen listed in his will of 7 May 1975, it was to the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
It appears that he was appalled by the condition of the refugees form the war of 1948 and started mentioning them in various despatches from 1953 onwards.
His will was challenged in court. Heard by an enthusiastically pro-Israel judge, the bequest was eventually disallowed but found its way to help Palestinian children anyway…
11. When Israeli Soldiers Are a Private Militia for Archaeology as a Tool for Dispossession
Iris Leal, Haaretz, 25 Nov 2024
Ze’ev Erlich, a civilian, was killed in Lebanon by Hezbollah gunmen. What was he doing there?
Archeology, argues Leal, operates in service of a faith that holds that any place holding remnants of Jewish history belongs to the Jews. That’s how theft of one acre after another is normalized, and Erlich, it should be stated, was the faithful emissary of that kind of archaeology.
“Here’s how journalist Amit Segal, who grew up in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, eulogized Erlich, referring to him by his nickname: “Zhabo, a man of Ofra and the founder of the field school there, was one of the most knowledgeable people in the field of the history the Land of Israel…. He fell near the tomb of Simon the Prophet in the village of Chamaa.” Even someone who doesn’t hear well could glean between the lines the assumption that the land where a Jewish prophet is buried is ours.”
12. ‘I Would Like for Israelis to Understand That Zionism Is Racism’
(also archived here)
Nirit Anderman, Haaretz, 23 Nov 24
A discussion of the film Lyd and its reception in Israel
Standfirst: ‘Lyd,’ co-directed by Palestinian journalist and activist Rami Younis, depicts what life might have been like if there hadn’t been a Nakba. Banned in Israel, the film is drawing crowds in North America. ‘To this day, apart from the Arab world and a few bleeding-heart left-wingers – no one actually acknowledges what happened to us,’ Younis says in an interview
Nirit Anderman writes
Any dictatorship worthy of the name would be proud of the way things unfolded in Israel on October 10 this year. Immediately after a right-wing activist learned that the Palestinian film “Lyd” – the Arabic name for the city of Lod – was going to be screened at the Al Saraya Theater in Jaffa, and fired off an urgent message to, among others, Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar, claiming that it endangered Israel’s security – the minister sprung into action.
Zohar declared that the film presents a “delusional, mendacious picture” and asked the Israel Police to prevent the screening. Officers hurried to obey, summoned the theater’s director for a “warning talk” and banned the event – because “no request for a permit to show the film had been submitted” to the country’s Film Review Board. The icing on the cake came from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “I hear the howls of people on the left over the cancellation of the screening of the film ‘Lyd’ in a Jaffa theater. They need to understand that a law is a law and an order is an order.”
13. Starmer lied in saying Israel isn’t carrying out genocide in Gaza. Here’s the proof
“We may be exhausted by 13 months of lies, disinformation and smears. But we’re not voiceless, or powerless. Our leaders seek to bully us into silence because they fear what we have to say”
Jonathan Cook, Blog, 18 Nov 2024
Cook’s speech in Bath on Saturday 17 November 2024, flays the West’s silent consent to the genocide in Gaza under the guise of Israel’s “right to self-defence”.
He has special contempt for Keir Starmer, recalling his words in a war crimes hearing into Serbia’s siege of Vukovar in 1991:
“Serbian forces carried out a sustained campaign of shelling, systematic expulsion, denial of food, water, electricity, sanitation and medical treatment – bombing, burning, brutal killings and torture, which reduced the city [of Vukovar] to rubble and destroyed its Croat population.”
Starmer was clear that Serbia’s actions were genocidal because they were a “radically disproportionate attack deliberately intended to devastate the town and its civilian population”.
[Also see Nicholas McGeehan’s thread on this topic here.]
14. Labour’s War on Protest
Francesca Newton Tribune, 18 Nov 2024
The Tories introduced laws that criminalised protest to deal with the disorder they knew their policies would cause — and Labour’s refusal to repeal these laws indicates their interest in protecting that status quo.
15. Moral Suicide
Michael Brenner, Scheerpost, 18 Nov 2024
Brenner’s essay in two parts, first dealing with Europe, Jews and Muslims, and then with the United States– takes the long view.
Excerpts:
- “Europe has an obsession about Jews. For nearly 2 millennia, it shunned them, despised them and persecuted them. Now, after a respite of a few decades, it condemns and abuses Muslims in a similar way – all in the name of supporting Jews. Israel’s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians – culminating in their massacre and mass eviction from Gaza – leaves Europeans unmoved.”
- “European countries have been denatured by America, in the sense that they are shed of sovereign status and its attendant political will. That perverse trans-Atlantic bond has been cultivated by both sides. It’s significance for understanding the European attitude towards Israel/Palestine is two-fold. One, there is an eerie inversion of roles for European polities who participate in dominant-subordinate relations with both America and Arab Muslims. It matches the classic profile of the “Authoritarian Personality.” Toward the superior one is docile, obedient, obsequious; toward the inferior one is arrogant, demanding and patronizing. The latter compensates for the former in terms of maintaining a positive sense of self.
- A short PS looks at how America’s internal dynamics differ from those of Europe: guilt regarding historical mistreatment of Jews is largely absent; there is a dramatic growth in the influence of a politicized Evangelical movement inspired by The Book of Revelation; and, “ With creeping doubts as to its prowess, and of its presumed calling to be the prophet of progress for all the world’s peoples, America compulsively grasps every occasion in order to confirm that it is Destiny’s child and to be reassured that its national mythology is inscribed in the heavens.”
RK
Thanks for this Digest. It makes it easier to find information, ideas and materials (eg videos) that’ll help us achieve more traction with our own efforts to stop this genocide and – please god – build a just and lasting peace.
We’re puny individuals and tiny groups doing our best to protect the even more helpless victims – including newborns – of well-funded, well-connected, massively resourced and almost unaccountable evil. We need all the help we can get to do anything worthwhile.
Thank you for the Digest and for everything else you’re doing.
A small point, but worth making:
The Skwawkbox’s report of the protest in Hastings gave the wording on the placards in upper and (mostly) lower case – but actually the protesters put the words all in capitals.
I wish people realised that the brain takes longer to read things that are all in capitals – something especially relevant when you’re showing them to people driving by. Caps also come across as shouting, of course. Outside of demonstrations, you rarely see anything all in caps.