Digest 6 – Selected Additional Reading
JVL Introduction
News and other media channels everywhere are reeling as Trump tries to drown out all else with his increasinly unhinged interventions in US and world politics. Reactions to him are dominating the news cycle.
This digest is a reminder of other issues, crises, realities.
We post links to a range of materials that might otherwise be passed over – all worth paying attention to.
In summary
Illusions of Containment, Tom Stephenson reviews a recent book on Hamas
Militarised AI, Sophia Goodfriend on the role that large technology companies have played in Israel’s war on Gaza.
‘Army of Militias’: Reservist’s Explosive Book on Gaza Exposes Israel’s War Machine From Within
How to Measure Famine On the classification of catastrophe in Gaza
Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’, a Panraj Mishra tour de force
Germany: On the way to authoritarianism in the service of Zionism, Jürgen Macker
The Only Path to Peace in Palestine: One Democratic State, Rohini Hensman
A History of Ceasefire Talks between Israel and Hamas, 2008-Present, Zachary Forster
The Algeria Analogy, Arthur Assseraf
How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance, Jonathan Cook
How Israel tests military tech on Palestinians | The Palestine Laboratory Episode 1 | Anthony Loewenstein
RK
Illusions of Containment
Also archived at https://archive.ph/0L4eD
Tom Stevenson, London Review of Books, 06 Feb 2025
Review of Hamas: The Quest for Power by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell.
“For all the success Israel has had in killing Hamas leaders it has had very little in stopping the movement’s spread. In part this is because there is not one Hamas – there are three. There is the political movement, shaped by religious ideology and committed to ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine through armed struggle. It was founded by a man (Yassin) in a particular place (Gaza) at a particular time (the late 1980s). It has a hierarchy and internal politics. It has a history. Then there is the Hamas that exists in the minds of the Israeli political and security establishment. This is an imagined Hamas, but the imagination is informed by knowledge – this Hamas is despised but also grudgingly respected. There is also the third Hamas, which exists only in Israeli politicians’ public pronouncements and, crucially, in the West. This isn’t an organisation so much as an example of primordial Middle Eastern savagery, one of the West’s many caricatural enemies. It is a Hamas without a history, one that emerged fully formed.”
Militarised AI
Sophia Goodfriend, London Review of Books, 28 Jan 2025
Last week, a trove of leaked documents offered a glimpse into the role that large technology companies have played in Israel’s war on Gaza. Israel’s military campaigns across Palestine and neighbouring countries have long offered the raw material that tech firms needed to build their experiments in surveillance and algorithmic warfare to scale: kill-chain data. Yet the past fifteen months of war offered Silicon Valley an unparalleled opportunity to refine its products. It happened just in time for a new era of militarised AI.
‘Army of Militias’: Reservist’s Explosive Book on Gaza Exposes Israel’s War Machine From Within
Ronen Tal, Haaretz, 30 Jan 2025
Archived at https://archive.ph/r2Goq
An ethos of revenge, and dysfunction: An Israeli lieutenant colonel in the reserves – and an anthropologist by profession – based his new book on his war diary, where he talks about an atmosphere of general collapse in the army and Israeli society as a result of Hamas’ onslaught
“One Way or Another the Sword Shall Devour” combines the author’s personal experiences and his critical analysis using anthropological tools
Hazani details the transformation of the IDF from a unified army in the service of the country into a collection of militias.
How to Measure Famine
On the classification of catastrophe in Gaza
Alex de Waal, LRB, 06 Feb 2025
“In her short film, The Food Chain (2002), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay asked Israeli officials whether the people of Gaza and the West Bank were suffering from hunger. ‘The state is humanitarian. The army is humanitarian,’ Lieutenant Colonel Itzik Gorevitch of COGAT (Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Territories) told her. ‘First of all, there is absolutely no hunger … There won’t be hunger in the territories, period.’ In the film a chorus of blindfolded actors, wearing blankets, sang a refrain: ‘There is hunger in Palestine/there is no hunger in Palestine.’ Richard Cook, a director at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration, said to Azoulay that arbitrary, banal impediments to food supplies were jeopardising the nutritional health of many Palestinians.”
Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’
Pankraj Mishra, the Guardian, 20 Jan 2025
Germany embraced Israel to atone for its wartime guilt. But was this in part a way to avoid truly confronting its past?
A searing account, adapted from The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, published by Fern Press on 6 February, of the failure of the vastly overrated denazification of West Germany after 1945 and the sickening philosemitism that emerged
“In recent decades, solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the very foundation of its collective identity.”
And yet… Mishra carefully deconstructs this burnished image,
“When in March 1960, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York, he had not only been presiding over a systematic reversal of the denazification process decreed by the country’s western occupiers in 1945, he had also been aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had “joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could”.
In September 1952, Adenauer had agreed to a deal that would compensate the state of Israel to the extent of some 3.5bn Deutschmarks. The deal was not popular: in 1951, only 5% of Germans had admitted to guilt over the fate of the Jews, and 21% thought that “the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich”. More embarrassingly, some in Adenauer’s own party voted against the deal. Nevertheless, Adenauer’s language at his meeting with Ben-Gurion was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a “fortress of the west”, adding: “I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.”
Germany: On the way to authoritarianism in the service of Zionism
Jürgen Mackert, Brave New Europe, 03 Feb 2025
“Germany’s unqualified support for the Zionist genocide has accelerated its transformation from an already hollowed-out neoliberal democracy into an authoritarian society.
After 15 months of inhumane crimes against the Palestinians, Germany’s political elite are more intent than ever on suppressing any criticism of this heinous slaughter.
Every effort is being made to prevent the Zionist genocide from being described as such, and every solidarity support for the victims of one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history is being criminalised.
With the adoption of the resolution ‘Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany’ in November 2024, the Bundestag made it possible for the government to intervene in social life quite principally to defame and punish as anti-Semites anyone – Jews and non-Jews – who raises their voice against the Zionist settler-colonial-apartheid regime and its war crimes.”
The Only Path to Peace in Palestine: One Democratic State
By: Rohini Hensman, New Politics, 20 Jan 2025
In a note accompanying a link to the article the author wrote:
“We need to convince supporters of the Palestinian cause that (1) far from being the realistic option, the ‘two-state solution’ is an impossibility and basically amounts to allowing Israel to carry on doing what it has always done, and (2) far from being pie-in-the-sky, one democratic state is the only just and realistic solution.”
A History of Ceasefire Talks between Israel and Hamas, 2008-Present
Zachary Foster, Palestine Nexus, 20 Jan 2025
“Israel and Hamas signed at least six ceasefire agreements in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2019 and 2021. Each case followed a similar trajectory. Hamas, by and large, observed the agreement. Israel, by and large, did not. Eventually, Israeli violence elicited Hamas rocket attacks, which elicited an Israeli campaign of aggression in Gaza, which resulted in another ceasefire, and then the pattern repeated itself. This is a brief history of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, from 2008 to the present.”
The Algeria Analogy
Arthur Asseraf, Jewish Currents, Fall/Winter 2024
“Algeria won, Palestine will win. Over the past year, this slogan has multiplied across social media posts, proliferated on posters covering the streets of Paris, and resounded at marches. Amid the despair of genocide, these words seek to give hope that something better is in store: If colonialism could be defeated after more than 130 years in Algeria, it can be defeated in Palestine. By reaching for analogies, we try not only to make sense of current events, but also, and perhaps more urgently, to imagine what is to come.”
The author concludes:
“In the last months of the Algerian War, a new phrase became popular among those who wanted the country to remain under French rule: “La valise ou le cercueil.” “The suitcase or the coffin.”…
I reject this zero-sum game. Lately, I have been thinking about the coffin and the suitcase, trying to find new meaning in these two objects. The choice we need to make is not between death and departure, but between accepting the way things are now and fighting for the way they could be. Israel has built a giant coffin that has swallowed Palestine. We can condemn an entire people to remain locked inside it, or we can gather what we can to move toward an uncertain future.”
Global South “Hague Group” Pledges Israel Arms Boycott and Backing for Palestinian State and Int’l Law
Juan Cole, Informed Consent, 02 Feh 2025
The governments of “Belize, Plurinational State of Bolivia, Republic of Colombia, Republic of Cuba, Republic of Honduras, Malaysia, Republic of Namibia, Republic of Senegal and Republic of South Africa” have announced the formation of “The Hague
They are pledged, among other things, to “act on the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, comply with their obligations under the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court and… implement the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice against Israel for its actions in Gaza”;
halt and prevent arms transfers to Israel where there is a clear risk of violations of humanitarian law, human rights law, or genocide;
do whatever they can to end the military occupation of the Palestinian people by Israel and enable the emergence of a Palestinian state.”
How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance
Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 31 Jan2025
The ghosts of thousands of Palestinian children crushed by Israeli bombs loomed over this year’s Auschwitz commemorations
An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.
The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the genocide of a people must “never again” be allowed to take place.
As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders – from Britain’s King Charles III, to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France – prominently in attendance at the main ceremony at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps, where more than a million Jews, Roma and other stigmatised groups were burned in ovens.
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But hanging over the proceedings – and the coverage – was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of “never again”? Had media outlets like the BBC?
How Israel tests military tech on Palestinians | The Palestine Laboratory E1 | Featured Documentary
Anthony Loewenstein, YouTube, 30 Jan 2025
Part one of two.
In this two-part series, Antony Loewenstein, a Jewish Australian journalist, uncovers how Israel profits from surveillance technologies using occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground. In Episode 1, he returns to Israel to investigate how cutting-edge military and surveillance technology is being used on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, before being marketed to international clients as “field-proven” and “battle-tested”.
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