Israel/Palestine

DEPARTING THE ANGLOSPHERE:

What Went Wrong in Israel? A Genocide Scholar Examines ‘What Zionism Became’: In his new book, Omer Bartov tracks how a liberatory strand of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he sees as responsible for genocide in Gaza (Aaron Gell, 4/21/26, The Guardian)

Much of What Went Wrong? focuses on what Bartov frames as the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights. Had Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, pushed for either approach, Bartov argues, the nascent state might well have grown into the kind of liberal democracy it has, however speciously, long proclaimed itself to be.

Despite his condemnation of present-day Israeli society, Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy.

Bartov acknowledged that the idea seems far-fetched as corpses are still being dug from the rubble of Gaza and Israel is prosecuting yet another bloody war. But what he sees as the nation’s preference for military confrontation over diplomacy depends entirely on American support, he pointed out, and that patronage is now being tested as never before. As a result of the Gaza genocide, a clear majority of Democratic voters now have a negative view of Israel. More recently, the ill-conceived US-Israeli aggression against Iran has significantly eroded GOP support. “Maga is becoming anti-Israel,” Bartov said, due to “Netanyahu completely leading Trump by the nose into a completely idiotic war”.

Despite some alarming strains of ethnic bias underlying the perception of wealthy and powerful Jewish interests manipulating the US government, pointing out antisemitism has lost effectiveness, in part because the influence of pro-Israel donors on US politics – and Israel’s campaign to convince the US to wage war on Iran – is undeniable. Additionally, the charge of antisemitism has grown hollow, Bartov said, due to its flagrant “weaponization” as “a tool to shut people up” as the state wreaks destruction on its neighbors. “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism,” he writes in What Went Wrong?, “Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.”

As a result, America’s indulgence of its longstanding Middle East ally may at last be reaching its limits. Should the United States withhold military support – as is advocated by growing numbers of Democratic policymakers – “Israel will have to go through a process of coming to terms with itself,” Bartov predicted. Under such circumstances, the country would have no choice but to pursue diplomacy. Ironically, that might be the so-called Jewish state’s best hope for a peaceful and prosperous future.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

PALESTINE IS A NATION:

Americans’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted dramatically, new poll shows (LINLEY SANDERS, February 27, 2026, AP)

Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

The assassination that changed Israel forever (Yossi Melman, 2 November 2025, The Spectator)

After the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, right-wing circles – especially among Jewish settlers – launched a public campaign that grew increasingly aggressive. What began as verbal incitement soon escalated into physical violence and criminal acts.

Itamar Ben-Gvir – today Israel’s minister of national security – was then a young disciple of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who preached Jewish supremacy. Ben-Gvir infamously tore the Cadillac emblem off Rabin’s car and declared before television cameras: ‘We got to the symbol – and we’ll get to him too.’ At several demonstrations, protesters came dangerously close to physically attacking Rabin.

Riding that wave of incitement were senior opposition figures from the Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu was among the most prominent voices fanning the flames. He marched at the head of a demonstration where protesters carried a coffin bearing Rabin’s name.

At a major rally in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, weeks before the assassination, Likud leaders stood on a balcony – among them Netanyahu, who delivered a fiery speech; Ariel Sharon, and others. When posters depicting Rabin in an SS uniform began circulating in the crowd, some Likud leaders, including future prime minister Ehud Olmert, realised the rally was spiraling out of control and left the scene. Netanyahu stayed.

After the assassination, Ami Ayalon was appointed head of the Shin Bet, replacing the failed Carmi Gillon. Ayalon told me last week bluntly that the politicians on the balcony may not have intended Rabin’s death, but their presence – without condemning the sights and chants of the rally – granted legitimacy to extremists. ‘It’s always the minority that acts,’ he observed.

The justice system also failed to act. Although 340 cases of incitement and violence were opened, prosecutors and judges dragged their feet – even after Rabin himself appealed to Supreme Court President Aharon Barak to intervene. ‘Our approach,’ admitted then–Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, ‘was to show tolerance toward free speech and the right to protest. In retrospect, that was a mistake.’

Ironically, there was a brief time when they could have escaped their spiral out of the West, when Sharon was in power and realized Israel was best served by Palestinian statehood. His stroke was the real disaster.

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel: In the early years, American Jewish support for Israel was a fraught issue. The turning point was the six-­day war of 1967, which solidified a strength of feeling that has only recently begun to fracture (Mark Mazower, 25 Sep 2025, The Guardian)

Of the few figures who stood out against the tide, perhaps the most notable was William Zukerman, a journalist who had been reporting on international Jewish affairs since the 1920s. Arguing that since 1948 the terms ­anti-­Zionist and Zionist had lost their meanings, Zukerman described himself as “pro-Israel” but “anti-nationalist”. He criticised what he called “the wave of Messianic nationalism which the Hitler Holocaust has released” among American Jews. In embracing the ethnic chauvinism that had swept over the world since the late 1930s, he argued that the Jews risked adopting a cruelty that was already changing “the entire character of the people”. Israel had turned Jews into “conquerors” whose indifference to the plight of the Arab refugees betrayed Judaism’s tradition of sympathy for the oppressed. For Zukerman, the Israeli leadership’s deliberate efforts to identify the country with Jews abroad served merely to increase the danger of antisemitism faced by the latter since it introduced “new diplomatic and political reasons in addition to the old social, economic and psychological ones”.

Zukerman’s articles were much discussed by American Jews at the time and are attracting new interest today. Nor was he alone: other Jewish leaders expressed similar concerns. But such a stance carried costs, and he was denounced as a “self-hating Jew” and an antisemite. What he termed a “perverted chauvinistic reasoning” meant that his opinions were treated “as almost the equivalent of treason”. He wrote: “To criticise any policy of Israel, whether it is the rendering homeless of a million native Arabs, the treatment of the Arab minority as­ second-class citizens or the transformation of the new state into a racial theocracy, is denounced not only as anti-­Israel but as ­antisemitic.”

One senses the shock he felt at the term being applied in this way to someone like him, who had done as much as anyone to chart the rise of antisemitism in interwar Europe. We are here at the very beginning of what one might call a kind of Zionist usage of the term that was only conceivable once Israel itself had come into existence. Recent research has revealed that Israeli diplomats were concerned enough about Zukerman’s influence to mount a ­behind-­the-scenes campaign against him, enlisting American Zionist organisations and eventually pressuring the proprietors of Jewish newspapers to drop him. As a result, his articles ceased to be widely available and when he died in 1961 his Jewish ­Newsletter, which he had kept going for 14 years, folded.

IS JUDAISM A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

Poised to Strike: Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza—but will it be stymied by criticism from abroad and discontent at home? (Benny Morris, 24 May 2025 , Quillette)

This week, the Israel Air Force (IAF) continued to hunt, bomb, and rocket the Hamas terrorist squads hiding among Gaza’s civilians, killing more women and children in the process—so far, according to Hamas figures, some 30,000 Palestinian women and children have died since October 2023. Meanwhile, Israel’s international position dramatically worsened. EU member states and Canada have imposed minor sanctions against the Jewish state and threaten worse. Observers in Jerusalem have warned that Israel faces an international relations “tsunami.” In Washington, Israel’s staunchest ally, President Donald Trump’s aides, speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that a break with Israel is likely if it does not end its war-making in the Gaza Strip. But Trump himself has remained mum—though he previously voiced his agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu that the war must end with Hamas’s destruction. According to recent reports, Trump’s new Arabian Gulf allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—are pressing Washington to end the Gaza War.

Palestinian suffering—and Muslim pressures within Western societies and from the Arab capitals—are now beginning to have an impact beyond America’s Ivy League campuses. Western public opinion and European governments are driven by daily TV clips from Gaza showing dead and dying women and children—though never dead and dying combat-age males. They are also influenced by worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground—Trump has even spoken hyperbolically of “a lot of people starving.” And finally they are alarmed at the prospect of a massive new push against Hamas by Israeli ground forces, designed, Netanyahu announced on 21 May, to end in open-ended Israeli rule over the whole Strip, together with the “voluntary” transfer of at least some of its population out of Gaza, as Trump proposed a few weeks ago.

SUICIDE BOMBING:

What has the IDF done to Gaza — and to itself? (John Ware, 1/15/25, The Article)

15 months later, his ex-defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, also once IDF Chief of Staff, said that Israel no longer had “the most moral army in the world.” Claiming to speak “on behalf of commanders who serve in northern Gaza” Ya’alon said: “War crimes are being committed here.”

The IDF denied this. What the IDF has, however acknowledged is that from the start of the war, it changed its rules of engagement.

As a consequence, one of the deadliest wars for children in the history of modern warfare was unleashed.

A recent New York Times investigation says that in the war’s first seven weeks, the IDF fired 30,000 munitions into Gaza. At 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, standard rules minimising civilian deaths were loosened.

By 30 November the Gaza Media Office said some 6150 children had been killed. The GMO is, of course, Hamas run. Even so, that estimate may turn out to have been conservative.

Based on a sample of 8119 deaths over five months which the UN claims to have independently audited, 44% were found to be children, with those aged 5 to 9 representing the single biggest age category. By that metric, it’s possible that some 6600 children were killed in the first seven weeks.

Amongst soldiers and officials quoted by the New York Times were those involved in the targeting. They told the paper that loosening the IDF’s rules to minimise collateral deaths meant a doubling of the allowable civilian to target death ratio: from a maximum of ten civilian deaths per target, to 20; for high value targets, up to 100 civilian deaths per strike. Even then, the paper said, the method to calculate the risks were “simplistic.”

IDF critics argue a target ratio of 100 to 1 would never have been contemplated by NATO forces in the 9/11 wars.

EXPECTATION BIGOTRY:

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: If you insist that the Jewish state is the only one that should not be allowed to defend itself against terrorist attacks, you are probably an antisemite. (David Benatar, 30 Jul 2024, Quillette)

The fact that anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are not necessarily antisemitic does not mean that they are never antisemitic. Similarly, the fact that anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are sometimes antisemitic, does not imply that they always are. Determining when anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are antisemitism requires argument. There will be cases in which the answer is clear, and other cases in which there is scope for reasonable disagreement. In what follows, I will try to unpick the most important factors at stake in determining this.

The first step is to clarify what we mean by “anti-Zionism” and “antisemitism.” […]

I propose the following definition:

Antisemitism is wrongful discrimination against Jews as Jews.
This definition parallels similar definitions of racism and sexism:

Racism is wrongful discrimination against (or in favour of) some people as members of a particular racial group.

Sexism is wrongful discrimination against (or in favour of) some people as members of a particular sex.
These are not uncontroversial definitions. For example, there are those who think that we need to add the condition that the discrimination is systematic. I reject that addition, for reasons I have explained elsewhere—but in any case, antisemitism has deep historical roots and is often systematic. My proposed definition encompasses attitudinal and systemic, intentional and unwitting antisemitism. My proposed definition makes no reference to Jewish institutions or collectives, because by implication, one way of being antisemitic is to wrongfully discriminate against Jews by targeting their institutions or collectives on account of their being Jewish.

On the other hand: If you insist that the Jewish state is the only one that should be allowed to treat certain citizens differently on the basis of Identity, you are probably an antisemite.