Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 on X:

The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza 🏳️‍🌈 Yoav Atzmoni who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community wanted to send a message of hope to the people of Gaza living under Hamas brutality. His intention was to raise the first pride flag in Gaza as a call for peace and freedom.

Editors Note:
She describes what the border fence security system is like, what the guards saw, what was reported, over what period of time. You, dear reader, can decide if the attack was a "surprise".

Zionism is the state ideology of Israel. Why do Jews believe they are the chosen people? What is the significance of the Jewish diaspora as a Jewish tradition? Why is Zionism, on one hand, a continuation of Judaism and, on the other, its refutation?

Like any religion, Judaism has many dimensions. Speaking about it simplistically, either in praise or condemnation, is primitive.

Judaism is tied to the belief that Jews are the chosen people (primarily in a religious sense). Their goal is to await the Messiah, who will be the King of Israel. Thus, their religion is associated with the anticipation of the Messiah.

According to Judaism, at the beginning of the first millennium, Jews went into the diaspora. The Second Temple was destroyed, marking the start of a two-thousand-year history of their dispersion. This era is part of the Jewish tradition. The purpose is to atone for Israel’s sins accumulated during previous historical periods. If this atonement is genuine and the repentance profound, then according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah will appear, signifying the blessing of the chosen people. In this case, the return of Jews to Israel, the establishment of an independent statehood, and the creation of the Third Temple will ensue.

This is the structure of the Jewish culture of anticipation. The most consistent representatives of this approach are the fundamentalists from the Neturei Karta movement. They say that the Jewish God commanded to endure the hardships of exile, so one must wait for the end and atone for sins. And when the Messiah comes, one can return to the Promised Land.

Zionism is Jewish Satanism, Satanism within Judaism, overturning all its foundations.

How did it happen that the state has already been established and prohibitions have been violated? To understand why modern Israel is in complete contradiction with the Jewish religion, one needs to go back to the seventeenth century, to the era of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbtai Tzvi, the herald of Zionism. He claimed he was the Messiah, and therefore Jews could return to Israel. The fate of Shabbtai Tzvi is sorrowful. When he arrived at the Ottoman sultan with claims to Palestine, he was given a choice: either be beheaded or convert to Islam. Then something strange happened: Shabbtai Tzvi converted to Islam. At that time, this was a major disappointment for Jewish communities.

However, followers of Shabbtai Tzvi (Sabbateanism) appeared – especially his teachings spread among Ashkenazi and Eastern European Jews. The Hasidic movement developed in parallel, which had no eschatological or messianic orientation but disseminated Kabbalistic teachings among ordinary people.

In some Sabbatean sects (particularly among the Frankists in Poland), a theology arose: supposedly, Shabbtai Tzvi was the real Messiah and made the transition to Islam deliberately; thus, he committed a ‘sacred betrayal’ (he betrayed Judaism to hasten the coming of the Messiah).

By such logic, one can easily convert to other religions. Jacob Frank, for instance, first converted to Islam, then to Catholicism, arguing that Jews consume Christian infants. He completely violated all forms of Talmudism and betrayed his faith – but Frank’s secret doctrine suggested that after the seventeenth century, the very notion of the Messiah changed. Now, the Jews themselves became the Messiah – there is no need to wait for him, so even if you betray your religion, you are holy – you are God.

Thus, an intellectual environment for Zionism was created. Zionism is Jewish Satanism, Satanism within Judaism, overturning all its foundations. If in Judaism one must await the coming of the Messiah, then in Zionism, a Jew is already God. This is followed by violations of the Talmudic commandments.

This leads to specific relations between Zionism and Judaism. On the one hand, Zionism is a continuation of Judaism; on the other, it is its refutation. Zionists say there is nothing left to repent for; they have suffered enough, and they are God.

This explains the peculiarity of the modern Zionist state, which relies not just on Israel but also on secular Jews, Jewish liberals, Jewish communists, Jewish capitalists, Jewish Christians, Jewish Muslims, Jewish Hindus, etc., all of whom represent the network of Frankism – each of them can comfortably commit a sacred betrayal, build a state, assert global dominance, and establish a ban on criticising Zionism (in some American states, criticising the state of Israel is equated to anti-Semitism).

The only step left for them is to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and begin the construction of the Third Temple. Incidentally, funds for the investigation of the Temple Mount have already been allocated by the Knesset – everything is moving in this direction.

How can one quell a conflict with such deep metaphysical roots through appeals to the UN, with phrases like ‘let’s reconcile’ or ‘let’s observe human rights’? In the Palestinian conflict, they have long disregarded these human rights. Moreover, we hear increasingly absurd statements from them – for instance, accusing people of anti-Semitism who are actually defending the Semitic Palestinians.

If we step beyond the hypnosis, the fog of nonsense, and the postmodernist defragmentation of consciousness, we shall see a very intriguing and terrifying picture of what is happening in the Middle East.

Contrary to what I wrote last week based on dispatches from Western and Arab news agencies filtered by Israeli military censorship, Israel’s attack on October 7, 2023 (operation “Al-Aqsa Flood) “) was not perpetrated by Hamas alone. Its triggering was decided by a unitary operation chamber of the entire Palestinian Resistance. Hamas, which is by far the main component, provided the bulk of the troops, but three other groups participated:
- Islamic Jihad (Sunni and Khomeinist),
- the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Marxist)
- and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-CG).

The Western press reported on the barbaric crimes committed by some of the attackers, but not on the respect of others. Once verified, the accusations of rape and decapitation of babies [1] constitute war propaganda. This one-eyed and lying journalism should no longer surprise us.

This clarification modifies the interpretation of the event. This is no longer a jihadist operation by the Muslim Brotherhood, but an attack by all Palestinians in Gaza. Only West Bank Fatah, which stands apart from the aforementioned groups and whose president, Mahmoud Abbas, is seriously ill, did not participate.

The aim of this operation was not to “kill Jews”, even if some Hamas jihadists did so (the Israelis count 2,700 dead in total), but to take prisoners, civilians and soldiers, to exchange them. with Arab detainees in Israeli high security prisons [2]. These are not necessarily combatants, but also civilians. The prisoners were taken away without being able to change clothes in a reminder of how the Israeli army treated Egyptian prisoners at the end of the Six-Day War.

Let us remember that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not oppose two States (that of Israel still has no borders and that of Palestine is still not recognized), but two populations. This is a special situation: the Palestinians are not represented by a state and the Israelis have additional responsibilities as the occupying power.

These events come as, on May 15, 2023, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Group of 77, the League of Arab States, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and China called for the suspension of Israel from the United Nations as that Tel Aviv will not respect its own commitments [3]

1. Did Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” surprise Israel?

Contrary to what Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government claimed, the “Al-Aqsa Flood” did not surprise Israel. This attack had been planned since the clashes of May 2021.

According to CNN, Hamas trained its fighters for this operation for a year and a half [4] . He built six training camps in Gaza and made promotional films there. Videos of these workouts were released weeks before the attack. [ 5 ]

In March 2023, Hamas sent a strong delegation to Russia. On this occasion, he warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that his patience was running out and his anger was “on the march”.

In 2023, Iran hosted talks between the region’s various pro-independence forces, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They were held in Beirut (Lebanon) under the presidency of General Ismaïl Qaani, commander of the al-Quds brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their aim was to reconcile these actors who had fought a ferocious war in Gaza, then in Syria. These meetings were made public in May 2023. On this occasion the Lebanese press discussed the preparation of the unitary operation which was carried out on October 7. Iran is therefore responsible for reconciling the Palestinian factions.

On September 30, the Egyptian Minister of Intelligence, Kamel Abbas, telephoned the Israeli Prime Minister to warn him against a major Hamas operation against Israel [5]. Egypt, which is fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, was worried that Israel would allow it to expand further.

On October 5, the CIA warned the Mossad of a major operation by the United Palestinian Resistance. The United States was worried about its scale. However, according to the New York Times , the CIA reports (September 28 and October 5), still classified, did not mention the use of new combat techniques by the Palestinian Resistance. Israeli intelligence services then held a meeting to assess the threat. The Shin Bet (counterespionage) and Amman (military intelligence) participated.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his office therefore lied to their citizens by claiming to have been surprised by Hamas.

2. Why did Israel allow its own people to be killed?

Several hypotheses are possible. Here are four:

- Settlers residing illegally in the West Bank are omnipresent in the Israeli coalition government. They were deaf and blind to what was happening in Gaza.

- Benjamin Netanyahu, reconnecting with the ideology of his father Benzion Netanyahu and his mentor, the Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky, intended to put an end to the Palestinian presence both in Gaza and in the West Bank. It was he who described geographic Palestine as “A land without a people, for a people without a land”.

- Benjamin Netanyahu, reviving an old project, wanted to create a pretext to justify a war against Iran and extend Israel’s influence in the Middle East.

- The American followers of German fascist Leo Strauss, continuing what they are already doing in Ukraine, wanted to create a pretext to justify a broader war against Russia.

These four hypotheses are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive.

3. The parallel of September 11

Israeli leaders have drawn a parallel between the official version of the Hamas attack and the official version of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. For them, it is a question of emphasizing the barbarity of the adversary, the surprise of the camp of Good and of justifying the wars which will follow.

This parallel is nourished by the fact that Hamas claims to be the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, while Osama Bin Laden was trained by Mohammad Qutb, the blood brother of the Brotherhood thinker, Sayyid Qutb.

This parallel does not hold: it is impossible that the September 11 attacks were perpetrated by al-Qaeda. The US authorities have never been able to respond to my objections [6] to their version. In addition, new elements have emerged since these events contradicting the administration of President George W. Bush. Today, 54% of Americans do not believe the version of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry.

However, while it is still unclear precisely who organized the September 11 attacks, we have identified a group that is involved, the Project for a New American Century. However, one of its main members, Elliott Abrams, is the organizer of the regime change that Benjamin Netanyahu carried out in Israel and which his opposition described as a “coup d’état” [7]. However, this man has a serious criminal past (he is notably involved in the genocide of the Mayans organized by the Israeli terrorist Yitzhak Shamir and the Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt [8]. He was convicted in the United States for his lies [9] and for its role in the Iran-Contras affair), we can reasonably wonder about its possible role in Israel’s passivity in the face of the preparation of the Hamas attack.

Last July, President Joe Biden appointed this controversial Republican to the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, that is to say, to the supervision of US propaganda around the world.

4. Who armed Hamas?

Such a sophisticated operation requires resources and information that only a state can have. The weapons he used were from the United States, the Soviet Union and North Korea. They circulate in Lebanon and Palestine.

Three hypotheses were formulated:

• The hypothesis of Iranian responsibility must be rejected because of the agreement concluded between Hassan el-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Rouhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moreover, Iran has already vehemently denied any responsibility to the United Nations. However, this is the theory defended by Elliott Abrams [10]. Iran is not responsible for the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, but for the reconciliation of Palestinian factions.

• The hypothesis of Russian responsibility is not based on any evidence. At most, we can note that the conflict in Palestine will absorb Western resources and therefore reduce their pressure against Russia in Ukraine. Likewise, we can anticipate an increase in hydrocarbon prices, favorable to Moscow. However, Russia does not have the means to initiate a new front as it fights in Ukraine. In addition, Moscow has continued to fight militias from the Muslim Brotherhood since the creation of the Russian Federation. However, this is the theory that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argued before the 31 NATO Defense Ministers in Brussels on October 11 [11]. The Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Galant, spoke by video during this meeting, to the same effect [12].

• The hypothesis of Turkish responsibility, on the other hand, still holds. In addition to the fact that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan organized the last Hamas congress in Istanbul, the main leaders of Hamas now reside in Türkiye, while those of the Muslim Brotherhood as an international body are divided between the United Kingdom. United, Qatar and Türkiye.
  However, knowing that the CIA was following the preparation of the Hamas operation, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken telephoned his Turkish counterpart and former head of the secret service, Hakan Fidan, on the night of October 6 to 7 [13], that is to say at the time when Hamas launched its attack and even before the Israeli army woke up. Subsequently, Antony Blinken telephoned his counterparts in Israel and Palestine, then again [14] and again [15] in Türkiye.
  Finally, during the summit of NATO defense ministers, Secretary Loyd Austin revealed that the United States had asked Turkey to intervene to free the US hostages. However, he did not specify whether this decision was made before or after the dispatch of the USS Gerald Ford naval group .

5. What does international law say about the Israeli-Palestinian difference?

According to the United Nations, Palestinians have the right to a sovereign state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. This formula implies that:

• The State of Palestine has the right to have its own army (which Israel relentlessly opposes);
• All post-1967 Jewish settlements and East Jerusalem must be returned to the State of Palestine.
• Every Palestinian, or right-holder, will have the right to return to Israel and settle in their home (right of return). Israel will have to compensate those whose property was recycled or destroyed.

According to the United Nations, Israelis have the right to a sovereign state within the 1967 borders with West Jerusalem as its capital. This formula implies that:

• Israel has the right to have its own army (which it already has)
• All post-1967 Jewish settlements and East Jerusalem must be returned to the State of Palestine. It is not impossible that Israelis will continue to live there, but it will be as foreigners.
• Israel must grant the right of residence to each Palestinian, or beneficiary, expelled in 1948, who requests it. Israel must return their property or compensate them (right of return).

Initially, these two states (Palestine and Israel) were to be federated within a binational supranational state where each citizen would have an equal voice. This is clearly impossible at the moment. We can envisage an international peace force coming to intervene between the two States of Palestine and Israel. Again this seems difficult. On the one hand because no one will want to be part of it and on the other hand because this is not what the United Nations originally planned. These envisaged peacekeeping observers, but not a military interposition force. Finally, we can consider demilitarizing the two states and giving them guarantees of non-aggression by their neighbors.

Everyone understands that international law imposes considerable losses of territory and property for Israel, whereas it only involves the abandonment of claims for Palestine. But it is the price of justice and peace.

6. What is Israel’s reaction?

Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes Jewish supremacists comparable to the Muslim supremacists of Hamas, changed the basic laws of Israel, a state without a Constitution, in August. In the opinion of observers, particularly the American press, the government carried out a “coup d’état” by suppressing the independence of the judiciary. Massive demonstrations have shaken Israel for several months.

Faced with the attack it is undergoing, Israel can only survive by agreeing to unify its ruling class. Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid demanded that Jewish supremacist ministers resign so that he could participate in a national unity government. Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of Internal Security) and Bezalel Smotrich (Minister of Finance) have supported, since they were in government, three anti-Arab pogroms, notably that of Huwarrah [16] . However, former Defense Minister General Benny Ganz did not set the same condition. Ultimately, the current Prime Minister decided to include both of them in his government, without dismissing the Jewish supremacists. But he created a war council, from which Jewish supremacists are excluded.

At that moment, military censorship came into play. It was so strong that the Minister of Information, Distel Atbaryan, resigned in the middle of the war.

It is not possible to know the exact composition of the war council, whose deliberations were very stormy. We just know that the Minister of Defense, General Yoav Gallant, is not at all on the same wavelength as his predecessor, General Benny Ganz. To the point that the Prime Minister called for help the former chief of staff, General Gadi Eisenkot, a supporter of massive bombings of civilians, so that he could participate in the council’s deliberations as an observer. Under no circumstances should Israelis and the rest of the world know how each other reacts to Benjamin Netanyahu’s passivity in the preparation of Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” and in the early hours of its implementation. . Likewise, no one knows what the war council decided. President Isaac Herzog himself was kept out of the deliberations.

It seems that the debates discussed the expulsion to Egypt or the massacre of the two million inhabitants of Gaza. This is why the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, urgently went to Tel Aviv to call for calm.

7. How can things evolve?

International law grants Israel the right to defend itself against the attack it is suffering. This is what he did for five days while chasing the attackers who had entered his territory. Subsequently, Israel began the siege of Gaza, while the Israeli army bombarded Gaza City (but not the southern Gaza Strip). This operation once again violates international law. If we can accept that Israel has a right to follow up on Palestinian fighters in Gaza, the siege of the Gaza Strip and the bombing of civilian buildings are war crimes. At a press conference, it emerged that Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, does not know what his army is planning.

Referring to the position of the Arab League since the Six-Day War, Egypt closed its border with Gaza. The League intends to support Palestinian demands and therefore refuses any transfer of population and any naturalization. Furthermore, Cairo does not intend to take responsibility for 2 million immigrants and especially not for Hamas, whose parent company, the Muslim Brotherhood, is banned in Egypt.

The Israeli army stands ready to reoccupy the Gaza Strip. It is massing all around. The occupation of Gaza would constitute a violation of international law, while a counter-insurgency war would, in itself, be a war crime.

The United States has shipped weapons and ammunition to Israel. They deployed a naval group off the coast of Gaza (the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford , the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy and the four guided-missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt ), then a second naval group (the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower , the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea , and the three guided-missile destroyers USS Laboon, USS Mason, and USS Gravely ). However, they called on Israel to exercise restraint.

It seems impossible that Israel could carry out Vladimir Jabotinsky’s project and forcefully empty the Gaza Strip of its two million inhabitants, without international intervention, starting with that of Hezbollah. A withdrawal of the army is more likely.

Religious fundamentalists think that because God is on their side – more, that God has Chosen Them to be His People — they can leave it to Him to keep tabs on history, remember the lessons of the past, count the years, tote up the gains, costs,  and losses.   So long as God doesn’t issue any red alerts or insolvency notices during their prayers, when the Chosen People get up they can concentrate their minds and resources on preparing for the future. When the murder of a million or two Palestinians is the future which the Israelis and Americans are concentrating on now, it’s obvious that they and their God have not been re-reading the Melian Dialogue, if He did in the first place.

That’s Sections 84 to 116 of Book Five of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which he wrote over twenty years of the war, from 431 to 411 BC, leaving off before Athens and its army were defeated and lost everything they thought they had won.

It was in 416 that the Athenian army laid a starvation siege to Melos; then when the Melians surrendered, the Athenians murdered every man and enslaved every woman and child. After that, the Athenian empire of Melos lasted just eleven years before the Athenians were driven off the island by a Spartan force the Hellenes had become too weak to resist. The German empire of the island didn’t murder as many; they were driven off after just two years, from 1943 to 1945.

What Thucydides has reproduced in his book is the argument for genocide if you think you are strong enough to get away with it.  

Its main point — the most remembered today of the lines from the book — is the Athenian declaration: “When these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they must.”  

This is what US President Joseph Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are insisting upon. It’s what Biden means to demonstrate with his fleets in the eastern Mediterranean, northern Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf.  

This is slaughter of everybody in Gaza because the Americans and the Israelis have the power,  for the time being.

Practical people is the phrase Thucydides put in the mouth of the Athenian side in the dialogue.

ATHENIANS

These days it means politicians running for election. They are Vladimir Putin in March 2024; Olaf Scholz in June 2024; Biden in November 2024; Rishi Sunak in January 2025; the French election is in 2027 but Emmanuel Macron cannot run for a third term. Netanyahu’s term is likely to run out as soon as the war against the Palestinians of Gaza ends. If all of them are dead or gone, Netanyahu may win.

The only certain winner on this list of practical people is Putin; he has now agreed with the Russian Army to concentrate their force against the US on the Ukrainian battlefield. The terms of this agreement can be found on, and also between, the lines of Putin’s speech of October 30.  Read between the lines here.  

In Thucydides’s reconstruction and dramatisation of the negotiations between the attacking and the defending sides,  the Melians acknowledged it was pointless appealing to commonly held ideas of justice, morality, and  fair play because the Athenians made clear they didn’t share them. Worse, the Athenians said they were convinced that only by demonstrating their superior force against the weaker Melians could they deter others, including their own critical and restive fellow citizens at home. “It is not so much your hostility that injures us,” the Athenians said. “It is rather the case that if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness, whereas your hatred is a sign of our power.”

So the Melians tried arguing instead that there were common and shared political and economic interests which should spare them from the Athenians’ liquidation plan. “If yours and ours happen to coincide, we must try to persuade you of the fact. Is it not certain that you will make enemies of all states who are at present neutral, when they see what is happening here and naturally conclude that in the course of time you will attack them too?”

Forget it – there is only the present for you, leave the future to us, the Athenians replied. “This is no fair fight , with honour on one side and shame on the other. It is rather a question of saving your lives and not resisting those who are far too strong for you.”

Death-dealing is the power – for those who are victims, and even more for those who are witnesses. Hope for another outcome which the Melians expressed, “is by nature”, said the Athenians, “an expensive commodity, and those who are risking all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined.”

The Melians tried the Chosen People line. That wasn’t because they were Semites, although  God had  sailed westward from ancient Palestine to make landfall on the island. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people but not a Jewish one, had established trading posts on Melos and intermarried with the Caucasian arrivals from Sparta, on the Hellenic mainland. The Athenians dismissed the theology – God, like history and warfare, chooses winners, not losers. “So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have,” the Melians were told. “Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can.”

The Melians then tried to argue that if they fought on for long enough, their ethnic allies, the Spartans, would come to their rescue, break the Athenian siege, defeat Athens. “Where danger is concerned,” came the Athenian reply, “the Spartans are not as a rule very venturesome.”

The force calculus would prevail on the Spartans, the Athenians were confident – Melos was too small and was surrounded, so a Spartan relief operation was out of the question. “What is looked for is a positive preponderance of power in action. And the Spartans pay attention to this point even more than others do.”

Inferiority wasn’t so dishonourable, the Athenians offered as they prepared to wind up the talks.  “There is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms – alliance on a tribute-paying basis and liberty to enjoy your own property…And when you are allowed to choose between war and safety…this is the safe rule – to stand up to one’s equals, to behave with deference to one’s superiors, and to treat one’s inferiors with moderation.”

MELIANS

The two sides then adjourned for internal consultations; later they returned to the table for the last round. The Melians said they had decided not to surrender their seven-hundred year old city state. “We put our trust in the fortune that the gods will send and which has saved us up to now, and in the help of men — that is of the Spartans; and so we shall try to save ourselves.” They added they were still open to negotiating terms of “a treaty which shall be agreeable to both you and us”. One condition was non-negotiable — the Athenians must “leave our country”.

The Athenian negotiators stood up. “As you have staked most on and trusted most in Spartans, luck, and hopes, so in all these you will find yourselves most deluded.”

The Athenian army built a new wall completely cutting off the Melians inside their city from the outside. Several months of siege followed while the Athenians withdrew their heavy forces to fight elsewhere. The Melians made sallies to capture food. Then the Athenians returned in force; but even then they didn’t risk a frontal assault. Instead, they bribed several Melians inside the city to betray the others. “As there was also some treachery from inside,” Thucydides concluded his account without more detail, “the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. Melos itself they took over for themselves, sending out later a colony of 500 men.” Book Five ends at this point.

That was almost two thousand five hundred years ago.

It’s near-certain that Biden and Netanyahu haven’t read the Melian Dialogue. If men like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jacob Sullivan were required to read the book during their undergraduate studies at Harvard and Yale, they have forgotten that after the genocide of the Melians, the Athenians were defeated – first their army and foreign empire, then their domestic democracy.

These practical men can hear the political clock ticking. They can’t hear the gods counting down.

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s. 

Diego did his disturbing work. The video he forwarded outdoes it all so far by provoking a disgust as profound as any I have ever felt. It features a number of scenes wherein Israelis record themselves sadistically ridiculing Palestinians in the most cravenly cruel manner. They imitate Palestinian children dying or starving. They apply racially offensive makeup. They laugh and dance while switching lights on and off and while ostentatiously drinking water from taps—this last to mock Gazans as Israel deprives them of power, potable water, food and much else.

And I am describing the children in these videos, ranging in age from, maybe, six or seven to somewhere in their teens or early twenties. The mothers stand behind them, smiling with approval and delight. Here is the video as posted by Al Jazeera English last Thursday. I have since seen several others like it.

By common agreement among many lawyers, scholars of international law, special rapporteurs, and the like—including Israelis in these fields—what we witness daily now is by all acceptable definitions a genocide. Whether or not Israel is committing war crimes by the hour is not even worth debating. But I am taken up now by the spectacle of human beings who have allowed themselves to be destroyed in the name of an ideology that proves every bit as racist as it was when, in 1975, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism to be so. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991; it should not have been.

I am reminded of what I learned years ago when studying the Japanese Imperial Army’s conduct in China and Korea before and during World War II and the long record of the Kempeitai, commonly known as Imperial Japan’s Thought Police. Victimizers, I came to conclude with conviction, are victims, too. This holds for the people in the videos I have recently viewed and for every Israeli wearing an IDF uniform. They have been stripped of all ordinary decency by the radical ideologues of “the Jewish state.” They can laugh or sneer or pull all the triggers they like: Their lives, too, have been destroyed. Look at the videos: The evidence of this is in every frame.  

“Nothing human disgusts me” is a line I remember well from The Night of the Iguana, the 1961 play by the superbly human Tennessee Williams. I hold to this thought (even while reading the foreign pages of The New York Times). What has happened to the people in the videos must disgust us. But what they suffer as victims could happen to all but the strongest among us. They are appalling specimens of humanity, but they are human. As we find our way to some morally, intellectually defensible high ground during the atrocities we witness daily, we need to bear this in mind.

And this, too: Those videos were not shot in isolation. They reflect a culture of racism, xenophobia, hatred, and—we see this now—sadism that has taken pride in itself for many years. These sentiments are instruments of the state, carefully cultivated. You may remember the videos shot at the time of the al–Aqsa crisis two years ago. Young Israelis in sparkling school uniforms or stylish clothes leapt up and down in a sort of frenzy in the streets of Jerusalem while shouting, “Death to all Arabs.” I read those images looking back and forward: They were the flowers of the Israeli state’s century of official indoctrination and a prelude to the videos coming out now.

Arnold Toynbee, the great if no longer fashionable historian, argued in his 12–volume “A Study of History” that civilizations rise when creative elites respond to new circumstances with imagination and courage, while they decline, in turn, not in consequence of external factors but due to spiritual collapses within. This is the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu, the Israel whose plan, we know by way of an official document leaked over the weekend, is to ethnic-cleanse Gaza and incorporate it into the Jewish state. Its leaders are brutes and—as the videos I reference show—they have destroyed Israel’s human spirit. 

I saw an interview Sunday with a Defense Department contractor who has visited Israel dozens of times over many years on DoD work. He recounted the steady decline in any belief in a peaceful settlement of the Israel–Palestine crisis that he has detected since 2007. For most Israelis, he observed, it is down to violence now. A headline in Monday’s editions of The Times, recording these changing desires and expectations: “I Don’t Have That Empathy. It’s Not Me Anymore.” This is the voice of a nation that has demolished itself in its attempts to destroy others. 

A couple of weeks ago in this space I published a commentary asserting that the two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine question is dead, and a single, secular state is the only way forward. I had some mail afterward to the effect that a one-state solution is too far from reality to think about. I will reply here that these readers have it upside-down. A one-state solution is now the only realistic idea worth considering. Until Israelis accept that they must live in a single nation wherein Palestinians dwell as equal citizens, there is no more future for them than there is for Palestinians. They, Israelis, will be condemned to live in a walled-off garrison state that will come to look ever more like a commodious version of the “open-air prison” we speak of when we speak of Gaza. 

“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” Netanyahu said in a much-remarked speech to the nation last Wednesday, “and light shall triumph over darkness.” This is the utterance of a destroyer—of people, of hope—a man who cannot find his way out of the Old Testament and nonsensically demands we live in it with him, a man who simply should not be leading anything in the 21st century. 

And we, we Americans, are urged daily to support the depravity into which this man leads Israel ever more deeply. Netanyahu’s depravity, Israel’s, must be ours, too. We are urged now to openly endorse war crimes and a genocide. And so we, too, are in consequence letting an apartheid state’s intentionally terrorizing campaign against Palestinians accelerate our none-too-sturdy nation into the kind of internal collapse Toynbee described as the dynamic of decline.

Across the country you find confrontations between those who argue in behalf of their consciences and those who censure, name-call, deplatform, or otherwise attempt to ruin them for not supporting open-and-shut murder. At the University of Pennsylvania, wealthy donors threaten to withhold their support if the administration does not come out in favor of this savagery. The Writers Guild of America West is under attack for similarly refraining. Artforum, the monthly chronicler of the gallery scene, fired its editor for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire, whereupon collectors now threaten to “deaccession” the works of artists who also signed. Let us add to this a 71–year old man’s murder of a 6–year-old Palestinian boy near Chicago two weeks ago, an incident that left his mother in critical condition. 

These implicit defenses of systematic savagery must be dressed up, of course. And so America plunges into the disgracefully cynical argument that to oppose the Israeli operation in Gaza is anti–Semitic. The Chinese put their hands up to contribute to a ceasefire and talks toward an enduring settlement of one or another kind, but China is anti–Semitic because it has not condemned the Hamas assault. 

A museum bureaucrat named Sarah Lehat Blumenstein is now going after artists who signed the letter that got Artforum’s editor fired. She threatens them with “a deaccession plan to dimmish the artists’ status.” Explaining herself in an interview with The Times, she said her efforts reflect “a fear that rising anti–Semitism was endangering her right to exist.”

The ADL may wish to come after me for this one, such have things come to, but this statement proposes a patently ridiculous equivalence, albeit one emblematic of the post–October 7 climate. If you oppose the Israelis’ genocide operation and merely call for a ceasefire, some museum functionary is frightened that her life is under threat? I view this as more than a vulgar misuse of history and a contemptuous use of the victim card. This reflects a nation that no longer knows how to make sense of itself. 

I loved, in this connection, a piece The Times ran in last Saturday’s editions to dress up, as a matter of personal affection, what has to be the Biden regime’s worst policy failure to date. Joe Biden just loves Israel, Peter Baker, The Times’s White House correspondent, wants us to know, and we should understand this—and along the way accept his “unwavering support.” “Some confidants,” Baker then writes, “said that Mr. Biden’s Irish heritage makes him relate to the plight of historically marginalized people and that his own family tragedy connects him to the grief of those who have lost so much.”

Readers, take as much time as you wish lingering over this, among the most preposterous sentences written to explain U.S. policy since violence erupted October 7. 

We propose to ban the exercise of conscience, condemnations of the out-of-control violence of an openly racist nation. No, you cannot think that. No, you cannot say that. You must think and say this. We tell ourselves stories about what good, well-intended fellows are those who support atrocities. U.S. foreign policy has not for many decades had much to do with the ideals of Western civilization as we were taught to think of them. Now we whose taxes pay for policy are urged to come right out with it: Yes, we approve of war crimes, violence against noncombatants, ethnic cleansing. What is Israel costing us? Ourselves and our self-respect, our psychological coherence, our regard of history, our culture, our humanity. 

Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the West cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the grave, grave error of al–Nakba in 1948, when began the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land. See the Toynbee reference above: Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it. And so Israel will continue to pull us in the wrong direction—or further in the wrong direction, I ought to say. I hope I am not around if ever Americans start in with the sadistic videos.

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Patrick Lawrence

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored without explanation.