Israel's war
(agk) Links – 2023 November
Important background
- Israeli-American academic Omer Bartov, one of the world's leading authorities on genocide and Holocaust studies, recalled recent court reform in Israel to remove judicial oversight of significant ethnic cleansing in the West Bank as the immediate background of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza in his 11/24/23 The Hamas attack and Israel's war in Gaza.
- South African former anti-apartheid activist/Al Jazeera editor Tony Karon and former Israeli peace negotiator/US-Middle East Project policy institute president Daniel Levy wrote in The Nation about the impact of Hamas's attack and the following two months on Palestinian politics on 12/8/23: Israel is losing this war.
- Robert Asprey's standard work on insurgency and counter-insurgency, War in the Shadows, has excellent chapters on Jewish insurgency in the British mandate from the 1917 Balfour declaration til 1948 and Palestinian insurgency in Israel til the first Oslo Accord in 1993. His account is weak on two points:
- Mandatory Palestine was British war booty carried off from the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in WWI. For 400 years it had been part of Ottoman Syria. The British policy throughout its territories was to use a smaller colonial population as administrators of a larger colonial population, with the understanding if the administrators turned against the British, their ethnic group would likely be killed by the resentful larger colonized group. This generally kept the administrative ethnic group loyal. In Palestine, their Jews turned against the British and have ever since reaped the problem the British Empire created.
- Asprey doesn't describe the enormity of the ethnic cleansing of Arabs in the 1948 Nakba. He describes only one massacre, and enumerates refugees. Joe Sacco's book Footnotes on Gaza is useful for visualizing some of the enormity of the Nakba, and describes Israeli systematic killing of 375 civilians in 1956. It can be downloaded from Anna's Archive. The Great Book Robbery film, broadcast by Al-Jazeera and available on youtube, gives a sense of what was lost. Asprey's focus was insurgency, not violence by even new states.
Faithful Christian responses to Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing
- Kansas economist and classicist Michael Hudson discussed the biblical context
of Netanyahu's biblical justification for genocide and ethnic cleansing in his 11/17/23 article
Were the prophets antisemitic?
- Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister Jeff Wright wrote in progressive Jewish publication
Mondoweiss about American Christian public statements, prayers, and actions for peace
in his 11/17/23 article
American Christians join the movement for 'ceasefire now!'.
Anti-Zionism
- Anti-Zionism is a perspective in Jewish debates which were once about 19th century questions of assimilation and colonization, and are now about genocide, ethnic cleansing, justice, and safety. Jewish anti-Zionism is represented by organizations including Jewish Voices for Peace, Breaking the Silence, All That's Left, and many others, and Anti-Zionist Jews are prominent in multi-confessional groups like Samidoun and Students for Justice in Palestine. Perspectives in Palestinian debates about the state of Israel are probably better described by concepts like steadfastness (sumud) and resistance.
Live updates can demoralize and paralyze. Walter Benjamin's Thesis IX:
A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we percieve a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
- Middle East Eye is UK-based, probably backed by Qatar like Al-Jazeera. They have good sources and area knowledge. Coverage overlaps with most major news sites. There's more focus on Israeli atrocities than resistance.
- The Hearty Salon West Asia Front threads regularly update with resistance news from twitter, telegram, and other social media. Useful for staying on top of what Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and other members of the 'axis of resistance' do and say, and what kind of damage Israeli forces are taking. Israeli bombing, ground invasion, and settler pogroms don't currently look like they'll end due to an attack of conscience, intervention of international law, or the US cutting off massive deliveries of weapons. That leaves military defeat as unfortunately the most likely endgame.
- KET's coverage also interests me.
Poem: Resist, my people, resist them by Dareen Tatour
Resist, my people, resist them.
In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows
And carried the soul in my palm
For an Arab Palestine.
I will not succumb to the "peaceful solution,"
Never lower my flags
Until I evict them from my land.
I cast them aside for a coming time.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the settler's robbery
And follow the caravan of martyrs.
Shred the disgraceful constitution
Which imposed degradation and humiliation
And deterred us from restoring justice.
They burned blameless children;
As for Hadil, they sniped her in public,
Killed her in broad daylight.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the colonialist's onslaught.
Pay no mind to his agents among us
Who chain us with the peaceful illusion.
Do not fear doubtful tongues;
The truth in your heart is stronger,
As long as you resist in a land
That has lived through raids and victory.
So Ali called from his grave:
Resist, my rebellious people.
Write me as prose on the agarwood;
My remains have you as a response.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Art