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Tag Archives: Israel
Einstein on the creation of Israel
However, he did not support the establishment of a Jewish state or an Arab state to replace the British Mandate for Palestine, instead asserting that he would “much rather see a reasonable agreement reached with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace” under the framework of a binational Jewish–Arab state.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), a German-born scientist, was predominantly known during his lifetime for his development of the theory of relativity, his contributions to quantum mechanics, and many other notable achievements in modern physics. However, his political views also garnered much public interest due to his fame and involvement in political, humanitarian, and academic projects around the world.
Einstein was a peace activist and a firm advocate of global federalism and world law. He favoured the principles of socialism, asserting that it was an ideological system that fixed what he perceived as the inherent societal shortcomings of capitalism. This became especially apparent in his later life, when he detailed his economic views in a 1949 article titled “Why Socialism?” for the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review. However, his view was not entirely uniform: he was critical of the methods employed by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, stating that they did not have a “well-regulated system of government” and had instead established a “regime of terror” over the fallen Russian Empire. His visible position in society allowed him to speak and write frankly, even provocatively, at a time when many people were being silenced across the European continent due to the swift rise of Nazism in Germany. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler assumed office as Germany’s leader while Einstein was visiting the United States. Einstein, an Ashkenazi Jew, was staunchly opposed to the policies of the Nazi government, and after his family was repeatedly harassed by the Gestapo, he renounced his German citizenship and permanently relocated to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1940. Though he held a generally positive view of the country’s culture and values, he frequently objected to the systematic mistreatment of African Americans and became active in their civil rights movement. As a Labor Zionist, Einstein supported the Palestinian Jews of the Yishuv. However, he did not support the establishment of a Jewish state or an Arab state to replace the British Mandate for Palestine, instead asserting that he would “much rather see a reasonable agreement reached with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace” under the framework of a binational Jewish–Arab state. Nonetheless, he praised the Truman administration for granting diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel in 1948.
Israel Unveils New Defense System To Deflect Accusations Of Human Rights Violations
The Onion • Jul 25, 2014 Subscribe to The Onion on YouTube: http://bit.ly/xzrBUA A new report finds climate change skeptics could reach catastrophic levels by 2020, the nation’s gratuitously sexual couples announce plans to wait in line at Six Flags, and a local grandpa looks absolutely precious in his new baseball cap. It’s the week of July 25, 2014.
The Secret Elite & the Balfour Declaration
BY JIM MACGREGOR & GERRY DOCHERTY
From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 3 (June 2018) (newdawnmagazine.com)
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has barely been out of the news since the State of Israel was created in 1948. Few people are aware of the secret wheeling and dealing that went on behind the scenes in the lead-up to the fateful decision of the British government to announce its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland.
The critical events discussed in the following article took place during World War I, the first global conflict in which millions of young men died on the battlefield. Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, authors of the book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, have previously appeared in New Dawn, writing about the real power behind the war, the group they identified as “The Secret Elite” – made up of bankers and politicians.
In the following exclusive article, they expose the shocking truth behind the controversial Balfour Declaration that justified the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and subsequently the State of Israel.
LETTER FROM ARTHUR BALFOUR TO LORD WALTER ROTHSCHILD
Foreign Office, November 2 1917
‘Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government the following Declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which have been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. I should be grateful if you would bring this Declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
(signed) ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR’1
The above letter was released by the British Foreign Office and printed in The Times on 9 November 1917.
Why at this critical juncture did the British War Cabinet decide publicly to favour Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people? There was a war on, and it wasn’t going particularly well. What was their purpose? Where did this fit into the Secret Elite’s strategy to crush Germany and advance its globalist ambition? How had it come about that a homeland for one specific religious group appeared on the agenda as if it was a solution to an unstated problem? Even if anyone believed the lie that the Allies were fighting for the rights of smaller nations, why had religious identity suddenly become an issue of nationhood? Had anyone considered giving Catholics such rights in Ireland or Muslims such rights in India? Was the world to be divided into exclusive religious territories? Of course not.
To complicate matters further, one nation (Britain) solemnly promised a national home to what would become in time a second nation (the Jewish State of Israel) on land which belonged to another people (Palestinian Arabs) while it was still an integral part of a fourth (the Ottoman/Turkish Empire).2 In pandering to a relatively small group of Zionists, the Balfour Declaration was bizarre, deceitful and a deliberate betrayal of the loyal Arabs fighting in the desert war against the Turks. Perfidious Albion had rarely plumbed such duplicitous depths.
The absolute destruction of Germany and her Ottoman allies promised to pave the way for a post-war re-drawing of maps and spheres of influence which would advance the Secret Elite’s overall strategy – namely the control of the English-speaking elect over the world. The strategic sands of Arabia and the oil-rich lands of Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia had long been prime targets. These were the first in a number of prerequisites which would shape the Middle East after 1919 to the advantage of Britain in particular. Critically, as a neutral, America had to be very careful about open intervention even after she had entered the war in 1917, and to an extent Britain acted as her proxy in putting markers down for a new world order. It is important to remember that when early discussions about the future of a Jewish homeland in Palestine were in progress, little mention was made of American involvement. The truth is otherwise. America was directly involved in secret intrigues.
So, too, were small but influential groups of politicians and businessmen, English, American, French, Russian, men and women of the Jewish faith spread literally across the world, who supported a growing movement to establish a permanent homeland in Palestine. They were called Zionists. Take care with this term. Initially it included a range of Jewish groups which held different views and aspirations. Some saw Zionism as a purely religious manifestation of ‘Jewishness’. A small but intensely vocal group fostered political ambitions. This latter form of Zionism included those determined to ‘reconstitute’ a national home for their co-religionists. In the words of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, “a national home for the Jewish race or people” implied a place where the Jews could be reassembled as a nation, and where “they [would] enjoy the privileges of an independent national existence.”3
There were a small number of suggested sites for the proposed new homeland, including one in Uganda, but in the first years of the twentieth century a more determined Zionist element began to focus their attention on the former land of Judea in the Middle East. They spoke of the creation in Palestine of an autonomous Jewish State, a political entity composed of Jews, governed by Jews and administered mainly in their interests. In other words, the recreation of a mythical Jewish State as was claimed to exist before the days of the so-called ‘diaspora’.4 Few voices were raised to ask what that meant, on what evidence it was predicated, or how it might be justified? It was an assumed biblical truth. Not every Jew was a Zionist; far from it, and that’s an important factor which must be borne in mind.
Frequently, historians write versions of history which imply an event ‘just happened’. In other words, they begin at a point that creates the impression there was no essential preamble, no other influence which underwrote the central action. One example is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. For generations, school pupils have been taught this murder caused World War I. Such nonsense helped deflect attention away from the true culprits. Another example can be found in the usual interpretation of the Balfour Declaration which has been described as the British Government’s note of approval for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, as if it turned up one day on the Foreign Secretary’s desk and was signed like the other items in his out-tray. It has been downplayed, granted but a minor mention in the memoirs and diaries of the politicians who carefully orchestrated its single sentence. The Balfour Declaration was much more than a vague promise made by British politicians under the pressure of war’s contingency. Such a simple interpretation has conveniently masked the international pressures which the hidden powers on both sides of the Atlantic asserted in favour of a monumental policy decision that opened the door to the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.
‘The Zionist Movement’
At the 261st meeting of the British War Cabinet on 31 October 1917, with Prime Minister Lloyd George in the Chair, the membership comprised Lord Curzon, Lord Alfred Milner, Andrew Bonar Law, (Conservative leader) Sir Edward Carson, G N Barnes (Labour Party), the South African General Jan Smuts and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. This was the inner-circle formed mainly from the Secret Elite’s political agents to run the war.5 They remained behind the closed doors of 10 Downing Street after other war business had been completed. The military and naval representatives were dismissed before the War Cabinet’s inner cabal proceeded to discuss the on-going issue of ‘The Zionist Movement’. As always, Lloyd George’s War Cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, recorded the minutes. This coterie of British imperialists, and Secret Elite members and associates, agreed unanimously that “from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made.”6 To that end a carefully constructed form of words was tabled and the War Cabinet authorised Foreign Secretary Balfour “to take a suitable opportunity of making the following declaration of sympathy with the Zionist aspiration.” It was no co-incidence that some five days previously the editor of The Times had urged them to make this statement.7
Two days after the War Cabinet’s decision, a letter was sent from the Foreign Office to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild (2nd Baron Rothschild) in London asking that he “bring this Declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.” It was signed Arthur James Balfour, and henceforth was known as the Balfour Declaration, though it was the product of many more minds than solely that of the British Foreign Secretary.8 Its precise wording was publicised across Jewish communities who hailed the letter as the beginning of a new epoch in their history. Despite the apparent care with which the War Cabinet attempted to lay down conditions to protect non-Jewish communities, in particular the rights of the Palestinian Arabs to whom the country belonged, the event was celebrated by Zionists across the world as a National Charter for a Jewish homeland.9 The genie was out of the bottle.
In truth, the letter was the product of years of careful lobbying in both Britain and America. It was neither a beginning nor an end-point. Though the communication was essentially between the British government and the Zionist Federation in Britain, it had an almost casual feel to it as if it was simply a letter between two members of the English gentry, Balfour and Rothschild. The Declaration was far from casual and much more contrived than a gentleman’s agreement.
By all known processes of law and morality, it was ridiculous. Consider the unprecedented nature of the proposal. Britain held no sovereign right whatsoever over Palestine or authority to dispose of the land.10 As if this would not cause sufficient confusion, the British Foreign Office had already promised parts of Palestine to the French, to the Arabs who owned the land, and finally, to the international Jewish community. Was there ever a better example of the wanton arrogance of the British imperialist ruling class? The very wording of the Balfour Declaration was ambiguous; the conditions set were impossible. What was meant by the phrase, “a national home”? It had no clearly defined meaning in international law. How could a foreign government promise to achieve world-wide approval for a national home for Jews in an Arab country without automatically prejudicing the rights of the Arabs whose ancestors had lived there for thousands of years?11 Its vagueness gave rise to interpretations and expectations which were certain to cause bitter dispute. What was going on?
Secret Discussions
The answer can be found by examining earlier versions of this controversial document and the extent to which Zionists on both sides of the Atlantic strove to nurture and protect it. Far from any notion of their sudden conversion to Zionism, the political drive to establish a Jewish homeland in the sands of the desert, British politicians had been engaged in such discussions for several years. This fact had been conveniently omitted from official histories, memoirs and government statements.
A previous War Cabinet meeting on 4 October 1917 had considered an almost identical draft declaration from Lord Alfred Milner, the most influential leader of the inner circle of the Secret Elite. He included the words “favour the establishment of a National Home for the Jewish Race.”12 The capitalisation of the term National Home was later altered, as was the very Milnerite phrase, “Jewish Race.” Lord Milner was a very precise thinker. While the words National Home implied that the Jewish people throughout the world should have a defined area to call their own, his version favoured “the establishment” of such a place. It did not imply a return to a land over which they had assumed rights. Secondly, Alfred Milner held race in great esteem. He defined himself with pride as a British “Race Patriot.”13 His wording was a mark of respect. Others feared it was a dangerous phrase which might be interpreted aggressively. It clashed with the concept of Jewish assimilation, like Jewish-Americans, and hinted that as a faith group, Jews belonged to a specific race of peoples. Consequently, his version was toned down.
Secretly, the War Cabinet decided to seek the opinion on the final wording of the declaration from both representative Zionists (their phrase) and those of the Jewish faith opposed to the idea of a national homeland. It is crucial to clearly understand that inside the international Jewish community there was a considerable difference of opinion, in favour of and against, this idea of a Jewish ‘homeland’. That these groups were apparently given equal standing suggested the Jewish community in Britain was equally split on the issue. They were not. The number of active Zionists was relatively small, but very influential.
Furthermore, the War Cabinet sought the American President’s opinion on the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine.14 The minutes of the 245th meeting of the War Cabinet in London revealed that Woodrow Wilson was directly involved in the final draft of the Declaration. So, too, was his minder, Colonel Edward Mandell House,15 and the United States’ only Jewish Chief Justice, Louis Brandeis,16 both of whom telegrammed different views to the British government.17 On 10 September, Mandell House indicated that the President advised caution; on 27 September, Judge Brandeis cabled that the President was in entire sympathy with the declaration. Much can change in politics over two and a half weeks.
As each layer of the onion is slowly peeled away from the hidden inner core of the eponymous Declaration, it becomes apparent that the given story has glossed over key figures and critical issues. There are hidden depths to this episode that mainstream historians have kept from public view and participants have deliberately misrepresented or omitted from their memoirs.
Secret Elite Fully Involved
The minutes of the War Cabinet Committee held on 3 September 1917 show that the earlier meeting had also been crammed with Secret Elite members and associates including Leo Amery, formerly Milner’s acolyte in South Africa.18 Item two on the agenda revealed that “considerable correspondence… has been passed between the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [A J Balfour] and Lord Walter Rothschild… on the question of the policy to be adopted towards the Zionist movement.”19 What? “Considerable correspondence” had been exchanged between Lord Rothschild and the Foreign Office; not a letter or enquiry, but considerable correspondence. A copy of one of these letters sent from the Rothschild mansion at 148 Piccadilly on 18 July 1917 has survived in the War Cabinet minutes. What it reveals shatters the illusion that the British government’s promise of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine stemmed exclusively from the Foreign Office under the pen of Arthur Balfour. Lord Rothschild’s letter began:
“Dear Mr. Balfour,
At last I am able to send you the formula you asked me for. If his Majesty’s Government will send me a message on the lines of this formula, if they and you approve of it, I will hand it on to Zionist Federations and also announce it at a meeting called for that purpose…”20
He enclosed his (Rothchild’s) recommendation for a draft declaration. It comprised two sentences: “(1) His Majesty’s Government accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people. (2) His Majesty’s Government will use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this object and will discuss the necessary methods and means with the Zionist Organisations.”21
Balfour’s reply “accepted the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted… and will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them.” What? How do you “reconstitute” a country? It might be interesting to consider the precedent that was being set. Could this mean that one day America might be reconstituted as a series of native Indian reserves or parts of England as Viking territory? Astonishingly, the Zionist movement was invited to dictate its designs for British foreign policy in Palestine.22 This was not some form of loose involvement. It was complicity. Lloyd George’s government, through the war cabinet, colluded with the Zionist Federation to concoct a statement of intent that met their (Zionist)approval. Furthermore, it was agreed that such an important issue, namely the future of Palestine, should be discussed with Britain’s allies, and “more particularly with the United States.”23 This action had all the hallmarks of an international conspiracy.
How many lies have been woven around the design and origins of the Balfour Declaration? Lord Walter Rothschild was the chief intermediary between the British government and the Zionist Federation. In this capacity he had been involved in the process of creating and formulating a new and explosive British commitment to the foundation of a Jewish home in Palestine. More than that, Rothschild and his associates sought to control “the methods and means” by which it would be created.
The Balfour Declaration was part of a process which was not bound by the convenience of time frames that shunts history into segments. Politically it served the Secret Elite ambitions both in the short and long terms. They understood that a pro-British Palestine would protect the vital sea route along the Suez Canal; that a declaration in support of Zionism would unlock the treasures which they desperately needed to crush Germany; that in both America and Britain, young Jewish men would come forward to join the dwindling rank and file in their armies. In all of this it is generally forgotten that unless powerful figures supported the Zionist claims before the war ended and established some vehicle through which they could influence the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, a rapid end to World War I would have been disastrous to their long-term ideals.
In our book Prolonging the Agony, this whole question is carefully dissected to reveal the double-dealing and double standards which were cruelly visited on the Arabs of Palestine, and the rank complicity of the British and American governments. Most pertinently we produce documented evidence that clearly shows the manner in which an early attempt to encourage the Turkish Ottomans to abandon the war in 1917 was stopped dead in its tracks because no basis had yet been established for Zionist inclusion in any post-war settlement.
The Balfour Declaration was no gentleman’s agreement.
Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty’s book Prolonging the Agony: How The Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-and-a-Half Years, citing original source documents, proves that World War I was deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged by the Secret Elite. The book is a fully documented exposé – a true history of the terrible events and shameful lies.
This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 3.
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Footnotes
1. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4 WC 261, p. 6
2. The original quotation from which this observation is taken was made by Arthur Koestler in Promise and Fulfilment, Palestine 1917–1949, p. 4
3. National Archives, War Cabinet Memorandum GT 2406.
4. Cabinet Papers: CAB 24/30; War Cabinet Memorandum GT 2406, p. 1
5. ‘The Great British Coup’ on author’s blog: firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com
6. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4, WC 261 p. 5
7. The Times, 26 October 1917, p. 7
8. Letter from A J Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917
9. ‘Great Britain, Palestine and the Jews. Jewry’s Celebration Of Its National Charter’,Anonymous pamphlet, 1917
10. Sol M. Linowitz, ‘Analysis of a Tinderbox: The Legal Basis for the State ofIsrael’, American Bar Association Journal, Vol. 43, 1957, p. 523
11. Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment, Palestine 1917–1949, p. 4
12. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4/19 WC 245, p. 6
13. A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 401
14. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4/19 WC 245, p. 6
15. War Cabinet Memorandum: GT 2015
16. War Cabinet Memorandum: GT 2158
17. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4/19 p. 5
18. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4/1. WC. 227, p. 1
19. War Cabinet Memorandum: 1803 – The Zionist Movement.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Cabinet Papers: CAB 24/24/4
23. Cabinet Papers: CAB 23/4/1. WC 227, p. 2
© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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About the Author
GERRY DOCHERTY was born in 1948. He graduated from Edinburgh University in 1971 and was a secondary school teacher by profession. He taught economics and modern studies, developed a keen interest in the theatre and has written a number of plays with historical themes. One of these plays was the powerful story of two cousins from his home town of Tillicoultry who were both awarded the Victoria Cross at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Energised by the research he had undertaken to write this play, he was intrigued by Jim Macgregor’s work on the First World War, and their mutual interest developed into a passion to discover the truth amongst the lies and deceptions that the official records contained. JIM MACGREGOR was born in Glasgow in 1947 and raised in a cottage in the grounds of Erskine Hospital for war disabled. There he witnessed the aftermath of war on a daily basis and, profoundly affected by what he saw, developed a life-long interest in war and the origins of global conflict. Jim graduated as a medical doctor in 1978, and left the practice in 2001 to devote his energies full-time to researching the political failures in averting war. His numerous articles have been published on subjects such as miscarriages of justice, the Iraq War, global poverty, and the rise of fascism in the United States. His powerful anti-war novel The Iboga Visions was published to critical acclaim in 2009.
The Daily Show – We Need to Talk About Israel
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There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.
Oct. 14, 2023 (NYTimes.com)
By Peter Beinart
Mr. Beinart is a journalist and commentator who writes frequently about American foreign policy.
In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”
Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.
There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.
Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.
In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.
The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.
As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.
Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never set foot in it.
Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.
Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”
But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.
It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.
And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”
Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is affiliated with more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.
The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.
Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.
The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.
That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.
The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.
Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”
Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.
The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.
After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”
As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.
Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”
Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.
Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.
From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.
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A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 15, 2023, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Work of Moral Rebuilding Must Begin Now. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Speech of Prince Turki Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia about Israel & Hamas
Kuya Dennis Ca Oct 19, 2023 ? JUST IN: SAUDI PRINCE CONDEMNS HAMAS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE WAR For the first time since the war broke out, a Saudi Prince has condemned not only Israel, but also Hamas, AND Western countries! This is a significant shift in tone, signaling increased support for Israel as they prepare to enter Gaza. TWO IMPORTANT POINTS: 1. The normalization deal between Saudi and Israel is NOT dead 2. Hamas continues to lose support, getting increasingly isolated as the Israeli army threatens to ‘eliminate’ them Note: Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal does NOT speak on behalf of the Government. However he served as the head of the General Intelligence Presidency for 22 years. KEY QUOTES: – I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians of any age and gender. Such targeting belies Hamas’s claims of Islamic identity. There is an Islamic injunction against the killing of innocent children, women, elders, and places of worship. – I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to the Israeli government. – I condemn Hamas for ethnically cleansing Gaza and its citizens and bombing them into oblivion. – I condemn Hamas for undermining the Palestinian Authority, as Israel has been doing. – I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian plight. – I condemn Israel for its indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian innocent civilians and the attempt to forcibly drive them out of Gaza. – I condemn Israeli targeted killing and the indiscriminate arrest of children, women, and men in the West Bank. – I condemn Israel for stealing Palestinian lands – I condemn Israeli colonists for rampaging through houses of worship in Jerusalem – I condemn Israel for destroying Palestinian homes and olive orchards – I condemn Israel for incarcerating Palestinian children, women, and men in concentration camps – I condemn Israel for targeted killings and assassinations of Palestinians – I condemn Israel for funneling Qatari money to Hamas, a group defined as a terrorist organization by Israel – I condemn Western politicians for shedding tears when Israelis are killed by Palestinians but refusing to express sorrow when Israelis kill Palestinians – Two wrongs don’t make a right. – What more provocation is required, to make it provoked, than what Israel has done to Palestinian People for three quarters of a century