Every pundit in the West seems to be talking about rearmament at the moment, and some governments have even promised to do it. But few people have much idea of what it involves, or even what the concept really means. Here’s a quick, and highly simplified guide to what it would mean and require in practice.
To begin with, we need to distinguish between politics and reality, bearing in mind that whatever option states eventually choose will contain bits of both. At one extreme, it’s easy to see how a medium-sized government, under pressure to “rearm”, but concerned about cost and practicability, might decide to react largely politically. So it could announce increases in defence expenditure which might or might not happen and whose real-terms value would depend on factors like inflation (“increase defence spending by 20% over the next five years!”) Symbolic increases in the size of the military could be announced, even if that military could not recruit enough personnel as it was. More reserves and part-time soldiers could make up some of the difference in numbers, without adding much capability. Equipment plans already agreed and funded could be counted towards the total. A few extra aircraft and armoured vehicles could be added to the end of existing orders, to be delivered some time in the next decade. And finally, units could be renamed and repurposed (an infantry battalion becomes an “airmobile” battalion with a new badge and a few helicopters scrounged from elsewhere.) So if your government starts announcing plans of this kind, the questions to ask include: how much of this is new? How much was planned anyway? Are spending increases in real or nominal terms? Are other capabilities being sacrificed or delayed to make way for announced new ones? And so on.
But let’s assume that, politics and presentation aside, a western state decides it actually wants to rearm on a significant scale. Well, the first thing to understand is that rearmament is not, primarily, a matter of spending money and buying equipment. Money in itself can only buy what is available to be bought: demand does not inevitably and instantly create its own supply, whatever Economics departments in Universities may teach these days. And any amount of equipment sitting around in storage is useless without personnel and support.
It’s also useless unless you know what you want to do with it. One point that seems to have escaped most commentators is that the purpose of rearmament is not necessarily just (or even) to have larger and more, powerful forces, it is to have a better capability to do the things you now believe you need to do as part of your security policy in the world as it is. Oh, and that implies having a security policy which is properly worked out, and in turn generates missions and tasks, that require capabilities, that in turn are provided through procurement and other means. If that sounds complicated, well it is, and so fantastic amounts of money are wasted by nations all over the world, not because of the absence of financial controls or budgetary accountants, but because governments spend money on defence without really understanding what they are doing and why they are doing it.
During the Cold War, it was noticeable that certain countries got very good value out of their defence budgets, because they had clear security policies, and developed clear defence policies to support them. So Germany and Sweden both, in different ways, put the majority of their effort into land/air territorial defence. Similarly, the French were ruthless in their prioritising: the nuclear force first, then Africa, then everything else. The British, obsessed with maintaining a “balanced force”, tried to do everything, at a smaller and smaller scale as time passed, winding up of course in their current parlous state. On the other hand, one reason that the US has historically wasted so much of its defence budget is that there is no central control or direction of any kind in Washington, but rather endless competition between powerful organisations which each try to expand into the areas of the others, and fight viciously among themselves. This produces enormous waste and duplication, not least because political strength, rather than strategic logic, determines where the money goes.
Since the end of the Cold War, western countries have drifted away from whatever real coherence in defence planning they then had, reacting to changing fashions and technologies, and being pushed this way and that in the absence of any clear doctrine. So the first requirement now, would be a thorough-going strategic reassessment, based on how the world looks after the end of the Ukraine War, followed by clear and coherent decisions about the practical steps that need to be taken. That, of course, is something that virtually every country has failed to do over the last generation, when the world was a simpler and less threatening place: nevertheless it is an absolute requirement now, and without it, money, as such, is irrelevant. But where on earth do you start?
It will be years before the strategic situation settles down properly, but we can perhaps make a few plausible guesses, on the basis of which we can construct some rearmament scenarios. Let’s assume that at the end of the current war, the area of Russian permanent control is the Russian speaking areas in the east of Ukraine, together with the coast up to Odessa. Beyond that may be an effectively demilitarised and de-populated zone, perhaps with a formal border of some kind. Some sort of Ukrainian state will therefore still be in existence. Very well, what does a representative NATO country actually do then, by way of rearmament? For a start, it’s hard to believe that the Russians have any interest in taking more territory, and certainly not that of NATO nations. So the situation is not like the Cold War, when NATO and WP forces faced each other across fortified borders.
If we look at the map, we see that the geographical situation would scarcely have changed, except that some Ukrainian territory has become Russian. Norway, the Baltics and Finland continue to have frontiers with Russia, as they do now. Depending on where Russian forces stop, there may be some contact with Romania. The changes, in other words, will be primarily psychological, rather than geographical, which is a problem when you want to make changes to your doctrine and forces. From the point of view of Greece or Portugal, nothing will have changed at all. We can expect the overall political atmosphere to be harsh and bitter, and at least as confrontational in principle as the Cold War was, yet the two sides will not be separated by the same fundamental ideological differences. And the West itself will be riven by internal jealousies and contradictions as well as by the different and often opposed economic and political interests of its members.
Creating a collective security strategy to respond to a situation like that may seem a tall order, if not utterly impossible, but it is, in fact, essential if western nations individually are to make plans that are even minimally coherent with each other. To take an extreme case, there is no point in hard-line western countries making plans to deploy their forces eastwards in a time of crisis, unless the countries into which those forces are going to deploy already have plans in place to receive them. So at a minimum, some kind of collective western strategic concept will be necessary. It’s not clear what kind of a state NATO will be in to produce one, and its history with documents of that type doesn’t inspire much confidence, but it’s doubtful if there will be any alternative forum in which to do it. Needless to say, the complexities of trying to produce a common concept based on a “threat” which is ill-defined and at best existential, are enormous, and would tax the resources of the finest brains and the best organisation.
Now then; we are the better part of 1500 words into this text about rearmament, and all I’ve done is to talk about the minimal conditions that would be necessary for it even to take place: and these are essentially conceptual and political, rather than practical. Without a clear idea of what rearmament is supposed to accomplish, you can waste large amounts of money and resources, and achieve nothing.
Let me suggest a possible outcome to conceptual debates: it’s not one I would necessarily recommend (I’m agnostic on these issues) but it would at least have the virtues of being tolerably clear and reasonably coherent. It is an example, in my view, of the minimum acceptable outcome that would actually make some sensible kind of rearmament theoretically possible, assuming that the resources were made available and the practical problems could be overcome.
We would have to start from the recognition that the West is weak where it matters. Thirty years of drift, and a steady movement away from a capacity for intensive land-air combat, and a concentration on counter-insurgency capabilities, have left the West with small, weak conventional forces in places where they might be needed. This would not matter if relations with Russia, the major military power on the continent, were good, but they are execrable, and about to get much worse. Moreover, NATO is sending so much of its own equipment to Ukraine that it is becoming steadily weaker. The US itself now has little actual combat power deployed in Europe.
So the risk is, ironically, a return to the mental atmosphere of the late 1940s: a weak and divided Europe, confronted with a Russia that was still heavily armed. The difference this time is that the Russian economy will not have been devastated by war and that its armed forces will not be low-quality occupation troops, but professionals armed with modern weapons. Unlike in the late 1940s, it’s not clear that a US link with Europe will stabilise the situation: indeed, it might well complicate it and make it worse. Under the circumstances, the fear in Europe would be of political intimidation rather than military conflict as such. If that were the case, then one could imagine priorities like the following being agreed:
Very large increases in armoured and mechanised ground forces, with artillery and attack helicopters.
Very large increases in fighter-ground attack aircraft, capable of surviving against Russian missiles.
Infrastructure and well-rehearsed plans for moving combat forces forward in a crisis.
Substantial programme to create proper layered missile defence system.
Now I would be astonished if, in practice, anything like this were agreed. But at least it provides the absolute minimum conceptual framework for ensuring that rearmament proceeds according to some kind of logic.
This kind of thing has happened in the past. A useful example is British air rearmament in the late 1930s, which was actually built around a clear strategic concept. The British government feared another war in Europe, but also believed that the return of conscription and the despatch of large forces to Europe would not be acceptable politically. And the greatest threat to an island nation was seen as air attack. Thus, the British developed a policy of expanding the Royal Air Force, developing new bomber aircraft with longer ranges, and subsequently developing new fighter aircraft as well, together with the world’s first radar system. This involved not just a massive programme of airfield renovation and construction (some 60,000 workers were employed full-time for years), but government-funded scientific and engineering development, construction of new factories ‘(including “shadow factories” which could be converted to war production if required) as well as huge new facilities for ammunition storage and production, flying training, operational command and control and administration and accommodation. It is reasonable to say, of course, that the technical expertise and organisational capability to carry out such a program no longer exists in Britain, nor for that matter in the West as a whole. But it does give a small indication of what “rearmament” means in practice.
So let’s take these four requirements: fantasising, perhaps, that the kind of authoritative strategic guidance required for effective rearmament programmes actually existed. Now there are some general points to make first. We have assumed that some kind of strategic concept for rearmament is available, and we have seen from a real example, that rearmament means a great deal more than buying equipment. There are massive personnel, infrastructure, logistic, scientific, technological and industrial issues as well. Let’s look at a few of the consequences as they would exist today.
Rearmament in the sense of this discussion means more than replacing old equipment with new equipment: indeed, it might well mean keeping old equipment in service when it should really have been scrapped. Most of all, it means extra military units: the RAF, in various expansion plans, formed a hundred new squadrons before 1939. And the first requirement is therefore extra personnel. In practice, this will require the reintroduction of military service in some form to fill the lower echelons. At the margins, it is possible to expand peacetime militaries somewhat, by vigorous recruitment. But militaries in most western countries now struggle to attract and retain enough applicants for their small professional forces. For example, depending on definitions, 10-20% of 18-25 year olds in most European countries are severely overweight or obese. (In the United States it is worse). Many of those already have illnesses like diabetes which are linked to weight and life-style. In addition, as professional militaries contract and become ever more distant from the population, young people find a military career less attractive. And smaller militaries mean worse career opportunities, and encourage the more able to leave. Most militaries are already struggling to pay their personnel enough to retain them, given the disadvantages of service life. Likewise, it is often particularly difficult to recruit and retain the people you actually need the most. This refers not just to glamour jobs like jet pilots, but to people like telecommunications technicians and field medical staff. Yet, of course, military service, even with reserve obligations in later years, cannot provide you magically with experienced officers and NCOs in shortage areas: these you will have to recruit on the open market in any case.
So in practice rearmament will mean both the return of military service (probably selective), and a considerably expanded officer and NCO corps, which will have to be recruited from scratch, and will take a decade to have any real presence. This will, of course, mean considerably expanding the recruiting, training and administrative systems of the military, and experienced trainers will have to be found from somewhere. The general de-industrialisation of western societies is a problem here as well: during the Cold War it was possible to conscript workers from electronics factories to be radar technicians or to repair thermal imaging sights on tanks. For the most part that is no longer possible. Likewise, in most western countries the number of science and technology graduates from universities is reducing, so the pool from which technical officers can be recruited is actually diminishing. In all likelihood, it will be necessary to set up special institutions to train engineers at technician and graduate level, although where the instructors will come from is not obvious.
But let us assume that these problems can be overcome, and that between intensive recruitment efforts and the return of selective military service, there is a large enough pool to draw on to fill out whatever force structure is decided upon. So how do you get the force structure, assuming that you don’t just shrug your shoulders and buy a few more of everything you already have?
Well, let’s go back to the missions and tasks. Assume a hypothetical NATO concept for a Force capable of moving East in the event of a crisis, and that on that basis, NATO asks your country for three mechanised brigades, with more artillery and air defence assets than at present, and two squadrons of attack helicopters. (We’ll assume that permanently stationing forces forward in other countries is just too politically and financially unrealistic. In Cold War Germany, the British, US and other forces essentially remained in the former Wehrmacht facilities they had taken over as occupation forces. That’s not going to happen in, say, Poland.) But of course if it comes to fighting, you can’t leave your own country undefended, so you want to retain two mechanised brigades for home defence, as well as substantial territorial defence forces. In addition, moving hundreds of vehicles through your country, most on heavy transporters, will create traffic management and security problems the like of which you probably haven’t seen in decades. (Oh yes, there’ll have to be a massive investment in transport units, as well as in railroads, air transport and strengthening roads and bridges.)
Well, there will be negotiation, of course, but after a while your experts will come back and say, perhaps: we need three completely new mechanised brigades, one new squadron of attack helicopters and modification of a second to the attack role, more artillery and air defence generally, and a massive investment in transport infrastructure. Most of the Cold War infrastructure has been sold off, so we’ll need new barracks, new training areas, new ordnance depots, new firing ranges, new communications units and infrastructure, new headquarters; oh and lots of less glamorous stuff like accommodation for the personnel, garages and maintenance depots, and personnel for the vehicles, schools and hospitals, that kind of thing. Very large numbers of people will have to be trained to operate and repair this equipment. In the Cold War, this kind of infrastructure generally existed: now, it generally does not, and land will have to be purchased and new facilities constructed.
The next day, the air force experts report back from their negotiations with NATO. They have finally agreed to provide three squadrons of ground-attack aircraft, optimised for low-level operations, and carrying stand-off weapons. This is a capability you do not currently possess. You do, of course, want to keep your existing fighter/ground attack capability for defence of your own terrain and airspace. Your extensive Cold War infrastructure has now largely been sold off: you may need to construct a new air base, to house the new operational squadrons as well as the training units. (You will anyway need to train more pilots per year, so your existing training facilities will need expanding.) Officers and technicians need to be recruited to learn about, teach and practice the repair and maintenance of a new type of aircraft and new weapons. Somehow, you’ll need to find the land, including perhaps building a complete new air base with a main runway perhaps 2km long, with hardened aircraft shelters, and maintenance facilities for 40-45 aircraft, and all the administrative, life support and security that goes along with it.
Now, I entirely accept that that’s a rather simplified, perhaps even superficial, presentation of what might be needed. Military experts, especially logistics specialists, will shake their heads and say it will all be more difficult than that, and they will no doubt be right. But it does give some impression of what would be involved. The other two issues—arranging to be able to deploy forward in crisis, or setting up a continent-wide anti-missile screen, have problems of equal or greater complexity, but this section is long enough already.
So let’s suppose that you are confident that you will be able to conscript and recruit enough personnel of the right type, including having reserves on standby, that you are busy constructing new barracks, airfields, ordnance depots and flying training areas with land you have purchased, that you have a coherent plan for how you intend to expand your military capabilities, in conjunction with your allies, and this is translated into a force structure that you can establish, support and use effectively. Then, of course, you need the equipment.
During the phase of preparation for the Second World War, even medium-sized countries had their own armaments industries. It was therefore possible to directly invest in one’s own industry, and define exactly what was needed. During the Second World War, some of the Allied belligerents used foreign aircraft and tanks (notably, but not exclusively, from the United States) when their own production was inadequate. But it is only really with the mammoth, shareholder-driven consolidation of the defence industry over the last generation or so that we have seen the number of suppliers shrink so radically. And the companies concerned now make equipment which is so expensive that it is produced in the minimum economic quantities as slowly as possible: about one Rafale fighter is manufactured per month, for example. Any serious western-wide rearmament programme would therefore run up against capacity problems instantly. In theory, new factories could be opened and production ramped up, but that would require the massive expansion of a skilled western workforce that is now a shadow of what it once was. Moreover, even in the US, around half the value of major western systems is imported: typically, a western state might buy an airframe from one country, with an engine from a second, with armament from a third and with avionics that it has developed or adapted itself. Because production goes at the speed of the slowest, a delay in one place delays the programme as a whole.
It’s easy to say “we’ll spend what it takes,” but as we have seen money is in some ways the least of the problems. Yes, the US transformed itself into the famous “arsenal of democracy” in about three years, but the idle manufacturing capacity, the technical skills and the management expertise existed already. And the level of technology was, of course, much lower. During the worst of the Covid crisis, many people realised for the first time the sheer length and complexity of industrial supply chains. Cars, for example, are not made “in” a country any more: they are at best assembled there. Components come from many countries. With military systems it’s much worse, and there’s no point, for example, in doubling the output of your aircraft factory from, say, two aircraft per month to four, unless you also double output at the factory that makes the engines, the various factories that make the avionics, even the factories that make the tyres and the ejector seats. Many of these components or sub-assemblies will come from overseas, and so in practice, all areas of the western defence economy, as well as many non-defence areas, would need to simultaneously expand their production, and find more skilled manpower and real estate. Non-western suppliers would have to be induced to cooperate.
Finally (to avoid going on for ever and ever) there is the problem of raw materials: defence equipment is made of stuff, and Europe is in general quite poor in the raw materials needed. World War 2 was arguably an industrial production war, where the victors (The US, Russia and Britain) had access to raw materials that the defeated (Germany and Japan) did not have. Indeed, David Edgerton has plausibly argued that the British ability to rearm in the 1930s, and to survive at all between 1939-41, was essentially because its Navy was able to secure the trade routes from its colonies. It’s not too much to say that it was the Empire that saved Britain from Hitler, and indeed it was the French Empire that enabled that country to bounce back. Needless to say, the world is no longer like that. (The top three aluminium producers in the world are China, India and Russia. Hmm.)
All in all, the West is in the position of an out-of-condition skier who has gone off-piste and now finds themselves at the bottom of a slope with no obvious way up. A lot of effort will be required.
And for what? How are governments going to explain the need to conscript young people, the priority given to defence spending over, say, education, the noise and danger of aircraft flying a hundred metres over your head, the endless construction, the danger and pollution of ammunition factories ….? I have made the heroic assumption that NATO, or some substitute grouping, could reach a consensus on what the new strategic situation is, and what needs to be done, and produce coherent plans for doing it, that could be explained to ordinary people. Maybe. But in the best of cases, with no enemy on the frontiers, with weak economies and massive social problems, is the kind of programme I have sketched out above, and which would be a minimum for “rearmament”, even remotely feasible?
In 2023, hard proof emerged that American neocons provoked Russian intervention in Ukraine and blocked efforts at a peaceful settlement. This had occurred several times in the past decade after peace agreements were signed, at Minsk in 2014, Minsk 2 in 2015, Paris in 2019, and Istanbul in 2022. None of these agreements were implemented by Ukraine because they were sabotaged by American neocons via the CIA. As previous parts of this series have explained, their goal is to weaken and destroy Russia by using Ukraine to fight a proxy war.
“Bennett speaks out”; former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; YouTube; Feb 3, 2023; • בנט מדבר
“HOW THE United States and Its NATO Allies Sabotaged Peace Between Russia and Ukraine”; Larry Johnson; November 14, 2023; https://sonar21.com/how-the-chance-wa…
MARIUPOL – Patients in the psychiatric ward of Mariupol Hospital No. 7 were not informed that a drug for rheumatoid arthritis, tested on them could potentially contribute to the growth of malignant tumors of the lymphatic and hematologic systems, documents obtained by Sputnik showed on Saturday.
The drug was tested at the commission of Western companies with the assistance of Ukrainian officials.
The documents were found in the hospital basement during reconstruction works. They mainly outlined the tests of experimental drug SB4, which suppresses the action of molecules called tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) that plays an important role in the immune system and is associated with inflammation in the joints. However, impaired biological functions of TNF-α are also known to contribute to the development of malignant tumors.
SB4 is produced by a number of pharmaceutical companies, including Biogen Idec Denmark Manufacturing ApS, Belgium’s Catalent Pharma Solutions and Fisher Clinical Services UK Limited. South Korean biopharmaceutical giant Samsung Bioepis sponsored the tests.
The documents include an investigator’s brochure on SB4 in English, printed by Samsung Bioepis and marked as confidential. It said, among other things, that a “possible risk for the development of lymphomas, leukemia or other haematopoietic or solid malignancies in patients treated with a TNF-antagonist cannot be excluded.” Children, adolescents, and young adults up to 22 years of age treated with a TNF-α antagonist were also reported to be prone to malignancies, sometimes fatal. Other tumors potentially caused by the substance include melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer, according to the brochure.
Among the documents was also a study protocol SB4-G31-RA dated November 2013, which contained the text of the information sheet and consent form offered to experimental patients in Ukrainian and Russian. In terms of possible cancer-inducing side effects, it only mentioned that “in rare cases,” up to one per 1,000 patients, another TNF-α antagonist drug, Enbrel, caused skin cancer.
The documents were compiled between 2008 and 2016. Among other things, they show that drugs were also tested on infants under the age of one year.
The findings also included boxes with numerous envelopes from logistics companies and containers for biological materials with recipient addresses in laboratories in Switzerland, the UK, and the US.
There have been some interesting developments over the past few days relating to Israel’s demonstrated subjugation of the government at all levels in the United States as well as its domination of the entertainment and news media. Nearly everyone now accepts that the current situation is not due to ordinary Americans actually liking what Israel represents and is instead rather a consequence of the US Israel lobby’s deep pockets and the corruption that can be bought by being willing to spend billions of dollars to support a single highly focused cause. And there is also the tool used frequently to keep potentially troublesome politicians in line, which is the willingness to do whatever is necessary to discredit and marginalize any and all critics of the Jewish state, to include the liberal often bogus claims of the alleged crimes of antisemitism and holocaust-denial to demonize those who are targeted.
Both current and previous Israeli Prime Ministers have boasted that they control the United States and the evidence is there that they can in fact do so. Most dispiriting in the Zionist induced sturm und drang which is a covert war of sorts directed against the United States Constitution has been the impact on the actual rights of all Americans, including freedom of speech. Last week South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate hopeful Kristi Noem boasted of new legislation in her state that would criminalize antisemitism. As criticizing Israel is considered to be ipso facto antisemitism and criminalized as a so-called “hate crime” it means, as some have observed, that Americans in South Dakota and also in Florida (thanks to Ron DeSantis) can criticize their own country, but not the self-declared Jewish state. Paul Craig Roberts puts it another way, observing that “I find it extraordinary that Jews alone among all ethnicities can control what can be said about them. The real threat is not anti-semitism. The real threat is the destruction of free speech and the rise of status based law that protects some chosen ethnicities and persecutes others. What is really needed is an alliance against those who are destroying the foundations of truth, freedom, and accountable government.”
Last week there was also an interesting vote in Congress, blocking or forcing the sale of the Chinese social media and networking site TikTok, which has become very popular among young people worldwide. What was not much discussed in the media in the lead-up to the vote, which claimed the site was a “national security threat,” was who was pushing for the bill. In reality, the story within the story was again all about Israel. “We have a major TikTok problem” complained the grotesque Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt, apparently freaking out because global youth aren’t buying Israel’s propaganda anymore since the site has something like a “memory” that directs readers and viewers to new information or videos that they had previously expressed an interest in. Many users were, per Greenblatt, interested in what is going on in Gaza and were receiving information hostile to Israel. The passage of the bill overwhelmingly, which was rushed through Congress, demonstrates yet again the Israel Lobby power. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was reportedly heavily engaged in lobbying up until the voting took place. It unfortunately demonstrates how Israel is able to decide how Americans choose to communicate and socialize with one another and the world. Summarizing the Israel Lobby’s view on the issue was the ever-delightful ex-presidential candidate Nikki Haley who responded to the legislation with “We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all and let me tell you why. For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.” And there’s even more to the damage done. The bill doesn’t just ban TikTok. It also creates a new unilateral authority for any president to ban any app or website he or she deems to be a “national security threat” if its owned or controlled by a “foreign adversary,” which includes not just China but also Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Goodbye free speech and association!
So, in return for considerable pain and nothing tangible to benefit the United States and its citizens, Israel is celebrated as “America’s best friend and closest ally” while also getting a free ride of billions of dollars from the US taxpayer and complete political protection bestowed by the clowns that run Washington no matter what it does and how much damage it actually inflicts on American people or interests. Along those lines, the biggest story recently has been Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s denunciation of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a 40 minute speech delivered from the Senate floor followed up by an X tweet.
Schumer, who is the highest ranking elected Jew in the US government, accused Netanyahu of continuing the Gaza war and running it in such a fashion so as to demonstrate that he “has lost his way to allow his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Schumer observed that Israel’s government, whoever heads it, must make “course corrections” and that “[Netanyahu] has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah” among nations, which has already to a certain extent taken place. In light of that, Schumer recommended that “At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel,” adding that it’s “a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government.”
Schumer also criticized Netanyahu for rejecting the Biden administration’s proposal to discuss the establishment of a Palestinian state immediately after the war ends. “As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7. The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” He added that “As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders, and we should let the chips fall where they may. But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice. There needs to be a fresh debate about the future of Israel. In my opinion, that is best accomplished by holding an election.”
An election would not necessarily produce a change in Gaza policy, with most Israelis supporting the war by a large margin, according to opinion polls. But one survey released in January suggested that only 15% of voters wanted Netanyahu to remain in office after the conflict ends. War cabinet minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s rival and most likely successor, basically supports the ongoing Gaza slaughter with only minor deviations from what the prime minister is currently doing.
Many congressional Democrats praised Schumer’s speech and a follow up X tweet but Republicans in the United States and leaders in Israel quickly responded negatively to his remarks. Israel’s Likud party saying Israel is not a “banana republic” while House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement “It is highly inappropriate and simply wrong for Senator Schumer to be calling for new elections in Israel.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed with that judgment: “It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel. This is unprecedented.” Opposing the Republican onslaught, some Democrats pushed back, including Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who observed that “Netanyahu has certainly not been shy about trying to interfere in American politics.”
Schumer’s speech must be placed in context. Schumer, who has been in the US Senate for 25 years, has always been a strong and uncritical supporter of what Israel does and how it manages its security. He has described his own surname as derived from the Hebrew word “shomer” which means “protector” or “guardian” and has elaborated on that theme to declare openly that he is “Israel’s protector” in the Senate. That said, it is quite possible that Schumer does believe that Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians with no end in sight is doing grave damage to the long-term viability of the Jewish state. Many other prominent American Jews and friends of Israel like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, are likewise warning that the Jewish state is acting recklessly, not in its own self-interests. Polls suggest that Israel is the most despised nation in the world due to its torturing, starving and outright killing of Palestinian civilians. Number two in those polls is the United States, which is paying the price of being Netanyahu’s political, financial and weapons supplier, enabling the deaths and making it complicit in the conflict, much of it being done in secret by Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and covered by a series of lies.
The impact of Israeli actions with elections coming up in the US might well have motivated Schumer to speak up now while there is still time to correct course and reduce both the Palestinian death toll and the damage being done to the White House. President Joe Biden almost certainly would have approved of the Schumer speech, but he characteristically did not want to get too far in front on the issue. The trick will be making the Gaza conflict look like it is Netanyahu’s war while also establishing one’s “humanitarian” principles in a way that does not actually blame Israel. It will be difficult and there is no certainty of success, but Schumer and Biden might be smelling electoral defeat in November with the margin of difference being the Gaza war and how the Democratic Party base and independent voters have responded to it.
The White House has powerful allies, interestingly enough, in the Republican Party, which has been transformed into a hardline Israel loving propaganda machine, as well as in the mainstream media, which continues to slant its coverage of Gaza to favor Israel. Indeed, Schumer’s remarks came, not coincidentally, a day after Senate Republicans invited Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at an upcoming party retreat in Washington. Voters who are genuinely antiwar might well vote Democratic as the lesser of two evils, particularly given Donald Trump’s advice to the Israelis to “finish the job” in dealing with the Palestinians. In any event, it is likely that such possibilities are currently swirling through the heads of Biden and Schumer as well as those who are directing the Democratic Party campaign.
And make no mistake that the Administration is currently making sure that those who want to continue the struggle against what is being consistently labeled the international terrorist threat, which justifies ongoing wars, will have something to promote. Top US intelligence officials last Monday at an annual hearing on global security threats held at the Senate Intelligence Committee offices warned that the war in Gaza could embolden terrorist groups, which are aligned in their opposition to the United States for its support of Israel. “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” said Avril Haines, who is of course Jewish, the director of national intelligence. At the meeting Senator Tom Cotton a Republican from Arkansas and a stalwart backer of Israel, prodded CIA Director William Burns and Haines to refute critics’ allegations that Israel is ‘exterminating the Palestinian people’ with its military campaign.” Indeed, Zionist apologists like Cotton aside, no one in the room suggested that putting an end to the Israeli genocide might be the best way to put an end to the proliferating terrorism threat.
And so the beat goes on. How to do everything Israel wants without appearing to do so has plagued every White House since Harry Truman, only it has gotten harder to execute as Israel behavior has worsened and American politicians have become more corrupted and openly dependent on Jewish political contributions. It will be interesting to see if the Schumer speech will actually have some resonance or will only serve to trick the public into believing that the US government has actually regained its independence. Only time will tell but it might become an interesting run politically speaking between now and November.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
An important myth about the position of Jews in the American South during the slavery and Jim Crow eras continues to heavily influence common perceptions about the role of Jews as victims of hatred and bigotry. Fundamental to the popular legend is the belief that Jews in the South were somehow outsiders in a peculiarly evil culture and thus more prone to be victimized by the swirl of regional race hatreds. Nearly every published handling of that history is framed by the presumption that the well-known anti-Black racism of the South also extended to Jews, but the history of the American South shows that the “atmosphere” for Jews in the apartheid South was not just attractive but especially welcoming and, most of all, extremely profitable.
One of the most popular writers on twentieth-century Southern Jewry, Harry Golden, addressed a persistent theme about Southern Jewish history he was determined to debunk:
“The point I hope to establish… is that this ‘most Gentile’ section of America has provided the most favorable “atmosphere” the Jewish people have known in the modern world.”[1]
Golden was speaking specifically about the American South. The reverence that most bible belt evangelical Christians held for the “People of the Book” placed Jewish immigrants in an especially favored class. Their presence was even taken by many ignorant southern Gentiles as a sign of God’s sacred endorsement of their slave-based society. So Christians in the American South were time and again militantly protective of their Jewish population.[2]
One of the hundreds of slave advertisements in the Nation of Islam book, JEWS SELLING BLACKS
A century and a half before New York became the epicenter of Jewish American life, wealthy and cultured Jews thrived in the large elite community of Charleston, South Carolina. The city was both a major slave-trading center and the birthplace of Reform Judaism, the branch of religion with which most Jews identify today. It was also the home-base of multiple slave-trading Jews who had enthusiastically performed their sacred Southern duties as slave masters and slave dealers, and all had shared in the benefits of the African slave trade. The Jewish Encyclopedia made an astounding claim that put Jewish Americans at the heart of the slavocracy:
“[T]he cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them.”[3]
In 1841, the slaveholding Charleston rabbi Gustavus Poznanski summed up the Southern Jewish American credo:
“This [Charleston] synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will our sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.”[4]
After the Civil War Atlanta became the region’s new urban and industrial center, attracting enough of their faith to have the largest population of Jews of any city in the South. Jewish upward mobility was described by historian Albert Lindemann as “more striking in Atlanta than in most northern cities,”[5] and Jews routinely held positions of public trust in this ultra-Christian, militantly white supremacist region. At least twelve Jews held office in Jim Crow Atlanta between 1874 and 1911—considerable representation for a group that never exceeded three percent of the total population.[6]
Scholar of Southern Jewry Dr. Mark K. Bauman maintains that of all the immigrant groups, the German Jewish community particularly “exerted power beyond its size so that it wielded considerable political influence and preferment.” Jews played a disproportionate role in the city’s economy, a high proportion being merchants, wholesalers, and tradesmen. According to one scholar:
“[Jewish] business leaders owned many of the largest commercial and manufacturing enterprises that provided employment for many local citizens…”[7]
Jews were partners in their own and Gentile law firms; they sat on grand juries; they served as bank founders, presidents, and officers; and they became officials in the chamber of commerce. “From 25 to over 35 percent” of Freemasons and many of the highest officers in the Masonic order were Jews.[8] Praise of Jews by their Gentile neighbors was effusive, as in this 1890 statement from an Alabama merchant extolling the “Hebrews of Atlanta,” in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution:
“[T]here is no one element in this city’s make-up more powerful than that. Look around you in any and every business, in every walk of life, and you will see that the leaders are the Hebrews. Everybody must admire the wonderful business capacity with which the race seems imbued, and everybody who makes any study of their home life will agree with me when I say that no people in the world are happier in their homes, none are better to their kinfolk, and none are better to the poor and needy….No religion has such well organized, such sensible and such beautiful charities…”
In that same year, a Jewish man surveying his own people’s accomplishments crowed:
“Here in Atlanta, they [Jews] are found in all walks of life, and they own, I suppose, between two [to] three million dollars’ worth of property. That is a conservative estimate.”[9]
The editor of the Atlanta-based Jewish South was bursting with justifiable optimism about the fortunes of Southern Jews when he wrote in 1878:
“[A]lthough [Judaism’s] growth in all sections of this land of the free has been most prosperous, still the South succeeded in producing the loftiest of fruits, of the greatest bounty and grandeur.[10]
“The Jews in Georgia, however, did more than merely become a part of the existing Georgia tradition. In many instances, they created, shaped, and influenced both the character and course of many of those traditions and institutions.”[Emphasis ours][11]
Jews embraced the race laws of America voluntarily and encouraged their Gentile neighbors to adhere to them unquestionably. It would take the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, to end American slavery legally, but a full thirty years later in 1896 the editors of the Jewish South newspaper opined, “Negroes are intellectually, morally, and physically an inferior race—a fact none can deny.”[14]
As lynching became the white national pastime the Jewish press turned on the most vulnerable and easy target. The Jewish Sentiment editor Frank Cohen cheer-led the lynchers and wrote in 1898:
“… The white man is not only superior to the black man but will assert his supremicy (sic) at the proper time and in the proper manner…”
It only improved for Jews as they moved into the 20th century. When the home of Jewish furniture magnate Oscar Pappenheimer burned down in May of 1914, the Atlanta police formed a cordon around the house to guard it overnight. It seems that Pappenheimer’s jewelry collection was one of the most valuable in the city. Destroyed were “the finest pipe organ in a private home in Atlanta,” three Steinway pianos, and “prized violins and cellos.”[12]
In 1906, that same Oscar Pappenheimer proposed a law targeting all Blacks: “I propose the registration of negroes in the southern states 14 years of age and more… Each person so registered should possess… a certificate… in which should be entered description, date and place of birth and, at each registration, record of abode, employment, conduct and reference….Let others decide whether it be legal to pass laws bearing on this subject with reference to the colored race only…” Pappenheimer’s Atlanta proposal was nearly identical to that which Adolf Hitler enforced against Jews in Nazi Germany 30 years later.
Jews reveled in their position as leaders among the many ethnic Europeans that settled the American South. No public position was denied to them, and the positions they attained found them eagerly swearing a solemn oath to uphold the sacred tenets of the apartheid legal system. They participated in the violence and terror that framed the slave system and stood elbow to elbow with all whites as slavery’s most ardent enforcers.[13]
It is true that the corrupt forces of historical revisionism have succeeded in burying this unsavory Jewish past, but all of these uncomfortable realities are well documented throughout the Jewish historical record. The Jewish role in the establishment and growth of apartheid societies goes even further back than Christopher Columbus and is much wider in scope than just the American South. It is a testament to the skill and reach of the Jewish myth-makers that so much race-hating Jewish history has been erased from the popular American consciousness.
[1] Harry L. Golden, Jewish Roots in the Carolinas: A Pattern of American Philo-Semitism (Greensboro, NC: Deal Printing, 1955), 6. He calls the Carolinas a “completely free society” and a “300-year-old ‘laboratory of philo-semitism.’”
[4] David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 466-67.
[5] Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 230.
[6] Steven Hertzberg, “The Jewish Community of Atlanta: From the End of the Civil War until the Eve of the Frank Case,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (March 1973): 267.
[7] Steve Oney, And The Dead Shall Rise (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 7, writes that “many of Atlanta’s factories…were Jewish-owned.”
[8] Mark K. Bauman, “Jewish Community of Atlanta,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, March 15, 2004, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org: “Jews routinely held seats on the aldermanic board, the school board, and in the state legislature.”
[9] “Hebrews of Atlanta: The Important Part They Have Taken,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 12, 1890, 16.
[10] Jewish South, Feb. 8, 1878, and Nov. 7, 1879. Also, Abraham J. Peck, “That Other ‘Peculiar Institution’: Jews and Judaism in the Nineteenth Century South,” Modern Judaism 7, no. 1 (Feb. 1987): 101, 102.
[11] “A History of Jews in Georgia,” William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, http://www.the
breman.org/research/stategeorgia.htm (retrieved April 9, 2009).
[12] “Pappenheimer Home Burned to Ground with $25,000 Loss,” Atlanta Journal, May 31, 1914, 1; Atlanta Constitution, May 31, 1914, 1.
Mike Benz, is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters. Mr. Benz founded FFO as a civil society institution building on his experience in the role of championing digital freedom around the world in the public sector.
We spoke about the power of the deep state, CIA in Ukraine, Rigged elections and How The US Deep State Infiltrated World Governments. PLUS much more…
On Thursday, multiple media outlets reported on secret meetings between Iranian and US officials with Omani officials acting as a conduit. According to the reports, the US asked Iran to instruct the Yemeni Houthis to stop their blockade in the Red Sea.
However, Iran has made it very clear that they will not negotiate on behalf of their allies, Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Thursday.
“It’s obvious that the Iranians are not going to negotiate on behalf of Yemen,” Marandi explained, pointing to when Saudi Arabia and Iran were negotiating to reestablish diplomatic relations. “There were years of negotiations to reestablish ties. The sticking point was that the Saudis wanted Iran to negotiate on behalf of Yemen because [Saudi Arabia was] at war with Yemen… and the Iranians insisted that they [would] not negotiate on their behalf… ultimately, the Saudis removed that precondition.”
Marandi insisted that contrary to media reports, “No negotiations between Iran and the United States took place [regarding Houthi attacks in the Red Sea] because the Iranians would not accept such negotiations.”
To stop the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, the US simply has to stop supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Marandi argued. “[The Houthis] have said from the very beginning when the genocide in Gaza began that they will block shipping to Israel, to Israeli ports, in order to put pressure on the regime to stop the genocide and they said they will do it in accordance with the Genocide Convention,” Marandi explained. “They are actually working within the framework of international law and their position is a deeply moral position… Yemen has said repeatedly that if the genocide stops, their actions in the Red Sea will stop.”
Meanwhile, the US and its “sidekick, the British” are working to help the Israeli genocide, including by killing Yemeni citizens, Marandi said.
However, that has caused problems for those countries who were added to Yemen’s blockade list in response. “[The US and UK] created a problem for themselves,” he explained.
“In this upside-down world that we live in today, the United States is attacking Yemen in order to help the Israeli regime continue with genocide unimpeded.”
The reverberations of that decision and the US insisting that shipping companies go around Africa instead of through the Red Sea, is hurting more than just the US and its allies. “What the Americans want to do, is they want to make this a crisis, a global economic problem,” Marandi said. “They want everyone to suffer so that they can gain leverage and put pressure on Yemen to end the blockade… for the sake of Israel and for the sake of the Israeli genocide, they’re willing to make everyone suffer.”
In the summer of 2022 I had the privilege of having dinner with Professor Robert Clancy—a leading Australian clinical immunologist and a pioneer in the field of mucosal immunology, with 260 publications on the subject.
He explained to me precisely why COVID-19 shots—designed to induce the production of antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 in the blood—cannot prevent infection by or transmission of the virus. The trouble, he explained, is that SARS-CoV-2 replicates rapidly in the nasal mucosa and transmits to other people days before it makes it down into the gas exchange region of the lungs and encounters blood antibodies.
This, he further explained, had long been understood about respiratory viruses such as those that cause the common cold and influenza, and this same quality was quickly ascertained about SARS-CoV-2.
Thus, from the outset, it was clear that the COVID-19 vaccines would NOT prevent infection by or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. This reality completely nullified any rationale for vaccine mandates.
non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others. ….
Taking all of these factors into account, it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines. This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so? This is a major challenge for future vaccine development, and overcoming it is critical as we work to develop “next-generation” vaccines.
In other words, in November 2022, Dr. Fauci and his colleagues published a paper in which they demonstrated their clear understanding of what Professor Clancy told me at dinner three months earlier—namely, the COVID-19 vaccines cannot “effectively control” SARS-CoV-2. The initial, much publicized claim that they would prevent infection and transmission was a bald-faced lie.
While Israel’s unsubstantiated claims of rape on 7 October have dominated western media headlines, credible documented cases of rape against Palestinians and Israeli-on-Israeli sexual assault have received far less attention.
Israel’s scourge of sexual violence and rape incidents did not originate five months ago – its roots go deeper and farther back than that, and there is a crucial context essential for understanding the country’s domestic environment of abuse.
Israel’s massive sexual violence problem
On 8 February, Haaretz brought to light a harrowing revelation: 116 separate files detailing instances of sexual assault and domestic violence against women and minors among Israelis ‘displaced’ from their illegal settlements due to the ongoing military conflicts with Gaza and Lebanon.
The cases surfaced during a special Knesset committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, where “committee chair MK Pnina Tamano-Shata [National Unity Party] chastised police representatives for failing to collect accurate data from each hotel regarding violence and sexual attacks.”
Although there were disputes over a lack of complete data, disturbing incidents were highlighted, including a case of pedophilia involving a 23-year-old establishing a “relationship with a 13-year-old girl, both living in the same hotel” and a rape committed after a man followed a woman to her room. It also noted that elevators were places of particular vulnerability for sexual assault and violence.
Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretz report, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”
Haaretz noted that most victims avoid reporting what happened to them and that “70 percent of those young women who did report what happened to them stated that their report was not handled at all, or not handled sufficiently.”
In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.
That’s a stunning indictment of the ‘world’s most moral army.’ And it isn’t just Israel’s war establishment afflicted with the rape bug.
Rape, normalized in Israel
In addition to being a regional hub for human trafficking and a haven for pedophiles, Israel consistently ranks the highest in West Asia for documented cases of rape and sexual assaults.
In 2020, protests erupted across Israel after 30 men gang-raped an intoxicated 16-year-old girl, which prompted Ilana Weizman, of the Israeli women’s rights group HaStickeriot, to disclose that a shocking one in five Israeli women was raped during her lifetime, with 260 cases reported every day.
In March 2021, a series of gang rapes against minors, with the youngest victim being just 10-years-old, sparked widespread concern in Israel over the prevalence of sexual assault. APCCI said that the rate of violent sexual offenses in Israel was 10 percent higher than the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, labeling it as an “epidemic.” A Knesset report from the same year revealed that nearly half of the sexual abuse cases between 2019 and 2020 involved underage girls.
Back in 2016, activists from Jewish Community Watch warned that Israel was becoming a “safe haven for pedophiles,” noting that sexual offenders were using the Israeli Law of Return, which allows any Jew to claim citizenship and live in occupied Palestine. Years later, in 2020, CBS News released a report entitled ‘How Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice in Israel,’ which demonstrated how wanted individuals were walking free in Israel, leaving behind a spate of unresolved criminal cases.
To add insult to injury, Hebrew media reported that 92 percent of civil rape investigations were closed without charges in Israel.
According to the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI), despite the country’s ‘good laws’ on sexual assault, inadequate enforcement of these laws means that people use “legal tricks” to avoid retribution for assaults, with many assailants avoiding prosecution. In short, “people are not afraid to hurt. There is no fear or retribution.”
Occasionally, in high-profile cases of rape and sexual assault, the Israeli judicial system has been known to act, as evidenced by the conviction of former Israeli president Moshe Katsav in 2010 for raping an aide and sexually harassing two other women.
However, Katsav’s release after serving just five years of a seven-year sentence ignited a debate on the early release of sex offenders. In 2022, APCCI reported that 75 percent of sexual offenders in Israel are released before completing their full sentence.
Israel, weaponizing rape against Palestinians
From the time of Israel’s founding, rape has been extensively documented in its use as a weapon of war against Palestinians. In a 2022 documentary named after the Israeli massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura, horrific admissions of rape committed by the Alexandroni Brigade were acknowledged for the first time on camera.
There are also various other reported cases of rape from that period: at least three rapes, one committed against a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, that occurred during the Safsaf massacre in October of 1948.
Because rape and other forms of sexual violence are often difficult to prove conclusively, it is essential to note that early Zionists also weaponized the threat of sexual violence, especially surrounding the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1948.
As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” stories of explicit gendered atrocities were deliberately spread to encourage residents of other villages to flee. In a recent series of interviews conducted with two Nakba survivors, both revealed that they fled their villages specifically due to the rape atrocities in the village of Deir Yassin.
Today, that same attitude of sexualizing vulnerable Palestinians is apparent in the countless snuff films published widely on social media with the approval of the Israeli military, featuring male Israeli soldiers going through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women and even mockingly wearing their lingerie.
This, coupled with what a UN panel of experts recently said were “credible allegations” of sexual assault against Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza, indicate a clear pattern of gendered violence taking place in the war.
At least two cases of rape, along with numerous cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape, have also been recorded. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has noted that “We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are.”
Systematic sexual humiliation
In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Israeli occupation soldiers took control of Palestinian TV networks in the West Bank city of Ramallah to broadcast pornography on several channels. Knowing that Palestinian society is a socially conservative one, it is clear that this was done with the intent of humiliation.
A prominent case of recent sexual humiliation in the West Bank occurred just last year near the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) and was investigated in a joint Haaretz-B’Tselem report. On 10 July, between 25–30 Israeli soldiers burst into the Ajluni family’s home, forcing five Palestinian women to strip naked at gunpoint and threatening to unleash army attack dogs on them.
One woman named Amal was taken into a private room with her children and forced to take off her clothes. The report states: “the children also had to witness their mother being ordered to turn around while naked as she sobbed over the humiliation. About 10 minutes later she and the children were taken out of the room pale and trembling.”
While it is not possible to note every single case of sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, it is well documented that female prisoners have been subjected to some of the worst forms of it.
During the Second Intifada, there were countless allegations of sexual violence against women and girls in Israeli military detention, a trend which Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports is again on the rise. The rights group said that the Palestinian female detainees recently released in the Hamas–Israel prisoner exchange were subjected to “threats of rape” and “were humiliatingly strip-searched several times” after their violent arrests.
An interrogator came in and asked me in English what I thought about what Hamas did. He swore at me and called me a ‘whore.’ He said there were 20 soldiers in the room and that they would rape me like Hamas–ISIS raped Jewish women in southern Israel. He kept swearing at me and threatening me and my family. Then, a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: ‘Welcome to hell.’ They sat me in a chair and started laughing at me and calling me ‘whore’ again and again.
Speaking to the media following her release from Israeli detention late last year, Baraah Abo Ramouz said the following about the “devastating” conditions faced by female Palestinian prisoners:
They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.
In 2022, the Shin Bet dropped a case of sexual assault against a Palestinian woman detained in 2015 over “lack of evidence.” This is despite the fact that a doctor and female soldiers had admitted to inappropriately touching the woman’s private parts, while the company commander in control admitted to giving the order. The victim’s filed appeal states:
In a situation in which there is no dispute that acts that constitute rape and sodomy were committed, [in which] there is sufficient evidence, and when no one is punished, it’s outrageous and unbearable.
According to former US State Department official Josh Paul, after he and his colleagues received credible evidence that Israeli forces had raped a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in Al-Moskibiyya detention center, Israel raided the offices of the human rights group that passed the information on to the State Department, later declaring it a terrorist organization.
False narratives fueling war crimes
While the Israeli government pushes the story that Hamas implemented a pre-planned systematic rape campaign on 7 October, for which there has been no independent investigation or evidence produced, documented cases of sexual violence are undermined and ignored.
The mere fact that Israel’s notorious ZAKA rescue service relied upon heavily for testimonies of rape on 7 October, was founded by serial rapist Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, nicknamed the ‘Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,’ is telling.
The wholly unsubstantiated rape claims of the Israeli government – widely amplified and parroted by western media – are impossible to take seriously when a known propaganda outfit like ZAKA is the source.
The UN Office of the Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict recently released a report after its Special Representative Pramila Patten completed an eight-day trip requested by the Israeli government.
The report on sexual violenceallegations was produced by a team of nine UN experts and had no investigative mandate. Yet statements from it made headlines in western media, suggesting that the UN had confirmed Israel’s narrative, although the report in no way substantiated it.
In the case of sexual violence allegations made about Kibbutz Be’eri, from where the majority of the allegations emerged, there was no evidence found. Two cases were debunked by the UN team as having been “unfounded.”
In one, widely cited as proof of rape, a woman was found separated from her family with her underwear pulled down. The UN team said that the “crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad, and the bodies moved.”
The UN report also noted that the interrogations of alleged participants in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Israeli intelligence agencies were not considered as evidence, another major blow to Israel’s body of claims.
In Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where the report concluded “the recurring pattern of female victims found undressed, 18 bound, and shot – indicates that sexual violence, including potential sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, may have occurred,” it also notes that “verification of sexual violence against these victims was not possible at this point.”
Given that the UN team found that Israelis had altered other crime scenes, an independent investigation would be needed to confirm that the crime scenes weren’t equally compromised.
The human cost of Israel’s lies
It should also be noted that the recent New York Times scandal – where its investigation into sexual violence on 7 October was directly discredited by the family members of a woman they tried to claim was raped – dealt a massive blow to the credibility of Israel’s narrative.
During Primila Patten’s press conference, in which she addressed the findings of her UN mission, she admitted that they had not interviewed any victims and did not find a systematic campaign of sexual violence, nor was the team able to attribute sexual violence to any specific Palestinian resistance group.
Amidst the recurrent circulation of unverified claims lacking independent investigation, these graphic and unsubstantiated allegations fuel widespread sexual violence against vulnerable Palestinians.
Israel, grappling with its own internal sexual assault issues, has a troubling history of utilizing gender-based violence within its military jurisdiction. The disproportionate lack of attention towards the ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the occupation state illustrates a clear double standard perpetuated by western mainstream media.
In early 2023, three Australian health professionals who had all been ‘struck off’ for speaking out against their government’s pandemic response, decided they must speak up for medical ethics and freedom of debate. They met and set up the Cape Byron Lighthouse declaration. The declaration’s four aims would have been uncontroversial only a few years ago:
All silencing and censorship by bureaucrats and regulators, including of experienced practitioners and scientists, must stop. There must be respect for every individual’s right to freedom of opinion and expression.
The right to ‘informed’ consent must be upheld – and must include being fully informed of relevant risks, as well as any benefits (proven or presumed).
Mandates and other forms of medical coercion are unethical – and must cease. Bodily autonomy is the inalienable right of every individual – and must be respected.
There is an urgent need for transparency and reform in science and medicine and to halt the increasing globalisation of public health. We demand the restoration of voice and decision power to individual practitioners – and to those they serve.
A year later, they reached out to HART and other groups to start making this a world-wide campaign. Three HART members, Drs Clare Craig, Liz Evans and Ros Jones are now so-called ‘Lighthouse Keepers’, alongside Drs Sam White and Anne McCluskey. The aim is for the public to nominate citizens in all walks of life who are prepared to speak out against censorship in all its forms. We do not necessarily all share the same views even on covid-19, let alone on other topics – it would be a dull life if we did! But we all share the belief that human interaction and discourse is vital to any society’s wellbeing.
Ros Neelon-Cook, one of the three founder members, has recently been interviewed by John Campbell – see COVID Psychological Manipulation: Unpacked. She very clearly covers the problem of fear interrupting critical thinking, as covered many times in various HART articles.
We encourage HART readers to sign. And please nominate people from around the world to act as lighthouse keepers for their area. Change is in the air.
The curtain opened. In front of a dismayed world, a staging of genocide is taking place under the supervision, assistance and protection of the world hegemon.
No water, no food, no medicine, no fuel, no electricity! We are fighting the human beast. The whole nation is responsible, no one is innocent. Burn completely, no hope left. Destroy Gaza now! Now! Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Wipe them out, their families, their mothers and their children. These animals are no longer allowed to live.
It is Amalek, calling the Leader – a nation that stood in the way of the Jews during their emigration from Egypt. Now go and slay Amalek; like a sledgehammer you will destroy everything that belongs to him. You will not spare him, but you will kill man and woman, young man and infant, bull and sheep, camel and donkey, Jehovah commands King Samuel (1S 15,3). You will wipe out the memory of Amalek under heaven, do not forget it! (Deuteronomy 25:19)
This is the framework in which Israel’s campaign against Gaza begins in October. If we leave aside the immediate consequences – dead, human suffering, destroyed earth, the long-term consequence will be a fundamental break in the paradigms and clichés of the Western world. In their smug self-righteousness, Netanyahu and the Zionist politicians do not realize what a Pandora’s box they have opened.
Genocide
To avoid misunderstandings: genocide, according to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such:
killing members of such a group;
causing grievous bodily harm or mental disorder to members of such group;
the intentional placing of any group in such living conditions as to bring about its total or partial physical destruction;
measures aimed at preventing the birth of children in such a group;
forcibly transferring children from one group to another.
The International Court of Justice must review the evidence and hear the parties and witnesses before rendering and reasoning judgment. A non-participating observer does not have to wait. If he sees someone kill another, he doesn’t have to wait for an investigation, an accusation, an indictment, a retrial, witnesses, evidence, and a verdict to know that he is committing a crime.
At the same time, it must be remembered that the Convention was adopted in December 1948. Earlier cases may fulfill its factual essence, but – unlike the current one – they cannot be retroactively judged on its basis.
The term genocide is already terrifying because of its weight, most people – incorrectly – understand it in the spirit of the Old Testament as the complete extermination of the entire target group. However, this was never achieved – that is why the formulation was completely or partially destroyed. A somewhat milder synonym is ethnic cleansing , more accurately describing the goal: removing the target group from the given territory. By persuasion, coercion, terror, banishment, killing, whatever.
Historical examples and comparisons are provided. The first genocide of Palestinians – Nakba in Arabic (النكبة, catastrophe, despair) – took place after the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948. Three quarters of a million Arabs expelled, 532 Arab towns and villages razed to the ground, an estimated 15,000 dead – also thanks to arms supplied by Czechoslovakia – is the trauma from which Palestinian identity is derived. It differs from the current genocide primarily in that it took place covertly. Israel has so far tried to cover up its tracks and denied that it ever happened. It is only now that they suddenly claim it as a model worthy of repetition and exceding.
In many ways, the genocide in Gaza resembles the post-war genocide of the Sudeten Germans: the size of the target group (2.3 or 3.2 million respectively), the intensity (around 25,000 dead in three months), the justification (revenge for an armed attack against the state, or for its destruction and occupation), collective punishment affecting mainly the innocent, rhetoric (Gallant: human beast, Beneš: human monster ), great power cover (USA, USSR), hidden personal motivation of the leaders (Netayahu’s avoidance of trial and prison, Beneš’s post-war presidency) , the intention of the booty (Palestinian land and natural gas fields, German possessions), the strategy (killing as a means of forcing them to leave) and the mass support of the population.
One difference is in the design. In the Czech case, the killing was not an officially announced program, but to a large extent the honest handiwork of ordinary citizens, so to speak. Two years later, it became the subject of an investigation. In the case of Gaza, the official program is officially announced and is carried out by a professional army killing industrially by the hundreds with bombs from above; honest manual labor is left only to the West Bank settlers. Another difference is in the outcome: Czechoslovakia was more successful in that Stalin secured the additional approval of the Potsdam Conference and the killing could end.
Genocide, however, primarily evokes reminiscences of the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. It differs from the current one in several ways, not only in the monstrous number of victims.
Above all, it was perpetrated covertly and in secret, even shyly, in front of its own population. German politicians did not publicly shout out their targets, German soldiers did not boast of photos of torture and murder in the media, small children did not joyfully sing ” we will kill them all” on German radio , and there is no evidence that the Leader himself gave the order for it. Being shot or gassed was – if such a word can be used – more humane than the slow death of those buried under the rubble, from injuries, diseases and the unavailability of medical care, from starvation. The strategy was also the opposite: initially the Jews were forced to emigrate by coercion and repression, physical liquidation came only when there was nowhere else to go. It was only on the eastern front that it was justified by the fight against terrorists (guerrillas) and acquired a character similar to Gaza.
Most of all, the events in Gaza are reminiscent of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943. Hundreds of thousands of Jews crowded into three square kilometers, in a hopeless situation, decided to fight desperately to the last man. They built a network of underground passages and bunkers, collected a meager arsenal of weapons, attacked police and SS units and forced them to retreat from the ghetto. A similarly brutal retaliation followed, artillery bombardment, flamethrowers, burning of houses block by block, flooding of underground passages, indiscriminate murder. Within a month, the ghetto was practically razed to the ground, 13,000 of its inhabitants perished and 50,000 of the survivors were deported to concentration camps.
The elimination of the inhabitants of Gaza by starvation may remind us of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33. However, it is wrongly labeled as genocide, there is a lack of definition of the target group and the intention of its destruction. Contrary to the Ukrainian narrative, it was not targeted against a specific ethnicity, and the motivation was not ethnic cleansing and looting, but the export of wheat despite a disastrous crop failure.
However, the most extensive genocide in history is the genocide of the indigenous population of both Americas. In South America in the 16th century is the spoils of gold and silver of Indian empires, in North America in the 19th century, territories of Indian tribes.
Gaza and Ukraine
If the war outcome of the Maidan putsch has already shaken many established clichés, after the massacres in Gaza there is practically nothing left of them.
Just a few months ago, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Donbas republics was presented as the ultimate violation of international law, while the annexations – without referendums – of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, were generously overlooked. Today, in the face of undisguised expansionism and the intended annexation of all of Palestine, Israel’s borders have become the most pressing issue in international politics.
Just a few months ago, the Russian bombing of civilian infrastructure was considered a war crime – regardless of the fact that they were mostly targets of military importance and regardless of the war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan. Compared to the interruption of water, food, medicine, and energy supplies to the world’s largest concentration camp, with the systematic bombing of housing estates, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, power plants, waterworks, and bakeries, this seems like the grossest hypocrisy today.
Just a few months ago, the media was filled with reports of Russian attacks against the civilian population – regardless of the fact that the ratio of thousands of civilian dead to hundreds of thousands of military dead is an unprecedented low in the history of world warfare. They disappeared. President Herzog abolished the distinction between civilians and terrorists. Compared to three times more civilian casualties in four months than in two years of the Ukrainian war, with hundreds of women and children killed per alleged terrorist, it is better not to mention Russian crimes.
The topic of the Ukrainian war did not disappear from the media only because of the failed offensive and the inevitable defeat of the West. First of all, they have run out of topics to disavow Russia – any accusations of any crimes only underline their multiple validity for Israel. There is a war between two armies going on in Ukraine, which at least the Russian side is conducting with maximum consideration for the civilian population. There is no war in Gaza, but a military massacre of the civilian population.
A certain similarity can be seen at most in the characters of Zelensky and Netanyahu. Both have dragged their country into wars they cannot win and whose outcome threatens the very existence of their states. Both of them have already been written off as politicians, and prolonging the war at any cost for them means postponing not only the end of their careers, but above all the post-war reckoning.
A similarity can also be seen in the likely future fate of both countries given their unwavering irrational belief in ultimate victory. For both, common sense would see ending the fighting, opening diplomatic negotiations, coming to terms with the loss of some territory, and accepting new neighbors – New Russia and Palestine – as the last realistic chance before destruction. For both of them, such an idea is absolutely unacceptable, so they have no choice but to enjoy their pride until the bitter end.
Gaza and Western Democracy
Just a few months ago, the cliché of the struggle of our Western democracy against a foreign (Russian) dictatorship, the struggle of Good against Evil, was prevalent. If we descend from the heights of transcendent metaphysics back to earth, we find that the highest imaginable Evil is crimes of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. After several months of massacres, it is clear that their perpetrators are not strangers, but ourselves – whether Israel, which we rightfully count among ours, or the entire collective West, which actively supports or at least passively tolerates it. Even countries like the Czech Republic and Austria, which might be expected to show particular restraint in the matter of genocide, vote at the UN General Assembly – as the only EU members – to continue the genocide.
Just a few months ago, Israel was being touted as the only democracy in the Middle East—regardless of the fact that Western democracy itself had long since been emptied by oligarchy, totalitarian propaganda, censorship, and repression. If Ukrainian neo-Nazism could still be trivialized and silenced in the media, in the perspective of Israeli apartheid, the Nuremberg Laws, the denial of human rights and the right to life to the inferior non-Jewish population – Muslims as well as Christians – the content of the term Israeli democracy suddenly overlaps with Nazi ideology.
The West – this is Europe including its branches, the USA and Israel. Today it could be more aptly described as a caste of Israeli-American oligarchs who have colonized it for their own purposes. Unreserved support for Israeli genocide may appear to us as an incomprehensible anomaly in view of traditional European values - the UN Charter and international law, peace and conflict prevention, resolution of disputes through action and not force, immutability of borders through violence, democracy, freedom, equality and human rights, social market economy , social security, elimination of poverty, human life as the highest value. It is as if in twenty years Europe has turned into the exact opposite of what shaped its identity at the end of the century and what citizens voted for in referenda.
Only in a longer-term perspective will we discover that the period of humanism in the second half of the 20th century was an anomaly, that it was only a temporary reaction to the trauma of two world wars. Since its birth in the 9th century, Europe has been the most aggressive, predatory and cruel civilization in history. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Conquista, slavery, the East India Company, colonialism, pogroms, world wars, the Holocaust – these are not anomalies, they are a continuous European tradition. It was only from the 19th century that the European USA took over the initiative from it, and from the second half of the 20th century, the European Ashkenazis took over new territories and genocided their population.
Let’s also note that the conquests of previous empires were generally motivated by the expansion of the territory and its resources, including – or mainly – its inhabitants. After these, loyalty to the new ruler and tribute were required, but they were usually left with extensive autonomy. Violently subverting their social structures, religion, culture would be counterproductive – it would only reduce their economic contribution. Only the USA, Nazi Germany, Israel and (let’s not forget) Czechoslovakia are conquering exclusive Lebensraum for themselves , a living space , which, of course, must first be cleared of its current inhabitants .
For a Western reader, these remarks are probably heresy of the coarsest grain. Outside the circle of Western civilization – that is, in seven-eighths of the human world – this is the basic perspective in which the West is seen and judged. The genocide in Gaza and its Western support only confirms it. The continued clamor for democracy, human rights, rule-based order can only further discredit the West. Respect and authority are gained by countries that are able to stand up to it and whose tradition is not burdened by conquests, colonialism and subversion, especially Russia, China, Iran.
Thus, Gaza gave another powerful impulse to the ongoing process of global polarization. In perspective, one can expect accelerated consolidation of the rising Global South in the new structures of BRICS+, SCO, EAEU and further decline in the influence, isolation and disintegration of the West. Desperate efforts following the example of Zelensky and Netanyahu, which cannot be avoided at all costs, can easily turn into a global nuclear conflict in Ukraine, the Middle East or the South China Sea.
Gaza and Israel
I still remember the enthusiasm and admiration for Israel at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With the Lebanon War and the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatil in 1982, sympathy began to quickly disappear – Israel must be like a rabid dog, declared Moshe Dayan, and so he began to appear. I remember the statement of an Israeli politician at the time after some other scandal in the sense that there will be an uproar about it for a few weeks and then it will be forgotten again. I think that’s how Israeli politicians have imagined it to this day. For a society whose thinkers have contributed a great deal to the knowledge of the human psyche, one can only marvel at such a level of ignorance.
It doesn’t work that way. The scream subsides, but the mental image is burdened with another negative emotion. They accumulate over a long period of time, even if they do not outwardly manifest themselves in shouting. The initial sympathy gradually turns into its opposite – we have all experienced such a process many times. Extremely negative events, such as an ongoing genocide, eliminate the remnants of latent sympathy for good.
Regardless of the current berserk mode of bloody unity, it is going on under the surface in Israel as well. The previous wave of resistance against Netanyahu’s attempt to introduce a dictatorship sensitized a critical view of one’s own history and its meaning. The campaign in Gaza pulled out of the hole of oblivion the circumstances of the establishment of the state, including the hitherto carefully concealed Nakba, terror, massacres such as Tantura, Deir Yassin and others. The process of coming to terms with its own history is just beginning in Israel, but the question is whether it will have enough opportunity and time to do so, whether the fanatical Deuteronomists, who understand the Torah literally as Jehovah’s order to kill others, will not expel all critical citizens from the land before the inventory.
It is said that states are maintained by the political forces by which and from which they were created, stated Masaryk. With a genocide that has no parallels in modern history in terms of its obviousness and cruelty, Israel has burned all bridges behind it. The return of the rabid dog to the international community is hardly imaginable. All that remains is to run forward: completing the purge in Gaza, extending it to the West Bank, eliminating Hezbollah and occupying Lebanon, attacking Iran.
But Israel does not have the means to do so. Even in the campaign in Gaza, it is completely dependent on weapons, ammunition, financial, intelligence and, in the future, military assistance from the USA and its veto in the Security Council.
But even the control of the US by the Israeli lobby is not a sustainable state. There, too, criticism of America’s participation in Israeli massacres is gaining unprecedented strength, not least in the Jewish community itself and the state administration. Nor can the US afford to become a permanently isolated outcast of the world, as the latest UN vote suggests. So far, American politicians are dependent on electoral votes, and they are rapidly polarizing under the reality of Gaza.
Despite the fact that the US is not even in a position to effectively intervene militarily in a volatile region without causing an uncontrollable explosion. An attack on Iran, in which the myopic sees its own perpetrator, would immediately result in a devastating storm on Israel and on forty American bases and the navy, caught in a regional trap, and the disruption of the vital oil trade by closing the Strait of Hormuz. A full invasion of Iran is hindered by the lack of financial, military and human resources, the reaction of the American population, Iran’s alliance with Russia and China, and practically zero chance of final victory.
The US can only watch helplessly at the tenacious resistance of Hamas, the binding of a large part of the IDF in the north by Hezbollah, the Houthi sanctions against Israeli shipping and even the attack – quite possibly under a false flag – on a base in Jordan with three dead. The toothless retaliatory bombing of Shiite terrorists is PR for the public and voters, but apart from the further consolidation of the Arab Axis of Resistance and the intensification of demands for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and Syria, it has no real effect.
The future of Israel cannot be predicted. The only thing that is certain is that it will not exist in its current form for a long time. Several possible directions of development can only be imagined very broadly.
The first is the escalation that is currently looming: Israel will deliberately continue to drive Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai, domestic pressure will force Egypt to armed border protection, Hezbollah to intensify attacks from the north, Israel to attack Lebanon and other actors, including USA, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and various Muslim militias, to actively participate in the wider and regional conflict. Israel’s chances of surviving it are more than doubtful. Unless the fighting escalates into a devastating World War III, what is left of Israel will certainly be far from what it is today.
Another is what is referred to as the two-state solution: Israel within the 1967 borders and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. In addition to Israel’s radical rejection, which perhaps sufficient pressure from the world could eventually break, similar to South African apartheid in the 1980s, the biggest problem is the dense network of settlements built by the most fanatical Zionist extremists in the Palestinian territories. An attempt to subject them to Palestinian state jurisdiction would most likely lead to protracted civil war and Israeli-sponsored terrorism with the prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian war and again a latent escalation into a wider regional conflict.
The third option is Palestine/Israel from the river to the sea, i.e. the only state entity within the boundaries of the former British Mandate of Palestine. Paradoxically, the Palestinians and Benjamin Netanyahu subscribe to it, but with different ideas: Israel is Erez Israel, the only Jewish state gradually eliminating the share of its racially inferior fellow citizens. The Palestinian idea is a democratic state of equal citizens, where, of course, the Palestinian majority would have a decisive weight. If there is a real regional war, this is probably the most likely outcome.
The fourth possible variant is a gradual dampening of the current conflict without further major dramatic reversals, but not a return to business as usual. The balance of power has irreversibly changed. Israel has lost both its nimbus of invincibility and the unconditional support of the West, which is also itself in a phase of decay. On the contrary, with its role as a common enemy, it consolidated the Islamic identity and self-confidence of Islam as, alongside the USA, China and Russia, another powerful pole in a multipolar world. Israel’s only chance of survival could be accommodation in the Islamic environment, but it has already burned all bridges for that.
Gaza and the Jews
Israel is a Jewish state.
If we were to take his self-declaration seriously, then the worst imaginable crimes against humanity up to genocide are committed by Jews. And if we were to follow the conclusions of its president, none of them is innocent.
I am afraid that many people already perceive it this way, not only in Islamic countries and in the Global South. As if Israel wanted to confirm all the centuries-old European anti-Jewish prejudices.
But it’s like all stereotypes: the differences within each group are greater than the differences between the groups. The most die-hard Zionists claim to be Jewish just as much as their staunchest opponents.
Jews are probably the most heterogeneous identity in the world. Those we meet in the West are generally Ashkenazi, culturally descended from Central Europeans who escaped Christianization by conversion to Judaism in the ninth century, much like the Iberian Sephardim, descended from those who escaped Islamization two hundred years earlier. The Jewish religion was chosen for the Turkic Khasars in the eighth century by King Bulan. The Jews – in the continuity of the ancient Hebrews – lived in part on the territory of Palestine even before the Ashkenazi invasion, in part merged with the Palestinian Arabs and in part lived in peace in the surrounding countries, mostly Islamic since the seventh century, from where they were forced to emigrate to Israel after 1948 as Mizrahim.
Over the centuries, however, they mixed with the local population and with Jews from other areas; the Central European Ashkenazis, for example, seamlessly follow the Eastern European Khazars. Seeing them as a biological race is misleading for several reasons. On the one hand, genetics has definitively disproved the idea of race, and on the other hand, the derivation of biological origin in the horizons of millennia is a pure myth. Thousands of years ago, we each had one trillion ancestors. We are all multiple descendants of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Muhammad, Confucius, Genghis Khan, the ancestor of Bohemia and Charlemagne. What unites Jews of various origins, languages and cultures is the mystique of their own uniqueness, the mystique of belonging to Jehovah’s chosen nation. Including secular Ashkenazim.
But not all Ashkenazim are Zionists. Zionism is the concept of the Jewish people formulated in 1896 by Theodor Herzel, demanding their own state in Argentina or Palestine. In the following year, the first Zionist Congress was held – incidentally, at the same time as the founding of the Czech National Social Party and the Bund, the party of the Russian Jewish proletariat, three concepts that authoritatively determined the following century. The Zionist colonization of Palestine begins especially after the adoption of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which Britain supports the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine – as a European enclave to control the Suez Canal.
It was clear from the beginning that the territory could only be acquired at the expense of its existing inhabitants. All the initial declarations about the peaceful coexistence of two equal nations – from Herzel to Žabotinsky – were hypocrisy in a situation where one group forcibly occupies the territory of another. Of course the native Arabs, Jews and Christians had to defend their land and property, of course the European colonization of Palestine – like all others – could only be accomplished by power, money, violence, weapons and terror.
Brutality, however, is nothing remarkable about the Ashkenazi colonization of Palestine, European colonizations from the New World through Africa to the Far East were similarly brutal. Its anachronism is remarkable. The European colonial system peaks at the end of the 19th century and ends no later than the Second World War, when the colonization of Palestine is just beginning. In addition to the British interest in controlling the Suez Canal, the main motive for European support is helplessness over hundreds of thousands of Jews freed from concentration camps, in which feelings of complicity for their suffering are mixed with resentment for their repatriation. Sacrificing the Palestinians as compensation for the victims of European genocide pushes the problem aside, away from Europe.
The status of victims of eternal anti-Semitism, pogroms and the Holocaust, together with the trauma of European guilt, gives Israel and European Jews a de facto nimbus of exceptionalism – and impunity; it morally – and often legislatively – excludes any discussion and criticism a priori. Let us note its Ashkenazi origin: it is based on an exclusive European experience. There was no persecution of Jews (Gypsies, Gentiles, heretics, witches…) anywhere else, especially not in Islamic countries, nor elsewhere in Asia, America, or even in the European USA and Canada. And let’s add that the identity of the victim is always an aggressive identity.
Now the Ashkenazi Zionists are forcibly implanting their victim identity into the Islamic world, where Muslims, Jews and Christians have lived together in mutual respect and tolerance. With European arrogance, they also transfer their battle cry of eternal anti-Semitism to the Muslims who are resisting the occupation of their country, launch a hateful anti-Islamic campaign in the Christian West, and manipulate the US into military interventions against its Islamic rivals. It is a suicidal strategy: an alliance with Christian Europe, persecuting the Jews for millennia, against Islam, providing them with a safe home for millennia.
However, the genocide in Gaza is also shaking the European alliance and the protective walls of European historical myths and taboos. Never again holocaust! But which one, the one committed against the Jews, or the one committed by the Jews? The most powerful Ashkenazi weapon is losing its force after seventy years, on the contrary, a critical revision can be expected. In time, the criminalization of Holocaust denial will either have to be extended to genocide denial in general or be abandoned – after all, this is a question for historians and lawyers, not politicians.
Also, the impact of the second Ashkenazi weapon, anti-Semitism, suffered from inflationary use already before October 2023. However, it does not have much of a chance to convince that it is a worse crime than genocide. With Gaza, the question of what its users actually mean by Semitism becomes even more pressing. If he means robbery, terror, ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide, perhaps we are all anti-Semites.
Israel’s barbarism also re-examines the age-old problem of Jewish identity: what is it? Is it a biological race according to Torah, Halachah, Nuremberg Laws and Israeli Laws? Religion in the sense of Maimonides, Hasids, Haredim, Jews in Islamic countries and proselytes? Secular nationality according to Herzl, Weismann and the early Zionists? Cultural tradition – but which one, Saba Kadisha of Damascus, Moses Mendessohn of Germany, Ba’al Shem Tova of Poland? A caste superior to the rest of the world according to Ovad Yosef, Schlomo Aviner, Israel Ariel?
Since October, over half a million Jews who had somewhere to go have left Israel. This is almost as many as the number of Palestinians expelled during the Nakba of 1948. The outlook for others is all the more bleak because Israel has burned all the bridges behind it. There is nowhere left to go to.
Once a punishable offense by the online censors, the CDC is now telling people to treat COVID just like the flu. Meanwhile, a 9th booster has been added with the 10th on the way.
By Kit Klarenberg | Mint Press News | January 28, 2025
Ever since Tel Aviv’s 1948 creation, much has been said and written about ‘Greater Israel’ – the notion Zionism’s ultimate end goal is the forcible annexation and ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of Arab and Muslim lands for Jewish settlement, based on Biblical claims this territory was promised to Jews by God. The mainstream media typically dismisses this concept as antisemitic conspiracy theory, or at most the fringe fantasy of a minuscule handful of extremist Israelis.
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