Dragged by her hair, incessantly punched and kicked, stripped naked, wrapped in an Israeli flag, sexually humiliated in her own language (lilla hora, “little whore;” hora Greta, “Greta whore”), threatened with gassing (revealing detail, this), uniformed guards all the while taking “selfie” photographs as they stand next to her laughing and jeering: What is this about, what the purpose here?
Israel’s extermination campaign has been devastating to human beings, but it has also been devastating for local ecosystems and the planet itself. By January this year, the war machinery used to murder hundreds of thousands and pummel Gaza to dust had released more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica or Estonia does in a year. The amount of carbon emitted to power the lives of millions was instead used by Israel to ruin the lives of two million people. On top of this, hundreds of olive groves have been torched, and the soil and groundwater have been poisoned for generations by bullets, bomb residue and the toxic stew from the tens of thousands of flattened buildings. Who knows how many animals and how much wildlife has died. Yet the big names of climate science, from Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe and many others, haven’t uttered a word between them. The rank stench of cowardice emanates from the rotting husk of the liberal body politic as it stumbles around, diseased and dying. This liberal body politic was perfectly content for Thunberg to challenge an amorphous, eight-billion-person-strong industrial civilisation that fuels ecological disaster. But now she’s challenging something very concrete: the people and hardware of a genocidal occupation government and its army.
NB: The most insightful lines in the essay below describe the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers: They were effectively an attempt to transport the extreme to which Israel has taken a premodern, even primitive ideology into a modern milieu and tell the world it must accept it. Zionism’s primitive component is the two thousand year old claim to use the Bible as a title deed to the land of Palestine. It is premodern because of its insistence that its opponents are less than human: this attitude is a precise replica of the viological racism of the Nazi regime.
The IDF have become sadistic military narcissists; and they imagine they are above and beyond all accountability. This is inevitable, given that no formal power has called them to account whilst they committed genocide before the eyes of the world. Only a powerful internationalist civilian movement can stop this gangster regime. And this is why they enjoyed humiliating Greta. Keep it up Greta, millions are in solidarity with you. DS
Patrick Lawrence: Against Chutzpah
I have been reading a lot these past days about how the Israelis treated those they detained when they illegally boarded the vessels that comprised the now-famous aid flotilla that never made it to Gaza’s shores. The Irish — naturally, given their bitter familiarity with imperial aggressions — gave fulsome accounts of the gratuitous brutality they endured while in Ktzi’ot Prison. Barry Heneghan, a member of the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish legislature, reported afterward that he was “treated like an animal.” Liam Cunningham and Tadhg Hickey, actors and activists, described how they were kicked, spat upon, slapped, zip-tied and left in the beating Negev Desert sun.
Nothing comes close to the account of her detention Greta Thunberg gave on Oct. 15 to Lisa Röstlund, a reporter for Aftonbladet, a Stockholm daily. This comes to me via Caitlin Johnstone, that Australian force of nature, who published machine-translated extracts in her newsletter the same day Röstlund’s interview with the courageous Swedish activist came out. I had already read of the dehydration, the purposely foul prison food, the bedbugs, the refusal of medical care. Now Thunberg gives the world a long list of “monstrous abuses” — Johnstone’s summarizing phrase — that is beyond infra dig.
Dragged by her hair, incessantly punched and kicked, stripped naked, wrapped in an Israeli flag, sexually humiliated in her own language (lilla hora, “little whore;” hora Greta, “Greta whore”), threatened with gassing (revealing detail, this), uniformed guards all the while taking “selfie” photographs as they stand next to her laughing and jeering: What is this about, what the purpose here?
“They’re like five-year-olds!” Thunberg exclaimed to Röstlund as she recounted all this. No, that’s not it, Greta. They’re like Zionists.
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As I read Thunberg’s account of her surely criminal mistreatment, my mind went to what may seem the unlikeliest places. I thought of that racist rampage Zionist spectators set themselves upon when they were in Amsterdam a year ago next month to cheer on Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli soccer club, as it faced off with Ajax. (The famous Dutch side trounced Maccabi, 5–0.) And then I thought of Bibi Netanyahu, who has the habit of boasting that he can control the United States and, lately and more specifically, Donald Trump. Al Jazeera reported on this 15 years ago. Max Blumenthal has more recently published various analyses to this effect in The Grayzone. And then I thought of all the terror Israeli soldiers and pilots have inflicted in plain view on the Palestinians of Gaza.
I described the treatment of Greta Thunberg and the other aid flotilla sailors detained at Ktzi’ot as “gratuitous brutality.” I take this back. There was nothing gratuitous in the conduct of Israeli prison guards in that case. Neither was there anything gratuitous about the frenzied riot of Israeli spectators in Amsterdam last November 8 and in days following. Nor in the Israeli prime minister’s more or less public boasts of the power he exerts over the White House. Nor, for that matter, in the stomach-turning spectacle of Israeli soldiers taking delight in their crimes against Gazans.
No, there is a public-display dimension to all of these cases of overreach and barbarism. The conduct of Zionists is meant to be seen — the more unacceptable it may be to civilized sensibilities the more this seems to be so. Those who tormented Greta Thunberg and her colleagues knew the world was watching and wanted the world to watch. When Maccabi spectators ran amok through Amsterdam’s streets shouting “Kill the Arabs,” “Fuck you, Palestine,” “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,” “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs” and other such niceties, they wanted the world to hear them.
So far as I understand the term, these are examples — extreme cases, surely, but cases nonetheless — of what was known in ancient Hebrew as khátaf, later coming out in Yiddish as khutspe and then entered English (apparently in the late 19th century, just as the Zionist movement gained momentum) as chutzpah. This term describes a certain kind of conduct toward others and has lots of different definitions. Those possessed of chutzpah are variously impudent, brazen, audacious, abusive or, as the saying goes, have a lot of gall. Arrogance and the presumption of superiority are implicit in the term.
I will add another connotation for the sake of my point, although I think it holds up well beyond my point. To display one’s chutzpah is to display one’s impunity. By this I mean the person of chutzpah is indifferent to norms. And, just as there is no point to chutzpah if no one can see it — of what use would that be? — the implication here is that one’s impunity must be perfectly evident to all others and the person of chutzpah must be indifferent to what all others may think.
In history chutzpah has been variously cast as an admirable trait in the mode of “gotta be me,” and alternatively as an odious disregard for others. I have always been of the latter persuasion. I find chutzpah in any manifestation — whether it is a case of table manners, the conduct of public discourse, or any other small thing — repellent. It is one thing to liberate oneself from deadening orthodoxies. It is altogether another to hold oneself, garishly and abusively, above others.
There are many ways to think about what the Zionist regime has done these past two years, or about what prison guards did to Greta Thunberg, or how Israeli soccer fans behaved in Amsterdam or how Bibi shows off his power over the United States. There is history, there is politics, there is geopolitics, there is the inherent insecurity of a small nation in a region hostile to it since the violence associated with its founding. There is no dismissing any of this.
But I have been convinced these past two years that something larger is at issue. Israel proposes to live and act in the community of nations, I mean to say, not according to law or what we know as morality or common forms of decency but according to what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination in the name of a righteous presumption of superiority. And with Zionist-nationalist fanatics now in control of the country’s direction, Israel has chosen this moment to insist that the world beyond its borders swallow this project as legitimate in the 21st century.
This is the ultimate in chutzpah, in my interpretation, and as a psychological and characterological question we ought to understand it as such. This phenomenon cannot be understood as distinct from Israel’s idea of itself as exceptional and as the earthly expression of a chosen people. What we know as chutzpah reflects both.
In this connection, the events in Amsterdam a year ago confirmed for me what had been until then an inchoate judgment. As I wrote at the time (in the above-linked piece) of the Israeli soccer hooligans and the vigorous local demonstrations against them:
They were effectively an attempt to transport the extreme to which Israel has taken a premodern, even primitive ideology into a modern milieu and tell the world it must accept it. This is what makes the mess in Amsterdam significant. And it is why it is important that it turned out to be, indeed, a mess.
To bring the thought up to date, I view all the massive protests against Israel’s barbarous behavior, mostly but not only in Europe, as of like importance. May there be many more of them. Ditto the recent decision of Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s president, to refuse visas to Israeli gymnasts who had planned to compete in a championship event in Jakarta Oct. 19–25. Ditto again the announcement Thursday that Israeli spectators will be barred from attending a match on Nov. 6 between Maacabi Tel Aviv and Aston Villa, another English soccer club.
These are acts of refusal, acts of rejection in response to Israel’s genocide, yes. They are also replies to Israel’s utter indifference to law and the norms of humanity in the name of ancient barbarities — to chutzpah on a national scale, the ultimate in chutzpah.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/10/17/patrick-lawrence-against-chutzpah
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The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
A Palestinian woman hugs an olive tree in a grove destroyed by Israel
World leaders who just a few years ago lauded Thunberg and rushed to share stages and photo-ops with her have said nothing. The climate scientists who hailed her moral clarity and feverishly retweeted her have ignored her. The prime minister of her own country has been silent.
Thunberg has been abandoned by a fake progressive liberal class that hailed her courage and valorised her strength just a few short years ago.
Why? Because to confront Israel isn’t the sort of strength the liberal class lauds. To put your body on the line against a genocide backed by the west isn’t the sort of courage they applaud. By displaying a moral consistency that to her no doubt seemed obvious, but to the liberal class is a mortal sin, Thunberg exposes every professed liberal value as a lie. Because Thunberg has stepped outside of her lane and transgressed against the only true values the liberal elite class understand: imperial values. The values of war and conquest, colonialism and militarism, and the profits to be gleaned therein.
The rank stench of cowardice emanates from the rotting husk of the liberal body politic as it stumbles around, diseased and dying.
This liberal body politic was perfectly content for Thunberg to challenge an amorphous, eight-billion-person-strong industrial civilisation that fuels ecological disaster. But now she’s challenging something very concrete: the people and hardware of a genocidal occupation government and its army. And in doing so she’s defying the militarism practiced by the west’s colonial treasure and the billion dollar contracts that flow between the two.
For the liberal class, Greta doesn’t understand some fundamentals. She doesn’t understand that for all Israel’s genocide it is an essential bulwark against Iranian terror. She just doesn’t understand that Israel is the Only Democracy In The Middle East®™ and this is a de facto signature of superiority regardless of anything else it does. Doesn’t she understand it’s better to do a genocide as a democracy than not do one as a one-party state?
Naive child.
Of course I joke, but I imagine these lines of reasoning are not far from their thought processes. Greta has transgressed by refusing to reproduce imperial narratives, and by refusing to be controlled.
She could have picked Aspen fireside chats with Hillary Clinton about the necessity of stepping up climate progress. She could have been contained by yearly Davos invitationals where she excoriates the liberal class for their lack of climate action. Restorative on-camera flagellation achieved, she then could have gone and enjoyed a Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2004 with Barack Obama. She could have picked non-confrontational NGO-style corporate-branded activism like her Gen Z golden child compatriot Malala. She could have had the lucrative career of performative activism she was being lined up for. But by shunning this path, she shows up so many liberals for the frauds they are. She also puts a spotlight on all the big climate scientists who’ve never once said genocide is bad for the environment.
These people are really shameful.
Israel’s extermination campaign has been devastating to human beings, but it has also been devastating for local ecosystems and the planet itself. By January this year, the war machinery used to murder hundreds of thousands and pummel Gaza to dust had released more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica or Estonia does in a year. The amount of carbon emitted to power the lives of millions was instead used by Israel to ruin the lives of two million people. On top of this, hundreds of olive groves have been torched, and the soil and groundwater have been poisoned for generations by bullets, bomb residue and the toxic stew from the tens of thousands of flattened buildings. Who knows how many animals and how much wildlife has died. Yet the big names of climate science, from Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe and many others, haven’t uttered a word between them.
Thunberg shows them up, as she shows up all those who not so long ago rushed to proclaim her a planetary saviour.
Greta exposes a bankrupt centrism.
It seems likely that she understood these ideological lines fairly quickly. It seems likely that she understood it was euro-centred privilege to proclaim the impending end of the world without recognising the world has already ended for many peoples and is currently ending for others.
This isn’t at all to say her original stance was misguided. It is to say that she recognises genocide and ecocide come from the same root. Systems of power that destroy ecosystems also destroy people, also destroy planets, also destroy worlds. She is in many ways simply displaying a logical consistency, as much as a moral one, about the interconnected nature of the evils that plague our civilisation. And this is where she broke with a liberal class who see evils selectively and in terms framed and dictated by empire. A class who backed the evil doers while insisting they were backing the good guys.
And now the most grotesquely evil outgrowth of the colonial enterprise might be coming to an end, if you believe the reports about a ceasefire. But the occupation and the killing won’t end until Israel is brought to heel and Zionism dismantled.
We only to have to look at the West Bank to understand this.
From October 2023 to April this year, more than 900 Palestinians were murdered by Israel in the occupied West Bank, with scores kidnapped to be placed into Israeli torture prisons without charge or trial, according to a UN report from April. In the West Bank there’s no Hamas, no weapons, no ‘war,’ no inciting excuses. There’s just pure Israeli barbarism and impunity, sanctioned and backed by western governments.
As an afront to humanity, justice, human rights and international law, Israel must be dismantled. But even the dismantling of Israel won’t be good enough. Israel is merely a colonial output, the tip of the spear. True restorative justice requires the end of the throwing arm.
And given her transformation from liberal darling to prisoner of conscience in an Israeli dungeon, I expect Greta is on board with that idea too.
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-liberal-abandonment-of-greta
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The Battle for the Soul of Judaism: Tribalism, Amalek and Axial Age Universalism of Isaiah
Peter Beinart: ‘What Israel Is Doing in the Name of the Jewish People Is a Desecration’
After the truth-shower 