Israel’s legitimacy grows out of the tragedy of the Holocaust and the West’s guilt about this makes Palestinians killing Israelis wicked in a way that Israelis killing Palestinians cannot be NB: A brilliant analysis, to be expected of Kesavan. Here are some further reflections: All observers ought to remember that antisemitism was Christian in origin, and… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Philistines & Pharisees
Jewish Voice for Peace Right now, Palestinians, Israelis and all of us with family on the ground are terrified for loved ones. We grieve the lives of those already lost and remain committed to a future where every life is precious, and all people live in freedom and safety. Following 16 years of Israeli military… Read More The Root of Violence Is Oppression
Since October 7, the settlers, with the complete support of the army and police, have been on a violent rampage, shooting innocent Palestinians point blank.. . We are facing an acute danger of vast proportions—an irreversible disaster. David Shulman and Yigal Bronner
NB: I post this along with a separate view, contained in this essay: After the pogrom in Israel, the angel of death is licking his lips: Hamas is not identical with the Palestinian cause: it is a curse on it. With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an… Read More Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them
Ideology is the most devilish variation of the lie: Hannah Arendt, Approaches to the “German Problem”; in Essays in Understanding, 1994 NB: The American establishment, its allies and a vast section of its media use the word evil with Nelsonian vision. As someone who has observed evil with both eyes and no national, religious, or… Read More Evil, with one eye
By Deepanshu Mohan There is a solar flare of deep inter-state conflict, conquest, and siege erupting all over the globe. Russia and Ukraine have been embroiled in a long drawn, painful war for over a year and a half. After a 10-month blockade, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Sept. 19, claiming the enclave in a day and causing nearly the entire… Read More On Justice and Sovereignty: The Limits of International Justice Architecture in a World Marred by Conflict and Conquest
To be considered a political being you must at the very least be considered a human being. Who gets to count as human? “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,”… Read More The double standard with Israel and Palestine leaves us in moral darkness
The driving out of peoples was ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’: Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, commenting on the exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Cited in R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans… Read More The Agony of Palestine
Bernard Haykel There are two immediate reasons why these attacks took place. First, Hamas has been vying with the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the leadership of the Palestinian cause and the success of these attacks is one way to achieve this. The PA is the official government of the Palestinians that signed the Oslo Peace… Read More Why Hamas attacked now – and how it weakens both Israel and hopes for peace
Extreme positions are not replaced by moderate ones but rather by extreme ones, though of the opposite kind: Nietzsche The Will to Power In the past 24 hours, two reports out of Israel have pointed to a striking conclusion: that the failure to prevent Hamas’s murderous assault on southern Israel rests in significant part with the government… Read More Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
After the truth-shower 