To be clear, Israel did spend 16 months burning Palestinians. "That is your prophecy" means that's the direction ethnic superiority goes. As Palestinian thought leaders have pointed out, settler colonialism eventually leads to genocide.
In reading your important book and hearing your podcasts, I feel my parents and grandparents nodding in grateful agreement. Your voice is essential to those of us who have felt alone and alienated from our friends in the American Jewish community. You are offering us a way back to our Jewish identity, a clarity in the midst of so much denial, rationalization, specious and self-serving justifications for Israeli actions.
Thank you for your work and your commitment to that clarity.
Of course, there's nothing original about expelling Palestinians to outside Arab countries -- it's how Gaza and the West Bank were created in 1948, and it also was Biden's suggestion in 2023. America taking it over just makes it marginally creepier, but not much.
I say BRAVO!!! as a Catholic who is listening to an administration which has appropriated Christian and increasingly Catholic tradition in ever more insidious ways to bless greed and contempt. As a Catholic who wonders if any other Christian ever stops to think about the moment in the Good Friday liturgy when we are required to stand and demand the crucifixion, to speak those words and to hear those words coming from your mouth and to realize what we are blindly and willfully demand just as a matter of course, as just the way the world works. This idea isn’t just a monstrosity for Israel and Jews but for Christians who themselves have lost and abandoned the essence of what Christianity proposes…the essential goodness of the person in themselves and the fragility of that goodness in the systems that humans (not God) create.
One outsider observation is that there seems to be more push back against Trump’s plan among Israelis in that Gaza would become US territory under the plan, not Israeli territory as it “should” be, than there is against the idea of ethnically-cleansing 2 million Gazans. Meir Kahane must be doing cartwheels of joy in his grave.
The second observation is how Orwellian the discourse has so quickly become: that the ethnic cleansing supporters are the TRUE humanitarian bleeding-hearts and western objectors to the dispossession are the ones being cynical and cruel to the Palestinians.
Let's not forget that in the mainstream humanitarian discourse in the United States today, people talk about how it was a grave injustice that the U.S. government turned away so many Jews who were fleeing the Nazis, and many more Jews would have been spared from the Holocaust if the U.S. had taken them in. This is probably the single most common example that is given of how the U.S. government has mistreated Jews in the past. So if we take that as a standard for what is humanitarian and what is not, then allowing the Palestinians to leave Gaza becomes analogous to allowing the Jews to leave Germany. Of course, the analogy does break down when you consider that the U.S. is not offering to take in these Palestinians, only telling other countries to accept them. And the other issue, the reason why people who think this way can't say it out loud, is that the Nazis in the analogy are the Jews of today.
My problem with that line of discussion—the fate of the Gazans after they’ve been ethnically-cleansed from Gaza—is it is a manipulative way to step past the most salient issue about Trump’s plan: the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza that, according to polling, some 70% of Israelis support. Trump clearly hasn’t given much thought about what happens to the Gazans nor does he even care. The point of the exercise is expulsion; the other mouth noises one hears are just marketing and cynical misdirection.
Yeah, Gazans should be allowed to leave of their own free will, if they so choose, and arrangements with Arab states, Europe, and the US would need to be made, yada yada, but…hey, wait a minute…you can’t do ethnic cleansing!
From the get-go, Biden and western nations had been pushing the Netanyahu govt for a “day after” plan, which could have included temporary partial relocation measures for humanitarian reasons. There was no humanitarian interest then, there’s none now. Everyone knows it would be political suicide for any Israeli PM, should there be a mass expulsion from Gaza, to ever let them back in any appreciable numbers.
A proposal to force the deportation of over 2 million people from their homes, take over a distant land as part of the United States by a Tyrant's fiat, all towards creating a beach front high end generator of wealth for the Tyrant is in its essence almost a pure Evil.
I am never surprised when extreme right wing types, the sort who fancy white supremacy, cozy up to or identify as modern Nazis love this idea. I'm am not surprised to hear the devotees of Meir Kahane wild about the idea.
But Commentary and much of the center of American Jewish organizations????
Your quotation of the TV interview with Lapid and your hero was brilliant, it demands every one of us, of my beloved Jewish community, finally confront the fact that we Jews are not only capable of committing vast Evil, but are right now. Anyone who endorses this disgusting, psychotic path to death and destruction is too.
Though this is an axiom wrongly assumed attribute to a king I think it embodies something at the core of your reference to the banality of evil. The state is nothing without the individuals within it. The ‘state’ cannot vote, cannot build or tear down anything, cannot enter war or exit it, it is the people who populate that state who sanction and enact. Although this may be a stretch I believe, as I think Leibovitz suggested to Tommy Lapid, it is the individual who ‘prophecies’ what will take place within the body politic that composes the state. One individual has suggested the removal, aka ethnic cleansing, of the people in Gaza and now more and more individuals are gathering around, under, over and behind him. Although it may sound like splitting hairs, the state qua state cannot sanction violations of human rights and international laws unless the individuals who constitute it agree to abdicate thought to the sloganeering of the autocrats who, in practice, live out that absurd 17th century axiom, L’etat, c’est moi! Thank you Peter for crying out both against and to those who have abdicated truly thinking about the violations they are willing to visit on the Palestinians for personal, and supposedly, collective (the state?) gain. It has to stop and, as we see this egregious violation of Palestinian human rights growing and growing, it begins with individual after individual piling abdicating their intellect and compassion to inhuman ideologies.
1- Can we say it was a or equate it to the Holocaust? “No” and “Yes.” No, because the numbers do not add up. Not only here. But also in other atrocities, such as in Congo, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Algeria, Iraq, and Vietnam... Just to name few… But “Yes,” because this is the first FULLY “American funded & backed” EXTREMELY violent genocide livestreamed to our phones for close to two years. So, no one can claim “ignorance…
2- On the “state that is not subjected to any external moral standards.” I can only add that America wants/pretends to be the world’s moral police. And their Foreign Policy (which is truly "foreign") has been horrific. To which I always say, “𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲?”
3- Peter talks about Palestinians going back to their homes in occupied Palestine. How can we blame people who are fighting/resisting, sometimes VIOLENTLY, when they can almost physically see the homes they were expelled from?
To be clear, Israel did spend 16 months burning Palestinians. "That is your prophecy" means that's the direction ethnic superiority goes. As Palestinian thought leaders have pointed out, settler colonialism eventually leads to genocide.
In reading your important book and hearing your podcasts, I feel my parents and grandparents nodding in grateful agreement. Your voice is essential to those of us who have felt alone and alienated from our friends in the American Jewish community. You are offering us a way back to our Jewish identity, a clarity in the midst of so much denial, rationalization, specious and self-serving justifications for Israeli actions.
Thank you for your work and your commitment to that clarity.
Of course, there's nothing original about expelling Palestinians to outside Arab countries -- it's how Gaza and the West Bank were created in 1948, and it also was Biden's suggestion in 2023. America taking it over just makes it marginally creepier, but not much.
Thank you Peter for helping us remember our human values.
I say BRAVO!!! as a Catholic who is listening to an administration which has appropriated Christian and increasingly Catholic tradition in ever more insidious ways to bless greed and contempt. As a Catholic who wonders if any other Christian ever stops to think about the moment in the Good Friday liturgy when we are required to stand and demand the crucifixion, to speak those words and to hear those words coming from your mouth and to realize what we are blindly and willfully demand just as a matter of course, as just the way the world works. This idea isn’t just a monstrosity for Israel and Jews but for Christians who themselves have lost and abandoned the essence of what Christianity proposes…the essential goodness of the person in themselves and the fragility of that goodness in the systems that humans (not God) create.
One outsider observation is that there seems to be more push back against Trump’s plan among Israelis in that Gaza would become US territory under the plan, not Israeli territory as it “should” be, than there is against the idea of ethnically-cleansing 2 million Gazans. Meir Kahane must be doing cartwheels of joy in his grave.
The second observation is how Orwellian the discourse has so quickly become: that the ethnic cleansing supporters are the TRUE humanitarian bleeding-hearts and western objectors to the dispossession are the ones being cynical and cruel to the Palestinians.
Let's not forget that in the mainstream humanitarian discourse in the United States today, people talk about how it was a grave injustice that the U.S. government turned away so many Jews who were fleeing the Nazis, and many more Jews would have been spared from the Holocaust if the U.S. had taken them in. This is probably the single most common example that is given of how the U.S. government has mistreated Jews in the past. So if we take that as a standard for what is humanitarian and what is not, then allowing the Palestinians to leave Gaza becomes analogous to allowing the Jews to leave Germany. Of course, the analogy does break down when you consider that the U.S. is not offering to take in these Palestinians, only telling other countries to accept them. And the other issue, the reason why people who think this way can't say it out loud, is that the Nazis in the analogy are the Jews of today.
My problem with that line of discussion—the fate of the Gazans after they’ve been ethnically-cleansed from Gaza—is it is a manipulative way to step past the most salient issue about Trump’s plan: the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza that, according to polling, some 70% of Israelis support. Trump clearly hasn’t given much thought about what happens to the Gazans nor does he even care. The point of the exercise is expulsion; the other mouth noises one hears are just marketing and cynical misdirection.
Yeah, Gazans should be allowed to leave of their own free will, if they so choose, and arrangements with Arab states, Europe, and the US would need to be made, yada yada, but…hey, wait a minute…you can’t do ethnic cleansing!
From the get-go, Biden and western nations had been pushing the Netanyahu govt for a “day after” plan, which could have included temporary partial relocation measures for humanitarian reasons. There was no humanitarian interest then, there’s none now. Everyone knows it would be political suicide for any Israeli PM, should there be a mass expulsion from Gaza, to ever let them back in any appreciable numbers.
Thank you Peter, I am horribly angry and shocked.
A proposal to force the deportation of over 2 million people from their homes, take over a distant land as part of the United States by a Tyrant's fiat, all towards creating a beach front high end generator of wealth for the Tyrant is in its essence almost a pure Evil.
I am never surprised when extreme right wing types, the sort who fancy white supremacy, cozy up to or identify as modern Nazis love this idea. I'm am not surprised to hear the devotees of Meir Kahane wild about the idea.
But Commentary and much of the center of American Jewish organizations????
Your quotation of the TV interview with Lapid and your hero was brilliant, it demands every one of us, of my beloved Jewish community, finally confront the fact that we Jews are not only capable of committing vast Evil, but are right now. Anyone who endorses this disgusting, psychotic path to death and destruction is too.
Bravo.
L’etat, c’est moi!
Though this is an axiom wrongly assumed attribute to a king I think it embodies something at the core of your reference to the banality of evil. The state is nothing without the individuals within it. The ‘state’ cannot vote, cannot build or tear down anything, cannot enter war or exit it, it is the people who populate that state who sanction and enact. Although this may be a stretch I believe, as I think Leibovitz suggested to Tommy Lapid, it is the individual who ‘prophecies’ what will take place within the body politic that composes the state. One individual has suggested the removal, aka ethnic cleansing, of the people in Gaza and now more and more individuals are gathering around, under, over and behind him. Although it may sound like splitting hairs, the state qua state cannot sanction violations of human rights and international laws unless the individuals who constitute it agree to abdicate thought to the sloganeering of the autocrats who, in practice, live out that absurd 17th century axiom, L’etat, c’est moi! Thank you Peter for crying out both against and to those who have abdicated truly thinking about the violations they are willing to visit on the Palestinians for personal, and supposedly, collective (the state?) gain. It has to stop and, as we see this egregious violation of Palestinian human rights growing and growing, it begins with individual after individual piling abdicating their intellect and compassion to inhuman ideologies.
Well said גט געזאגט
1- Can we say it was a or equate it to the Holocaust? “No” and “Yes.” No, because the numbers do not add up. Not only here. But also in other atrocities, such as in Congo, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Algeria, Iraq, and Vietnam... Just to name few… But “Yes,” because this is the first FULLY “American funded & backed” EXTREMELY violent genocide livestreamed to our phones for close to two years. So, no one can claim “ignorance…
2- On the “state that is not subjected to any external moral standards.” I can only add that America wants/pretends to be the world’s moral police. And their Foreign Policy (which is truly "foreign") has been horrific. To which I always say, “𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲?”
3- Peter talks about Palestinians going back to their homes in occupied Palestine. How can we blame people who are fighting/resisting, sometimes VIOLENTLY, when they can almost physically see the homes they were expelled from?
Amen.
Remember, Dershowitz is the guy who redefined chutzpah to mean spunk.
Le Monde diplomatique: Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home
https://epalestine.blogspot.com/2022/09/Stranger-in-My-Own-Land.html