Killing the “animals” – Israel’s “surgical” bombing of Gaza

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are part of America’s DNA and many of us would prefer to not think about it. Maybe that’s why American politicians bristle at those words when applied to Israel. It is inconceivable to many of us that a nation often described as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and (for Believers) the second incarnation of Biblical Israel could ever commit such atrocities. Congressional resolutions, preferred trading status, military and intelligence cooperation, and vetoes at the UN shield Israel from the consequences of its actions. Israel has received over $165 billion in aid from the US, the largest for any country. Laws in 37 states penalize or criminalize criticism of Israel. It’s been a veritable love-fest. Until this month Israel has largely enjoyed impunity for humanitarian crimes against a civilian population almost as large as its own.

But these last couple of weeks have been very different. Israel’s bombing of Gaza has moved well beyond retaliatory, far beyond indiscriminate, to a level bordering on genocidal. And there is no clearer sign of the persistence of the ethnic cleansing that created Israel than a widely-discussed plan to use it again in concert with the bombing of Gaza.

On October 9th Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared a siege on the entire civilian population of Gaza, calling them “human animals.” Intended was apparently a return to primitive warfare where walled cities are conquered by destroying all life within. But a walled city is more than just a metaphor in Gaza, where the world’s largest open air prison is surrounded by deadly border technology.

Palestinian home vandalized, reads – “Death to the Arabs”

Voice after Israeli voice promised vengeance on Gaza’s civilian population for the Hamas attacks. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” retired IDF Major General Giora Eiland wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. In a nation that enshrines Jewish supremacy in law and where “Death to the Arabs” is chanted at marches, rallies, soccer games or sprayed on Palestinian homes and graves, and where government ministers invoke it while encouraging anti-Arab pogroms, it’s not just Hamas Israel is looking to expel or kill. It’s every Palestinian in Gaza.

Gallant’s orgy of bombing, which launched as many strikes in a single day as the United States launched in Afghanistan in a year, was originally to be followed up by forcible transfer of all Palestinians from Gaza.

Leaflet warning Gazans to flee south

On October 13th Israel dropped leaflets telling residents of Gaza City:

“You must evacuate your homes immediately and go to the south of Wadi Gaza. For your security and safety you must not return to your homes until further notice from the Israeli Defense Forces. Public and known shelters must be evacuated. It is forbidden to approach the security wall, and anyone who approaches exposes himself to death.

Gazans from the north made the trip by car, donkey cart, and on foot in scenes reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba. Almost as soon as compliant refugees from Gaza City arrived in Khan Yunis, Israel began carpet bombing them. An episode of the New York Times podcast “The Daily” gave listeners a sense of the desperation of civilians and the indiscriminate nature of the bombing. Nowhere was safe. Everything was being bombed. Thousands of children have been killed as a result. A panel of U.N. experts has called Israel’s bombing “collective punishment” and “a war crime.”

But vast destruction and massive civilian casualties, not precision strikes on Hamas, were always the objectives.

A document provided to the Israeli financial magazine Calcalist (roughly, the Economist) and circulated within the Intelligence Ministry promotes the forced transfer of all residents from Gaza. According to Calcalist, “the document, [recommended by Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel], which is unlikely to affect government policy, may have been written to give a boost to the settler movement and its objectives [but] in any case it is a direct continuation of the extreme policy that the government has been promoting since it was established.”

“Gamliel’s document supposedly looks at three alternatives in the post-war era, but the alternative ‘to yield positive and long-term strategic results’ is a transfer of Gaza citizens to Sinai. The move includes three steps: establishing tent cities in Sinai to the southwest of the Gaza Strip, creating a humanitarian corridor to assist residents and, finally, building cities in northern Sinai. At the same time, a sterile area of several miles will be established within Egypt south of the border with Israel, so that evacuated residents cannot return. In addition, the document calls for cooperation with as many countries as possible so that they can absorb the displaced Palestinians from Gaza and provide them with absorption packets. Among other things, Canada, European countries such as Greece and Spain, and North African countries are mentioned.”

A similar white paper calling for ethnic cleansing of Gaza was produced by Misgav, the Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. The document, “A plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” is exactly what it sounds like – a plan to force all of Gaza’s inhabitants over the Rafah crossing into ten refugee cities in the Sinai desert. As with Gamliel’s white paper, the international community is expected to fund Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gazans and absorb the resulting stateless refugees. According to Misgav plan, whatever the cost, it’s

“actually a very worthwhile investment for the State of Israel. The land conditions in Gaza, which are similar to the Gush Dan area, will in the future allow many Israeli citizens to live at a high level and in fact will expand the Gush Dan area to the Egyptian border. It will also give a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”

The white paper goes on to say that a deal between Egypt and Israel (and also Saudi Arabia, which would provide some of the funding and construction) could be easily concluded in days. The authors salivated over the Hamas attack as an opportunity that might never come again:

“The IDF must create the right conditions for the Gazan population to immigrate to Egypt [and] there is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.”

Click image to hear Ayalon discuss the Misgav plan to expel Gazans from Gaza

While Calcalist did not anticipate that the Gamliel document would get much traction within the government, in an interview with Marc Lamont Hill on Upfront, former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon cited the Misgav plan (with its ten cities) and downplayed the forced transfer as a “temporary relocation.” But who was Ayalon kidding? Building ten cities for refugees in Egypt sounds like a “relocation” that is anything but temporary.

Nof Zion is a religious Zionist settlement in East Jerusalem created by removing the Palestinian residents of Jabel Mukaber (Author, 2009)

Friends and family know that I am no partisan of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, its 75-year occupation of Palestinians now either relegated to refugee camps or internally-displaced, controlled by barbed wire, high-tech fences, whose movements are controlled by ubiquitous checkpoints, who are surveilled, suffer warrantless searches by the Israeli military and indeterminate detention without recourse to a justice system only for Jews, whose houses are bulldozed or expropriated by settlers, who are denied their own state, ringed by settlements that further ghettoize them and breed resentment and hatred, such as we saw last week.

for Palestinians in the West Bank there is no such thing as freedom of movement. Instead, checkpoints and walls and barbed wire (Author, 2009)

I have friends and family with Israeli roots, and I am still in touch with peace activists from the Eshkol district in Israel where almost all the attacks occurred. I have plenty of anger and grief over what happened in the Negev. But I do think we have to be honest about where Palestinian resentment comes from. We also need to admit that killing a child, whether by commando, blockade, sanctions on medical equipment, or F16, is still the murder of a child.

Over the years I have followed Israel’s many military operations against both Fatah and Hamas; its shameful participation in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of 3,500 Palestinians in Lebanon by Falangist militias; a commando attack on the Mavi Marmara, which killed 19 peace activists, including Americans trying to deliver aid to Gaza; Israel’s disproportionate use of military force in Operation Cast Lead, the 2008 version of what is likely to come this week; and the killing of journalists, last year Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, three days ago Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah.

I have met Palestinians whose olive groves are routinely vandalized or destroyed by settlers, whose young men are routinely harassed in often deadly versions of Stop and Frisk, and whose children are detained without warrant or counsel in adult prisons for throwing rocks. I have met Gazans who live in the tiny enclave of refugee camps the size of Detroit – but with 3.5 times the population – and can’t even fish the waters off their own coast. And I have met Palestinians who still have the key to a home now occupied by a Jewish family in Jerusalem. Both historical and daily wounds afflict Palestinians because of ethnic cleansing and occupation that began in the 20th Century and festers well into the 21st.

Over time Israel’s politics have lurched from right to far right. Its 37th government is now comprised of extremists who intend to neuter Israel’s supreme court – the last obstacle to full annexation of the West Bank. And they also want to impose religious restrictions, such as gender segregation and changes to marriage law, on even secular citizens. Last week’s trauma to Israel has been compared to 9/11. As with 9/11, when Americans began chanting “USA! USA!,” Israelis now heed the call to “Stand with Israel.” Trauma seems to feed nationalism. This is also true of Palestinians.

A member of the ruling coalition recently endorsed pogroms on Palestinian villages after extremist settlers went on a rampage of killing and arson. “I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the state of Israel should do it,” said Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who is also responsible for civil administration in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir enlightened journalists with his Jewish supremacist views: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria [biblical names for the West Bank] is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

These are the gloves-off versions of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing that Israel’s government was once too ashamed to say out loud. Before Hamas attacked Israel such talk was beginning to frighten semi-liberal secular Israelis. Now Israel’s pro-democracy demonstrators are fully behind a new war government that has already killed over 2,000 in Gaza with indiscriminate bombing.

But territorial maximalism is a primary goal of all the political parties in Israel’s coalition government. Israel’s settler movement and its friends in the Knesset are still angry about Arial Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. Even if Hamas had not attacked Israel last week, many expected extremist ministers to propose re-establishing some of the 21 Jewish settlements that once occupied 45% of the Gaza Strip. Such talk has surfaced in the wake of the attacks, and Israel is now forcing 1.1 million Gazans to flee south – an incomprehensible number which Palestinians fear could create a second Nakba (catastrophe). Those with passports are fleeing across the Erez Crossing into Egypt. Between the bombing and the forced expulsions, there will surely be another reduction in the population of Gaza. Someone has called it “ethnic cleansing on the installment plan.”

Throughout the years the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians through raids, military operations, or settler violence. Israel calls this periodic bloodletting “mowing the grass.” In its efforts to target Hamas fighters, Israel manages to mow down mostly civilians, more often than not children. Each time a payment on the aforementioned installment plan.

Even assuming that reports of children being decapitated by Hamas fighters last week are true, why have so few tears been shed for the thousands of children whose bodies are blown apart by Israeli bombs paid for by American tax dollars? Perhaps for the same ugly reason it has been so easy for Americans to kill Mexicans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Puerto Ricans, Afghanis, and Iraqis. Israel certainly has some soul-searching to do. Americans too.

For all the US State Department and Israeli Foreign Ministry press releases expressing shock, anger, and solidarity — for all the many emotional appeals, for all the bias in the media, the cynical invocations of the Holocaust, the unfortunately necessary pushback against antisemitic incidents that inevitably occur in the wake of this conflict, or the religious and racial connections between Western Jews and Christians – we’re still ignoring the most glaring feature of this conflict: the wrongs done and wrongs being done to Palestinians.

The Occupation is Israel’s and Israel’s alone. Every death that emanates from this conflict weighs most heavily on Israel because Israel chooses not end the Occupation. No nation should enable, justify, defend, or fund the Occupation. Let Israel go it alone and see how quickly change can come about – when the US isn’t subsidizing it.

It is an abomination that Israel’s occupation has gone on for 75 years. The human misery it has inflicted and inflicts daily ought to shame every Western power complicit in its continuation.

The United States must not provide a cent more to Israel.

Approximate range of Hamas attacks

For some people, the Hamas attacks came out of nowhere and can only be explained by sinai chinam, the Hebrew term for baseless hatred. This of course ignores the history and the reality of the moment. With American politicians streaming into Israel to express sympathy and solidarity, it has become politically and socially dangerous to point out that the Hamas attack, while violating every standard of human decency and every law of war, was not unprovoked. It is also politically and socially dangerous to note that, unless something changes, Hamas’s savage attack and Israel’s savage response won’t be the end of it. That “something” is Israel’s 75 year occupation of a population almost its own size.

W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, is a deeply dark and political poem about the rise of Nazism culminating in the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939. In it we find these lines: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” As today, Auden’s expressions of simultaneous revulsion at Nazism and disgust for the reparations and humiliations Germany was subject to, and which fed Nazism, were not appreciated by a flag-waving public averse to nuance.

Managing the occupation of a population almost its own size has left Israel with basically three options: (1) to grant citizenship to Palestinians and create a democratic secular state; (2) clear out of the illegal settlements to permit a Palestinian state to exist; or (3) kill as many Palestinians as possible and force them to flee elsewhere. Israel has always chosen the third option and, appallingly, most Western nations with histories of colonialism and ethnic cleansing themselves have been complicit enablers — the United States especially.

Some of the 20 sites attacked

Americans may not like to face facts, but for years many Israelis, including those in Israel’s security establishment, have warned that Israel has become an apartheid state. In September, Tamir Pardo, the former head of Mossad, used exactly those words: that Israel was forcing an apartheid system on Palestinians in the West Bank. The month before, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir acknowledged exactly how the system works: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria” — the biblical names for the West Bank — “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.” And this was the West Bank he was talking about, not the strip of squalid, densely-populated refugee camps in Gaza to which residents of hundreds of Arab villages in the Negev were forced to flee and which is now the largest open-air prison on the planet.

Last week’s attack on Israel was stunning and ambitious. Amid a barrage of rockets which temporarily overwhelmed the Iron Dome defense, Hamas commandos also used low-tech ordnance, drones, and paragliders to overwhelm Israel’s border surveillance systems, then systematically attacked over 20 kibbutzim. All were within striking distance of Gaza, and the targets in most cases were kibbutzim and moshavim of military importance or which had been built on “cleansed” Arab villages. There is no question that Hamas used terror, but it was not merely a symbolic act like felling the Twin Towers or crashing into the Pentagon. Hamas was conducting a military operation to test Israeli defenses, new tactics, and its own reach. For next time.

Nahal Oz, which was one of the 20 attacked, is half a mile from the town of Sakarya in Gaza. After the 1967 war it became an access point for the Gaza Strip. Because of its proximity to Gaza, it has been under steady attack since its founding in 1951 as Israel’s first Nahal (paramilitary/vocational) settlement.

Density of Israel’s agricultural settlements and Gaza’s refugee camps

In April 1956, Nahal Oz’s security officer Ro’i Rothberg was killed and his funeral was attended by none other than Moshe Dayan, whose eulogy acknowledged Gazans’ anger at being ethnically cleansed from their own land, the burden that Nahal border settlements bore to serve as security buffers for the rest of Israel, and – freely expressed – that Israel’s settlement can only proceed by ignoring the pain and anger of those it has consigned to the life of refugees. It is an astoundingly warped and profoundly un-Jewish perspective on human suffering:

Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders? […] We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.

Ashkelon, which was bombarded by missiles during the attack, was once the Palestinian town of al-Majdal with 10,000 residents, mainly Muslim and Christian. It was ethnically cleansed in 1948.

Be’eri, one of this hardest-hit by Hamas, is roughly 2 miles from Gaza and, as the crow flies, perhaps 5 miles from Gaza City. It is one of 11 settlements in the Negev established by the Jewish Agency in 1946 to block the Morrison-Grady Plan, a partition plan which would have assigned the Negev to a Palestinian state. The rave at which over 260 young people were slaughtered is just outside Be’eri, where over 107 were also butchered at the Be’eri kibbutz. Most of Be’eri’s members belong to Israel’s secular left. Vivian Silver, who was on the board of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization reviled by the Netanyahu government, was one of those abducted by Hamas.

Kfar Aza was another scene of brutal butchery of civilians by Hamas. Established in 1951 by Maghrebi Jews from Egypt and Morocco, Kfar Aza lies 3 miles east of Gaza.

Kissufim, whose residents were murdered and abducted, is another Nahal settlement founded in 1951 by the Zionist Youth Movement and is quite close to the former Gush Katif settlement in Gaza, one of 21 settlements evacuated by Arial Sharon in 2005. There is also a crossing to Gaza two miles to the West.

Magen is 2.5 miles from the Gaza border and was also overrun in the Hamas attack.

Nirim is another 11-point settlement founded in 1946 by Hashomer Hatzair volunteers to thwart the Morrison-Grady partition plan. An important battle took place in Nirim in 1948 but Israel was able to hold the town.

Ofakim was founded in 1955 by Moroccan and Tunisian Jews, displacing Bedouins in an area called Khirbat Futals. The original residents fled to Al-Muharraqa, from which they were then expelled to the Gaza Strip. Many of the hostages from the October raid by Hamas were from Ofakim.

Sderot s only a half mile from Gaza and was built on the site of the Palestinian village of Najd, whose 13,576 residents were ethnically cleansed the day before the British Mandate ended and Israeli independence was declared. Villages like Sderot were intended to serve as buffers to prevent “re-infiltration” by Palestinians to Israel. For years towns like Sderot in the Negev were where Israel’s Ashkenim settled new arrivals from the Maghreb, then Ethiopia and Russia.

The Eshkol district which includes most of these communities includes Yesha, where Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, himself a settler, owns a home.

Urim, which was attacked but not penetrated by Hamas, is built over the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Imara, whose original residents were forced to flee to Gaza.

Yad Mordechai kibbutz was founded in 1936 by Polish Hashomer Hatzair on the site of the Palestinian village of Hiribya.

Yated (“anchor”) was founded in 1982 and is among the southern-most settlements near Gaza’s Rafah crossing to Egypt.

Zikim, which was the scene of a naval assault by Hamas, was originally known as Hiribya. In 1945 it had a population of 2500. Its residents fled Jewish militias and most fled to Gaza. In 1949 Hiribya was re-settled by Hashomer Hatzair, a Labor Zionist youth group which formed several kibbutzim in Israel’s South.

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One of the most disturbing videos that surfaced after the attacks was of the attack on young Israelis at a rave barely two miles from Gaza. Disturbing because 260 young people with the rest of their lives before them were massacred just to make a political point. But also disturbing that anyone can imagine the freedom to dance with joyous inhibition barely two miles from so much inflicted human misery.

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.

Israel’s occupation has been ongoing since either 1947 or 1967, depending on how you count. An indisputable fact is that Israel has kept Palestinians under martial law for the last 75 years and has steadily chipped away at land intended to be their national homeland.

Israel and the Western nations, however, have continuously thwarted Palestinian statehood and winked as endless incursions, assassinations, land theft, and marginalization has created a de facto Apartheid state. American politicians speak of their deep commitment to a “two state” solution, knowing full-well that the land theft has now progressed so far that, without dismantling the illegal settlements, “two states” is nothing but a cynical, meaningless slogan.

Much like the US creation of the Taliban, Israel’s creation of Hamas (which was intended to neutralize the political power of Fatah and the PLO) has backfired spectacularly.

In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the decision to “withdraw” from Gaza. The Israeli military indeed withdrew from Gaza, but more controversial and traumatic for Israelis was the decision to physically dismantle 21 illegal settlements. This was seen as a betrayal of Zionist ideals by Israel’s far right, which still lists Sharon’s “betrayal” in its long enumeration of grievances.

Israel’s 2008 war on Gaza, known as “Operation Cast Lead,” killed 3 Israeli civilians and left 10 IDF soldiers dead by “friendly” fire. It also left vast devastation in Gaza and killed between 759 and 926 Palestinian civilians. A prize-winning photo by AFP photographer Mohammed Abed shows Israeli phosphorus munitions (which melt human bodies) raining down over a ruined school in Gaza. This was a brutal, disproportionate use of Israel’s military, which drew widespread international condemnation — though very little from the United States.

Israel is now in the throes of a crisis of its one-sided democracy. Amid demonstrations that have exposed fault lines in Israeli society, the nation formed its 37th coalition government around Netanyahu’s ultraconservative revisionist Zionist Likud party, Bezalel Smotrich’s ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, and Itamar Ben Gvir’s Neo-fascist Jewish Power party, which openly calls for expelling all Arabs from Israel and territory that Israel claims.

Ben Gvir’s political base is the old Kach party, which was banned for its advocacy of terrorism, and consists of extremists from the settler movement with links to Ygal Amir, who assassinated Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995, and Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer and injured 125 in Hebron in 1994.

Last year Netanyahu and Ben Gvir agreed to legalize settlements frozen, not coincidentally, in 2005. The entire West Bank is to be Israel’s Wild West. In a nation without a constitution, Israel’s supreme court is the only obstacle to human rights abuses. And now this coalition wants to neuter the nation’s court. Liberal Israelis fear the country is headed toward a future like Hungary’s.

With greater Palestinian suffering and the rise of a more authoritarian Zionism with fewer restraints and greater territorial aspirations — this is the dangerous context to this weekend’s invasion of Israel by an undisciplined group of Hamas fighters who carried out horrific murders, rapes, assaults and abductions of Israeli and international civilians in violation of international law.

But as an opinion piece by Sanjana Karanth reminds us, the Hamas attack may have been sadistic, indiscriminate and illegal. But to consider it totally “unprovoked” is to ignore 75 years of Israeli repression and Palestinian suffering.

As I watched videos of Hamas fighters moving systematically house-to-house in Sderot, it reminded me of the many videos I’ve seen of IDF troops moving house-to-house in Palestinian villages. It is likely that the Hamas kidnappings were intended in some twisted way to parallel Israel’s arrests, removal to Israeli soil, and indefinite imprisonment of Palestinians, arrested without warrant and imprisoned without court proceedings.

In 2009 I visited Israel and Palestine. I saw one of Israel’s physical Apartheid walls with my own eyes, the dehumanizing checkpoints, and I got a sense of the grim reality and deprivations for Palestinians. I visited a refugee center that generations of Palestinians have had to call home. I also visited an illegal settlement so large and so “American” that it was indistinguishable from an Orange County suburb with its ACE Hardware store and a community college. I visited Hebron and met an ultranationaist settler whose zealotry and violent fantasies alarmed me more than walking around Ramallah unchaperoned looking for a lunch spot.

In Sderot, which this weekend was ravaged by the Hamas invasion, I met with Mizrachi (Jews from Arab countries) peace activists who used to go into Gaza City to shop and who described the widespread PTSD of adults and children who have to hide in safe rooms. At the Zikim kibbutz, which was also breached by Hamas, I met with lefty Jews like me who sympathized with the plight of Palestinians despite being shelled. A huge concrete shield is built over the kibbutz’s daycare center to protect it from ketusha rockets fired so often that a cheeky rockets-to-ploughshares menorah was constructed out of the spent cylinders.

Everyone I met on that visit were all dear people, all precious lives. For everyone, Israelis and Palestinians alike, I want what we should all have – peace, enough to eat, security, a future for children and grandchildren. But for both Palestinians and Jews there can be no peace so long as Israel and Western nations (themselves no strangers to colonialism) wink at Israel’s colonial oppression and refuse to recognize the explosive potential of an oppressed people rising up in frustration because no one cares about them.

Once again this week we saw that potential.

As Israel’s “pro-democracy” movement suggests, Israelis themselves are beginning to understand that a state only for Jews with laws that privilege only Jews cannot ultimately even be a democracy for Jews. Just as white Americans have started to acknowledge this truth and our own history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow, many Israelis are beginning to grapple with the realization that Zionism is not so different from good old-fashioned American white supremacy. It might help that many are former Americans who emigrated.

The long-awaited Third Intifada has finally broken out. The old slogan “no justice, no peace” seems particularly apt. Palestinian desperation and Israeli insecurity will be permanent features of Israel’s Apartheid state unless there is sufficient American and international pressure on Israel to abandon its vast illegal settlements to finally enable a Palestinian state to become a reality.