Chris Hedges: Rebranding Genocide
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
December 16, 2025 By Chris Hedges , https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/16/chris-hedges-rebranding-genocide/
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself. Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians. The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it is a “ceasefire.” Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons — 1700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well as around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.
Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement — brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning Palestinians. Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.
The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.
The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes, “was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. Hamas — along with other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops. Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange. Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.
But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so many times in the past, be betrayed.
Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day before the “ceasefire.” Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three others were also apparently killed in the strike.
The genocide is not over. Yes, the pace has slowed. But the intent remains unchanged. It is slow motion killing. The daily numbers of dead and wounded — with increasing numbers falling sick and dying from the cold and rain — are not in the hundreds but the dozens.
December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under five were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. Israel has opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement. Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantly shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown up — even if they are children.
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to UN estimates. The Strip, only 25 miles long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment. Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July. The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights group Adalah explains. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enacted since October 7.
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions. Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs.
We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.
If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we deserve.
Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide. Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.
This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.
The Lobby Is Milking the Bondi Beach Attack To Silence Critics of Israel’s Genocide
Jonathon Cook. December 16, 2025
It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate
I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.
Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.
Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.
Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”
If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.
The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.
Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”
No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-silence-critics-israel-genocide/
Israel’s biggest con trick: Hiding the true numbers it has killed in Gaza
10 December 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-12-10/israel-con-numbers-killed-gaza/
Israel has penned us all into a ‘debate’, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire – not the genocide it is waging by other means
The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a “debate” in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.
It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)
Or even that these “debates” always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.
No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate”, one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.
The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.
These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on.
Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been.
How long would your elderly parents survive in this hellscape?
How well would your diabetic child fare, or your sister with asthma, or your brother with cancer?
How well would you cope with catching pneumonia, or even a common cold, if you hadn’t had more than one small meal a day for months on end?
How would your wife deal with a difficult childbirth if there were no anaesthetics, or no hospital nearby, or a barely functioning hospital overwhelmed with victims from Israel’s latest bombing run.
And what would be the chances of your baby surviving if its mother could produce no milk from her starvation diet? And if you could not give the baby formula feed because Israel was blocking supplies from entry into the enclave? And if, anyway, the contaminated water supply could not be mixed into the formula powder?
None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.
According to a letter from experts in this field to the Lancet, studies of other wars – most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave – indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.
The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 350,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.
The reality is likely to be even worse. That is without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been left with horrific injuries and psychological trauma.
Israel’s war planners know exactly how this direct-to-indirect ratio works. Which is why they chose to destroy nearly every home in Gaza, to bomb the power, sanitation and water facilities, to level the hospitals, and to block aid month after month.
They knew this would be the way Israel could carry out a genocide while offering its allies – western governments and its army of lobbyists – a “get out of jail card” for their active complicity.
Donald Trump’s so-called “ceasefire” is just another layer of deception in this endless game of smoke and mirrors. The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, reports that less than a quarter of aid trucks are getting into Gaza, past Israel’s continuing starvation blockade, despite Israeli commitments agreed as part of the “ceasefire”. Apparently, this doesn’t register as a gross ceasefire violation. It goes unnoticed.
Unicef reports further that in October alone, at the start of the “ceasefire”, nearly 18,000 new mothers and babies had to be hospitalised in Gaza from acute malnutrition.
The genocide isn’t over. Israel may have slowed the rate of direct killings it is committing by bombing Gaza, but the indirect killings continue unabated. And so does the Israeli-engineered “debate” in the West, one designed to obscure and excuse the mass murder of Gaza’s population.
U.S. Military Budget Bill Would Ramp Up Israel Aid to Fill In ‘Gaps’ When Other Countries Impose Embargoes Over Genocide.
“this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region.”
The House Armed Services Committee said in September that the measure “combats antisemitism.”
Stephen Prager, Dec 09, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-israel-weapons-gap-ndaa
A little-reported provision of the latest military spending bill would direct the US to create a plan to fill the “gaps” for Israel whenever other nations cut off arms shipments in response to its acts of genocide in Gaza.
As Prem Thakker reported Monday for Zeteo, the measure is “buried” more than 1,000 pages into the more than 3,000-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is considered by lawmakers to be “must-pass” legislation and contains a record $901 billion in total spending.
Republicans are shepherding the bill through the US House of Representatives, where—as is the case with most NDAAs—it is expected to pass on Wednesday with Democratic support, even as some conservative budget hardliners refuse to back it, primarily over its $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
Since the genocide began following Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, the US has provided more than $21.7 billion to Israel, including hundreds of millions that have been supplied through NDAAs.
The new NDAA includes at least another $650 million to Israel, an increase of $45 million from the previous one, even though this is the first such bill to be introduced since the “ceasefire” that went into effect in October. This aid from the Pentagon comes on top of the $3.3 billion already provided through the State Department budget.
But this NDAA also contains an unprecedented measure. It calls for the “continual assessment of [the] impact of international state arms embargoes on Israel and actions to address defense capability gaps.”
The NDAA directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to assess “the scope, nature, and impact on Israel’s defense capabilities of current and emerging arms embargoes, sanctions, restrictions, or limitations imposed by foreign countries or by international organizations,” and “the resulting gaps or vulnerabilities in Israel’s security posture.”
As Drop Site News explains, “this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region.”
“The point of this assistance, to be clear, is to make up for any identified insufficiencies Israel may have due to other countries’ embargoing it as a result of its ongoing genocide in Palestine,” Thakker wrote.
A similar provision appeared in a September version of the NDAA, which the House Armed Services Committee praised because it supposedly “combats antisemitism”—explicitly conflating a bias against Jewish people with weapons embargoes that countries have imposed to stop Israel from continuing its routine, documented human rights violations in Gaza.
Among the nations that have cut off weapons sales to Israel are Japan, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile, other major backers, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have imposed partial freezes on certain weaponry.
While official estimates from the Gaza Ministry of Health place the number of dead from Israel’s military campaign at over 70,000, with more than 170,000 wounded, an independent assessment last month from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Center for Demographic Studies in Spain found that the death toll “likely exceeds 100,000.” This finding mirrored several other studies that have projected the true death toll to be much higher than what official estimates show.
Embargoes against Israel have been called for by a group of experts mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, numerous human rights organizations, including the leading Israeli group B’Tselem, have said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has amounted to genocide.
‘Genocide is not an Oakland value:’ inside Oakland’s grassroots campaign to end military shipments to Israel
Oakland International Airport has become a key hub for transporting military cargo to Israel during the Gaza genocide. Now, over 30 groups and thousands of Oakland residents have come together in the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo to stop it.
Mondoweiss, By Joseph Mogul December 8, 2025
Talia Rose starts their shift at Oakland International Airport (OAK) at 3:00 a.m., unloading same-day packages from UPS planes. Across the tarmac, they watch FedEx planes come and go. “I never had any idea what the hell is on those planes besides big metal containers that carry packages,” Rose said.
But that would change in August, when Rose attended a local organizing forum where a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) presented a soon-to-be-public report titled “Exposing Oakland’s Military Cargo Shipments to Israel.”
The report—published by PYM, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), and U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)—details FedEx’s routine shipments of F-35 Lockheed Martin fighter jet components to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase. The report describes OAK as a “dependable conduit for critical military technologies,” concluding “beyond a reasonable doubt that military cargo being shipped out of OAK has been used by the Israeli Air Force to carry out airstrikes and commit genocide in Gaza.”
Learning about OAK’s role in facilitating genocide disturbed Rose. “After reading the report, knowing there’s a minimum of three [shipments] a week going through the airport that have F-35 parts, it’s a feeling of overwhelming anxiety,” they said. “I’m right there, you know? I’m across a tarmac from it. It feels like I should be able to do something.”
With the launch of the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo campaign, Rose and thousands of Oaklanders would find what they could do.
The campaign was launched shortly before the People’s Conference for Palestine, a weekend-long event aimed at strengthening the movement, where PYM called for a shift towards local arms embargoes. Their theory was that a strong campaign would need the trifecta of a mass local base, organized workers, and progressive elected officials. Oakland has all three.
A central node of the weapons supply chain
Voulette Mansour, a PYM-Bay Area organizer whose grandparents were displaced during the 1948 Nakba, attended the People’s Conference. Behind the scenes, Mansour and PYM had been preparing for the campaign launch for months, eagerly anticipating this moment. “We had been doing a lot of background work on the research and preparing to launch the report,” Mansour said.
Through research infrastructure developed by PYM’s Mask off Maersk campaign—which targeted the largest maritime carrier of U.S. military cargo (including F-35 components) to Israel—PYM uncovered OAK’s role in the F-35 supply chain. “We were shocked that Oakland popped up on the map, not just as a blip, but as a central node,” said Mansour, “When we found this out, we were disgusted that this was happening in our city, but we also saw it as an opportunity.”
The “Exposing Oakland’s Military Cargo Shipments to Israel” report confirmed multiple shipments every week for over a year, making OAK the second most important logistical hub in the U.S. F-35 supply chain to Israel, behind Fort Worth.
The F-35 fighter jet is considered the crown jewel of the Israeli Air Force; Israel has its own modified version, called the F-35I, which is retrofitted specifically for Israeli weapons systems. Each jet costs around $100 million (subsidized by U.S. taxpayers in the form of federal weapons contracts) and can carry up to 18,000 pounds of munitions. Lockheed Martin is the primary manufacturer of the F-35, but over 1,900 contractors are involved in supplying various components, creating a vast and intricate global supply chain that the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is responsible for coordinating. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
That wave is swelling. On November 22, PYM launched a new global campaign, the People’s Embargo for Palestine, by creating an international arms embargo ecosystem through the coordination of research and strategies across local campaigns.
This is the next phase of our struggle,” said Mansour. “We raise the ceiling of our struggle through pushing for an arms embargo.” https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/genocide-is-not-an-oakland-value-inside-oaklands-grassroots-campaign-to-end-military-shipments-to-israel/
Gaza Denied the Right to Heal: Ceasefire Fails, New ‘Green-Zone’ Plan Threatens Modern Ghettos and Collective Imprisonment
December 4, 2025, By: Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/04/gaza-denied-the-right-to-heal-ceasefire-fails-new-green-zone-plan-threatens-modern-ghettos-and-collective-imprisonment/
Anew report from Euro‑Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warns that a proposed postwar plan for Gaza Strip — backed by United States government and Israeli government officials — could amount to “unlawful collective imprisonment” of Palestinian civilians.
The report finds that “this plan entrenches long-term illegal control and the forcible de facto annexation of territory. It imposes unlawful collective imprisonment on the civilian population, in clear violation of international law and the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”
The report adds, “Entry and exit would be permitted only through security screening, effectively converting these sites into overcrowded detention camps that impose severe restrictions on residents’ freedom of movement and daily life.”
Euro-Med, along with anyone with eyes, ears and a heart would think that the proposed design “mirrors the historical model of ghettos,”
What is being reported demonstrates a clearly coercive environment: Palestinians displaced by war would effectively be forced into the “green-zone” communes by the denial of basic services — housing, safety, food, water — unless they relocate.
Even more troubling: once inside, residents reportedly would face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, daily life, and access to services, raising grave concerns over human rights, forced displacement and long-term structural confinement.
This story demands our attention. After Gaza has been brutally assaulted with genocidal intent, it is now being reshaped in a way that entrenches segregation, displacement and total control. Not much less could be expected from a modern apartheid state that has been allowed to do whatever it has wanted for 77 years.
For more, here is a tweet from Ramy Abdul, Chairman EuroMedHR, detailing their report and a map in which they make it clear: “Gaza’s Yellow Line: Where Genocide is Internationally Acceptable”
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor @EuroMedHR has obtained alarming details about a U.S.–Israeli plan—supported by several Western and Arab states and institutions—that aims to turn Gaza into a forced ghetto, a massive detention zone, and a site of land annexation and resource Show more
More on this from The Nation: in an article published two days ago, Gaza writer Hassan Abo Qamar describes the so-called “ceasefire” as changing nothing — Gaza remains a prison, and its people continue to endure unrelenting hardship.
“The world calls this ‘peace,’ yet in reality ‘peace’ here does not mean the end of anything; hunger, fear, and death remain, while the occupation continues to strangle Gaza through crossings, restrictions, and deliberate obstruction of recovery.”
“The truth is simple: Gaza has been denied the right to heal.”
There is no way to end this article or post it without acknowledging what we see every day: Nothing has changed, and the Israelis are still killing. I end with this video for those following today’s events, including Al Jazeera’s reporting on today’s violations of the ceasefire, in which five people — including children — were killed. Once again, the ceasefire has not stopped the ongoing genocide. And now, with this new plan to create modern ghettos, the Israelis are leaning further into the playbook of the Third Reich.
How Israeli-Linked Operatives and Firms Are Embedded in U.S. Cyber Systems.
December 5, 2025 , By: Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/05/how-israeli-linked-operatives-and-firms-are-embedded-in-u-s-cyber-systems/
The Substack report, “Former Israeli Spies Now Overseeing US Government Cybersecurity” by Nate Bear (¡Do Not Panic!), is well worth reading. It uncovers that a firm with deep roots in Israeli military intelligence is now managing critical cybersecurity infrastructure for more than 70 U.S. federal agencies — including the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury, Transportation, Energy, Agriculture and Health.
The company, Axonius, was founded by former operatives from Israel’s intelligence unit Unit 8200. Its platform centralizes data from all IT tools used by agencies — giving “visibility and control over all types and number of devices.” This means administrators in Tel Aviv can theoretically track device usage, logins, website access, and can even disable devices or accounts for millions of U.S. federal employees.
While Axonius pitches itself as a tool to unify and strengthen federal cybersecurity, the investigation argues that the massive scale of its deployment — combined with its leadership’s intelligence background — raises serious national security and privacy concerns.
Because much of the company’s engineering and software development is run out of Tel Aviv — and many of its employees are former Israeli spies — critics say the United States has, in effect, outsourced federal level cybersecurity to a foreign intelligence‑linked firm.
Whether Axonius has acted, or plans to act, maliciously remains unclear. But the story highlights how deeply embedded Israeli‑linked cyber intelligence infrastructure may now be across U.S. government systems — something many see as a troubling precedent.
While dystopian in nature, it is a must-read and a must-deal-with report, as we have been exposing what is happening in Gaza. The relentless nature of Israeli surveillance is an unbearable nightmare. You should also read Gaza journalist Mohammed R. Mhawish’s 16-month investigation — “Watched, Tracked, and Targeted in Gaza” — into what is happening in Gaza now, focusing on the surveillance state. Both are must-reads.
This is not a new development. Obviously, thanks to the work of these journalists, I was inspired and did a basic search to find out about the relationship between Israel and United States spy connections, and I found this from 12 years ago, with The Guardian reporting: “The National Security Agency (NSA) has a secret agreement with the Israeli intelligence agency Israeli Sigint National Unit (ISNU) — established in principle in March 2009 — that allows the NSA to share raw, unfiltered intercepted communications with Israel,” and “The sharing of raw, pre‑minimization intelligence contradicts previous government assurances of ‘robust safeguards’ to protect Americans’ privacy.”
So needless to say, this isn’t the first — or the last — time these countries have worked together. What’s striking is how public it seems now, and it’s clear their privacy concerns for Americans aren’t what they once were.
However, as we will see, the relationship is also riddled with a double‑dealing, spy‑vs‑spy aspect that bears remembering. This is also covered in Nate’s Substack report and in a clip below with former CIA agent John Kiriakou, both discussing the distrust Mossad has for our intelligence agencies — and the ongoing issue of stealing technology and spying on the United States.
That distrust has played out a number of times, with Israel being accused or caught spying on the United States. One time was during the Obama Iran talks, with the Wall Street Journal’s shocking report about Israel spying, quoting a senior U.S. official: “It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy.”
Or being accused of planting devices by the White House in 2019 to spy on Donald Trump, or now just hanging out and having secret meetings — like U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee did when he met convicted spy Jonathan Pollard at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in July of this year.
For those who forget Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, he was sentenced to life in prison for stealing classified U.S. material and sharing it with Israel. He served 30 years before being granted parole under President Obama in 2015 and moved to Israel in 2020.
But as Kiriakou says in the clip, they don’t trust that we give them the best of our technology. So they work both sides and always in their own interest. After Nate’s report, they might not need to steal it anymore. But based on their pattern already in our history, they won’t stop their spy‑vs‑spy activities.
See below the Kirakou video [on original] for another video about the Mike Huckabee story with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss the scandalous—and still unpunished—secret meeting between U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and one of the most notorious Israeli spies, Jonathan Pollard, who handed vast troves of U.S. secrets to his handlers in Tel Aviv and now proudly identifies as an “Israel Firster.”
Israeli army shells east of Gaza Strip, detonates buildings despite ceasefire.
November 30, 2025 , https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251130-israeli-army-shells-east-of-gaza-strip-detonates-buildings-despite-ceasefire/
The Israeli army carried out airstrikes and home demolitions in the military-controlled yellow zone across the Gaza Strip early Sunday, Anadolu reports.
Israeli aircraft struck several areas in Rafah, while naval vessels fired shells toward the city’s coastline, local sources and witnesses told Anadolu.
Israel’s military vehicles stationed near the Morag Axis, norx`theast of Rafah, conducted sweeping operations and heavy gunfire in the area.
Israeli artillery shelled eastern Khan Younis, and helicopters launched fire on buildings amid home detonations in the area, according to witnesses.
An Israeli airstrike hit east of Al-Bureij refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, an Anadolu correspondent said.
In the northern Gaza Strip, the Israeli strikes targeted eastern Gaza City, and intense gunfire from Israeli helicopters was reported from eastern Jabalia.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement it signed with the Palestinian group Hamas, having committed nearly 500 violations and killed 354 Palestinians since Oct. 10, according to the Gaza government figures.
Since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and injured nearly 171,000 people in the over two-year war that has left much of the enclave in ruins.
Microsoft Faces Reckoning for Assisting Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.
The tech giant could face legal liability for aiding and abetting “atrocity crimes” in Palestine, legal groups say.
By Mike Ludwig , Truthout, December 3, 2025
head of its annual shareholders meeting on December 5, Microsoft is coming under mounting pressure to reconsider its relationship with the Israeli military, which has used the tech giant’s products to carry out the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
In an open letter to the company released on Tuesday, December 2, an international coalition of legal aid groups said Microsoft and its executives potentially face legal liability for “aiding and abetting … atrocity crimes” committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians.
“Over the last few months, it has become exceedingly clear that Microsoft’s services and technologies have been used to violate Palestinian human rights, and shareholders should be aware of just how much this opens up the company to legal liability,” said Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer at 7amleh–The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, in a statement on December 2.
Microsoft provides “major services” to other Israeli ground, air, and naval forces despite widespread agreement among experts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the legal aid groups. The letter lists multiple examples, including Mamram, the Israeli military’s central computing system and “weapons platform” that assisted the assault on Gaza with AI support and cloud services. Microsoft provided “rapid support” to Mamram during the initial months of the genocide to keep systems from crashing, according to the letter.
As Truthout has reported, products provided by Big Tech are so integral to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine that the mass killings and near-total destruction of infrastructure in Gaza are often described as “the first AI-powered genocide.”
By providing technology services to the Israeli government, Microsoft has exposed both the company and its leadership to “wide-ranging criminal and civil legal liability” both internationally and within domestic courts in the United States and European Union, the legal aid groups say.
“The EU dimension is devastatingly critical here — significant infrastructure powering Israel’s military targeting is hosted and processed in Europe, including by Microsoft,” …………………………………………………………………………… https://truthout.org/articles/microsoft-faces-reckoning-for-assisting-israels-genocide-in-gaza/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=19a0adacba-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_12_03_10_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-0614adc67f-650192793
International tribunal finds Israel guilty of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Mondoweiss, By Marianne Dhenin November 27, 2025
The International People’s Tribunal on Palestine held in Barcelona presented striking evidence of Israel’s forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the deliberate destruction of food security in Gaza.
The International People’s Tribunal on Palestine convened on November 22 and 23 in Barcelona. The event brought together organizers, human rights advocates, and legal experts and offered a platform for survivors of the ongoing assault on Gaza to present evidence of Israel’s international crimes. After two days of testimony, jurors returned their verdict: Israel, the United States, and other Western powers are guilty of the crimes of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinian people.
“The mass killings, deliberate starvation, systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, environmental devastation, and the targeting of hospitals, shelters, schools, and places of refuge were carried out as a matter of state policy, and with full knowledge of their fatal consequences,” said head juror Ceren Uysal, reading from the verdict as the tribunal closed.
Hosted by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, International People’s Front, and People’s Coalition of Food Sovereignty (PCFS), the tribunal offered a quasi-judicial platform for advocates and survivors of Israel’s ongoing genocide to present evidence and legal arguments related to the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. It follows in a tradition of popular forums seeking justice and accountability where institutions have failed to provide it, including previous tribunals on recent crimes in Gaza.
It came as Israel continues to commit violence in Palestine. Israel has violated the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in effect since October 10, 2025, at least 497 times, killing more than 340 people, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. On November 17, the United Nations Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s plan for an international force that he will lead to oversee the continued occupation of Gaza, drawing condemnation from legal experts and rights groups, who argue the plan violates Palestine’s right to self-determination and will fail to protect Palestinians.
Against this backdrop, the International People’s Tribunal repudiated the status quo. It offered striking evidence for Israel’s guilt, particularly for the forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the undermining of their food security. “The strategy of using food as a weapon has been going on for a long time in Palestine and Lebanon, but now it is intensified,” Razan Zuayter, PCFS global co-chairperson, told Mondoweiss. Zuayter also chairs the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), which endorsed the tribunal.
Over the course of the two-day event, more than a dozen witnesses made this case. Farmers testified that Israeli forces had razed their lands, uprooting trees, killing livestock, and blackening the soil. One witness, who testified anonymously for fear of reprisal, described an attack Israeli forces committed on their land in May 2024. “A group of bulldozers and tanks attacked our area and destroyed a set of chicken farms for meat and egg production,” they said. “The stench of death and foul odors spread throughout the place, forcing us to flee.”
Musheir El Farra wept on the stand on November 23, recounting Israeli attacks on his hometown of Khan Younis that killed more than 200 members of his extended family. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/international-tribunal-finds-israel-guilty-of-genocide-ecocide-and-the-forced-starvation-of-the-palestinians-in-gaza/
A Ceasefire in Name Only: Gaza’s Prolonged Purgatory
2 December 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/a-ceasefire-in-name-only-gazas-prolonged-purgatory/
A ceasefire can be a strange thing. The assumption, generally speaking, is that the parties to it restrain themselves for a period of time, ordering their forces and disciplining their charges from straying. But straying happens, transgressions inevitable. Some are genuine enough: silly misunderstandings, hot headed confusion, a fear that the other side has broken it. Room for error, and a degree of death and injury, is crudely permitted.
In the case of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, transgressions have become the lingua franca of the parties, though Israel remains, by far, the perpetrator par excellence. The latter’s departures from the agreement have been so vicious as to prompt the observation that they are pursuing a mutilated reading of the agreement, essentially a “reduce fire.” The deaths of 347 Palestinians in Gaza since October 10, including 136 children, do not point to cooling restraint.
On October 28, at least 104 Palestinians were slaughtered in a single day. This might have suggested a breach so serious as to suggest a repudiation. Not so, claimed Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani. “Fortunately,” he told a US audience, “I think the main parties – both of them [Israel and Hamas] – are acknowledging that the ceasefire should hold and they should stick to the agreement.”
What is becoming apparent is that the ceasefire has led to a state of affairs where Israeli forces have been permitted enormous latitude in the way it inflicts violence on local Gazans. The UN Women’s Chief of Humanitarian Action, Sofia Calltorp, reveals how Gazan women told her “again and again: there may be a ceasefire, but the war is not over. The attacks are fewer, but the killings continue.” Agnès Callmard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, goes so far as to declare that the ceasefire has created “a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal.” What has in fact happened is a mere reduction of “the scale of [Israel’s] attacks” and the meagre allowance of humanitarian aid into the Strip.
In a briefing note released on November 27, the organisation is adamant that “Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” Expulsions continue, prosecutions of alleged atrocities and war crimes by Israeli forces non-existent. The means to build the crucial infrastructure required to sustain life is being hampered, while unexploded ordnance, contaminated rubble and sewage, remain unaddressed.
Structural realities have also intruded. The Israeli Defense Forces remain in control of over 58% of Gaza. According to a clutch of special rapporteurs and experts in the employ of the United Nations, including Francesca Albanese, Ben Saul and Irene Khan, 40 active Israeli sites continue to operate “beyond the agreed withdrawal line, in clear breach of the ceasefire terms.” They also warn that the UN Security Council resolution authorising the deployment of an International Stabilisation Force (ISF), with Egypt and Israel coordinating border matters alongside a spanking new Palestinian trained police force “risks replicating – if not aggravating – the model of security coordination that has entrenched Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime in the West Bank.”
Humanitarian assistance remains at a painful trickle, an obscene state of affairs given the levelling devastation wrought by the war (85% of water and sanitation facilities were damaged or destroyed; likewise 92% of homes). The charity Oxfam does not spare any details in what is needed: “The most pressing needs include food and healthcare and shelter, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene services (WASH) including menstrual products and waste management services.” While some food and goods have become more available in local markets, they remain prohibitively expensive for Gaza’s residents.
Between October 10 and 21, seventeen international non-government organisations had essential aid shipments for Gaza, including water, food, tents, and medical supplies, blocked, with Israeli authorities claiming they were not authorised to do so. Some 99 requests by international NGOs to deliver aid were rejected, along with six requests from UN agencies. “This includes,” stated Oxfam last month, “agencies that continue to have long-standing INGO registration with Palestinian and Israeli authorities and are legally permitted to operate by the latter while new registration processes are ongoing.”
A system of brutality, practised, insistent, even casual, has been entrenched against those in Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank. The summary execution of two men in Jenin by Israeli soldiers after their surrender was lauded by Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who thought the killings the very thing “expected of them.” Implicit is the suggestion that Palestinians are required to behave in specific, tolerated ways: humbly submit to their apparently generous oppressors, suffer ceaseless purgatorial deprivation and accept a ceasefire in name only.
Outrage after footage of Israeli soldiers executing two Palestinians in Jenin goes viral.
Human rights organizations call the killing of two unarmed Palestinians in Jenin by Israeli soldiers an “extrajudicial execution.”
By Qassam Muaddi November 28, 2025, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/outrage-after-footage-of-israeli-soldiers-executing-two-palestinians-in-jenin-goes-viral/
The killing of two unarmed Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the northern West Bank city of Jenin has provoked international outrage after video footage of the incident went viral on Friday. Credited to the local Palestine TV station, the footage shows two young Palestinian men surrendering to Israeli soldiers and lying on the ground in front of a garage under soldiers’ instructions. They then appear to be directed by the soldiers to go back inside the garage, where one of the troops is seen aiming and shooting at him as he lies on the ground.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health identified the victims as Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry condemned the killing in a statement, calling it “a war crime” and a case of “extrajudicial killing.”
The Israeli army and border police said in a joint statement on Friday that Israeli troops “operated to apprehend wanted individuals” allegedly affiliated with a resistance network in the Jenin area, and that after they exited, “fire was directed toward the suspects.”
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, under whose jurisdiction the border police operates, voiced his “total support” for the Israeli soldiers in question, asserting that they “acted exactly as expected of them: terrorists must die.”
The footage has drawn widespread condemnation from rights groups, with Israeli human rights group B’Tselem stating that “the execution documented today is the result of an accelerated dehumanization process of Palestinians” and calling on the international community to “put an end to Israel’s impunity.”
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the killings, saying in a statement that “killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank have been surging, without accountability, even in the rare cases where investigations are announced.”
A pattern of extrajudicial execution
While the latest killing in Jenin was caught on video, Palestinians have remarked that it is not an isolated incident. In 2022, the Palestinian Human Rights Association documented 38 cases of the arbitrary killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces between August 1 and November 4. Yet the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank has sharply risen since October 2023, with at least 1,030 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the past two years in the West Bank.
The killing of the two Palestinians in Jenin comes two days after the Israeli army announced the launch of a new wide-scale military operation in the northern West Bank, which began with a large raid into Tubas. The operation comes almost a year after Israel’s previous “Iron Wall” offensive in the northern West Bank, during which Israeli forces displaced over 40,000 Palestinians from their homes in refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem.
Jenin city and its adjacent refugee camp have been at the center of Israeli military raids since late 2021, as it became the center of Palestinian armed resistance groups such as the Jenin Brigade. After October 2023, Israel launched a protracted military campaign to dismantle them.
UN Condemns ‘Brazen’ Israeli Killing of Surrendering Palestinians in West Bank
A UN official decried the incident as “yet another apparent summary execution” by Israeli forces.
Brad Reed, Nov 28, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-kills-surrendering-palestinians
The United Nations on Friday accused Israeli security forces of carrying out a “brazen” killing of two Palestinian men who were seen surrendering in video footage.
The footage, which was first aired by the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and reposted on X by Drop Site, shows two Palestinian men exiting with their hands raised from a building in the West Bank city of Jenin that had been surrounded by Israeli forces.
The two men then crawled out of the building entrance and knelt down with their hands still raised before apparently being instructed by Israeli forces to go back toward the entrance of the building. The two men did so, and were then shot dead by at least one Israeli officer.
According to France 24, United Nations rights office spokesman Jeremy Laurence told reporters on Friday that the incident was “yet another apparent summary execution” by Israeli forces.
“We are appalled at the brazen killing by Israeli border police yesterday of two Palestinian men in Jenin,” he emphasized.
Laurence added that UN rights chief Volker Turk was demanding “independent, prompt, and effective investigations into the killings of Palestinians,” and for those involved in the killings to “be held fully to account.”
The Palestinian Authority, which identified the two men killed by Israeli officers as 37-year-old Yussef Ali Asa’sa and 26-year-old Al-Muntasir Billah Mahmud Abdullah, accused Israeli forces of carrying out “brutal” executions that amounted to a “war crime.”
In a joint statement, Israeli police and the military said that the “incident is under review by the commanders on the ground, and will be transferred to the relevant professional bodies,” and they claimed that the two men killed were “wanted individuals who had carried out terror activities, including hurling explosives and firing at security forces.”
Despite pledges for a review of the incident, BBC reports that Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has already given a thumbs-up to officers’ actions and he responded to footage of the incident by saying, “Terrorists must die.”
How Zionism was sold to the world
Harriet Malinowitz’s new book, “Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara,” reveals how Israeli propaganda and public relations promoted Zionism while concealing Palestinian oppression and dispossession.
Mondoweiss, By Eleanor J. Bader November 29, 2025
There are a number of pressing questions at the heart of Harriet Malinowitz’s newly released book, Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara. “How could what was initially a small group of Eastern European Jewish thinkers and activists convince the Jews of the world to agree that they were all one ‘people’ undergoing one shared threat with one shared path to salvation – as well as a shared imperative to seek it?” she asks. “How could they convince the rest of the world to include them in the family of nations? And how could they convince all involved – including themselves – that their project of liberation was a benign and noble one to which they were entitled, producing no casualties or collateral damage?”
The answers to these queries are at the crux of Selling Israel, and the book not only systematically examines them, but dives into how hasbara – globally enacted but Israeli government-instigated propaganda and public relations efforts– has been used to boost Zionism, diminish the perception of Palestinian oppression, and promote the fallacy that the 78- year-old country began as a land without people.
The exhaustively researched work was touted by Publisher’s Weekly as “an impressive and meticulous challenge to established narratives.”
Malinowitz spoke to reporter Eleanor J. Bader about herself, her research, and her findings shortly after the book’s publication.
Malinowitz………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… During my own time on a kibbutz, there were Palestinian men working in the fields not far from the kibbutz members and international volunteers, but when we were all called in for a break in the “breakfast hut,” I saw that they simply kept working. I also met and drank tea with Palestinian merchants in the “shuk,” or Arab market, in Old Jerusalem, so I realized that what I’d been told about everyone in Israel being Jewish was untrue. I was told they were “Israeli Arabs” – without any coherent explanation. This left me completely baffled. Still, I was sure that I must be the one who wasn’t getting something…………………………
……………………….. I read Lenni Brenner’s 1983 book, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, which talked about Zionist complicity with Nazis. That provided another jolt.
I knew just enough to be excited by the first Intifada in 1987. But by the time of the second Intifada in 2002, people had cell phones and I could hear gunfire in Jenin via Democracy Now! on the radio. There were now blogs and listservs which carried information in new ways. But I was still naïve enough to be astounded that Israel refused to let a UN fact-finding team into the area.
This was a real turning point for me……………………………….
…………………………………… when I returned to the U.S., I plunged into research on the history of Palestine and of Zionism and eventually merged those interests with my research on propaganda, already well underway. I soon knew that I wanted to write a book on Zionism and propaganda, but it took me twenty years to complete the project!
Bader: The idea that God promised Israel to the Jews is largely unchallenged. Why is this?
Malinowitz: I think people are afraid to mess with other people’s religious beliefs, particularly where God is concerned. Plus, a lot of people believe the claim!
Bader: You write that Israelis rarely invoked the Nazi Holocaust before the 1960s because it was felt that the loss of six million Jews seemed like a sign of weakness, as if they’d gone to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.” Yet you also note that the genocide was seen by David Ben-Gurion to be a ‘beneficial disaster.’ Can you elaborate?
Malinowitz: I was shocked by how disparaged survivors of the Holocaust were in the country’s early years, as if they were a stain on Israeli masculinity that had to be expunged. Later, though, there was an ideological shift; the Israeli military reassured the world that they were strong, determined, and capable of fighting back if attacked, but at the same time the Holocaust could be invoked as a reminder of their perpetual victimhood, justifying all their exploits in the name of averting another genocide against the Jewish people. Similarly, the Holocaust has been used strategically when it serves international fundraising or is needed to garner empathy for Israel as an allegedly beleaguered nation.
Bader: Zionism was mostly promoted by Ashkenazi Jews who put forward the idea that there is one unified Jewish people. How did that idea spread?
Malinowitz: Zionism started out as an idea hatched by Eastern and Central European Jews, emerging in response to their own dire situation in the late nineteenth century. ………….For me, the claim that Israel represents all Jewish people is a fallacy. I, for one, was never consulted about this!
………………………………………………………………Malinowitz: Doubt can be a powerful weapon. There is a template that was developed by the tobacco industry that Zionists, climate and Holocaust deniers, Armenian genocide deniers, and others have used. The idea is there are competing narratives and both should be equally considered – rather than examining their credibility. This was why it took so long to convince the public that smoking caused cancer – because industry operatives challenged scientific expertise with their own “research,” leaving people thinking that the jury was still out and they might as well go on smoking until there was a clear and present danger. It’s been the same with Nakba denial. If the Zionists didn’t really force the Palestinians out in 1948, then they bear no responsibility for the refugees, right?
Bader: The idea that Israel is essential to Jewish survival has long been accepted as true. Why did alternatives to Zionism fail to gain traction?
…………………………………………………………………….., Zionists pushed the idea of Israel as the only solution t0 antisemitism, the only way Jews could be safe. …
…………………………………………………………………………..https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/how-zionism-was-sold-to-the-world/
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