Coming to Palestine Now an Audiobook!

My book Coming to Palestine is now an audiobook. You can listen to it on YouTube. The audiobook is also here. HT: Jorge Besada.

TGIF: Smells Like Genocide

If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The Republic of South Africa filed the complaint, which is ironic because Israel was a staunch ally of South Africa's former apartheid regime.

The official complaint is welcome, but thanks to social media, each of us already has ample evidence from a large variety of sources showing Israel's assault on the Gazans. Just watch the abundant video evidence that has accumulated since October 7, when Hamas fighters and perhaps other Gazans committed unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians after breaking through the fence that has kept them in an open-air prison for many years.

Since that horrible day, the Israeli Defense Force has brutally and indiscriminately pounded the 2.3 million people, about half of whom are children, who live in that 25x5-mile, densely populated strip. The conservatively estimated death toll -- there must be many victims under the rubble -- now stands at over 23,000, about half of whom are kids. Hundreds of thousands of residences have been destroyed or damaged. People have been displaced. Infrastructure and medical facilities have been rendered inoperable. Gaza resembles nearly Hiroshima after the U.S. government dropped the atomic bomb.

Moreover, one need not advocate strictly limited government (or no government at all) to be appalled at the U.S. government's complicity in that genocide, a word I do not use casually and have, I think, never written before.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted after the Nazi nightmare, formally defines as genocide several "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." (My emphasis.) Those acts are:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Israel argues that it is not killing Gazans indiscriminately because they are members of a particular ethnic or religious group; rather it tries to minimize collateral damage while rooting out lethal Hamas and its infrastructure. But is that credible? So many babies, toddlers, elderly, and seriously ill have been killed or maimed, so many homes, hospitals, and sanitation facilities destroyed.

South Africa's 84-page application to the ICJ is a well-documented comprehensive paper and bill of indictment against the state of Israel's conduct. In great detail and with much background, it enumerates both the Israeli government's genocidal actions and the many public statements made by Israeli civilian and military officials that declare in no uncertain terms their intention to do what is defined as genocide under the international convention.  Israel is a signatory to that convention, as is the United States.

At this stage, South Africa is requesting an immediate provisional order for a cessation of Israel's onslaught while the merits of its case are considered.

South Africa's application states:

South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ..., whether as a matter of law or morality. [My emphasis.]

Note the condemnation of Hamas for its atrocities. It goes on:

The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.... The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

This threat to the Palestinians has not passed, says the application, so a provisional cease-and-desist order is imperative right now:

...Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group. Repeated statements by Israeli State representatives, including at the highest levels, by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence, express genocidal intent. That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine. It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza, which have involved the sustained bombardment over more than 11 weeks of one of the most densely populated places in the world, forcing the evacuation of 1.9 million people or 85% of the population of Gaza from their homes and herding them into ever smaller areas, without adequate shelter, in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed.

As of the filing in late December,

Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including over 7,729 children — with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the rubble — and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe bodily and mental harm. Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.

And no end is in sight. The Israeli government has said the attack will go on for months, even a year. The Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, said on television that "every school, every mosque, and every second house has an access to a tunnel...and of course ammunition." When asked if that meant all of Gaza should be destroyed, she responded, "Do you have another solution how to destroy the underground tunnel city?"

That was just the latest in the many official Israeli statements -- from the prime minister and president on down -- indicating that the target of the onslaught is the entire population of Gaza, whether by bombing or by systematic deprivation of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies. (Even ambulances have been attacked.) Those statements are documented in the South African application because they demonstrate the Israeli government's genocidal intention. As a South African representative told the ICJ on Thursday, "The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible."

This death, injury, starvation, dehydration, and utter destruction of homes and infrastructure is perpetrated by a nation whose most devout supporters worldwide believe it has a holy mission to be a "light to nations." (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, and 60:3) Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rallied his troops by invoking the biblical story of the divinely commanded Israeli destruction of the Amalekite men, women, and children. Before the ICJ, Israel tried to explain that invocation by fully quoting Netanyahu, who told the troops, "The IDF is the most moral army in the world, and IDF does everything to avoid harming the uninvolved...." But the Israeli leaders have indicated repeatedly that no Gazans are uninvolved.

While the application was filed against Israel, the U.S. government -- for obvious reasons -- should not regard itself as off the hook: the genocide convention also prohibits "complicity in genocide." Moreover, a complaint has been filed in another court, the International Criminal Court, against President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for their role in helping Israel. Moreover, the prohibitions in the genocide convention have counterparts in U.S. law.

The Biden administration opposes South Africa's application, though it admits it has not investigated the matter. Revealingly perhaps, an Israeli government spokesman dismissed South Africa as an "advocate for the devil."

TGIF: Hear, O Israel, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

An older generation of Americans, including Jewish Americans, admire the colonists who resisted the British king and parliament in the late 1700s. Jewish Americans go further and admire the Judeans who revolted against the Greeks and Romans (twice) in antiquity.

So isn't it peculiar that they do not applaud the similar Palestinian resistance to Israel's domination? The most we get from U.S. politicians is Bernie Sanders's weak statement about putting conditions on the massive aid to Israel, which is in political disarray because its ruling competition wants to subordinate the independent judiciary.

To appreciate the Palestinian resistance and daily Israeli attempts at suppression, watch the Mondoweiss video "On the Brink: Jenin's Rising Resistance" (video and transcript). It begins like this:

Male Voice: "Palestinian health officials say at least nine Palestinians have been killed." Female voice (Yumna Patel): "It was the bloodiest few [almost five] hours the West Bank had seen in years." Male voice again: "More than a hundred military vehicles entered the camp [on Jan. 26 this year]." Female voice again: "Ten Palestinians [including two teen-aged boys and a 61-year-old woman sitting in her home] were killed in a single Israeli army raid. Dozens more were injured. Palestinians described it as a massacre, and it all took place in an area of less than half a square kilometer."

According to host Patel, "The Jenin refugee camp is home to over 15,000 Palestinian refugees, the descendants of those who were forced out of their homes by Zionist militias in 1948, during the creation of the state of Israel." Jenin is also home to "armed resistance groups who routinely confront Israel soldiers during army incursions into their camp," On this latest raid Palestinian medics with the Red Crescent were kept by Israeli forces from administering aid.

Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not "antisemitism," a word used to describe disparate things in different places throughout history, including criticism of Israel's inhumane treatment of Palestinians that goes back well over 100 years.

"In 2002," Patel says, "in the midst of the Second Intifada, the Israeli army launched a massive invasion of the Jenin refugee camp following a number of suicide bombings inside Israeli territory. During the invasion, the army killed more than 50 Palestinians and destroyed more than 400 homes in the camp, displacing more than a quarter of the camp’s entire population. More than 20 years later, the effects of the 2002 invasion are still felt in the camp today."

This is about individual rights and personal autonomy. "During January’s [this year] raid, Mohammad al-Sabbagh witnessed his family home being destroyed for the third time." Also, "During the army raid on January 26, 21 years after his father was killed, Ziad al-Sabbagh barricaded himself alongside his comrades inside his family home during the army’s assault. Though he made it out alive, he was arrested by Israeli forces. And the al-Sabbagh family home was once again destroyed."

"It's death or freedom," says one fighter. That sounds like Patrick Henry, who purportedly said, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” (March 23, 1775, St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia, speech at the Virginia convention.)

The unconscionably inhumane treatment of the Palestinians is either consistent with what are called Jewish values or it is not. If it is, well then... But if it is not, then why has it gone on 56 years after the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights were taken militarily (to be annexed in law or in fact) and 75 years after a group of Europeans declared the existence of Israel (no borders specified) and the Palestinians who managed to stay in Israel, despite the catastrophe (Nakba) of their brethren being driven from their homes, were made no better than second-class citizens (if that), subject to all sorts of government and quasigovernment mistreatment and discrimination? So much for Israel's Declaration of Independence, which promised that "it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel." (This took place following a UN General Assembly recommendation that Palestine be divided, with more than half given to Jewish Europeans even though Jews were a minority of the Palestinian population and the UN had no right to partition the land.)

"Back in 2002," Patel says, "the army framed the deadly invasion of the camp as a defensive measure to prevent future attacks against Israeli citizens. The raid on January 26 was justified for the same reasons. But the residents say that Israel’s frequent raids over the years have only created more resentment and motivated more people to take up arms."

Jamal Hweil told Patel: "Any person who wants to know the truth has to ask, is the resistance a result or a cause? The cause is the presence of the occupation. The cause is the existence of the [refugee] camp and the displacement of the Palestinian people and the persistence of the refugee issue. The cause is the presence of an occupation of our lands. Resistance isn’t the cause. Resistance is the result.”

As a young Jenin Brigade fighter told Patel: “The world must know that we are not terrorists, as the [Israeli] occupation claims. We are fighters in the name of God. We came out of our mothers’ wombs into this world to fight this occupier, who has stolen our religion, our customs, our traditions, and who has killed our fathers and our brothers. The world needs to know we aren’t terrorists. The occupation is the only terrorist in this world." He continued:

What pushed me towards resistance are my own personal convictions, from what I’ve seen in my life. We were brought up as kids in the middle of this, every day an army raid, every day an operation, every day someone is arrested, everyday youth are executed, women are executed. The occupation enters the camp and the city without differentiating between the old and the young. It will kill whoever is in its way.

Says Patel: "The Jenin Brigade was started in 2021 by fighters affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement but has since evolved to include fighters from a number of factions in the camp. The new cross-factional model has since inspired the birth of other groups outside Jenin, who spread messages of Palestinian unity against Israeli occupation." [Emphasis added.]

"It’s a message," Patel says, "that hadn’t been heard in years, and it has appealed primarily to young men, who have grown increasingly disillusioned with their own leaders after decades of political infighting and a stalled peace process." [Emphasis added.]

As one fighter says, “When this generation witnesses this frustration, when it sees a dead end on the political horizon, when it sees the worsening economic conditions, what do you expect from these youths?”

Ammar Izz al-Din told Patel: “Enough of the ‘negotiations.’ These negotiations have brought us nothing. Since I was born I’ve been hearing about negotiations, and it’s all been for nothing. You can’t negotiate with Israel.”

I'm not endorsing violence, but this despair is Israel's -- its rulers' and most of its people's -- fault; they have all refused to address the Palestinians' legitimate grievances. The former head of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldmann, wrote in his 1969 autobiography that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, told him that were he an Arab, he wouldn't talk to Israel's founders because “We had taken their country." (And let's remember how the Israelites came to possess all of Canaan in the first place, according to the book of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible.)

A day after the latest Israeli raid, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem whose grandfather was killed by an Israeli settler in 1998, "killed seven people inside an illegal Israeli settlement in occupied East Jerusalem." He was killed at the scene. Yet the government of Benjamin Netanyahu cracked down, Patel reports, "announcing sweeping measures that rights groups warned amounted to collective punishment.... At the same time, Israeli settlers in the West Bank carried out a series of 'revenge' attacks against Palestinians, burning people’s homes and cars, hurling rocks at Palestinian vehicles, and even shooting at Palestinians with live ammunition. It was reported that in a single night, settlers carried out close to 150 attacks against Palestinians and their property."

Why care about this? Because the U.S. government, influenced by the Israel lobby (Rep. Ilhan Omar was essentially right when she said it was “all about the Benjamins;” for some politicians it is), gives billions in military aid to Israel every year. And Netanyahu, with his eyes on Iran as a world, threatens to start a war or to goad America. into starting it.

It may be worth a reminder that the prophet Hosea (4:1-2, 6-7, 9) said, "Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.... My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee.... As they were increased, so they sinned against me: therefore will I change their glory into shame.... and I will punish them for their ways...."

And Jeremiah (32:42), "For thus saith the Lord; ...I have brought all this great evil upon this ['my'] people."

And Ezekiel (7:8) says, "Now will I shortly pour out my fury upon thee ['Israel'], and accomplish mine anger upon thee: and I will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense thee for all thine abominations."

I'm not saying this, and I don't buy it. But it's in The Book!

Admittedly this is a god who reportedly ordered genocide against other Canaanites and was angrier at the children of Israel for worshiping other gods than for anything else. But the remnant of anti-Zionist Jews (bless their hearts) such as the American Council for Judaism interpret unfaithfulness to include a failure to act justly. and idolatry as the placement of the Jewish state above all else. It is ironic that Israel does not heed its own foundational, if allegorical, texts.

Thomas Jefferson's statement concerning American slavery, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, comes to mind: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just...."

Of course the reason for Israel and Jewish Americans to behave justly toward the Palestinians is not Yahweh's wrath. It's justice itself!

As I wrote in Coming to Palestine: 

Realization of the [Zionist] dream of a Jewish state logically entailed the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians, who by the common standard of justice were legitimate owners of their land. Those who remained were made third-class citizens or even worse in an apartheid state. The countless micro offenses against those individuals were compounded by a macro offense: the destruction of their flourishing culture, communities, and country..... [H]ere’s one thing advocates of universal freedom and justice can say: The rights of the Palestinians must not be plastered over by irrelevant claims about the Jewish State’s right to exist.

 

 

 

"Coming to Palestine" Discussed on Podcast

I discussed my Libertarian Institute book Coming to Palestine on the podcast The Enragés (a project under the auspices of the Center for a Stateless Society).

Podcast Discussion of Coming to Palestine

Keith Knight and I discussed my book Coming to Palestine on his podcast, Don't Tread on Anyone. Watch and listen here.

Decentralized Revolution Appearance

I discussed Israel-Palestine with Aaron Harris on the Mises Caucus's Decentralized Revolution podcast. Watch and listen here.

TGIF: About that "Real Estate Dispute" in Sheikh Jarrah

When the Israeli government describes the conflict over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem as just a "real-estate dispute," it has a point. Palestinian families are at risk of eviction (and some have already been evicted) from homes they've lived in for many years so that Jewish settlers, many of whom were born in Brooklyn, N.Y., can move into them. This is being done on the basis of a 1970 law that permits Jews to acquire Palestinian properties that are said to have been once owned by Jews. Also, under a 1950s law, the Israeli government claimed the properties of so-called "absentee" Palestinians, even if those individuals displaced by war and other means were refugees living elsewhere in Israel.

Demonstrated solidarity with those besieged Palestinian families by worshipers in the Al Aqsa mosque and the Gaza Strip--and the Israeli military's (IDF) overwhelmingly destructive punishment--produced nearly two weeks of cruelty against the tiny (5-by-25-mile) and densely populated Gaza Strip, in which over 200 Palestinians, including about 70 children, were killed and many more wounded by the IDF, and about a dozen Israeli Jews were killed by Hamas projectiles. A ceasefire was reached and seems to be holding.

What's the actual story about this "real estate dispute"? To answer that question in a way I would be fully confident in I would need to undertake a long and costly research program. In lieu of that, I will rely--for the sake of discussion--on a narrative that seems plausible, though it will satisfy neither side's hardliners.

In other words, I will stipulate for this article that the government of Jordan, which controlled East Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967, expelled, drove, and otherwise pressured Jews to leave their homes in the 1950s and allowed Palestinian families to move in. As I understand it, Jordan also forbade Jews from visiting Jerusalem sites they regard as holy, especially the Western Wall. I do not defend those policies.

For the record, I note that Jordan was not an antagonist of Israel when the the self-identified Jewish state declared its independence in territory containing many Palestinian Muslims and Christians in May 1948. On the contrary, Israel and Jordan (then Transjordan) colluded to deny the Palestinians an independent state by dividing Palestine between them. Israel would get what the UN General Assembly had recommended for the Jewish state (55 percent)--in fact by the end of the "war of independence," it had expanded to 78 percent--and Jordan would get the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. (Egypt ended up in control of the Gaza Strip.) The secret Israel-Jordan agreement did not include Jerusalem, which the UN had recommended as an international city, under neither Jewish nor Palestinian control. Of course, Israel's 1967 war against Jordan and Egypt, among other Arab states, led to the current status of the West Bank and Gaza as "occupied territories"--although after almost 54 years, it is absurd not to see those lands as illegally annexed, if only de facto.

Here is how John Kunza of the website Jewish Unpacked, a Jewish publication that says it seeks to bring nuance to the Israel-Palestine controversy, describes Sheikh Jarrah:

In 1905, an Ottoman census that included Sheikh Jarrah and its surrounding areas found 97 Jewish families living in the area alongside 167 Muslim and six Christian families. Following Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the Jewish population was expelled from Sheikh Jarrah since the area fell on the Jordanian side of the new border.

Eight years later, in 1956, Jordan relocated 28 Palestinian families who were displaced during Israel’s War of Independence to Sheikh Jarrah. The move was approved by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and the organization stipulated that the families would be given ownership of their homes after three years which would then end their refugee status. The Jordanian government never did formally transfer over the property rights to the Palestinians.

By the 1950s Sheikh Jarrah had changed hands several times from Ottoman rule, to British Rule, to Jordanian rule, to Jordanian rule with assistance by UNRWA which was in part stipulating property rights in the area. By this time the Jewish population, which had been documented living there for thousands of years, had completely moved out or was expelled and a Palestinian population had moved in or was relocated to the neighborhood.

To complicate the story, Israeli-American Kalmen Barkin noted in an interview with Scott Horton that some of the homes of Jewish families before the founding of Israel were owned not by those families but by nonprofit Jewish organizations that then disbanded. I will ignore that because, while important, it is not relevant to the point I want to make here.

An overall account of  Sheikh Jarrah, of course, may not tell us the truth about the particular homes and land at issue right now. Al Jazeera sheds light on those homes here. In part, Al Jazeera states:

Israeli settlement groups said Palestinian families had built their homes on land owned by Jews before 1948 and that they must vacate these homes, but Palestinian cartographer Khalil Toufakji refuted those claims.

Toufakji said he found the land deed that negates any Jewish ownership of the area at the time after digging through the archives in Ankara 11 years ago.

I can't confirm or refute Toufakji, so I will tentatively accept the settlers' side in order to show that even their version does not get them where they want to go.

Taking Kunza's account at face value, it must be pointed out that many more than 97 Palestinian families were driven--by terrorism and outright massacres--from their homes not just in West Jerusalem but throughout what would become and then became Israel in 1947-48. During that time, some 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed of their land. At least 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed to make way for Jewish villages. In 1967 additional Palestinians were dispossessed. All of this and more later was done to "Judaize" the entire "land of Israel." Critics call this "ethnic cleansing," but the perpetrators and their defenders themselves used the Hebrew word for purify. Even right-wing Israel partisans, including historian Benny Morris, say that expelling the Palestinians was necessary for the creation of a Jewish state. (For details see Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. For my summary see Coming to Palestine.)

Here's the upshot: when Israel's partisans justify the evictions of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, they prove too much from their own point of view. If, as they insist, Jews--any Jews--have the "right of return" to any land previously owned or occupied by Jews, then so must Palestinians have a right to return to land previously owned or occupied by Palestinians anywhere in the territory between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Rights cannot be applicable only to individuals of particular religious or ethnic. Today some Palestinians still have deeds and keys to homes they or their families were driven from in 1948. They have claimed a right of return or at least compensation, but Israeli law recognizes only a Jewish right of return. This is one reason that Israel, from the river to the sea, is increasingly described as one apartheid state dedicated to Jewish supremacy or domination. (See the recent reports from Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem, the Israeli human-rights organization.)

When we acknowledge that if a right of return exists, it must be applicable to all, then we can see at least the start of way out of the turmoil in Israel-Palestine: good-faith discussions among all the parties in which all disputed property claims are considered with respect and fairness.

I opened by saying that the Israeli government has a point when it describes the fight over homes in Sheikh Jarrah as a real-estate dispute. But it is not merely a real-estate dispute. It's much more because it is part of a decades-long comprehensive program to dramatically reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the Palestinians from what Israel and the Israelis regard as exclusively Jewish land.

Discussing Israel-Palestine on Year Zero

 I discussed what's going on in Israel-Palestine on the Year Zero podcast. Have a listen.

Palestine/Israel Erupts Again

 In Coming to Palestine I defended, from a libertarian perspective, the Palestinians against Israeli/Zionist oppression. I am reluctant to repeat that case in a far shorter form here, but the horrendous current events throughout Palestine/Israel, including the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, cry out for comment. I can do no better than to link to Caitlin Johnstone's piece "Fifteen Thoughts on Palestine." It deserves careful reading.

I will add only a few thoughts. The mainstream criticism of the Palestinians, who object to being dominated by a settler colonial state, boils down to "But Hamas...." (This is not to say, of course, that all would be well if Hamas disappeared.) My answer to that objection is this: how long will take to learn that relentless oppression of a group breeds and nourishes the most violent ("extremist") faction of that group? If you want the violence-minded constituents not to rise to the top or to fade away, you must stop oppressing the group! Don't make violence appear to be the only alternative because all peaceful paths have been blocked.

Yet that is what Israelis and their bipartisan American-backers have consistently done for decades with their phony "peace process" and other subterfuge.

I don't like Hamas. Even though it has moderated its aims and has given signs of accepting of two-state solution, it's a far cry from having a libertarian orientation. For one thing, launching even its crude rockets toward civilians is wrong, however understandable. I attach that final phrase because many residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees from earlier expulsions perpetrated by pre-state Zionist paramilitary forces and then the Israeli military. One of the places where refugees were driven from is Sderot, which is a rocket target favored by Hamas. Still, I condemn targeting civilians.

That said, we must never forget who the aggrieved party is: the Palestinians, who were driven from land they had lived on and worked for generations--all for the sake of building a Jewish state. Let's also remember that at one time much Jewish opposition was expressed against the idea of a Jewish state in part because it would require mistreatment of the Palestinians. (Again, see my book.)

Finally, ceasefire talk is in the air, both from Hamas and the UN (and opposed by the Biden administration). Yet Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat says, "We don't think this is the right time for a ceasefire."

That's the worst thing a government spokesman or leader can say when that government is pulverizing essentially defense people. Keep in mind that under "normal" conditions the people of Gaza are treated worse than prison inmates, subjected to bad water, restricted food and medical supplies, and complete control over entry and exit by the Israeli military.

It's always time for a ceasefire, followed by real good-faith efforts to relieve the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere of the oppression they have suffered for so many years.

Individual, Not National, Self-Determination Should Be the Goal

Jeff Halper, the American-born, Israel-based veteran human-rights activist is heroic. He has dedicated his life to working for justice for the Palestinian victims of Israeli settler colonialism, much of that as the director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. His new book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State is the subject of a recent YouTube video, which I recommend to all who are interested in the struggle for freedom.

As much as I admire Halper, I still must take issue with him and many others in his camp on a basic issue: national self-determination. The issue is important because it is a key part of the collectivist-left outlook and therefore in conflict with libertarian individualism, which otherwise shares many of the same concerns.

Halper, like a growing number of people who have worked to bring attention to the Palestinians' plight, favors "one democratic state" in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. This position has emerged from the realization that the two-state solution is impossible in light of Israeli policy and actions in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. These areas are still called "occupied territories," but in fact, after the more than half-century since Israel conquered them, they are more aptly called de facto annexed territories, with varying degrees of repression of the stateless non-Jewish residents. In January the most prominent human rights organization in Israel, B'Tselem, issued a report supporting its declaration that the entirety of the land between the sea and river, and not just the territories acquired in 1967, constitutes "a regime of Jewish supremacy." "This is apartheid," B'Tselem said.

I agree with these positions. For me they flow naturally from my commitment to individual rights, including the right to peacefully acquire and exchange things, even things like parcels of land. When individual rights are respected, we may reasonably speak of the right to self-determination. But regrettably, Halper and his colleagues don't talk so much about individual self-determination. They prefer to talk about national self-determination; they seem to see the oppression of individuals as merely a manifestation of the oppression of a national group. I find this odd. I would have thought that self-avowed left universalists would find the idea of national self-determination unappealing. It's true that the slogan has been used by groups striving to break free from an empire. But nationalism and national rivalries have cost many lives and caused much misery over the centuries. So why does the left emphasize national self-determination rather than individual self-determination? Nations after all don't have selves. People do.

I wonder if it's because the collectivist left senses that individualism clashes with their basic beliefs. It suggests a framework that is pro-market, pro-trade, and -- horror! -- pro-private property--things they do not generally like.

What I want to say to such leftists is that, with respect to Palestinian justice, they can't get where they want to go by confining their analysis to national self-determination.

This is clear from Halper's interview. He says he supports both Palestinian and Jewish national self-determination and insists that an exclusive nation-state is not required for it to be realized. (This may strike one as odd since Palestinian refers to geography and Jew refers to religion.) All that's required for national self-determination, Halper says, is for a group to control its culture (whatever that means), resources, and land. But if he's right, how can a program of national self-determination for both groups get him where he wants to go, namely, to a non-supremacist state in which both groups can coexist?

The very heart of the controversy as it is generally understood is a dispute over who the land belongs to and who should control it: the group that has lived there continuously for the last millennium-plus -- mostly, Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and secularists, along with other, including Jewish, communities -- or the Europeans (of the Zionist movement) who arrived only a bit more than a century ago for the explicit purpose of changing the land into a Jewish State by dispossessing most if not all of the Palestinians. (Many of the Europeans in this group were complete secularists, even atheists, who nevertheless called themselves members of the Jewish People. They thereby invoked the same discredited racial theory that was rejected by liberal-minded people when it was espoused Europe in the 1930s by those who wanted to murder Jews.)

Halper's embrace of national self-determination for both "national peoples" in Israel/Palestine, then, can't be the path to peace and justice because it resolves nothing.

But we need not despair. We can still hope for peace and justice. How? By jettisoning national self-determination in favor of individual self-determination. After all, the rights that the Zionist project violated, and continues to violate, are not national rights. They're individual rights. Identifiable Palestinians were expelled by European Zionists from homes and real estate that they demonstrably owned. (Pre-Zionist Jews also legitimately owned property in Palestine, and their rights should be respected in any new arrangement.) Those property-owning Palestinian individuals lived in the hundreds of villages that the Zionist militias destroyed in their quest to establish a Jewish state in 1947-48. Some of those Palestinian individuals still possess the keys to their old houses and the deeds to their old real estate.

In other words, this isn't about nations or peoples. It's about individual human beings with natural rights, including property rights. The Palestinian People were not killed, dispossessed, and plundered by the Jewish People. Rather, particular Palestinian individuals were victimized by particular European Jewish individuals (though again, most were secular and even anti-religious) who claimed to be acting in the name of an ethnic or racial entity. (In fact, Jews are of many races and ethnicities.)

I don't deny that in process of establishing a Jewish state, Palestinian culture was assaulted and even erased. What I'm saying is that culture is carried by individuals. You can oppress a culture only by systematically violating the rights, including the property rights, of many individuals. The individual is the unit of moral analysis.

The path to peace and justice, then, lies in a single classically liberal state in which the rights of all individuals, regardless of religion, race, or ethnicity, are respected. This entails the right to engage in commerce and to move about peacefully.

I discuss these and many issues, including the claim that Zionist organizations and individuals purchased all of the land from Palestinians legitimately, in Coming to Palestine.

Scott Horton & Me

Scott Horton and I discuss the roots of violence in Palestine/Israel. Listen here.

Lions of Liberty Interview

I was a guest on the Lions of Liberty podcast to talk about Coming to Palestine. You can listen to the interview here.

TGIF: To Be or Not to Be a Jewish State: That Is the Question

Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country. To be Jewish, according to the prevailing view, it is enough to have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the many problems with this conception, such as: how can there be a secular Judaism?)

The definition of Jew has been bitterly controversial inside and outside of Israel since its founding. The point is, as anthropologist Roselle Tekiner wrote, "When the central task of a state is to import persons of a select religious/ethnic group -- and to develop the country for their benefit alone -- it is crucially important to be officially recognized as a bona fide member of that group." (This is from the anthology Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, which is not online and is apparently out of print. But see Tekiner's article, "Israel's Two-Tiered Citizenship Law Bars Non-Jews From 93 Percent of Its Lands.")

Second, Israel's champions insist that Israel is a democracy -- indeed, the only democracy in the Middle East. They vehemently object whenever someone demonstrates how Israel-as-the-state-of-the-Jewish-People must harm the 25 percent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, most of whom are Arabs.

Yet Israeli law uniquely distinguishes citizenship from nationality. The nationality of an Israeli Arab citizen is "Arab" not Israeli, while the nationality of a Jewish citizen is "Jewish" not Israeli. Are citizens of any other country distinguished in law like that?

This has consequences. For example, the prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews. This is not the result of political bargaining with religious parties but of a desire to protect "the Jewish people" from impurity. These contortions are required by Israel's self-declared status as something other than the land of all its citizens. Early Zionists said they wanted Palestine to be as Jewish as Britain is British and France is French -- a flagrant category mistake that has had horrific consequences for the Palestinians.

The insistence by Israel's supporters -- that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic -- thus is puzzling. What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state if that status has no real consequences for non-Jews? If all it meant was that the Star of David was on the flag, we might hear far fewer objections to Israel. But of course it means much more.

To see what it means, one has to look beyond Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Basic Law (its de facto constitution), and specific statutes, which contain language that on its face forbids discrimination against non-Jews. We should know better than to take official documents at face value. What matters in any society is the "real constitution," the principles that underlie commonly accepted behavior. The old Soviet Union’s constitution listed freedom of the press among the “rights” of Soviet citizens, and the U.S. Constitution says that only Congress may declare war and that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

More pertinent, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, wherein the British government “view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” also stated that “it [was] clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” We know how that worked out.

So what’s the story inside Israel? (I’m not talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel has occupied for 52 years and where Palestinians have no rights whatever.)

After doing an interview recently about my new book, Coming to Palestine, I was challenged by a listener over my statements that the Israeli government treats Arab and Jewish criminals differently depending on whether they shed “Jewish blood” or “Arab blood” (no such distinction actually exists) and that political parties can’t call for changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens.

Who is right?

Regarding criminal justice, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy shows anecdotally that Arab Israeli citizens who kill Jews can spend more time in prison than Israeli Jewish citizens who kill Arabs. “Arab blood is cheaper in Israel,” Levy wrote in 2014, “and Jewish blood is thicker.” He says things are the same today. Over the years, many articles have been published documenting this de facto, though not de jure, disparity. Indeed, Haaretz reported in 2011 that

Arab Israelis who have been charged with certain types of crime are more likely than their Jewish counterparts to be convicted, and once convicted they are more likely to be sent to prison, and for a longer time. These disparities were found in a recent statistical study commissioned by Israels Courts Administration and the Israel Bar Association…. The [unpublished preliminary] study is unique in that it is the first of its kind to be commissioned and funded in part by the courts administration, and in that it sought to examine claims by attorneys that Israeli judges deal more harshly with Arab criminals than with Jews.

Note that government discrimination against non-Jews across the spectrum of issues is not usually written into the law, although it may be. Mostly flagrantly, discrimination is legally applied to the "right of return." People defined as Jews, no matter where they were born or live, can become Israeli citizens/nationals virtually on arrival, while Arabs driven from their ancestral homes in 1947-48 and 1967 may not go back, much less become full-rights citizens/nationals. Put concretely, I, an atheist born in Philadelphia to Jewish parents born in Philadelphia (with roots likely in the vicinity of the Black Sea), can "return" [sic] to Israel and become an Israeli citizen at once, while my friend Raouf Halaby, a naturalized American citizen born to Arab Christian parents in west Jerusalem three years before Israel was founded, may not. The only difference is that my mother was Jewish, making me, a Spinozist, a Jewish national in Israel's eyes, and Raouf's mother was not.

Regarding restrictions on political parties, the Basic Law: The Knesset states:

A candidates' list [party] shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include...:

1. negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;... 

Before proceeding, let us note a conundrum. The issue I'm raising here is whether a state be both Jewish and democratic. The root of the word democracy is demos, people. So if the raison d'être of Israel is the welfare of only some of its citizens and millions of certain others who are citizens and residents of other countries, how can Israel be a real democracy? Strictly speaking, considering that word and, the law's language legitimizes a party that "negat[es] the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish ... state" but not as a democratic state. Would the Israeli election authorities accept that distinction? I don't think so.

In the past the Israeli Supreme Court has reversed government bans on a party’s or candidate's inclusion in an election. Particular cases will revolve around the exact wording of a party’s mission statement or candidate's platform, and legal language is subject to endless, unpredictable, and political interpretation. But, regardless, the government has the power to ban at its disposal, and future Supreme Courts may not be so liberal. So the threat of a ban always looms. Incidentally, a party or candidate that engages in “incitement to racism” is also ineligible to participate in elections, yet this provision has yet to be applied to Jewish parties and politicians, such as Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu, that routinely spout racist rhetoric.

Israel's champions also deny that Arab Israelis -- citizens, mind you -- have grossly inferior access to land, most of which is owned by a “public” authority and the Jewish National Fund (very little is privately owned); building and village permits; public utilities; education; roads; and other government-controlled services and resources. The Israeli government has carried out programs in the Galilee and Negev, known as Judaization, from which Arab Israelis, especially Bedouins, have been cleared to make way for Jewish Israelis. Such restrictions inside Israel have the stink of apartheid.

In his book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White documents that the Israeli government allocates resources -- unsurprisingly -- just as one would expect, considering that Israel by its founding doctrine is not the land of all of its citizens but only of some. This doctrine was reinforced last year in the Nation-State Law, which declares that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
So, as Israel's champions say, all Israeli citizens are indeed equal. It's just that some -- those whose nationality is "Jewish" -- are more equal than others -- those whose nationality is "Arab" or anything else but "Jewish."

TGIF -- The Goal Is Freedom -- appears occasionally on Fridays. This also appears at The Libertarian Institute.

Word Order Matters

What people of good will seek for Israel and Palestine is not just a peace, but a just peace.

The Double Essentialism of Zionism

Zionism, the Jewish nationalist philosophy that underlies the state of Israel, entails two kinds of essentialism: Jewishness for Jews and anti-Semitism for gentiles. In other words, no matter how hard they try, Jews cannot stop being Jewish and gentiles cannot stop being anti-Semites. (But see Shlomo Sand's How I Stopped Being a Jew.)

Rights of Return Compared

Israel's defenders often ask how third-generation Palestinians can possibly be recognized as refugees with a right of return to the properties from which the Zionists drove their grandparents in 1947-48. But didn't those Zionists, most of whom had arrived ony three years earlier, claim to be 80th-generation refugees with a right of return to Palestine? (In the latter case, it could not be a real return because their ancient ancestors had not been exiled by the Romans and thus were not a diaspora. Most Jews today are likely the descendants of converts, of which there were many far and wide in antiquity.)

TGIF: Let's Make Sure the Nazis Killed in Vain

I don’t know how many times I've heard that if we don’t stand by Israel, the victims of the Nazi Judeocide will have died in vain. I knew something was wrong with that claim, but for the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I think I can.

The claim is peculiar right off the bat. How would backing an Israeli regime that systematically and indiscriminately oppresses an entire non-European population in the 21st century possibly honor the victims of the Nazis, who were in power in Germany from 1933 to 1945? It makes no sense.

But that’s not all. To die in vain means that to die in the futile pursuit of a cause that remains unfulfilled even posthumously. This can include suicide as well as death at the hands of murderers. But someone who is killed while simply living dies neither in vain nor (perhaps eventually) triumphantly. A “passive” murder victim just dies, no matter what the killer intended. (No disrespect whatever is intended by the word passive here. I mean the death was not in a cause pursued by the victim.) It's a tragedy, but nothing more -- as though that were not enough.

The victims of the Holocaust did not see themselves as dying for a cause and were not expecting their deaths to accomplish anything on their part. They certainly did not think of themselves as dying for the future establishment of a chauvinist Jewish state in Palestine, although a small number might have been Zionists.

They died merely because their Nazi killers viewed them in a particular way. Indeed, most German Jews were surprised at being regarded as Jews rather than as Germans. In Nazi Germany one did not have to be a believing and practicing Jew to be targeted because the anti-Semites subscribed to the once-a-Jew-forever-a-Jew philosophy; having a Jewish mother was enough. (The philosopher Spinoza, who was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, would have been branded a Jew, although he rejected religion and changed his first name from the Hebrew Baruch to the Latin Benedictus.)

I note that today’s Jewish nationalists, that is, Zionists, take the same essentialist position. In their eyes (and unfortunately in the eyes of many non-Jews), one can never stop being a Jew. For them, Judaism is not a matter of religion but of blood. (They too regard Spinoza as a Jew.)

This is utter rubbish: there is no Jewish gene, despite the shameful Israeli search. Moreover, Jews do not constitute a single distinct ethnic group: Jews are found among many ethnic, racial, and national groups. There is no universal Jewish language, food, theater, music, etc. -- that is, no worldwide secular Jewish culture. The dominant culture in Israel is not Jewish; it's Israeli. Judaism represents a worldwide religious community with common beliefs and rites. Why isn't that enough? (See Shlomo Sand’s How I Stopped Being a Jew, which eloquently defends a position I wish to associate myself with.)

So here we are: no matter what I and others do, the victims of the Holocaust cannot have died in vain or not died in vain. People who talk in such terms commit a category mistake.
I could leave the matter there, but I can take this a step further. While nothing we can do will determine whether the Jewish victims of the Nazis died or did not die in vain, all of us -- Jew and non-Jew -- can work to guarantee that the Nazis killed in vain. That's what we should want for any homicidal and tyrannical regime. The best thing to be said about a despot is that he lived in vain.

Now the question is: how can we best guarantee that the Nazis killed in vain? Jewish nationalists (including the ill-defined secularists among them) would give the same answer to other Jews as before: embrace Jewish identity, with Israel, the self-described "nation-state of the Jewish People [everywhere]," at the center of that identity.

I say that’s not a good answer. For one thing, as Shlomo Sand writes, to the extent that Jews and non-Jews embrace an ethnic/racial/genetic notion of “the Jewish People,” the Nazis achieve ex post a major ideological goal -- and that would mean their killing was not entirely in vain. I want no part of it.

For another, a Jewish national identity necessarily comes at the expense of millions of Palestinian Arab Muslims, Christians, and secularists, who are thrown a few crumbs but have no real rights in Israel itself and have even less than that in the apartheid occupied West Bank and the concentration camp -- some Israelis use that term -- known as the Gaza Strip.

A far more promising way to make sure the Nazis killed in vain is to work overtime for individual freedom and toleration in all spheres, which means minimal -- zero would be better -- political power. That is: embrace radical liberalism, otherwise known as the libertarian philosophy, to combat oppression and bigotry. How many Jews could Hitler have killed had he remained a failed artist and paperhanger in Austria because no state was available? None, I’d guess: the creep probably would have had the crap kicked out of him on his first try. Power is poison, and we must work to eliminate it -- and the myth-based nationalism that it fuels -- in favor of voluntary peaceful social cooperation.

Once we see things that way, we will be equally appalled by all genocides and lesser forms of oppression. (One, of course, is especially horrified by the sheer scale and methodical nature of the Nazi killing machine, but that should be true no matter the victimized group.) No special consideration can be accorded to Jewish tragedies -- no "hierarchies of suffering," to use Haaretz writer Amira Hess's phrase, can be accepted -- without preventing the Nazis from having killed in vain.

With all its splendid ethnic, cultural, and individual variations, the human race is one people with one proper code of justice for all. Invidious divisions undermine justice, liberty, peace, and cooperation by fragmenting and weakening the oppressed before their oppressors.

TGIF -- The Goal Is Freedom -- appears occasionally on Fridays. Also posted at The Libertarian Instiute.

Another Interview

Scott Horton and I did another -- shorter (half-hour) -- interview about my new book, Coming to Palestine. Listen here.

Coming to Palestine Featured on Scott Horton Show

Scott Horton interviewed me about Coming to Palestine. Listen here.

What Is Judaism?

From Rabbi Elmer Berger's A Partisan History of Judaism: The Jewish Case against Zionism (1951):

Judaism evolved from a primitive tribalism to as noble a spiritual and universal vision as man has ever attained. This fact attests, even without detailed proof, to the truth that "unity" and segregation may have had their partisans but that there must also have been undiscourageable partisans of another kind through the long history of Jews and Judaism.

For change and evolution rarely, if ever, are born from uniformity. Uniformity is imposed, as our modern world knows, in order to suffocate rather than encourage growth. That the history of Judaism reveals such growth is proof of disunity, of individualism, of liberalism, and of respect for these things in whatever degree necessary; to have accepted their achievements and grafted them into the organism of Judaism itself.

Both traditions and both viewpoints existed side by side. There has been a constant strugge between them. Sometimes the viewpoint of universalism and assimilation of all but religious identity prevailed. Sometimes the segregaton was initiated by separtist Jews. Sometimes it was enforced by segregation-minded people who were not Jews. Sometimes both groups or a combintion of circumstances created by segregationalists of both kinds established the pattern.

But the important fact remains that always, among both Jews and those of other faiths, there were those who respected the individual integrity of people of Jewish faith and the transcending, universal values of Judaism....

For people other than Jews to resist the apparent prevalence of "Jewish" nationalism and affirm that Judaism is a highly personalized conviction about God, the universe, and mankind is not, therefore, to violate either the feelings of Jews or the traditions of Judaism....

In plain English, to oppose Jewish separatism and segregation in our national life, except in the field of religion, is not the equivalent of anti-Semitism.