Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and slavery, designed famine and war crimes against children and other civilians in service to kleptocratic colonialist regimes and Imperial conquest and dominion; this is the state of Israel in all her horror and terror, and now of Vichy America under the Trump regime and his Theatre of Cruelty.
Israel and America together are Atrocity Regimes of no laws but authoritarian rule by force and fear, no morality but hate, no grand dreams of our humanity and citizenship as equals but nightmares of fascisms of race, faith, and national identity.
Herein we witness again a great and terrible truth; no matter where you begin with ideas of kinds of people, with hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
In Gaza we find a scrying glass of our future as the Trump and Netanyahu regimes plan for the whole of humankind. To this nightmare of tyranny and terror under the iron regimes of those who would dehumanize us, enslave us, and steal our souls we must give the reply written on the gates of Auschwitz by her prisoners; Never Again!
Images of mass starvation from the use of famine as a weapon of genocide and war by Israel confront us daily in our news, and for over fifteen months now, yet the world does nothing to break the Israeli blockade of food and medical aid; indeed both Biden and Trump have bombed our counter-blockade positions in Yemen and made all Americans complicit in genocide as pour taxes buy the deaths of children.
As I wrote in my post of March 19 2024, Israel Unleashes the Third Horseman: Famine in Gaza; Netanyahu now rides upon his black horse of famine, bringing his mad dream of the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem with all of its attendant shadows lingering from the Holocaust.
As the passage in Ezekiel 14:21 warns us when the Infinite unleashes the “Four disastrous acts of judgement” to bring a Reckoning against the Elders of Israel for crimes of idolatry, the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
Israelis and Palestinians are one people divided by history, divisions shaped in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Perhaps Aynn Rand saw truly in this one prediction of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, as she is often paraphrased from her novel The Fountainhead; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
If we wish to preserve our humanity, our reply must always be “All of us, in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and an emerging United Humankind.”
The Gaza War has as its major theme the question of human rights, and if such an idea will have a place in whatever future we may choose. Here then is a retrospective of my witness of history of this conflict, and of its consequences for human being, meaning, and value, and of the choices we make about how to become human together.
As I wrote in my post of February 8 2025, Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians; Once you open the door to theocratic tyranny and terror, there is no going back; we must go through it, and reach our liberation on the other side.
Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump wishes to erase the Palestinians and in their place build a Riviera and playground of wealthy fools and hegemonic elites as a new crusader kingdom, dazzled by fantasies of limitless wealth and a power base independent from the limits of the American political system. This aligns with the historical forces at work which drive the global embrace of authoritarian regimes and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, as capitalism in its terminal stage seeks to free itself of democracy as its host political system.
We have see this dream of madness and cruelty before, during the Crusades which continued from 1096 with the capture of Jerusalem to 1718 in the Austro-Turkish War; the central conflicts involved in the idea of colonial empires authorized by the Infinite as war, plunder, and amoral rapacity versus the ideals of chivalry and the social use of force as defense of the innocent and the powerless are beautifully interrogated in the film Kingdom of Heaven.
If Trump and Netanyahu are permitted to realize their dreams of imperial conquest and dominion through the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians, we will witness the re-enactment of the horrors and travesty of the Crusades, as Vichy America establishes a colony of Christian Identity-Zionist elites beyond the reach of all law by which to destabilize and capture Europe and much else.
And the world will enter a new dark ages as democracy and civilization falls to an Age of Tyrants and wars of imperial dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable horror, possible for seven or more centuries as were the Crusades, and ending with the extinction of humankind.
This we must resist, by any means necessary.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror; I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the Nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, checkpoints and bantustans, concentration camps and slave pens, and systems of surveillance, force, and control, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2025, Anniversary of the Third Intifada of 2021, Now Ongoing In the Tenth Theatre of World War Three Which Contains and Supersedes the Gaza War; Both visitors to the Holy Land seeking signs of the Invisible manifest in its Disneyland of conflicted faiths and those trapped within its nightmare of walls, checkpoints, razor wire, pervasive surveillance, universalized violence, identitarian politics, and the tyranny and terror of one of our world’s most horrific regimes of force and control are here become the ghosts of the Holocaust; Israel echoes with the silent screams of stolen voices and the devouring shadows of a history weaponized in service to power as narratives of victimization and security as power, a strategy designed to first break our solidarity with division and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as falsification and then dehumanize and subjugate us as masters and slaves and as genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Israel as a dream of refuge and of universal brotherhood and love has been betrayed and subverted by Israel as a xenophobic theocracy, military empire, and slave camp; here Auschwitz has been institutionalized on a national scale, its former prisoners now its guards.
Why would anyone choose to recreate a hell they had escaped from, even as its masters rather than its slaves?
I understand all too well the seduction of power as security in a world of hostile and chaotic forces, and how overwhelming and generalized fear can be shaped by authority to centralize power by offering us loaned power over Others as figures of existential threats; to be the arbiter of virtue through force and control. But security is an illusion, the state as embodied violence obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, and our common pain unites us in ways which transcend the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which only love can free us from.
Love as solidarity in action can redeem the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, Tikkun Olam in Hebrew, and liberate us to live as guarantors of each other’s humanity.
As I wrote on the first anniversary of the Third Intifada on this night years ago; This must be the most written about, studied, debated, experimented with and fought over issue in global politics since the Second World War of which it is a result, this nation wherein one people are divided by history as Israelis and Palestinians, and a measure of our humanity, as the classic example of the double minority; what do you do with one city and one nation claimed by two historical communities, as a basis of identity as faith and nationality and the consequences and praxis of identity politics as violence?
Here a nation and a people are riven by dissociative identity disorder, conflicted and locked in titanic struggle as with the fragmentation of identity, memory, and consciousness of multiple personalities, madness on a national and civilizational scale born of the legacies of history and life disruptive events, epigenetic trauma, grief, terror, guilt, despair; and also rage.
In the duality of Israel and Palestine are made plain the origins of evil as violence and tyranny in the recursive and interdependent Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as overwhelming and generalized fear and existential threats are weaponized in service to power by authority, which forms carceral states of force and control as unequal power and embodied violence, through elite hierarchies and divisions of belonging and otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Here fascism as a systemic evil operates as possession and theft of the soul. What can we do about it? As Lenin asked in his essay of 1902; “What is to be done?” How free ourselves of the systemic forces of our subjugation to authority, elites, and those who would enslave us?
We must first recognize and be cautious of those who claim to speak for us and act in our name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism. To free ourselves of the lies and illusions, falsification and rewritten histories, conspiracy theories and alternate realities through which we become dehumanized, we must be truthtellers engaged in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
We must second seize our self-ownership and autonomy in refusal to submit to authority, for the great secret of power is that it is empty and hollow, and is delegitimized through refusal to trust and believe authority, and of force that it is brittle and finds its limit at the point of disobedience. Simple acts, but also inherent powers of human being which cannot be taken from us; for who refuses to submit is free, and becomes Unconquerable.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership and for freedom of identity.
There is no just authority.
Tonight I sit at home among the vast darkness of my hills, a night which follows days of rain and filled with the songs of frogs and birds, a serenity disturbed only by the chiaroscuro of my memories of this night of 2021 one year ago, in the defense of al Aqsa. Like flashes of lightning, the hand of the past can bring the Chaos and reach out to seize and shake us, destabilizing us and our constructions of normality with unpredictable and sudden disruptive events unmoored from their anchorages in time.
But Chaos is also a measure of the adaptive range of a system, which brings both the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom in our reimagination and transformative rebirth of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimagines Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
One may think of Bringing the Chaos in terms of the redemptive power of love, of solidarity, of our duty of care for others, of seizures of power as the restoration of balance, of Resistance and revolutionary struggle as placing our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and as tikkun olam or healing the brokenness of the world.
In Jerusalem and al Quds, we are betrayed by the normality of submission to authority and the divisions of unequal power, dehumanized by those who commit atrocities in our name, and made complicit in crimes against humanity through narratives of victimization which as Voltaire teaches us permit anything.
Gott mitt uns; it is an ancient terror. And this we must resist.
Old myths, and old grievances, woven into the fabric of our psyche and our civilization. And like all history, memory, and authorized identity, mimetic forces from whose legacies we must emerge.
In this moment I turn once again to the brilliant diagnosis of the illness of power as captured identity as written by Alon Ben-Meirin in Huffpost, though his prescription of a two state system is debatable and for myself must be superseded in time with a secular state with one law for all and no official divisions of tribe, language, or faith, in an article entitled In The Grip Of Powerful Illusions; “The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears to be illogical and unsettling as a majority of Israelis and Palestinians realize that coexistence, whether under conditions of enmity or friendship, is a fact that neither side can change short of a catastrophe.
The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears to be illogical and unsettling as a majority of Israelis and Palestinians realize that coexistence, whether under conditions of enmity or friendship, is a fact that neither side can change short of a catastrophe. Both sides understand that the general parameters of a sustainable peace agreement must rest on a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with some land swaps. However, both sides choose to revel in illusions and live in defiance of time and circumstances. They seem to prefer continuing violent clashes and bloodshed over peaceful coexistence, while blaming each other for the unending destructive path that tragically both have chosen to travel.
There are fundamental imperatives, coupled with long-term mutual security measures, which represent what was on the negotiating table in 2000 at Camp David and in 2010/2011 and 2013/2014 under the Obama administration’s auspices in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Each round, with various degrees of progress, aimed at finalizing an agreement and yet ultimately failed to do so. The question is: why?
Biased and selective perceptions, reinforced by historical experiences, religion, and incompatible ideologies, have locked both sides into immobile positions. The factors that maintain and enhance these patterns include emotions such as fear, distrust, and insecurity. The psychological outcome is mutual denial of the narrative of the other and mutual delegitimization.
Put together, the operative result is stagnation and polarization. What is therefore needed is a consensus-oriented dialogue at the leadership level by both officials and non-officials, and people-to-people interactions, to resolve the issue of perception – a tall order given the current environment that buttresses rather than ameliorates prejudiced perceptions.
There are certain psychological concepts which are relevant to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the concept of illusion is an essential one. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud offers the following definition: “…we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”
What is characteristic of illusions is that: 1) they are derived from deep human wishes, and 2) the belief is held (or would be held) in the absence of any compelling evidence, or good rational grounds, on its behalf.
It is impossible to deny that both Israelis and Palestinians are in the grip of very powerful illusions which only serve to prolong the conflict and prevent any mutual understanding. In particular, the belief shared by many Israelis that they have a biblical right to the land (including Judea and Samaria) and that God gave it to the Jews in perpetuity is undoubtedly an illusion of yesterday.
This belief is not affirmed because there is real evidence that God deemed it to be (although two Jewish kingdoms did exist–the first in the tenth century BCE and the second beginning in 539 BCE–on the same land), but because it satisfies a deep-seated psychological need for a God-given Jewish homeland.
The belief that by expanding the settlements Israel will augment its national security and maintain its hold on the entire land is an illusion of tomorrow, which generally ignores the presence of Muslims in the same land for more than 1,300 years.
It is important to note how these illusions sustain and reinforce one another, and constitute a psychological barrier which is much more impervious to critical reflection. Israel’s illusions have served to create the logic for occupation.
The Palestinians, for their part, are not without their own illusions. They also believe that God has reserved the land for them, and appeal to the fact that they had inhabited the land for centuries. From their perspective, the presence of the al-Aqsa Mosque, which was built in 705 AD in Jerusalem, attests to their historical and religious affinity to the Holy City.
They also cling to the idea that they will someday return to the land of their forbearers, as they have and continue to insist on the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, even though this has become a virtual impossibility.
The Palestinians hold fast to their illusions of yesterday and tomorrow just as blindly and desperately as the Israelis, which leads to resistance to and fear of change. As such, unless both sides change course and accept each other’s affinity to the same land, specifically because it is religiously-based, the situation is bound to lead to a catastrophe.
This has contributed to making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict both chronic and intractable, as the various illusions are continuously and consciously nurtured by daily hostile and often violent encounters between the two sides.
In seeking to bridge concepts that could link between the domains of psychology and politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it could be proposed that a collective mutual resistance to change (both conscious and deliberate, and inner unconscious) protects a vulnerable identity.
Compared, for example, to the stable and mature political identities of the American, British, and French nations, the political identities of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are, in a way, in their adolescence.
Identities in this setting are more vulnerable, and the protagonists are naturally more defensive and resistant to change. By its very nature, the players must find it difficult (if not impossible) to articulate this publicly, as to do so is to admit to this vulnerability.
The concept of psychological resistance to change may well affect the political setting in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular; it is closely connected to perceptions at many levels and provides protection for vulnerable identity formation.
It is this mindset, strengthened by historical experiences, which transcends the more than seven decades since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began. Individuals and groups, Israelis and Palestinians alike, have and continue to interpret the nature of the discord between them as “you versus me” in a prejudiced and selective way.
In turn, this has stifled any new information and enabled the continuing resistance to change, which could shed new light on the nature and substance of the conflict and help advance the peace process.
The concept of unconscious resistance to change in this setting links well to the view of perceptions driving the polarization in the conflict. Historical experience, which formulates perceptions, serves among other things to enhance the sense of identity of “who we really are,” a formative collective assumption that sits at the bedrock of both key players and drives functional and dysfunctional behavior.
In principle, such a mindset prevents either side from entertaining new ideas that might lead to compromises for a peaceful solution. The paradox here is that majorities on both sides do want and seek peace, knowing full well that this would require significant concessions, but are unable to reconcile the required concessions with imbedded perceptions that have precluded these compromises as a result of resistance to and fear of change.
Therefore, any framework for peace must include provisions that would dramatically increase the odds in favor of a solution. First, both sides need to commit to reaching an agreement based on a two-state solution out of the conviction that change, which translates to coexistence, is inevitable. Therefore, they ought to adjust to each other’s requirements, which of necessity requires them to make significant concessions.
Second, to facilitate that, they must undertake reconciliatory people-to-people social, economic, cultural, and security interactions to mitigate their resistance to change, which must begin, at a minimum, one year before the negotiations commence to create the psychological and political atmosphere to cultivate the trust necessary for substantive and successful peace negotiations.
The resumption of peace talks will go nowhere unless Israelis and Palestinians change their prejudiced perception and resistance to and fear of change, and finally come to the realization that their fate is intertwined and neither can live in peace and security without the other.
I feel compelled to conclude my last article for the year with a dire warning that both Israelis and Palestinians alike will do well to ponder upon as they approach the end of the seventh decade of their tragic conflict.
Every Israeli extremist and Palestinian militant, those who want it all must stop and think where Israel and the Palestinians will be in ten years if the current situation persists?
Your illusions of today will not become a reality of tomorrow, and what tomorrow will bring is nothing but more pain, tears, and agony.
Your conflict is evolving ever faster into a religious war. A Muslim-Jewish Armageddon is in the making that will set the whole region on unfathomable fire.
If you are true believers, dare not defy God’s will, for he has thrust you together to put you to the test–you must either live in peace and harmony, or you will be condemned to oblivion and despair.
You possess the power to choose your own destiny. Will it be self-destruction or will it be the fulfilment of a glorious dream?
Rise up and pass a legacy of hope to every Israeli and Palestinian child, for they have the God-given right to grow up and prosper and none should die for your illusions in vain.”
As I wrote in my post of November 9 2023, A Mirror of Our Darkness: Kristallnact; Israel is commemorating this tragedy which opened a door to an even greater tragedy in the Holocaust by doing exactly the same thing to the Palestinians, one people divided by history and faith weaponized in service to power. And this too will open doors to greater state terror and tyranny, unless both peoples can unite against authorities who commit atrocities in their name as a strategy of subjugation and liberate each other from those who would enslave them.
If you think of nations as children who are survivors of abuse, much becomes clear; for once they have seized power they are far more likely to become abusers themselves. This is how fear works, why it is the true basis of exchange, why politics is the Art of Fear, and why states are embodied violence. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been savaged by existential threats long before they began savaging, brutalizing, and dehumanizing each other.
That predatory regimes on both sides have used division and identity politics to centralize power and legitimize authoritarian dominion is a predictable phase of liberation struggle, especially of anti-colonial revolution.
The trick of becoming human, friends, is to embrace ones own darkness in struggle as well as one’s enemies, and emerge from the legacies of our history which shadow us like an invisible crocodile tail.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics, self-justification, and psychopathy of power; the lie that only power has meaning and is real, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; my teenage role model Napoleon, Washington who is central to our family history and coined the motto on our coat of arms in the passcode during the Battle of Trenton, Victory or Death, when the whole Revolution was wagered on a forlorn hope, of the tragic drama of fallen heroes like Robert Mugabe, the monstrous tyrants Stalin and Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the American and Napoleonic Revolutions become Empires, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, India where the glory of liberation came hand in hand with the tragedy of Partition and is now under the boot of Hindu Nationalism, nearly all anticolonial revolutions which with the first period of liberty as new nations became dreadful tyrannies, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
A great many wise people have written beautifully of the horrors of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness; herein I wish only to signpost that the forces which lie both within us and without as social conditions and epigenetic trauma, of atavisms of barbarism and systems of oppression, are universal to human beings as imposed conditions of struggle and operate continually even when obscured from view, beyond the horror and abjection of points of fracture of the human soul like those of Kristallnacht and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
I write to you as one who has lived by the battle cry of Never Again! for over forty years now, and it is of deep and vital importance to apply this principle of action not only in Resistance to fascism as an intrusive enemy of all that is human in us, but also to ourselves and our own use of violence and social force toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As Nietzsche teaches us in Beyond Good and Evil; “Those who hunt monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
In the dark mirror of Gaza, with its monstrous reflections of Kristallnacht and of Auschwitz, do you like what you see, O Israel?
Speaking as someone who has been defined by my resistance struggle against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982 and for a future in which all human beings are equal and share the same universal human rights, throughout the world and ever since, where ever men hunger to be free, including Palestine, I will fight on to resist our dehumanization by state tyranny and terror and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil like that of Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s Vichy America, and those who follow in my wake will fight on for a thousand years if necessary.
We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated.
In this context I paraphrase the iconic speech from Hunger Games; I have a message for Presidents Trump and Netanyahu. “You can torture us and bomb us and burn our nations to the ground. But do you see that? Fire is catching… And if we burn… you burn with us!”
Kingdom of Heaven
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
“If we burn, you burn with us”
The Magicians
Carnival Row
News of Gaza: the meanings of the Palestinian Holocaust
Israel Has Made Gaza a Hell on Earth
Gaza’s Destruction Has Discredited the Global Moral Order
https://jacobin.com/2025/01/gaza-genocide-censorship-international-law
The Gaza Massacre Is Undermining the Culture of Democracy
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gaza-genocide-holocaust-memory-democracy
References
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, by Albert Camus
Dirty Hands, by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud
Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies
by Blair Davis (Editor), Robert Anderson (Editor), Jan Walls (Editor)
Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice
by Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, George Novack, David Salner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/184450.Their_Morals_and_Ours
The Groundings with My Brothers, by Walter Rodney
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1205543.The_Groundings_with_My_Brothers
What Is to Be Done?, Vladimir Lenin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1108378.What_Is_to_Be_Done_?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18
Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes Love Vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Circle and in Us : A Jungian-Feminist Perspective, by Jean Shinoda Bolen
The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz
Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, David C. Martin
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12321.Beyond_Good_and_Evil?ref=nav_sb_ss_4_6
Voltaire’s Revolution: Writings from His Campaign to Free Laws from Religion
A History of the Gaza War From My Journals
June 21 2025 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human: On Sartre’s Birthday, And A Eulogy
June 5 2025 Fifty Eight Years of Occupation, Theocratic State Terror, and Israeli Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil: Anniversary of the Fall of Jerusalem In the 1967 Six Day War
June 2 2025 Greta Thunberg Runs The Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid To Gaza With the Freedom Flotilla Coalition
May 29 2025 Anniversary of the Final Day of the Third Intifada of 2021: On The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force; Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
May 23 2025 Anniversary of the International Criminal Court Issue of Arrest Warrant For Netanyahu and Charge of Leaders of Israel and Hamas Equally With Crimes Against Humanity In the Gaza War
May 14 2025 America Falls With Our Failure of Empathy, Abandonment of Our Universal Human Rights, Cowardice in Confronting Evil, and Complicity in Genocide: Anniversary of Israel’s 2024 Rafah Campaign
May 12 2025 Shireen Abu Aqla, Martyr in Witness and Journalism as a Sacred Calling in Pursuit of Truth
May 11 2025 Anniversary of the Third Intifada of 2021, Part Two
May 10 2025 Anniversary of the Third Intifada of 2021, Now Ongoing In the Tenth Theatre of World War Three Which Contains and Supersedes the Gaza War
May 8 2025 On this Victory Europe Day Celebrating Liberation From the Nazis, As World War Three Rages in Ukraine and Palestine and the Captured State of Vichy America Is Riven By Tyranny and Resistance, Let Us Liberate All of Humankind From Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and the Imperial Conquest and Dominion and the Carceral States of Force and Control of Tyrants
April 12 2025 This Passover, Stand Against Genocide. This Passover, Stand With the Children: the Peace and Divestiture Protests and Occupations
March 29 2025 A Two Front War Against Democracy In Palestine and America: the Case of Rumeysa Ozturk
March 28 2025 Witness of the Martyr Hossam Shabat, and His Eulogy By Sharif Abdel Kouddous
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
March 11 2025 Free Speech Versus State Sponsorship of Genocide and Repression of Dissent: Case of Mahmoud Khalil
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
January 31 2024 Why the Fight For Our Universal Human Rights Is the Same Fight In Gaza and Ukraine: An Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
January 4 2024 On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza
November 29 2024 International Day of Solidarity With Palestine
November 13 2024 Hope and its role in Resistance to State Terror and Tyranny: Gaza and America As Grounds of Struggle and Theatres of World War Three
September 29 2024 Restoring the Balance: Palestine, Israel, and the Anniversary of the Second Intifada
September 19 2024 Israeli Terror Attack Kills Americans With Impunity: No BDS, No Arrest of Netanyahu and Other War Criminals, No Policy of Regime Change in Israel
July 28 2024 A History of the Gaza War Thus Far
July 24 2024 Tyrant of Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum, Hebrew National Socialism, Netanyahu Addresses Congress When He Should Be On Trial For Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity
May 24 2024 In the Wake of the great Reckoning For the Crimes of Israel, Recognition of the Sovereignty and Independence of Palestine Raises the Question; Whose Palestine? What Will a Future Palestine and Israel Become?
May 21 2024 Abjection Despair Horror: Surviving the Terror of Our Nothingness in the Mirror Of Gaza
April 7 2024 Things Fall Apart: Six Months of War in Gaza
March 19 2024 Israel Unleashes the Third Horseman: Famine in Gaza
Palestine: a reading list
The World After Gaza: A History, Pankaj Mishra
Concerto al-Quds, Adonis
Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, Nur Masalha
The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, Ben Ehrenreich
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine, When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, Occupation Diaries, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation, Raja Shehadeh
Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury
The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said David Barsamian (Editor), Orientalism, Edward W. Said
On Palestine, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948, Ilan Pappe
Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays, Amos Oz
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter
Robert Fisk on Israel: The Obama Years: A unique anthology of reporting and analysis of a crucial period of history, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk
The Unmaking of Israel, Occupied Territories: The Untold Story Of Israel’s Settlements, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount Gershom Gorenberg
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Black
An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Jeff Halper
Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Joel Kovel
Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, Marc Lamont Hill, Mitchell Plitnick
Mornings in Jenin, Against the Loveless World, The Blue Between Sky and Water, Susan Abulhawa
Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, Basem L. Ra’ad
I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, A River Dies of Thirst: journals, Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, Mahmoud Darwish
Palestine on a Plate: Memories From My Mother’s Kitchen, Baladi: A Celebration of Food from Land and Sea, Joudie Kalla
The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, Laila El-Haddad
Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, Yasmin Khan
The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan
Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, Amira Hass
Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story, Ramzy Baroud
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Gilbert Achcar
Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, Marcello Di Cintio
A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel Bari Atwan
Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution, Arafat: The Biography, Andrew Gowers, Tony Walker
Hamas: A History from Within, Azzam S. Tamimi
Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Sara Roy
The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Emile Habiby
Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua
Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel, Gaza Weddings, Time of White Horses, Ibrahim Nasrallah
A Balcony Over the Fakihani: Three Novellas, A Compass for the Sunflower, The Eye of the Mirror, Liana Badr
Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine, Ibtisam Barakat
So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali
Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, Return: A Palestinian Memoir, Ghada Karmi
The Parisian, Isabella Hammad
Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, Zachary Karabell
Torch of Liberty 