From Craig Corrie – 21 Years Later
Gaza Crushed With Our Tax Dollars
On March 16, 2003, our daughter Rachel Corrie was killed as she stood to protect the home of a Palestinian family in Rafah in Gaza. Rachel was crushed to death by the Israeli military under a militarized, Caterpillar, Inc. D9R bulldozer, supplied by our United States government, paid for by our tax dollars. Now, twenty-one years later, we are witnessing the entire Gaza population being crushed by the Israeli military, using planes, bombs, shells, tanks and, yes, even bulldozers supplied by the United States. Genocide. Paid for by our tax dollars.
In some ways you could see this coming: soldiers never held accountable for their war crimes, human rights violations by the army of a country feeling entitled to the land of another people. We know this story, and we have seen this genocide. Ask any native American.
Our family worked for almost two decades to secure accountability in Rachel’s case, first through diplomatic means, and when that failed, through a civil lawsuit in Israeli courts. Some of the court testimony is particularly telling. An IDF Colonel responsible for training stated that there are no civilians in war zones, and the officer responsible for the military police investigation into Rachel’s killing testified that he thought Israel was at war with everyone in Gaza, including the peace activists. And all the time, the Israeli defense team referred to the people of Gaza – Rachel’s friends, our friends – as “the terrorists.” Even the Israeli high court said that international law did not apply to the actions of Israel in Gaza. How telling.
Repeatedly, the U.S. supplies weapons to Israel that are used in ways giving probable cause of human rights violations. But when the U.S. asks for investigation, Israel replies with reports that are far from the result of the thorough, credible, and transparent investigation required of, or in Rachel’s case promised by, Israel. Citing that violations cannot be proven, the U.S. continues military aid – rather than withholding more funding until our questions are properly answered, as allowed by U.S. law and dictated by common sense. The U.S. routinely rewards IDF war crimes with increased military aid, rather than sanctions. When that aid is abetting genocide, as it has since October 7, 2023, the aid itself is a war crime.
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The time to avert the massacre of October 7 and the genocide that has followed was during all the prior years of the Israeli occupation. Repeatedly, Palestinians, often joined by Jewish Israelis, have protested nonviolently to have their rights respected. Cindy and I have joined them for Friday afternoon protests in the olive groves west of Bil’in in the West Bank and have been met by teargas and small arms fire from the IDF, even though we never left Bil’in land. I remember stumbling up the hillside while an Israeli friend helped Cindy to medical aid for gas inhalation.
We have watched a landowner weeping as her olive trees were being uprooted to make way for a great wall to divide her forever from her crops. We watched from afar the Great March of Return in Gaza, again met by gunfire – often targeted at medics, journalists, and even children. Had Israel and the U.S. been moved by any of these nonviolent protests to respect the rights of Palestinians, then the violence of October 7, 2023, and the more than five months of carnage and destruction in Gaza thereafter might have been avoided. To have peace, there must be justice, and there is nothing peaceful about the daily injustice of the occupation.
On a larger, even more depressing scale, I remember in grade school wondering how it was possible that any nation could ever let the Holocaust happen. It was personal. Linda, the girl I shared a desk with, was Jewish. Now, as I watch in horror at the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza and rationalized in Washington DC, I see how genocide happens: by nations making excuses and looking the other way.
That is where we come in – by refusing to look the other way. And an amazing number of us around the world have done so. Activists on the street corners, in city council meetings, in front of the White House, on state capitol steps, many for the first time in their lives, refusing to hear the excuses, refusing to look the other way. We are heartened by each one of you and by the visible, constructive actions you are taking. You have joined with Rachel, who wrote to her mother more than two decades ago, “This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donations by check can be mailed to the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice, 203 East 4th Ave, Suite 402, Olympia, WA 98501.
CALL Pocan’s offices and insist on a pledge not to vote for any further military aid. He’s still not done that. Here is the link to the Democratic discharge petition.
Pocan in Madison (608) 258-9800
Pocan in DC (202) 225-2906
Right now, the Israeli military is preparing to invade Rafah, where over 1.7 million Palestinians are sheltering and starving from months of brutal bombardment.
Yesterday, AIPAC was on Capitol Hill lobbying members of Congress to give billions in unconditional weapons funding to Israel — directly enabling the attack on Rafah.
Now, Democratic leadership is using a procedure called a discharge petition to try to force a vote through and fund Israel’s assault on Gaza this week.1
We put this easy tool together for you — all you have to do is fill in your information and press the button!
Here’s why this is urgent: The discharge petition only needs 218 signatures to bring a vote to the floor — and at least 169 Democrats have already signed on.
That means we need to take action today to urge our representatives to refuse to sign or withdraw their signatures — and make it clear that they oppose billions in unconditional weapons funding for Israel.
The Israeli government has made its intention to invade Rafah very clear. Sending $14 billion in military funding would only enable Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has already killed over 31,000 Palestinians.
On Monday, we joined a broad coalition of nearly two dozen progressive organizations calling on the Democratic Party to reject AIPAC.2
Moments like this are exactly why we organize — and exactly why we need people like you in our movement.
When you send a letter to Congress, you’ll be joining thousands of people across the country who are saying NO to AIPAC’s agenda and NO to Israel’s massacre of Palestinians.
When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns.
They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.
This week, after witnessing the Flour Massacre in which over 100 Palestinians were killed at the site of a food aid shipment and over 750 more starving Palestinians were injured, the Biden Administration has announced its intention to conduct air drops of humanitarian aid to Gaza. This act is too little too late and an effort to evade holding Israel accountable to its duties before both U.S. and international law as a recipient of billions in taxpayer dollars.
This cosmetic change in the Biden Administration’s approach suggests that the President and U.S. government have lost complete control over any actions of the Israeli government. In the face of what experts have called the fastest-ever onset of famine since WWII—imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza—the Biden administration’s actions show a crass dismissal of Palestinian suffering directly aided and abetted by both U.S. weapons and military aid. The administration must drastically change course as its current approach has indisputably failed while giving Israel license since October 7th to exact deadly collective punishment on the Palestinian people in Gaza—with full U.S. financial and political coverage.
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The humanitarian catastrophe wrought by the Israeli campaign in Gaza is the disastrous next phase in Israel’s genocide. In addition to over 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israel including over 13,000 children, over 70% of homes have been destroyed, at least 10 children have died from hunger, and over a million Palestinian civilians face starvation and indefinite displacement. The Biden Administration pleading with Israel for the entry of limited humanitarian aid and a temporary ceasefire has failed. The United States provided cover for Israel through vetoes of a ceasefire at the UN Security Council even as most of our allies voted for ceasefire.
Israel has completely ignored the demands of the International Court of Justice which found genocide “plausible” in Gaza if Israel took no action to allow the free entry of humanitarian aid, to avoid continued killing of Palestinian civilians, and to prevent conditions “calculated to bring about [Palestinians’] physical destruction in whole or in part.” Alongside the U.S. federal court’s finding regarding genocide in Gaza, these acts implicate the United States as complicit in genocide. Dropping aid from the sky does not change this reality and indeed, Israel may still obstruct or bomb such aid given the precedent of the past few weeks.
The U.S. must cut military aid to Israel, thereby compelling an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Compel Israel to withdraw from Gaza. Recognize Palestinians’ full human and political rights, and pressure Israel and Egypt to immediately allow the full flow of humanitarian trucks into Gaza without restriction. This is the only strategy that can emerge from a commitment to doing what is right and humane—in addition to what is in the U.S.’s best interest for its standing before the world.
Political expediency and election prospects are only secondary considerations amidst an unmitigated genocide enabled by this administration. Speeches of sympathy with Palestinians are directly at odds with current policy. The Flour Massacre must compel the U.S. to reckon with Israel’s intent and our complicity: the Biden administration must act decisively to stop genocide.
Sincerely, Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid Executive Director
One of the most disturbing things about our society—we’re not alone in this—is how easily our culture slips quickly into promoting violent bigotry. Usually what happens is this: a tiny number of people who are members of a particular demographic group carry out some outrageous act, and then the group as a whole is stigmatized and made to be feared even though nearly everyone in the group had nothing to do with the outrageous act whatsoever.
After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, for instance, anti-Japanese bigotry exploded. The Democratic president, known for his compassionate social democratic politics, rounded up around 125,000 Japanese Americans, the vast majority of the population living on the U.S. mainland at the time, and put them into internment camps. The Japanese were treated as subhumans—even Dr. Seuss started drawing grotesque racist caricatures of them—and the U.S. military had no hesitation in vaporizing Japanese civilian populations. (“There are no civilians in Japan,” declared an Air Force intelligence officer, who deemed the entire population a “legitimate military target,” a view that is defended by some to this day.) As John Dower writes in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War:
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They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart—and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the “good German” in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies…. The racist code words and imagery that accompanied the war in Asia were often exceedingly graphic and contemptuous. The Western Allies, for example, consistently emphasized the “subhuman” nature of the Japanese, routinely turning to images of apes and vermin to convey this. With more tempered disdain, they portrayed the Japanese as inherently inferior men and women who had to be understood in terms of primitivism, childishness, and collective mental and emotional deficiency. Cartoonists, songwriters, filmmakers, war correspondents, and the mass media in general all seized on these images…. An endless stream of evidence ranging from atrocities to suicidal tactics could be cited…. to substantiate the belief that the Japanese were a uniquely contemptible and formidable foe who deserved no mercy and virtually demanded extermination.
Japanese nationalists dehumanized their own enemies in the same way, of course, perpetuating myths of Japanese racial superiority. These kinds of stories about the big scary Other are ubiquitous in times of war. George Orwell observed in 1937 that “Every war is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.” Given this fact, Orwell said that our “essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.” Looking back we can recognize it in the way Germans were portrayed during World War I—one infamous U.S. Army poster depicted Germany as an ape wielding a bloodstained club, with the caption “DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE”—and in the treatment of Muslims after 9/11.
Khaled Beydoun, a scholar who studies Islamophobia around the world, spoke to Current Affairs last year about how the hatred and suspicion of Muslims spread along with the U.S. “war on terror.” He spoke, for instance, to a U.S. soldier who signed up to fight in Iraq because he believed he was going to fight a terrible enemy that had attacked the country. Instead, he found himself destroying a country whose people had never attacked the U.S. at all. Afterwards, he felt betrayed by his country, and Beydoun reflected on how effective propaganda can be:
“It’s really frightening how very good men, like the man I spoke to in the book, can be made into monsters with a scintilla of propaganda. When I sat across from this guy, he and I could be friends. We liked the same things. We live 10 miles away from one another. He was sort of an alpha male, and I say that in a benign way, where his objective was to just take care of his family and his community, and he had a love for his country. Those are beautiful things to be commended. But the way in which the media was disseminating this violent, vile information about Muslims—people like me, somebody who sat across him at the table—mobilized him to want to enlist in a war in a place that he had no knowledge of. He just knew that he wanted to defend his country and wanted vengeance, and that these Muslims, these Arabs, who were a world away, were the culprits of the 9/11 terror attacks…. [Afterward] he realized how the war had broken people like him, and how it told lies about people like me.”
By now, we have seen the same processes enough times to understand how they work, and we should be on our guard. We know that war drives people crazy. They see the body counts on their own side, and they want revenge, and empathy for the “other side” is in short supply. They see the enemy as monstrous and their own actions as purely defensive. They aren’t in the mood to make too many distinctions between civilians and soldiers on the other side.
That’s true in U.S. media, too. We know that Palestinian deaths are given a lot less weight than Israeli deaths in the American media, and even the liberal Washington Post ran (before deleting, under pressure) a nasty propaganda cartoon showing a swarthy Hamas terrorist strapping babies to his body. This past week, the major newspapers and TV networks hit a new low, with three especially egregious cases.
First was the Wall Street Journal, which ran an op-ed on February 2 calling Dearborn, Michigan, “America’s Jihad Capital.” Given the inflammatory title, you might think the author—one Steven Stalinsky—had uncovered evidence that some kind of political violence or “holy war,” as the word “jihad” is often interpreted in the West, was going on in Dearborn. But that’s not the case. Instead, Stalinsky spent 800 words clutching his pearls about the fact that—shockingly enough—some Muslims in Michigan don’t like Israel very much. The editorial is a masterpiece of dishonesty and Islamophobic fearmongering. It cherrypicks isolated expressions of anger, like when one imam said that Israel’s actions have filled his congregation with “fire in our hearts that will burn that state” and pretends they’re representative of the Michigan Muslim community as a whole, spinning them as evidence of “local enthusiasm for jihad.” It conflates simple political statements such as “America is a terrorist state”—which is straightforwardly true, if we apply the dictionary definition of “terrorism” consistently—with “open support for Hamas.” The Wall Street Journal has been on a roll lately, using the headline “Chicago Votes for Hamas” when that city called for a ceasefire in Gaza at the end of January. But Stalinsky’s rhetoric is irresponsible even by the Journal’s standards. TheDetroit Free Press reports that, since the article was published, “swarms of online hate” have been directed toward Dearborn’s Muslim community, leading Mayor Abdullah Hammoud to ramp up security around mosques and other places of worship. (Not that more police will necessarily help, since U.S. law enforcement has a well-documentedIslamophobia problem of its own.) All of this is a predictable consequence of publishing what amounts to a racist incitement, and any editor with even the slightest professional competence or ethics would have known better.
Meanwhile, a handful of whistleblowers at CNN have confirmed what was already fairly obvious: that the network has a systematic anti-Palestinian bias in its coverage. Summing up the testimonies of six anonymous staffers, The Guardian reports that CNN has “tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives” at an institutional level, while “Israeli official statements are often quickly cleared and make it on air on the principle that they are to be trusted at face value, seemingly rubber-stamped for broadcast….” The principle of journalistic neutrality in reporting on a conflict, it seems, has been disregarded. In particular, CNN journalists say they’ve been instructed to include the words “Hamas-controlled” any time they cite statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health, implicitly casting doubt on the legitimacy of civilian death tolls from the region, even though the Ministry’s figures have held up to scrutiny from numerous outside observers, including Israel itself. (Israel has sometimes even suggested that Israeli bombs have been flattening bakeries and apartment blocks without killing any innocent children at all.) They also report that memos have been circulated around the newsroom instructing them to always emphasize Hamas as the “cause of this current conflict,” ignoring the decades of Israeli occupation and violence in Palestine before October 7. At the same time, prominent anchors like Anderson Cooper have allowed current and former Israeli officials, like ex-Mossad leader Rami Igra, to say blatantly inflammatory things like “the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a nonexistent term” without pushback during interviews. At this point, unless dramatic changes are made, there’s little choice but to regard CNN’s Gaza coverage as ethically compromised and unreliable and to treat it accordingly.
Finally, in a column called “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” notorious New York Times writer and Iraq War booster Thomas Friedman has decided it’s a good idea to compare a variety of Muslim and Arab people to parasitic insects. The column is so breathtakingly racist, it seems like something out of a Victorian newspaper—but don’t take our word for it, read Friedman in his own words:
Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.” Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out. We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
What can you even say to something like this? It’s well-known that comparing your political enemies to rats and insects is a dehumanizing tactic, just as it was in the lead-up to Japanese internment. Certainly Friedman, who was educated at Brandeis and the University of Oxford, knows it—and yet here he is, spewing this rhetoric anyway. The late Edward Said had him dead to rights in 1989, when he described Friedman’s writing as a “threadbare repertoire of often racist clichés.” Nothing has changed. If anything, the New York Times has gotten worse, seemingly not bothering to edit the excretions of its tenured staff whatsoever. Just like in Dearborn, there are real-world consequences to promoting this kind of imagery in the paper of record. Friedman’s argument that “setting fire to the whole jungle” is the only way to kill the Iranian “wasp” is an argument for unrestrained war in the Middle East, and unfortunately many political leaders still read the New York Times.
History shows that dehumanization takes hold easily, and its effects are deadly. At its worst, it is the road to concentration camps, gas chambers, and mass executions. We have to always be on guard against it, especially during times when war is causing a suspension of people’s usual critical faculties. It’s disgusting, but not surprising, to see even liberal papers printing, without a second thought, analysis that treats Iranians as insects. But one of the crucial lessons that history offers is that societies don’t notice themselves heading into this kind of moral abyss. Only the victims do. But their cries can’t be heard because they’re treated as menacing oppressors. Islamophobia, like all forms of bigotry, is poison to the soul of this country and portends terrible consequences for Muslims around the world. We have to fight against it—and remember that it won’t be the last time.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE Hamas commandos led a series of raids into Israel on October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before an empty chamberOpens in a new tab at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. The Israeli prime minister brandished a map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. On this map, Gaza and the West Bank were erased. Palestinians did not exist.
“What a historic change for my country! You see, the land of Israel is situated on the crossroads between Africa, Asia, and Europe,” Netanyahu bellowedOpens in a new tab at a handful of spectators in the large hall, nearly all of whom were his loyalists or underlings. “For centuries, my country was repeatedly invaded by empires passing through it in their campaigns of plunder and conquest elsewhere. But today, as we tear down walls of enmity, Israel can become a bridge of peace and prosperity between these continents.”
During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalizing of relations with Saudi Arabia, an initiative spearheaded under the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden White House, as the linchpin of his vision for this “new” reality, one which would open the door to a “visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. It will connect India to Europe with maritime links, rail links, energy pipelines, fiber-optic cables.”
He was speaking on the grand stage of the U.N. General Assembly, but no world leaders bothered to attend. Outside, some 2,000 people, a mixture of American Jews and Israeli citizens, protested his attacks on the independence of the Israeli judiciary system. The scene served as a reminder of how deeply unpopular his far-right governing coalition, not to mention Netanyahu himself, had become in Israel. At that moment, it seemed that Netanyahu was pushed against the ropes, in a losing battle to continue his political reign.
Netanyahu is using the horrors of October 7 to wage the crusade he’s been preparing for his entire political career.
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Just days later, as Hamas commandos penetrated the barriers encircling Gaza and embarked on their deadly raids targeting several military installations as well as kibbutzim, everything changed in an instant. Everything, that is, except the primary agenda that has been at the center of Netanyahu’s long political career: the absolute destruction of Palestine and its people.
Just as the Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify a sweeping war in which it declared the world a battlefield, Netanyahu is using the horrors of October 7 to wage the crusade he’s been preparing for his entire political career. With his grip on power fading last fall, the October 7 attacks provided him with just the opportunity he needed, and he hitched his political survival to the war on Gaza and what could be his last chance to eliminate Israel’s Palestinian problem once for all.
In that sense, Bibi was saved by Hamas.
Intelligence Failures
Four months in, Netanyahu’s war of annihilation against Gaza has become a guerrilla war of attrition. Not a single Israeli hostage has been freed through military force, and Hamas has shown an enduring resilience and ability to pick off Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The Israeli public, outside of the ideological true believers intent on occupying and settlingOpens in a new tab Gaza, is showing signs of fatigue and desperation. Many family members of captives are growing louderOpens in a new tab in their demands for an immediate deal with Hamas that centers the lives of their loved ones over the political agenda laid out by Netanyahu and his clique. Some have demandedOpens in a new tab new elections or Netanyahu’s resignationOpens in a new tab. Protests against the war, though small, are beginning to grow inside Israel, with some demonstrationsOpens in a new tab echoing global calls demanding a humanitarian ceasefire and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
As the death toll in Gaza surpasses a conservative estimate of 27,000 lives, many of the core narratives deployed by the Israeli and U.S. governments to justify the slaughter are coming under increased scrutiny; some have been definitively debunked. In Israel, this is a delicate line of inquiry. That Hamas killed large numbers of Israelis is not in doubt. But how they managed to do so while living under the lauded and vigilant eyes of the Mossad, Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, and the IDF is the subject of mounting public attention.
There have been several credible reports that Israeli intelligence analysts warned that Hamas operatives appeared to be training for raids into Israel. The New York Times and other outlets have reportedOpens in a new tab on the existence of a 40-page internal Hamas document code-named “Jericho Wall.” Purportedly obtained by Israeli intelligence, it is said to lay out detailed plans by Hamas to conduct precisely the type of assault against Israeli military installations and villages that occurred on October 7.
While warnings from Israeli analysts who reviewed the document were reportedly brushed aside by senior officials, last July a signals intelligence officer urged the chain of command to take it seriously. Noting a recent daylong training exercise by Hamas in Gaza, the analyst asserted that the training precisely mirrored the operations laid out in the document. “It is a plan designed to start a war,” she pleadedOpens in a new tab. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
The night before Hamas’s raid, intelligence analysts began reporting significant evidence suggesting that Hamas might be preparing for an attack inside Israel. The head of Shin Bet traveled to the south and orders were issued to deploy a special counterterror force to confront any potential incursions, according to an investigative reportOpens in a new tab in the Israeli publication Yedioth Ahronoth.
Shortly after 3 a.m. on October 7, a senior intelligence official concluded the activity in Gaza was likely another Hamas training exercise, saying, “We still believe that [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is not pivoting towards an escalation.”
A few hours later, as Israeli officials gathered in a command center chaotically scrambling to deploy forces to respond to the multipronged attacks led by Hamas, a senior officer silenced the room: “The Gaza Division was overpowered.”
Early on in the war against Gaza, Netanyahu sought to deflect blameOpens in a new tab for failing to foresee Hamas’s attacks onto his intelligence services. “Contrary to the false claims: Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Hamas’s war intentions,” read a tweet posted on Netanyahu’s official Twitter account. “On the contrary, all the security officials, including the head of military intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was looking for a settlement. This assessment was submitted again and again to the prime minister and the cabinet by all the security forces and intelligence community, up until the outbreak of the war.”
But serious questions lingered over how Hamas was able to lay siege to large sections of what Israel calls the “Gaza envelope” and whether Netanyahu had knowledge that an attack of this very nature was being planned in full view of Israel’s extensive surveillance systems and spy networks. There is also a mounting body of evidence to indicate that Israeli forces were given orders on October 7 to stop Hamas’s attacks at all costs, including the killing of Israeli civilians taken captive by Palestinian fighters. The Israeli military has indicatedOpens in a new tab that it plans to conduct an “uncompromising” investigation into the intelligence failures, drawing the ire of some far-right members of Netanyahu’s government.
Under fire from his own ministers and supporters for impugning Israeli military and intelligence agencies, Netanyahu apologized for his comments, deleted the tweet, and then shifted to the stance he now repeats: There will be a time for such inquiries — but only after Israel achieves total victory in Gaza and eliminates Hamas. “The only thing that I intend to have resign is Hamas,” he saidOpens in a new tab in November. “We’re going to resign them to the dustbin of history.”
Information Warfare
The violent ethnonationalist ideology at the center of Netanyahu’s reign was born before his tenure and will endure when he’s gone. But his rule has embodied the most extremist and destructive version of the Israeli state project.
Netanyahu understands the power of defining and dominating the narrative, particularly when targeting it to U.S. audiences. For decades, he has advanced the Israeli propaganda doctrine of hasbaraOpens in a new tab — the notion that Israelis must be aggressive about “explaining” and justifying their actions to the West — to manipulate his adversaries and allies, domestic and international, into serving his objectives.
Netanyahu’s “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power,” observedOpens in a new tab former President Barack Obama in his 2020 memoir.
In the aftermath of October 7, Netanyahu cast Israel’s siege of a tiny strip of land the size of Philadelphia as a war of the worlds in which the very fate of humanity was at stake. “It’s not only our war. It’s your war too,” Netanyahu said in his first interviewOpens in a new tab on CNN after the October 7 attacks. “It’s the battle of civilization against barbarism. And if we don’t win here, this scourge will pass. The Middle East will pass to other places. The Middle East will fall. Europe is next. You will be next.”
The Israeli government rapidly deployed a multipronged propaganda strategy to win unprecedented support from the U.S. and other Western governments for a sweeping war against the entire population of Gaza. To oppose Israel’s war is antisemitic; to question its assertions about the events of October 7 is akin to Holocaust denial; to protest the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is to do the bidding of Hamas.
At the center of Israel’s information warfare campaign is a tactical mission to dehumanize Palestinians and to flood the public discourse with a stream of false, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable allegations.
“We were struck Saturday by an attack whose savagery I can say we have not seen since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu told President Joe Biden in a phone callOpens in a new tab on October 11. “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them.” He added: “We have never seen such savagery in the history of the state. They’re even worse than ISIS and we need to treat them as such.”
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” saidOpens in a new tab Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9.
The message of these statements and others like them was clear: Israel is confronting monsters, and no one has any business telling the Jewish state, established in the aftermath of World War II under the mantra of “Never again,” how to respond to an attempted genocide. Israeli officials routinely invoke the Holocaust, compare Hamas to the Nazis or to ISIS, and portray the events of October 7 as evidence of an organized effort to commit genocide against the Jewish people.
On October 10, three days after the attacks, the Israeli military organized a tour for international journalists to view the scene at Kfar Aza Kibbutz. As they guided reporters and camera crews through the community, IDF officials spread rumorsOpens in a new tab that as many as 40 babiesOpens in a new tab had been murdered by Hamas, some of them beheaded. “It’s something I never saw in my life. It’s something I used to imagine of my grandmother and my grandfather in Europe and other places,” an Israeli general toldOpens in a new tab reporters. “We got very, very disturbing reports that came from the ground that there were babies that had been beheaded,” saidOpens in a new tab IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus in a briefing for international journalists. “I admit it took us some time to really understand and to verify that report. It was hard to believe that even Hamas could perform such a barbaric act.”
Lt. Col. Guy Basson, deputy commander of the Israeli army’s Kfir Brigade, claimed that he saw the aftermath of eight babies who were executedOpens in a new tab in a nursery at Kibbutz Be’eri. Among the victims, Basson asserted, was also a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. “I see the number engraved on her arm, and you say to yourself, she went through the Holocaust in Auschwitz and ended up dying on Kibbutz Be’eri.” Another Israeli soldier toldOpens in a new tab a journalist that “babies and children were hung on a clothes line in a row.”
Three weeks after the October 7 attacks, Eli Beer, the head of a volunteer EMS squad in Israel, traveled to the U.S. and addressed a gathering at the convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. “I saw in my own eyes a woman who was pregnant, four months pregnant,” he saidOpens in a new tab. “They came into her house, in front of her kids, they opened up her stomach took out the baby, and stabbed the little, tiny baby in front of her and then shot her in front of her family and then they killed the rest of the kids.”
Beer offered graphic descriptions of other horrors he claimed to have witnessed. “These bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven. We found the kid a few hours later,” he toldOpens in a new tab the U.S. audience on October 28. “I saw little kids who were beheaded. We didn’t know which head belonged to which kid.” Beer, whose stories were widely reportedOpens in a new tab in the international media, also met withOpens in a new tab Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Israel soon after the attack.
But there is a problem with the gut-wrenching narratives that have bolstered the underlying justification for the slaughter of Gaza: They are either complete fabrications or have not been substantiated with a shred of evidence. Many have been thoroughly disproven by major Israeli media outlets.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials presentedOpens in a new tab U.S. and international leaders with a range of graphic images and videos along with unverified narrative explanations for what they allegedly depicted. “It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way,” Blinken saidOpens in a new tab after first viewing the photos. “Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million.”
In a coup for Netanyahu’s hasbara campaign, Biden and other leaders have laundered many of Israel’s obscene lies.
In a coup for Netanyahu’s hasbara campaign, Biden and other leaders have laundered many of Israel’s obscene lies. Beginning just days after October 7, Biden repeatedly claimed that he personally saw photographs of beheaded babies and more atrocities. Even after the White House admittedOpens in a new tab Biden had seen no such photos, he continued to make the allegation, including after visiting Netanyahu and other Israeli officials in Tel Aviv. “I saw some of the photographs when I was there — tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman,” Biden saidOpens in a new tab at a campaign event in December.
Blinken told the U.S. Senate another harrowing story about how Hamas terrorists had tortured a family in their living room while intermittently taking breaks to eat a meal their victims had placed on the dining table before the horrors began that morning. “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed,” Blinken saidOpens in a new tab. “And then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with.”
There was no Holocaust survivorOpens in a new tab killed at Kibbutz Be’eri that day. There were no mass beheadings of babies, no group executions in a nursery, no children hung from clotheslinesOpens in a new tab, and no infants placed in ovens. No pregnant woman had her stomach cut open and the fetus knifed in front of her and her other children. These stories are entirely fictional, a set of audacious lies weaponized to generate the type of collective rage used to justify the unjustifiable.
According to major Israeli media outletsOpens in a new tab that have worked diligently to identifyOpens in a new tab all the victims of the October 7 attacks, there was one infant killed that day: a 9-month-old named Mila CohenOpens in a new tab who was shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri as her mother held her in her arms. Cohen’s mother, who was wounded by gunfire, survived. Among the other civilians killed on October 7, seven of them were between the ages of 2 and 9 years, and 28 were between the ages of 10 and 19. Fourteen of these children died in Hamas rocket attacksOpens in a new tab, not at the hands of the armed commandos who stormed the kibbutzes.
There is no doubt that widespread atrocities and war crimes were committed during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7. It is also true that Israeli military, government, and rescue officials have engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign about the nature of many deaths that occurred that day.
These stories are a set of audacious lies weaponized to generate the type of collective rage used to justify the unjustifiable.
Israeli officials have toured the world with a film producedOpens in a new tab at the direction of the IDF. The 47-minute “Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre” features video allegedly seized from Palestinian attackers equipped with GoPro cameras and cellphones, according to Israeli officials. The movie has not been released to the public and has only been available via special invitation from the Israeli government. Its audiences have includedOpens in a new tab Hollywood celebrities, dozensOpens in a new tab of U.S. lawmakers and government officials, journalists, and global luminaries; it has screened at various international venues, including museums established in memory of the Holocaust. While hours of footage of the attacks and their aftermath are available online, including video shot by Palestinians who participated in the raids, the Israeli government has said the footage is too sensitive to be publicly released.
An IDF official, in uniformOpens in a new tab, personally delivers the professionally produced Digital Cinema Package for the screenings, and viewers are required to sign nondisclosure agreements affirming they will not record or distribute the footage. “It will change the way you view the Middle East and the way you view the war in Gaza,” said Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, at the Los Angeles premiereOpens in a new tab of the footage last November. The film was characterized in media accounts as depictingOpens in a new tab “murder, beheadings, rapes and other atrocities against Jewish adults and children.”
The event, at the Museum of Tolerance, was organized by Israeli actor Gal Gadot, star of the “Wonder Woman” movies, for film executives and other members of the Hollywood industry. “Hamas must be eradicated. This is the only way to prevent another massacre,” Erdan added. “If Israel doesn’t eradicate this evil, mark my words: The West is next.”
While Israel has emphasized how incendiary the footage is, British journalist Owen Jones, who attendedOpens in a new tab an IDF screening in the U.K., said a “significant amount” of the video is already in the public domain. He said that while there was footage of one IDF soldier who had apparently been decapitated, as well as the already public footage of an unsuccessful attempt to behead a migrant Thai worker with a garden tool, there was no footage substantiating allegations of torture, sexual violence, and mass beheadings, including of babies or other children. “Clearly this footage hasn’t been selected at random. You would expect it to be the worst material that they have,” Jones said. “This isn’t to say none of this happened, it’s just not in the footage, which has been provided by the Israeli authorities.”
Israel’s hasbara campaign is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s monthslong carnival of lies, sanitized and promoted by major media outlets, about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And Biden directly participated in President George W. Bush’s campaign as well. In his October 2002 Senate floor speech endorsing war against Iraq, Biden declared that Saddam HusseinOpens in a new tab “possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.”
Allegations of Systematic Rape
The Israeli propaganda machine is well oiled. Anyone can look back at Israel’s four-month war against Gaza and trace a pattern: Israel chooses an issue and demands global attention to its agenda at the expense of any other matter.
When news organizations began reporting on the civilian toll of Israel’s initial airstrikes against Gaza, the government accusedOpens in a new tab photographers for major news organizations of being Hamas members or sympathizers who had foreknowledge of the October 7 attacks. Netanyahu said the journalists were “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” Israel then portrayed Gaza’s hospitals as secret Hamas command centers, an allegation that the Biden administration bolstered as the IDF prepared to lay siege to Al-Shifa Hospital last November.
Throughout the war, Israel has sought to direct media and global attention to various new smoking-gun narratives. And in nearly every case, it succeeds in getting the U.S. on board to launder and promote the talking points.
In late November, as the civilian death toll in Gaza climbed, Israel was struggling to retain its dominance of the narrative. Global demands for a ceasefire were mounting, and even some of Israel’s alliesOpens in a new tab were expressing horrorOpens in a new tab at the indiscriminate killing of women and children and the worsening humanitarian catastrophe.
A weeklong truce, during which captives were exchanged, raised hopesOpens in a new tab that a more enduring peace deal could be on the horizon, despite Israeli insistence that that was out of the question. “A prolonged ceasefire that allows more hostages to be released, and that evolves towards a permanent ceasefire linked to a political process, is something we have consensus on,” saidOpens in a new tab the EU’s top foreign policy official Josep Borrell.
Days earlier, the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium traveled to the Rafah border to push for such a deal and drew the fury of the Israeli government when they publicly condemned the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. Eli Cohen, then the Israeli foreign minister, accused the leaders of offering “support [for] terrorism,” while Netanyahu released a statementOpens in a new tab condemning them because they “did not place total responsibility on Hamas for the crimes against humanity it perpetrated.”
Anyone can look back at Israel’s four-month war against Gaza and trace a pattern: Israel chooses an issue and demands global attention to its agenda at the expense of any other matter.
It was at this moment that the Israeli government decided it needed to remind the world of Israel’s victimhood and launched a new phase of the hasbara campaign. It began accusing the international community of standing silent in the face of what Israeli officials described as a widespread campaign of rape and sexual violence aimed at Jewish women and orchestrated by Hamas on October 7. By early December, the issue had become a major focus of conservative media and Israel’s allies.
“I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu saidOpens in a new tab in a December 5 speech in Tel Aviv.
That day, on the other side of the globe, Biden was at a campaign fundraising event in Boston. “Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty: reports of women raped — repeatedly raped and their bodies being mutilated while still alive, of women corpses being desecrated, and Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering as — on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. And it’s appalling,” Biden saidOpens in a new tab. “The world can’t just look away — what’s going on. It’s on all of us — the government, international organizations, civil society, individual citizens — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation — without equivocation, without exception.”
From the earliest moments following the October 7 attacks, Israel charged that women had been raped by Hamas fighters, though it was often an allegation made in sequence alongside other alleged atrocities. But in mid-November, those assertions began evolving into a sustained public blitz, accusingOpens in a new tab Hamas of instituting a plan to “systematically rape women.” Israel government spokesperson Eylon Levy spokeOpens in a new tab of a “Hamas rapist machine.”
“Hamas used rape and sexual violence as weapons of war,” chargedOpens in a new tab Erdan, the U.N. ambassador. “These were not spur-of-the-moment decisions to defile and mutilate girls and parade them while onlookers cheered; rather, this was premeditated.”
To date, there has been no credible evidence presented publicly that such a campaign took place, and Hamas has vehemently denied that its fighters committed any acts of rape or sexual assault. The fact that Israel has not produced forensic evidence for individual rapes does not prove that no such deeds took place. Rape investigations are often complex, particularly when the crime occurs amid a chaotic scene of mass violence. Sexual violence is common in warfare, and it often takes years for the full story of such crimes to emerge.
But there is a difference between making specific allegations of rape or sexual assault and charging that organized mass rape was a central component of an operation meticulously planned over the course of years. Israel’s evidence of the latter comes nowhere near to measuring up to its claims.
Israeli rescue workers as well as civilian and military medical officials have described evidence of dead women who were naked or had clothing removed, as well as women who were subjected to genital mutilation, though they have not released documentary or forensic evidence.
But many of the most graphic allegationsOpens in a new tab of mass rapes have been offered by Israeli military or rescue officials who acknowledge they have no trainingOpens in a new tab or expertise in forensics. Some of them, whose claims have been featured in many media accounts, also spread false stories about other alleged atrocities.
Shari Mendes, an architect serving in the IDF reserves in a rabbinical unit, was deployed to a morgue to prepare bodies for burial after the attacks. An American originally from New Jersey, Mendes did multiple TV and print interviews about her experiences. “We have seen women who have been raped, from the age of children through to the elderly,” she toldOpens in a new tab reporters, emphasizingOpens in a new tab, “This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.”
For months, Mendes has served as one of the most visible witnesses bolstering Israel’s allegations of systematic rape. But few media outlets featuring her claims have mentioned the valid concernsOpens in a new tab about her credibility and her history of promoting a false story. She toldOpens in a new tab the Daily Mail last October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.”
On December 5, as Israel engaged in a global media push around its allegations that Hamas had committed mass rapes, Mendes was a featured speaker at an eventOpens in a new tab in New York organized by Israel’s mission to the U.N. on sexual violence and the October 7 attacks. The Times of Israel reportedOpens in a new tab that Mendes “is not legally qualified to determine rape.”
The observations of first responders or members of religious burial units, particularly those without relevant scientific credentials, are not a replacement for forensic documentation of an uncontaminated crime scene. Israeli authorities have said evidence that would typically be taken in cases of suspected sexual assault was not recovered in the aftermath of the attacks, attributing this failure to a combination of the magnitude of the deaths, the charred nature of some bodies, and to Jewish burial practices.
Some of the evidence publicly citedOpens in a new tab by Israeli officials is testimony provided by Zaka, the private Israeli rescue organization whose members have been widely documented to have spread false allegations. Haaretz published an exposéOpens in a new tab documenting Zaka’s role in the rampant mishandling of forensic evidence that day and its subsequent campaign of misinformation.
The Israeli government has maintained that it possesses evidence that has not been made public and has enlistedOpens in a new tab international teams of forensic and other crime scene experts. Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs told the New York TimesOpens in a new tab there are “at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived.”
But other Israeli officials have statedOpens in a new tab that there are no known living victims of rape that day, while some have described the challenge of identifying potential victims.
Related
New York Times Puts “Daily” Episode on Ice Amid Internal Firestorm Over Hamas Sexual Violence Article
The family of Gal Abdush, whose alleged rape was at the center of the Times article, disputed the article’s assertion she was raped. One relative also suggested the family was pressured, under false pretenses, to speak with the reporters. Abdush’s sister wrote on Instagram that the Times reporters “mentioned they want to write a report in memory of Gal, and that’s it. If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that.” A woman who filmed Abdush on October 7 told YNetOpens in a new tab that Israeli journalists working for the Times had pressured her into giving the paper access to her photos and videos. “They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” she recalledOpens in a new tab. This series of events was documented extensively by MondoweissOpens in a new tab.
Critics of the Times story also pointed to the inconsistenciesOpens in a new tab of the accounts of some of the alleged witnesses featured, as well as to its use of information provided by members of Zaka.
Several Israelis who survived the October 7 attacks have publicly claimed that they witnessed rapes by Palestinian assailants, but Israeli investigators have said they are still searching for supporting evidence. Authorities also say they must match alleged victims with specific eyewitness testimony in order to bring potential charges.
What often goes unmentioned in Israel’s sweeping allegations is an important fact: Hamas was not the only Palestinian group to attack Israelis on October 7. Many individuals who had no knowledge of Hamas’s plans poured across the border and committed acts of violence in what has been referred to as an unplanned “second wave.” Some of these non-HamasOpens in a new tab Palestinians also took Israeli hostages back to Gaza.
One survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, has given multiple interviews to major media outlets, including the New York Times, about a rape he claims to have witnessed. During an appearance on CNN, Raz Cohen describedOpens in a new tab the assailants as “Five guys — five civilians from Gaza, normal guys, not soldiers, not Nukhba,” referring to Hamas’s elite commando force. “It was regular people from Gaza with normal clothes.” Cohen, it must be noted, has told varying, sometimes contradictory, versions of what he witnessed.
Israel has painted all actions on October 7 as being committed by Hamas and its fighters. That storyline obviously serves Israel’s military and political objectives, but the truth is more complicated.
In light of Israel’s well-documented campaign of lies and misinformation about other events on October 7, incendiary allegations, such as claims that Hamas engaged in a deliberate campaign of systematic rape, should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Friendly Fire
As many U.S. media outlets and politicians have promoted and laundered Israel’s claims, spreading them far and wide, there have been strong voices among the Israeli public and media that have exhibited skepticism. This is especially true regarding the actions taken by Israeli forces as they responded to the October 7 attacks. Calls are growing inside Israel, led by survivors and victims’ families, for the Israeli government to provide a factual explanation of precisely how their loved ones died: Were they killed by Palestinian militants or by the Israeli military?
Israeli media outlets have aired interviews with survivors and IDF personnel describingOpens in a new tab what they refer to as “friendly fire” incidentsOpens in a new tab, including the shelling of a house where Hamas commandos were holding Israeli civilians hostage. Families of some Israelis killed at Kibbutz Be’eri have citedOpens in a new tab witnesses who said that an Israeli tank fired on a house filled with Israeli civilians held hostage on October 7. A dozen hostages, including 12-year-old twins, died inside the house after Israeli forces began shelling it.
“According to the evidence, the shooting of the tank was fatal and killed many hostages in addition to the terrorists,” the families wroteOpens in a new tab in a January 4 letter to the IDF’s chief of staff. Given the “seriousness of the incident, we do not think it is right to wait with the investigation until after the end of the war.” They demanded a “comprehensive and transparent investigation into the decisions and actions that led to this tragic outcome.” Israeli military Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram has since admitted he ordered the shelling that day. “The negotiations are over,” he recalledOpens in a new tab saying. “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”
Yasmin Porat, who had escaped the horrors at the Nova music festival and sought refuge in a home at Be’eri, offered extensive details on this incident, as Electronic Intifada reportedOpens in a new tab. In a seriesOpens in a new tab of interviews on Israeli media, Porat described how Palestinian commandos entered the home and told the Israeli civilians they intended to take them hostage and, after moving them to a location with other hostages at the kibbutz, ultimately used their Israeli captives to contact the police to negotiate. “Their objective was to kidnap us to Gaza. Not to murder us,” she told Israeli network Kan News. “And after we were there for two hours with the abductors, the police arrive. A gun battle takes place that our police started.”
Porat, who said her captors “treated us very humanely,” described how she managed to escape the house by convincing one of the gunmen to exit with her. After using her as a “human shield” to exit the house, the Palestinian was taken into custody, and Porat remained on the scene as Israeli forces laid siege to the house. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire,” she said. “Everyone was killed there. Just horrible.”
Other witnesses at Be’eri have describedOpens in a new tab how Israeli forces were able to retake the kibbutz from Palestinian fighters only after the IDF shelled houses where hostages were being held.
There is also evidenceOpens in a new tab indicating that Israeli forces responding to the attacks at the Nova music festival, where 364 people died, may have killed Israeli civilians as they attacked Palestinian militants, including with munitions fired from Apache helicopters. Yedioth Ahronoth and other major Israeli media outlets have published reports detailing the massive fire from combat helicopters and drones unleashed against the gunmen who violently stormed the festival. Military sources describedOpens in a new tab the difficulty in distinguishing civilians from attackers, particularly in the early phases of the Israeli counterstrike.
In the most sweeping journalistic account to date of the events surrounding the Israeli military’s operations on October 7, Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun — two well-connected and prominent Israeli journalists —wroteOpens in a new tab about the state of chaos and panic within the security establishment. They described “a command chain that failed almost entirely and was entirely blindsided; orders to open fire on terrorist vehicles speeding towards Gaza even as there was a concern that they contained captives — some sort of renewed version of the Hannibal Directive.”
The Hannibal Directive, which dates back to 1986 and has been the subject of great controversy in Israel, authorized military forces to stop the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers at all costs, even if it meant shooting or injuring the captives. In a 2003 investigationOpens in a new tab, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the broadly held understanding of the directive: “From the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”
The Hannibal Directive was allegedly rescindedOpens in a new tab in 2016. But Bergman and Zitun report that by midday on October 7, the IDF issued a similar order, instructing all units to stop Hamas from bringing hostages back to Gaza and to do so “at any cost.” They describe Israeli helicopter gunships, drones, and tanks firing on any and all cars en route to Gaza, burning them and in some cases killing everyone inside the vehicles. Haaretz reportedOpens in a new tab on an IDF commander, locked in a subterranean bunker, calling in a strike against his own bases “in order to repulse the terrorists.”
The truth is that we do not know how many of their own people Israeli forces killed during the counteroffensive on October 7. Nor do we know what happened in the firefightsOpens in a new tab when armed Israelis, including kibbutz private security and military personnel, sought to defend their settlements.
How many Israelis — soldiers and civilians — were killed in the chaos and had their deaths recorded as killed or sadistically burned alive by Hamas?
Beyond the deadly shelling of the house at Be’eri, the public has been given very few details of what exactly transpired when official Israeli military forces deployed to confront the commandos from Gaza. Israeli military and police forces engaged in prolonged standoffs and shootouts with Palestinian gunmen holed up in houses, police stations, military installations, and other buildings, often holding hostages. In some cases, these battles went on for days.
In November, Netanyahu senior adviser Mark Regev was asked by MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan about some of the lies told by Israeli officials and soldiers about the events of October 7. Regev remarked that when a claim has been proven false, Israel retracts or clarifies it. “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake,” Regev saidOpens in a new tab. He then added: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours; in the end, apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”
Israel’s social security agency has stated that the death toll from October 7 is 1,139 people. It has identified 695 Israeli civilians killed that day, along with 71 foreigners, most of whom were migrant laborers. Some 373 members of Israeli military and security forces were reportedOpens in a new tab dead.
Israel has estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 Palestinian fighters were killed that day, many of them during assaults launched with advanced weapons fired from tanks, helicopters, and drones. How many Israelis — soldiers and civilians — were killed in the chaos and had their deaths recorded as killed or sadistically burned alive by Hamas? How many Israeli lives were sacrificed under Hannibal-style orders to prevent them from being taken hostage at all costs?
The answers to these questions will bring no absolution to those who initiated the carnage on October 7. No civilians would have died in those Israeli communities had Hamas not launched its operations. It is also true that if Israel had not engaged in a 75-year campaign of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, there would not have been an October 7. The illusion promoted by the Israeli state that its people could live a bucolic life in the “Gaza envelope” while their government enforced the caging and repression of 2.3 million Palestinians next door was shattered.
The families of the dead deserve to have answers. The specifics of what happened that day also matter because of how these events have shaped the public attitude toward Israel’s war, with its horrifying death toll, particularly among Palestinian children.
Faulty Justifications
Cynical manipulation of the truth has been a hallmark of Netanyahu’s career. He has long advocated for Hamas to achieve and maintain power in Gaza precisely because he believed it was the single best path to achieving his own colonial agenda.
Related
Before They Vowed to Annihilate Hamas, Israeli Officials Considered It an Asset
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu toldOpens in a new tab his Likud confederates in 2019. The logic was clear: The world will never give the Palestinians a state while Hamas remains in power. That’s why, since at least 2012, Netanyahu has facilitated the continued flow of moneyOpens in a new tab to Hamas.
By January 18, with the horrors in Gaza intensifying, U.S. and European diplomats were telling anyone who would listen that they were deep into planning for a “day after” scenario that would pave the way for a two-state solution. Netanyahu responded to this chatter by giving a televised speech in Hebrew. “I clarify that in any arrangement in the foreseeable future, with an accord or without an accord, Israel must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu saidOpens in a new tab. “That’s a necessary condition. It clashes with the principle of sovereignty but what can you do?”
While it was reported as a defiant rebuke of his U.S. and European allies, there was nothing new in Netanyahu’s position. It has been the Likud party’s official stance since its 1977 charter. “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” the documentOpens in a new tab reads. “A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a ‘Palestinian State,’ jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel, and frustrates any prospect of peace.”
The hospitals are Hamas, the U.N. is Hamas, journalists are Hamas, European allies are Hamas, the International Court of Justice is antisemitic.
The lies that were spread in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks did not end there. Nearly every week, sometimes every day, the Israeli government and military have unloaded a fresh barrage of allegations intended to justify the ongoing slaughter. The hospitals are Hamas, the U.N. is Hamas, journalists are Hamas, European allies are Hamas, the International Court of Justice is antisemitic. The tactic is effective, particularly because the U.S. and other major allies have consistently laundered Israel’s unverified allegations as evidence of the righteousness of the cause.
The latest example is Israel’s campaign to destroy UNRWA, the single most important humanitarian organization in Gaza, which was established in 1949 specifically to protect Palestinians violently expelled from their homes and land by the creation of the Israeli state. Almost immediately after the ICJ ruled against Israel in the genocide case brought by South Africa in The Hague, Israel accused 12 of the organization’s 30,000 employees of participating in the October 7 attacks.
Israel then presentedOpens in a new tab the U.S. and other governments with “intelligence” it claimed to have obtained from the interrogations of Palestinian captives, documents recovered from the bodies of dead Palestinians, seized cellphones, and signals intercepts. Israel charged that 10 percent of UNRWA’s 12,000-person local staff in Gaza had some form of “links” to Hamas. “The institution as a whole is a haven for Hamas’ radical ideology,” an anonymous senior Israeli official told the Wall Street Journal in a widely cited article penned by a former IDF soldierOpens in a new tab.
The innuendo-laced allegation of UNRWA staff having undefined “links” to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or “close relatives” who belong to the groups is a risible charge given that Hamas is not just an armed militia, but also the governing civil authority in Gaza.
The U.S. responded to Israel’s allegations by immediately announcing it was suspendingOpens in a new tab all funding to UNRWA. “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves,” Blinken admittedOpens in a new tab on January 30. Nonetheless, he declared: “They are highly, highly credible.”
But journalists from Sky News reviewed the so-called dossier and reportedOpens in a new tab, “The Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.” Britain’s Channel 4 also obtained the document and determinedOpens in a new tab it “provides no evidence to support its explosive new claim that UNRWA staff were involved with terror attacks on Israel.” The Financial Times, which also reviewed the materials, reportedOpens in a new tab there were specific allegations of direct participation in the October 7 attacks against four Palestinians employed by UNRWA, not 12 as originally asserted.
This was a transparent attempt by Israel to distract from the rulings in the ICJ genocide case and to obliterate a U.N. agency that Israel has long viewedOpens in a new tab as an impediment to its goal of denying Palestinians the right to return to the homes and territory from which Israel expelled them. It was also an action that explicitly violated the orders issued by the world court, which directed Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.” Based on Israel’s sweeping and unverified allegations alone, the U.S. led scores of Western nations to denounce the U.N. agency and pull their funding at the moment it is needed most.
From weapons and intelligence to political, diplomatic, and legal support, Israel has wanted for nothing from the Biden administration. The mounting pile of Palestinian civilian corpses and their surviving family members, meanwhile, are relegated to the workshopped afterthoughts uttered by Western politicians who have been told they should occasionally squeeze a line or two into their speeches about death and suffering in Gaza.
Propaganda and weaponized lies can only obscure the dead bodies, the forced starvation, the mass killing of children, and the utter destruction of an entire society for so long. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceal the nexus between the actions taken by Israel after October 7, the mendacious narratives it deployed, and Netanyahu’s desperate struggle to retain political power and his personal liberty. The 1,200 Israeli and international victims of October 7, and the more than 27,000 Palestinians whose deaths were justified in their names, deserve an unvarnished rendering of the truth.
An Open Letter to Senator Tammy Baldwin: A Shameful Vote on Gaza
On Tuesday January 16, the US Senate killed Senate Resolution 504, submitted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, calling for basic oversight of U.S. weapons to Israel. Only 11 senators had the courage to vote in favor even though a clear majority of Americans want an end to this bloody war.
Sen. Baldwin, to your everlasting shame, you ignored your constituents and joined Sen. Ron Johnson and the others who made the cruel choice to keep giving Israel a free pass to commit mass murder.
Our sister city of Rafah is being bombed, shelled, and overwhelmed with more than a million starving, thirsty, sick and wounded civilians — including some 500,000 children — fleeing death and the total destruction of their lives. The projects that the citizens of Madison have so generously supported in Gaza over the last 21 years have been destroyed, damaged or rendered inoperable by Israel with weapons provided by our own tax dollars.
Prominent among these is the Atfaluna Society for the Deaf, a children’s school and adult crafts workshop, which was completely destroyed when Israel deliberately blew up the entire neighborhood where it was located.
Are the people that our hands were extended to still alive and intact, searching desperately in the cold and wet winter of Gaza for food, water, medicine, shelter, the bodies and body parts of missing relatives?
Or are they among the 25,000 already confirmed dead, the 7,000 buried under the rubble, the 62,000 enduring their wounds without benefit of medical care, painkillers, or anesthetics to relieve the pain of amputations and caesarean sections? We don’t even know.
We are angered and devastated beyond words that you — who have the unmitigated gall to call yourself a Progressive when asking for our votes — lacked the courage to even investigate whether Israel is using taxpayer-provided weapons to commit war crimes in Gaza in violation of US law.
As Ahmad Abuznaid of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights said, “Every senator who has voted to let Israel off the hook, refusing to conduct the most basic oversight for U.S. weapons, is deeply complicit in Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza. History will remember how you fueled bloodshed during a genocide.”
Senator Baldwin, in the name of all that is decent, compassionate and just, how many more must suffer and die before you take action? When will it be enough?
Rowan Atalla
Amy Atalla-Hill
Tsela Barr
Cassandra Dixon
Lisa Masri
Barbara Olson
Donna Wallbaum
Kathy Walsh
The Occupation of the American Mind and My Neighborhood
Central Library, 201 W. Mifflin Street, Room 302
5:30 pm social time
6:00 pm screenings
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Trailers: Occupation of the American Mind and My Neighborhood.
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Co-sponsored by Madison Veterans for Peace – Chapter 25,Madison for a World BEYOND War, Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, and Jewish Voice for Peace – Madison.
Help make sure Congress’ phones are ringing off the hook on their first day back in Washington, as Bernie Sanders’ attempt to block more weapons to Israel comes up and renewed efforts get underway to approve Biden’s $106 billion dollar arms deal (including $14 billion for Israel).
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Nearly three years ago, Congress gave Israel a pass to stockpile precision-guided bombs “without regard to annual limits.” An inside source confirms that even more have been transferred since October 7.
The United States has had the authority to quietly transfer precision-guided munitions, or PGMs, to Israel for the past three years through a little-noticed provision passed by Congress in January 2021.
Section 1275 of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allows a limitless transfer of PGMs from U.S. reserve stocks to Israel’s stockpile without normal congressional notifications, as long as U.S “combat readiness” isn’t compromised.
PGMs — which include any guided missile designed to hit an extremely precise target — have been an Israeli weapon of choice in the massive and deadly bombardment that has destroyed an estimated 98,000 buildings in Gaza and reportedly killed more than 15,000 Palestinians. Satellite-guided bombs (a type of PGM) of between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds made up about 90% of the weapons the Israeli military used in the first two weeks after October 7.
While PGM’s advanced targeting is billed as a way to avoid civilian harm, they have been linked to many strikes by Israel and other U.S. allies on densely populated areas, including homes in central Gaza and the Jabalia refugee camp. A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitted to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that they struck the camp knowing the area was crowded with civilians.
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President Joe Biden says that the United States has been “surging additional military assistance” to Israel since October 7. But government reporting on the details of that assistance has been sporadic and opaque.
Now, a source in the State Department confirms to In These Times and Women for Weapons Trade Transparency that Section 1275 has been invoked since October 7 to rush more PGMs to Israel.
An endless stockpile
Israel lobbied the United States for greater access to PGMs in the wake of its 2014 assault on Gaza that left some 2,200 Palestinians dead. The Israeli government argued that it needed more smart bombs to use against Hamas and Hezbollah in case of emergency. Section 1275 of the 2021 NDAA was seemingly meant to fulfill that request, enabling the president to bypass normal weapons spending caps on transfers of PGMs already stored in U.S. reserves.
“Although it is almost impossible for independent experts to trace due to a lack of basic transparency, there is little doubt that Israel and the U.S. took advantage of the provision,” says William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “The whole purpose of doing it in this fashion is to hide the extent of these deadly transfers — and the mechanisms used to carry them out — from public view.”
The Jerusalem Post reported in 2021 that the United States quickly replenished the hundreds of PGMs dropped on the Gaza Strip in May 2021 and that Israel planned to purchase “far more” by 2024.
Hartung says that the common-sense logic in Washington D.C. is that U.S. weapons transfers should “increase stability” or “bolster the ability of allies to defend themselves.”
“While this may be true in some cases, in many others — such as U.S. arms supplies to Saudi Arabia for use in the war in Yemen or for Israel’s war on Gaza — pouring in arms to regions of tension enables human rights abuses, entrenches authoritarian regimes and fuels deadly conflict,” he says.
A New York Times investigation found that Israel used JDAMs — a type of PGM — in May 2021 attacks on a Gaza apartment complex that killed civilian families.
Civilian killings, precisely targeted
The Biden administration argues that guided weapons are a valuable tool to reduce civilian casualties by enabling more precise targeting. But U.S. policy decisions have tacitly admitted that sometimes the opposite is true. In 2016, President Barack Obama’s administration suspended PGM sales to Saudi Arabia due to “systemic, endemic” concerns that the advanced weaponry was deployed against civilian targets.
Supplying these attack munitions to Israel, a government with a history of striking civilian infrastructure with PGMs — and which has publicly stated that the emphasis of its bombing of Gaza is “damage and not accuracy” — has been particularly controversial.
When the State Department notified Congress on October 31 that it planned to transfer $320 million in kits to convert unguided bombs into precision munitions, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced a resolution of disapproval in a move applauded by peace and arms control civil society groups, including Women for Weapons Trade Transparency.
There is ample evidence that PGMs have been used in the current Israeli campaign in strikes against civilian infrastructure. Marc Garlasco, a military advisor at the Dutch peace organization PAX, says that “photos of weapon remnants, craters, and reporting out of Israel and Gaza indicate strikes carried out in Gaza City, including strikes at multiple refugee camps, were conducted with GBU-31’s and other [PGMs].” Analysts believe Israel used a Boeing-manufactured guided bomb unit, a kind of PGM, during its Oct. 31-Nov. 2airstrikes on Jabalia Refugee Camp, which reportedly killed 195people.
An Amnesty International investigation released December 5 traced the killing of 43 civilians in Gaza — including 19 children — back to Boeing-made JDAMs (a type of PGM) supplied by the United States. After ordering residents of Northern Gaza to relocate south, the Israeli military struck family homes in Deir al-Balah, below the evacuation line, without warning. The strikes killed 24 people on October 10 and 19 people on October 22. (This story has been updated to include the Amnesty report.)
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Less and less transparency
In its request for $14.5 billion in military aid to Israel, the Biden administration is following the precedent set by Section 1275 and other NDAA amendments by further undercutting transparency in all stockpile transfers, not just for PGMs. The President’s requested supplemental bill would waive the annual cap on transfers to the U.S. stockpile within Israel. With no limit on those transfers and Israel’s ability to draw from that stockpile at will, the U.S. would supply Israel with a virtually endless supply of weaponry without congressional authorization or oversight.
The Senate is currently working to pass the supplemental, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) saying the bill could be up for a vote as early as this week.
The White House’s supplemental request also contained another transparency waiver, first reported by Women for Weapons Trade Transparency and In These Times last month, which would let the White House unilaterally blanket-approve future sales of military equipment and weapons to Israel without notifying Congress.
In response, some Democrats want stronger assurances that U.S. weapons will be used consistently with U.S. law and called for greater transparency in transfers.
Several high-ranking Democrats have already come out against giving Biden increased powers to transfer weapons to Israel without scrutiny. “We should not make exceptions to this practice — it’s our duty to review these funds and ensure their use is in the best interests of the American people and in alignment with U.S. policy,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement to the Washington Post.
Sen. Schumer’s office did not respond by deadline to an inquiry about whether the two transparency waivers will be included in the bill.
ARI TOLANY is a research consultant with Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, where her research focuses on the arms trade, civilian harm, and state fragility. Previously, Ari was the U.S. program manager at Center for Civilians in Conflict and a Scoville Peace Fellow at the Stimson Center.
LILLIAN MAULDIN is a Founding Board Member of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency and a Research Fellow at the Center for International Policy. Her work focuses on political strategy and legislative and grassroots advocacy.
JANET ABOU-ELIAS is a Founding Board Member of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency and a Research Fellow at the Center for International Policy. Her research focuses on international arms trade policy, U.S. foreign policy, and sustainability initiatives.
WOMEN FOR WEAPONS TRADE TRANSPARENCY is a nonprofit committed to producing high-quality research on the international weapons trade and advocating for humane and sustainable global demilitarization policies.
In this new book, longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine the political lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid. Let This Radicalize You answers the urgent question: What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing?
We’ve partnered with the publisher, Haymarket Books, and 100% of your donation will go towards supporting In These Times.
Norman Finkelstein is crouched on the floor of his apartment, running his fingers along a bookshelf so overcrowded that it’s bending into a U-shape. “It has a green cover,” he assures me before landing on the spine of his tenth book, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming to an End. The subtitle stands as a summation of Finkelstein’s career, which has been devoted to proclaiming to his fellow Jews and others his disenchantment with the Jewish state. But right now, he’s thumbing through the book for proof that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was a guard at Israel’s biggest prison camp during the early 1990s, when many Palestinians were tortured there.
I already know about this story (it’s in Goldberg’s memoir), but Finkelstein, 69, is not used to a world in which people are inclined to believe him. As America’s most divisive Israel-Palestine scholar, he spent the past 40 years being ostracized by the media and academia. Then the October 7 Hamas attack propelled him into the spotlight and his 13th book, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, into the top-selling spot in Amazon’s Middle Eastern History category. True, there aren’t many books about Gaza (“That’s like being the tallest building in Wichita,” Finkelstein says), but its success is being seen as a vindication by both his longtime and newfound followers.
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He hasn’t held a steady academic job since DePaul University denied him tenure under political pressure in 2007. Now, after years of sporadic work and low pay as an adjunct, Finkelstein is suddenly spending ten hours a day fielding emails from people clamoring for his insights. “It’s become a complete nightmare,” he says, scrolling through hundreds of new messages in his inbox. His heavily trafficked X account (380,000 followers) and Substack (over 15,000 subscribers) — both run by a three-person technical staff that is paid from subscription revenue — are a torrent of grim facts and sardonic quips about the Israel-Hamas war. (“IDF ‘Searching’ for Hamas Command-and-Control Center Under Al-Shifa Hospital,” reads a typical caption alongside a video of the Seven Dwarfs singing “Heigh-Ho.”)
Finkelstein is five-foot-ten and fit with the angular jawline of a retired drill sergeant. He has short white hair and dark eyebrows and speaks in unhurried paragraphs even when he’s debating Piers Morgan on television — a man unafraid to be long-winded. His warbling Brooklyn accent is a relic from the days when he roamed the halls of James Madison High School, which counts Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer among its alumni. He takes regular five-mile jogs along Coney Island Beach and keeps a desktop folder of photos of himself posing in front of the sunset.
Finkelstein is reflective and slightly melancholic in private conversation, but his public reputation is as someone who will browbeat you into submission. (An X user recently observed that he “comes off super radical on basically the strength of being very rude.”) One YouTube video shows him at a 2003 talk at the University of Waterloo. He’s berating an audience member over her “crocodile tears” for Israel, declaring, “My late father was in Auschwitz. My late mother was in Majdanek concentration camp” — he pauses to bark at a heckler to “please shut up” before continuing — “and it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.”
When he was a child, Finkelstein’s mother would have visceral reactions to injustice, especially to TV reports about violent conflict, which she’d experienced firsthand growing up in wartime Poland. “She physically could not watch it,” Finkelstein says. He inherited her indignation, and as a student inspired by the civil-rights movement, he dived into protests against the Vietnam War. He became too involved, his mother concluded. “She thought I was destroying my life, and there was a feeling that she was responsible for it,” he says.
He wouldn’t actually destroy his life until several years later. In 1984, when he was a doctoral student at Princeton, Finkelstein investigated the sourcing of a celebrated new book by the journalist Joan Peters called From Time Immemorial. Peters argued that Palestinians didn’t actually exist and that Zionist colonization had lured non-native Arabs into the region, where they started waging war on the Israelis. It was mostly a fabrication, Finkelstein discovered, based on fudged demographic data, but a consensus had already formed that this was a monumental work; it was gushed over by the likes of Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel. Initially, no U.S. publication would touch Finkelstein’s findings (In These Times eventually published them), nor would any American academic except for Noam Chomsky, who became his mentor. “You’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it,” Chomsky warned his protégé. “And they’re going to destroy you.”
It was a frosty introduction to a profession that still seems intent on freezing Finkelstein out, even decades after Peters’s work was widely discredited. He kept writing books and papers that made people angry — his most controversial work, 2000’s The Holocaust Industry, argued that the memory of Jewish genocide was being politically exploited by Israel — but landed a full-time job teaching political science at DePaul in Chicago. “DePaul wanted to get rid of me from the get-go,” Finkelstein says matter-of-factly. In 2003, he accused the lawyer Alan Dershowitz of plagiarism for lifting citations from Peters’s book for his own polemic, The Case for Israel. Thus began one of academia’s all-time bitter feuds: Dershowitz even lobbied California’s then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the publication of one of Finkelstein’s books. (Schwarzenegger declined to intervene.) Finkelstein denounced Dershowitz’s work — “If Dershowitz’s book were made of cloth, I wouldn’t even use it as a schmatta,” he said — and dedicated himself to debunking it until he went up for tenure in 2007. His department and college at DePaul voted to grant it, but the university-level tenure board rejected him following a high-profile campaign by Dershowitz. (The university’s president denied that outside pressure had anything to do with the decision.)
“I live a very simple life,” Finkelstein says of how he survived the intervening years, during which his annual income was sometimes less than $5,000. His apartment is rent-stabilized — he took it over from his father, who died, along with his mother, in 1995 — and it doesn’t look like he’s bought any new furniture since moving in. Hunter and Brooklyn Colleges throw him a teaching gig every so often. He admits that he was so deep in the weeds on Israel-Palestine that “even a specialist wouldn’t have been interested” in what he was writing. He learned that his 2019 book — a granular indictment of the International Criminal Court’s head prosecutor — had sold just a few hundred copies. “Why am I doing this?” he asked himself. “Nobody cares.”
But caring about this conflict — stubbornly and single-mindedly, like so many others devoted to this issue, and not without errors of judgment — is the rare constant in Finkelstein’s turbulent life. After three years of saying relatively little about Israel-Palestine, he resurfaced on October 7 singing the praises of Gaza’s “heroic resistance,” only to be sobered later by the extent of the carnage Hamas had wreaked. “Of course they changed,” he says of his initial feelings, but not enough to alter his unyielding beliefs about the root of the conflict’s dynamics. “What,” he asked days later, “were the people of Gaza supposed to do?”
Democratic Socialists of America brings democratized unions out in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, and an end to settler colonial apartheid while we’re at it. 2,000 march to the offices of AIPAC, captain of the Israel lobby that bribes and coerces politicians to support any genocide of Israel’s choosing. Midtown Manhattan, 12-21-23.