To: Embassy of Israel info@washington.mfa.gov.il
Cc: Major General Hidai Zilberman,
Israel Defense & Armed Forces Attaché to the U.S. def-sec1@mod.gov.il
Yinam Cohen, Consul General of Israel to the Midwest contactus@chicago.mfa.gov.il
Director for Political and Public Affairs political@chicago.mfa.gov.il
Livia Link-Raviv, Consul General of Israel to the Southwest concal.sec@houston.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Houston consular.dep@houston.mfa.gov.il
Anat Sultan-Dadon, Consul General of Israel, Southeast US consulgeneralsec@atlanta.mfa.gov.il
Israel Consul Services, Atlanta consular-services@atlanta.mfa.gov.il
Gaza Trails of Tears (Oct.23–Feb.24)
The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 were deplorable and inevitable.
That was always the plan. Zealots both ways got what they wanted.
It is dark jingoism for Israeli officials to claim these attacks were “unprovoked” – in denial of their escalated blockades, incursions & raids, cumulative land grabs & Palestinian deaths in the last few years, upon decades of displacement and occupation.
It is cynical savagery to set loose revenge on the people of Gaza, to bomb homes & neighborhoods, to starve people of food, water, fuel, power, and medicine, and to mandate exile with nowhere to go and no hope of return.
It is obtuse sophistry to bemoan the mishaps of a holiday, or security forces diverted to enforce illegal West Bank settlements and suppress protest, or arrogant foolhardy failures of security intelligence.
This was a foregone political gambit of Israel’s far-right regime, and a fateful strategic triumph. It was the catastrophic pretext they have precipitated with incremental abuses, and awaited to escalate reprisals and quell dissent. It was no mistake…
The ascent of the Likud faction in the Israeli government is defined by ‘Provocateur Politics’ – on the proven formula of fomenting violence, crisis and tribal fear as a sure path to political power, justifying policies & means of vengeance.
In turn Hamas rose in this shadow, fed by Palestinian rage across the region, and the tribulations of exiles in Gaza, operating on the same paradigm of reciprocal spite and power through conflict.
These reactionary factions have dragged their peoples into death spirals, their dialectical motives intertwined and darkly aligned in the modern history of self-perpetual antagonism. Peace has been sabotaged at crucial junctures by right-wing extremists on both sides – most decisively in the fateful assassinations of humane leaders who advanced hopeful initiatives for peace and coexistence… Anwar Sadat in 1981, Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. In each era, militant regimes on each side seized control and provoked new violence.
The Likud rose with Rabin’s murder, then Ariel Sharon led an Israeli Army assault on the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque in Old Jerusalem – a miscreant act most sure to enrage the Islamic world. This was not just stupid… it was done in the malignant certainty of escalating conflict, and spawning new generations of enemies, to assure future strife and political power, ad nauseam.
The deep paradox is how the contrary ideologies spring from a common root – fundamentalist religion, Judaic and Islamic, claiming antiqual rights and dominion of their god from the River Jordan to the Sea. Obedience to scripture devolves into scripted hate, in the long legacy of brutal theocracies in the Levant. The purge of infidels in the name of any god is a primitive mission of vainglorious liars and blind believers, always for power. That is the nexus of zealous faith and fascism, both ways – further complicated by the sanctimonies and claims of the Christian West, and the legacy of the Crusades & colonialism.
U.S. policy is stuck in doctrinary lockstep with Israel’s postures, vested in geomilitary support. The voice of American Jews drones in the sentiments of congregations at-large, resonating ancient prayers and modern fears, in fresh remembrance of the Holocaust. And it shrills in the invectives of AIPAC, JDL, & other loud propagandists for the inviolable Jewish State, ordained by ancient deity and modern retribution.
But the influence of this small minority is much overstated:
The greater unspoken sway of Christian Zionism is most decisive and inexorable – at once deeply rooted in biblical prophecies and homilies of Americanism, and devolved into a visceral cult of divine violence destined for the Middle East: The Book of Revelations foretold that Israel would be restored and conflagrations would follow, in order for Christ to return and for the righteous to know the Rapture. So believers blink and nod to Sunday sermons pledging fealty to the Hebrews in the fervent certainty of their destruction, and cheerleading Armageddon as the final proof and victory of Christianity.
These fundamentalists are like the others, deranged in the triumphal doomsday myths of necrophiliac religions. These motives are woven into the draconian impulses of the evangelical right, and the political religion of America’s “special relationship” with Israel – ever more isolated and discredited in the views of other nations, and doomed to lose their trust.
Our thinking cannot be confined by media tunnel-vision, fixed on the short news-cycle of this episode of violence and vengeance since October 7, focused on Gaza as a singular crisis. We cannot disregard the contexts of history and geography – the influx of European Jews over a century, ongoing displacement of native populations, prior episodes of conflict at every border, spasms of reactive strife, the deprivations of economic blockade and the affronts of military occupation. The West Bank is a balkanized landscape, as Israel’s government has accelerated illegal settlements, seized control of the Jordan Valley aquifer, and locked down Palestinian towns behind walls and military roadblocks. Keen heartful observers have seen the parallels with South African apartheid, and German Army tactics confining Jews in 1942 Warsaw.
What darker irony than Israeli soldiers with guns trained on Palestinian ghettos?
This is the legacy of Netanyahu the Nazi Jew…
There is nothing transient, containable or terminable about this little war… it is made to spread in regional space and ripple in time. In the destruction of whole townscapes of Gaza, the shattering of its infrastructure and civic life, the nascent motive is obvious – to make this place uninhabitable, with no possibility of restoring those who lived there.
This land is to be occupied and taken as part of “Greater Israel” – the latest quasi-historical birthright intoned by Likud shills, the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the Mideast, once again decimating and exiling native peoples from their homes.
The “Two-State Solution” is the 100-year consensus of diplomacy and international law… Netanyahu’s whole career has subverted it, and now he is poised to foreclose and kill it. There can be no sovereign Palestine on broken lands, behind walls under the gun.
In these weeks as the siege and devastation of Gaza persist, we witness a new surge of antisemitism worldwide. Jewish people are not to blame, beyond their blithe sympathies of history, blood & faith, and their blind assent. This hatred is roused by the strident glaring cruelties of the Israeli security state, backed by U.S. military subsidies and power. There is nothing ‘Jewish’ about this evil… it is the virulent corruption to which all kinds of flawed humans are prone, under the twisted incentives of state power.
It is heartbreaking to see racist crimes and hear callow deceits in the name of Judaism, and under its flag. It is maddening for fair hard critiques of Israeli government actions to be smeared as ‘antisemitic’ by charlatans. It is ominous to know that even if Hamas is destroyed to the man, a new Intifada will surely arise in a new name, more fierce than before, with graver threats to Israel’s people and future.
As a Jew I am shamed, outraged and endangered.
I am betrayed in our core teachings of justice, of learning as a value in-itself, of truthtelling and acting responsibly in accord. Then in witness of brazen atrocities, I am duty-bound by this knowledge, can no longer consent to brute violence and denial in our names, or abide euphemisms in the guise of political analysis. Israel has to stop the carnage. The U.S. has to pull the plug.
This glyphic proclamation came out of the Holocaust horrors: “Never Again”.
The resonance of this vow was its higher intent, for the right of defense and protection of all spited peoples… it means Everyone. If reduced to a cheap cliché justifying more barbaric military afflictions on innocent populations, it is demeaned. Jews should not do this. Pale American protests are not enough.
This writing commenced days after October 7, as the fateful siege of Gaza began. It has been painful to compose, vexed through weeks of dark events, as this disaster escalated and spread, with deeper tragedies and fallacies to unravel. Now there are 30,000 Palestinians dead, countless injured & sick, nearly 1.5 million displaced, exhausted and at risk of starvation, and Gaza is destroyed, in rubble.
The UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice have condemned this warfare, and called for a cease-fire. In defiance Netanyahu has doubled down on the rampage, renounced any restraint… Israeli military attacks on civilians continue unabated, and newscasts keep showing poor families in fear with nothing left, on roads in flight, and in tears. America has not lived down its Trail of Tears For 185 years.
Incredibly in the face of all this, right-wing U.S. politicians are pushing pompous “Resolutions” in State legislatures, crowing unconditional support for the Israeli government. In Missouri such buffoons put forth HCR 30, SCR 24, and SCR 25 – echoing righteous biblical tropes, elevating state religion, pandering to ultrazionist land grabs, and extolling the seizure of Jerusalem as a unilateral capital:
It’s the Holy Chaos agenda that Trump abetted, and they line up like ducks.
This is no time for phony postures in our names, nor coercive ideological frames.
At no time has the need been greater for statesmanship of compassionate wisdom, aligned with true values of Judaism, Islam and Christianity alike. It is the knowledge that our highest self-interest is in the well-being of peoples around us, and our surest security is in their safety.
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scott addison
Riverview, MO (14 Feb. 2024)