I recognize that one of my great intellectual limitations is that, while I can identify problems and ask questions, I am at a loss when it comes to solutions. That is why I try to listen respectfully to people who have constructive ideas, even if I don’t necessarily always fully agree with their analyses. Creative, productive genius – what is often called “vision” – is a true intellectual gift, and I respect it even if my own intellectual abilities are primarily critical. However, one thing of which I have absolute, positive certainty is this: Whatever the solutions to the questions of Palestinian human rights, autonomy, and freedom, and to the questions of Israelis’ security might be, they will not be found without a ceasefire. By continuing to prosecute this war, the State of Israel is not only denying Palestinian human rights, autonomy, and freedom, but Israelis’ rights – and their future – as well. The war, for leaders of the State of Israel, is about nothing but the war itself.

That much became clear this week, as the State of Israel’s War on Gaza reached 100 days and almost 24,000 Gazan dead, and the Israeli government’s legal team sought to justify the bloodshed at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The Israeli case, presented by Briton Malcolm Shaw and Israeli-Australian Tal Becker sought to argue that anything that the State of Israel chooses to do in its “self-defense” is legitimate – a pathetic plea in the face of international law, the principle of jus ad bellum, and the comments earlier this week by David Cameron, the former Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary of Shaw’s own country, that he is “worried” Israel has violated international law in Gaza.

***

My father and I used to argue about Zionism and the State of Israel. It didn’t really happen that often, but it was one of the things that we disagreed about; the other being whether Mozart was the greatest of all composers. (Dad was on team Mozart, and I was on team Bach.) Disagreement, of course, is both a time-honored Jewish tradition and an inevitable feature of the generational differences within families.

I wouldn’t say that my father was a particularly obsessive or overcommitted Zionist – he visited the State of Israel only once (for work), and never expressed even the slightest interest in making Aliyah – but he did feel a strong emotional connection to the country and regarded it as the Jewish homeland.

My father’s “Zionism” – in scaredy-quotes because it did not rise to the standard of blind devotion now demanded by the State of Israel and its proxies in the Diaspora – was a casual, emotional, and sometimes unthinking Zionism common in his generation. He was born in 1925, served in the Second World War, and the defining experience of his Jewishness, already more secular than his parents’, was learning of the revelations of the Shoah. Through that lens, the creation of a “Jewish State” appeared to him to be both necessary and just.

I don’t think that he really thought that much about Zionism, as a belief system that structured his thinking, or even his Jewishness in the years in which he built a family and a career (as a Jewish camp director, and then as the director of a Jewish community social services unit in Montreal). I can’t recall him ever self-identifying as a Zionist, even though that category was certainly available. He might as well have identified as a Montreal Canadiens fan. It wasn’t something that he chose or thought much about.

In fact, the one time that he self-identified as anything happened the first time that I brought my partner home to meet him. The three of us were sitting on the deck out behind his suburban Montreal home, enjoying the summer breeze. My father leaned close to Molly and said, in a low, conspiratorial tone, “we’re socialists.” That was the thing that was important.

Make no mistake, I grew up, with and older brother and a younger sister, knowing at least something about the State of Israel. There were the picture books in our home celebrating the 20th and then the 25th anniversaries of Israeli independence, and the records of Israeli hits like “Erev Shel Shoshanim” and “Bashana Haba’ah” (both still favorites); there was the March to Jerusalem every spring, and the dancing of the Hora to “Mayim, Mayim” (“water,” not the former Jeopardy host). We drank Mount Carmel wines at Pesach and Shabbes rather than the vile Manischewitz stuff, although there was an equally vile bottle of a liqueur called Sabra in our tiny liquor cabinet.

To the extent that my father was a Zionist, his commitment was to his fellow Jews, a fair number of whom lived in the State of Israel by the time I was conscious of there being a State of Israel. He not only wished them well, but he was utterly devoted to their welfare, as he was devoted to the welfare of Jews everywhere. Israel was the “Jewish State” or, more accurately as he once said, “a state full of Jews” and, as a Jew, he felt connected to it.

Our sense of connection to other Jews, that we take solace in each other’s presence, pride in each other’s accomplishments, shame in each other’s transgressions, is really the defining feature of Jewishness, even more than Halakha and the Torah. To meet another Jew is always to meet a landsman, whether they are Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Beta Israel, or whatever. There is an immediate recognition, and something shared that is hard to express to Gentiles. Even if there are Jews we don’t care for (you should have heard my father talk about Roy Cohn and Menahem Begin, oy!), to be a Jew is to care for Jews as a totality. This, I believe, was what lay at the bottom of my father’s Zionism.

Still, he had embraced a lot of the Zionist myth – the heroic sabras in bucket hats “making the desert bloom” – and the idea that there was something importantly, ineffably JEWISH (in all caps, just like that) about the State of Israel. It was sometimes hard for him to see beyond that so, when I turned my back on Zionism and the State of Israel in the 1980s, he interpreted it as a repudiation of my Jewishness (not such a wild idea, I guess, since my mother was not born Jewish) and of that ineffable connection that we have with each-other.

When the subject of the State of Israel or Zionism came, we argued. They were never vicious disputes, but disagreements on principal – and not necessarily the principles one might expect – that invariably ended with an agreement to disagree and dinner or a beer. Over time, my father came to realize that my rejection of the State of Israel as my homeland was not a rejection of my Jewishness, and I came to understand that his Zionism was not the exclusive territorialism that defines mainstream Zionism today. “There is no reason why Jews can’t share our homeland,” he once confided in me while he cursed at Ariel Sharon on the CBC National news. “A land can accommodate many different peoples.”

It was a logic that made sense to a man who regarded himself as a Quebecois as much as Jacques Parizeau, and as much a Canadian as Brian Mulroney (or to be honest, more). If you pressed him, he’d say that he was a human first, a Montrealer second, and that everything followed from that. To really know my father, you must realize that he was a profoundly decent, deeply caring man who wanted the best for everyone. He was a mensch.

His menschlekhkeyt was not without conflict, however. He had served heroically on the crew of a RCAF Lancaster bomber during the Second World War, believing that he had an obligation to fight fascism and defend civilization against the Nazis, yet he was tormented for the rest of his life by the thought of the German civilians who died under allied bombs. I saw the first cracks appear in his Zionism as we watched coverage of the First Intifada. Yitzhak Shamir was “a terrorist” who has “betrayed Israel,” he said despondently as we watched Israeli soldiers fire on rock-throwing teenagers.

I heard the sadness in his voice when he called to tell me to turn on the TV because Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated by “a settler terrorist;” he utterly loathed Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet, until the end of his life, my father clung to a belief that the State of Israel could be good, even if it was not, that a Jewish state and a Palestinian state could coexist, and that Zionism was once, and could be again, an agent of justice and freedom and capable of embracing “the other” if the conditions were right.

It was, perhaps, a fantastical kind of Zionism, and a way for a good and moral man to reconcile the contradictions between reality and his ideals. He hated war and violence and hated that they were being perpetrated in the name of the Jewish people, but he remained committed to a dream of the State of Israel as an expression of justice and equality. A delusion, perhaps, but one that allowed him to live through war, knowledge of the Shoah, and the brutal 20th century while being both a Jew and a mensch.

My father died almost twelve years ago. He would be 98 now. As much as I miss him – and I miss him every day – I am glad that he did not have to witness the State of Israel’s War on Gaza. There would be no argument between us, but only heartbreak that the “state full of Jews” to which my father felt so connected, and which he honestly believed could be – should be – an agent of justice and equality had become instead an embodiment of evil. It would have destroyed him.

On one of the last occasions when we spoke, when he was recovering from chemotherapy at the Catherine Booth Hospital about a month before he died, I asked my father about the guilt that he felt for being part of Air Marshal Arthur “Butcher” Harris’s terror bombing of Germany in the Second World War. “It was a war crime,” he said. “If we hadn’t won, we would have been put on trial. There was never a justification for slaughtering civilians, the way we did, just because they were there. All the reasoning and defense of it at the time and after the fact was just lies to cover up mass murder.”

“That makes me a war criminal,” he continued, “and that is a hard thing to live with.”

Were he alive today, Joe Friedman would be demanding a ceasefire.

***

Thanks to my friend Gil Wald, who regularly sends me news links through Messenger, I went ahead and got a subscription to Haaretz. I have been reading it through my university library, but that did not come to my phone and tablet, where I usually read the news these days. It is a front-row seat to the utter chaos that is Israeli society and political culture, mostly (but not entirely) from a position antagonistic to the right and the current Israeli government.

This has been revealing. Even the current Haaretz editorial advocates for a ceasefire, albeit in sotto voce and never quite using either the words “cease” or “fire.” Noting that the goals of “destroying Hamas” and “bringing home the hostages” are inherently contradictory, Haaretz prioritizes the latter: “In other words, anyone who wants to bring the hostages home – alive – must demand that the government advance a deal for their release, at any price. Even a domestic political price.”

To be fair, Haaretz is a marginal voice in the State of Israel. Its daily circulation of 72,000 represents less than 5% of the Israeli news market share, while Israel Hayom, a free newspaper founded and funded by Sheldon Adelson that champions the Israeli ultra-right, has a daily circulation of about 275,000, and a 30% market share. That alone demonstrates the state of Israeli political culture. (A dumpster fire, but one where the far right burns the brightest.)

Still, the one thing that any government bent on total domination of its populace and of an occupied people cannot easily abide or survive is doubt. Fascism came to power in Italy, and National Socialism in Germany largely on the basis of a claim of unanimity, albeit one that they manufactured through brutality, repression, and the exclusion of dissenters from the body politic. That, to a great expense, helps to explain the right’s idée-fixe of “judicial reform” but, even more significantly, it explains why you can search the pages of Israel Hayom, the right’s bellicose mouthpiece, and find not a single report on the anti-government and anti-war protests that have brought Israelis into the streets in the last week by their thousands. These have been front-page news in Haaretz.

Haaretz peddles a bankrupt liberal Zionism still beloved of many Diaspora Zionists but which Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, the settlers, and the blackhat fascists garroted a generation ago in the State of Israel. Its 5% news market share does, in fact, represent the stake that the liberal political rump, fed by the myths of “good” Labor Zionism, still holds in the Israeli political culture. That makes it a kind of weak tea. Moreover, it is clear that Haaretz has much greater traction in the international market (mostly in the English-speaking Diaspora) than in the State of Israel itself.

Yet, it does reveal that, even if it is a minority voice in the State of Israel, it is a voice of doubt, and a crack, though perhaps only a hairline fracture, in Israeli maximalist Zionist unanimity. More important to me is the fact that it continues to give a platform to commentators like Hanin Majadli, Klein, Gideon Levy, and others, whom the Israeli right would dearly love to silence, or to throw down a well, as the High Priests did to Jeremiah 2,600 years ago.

Levy, in particular, has been a comfort to me since I began obsessively following Haaretz. His current column is “If It Isn’t a Genocide in Gaza, Then What Is It?” He eloquently lists the atrocities committed by the IDF and the Israeli government to date and darkly warns of the ones to come, before turning to his government’s self-serving defense at the ICJ. “None of this of course proves that Israel has committed genocide,” he concludes. “The court will decide that. But to feel good about such arguments for the defense? To feel good after The Hague? To feel good after Gaza?”

I am not one possessed of a surfeit of hope, and I know that Levy is speaking into a howling storm of darkness. But I want it to give me hope. Yet, there is another lesson to be drawn here: If it is possible for Israelis like Levy, Klein, Haaretz, in its way, and the perhaps tiny cohort of others in the State of Israel to speak up, take a stand – an amidah – against evil, then that means that those Israelis and Zionists who have not, and just go along with the party line, have made an explicit choice to ally themselves with evil.

***

The leaders of the State of Israel and their Zionist proxies are very fond of metaphors and analogies. As the South African delegation pointed out in their opening statement to the ICJ, Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers are fond of making an analogy between Amalek, the Israelites’ greatest enemy in the Tanakh, and the Palestinian people, or Gazans, or Hamas, depending on how they want to spin it at any moment.* As the South Africans pointed out, this is an explicit analogy to genocide.

In his opening statement to the ICJ, Tal Becker indignantly retorted that “Israel has the inherent right to take all legitimate measures to defend its citizens and secure the release of the hostages… Israel has the inherent right to take all legitimate measures to defend its citizens and secure the release of the hostages. This right is also not in doubt. It has been acknowledged by States across the world.”

This is a bait-and-switch. I know of no one who would say that the State of Israel has the right to defend itself, not even the South African delegation at the ICJ. The question is whether killing 23,000 Palestinians, obliterating the built environment of Gaza in a calculated campaign of domicide (I will leave it to the court determine if it is genocide), and subjecting the people there to famine and disease constitute “legitimate measures.”

The point is that they don’t. And since Israelis and their Zionist proxies are fond of analogies and metaphors, here is one that I have for them that might allow them to understand why their country is in court, charged with genocide: “If someone attacks you in the street, or in your home, you do have a legal right to use force to defend yourself. However, that defense does not extend to then going to your assailant’s home, burning down his house, and murdering his family.” Anything subsequent to defending yourself from the attack is a crime – specifically, arson and murder.

This is not a difficult thing to understand. I do not know why so many Zionists and Israelis, many of whom are educated, learned people, find it so hard to grasp.

***

The Guardian: Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe (9 Jan 2024)

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. War is a crime against all humanity and, it turns out, a crime of incomprehensible proportions against the planet upon which we live and from which we draw life. I do not want to minimize the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank who are the specific targets of Israeli aggression and brutality, but this news serves as a reminder that the oppression of some is the oppression of all – in the most basic possible sense.

Not that this will move the leaders of the State of Israel, which has always promoted itself as an “environmental champion” even though it is very near the bottom of the pile in the OECD’s environmental policy assessments. (All of that “making the desert bloom” meshugas profoundly damaged the environmental infrastructure.) But the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies have always preferred myth to reality.

Remember that “most moral army in the world” canard? If you repeat a lie often enough and with enough conviction, people will accept it as truth, especially if it conforms to their preexisting ideological investments.

Yet, here we are, with the State of Israel condemning Palestinians to war, pestilence, and death, and helping to ensure the suffering of everyone in the world because of its obsessive compulsion to destroy. Do you think Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Itamar Ben-Gvir and all the rest care whether they are fouling the whole world? Of course not. All that matters is Thanatos. The death drive.

***

Reuters: UK’s Cameron says he’s worried Israel may have breached international law in Gaza (9 Jan 2024)

My first reaction is to say, “well, duh.” However, I think David Cameron’s comments deserve attention. For one thing, “war crime” is a legal category of International Humanitarian Law, so an atrocity is not actually a war crime (although it might be a “suspected war crime”) until it is judged so in an international court like the ICJ or ICC. And if a senior minister in the government of one of the State of Israel’s staunchest supporters is worried “that Israel has taken action that might be in breach of international law,” it means that they are thinking about the current situation in terms of international law.

The State of Israel has, in the past, gotten a pass on its violations of international law and its treaty obligations (like the Geneva Conventions) because of unquestioning and unwavering support from its sponsors, like the United States and the United Kingdom, who have a veto on the UN security council. (The mechanisms of pursuing charges against a country or, more often, its leaders in the ICJ and ICC are Byzantine and difficult and are subject to approval or veto by the Security Council.) Yet, these public comments from the UK’s top diplomat suggest that this support might be ever so slightly wavering. I cannot remember a time when a senior representative of one of the State of Israel’s main sponsors suggested the possibility of war crimes.

That makes this significant (as much as I revile Cameron). What makes it even more significant is that Cameron’s comments come days after South Africa’s petition to the ICJ to investigate the State of Israel on a charge of genocide. No senior British diplomat makes “off the cuff” remarks; what they say, and how they say it (their rhetoric) is carefully calibrated and meant as seriously as what used to be called “diplomatic notes.” This is how governments talk to each other – in this case, Great Britain and the State of Israel – without talking directly, or through channels. Cameron’s comments almost certainly have a specific meaning and a specific audience.

So, the fact that he made these comments publicly deserves some attention. But yeah, Mr. Cameron, “well, duh.”

***

“That the Nation-state shall be the exclusive model, that outside of it extant minorities are doomed, is what the Zionists want, and the Jewish establishment, and all the majority-minded thinkers whether of the right or left. They are adopting the theory and practice of the very institutions and powers who wagered for two thousand years on the disappearance of the Jews, and who lost their bet. They have adopted the viewpoint of the conqueror and colonizer.”

– Richard Marienstras, “The Jews of the Diaspora, or the Vocation of a Minority,” 1975.

***

* “Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.” Deuteronomy 25:19