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Weekly Briefing: At year’s end, Israel’s dead end

Philip WeissDecember 30, 2023

Demonstrator at Palestinian solidarity rally in Washington on Nov. 4, 2023. Photography by Andrew Courtney.

As the year ends, consider:

There are still no western reporters allowed in Gaza to witness a historic genocide. That censorship skews the western gaze. And the New York Times and all the networks and Biden too accept these fascistic rules and preach that this is truth and democracy.

Our reporter in Gaza, Tareq Hajjaj, walked out with his son on his first birthday to try to find a candle for a cake his mother was scraping together and Israeli missiles struck a nearby car and a man told Tareq to cover Qais’s eyes so he would not see the limbs strewn on the sidewalk. 

Later Tareq wrote a letter to his son. “On your birthday, we walked over rivers of blood and disfigured human corpses.”

Israel has no vision. The leadership of that country has not the slightest idea where it is going with this madness. It has made Hamas popular around the world. It appears now to want world war as a fix to its problems. All its other fixes have not worked. The “Abraham Accords.” “Managed occupation.” “Economic peace.” 

None of those fixes answers the core problem: Palestinians refuse to accept lesser status under Zionist rule.

Israel’s only answer now is rivers of blood, pound the Palestinian cities till the Palestinians flee. To try to convince them not to be Palestinian, to forget about their land. The formula going back to Golda Meir– there is no such thing as a Palestinian.  

Tragically for Americans, our leaders are completely bought in to the Israeli trauma and absence of vision (and tragically for Jews, so is my community). The vast majority of Americans of both parties are for a ceasefire. But “The degree of political capture of U.S. political institutions is so absolute now that they don’t even care what the American people think” (says Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from the U.N. over its failure to stop apartheid and genocide).  

McCarthyite Zionists have knocked off the leaders of the University of Pennsylvania for supposedly tolerating antisemitism, and a battle is now being waged to knock off/save the president of Harvard on the same grounds. 

The new definition of antisemite is, Someone who opposes the idea of a Jewish supremacist state between the river and the sea. Because that’s the dead end at which Zionism has arrived, Jewish supremacy. That is its only vision, which is no vision. Though, thankfully, that racism is being exposed to the world– despite the absence of western reporters in Gaza. 

Qais’s doctor says he should eat an egg a day and he has not eaten an egg in months. But his father says, “Don’t worry little one.” 

“We will have a new house one day, wide and spacious and surrounded by trees and a vegetable garden. Right now, all we have to do is wait and join our hopes with yours for all the good things that can happen to us — to see the end of the war, to live a normal life where your access to food isn’t conditional upon your suffering, and to be able to see and hear what a child on their first birthday are supposed to see and hear.”

Let’s say, Amen,

Phil

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