AFTER GAZA

Acknowledgement to Peter Beinart's Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza

Netanyahu’s continuation of the war in Gaza has gone far beyond retribution; Israel stands accused of genocide. World opinion largely condemns Israel.

GAZA

At the very least, Netanyahu’s war is a cynical ploy for him to hang on to his stay-out-of-prison card. His trial in the Jerusalem District Court began on 24 May 2020, with witness testimony starting on 5 April 2021. The prosecution listed 333 witnesses. It rested in July 2024, and his defense, starting with Netanyahu's testimony, began in December 2024. The contest is still going on.

By murdering 1,200 Jews, taking 250 men, women and children as hostages — and by executing, or letting most of them die — Hamas took the focus off Netanyahu's attempt to minimize the nation’s supreme court powers. Israel has undertaken a broad war of payback and attrition and over 55,000 Gazans have died with no end in sight. Still, Hamas survives. The goal of eliminating it has not been reached because each new bombing, each new incursion, is a recruitment tool for new Hamas fighters.

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The state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. It arose as an artificial territory carved out by the Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during World War I, expressing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people " in what was then known as Palestine.

This mandate was issued amidst the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine at that time. The Balfour statement also expected that the rights of existing non-Jewish communities would not be prejudiced. Though Jewish leaders and supporters claimed the land was solely theirs, the territory was not a defined nation as that term is commonly understood.

Following on Balfour, the first proposal for separate Jewish and Arab states in the territory was made by the British Peel Commission report in 1937. Thus, the proposed two-state solution is of long standing and remains profoundly contentious — dividing friends, families, politicians and nations. French president Emmanuel Macron has said he would recognize an independent Palestinian state. In time, others will follow.

There is in reality no other viable solution, however long it takes to get there. Trump’s quixotic wish to expel two million people to an unnamed somewhere for a French Riviera-style beachfront development is, as usual for him, truly nuts. We know it won't be Egypt or any of the other Arab nations. They have long disavowed taking on the onerous and budget-breaking responsibility of caring for 2,000,000 displaced Palestinians.

The annihilation of six million Jews brought the homeland question to the fore. After twenty plus centuries of forced removal, compulsory religious conversion, denial of basic human rights, pogroms, and finally, Hitler, the idea of a permanent place for the Jews who survived World War II grew in strength and intensity. Thus Israel moved from victimhood to statehood -- but that necessitated the forcible displacement of an estimated 700,000-800,000 Arab people — termed by them the nakba, the catastrophe. They had lived on these lands at least as long as the Jews.

For many non-Arabs, and some Jews as well, Israel’s outright claim to the land is simply not defensible. But it has so far kept Netanyahu in power, his right-wing cabinet in place and the corrupt administration of the Palestine Authority, an Israeli subsidiary, led by Mahmoud Abbas (who assumed the presidency in January 2005) still in charge. Not to be overlooked is Netanyahu's past role in providing funds to Hamas as a sop to keep them quiet.

The  search for a Jewish homeland is a sticky business indeed. As Rachel Cockerell explains in her book Melting Point, the German Jews who had come to the US before the mass migration of the late 1880s and 1890s had become wealthy leaders of the Jewish community. The last thing they wanted were the poverty-stricken F-O-T-B multiplying their numbers in the City that had made them wealthy and more or less accepted — except that they weren’t.* Rothschild and the other German Jewish aristocrats unsuccessfully attempted to move the Jewish immigrant center of gravity far from New York.

Galveston TX, easily accessible by boat, out of sight and far, really far, from New York City was their proposed solution.

That endeavor to resettle large numbers of citified Jews in the American southwest failed. Some Jews did arrive there by boat and some moved there -- as the contemporary Texas Jewish Historical Society recounts. Cockerell tells this story of wandering Jews vividly and movingly. She writes that the quest for a Jewish homeland led to what is now Uganda and other parts of Africa, as well as other nations -- all to no avail. Jewish history of course begins in Africa. We weren’t the pasty white we are today. Jesus, as historical and biblical accounts assert, was a typical first-century Jewish man, likely with brown skin, dark hair, and brown eyes, similar to other people from the Middle East during that time.

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Peter Beinart, an Orthodox Jew, writes in Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza, a “story that enables our leaders, our families and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip — the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name …”

Conquest and displacement are the progenitors of nationhood almost everywhere. Present day Europe owes much of its configuration to the barbarity of the Ottoman Empire. The US’s westward expansion and settlement were realized by forcing indigenous peoples off their land — into poverty, illness and death. Slavery was an economic engine here for 246 years.

At this moment, Israel and Iran are in a hot war. Casualties and deaths are increasing on both sides. Israel may for now have the upper hand with much better intelligence (e.g., knocking off the their generals seriatim), much better ordnance and Trump's immediate threat to send in the B-2 bombers to take out their nuclear arsenal. Netanyahu’s government has not yet crumbled only because the zealots on his right flank keep him there. Better he should draw the heat than them. In the long, or even intermediate term, this is thin paste.

Trump provides military aid and other assistance just as US presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have always done, since Truman immediately recognized the new state. Some of our support is overt. How much more is covert is publicly unknown. What we do know is that Israel, neither Greenland nor Canada, is already the de facto if not the de jure 51st state.

Israel

The demands for a two-state solution, vociferously denied by Netanyahu and a solid majority of Israelis, cannot simply be brushed off. A poll by Pennsylvania State University, conducted in March 2025, found that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The poll also indicated that 56% of Jewish respondents supported the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries. For now, the two-state solution is off the table. Still, the two states are essentially conjoined twins, Semites, who will ultimately have to live together in peace. Israel does not support that outcome now but has in the past.

All wars end at some point.

*The German Jews started the Harmonie Club because the other clubs in the city would not accept them. The Harmonie was "integrated" when they accepted the first Russian Jew.