Thank you for your clarity and courage in speaking truth - not just facts. In a time when we are constantly being pushed to take sides, your voice is a grounding reminder of our shared humanity.
I am with you, Silvano. It breaks my heart too, knowing that every person caught in this pain is someone's child, longing for safety, for home, for dignity.
Please know I will not unsubscribe from someone who brings such nuance, compassion, and honesty to these conversations. Your words matter deeply.
You, Sylvano, by virtue of your very Jewishness are caught between the Devil and the,deep blue sea. My heart goes out to you trapped as you are in something not of your own making and ambushed by, and even the victim of, your own history. I understand you when you say you are speaking of your feelings but those feelings are a response to the dilemma you find yourself in and on that you have my deepest sympathy.
Sadly, I think that Benjamin Netanyahu has set Israel on a course that he and, ultimately, all Jews, including the diaspora, will never be forgiven for. Victimisation of innocent Jews like yourself by the vicious and ignorant will probably only get worse. Decent people must fight against anti-Semitism wherever it is found but forgiveness for what has been perpetrated will be hard to find.
You may or may not be surprised to know that I agree with your assessment of Nethanyahu and the consequences of his actions. So do the leader of the opposition and a lot of Israeli. Nethanyahu main concern is staying in power (and therefore out of prison), He and his wife don't care about the hostages or anybody else.
And if we are to speak frankly, my dear, let us not ignore the body politics at play. The Zionist project depends not only upon the violent policing of Palestinian bodies but upon the ideological shaping of Israeli Jewish bodies: from the earliest schooling. It inculcates children to normalise occupation, to dehumanise Palestinians, to valorise militarism, and to weave settler-colonial entitlement into the very fabric of identity. This is pedagogy as indoctrination, and it is a stain upon any claim to civilised society. Indeed, I am scarcely surprised you cannot move beyond it. When one’s identity has been constructed upon precisely such body politics (inculcated, rehearsed, and valorised), it becomes not merely a point of reference but the very brick and mortar of one’s worldview. And when the edifice itself is built upon dispossession, it is little wonder the windows remain so tightly shuttered
I could write much more here, but I do not believe I have a true partner in what I would wish to be a genuine conversation.
Your essay speaks from personal experience and genuine community concern. But to suggest that Palestinian resistance is inherently violent, or to erase the deep asymmetries of power and suffering at the heart of this colonial reality, is both morally and politically indefensible.
Justice demands clarity, not your conflations. Justice demands opposing antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism equally; condemning all violence against civilians and actively stopping it; recognising the structures of Israeli Jewish settler-colonial domination in Palestine; and supporting the Palestinian people’s right to resist and to seek national liberation, by all means recognised under international law. And not condemning 'the current government that you do not vote for'. It's condeming the majority of the society and the all the Zionist movement since the beginning.
We must name the root cause of this crisis clearly: it is not “ancient hatred,” nor a “tragic conflict,” but the Zionist settler-colonial project itself, initiated by British imperialism, enabled by decades of international complicity, and perpetuated by narratives such as yours.
No amount of propaganda will erase this truth. And no just peace can be built until this system is dismantled.
I would welcome further dialogue, but only one grounded in historical truth, anti-colonial ethics, and the universal principles of human liberation.
You end by suggesting that Jews and Muslims in Europe are both “pawns” and face symmetrical risks. But this flattens the structural realities of the present moment.
Israel is a nuclear-armed apartheid state, with overwhelming military superiority sustained by criminal international arms deals, vast Western support, and near-total impunity on the international stage. It holds millions of Palestinians under military occupation and siege, subjects them to daily violence, and denies them their most basic rights.
Palestinians are a stateless, colonised, besieged Indigenous people. They fight for their very survival. There is no symmetry here, only a vast power imbalance, which must be recognised if any honest conversation is to take place.
You lament that people “almost demand” you criticise Israel. But opposing the Zionist project, a system of apartheid and settler-colonial domination, is not antisemitism. It is a moral obligation.
Palestinian armed resistance, whenever possible, perfectly legitimate and just, and international solidarity with it, do not target Jewish people as such. They target a racist colonial state and an unjust political system of erasure, murder, and expulsion. Many Jewish people, including anti-Zionist Jews inside Israel, reject Zionism and stand in principled solidarity with Palestinians and their right to resist and defend themselves.
To conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is an act of political dishonesty that shields Israeli crimes from accountability.
You write: “Maybe not as many as Gazan children, but do numbers matter?”
Yes, they do. Numbers reflect the scale of state-organised violence.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have murdered over 36,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, through systematic bombardment of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure. They deliberately offer false “safe zones” and then target those very areas. Israeli armed forces are documented taking pride in “scoring high numbers” while intentionally murdering Palestinians in Gaza. Senior Israeli figures openly admit that Palestinian children must be murdered to preserve the so-called Jewish state. This is not an isolated phenomenon, this genocidal discourse permeates all sectors of Israeli society and government. Israel’s siege deliberately starves Gaza’s population, a war crime under international law.
At the same time, Zionist settlers/colonisers and the Israeli military have accelerated campaigns of ethnic cleansing across the West Bank, driving Palestinian families from their homes through violence, arson, live fire, and systematic destruction of infrastructure (roads, sewage, water systems, and more).
To centre Israeli victimhood while minimising these atrocities is to reproduce the core logic of colonial erasure.
3. Daily military violence and restrictions on Palestinian life
You focus, rightly, on Jewish fears in Europe. But you say almost nothing about the routine, Israeli and internationally-sponsored, state-directed violence that Palestinians endure.
Israeli occupation forces (IOF) conduct daily military raids across the West Bank and in Jerusalem, killing Palestinian civilians, including children, and kidnapping thousands, who are held hostage under “administrative detention” without trial, subjected to extreme torture for years, often for life.
The Israeli terrorist state systematically demolishes Palestinian homes, schools, medical facilities, roads, and water infrastructure. Israeli settlers, acting as paramilitary shock troops, violently attack Palestinian villages with full impunity, often under the direct protection of Israeli forces, whether manned or remote (drones).
Palestinians are denied basic freedom of movement: they face hundreds of military checkpoints, Jewish settler-only roads (in PALESTINE), separation walls, and arbitrary permit systems that fragment and control their lives. These restrictions also carry enormous financial and temporal costs within an already deliberately suffocated economy, an economy prevented from freely trading and communicating with the world.
In Gaza, two million Palestinians remain trapped under an illegal and inhumane siege, facing starvation, disease, and systematic bombardment. All of this is part of a deliberate strategy of collective punishment. And now, for nearly two years, we are witnessing a full-scale, internationally-backed genocide.
2. Historical and structural violence must be acknowledged
Your piece frames the current violence as if it emerged in a vacuum, or as if there is symmetrical responsibility between two “sides.” This is a profound falsification of history.
Zionism is and has always been a settler-colonial project, which has now evolved into the state of Israel. Its foundations were laid through British imperial policy, most infamously in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine without the consent of the Indigenous Palestinian population.
From its inception, the Zionist project aimed to create an exclusive Jewish state through demographic engineering, that is, through the forced removal and dispossession of Palestinians. In 1948, during the Nakba (catastrophe), Zionist militias (terrorist forces) and the Israeli military forcibly expelled over 750,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than 500 villages, and carried out systematic massacres. This was not incidental violence, it was a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and it remains the unresolved core of the Zionist project.
Since 1967, Israel has brutally occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, while continuously expanding illegal Jewish-only colonies, heavily militarised and protected, with an apartheid road system, a double legal system, and full impunity for coloniser crimes committed against Palestinians and their infrastructure, systematically annexing Palestinian land.
This is not a “conflict” between equals. It is a colonial process, an apartheid system maintained through military force and legitimised through decades of sophisticated lobbying, against which the Palestinian people have every right under international law to resist.
1. Isolated criminal acts do not define a national liberation movement
You begin with the killing of two Israeli state officials in the United States, whose perpetrators reportedly shouted “Free Palestine.” These are murders and deserve forensic scrutiny and contextual analysis.
But to suggest that such acts reflect the nature of the Palestinian liberation movement, or of global resistance to Zionist settler-colonialism, is both misleading and dangerous.
The Palestinian struggle is not a humanitarian “solidarity” movement. It is a national liberation movement, the collective, historic resistance of an Indigenous people against the colonial expansion of the Zionist project and the apartheid, ethno-nationalist state of Israel. Palestinians are fighting military occupation, siege, forced displacement, mass kidnapping framed as “arrests,” unimaginable torture (including rape as a common tactic), land theft, ethnic cleansing, systematic expansion of militarised Israeli Jewish colonies in Palestine, unchecked coloniser violence against Palestinians, systematic dehumanisation, and a fully-fledged genocide with mass starvation broadcast on our screens.
Globally, millions of people, including many anti-Zionist Jewish allies, support this legitimate and legal struggle for justice and decolonisation. They do so through mass mobilisation, political advocacy, cultural work, legal action, and international solidarity.
To conflate this broad, legitimate resistance with isolated violent acts committed by individuals abroad is a deliberate strategy of Zionist propaganda: it serves to delegitimise Palestinian resistance and to obscure Israel’s colonial violence and annexation.
I read your post “The point of view of a diaspora Jew” with care. The fears you describe as a Jewish person in London, and the antisemitism you rightly denounce, must never be dismissed. Antisemitism is a grave injustice, and all people of conscience should stand firmly against it.
However, I must respond to the broader framing of your piece, which reinforces serious misconceptions about the Palestinian national liberation movement, the historical and structural nature of Zionist settler-colonialism, and the responsibilities of those who engage in public debate.
All of those things are Middle Eastern Politics. Children were/are killed on both sides. The Israeli children killed on October 7th are seldom mentioned. They existed and were killed. Arab-Israeli is a common term to indicate Arab Israeli citizens. Women were raped and killed on October 7th, and the world stood silent. Neither side is full of angels and shrinking violet. But that happens in the Middle East. I was called child-killer in London, a couple died in Washington, and people were attached with a flamethrower and Molotove Cocktails in Colorado. I suspect that people who shout "Globalise the Intifada" have no idea what it means, I have to admit that I found that slogan threatening as a Jew who lives in London, not an Israeli.
Last but not least, since you brought our dialogue to the Middle East. The rockets launched against Israel from four sides do not attack innocent civilians? Or in your opinion there is no such a thing as an Israeli innocent civilian.
To reduce an ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and settler-colonial expansion to “Middle Eastern politics” is an act of denialism and moral cowardice.
To invoke “children on both sides” while Israel systematically slaughters over 15,000 Palestinian children, deliberately, proudly, filmed and broadcast, is obscene.
To use colonial language like “Arab-Israeli” is an erasure of Indigenous Palestinian identity, the same identity Israel has spent 76 years attempting to eliminate through forced displacement, apartheid laws, and violence.
To invoke “rockets from four sides” while Israel: razes entire civilian neighbourhoods, bombs refugee camps and hospitals, starves 2 million people in Gaza to death,
ethnically cleanses the West Bank through settler terror is to...
...is to invert victim and oppressor in a way only possible through the most cynical colonial apologetics.
My dear, if all you can contribute to a discussion on genocide and colonialism is ‘BS’, perhaps the conversation is a shade too elevated for your current talents. I suggest you take a little rest. We shall carry on without you.
Konrad, quite frankly, I stopped reading after you wrote that "there was never a Palestinian state" is an excuse. It is not, it is a fact. You can make what you want with that, but it is a fact. Like there was no Italian state before 1861.
In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine (the name is a British idea, there was never a 'Palestiinian province of the Ottoman Empire) into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab world rejected the partition, after the war in 1948 the West Bank was part of Jordan and the Gaza strip was part of Egypt. Residents of the West Bank were Jordanian citizens until the mid-eighties (I remember reading the Jordan stripped them of their citizenship). These are facts, not excuses. Facts that may have been spun by different sides in different ways, but these are facts. Do what you want with them, but don't call them excuses, just find another word in English! (Pretext would work!)
My dear, it is tiresomely predictable to hear the coloniser declare there was ‘no Palestinian state,’ when it is precisely the settler-colonial project and its imperial patrons that ensured such a state could not arise. To cite the absence of a state as a justification for dispossession is the oldest trick of empire, used by the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, the Americans against Native nations, and now, alas, by Zionists in Palestine. The argument is not merely morally bankrupt, it is historically illiterate. One cannot murder the parent and then proclaim the child illegitimate.
I disagree. The partition was rejected by Arab countries. It would not have been the first former British colony partition into multiple states. British India became India and Pakistan (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), for instance. Or two halves of colonial Cameroon (one British and the other French) became one country following independence. If the Arab countries had accepted the partition in 1947 there would have been a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Instead, there was a border with Jordan and one with Egypt. Nobody mentioned Palestine before 1967 (not a valid reason not to mention it later, but another fact). By the way, try to make your case without making any judgement on morality. Any moral high ground pedestal has cracks.
My dear, to suggest that ‘nobody mentioned Palestine before 1967’ is simply to advertise one’s ignorance. The term Palestine is present in Ottoman administrative records, British Mandate currency and passports, League of Nations documents, Zionist maps, and Palestinian anti-colonial literature, decades before 1967. One cannot erase a people with such clumsy revisionism.
As for your repeated partition apology, no colonised people is required to accept the partition of their homeland by imperial fiat. Would you have urged the Algerians to ‘accept’ French Algeria? Or Kenyans to embrace the British Crown? The rejection of colonial dispossession is not some tragic failing. It is the essence of anti-colonial resistance.
And finally, when a project is founded upon ethnic cleansing and apartheid, one can hardly demand its critics refrain from speaking of morality. In such cases, it is the absence of moral clarity that constitutes the greater offence.
My dear, advising others to ‘get informed’ while parroting colonial propaganda is rather like serving ashes and calling it a banquet. One fears you have mistaken the room.
Let's start with definitions which your "text", Silavno, lacks what created the capacity and room for your moral dishonesty and argument manipulations.
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict" Zionist settler-colonial project and Palestinian national liberation struggle
"Two sides" Coloniser and colonised / oppressor and oppressed
"Cycle of violence" Structural state violence and colonial resistance
"Tensions" Systematic colonial violence and military repression
"Humanitarian crisis" Deliberate colonial siege and ethnic cleansing
So, everything you wrote give people the right to hate me, a Jew who has no agency in the state of Israel? October 7th was an attack that killed Israeli citizens of all ages in a brutal way. Provoked, unprovoked is a different conversation.
Arab-Israeli are Arabs who are citizens of Israel. They are not discriminated against. Non-citizens are under some sort of discrimination everwhere.
Everything you linked is part of Middle Eastern politics. I was talking about Jews in the diaspora.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise about 19% of the population, face many forms of institutionalized discrimination. In 2018, discrimination against Palestinians was crystallized in a constitutional law which, for the first time, enshrined Israel exclusively as the “nation state of the Jewish people”. The law also promotes the building of Jewish settlements and downgrades Arabic’s status as an official language.
The report documents how Palestinians are effectively blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land, as a result of racist land seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning and zoning.
The situation in the Negev/Naqab region of southern Israel is a prime example of how Israel’s planning and building policies intentionally exclude Palestinians. Since 1948 Israeli authorities have adopted various policies to “Judaize” the Negev/Naqab, including designating large areas as nature reserves or military firing zones, and setting targets for increasing the Jewish population. This has had devastating consequences for the tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins who live in the region.
Thirty-five Bedouin villages, home to about 68,000 people, are currently “unrecognized” by Israel, which means they are cut off from the national electricity and water supply and targeted for repeated demolitions. As the villages have no official status, their residents also face restrictions on political participation and are excluded from the healthcare and education systems. These conditions have coerced many into leaving their homes and villages, in what amounts to forcible transfer.
Decades of deliberately unequal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel have left them consistently economically disadvantaged in comparison to Jewish Israelis. This is exacerbated by blatantly discriminatory allocation of state resources: a recent example is the government’s Covid-19 recovery package, of which just 1.7% was given to Palestinian local authorities.
Your quotes are a waste of ink. The one post that you made by “The Human Rights Watch “ is filled with disinformation not facts of any truth.
There never was a Palestinian state. The British government relinquished sovereignty over 77 years ago and “now” you bring up colonization! What a waste of time to continue to engage with a person who lacks factual information about the Middle East and quotes organizations that promote hate and lack factual knowledge. The so called Palestinian people have repeatedly refused to take responsibility for the care and love of their own people. Arabs are made up of tribes. These are tribal leaders who subject their own tribespeople to the discrimination and oppression that they accuse others of being responsible for. Start your complaints with those within. No other people have claimed refugee status for 5 generations. When given control over Gaza the people of Gaza voted their own terrorists into power 20 years ago. Funding comes from Iran, Qatar and assorted other Islamic family controlled countries to keep the fight going. How’s that anyone else’s fault. Life brings life. Your sanctioning of death… well just look at the successful countries that you clearly support. The only one speaking victomese are those who have supported and perpetuated the atrocities and violence that has become a reality throughout the western world today. The 20+ Islamic countries are not taking any of these so called Muslim victims into their own countries. Why? Aren’t they brothers ? Don’t they have any compassion for their fellow islamists? Only divisions of Sunni and Shiah. Get yourself some real life experience. Move out of academia and go out and see the reality of an NON APARTHEID Israel. See for yourself the mixed reality of cultures and religious freedom and values that exist in Israel today and the inequalities in the Islamic world. This is the reality that you support spreading . I suggest that you make haste as the doors are closing if your beliefs are to be believed
“There never was a Palestinian state” is the classic settler excuse for dispossession. Indigenous peoples do not need to have established states to have land, rights, identity, and history. Palestine existed with its people long before Zionist colonialism arrived under British protection.
“The British relinquished sovereignty” is false. They engineered the disaster. Balfour, British Mandate forces, and armed Zionist militias laid the groundwork for ethnic cleansing, which is still ongoing.
Referring to Palestinians as “tribes” is blatant colonial racism. Palestinians are an Indigenous people with modern culture, history, and national identity, despite every attempt to erase them.
Blaming Palestinians for being attacked, blockaded, and starved by Israel is grotesque. No elections under siege and occupation are free. You cannot hold people captive, kill them en masse, and then accuse them of choosing their conditions.
The smear about “Islamic terrorism” is transparent racism. Palestinians include Muslims, Christians, secularists, and anti-Zionist Jews. This is a national liberation movement, not your cartoonish fantasy.
“Why do not Arab countries take them” Because they are Indigenous to Palestine. They have the right guaranteed under international law to return to their own land. Ethnic cleansing is not made moral by exporting the victims elsewhere.
And “non apartheid Israel” is laughable. Even Israel’s own human rights groups acknowledge it as an apartheid state. Two legal systems, racial segregation, mass displacement, military dictatorship over Palestinians, siege, and systematic denial of basic human rights.
When your arguments collapse, you resort to personal insult. “Get out of academia.” But the facts remain.
Palestine is under colonial occupation. Zionism is a settler colonial project. Palestinians are resisting, as is their right, against apartheid and genocide.
No amount of racist distraction will change this truth and the world is watching.
Too much time spent on nonsense. Read Douglas Murray or more expediently listen to some of his podcasts. Get yourself straight. You will thank all of us that you have access to a real factual source
My dear, and should you next feel tempted to summon the wisdom of Mr Dershowitz, Mr Pipes, Ms Hirsi Ali, Mr Shavit, Mr Sharansky, Mr Karsh, Mr Benny Morris (in his latest unfortunate phase), Ms Glick, Ms Hotovely, Mr Schanzer, Mr Avineri, Ms Wisse, Mr Jonathan Schanzer, Mr Eugene Kontorovich, Mr Gil Troy, Ms Ruthie Blum, Ms Melanie Phillips, Mr Douglas Murray (already alas cited), Mr Bret Stephens, Mr Efraim Inbar, Mr Einat Wilf, or the ever dependable archives of MEMRI, CAMERA, NGO Monitor (an instrument of lawfare and colonial repression if ever there was one), HonestReporting, the Jewish Chronicle, the Jerusalem Post’s opinion pages, StandWithUs, or the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, do resist. One can only descend so far before even polite society must avert its gaze. I wish you a pleasant afternoon. Some of us must return to the study of facts.
My dear, as an academic I am quite accustomed to encountering the occasional irredeemable source. I am less accustomed to (but observant of, with a growing concern) seeing one so proudly parade them. I shall leave you now to your podcasts and your prejudices. The rest of us will continue in the realm of evidence and history.
How dare you? I have discussed my feelings. It has nothing to do with Middle East politics, but with my feelings. What specifically is dishonest in this post? Did I make any comment on military action? What is dishonest?
Thank you for your clarity and courage in speaking truth - not just facts. In a time when we are constantly being pushed to take sides, your voice is a grounding reminder of our shared humanity.
I am with you, Silvano. It breaks my heart too, knowing that every person caught in this pain is someone's child, longing for safety, for home, for dignity.
Please know I will not unsubscribe from someone who brings such nuance, compassion, and honesty to these conversations. Your words matter deeply.
Thank you, DD 🕊
You, Sylvano, by virtue of your very Jewishness are caught between the Devil and the,deep blue sea. My heart goes out to you trapped as you are in something not of your own making and ambushed by, and even the victim of, your own history. I understand you when you say you are speaking of your feelings but those feelings are a response to the dilemma you find yourself in and on that you have my deepest sympathy.
Sadly, I think that Benjamin Netanyahu has set Israel on a course that he and, ultimately, all Jews, including the diaspora, will never be forgiven for. Victimisation of innocent Jews like yourself by the vicious and ignorant will probably only get worse. Decent people must fight against anti-Semitism wherever it is found but forgiveness for what has been perpetrated will be hard to find.
You may or may not be surprised to know that I agree with your assessment of Nethanyahu and the consequences of his actions. So do the leader of the opposition and a lot of Israeli. Nethanyahu main concern is staying in power (and therefore out of prison), He and his wife don't care about the hostages or anybody else.
I fervently disagree. I invite you to offer a more specific solution to a rather complex situation.
No subscriber lost because of this post is a subscriber worth having.
And if we are to speak frankly, my dear, let us not ignore the body politics at play. The Zionist project depends not only upon the violent policing of Palestinian bodies but upon the ideological shaping of Israeli Jewish bodies: from the earliest schooling. It inculcates children to normalise occupation, to dehumanise Palestinians, to valorise militarism, and to weave settler-colonial entitlement into the very fabric of identity. This is pedagogy as indoctrination, and it is a stain upon any claim to civilised society. Indeed, I am scarcely surprised you cannot move beyond it. When one’s identity has been constructed upon precisely such body politics (inculcated, rehearsed, and valorised), it becomes not merely a point of reference but the very brick and mortar of one’s worldview. And when the edifice itself is built upon dispossession, it is little wonder the windows remain so tightly shuttered
Hey what planet are you living on. ??? Your information is based on biased lies and propaganda
I could write much more here, but I do not believe I have a true partner in what I would wish to be a genuine conversation.
Your essay speaks from personal experience and genuine community concern. But to suggest that Palestinian resistance is inherently violent, or to erase the deep asymmetries of power and suffering at the heart of this colonial reality, is both morally and politically indefensible.
Justice demands clarity, not your conflations. Justice demands opposing antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism equally; condemning all violence against civilians and actively stopping it; recognising the structures of Israeli Jewish settler-colonial domination in Palestine; and supporting the Palestinian people’s right to resist and to seek national liberation, by all means recognised under international law. And not condemning 'the current government that you do not vote for'. It's condeming the majority of the society and the all the Zionist movement since the beginning.
We must name the root cause of this crisis clearly: it is not “ancient hatred,” nor a “tragic conflict,” but the Zionist settler-colonial project itself, initiated by British imperialism, enabled by decades of international complicity, and perpetuated by narratives such as yours.
No amount of propaganda will erase this truth. And no just peace can be built until this system is dismantled.
I would welcome further dialogue, but only one grounded in historical truth, anti-colonial ethics, and the universal principles of human liberation.
6. Power must be named clearly
You end by suggesting that Jews and Muslims in Europe are both “pawns” and face symmetrical risks. But this flattens the structural realities of the present moment.
Israel is a nuclear-armed apartheid state, with overwhelming military superiority sustained by criminal international arms deals, vast Western support, and near-total impunity on the international stage. It holds millions of Palestinians under military occupation and siege, subjects them to daily violence, and denies them their most basic rights.
Palestinians are a stateless, colonised, besieged Indigenous people. They fight for their very survival. There is no symmetry here, only a vast power imbalance, which must be recognised if any honest conversation is to take place.
5. Criticising Israel is not antisemitism
You lament that people “almost demand” you criticise Israel. But opposing the Zionist project, a system of apartheid and settler-colonial domination, is not antisemitism. It is a moral obligation.
Palestinian armed resistance, whenever possible, perfectly legitimate and just, and international solidarity with it, do not target Jewish people as such. They target a racist colonial state and an unjust political system of erasure, murder, and expulsion. Many Jewish people, including anti-Zionist Jews inside Israel, reject Zionism and stand in principled solidarity with Palestinians and their right to resist and defend themselves.
To conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is an act of political dishonesty that shields Israeli crimes from accountability.
4. The scale of violence is not symmetrical
You write: “Maybe not as many as Gazan children, but do numbers matter?”
Yes, they do. Numbers reflect the scale of state-organised violence.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have murdered over 36,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, through systematic bombardment of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure. They deliberately offer false “safe zones” and then target those very areas. Israeli armed forces are documented taking pride in “scoring high numbers” while intentionally murdering Palestinians in Gaza. Senior Israeli figures openly admit that Palestinian children must be murdered to preserve the so-called Jewish state. This is not an isolated phenomenon, this genocidal discourse permeates all sectors of Israeli society and government. Israel’s siege deliberately starves Gaza’s population, a war crime under international law.
At the same time, Zionist settlers/colonisers and the Israeli military have accelerated campaigns of ethnic cleansing across the West Bank, driving Palestinian families from their homes through violence, arson, live fire, and systematic destruction of infrastructure (roads, sewage, water systems, and more).
To centre Israeli victimhood while minimising these atrocities is to reproduce the core logic of colonial erasure.
3. Daily military violence and restrictions on Palestinian life
You focus, rightly, on Jewish fears in Europe. But you say almost nothing about the routine, Israeli and internationally-sponsored, state-directed violence that Palestinians endure.
Israeli occupation forces (IOF) conduct daily military raids across the West Bank and in Jerusalem, killing Palestinian civilians, including children, and kidnapping thousands, who are held hostage under “administrative detention” without trial, subjected to extreme torture for years, often for life.
The Israeli terrorist state systematically demolishes Palestinian homes, schools, medical facilities, roads, and water infrastructure. Israeli settlers, acting as paramilitary shock troops, violently attack Palestinian villages with full impunity, often under the direct protection of Israeli forces, whether manned or remote (drones).
Palestinians are denied basic freedom of movement: they face hundreds of military checkpoints, Jewish settler-only roads (in PALESTINE), separation walls, and arbitrary permit systems that fragment and control their lives. These restrictions also carry enormous financial and temporal costs within an already deliberately suffocated economy, an economy prevented from freely trading and communicating with the world.
In Gaza, two million Palestinians remain trapped under an illegal and inhumane siege, facing starvation, disease, and systematic bombardment. All of this is part of a deliberate strategy of collective punishment. And now, for nearly two years, we are witnessing a full-scale, internationally-backed genocide.
2. Historical and structural violence must be acknowledged
Your piece frames the current violence as if it emerged in a vacuum, or as if there is symmetrical responsibility between two “sides.” This is a profound falsification of history.
Zionism is and has always been a settler-colonial project, which has now evolved into the state of Israel. Its foundations were laid through British imperial policy, most infamously in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine without the consent of the Indigenous Palestinian population.
From its inception, the Zionist project aimed to create an exclusive Jewish state through demographic engineering, that is, through the forced removal and dispossession of Palestinians. In 1948, during the Nakba (catastrophe), Zionist militias (terrorist forces) and the Israeli military forcibly expelled over 750,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than 500 villages, and carried out systematic massacres. This was not incidental violence, it was a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and it remains the unresolved core of the Zionist project.
Since 1967, Israel has brutally occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, while continuously expanding illegal Jewish-only colonies, heavily militarised and protected, with an apartheid road system, a double legal system, and full impunity for coloniser crimes committed against Palestinians and their infrastructure, systematically annexing Palestinian land.
This is not a “conflict” between equals. It is a colonial process, an apartheid system maintained through military force and legitimised through decades of sophisticated lobbying, against which the Palestinian people have every right under international law to resist.
1. Isolated criminal acts do not define a national liberation movement
You begin with the killing of two Israeli state officials in the United States, whose perpetrators reportedly shouted “Free Palestine.” These are murders and deserve forensic scrutiny and contextual analysis.
But to suggest that such acts reflect the nature of the Palestinian liberation movement, or of global resistance to Zionist settler-colonialism, is both misleading and dangerous.
The Palestinian struggle is not a humanitarian “solidarity” movement. It is a national liberation movement, the collective, historic resistance of an Indigenous people against the colonial expansion of the Zionist project and the apartheid, ethno-nationalist state of Israel. Palestinians are fighting military occupation, siege, forced displacement, mass kidnapping framed as “arrests,” unimaginable torture (including rape as a common tactic), land theft, ethnic cleansing, systematic expansion of militarised Israeli Jewish colonies in Palestine, unchecked coloniser violence against Palestinians, systematic dehumanisation, and a fully-fledged genocide with mass starvation broadcast on our screens.
Globally, millions of people, including many anti-Zionist Jewish allies, support this legitimate and legal struggle for justice and decolonisation. They do so through mass mobilisation, political advocacy, cultural work, legal action, and international solidarity.
To conflate this broad, legitimate resistance with isolated violent acts committed by individuals abroad is a deliberate strategy of Zionist propaganda: it serves to delegitimise Palestinian resistance and to obscure Israel’s colonial violence and annexation.
Since you asked me what is dishonest...
I read your post “The point of view of a diaspora Jew” with care. The fears you describe as a Jewish person in London, and the antisemitism you rightly denounce, must never be dismissed. Antisemitism is a grave injustice, and all people of conscience should stand firmly against it.
However, I must respond to the broader framing of your piece, which reinforces serious misconceptions about the Palestinian national liberation movement, the historical and structural nature of Zionist settler-colonialism, and the responsibilities of those who engage in public debate.
All of those things are Middle Eastern Politics. Children were/are killed on both sides. The Israeli children killed on October 7th are seldom mentioned. They existed and were killed. Arab-Israeli is a common term to indicate Arab Israeli citizens. Women were raped and killed on October 7th, and the world stood silent. Neither side is full of angels and shrinking violet. But that happens in the Middle East. I was called child-killer in London, a couple died in Washington, and people were attached with a flamethrower and Molotove Cocktails in Colorado. I suspect that people who shout "Globalise the Intifada" have no idea what it means, I have to admit that I found that slogan threatening as a Jew who lives in London, not an Israeli.
Last but not least, since you brought our dialogue to the Middle East. The rockets launched against Israel from four sides do not attack innocent civilians? Or in your opinion there is no such a thing as an Israeli innocent civilian.
Since you asked, let’s be clear:
To reduce an ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and settler-colonial expansion to “Middle Eastern politics” is an act of denialism and moral cowardice.
To invoke “children on both sides” while Israel systematically slaughters over 15,000 Palestinian children, deliberately, proudly, filmed and broadcast, is obscene.
To use colonial language like “Arab-Israeli” is an erasure of Indigenous Palestinian identity, the same identity Israel has spent 76 years attempting to eliminate through forced displacement, apartheid laws, and violence.
To invoke “rockets from four sides” while Israel: razes entire civilian neighbourhoods, bombs refugee camps and hospitals, starves 2 million people in Gaza to death,
ethnically cleanses the West Bank through settler terror is to...
...is to invert victim and oppressor in a way only possible through the most cynical colonial apologetics.
BS
My dear, if all you can contribute to a discussion on genocide and colonialism is ‘BS’, perhaps the conversation is a shade too elevated for your current talents. I suggest you take a little rest. We shall carry on without you.
I done trying to elevate you “my dear” into the reality that you are in denial of
Konrad, quite frankly, I stopped reading after you wrote that "there was never a Palestinian state" is an excuse. It is not, it is a fact. You can make what you want with that, but it is a fact. Like there was no Italian state before 1861.
In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine (the name is a British idea, there was never a 'Palestiinian province of the Ottoman Empire) into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab world rejected the partition, after the war in 1948 the West Bank was part of Jordan and the Gaza strip was part of Egypt. Residents of the West Bank were Jordanian citizens until the mid-eighties (I remember reading the Jordan stripped them of their citizenship). These are facts, not excuses. Facts that may have been spun by different sides in different ways, but these are facts. Do what you want with them, but don't call them excuses, just find another word in English! (Pretext would work!)
My dear, it is tiresomely predictable to hear the coloniser declare there was ‘no Palestinian state,’ when it is precisely the settler-colonial project and its imperial patrons that ensured such a state could not arise. To cite the absence of a state as a justification for dispossession is the oldest trick of empire, used by the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, the Americans against Native nations, and now, alas, by Zionists in Palestine. The argument is not merely morally bankrupt, it is historically illiterate. One cannot murder the parent and then proclaim the child illegitimate.
I disagree. The partition was rejected by Arab countries. It would not have been the first former British colony partition into multiple states. British India became India and Pakistan (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), for instance. Or two halves of colonial Cameroon (one British and the other French) became one country following independence. If the Arab countries had accepted the partition in 1947 there would have been a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Instead, there was a border with Jordan and one with Egypt. Nobody mentioned Palestine before 1967 (not a valid reason not to mention it later, but another fact). By the way, try to make your case without making any judgement on morality. Any moral high ground pedestal has cracks.
My dear, to suggest that ‘nobody mentioned Palestine before 1967’ is simply to advertise one’s ignorance. The term Palestine is present in Ottoman administrative records, British Mandate currency and passports, League of Nations documents, Zionist maps, and Palestinian anti-colonial literature, decades before 1967. One cannot erase a people with such clumsy revisionism.
As for your repeated partition apology, no colonised people is required to accept the partition of their homeland by imperial fiat. Would you have urged the Algerians to ‘accept’ French Algeria? Or Kenyans to embrace the British Crown? The rejection of colonial dispossession is not some tragic failing. It is the essence of anti-colonial resistance.
And finally, when a project is founded upon ethnic cleansing and apartheid, one can hardly demand its critics refrain from speaking of morality. In such cases, it is the absence of moral clarity that constitutes the greater offence.
Mr Academic do yourself a favor and get informed with the facts
My dear, advising others to ‘get informed’ while parroting colonial propaganda is rather like serving ashes and calling it a banquet. One fears you have mistaken the room.
Let's start with definitions which your "text", Silavno, lacks what created the capacity and room for your moral dishonesty and argument manipulations.
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict" Zionist settler-colonial project and Palestinian national liberation struggle
"Two sides" Coloniser and colonised / oppressor and oppressed
"Cycle of violence" Structural state violence and colonial resistance
"Tensions" Systematic colonial violence and military repression
"Humanitarian crisis" Deliberate colonial siege and ethnic cleansing
"Israeli democracy" Apartheid ethno-nationalist regime
"Right to self-defence" (Israel) Colonial military aggression and collective punishment
"Peace process" Colonial management of Palestinian dispossession
"Israeli Arabs" Palestinian citizens of Israel / Indigenous Palestinians of 1948 lands
"Settlements" Illegal colonial outposts / instruments of land theft
"Security barrier" Apartheid wall / separation wall
"Clashes" Israeli military assaults and Palestinian resistance
"Both sides must refrain from violence" Israel must end its colonial war and military occupation; Palestinians have a legal right to resist
So, everything you wrote give people the right to hate me, a Jew who has no agency in the state of Israel? October 7th was an attack that killed Israeli citizens of all ages in a brutal way. Provoked, unprovoked is a different conversation.
Arab-Israeli are Arabs who are citizens of Israel. They are not discriminated against. Non-citizens are under some sort of discrimination everwhere.
Everything you linked is part of Middle Eastern politics. I was talking about Jews in the diaspora.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
Lesser citizens
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise about 19% of the population, face many forms of institutionalized discrimination. In 2018, discrimination against Palestinians was crystallized in a constitutional law which, for the first time, enshrined Israel exclusively as the “nation state of the Jewish people”. The law also promotes the building of Jewish settlements and downgrades Arabic’s status as an official language.
The report documents how Palestinians are effectively blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land, as a result of racist land seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning and zoning.
The situation in the Negev/Naqab region of southern Israel is a prime example of how Israel’s planning and building policies intentionally exclude Palestinians. Since 1948 Israeli authorities have adopted various policies to “Judaize” the Negev/Naqab, including designating large areas as nature reserves or military firing zones, and setting targets for increasing the Jewish population. This has had devastating consequences for the tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins who live in the region.
Thirty-five Bedouin villages, home to about 68,000 people, are currently “unrecognized” by Israel, which means they are cut off from the national electricity and water supply and targeted for repeated demolitions. As the villages have no official status, their residents also face restrictions on political participation and are excluded from the healthcare and education systems. These conditions have coerced many into leaving their homes and villages, in what amounts to forcible transfer.
Decades of deliberately unequal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel have left them consistently economically disadvantaged in comparison to Jewish Israelis. This is exacerbated by blatantly discriminatory allocation of state resources: a recent example is the government’s Covid-19 recovery package, of which just 1.7% was given to Palestinian local authorities.
Your quotes are a waste of ink. The one post that you made by “The Human Rights Watch “ is filled with disinformation not facts of any truth.
There never was a Palestinian state. The British government relinquished sovereignty over 77 years ago and “now” you bring up colonization! What a waste of time to continue to engage with a person who lacks factual information about the Middle East and quotes organizations that promote hate and lack factual knowledge. The so called Palestinian people have repeatedly refused to take responsibility for the care and love of their own people. Arabs are made up of tribes. These are tribal leaders who subject their own tribespeople to the discrimination and oppression that they accuse others of being responsible for. Start your complaints with those within. No other people have claimed refugee status for 5 generations. When given control over Gaza the people of Gaza voted their own terrorists into power 20 years ago. Funding comes from Iran, Qatar and assorted other Islamic family controlled countries to keep the fight going. How’s that anyone else’s fault. Life brings life. Your sanctioning of death… well just look at the successful countries that you clearly support. The only one speaking victomese are those who have supported and perpetuated the atrocities and violence that has become a reality throughout the western world today. The 20+ Islamic countries are not taking any of these so called Muslim victims into their own countries. Why? Aren’t they brothers ? Don’t they have any compassion for their fellow islamists? Only divisions of Sunni and Shiah. Get yourself some real life experience. Move out of academia and go out and see the reality of an NON APARTHEID Israel. See for yourself the mixed reality of cultures and religious freedom and values that exist in Israel today and the inequalities in the Islamic world. This is the reality that you support spreading . I suggest that you make haste as the doors are closing if your beliefs are to be believed
“There never was a Palestinian state” is the classic settler excuse for dispossession. Indigenous peoples do not need to have established states to have land, rights, identity, and history. Palestine existed with its people long before Zionist colonialism arrived under British protection.
“The British relinquished sovereignty” is false. They engineered the disaster. Balfour, British Mandate forces, and armed Zionist militias laid the groundwork for ethnic cleansing, which is still ongoing.
Referring to Palestinians as “tribes” is blatant colonial racism. Palestinians are an Indigenous people with modern culture, history, and national identity, despite every attempt to erase them.
Blaming Palestinians for being attacked, blockaded, and starved by Israel is grotesque. No elections under siege and occupation are free. You cannot hold people captive, kill them en masse, and then accuse them of choosing their conditions.
The smear about “Islamic terrorism” is transparent racism. Palestinians include Muslims, Christians, secularists, and anti-Zionist Jews. This is a national liberation movement, not your cartoonish fantasy.
“Why do not Arab countries take them” Because they are Indigenous to Palestine. They have the right guaranteed under international law to return to their own land. Ethnic cleansing is not made moral by exporting the victims elsewhere.
And “non apartheid Israel” is laughable. Even Israel’s own human rights groups acknowledge it as an apartheid state. Two legal systems, racial segregation, mass displacement, military dictatorship over Palestinians, siege, and systematic denial of basic human rights.
When your arguments collapse, you resort to personal insult. “Get out of academia.” But the facts remain.
Palestine is under colonial occupation. Zionism is a settler colonial project. Palestinians are resisting, as is their right, against apartheid and genocide.
No amount of racist distraction will change this truth and the world is watching.
How many times have you been to Israel in person? How long have you lived here and seen all of this genocide with your own eyes?
The world is assuming and being bought
How many times have you been to Israel 🇮🇱 How long have you lived there? I’m guessing not much
No one but you is a racist in this dialogue, “my dear”
Who are you?!?!?! You have entirety not enough time to investigate the truth
Too much time spent on nonsense. Read Douglas Murray or more expediently listen to some of his podcasts. Get yourself straight. You will thank all of us that you have access to a real factual source
My dear, and should you next feel tempted to summon the wisdom of Mr Dershowitz, Mr Pipes, Ms Hirsi Ali, Mr Shavit, Mr Sharansky, Mr Karsh, Mr Benny Morris (in his latest unfortunate phase), Ms Glick, Ms Hotovely, Mr Schanzer, Mr Avineri, Ms Wisse, Mr Jonathan Schanzer, Mr Eugene Kontorovich, Mr Gil Troy, Ms Ruthie Blum, Ms Melanie Phillips, Mr Douglas Murray (already alas cited), Mr Bret Stephens, Mr Efraim Inbar, Mr Einat Wilf, or the ever dependable archives of MEMRI, CAMERA, NGO Monitor (an instrument of lawfare and colonial repression if ever there was one), HonestReporting, the Jewish Chronicle, the Jerusalem Post’s opinion pages, StandWithUs, or the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, do resist. One can only descend so far before even polite society must avert its gaze. I wish you a pleasant afternoon. Some of us must return to the study of facts.
My dear, as an academic I am quite accustomed to encountering the occasional irredeemable source. I am less accustomed to (but observant of, with a growing concern) seeing one so proudly parade them. I shall leave you now to your podcasts and your prejudices. The rest of us will continue in the realm of evidence and history.
You clearly are at best a limitedly informed dare I say academic. This is not the first time an ill informed person has claimed that as validation
This text is truly dishonest, manipuative and, yes, lazy...
How dare you? I have discussed my feelings. It has nothing to do with Middle East politics, but with my feelings. What specifically is dishonest in this post? Did I make any comment on military action? What is dishonest?
I trust you are content with my specific answers to your questions, as per your request.
You Konrad sudet chatterjer are a small minded person. Discompassionate and lacking in empathy knowledge and experience