Prefatory Note This post is a much modified, updated version of my responses to questions posed Murat Sofuoglu, a Turkish journalist associated with TRT World. The dehistoricizing and decontextualization of the Hamas attack of October 7 was spread around the world by the most influential global media platforms and political leaders of the liberal democracies, and led to widespread sympathy for Israel and some months of tolerance of their response despite its legally and ethically unacceptable character. As such the Israeli response was initially sanitized by regarding Palestinian grievances in Gaza as irrelevent, and also by uncritically accepting Israeli hasbara that its response to the Hamas attack was solely motivated by security and counter-terrorist considerations, and thus disconnected from the Greater Israel priority and preoccupations of the Netanyahu coalition that came to power at the start of 2023 or more than nine months before the attack.]
1. Has the Israeli model to secure Jews a homeland in Palestine failed?
I think it is misleading to refer to the Zionist Project in the singular and by reference to ‘a homeland’ as originally pledged in the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917. The minimum pre-1948 goal of world Zionism was to create a Jewish supremist state in Israel with an unlimited right of returns for Jews from anywhere in the world, and the denial of such an equivalent right to the Palestinians who were the native majority population. The Nakba that accompanied the 1948 War involved the forced expulsion from Palestine and permanent refugee/exile status for of at least 700,000 non-Jewish residents of the portion of Palestine set aside for Israel by the partition resolution of 29 November 1947 UN GA Res. 181. Israeli expulsion politics exhibited the Zionist intention in the fog of war was to ensure a long-term Jewish majority settler population that would enable Israel to claim credibly in its early years to be both Jewish and democratic, the latter proving to become
overwhelmed by the apartheid regime that was convincingly delimited as such over the course of the last decade. The occupation was fully documented as a type of apartheid violating the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This assessment was validated by comprehensive reports, filled with data, prepared by ESCWA, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli NGO, B’Tselem.
Prefiguring the response of the governments of most liberal democracies was the failure to express any adverse reactions to Israeli apartheid despite their earlier support for the global anti-apartheid movement that exerted so much pressure on the South African government that it pleasantly surprised the world by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and proceeding rapidly to become a constitutional democracy incorporating legal commitments to racial equality. Why was there no negative international response to Israeli apartheid? At the very least the apartheid assessments should have led to a demand that Israel withdraw from Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Even earlier, the most that the US Government could manage to say about the relentless expansion of unlawful settlements that ‘it was unhelpful.’ At first, Western governments were reluctant to be even mildly critical of Israel because of their own failure to do more by way of opposition to the Holocaust, inducing a debilitating sense of guilt made more potent by Israel’s domination of the public discourse subtly facilitated by a racist dehumaniization of the Palestinian other as an Orientalized inferior people when compared to the rapid modernizing prevailing temperament in the new Jewish state.
The UN contributed to the Palestinian tragedy by initially proposing partition of a previously colonized national entity without bothering to consult the Arab majority population residing in Palestine that would have certainly been opposed to lending legitimacy to such a fracturing of their homeland. But the Palestinians were never given a chance to vote in a referendum on partition, which itself was an ahistorical imposition of UK colonial interest and methods of control by a logic of ‘divide and rule.’
This post-1945 tragedy was compounded and prefigured the future ordeals of the Palestinian people by the failure to at least secure the promised Palestinian state of equal status to Israel before legitimating Israel’s claims to statehood by diplomatic recognition and admission to the UN as a member sovereign state. The 1967 War aggravated Palestinian grievances by. establishing Israeli de facto control by way of conquest over the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, again given unregulated de facto control by way of the doctrine of Belligerent Occupation, supposedly within a temporary and regulative international law framework set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention and the First Additional Protocol. Israel massively violated its terms of occupation in numerous fundamental ways from Day One. Perhaps, the most flagrant early expression of Israeli territorial unilateralism was its incorporation of East Jerusalem into sovereign Israel as ‘its eternal capital.’ This symbolic and substantive land-grabbing that included Islamic sacred sites has never to this day been accepted by the majority of states, and the Israeli move to establish Jerusalem as the Israeli capital was declared ‘null and void’ in an 2017 Emergency Session General Assembly Resolution (ES-1019) supported by a super-majority of Member states but opposed and then ignored by the US and the main states of NATO [the vote was 129-9-35 (abstentions).
The developments between 1967 and 2024 consolidated Israeli territorial ambitions in occupied Palestine by way of the extensive unlawful settlement movement, a coercive apartheid occupation regime that subjugated Palestinians living under prolonged occupation that culminated in the genocidal and ecocidal assault on Gaza that killed many in real time and totally devastated Gaza as a livable habitat. The settler colonial assessment of Israel disposing the majority native population resembled the pattern of the breakaway British colonials (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) each of which, although New Zealand less so, implemented their colonial encroachments by genocidal tactics in response to resistance, and succeeded in establishing their flourishing and enduring state.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that Zionism, and since 1948, Israel itself pursued a two-track strategy: first, a public hasbara discourse that claimed moderation and pretended to seek a democratic polity and engage in a search for a political compromise on land rights, democracy, and human rights with the native population; secondly, a political strategy that opportunistically advanced by stages to realize the hard core Zionist Project of restoring Jewish exclusive control over the Biblically ‘promised land’ of Jewish tradition at a given time for what it could get by way of an expansionist vision with respect to Israel itself, neighboring countries, and regional geopolitics. Not only did the shadows cast by the Nazi Holocaust in the early years of Israel’s existence inhibit criticism of the settler colonial aspects of Israel’s approach to the indigenous non-Jewish residents of Palestine but Israel’s first political leader, David Ben Gurion a committed secularist, cynically declared ‘Let the Bible be our weapon,’ and in the process claimed a religious entitlement to all of historic Palestine as ‘the promised land’ of Jewish tradition, which has prevailed over the prime norm of colonial decline, that of the right of sef-determination.
After the 1967 War Israel became itself a partner in ‘colonialism after colonialism’ in the Middle East. There emerged a strategic relationship with the United States and Europe that embraced regional security, safeguarding oil and gas reserves for the West, and cooperating with respect to the containment of political Islam, especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). This US led geopolitical limitations imposed on regional autonomy were highlighted by the unprecedented US political commitment to ensure that Israel possessed a military capability to defeat any combination of regional adversaries. Such a willingness to indulge ‘Israeli exceptionalism’ with respect to regional security was dramatized by looking away while Israel covertly, with European active complicity not only became the sole nuclear weapons state in the Middle East but assumed the role of guardian of non-proliferation when it came to Iran. As Israel gained in strength and regional acceptance via the Abraham Accords reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency it seemed on a path that would end with a one-state solution under its sole and uncontested dominion.
As Israel gained in political acceptance and self-confidence it became less shy about revealing its nationalist agenda. The 2018 Basic Law, with a quasi-constitutional status, was forthright in claiming Israel as a Jewish State, with the Jewish people exclusively entitled to exercise the right of self-determination (ignoring the rights and relevance of the 20% of its population that was non-Jewish, and Hebrew was confirmed as the only official language. Even extreme Israeli apologists seemed reluctant to any longer claim, what was never true, that “Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East.” The net result as of late 2024 is that it is the Palestinians who have become unwelcome strangers in their own historic homeland. Israeli democracy, such as it has become, was clearly in practice and law ‘for Jews only.’ And again the Western patrons of Israel watched from the sidelines as Israel kept enlarging and disclosing its zero-sum vision of conflict resolution, and disregard of the US role as intermediary in the search for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict.
2. What is Israel trying to achieve with its ongoing war campaign across the Middle East?
Again, we are challenged to deal with Israel’s mainly undisclosed intentions and what is disclosed is not trustworthy or a small part of the Israeli policy agenda motivating the enlargement of the combat zone. For greater insight we are forced to rely on conjecture to produce some kind of illuminating, yet plausible, interpretation. As with Gaza, Israel claims a right of self-defense. It seeks extra weight by insisting that its enemies are all sponsors or guilty of ‘terrorist’ violence’ and proxy engagements determined to undermine Israeli security, Even if we accept this line of argument Israel’s use of force in Lebanon is disproportional and indiscriminate, self-acknowledged and operationalized as an inflammatory application of the Dahiya Doctrine originally set forth in the Lebanon War of 1982. The Dahiya Doctrine was enunciated by a leading Israeli general, expressing the intention to retaliate disproportionately against security provocations threatening Israeli interests. The Gaza genocide can be viewed as a grotesque and maximal example of Dahiya thinking and practice, although specifically motivated by Israeli extraterritorial security priorities, ethnic cleansing, economic ambitions, regional paranoia, as well as its invariable dismissal of the genuine grievances and armed resistance of adversaries as invariably of a terrorist character.
In certain ethical respects the Dahiya Doctrine is an Israeli adaptation of the logic of deterrence that guided security policy of both US and USSR during Cold War. Its most salient feature was known as Mutual Assured Destruction (or to critics as MAD). Israel’s adaptation consisted of substituting the threat of genocide for that of nuclear retaliation. The core idea of deterrence is a credibly threatened unacceptably disproportionate response to any fundamental threat to strategic interests or to homeland security of the nuclear antagonists and their close allies.
There is no mutuality in Israel’s approach to deterrence, which is a generalized warning to its regional adversaries of dire results if they dare to attack or provoke Israel. Any regional state purporting to balance Israel hegemonic nuclear capabilities is projected as such a threat, which presupposes a geopolitical right to maintain Israel’s regional nuclear supremacy.
3. Do you think with the current campaign, the Netanyahu government aims to resolve once and for all the Jewish question, fixing Israel’s place in the Middle East?
It seems as though Israel has been expanding its combat objectives initially justified as retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack by adopting a proclaimed goal of exterminating Hamas. While pursuing this goal Israel engaged in such excessive and indiscriminate violence that its behavior was widely perceived as a transparent instance of genocide committed in real time and including a growing and increasingly activist minority in the civil societies of the Western countries, including many Jews, whose governments most ardently support Israel. Israel has suffered a near total loss of legitimacy as a normal state and is increasingly viewed as a pariah or rogue state to an extent exceeding the condemnation of even overtly racist and oppressive South Africa. This ended when the Pretoria government surprised the world by abandoning apartheid in the mid-1990s, apparently for pragmatic reasons associated with debilitating sanctions that limited South Africa’s participation in world society, including cultural and sporting boycotts that curtailed the freedoms of the ruling white minority.
Israel has handled this international hostility differently and more defiantly than South Africa, partly because it has had the benefit of strong geopolitical support from the governments of the Global West, especially the all-important US. Israel’s security is a matter of strategic importance to the West as a beachhead in the Middle East for the related purposes of ensuring access to oil and gas reserves of the region and containing the spread of political Islam. Thus, the increase of Israel’s war objectives to include Hezbollah, the Houthis, and of course Iran has also become a battleground in the Clash of Civilizations within the region and is a potent source of instability parallel to the incipient Second Cold War with China and Russia. Whether Israel, with Washington’s backing and probable participation will provoke war with Iran is one of the great uncertainties of this historical moment. Part of this uncertainty involves assessing the relevance of Netanyahu’s personal survival agenda and whether the Religious Right in the governing coalition will push these wider objectives to the point of regional war with dangerous geopolitical risks. An ethical imperative is also continues to be present– not to shift attention away from the ongoing acute human catastrophe entrapping the civilian population of Gaza in deliberately induced death threatening traumas of mass hunger and widespread disease.
What Israel does and refrains from doing in the next few weeks will have a major impact on the prospects for a peaceful future responsive to growing ecological challenges. This in turn may reflect the outcome of the US presidential elections, and how the new leadership handles this dangerous, fragile global situation that combines a prolonged humanitarian catastrophe, ethical and legal gross abuses of civilian innocence, and hazardous neglect of heightened risks of geopolitical encounters and ecological collapses.
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Global Justice in the 21st Century 
The Nuclear Challenge 70 Years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (7): Nuclear Civil Disobedience
4 SepIn the years after World War II there was a widespread belief that rational minds would prevail, and that nuclear weapons would not be further developed, and their possession as well as their threat or use prohibited. The onset of the Cold War, the Soviet acquisition of the bomb, and the Eisenhower threat to use nuclear weapons if necessary to end the Korean War basically extinguished any real prospect of nuclear disarmament. Of course, the diplomacy of peace advocacy and of nuclear nonproliferation made it expedient to continue to affirm nuclear disarmament as a goal of foreign policy. And indeed up through the 1960s both Washington and Moscow tabled disarmament proposals with some fanfare, yet clearly lacked the political will to confront what had already become the powerful nuclear establishment that was a principal component of the military-industrial-complex that was so memorably depicted in Eisenhower’s still relevant Farewell Address.
It is against this background that it became increasingly clear that nuclear weapons would remain part of the geopolitical scene so long as their role was left to governments and normal statecraft. Before long all five permanent members of the UN Security Council opted for possession of nuclear weapons, which as a result seemed to connect great power status on a global level with entry into the nuclear club. Its expansion beyond this circle of World War II victors was more problematic as the further spread of the weaponry collided with the geopolitical priority of nonproliferation and with the oligopolistic mentality that was shared by the nuclear weapons states, and belied the central claim of the West that nuclear weapons were needed and effective in a deterrent posture, keeping the peace by discouraging attacks and provocative international initiatives. The strategic rationale for nuclear weaponry relied upon by the United States and Europe stressed the need to offset Soviet superiority in conventional weaponry and territorial access from their base in the Asian landmass.
Ever since the 1980s peace activists, especially those with deep religious convictions, have mounted civil society campaigns centered on the immorality of threatening or using nuclear weapons, and even on possessing and contemplating possible use. Those activists with the deepest convictions have repeatedly resorted to nonviolence civil disobedience, sometimes in provocative forms (spilling their own blood at nuclear facilities, damaging warheads, blocking trains carrying missiles), to communicate the depth of their opposition, and their own willingness to accept prison sentences to get their message better heard. I was deeply moved and influenced by the purity of several of the leading personalities who followed this line of thought and action, and participated in a supportive role by being an expert witness in several high profile legal cases. Among those I came to know through this contact, and particularly admired, were the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, Elizabeth McAlister, and James Douglass. They were and remain for me among the most charismatic and inspirational figures in my life experience, not only for their anti-nuclear clarity (accompanied by strong earlier stands against the Vietnam War and wider commitments of service to the poor), but for the ways they connected such strong spiritual identities with their daily life styles and citizen engagements that harmoniously fused religious values with deeply felt and reflected upon moral/political understanding of how to live in the world.
I was particularly drawn to the work and outlook of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Protest founded by James and Shelley Douglass in Bangor, Washington and reaching out to many in the greater Seattle area with their uncompromising and sustained opposition to nuclearism, with a focus on so-called first-strike weapons. There worldview combined their embrace of pre-Constantine Christianity, the early pacifist Christian communities that were persecuted and yet adhered to their beliefs and practices, and Gandhi whose life, work, and thought established the radical transformative potentiality of militant nonviolence. I was impressed during my years of contact with the people of Ground Zero by their deep belief that the point of confrontation is always conversion to truth and right action, and not passing judgment as to evil. By virtue of such efforts they managed to generate widespread sympathy with their work, eventually persuading the formerly apolitical Archbishop of Seattle, Raymond Hunthausen, to join them in nonviolent civil disobedience and gaining the respect and even the support of some local prosecutors.
An important element in their dedicated lives was the strong belief in living up to the Nuremberg ethos, including respect for the UN Charter and for international law generally. It was my role to show that their beliefs in what I called ‘the Nuremberg obligation’ created a civic, if not a legal, duty to oppose within reasonable bounds policies and behavior by a government if it directly violated international law, and the more so, if the context involved warmaking. I also gave my opinion that it was reasonable for individuals to believe that all activities associated with nuclear weapons involved or were leading to the commission of the most severe of war crimes, and that these persons being prosecuted did so believe.
From a somewhat more secular point of view, Daniel Ellsberg, followed in these footsteps, taking a journey that has led him from the pinnacles of state power in Washington as a top level strategic advisor to his brave and precedent-setting decision to release the Pentagon Papers that divulged the secrets wrongly withheld from the American public, a shocking documentary record of the policies and conduct of the U.S. Government in relation to the Vietnam War.
I have known Ellsberg since we were both students at Harvard in the 1950s, and were originally at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Dan was a starstudent of Cold War strategy within the reigning realist paradigm and I was an obscure and alienated critic, but we managed to keep some contact in subsequent years, and I was one of those who Dan entrusted with the cache of top secret documents that constituted the Pentagon Papers, and was later called to testify before the Boston Grand Jury (convened to investigate the criminality of the release) and later as an expert in the criminal trial that the government started and lost with respect to Ellsberg and the NY Times.
Ellsberg also has worked while at the Pentagon on nuclear war plans, the secret of secrets, irresponsibly sharable over the years with such reckless military adventurers as Curtis LeMay and Dick Cheney, and their less extremist colleagues. It is a wonder that with this kind of incubated knowledge of the most deadly reality the human species has ever confronted, that species endangering catastrophes have not yet darkened the horizon.
Ellsberg’s perseverance with respect to nuclear weaponry has become iconic. Besides, lucidly lecturing throughout the world he has committed civil disobedience about 100 times, engaged in long vigils and fasts devoted to dramatizing the failures of the UN and U.S. Government to achieve nuclear disarmament. Most recently, at an event on August 7th observing the 70th anniversary of the nuclear attacks, Ellsberg joined with 50 other protesters in a ‘die-in,’ outside of Lawrence Livermore Labs where nuclear warheads have for decades being continuously developed to attain ever higher levels of annihilating perfection. It is worth observing that the Livermore Labs are located in Livermore, California, which is in the Bay Area, and that the large budget for work on weapons, often more than $1 billion is federally funded by Department of Energy, and the operation is carried on as a partnership between the University of California and several large corporations, an alliance suggestive of the bondings between the government, universities, and the private sector. Ellsberg’s words at Livermore deserve contemplating and heeding as best we can however we are situated:
“The killing at Hiroshima was mass murder.… In the target plans that I worked on, and ones I worked on in Russia, the smoke will go into the stratosphere as it did in Hiroshima by higher firestorm. But simultaneously, thousands of cities, with pillars of smoke, will join around the globe blotting out the sunlight sufficiently to kill harvests around the world, and condemn nearly the entire population of the world to death. It’s the Doomsday Machine, The End. We’ve known that, not at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but for the last twenty-five years, and yet these threats go on; the threats go on. They are threats of ending nearly all life. It’s never a good day to die, but it is a good day to get arrested.”
It is a somber message, but an informed recognition of where we are as a nation, and what this portends for species vulnerability, but also what it means culturally when national security is unethically conflated with a latent threat to commit a massive genocide, even omnicide.
70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is lamentable that more than ever it is the voices in the wilderness that speak most clearly to those who are the global managers of security for the peoples of the world. We can be thankful for those who have put their bodies on the line in this unbroken tradition of anti-nuclear civil obedience. An aspect of the problem has followed from the fact that the media puts almost all of its weight on the side of the nuclear militarists, and refuses to give attention or space to those who for decades selflessly seek to awaken us from this lengthy, hazardous, and immoral ‘nuclear sleep.’
Tags: civil disobedience, Daniel Berrigan, Daniel Ellsberg, deterrence, Eisenhower, James Doughlass, nuclear civil disobedience, Nuclear disarmament, nuclear weapons, Philip Berrigan