ISRAEL

GILAD ATZMON—Ben Yishai is honest enough to admit publicly that Israel’s enemies understand the psychological, spiritual, cultural and political fabric of Israeli society. They are aware of Israel’s weaknesses and the IDF’s paralysis and they act upon these. According to Ben Yishai, the Shiite axis, Hamas and the Salafi-Jihadists all understood that they “could not destroy Israel with one or two violent military moves, therefore they went on to wage a war of strategic attrition against us.” Any violent round or war whose results are inconclusive in favour of Israel, Ben Yishai says, are going to be seen as another nail in the Zionist’s coffin.

JAMES NORTH—The U.S. mainstream press is mostly missing the Israel angle. Let’s start with the New York Times front-page report on the U.S. efforts to tighten the existing boycott and reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero by threatening importers like China and India. The word “Israel” appears nowhere in the fairly long article. Not once. The Washington Post made exactly the same omission: no mention of “Israel.”

ADAM SCHATZ—I used to call myself a non-Zionist, rather than an anti-Zionist: the latter term seemed to traduce the origins of Zionism, which arose as a response to the existential threat to Jewish life in Europe. ‘Anti-Zionism’ overlooked the richness of the debates within early Zionism. The ‘cultural Zionist’ Ahad Ha’am, for example, supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not a Jewish state, and castigated ‘territorial’ Zionists for imagining that ‘Palestine is a land almost entirely deserted, an uncultivated desert,’ and that ‘the Arabs are desert savages, a people like donkeys, incapable of seeing and understanding what is happening around them. This is a great mistake.’ One of the founders of bi-nationalism – what’s now envisaged as a single state, accommodating both people’s national aspirations – Ha’am considered himself a Zionist. So did the journalist and activist Uri Avnery, one of the fiercest critics of Israel’s wars and occupation, who died last year, aged 94. But these ‘Zionists’ do not represent actually existing Zionism.

WHITNEY WEBB—Even the Times of Israel ran an op-ed article about “When Genocide is Permissible” in reference to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Though the post was eventually taken down, it points to an all-too-common and dangerous mentality that social media, the Israeli government, and Western media “conveniently” ignore.An Israeli news agency even put the then-suspected preferential treatment to the test and found that Facebook and the Israeli authorities treated calls for revenge from Palestinians and Israelis very differently.Even massive rallies calling for Palestinian genocide have been ignored entirely by social media and the corporate press. Earlier this year in April, a massive anti-Palestinian rally took place in Tel Aviv where thousands called for the death of all Arabs. The rally was organized to support an Israeli soldier who killed an already-wounded Palestinian by shooting him execution-style in the head.