By Alex Stein · Wednesday, May 15, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative  “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “We don’t want no two states, we want 1948” are two of the slogans that have been heard on American campuses during the protests in recent weeks. These reflect the idea that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian-Arab state and violence should be used to achieve this goal if necessary. While much of the discourse since October 7 has focused on the nature of Hamas’s attack—the rapes, the burnings, the shootings—not enough has been written on what it actually sought to achieve.
There is nothing surprising about violent Palestinian opposition to Zionism. As Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote: “The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists. . . . Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.” Ireland, Algeria, India, Vietnam—it is the same every time. What makes the Palestinian case different is that the Jews also have a legitimate claim to the land. This is why Israelis have responded differently to Palestinian violence than in all the examples above. As the famous Zionist song puts it: “I have no other country.”
This rejectionism creates a situation whereby the use of violence has always been more catastrophic for the Palestinians than it has been for the Jews. This phenomenon goes all the way back to 1929. That year, following false claims regarding Jewish ambitions toward the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa, violent riots broke out across Palestine, with the main focal points being Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tzfat, and Hebron. They lasted around a week, and by the end 133 Jews had been killed—the vast majority of whom had been murdered by Arabs—and 116 Arabs were killed—around 20 of whom were murdered by Jews, with the majority being killed because of police and military activities.
Continue reading →
By Gabriel Mayer-Heft · Monday, February 12, 2024 Our tour began at the central train station in Tel Aviv. My colleagues and I were delighted to see the members of our board as well as several others in the field of international relations. While waiting for our bus to arrive, we engaged in pleasant conversation. As we boarded the bus to begin our descent to Kfar Aza, I noticed that the sky was emblazoned with a beautiful double rainbow.
Once on the bus, the conversation quickly turned to our musings on the war and the future of the region. As those who attended were quite knowledgeable, it was a pleasure to listen to their erudite analysis. Conversation quickly subsided once we drove past the area in which the cars from the Nova party were parked. The enthusiastic conversation died down, and everyone looked slack-jawed upon the cenotaph. The rest of the journey was quieter.
Upon arriving at the Kibbutz, there was a palpable change in mood from when we had first departed. Though faces of those in attendance were concealed by the benches on the bus throughout the journey, it was now clear that their expressions had hardened. We donned our vests and helmets, and set out.
Continue reading →
By Bernhard Junginger · Monday, December 18, 2023 Editor’s note: Martin Cüppers directs the Research Unit Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He studies the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust, and how they were treated by postwar German society and its judiciary. Together with Klaus-Michael Mallmann he published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Half Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine] in 2006. His work belongs to a growing body of scholarship that exposes how Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general. Other contributions to this important line of research include books by Matthias Küntzel, such as Jihad and Jew-Hatred (Telos Press, 2009) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), and Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. The Nazi genealogy of Palestinian animosity toward the Jews helps understand the particular viciousness of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. This interview originally appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 5 and appears here with Cüppers’s permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose commentary appears here.
Mr. Cüppers, in your book Half Moon and Swastika you explore the connections between the Third Reich, the Arab world, and the Palestine conflict. What is your main finding?
In light of our current context, the book makes clear that the terrible Hamas massacre of October 7 was inconceivable without the historical influences of Nazi Germany.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Friday, October 13, 2023 Hamas’s horrifying attack on Israeli civilians is a continuation of terrorist methods that it has been using for years against Israel. As a technique of war, its terrorism functions primarily as a way of gaining support from current and potential allies. Such a massacre can only serve Hamas’s war aims to the extent that the use of terror as a technique of war points to an ideological similarity with its allies, Iran and Hezbollah. Hamas’s use of terror only makes sense because the allies it is trying to convince—anti-Semitic populations and terrorists in the Arab world as well as totalitarians everywhere—share their disregard for principles of human rights as well as their use of fear and hatred as the primary determiners of political life. Terrorism only works for Hamas insofar as it can appeal to similar inclinations in others in order to build a broader alliance of terrorist movements and totalitarian states.
This terrorist approach to politics defines the asymmetry in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. In contrast to Hamas, Israel and its main ally, the United States, are committed to protecting human rights, even in the face of terrorist enemies. Without such self-control, Israel could destroy Hamas by conducting the same kind of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians that Hamas has used against Israel. There is no doubt that if Hamas had the means at its disposal, it would not hesitate to kill the entire population of Israel. But in eschewing such terrorist methods, Israel ends up being attacked for its failures to live up to the human rights principles that it espouses. In its commentary on the conflict, Human Rights Watch focuses primarily on the Israeli siege of Gaza as a war crime while treating Hamas’s massacres of Israelis merely as the work of “individuals” who “should be brought to justice.”[1] Perversely, Israel loses legitimacy due to its general support for human rights, even as it struggles to balance a respect for human rights with its need to fight for its existence against the terrorists and totalitarians that surround it. Meanwhile, Hamas is not considered to be the political leadership of Gaza but as a set of bad individuals to be differentiated from the Gazan population. Clearly, Hamas’s use of Palestinians as human shields indicates how its terrorism translates into totalitarian rule within Gaza. Yet to treat the Palestinians as victims and Hamas as a few bad individuals ignores the political reality that Hamas constitutes the elected political authority of Gaza and recruits its fighters from the Gazan population that supports it.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, November 11, 2020 The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, delivered this speech on September 4, 2020. I discussed it in a TelosScope post here, putting it in dialogue with President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech of July 4. There has been interest on the part of some readers in a full translation of Macron’s text, so it is offered below.
The context: Macron is welcoming a group of newly naturalized citizens into the national community. Hence his double agenda: on the one hand, highlighting the diversity of France as an immigrant nation, while on the other insisting on the unity of French history, culture, language, and above all the Republic. This is a speech about the Republican values that Macron expects all French citizens to share and, what’s more, to uphold actively and vigorously. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” have a standing in French political culture similar to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from the American Declaration of Independence.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, November 10, 2020 In the wake of recent killings in Paris and Nice, as well as in Vienna, the debate over “Islamism” has regained prominence in Europe, especially in France. Islamism as a political ideology must of course be rigorously distinguished from Islam, the religion. That conceptual distinction ought to be readily understandable and familiar from previous iterations of responses to terrorism. What however appears to be new in the current French discussion is the perceived linkage between Islamism, terrorist violence, and academic post-colonialism, regarded as providing a justification for the violence. That association is being made at high levels in the Macron government, generating considerable controversy. That is the context for the open letter published in Le Monde, translated below. Do academic ideas have consequences in the world?
Continue reading →
|
|
