Last week over a 1000 American pastors, mostly white, mostly men, and mostly evangelical, flew to Israel for a summit. It wasn’t to address the suffering of Palestinian children or to assist Palestinian families. It wasn’t to demand an end to the genocide. It wasn’t even to pray for a just peace for all peoples. It was a training program for Israeli propaganda.
Mike Huckabee, the Trump regime’s ambassador to the genocidal state and rabid Christian Zionist, joined the group. He said: “It’s an extraordinary time for pastors to go to their pulpits and push back on the bigotry being pushed toward Israel.”
Notice that Huckabee didn’t say bigotry against Jews. He said bigotry against Israel. Against a state. A state which is actively committing genocide with the full support of the United States.
This is significant because Christian Zionists are notoriously antisemitic. They do not support Israel because they love Jews, whom they believe are destined for hell if they continue to refuse their evangelical message of salvation. They do it because it fits neatly into their narrow, misinformed and heavily biased interpretation of the ramblings of a man who lived in a cave on a Greek island years after Christ walked the earth.
American evangelicals see Jews as essential only insofar as their role in the fulfillment of an eschatological opera. But they don’t see Palestinian Christians at all. They are rendered invisible because to acknowledge them would mean admitting the deep racism at the heart of their theology.
Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with an arrest warrant on him for war crimes, also addressed the crowd saying: “I’m counting on you. I know you’ll do what has to be done.” He also told them he wanted them to recruit 10,000 more pastors.
There is something deeply perverse about a group of Christian men being flown into a nation which is committing the very worst crime against humanity, only to “learn” from the very criminals perpetrating it. And doing this all while ignoring the mass suffering occurring just a few kilometres away. Not one of those pastors visited a Palestinian church or even mentioned Israel’s bombing of churches in Gaza.
That this happened during Advent is also staggering. This is a time when Christians around the world meditate on the story of a refugee child hunted by a vicious genocidal king. But instead of attending to the suffering of children being slaughtered by a contemporary genocidal government, they basked in its comfort and vowed to defend it.
To be sure, this is the heart of American Christianity. And it is a cold, deadened one. A theology of death. A gospel of calculated cruelty. And nothing will awaken these dead bones from the white washed sepulchers they have chosen to repose in.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t care that young Jewish students were moved by videos and photos of the firebombing of families huddled in their tents after their homes were reduced to rubble, or the bloated bellies of children being starved to death by Israel’s deliberate policy of famine, or the murder or scores of doctors, nurses and paramedics, or the blatant killing of more journalists than any other conflict in the world, or the rape of a Palestinian prisoner, or the complete and utter decimation of nearly every structure in Gaza, or the coldblooded killing of 5 year old Hind Rajab who was shot 335 times by Israeli soldiers as she sat in a car surrounded by the bodies of her dead family.
What Hillary Clinton does care about is that some of these young Jewish students couldn’t tell her which river or which sea was being referred to in the popular chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
To her, this is all “TikTok propaganda.” Never mind about the scores of genocide scholars who have declared this to be a genocide. Never mind that Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem said their country is committing genocide. Never mind Doctors Without Borders, or Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch. Never mind UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. It is all just social media from the “Chinese communist party.” Apparently, those Israeli politicians who talked about their genocidal plans openly and the IDF soldiers who posted their crimes were all “propaganda” from TikTok and China. This is her metric.
And why is this so important? Why do we need to keep talking about what Hillary Clinton said? Because it is the same metric and coldblooded calculous that every Western, liberal Zionist apologist has used to justify Israel’s genocide. A metric that involves ignoring a “wall of carnage,” as former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz so aptly put it. Or the endless “Dead Gaza Babies” as liberal icon Van Jones bemoaned.
It is a metric of breathtaking arrogance, staggering apologetics and nauseating sycophancy. A metric that extracts the humanity of the Palestinians from the entire equation to rationalize and excuse their annihilation.
Western liberalism is even more dangerous than the far right because it has the effect of normalizing state violence in the name of “humanitarian intervention.” It lulls decent people into complacency by using pacified and watered down rhetoric about human rights, inclusivity and equality, so much so that these terms becomes utterly toothless and devoid of any power. And it provides a veneer of respectability and civility through platitudes and bromides, masking its true imperialistic nature. It has also played the role of handmaiden to Trumpian fascism.
And it doesn’t stop in the US. Liberal leaders like Justin Trudeau, Kier Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen and Frank-Walter Steinmeier have all used their positions to justify and support this crime against humanity.
The genocide in Gaza has done what no other atrocity in contemporary history has been able to do. It has revealed to us just how depraved and twisted most Western political leaders and media figures are at their core. It showed us that if they can allow, aid or even applaud what Israel is doing, then they can easily do the same to us.
Kenn: Phil, I see you have been under a deluge of hate and mockery from online Zionists after a few of your pieces on the genocide in Gaza. What do you think is behind such a reaction? I am suspecting that there is a real fear amongst these groups that they are losing control of the narrative and are getting desperate. What are your thoughts?
Phil: My recent Facebook post on the subject did provoke a thousand-plus invasion of highly agitated Zionist trolls. They made the desert bloom with seething hate.
By the evidence, your insight regarding Israeli propagandist’s fumbling of the narrative is dead-on accurate. To wit, after, for example, witnessing the uniformed thugs of the IDF live-streaming their war crimes it was inevitable that large segments of the people of the world were going to grow incredulous to Israeli hasbara.
AI generated definition of the term hasbara: Hasbara is a Hebrew word that means “explanation” and is used to describe the Israeli government’s public diplomacy and public relations efforts to shape international opinion about the state of Israel.
How is it possible for Zionist propagandists to believe that ever proliferating images of bombed out hospitals, murdered doctors, medical personnel, aid workers, journalists, as well as entire families blown to bits in their homes could be explained away as acts of self-defense in behalf of little David Israeli facing down the looming Palestinian Goliath threatening a new, impending Holocaust?
Zionist apologists were, per always, playing victim as, all the while, Israeli government leaders and rabbis were, in full-throated fury, summing up the Old Testament, blood-crazed spirit of Amalek.
“When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” — Deuteronomy 25: 19
Hence, Zionist true believers found themselves in the (impossible) position of attempting to term their massive war crimes (to the point of a genocidal rampage) as being acts of national preservation. When, as time passed, it became apparent that what was retailed as a war against terrorist aggression was, in fact, a new facet of Zionist land theft i.e., the Israeli version — cue cringe-inducing irony — of Third Reich era Germany’s concept of Lebensraum.
My night terrors include the thought: How are we Jews going to survive the self-destructive conflation of Judaism and Zionism as weaponized by the Zionist ethno-supremacist state and their confabulation-prone apologists? As noted, the Zionist state’s version of Lebenstraun.
Lebensraum (noun): The (coveted) territory a nation state believes is needed for its natural development and crucial to national notion of self-determination e.g., God, in the Zionist worldview, has ordained that the Biblical era lands of Judea and Samaria are the birthright of the Zionist settler-colonialists.
Yet archaeological evidence and medical science confirm the following: The Jews of the ancient Levant closest ancestors are the Palestinian people.
My DNA reports my ancestors were of German, French, Dutch and Spanish (the latter via the 1492 Jewish expulsion during the Spanish Inquisition) origin. I also harbor 4% lineage from Northern Iraq/Iran. Thus the claim is risible that the so-called Promised Land was promised to me.
Among the hasbara fairytales believed and parroted, we diaspora Jews returned to our ancestral homeland and “made the desert bloom.” In reality, we have drenched the soil with the blood of the rightful inhabitants of the land and rendered our collective mindscape into a wasteland ridden with a soul-defying architecture constructed of casuistry and false, noxious mythos.
The world has looked on and asked, isn’t the Zionist worldview somewhat on the Nazi-adjacent side of the political/societal spectrum?
Your thoughts on the matter, Kenn?
Kenn: I think that the parallels of Zionism to Nazism are so striking, that it is staggeringly difficult for most people to comprehend. For 80+ years, Zionist propaganda proliferated with the assistance of the West, primarily the American Empire. So many crimes and atrocities were whitewashed by the Western press and politicians, that the public at large simply did not know the scale and, up until recently, remained ignorant of Israeli barbarism.
Education around the Holocaust played a large part in this. It began the project of conflating Zionism, a political ideology, with Judaism. Thus, the only safe place for Jews following the Shoah was in historic Palestine. The Indigenous population had to be removed, demonized and erased, both literally and figuratively. Israel’s so-called founding father, David Ben-Gurion, said that “the old will die and the young will forget.” This was the hope of many early Zionists who deluded themselves into thinking that the Indigenous people would simply move on and accept their displacement. They ingested these lies based on their Western colonial counterparts, who viewed the Indigenous populations they ethnically cleansed or tried to exterminate as imbeciles who could be manipulated into forgetting their own history.
Portrayals of the so-called “Indian War” that are an analog of Zionist propaganda involving Islamic terrorists
Now, we see this kind of major disconnect from reality among Zionists, who are largely older, white Americans. These are the ones who were the most propagandized. They saw what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe (as well as countless other groups), but they did not take away some universalist message of solidarity. The slogan “never again” was uniquely applied to Jews. The mere inference that others could suffer from similar atrocities was taken as offensive and absurd. And this is of course racism.
What I found interesting about the reaction to your posts was this narrative of the “self-hating Jew.” And it reminded me of how early Zionism utterly loathed Jews who appeared weak or ill. Israel turned away thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe who did not fit the new Jew mythos. Ironically, this new mythos bore a striking resemblance to the Aryan archetype of the perfect man and woman. A fascistic portrayal of the human being.
Phil: Kenn, you apprehended a (tragic) truth regarding the misapprehension of the nature of strength. Wilhelm Reich, who fled Nazi Germany due to his grasp of the dangers of fascism, explored the nature of the pathology he termed “narcissistic armouring.” In short, a chronic rigidity of thought manifested in both psyche and body resultant from the psyche being overwhelmed by the trauma inherent to the excesses of authoritarianism.
A lack of empathy and a tendency towards excessive rage when threats, real or imagined, are extant are defining traits of the pathological condition. To wit, we can consider that the Zionist state suffers — and causes all within its reach to suffer — due to a collective form of narcissistic armouring. In the mindset of those thus armoured, on an emotional basis, signs of weakness are viewed with disdain yet any sign of strength, even in a defensive posture, of those considered adversarial in nature, is viewed as an existential threat that must be annihilated. I suspect this explains the odious mindset of pro-Zionist — and authoritarianism-rancid rightwing — social media trolls.
Then there is this regarding the phenomenon of collective forms of narcissistic armouring, on a nation building basis: Israel was founded by campaigns of ethnic cleansing and, as the world has witnessed because of its massive war crimes in Gaza, is prone to genocidal rampages. Therefore, as hideous as it sounds when spoken aloud, unnervingly large segments of the Israeli citizenry regard even Palestinian infants as future terrorists and act as apologists for their massive extermination. A mindset, once again, analogous to the actions of Third Reich era Germany where Jews were viewed as genetically inferior to their Aryan race betters but were seen as a dangerous presence, fatal to the common good, that must be first expelled, then isolated, then exterminated.
Below the surface of Israel’s self-justifying lies, the nation’s Ashkenazi elites sense the unsustainable nature of the Zionist project: they are heading for the exits in droves while hyper-authoritarian religious zealots go full-force Brownshirt in the West Bank. Israelis might embrace the mythos that they have trudged through the desert and arrived in the Promised Land. But by means of the narcissistic armouring they manifest — they have become Pharaoh’s army.
Kenn: The idea of narcissistic armouring explains so much regarding Zionism’s constant reframing and battle. One of the ways it manifests is this notion of Israeli food. Of course, this is ridiculous. There is no Israeli food. There is appropriated food from various nations and ethnic groups in the region, but it is all stolen and rebranded.
And it is fascinating to me to see this real time dissolution of the original Zionist project into a kind of a hyper-religious form. As you mentioned, thousands of Israelis of Ashkenazi descent are fleeing Israel. They have been buying up property in Cyprus, Thailand, Portugal and elsewhere. These are the descendants of the secular Zionists who manufactured a kind of quasi-socialist utopia for Jews in historic Palestine. Of course, the only way to realize this dream was to erase the original inhabitants and invent a story of origin for themselves, even though we know from a variety of historians that this is a complete farce. But where is this “connection” to the land that they insisted they possessed? Where is the promised safety for Jews in Israel if they are leaving en masse?
In “The Invention of the Jewish People,” Schlomo Sand dismantles the Zionist mythology of a common people. Many of the Jews we see in Europe have absolutely no origin in Palestine, but are the descendants of converts to the faith early on, well before Christian authorities outlawed such proselytization. Even David Ben-Gurion believed that the Palestinians were the direct descendants of ancient Jews who had remained in the land after the Roman expulsions and converted to Islam over the centuries. This was, of course, very problematic for the European Jews who had no real connection to the Levant outside of religious mythology.
But it is interesting to me that so many Zionists feel it is imperative to erase the Palestinians simply on the basis that they do not possess a “nation.” This was exactly what has been done to Jews for thousands of years. Nationalism itself is a relatively new idea, only seen in recent centuries of human history and emerging in Europe. Imposed on the world via colonialism. So, to think that nationhood is the pinnacle of a people’s existence is rather trite and silly. But the racism is thick in this too. Imagine saying that there was no such thing as the French or the Spanish or the Czechs, because they are all just Europeans. In this same way, they are saying there is no such thing as Syrians or Egyptians or Lebanese because they are all just Arabs.
It is a feat of enormous delusion that so many Zionists think they will succeed in erasing the Palestinians. The first time we see the term Palestine is in The Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. He mentions it as a district of Syria. And I was recently reading a book on Pompeii and found it fascinating to discover that the ancient city that was buried under molten ash had traded with Palestine. So, it is rather odd that these modern day Zionists try so hard to erase Palestine from the historical record. It is an impossible task for them, yet they persist in trying.
But this is what colonialism is in a nutshell. The Europeans did it in the Americas, Africa, Asia and beyond. Razing Indigenous temples and cities and erecting cathedrals on their foundations. Erasure of a people is nothing new. It is the lynchpin of all colonial projects. And much of this is psychological warfare. Constantly harping on about this obviously false notion that Palestine never existed or that there is no such thing as the Palestinians is meant to demoralize or mock people, especially ones that are being ethnically cleansed or genocided like the Palestinians.
The Nakba, then and now
Israel is falling apart. Mental health in the country is spiraling downward and thousands are weighing their options for getting out. And when they leave, what will become of the state when you only have rabid extremists and religious nutcases rampaging in the occupied territories? Do you see this as the beginning of the end for the Zionist project and if so, what is the future of Jews and Judaism in the wake of Zionism’s brutality and lies?
Religious zealot land thieves, under the protection of IDF uniformed thugs (i.e., de facto Brownshirts) perpetrating the Zionist form of Lebensraum
Phil: Years of participation and complicity in ethnic cleansing, perpetual aggression directed at their neighbors, and the Gaza genocide is inflicting a psychological toll on the citizenry of Israel.
“Israel is experiencing what experts describe as a severe “mental health tsunami,” with around two million people in need of psychological assistance as addiction rates climb and social cohesion weakens,” according to the news outlet Yedioth Ahronoth.
But don’t expect a reckoning of national conscience to take hold in the Zionist ethno-supremacist state. On an historical basis, in regard to modern nation states, a form of collective psychological affliction causes the populace to seek psychical remedy in the palliatives administered by authoritarian demagogues e.g., in the case of Israel, rightwing/religious death cult leaders such as Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Political and religious zealot demagogues are adept black magicians in the art of displaced resentment and the psychological projection of the collective dark side of a culture unto the alien other and treasonous underminers in their midst.
In short, events will careen towards calamity. The process of cultural/national truth-resonant reckoning does not unfold, if ever, until a collective bottom is hit.
Hence, Zionism is manifested as a psychotic episode, including evincing homicidal impulsiveness, in the form of a nation. Of course, the pathological proclivity has existed since Israel’s inception but now the affliction has lapsed into a state of exponential runaway.
The Zionist leadership has become, as is a general rule with leaders of authoritarian states, inmates in an asylum for the criminally insane — who now run the asylum.
As a result, the general population is suffering a collective nervous breakdown.
Carl Jung diagnosed the root cause of their pathology: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
In short, the Zionist state’s path to recovery would be the recognition of the internal carnage they inflict on their own souls due to the suffering they perpetrate on all within range of their blood-drenched belligerence.
“None of us are free until Palestine is free.”
That is the declaration provoked a troll swarm to descend upon my comment section, raging, in essence, “genocide=freedom.”
A Third Reich-adjacent reaction, wouldn’t you say?
Hint: The 1000 Year Reich lasted 12 years.
My mother, her father arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, escaped Nazi Germany by Kindertransport. She lived until 92 years of age. Her very life is a testament to the deathscape of ash and dust that is the fate of genocidal nations.
Israel is coming apart at the seams, both on a cultural and political basis. The Ashkenazi elite are headed for the exits as the religious zealot settler class are inflamed with the death-besotted mythos of Amalek.
History reveals, nations that beat their plowshares into weapons to wage genocide hasten their mortal return to inevitable dust.
Pictured my (Phil Rochstroh) mother, Erica Meyer and her older sister, Gisela, both Children of The Kindertransport that delivered Jewish children into the homes of strangers in the U.K.
This is the former speechwriter for Barrack Obama, Sarah Hurwitz, at the Jewish Federation of North America General Assembly this past Sunday. She made some rather provocative remarks there regarding the “disconnect” between younger and older Jews in relation to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I would like to respond to those remarks directly.
Sarah- “I think since Oct 7, and even before, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel and I think that is especially true of young people. So, we are now wrestling with a new generational divide here. And I think that is particularly true in that social media is now our source for media.”
“And it used to be the media you got in America was American media and it was pretty mainstream. You know, it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is a global medium. Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews.”
“So, while in the 1990s, a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them. They find them on their phones. It’s also this increasingly post-literate media, less and less text, more and more videos.”
Me- Let me get this straight, Sarah. You are saying that Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes are ideologically the same? Nick Fuentes, who openly praises Hitler? And what “weird bookstore” are you referencing? Left leaning ones who sold books with Palestinian voices and perspectives? And are you saying that mainstream media once told a single narrative which was all pro-Israel? On this last one, I would agree wholeheartedly. Seldom were Palestinian voices heard in legacy media. But, unlike you, I wouldn’t call that balanced journalism.
Sarah- “You have TikTok just bashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything we try to say to them they’re hearing through this wall of carnage. So, I want to get data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene.”
Me- Oh, Sarah. You poor thing. You are having a really tough time explaining away the racist nature of the Zionist project, decades of ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, and US support for all of it because of a “wall of carnage.” How terribly inconvenient for you. As your friend Van Jones quipped: these young people are seeing all those “dead Gaza babies” scroll by on their newsfeed. And they are appalled by it. How rude of the Palestinians to post about their annihilation. And how silly of these young Jews to be moved by such images and videos.
Hate to break it to you, Sarah. But you are obscene.
Sarah- “And you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet we made on Holocaust education to serve as antisemitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit. Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated youngsters and they think antisemitism is like anti-black racism, powerful white people against powerless black people.”
“So, when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising they think, Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel, you fight the big powerful people, hurting the weak people.”
Me- My God, Sarah. Where to begin with this one? Are you saying Holocaust education was only about combating antisemitism? It isn’t a lesson on the evil of scapegoating? Dehumanization? Genocide? And that these lessons apply to any marginalized or oppressed people? As someone who has spent a lifetime studying the Holocaust, how did I miss the lesson that it only applied to Jewish people and should be used to defend an ethnostate committing atrocities?
Sarah, normal human beings are appalled by cruelty and sadism. Normal people are repulsed by atrocities and brutality. And they understand that it is wrong for powerful people to violently crush and wipe out weaker people.
Sarah- “The problem is, we’re not just a religion. We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So, my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”
“But that’s a category error. The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”
Me- Sarah, if your siblings were murdering children, would you be okay with that? Would you not even say one word in objection? This is not just a dysfunctional family. What you just described isn’t a “family” at all. It is a cult. A death cult, to be more exact.
What a pity, Sarah. You cannot stand atop a mountain of corpses and defend what your “family” is doing any more without push back from young Jews around the world. And the whitewashing spin the legacy media used to employ no longer works.
Sarah, you made opposition to this genocide even more imperative, moral and clear. And for that, I thank you.
Apparently, carrying out and defending a genocide isn’t enough for some people. Case in point, the Miss Universe contest being held in Thailand.
Zionists are accusing Nadeen Ayoub (Miss Palestine) of not being Palestinian. It’s kind of funny, since they spend half of their time denying Palestinians exist, to saying someone isn’t Palestinian enough.
Ayoub was born in Michigan, but her parents are Palestinian. She grew up in Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank. And she did study in Canada where she earned a BA in Psychology and Literature. She is the first “Miss Palestine” in the pageant’s history. Melanie Shiraz (Miss Israel) although born in Tel Aviv, lived most of her life in the US (Florida and California) until just before October 7th 2023.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were violently expelled from their homeland during the Nakba. So, being born there was not an option for millions of Palestinians due to ethnic cleansing, Israel’s violation of international law in the “right of return” for refugees and decades of apartheid policies.
But the irony of all of this is that the people spreading these lies about Ayoub don’t seem to have a problem that the “founding father” of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who was born David Grün in Płońsk, Congress Poland, Russian Empire in 1886. Or that their beloved Golda Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire in 1898, and grew up in Milwaukee. Or that huge swaths of Israeli society originally came from somewhere other than what is now Israel.
In fact, the “Jewish Nation-State Law” defines Israel as the national home of the Jewish people and grants the right to national self-determination exclusively to Jews, effectively marginalizing Palestinian citizens of Israel, even if they were born there and even if their ancestors go back centuries. And Jewish people are allowed to come to Israel from anywhere in the world, and they are granted citizenship regardless of where they were born or if they have any ties to the land, other than religious ones. It is called “Aliyah.”
This is the nature of racist ideologies. Stealing land, destroying villages and farmland, and killing hundreds of thousands of people in Palestine wasn’t enough. Their very existence must be erased from the public record.
But regardless of their crass efforts, Ayoub seems to rise above it all.
“We are more than our suffering. We are women and people with dreams, creativity, talents, and we just want a chance to offer that to the world,” Ayoub said.
“I want the world to see that Palestinians are more than just their struggles and their suffering and their pain,” adding, “Palestinians, we have a lot of dignity.”
“My biggest pain, honestly, is the suppression of the identity and beauty. It’s not just what we see in the headlines, not just the suffering. We’re so much more,” Ayoub said. “We’re beautiful, we love life, we just want a chance to show you that life.”
Kenn Orfanos, November 2025
*Photo is of the inane meme circulating in online Zionist circles.
One of the most popular myths of our time is that Israel controls the United States. This can be seen among many circles, both on the right and the left. This erroneous notion is the result of several factors. I will address two of them here.
The first is the romanization of America itself. Most Americans do not see themselves as subjects of the most powerful empire on the planet. On the contrary, they like to see themselves citizens of a democracy. But this falls apart easily with a simple look at polling.
Most Americans do not want the US to give Israel billions of dollars in funds each year. Most oppose what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Most would like that money spent domestically on things like healthcare or education. Yet, the vast majority of American political representatives on both sides of the aisle widely ignore these desires. Both ruling parties have pledged their support to the Empire and its assets. This is because American Imperialism is a bipartisan affair.
Another byproduct of this delusion is that so many Americans have been conditioned to ignore or absolve the copious crimes committed by its soldiers and military sector abroad on behalf of American and international businesses. The delusion that the United States operates from a place of benevolent power has been largely internalized by most Americans.
That the US has 800+ military bases around the world and that this is rarely questioned or even discussed by most American politicians or the mainstream media is telling. Somehow, this is justified as “protecting American interests.” Of course, those interests also happen to align with that of American capital and the investments of the international billionaire class.
When troops are deployed it is almost always depicted as a “reluctant, yet necessary” action to guard the US from would be enemies. The fact that these supposed “enemies” live in impoverished nations that happen to be rich with natural resources is barely a footnote in the national mainstream discourse.
The second has more to do with antisemitism and its pernicious influence on the American mindset. An old bigoted trope is the belief that Jews control the planet. That they have near supernatural powers in manipulating government officials and policy. The idea that a tiny nation-state in the Middle East controls the wealthiest and most powerful imperial force in the world is demonstrably ludicrous upon close inspection. But this idea has its roots in a centuries old bigotry.
This is not to say that Zionist lobbies like AIPAC or the ADL do not have significant sway over politicians. They do. But both of those organizations are American. And there are far more Christian Zionists in the US than Jewish Zionists.
These American evangelicals, who view Israel as essential to the fulfilment of their apocalyptic eschatological prophecies, have enormous sway over US policy. To focus solely on the influence of these organizations is to ignore how American Empire uses ethnic and religious differences to its own advantage. This is how it has operated since its inception.
There were no Israelis in North America when the Indigenous population was ethnically cleansed and nearly wiped out by genocide. There were no Israelis in North America when Black Africans were enslaved for over 400 years. There were no Israelis involved in the US conquest of the Kingdom of Hawaii, or the brutal occupation of the Philippines, or the nuking of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Expansion, exploitation, racism, genocide, enslavement, destabilization of nations, toppling of democratically elected governments, assassinations, coups. All of them are as American as apple pie. They were encoded into the very DNA of the America project since day one. But an infantile sentimentalization of American history has managed to sponge this away from much of the American public’s consciousness.
One of the easiest ways to understand Israel is to see it as an American military base that protects its geopolitical and capital interests in the Middle-East. Almost all of its citizens must serve in the military, with some religious exemptions. What this has done is create a culture of militarism which thrives on paranoia, perpetual victimhood and the myth of supremacy.
It has also reinforced the impunity so many Israelis have enjoyed and think they are entitled to, even after proudly posting their crimes online. Israeli politicians and media have openly expressed their genocidal intentions and plans. For decades, Israelis have gotten away with their crimes thanks to the protection and support of the most powerful empire on the planet.
A big part of this has to do with the lie that the US cares about Jewish people or is fighting antisemitism. And Hollywood has played an enormous role in this storyline. It has consistently worked with US military and CIA operatives to push the myth of a “clash of civilizations.” Nakedly racist shows like Homeland and movies like Zero Dark Thirty use propaganda to normalize Islamophobia and American imperial violence in the Global South.
The nation that turned Jews away during the Holocaust has never cared about their welfare. They are a tool to advance its power on the world stage under the guise of a “noble, humanitarian cause.” But the lie is beginning to fall apart as more and more people see the Trump regime downplay real antisemitism, conflate Judaism with the political ideology of Zionism, and attack Jews who oppose Zionism and Israel’s murderous genocide.
Israel is the American Empire’s most important colonial asset. And this asset has maintained its relevance by supplying the Empire, as well as many other governments, its advanced security and surveillance technology. Technology that has been lab tested over many years on the Palestinians.
This is why Palestine is the most pressing moral question of our age. If the powerful get away with what they have done to Gaza, they will surely do it again anywhere and against anyone that stands in the way of their profit and control. A recent look at the bloodstained earth in Sudan is an example of this.
It should be abundantly clear that the horrendous genocide that Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians could not have happened were it not for American money, weapons and diplomatic cover. In fact, Israel, in its current form, would not exist were it not for American money, weapons and diplomatic cover.
This is the flex of American colonial power, upgraded for the age of late capitalism. But the monster that the US created is beginning to unravel under the weight of its own unhinged delusions, paranoia, racism and blatant brutality. The American led project that was meant to legitimize colonialism for the modern era is rapidly disintegrating. The public are simply not buying the lies as easily as they once did. And for that, we need to thank Israel itself. It has proven to be its own worst enemy.
So, while the apartheid state of Israel is indeed committing genocide, to look at this only through that narrow lens misses the big picture. American Empire, even though it is in steep decline, is the man behind the curtain. It, along with other Western aligned powers and the global wealthy elite class, are behind every bullet, every drone, every bomb.
Every destroyed hospital, bakery, school, apartment building, farm was destroyed by both Israel and its benefactor, the American Empire. Every family buried under the rubble of their home was torn apart by Israel and its colonial benefactor, the American Empire. Every child shot at, starved or blown up, was a victim of Israel and its colonial benefactor, the American Empire. In every sense, this is an all-American genocide.
I want to choose my words carefully because I understand the deep trauma that Israel and the United States has inflicted on millions of Palestinians. And not just for the last two years, but for decades.
It is because of that last sentence that I am cautious about celebrating a ceasefire and a plan for the end of this genocide when it comes from a fascist regime. And it is too early to tell if this will last, or if it is yet another distraction.
Certainly, other states (Qatar, Turkey, Egypt) were involved. But this is a US plan. And the American Empire, as it is in steep decline, can never be trusted. Everything it does is spectacle and farce. Its primary colonial asset and military base in the region is Israel. It has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in it. So, it will maintain it as long as the empire stands.
That said, if one Palestinan life is spared by this “agreement” I will rejoice. But I understand the dynamics and duplicity of empire too well to celebrate its supposed achievements.
Gaza has been completely obliterated. It is highly likely that hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered. It may never be habitable in the foreseeable future. And it isn’t clear who will pay the 80+ billion dollars to rebuild it.
To be sure, Israel will continue its colonial settler project in the occupied territories. The West Bank will be absorbed into the Zionist state, and Palestinians will be forced into bantustans on their ancestral lands. The illegal settlers will continue their pogroms protected by the IDF.
But Israel, like its colonial benefactor the United States, will never be accepted by the majority of the world again. Their myths of morality and greatness are forever sullied. The slow decay of the American Empire will ensure the eventual demise of its colonial assets.
They will try desperately to normalize every crime they’ve committed by buying the media and criminalizing dissent. But we have all seen too much. Their cynical game of baseless smears and propaganda is over, and all but the obtuse know this.
And one thing to celebrate is the Palestinians themselves. Their integrity in the face of genocide has never wavered. They’ve put our leaders and media, with all their racism, empty platitudes and hypocrisy, to shame. They’ve ripped the mask off of Western imperialism and smashed it to dust. Their humanity is unmatched. And for that, I am forever grateful.
Right now, Israel is attempting to erase history itself. It is obliterating Gaza City. Demolishing what is left of its historic mosques, churches, cafes, schools, parks and neighbourhoods. Forcing its inhabitants to flee and killing anyone who remains.
A city that once welcomed Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Ottoman travelers is rapidly becoming a killing field of dust and ash. Without a doubt, this destruction of one of the world’s most ancient cities is by design.
After almost two years of relentless atrocities, Israel is now trying to sanitize the scene of the crime. Killing journalists is one of its tactics. Witnesses, especially those with journalistic training and integrity, tell the truth. And they are the biggest threat to the machinery of colonization. But erasing the history of a people delivers a blow that is even more devastating.
Early on, Israel blew up Gaza’s universities and libraries. It razed its grand boulevards, reduced its archeological sites to rubble and even bulldozed its cemeteries. There was no reason to do any of this except to demoralize the Palestinians. To inflict both a wound and an insult to its collective and shared memory.
From its inception, Israel has been at war with the truth. It invented a homeland in a place that already had a people. It used the real generational trauma of Jewish suffering in Europe and elsewhere to instill perpetual fear and victimhood in its population and taught them to be repulsed by anything that smacked of “weakness.” It built a state that saw its neighbours as alien. As inferior. As savages.
But Israel itself is a fantasy. It is a beach resort built on a mass grave in Tantura. It is a soulless mall erected over the stones of a once bustling souk in Jerusalem. It is a bland settlement sprawling over uprooted, ancient olive groves. It is non-indigenous trees planted over the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. Trees that now ignite in flames each year thanks to an angrier climate and the fact that they never belonged to that land to begin with.
Israel took notes from the cruelest pages of European and American colonial settler projects and it modernized it. It learned from the Spaniards who razed Mayan and Incan temples and built cathedrals on their foundations. It studied the British who locked Indigenous Africans in concentration camps where they were starved and tortured. It copied the Americans who wiped out the Buffalo knowing it would mean certain death for Native Americans. And, as all settler colonial projects, its racist ideology led to its logical conclusion in the annihilation of its Indigenous peoples.
There is no such thing as a democratic ethno-state, yet this is what Israel has wanted the world to accept for 80 years. In doing so, it unwittingly created a psychosis that has poisoned its society and driven it into the iron grip of genocidal mania. In fact, polls show that most Jewish Israelis support its government’s actions in Gaza, with many believing it hasn’t gone far enough.
But even as Israel carries out its Final Solution in Gaza, its image and connection to the world has been forever soiled. Some dolts will forever cheerlead its sadistic project and attempt to smear those who oppose it as antisemitic, even if they are Jewish. But Israel will never be accepted as a democratic state again. And on some level, most Israelis know this. Many of those who have traveled abroad in recent months have found this out.
This is of small consolation to the Palestinians who are now living in a hell that is only made possible by the support of the US and other Western nations. But memory is imperative. It is the cornerstone of democratic values and the only bridge to a future where everyone is afforded the same rights. The same dignity. If we lose it, we are bound to repeat this horror again and again.
As fires rage, Israel has declared a national emergency. And it has requested assistance from other countries as it attempts to extinguish the rapidly spreading blazes. In fact, the Jerusalem District Fire Department Commander, Shmulik Friedman, said this was “perhaps the largest fire ever in the country.” Several neighbourhoods have been evacuated around Jerusalem. And the main highway was shutdown while many people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot.
Unsurprisingly, notorious war criminal, Itamar Ben Gvir, is blaming Palestinian Israelis for setting them. Even if this is true, these wildfires would never have taken off with this speed and ferocity unless there was something else going on.
Years ago, I read how the Jewish National Fund planted trees over the ruins of Palestinian villages following the Nakba. Villages that had been violently emptied of their inhabitants by Zionist militias. It was a project that aimed to obscure the ethnic cleansing of Palestine as well as prevent any chance of return for refugees, a right under international law.
But the JNF did not plant indigenous trees. They planted trees they thought would look more European, severely impacting native biodiversity and increasing the risk of wildfires in an ever warming climate. And this underscores the ultimate failure of any colonial settler project. You cannot claim indigeneity and then attempt to expunge any trace of indigenous life from the land without grave consequences.
As fires consume parts of Israel, it continues to reign death down on Gaza. Tens of thousands of civilians, including thousands of children, have been buried under rubble, blown apart and burned to death. Millions face starvation imposed by Israel. Gaza has been turned into a graveyard. So, it may be difficult to muster up any sympathy for the perpetrator as it battles these wildfires.
One could only hope that more Israelis would make the connection. That they would see and understand the consequences of decades of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and now genocide. The colonial settler project has always been built on lies. And deadly ones.
Apartheid and genocide apologists are fond of repeating the lie that “Palestine never existed” or that there is no such thing as Palestinians. But in “Palestine: a Four Thousand Year History” by historian Nur Masalha, the long history of the region is detailed. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a district in Syria. It was called Palaistinê and it was between Phoenicia (modern day Lebanon) and Egypt in the 5th century BCE. From the 2nd to 4th centuries AD, the Romans referred to it as a province called Roman Palestine. The Ottoman and British Empires also called the region Palestine. Even early Zionists referred to it as Palestine when discussing plans to colonize it.
The insatiable colonial impulse to purge Indigenous history isn’t anything new. We have seen this in the Americas, where white European settlers attempted to eradicate Indigenous cultural identity and history. The Spaniards razed temples to the ground to build cathedrals on top of them. The British burned villages. The Americans and the Canadians forbade Native peoples speaking their languages and practicing their religions.
The erasure of Indigenous history is key to justifying a project of violent subjugation, ethnic cleansing and annihilation. In this new narrative, the settlers are cast as the true victims. A “civilized” people trying to tame a wild land. A “villa in the jungle” surrounded by rapacious beasts. It must tell itself and the world this lie in order to rationalize its actions.
This is why Gaza has been systematically leveled. Why its historic landmarks, buildings, ancient mosaics and markets, museums, libraries and universities have been blown up or burned down. It isn’t fighting a war, it is demoralizing a people by attempting to nullify their identity. Like the people who live there, these buildings and places represent historical truth. And the colonial settler cannot tolerate the existence of those damning reminders.
No matter how much destruction it causes, the historical record is clear. Palestine existed. Palestine exists. And the Palestinians will not be erased, even though this genocidal campaign is trying its hardest to do just that.
Kenn Orfanos 