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The Fraught Politics of a Word and People Besieged

“Four years before [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of ‘dead weight’ did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?”

Nazis! Liquidating the ghetto of Gaza


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  • Huwara, February 2023

“I want to restore security for the residents of the State of Israel,” fellow Otzma Yehudit MK Zvika Fogel said the morning after the rampage. “How do we do that? We stop using the word ‘proportionality.’ We stop with our objection to collective punishment [just] because it doesn’t fly with all sorts of courts. We take the gloves off.

“Yesterday, a terrorist came from Huwara. A closed, burnt Huwara — that’s what I want to see,” he told Galey Israel Radio. “That’s the only way to achieve deterrence. After a murder like yesterday’s, we need burning villages when the IDF doesn’t act.”

“A curious news item on January 10th about a secretive meeting of twenty-odd far-far-right-wingers in an isolated lake-front villa near Potsdam. Among them were several middle-level AfD leaders, three fringe right-wing members of the already right-wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), (who have since been dropped),  a few wealthy but little-known businessmen and a leader of the quasi-fascist Austrian “Identitarian” movement. Their theme was a program – “after achieving power” – of “remigration”, the compulsory expulsion of all people with “non-German roots,” even those with German citizenship but not considered properly “assimilated into German language and culture.” This might mean up to 15 million immigrants plus five million with two immigrant parents.”

  • Yallah Gaza 
 



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