Via Joel Beinin [my italics] “Netanyahu is not Israel – his government does not represent us!” proclaims a recent open letter of 160 Israeli writers, academics and intellectuals. “A war without political goals is a war of deception. A war in which more than 15,600 children have been killed is immoral,” they assert. They believe that after the horrific October 7 massacre in the communities of the western Negev, Israel “set out to wage… a just war.” In contrast, “the war that began on March 18, with Israel's violation of the ceasefire and its failure to comply with the agreement to release the hostages” is not the same war. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health (MOH), Israeli forces killed at least 14,500 Palestinian children between October 7, 2023 and January 2025. While the Gaza MOH casualty figures are widely considered reasonably accurate, a study in the British medical journal Lancet concludes that they may actually undercount casualties by as much as 40%. Were the deaths of...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51