Caitlin Johnstone on the Gaza genocide

The Gaza holocaust will be a litmus test for high-profile figures for decades.  Everyone’s comments or lack thereof on Israel’s genocidal atrocities will be looked up and amplified whenever their name rises to public attention.  It will be the first step in determining whether anyone deserves to be listened to, taken seriously, or voted for.  Their comments on Gaza in the mid-2020s will be the first gate through which they must pass to be considered worthy of attention by normal people. 

Someone asked me, “Why do you care so much about Palestine?” 

I told them ultimately it’s not even especially about Palestine.  I care about humanity.  I don’t want my kids and grandkids living in the kind of world that would watch civilians get ripped to shreds in full view of the entire planet with the support of my government and its allies.  I think that’s pretty reasonable.

~ Caitlin Johnstone, "They Seriously Expected Parades and Trophies For Pausing a Genocide," LewRockwell.com, October 14, 2025

 

Steve Hanke on stopping the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East

If you want to know what's going on, you've got to know who's funding what's going on.  Where does the money come from?  And the money and the munitions and the intelligence all come from the United States.  If the United States cut the funding off and cut the intelligence off and the munitions going into the Ukraine and Middle Eastern war zones, the war would stop.  As an economist, that's my formula for peace.  I'm 100% for peace and the best way to stop a war is to stop funding the thing.  It'll stop in a hurry.

~ Steve Hanke, "Steve Hanke: Recession is Coming - The Fed, Trump & Wall Street Are Blind," Wealthion, 9:45 mark, June 25, 2025

Promised Land on the first Irgun attacks

In Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, Benny Morris writes that the Irgun Bombs of 1937 and 1938 “sowed terror in the Arab population and substantially increased its casualties. The bombs do not appear in any way to have curtailed Arab terrorism, but they do appear to have helped persuade moderate Arabs of the need to resist Zionism and to support the rebellion.”

The first Irgun attack occurred on November 11, 1937. Morris writes that the attacks were responsible for “killing two Arabs at a bus depot near Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, and wounding five. Three days later, on November 14, a number of Arabs were killed in simultaneous attacks around the country—a day that the Irgun thereafter commemorated as the ’Day of the Breaking of the Havlaga (restrain).’”

Morris also describes the events on July 6, 1938, when “an Irgun operative dressed as an Arab placed two large milk cans filled with TNT and shrapnel in the Arab market in downtown Haifa. The subsequent explosions killed twenty-one and wounded fifty-two. On July 15 another bomb killed ten Arabs and wounded more than thirty in David Street in Jerusalem’s Old City. A second bomb in the Haifa market—this time disguised as a large can of sour cucumbers—on July 25, 1938 killed at least thirty-nine Arabs and injured at least seventy. On August 26, a bomb in Jaffa’s vegetable market killed twenty-four Arabs and wounded thirty-nine.”

~ "The Beginning of the Israel-Palestine Conflict," Promised Land: The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience

Wanted by the British government: Menachem Begin

Jeremy Hammond on Donald Trump's plans to rebuild Gaza

If Trump believed that the Palestinians would agree to be dislocated from Gaza because of Israel’s destruction, and that Israel’s Arab neighbors would be delighted to assist in the plan to complete the ethnic cleansing that Israel started in 1948, he sorely miscalculated.

~ Jeremy R. Hammond, "David Hearst Explains Trump's Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza," Jeremy R. Hammond, February 10, 2025

Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. on Israeli genocide

Genocide is defined as "violence that targets individuals because of their membership in a group and aims at the destruction of a people." 

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948, established genocide as an international crime.  The US was one of the signers to this agreement.

This was done primarily in response to what had happened to the Jews in Europe during World War II.  In fact, because of what happened then, you would think that the Jewish people would be the strongest opponents to genocide anyplace.

I think everyone realizes that the United States would be the first to act and would lead the campaign against this genocide if it was being done by any other country than Israel. 

~ Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., "Israel Against The World – With US Aid," The Knoxville Focus, January 18, 2025

Peter Ford on Israel and UNRWA

The Israelis love to make up any propaganda they can about UNRWA, and they try to limit UNRWA funding. They use any method to try to stymie, block, or make more difficult the operations of UNRWA. They really do want to bring an end to this agency.

 

In a way, you can understand it because the agency is synonymous with Palestinian rights and in particular with the right of return. This implies the Palestinians have a right to return to those towns and villages from which their forebears were expelled back in 1948. 

So this is why UNRWA is a thorn in the side of Israel and one they would love to destroy completely. Their ambition has no limit. And we’ve seen this during the Gaza crisis. They have used this to try to exclude UNRWA, make propaganda against UNRWA, and create substitutes for UNRWA. Creating a substitute is the latest strategy. The organization that had some of its staff killed by the Israelis is one of these. In fact, that organization was particularly friendly to the Israelis and the Israelis facilitated its entry to Gaza. And it was a tragic irony that the Israelis ended up killing employees of this agency, World Central Kitchen. The Israelis aim to replace UNRWA with organizations they can control like this. That’s part of the plan with the port to be created by the Americans and the British in northern Gaza. It would be serviced by organizations other than UNRWA.

~ Peter Ford, Special Representative to the Commissioner General of UNRWA, "The Future of UNRWA and Hamas in Gaza" by Rick Sterling, LewRockwell.com, June 6, 2024

Jeremy Hammond on protesters using "from the river to the sea" as a slogan

This reminds me of the whole "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" slogan that they've been chanting and the media keep hammering on how the U.S. Congress and House keep passing resolutions defining that as antisemitic.  Well, that's just so utterly stupid.  Not to say that there aren't people who chant that who [are] antisemitic, but most of these kids on college campuses who are chanting the slogan "from the river to the sea," they're not advocating the slaughter of Jews in Israel.  They're advocating a single-state solution in which all people have equal rights.  They're opposing the apartheid regime.  And that's what they mean when they say "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."  

The other thing that renders that accusation that that's "antisemitic" so stupid is that if you look at the charter of Likud, the party of current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they use essentially the same slogan saying "from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, there will be only Israeli sovereignty."  Evidently Hamas plagiarized from Likud.

~ Jeremy Hammond, "Scott Horton and I Explain How Israel Supported Hamas," Jeremy R. Hammond Blog, 8:40 mark, May 17, 2024

Ilan Pappé on Zionism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

The Nakba is a bit of a misleading term because it means in Arabic "a catastrophe."  It really, what the Palestinians suffered, was not a natural catastrophe, rather ethnic cleansing, which is a clear policy motivated by clear ideology.  And that policy was part - and a total part - of the Zionist program for Palestine from the very inception of the movement in the late 19th century.

Of course very early on they didn't have the capacity to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland.  But already in the mid 1920s, when the Zionist community in Palestine was still very small, it was able, through purchase of land on which there were many Palestinian villages, to convince the British Mandatory power to evict thirteen Palestinian villages, and that was between 1925 and 1926.  And then slowly this process of buying land and evicting the people who lived on this for hundreds of years brought the Zionist movement where it purchased at least 6% of the land of Palestine, which was of course not enough.  

And then they went to the big ethnic cleansing of 1948.  But as we know, it didn't stop in 1948.  Israel continued to expel Palestinian villages between '48 and '67 [which formed to move] the Palestinian minority in Israel which were allegedly citizens of Israel.  Israel expelled 300,000 Palestinians during the Six-Days War in June 1967.  And since June 1967 until today about 600,000 Palestinians, in one way or another, were dislocated and uprooted by Israel.  

And of course now we have a case of ethnic cleansing that even overtakes the magnitude of the ethnic cleansing during 1948.  So there is not one moment in the history of the Palestinians in Palestine since the arrival of Zionism in Palestine in which Palestinians are [not] potentially under danger of losing their home, their fields, their businesses and their homeland.

~ Ilan Pappé, "Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Interrogation at U.S. Airport and 'Collapse of the Zionist Project'," Democracy Now!, 6:25 mark, May 22, 2024

Jeremy Hammond on Israel's war on terror

That the real threat to Israel has been that of peace achieved through implementation of the two-state solution is well evidenced by its policies and their predictable consequences.  This is oftentimes the only rational explanation for Israel’s actions.  Its continued occupation, oppression, and violence toward the Palestinians have served to escalate the threat of terrorism against Israeli civilians, but this is a price Israeli leaders are willing to pay.  Indeed, the threat of terrorism has often served as a necessary pretext to further goals that would not be politically feasible absent such a threat.

This was recognized within the Israeli government itself.  In October 2003, for example, Moshe Ya’alon, the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), criticized the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon because they served to increase hatred of Israel and strengthen terrorist organizations.

~ Jeremy R. Hammond, Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

2016

Walter Block: "I would say that 75% of libertarians favor Israel" regarding the Gaza invasion

I regard the Mises Institute as the preeminent Austro-libertarian group.  However, that's only the Mises Institute.  There's the Cato Institute which is much more pro-Israel, Reason Foundation is much more pro-Israel...  I would say that 75% of libertarians favor Israel and 25% don't, which is roughly my assessment of the overall population of the U.S.

~ Walter Block, "Is Zionism a Libertarian Movement?," Gilad Alper, 1:01:00 mark, May 18, 2024

Rabbi Barclay on the killing of Palestinian children

Candace Owens: Do you think it is sad when an innocent Palestinian child dies?

A: Candace, I cry every day.  And it's not just for Israel.  And this is one of the things you clearly do not understand!  The same when most don't who are antisemitic don't get it.  I cry for what's going on in Israel.  I cry just as much for what we are forced to do.  Golda Meir had a great quote.  She said that "One day we may be able to forgive them for killing Israeli children.  We will never be able to forgive them for making us kill their children."

~ Rabbi Barclay, interview with Candace Owens, Candace Owens Podcast, 30:20 mark, March 18, 2024

Connor O'Keeffe on pro-Palestinian student protests and cultural Marxism

The strategic ineptitude of these students can seem almost astounding until you remember what they are being taught at these schools.  Universities like Columbia have gone all in on identity politics and social justice.  A more accurate name would be trait-based collectivized justice.  The dominant historical narrative that permeates almost every department and class curriculum considers the world to mostly have been in balance until white, western Europeans decided to get rich by stealing and expropriating resources from the rest of the world.  Putting aside how economically and historically delusional that is, by framing history as a series of injustices committed by an entire identity group on other identity groups in their entirety, adherents conclude that justice can only be attained on a collective, group level. 

And so, when students see the horrific images and videos coming out of Gaza of mostly brown, mostly Muslim people being blown up, crushed, and starved by white-looking descendants of European immigrants, it seems to fit neatly into their learned worldview.  So even though, in this case, it leads most of them to the correct general conclusion, it shouldn’t be a surprise that an imprecise, historically flawed narrative leads to imprecise, strategically flawed activism.

~ Connor O'Keeffe, "What Campus Protesters and Their Critics Get Right and Wrong," Mises Wire, May 1, 2024

Jeremy Hammond: Biden's concerns for humanitarian situation in Gaza is a cynical PR ploy

Under the administration of President Joseph R. Biden, the US government has been portraying itself as being seriously concerned about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has been waging a devastating military assault that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on January 26 judged to be a plausible genocide...  Biden also said that his administration had been “working non-stop to establish an immediate ceasefire” that would “ease the intolerable humanitarian crisis”. 

“We have been very, very clear about our concerns over the humanitarian situation there and how unacceptable it is that so many people are in such dire need,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told reporters.

But the reality is that the US government has been fully supporting Israel’s military assault on the civilian population of Gaza, including by arming Israel and repeatedly blocking ceasefire resolutions in the United Nations (UN) Security Council aimed at enabling the delivery of urgently required humanitarian aid.  Transparently, the Biden administration’s proclaimed desire to help the people of Gaza is a cynical public relations effort aimed at trying to create an illusion that the US government is not complicit in Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity.

The Biden administration is seeking to distance itself from responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe because of the support he has been losing among members of his own Democratic party, and with the ICJ already having judged the situation to be a plausible genocide, US government officials are undoubtedly motivated by a desire to avoid potential future charges of complicity and failing in its own moral and legal obligation under the 1948 Genocide Convention to act to prevent genocide.

[...] 

The objections to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s months-long assault on the civilian population of Gaza coming from within his own political party have created a public relations problem for the White House during an election year, but American voters should not delude themselves into the belief that the US government is a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem. The American people have the power to change the course of history for the better, but they have to actually use it. A simple first step would be to recognize that there are certain positions that ought to automatically disqualify a presidential candidate from consideration—and supporting a genocide is certainly one of them. 

If upholding basic moral values this way rules out all three of the top contenders in the presidential race—Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—then so be it. 

~ Jeremy R. Hammond, "US Humanitarian Aid to Gaza Is a Cynical PR Ploy," Foreign Policy, March 20, 2024

Mahmoud Issa on the economic costs of the Gaza invasion

Israel's retaliation has killed more than 33,000 people, with thousands more still unrecovered in the rubble, according to Gaza health authorities. Most of the territory's 2.3 million people are now homeless.

Long blockaded by Israel, Gaza's economy had struggled for years before the current conflict, suffering one of the world's highest unemployment rates.

The economic shock inflicted by the latest war - the deadliest in decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict - is one of the largest observed in recent history, the World Bank and the United Nations said in a recent report.

As of Jan. 31, it said, the enclave had suffered some $18.5 billion of damage to critical infrastructure - equal to 97% of the GDP in 2022 of Gaza and the West Bank, where Palestinians exercise limited self-rule under Israeli military occupation. 

~ Mahmoud Issa, "A life's work destroyed - Palestinian counts cost of Gaza war," Reuters, April 5, 2024

Palestinian owner of a mobile phone business
holds phones inside his shop which was
destroyed in an Israeli strike

Colonel Douglas Macgregor on Chuck Schumer's speech on the Gaza invasion

Cyrus Janssen: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, he did come out a couple of weeks ago and say Netanyahu is the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East.  He had a very powerful speech that obviously not supported by the Netanyahu regime.  He was very upset about that, immediately came out blasting him.  Of course you have some people within our Senate and our Congress who had pushed back against Schumer.  Do you think that was really the Democrats trying to somehow save some face here?  Because at one point we just passed a bill for an additional $3.8 billion to Israel and at the same standpoint we are blocking now foreign aid to the UNRWA, which is the only relief agency which actually provides humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza...

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Well, first of all I don't think Chuck Schumer was terribly serious about any of it.  That was sort of a smokescreen designed to give, as you say, the Democrats and President Biden some cover.  It wasn't taken seriously in Israel because they know he's not serious.  You heard him speak: "I've supported Israel all my life.  There's no one more supportive of Israel than I am.."  Effectively declaring himself an Israeli.  

~ Colonel Douglas Macgregor, interview with Cyrus Janssen, 12:20 mark, April 3, 2024

Alex Kane on the Democrat fantasy about blaming Netanyahu for the Gaza catastrophe

[Senator Chuck] Schumer’s address is the most notable of several recent public statements in which Democrats have positioned Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza—which has killed at least 32,000 Palestinians and engineered a looming famine for over a million—as “Netanyahu’s war.” ... 

But despite Democrats’ repeated suggestion that Netanyahu is the impetus for Israel’s war, political analysts say that in reality the prime minister’s actions are in step with Israel’s political mainstream.  “Schumer is operating in this fantasy that if you get rid of Netanyahu, you might be able to get somebody else who’s more moderate who could then save the relationship between the US and Israel under the pretense of support for progressive values and democracy,” said Omar Baddar, a Palestinian American political analyst.  But this narrative ignores how Israeli politicians almost across the board agree with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as do the majority of Israelis.  Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the Israeli opposition, supports the ongoing assault, as does war cabinet member Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival and the man who, according to polling, would become prime minister if Israel held elections today...

Instead of constituting a substantive shift in US support for Israel, experts say, Democrats’ emboldened critique of Netanyahu should be understood as an attempt to respond to growing voter frustration without changing policy, as the Biden administration remains unwilling to use US aid and arms exports to Israel as leverage to demand a change in behavior.  In this context, the choice to focus on Netanyahu “is a political decision to avoid outright criticism of Israel’s war conduct,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.  For Schumer, in particular, blaming Netanyahu as an individual was a way “to avoid the implication that he is lessening his support for the Israeli state or the Israeli people,” she said. “Instead, Schumer is focusing on a man who is unpopular among Democrats to say, ‘See, we are standing up for our values, so voters should stop being mad at us.’”

~ Alex Kane, "Chuck Schumer and Democrats’ New Line on 'Netanyahu’s War' The majority leader’s recent speech exemplifies his party’s effort to isolate Netanyahu and pacify voters without changing policy," Jewish Currents, March 26, 2024

Schumer speaks at November 14th
"March for Israel" in Washington, DC

Caitline Johnstone on Israel's targeting of hospitals in Gaza

Why would Israel want to destroy Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure?  The answer to that question has been clear for months: to make the land uninhabitable for the Palestinians.  The same reason they’re deliberately starving Gazans, destroying their homes, continually moving them from place to place and bombing every “safe zone” they create. 

This is naturally giving rise to a situation in which the inhabitants of Gaza will either die or flee to some other country — which just so happens to be exactly what Israel wants them to do. 

It’s so obvious what’s happening here.  Painfully obvious.  Poke-you-in-the-eyeballs obvious.  But we’re still subjected to a western political-media class who keeps forcefully telling us that this blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is not what it looks like.  Telling us that all this starvation and destruction and elimination of healthcare services and the way it directly places pressure on the Palestinians to leave their homeland is just a series of coincidences arising from Israel’s “war” of “defense,”  That only by pure happenstance does it look exactly the same as the advancement of an agenda that Israelis have sought to advance for generations. 

Well I personally am through with having my intelligence insulted, and I hope you are too.  The sky is blue, a spade’s a spade, the emperor has no clothes, and Israel is conducting a very obvious ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

~ Caitline Johnstone, "Israel's Savage Destruction Of Gaza's Healthcare System Is Exactly What It Looks Like," Caitline's Newsletter, April 1, 2024

The Economist on the failure of Israel's invasion of Gaza

If you are a friend of Israel this is a deeply uncomfortable moment.  In October it launched a justified war of self-defence against Hamas, whose terrorists had committed atrocities that threaten the idea of Israel as a land where Jews are safe.  Today Israel has destroyed perhaps half of Hamas’s forces.  But in important ways its mission has failed. 

First, in Gaza, where its reluctance to help provide or distribute aid has led to an avoidable humanitarian catastrophe, and where the civilian toll from the war is over 20,000 and growing.  The hard-right government of Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected plans for post-war Gaza to be run by either the Palestinian Authority (pa) or an international force.  The likeliest outcome is a military reoccupation.  If you add the West Bank, Israel could permanently hold sway over 4m-5m Palestinians.

Israel has also failed at home.  The problems go deeper than Mr Netanyahu’s dire leadership.  A growing settler movement and ultra-Orthodox population have tilted politics to the right and polarised society.  Before October 7th this was visible in a struggle over judicial independence.  The war has raised the stakes, and although the hard-right parties of the coalition are excluded from the war cabinet they have compromised Israel’s national interest by using incendiary rhetoric, stoking settler violence and trying to sabotage aid and post-war planning.  Israel’s security establishment is capable and pragmatic, but no longer fully in charge. 

Israel’s final failure is clumsy diplomacy.  Fury at the war was inevitable, especially in the global south, but Israel has done a poor job of countering it.  “Lawfare”, including spurious genocide allegations, is damaging its reputation.  Young Americans sympathise with it less than their parents do.  President Joe Biden has tried to restrain Mr Netanyahu’s government by publicly embracing it, but failed.  On March 14th Chuck Schumer, Israel’s greatest ally in the Senate, decried Hamas’s atrocities but said Israel’s leader was “lost”.

It is a bleak picture that is not always acknowledged in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Mr Netanyahu talks of invading Rafah, Hamas’s last redoubt, while the hard right fantasises about resettling Gaza. Many mainstream Israelis are deluding themselves, too. They believe the unique threats to Israel justify its ruthlessness and that the war has helped restore deterrence. Gaza shows that if you murder Israelis, destruction beckons. Many see no partner for peace—the pa is rotten and polls say 93% of Palestinians deny Hamas’s atrocities even took place. Occupation is the least-bad option, they conclude. Israelis would prefer to be popular abroad, but condemnation and antisemitism are a small price to pay for security. As for America, it has been angry before. The relationship is not about to rupture. If Donald Trump returns he may once again give Israel a free pass. 

This seductive story is a manifesto for disaster.

~ "At a moment of military might, Israel looks deeply vulnerable," The Economist, March 23, 2024

Charles Schumer on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a two-state solution

Gaza is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe.  Entire families wiped out, whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, mass displacement, children suffering.  We should not let the complexities of this conflict stop us from stating the plain truth: Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas and Israel has a moral obligation to do better.  The United States has an obligation to do better.  I believe the United States must provide robust humanitarian aid to Gaza and pressure the Israelis to let more of it get through to the people who need it.  

Jewish people throughout the centuries have empathized with those who are suffering and who are oppressed because we have known so much of that ourselves.  As the Torah teaches us, every human life is precious.  Every single innocent life lost, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a tragedy, as the scripture says, "destroys an entire world."  What horrifies so many Jews, especially, is our sense that Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear.  We must be better than our enemies lest we become them.

[...]

And now, as a result of those inflamed tensions in both Israeli and Palestinian communities, people on all sides of this war are turning away from the two-state solution, including Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent weeks has said out loud repeatedly what many have long suspected by outright rejecting the idea of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty.  As the highest ranking Jewish elected official in our government and as a staunch defender of Israel, I rise today to say unequivocally: this is a grave mistake, for Israel, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world.  The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution, a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity and mutual recognition.

[...] 

Jews have a human right to their own state just as any other people do, Palestinians included.  As I have said, there are also some Israelis who oppose even a two-state solution with a demilitarized Palestinian state because they fear that it might tolerate or be a harbor for further terrorism against the Jewish state.  I understand these fears, but the bitter reality is that a single state, controlled by Israel, which they advocate, guarantees certain war forever and further isolation of the Jewish community in the world to the extent that its future would be jeopardized.  Let me elaborate.  They say the definition on insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  If Israel were to not only maintain the status quo, but to go beyond that and tighten its control over Gaza and the West Bank, as some in the Netanyahu administration have suggested, in effect creating a de facto single state, then what reasonable expectation can we have that Hamas and their allies will lay down their arms?  It would mean constant war.  On top of that, Israel moving closer to a single state entirely under its control would further rupture its relationship with the rest of the world, including the United States.  Support for Israel has declined worldwide in the last few months, and this trend will only get worse if the Israeli government continues down its current path.

~ Sen. Charles Schumer, speech before Senate, March 14, 2024

Phil Duffy on the ancient Jewish claim to Palestine

In the final analysis, the Zionists are asking the world, but particularly the United States, to issue them a license to commit genocide. 

I believe that the Zionist claim is that God awarded them Palestine.  I have seen various versions of this, and would welcome any Zionist to point to their version of the story.  It always comes down to this:

1. The Jews voluntarily left Palestine for greener pastures in Egypt (the story of Joseph).
2. At first things worked out but ultimately the Egyptians enslaved the Jews. 
3. Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and into the desert (Exodus). 
4. Moses died and was succeeded by Joshua who led the Jews against the Canaanites who had then homesteaded Palestine. 
5. The Jews massacred the Canaanites and took possession of Palestine.

I have some reservations about this account.  I don’t think Jesus would have recommended to his fellow Jews that they act similarly during his time on Earth, but I’ll accept the Zionist version, with a question – “Is that all you have as proof that Palestine belongs to you?”

The Jewish Diaspora (dispersion) presents a theological challenge for Jews.  After 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the Temple, huge numbers of Jews left Judea, leading to the claim by Zionists that they were driven off the land that was legitimately theirs.  The claim does not square with history.  Zionists are not claiming they have a right to Judea, but to the larger landmass that was occupied by Jews of Judea and the 10 lost tribes of Israel.  Those 10 tribes split with the two tribes of Judea after the death of Solomon and have been assimilated into other cultures.  Further calling into question the claim that Jews were driven from Judea is that many remained and lived side-by-side with Arabs.  Those who left after 70 AD and became a part of the Diaspora were probably only a fraction of the number of Jews already in the Diaspora.  A large number already had left Israel to live their lives elsewhere.

In summary, most of the Jews who left Israel did so voluntarily, and those who left after 70 AD, although feeling the pressure of having lost to the Romans in an unsuccessful uprising, did so voluntarily.

~ Phil Duffy, February 1, 2024