Jews in Israel and around the world marked the one-year anniversary (yahrzeit) of the deaths of 1139 people killed by Hamas and its allies in the shocking and brutal attack of October 7, 2023. Some will mark it on October 24, which corresponds to the Hebrew date of Simchat Torah eve when the attack occurred. The victims included 695 Israeli civilians, among them 36 children, 373 military, police, and Internal security (Shabak) personnel, and 71 foreigners. My family suffered a direct loss that day.

PHOTO: © Ahmad Gharabli, AFP

On Sunday, Sept. 1 the Israeli army announced it recovered the bodies of six Israeli civilian hostages aged 23 to 40 in Rafah. Israeli army sources announced that Hamas fighters killed the hostages at point blank range a day or two before the army closed in on the tunnel in which they were found. Taking and murdering civilian hostages are serious war crimes according to International Humanitarian Law.

Five of the six, Ori Danin, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi, were seized at the Nova music festival. Carmel Gat was abducted from nearby Kibbutz Be’eri. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents addressed the Democratic Party’s national convention last month, was a US citizen. Some 100 hostages remain in Gaza. About one-third of them are presumed dead.

Many sectors of Israeli society erupted in protest upon hearing the news

Image from Tony Karon and Daniel Levy, “Israel is Losing This War,” The Nation

Growing numbers of Israeli observers have been saying publicly that Israel cannot win the Gaza war. Their judgment has nothing to do with what a new Human Rights Watch report defines as the war crimes and crimes against humanity that Hamas and its allies committed during their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Rather, it is a consequence of Israel’s response to October 7: a military strategy prioritizing mass bombardment, the annihilationist rhetoric of its military and political leaders, and media reporting that obscures the massive destruction, loss of civilian life, and humanitarian catastrophe that the rest of the world is witnessing (the daily Haaretz and +972 webzine are important exceptions).

Israel’s continuing war on the Gaza Strip and the shocking accounts of the human carnage it is inflicting on Rafah are deepening its international isolation. Global opinion is outraged by the unrelenting live-stream display of gruesome Palestinian civilian casualties, the targeting of humanitarian aid workers and journalists, and images of wanton cruelty by Israeli soldiers circulating on social media. Diplomatic and legal measures long discussed as alternatives to the failed U.S.-managed “peace-process” are materializing more rapidly since Israeli leaders publicly announced their genocidal intentions in invading Gaza.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jews demonstrating near US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's home in Brooklyn, NY, Passover, April 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Here in the United States, the most prominent consequence of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip is the emergence of a broad-based movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in opposition to U.S. support for Israel's massive slaughter of civilians in full view.

The riveting artistic power of “The Battle of Algiers” rendered Algeria the best-known instance of settler colonialism and armed struggle for decolonization and national independence. The black and white newsreel style of the film and its compelling music uncompromisingly impress on the viewer both the structural and the kinetic violence of the French settler colonial regime and the urban terror unleashed by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1956-57.

A popular reading sees “The Battle of Algiers” simply as a justification of anticolonial armed struggle.

Around 5 pm on Thursday, April 18, 2024, Hebrew University professor and internationally renowned feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested by Israeli police at her home in the Old City of Jerusalem on the charge of incitement to violence.

Photo credit: Netanyhau: is the Obstacle to a (Hostage) Deal. Protesters call for a general strike outside of Tel-Aviv Histadrut union headquarters, April 6, 2024. (Iddo Schejter / The Times of Israel)

Journalists and pundits are assessing what Israel has and hasn’t accomplished as they mark the half-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza.

On March 12 senior administrators at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian from teaching. Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian-Israeli and holds the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University and the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is an internationally renowned scholar and specializes in trauma, state crimes, criminology, surveillance, gender violence, and violence against children.

PHOTO: Netanyahu greeting Biden at Ben-Gurion Airport, Oct. 18, 2023. [Brendan Smialowski/AFP]

“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation,” wrote Irfan Galaria in a Los Angeles Times opinion article describing his 10 days volunteering with MedGlobal in the Gaza Strip. Why doesn’t President Biden see what Dr. Galaria along with UN agencies, humanitarian organizations, human rights NGOs, and the International Court of Justice see: plausible evidence of genocide. Or, if he sees it, why does he actively abet it by defunding UNRWA, the largest humanitarian relief operation in the Gaza Strip, while continuing to arm and run international diplomatic interference for Israel?

Photo Credit: Grayscale Media/CARE

Tony Karon and Daniel Levy boldly proclaimed two months ago, “Israel Is Losing This War” (The Nation, Dec. 3, 2023). Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+ and a former senior editor at Time magazine and activist in the South African anti-apartheid movement; Levy is a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians under prime ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. They argue that Israel is seeking an impossible absolute military victory and Hamas is seeking a long-term political victory.

In a wide-ranging interview on Democracy Now! two months later, Levy confirmed and expanded on this judgement. He quoted former Israeli Chief-of Staff and current member of the war cabinet Gadi Eisenkot’s assessment that “complete victory over Hamas is unrealistic” and that “it’s not possible to return the hostages, alive, in the near term, without a deal.” Levy termed US proposals for a post-war arrangement – essentially a recommitment to establish Palestinian Bantustans that would be called a “state” – “magical thinking.”

On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest international judicial forum and a branch of the United Nations, issued an interim order directing Israel to take provisional measures in response to South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide. The Court ruled that Israel must refrain from committing genocidal acts of violence covered by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide (referring to the many statements by Israeli officials in command authority expressing apparent genocidal intent), and take immediate measures to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. The Court also ordered Israel to preserve evidence of genocide and to report to the Court within one month on the measures it has taken to carry out its order.

A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of a destroyed building after an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, December 29, 2023. Credit: Fatima Shbair /AP

By now, there has been so much human suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians that it’s a struggle to keep space in our hearts and souls to acknowledge the stories of every individual and family that we can know about as well as the many whose names we may never learn.

Amira Hass has been bravely doing that with her articles in Haaretz. For example, “Israel's Bombs Are Wiping Out Entire Palestinian Families in Gaza.”

Perhaps Amira’s article below, reporting on responses to those articles, will be a wakeup call to the American Jewish rabbis, intellectuals, and institutional leaders who have been reluctant to forthrightly criticize Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip. The majority of them, even self-designated liberals and progressives, have been saying that “good Jews” should accept, even if regretfully, that massive deaths and the destruction of Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip are required to secure a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine. Right-wingers want us, as Amira Hass’s reader does, to revel in it.

On September 12, Israel’s Supreme Court heard arguments for and against petitions from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Movement for Quality Government, and other public watchdog NGOs. The petitioners asked the court to strike down a Basic Law enacted by the Knesset in July that prohibited judicial review of decisions of government officials on the grounds of reasonableness. “Reasonableness” is a British common law doctrine inherited from the Mandate era and incorporated into Israeli jurisprudence.

The case was so momentous that, for the first time ever, all 15 justices sat as a single panel.

art by Shoshke ©

In early August, four Israeli academics affiliated with North American universities initiated a petition entitled “The Elephant in the Room” (full text below) calling on leaders of North American Jewry – foundation leaders, scholars, rabbis, educators – to:

1. Support the Israeli protest movement, yet call on it to embrace equality for Jews and Palestinians within the Green Line and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

2. Support human rights organizations which defend Palestinians and provide real-time information on the lived reality of occupation and apartheid.

3. Commit to overhaul educational norms and curricula for Jewish children and youth in order to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present.

4. Demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organizations.