August 7, 2025: Issue #96

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

Gaza. Israel. Palestine. History, horror, and karma. Thinking out loud.

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INTRODUCTION

After having written on Gaza and Palestine at considerable length in earlier issues, especially during the first year of the war, I had been easing off weighing in more recently, partly because so many other people were doing so quite cogently and what more was there to say, but also because I was almost struck dumb by the horror of what was continuing to happen, notwithstanding all the cogent commentary. In recent weeks though I have been returning to the topic with a greater sense of urgency—I notice this partly in the way Palestine-adjacent citations have been swelling in my ongoing Commonplace books—and I’ve been wanting to put my current thoughts in some kind of order. Hence this issue. I will begin by sampling those Commonplace books (rejiggering the entries to some extent along historical chronological lines, with no attempt to be encyclopedic in that regard, simply mining a certain tenor of citations that surprised me, and surprise me at my sense of surprise and how thoroughly this vein of candor and trepidation and prescience has been occluded in the years since). I will then proceed to a consideration of Workpoints, occasions for further reflection. In so doing I am hoping as well to engage the rest of you, and would welcome comments and suggestions.

An aerial view of Gaza City looking east from a Jordanian humanitarian airdrop last week. (Photo: Heidi Levine, Washington Post.)

Commonplace Book

1898 Nachman Syrkin (founder of Labor Zionism, the taproot of Israel’s eventual Labor party): “Palestine, thinly populated, in which the Jews today constitute 10 per cent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews.”

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Three months after the 1929 Hebron massacre {which saw the deaths of nearly 70 Jews and scores of others maimed or wounded}, the celebrated historian Hans Kohn – active in the Zionist movement since 1909 – wrote the following letter: “I feel that I can no longer remain a leading official within the Zionist Organization… We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course, the Arabs attacked us this past August. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. But we are obliged to look into the deeper cause of this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years [since the start of the British occupation] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. We have been relying exclusively upon Great Britain’s military might. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with Arabs… for twelve years we pretended that the Arabs did not exist and were glad when we were not reminded of their existence.” (Jewish National and University Library 376/224, Kohn to Berthold Feiwel [1875–1937]. Jerusalem, 21 Nov. 1929).

(https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210819-the-massacre-of-jews-in-1929-hebron-is-a-microcosm-of-the-conflict/)

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In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism {which would lead in a direct line to the likes of Menachim Begin, Likud, and the Netanyahus, père et fils}, wrote “The Iron Wall”. While claiming Zionist Jews would respect other religions, he revealed his goal:

There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out.

Years later, he admitted how he would achieve his goal:

“…the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. … Hitler — as odious as he is to us — has given this idea a good name in the world.” —Ze’ev Jabotinsky, 1940

{Will Shetterly, Medium, “Zionists always Dreamt of Ethnic Cleansing”}

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"A Zionist is a national socialist, a national socialist is a Zionist," wrote Joseph Roth – one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 20th century and a prophetic observer of the rise of Nazism – in a letter in 1935, going on to say that what he wished "to do was protect Europe and humanity, both from the Nazis and the Hitler-Zionists.”
(Richard Flanagan, quoted in my Australian cousin Nicholas Gruen’s Substack, 7/20/25)

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“The unique durability of the Jewish community is to a large degree based on our geographical dispersion, and the fact that we consequently do not possess instruments of power that will allow us to commit great stupidities out of national fanaticism.”
— Albert Einstein, 1936

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“I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.”
—Albert Einstein, 1938

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“Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries— all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.”
— Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, 1940

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“I am in favor of Palestine being developed as a Jewish Homeland but not as a separate State. It seems to me a matter for simple common sense that we cannot ask to be given the political rule over Palestine where two thirds of the population are not Jewish. What we can and should ask is a secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.”
— Albert Einstein, 1946

(Three Einstein quotes and the Weisz above all from Will Shetterly on Medium.com, May 22, 2025, “Zionism’s Identity Crisis”)

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“All people who do not want this war must leave together with their women and children in order to be safe. This is going to be a cruel war, with no mercy or compassion. There is no reason why you should endanger yourselves.”
— leaflets signed by the Haganah high command advising the Palestinians to flee, 1948

“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”
—David Ben-Gurion, 1948
{Shetterly}

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Dec. 4, 1948 NYT

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Flash forward to 1983, with Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces:

“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

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The eminent Jewish historian, the late Tony Judt, put it this way in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006:

When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of 'antisemitism' – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.

(Flanagan in Gruen 7/20/25)

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And it can be argued [all this] was part of the project from the get-go. Here is Bibi Netanyahu’s greatest influence, his beloved father, Benzion, in 2009, from Peter Beinart’s 2012 book, The Crisis of Zionism:

In 2009, at the age of ninety-nine, [Benzion] told the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Israel should retake the Gaza Strip, from which it had withdrawn four years earlier. “We should conquer any disputed territory in the land of Israel … Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war … You don’t return land.”

… In a 2003 book on Zionism’s founders, he … described his proposals for relocating the Arabs of Palestine “to Arabia, Iraq, Syria — anywhere — as long as they will get out of the land of Israel,” without a word of criticism. “The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump into the river,” Netanyahu told Maariv in 2009. “What does the Arab’s jump mean?” asked the interviewer, trying to decipher the metaphor. Netanyahu explained: “That they won’t be able to face the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist and they will run away from here.”

(Andrew Sullivan, Weekly Dish, Aug 1, 2025)

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A haiku of my own from a while back:

The IDF Soldier’s Jenin lament

Palestinians
keep smashing their damned faces
into my sore fist

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I’m remembering the response I recorded a few issues back that an Israeli expat reported having gotten when he questioned a friend back in Israel about whether they knew what was actually going on in Gaza. “I know enough,” came the reply, “to know that I don’t want to know any more.” Which at this point, and frankly through much of its history, could well serve as the defining motto for the entire country.

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Which brings us up to this past week, when Israeli Cabinet Minister Gila Gamiel released a video of her scheme for an eventual Gaza Riviera (that’s her at the beginning of the video):

For the full video, see here—and think about the sheer ghastliness of these happy young Israelis lustily chowing down atop the very graves of today’s starved Gazan children. Another defining image.

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Workpoints

1. After Gaza, Never Again will Israel or its apologists be able to play the Holocaust card (especially the part that asks How could the world have stood by as…?).

2. There was no question that in 1945, after what had been done to them, the Jews deserved and may even have required a state of their own: it’s just that it should have been, say, the state of Bavaria. Which is to say that it should have been carved out of the former Nazi Reich in the context of a wider post-war settlement. That would have made sense and particularly (in a Europe already awash in changing borders and shifting populations anyway) carried a certain compelling moral logic. Now it may be true that Europeans generally would never have countenanced such a state in the middle of Europe (antisemitism being a far more than merely German problem), but that in no way justified the insertion of a Jewish state into Palestine, against the wishes of the vast majority of that place’s inhabitants—the last such European colonial project instantiated at the very moment that such colonialism was on retreat everywhere else in the world.

2a. People are always wondering why the Palestinians don’t engage in Gandhian nonviolence, or Martin Luther King-style peaceful marches, instead of resorting to the sorts of violent intifada-like uprisings favored by the likes of Hamas. The answer is of course that the Palestinians long have (despite the fact that from early on the Mossad for their part engaged in assassination campaigns aimed at liquidating the sorts of moderate leaders who advocated such approaches, people like Wael Zuaiter in 1972, Kamal Nasser in 1973, and Isaam Sartawi in 1983—look them up), culminating in the weekly Friday Marches of Return toward the northern Gaza border of 2018-9, in which tens of thousands of Gazan civilians took part, and to which the IDF regularly responded with lethal targeted fire by sharpshooters aimed at unarmed demonstrators. According to Wikipedia’s comprehensively sourced survey:

At least 189 Palestinians were killed between 30 March and 31 December 2018 [during these marches]. (An independent United Nations commission said that at least 29 out of the 189 killed were militants.) Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and live ammunition. According to Robert Mardini, head of Middle East for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), more than 13,000 Palestinians were wounded as of 19 June 2018. The majority were wounded severely, with some 1,400 struck by three to five bullets. No Israelis were physically harmed from 30 March to 12 May, until one Israeli soldier was reported as slightly wounded on 14 May, the day the protests peaked. Some 35,000 Palestinians protested that day, with thousands approaching the fence. The same day, 59 or 60 Palestinians were shot dead at twelve clash points along the border fence.

Alas, the demonstrations failed to galvanize any sort of serious response on the part of Israelis, or for that matter the rest of the world. Generally speaking, the attitude of Israelis whenever Palestinians weren’t violently rising up in response to the conditions of their abjection was that everything was basically fine and nothing needed to be changed; whenever Palestinians did respond with violence, the immediate Israeli response was, How can we be expected to negotiate with monsters like these? This despite the fact that the Netanyahu regime itself actively supported Hamas’s dominion over Gaza, for example by facilitating Qatar’s subsidizing of that dominion to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, as a way of fracturing Palestinian solidarity and then being able to claim that Israel had no unified Palestinian entity with which to negotiate.

Such was the situation right up to the fall of 2023 when it looked as though Netanyahu, the Trump administration, and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of some grand settlement which would have bracketed the quiescent Palestinians out of the equation altogether. At which point Hamas launched its October 7th intervention. Which is in no way to excuse the horrific violence that ensued. But nor is it possible to evaluate any of what transpired in the absence of that prior backdrop.

3. By this point, coming on two years on, there is a spectrum of Diaspora thinking that runs the gamut from “As a Jew, I always support the state of Israel, that’s the main thing being a Jew in today’s world means,” thru “As a Jew, I oppose the current government of Israel,” thru “As a Jew, I abhor the current outlook and behavior of the Israeli nation as a whole (with perhaps a few, shockingly few exceptions),” thru “As a Jew, I now agree with those fellow Jews who were against the formation of a Jewish state in the first place” thru “The Jews have forfeited whatever right to a state they might once have had” thru “I’ve had it with Israel, my own Judaism no longer has anything to do with that benighted place.” (Corollary to that last: Jews are always best in exile; every time they get a state, all they do is fuck it up. Isn’t that after all a sort of Cliff’s notes summary of the entirety of the Old Testament?)

3a. Which still doesn’t answer the question of what is now to be done with the 7 million plus Jews that live in the territory “Between the River and the Sea” in that part of the world (any more than it answers the question of what is to be done with the 7 million Palestinians). If, thanks to the untrammeled actions of coming on decades of Israeli insertion of Facts on the Ground, it may indeed no longer be possible to envision any sort of Two-State solution (the hankering after same having become a fig leaf over the need for more decisive action), why is it obvious that one side or the other should be the one that should have to leave by way of a mass ethnic cleansing? Short of that, what might a confederated one-state solution, with civic and human rights assigned to all of its inhabitants as equal fellow citizens and no religious carve-outs whatsoever (for example on the order of something like Belgium) look like?

3b. Besides which the national destinies of Jews and Palestinians run so uncannily parallel. Palestinians, as has often been noted, are veritably the Jews of the Arab World: nobody wants them either. They too feature long secular traditions (many of them are not even Muslim), they are exceptionally well educated and famously resilient and resourceful (all of which adds to the suspicion in which they are held, especially among Arab governing elites). (On top of which, incidentally, they are every bit as “Semitic” as Jews are, if not more so—veritable sibling peoples—notwithstanding the unipolarity with which the term “anti-Semitism” gets tossed around.) Imagine the veritable dynamo that might have been unleashed if ever the two peoples had been allowed to have worked in concert as equal partners (and might yet be if ever they still were).

4. I, at any rate, consider myself an ardent nineteenth century Zionist, by which I mean that I believe that a people currently without a state deserve a state, or at least full and equal citizenship, in the land of Palestine.

4a. If told that that sort of attitude simply pegs me as a self-hating Jew, as I once was by Alan Dershowitz when I hazarded such a line during the Q & A period after one of his archly pro-Israeli tirades several years ago, my reply tends to run along the lines of, “No, I’m a Jew who likes himself fine, I hate you.”

4b. But in what way am I a Jew? For me the moral core of Judaism, or at least the Jewish cultural traditions I feel myself having grown out of and being drawn back to, has everything to do with living in a state of exile, as part of a vast international diaspora, a state of exile that is in turn somehow resonant with and revelatory of the entire human condition. The tradition from out of which Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kafka, Rosa Luxembourg, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and so forth all arose, which I (like Gershom Scholem) am convinced has deep roots in a Kabbalistic loam.

5. It seems to me there are all sorts of relatively easy questions at this point (viz, Is what Israel is currently doing evil? Should there be an immediate cease fire followed by a massive humanitarian program of rescue and reconstruction, much of it paid for by Israeli reparations? Should Israel’s leaders be held to some sort of international criminal account? And so forth.) There is on the other hand one that I am calling The Hard Question. Which is to say how to answer when full bore belligerent Israelis Zionists demand to know, re wholesale aggressive conquest and ethnic cleansing or apartheid bantustans and the like: “How come you got to do it and we don’t?”

5a. Before trying to answer that question, a little history. Because it is entirely pertinent to note how back in the 1920s when the Nazis were first beginning to formulate the potential legal framework for any eventual solution to “the Jewish problem” (and for that matter the whole question of how the coming Reich would be able to carve out its necessary lebensraum to the east), they sent scholars to America to study both the sequential eviscerations of the original native populations, and the Jim Crow Laws designed to contain the descendants of the country’s onetime slaves. For a good summary of the literature here, see the last half of Alex Ross’s excellent survey piece, “The Hitler Vortex,” in the April 30, 2018 New Yorker, to wit:

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. James O. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

And so forth (for the whole piece, on this side of the paywall, see here). For our purposes here, though, the main point is that Jabotinsky and his confederates self-consciously styled themselves and their movement after such fascist and specifically Nazi analogs and came to similar sorts of adaptations of the prior American models by way of the very manner through which the Nazis were deploying them. So, it’s not a question of “How come we don’t get to do the same thing?” Israelis have been doing so, and with ever more focused ferocity in the era since Begin’s ascension, and (following the assassination of a relatively more moderate Rabin) that of Netanyahu.

5b. Now as for why this might not be a good idea generally, and all the more specifically in the Jewish case, I hold, for starters, with the seminal ruling (37a:13) from the leading Jewish Sanhedrin court from ancient times:

THEREFORE WAS ONE SOLITARY MAN CREATED FIRST,
ADAM,
TO TEACH YOU THAT IF ANYONE DESTROYS
A SINGLE SOUL FROM THE CHILDREN OF MAN,
SCRIPTURE CHARGES HIM AS THOUGH HE HAD DESTROYED
AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE...

A child at Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. (Photo: Geir Stray Andreassen)

But beyond that, I hold with something I (admittedly somewhat facetiously) refer to as the Kabbalistic notion of karma. Which is simply to say that What Goes Around Comes Around. You behave in that way and you eventually find yourself in a pariah state still led by the likes of Netanyahu, with thousands of onetime IDF citizen soldiers lapsing into all manner of PTSD sequelae after all they were forced to see and do, and thousands others of their fellow citizens self-deporting to avoid similar fates among their own children… and who is to say what will happen to you next, and what you will deserve to have happen to you.

6. Having said that, and coming full circle, as the once-stellar (since fired) MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan noted in a piece from last week’s Guardian, “Retired Israeli Maj Gen Yitzhak Brick acknowledged in November 2023: ‘All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.’”

And if Netanyahu and his confederates have earned a one-way ticket to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, so too have Trump and Rubio and for that matter Biden and Blinken. And in Karmic terms, so have we all.

It might also be noted how, in karmic terms, Trump and what he is doing to this country might well be seen as a direct outgrowth of the sorts of history surveyed earlier and how the ways in which that sour heritage warped our body politic continue to play out to this day.

7. Thoughts? (Please add your own in the Comment section.)

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ANIMAL MITCHELL

Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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