19.09.24
Editorial Note
Another social experiment by an anti-Israel Israeli academic has emerged.
Her name is Erica Weiss; she is a professor of Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Much of her work focuses on Israel’s army refusal. For example, “Competing ethical regimes in a diverse society: Israeli military refusers;” “Best Practices for Besting the Bureaucracy: Avoiding Military Service in Israel;” Refusal as Act, Refusal as Abstention;” “Incentivized Obedience: How a Gentler Israeli Military Prevents Organized Resistance;” “Beyond Mystification: Hegemony, Resistance, and Ethical Responsibility in Israel;” “Sacrifice as Social Capital among Israeli Conscientious Objectors,” and similar.
Weiss is leading a research project on coexistence called “Praxis of Coexistence.” In Israel, she looks at coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Her team focuses on “working-class and poor cities where residents don’t always buy into the ideology of liberal multiculturalism yet still find ways of living together,” she writes. “We carry out research in six countries, in cities such as Birmingham in England, Ramle in Israel, and Timișoara in Romania, where significant tensions exist between religious and ethnic groups cohabiting the same spaces.” Her project “investigates how communities accommodate differences in culturally resonant ways and asks what everyday practices and justifications they draw on to maintain civil relations and avoid conflict and violence.”
In a recent article, she claims “Criticizing Israel is risky business in academia.” She takes issue with the alleged risks of academics who criticize Israel. She brings three examples: the case of the anthropologist Ghassan Hage, who was dismissed from the Max Planck Society in Berlin for his anti-Israel posts on social media; the Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who claimed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza as well as called for the abolishment of Zionism; and the anthropologist Regev Nathansohn, an untenured professor at Sapir College in Israel, who signed a petition calling for the United States to stop arming Israel and characterized the war on Gaza as “plausible genocide.”
Weiss claims, “Many of the scholars who have been punished for criticizing Israel, including Hage, Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Nathansohn, have long track records of research and writing oriented toward finding ethical paths forward in the ongoing disaster in Israel/Palestine. Their work promotes the kind of dialogue that’s critical to any progress that Jews and Palestinians may hope to make toward peace and justice in the region. These scholars are trying to enact and give life to ethical projects beyond the academy to oppose state violence and ethno nationalism. This is grounded research in the deepest possible way. The only threat they pose is to the ability of Israel to act with impunity.”
She stated, “When I see the work of these scholars being misrepresented and attacked, I feel a duty to speak out.”
Weiss misrepresents the cases: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian made her decision to retire from the Hebrew University and Regev Nathansohn is still teaching at Sapir College.
Her defense of Ghassan Hage is egregious. Hage was indeed dismissed by the Max Planck Society in Berlin, which reacted to his posts, including a poem published on October 7, 2023.
Hage wrote, “When the Zionists occupied Palestine and the Palestinians resisted, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said. And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard and unyielding occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said. And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, and strict occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said…. And here we are today. And the Palestinians, like all colonized people, are still proving that their capacity to resist is endless. They don’t only dig tunnels. They can fly above walls. And the Zionist response is to say: we’ll show you! No more Mr. Nice Guy! We’re going to further upgrade our occupation to at least monstrous, homicidal and diabolical. And does anyone among the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists think of saying: Don’t you think we need to find a way out of this infernal cycle? No, for indeed, the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists is part of the infernal cycle, and all it has in it to do is to acquiesce and say: Israel has the right to defend itself”
Max Planck Society explained that Hage was fired because of his “posts on social media expressing views that are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society.”
Weiss then discusses “Human rights experts and activists [who] have named the situation in Palestine ‘scholasticide’ or ‘educide,’ terms that refer to the systematic destruction of a people’s educational system… According to numbers released by the Palestinian Education Ministry in April 2024, Israeli forces have killed more than 5,000 students and 260 teachers since October 2023. They have bombed all 12 of Gaza’s universities and attacked more than 500 schools—including buildings where displaced families are sheltering.”
She asks, “What should concerned people do about attacks on educators who express critiques of the Israeli state?”
Weiss argues that “Scholars and educators who have worked constantly toward a vision of multi ethnic and multi religious coexistence, like Hage, are being accused of hatred… we need to be helping the public understand our fellow scholars’ work and why it matters when they are censored. When these scholars are accused of criticizing Israel, their commentary and analysis must be understood within the context of their body of work and the political reality in Israel/Palestine.”
Weiss continues, “University administrators and politicians who accuse critical scholars such as Hage of antisemitism seem incapable of distinguishing between those who use their critical voices to question violence and racist and colonial policies and create conditions for justice and peace in the region, and those who promote actual antisemitism, including in some academic circles.”
Weiss argues, “As someone who has worked on questions of state violence, coexistence, tolerance, and peace in Israel/Palestine for two decades, I was struck by how Hage’s descriptions of multi ethnic and multi religious communities resonated with historical accounts of the region before the state of Israel was created. I still find these possibilities of pluralism in the communities where I work.” In Ramle, Israel, she found “coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, looking at daily interactions between neighbors in places like this food market… in Ramle, I have seen deep friendships and relationships of care and reciprocity between Jewish families that arrived from Middle Eastern countries decades ago and their Palestinian neighbors. These relationships call on older traditions of religious tolerance in the region.”
She ended her article by urging, “we must expand our responses beyond anemic defenses of academic freedom and freedom of expression. As essential as these principles are, they do not enable us to fully demonstrate the ‘post-truth’ distortions of ethical reasoning and commonsense that are occurring in the censorship of critical voices of Israel. We can and must do more. We must use our knowledge of history, politics, and culture to name and challenge the ethical distortions being brandished in cynical rhetorical ploys. Those consuming media related to Israel/Palestine can also do more to fact-check and analyze the content and sources they encounter, following guidance from organizations such as the News Literacy Project. In this era of rampant misinformation, we need more scholars, journalists, and other informed citizens to step up and communicate about distortions of facts beyond the academy. And we need an academy that puts decisions about sanctions in the hands of those who are qualified to make these evaluations, such as experts in the Middle East and antisemitism, rather than administrators and lawyers.”
Over the years, IAM has profiled many Israeli academics who abuse their positions to contribute to the anti-Israel propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Erica Weiss represents an addition to this club of veteran Israel-bashers. However, her position is especially perverse given the brutality of the Hamas attack against civilians. How can one describe the barbarity of killing innocent women, men, the elderly, and children, abducting others, or gang-raping women as “resistance”? Weiss, who is so enamored of “ethical solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fails to realize that ethics should apply to the treatment of Israeli Jews as well.
These Israel-bashers are following the formula that the Palestinians (including Hamas) can do no wrong and the Israelis can do no right. This pernicious formulation allows Hamas to be portrayed as “resistance heroes” and their victims (even the peace activists in the kibbutzim) as villains in the settler-colonial drama.
The case of Weiss highlights the failure of the academic community to oppose activist scholars who abuse their position to spread propaganda.
REFERENCES:
Speaking Truth to Israel Requires More Than Academic Freedom
Educators and students critical of Israel’s war on Gaza face censorship, harassment, and dismissal. An anthropologist who researches coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians argues such critics need more than free speech protections.
11 SEP 2024
CRITICIZING ISRAEL IS risky business in academia. As a professor at an Israeli university who leads a research project on coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, I’ve witnessed the threats firsthand.
Students motivated by right-wing organizations have recorded me and my colleagues in classrooms and hallways, waiting for us to say something they can take to the administration, press, or police. Faculty critical of Israel are surveilled by activists from ultranationalist organizations such as Im Tirzu and Israel Academia Monitor. Israel’s legislature is currently considering a bill requiring the Council for Higher Education to fire professors who show “support for terrorism,” a coded phrase often interpreted to include criticisms of the state.
I lead a collaborative, international research project called Praxis of Coexistence. Our team looks at working-class and poor cities where residents don’t always buy into the ideology of liberal multiculturalism yet still find ways of living together. We carry out research in six countries, in cities such as Birmingham in England, Ramle in Israel, and Timișoara in Romania, where significant tensions exist between religious and ethnic groups cohabiting the same spaces. The project investigates how communities accommodate differences in culturally resonant ways and asks what everyday practices and justifications they draw on to maintain civil relations and avoid conflict and violence.
In December 2023, I attended an online seminar featuring the anthropologist Ghassan Hage, a leading expert on race and migration. I found his work enlightening and suggested reading Hage’s recent book, which focuses on coexistence and religious pluralism, with the Praxis group. Everyone was enthusiastic to do so. But a few days before we met on Zoom to discuss the book, the news broke that Hage had been fired from his position at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany.
In a short statement, the Max Planck Society stated that Hage’s views, as expressed in social media posts, were incompatible with the values of the institution. Hage had denounced Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, and the society implied his criticism was antisemitic according to German law. Hage responded to this claim, standing by his critique of Israeli ethnonationalism and condemnation of the violence and humiliation imposed on Palestinians. He reasserted his commitment to the “ideal of a multireligious society made from Christians, Muslims, and Jews living together on that land” of Israel/Palestine—an ideal that I share.
My group and I exchanged this news on WhatsApp. We were deeply confused by the decision to terminate his contract, which was particularly disorienting in light of our recent engagement with Hage’s valuable work.
Unfortunately, Hage’s experience is far from unique right now.
In Israel, attacks on educators and students critical of the state have intensified since October 7, 2023. In March 2024, Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended from Hebrew University in Jerusalem after claiming Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and calling for the abolishment of Zionism on a podcast. Later Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested at her home by the police, though quickly released.
Another example: Anthropologist Regev Nathansohn, an untenured professor at Sapir College in Israel, signed a petition calling for the United States to stop arming Israel and characterizing the war on Gaza as “plausible genocide.” He was attacked by students, condemned by his college, and put on unpaid leave, making him ineligible for unemployment benefits.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is without speaking of the situation for Palestinian academics in the West Bank and Gaza, for which the term censorship is wholly inadequate.
Human rights experts and activists have named the situation in Palestine “scholasticide” or “educide,” terms that refer to the systematic destruction of a people’s educational system. According to numbers released by the Palestinian Education Ministry in April 2024, Israeli forces have killed more than 5,000 students and 260 teachers since October 2023. They have bombed all 12 of Gaza’s universities and attacked more than 500 schools—including buildings where displaced families are sheltering.
GOING BEYOND “ACADEMIC FREEDOM”
What should concerned people do about attacks on educators who express critiques of the Israeli state?
After Hage and other scholars were fired, suspended, and threatened, many individuals and scholarly associations came to their defense. The American Anthropological Association, the European Association of Social Anthropologists, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, a group of Jewish Israeli scholars, and others wrote and circulated statements and letters of support.
Most of these statements focus on condemning censorship and emphasizing the rights of academic freedom and freedom of expression. The Board on Academic Freedom in Germany, where scholars critical of Israel face particularly restrictive conditions, urged “universities and research institutions to commit themselves to building and maintaining spaces for discussion and encounter, which welcome plurality and contradiction.”
Protecting academic freedom and freedom of expression is crucial—especially given the widespread silencing of Palestinian human rights advocacy. But doing so does not address the full extent of the problem.
One could imagine a situation in which a scholar espoused offensive or problematic views but was protected by these freedoms. On its own, a commitment to protecting free speech is politically and ethically neutral; this is why the American Civil Liberties Union defends the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Ku Klux Klan.
Protecting freedom of speech alone is not enough.
The free speech discourse misses the way the recent wave of dismissals and suspensions are in many cases a complete upside-down distortion of reality. Scholars and educators who have worked constantly toward a vision of multiethnic and multireligious coexistence, like Hage, are being accused of hatred. Protecting their freedom of speech alone is not enough.
Scholars in the social sciences and humanities must put our ethical values and critical thinking tools to work to explicitly challenge such “post-truth” distortions. To start, this means insisting that a scholar’s work is more than their social media presence. But beyond that, we need to be helping the public understand our fellow scholars’ work and why it matters when they are censored. When these scholars are accused of criticizing Israel, their commentary and analysis must be understood within the context of their body of work and the political reality in Israel/Palestine.
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP ON COEXISTENCE
What does it mean to “support Israel” today?
Jacqueline Rose, a humanities professor who has explored internal Jewish critiques of Zionism, argues Israel is locked in a “spiral of destruction.” This spiral harms and traumatizes Palestinian people and Israeli people. Israel, Rose argues, is ruled by a government that is systematically eliminating any chance for justice and peace.
Within this political context, antisemitism and anti-Zionism are wrongly conflated. University administrators and politicians who accuse critical scholars such as Hage of antisemitism seem incapable of distinguishing between those who use their critical voices to question violence and racist and colonial policies and create conditions for justice and peace in the region, and those who promote actual antisemitism, including in some academic circles.
When the Praxis research group met to discuss Hage’s reading, we were struck by his commitment to understanding how communities learn to coexist with others who are different from themselves. His work describes a mode of living within dense, urban settings that is attuned to others and in conversation with people who sometimes express dramatically opposing claims and aims. This approach to navigating conflict contrasts with the tendency within modern capitalist societies to impose order by avoiding direct engagement and using the law to live impersonally and transactionally.
Hage’s insights resonated deeply with the empirical data we’ve gathered. In the places we work around the globe, people from varied religious and ethnic backgrounds live intimately in ways similar to those Hage describes. Neighbors and strangers often seek to deal with conflicts directly and avoid involving the police or the state. In these places, a stolen bike will start a long chain of calls and conversations involving intermediaries, parents, and community and religious leaders, all seeking to find a path to repair that avoids violence.
The author’s research focuses on coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, looking at daily interactions between neighbors in places like this food market in Ramle, Israel.
In other words, Hage highlights and theorizes modes of living together with difference that actually work. As someone who has worked on questions of state violence, coexistence, tolerance, and peace in Israel/Palestine for two decades, I was struck by how Hage’s descriptions of multiethnic and multireligious communities resonated with historical accounts of the region before the state of Israel was created.
I still find these possibilities of pluralism in the communities where I work. For example, in Ramle, I have seen deep friendships and relationships of care and reciprocity between Jewish families that arrived from Middle Eastern countries decades ago and their Palestinian neighbors. These relationships call on older traditions of religious tolerance in the region. They persist in part because Ramle remains peripheral in contrast to economic centers like Tel Aviv or symbolic centers like Jerusalem.
These fleeting and partial spaces of Israeli/Palestinian coexistence—ones that defy the ethnonational logics of the Israeli state—could be nourished, but they run the risk of disappearing entirely.
LIVING OUR ETHICAL AND POLITICAL VALUES
Many of the scholars who have been punished for criticizing Israel, including Hage, Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Nathansohn, have long track records of research and writing oriented toward finding ethical paths forward in the ongoing disaster in Israel/Palestine. Their work promotes the kind of dialogue that’s critical to any progress that Jews and Palestinians may hope to make toward peace and justice in the region.
These scholars are trying to enact and give life to ethical projects beyond the academy to oppose state violence and ethnonationalism. This is grounded research in the deepest possible way. The only threat they pose is to the ability of Israel to act with impunity.
When I see the work of these scholars being misrepresented and attacked, I feel a duty to speak out. I know many anthropologists and other scholars agree. But we must expand our responses beyond anemic defenses of academic freedom and freedom of expression. As essential as these principles are, they do not enable us to fully demonstrate the “post-truth” distortions of ethical reasoning and common sense that are occurring in the censorship of critical voices of Israel. We can and must do more. We must use our knowledge of history, politics, and culture to name and challenge the ethical distortions being brandished in cynical rhetorical ploys.
Those consuming media related to Israel/Palestine can also do more to fact-check and analyze the content and sources they encounter, following guidance from organizations such as the News Literacy Project.
In this era of rampant misinformation, we need more scholars, journalists, and other informed citizens to step up and communicate about distortions of facts beyond the academy. And we need an academy that puts decisions about sanctions in the hands of those who are qualified to make these evaluations, such as experts in the Middle East and antisemitism, rather than administrators and lawyers.
Open Bio
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I am a cultural anthropologist researching the ways people navigate the ethical dilemmas they encounter during their everyday lives and with people who are different than themselves.
I am originally from New Paltz, New York. I did my Ph.D. in Anthropology at Princeton University (2011). I joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University in the fall of 2013. I do my research in Israel and Palestine, using ethnographic methods.
I live in Caesarea with my husband, Michael, and our three children, Jordan, Boaz, and Adar.
Research:
Peace and Inter-Religious Coexistence- I am interested in how people think about and imagine peace. I am particularly interested in the ways that people who are far from the professional spheres of peace and reconciliation think about peace. I am interested in understanding the ways secular and religious groups think about peace differently and through different traditions.
Ethics and Ideas of Justice– My research involves a non-normative examination of the way people understand their ethical obligations. In my previous research, I looked at the way Israeli soldiers struggle to reconcile the responsibility they feel towards Palestinians and the responsibility they feel towards other Israelis. In my new research I am asking how people understand coexistence through the lens of faith. I ask how religious study and prayer inform people about their ethical responsibilities to their neighbor, and how they come to understand who falls under this category of care.
I am interested how political ideology effects people’s understanding of community and responsibilities to the state and to one another. Israel has both liberal and non-liberal components both within the legal and political structure and within the Israeli population. This diversity means many ethical models coexist and compete in public and private. I am very interested in tracing these influences in my work.
Democracy- I am interested in the ways different groups imagine the public sphere. How people think about topics like religion and state, community, public discourse, and civic conflict resolution through their different traditions and beliefs are of particular interest.
Current Collaborations:
Carole McGranahan, “Rethinking Disciplinary Ethics in Anthropology” and editing essay collection
“Rethinking Pseudonyms in Anthropology” in American Ethnologist, University of Colorado,
United States
Nissim Mizrachi, The Perception of Tolerance in Israeli Society, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Yifat Biton, Building a Research Driven Model for Conflict Resolution, Bridging Insights, Israel
Gili Re’i and Eilon Schwartz, Expanding the Imagination of Peace, Van Leer Institute, Israel
I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
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Erica WeissTel Aviv University | TAU · Department of Sociolgy and Antropology
Publications (14)
State-authorizing citizenship: the narrow field of civic engagement in the liberal age
Article
Full-text available
- Aug 2018
Liberal citizens are held ethically accountable not only for their own acts and behaviors, but also those of their state. Reciprocally, a proper liberal subject is one that metonymizes with the state, merging their fates and moral worth, and taking personal responsibility for the state’s actions. I claim that as a result, the liberal subject is not…
Competing ethical regimes in a diverse society:: Israeli military refusers
Article
- Feb 2017
All Jewish military refusers in Israel defy state law and incur public acrimony for their transgression. Yet different social groups use distinct ethical regimes to justify this controversial act. While liberal Ashkenazi refusers cite personal conscience, ultra-Orthodox refusers rely on scriptural authority, and Mizrahi refusers often appeal to fam…
Best Practices for Besting the Bureaucracy: Avoiding Military Service in Israel
Article
- Sep 2016
This article considers the evasion of mandatory military service in Israel. Exemption from service is granted on a number of grounds at the discretion of military bureaucrats. Each year, many young people seek to obtain such an exemption for a wide variety of reasons, both ideological and pragmatic. At their disposal is a body of knowledge, collect…
Refusal as Act, Refusal as Abstention
Article
- Aug 2016
Article
- Jul 2016
en In this article, I consider the shifting politics of animal rights activism in Israel in relation to human rights activism. I find that whereas in the past, human and animal rights activism were tightly linked, today they have become decoupled, for reasons I explore in this article. Although human and animal rights activism once shared social an…
Incentivized Obedience: How a Gentler Israeli Military Prevents Organized Resistance
Article
- Mar 2016
In this article, I offer an ethnographic examination of neoliberal techniques of control through absence by the Israeli military, the state institution most associated with discipline, indoctrination, and direct coercion. I highlight the ways that the apparent withdrawal of the state from practices of indoctrination and the punishment of conscienti…
Provincializing empathy: Humanitarian sentiment and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Article
- Sep 2015
This article considers the role of the humanitarian sentiment empathy in peace initiatives in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Recently, a sustained critique of humanitarianism has emerged. While many of these accounts focus on the ethical effects of specific manifestations of humanitarian governance, there is a significant strain criticizing the in…
Beyond Mystification: Hegemony, Resistance, and Ethical Responsibility in Israel
Article
- Mar 2015
This article reevaluates the usefulness of the theoretical continuum between hegemony and resistance in light of recent Israeli experiences. Specifically, through the comparison of “conscientious objection” and “draft evasion,” I find that the breakdown of hegemonic consciousness is not sufficient to understand why some disillusioned Israeli soldie…
Sacrifice as Social Capital among Israeli Conscientious Objectors
Article
- May 2014
This article considers counterhegemonic sacrifices as a means of social intervention, and in doing so explores the social efficacy of non-ritual sacrifice in the modern era. Ethnographically, this article examines the way Israeli conscientious objectors succeed in having their refusal of military service and the social costs they incur understood a…
Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty
Article
- Mar 2014
In Conscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions…
Security and Suspicion: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel by Juliana Ochs
Article
- Sep 2012
Principle or Pathology? Adjudicating the Right to Conscience in the Israeli Military
Article
- Mar 2012
The Israeli military’s Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants’ principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected b…
The Interrupted Sacrifice: Hegemony and Moral Crisis among Israeli Conscientious Objectors
Article
- Jul 2011
In this article, I explain why some of the most elite and dedicated soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces ultimately became conscientious objectors. I argue that because the sacrificial moral economy, and not the state as supersubject, was hegemonically inculcated in these young people, resistance was possible. This case prompts a reconsideration…
The Deployment of Moral Authority: Veteran Activism in Israel
Article
- May 2009
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Saturday, October 7, 2023Israel-Palestine: The Endless Dead-End That Will Not End
When the Zionists occupied Palestine and the Palestinians resisted, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard and unyielding occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, and strict occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict and brutal occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal and severe occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe and unrelenting occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting and ferocious occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious and callous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous and merciless occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless and heartless occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless and cruel occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel and brutish occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish and inhuman occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman and heinous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman, heinous and hideous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman, heinous, hideous and barbarous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And here we are today. And the Palestinians, like all colonised people, are still proving that their capacity to resist is endless. They don’t only dig tunnels. They can fly above walls.
And the Zionist response is to say: we’ll show you! No more Mr. Nice Guy! We’re going to further upgrade our occupation to at least monstrous, homicidal and diabolical.
And does anyone among the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists think of saying: Don’t you think we need to find a way out of this infernal cycle?
No, for indeed, the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists is part of the infernal cycle, and all it has in it to do is to acquiesce and say: Israel has the right to defend itself
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Comment:
J October 10, 2023 at 1:47 AM
You reduce the actions of Palestinians to the word “resist”, yet indiscriminately firing rockets into populated areas is not “resistance.” You overlook the overt intolerance of Palestinians towards Jews (a two way street, undoubtedly), but you cannot attribute a noble cause to Palestinians and an un-noble cause to Israel, as it is a biased simplification in both cases.
israel-academia-monitor.com 
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