I’m guessing Jeremy Ben-Ami is the sort of person who denies the Armenian Genocide despite it being Raphael Lemkin’s original case for the word “genocide” in the first place.
Has Israel BECOME like Nazis, or were they like Nazis from the inception? The more I learn, the more I think it is the former.
I have a friend who made a film about the town her family is from, Tantura. The Hagganah used all of the methods of torture and extermination they had learned from Nazis, shooting people in front of the graves they had been forced to build, live burials, rapes beheadings,among other horrors. Her father was then put in a concentration camp for 2 years.
The current violent insanity, in my mind, is just a manifestation of the nascent genocidal tendencies that Israel was born from.
From Scott Weiner to Jeremy Ben-Ami this new (or maybe not so new) idea of associating the word genocide only with the mass murder of Jews (not even the other victims of the Holocaust) is baffling to me. When I was growing up the genocide in Rwanda was referred to as a genocide. That is still pretty recent history. There is a lot you have to unlearn and so many parts of your brain you have to shut off to claim the word genocide should only be used for the genocide during WWII.
One thing I find particularly noteworthy is the consistency with which fascist ideologies must re-write history to fit their nationalist agenda. How the creation of Israel was based on some historical claim of a divine right to the land, when there is very little historical or archeological evidence to support the claim that the ancient Israelites were anything other than Caananite people themselves. There is no evidence that Jews were enslaved in Egypt in the millions, nor that the Israelites spent forty years wandering the desert or ever crossed the Red Sea. The historical evidence would suggest that much of the Torah and the books of the Old Testament were written hundreds of years after events had taken place, not as historical documents, but as propaganda after-the-fact, to justify the violence committed by the Israelites against other Caananite tribes to steal their land. It's not any different than the Aenead being propaganda to create a historical tie to the Greeks for the Roman Empire.
Even the term "antisemitism" involves cultural erasure and propaganda, because nobody uses it to refer to hatred of the Palestinians and other Arab peoples, even though semitic languages include Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Is there any genetic evidence to suggest that Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of people who left Jerusalem after it was sacked by the Romans? Apparently, over 60% of Israelis are allergic to olive tree pollen? I've got 2% Levantine DNA, does that make me more of a semitic person than most Ashkenazi Jews? Is it antisemitic for me to even ask these questions, as I am not Jewish? I'm a staunch atheist who was raised by fundamentalist Christians, so my interest comes from a lens of seeing organized religion as a weapon to justify harm, but I see very little discussion involving the legitimacy of claiming land because a genocidal deity promised it to people's ancestors during the Bronze Age.
There was a NYT Magazine piece years back about how modern DNA testing was revealing what many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews had believed or suspected for decades: that in the first years of the creation of the Israeli state, when most settlers were still living in tent cities, the Israeli government routinely stole the babies of non-white Jews immediately or shortly after delivery, told the families the child did not survive, and gave the babies to white Jews who could not conceive, to raise as their own. No one could prove their child was still alive, the article talks to victims who spent decades looking into the faces of children on the street to see if they were their own child. But DNA tests in the 21st century proved a terrifying reality to thousands of Israelis, that they were not who they had been told they were.
I say all of this just to point out the ways in which fascism everywhere MUST rewrite history to legitimize the harm being done in the present. And just like US history makes heroes of slave owners and colonizers, Israeli history was never what we were told it was. Fascist states don't arise out of nowhere, the foundations are laid for decades and centuries, and are propped up by a people's willingness to believe themselves divinely appointed and protected in their conquests. It's deeply unsettling. Your work takes a kind of courage and moral clarity that is sadly lacking in most places, not just to travel into a war zone, but to speak the truth to your own people, who remain largely unreceptive. Thanks Jasper. I don't know how you can do this without having your spirit crushed, but it really is invaluable and very admirable.
Re: my previous comment TL/DR fascist states rewrite history to fit their nationalistic agenda, and the roots of Israeli fascism or authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, were laid a century ago.
If temporarily paywalling select posts before making them free doesn’t work for you, please feel free to send over your more ethical proposal for how I’m supposed to pay my bills.
When did bearing witness become a means of survival?
Moral witness, rationed by time and subject to payment, is neither moral nor witness.
If everything must be transactional, then do the Zionist settlers deserve a share?
Without their inhumanity, what would there be to write about?
Substack is now the place where writers earn their supper by serving their patrons a dose of moral outrage and absolution, so that they, too, can ignore their complicity.
If you'll pardon me for butting in, the only way to do this type of reporting at this scale is to charge money for it, or to take ad money, and only one of those options does not demand that a writer self-censor. I don't remember where Marx demanded that people perform free labor, can you reference the parts of Das Kapital where that is stated as a tenet of anti-capitalism? You could also do your own, free reporting on the topic, nothing is stopping you. But there's nothing radical about demanding anyone perform free labor, or in devaluing the valuable labor you just don't appreciate. Sorry, comrade.
Welcome. It’s a shame you join us here, there was a bit more exchange . I’m not sure why it does not appear here, nor whether it would make any difference, If you care to read it, you can find it in my Notes.
I think I read Marx once, but I didn’t retain much. I thought Marx’s key argument was about the means and control of production; remuneration was secondary.
But let’s return to this post and this writer. I don’t have an answer for how this writer pays his bills, and frankly, I don’t care.
This “type of reporting,” while heartbreaking, is not actually revealing anything new. The horrors of the occupation of Palestine are decades old. Yes, the complicit Western corporate media will not cover it, but it is not unseen nor unknown.
Everyone knows who Francesca Albanese is. Her report and her videos are available to all without a fee. Have you an X or Telegram account? The horrors of Gaza and the West Bank have been live-streamed by the perpetrators themselves. We have seen plenty; we know more than we want to know.
And yet the ethnic cleansing continues, as it has for decades, not because this inhumanity has not been exposed, but because we, the Collective West, condone it, fund it, supply the weapons, and grant our thugs immunity from prosecution.
So, comrade, I challenge you: Ask yourself how it is that this writer is able to report from the West Bank in the first place? Have you actually read his post? “Jasper Diamond Nathaniel” does this sound like a Palestinian name to you?
His post is not lifestyle writing; it is not niche analysis. It is testimonial writing, its moral witness, a historical warning. He explicitly frames himself as bearing inherited memory, invoking pogroms, the Holocaust, the Farhud, and the duty to recognize patterns before it is too late. He accuses institutions of silence, complicity, cowardice, and warns that history’s judgment will come. It’s all good stuff.
But how does he do it, from where, the West Bank? In the midst of such horror, he has the time to reduce my moral critique into his financial problem, implying that we, as readers, are responsible for his expenses, did we dispatch to the West Bank? He equates my criticism with a demand for his free labor, is that not deflection?
If you want to know what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, you can see and learn more than you’ll ever want to for free. But if you prefer to distract yourself with the writings of a vampire, that is your decision.
Personally, if he is in the West Bank, I would rather he picked up rock instead of a pen!
I referenced Marx facetiously, because demanding someone perform free labor is capitalist exploitation, even if you dress it up in revolutionary language. Exploitation of labor is at the core of white supremacy, capitalism, and is the basis for the patriarchal domination of women around the world.
Jasper never said he was Palestinian, he's a Jewish American, and his work and his activism led directly to a young man being freed from an Israeli torture prison, which probably saved his life. If you want free content, you can watch his many interviews on YouTube.
I find it repugnant to attack a person who has devoted their life and their career to not only reporting on a genocide, but traveling to Palestine to witness it first-hand (which was live-streamed, for free), because of your own gross entitlement to information which you also claim isn't new or informative. Your sanctimonious smugness is so weird, it actually seems like perhaps the most sophisticated form of pro-zionist trolling I've seen on the internet so far, like, this is just a bizarre take. Go to a library and read some free books. Or go to the West Bank and throw rocks at settlers yourself. You seem very entitled and unkind, and frankly, like a basic capitalist, and it's gross.
I appreciate your honestly and understand your scorn.
No I was not aware of Jasper`s good deeds, we all have a moral obligation to speak out about the inhumanities in Palestine and elsewhere. So I can applaud Jasper for his good deeds, his courage, but I will not applaud nor accept nor be silent of the hypocrisy on this platform.
You find my comments repugnant, fair enough. Can you understand why I find it even more repugnant that the world has to pay to read about such inhumanity! No one needs to paywall their writings about inhumanities,
I am not a writer, just an observer, so forgive me, I haven`t got the skill to help you see the hypocrisy of pay walling such writings, even temporarily, If my exposing the hypocrisy of profiting from suffering bothers you, please ask yourself why.
I`m sorry that I picked on Jasper, I had no intention make it a personal issue, I came across his post, I shared my thoughts not for him to defend. Perhaps I am always holding a rock when I read Substack posts, Jasper was not a target, but if he insists to stand up and bemoan that he has bills to pay, then made himself a target.
And I should correct myself, because actually Mohammed Ibrahim isn't even a "young man," he is still a boy. A child. And Jasper's work and his advocacy led directly to geeting this child freed from an Israeli torture prison where he had been detained for nine months. For the crime of, allegedly, throwing a rock. An act which you think Jasper should have done instead of working to free that child. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I feel so betrayed by my whole German education.
- Watch out for the subtle beginnings of fascism, notice the pattern, so we can make sure Never Again etc.
- Oh, I think I spotted one over there!
- Ok, now that's trivialising the holocaust, I'm afraid that is against the law.
The Germans were not the first, last or worst for fascism and Israel makes them look benogn.
unstintingly truthful, incredibly powerful writing. Thank you for all you have done and all you do.
A lot of us see the patterns but your writing is so useful to compile and present an analysis of the problems
Thank you for the work and truth telling you do.
Another insightful and informative article that the world , and Jews especially, need to really absorb and address.
Superb article, thank you for your incisive commentary.
Really great stuff Jasper.
I’m guessing Jeremy Ben-Ami is the sort of person who denies the Armenian Genocide despite it being Raphael Lemkin’s original case for the word “genocide” in the first place.
Has Israel BECOME like Nazis, or were they like Nazis from the inception? The more I learn, the more I think it is the former.
I have a friend who made a film about the town her family is from, Tantura. The Hagganah used all of the methods of torture and extermination they had learned from Nazis, shooting people in front of the graves they had been forced to build, live burials, rapes beheadings,among other horrors. Her father was then put in a concentration camp for 2 years.
The current violent insanity, in my mind, is just a manifestation of the nascent genocidal tendencies that Israel was born from.
Thank you for all your efforts to raise awareness for Palestinians.
Additionally, it is great to see that great investigative journalism is still around.
I linked this article in a comment section of a piece about Gaza in a German newspaper. There is hardly any reporting on the Westbank.
Hopefully your words will help make people see what is happening on the ground.
From Scott Weiner to Jeremy Ben-Ami this new (or maybe not so new) idea of associating the word genocide only with the mass murder of Jews (not even the other victims of the Holocaust) is baffling to me. When I was growing up the genocide in Rwanda was referred to as a genocide. That is still pretty recent history. There is a lot you have to unlearn and so many parts of your brain you have to shut off to claim the word genocide should only be used for the genocide during WWII.
Right, the Armenian genocide happened before the Holocaust, but nobody says that calling the Holocaust a genocide is offensive to Armenians.
One thing I find particularly noteworthy is the consistency with which fascist ideologies must re-write history to fit their nationalist agenda. How the creation of Israel was based on some historical claim of a divine right to the land, when there is very little historical or archeological evidence to support the claim that the ancient Israelites were anything other than Caananite people themselves. There is no evidence that Jews were enslaved in Egypt in the millions, nor that the Israelites spent forty years wandering the desert or ever crossed the Red Sea. The historical evidence would suggest that much of the Torah and the books of the Old Testament were written hundreds of years after events had taken place, not as historical documents, but as propaganda after-the-fact, to justify the violence committed by the Israelites against other Caananite tribes to steal their land. It's not any different than the Aenead being propaganda to create a historical tie to the Greeks for the Roman Empire.
Even the term "antisemitism" involves cultural erasure and propaganda, because nobody uses it to refer to hatred of the Palestinians and other Arab peoples, even though semitic languages include Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Is there any genetic evidence to suggest that Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of people who left Jerusalem after it was sacked by the Romans? Apparently, over 60% of Israelis are allergic to olive tree pollen? I've got 2% Levantine DNA, does that make me more of a semitic person than most Ashkenazi Jews? Is it antisemitic for me to even ask these questions, as I am not Jewish? I'm a staunch atheist who was raised by fundamentalist Christians, so my interest comes from a lens of seeing organized religion as a weapon to justify harm, but I see very little discussion involving the legitimacy of claiming land because a genocidal deity promised it to people's ancestors during the Bronze Age.
There was a NYT Magazine piece years back about how modern DNA testing was revealing what many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews had believed or suspected for decades: that in the first years of the creation of the Israeli state, when most settlers were still living in tent cities, the Israeli government routinely stole the babies of non-white Jews immediately or shortly after delivery, told the families the child did not survive, and gave the babies to white Jews who could not conceive, to raise as their own. No one could prove their child was still alive, the article talks to victims who spent decades looking into the faces of children on the street to see if they were their own child. But DNA tests in the 21st century proved a terrifying reality to thousands of Israelis, that they were not who they had been told they were.
I say all of this just to point out the ways in which fascism everywhere MUST rewrite history to legitimize the harm being done in the present. And just like US history makes heroes of slave owners and colonizers, Israeli history was never what we were told it was. Fascist states don't arise out of nowhere, the foundations are laid for decades and centuries, and are propped up by a people's willingness to believe themselves divinely appointed and protected in their conquests. It's deeply unsettling. Your work takes a kind of courage and moral clarity that is sadly lacking in most places, not just to travel into a war zone, but to speak the truth to your own people, who remain largely unreceptive. Thanks Jasper. I don't know how you can do this without having your spirit crushed, but it really is invaluable and very admirable.
Thank you, Jessica--very well-said!
Thanks Bob!
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/middleeast/israel-yemenite-children-affair.html
And of course Benjamin Netanyahu is a Holocaust denier to an extent that would be illegal in much of Europe.
Re: my previous comment TL/DR fascist states rewrite history to fit their nationalistic agenda, and the roots of Israeli fascism or authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, were laid a century ago.
Israel may not be Nazi, but at this point Jonathan Greenblatt definitely is.
Surprising post, not for its content, but because I was able to read it.
I am not grateful for the privilege.
I am saddened that writing like this is not always available to everyone.
I am saddened that you, and so many others, place barriers in front of your writing.
I am saddened that extracting profit takes precedence over the sharing of these stories.
Writers write for different reasons. Some because they must, because silence would be a betrayal.
Writing born of necessity seeks to be shared. Writing shaped by incentives seeks to be contained.
The difference matters.
If temporarily paywalling select posts before making them free doesn’t work for you, please feel free to send over your more ethical proposal for how I’m supposed to pay my bills.
When did bearing witness become a means of survival?
Moral witness, rationed by time and subject to payment, is neither moral nor witness.
If everything must be transactional, then do the Zionist settlers deserve a share?
Without their inhumanity, what would there be to write about?
Substack is now the place where writers earn their supper by serving their patrons a dose of moral outrage and absolution, so that they, too, can ignore their complicity.
If you'll pardon me for butting in, the only way to do this type of reporting at this scale is to charge money for it, or to take ad money, and only one of those options does not demand that a writer self-censor. I don't remember where Marx demanded that people perform free labor, can you reference the parts of Das Kapital where that is stated as a tenet of anti-capitalism? You could also do your own, free reporting on the topic, nothing is stopping you. But there's nothing radical about demanding anyone perform free labor, or in devaluing the valuable labor you just don't appreciate. Sorry, comrade.
Welcome. It’s a shame you join us here, there was a bit more exchange . I’m not sure why it does not appear here, nor whether it would make any difference, If you care to read it, you can find it in my Notes.
I think I read Marx once, but I didn’t retain much. I thought Marx’s key argument was about the means and control of production; remuneration was secondary.
But let’s return to this post and this writer. I don’t have an answer for how this writer pays his bills, and frankly, I don’t care.
This “type of reporting,” while heartbreaking, is not actually revealing anything new. The horrors of the occupation of Palestine are decades old. Yes, the complicit Western corporate media will not cover it, but it is not unseen nor unknown.
Everyone knows who Francesca Albanese is. Her report and her videos are available to all without a fee. Have you an X or Telegram account? The horrors of Gaza and the West Bank have been live-streamed by the perpetrators themselves. We have seen plenty; we know more than we want to know.
And yet the ethnic cleansing continues, as it has for decades, not because this inhumanity has not been exposed, but because we, the Collective West, condone it, fund it, supply the weapons, and grant our thugs immunity from prosecution.
So, comrade, I challenge you: Ask yourself how it is that this writer is able to report from the West Bank in the first place? Have you actually read his post? “Jasper Diamond Nathaniel” does this sound like a Palestinian name to you?
His post is not lifestyle writing; it is not niche analysis. It is testimonial writing, its moral witness, a historical warning. He explicitly frames himself as bearing inherited memory, invoking pogroms, the Holocaust, the Farhud, and the duty to recognize patterns before it is too late. He accuses institutions of silence, complicity, cowardice, and warns that history’s judgment will come. It’s all good stuff.
But how does he do it, from where, the West Bank? In the midst of such horror, he has the time to reduce my moral critique into his financial problem, implying that we, as readers, are responsible for his expenses, did we dispatch to the West Bank? He equates my criticism with a demand for his free labor, is that not deflection?
If you want to know what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, you can see and learn more than you’ll ever want to for free. But if you prefer to distract yourself with the writings of a vampire, that is your decision.
Personally, if he is in the West Bank, I would rather he picked up rock instead of a pen!
I referenced Marx facetiously, because demanding someone perform free labor is capitalist exploitation, even if you dress it up in revolutionary language. Exploitation of labor is at the core of white supremacy, capitalism, and is the basis for the patriarchal domination of women around the world.
Jasper never said he was Palestinian, he's a Jewish American, and his work and his activism led directly to a young man being freed from an Israeli torture prison, which probably saved his life. If you want free content, you can watch his many interviews on YouTube.
I find it repugnant to attack a person who has devoted their life and their career to not only reporting on a genocide, but traveling to Palestine to witness it first-hand (which was live-streamed, for free), because of your own gross entitlement to information which you also claim isn't new or informative. Your sanctimonious smugness is so weird, it actually seems like perhaps the most sophisticated form of pro-zionist trolling I've seen on the internet so far, like, this is just a bizarre take. Go to a library and read some free books. Or go to the West Bank and throw rocks at settlers yourself. You seem very entitled and unkind, and frankly, like a basic capitalist, and it's gross.
I appreciate your honestly and understand your scorn.
No I was not aware of Jasper`s good deeds, we all have a moral obligation to speak out about the inhumanities in Palestine and elsewhere. So I can applaud Jasper for his good deeds, his courage, but I will not applaud nor accept nor be silent of the hypocrisy on this platform.
You find my comments repugnant, fair enough. Can you understand why I find it even more repugnant that the world has to pay to read about such inhumanity! No one needs to paywall their writings about inhumanities,
I am not a writer, just an observer, so forgive me, I haven`t got the skill to help you see the hypocrisy of pay walling such writings, even temporarily, If my exposing the hypocrisy of profiting from suffering bothers you, please ask yourself why.
I`m sorry that I picked on Jasper, I had no intention make it a personal issue, I came across his post, I shared my thoughts not for him to defend. Perhaps I am always holding a rock when I read Substack posts, Jasper was not a target, but if he insists to stand up and bemoan that he has bills to pay, then made himself a target.
And I should correct myself, because actually Mohammed Ibrahim isn't even a "young man," he is still a boy. A child. And Jasper's work and his advocacy led directly to geeting this child freed from an Israeli torture prison where he had been detained for nine months. For the crime of, allegedly, throwing a rock. An act which you think Jasper should have done instead of working to free that child. You should be ashamed of yourself.