Will Zionism survive the war? – Yuval Noah Harari/WaPost
Full-page op-ed by Israeli historian on choice facing Jewish people across the world:
“…Like the anti-Israel demonstrators around the world, the Netanyahu coalition believes in the slogan “from the river to the sea.” In its own words, the founding principle of the Netanyahu coalition is that “the Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of Eretz Yisrael” — Eretz Yisrael is a Hebrew term referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects. This is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.
“Nothing that has happened since Oct. 7 indicates that the Netanyahu coalition has changed its views. On the contrary, the carnage and devastation inflicted on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, the killing and dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank, and the refusal to commit to any future peace plan all indicate that the current Israeli government has no respect either for the individual human rights of Palestinians or for their collective national aspirations….
“There is a lot at stake here, not just for Israel, but for Jews all over the world. If Netanyahu and his political allies cement their hold over Israel, it would spell the end of the historical bond between the Jewish people and ideas of universal justice, human rights, democracy and humanism. Judaism would instead make a covenant with bigotry, discrimination and violence. Jews in London and New York might wish to argue that they have nothing to do with Israel, and that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t represent the true spirit of Judaism. But they would be in an analogous situation to British and American communists in the 20th century, who tried in vain to argue that what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union wasn’t really communism.”
My Grandmother Survived the Nakba—Now I Hope to Survive a Genocide -Abeer Barakat/Nation
“As I lie down to sleep, fully dressed in case I need to escape, I reflect on how it feels like a time machine has transported me back to my grandmother’s youth. I’m surrounded by massacres even more horrific than the infamous April 9, 1948 massacre in Deir Yassin, when over 100 Palestinian villagers were killed by Zionist paramilitary gangs, helping to trigger the mass flight of Palestinians. However, instead of the killings being committed by paramilitary gangs, they are at the hands of a powerful, organized army, with weapons and funding provided by the United States.”