Twenty Impossibles: Between Frivolousness and the Indefensible

7 November 2026

للخوف أسماء عديدة

من بينها الا نخاف

وان نرى الصياد

في ريش الطريدة

محمود درويش، الخوف.

ينظر القاتل إلى شَبَح القتيل، لا إلى

عينيه، بلا ندم.

محمود درويش، شريعة الخوف.

"אמיר אורן: תסביר, תסביר אביגדור..."

אביגדור פלדמן נשאל בראיון עם אמיר אורן מעיתון הארץ, פודקאסט אפרכסת, 5 בדצמבר 2025.

"אמיר אורן: עד כמה מוזר לך להיות בצד השני של החקירה, לשבת בתא מול מדובב?

...

'סטיב' איש שב"כ, ראש אגף החקירות לשעבר: הטלת ספק זה אחד הערכים המרכזיים בשירות..."

אמיר אורן מעיתון הארץ בראיון עם 'סטיב' ראש אגף חקירות לשעבר בשב"כ, פודקאסט אפרכסת, 5 באוקטובר 2025.

"בראל שייך לאותה הקבוצה הלא-גדולה של עיתונאים בעלי יוזמה המנצלים הזדמנויות לסייר בארצות השכנות, למרות הסיכונים שלעתים כרוכים בכך, כדי להיווכח באופן בלתי אמצעי במה שמתרחש בהן."

שמעון שמיר, "קופץ אל השכנים" (סקירה של הספר כשמכוניות נפלו מהשמיים: מסע בין כיבושים), הארץ, 23 בנובמבר 2011.

"אלי פודה: המושג עדיין קיים, מזרחנות, רק מה אתה יודע שמים אותו במירכאות..." (הדגשה לא במקור)

אמיר אורן: כיוון שמזרח זה מבט מאירופה, הרי אפשר את כדור הארץ לגלגל איך שרוצים, ואתה דווקא בעד הכללת ישראל בתחום המחקר, אז אולי מרחבן, במרחב כולו.

אלי פודה: אבל, אתה עוסק שנים בתקשורת, זה נשמע לך מונח טוב?"

אלי פודה מתראיין אצל אמיר אורן, פודקאסט אפרכסת, 11 בנובמבר 2025.

"יום טוב סמיה: תודה על הפודקאסטים שאתה עושה. הסכתים. זה בסוף מסמך היסטורי לפי דעתי, יישאר איפשהו בספריות..."

יום טוב סמיה מתראיין אצל אמיר אורן, פודקאסט אפרכסת, 16 בספטמבר 2025.

"יהודה מסתכל בשעון

ומפלבל בעיניו

משרד בצפון

ארציאלי בע"מ יועץ

אחר הצהריים

ובחוץ העולם מתרוצץ

לוחץ זמזם עונה

תביאי לנו קפה"

 שלום חנוך, מחכים למשיח, 1985.

Introduction

This essay is a continuation of another one headed ‘Close Encounters: The Most Colonial and Apartheid Democracy’ published in May 2026. We continue to critically analyze the ‘thought’ and political performance of Palestinians in Israel and others in various spheres, including the legal one. The presupposition for writing is that, without adopting the legal, intellectual, and political framework that Israel is a colonial and apartheid state, it would be difficult to understand past and contemporary realities, and no genuine potential for overcoming its cruelty can emerge.

Protest and the Repressed

On 1 May 2023, Haaretz newspaper published an interview that captures the dominant political behavior among Palestinians in Israel. Retired high school teacher and author Mohammad Ali Taha, who heads a peculiar ad hoc committee that strives to unite Palestinian politicians in their drive to be members of the Knesset, lacking any clear agenda, called in Hebrew for participation in protests that were taking place at the time, emphasizing the need not to raise Palestinian flags. He opined that the purpose should be to struggle for whatever is left of Israeli democracy.

The demonstrations, however, were filled with Israeli flags and were not about democracy, but rather about the potential shift of power from Mapai to its rivals and the status of the religious communities in Israel, whom Mapai’s proponents blame for not serving in the Israeli military. By Mapai we refer to the traditional political structure in Israel that stretches from the actual Mapai to its subsequent configurations, from Shimon Peres and Sharon to Shulamit Aloni. This model necessarily affects the outsiders/insiders since the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, the Israeli Communist Party (ICP), later joined by the amorphous Hadash. Mapai established Israel’s colonial and apartheid system, enhanced by Likud’s Jabotinsky’s Beitarism. The latter builds on its solid constituency of resentful Mizrahi Jews who adore their culture but, for some reason, hate Palestinians and Arabs.

Israel’s cruel presence in the Middle East has been sustained throughout the years by various imperial powers, namely Britain, France, and currently the United States, often with the backing of influential Jewish communities in these countries. All enjoy a failed regional Arab system, particularly in the oil-rich Gulf states, that would assist in upholding the rights of Palestinians.

Like Emil Habibi before him, Taha’s vision of Zionism, Israel, and Israeli society has been shaped by the ICP. Taha did not engage in a shameful act similar to Habibi’s during 1948, nor did he call for the enlistment of non-ethnically cleansed Palestinians to serve in the Israeli military, as did a non-Jewish leader among the ICP from depopulated Haifa, of all places. Taha nevertheless follows the pattern of Habibi’s novel The Pessoptimist, and not only because of his personal history as a high school teacher in the Israeli educational system.

After the ethnic cleansing of more than two-thirds of their people in 1948, Palestinians in Israel did not constitute a meaningful political formation. On the contrary, they were, and in large part remain, a reflection of Habibi's main charachter. Many were part of Mapai’s apartheid and colonial politics. The ICP, on the other hand, led the purportedly politicized elements of Palestinian society with a clear mission and purpose of anti-Palestine, and anti-Palestinianism. They were essentially part of the Zionist political entity of Israel, notwithstanding their marginality, in terms of adhering to the negation of Palestine as such.

Indeed, all the milestones of Palestinian protests in Israel since 1948, were contained by the politics of the ICP who countered Palestinian identity and the Palestine Liberation movement seeking impossible ‘integration’ in Zionism and Israel. From the massacre of Kafr Qasem in 1956 to Land Day in 1976, to October 2000, November 2013, and May 2021, the ICP-Hadash could not connect the bursts of anger to any Palestinian context. Indeed, their radicalism, including refusing to serve in the Israeli military and even daring to call Israel’s conduct in Gaza genocide, is still part of a depoliticizing energy when their intellectual and political conceptualization is placed in its appropriate milieu.

Tamar Gozansky’s interview in Haaretz on 23 January 2025 epitomizes the inept criticism that is more a call for restraint towards ICP’s Palestinian members than an actual invitation for dissent. The fact that no ICP member or sympathizer, including in the Haaretz newspaper, dared to reveal the censorship of the Israeli military and government about the resistance operation from Gaza on 7 October 2023 (that it is directed at IDF Gaza Division and its Southern Command and that at least most Israeli civilians who were killed died as a result of intentional Israeli fire), is further evidence of the location of its politics. Instead, some prominent figures in ICP’s orbit, in and outside Haaretz, wholeheartedly joined the national hype and amnesia after the qualitative resistance operation from Gaza.

Tawfiq Zayyad symbolizes the failed quest to expand the scope of ICP’s politics by attempting to reach out to progressive Israeli academics, what is known as Hadash. Yet for years, while ICP – Hadash constituency was predominantly Palestinian, the ICP maintained its grip and included in its few (3-4) parliamentary members, two Israeli Jewish individuals, the ICP’s envoy and representative of the marginalized Mizrahi community. Hadash turned to be a mere academic articulation of ICP’s agenda and vision. Palestine and the Palestinians were neither central nor prevailing despite the 1948 rupture and the diplomatic, academic, and revolutionary performance of ethnically cleansed Palestinians outside of Palestine. ICP – Hadash was constructed in the vision of Adva’s founder Shlomo Svirski, a progressive academic, who discovered that Mizrahi Jews formed a working class. Reaching the Israeli Knesset, Zayyad himself was therefore sidelined in the party that was supposed to represent him and, if not his people, at least the ‘steadfastly remaining’ non-ethnically cleansed Palestinians. The political erasure of Palestinians in Israel was near complete with ICP - Hadash insistence on competing also in the Histadrut.

A certain version of Hadash led by Azmi Bishara split from it and cooperated with political factions that recognized Palestinianism as significant to the status and future of Palestinians in Israel with ambitious progressive values, Muhammed Miari’s Progressive List and Abna Al – Balad. The Islamist forces in Palestinian society were split between an admirable self–help organization led by the repeatedly persecuted Sheikh Raed Salah with attachment to the Palestinian cause and another one headed by the late Sheikh Abdullah Nimer Darwish that focused only on the daily needs, reluctant to vocally advance Palestinian rights for liberation despite, or maybe because of his personal oppositional history. Mansour Abbas’s absolute deviation from what the Israeli security establishment denotes as the ‘moderate’ Islamists in Israel into a gullible pronouncer legitimating Zionism’s objective is a travesty that deserves no less than his exclusion from Palestinian politics, anywhere.

Azmi Bishara continued the tradition of the ICP, by emphasizing thought, coupled with his Eastern German education that followed unnecessary complication of facts and history in the form of philosophy derived mostly from the libraries of Israeli universities. Hence, the peculiar ‘state of all its citizens’ slogan that he introduced, with a very limited type of autonomy, that certain Jewish thinkers advanced in Eastern Europe. It was a familiar Palestinian obscure intellectual endeavor, to convince Israeli Jews of the righteousness of an argument by practically saying: here, you used it sometime in the past. Another ICP-Hadash symptom that stuck with Bishara is his over-preoccupation with antisemitism and the Holocaust, the mechanisms used by the ICP to silence and repress Palestine and Palestinianism. Failing to understand Zionism’s constant savagery, even when it bursts from Haaretz newspaper, is one of Bishara’s many substantial intellectual errors.

Oren Yiftachel is the type of progressive Israeli academic that Zayyad and subsequently Bishara had hoped would help in transforming the Israeli political landscape. A self-proclaimed critical geographer, Yiftachel opposes the notion that Israel is an apartheid state from its inception despite the clarity of its land regime. A Kibbutznik by upbringing, Yiftachel never approached the colonial design of Israel premised on the Kibbutz and the Moshav. His mild critique of Arnon Sofer in 2009 reveals a disturbing conceptual limitation. Not less importantly, Yiftachel contributed significantly to a petition to the Supreme Court that challenged the privatization of land to infighting families in the Kibbutz and Moshav, advancing the creative argument that it is state land, which belongs to the Jewish people according to Israeli Basic Laws that have the standing of constitutionality. Yiftachel resides in Omer, one of the many towns that symbolize Israel’s coloniality and apartheid.

Danny Rabinowitz is another type of academic that have arisen during Israel’s triumphalist Oslo years of the 1990s called the post – Zionist era. In Overlooking Nazareth, he did not reach the level of research produced years earlier by Elia Zureik about Israel’s internal colonialism, who nevertheless reviewed his work with academic diplomacy. Despite his findings and some of his assertions, Rabinowitz expressed opposition to mild forms of resistance, such as Palestinians claiming space on a bus that belongs to a local Nazareth company. Rabinowitz detected hospitality as a virtue among the local Palestinian that ought to be used to welcome the foreign and outsider. Rabinowitz is a manifestation of the ICP – Hadash figure who always prefers to find himself in control. Ironically, the book was published in 1997 at the midst of Israel’s accusatory terrorism campaign of blowing up buses in Tel Aviv and elsewhere to shatter even an unfair and ill-advised Oslo process with the Palestinians.

In Coffins on Our Shoulders, Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu Baker attempted to sketch the profile of third-generation Palestinians, concluding that they are different from previous generations. Perhaps the only significant aspect of this book is Abu Baker’s honest admission. The Hebrew title is more telling, which is the The Standing Tall Generation (Ha-Dor Ha-Zakuf). The English one is taken from one of Marcel Khalife’s songs, a progressive Lebanese singer, that betrays the actual differences between sacrifices made by Palestinians and Lebanese in Lebanon and their counterparts in Israel, not to mention Palestinians in the 1967 occupied territories (East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza). Palestinians outside of Israel were standing tall in pre- 1948 Palestine and at least since the formation of their liberation movement in the mid-1960s, after their ethnic cleansing, as well as through their intellectual scholarship.

In such a miserable political and intellectual climate, it is no surprise that the Palestinian academic in Israel projects a lack of audacity and engages in little to no critical research. Their number is excessively less than their percentage in society, despite the unappealing knowledge and often lacking in quality manufactured by Israeli academics. The burdening shadow of Sami Smouha still haunts the local academic community, sociologically and politically. A lazy and uncourageous research methodology has developed that centers on familiarity with the Israeli political system. In psychology, the only path for academic research was through management of co-existence groups of Arab and Jewish students with grotesque relation to the Question of Palestine. Psychological theorizing could only declare that Palestinians in Israel are a marginal group.

Fania Oz continues her fetish of invoking Ben-Gurion, former Ratz (Meretz) leader Nitzan Horowitz declared the end of its historical role, and many in the Israeli “left” have been yearning to return to the days of Berl Katznelson. In law, suffice to quote Hebrew University Law Professor Michael Karayanni, appointed on 1 November 2026 as President of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, during his inaugural presentation as a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in December 2022, months after Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that Israel is an apartheid state in the entirety of historic Palestine:

If all I did in life was to observe reality and ask why, it is doubtful if I would have reached this moment.

Two key studies about the Palestinians in Israel have never found their way to the minds of local Palestinian academics and their Israeli colleagues: Ian Lustick’s work on the Israeli state control of a national minority and the more persuasive one of John Quigley’s apartheid paradigm. As to the excellent research by Palestinians outside of Israel, their exclusion is part of Israel’s epistemological denial to sustain its fragile to non-existent legitimacy. Consider, for instance, the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Undoubtedly the best articulator of the Palestinian experience. He is either ignored even by ‘progressive’ Israeli academics, or brutally misrepresented by local Palestinian academics with unqualified aspirations for intellectual rigor who express genuine versatility when necessary.    

During the latest elections to the Israeli Knesset, Palestinians in Israel voted in large numbers for two lists representing the varieties of this community. The large turnout can be explained in part as a protest against Ben Gvir’s constant provocations leveled against them. However, both running lists failed to articulate any clear direction. The more politicized non–Mansour Abbas list practically mimicked the non – Likud party messaging calling for the replacement of Netanyahu, despite the many similarities between him and any potential successor regarding Palestinians’ rights, including within Israel. No emphasis was placed on genocide, Israel’s constitutional apartheid structure and nature, its enduring coloniality, and what a post genocide and apartheid polity should emerge. This is what is expected from a progressive and visionary political platform. Instead, the non–Mansour Abbas list was a pitiful incarnation of the most significant artistic creation that this population managed to generate.    

The Hebrew Palestinian and ‘Co-existence’

Anton Shammas and Sayed Kashua tried to write literature in Hebrew. Both eventually decided to immigrate from Israel. There is no necessary connection between the two facts. But it does seem unattractive for an average Mapai consumer of culture to want to read a Palestinian Arab author. David Grossman, for example, who went on an odd journey among Palestinians in Israel documented in a book titled Present – Absentees, could not identify Israel’s coloniality that sabotages the country’s geography by the Kibbutzim and Moshavim.

Hanan Hever (2013) bestowed heroic virtues on Anton Shamas’s only novel (1986) and possibly interpreted it in his own wishful thinking, describing it as a vanguard political manifesto with the purpose of transforming Israeli Jewish society and its state. Here, too, we are faced with a progressive Israeli academic who adores his subject of analysis for his audacity to accept the Israeli Jew in Hebrew. The acceptance theme is central to Hadash-oriented Israeli academics, that places history aside, and focuses on the potential future. Hever has elevated Shamas from an Israeli Arab author in his defense of his novel against Amos Oz in 1991 to a proud Palestinian in 2013. An employee in the dogmatic Israeli broadcasting authority, Shamas’s novel, like many others, is about identity and social (dis)location, but it is far from Hever’s political contextualization as a text of a post-1982 Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and its consequences.

Hever is aware of the limits of the fragmented Israeli society, in other words, the constant issue of the Mizrahi Jew, but could not suggest a decent historical inquiry in order to potentially generate a different awareness at least among Israeli academics. A major obstacle to this possibility is one of Hever’s closest allies, Haaretz newspaper, and their persistent, masqueraded explosive reporting known to many, including its main historian Tom Segev who has written briefly about Israel’s constant ‘Shameful Business’ (עסק ביש) abroad, along with political assassinations. If we add Israel’s internal accusatory terrorism aimed at blaming Palestinians and engaging in military destruction as occurred in the 1990s[1] and 2000s[2], the picture that emerges is that we are dealing with no less than a pathologically deranged political entity projected by Dan Margalit’s interviews with former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit and Shimon Peres.

The ICP – Hadash Israeli academic, marginal in the Israeli academy, has contributed to shaping a limited criticality stemming from its Mapai-oriented format. To this day, even those purported critics do not grasp the Palestinian experience, nor do they reach the performance of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine before the formation of Israel in 1948. Palestine remains absent from the consciousness of ordinary Israelis and their academic institutions. Ilan Pappe’s ouster from Haifa University and the predatory legal and societal attack against Mohammed Bakri’s film ‘Jenin Jenin’ is a reflection of what Israel has been and became. Benny Morris disclosed in 2004 Israel’s actuality to Haaretz’s righteous reporter Ari Shavit, who wrote:

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins.[3]

Shavit is absolutely poignant. What used to be called post – Zionism in Israel is a result of the Israeli belief that the Palestine Liberation Movement was defeated. Shulamit Aloni never regretted her Palmach service or the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Meron Benvenisti turned from an ardent Zionist to a progressive who defends the actions of 1948 and the implausibility of evacuating settlements in the 1967 occupied territories. Yosi Sarid has never detached from his values as an indoctrinating high school teacher. As to Haim Oron and Mapam, their locational existential dilemma provides an explanation for their pervasive denial, notwithstanding or possibly because of Yizhar’s novel.  

Mapai’s Righteousness, Legal – Intellectual Frameworks, and Genocide in Gaza

The justification for Zionism and Israel was inherently colonial, focusing on land redemption with an abundance of biblical charges. Emphasis on the events of the Second World War came later, when the actual practices of Zionism against the Palestinians were gradually revealed. Anita Shapira explains in her ordinary mythical persuasion trying to convince the foreign reader critical of Israel:

Just as today’s VIP visitors to Israel are taken to see the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, so in the first decades of statehood were they ushered off to a kibbutz, especially if they were situated on the left side of the political spectrum. In 1972, for instance, at a time when many New Leftists had come to regard Israel as a present-day Sparta constantly brandishing its sword, the crowned prophet of the student revolution, Herbert Marcuse, visited Israel for the first time. His hosts took him to Kibbutz Hulda, where he was shown around by Amos Oz, who later gratefully quoted him as saying: ‘Yours is the only socialist experiment that has not spilt blood and so far has not turned bourgeois.’[4]

Although the local political tide within Zionism has slightly shifted from Weizmann and Ben-Gurion to Jabotinsky / Kook / Ovadia Yosef, the same approach regarding Palestine and the Palestinians remains. In a sense, the Kibbutz and the Moshav are a phenomenal economic disaster that continue attempting to survive with the support of the state colonially and through a legal regime of apartheid.

Legally, there is little room to dispute Israel’s unjustified formation. The 1917 Balfour Declaration was granted by an imperial power when Jews in Palestine were no more than 10% of the population. It was generated pursuant to the lobbying, among others, of the first High Commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel and his famous 1915 letter. Although Britain abstained during the vote on the 1947 illegal partition plan of Palestine, in the United States, President Truman’s approval was a result of intense campaigning by American Jews, six months after the Soviet Union had backed the unlawful plan. The U.S. State Department and Pentagon were surprised by the act and did not favor it.[5] 

The Holocaust argument advanced by Chaim Weizmann and many years later by Chaim Gans defies history, legality, and logic. In the case of Weizmann’s appeal for statehood, it is clear that the status of a refugee in one place does not generate a right to sovereignty in another, regardless of the actual sinister intentions of Zionism from its inception.[6] As To Gans’s attempt decades later, it should be understood as no more than a diplomatic exercise of false intellectuality stirred by Israel’s deteriorating status, particularly academically in the United States and Britain, because of Israel’s conduct against Palestinians.

Gans’s brazen attempt should be read together with another eccentric intellectual effort, Avishai Margalit’s co-authored book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004). It is a clear proclamation directed primarily against critics of U.S. foreign policy, who often tend to support Palestinian rights. Perhaps it is a counter effort to Edward Said’s influential intellectual project in Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Culture and Imperialism. For years, Margalit tried to represent Israel on the pages of the New York Review of Books, collaborating with formerly leading intellectual Michael Walzer. During Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Walzer was the theme of a special conference at Van Leer Institute honoring his work and legacy, which is essentially Zionist and anti – Palestinian rights oriented.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz insisted on deriving legitimacy for Israel in Palestine not from law, but only through belief. Jews believe Palestine is the Land of Israel; therefore, they can and should be entitled to sovereignty. Of course, it is a very vague source of legitimation, unsustainable by history, law, geography, and politics. Additionally, it paves the path for other religious groups to argue the same about the ‘Holy Land’, a consequence that is practically and morally undesirable.  Leibowitz moral impulse was triggered only after 1967, culminating in proposing partition as a political resolution. Regardless of his sharp judgement of Israeli society, premised on potential international criticism of Israel, his vision was as meaningless as his legitimation for Zionist sovereignty.

Any society might be sensitive to international assessment. In the case of Israel, it is worse, because the international appraisal is apposite, countered by the country’s traditional self-indulgence intellectually and politically. Aharon Barak resigned[7] from the International Court of Justice’s panel of Judges hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, after having been appointed to defend his country.[8] Subsequently, Barak claimed that charging Israel with genocide is the same as accusing him. He also added that he went to The Hague to defend law and justice out of Zionism.[9] Asa Kasher, Israeli philosopher and author of the IDF’s code of conduct, also could not see genocide being committed in Gaza.[10]

Other than the factual and legal errors by nearly all Israeli legal and philosophical figures in relation to Israel’s perpetration of genocide in Gaza, they also use the concept of genocide to absolve Israel from any substantial wrongdoing. Crimes against humanity are next in line in terms of Israel’s horrendous and treacherous behavior, also ignored by the educated Israeli observer.

Hebrew University Law Professor Yuval Shany co-authored his opinion in Just Security, echoing Asa Kasher’s approach. He challenged the findings and conclusions of Amnesty International's report about Israel’s commission of genocide in Gaza.[11] The passion in writing is clear. Why Just Security insists on hosting such authorship is beyond reasonable understanding. Had Shany and his companion tried to focus on the legal definition of genocidal intent, it would have been more plausible to grasp. But the other ‘factual’ arguments once again attest to the provinciality of the Israeli academic and the disturbing ‘balancing acts’ of the American academy’s patrons.

Hostility to international investigations of Israel’s grave crimes against Palestinians is a common theme among Israeli academics and their close colleagues in the United States. The 2009 Goldstone report about Israel’s crimes in Gaza enraged not only Israel and Alan Dershowitz, but the Harvard establishment as such, resulting in Martha Minow’s intervention to convince Richard Goldstone to retract the original published report.[12] Hebrew University Law Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer vehemently opposed international investigation of Israel’s appalling crimes in Gaza, indicating in the Jerusalem Post that his care for the integrity of international law requires opposing the established U.N. Human Rights Council commission headed by William Schabas because it lacks any Israeli member.[13]

Standing up for one’s own country is not necessarily a bad virtue. But when you are aware of its inherent coloniality and apartheid, such defense is rendered obsolete and demands consequences against the defender. Here, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement may think it has an uphill battle in the United States. On the contrary. If they state the facts and adhere to a decent line of argumentation, their case can and should be made easily even if opposed by Israel’s donating lobby. Another option is to read Haaretz newspaper carefully and refer to the epistemology of Israeli orientalist Elie Podeh.

  Ben Gurion and Peres. Source: Ynet, 7 September 2017

Truman and Weizman, May 1948. Source: Washington Post, 13 May 2023.

Haaretz’s Amir Oren conducts a murky interview with Shabak’s ‘Steve’, the former head of its interrogation unit. Source: Oren’s podcast, 5 October 2025.

Yair Lapid, Mechanic fixing cars. Source: Bank Hapoalim advertisement, 2004.

[1] Clyde Haberman, “Suicide Bombs Kill 19 in Israel; Shadow Cast over Peace Talks”, New York Times, 23 January 1995; Serge Schmemann, “Suicide Bomber Kills 5 in a Bus Attack Near Tel-Aviv”, New York Times, 25 July 1995; Serge Schmemann, “Bus Bombing Kills Five in Jerusalem; 100 Are Wounded”, New York Times, 22 August 1995.

[2] Joel Brinkley, “Bomb Kills At Least 19 in Israel as Arabs Meet Over Peace Plan”, New York Times, 28 March 2002.

[3] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest”, Haaretz, 8 January 2004.

[4] Anita Shapira, “The Kibbutz and the State”, Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2010.

[5] Gordon Sander, “How a U.S. president known to disparage Jews became godfather of Israel”, Washington Post, 13 May 2023. See also Walid Khalidi, “The Hebrew Reconquista of Palestine: From the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution to the First Zionist Congress of 1897”, 39(1) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.24-42 (2009).

[6] See Walid Khalidi, “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution”, 27(1) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.5-21 (1997).

[7] JP Staff, “Aharon Barak resigns from Hague panel, citing family-personal reasons”, Jerusalem Post, 5 June 2024.

[8] Bini Aschkenasy, “Israel to fight Gaza genocide claim at ICJ: When, where and how? – explainer”, Jerusalem Post, 7 January 2024.

[9] Tamar Almog et al., “Aharon Barak: When accusing Israel of genocide I am being accused”, Kan / Reshet Bet Radio, 29 May 2024 (Hebrew).

[10] Yair Weinriv, “Prof. Asa Kasher: I have not seen in Gaza any act of the genocide family”, Kan / Reshet Bet Radio, 10 August 2025 (Hebrew). See also, "IDF ethics author: Gaza situation not even close to genocide”, Israel National News / Arutz 7, 10 August 2025.

[11] Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, “A ‘Cramped Interpretation of International Jurisprudence’? Some Critical Observations on the Amnesty International Genocide Report on Gaza”, Just Security, 16 December 2024. It should be noted that Amnesty International’s Israel branch also trivially disagreed with the same report.

[12] See, Hikmah – Center for International Law and Human Rights, Letter to the President of the International Criminal Court, 8 August 2026, available at: https://www.hikmahs.org/post/letter-to-the-international-criminal-court-and-acting-u-s-attorney-general 

[13] Mordechai Kremnitzer, “A betrayal of international law”, Jerusalem Post, 28 September 2014.