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Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil

First published in Canadian Dimension April 18, 2024

Lavender fields near Hitchin, England. Photo by DeFacto/Wikimedia Commons.

“Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1

Lavender

For some unknown, but no doubt morbidly humorous reason—the same sick humour, perhaps, that leads the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to refer to their periodic punitive strikes on Gaza as “mowing the grass“—the IDF have decided that “Lavender” is an appropriate name for the artificial intelligence (AI) software they use to identify “human targets” in Gaza.

Since October 7, IDF strikes have killed at least 33,545 Palestinians including 8,400 women and over 13,000 children, injured another 76,049, and left 8,000 more missing, presumed buried under the rubble. The blitzkrieg has destroyed over 60 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, made two million people homeless, and left most of the strip uninhabitable.

Israel’s supporters deny that this bombing has been “indiscriminate” (as Joe Biden himself recently called it). They are right. It is worse. Seldom in the history of human conflict have so many bombs been so deliberately aimed at targeted individuals.

The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings.

The Lavender software

On April 3 the Israeli–Palestinian magazine +972 published an explosive article by journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham on the IDF’s use of the Lavender software, based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers, all of whom have served in Gaza during the current campaign. The story was shared with the Guardian, who ran it as an exclusive the same day, and was picked up by the Washington Post (April 5) and subsequently discussed in an opinion column in the New York Times (April 10).

Though CBC Radio’s daily podcast Front Burner carried a 30-minute interview with Yuval Abraham on April 8, the Lavender revelations have gained little traction in the mainstream media. They have been crowded out in the din of swiftly moving events—the continuing political fallout from the IDF’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers on April 1 that brought the number of humanitarian personnel killed in Gaza to at least 224, an attack that became newsworthy only because six of the victims were Westerners; and more recently, Iran’s missile and drone attack on military bases in Israel on April 13 in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of its embassy in Damascus. This is unfortunate, because Lavender in many ways encapsulates all that is most chilling about Israel’s genocidal treatment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

“The Lavender software,” says Yuval Abraham, “analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad]” on a scale of 1–100.

Mining data culled from a multiplicity of sources, it reaches its conclusions in much the same way as Amazon’s algorithm decides that given my demographic and my fondness for Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, I must be a fan of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. How could Amazon’s algorithm possibly know that my idea of hell is being forced to listen to Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for all eternity?

“Characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives” are fed into the machine as training data, against which the general population is then compared. Features that can increase an individual’s rating include “being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.”

“An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating,” Abraham explains, “and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.”

“The system … is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all,” but is reckoned to be accurate nine times out of ten on the basis of a sample manual check on several hundred Lavender-generated targets carried out at the beginning of the war.

A common error occurred, however, “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often,” admitted one source.

From database to kill list

Prior to October 7, IDF policy restricted the category of “human target” to “a senior military operative who, according to the rules of the military’s International Law Department, can be killed in their private home even if there are civilians around.” This was to ensure adherence to the principle of proportionality under international law, which measures the acceptability of civilian casualties (so-called collateral damage) relative to the military advantage to be gained from the strike.

Killing human targets while they are at home often inevitably takes out other family members, including children. For that reason, the IDF’s human targets were very carefully—and always manually—vetted by intelligence officers, and they never numbered more than “a few dozen.”

But after October 7, “the army decided to designate all operatives of Hamas’ military wing as human targets, regardless of their rank or military importance. And that,” says Abraham, “changed everything.” What started as a database morphed into a kill list.

Under constant pressure from above to generate “more targets for assassination,” says officer B., the senior source interviewed by Abraham, “We attacked at a lower threshold”:

the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.


“Training the system based on [the latter’s] communication profiles made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population,” says another of Abraham’s intelligence officers, resulting in its “including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”

On this basis the Lavender database “marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected ‘Hamas militants,’ most of them junior, for assassination”:

if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.

Twenty-second verifications

While the IDF claims that “analysts must conduct independent examinations, in which they verify that the identified targets meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law and additional restrictions stipulated in the IDF directives,” officer B. tells another story:

At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked. We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one—we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”


“At first,” B. said, “we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man—that was enough … I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day.” Ensuring the exclusion of women was not out of chivalry, but because women do not serve in Hamas’s military.

Another source, defending the use of Lavender, argued that “when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it … So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”

“Everything was statistical, everything was neat—it was very dry,” said B. The Israeli military “essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine ‘as if it were a human decision,’” substituting the one for the other.

Palestinians inspect the ruins of Watan Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, on October 8, 2023. Photo by Naaman Omar/Wikimedia Commons.

Where’s Daddy?

The extraordinarily high casualty rate from bombing, both in absolute terms and in relation to other recent conflicts like the Ukraine War, especially during the early stages of Israel’s bombardment, was a direct result of the application of Lavender.

When combined with two other AI programs, “Gospel” (which located buildings associated with Hamas operations) and the cutely-named “Where’s Daddy?” (which tracked individuals’ movements in real time), the whereabouts of those on the Lavender-generated kill list could be determined with a lethal degree of accuracy.

While the IDF claims that “analysts must conduct independent examinations, in which they verify that the identified targets meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law and additional restrictions stipulated in the IDF directives,” officer B. tells another story:

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” said A., an intelligence officer. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside …


Eventually everyone on Lavender’s list was entered into the Where’s Daddy? tracking program.

“You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can kill,” explained another source. “It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.” “Even if an attack is averted,” adds officer C., “you don’t care—you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”

In the first 45 days of bombing, at least 6,120 of the 11,078 reported Palestinian deaths in Gaza came from just 825 families. Many entire families were wiped out in single strikes. Among several cases documented by Amnesty International early on in the war:

On 10 October, an Israeli air strike on a family home killed 12 members of the Hijazi family and four of their neighbours, in Gaza City’s al-Sahaba Street. Three children were among those killed. The Israeli military stated that they struck Hamas targets in the area but gave no further information and did not provide any evidence of the presence of military targets. Amnesty International’s research has found no evidence of military targets in the area at the time of the attack.

Amnesty International spoke to Kamal Hijazi, who lost his sister, his two brothers and their wives, five nieces and nephews, and two cousins in the attack. He said: “Our family home, a three-storey house, was bombed at 5:15 pm. It was sudden, without any warning; that is why everyone was at home.”

Collateral damage degrees and dumb bombs

The likelihood of Lavender-directed strikes producing inordinately high civilian casualties was compounded by two further factors.

First, the thresholds for acceptable collateral damage were raised early in the war. From a situation in which at most a few dozen senior Hamas operatives were marked as human targets and the probability of attendant civilian casualties was manually assessed and decisions made on a case-by-case basis, the army decided that “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.”

Strikes were authorized on the basis of a “predetermined and fixed collateral damage degree” (as the ratio of civilians killed relative to targets was called). In the case of a battalion or brigade commander, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians.” Abraham’s article documents several such mass killings.

Second—in sharp contrast to the high precision weaponry Israel used to take out senior figures in of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in its April 1 attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus—the IDF’s preferred munitions for assassinating low-level Hamas targets identified by Lavender have been so-called “dumb bombs,” which collapse entire buildings on their occupants. The reasoning is impeccable:

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people—it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”


“In practice,” said source officer A., “the principle of proportionality did not exist.”

Without regard for persons

A century ago, the great German sociologist Max Weber argued that in contrast to systems of authority in pre-modern societies, modern state bureaucracies—of which the army is an extreme example—operate “without regard for persons.” “Modern loyalty,” he says, “does not establish loyalty to a person, like the vassal’s or disciple’s faith in feudal or in patrimonial relations of authority. Modern loyalty is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes.”

“The more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’” he explains, “the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation,” the more efficient its operations will be. If this sounds soulless, it is.

But paradoxically, the functioning of this thoroughly amoral machine rests, rather paradoxically, on a specific moralization of the individual’s relation to it. In Weber’s words:

the honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own convictions. This holds even if the order appears wrong to him and if, despite the civil servants’ remonstrances, the authority insists on the order … without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall to pieces.


It was precisely the moral imperative of following orders in the name of duty, with the concomitant abnegation of individual responsibility, that was repeatedly appealed to by defendants (and rejected by the court) at the Nuremberg trials. Hannah Arendt, discussing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, famously described this as “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

Zygmunt Bauman extends this line of analysis in his classic Modernity and the Holocaust—a work not much liked in Israel—in which he argues that “The light shed by the Holocaust on our knowledge of bureaucratic rationality is at its most dazzling once we realize the extent to which the very idea of the Endlosung [Final Solution] was an outcome of the bureaucratic culture.”

Lavender takes this abnegation of personal responsibility—in this case, for thousands of innocent deaths—demanded by bureaucratic organization a quantum leap further, outsourcing moral judgment to a literal machine. Automation of the selection of “human targets” relieves the burden of responsibility—and guilt.

For me, the most chilling admission in Abraham’s article came from his most senior source, officer B.

There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard … And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.


There has been much comment on the left, rightly, on how integral dehumanization of Palestinians—“human animals,” according to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—is to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The moral of the Lavender story is that genocide dehumanizes not only its victims but its perpetrators, enablers, and defenders as well.

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The student protests and the Gaza genocide

First published in Canadian Dimension May 1, 2024

Student encampment at Columbia University. Photo courtesy Columbia Students for Justice for Palestine/X.

There are snipers on the roof of the school where I got my MA.

There are police beating students at the school where I got my PhD.

At each school, I studied authoritarian regimes and how they brainwash people into believing that state brutality is not only normal, but deserved.

—Sarah Kenzior, post on X, April 28, 2024

LBJ, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?

To some of us of a certain age, 2024 is beginning to have a very 1968 feel about it. I turned 18 in 1968. When the Rolling Stones released “Street Fighting Man” that summer, many in my generation saw it as a call to arms.

The annus mirabilis, annus horribilis began with North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive, which turned the tide of the Vietnam War and galvanized a worldwide anti-war movement. On March 17, mounted police charged down protesters outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in London, England. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, setting off riots in Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, and scores of other American cities. In May, student protests paralyzed Paris and triggered a general strike that brought General De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to its knees. On June 4, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. On the night of August 20-21, Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, peremptorily ending Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring.

A week later it was the police’s turn to riot at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where they savagely beat anti-war protestors on Michigan Avenue. On October 2, armed forces opened fire on 10,000 demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, killing hundreds of university and high school students. When the Mexico Olympic Games opened ten days later, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in Black Power salutes on the 200-metre medal podium and Czech gymnastics multi-gold medalist Věra Čáslavská turned her head and averted her eyes as the Soviet anthem began to play and the Soviet flag was raised. On October 21, International Anti-War Day, thousands of students occupied Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.

Two weeks later, Richard Nixon, the red-baiting veteran of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) , was elected US president.

Today’s circumstances are not the same, but the déja vu is inescapable. Then as now, the trigger for disorder has been an unpopular foreign war. Then as now, domestic opposition to involvement in that war has been met with widespread repression. Then as now, the repression has exposed power structures that would sooner hide behind bland facades of neoliberal normality. And then as now, young students have been in the vanguard of the protests.

Gaza is the moment of moral conscience for this generation, as Vietnam was for mine. I’m cheering for the kids.

Do you feel safe sending your child to a school which gives up its students to the police?

On April 17, Columbia University President Baroness Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, formerly vice president at the World Bank, deputy managing director of the IMF, deputy governor of the Bank of England, and president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics, testified before the US House Education and Workforce Committee on “campus antisemitism.”

The committee, whose resident attack dog is New York’s 22nd congressional district representative and aspiring MAGA vice-presidential running mate Elise Stefanik, had previously claimed the scalps of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Harvard University President Claudine Gay.

Magill and Gay’s resignations were quickly hijacked for the Republicans’ wider “war on woke,” and in particular its war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy couldn’t stop himself from saying the quiet bit out loud. “Better late than never,” he crowed. “It was a thinly veiled exercise in race & gender when they selected Claudine Gay”—the first Black president of Harvard and only the second Black woman to head an Ivy League university. Here as elsewhere, charges of antisemitism were a convenient vehicle for advancing—and concealing—other political agendas that have little to do with protecting Jews.

The House antisemitism investigations have been compared, not unreasonably, to HUAC’s witchhunting of “subversives” during the early years of the Cold War. No doubt mindful of Magill and Gay’s fate, Shafik turned out to be a more than friendly witness. She assured the committee that “Antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

Conceding that “the events of October 7 brought to the forefront an undercurrent of antisemitism that is a major challenge for universities across the country”—a representation of the situation that has been fiercely contested by participants, who among other things point to the large numbers of Jewish students and faculty taking part in the pro-Palestine protests—Shafik detailed the steps Columbia had taken to combat antisemitism since October 7. The “central challenge,” she said, was “trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination.”

Her opening statement detailed a raft of actions taken with the aim of monitoring, policing, and disciplining protesters, but offered little but platitudes in regard to free speech.

“We restricted access to our campus to those with valid Columbia identification, increased the public safety presence across all of our campuses, brought in external security firms,” Shafik explained. “We updated our policies and procedures … to make it easier to report allegations of hate speech, harassment, and other forms of disruptive behavior, including antisemitic behavior” via “enhanced reporting channels, and supplementing internal resources through a team of outside investigators.”

On October 12, “we brought law enforcement onto our Morningside Heights campus to ensure the safety of our community at a protest for the first time in more than 50 years”—that is to say, since Columbia was occupied back in 1968 (when the police raid on April 30 resulted in 712 arrests and 148 reports of injuries). Thereafter the university authorities have maintained “regular communication with the New York City Police Department, ensuring they were either present or on standby for all major events, including vigils and demonstrations.”

Shafik was “personally frustrated,” she told the committee, to discover that Columbia’s existing “policies and structures were sometimes unable to meet the moment.” The school’s event policy was hastily rewritten to restrict the places and times that protests would be permitted on campus, require two working day’s notice of intended demonstrations, and set out “a clear procedure for adjudication of alleged violations and consequences for students and student groups who break the rules.”

Following these revisions two student societies, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), were suspended after leading an unauthorized student walkout on November 9, and several students were suspended on March 24 after “an event took place at a campus residential facility that the University had previously barred—twice—from occurring.”

Columbia concurrently established a Task Force on Antisemitism “led by three prominent Jewish members of our faculty,” whose brief was “first, to assess the events and other causes contributing to the pain in Columbia’s Jewish community; second, to review the relevant policies, rules, and practices that affect our campus; and third, to propose other methods to help the entire community understand the effects of antisemitism at Columbia.”

What is claimed to be an internal administration document leaked to SJP suggested that Dean of General Studies (GS) Lisa Rosen-Metsch, one of three members of the Task Force, had not only overseen “a serious and intentional misuse of GS institutional aid, where TAU [Tel Aviv University] Dual BA Program students receive disproportionately higher funds than others, without the required basis of demonstrated financial need,” but also “convened meetings with GS veterans who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), directing them to counter pro-Palestinian student activities and to actively disrupt pro-Palestinian activity on campus.” If the document is genuine these are serious allegations, which undermine any confidence in the impartiality of the Task Force—or of Columbia University.

Notwithstanding Shafik’s acknowledgment—the only one in her entire statement—that “Our Palestinian students and faculty have also been affected as their families and friends suffer through a humanitarian crisis,” no such dedicated task force was set up to address their pain: a pain, it might be conjectured, that went deeper than merely being made to feel uncomfortable in the presence of students protesting the ongoing Israeli actions that were taking the lives and obliterating the homes of their friends and relatives in Gaza. Anti-Palestinian, -Arab, or -Muslim speech and actions were evidently not seen as deserving of comparable attention by the university either then or later.

This is despite the fact that three Palestinian students had been shot in Burlington, Vermont, on November 25, leaving one paralyzed from the chest down after a bullet lodged in his spine—and in full knowledge that several of Columbia’s own students had been sprayed with a noxious chemical substance, possibly Skunk, at a pro-Palestine rally on January 19, sending ten of them to hospital. Former IDF soldiers studying at Columbia were alleged to be involved in this attack.

Despite the deafening chorus from the pro-Israel lobby bemoaning Jewish students across the US being made to feel “unsafe” by protesters demanding Palestinian freedom (as distinct from Israeli sovereignty, as in Likud’s program) from the river to the sea, none—thankfully—have yet been subjected to remotely comparable violence.

Predictably, the Task Force on Antisemitism’s first report “endorsed Columbia’s new Interim University Policy for Safe Demonstrations” and “also called for stronger enforcement of our policies, a goal toward which we are diligently working.”

Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!

In the early morning hours of April 17, the same day Shafik testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee, students established a Gaza Solidarity Encampment of around 50 tents on the South Lawn of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus in support of “divestment and an end to Columbia’s complicity in genocide.”

The protest was organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a coalition of over 120 groups, including the SJP and JVP, founded in 2016 to “call on the University to divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that profit from the State of Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights through its ongoing system of settler colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid.”

Dressed in full riot gear, the NYPD cleared the encampment the next day and arrested over 100 people, 108 of whom were charged with trespass. NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

It wasn’t the cops that initiated the sweep. Shafik had requested NYPD in writing to remove the students, claiming that “the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present dangerto the substantial functioning of the University.” The formulation I have italicized was likely included to justify Shafik’s acting without the imprimatur of the university’s senate executive committee, which she was statutorily bound to consult in such serious cases.

Protesters block traffic during a pro-Palestinian demonstration demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, near the home of Senator Chuck Schumer in Brooklyn, April 23, 2024. Photo by Andres Kudacki/AP.

Columbia and its partner institution Barnard College then summarily suspended three students. Among them was Isra Hirsi, the daughter of congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D–MN05), who is one of a small but growing number of Democratic representatives to have opposed the Biden administration’s continuation of unconditional financial and military support for Israel despite the spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It is doubtless pure coincidence that Omar had given Shafik a stiff grilling at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing.

On April 20 Columbia told all the arrested students that they had been suspended, meaning that many would be forced to vacate their student housing. At Barnard, students were given 15 minutes to pack their belongings.

Undeterred, protesters set up camp again on April 22. The following days saw an uneasy standoff, with negotiations between the students and the university authorities taking place against the threat of bringing the cops in again. On April 29, Columbia gave the students an ultimatum. The bold type is the university’s:

Please promptly gather your belongings and leave the encampment. If you voluntarily leave by 2 p.m., identify yourself to a University official, and sign the provided form where you commit to abide by all University policies through June 30, 2025, or the date of the conferral of your degree, whichever is earlier, you will be eligible to complete the remainder of the semester in good standing (and will not be placed on suspension) as long as you adhere to that commitment … If you do not leave by 2 p.m., you will be suspended pending further investigation.


Shafik issued a statement the same day in which the University offered “to develop an expedited timeline for review of new proposals from the students by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers divestment matters”; “to publish a process for students to access a list of Columbia’s direct investment holdings”; “to convene a faculty committee to address academic freedom and to begin a discussion on access and financial barriers to academic programs and global centers”; and “to make investments in health and education in Gaza, including supporting early childhood development and support for displaced scholars.”

These concessions fell far short of the students’ demands, but to wring them at all from an administration whose first response had been to call in the NYPD says much for the power of protest. Shafik remained adamant, however, that “the University will not divest from Israel.”

The 2:00 p.m. deadline passed without the students leaving. On the evening of April 29, Columbia began issuing mass suspensions. Elise Stefanik meantime issued a statement that read:

Columbia has surrendered to the radical pro-Hamas antisemitic mob instead of securing campus and protecting Columbia’s Jewish students. There can be no more extensions or delays. There can be no negotiations with self-proclaimed Hamas terrorists and their sympathizers. 


Overnight, the students occupied Hamilton Hall, a building that had been a centre of the 1968 protests too. They hung a banner out of an upper floor window renaming it Hind’s Hall, in memory of six-year-old Hind Rajab, the little girl who was killed, likely by Israeli tank fire, in Gaza along with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew sent to rescue her after she had endured hours, trapped in a car with her dead relatives, as the sole survivor of an IDF strike.

Though the front pages of the American press have been filled for the last two weeks with breathless accounts of the campus protests, it is easy to lose sight of their objective.

As Maryam, a Barnard College student arrested in the NYPD sweep on April 18 and subsequently suspended (and made homeless) for her part in the encampment, urged on April 22,

I wish people would listen to Columbia student organizers and center Gaza. Our escalation is long overdue and we are escalating for Palestine & nothing else. Please have all eyes on Palestine and do not cease coverage of Gaza whatsoever. 

Israel bombs, NYU pays, how many kids have you killed today?

I have dwelt on Columbia not only because the current campus unrest first came to a head there, but also because both the students’ actions and the administration’s response foreshadowed events across North America and beyond.

The faceoff at Columbia unleashed a tsunami of encampments, occupations, and other forms of protest at dozens—likely by now hundreds—of US universities, ranging from Ivy League schools like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Brown, top private universities like NYU, Emory, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, and large public universities like UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, and the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, to small colleges and working-class campuses like Cal Poly Humbolt.

Per the New York Times the latter school, which is situated in redwood forests 275 miles north of San Francisco, has become “the site of the nation’s most entrenched campus protest. It has gone well beyond the encampments seen on many college quads elsewhere; at Cal Poly Humboldt, protesters took over the power centre of the campus and have rejected increasingly desperate entreaties from officials for them to vacate the premises.”

The movement has since spread to universities in Canada (McGill, Concordia, the University of Ottawa, and UBC), France (Sciences-Po and the Sorbonne), Australia (Universities of Melbourneand Sydney), Italy (Sapienza University in Rome), and the UK (Warwick, UCL). I am proud to say that the first international Gaza solidarity encampment was erected by students and faculty at the University of Alberta, where I taught for 20 years and remain a professor emeritus, on April 22.

Putting a whole new complexion on the hollow and tokenistic land acknowledgments with which McGill, like every other university in Canada, nowadays begins all its official functions, the Traditional Council of the Five Nations Longhouse Confederacy of the Kahnawake Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) Nation, upon whose territory McGill University sits, drew unwelcome attention to the enduring connections between settler colonies past and present across the globe.

Noting “the behavior of the european [sic] for the last five hundred years … in their systematic colonial genocide wars upon our Mother Earth and all Original Peoples and our territories here in Turtle Island and abroad, including Palestine,” and tartly observing that “any and all military actions are intrinsic with the more primitive and lower levels of human thought,” the Council stated:

in accordance with the Two Row Wampam Peace Treaty, we grant the full right to those who are occupying McGill and other campuses throughout Turtle Island to be upon the said lands, with the express intent of engaging their administrations to divest from the colonial genocide of israel [sic] upon the Palestinian People and from the war machine in general. 


Many encampments in the US have been violently broken up by police—at the university’s behest. On April 29 the New York Times published an incomplete list of campuses where protestors had been arrested, including Columbia (108 arrests), Yale (60), NYU (“dozens”), USC Los Angeles (93), UT Austin (57), Emerson College in Boston (118), Ohio State University in Columbus (36), Emory (28), Aurora campus in Denver (40), Arizona State University in Tempe (69), Northeastern University in Boston (98), Washington University in St. Louis (100 arrests, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein), and Virginia Tech (91).

Police have since made further arrests at UT Austin, Cal Poly Humbolt, the University of Utah, Virginia Commonwealth University, UNC Chapel Hill, and elsewhere. Raising the spectre of the killing of four students and wounding on nine others by the National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, police snipers were photographed on roofs overlooking demonstrations at Ohio State and Indiana University.

Though nobody has yet been killed, video offers plentiful evidence of vicious policing. There is likely an element of class resentment here, since the protesters have been widely portrayed in the media as spoiled rich brats. Clips from Emory showing philosophy department chair Noëlle McAfee being led away in handcuffs in her own words “like a criminal” and economics professor Caroline Fohlin being thrown to the ground and restrained by burly cops (even as she shouted “I’m a professor!”) went viral on social media. Neither of these academics were involved in the encampment, but they made the mistake of questioning police manhandling of their students.

As with Israel’s targeted killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza on April 1, which momentarily grabbed the attention of Western politicians and media only because six of the victims hailed from Western countries (the IDF had previously killed at least 224 Palestinian humanitarian personnel in Gaza without arousing international indignation), the spectacle of middle-aged, upper-middle-class, professional white women being on the receiving end of police brutality brought home power dynamics that are routinely experienced by Black, brown, and Indigenous minorities on a daily basis but otherwise hidden from sight.

Since we are in Atlanta, Georgia, we might recall the name of another protester, 26-year-old Stop Cop City activist Manuel Terán, into whose head, torso, hands, and legs police pumped at least 57 bullets during a multi-agency “counter-insurgency” raid in January 2023.

This is not the only respect in which events in the US uncannily mirror events in Gaza, opening up power relations to the clarifying light of day.

Say it clear, say it loud, Palestine will make us proud

“It is kind of weird that the biggest story in the US about Israel-Palestine is about college campuses when there are multiple mass graves being uncovered and constant bombardment in Gaza right now,” Benjamin H. Bradlow, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University posted on Xon April 21.

The American Association of University Professors drew attention to the same jarring contrast in a post juxtaposing the phoney hysteria surrounding US campus protests with the very real scholasticide—the magnitude and systematicity of the horror cry out for the neologism—the IDF has let loose on the Palestinian education system in Gaza:

It’s worth reminding those critical of the student protests raging across the US: Gaza no longer has universities. Every single university in Gaza has been bombed into oblivion. Hundreds of academics, scholars, professors, & students have been killed since Oct. 7.


But if the material fabric of American universities remains intact, give or take the odd broken window or piece of “offensive” graffiti, the same can no longer be said of the cozy, liberal blanket of myth within which they have long nestled.

Columbia may have chairs, lectures, and reading rooms dedicated to the memory of Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar whose Orientalism (1978) was “perhaps the most influential scholarly book of the late twentieth century,” enshrine Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in its core curriculum, and afford postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak the space in which to speak, but when the chips are down the gloves come off.

The administration “deanlets” whose takeover Benjamin Ginsberg warned of a decade ago in his grimly prescient The Fall of the Faculty are now running the university show, and it is clear that their commitment to the humane values of free speech, academic freedom, open intellectual inquiry, and faculty governance that supposedly form the bedrock upon which the modern university is built count for little compared with the next check from a wealthy donor or threat from a rabble-rousing politician.

When New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft pulled support from Columbia because of “the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country” and MAGA Republican Speaker Mike Johnson warned President Biden “Antisemitism is a virus, and because the administration and woke university presidents aren’t stepping in, we’re seeing it spread … We have to act” after paying a photo-op visit to Morningside Heights, Columbia students and faculty might have expected some pushback on the part of their president against such slurs.

But no. Minouche went with the flow and abjectly accommodated to the entitlements of power.

In a lengthy open letter published on April 29 in the Boston Review, Robin D.G. Kelley, who is now Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA but who taught at Columbia from 2003-2006, castigates Shafik’s “draconian, unethical, illegal, and dishonest actions toward your own students and faculty.”

“In my nearly forty years as a faculty member,” he says,

I have never seen such brazen cruelty toward students and faculty, such cowardice before what amounts to a right-wing witch hunt, and such blatant dishonesty … In your desperate effort to deflect attacks from the likes of Elise Stefanik, you have abandoned the principles of academic freedom—including our obligation to engage in truthful, accurate, and nuanced discourse—and sacrificed the safety of our colleagues.


“I suspect that your previous executive and managerial posts in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bank of England did not prepare you to lead a university,” he acidly goes on. But that is surely why Shafik was hired. “You are keeping no one safe,” Kelley rages, “except for your donors, trustees, and Columbia’s endowment.”

In today’s upside-down Orwellian world, in which politicians gaslight the public into believing that a genocide carried out in plain sight is legitimate self-defense and anybody who suggests otherwise—including Jews—is “antisemitic,” are these not the only people—corporations, in the US, being people too—that really matter? The ones who are used to calling the shots?

The genocide in Gaza and the repression on American university campuses are intimately connected. It is time we lifted our heads from our everyday evasions and diversions, our compromises and complicities, and started to listen to the kids.

By on

Observations on the deadliest attack on the Palestinian people since the Nakba

First published in Canadian Dimension August 5, 2024

Gazan children. Photo by gloucester2gaza/Wikimedia Commons

“It’s been 300 days since October 7—the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” posted UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on X on August 1. “Many who were brutally abducted and taken hostage remain in captivity,” he added. “Today we renew our call for an immediate ceasefire and for Hamas to release all hostages now.”

That’s it? That’s the tweet? I thought, floored—though not surprised—by Lammy’s sidelining of everything else that had happened during that 300 days in Gaza.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Israel had assassinated Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran—the chief negotiator in the ongoing Cairo ceasefire talks, and a (relative) moderate who is on record as being open to Hamas laying down its arms in exchange for a two-state solution on Israel’s 1967 borders. This was hardly a move calculated to bring about an immediate ceasefire or the release of Hamas’s hostages.

Nor was the passage on July 19 of a resolution in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, by a majority of 68 to nine rejecting any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the declared policy of the British government of which Lammy is a part—on grounds that “The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.”

The unbearable lightness of Palestinian being

What incensed me more in Lammy’s post was his total erasure of the horrors Israel has inflicted on Palestinians since October 7. That day is seemingly frozen in aspic, a measure of “pure, unadulterated evil” that can only be compared to the Holocaust.

Israel’s no less evil and infinitely more destructive retaliation, in the deadliest attack on the Palestinian people since the Nakba of 1948, does not even merit a mention.

Has Lammy forgotten—to take a few atrocities at random—the murder of five-year-old Hind Rajab, together with the paramedics sent to rescue her, by Israeli tank fire as she waited, terrified, trapped in a car with the corpses of the rest of her family?

Israel’s targeted drone strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers after it had been given the go-ahead to travel by the IDF?

The Flour Massacre, in which Israeli troops fired on Palestinians waiting to collect food aid in Gaza City, killing at least 112 people and injuring 760?

The mass graves uncovered after the IDF withdrew from the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals, containing almost 400 bodies, some showing evidence of being buried alive?

The blockade of roads and crossings and the destruction of food aid packages destined for Gaza by Israeli settlers, while the army looked on?

The IDF soldiers prancing around with looted Palestinian women’s underwear and children’s toys, images they themselves proudly posted on social media?

The torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman detention centre—and the riots and protests in the Knesset that erupted when some of those responsible were arrested and charged with abuse?

The abuses at Sde Teiman are no anomaly. According to a lengthy story published on August 5 in the Guardian following a recent report by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem,

Violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been normalised across Israel’s jail system, according to Guardian interviews with released prisoners, with mistreatment now so systemic that rights group B’Tselem says it must be considered a policy of “institutionalised abuse.”

Former detainees described abuse ranging from severe beatings and sexual violence to starvation rations, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs including water, daylight, electricity and sanitation, including soap and sanitary pads for women.

The quantum of killing

What is the measure of our evil? The evil that Lammy overlooks because he refuses to see beyond the (undoubted) evils committed by Hamas on October 7?

Is it the 39,324 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, who have been confirmed killed by Israeli actions in Gaza since October 7—an undoubted understatement of the true death toll, because Israel has destroyed the administrative machinery for counting Palestinian deaths along with its annihilation of Gaza’s health service?

Is it the 592 people, including more than 143 children, who have died in the same period at the hands of Israeli security forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank?

Is it the 10,000-plus Palestinians who are missing, presumed dead, in the rubble of Gaza, of whom 40 percent are believed to be children?

Is it the 186,000 Palestinian deaths that a recent article in The Lancet predicted will be the likely eventual outcome of Israel’s protracted assault?

Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organizations still active in the Gaza Strip.


Or is a more telling measure of evil the monstrous disproportionality between the death toll in Israel from October 7, and the death toll in Gaza since?

According to official Israeli figures, 1,139 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’s attack, of whom one-third (32.75 percent) were members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), police, or kibbutz security guards.

Just 36 of these victims were children. Only two of them were babies, neither of whom were beheaded, burned alive, baked in ovens, or hung on clothes lines. An unknown, but likely substantial, number of people perished from IDF “friendly fire” or implementation of its notorious Hannibal Directive.

For every victim of October 7 in Israel, 35 Palestinians—a majority of whom were women and children—have now paid with their lives in Gaza. For every Israeli child killed on October 7, Israel has now slaughtered 416 Palestinian children.

Other comparisons underline the magnitude of Israel’s killing spree. As of January 15, three months into the war, the average number of deaths per day in Gaza—250—was “higher than any recent major armed conflict including Syria (96.5 deaths per day), Sudan (51.6), Iraq (50.8), Ukraine (43.9), Afghanistan (23.8) and Yemen (15.8).”

As of March 14, “at least 12,300 youngsters [had] died in the enclave … compared with 12,193 globally between 2019 and 2022.”

By April 24, “Israel [had] dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip … far surpassing the [tonnage] of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II.”

Mutilés de la guerre

Should the measure of our evil include the 17,000 Gazan children left unaccompanied or separated from their parents (as of February 2—there have been many more since)—each “a child who is coming to terms with this horrible new reality” of loss and grief?

The anguish of the thousands of Palestinian parents who have watched their children die, often in agony, or salvaged their body parts from the rubble in plastic bags?

The indelible memory of seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, who was left hanging dead from a wall, ribbons of flesh all that was left of her legs after an Israeli air strike on Rafah?

The appalling number of wounded—more than 90,830 people so far, out of a pre-war population of 2.3 million?

After just a month of war, in November 2023, UNICEF estimated that approximately 1,000 Palestinian children had one or both legs amputated, adding recently that “it is exceedingly likely that this number has been far surpassed in the past four months.”

Surgeons working in Gaza have testified to the horror of these operations, which often have had to be done without anaesthetic. Dr. Seema Jilani, who served as a senior emergency health adviser for the International Rescue Committee, described “a hellscape full of nightmarish scenes” for the New York Times:

There was the 6-year-old boy, covered in burns, whose foot had been severed. A girl missing both feet. A toddler whose right arm and right leg had been torn off and who appeared to be hemorrhaging. He needed a chest tube, but none were available. Nor were any stretchers—and he hadn’t been given anything for his pain.


Is it a measure of our evil that the weapons Israel employs in Gaza—many of them manufactured by Western companies—are designed to produce such mutilations? Or that IDF decisions about targeting of individuals are routinely outsourced to AI?

These weapons include white phosphorus, which burns down to the bone, causing wounds that are slow to heal and prone to infection; MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, which when dropped onto densely-populated areas (as they were at Jabalia refugee camp) cause hundreds of casualties; and Israeli-made “missiles and shells … packed with additional metal designed to fragment into tiny pieces of shrapnel … that leave barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body.”

Described by Amnesty International as “a more sophisticated version of the ball-bearings or nails and bolts which armed groups often pack into crude rockets and suicide bombs”—a nice irony given the standard Israeli description of Palestinian resistance groups as “terrorists”—Israel’s fragmentation weapons are specifically “designed to create large numbers of casualties.” The cruelty is the point.

A state of exception

For those who have so far escaped death or injury, Israel has left little in Gaza but what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls bare life—a “state of exception,” as in Guantanamo Bay or the Nazis’ concentration camps in which life is reduced to mere biological survival outside of the protection of law (sorry IHRA, I make no apology for “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”).

Drawing on the testimony of soldiers and defence officials, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes how the IDF has created literal “kill zones” in Gaza, where anyone who ventures into them will be shot. Al Jazeera captured graphic video of one such incident, in which four Palestinian civilians were killed by drone fire.

American doctors who have worked in Gaza hospitals testify to the IDF’s targeting of Palestinian children. On one occasion, relates reconstructive surgeon Dr Irfan Alaria,

a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.


On July 26, 45 American physicians and nurses who had worked in Gaza wrote to US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, describing how “every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.”

We wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget.

Displacement and disease

Should our measure of evil include what is euphemistically called “displacement”—the eviction of people from their homes as they are ordered to move from one “safe zone” to another, which often turn out not to be safe at all? Is this not itself a form of terror?

The UN estimates that 1.9 million people—90 percent of Gaza’s population—have now been internally displaced, in some cases fleeing up to ten times. Some 110,000 made it out into Egypt before Israel stormed and closed the Rafah crossing. The rest are living in tents or bombed-out buildings or sheltering in UNRWA and other international aid agency premises.

As has been repeatedly demonstrated in the course of the last ten months, none of these temporary refuges are safe from Israeli shells, missiles, and bombs.

Nor, increasingly, do they provide protection against those other two horsemen of the Apocalypse, famine and pestilence.

Back in December the world’s famine watchdog, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee, warned that “Famine may occur by the end of May 2024 if an immediate cessation of hostilities and sustained access for the provision of essential supplies and services to the population did not take place.”

On July 9, the UN Human Rights Office reported that “famine has spread across the entire Gaza strip.”

The International Rescue Committee warned in April of an impending “public health catastrophe,” in which:

With Gaza’s health system decimated by Israel, diseases once easily controlled are now spreading, and children, especially malnourished children, are the most susceptible. Projections suggest that the spread of cholera, measles, polio, and meningococcal meningitis pose a mortal threat.


On July 29 Gaza’s Health Ministry declared a polio epidemic across the Gaza Strip, which, it said, “poses a health threat to the residents of Gaza and neighbouring countries” and represents a “setback” to the global polio eradication program.

Israel responded with a crash program of polio vaccinations for IDF soldiers serving in Gaza or due to be sent to Gaza, while offering no such protection to Palestinians. This is as graphic an illustration of apartheid as we could ask for.

Meantime, following orders from their brigade commanders, soldiers of the 401st Brigade of the IDF Armored Corps blew up the main water reservoir serving the city of Rafah. They filmed themselves and posted the video on social media with the caption “Destruction of the Tel Sultan water reservoir in honour of Shabbat.”

If I must die

Should our measure of evil include the material destruction and cultural devastation Israel has visited upon the Gaza Strip?

On April 2, a joint report by the World Bank, the UN, and the EU estimated the cost of damage to Gaza’s physical infrastructure at the end of January at $18.5 billion. An estimated 37 million tons of debris would need to be cleared before reconstruction could even begin. “On the most optimistic scenario,” rebuilding Gaza’s homes would take until 2040.

Israel has damaged or destroyed 88 percent of Gaza’s schools, 80 percent of its commercial facilities, 65 percent of its roads, 62 percent of its homes, and 267 places of worship.

Gaza’s water, sanitation, electricity, and telecommunications infrastructure has largely collapsed as a result of Israeli action. Some 84 percent of Gaza’s health facilities are destroyed or damaged, and only 16 out of 35 hospitals are even partially functioning.

Around 63 percent of Gaza’s heritage sites have sustained damage, out of which 31 percent have been completely demolished. Among the scores of archives and libraries destroyed are the Central Archives of Gaza City and the Rafah Museum.

All 12 universities in Gaza were bombed and damaged or destroyed during the first hundred days of the war. Israeli soldiers filmed themselves gleefully setting fire to the library in al-Aqsa university in Gaza City and posted the video online.

The IDF blew up Gaza’s last surviving university, Israa University, on January 17, more than two months after it occupied the school and converted it into a military barracks—in other words, long after it had ceased to pose any conceivable military threat.

This scholasticide extends beyond buildings, books, and artifacts. As of April 2024, according to a UN Human Rights report, “more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors [had] been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers [had] been injured—with numbers growing each day.”

Palestinian doctors have been detained en masse, beaten, humiliated, and tortured. As of August 2, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ “preliminary investigations showed at least 113 journalists and media workers were killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalistssince CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”

Even artists and poets are not safe. In the best-known case—there have been many others—scholar and poet Refaat Alareer, a professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, was killed along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister, and four of her children, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on December 7.

His last poem, “If I Must Die,” has echoed around the world.

The ICJ

Not everyone has been as indifferent to Palestinian suffering or oblivious to Israeli culpability as David Lammy. It is not only the protestors on university campuses and demonstrators in Western capitals who refuse to look away from the carnage, but the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

On July 19, the ICJ—the world’s highest authority on the interpretation of international law—delivered a long-awaited advisory opinion on “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” Unambiguous and uncompromising, the ruling was a bombshell.

A press release issued by the court bullet-pointed the judges’ main conclusions. The key takeaways included:

  • the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful;
  • the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible;
  • the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory; [and]
  • the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Of particular relevance to the US, the UK, Canada, and other Western states that have supported Israel, the ICJ also ruled that:

all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


The court was clear that it regards Gaza as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory because Israel “continue[s] to exercise, certain key elements of authority … including control of the land, sea and air borders, restrictions on movement of people and goods, collection of import and export taxes, and military control over the buffer zone, despite the withdrawal of its military presence in 2005.”

For the avoidance of any doubt, it adds “This is even more so since October 7, 2023.”

The ICC

Neither this, nor ICJ Justice Charlesworth’s separate declaration, in which he emphasized that “the population in the occupied territory does not owe allegiance to the occupying Power, and … is not precluded from using force in accordance with international law to resist the occupation,” exonerates Hamas from criminal responsibility for actions carried out on October 7 that were contrary to international law.

And per the ICC, Hamas—or others who followed them through the breaches in the fence—indeed did commit some grievous crimes.

On May 20, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan asked the court to issue arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, whom he charged with committing “war crimes and crimes against humanity” on October 7.

These crimes included “murder,” “taking hostages,” “rape and other acts of sexual violence, “torture,” “cruel treatment,” and “outrages upon personal dignity.”

Khan also sought arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant. He itemized their crimes as:

  • Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the [Rome] Statute;
  • Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
  • Wilful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
  • Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i);
  • Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity;
  • Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h);
  • Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k).

However heinous the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, they do not justify—or excuse—the crimes committed by Israel since. That is why Khan wants to see Sinwar and Netanyahu side by side in the dock at the Hague.

Dief, like Haniyeh, is now dead, another victim of Israel’s patented brand of summary justice. Haniyeh was taken out by a precision strike—the full details have not yet been made public—on the house where he was a diplomatic guest in Tehran. Dief, on the other hand, was “eliminated” in an Israeli air raid on Khan Younis on July 13.

It should not by now surprise us to learn that at least 90 Palestinians were killed and around 300 wounded in the strike.

Bringing it all back home

There are many ways of measuring the evil that Israel has done to Palestinians, both during the decades of occupation before October 7, and in the ten months since.

But the true measure of our evil lies in the West’s complicity in maintaining Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and in particular, in the support it has offered Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza in response to October 7.

That support runs from supplying Israel with weapons, economic aid, and diplomatic cover, through mass media recycling Israeli propaganda and suppressing Palestinian voices, to university presidents firing faculty and unleashing police on students who are peacefully protesting Israel’s genocidal war. Seldom has the postwar West seen such a concerted crackdown on freedom of expression and political dissent.

The world’s highest courts have now made it clear that to continue this support is to act as an accessory to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and (possibly) the worst crime of all—genocide. Israel is not fighting a “war of civilization against barbarism” (Netanyahu) and nor are we.

The West has long since lost any right to pontificate about human rights or the rule of law. Its vaunted “rules-based order” died on the killing fields of Gaza.

By on

Is it ‘antisemitic’ to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza?

First published in Canadian Dimension August 28, 2024

Stripped, blindfolded, and bound Palestinian civilians are taken prisoner and ordered into a line by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza in December 2023. Photo from a social media post by an Israeli soldier.

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
—John Stuart Mill

Supporters of Israel’s current “war” against Gaza often ask why critics don’t show equal concern for the victims of no less horrific conflicts elsewhere.

The implication, which is spelled out in the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of antisemitism, is that while “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic,” we are guilty of antisemitism if we single out Israel for criticism while remaining silent on comparable atrocities in Sudan, or Myanmar, or Yemen.

While the IHRA definition has been accepted by many Western governments (including Canada), it has been challenged as “unclear in key respects and widely open to different interpretations” by 350 leading international scholars in the fields of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies who came together to sign the alternative Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) in 2020.

Pointing out that “The IHRA Definition includes 11 ‘examples’ of antisemitism, 7 of which focus on the State of Israel,” the JDA offers an alternative set of guidelines and examples.

The authors caution:

In general, when applying the guidelines each should be read in the light of the others and always with a view to context. Context can include the intention behind an utterance, or a pattern of speech over time, or even the identity of the speaker, especially when the subject is Israel or Zionism. So, for example, hostility to Israel could be an expression of an antisemitic animus, or it could be a reaction to a human rights violation, or it could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the State. In short, judgement and sensitivity are needed in applying these guidelines to concrete situations.


Since October 7 I have published more on the Gaza genocide—I choose the word advisedly, for reasons that have recently been eloquently spelled out by former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier and world-renowned historian of genocide Omer Bartov—than I have ever published on any contemporary conflict in my 73 years on this planet, which have seen genocides in Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, and elsewhere, in many cases resulting in more deaths. This is an exception to my usual writing. As a rule, I seldom comment on current affairs.

Does this make me an antisemite?

Or is there something truly exceptional in the Gaza situation itself that calls for exceptional attention—and action?

Self-defence?

What has been going on in Gaza for almost a year now is not a conventional war between states. Indeed, to describe it as a war at all is misleading.

According to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion of July 19 on “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Gaza remains an occupied Palestinian territory because Israel:

continue[s] to exercise, certain key elements of authority … including control of the land, sea and air borders, restrictions on movement of people and goods, collection of import and export taxes, and military control over the buffer zone, despite the withdrawal of its military presence in 2005.


“This is even more so,” the judgment pointedly adds, “since October 7, 2023.”

What triggered Israel’s latest assault on Gaza was thus not an attack by a foreign state, like Russia’s assault on Ukraine or Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur war, but an uprising by an occupied populace exercising a right of armed resistance that is recognized in international law.

This does not mean that Hamas committed no war crimes on October 7, but that Israel’s retaliation cannot be construed as self-defence.

A state cannot defend itself against a population whose land, per the ICJ, it has been illegally occupying for the last 67 years. This is not a war but a policing operation, albeit one of exceptional savagery.

October 7 may have seen “the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust,” as Benjamin Netanyahu admonished Justin Trudeau when the latter questioned Israel’s “killing of women, of children, of babies” in the Gaza Strip. But contrary to its leaders’ frequent comparisons with the Holocaust, Israel is not facing an existential threat.

Hamas’s founding covenant promised “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” by Holy War—a statement that may be, but need not be interpreted as threatening a genocide of the Jewish population rather than elimination of an Israeli state in which “the right to exercise national self-determination … is unique to the Jewish people.” But Hamas is no more in a position to achieve this aim than it was in 1988.

It has no nukes, nor fighter planes, nor warships, nor tanks, nor high-tech drones and bombs. October 7 was launched on the back of hang-gliders, motorbikes, bulldozers, and the kind of assault rifles Americans can buy at Walmart.

In any case, Hamas revised its covenant in 2017 to accept a two-state solution, which has supposedly been the cornerstone of Western foreign policy since the 1993-5 Oslo Accords.

Managing terrorism

The total death toll on October 7—including those killed by IDF friendly fire—was 1,139 people, and one-third of the Israeli victims were not civilians, but members of the security forces. Horrific as the Hamas massacres were, this is paltry compared with the slaughter and destruction Israel has wreaked upon Gaza since.

The figure for known deaths in Gaza from Israeli military action now exceeds 40,000, while a recent article in the Lancet conservatively estimates the likely cumulative death toll from all war-related causes, including famine and disease, at upward of 186,000.

There was never any military necessity for Israel to cause so many civilian casualties. Hamas’s future threat could have been handled as Spanish governments did the Basque separatist terrorists of ETA or British governments did the IRA, by a combination of military containment and political engagement.

Instead, Israel consciously and deliberately chose the genocidal Amalek option. Sending his soldiers off to war, Benjamin Netanyahu recalled an episode from the Bible:

“This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”


According to official Israeli figures, 4,688 people were killed in “Palestinian terrorist attacks” since 1948, including the October 7 victims. For comparison, around 3,500 people died in the Irish Troubles between 1969 and 1998—meaning that the number of deaths from terrorism per annum in the Troubles was almost double that of Israel.

Despite this, neither Margaret Thatcher—who narrowly escaped death when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 during the Conservative Party annual conference, killing five people and injuring 34 others—nor any other British prime minister responded by bombing West Belfast and Derry back into the Stone Age, even if the IRA was as embedded in the Catholic civilian population as Hamas is in Gaza.

Nor did Northern Ireland’s British occupiers cut off electricity, water, food, and fuel to Republican areas, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised he would do to Gaza’s Palestinian “human animals” on October 9 (a promise Israel largely fulfilled).

The IRA’s indiscriminate pub bombings (and “kneecapping” of suspected informants and collaborators) were appalling too. But I suggest that had the British or Spanish authorities acted like Netanyahu or Gallant toward Gaza, the reaction among other Western governments—not least, the US government—would have been very different.

As a response to a terrorist attack from an occupied territory, Israel’s Gaza campaign is wholly exceptional, at least among Western democracies that claim to be governed by international law—the club to which Israel repeatedly and proudly claims to belong, and on whose behalf, Netanyahu frequently says, it is fighting.

Israel exists in a state of exception, to use the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept, in which the rule of law is suspended and the normal rules don’t apply.

Tooling genocide

Although a handful of countries have broken ranks as the conflict has ground on, the majority of Western states, led by the US, the UK, and Germany, have unconditionally supported Israel irrespective of the ever-rising death toll and destruction in Gaza.

Such unanimity is exceptional. Under President Eisenhower, the US condemned the British, French, and Israeli 1956 invasion of Suez, while Canada, like France and Germany, refused to participate in the US-led “coalition of the willing” that invaded Iraq in 2003.

As remarkably, this consensus extends across the mainstream democratic political spectrum, with so-called centre-left governments—Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Democrats in the US, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the UK, Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats in Germany, Anthony Albanese’s Labour Party in Australia, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Canada—being as “ironclad” in their support for Israel (and as McCarthyite in their tarring of Israel’s critics as “antisemitic”) as their right-wing counterparts.

This support includes massive provision of arms, without which Israel could not continue its genocide. The US is Israel’s largest supplier of armaments (69 percent in 2019-23), followed by Germany (30 percent in 2019-23).

On August 13 the Biden administration approved a further $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, 30 medium range air-to-air missiles, tactical vehicles, 32,739 tank cartridges of 120-mm rounds and 50,400 120-mm high-explosive cartridges for mortars.

The US’s one and only brief suspension of a munitions shipment (of 1,800 2,000-pound and 1,700 500-pound bombs) was lifted after Biden quietly forgot his threat to withhold further supplies of offensive weapons if Israel invaded Rafah.

Genocide Joe has now thankfully bowed out, but his anointed successor Kamala Harris has let it be known that her administration will not countenance an arms embargo on Israel either.

To be sure that the world got the message, no Palestinian American was permitted to speak on the main stage at the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago—despite the risks of alienating Arab American voters in swing states like Michigan, which the Democrats need to win in November to hold the White House.

Canada has supposedly officially halted its arms sales to Israel, though it has now emerged that $60 million of made in Québec military hardware is still destined for murdering Palestinian children as part of the US$20 billion package.

Despite pro forma calls for a ceasefire by their foreign ministers, Germany and the UK are still providing Tel Aviv with arms. Having repeatedly called upon the previous Tory government to make public the legal advice it had received on doing so, the new British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has so far resisted calls to publish the advice himself.

At best, Western governmental representatives have criticized this or that individual IDF action or Israeli politician’s inflammatory statement or expressed “heartbreak” at the Palestinian people’s “suffering”—as if it were the result of an earthquake or tsunami rather than a war in which Western governments themselves are deeply implicated.

These mild admonishments are invariably prefaced (and thereby framed) by affirmations of Israel’s “right to defend itself” and ritual invocation of the horrors of October 7, as if these could somehow mitigate the evils perpetrated by Israel since.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, October 13, 2023. Photo by US Department of Defense/Wikimedia Commons.

Diplomatic cover

Recent calls for a ceasefire from the US, UK, and the settler-colony troika of Canada, Australia and New Zealand are long on pieties and short on proposals that might actually achieve the purported objective—like UN Security Council mandated sanctions on Israel or an embargo on the supply of arms.

David Lammy, for example, issued a statement on July 14 that began: “The death and destruction in Gaza is intolerable. This war must end now, with an immediate ceasefire, complied with by both sides.” He continued:

I am meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to stress the UK’s ambition and commitment to play its full diplomatic role in securing a ceasefire deal and creating the space for a credible and irreversible pathway towards a two-state solution. The world needs a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.


Nothing came of Lammy’s Middle East trip. Netanyahu refused to meet with the British foreign secretary, following the incoming Labour government’s decision to withdraw its predecessor’s objection to the International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor’s pursuit of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and the Israeli defence minister.

Since October 7 the US and its allies have consistently blocked any effective diplomatic initiatives to end the war through the international body that is best placed to do so, the United Nations. This sharply contrasts with America’s unsuccessful attempts to use the UN as a cloak for its unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Having vetoed two earlier UNSC attempts to mandate a ceasefire, the US finally abstained on resolution 2728 demanding “an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan, the immediate and unconditional release of hostages and the urgent need to expand the flow of aid into Gaza,” allowing it to pass on March 25 on a vote of 14-0.

In a press conference immediately afterwards, US State Department spokesman Max Miller sought to undermine the resolution by repeatedly denying that it was binding.

Israel predictably ignored this resolution, as it has since ignored resolution 2735, which was presented by the US and passed unanimously on June 10 with one abstention (Russia). This endorses the three-stage US “roadmap to an enduring ceasefire and the release of all hostages” that Joe Biden unveiled in a televised address to the nation on May 31 as “a comprehensive new proposal” which, he said, “Israel has now offered.”

The ball was now firmly in Hamas’s court, US representative Linda Thomas-Greenfield assured the Security Council:

“The only way to bring about a durable end to this war” is a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, she stressed, adding that Israel has agreed to a comprehensive deal on the table, which is nearly identical to Hamas’ own proposal. “Now we are all waiting for Hamas to agree to the ceasefire deal it claims to want, but we cannot allow to wait and wait,” she stated, noting that “with every passing day, needless suffering continues.”


Either Biden and Thomas-Greenfield were lying or the Israeli government was stringing them along.

The day after Biden’s TV address, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters that “Hamas accepts a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution and is ready to negotiate over the details,” adding that “it was up to Washington to ensure that Israel abides by it.”

Benjamin Netanyahu meantime declared, contrary to Biden, that Israel’s “conditions for ending the war have not changed”:

The destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel … The notion that Israel will agree to a permanent ceasefire before these conditions are fulfilled is a non-starter.


Negotiations have continued in Doha and Cairo, but every time a breakthrough seems in sight Israel moves the goal posts and comes up with new conditions it knows are likely to be unacceptable to Hamas. The latest have included continuing IDF military occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border and the newly-bulldozed Netzarim corridor that now divides the north and south of the Gaza Strip.

Crucially for Hamas, Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to commit to what Biden, in his May 31 address, assured the American people would be the outcome of the process—namely, that in phase two of the proposal,

Israeli forces would withdraw from Gaza; and as long as Hamas lives up to its commitments, a temporary ceasefire would become, in the words of … the Israeli proposal, “the cessation of hostilities permanently.”

Notwithstanding these repeated attempts to derail the talks—not to mention Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, the chief negotiator in the Cairo ceasefire talks, in Tehran on July 31—the US continues to blame the failure to reach an agreement on Hamas.

These are not good faith negotiations. They are political theatre.

Legal aid

On January 26, in response to South Africa’s request that the ICJ impose provisional measures “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts,” the court ruled that there was a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza. It required Israel, inter alia, to:

take all measures within its power to prevent … (a) killing members of the group [Palestinians]; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.


A US state department spokesperson dismissed the ICJ findings (and the extensive and compelling evidence on which they were based), with the blithe assertion: “We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded.”

This is typical of US attempts to undermine the authority and discredit the judgments of the world’s two highest courts.

While paying lip-service to the ICJ’s “work in upholding the international rules-based order,” Canada made clear that “Our support for the ICJ does not mean that we accept the premise of the case brought by South Africa.” As ever, Mélanie Joly’s statement, which conspicuously ignored the question of genocide, went on to affirm “Israel’s right to exist and defend itself” and condemn “Hamas’s brutal attacks of October 7.”

On May 20, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan asked the ICC to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity that included “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” “wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health,” “wilful killing … or murder as a war crime,” “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population,” “extermination,” “persecution,” and “other inhumane acts.”

Khan concurrently requested warrants for three Hamas leaders for crimes including “murder,” “taking hostages,” “rape and other acts of sexual violence,” “torture,” “cruel treatment,” and “outrages upon personal dignity.” Dispensing its own brand of summary justice, Israel has since assassinated two of them, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh.

Predictably and ludicrously, Israeli politicians branded the ICC, as they previously had the ICJ, as “antisemitic.”

“We haven’t seen such a show of hypocrisy and hatred of Jews like that of the Hague Tribunal since Nazi propaganda,” proclaimed far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. This is a man who recently complained to a conference in support of Jewish settlements that:

It’s not possible in today’s global reality to manage a war—no one will allow us to starve two million people, even though that might be just and moral until they return the hostages.


By ignoring the rulings of its own highest international courts, the West, led by the US, is allowing Israel to do exactly that.

Ignoring the substance of Khan’s charges, many Western governments—this time France and Germany were more circumspect—responded to his request for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders with outrage. Urged on by the US, Rishi Sunak’s UK government launched proceedings at the ICC challenging its jurisdiction in Gaza.

Joe Biden issued a White House statement that read, in full:

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security. 


Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that:

We reject the Prosecutor’s equivalence of Israel with Hamas. It is shameful. Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization that carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and is still holding dozens of innocent people hostage, including Americans.


On June 4, the US House of Representatives passed a bill “To impose sanctions with respect to the International Criminal Court engaged in any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.”

This time Mélanie Joly refrained from any official Canadian comment beyond noting that “All parties must make sure that they abide by international law.” But Justin Trudeau, too, found “the sense of an equivalency between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists that lead up Hamas” “troubling.”

For these Western leaders, what was outrageous or troubling was Kamil Khan’s even-handed focus on the crimes committed, irrespective of the status of their perpetrators.

What is more troubling is the unspoken assumption that elected representatives of “democracies” deserve different treatment to those whom the West has branded as terrorists—even if their crimes are the same (or worse). Do I need to remind today’s politicians that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected as German Chancellor too?

In a press release summarizing its advisory opinion of July 19 on “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the ICJ unambiguously spelled out the obligations of states regarding Israel’s behaviour in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza:

all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


The West’s continuing military and diplomatic support of Israeli action in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories, in short, has been and continues to be in flagrant violation of international law.

Israel again inhabits that state of exception, beyond and outside the law, rather like the absolute immunity the US Supreme Court has recently granted Donald Trump.

States of exception

If Israel inhabits one state of exception, Palestinians inhabit another—and the two are mutually complementary.

The Palestinian state of exception is one of perpetual homelessness, hunger, disease, and violence. It is policed by IDF snipers who shoot Palestinian children in the head, the torturers and rapists of Sde Teiman and other Israeli detention camps and prisons, and the depraved young soldiers of “the most moral army in the world” who post videos of themselves prancing around in underwear stolen from displaced—or dead—Palestinian women on social media.

It is Israel’s state of exception, guaranteed by the West, that enables this reduction of Palestinian existence to bare life.

So to return to the question with which I began: is it antisemitic to single out Israel for criticism over Gaza while remaining silent on comparable atrocities elsewhere?

I do not think I—or the thousands of others across the West who are appalled by the genocide in Gaza—have suddenly morphed into antisemites. We refuse, rather, to make Palestinians an exception to human rights or Israelis an exception to human obligations.

My short answer to the question “Why Gaza?” and not Sudan, Myanmar, or Yemen—or East Timor, Bosnia, or Rwanda—is that inadequate as their responses to other atrocities may often have been, Western governments (and other institutions, like corporations, the mainstream media, or universities) were rarely actively complicit in perpetrating these horrors. Gaza is different. We are up to our necks in it.

I refuse to turn away and pretend the genocide in Gaza is a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

As a citizen of two Western democracies, Canada and the UK, I want to say, loud and clear: not in my name.

By on

‘Unwavering support’ versus ‘ironclad commitment’—a tale of two strategies

First published in Canadian Dimension October 1, 2024 / 14 min read

The Great Mosque of Gaza in the late nineteenth century. Photo by Maison Bonfils/Library of Congress.

The discrepancy between Western framing of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza has often been noted. In the words of one critic, Kari McKern, writing in July 2024:

In Gaza, Palestinian suffering is often sanitised or contextualised to diminish its horror. When an Israeli airstrike hit a UN school sheltering civilians in July 2024, killing dozens, many Western outlets led with the Israeli military’s claims of militant activity in the area rather than centring the civilian deaths. Meanwhile, Ukrainian civilian casualties are presented as unambiguous tragedies, with individual stories examined and highlighted to evoke empathy. This asymmetry extends to the language used to describe combatants and their actions. Hamas fighters are invariably “terrorists,” while Ukrainian forces are “defenders” or “freedom fighters.” Israel “responds” or “retaliates,” while Russia “invades” or “attacks” …

The human toll in both conflicts is staggering, yet the West’s reaction has been wildly inconsistent. [When] Ukrainian apartment buildings are destroyed Western leaders were quick to decry war crimes. But similar accusations against Israel for its actions in Gaza are absent, muted or included so as to be dismissed entirely. As one Palestinian journalist put it, “Our dead don’t seem to count the same way.”


There is one instance of the West’s double standards, however, that has received little if any comment. Arguably, it is the most important—and revealing—inconsistency of all. It concerns Western, and especially American, policies regarding arms supplies to “allies.”

When US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer met in Washington, DC, two weeks ago for “an in-depth discussion on a range of foreign policy issues of mutual interest,” the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza dominated their conversation.

According to the official White House readout of their September 13 meeting, “The two leaders reaffirmed their unwavering support for Ukraine as it continues to defend against Russia’s aggression.” In that connection, they “expressed deep concern about Iran and North Korea’s provision of lethal weapons to Russia and the People’s Republic of China’s support to Russia’s defense industrial base.”

While paying lip-service to “the urgent need for a ceasefire deal that will free the hostages and enable increased relief in Gaza, and the need for Israel to do more to protect civilians and address the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza,” the self-appointed leaders of the free world “reiterated … their ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.”

No doubt diplomats can explain the subtle differences between “unwavering support” and “ironclad commitment.” On previous form, they would seem to be considerable.

Unwavering support, or the “slow yes” Ukraine strategy

Kari McKern’s point was nicely illustrated in Keir Starmer’s address to the UN Security Council on September 25.

Directly addressing the Russian representative, he said he deplored the 35,000 Ukrainian civilians killed or injured, the six million forced to flee and the 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022—not to mention “Six hundred thousand Russian soldiers … killed or wounded in this war.”

And for what? The UN charter, which they [Russian representatives] sit here to uphold, speaks of human dignity. Not treating your own citizens as bits of meat to fling into the grinder.


“I think of Yaroslav Bazylevych, whose wife and three daughters were killed earlier this month by a Russian strike on civilians in Lviv,” the British PM went on. “And I wonder how Russia can show its face in this building.”

We must ensure accountability for those violating the UN charter and this council must recommit to the values that it sets out. This should go without saying. Yet, the greatest violation of the charter in a generation has been committed by one of this council’s permanent members.


We have yet to hear Starmer shedding any tears over Israel’s killings of five-year-old Hind Rajab and seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, or the assassination of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was murdered along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister, and four of her children in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his Gaza apartment on December 7—or any criticism of Israel’s condemnation of scores of its own citizens to fiery deaths at IDF hands on October 7 as a result of applying the Hannibal Directive.

The British PM also had little to say about “flagrant violations of the charter” when Israel disregarded four UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions this year, ignored two rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the illegality of its continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories seized during the 1967 Six Day War, and refused to cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. But let that pass.

The crucial point, in the present context, is that despite what Starmer (rightly) represents as a blatant act of aggression by Russia—and notwithstanding the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children)”—the West has consistently not provided Ukraine with all the armaments it has requested, nor permitted their unconditional use against Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated pleas that these restrictions harm Ukraine’s ability to defend itself have so far fallen on deaf ears—not least in the US.

Though the line is not always an easy one to draw, the Biden administration has mostly limited its “unwavering support” to provision of defensive weapons for use in fighting within Ukraine or immediately adjacent border areas, and conditioned supplies of arms on their not being used to strike the Russian heartland.

Hardware requested in the course of the war by Ukraine and denied or delayed by Western states includes Patriot air-defence missiles (not supplied by the US until 300 days into the war), US Abrams and German Leopard and Marder tanks, long-range high precision HIMARS artillery, and F-16 fighter jets (which the US embargoed until 29 months after the Russian invasion).

Provision of ATACAMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems), which have a range of around 190 miles and could hit many Russian cities, has so far remained a particular no-no.

While the UK now wishes to give Zelensky permission to deploy British-made Storm Shadow long-range ballistic missiles to strike targets deep within Russia, the US, which makes some components for the missiles, has so far refused to entertain this. Despite the urgings of Starmer and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on their recent visits to Washington, at the time of writing the US is continuing to veto Britain’s suggestion.

Criticizing what he calls the Biden administration’s “slow yes” strategy in Time magazine in December 2023, Elliot Ackerman wrote that:

This has led to a kind of phony war, in which the US and NATO cheer Ukraine’s victories and gradually provide Ukraine with high-end weapons, but dole them out slowly and in numbers small enough to allow Ukraine to fight but not to win.


The key considerations behind this strategy, at least as publicly stated by Biden and other American officials, appear to be avoidance of provoking a potentially nuclear escalation, as Putin has threatened, and fear of exacerbating disagreements among NATO European members, whose support for the Ukrainian cause differs widely.

These are eminently reasonable concerns. We might therefore equally reasonably ask: why has similar caution not prevailed when it comes to arming Israel?

Ironclad commitment, or the “we never say no” strategy

While the united Western support for Israeli action that followed Hamas’s attacks of October 7 has slowly fractured as the carnage in Gaza has grown, with Ireland, Spain, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, and even France among others becoming more critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian cause—though not of Hamas—Israel’s major Western arms suppliers have stood fast in their commitment to the Jewish state.

The UK and Germany have recently introduced (very) limited restrictions on licenses for arms sales to Israel following the ICJ advisory opinion of July 19 on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories—presumably in the hope that this will protect them against any future charges of complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

A German government spokesman was nonetheless adamant that “There is no ban on arms exports to Israel, and there will be no ban,” while David Lammy assured the UK Parliament that it was “with regret” that “we are announcing the suspension of around 30 export licences to Israel,” affirming once again that “The UK continues to support Israel’s right to self-defence in accordance with international law.” Those 30 licenses represented a mere eight percent of the UK’s total arms sales to Israel.

According to Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Canada officially ceased approving new arms supplies to Israel in March. The details, however, including continuing use of Canadian-made components in US-supplied weapons, remain distinctly murky.

Michael Bueckert, vice president of Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East, is one of many who argues that because of lack of clarity and loopholes in the law:

this government is misleading Canadians into thinking that we aren’t exporting weapons to Israel at all. As Canadians increasingly demand that their government impose an arms embargo on Israel, politicians are trying to pretend that the arms trade doesn’t exist.


Most consequentially, the US (which supplies around 70 percent of Israel’s arms imports) has remained determinedly immune to any pressure to restrict or condition these supplies, whether from international bodies like the UN, the ICJ, the ICC, and a raft of human rights and charitable NGOs, or from domestic critics.

I am not just referring here to the usual left-wing suspects like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, or “Squad” members Ilhan Omar and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Even the self-described “highest-ranking Jewish elected official in our government, and a staunch defender of Israel,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, warned back on March 14:

If Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition … continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.

The United States’ bond with Israel is unbreakable, but if extremists continue to unduly influence Israeli policy, then the Administration should use the tools at its disposal to make sure our support for Israel is aligned with our broader goal of achieving long-term peace and stability in the region.


While Schumer did not explicitly call for conditioning future US arms supplies on Israel “changing course,” the inference is difficult to avoid.

Despite widespread speculation at the time that “There is a very real chance that the United States will halt the sale of offensive weaponry to Israel by month’s end should it fail to dramatically improve the amount of aid entering Gaza, or if it launches a military operation in Rafah without a credible plan for the million-plus Palestinians sheltering there,” the Biden administration instead doubled down on arming the genocide.

On May 8 Biden told CNN that “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah … I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem.” The subsequent US suspension of a shipment of 1,700 500-pound bombs and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs—its only restriction of arms supplies to date—proved to be short-lived. Israel ignored Biden’s “red line” and launched its bloody assault on Rafah. The US lifted its halt on 500-pound bombs on July 10.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly twice played fast and loose with US law in cases that would have required the US to cease supplying arms to Israel.

In late April, Blinken allegedly ignored misgivings in the State Department over whether Israel’s use of US-supplied arms in Gaza was “consistent with all applicable international and domestic law and policy, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” and certified Israel’s own assurances as “credible and reliable.” This was required under the Biden administration’s National Security Memorandum (NSM) 20, a measure adopted on February 8 with the declared aim of ensuring accountability.

Around the same time, per a recent scoop in Politico, Blinken was aware of both a US Agency for International Development (USAID) 17-page memo to the State Department claiming that Israel was “subjecting US humanitarian aid destined for Gaza to ‘arbitrary denial, restriction and impediments,’” and emails from the head of the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration which asserted that “Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel.”

Blinken chose to ignore both sets of recommendations, testifying to Congress on May 10 that “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

On July 2, 12 former Biden administration officials who had resigned over US policy toward Gaza issued a joint statement in which they argued that:

America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza.


Ongoing weapons transfers to Israel despite its actions in Gaza, they added, have “put a target on America’s back.”

Notwithstanding the Rafah offensive and other subsequent Israeli atrocities including airstrikes on schools and hospitals, on August 13 the Biden administration approved a further $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, 30 medium range air-to-air missiles, tactical vehicles, 32,739 tank cartridges of 120-mm rounds and 50,400 120-mm high-explosive cartridges for mortars.

America’s “ironclad commitment” to Israel seems unlikely to change whoever wins the November US presidential election. Interviewed on CNN on August 30, the only person standing in the way of a second Donald Trump presidency offered little “joy”—am I the only one who finds this campaign motif obscene in the circumstances?—to Palestinians:

Let me be very clear: I am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself. And that’s not going to change …


Asked whether this means there would be “no change in policy in terms of arms and so forth?” Kamala Harris responded: “No, I—we have to get a deal done.”

This refusal to countenance any deviation from Biden’s policy is all the more remarkable given that opinion polls suggest the election is likely to be extremely close.

According to a recent YouGov poll in the crucial swing states of Arizona, Pennylvania, and Georgia, “80% or more of Democrats and Independents support a permanent cease-fire and 60% or more disapprove of more weapons to Israel.” Polls cannot be treated as reliable predictors, but the successes of the “uncommitted” campaign in the Democratic primaries earlier this year suggest that in refusing to reconsider the party position on arms to Israel Harris is risking losing substantial Arab American, Muslim American, and youth support and votes in the swing states where she needs them most.

There could be no more eloquent—or sadder—testimony to the US “ironclad commitment” than the Democrats’ apparent willingness to throw the election to Donald Trump rather than even consider conditioning arms supplies to Israel on its behaving in accordance with international law.

Beyond realpolitik?

The contrast between Western, and especially US, policies on arms supply to Ukraine and Israel, is glaring. It is also difficult to rationally comprehend, let alone morally justify.

While the figures for Ukrainian casualties cited by Keir Starmer in his September 25 address to the UN are undoubtedly horrific, they look positively benign when compared with the casualties in Gaza. In eleven months of war (compared with two years and eight months of war in Ukraine), at least 41,534 Palestinians have been killed and more than 96,092 injured. More than 10,000 are missing, presumed buried under the rubble.

Though Gaza’s Health Ministry casualty figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants, even Joe Biden conceded back in March that “more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed—most of whom are not Hamas” (my emphasis).

Israel has slaughtered nearly 16,500 children in Gaza—surely a more heinous war crime than Russia’s kidnappings of Ukrainian kids. Around 1.9 million people—nearly nine in ten Gazans—have been “displaced,” i.e., forced to flee from their homes, at least once.

In making these comparisons, we need to remember that while the pre-war population of Ukraine was 37.9 million, that of Gaza was a mere 2.3 million.

If ever there was a case for embargoing or at least conditioning arms supplies on purely humanitarian grounds, Gaza provides it. The IDF makes Putin’s butchers of Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria—not to mention Mariupol—look like the most moral army in the world.

Ukraine is facing a genuine existential crisis provoked by an invasion by a great power that possesses the largest nuclear armory on the planet. Should Russia win this war, the implications for European—and Western—security are potentially profound.

By contrast, however appalling (or criminal) the events of October 7 may have been, Israel is confronting what some have likened to a prison breakout by a people whose territories it has been illegally occupying for 67 years, in an area around twice the size of Washington, DC, whose borders it has blockaded since 2007.

Hamas might wish to destroy Israel but it does not remotely have the capacity to do so. October 7 is not evidence of an existential threat to the Israeli state, but of unforgiveable lapses in security while its leaders’ minds were on other things.

The costs to the West of its “ironclad commitment” to Israel far outweigh any benefits. Whatever potential geopolitical, economic, or domestic political advantages may once have been conferred by support for Israel are forever buried in the rubble of Gaza. We are beyond realpolitik, and the world is slowly realizing it.

On September 18 the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted “a historic text demanding that Israel brings to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, no later than 12 months from the adoption of the resolution,” in accord with the ICJ advisory opinion of July 19.

With a recorded vote of 124 nations in favour, 14 against, and 43 abstentions, the resolution calls for Israel to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces, immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank.

The General Assembly further demanded that Israel return land and other “immovable property”, as well as all assets seized since the occupation began in 1967, and all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions.

The resolution also demands Israel allow all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their place of origin and make reparation for the damage caused by its occupation.


Apart from Israel and the US, the opponents of the resolution were Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, and the Pacific states of Fiji, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Tonga, and Tuvalu—a tiny minority of the international community.

Several European nations, including the UK, Germany, and Italy, abstained, as did Australia, Canada, India—and Ukraine, whose supply of US arms, as we have seen, has always been conditional on doing what Uncle Sam says.

It is noteworthy—and shows how far opinion has shifted over the last eleven months—that supporters of the resolution included Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, and Spain. Most of the BRICS countries, including Russia, China, South Africa, and Brazil, voted in favor of the resolution.

Israel and the United States are increasingly isolated in the court of world opinion.

Yet still the carnage continues and still the arms flow. On September 27, in what may prove to be a cataclysmic escalation of the war to Lebanon, Israel dropped US-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on the Dahiya residential area of Beirut, flattening six apartment blocks and killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Benjamin Netanyahu authorized the strike by telephone from his hotel room in New York, where he was addressing the UN General Assembly and scores of delegates walked out.

The cost of Nasrallah’s scalp was likely several hundred Lebanese civilian lives. The Palestinian journalist got it right. Their dead don’t seem to count the same way.

By on

An entertainment in four acts

DEREK SAYER

First published on Substack, August 9, 2024

Act 1   The curtain rises

“When the clarinet slithers up a disjointed scale at the outset of the piece,” writes The New Yorker‘s opera critic Alex Ross, “the curtain effectively goes up on twentieth-century music.” 

The piece in question is Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, which had its world première at the Semper Opernhaus in Dresden on December 9, 1905. Like Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which caused a (literal) riot when it made its debut at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées eight years later on May 29, 1913, Salome was a succès de scandale. This was not just because of the modernist dissonance of its musical score.

The first Salome, soprano Marie Wittich, found Strauss’s reworking of Oscar Wilde’s notorious 1891 play “distasteful and obscene.”  She flat out refused to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils—a professional dancer took her place, as would become the norm in many later productions—or to kiss the severed head of John the Baptist at the climax of the opera. “I won’t do it, I’m a decent woman,” she protested. 

The audience had no such scruples. “It was received with unbounded enthusiasm,” Lawrence Gilman informed readers of The North American Review:

There were thirty-eight recalls for the singers, the conductor and the composer, when the curtain fell after the brief performance (the work lasts but an hour and a half). Since then, it has traversed the operatic stages of the Continent in a manner little short of triumphal. It has been jubilantly acclaimed as an epoch-making masterwork, and virulently denounced as a subversive and preposterous aberration: yet it has everywhere been eagerly listened to and clamorously discussed.

Over the next two years Salome was staged in more than fifty European opera houses. Having been banned by the censor in Vienna (where it was not performed until 1918), it had its Austrian première at the Stadtteater in Graz on May 16, 1906.  Such was its allure that Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Giacomo Puccini, and Alban Berg (and according to Richard Strauss, the young Adolf Hitler) were all in the Graz audience.

Salome’s New World première took place at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on January 22, 1907, with Olive Fremstad in the title role.  According to the Met’s chief archivist Peter Clark, Fremstad was “a daring Salome … perhaps too daring in her fondling the severed head of John the Baptist.”  Two days later, the New York Times carried a letter from an eminent psychologist castigating Strauss’s opera as

a detailed and explicit exposition of the most horrible, disgusting, revolting features of degeneracy (using the word now in its customary social, sexual significance) I have ever heard, read of, or imagined … the fact that it is phrased in limpid language and sung to emotion-liberating music does not make it any the less ghastly to the sane man or woman with normal generic instincts.

Banker J. Pierpoint Morgan’s daughter Anne, who is nowadays remembered as a pioneering feminist and member of the “Mink Brigade” of wealthy society ladies who supported the New York garment workers’ strike of 1909, was equally distressed by the opera’s immorality. Luckily Daddy sat on the Met board.  Five days later Salome was pulled as “detrimental to the best interests of the Metropolitan Opera House.” 

The lone performance and abrupt cancelation of Strauss’s opera may not have been the only factor in the wave of “Salomania” (as the New York Times baptized it) that swept the US in 1907-9, but it certainly helped things along. Before long a Salome dance craze was conquering burlesque and vaudeville stages across the nation.

Never one to miss the opportunity to document a popular trend, the painter Robert Henri, founder of the Ashcan School, hired a vaudeville dancer to model Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils for him in the privacy of his studio. He painted two versions of Salome Dancer in 1909, which today hang at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College and the Ringling Museum of Art in Saratosa, Florida. One critic wrote: 

Her long legs thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and glint through the over-brushed back veil. It has far more oomph than hundreds of virginal, genteel muses, painted by American academics. [Henri] has given it urgency with slashing brush marks and strong tonal contrasts. He’s learned from Winslow Homer, from Édouard Manet, and from the vulgarity of Frans Hals.

Others were less enamoured of this salacious European import. The actress Marie Cahill, who had previously “startled Broadway by entering a strong protest to theatrical managers against compelling chorus girls to wear tights and excessively short skirts against their will,” wrote to Teddy Roosevelt and other political leaders in August 1908 demanding “the establishment in the state of New York of a commission with powers of censorship over the dramatic stage.” She recommended the “very successful” Lord Chancellor’s censorship of London theaters as a model to follow.

Her fear, she said, was “for the young and innocent,” in particular “the large body of foreign youths and girls” thronging the city:

Is it not the duty … of the true citizen to protect the young from the contamination of such theatrical offerings as clothe pernicious subjects of the ‘Salome’ kind in a boasted artistic atmosphere, but which are really only an excuse for the most vulgar exhibition that this country has ever been called upon to tolerate?

The New York Times took a lighter view, reassuring its readers that “In spite of rumors which have been prevalent of late, it is extremely improbable that a ‘Salome’ dance will be substituted for the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz at the New Amsterdam.”

It is announced on good authority that the management there has been exceptionally active in guarding against outbreaks of Salomania among members of the company. As soon as any chorus girl shows the very first symptoms of the disease she is at once enveloped in a fur coat—the most efficacious safeguard known against the Salome dance—and hurriedly isolated.

Irving Berlin, who was then working as a waiter at Jimmy Kelly’s on Union Square, had his first hit with a little ditty called Sadie Salome (Go home!). There is a fine recording of him singing it with a mock Yiddish accent. The song was popularized by eighteen-year-old Fanny Brice, the original funny girl, in Max Spiegel’s burlesque musical The College Girls, in which she performed a spoof of Salome dancing. Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. saw the show and immediately hired Fanny for his Follies of 1910.

It’s nice to know that the opera whose opening chords raised the curtain on twentieth-century music was indirectly responsible for Irving Berlin getting his first job in Tin Pan Alley and Fanny Brice joining the Ziegfeld Follies. But Irving’s story of a good Jewish girl gone to the bad confirmed all Marie Cahill’s worst fears: 

Sadie Cohen left her happy home
To become an actress lady
On the stage she soon became the rage
As the only real Salomy baby
When she came to town, her sweetheart Mose
Brought for her around a pretty rose
But he got an awful fright
When his Sadie came to sight
He stood up and yelled with all his might:

Refrain:
Don’t do that dance, I tell you Sadie
That’s not a bus’ness for a lady!
‘Most ev’rybody knows
That I’m your loving Mose
Oy, Oy, Oy, Oy
Where is your clothes?

Act 2   The return of the repressed

Writing in the Brooklyn Eagle in 1926 from Paris, where Salome had by then long been recognized as “an opera that undoubtedly ranks in importance with the greatest works of the post-Wagnerian period,” Edward Cushing lamented that “the severed head of John the Baptist remained among properties blackballed by the moralistic indignation of a Powerful Few.”  Salome would not be performed at the Met again until 1934.

Happily, New Yorkers with a taste for degeneracy were able to satisfy their perverse instincts when Salome was staged at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House in 1909, with the Scottish-born, Chicago-raised, Paris-trained soprano Mary Garden as Strauss’s lascivious heroine. 

Famous for creating the leading role in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique in 1902—she recorded a brief excerpt from Act 3 in 1904, accompanied by Debussy on the piano—Garden performed the Dance of the Seven Veils herself, stripping down to a bodystocking.  

After Hammerstein’s opera company folded, Mary took her Salome to her hometown, reprising the role in the Chicago Grand Opera Company’s inaugural season at the Auditorium Theater in 1910. The city’s guardians of public morality were not pleased by what they heard and saw.  The Chicago Tribune reported that patrons were ”oppressed and horrified. But of any real enjoyment, there was little or no evidence.”  

The Tribune’s theater critic Percy Hammond seems nevertheless to have relished the star’s erotic writhings:

She is a fabulous she-thing playing with love and death—loathsome, mysterious, poisonous, slaking her slimy passion in the blood of her victim … She is Salome according to the Wilde formulary—a monstrous oracle of beauty. 

Like Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus or Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, Salome hits that sweet spot where highbrow and lowbrow meet and transmute base instinct into high art. 

Chicago police chief Roy T. Stewart, who was invited to witness the spectacle for himself at the next showing, was having none of that. He threw his weight squarely behind the middlebrow:

It was disgusting. Miss Garden wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip. If the same show was produced on Halsted Street, the people would call it cheap, but over at the Auditorium they say it’s art.

Salome was scheduled for four performances—all of which were sold out in advance—but the company’s board of directors followed the Met’s moral compass and canceled the production after just three nights.

Back in the Old World, the Lord Chamberlainkept Salome off London’s stages until Thomas Beecham negotiated a compromise that permitted a censored production to be staged at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on December 8, 1910.

“We had successfully metamorphosed a lurid tale of love and revenge into a comforting sermon,” Beecham claimed. To soothe Christian sensibilities, the setting was shifted from Judea to Ancient Greece and all Biblical references were removed.  Jochanaan (John the Baptist) became simply “The Prophet,” and his severed head was replaced by a bloodied sword.  

Still the Freudian does have a habit of slipping, come what may, and the repressed insists on returning. As Beecham  related in his autobiography, the cast did not play ball with the censors. On opening night, 

Gradually I sensed […] a growing restlessness and excitement of which the first manifestation was a slip on the part of Salome, who forgot two or three sentences of the bowdlerised version and lapsed into the viciousness of the lawful text. The infection spread among the other performers, and by the time the second half of the work was well under way they were all giving in and shamelessly restoring it to its integrity, as if no such things existed as British respectability and its legal custodians. 

After two World Wars, opera audiences became more liberal—or at least more blasé.  Strauss’s onetime shocker took its place in the standard repertoire alongside The Marriage of Figaro, Carmen, and La Bohème. 

When Salome was revived at the Met in 1949 under the baton of Fritz Reiner, the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch sang and danced the title role, “her ripe form swathed in flimsy green garments that set off a mop of carrot-coloured hair.”  This time, “when the great gold curtains finally swept together, the audience set up a thunderous roar, an ovation that lasted for fifteen minutes.”[1]

New York Times opera critic Olin Downes hailed Salome as “a vital modern opera”:

The music is white hot … Strauss’s use of dissonance, which is now child’s play, but which in 1905, or 1907, was the last word of harmonic writing, is still very effective … It still seizes you. But the whole score, with its inherent banalities intact, remains an astonishingly unified and indestructible whole, which, as of 1949, stands up astonishingly well.

Downes went on to suggest that Salome’s place in the repertoire would be safe until producers began to find it “hopelessly old hat” and “impossible to take seriously. Then it will be interpreted superficially, and begin to sound frayed and of the past.”

Seventy-five years on, Salome seems in no danger of falling out of fashion. That has not stopped producers outdoing themselves in more or less successful attempts to recapture its shock factor. 

Adam Yegoyan thought it cool to stage the Dance of the Seven Veils as a gang rape for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996.  Lydia Steier’s production at the Paris Opera in 2022 also climaxed in a mass rape, with the added refinement of having her Salome stand stock still on a pedestal while her stepfather Herod danced around her, removing her garments once by one.

Catherine Malfitano has the distinction of being the first Salome to dispense with the bodystocking and bare her all for art in Peter Weigl’s production at the Deutsch Oper Berlin in 1990. Maria Ewing spectacularly did the same for (her husband) Peter Hall’s production at Covent Garden in 1992—a more than adequate atonement for Thomas Beecham’s bowdlerization in the same house eighty-two years before. 

The Met finally caved in 2004.   New York Times reviewer Anthony Thommasini couldn’t get enough of “attractive blonde-haired Finnish soprano” Karita Mattila:

Ms. Mattila was so intense, possessed and exposed in the role that she pummeled you into submission.

And I use the word exposed literally. For her slithering and erotic interpretation of Salome’s ”Dance of the Seven Veils,” cannily choreographed by Doug Varone and sensually conducted by Valery Gergiev, Ms. Mattila shed item after item of a Marlene Dietrich-like white tuxedo costume until for a fleeting moment she twirled around exultant, half-crazed and completely naked. 

Nowadays exposing the soprano seems to have become par for the course. Among recent interpreters, Mlada Khudoley, Nicola Beller Carbone, and Patricia Racette have all ended Salome’s dance au naturel. 

In the end what endures is the music. As Lawrence Gilman told readers of the North American Review back in 1907,

in harmonic radicalism and in elaborateness and intricacy of orchestration [Salome] is [Strauss’s] most extreme performance. His use of dissonance—or, more precisely, of sheer cacophony—is as deliberate and persistent as it is unabashed. The entire score is a harmonic tour de force of the most amazing character—a practically continuous texture of new and daring combinations of tone.

Of the many recordings, Ljuba Welitch’s 1944 Vienna Radio broadcast of the closing scene, conducted by Lovro von Matacic, is hors de concours. In part, as Bryan Crimp writes in his liner notes, this is “because the voice is so youthful.”[2]  But only in part. It’s not just the voice, which indeed shines gloriously, but what Welitsch does with it.

Welitsch and Matacic rehearsed the performance with the composer himself, who was by then in his eightieth year. “Richard Strauss was terrific,” Welitsch told an interviewer for the magazine Opernwelt later, “he went through every bar, every phrase with Matacic and me. For example, this ‘Ich habe deinen Mmmmmuuuunnnd geküsst’ (I have kissed your mouth), this desire, he said, must come out in you, it was fantastic.”

Ljuba didn’t disappoint. Especially in that exultant, incandescent final passage. For Jürgen Kesting, 

In the 1944 recording, for the climactic phase, on the last syllable of “Jochanaan” … the slenderly sensual voice not only sparkles like a diamond, it burns. What Welitsch has left behind is not only the ominous best rendering or representation of this scene—but the only one ever.

Listen to it, if you dare. Here we really do have the Salome of Strauss’s dreams (or should I say nightmares?)—”a sixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde.”

Act 3   What is this shit?

Salome may have raised the curtain on twentieth-century music, but Strauss grew weary of being portrayed as the torch-bearer for modernism by his opponents and fans alike. As early as 1900 he had confessed to Romain Rolland that

I am not a hero; I haven’t got the necessary strength; I am not made for battle; I much prefer to go into retreat, to be peaceful and to rest. I haven’t enough genius … I don’t want to make the effort. At this moment what I need is to make sweet and happy music. No more heroisms.

Elektra (1909) took Salome’s dissonance even further, but with Der Rosenkavalier, which premiered in Dresden in 1911, Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal offered something completely different—a camp pastiche of Mozart and (Johann) Strauss’s comic operas which the critics panned and audiences loved.

On February 11, 1909 Hofmannsthal had written to Strauss, “My dear Doctor, I have spent three quiet afternoons here drafting the full and entirely original scenario for a new opera, full of burlesque situations and character.  It contains two big parts, one for baritone and one for a girl dressed up as a man, à la Farrar or Mary Garden.”  

Geraldine Farrar wanted too much money. Mary Garden turned down the role of Count Octavian “because it would bore me to make love to a woman.”  She was referring to the fact that at the beginning of the opera the curtain rises on 17-year-old Octavian in bed with the 33-year-old Marschallin, with whom he had spent the night. Strauss loved to write for the soprano voice, and casting Octavian as a trouser role enabled him to compose some luscious soprano duets and trios.

Der Rosenkavalier was the operatic equivalent of Bob Dylan’s infamous 1970 album Self-Portrait. Griel Marcus began his review of the latter in Rolling Stone with the words “What is this shit?”

Imagine a kid in his teens responding to Self-Portrait. His older brothers and sisters have been living by Dylan for years. They come home with the album and he simply cannot figure out what it’s all about. To him, Self-Portrait sounds more like the stuff his parents listen to than what he wants to hear; in fact, his parents have just gone out and bought Self-Portrait and given it to him for his birthday. He considers giving it back for Father’s Day.

But Richard Strauss had found his operatic métier, and he never looked back. He knew well indeed, he said, that as an art form opera was dead. Wagner was so gigantic a peak that nobody could rise higher. “‘But,’ he added, with a broad, Bavarian grin, ‘I solved the problem by making a detour around it.’” 

The detour produced a string of Strauss/Hoffmannsthal hits: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die ägyptische Helena (1928), and Arabella (first performed in 1933). After Hoffmannsthal died in 1929 Strauss turned to the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig for his next opera, Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman).

By the time Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Strauss was Germany’s pre-eminent living composer. At first he thought he could quietly retreat to the villa in the Munich suburb of Garmisch he bought with the proceeds from Salome until the storm passed. 

“I made music under the Kaiser,” he supposedly told his family. “I’ll survive under this lot, as well.” Considering himself above politics, he assured them: “I just sit here in Garmisch and compose. Everything else is irrelevant to me.”  He soon discovered that for an artist of his stature, neutrality was not permitted.

Strauss “met frequently with Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels,” recalled Stefan Zweig, “and at a time when even [Wilhelm] Furtwängler was still in mutiny, allowed himself to be made president of the Nazi Chamber of Music.” 

Strauss’s open participation was of tremendous importance to the National Socialists at that moment. For, annoyingly enough, not only the best writers, but the most important musicians as well had openly snubbed them, and the few who held with them or came over to the reservation were unknown to the wide public. To have the most famous musician of Germany align himself with them at so embarrassing a moment meant, in its decorative aspect, an immeasurable gain to Goebbels and Hitler. Hitler, who had, as Strauss told me, during his Viennese vagabond years scraped up enough money to travel to Graz to attend the premiere of ‘Salome,’ was honouring him demonstratively; at all festive evenings at Berchtesgaden, besides Wagner, Strauss songs were sung almost exclusively.

The Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Chamber of Music) regulated all aspects of German musical life. Its brief was to make “good German music,” which meant such modernist deviations as expressionism and atonality, together with jazz (“Negro music”), swing, and anything by Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, or Schoenberg—not to mention Irving Berlin—were banned. Fortunately Strauss’s years of dissonance were far behind him. 

Strauss’s works during his time at the Reichsmusikkammer include the suitably pompous Olympic Hymn for the 1936 Berlin Games. But by the time the hymn was played at the opening ceremony, he had been forced to resign his position. He was already in trouble over his insistence on including Stefan Zweig’s name in the program for the première of Die Schweigsame Frau, when a letter to Zweig in which Strauss criticized Nazi racial politics was intercepted by the Gestapo.  Die Schweigsame Frau was canceled after the second performance and banned throughout Germany.

Strauss was undoubtedly vain, loved fame and money, and hoped to use his position at the Reichsmusikkammer to improve the lot of German musicians. But as Zweig makes clear, the composer had other reasons for working with the Nazis too:

To be particularly co-operative with the National Socialists was … of vital interest to him, because in the National Socialist sense he was very much in the red. His son had married a Jewess, and thus he feared that his grandchildren whom he loved above everything else, would be excluded as scum from the schools; his new opera was tainted through me, his earlier operas through the half-Jew, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his publisher was a Jew. 

After 1936 the regime kept Strauss on a tight leash, and his daughter-in-law Alice and grandsons Christian and Richard were hostages for his good behavior. Alice and her sons were harassed during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. After Alice’s grandmother Paula Neumann was detained in Prague in 1942, Strauss drove to the gates of Terezín concentration camp to demand her release. He was unsuccessful. Together with twenty-five other relatives of Alice’s, Paula Neumann perished in the camps. 

By the time Strauss came to rehearse that incandescent final scene of Salome with Lovro von Matacic and Ljuba Welitsch, he had been living in Vienna for two years. He moved there with Alice and her children in 1942, promised protection by Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter of Vienna. The Gestapo arrested Alice together with Strauss’s son Franz in 1944, but Strauss was able to secure their release and allowed to take them back to Garmisch, where they were held under house arrest till the war ended.

The final months of the war hit Strauss hard as he watched opera house after opera house where his works had played—the Lindenoper in Berlin, the Semper in Dresden, the Vienna State Opera house—reduced to rubble and ashes by Allied bombs. 

A famous photograph by Lee Miller shows the young Irmgard Seefried singing an aria from Madame Butterfly in the ruins of the Vienna State Opera in 1945. A year earlier, on June 11, 1944, at the outset of her career, Seefried was “a Composer of one’s dreams” in Ariadne auf Naxos, conducted in the same building by Karl Böhm in a special performance to celebrate Richard Strauss’s eightieth birthday. 

The performance was recorded.  “[Seefried] is in magnificent voice,”  writes Ken Melzer, 

and ever attentive to the character’s mercurial changes of moods; from frustrated artist, to inspired creator, to an impetuous young man in love (both with his art and, for a bit, with Zerbinetta). The Composer’s final apostrophe to his art is everything it should be, radiantly sung, and brimming with humanity.

Strauss poured his grief into the “solemn, dark, and resigned music from the end of a sorrowing composer’s life” of Metamorphosen, a suite for 23 solo strings composed between 13 March—the day after the destruction of the Vienna Opera House—and 12 April 1945. In its conclusion, Strauss quotes the opening bars of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, beneath which he wrote on the final page of the score: “In memoriam.” 

A few days after finishing Metamorphosen, he recorded in his diary:

The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance, and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.

Listening to Metamorphosen, scored for ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three double basses, one might well ask “Ist dies etwas der Tod?” (Is this perhaps death?)  In keening music of unrelenting ferocity, the 23 strings plumb the depths of sorrow, grief, misery, despair. 

Act 4   Ist dies etwas der Tod?

David Bowie’s favorite albums, as listed in Vanity Fair in November 2003, include The Fabulous Little Richard, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, John Lee Hooker’s Tupelo Blues, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Charles Mingus’s Oh Yeah, The Fugs self-titled debut album, and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps—the latter on Woolworth’s Music for Pleasure budget label with Australia’s Ayres Rock blazing red on the cover, which David bought in the late 1950s when he was in his early teens. That MFP recording was my introduction to The Rite of Spring too. 

In their time and in their way, all of these were “edgy.”  But Bowie’s “one album that I give to friends and acquaintances continually” may come as more of a surprise— 

Although Eleanor Steber and Lisa della Casa do fine interpretations of this monumental work, [Gundula] Janowitz’s performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songshas been described, rightly, as transcendental. It aches with love for a life that is quietly fading. I know of no other piece of music, nor any performance, which moves me quite like this.

“At the end of a long and successful career, when a composer still has the power to move his audience with a swansong of such sublime beauty that it takes your breath away—well, you know that work is a masterpiece,” writes Jane Jones: 

The words are all warm, wise and reflective with no hint of religious consolation as death approaches, but rather a deeply felt appreciation of the world before leaving. This isn’t some maudlin notion with the benefit of hindsight, although these songs do have a profound sense of longing and melancholy, but the overwhelming effect is one of a feeling of serene peace. It’s simply one of the most touchingly beautiful ways for a composer to end his career. 

“Strauss clearly is making a final statement, offering a credo of sorts, particularly in the song Im Abendrot (At Sunset), which describes death as a vast, tranquil peace after the weariness of wandering,” agrees soprano Renée Fleming, who has sung Strauss’s cycle more often than any other work in her repertoire. 

Strauss did not know that these would be his last songs when he composed them at the age of 84, less than a year before his death. The title was given by his publisher.  

In the same way that it is now almost impossible to look at photographer Francesca Woodman’s teenage self-portraits without seeing in them a foreshadowing of her suicide at 22, it is difficult today to hear the Four Last Songs as anything but an envoi. But would we hear them the same way if Strauss had lived ten more years? 

“Ist dies etwas der Tod?” is the last line of Im Abendrot (At Sunset), the Alfred von Eichendorf poem that concludes the last of the Four Last Songs in the order in which they are usually performed (although it was actually the earliest of the four to be composed—its conventional placing at the end is for poetic and dramatic effect).

The musical mood could not be more different than that of Metamorphosen.  Here the strings soar, the soprano shimmers and shines, the horns softly glow, and the flutes trill in imitation of Eichendorff’s two skylarks nightdreaming as they climb into the sky at dusk. Despite the fact that three of the four poems Strauss chose to set (the others are by Hermann Hesse) ostensibly deal with death, the music makes us feel that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds to leave behind.

When I was much younger I used to love these songs. They moved me as they did David Bowie. But at the age of 73, I am more ambivalent—and the more so, the more I have learned about the circumstances of their creation. 

In ill health, short of money, his reputation sullied by his association with the Nazi regime, Strauss and his wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna, left defeated Germany in October 1945 for Switzerland where they lived in hotels. The recent past continued to shadow him. 

Between finishing Im Abendrot in Montreux on May 6, 1948 and completing Frühling (Spring) on July 18 in Pontresena, Strauss faced a de-Nazification hearing. In the event, he was cleared of collaboration. He finished Beim Schlafengehen (Going to Sleep) in Pontresina 17 days later, and September in Montreux on September 20. 

There are undoubted moments of astonishing beauty in these works. The violin solo before the lines “Und die Seele unbewacht/will in freien Flügen schweben” (And the unguarded soul/wants to float in free flight) in Beim Schlafengehen is breathtaking. 

But—for me at least—it also brings back another violin solo, in Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, ascending from the orchestra pit up to the gods where I was sitting in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal way back when—only, that solo came at the climax of Kostelnička’s aria Co chvila (A Moment) in which the sextoness resolves to kill her daughter Jenůfa’s illegitimate baby. 

The violin ratchets up the tension unbearably as Kostelnička snatches up the child and rushes out into the icy night. Compared with this, the violin solo in Beim Schlafengehen feels like cheap artifice.

And this is my problem with Strauss’s entire cycle.  Not least, with those trilling skylarks with which Im Abendrot, and the cycle, concludes. What kind of shit is this? I ask. Especially coming from the composer whose scandalous, vulgar, cacophonous Salome lifted the curtain on twentieth-century music? 

When all is said and done, the poems are trite, the sentiments shallow, the music less a coming to terms with death than a determined looking away from it, cloaking its terrors in a blanket of saccharine loveliness with not a dissonant note to disturb the reverie.

The cycle is an ersatz envoi, a camp masquerade, fit to stand alongside Frank Sinatra’s My Way and John Lennon’s Imagine as an enduring memorial to the middlebrow.  There can be few better examples of kitsch as Milan Kundera defines it—“the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.”

The Four Last Songs bear the same relation to Metamorphosen as Der Rosenkavalier does to Salome and Elektra. Richard is up to his old tricks again. Taking a detour. 

Or is he?

As I sat down to write this piece, I listened for the first time in years to Gundula Janowitz’s rendition of the Four Last Songs, the one recommended by David Bowie. 

“This recording is frequently cited as a favourite for obvious reasons,” writes Ralph Moore in his review of forty-six of “the most notable” renditions of the cycle—there have been many more, for what soprano worth her salt could resist the challenge of such beauty? He praises

the silvery, soaring ecstasy of Janowitz’ lirico-spinto soprano, the mastery of Karajan’s control of phrasing and dynamics and the virtuosity of the Berlin Philharmonic at their peak. Janowitz’ voice has an instrumental quality which blends beautifully with the orchestra. The rapt quality essential to these songs making the necessary impact is present throughout; the requisite trance-like atmosphere is generated without risking torpor or languor. For me, as for many others this is as close to a flawless recording of these masterpieces as can be achieved.

I agree. Janowitz strikes the perfect balance between the lightness of a Lisa Della Casa or Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and the sumptuousness of Jessye Norman, whose recording, to my ears, drowns under the weight of its own splendor. Norman’s Im Abendrot clocks in at a stately 9 minutes and 56 seconds, where Janowitz is done and dusted in 7:09. 

Detail, Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing, known as Salome Tattooed, 1874, oil on canvas, 92 x 60 cm (Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris)

By chance, as I was listening to Janowitz my laptop was open on Gustave Moreau’s 1874 oil painting Salome Dancing, aka Salome Tatooed, which I had downloaded while searching for possible illustrations for this essay. More high camp.  On the face of it, Moreau’s salacious painting and Strauss’s sublime music couldn’t be further apart.

This “fortuitous meeting of two distant realities on an inappropriate plane” (Max Ernst) produced a remarkable synesthesia. Call it hasard objectif. Letting the music wash over me, I continued to gaze—with, no doubt, a very male gaze—at Moreau’s Salome.

And Salome returned my gaze: while her head is modestly averted, the eyes tatooed beneath her breasts look full frontally into yours.  

Strauss’s lush orchestration mirrors all the dark richness of Moreau’s colors, the glowering reds, the glints of blue and gold. Janowitz’s voice, soaring effortlessly over the orchestra, is the perfect aural counterpart to Salome’s luminous dancer, exposed and vulnerable and yet commanding the rapt attention of all. 

I briefly wondered what might happen if we were to stage the final scene of Salome to the accompaniment of the Four Last Songs, or substituted the words “Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jokanaan” for “O weiter, stiller Friede! so tief im Abendrot” (O vast, silent peace, so deep in the sunset) in Im Abendrot. The idea is not so preposterous.

After all, a mere four years separated Strauss’s Four Last Songs from that definitive recording of the final scene of Salome for Vienna Radio in 1944, when the old master coached Ljuba Welitsch on how to pour every last ounce of desire into the princess’s triumphant “Ich habe deinen Mmmmmuuuunnnd geküsst, Jokanaan.” 

Somewhere, I’m sure, Richard Strauss is grinning that broad Bavarian grin.

Notes

[1] Frank Merkling, sleevenotes to Ljuba Welitsch, Final Scene from Salome and Other Arias, CBS Legendary Performances 61088.

[2] Ljuba Welitsch, soprano. The HMV Treasury, HLM 7006

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Girl in lavender, Sénanque Abbey, Provence, July 2002

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the current conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension.

The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

My most recent Substack/Canadian Dimension articles are:

Powerful stories: facts, fictions, and fabrications regarding Israel’s Black Sabbath, Substack, April 1, 2004, and Canadian Dimension, April 2, 2002

All the perfumes of Arabia: Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil, Substack, April 15, 2004, and Canadian Dimension, April 18, 2024.

My earlier Gaza articles are listed here and here.

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In memory of Hind Rajab and Sidra Hassouna

On April 3 the Israeli magazine +972 published an explosive article by Yuval Abraham based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers, all of whom have served in the army during the current war on Gaza. Its subject was the use of AI software named “Lavender” to generate targets for bombing. Abraham suggests that much of the death toll from the Israeli assault (which has now passed 33,000) is a result of the IDF treating the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Personally, I wouldn’t blame the killing on the software. The great fear about AI has always been of its escaping human control and taking over, as in the Matrix films. This is wrong. What the obliteration of Gaza has shown is that the greater danger comes when the awesome capabilities of AI are put at the disposal of human beings.

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ …

Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics … among the general population … An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination. 

The Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets … during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants—and their homes—for possible air strikes.

One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing—just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.

The Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. 

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” … were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

When it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. 

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people—it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. 

Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

The following was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to the UK, on February 14, accompanying several photos of Sidra Hassouna and her family:

This is 7 year old Sidra, the cousin of my wife. The impact of the Israeli missile was so powerful it flung her out, leaving her mutilated body dangling from the ruins of the destroyed building in Rafah 48 hours ago. My wife’s aunt Suzan, her husband Fouzy Hassouna, two of their sons, Muhammad and Karam, Karam’s wife Amouna and her three children (7-year-old twins Sidra and Suzan, and 15-month-old Malik) were all killed. The family had been displaced from the north of Gaza and took shelter in Rafah. We will be relentless until those responsible brought to justice.

All texts, except the last, are quotations from Yuval Abraham’s article “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” You can read more about Hind Rajab and Sidra Hassouna here and here. 

I took the photographs at Notre Dame de Sénanque abbey in Provence in July 2002.

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Medic carrying a wounded Palestinian child in Gaza. Photo courtesy Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.

As I explained in a previous post, I don’t usually write on current political events outside of Facebook and Twitter posts, but there are limits. I will not keep my head down and my mouth shut in the face of what 15 out of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice have ruled is plausibly a GENOCIDE being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, until very recently with the unqualified support of the governments and major opposition parties of the two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, of which I am a citizen. 

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension.

The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

My most recent Substack/Canadian Dimension articles are:

A moral crossroads for the West: Is Benjamin Netanyahu about to cross his Rubicon? Substack, 14 March and Canadian Dimension, 14 March

The threshold of intent: Closing in on a Final Solution in Gaza? Substack, 25 March and Canadian Dimension, 25 March

Details and links to the earlier articles can be found in my earlier post Silence is complicity.

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Fars Media Corporation, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”  The answer is, you’re doing it.  Right now.  

Aaron Bushnell

I don’t usually write on current political events outside of Facebook and Twitter posts, but there are limits. I will not keep my head down and my mouth shut in the face of what 15 out of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice rule is plausibly a GENOCIDE being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, with the support of the governments and major opposition parties of the two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, of which I am a citizen.

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension. The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

Click on the links below for full texts:

—A massacre of thoughts: the weaponization of October 7, “antisemitism,” and the ousting of Claudine Gay (Substack, Jan 8)

—Are you, or have you ever been …: the ghost of Joe McCarthy comes to Harvard Yard (Substack, Jan 10)

—Eyeless in Gaza: paratexts, contexts, and the weaponization of October 7 (Substack, Jan. 10, subsequently revised and updated and published in Canadian Dimension, Feb 9)

—An open letter to Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly: some comments on Canada’s response to the ICJ ruling on Israel (Substack, Jan 27)

—The west responds to ICJ ruling of urgent risk of genocide in Gaza by defunding key aid agency: as Mahatma Gandhi once supposedly said, western civilization would be a good idea (Substack, Jan 28)

—A clarifying moment: Canada and the ICJ ruling on genocide in Gaza. Does this mark a coup de grâce for the ‘rules-based international order’? (Canadian Dimension, Jan 30)

—Who did the ICJ Gaza ruling vindicate? An unpublished letter to the Guardian newspaper (Substack, Feb 9)

—The time of monsters: 1.4 million starving Palestinian refugees await the Israeli assault on Rafah (Substack, Feb 12)

—Over the top? Does the Super Bowl Massacre mark a turning-point in western support for Israel’s Gaza war? (Substack, Feb 15)

—Is the tide turning on Israel? Western leaders seem finally to be waking up to the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has unleashed upon Gaza (Canadian Dimension, Feb 21)

—An extreme act of protest: Aaron Bushnell, Jan Palach, and resisting the normalization of the unthinkable (Substack, March 1; slightly revised version in Canadian Dimension, March 3; Czech translation in Britské listy, March 5)