Wednesday, June 18, 2025

THE BIRTH OF SERIOUS COLLECTIVE OBJECTION......

 

Yesterday, two very different visions of America were on full display.

In Washington, D.C., Donald Trump staged a grossly expensive and "profoundly low energy" military parade—a spectacle featuring tanks, troops, and weapons rolling through our nation's capital on his 79th birthday.1 It was a sparsely attended and, ultimately, empty attempt to show force by a historically weak president who governs through fear because he cannot lead through trust.2,3

But across America, the real show of strength was happening.

In cities outside of D.C., small towns, and rural areas all across the country, an estimated 5 million people flooded the streets peacefully protesting at 2,100 "No Kings" events in all 50 states, red and blue—a massive display of the power we hold when we stand together for democracy, dignity, and hope. There were even No Kings events in other countries standing in solidarity!4

Our movement isn’t just growing—it’s surging. Look at our trajectory since 2017:




Two months ago, in April: 3 million of us protested at 1,300 Hands Off! events.

Yesterday: 5 million of us protested at 2,100 No Kings events.

Each week, hundreds of thousands more people are joining the movement. But this is just the beginning, and we can't afford to slow down now.

Historians who study social movements worldwide have coined the "3.5% rule"—that throughout history, few authoritarian governments have withstood 3.5% of their population peacefully mobilized against them in a sustained way.6 The rule helps us understand just how big our movement needs to get to stop Trump's tyranny—on the order of more than 11 million people showing up again and again.

We still have a long way to go, but we have the momentum, omar. That's why Trump and his allies tried to tighten his grip on power so dramatically last week, militarizing our cities, manhandling and handcuffing a Democratic senator, and terrorizing families.

MoveOn will continue dedicating our work, day in and day out, 24/7, to building this mass mobilization movement alongside a web of other allied organizations. But given Trump's chilling escalation last week, time is not on our side. And, quite frankly, we need your help to have the financial resources to turbocharge our organizing, community by community all across the country.

Our country is in crisis, as we saw so tragically yesterday in Minnesota, when a Trump supporter assassinated Democratic State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and wounded Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.7 We mourn the horrific loss of life and grieve the continued escalation of political violence in America.

And while protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, demonstrating our collective commitment to nonviolence as the antidote to intimidation and force, there were also a handful of isolated acts of violence directed at peaceful protesters.

But even in the face of such tragedy in Minnesota, we can choose hope over fear, community over division, nonviolence over brutality, democracy over authoritarianism. And we must choose it together, right now, while we still can.

Yesterday proved that when we come together, we are unstoppable. Trump's empty parade showed his weakness. Our overflowing streets showed our strength.

The future is in our hands. We got this, together.

Thanks for all you do.

–Britt, David, Nakia, Emily, and the rest of the team.

The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your ongoing support, now more than ever. 

Yes it's the start of serious collective objection, and this report received by email from the move on people, is only one of many across the country, all sharing the same distrust of the actual trends of the governing administration and its oligarchy and loyalties. A strong and daring opposition through an untrained and generally politically uninvolved larger population in the US. It could turn into a threatening movement to the new ruling class and their ideologies. 

As always, copied to the blog for better information of facts on the ground to my readers, my deepest thanks to all.  

Saturday, June 14, 2025

WORLD CLASS GAMING.......

 

Israel hit several important strategic Iranian civilian and military targets, plus of course few nuclear sites, killing several high ranking military leaders and scientists. They used in their attack more than 200 attack fighters and more than once, plus their fueling supply equipment. As well as some previously smuggled equipment and drones deep into Iran to hit all types of military ground to air missiles and other targets. 

One's immediate question, why didn't Iran defend itself at all ?? We didn't hear of any incident or attempts targeting any of the aggressor's equipment. Not a single air defense activated, not one fighter in the air, not one missile fired. So what type of a scenario are we facing or witnessing?? 

Iran struck back, sending more than 100 hundred drones toward Israel in retaliation, we've seen it before, Israel claims to have intercepted all of them, whether true or false, they did at least defend themselves and their people against Iranian retaliation by air. Iran, it seems did nothing of the sort, not even attempt to.  
 
Iran is allowing it all to happen, so as to have a good and valid reason to retaliate ?? Iran is incapable of any sort of defense or interception of large fleets of enemy aggression ?? Iran being totally penetrated and infiltrated by agents on the enemy's payroll ?? Maybe a scenario like the one that was circulated after the assassination of Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh in the middle of luxury Tehran neighborhood, are they going to simply sit and lick their wounds, and promise the world a harsh retaliation, we heard it all before in its entirety, we don't need it again. 

Are we to believe that the whole scene is a staged one, an escalating down exercise, all under the baton of Maestro Ameritrump and his CIA games masters.... Maybe, possibly, the world needs to be on its tows for a few days before we are fed a new smart deal, enough of a deal to put the entire region , and possibly the world down on its knees, begging . Then the leader of the cavalry marches in triumphally on his white horse, imposing his peace initiatives.

Of course, a Noble peace price later is de rigueur. A truly win-win situation to all parties.  We will all be waiting for the next new adventure, to be invented, threaten  world peace again, then hope for a suitable Noblean  magic solution, a la Middle-Eastern model.

A final word, I have to admit that I'm not really sure if Mr. Trump isn't really totally fooled and played by his entourage, and more so by Mr. Netanyahu and his coalition, but honestly, I don't think he's that naive, he must have known of the early steps and later intentions, even if he didn't design them himself. So maybe he will deserve a Nobel peace price for bringing some sort of a pseudo peace in the area of the Middle-East.  
 
Simply observing the events over that area of the world, and giving what I believe could be the prevailing scenario.
 As always, my profound many thanks to all.                   

Friday, June 13, 2025

The Fire 6000 Miles Away


The Fire 6000 Miles Away

We may have our hands full fighting the chaos Trump/Musk and Co. are creating in the US, but if we don’t pay attention, the fires in Israel/Palestine will burn us here too.

Jeremy Ben-Ami

Apr 20

I had the opportunity to chat this week with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, one of this generation’s most astute observers of the American – and global – condition.

I particularly value his insights into how Democrats lost – and MAGA won – the hearts and minds of the swath of the country that powered Trump’s win in 2024. So many in blue America can’t fathom how a President we see as destroying all that is great about America remains so popular with those likely to suffer most from the havoc he wreaks. Kristof writes,

“Part of the problem, I think, is that many educated Democrats are insulated from the pain and frustration in the working class and too often come across as out of touch. Instead of listening to frustrated workers, elites too often have lectured them, patronized them or dismissed them as bigots.”

He suggests an idea I love, establishing a Bewildered Liberals Book Club for people looking to understand how it is that a plurality of Americans can support a felon working to corrode our democracy.

Though much of our conversation focused on the diagnosis of and prescription for “Bewildered Liberal syndrome,” that wasn’t why I invited Nick to a recent J Street webinar (I’ve pasted a link to it below).

He had recently traveled to Israel and the West Bank, and when I thanked him for his reporting and for bringing these stories to life, he replied wistfully, “You read it, Jeremy, but I don’t think a lot of others did. People have really kind of tuned out.”

I get it.

Our brains can only process so much calamity at any one time. Right now our own home is burning, which makes it hard to focus on the fire 6000 miles away.

Of course, that lack of attention is precisely what is giving Netanyahu and his far-right government much freer rein. The Israeli right has taken President Trump’s call for what amounts to ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Gaza as a green light to pursue their most extreme fantasies and policies.

All food, water, medicine and other forms of humanitarian aid have been blocked from entering Gaza for over a month now.

Large areas of Gaza are being literally bulldozed to create a buffer zone. Hundreds of thousands of people are being pushed into smaller and smaller areas. And in those areas, Israeli military operations purportedly aimed at militants become ever more likely to catch civilians in the crossfire.

And through it all, dozens of Israeli hostages remain trapped in tunnels - suffering inhuman abuse and deprivation for eighteen months now. Their - and their families’ - only hope continues to be a negotiated deal to end the fighting, bring them home and restart aid. Yet this is precisely the deal their Prime Minister has to avoid to stay in power.

Over on the West Bank, Kristof relays that it has never been this bad. He calls what’s going on there the “Gazaification of the West Bank” – applying the military toolbox from Gaza to the refugee camps on the West Bank.

Tens of thousands of people displaced – most likely permanently. Tanks in the streets, airstrikes a regular occurrence.

The inevitable result? The creation of the kind of hopelessness and despair on the West Bank that fueled Hamas’s rise in Gaza.

Nick relays the story of Mohammed Abdul Jalil, a 12-year old boy whose home in a refugee camp was demolished by the Israeli army. Asked what he hopes to be when he grows up, Mohammed says “with great bravado,” a fighter for Hamas. So long as Palestinian children like Mohammed have nothing to live for, they can only find meaning in life through having something to die for.

Who in the US has time for any of this when the foundations of American democracy are being destroyed? When the world economic order is being undone? When our most respected institutions of research and higher education are being undermined?

Legal immigrants are being seized from our streets by masked agents and whisked to detention facilities in other states or even other countries. Wait, can it be that Head Start is going to be eliminated? Environmental groups are losing their tax-deductible status? And DOGE staff have access to all our data? And, and ….

Another excellent and very factual article by Jeremy Ben-Ami, well done and simply expressed Mr. Ben Ami. And months later still accurately factual, more so with the ongoing LA and Texas and many parts of the country and the interference of the US army and the national guards, further inflaming the situation in different States.   I'm only copying part of it, to suite the blog, you can click on the heading words and get his site address, but the message here is clear and indicative of the actual mood and the situation. 

As always, my many thanks to everyone.     


Sunday, June 8, 2025

A FACTUAL SITUATION.....

 

HAARETZ                             Haaretz                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

 

Yes  to Transfer:    82% of Jewish Israelis Back Expelling Gazans

Twenty years ago, Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, the spiritual father of the 'hilltop youth,' sketched out his vision for destroying Israel's democratic institutions and establishing Jewish supremacy. After October 7, it seems that his vision is coming to fruition


         Shay Hazkani and Tamir Sorek

            May 28, 2025


 

A recent survey of Israeli Jews reveals a growing comfort with the idea of forcibly expelling Palestinians - both from Gaza and from within Israel's borders. The poll also found that a significant minority supports the mass killing of civilians in enemy cities captured by the Israeli army. These disturbing trends reflect the radicalization of religious Zionism since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and the failure of secular Israeli Jews to articulate a vision that challenges Jewish supremacy.

Commissioned in March by Pennsylvania State University and conducted by Tamir Sorek for the Israeli polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group, the survey polled a representative sample of 1,005 Jewish Israelis. It posed a series of "impolite" questions - topics typically avoided in


 

 1- Secular

2-Traditional

3-Orthodox

4-Haredi

mainstream Israeli polling - about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

According to the results, 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp rise from a 2003 survey, in which support for such expulsions stood at 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Religious interpretations play a key role in shaping these views. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command - killing all its inhabitants." Sixty-five percent said they believed in the existence of a modern-day incarnation of Amalek, the Israelite biblical enemy whom God commanded to wipe out in Deuteronomy 25:19. Among those believers, 93 percent said the commandment to erase Amalek' s memory remains relevant today.

This apocalyptic rhetoric has found fertile ground in religious Zionist circles, where leaders have long advocated for such extreme policies.

One of the most influential figures to call for such policies is Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. In January 2005, just before Israel's dismantling of its Gaza settlements, Ginsburgh delivered a sermon near the Knesset that laid out a vision fundamentally at odds with the secular Zionist ideal of a "Jewish and democratic state.11

Ginsburgh gained notoriety for his pamphlet "Baruch Hagever" ("Baruch the Man"), which praised Baruch Goldstein, the settler


who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron' s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994-. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Ginsburgh was placed under administrative detention. He later endorsed a book that sanctioned the killing of non- Jewish women and children.

His 2005 sermon, now known as "Time to Crack the Nut," was a call to embrace Jewish supremacy in the Land of Israel. It prepared his followers for mass violence and ethnic cleansing - policies that, two decades later, appear to be unfolding in Gaza. With Ginsburgh' s vision seemingly coming to fruition, it is worth revisiting the ideological framework he proposed.

***

Born in the United States in 1944, Ginsburgh began his rabbinic career in the Chabad movement. Though he still resides in Kfar Chabad, his greatest influence is among nationalist Haredi Jews within the religious Zionist movement. His teachings blend Hasidic mysticism with messianic nationalism, drawing inspiration from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Revisionist Zionist movement. His appeal even extends to some secular Israelis, drawn to his New Age-inflected ideas and his concept of "Jewish psychology."

The most radical followers of Ginsburgh's ideology are the so­ called "hilltop youth" - violent, young settlers from illegal outposts - who now form an armed militia responsible for frequent attacks and occasional killings in West Bank villages. Unlike the early leaders of the Gush Emunim settler movement, who at least nominally accepted the idea that Palestinians could remain in the land as a ger toshav (a halakhic term for a non- Jew living in the Land of Israel) without political rights, Ginsburgh


views any Palestinian presence in the Land of Israel as a desecration of God Is name.

In his "nut cracking" sermon, Ginsburgh likened the State of Israel to a nut with four shells encasing the fruit - the Jewish people. Drawing on Kabbalistic concepts, he described these shells (kelipot) as spiritual impurities, remnants of creation that must be shattered to release divine sparks. While some shells may contain traces of holiness, most are aligned with evil - the sitra achra, Aramaic for II other side."

Initially, Ginsburgh argued, these shells were necessary for the Jewish people's development. But now, he claimed, they have become obstacles. To bring about redemption, the shells must be broken. The first three - the media, the judiciary, and government institutions - are irredeemably impure and must be destroyed. The fourth, the military, can be salvaged, but only if its moral foundations are purged.

The secular media, Ginsburgh stated, "creates an atmosphere in which speaking in the name of Torah is seen as anachronistic, primitive and irrelevant to all conversations essential to our lives.11 The legal and justice system encourages II assimilation and blurring the differences between Israel and the nations." It receives frequent assistance from the educational system, "which also strives ... to impose those foreign and confusing values on the youth.11 The Knesset and government advance interests alien to the Jewish people.

The cracking of these three shells is nearing completion, with the rapid pace of regime change stemming from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul, the crushing of the education system and the widespread abandonment of the professional ethos within the Israeli media.


The army is the most important and useful of these shells, Ginzburg argues.-It is ''soft and easy to digest.'' Its cracking will release the divine substance inherent in it in an apocalyptic process. Ginsburgh asserts a simple Jew who will rely on a primal desire for revenge - whom he calls "the nutcracker" - will instigate this process.

That person shall not be bound by the military's emasculating rules, those Gentile values associated with the so-called "purity of arms" that prevent soldiers from fulfilling the Talmudic commandment, "if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." That same nutcracker will take revenge against the Gentiles, the Arabs of the Land of Israel, without moral constraints. He will emulate Baruch Goldstein, or the biblical Shimon and Levi, who killed all of the residents of Shechem after the rape of their sister Dina.

This was not an end-of-time prophecy. As early as 2005, Ginsburgh articulated a clear vision upon which his followers should act. But the plan required a window of opportunity to crack open the nut, a time when vengeance could be spontaneously and organically applied to the Gentiles so that the divine substance would be released from the shell. At that point, all that would then remain would be the fruit, the people of Israel, ready to take on the time of salvation. At the moment of vengeance, Ginsburgh believes, the avengers can also free themselves from the shackles of halakha, or Jewish religious law, which restricts bloodshed.

The opportunity presented itself on October 7, 2023, following the Hamas massacre of civilians in Israel. "The wicked acts of the people of Gaza underscores their Amalek-like features," he wrote in his "Niflaot" pamphlet on the weekly Torah portion a


few weeks after the massacre. These features, he added, ''demands that we observe the command 'Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven, you shall not forget it' - total annihilation, not sifting, 11 meaning not checking who is innocent and who is guilty. Sacrificing the hostages by refusing any deal to secure their release is a reasonable price to pay for what the rabbi, like Netanyahu, calls "total victory."

The secular public's widespread adoption of positions in support of ethnic cleansing and genocide is more evidence of the realization of Ginsburgh's vision. That public has failed to articulate an alternative vision to messianic Zionism in the form of human rights for all. Thus, 69 percent of secular Israelis in the Penn State survey supported the expulsion of Gazans, while 31 percent of them considered Joshua's extermination of Jericho's residents as a precedent that the IDF should adopt.

***

Ginsburgh's achievement is indeed a result of cracking the shells, even if the ones doing the cracking were mostly not his actual supporters. The Hebrew media, the first shell, was always mobilized in support of the state, but it carefully maintained an aura of professionalism. Since October 7, it has pretty much abandoned this posture. Now, many journalists have foregone critical coverage. Some have even joined the calls for revenge, expulsion and extermination.

The judiciary once refused to openly declare Jewish supremacy in the Land of Israel and the right to expel, exterminate or starve the Jews' enemies, even as it supported the occupation.

Ginsburgh likened the judiciary to a stumbling block that "we must break ... with derision and 'contempt of court.'" It seems that the second shell has also splintered, if it hasn't already been �7,z, completely removed.

Two months ago, Supreme Court Justice David Mintz rejected a petition by the human rights group Gisha to order Israel to supply humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Mintz, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Dolev, asserted that this was a "war of commandment" just like in the Torah. He effectively authorized the denial of food, water and medicine to 2 million Gazans. The ruling, joined by Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Justice Noam Sahlberg, a resident of the Alon Shvut settlement, is already taking its toll.

The educational system, part of the second shell, has become a workplace where Jewish teachers promoting universal values risk dismissal (Arab teachers have long been familiar with this danger). Scholars of education point to a sharp shift in the curriculum's nationalist, ethnocentric direction since the second intifada. It has led to growing support for expulsion and extermination, especially among those who completed their education in the past 20 years.

Some 66 percent of those under age 40 support expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel, and 58 percent want to see the army follow the path laid down by biblical Joshua in Jericho. A generational gap in political positions is not an unusual phenomenon, but in Israel, it has widened greatly since 2000.

What has happened in the Knesset and the government also neatly follows the rabbi's prophecy. Ginsburgh himself demanded: "We must eradicate the government - left or right - it must be overthrown. And when a new one is established, it must be overthrown as well, and so on, until a Torah-based government is established in the country." Ginsburgh could boast quite a bit of divine support after five elections in three  and a half years.                            

With the fourth shell, the goal has also been practically achieved. It's hard to find any soldier who would refuse illegal orders, such as starving hundreds of thousands of people, creating kill zones, or bombing densely populated residential neighborhoods. Only 9 percent of men under 40, the main demographic group serving in the IDF in Gaza, rejected all the ideas of deportation and extermination presented to them.

Ginsburgh has not missed the fundamental change in policy taking place in the current war. He was exalted to learn that the IDF no longer considers the presence of civilians, "who constitute a shelter for terrorists," in his words, as reason not to act. Last September, he congratulated the heads of state "on the change for the better" that has taken place in their position.

 

***

Some see the shock and anxiety that gripped the Israeli public in the wake of October 7 as the only explanation for this radicalization. But it seems the massacre only unleashed demons that had been nurtured for decades in the media and the legal and educational systems. Zionism, besides being a national movement, is also a movement of immigrant-settlers, seeking to displace the local population. Settler-immigrant societies always encounter indiscriminate violent resistance from indigenous groups. The desire for absolute and permanent security can lead to an aspiration to eliminate the resisting population. Therefore, virtually every settlement project has the potential for ethnic cleansing and genocide, as indeed happened in North America in the 17th through 19th centuries or in Namibia in the early 1900s.


To be sure, Ginzburg is not the cause of Israel's moral collapse.  But the nationalist Haredi movement, with Ginsburgh as one of its most prominent leaders, offers Israelis a religious veneer for erasing Palestinian indigeneity. It provides a language and a plan of action for both observant and secular Israeli Jews who seek a solution to the conflict that doesn't force them to cede the privileges granted by a regime of Jewish supremacy.

The use of biblical language to justify war crimes is likewise not a novelty of Zionism. Puritan settlers in America, Ireland and other places seized on the Bible and compared the indigenous populations who opposed them to Amalekites and Canaanites.

They too resorted to ethnic cleansing and genocide against the natives.

Note that this process is not deterministic. While messianic Zionism seeks to block decolonization in Israel and Palestine, it doesn't make it impossible. Opponents of messianism have had several opportunities where they could have chosen a different path, but the price was that they would have to reinvent themselves as Israelis, and dismantle the regime of Jewish supremacy. Absent a willingness to make these changes, the door remains open to the impetuous spirit of Ginsburgh and his ilk.

If there is any chance of stopping the march toward a Spartan, outcast society, it lies in the rejection of the idea of Jewish supremacy and Judaization, even in the version currently accepted by secular Zionism. The alternative vision to suicidal messianism is a true, equal partnership between the river and the sea.

Shay Hazkani is a professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Maryland. He is the author of "Dear Palestine: A


Social History of the 1948 War" (2021).

 

Tamir Sorek is a professor in the History Department of The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of the book "The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad" (2020 ).


A serious and factual article forwarded to me from a friend, it was innitially published in the leading English newspaper Haaretz, Penn State university professor collaborated with the data. I thought my readers would learn the truth about the reigning atmosphere and ferocious violence throughout this situation engulfing Israel/Palestinians and all their neighbors in the Middle-East. 

As always, my many thanks to all.