A Blog from David Crump
“If Americans Knew” is an independent newsite that provides the news coverage on Palestine/Israel that you will never see on mainstream, corporate media. I read it regularly.
For example, here is a recent story with an accompanying video posted on X.
It reminds us of the long-running peaceful, non-violent marches that occurred in Gaza for several years prior to the attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
The message reads:
Massive anti-war demonstrations have erupted around the world, sparked by Israel’s genocidal attacks against the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Several days ago, half-a-million people (!) marched through London calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Similar marches have occurred throughout the USA, in India, Pakistan, the UK, and many other countries.
Yet, the political elites in these countries continue to control the propagandistic news media while ignoring the protests of the common people.
Craig Murray has a good story critiquing the disparate, undemocratic actions that keep the people’s voices muted, ensuring that worldwide calls for peace go ignored.
The article at Consortium News is titled “Something has Snapped.” Below is an excerpt:
There seems to be a presumption that the general population harbour the same Zionist assumptions which the journalists are paid to promote. Well, we don’t.
It feels like something has snapped, not only in Palestine but in the U.K. and much of Europe, where the process of alienation between the governed and the ruling classes has been accelerated.
Democracy has been failing in the West for a while . . .
There are key moments in societal breakdown, and this is one.
Read the entire article here.
I am convinced that extensive Israeli settlement throughout the West Bank has made the fabled two-state solution an impossibility.
New solutions must be sought. But the ethnic cleansing of Gaza cannot be one of them.
Aside from that caveat, Prof. Mearsheimer offers a good summary of the present situation in Gaza:
All Christian theology has practical results in the way believers live their lives. Unsurprisingly, bad theology will have bad results.
The immoral legacy of Christian Zionism is helping to drive US congressional support for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza today.
Israel is inflicting genocide upon the people of Gaza.
Since the horrific Hamas assault against southern Israel on October 7, which killed approximately 1,400 people, the death toll in Gaza has risen to over 7,000, more than 3,000 of them children.
This grossly disproportionate death toll is deliberate.
The Israeli military doctrine of Dahiya dictates that Israel will always respond with overwhelming force, deliberately killing many more of their opponents than the opponents have killed Israelis. The Dahiya doctrine is supposedly intended to serve as a deterrent in limiting hostilities. It has been consistently applied throughout the West Bank as well as in the five wars inflicted on Gaza over the past fifteen years.
Which raises the question: does the Dahiya doctrine work? Has it deterred Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation?
The answer is two-fold: As a deterrent to Palestinian resistance, the answer is No. Dahiya is a failure. And Israeli leaders are insane for believing that another round of carpet bombing in Gaza will eliminate the Palestinian urge to resist their seventy-five-year military occupation. It hasn’t worked yet. Why should anyone except Israeli and American arms manufacturers imagine that it will work now? This is the classic definition of insanity.
The second answer gets to the heart of the issue. Dahiya does not deter Palestinian resistance against Israeli oppression, but it does kill a massive number of Palestinians. This is the crux of the issue in Gaza today.
If you cannot kill a person’s dream of freedom, you can always kill the dreamer. Killing the dreamer kills the dream, unless of course there are many, many more dreamers waiting in line. In which case, all the dreamers must be killed by those who oppose the dream.
This is what Israel is trying to do right now. A number of Israeli leaders have explicitly addressed the “need” (in their view) to eradicate every Palestinian from Gaza, to “wipe them out,” to send them all to the grave or to Egypt; anywhere but in Israel.
Similar plans are being implemented in the West Bank. More than 100 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli soldiers, 30 of them children, in the past few days. For, you see, they share the same dream as the people of Gaza – freedom from Israeli military occupation; equal rights and equal citizenship in a sovereign state where they can live their lives out from under an occupier’s bootheel.
Yes, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a war crime. If possible, all the perpetrators should be arrested, brought to trial and punished.
But October 7th was not the beginning of this tragic story. That sad and bloody day unfolded within the context of another crime against humanity, a prior crime that created the conditions for the Hamas attack against Israel.
Israel has occupied Gaza for 75 years; 17 years ago, Israel imposed a strict military blockade that has killed its economy and starved its people. Now Israel imposes a siege, cutting off all water, food, fuel, and power to 2.3 million people. This also is a war crime.
As I wrote in a post yesterday, Israel’s objective is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians — men, women, children, the elderly and disabled, everybody.
I personally know a number of Christian Zionists (Christians who believe that Israel is God’s chosen nation with a right to own all the land of Israel) who remain in lock-step with Israel’s Dahiya strategy. When challenged on this question of genocide, their responses fall into two categories.
First, they say that Israel has the right to defend itself, especially against an antisemitic aggressor like Hamas. Hamas poses an existential threat to Israel, they insist, which gives Israel the right to use whatever means are necessary to eliminate that threat.
Second, they say that the Palestinians have brought these troubles onto themselves. The people of Gaza elected Hamas as their government, voting them into power. You reap what you sow, I am told. Terrorist leaders can only bring catastrophe onto their people.
I have several responses to these popular excuses for why someone claiming to be a Christian could possibly sanction Israel’s current bloodlust.
First, Palestinians are human beings loved by God. They are created as the Image of God, as are all Israelis, Americans, and every person on this planet. However, the racism of western news coverage is blatant, if unrecognized, in the subtle ways that Palestinian humanity is minimized or even denied. For whatever reason, their humanity is not equal to the humanity of Israelis and other westerners.
The Israeli defense minister has called Palestinians “human animals.” Others have called for the army to “wipe out” all Palestinians. US Defense Department spokesmen lament the loss of Israeli lives in the tragic terms of family loss and personal grief. Whereas, Palestinians deaths are dismissed as mere collateral damage, the unavoidable consequence of war. Palestinians are dehumanized as the inconvenient byproduct of a necessary (and glorified) war machine now grinding its way towards victory.
Second, Christians are called to live as citizens of God’s kingdom, a divine, heavenly kingdom that has no allegiance, much less an alliance, with any earthly nation-state. No nation on this earth can ever claim to be carrying out God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. No nation can ever claim my allegiance since I (as a Christian) have already sworn my loyalty to God’s peaceable kingdom, where I am commanded to be a peacemaker – never a warmonger.
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, supporting Israel does not please our Lord. In fact, supporting war and slaughter grieves our God, for it is the antithesis of all that Jesus came to accomplish for humanity.
Third, yes Israel may have a right to defend itself, but no one has the right to commit genocide, nor to execute their Dahiya doctrine in response to an attack. Just war theory has always maintained that Christians insist on a proportional response to an attack. There is nothing proportional about Israel’s reactions to Hamas. This is anything but a just war.
Fourth, when do the Palestinians gain the right to defend themselves? The Hamas attack did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the symptom of a deeply rooted, deadly disease called Israeli military occupation. As long as Israel’s occupation continues, Palestinians will continue to resist. You can count on it. It is human nature.
God did not create the Image of God to suffer interminable abuse. There is something innate to every human being that leads us to stand up against such abuse, to rise up, to raise our hands, and to say, “No more. You cannot beat me any longer. This is wrong. I will resist your efforts to dehumanize me.”
Furthermore, it is more reasonable to ask what the state of Israel expected would happen after 75 years of oppression? You can only persecute people for so long before they resist their persecutors. Why should anyone be surprised that a group like Hamas now exists in Gaza? It is the obvious and easily anticipated outcome of Israeli policies.
What we are witnessing now in Palestine is comparable to any number of anti-colonial uprisings that occurred throughout the “third world” in the 1960s and ‘70s. Israel has always been a settler-colonial state where European settlers have taken away the land of indigenous Palestinians.
Or think of the American slave revolts, like Nate Turner’s revolt in the 1830s. History has taken sides with the slaves (and the colonized) who revolted, throwing off the heavy shackles of their onerous oppression. Does anyone now applaud the slave owners who murdered black men, women and children as if they were animals in order to put down the slaves’ struggle for liberation and maintain their own brutal domination?
History will judge Israel’s current oppression of the Palestinian people in the very same light. Israel is the abusive master brutalizing the brown skinned people now resisting their enslavement.
Finally, on a thoroughly pragmatic note: Gaza has not held any elections since 2006. This means that the vast majority of the Palestinian population were either not yet born or were too young to vote in Gaza’s last election. So, how can all Gazans be held responsible for voting Hamas into office 17 years ago? Half the Gazan population are minors. The median age is 16.
Most Gazans have never had any say in who does or does not govern them. By blaming the people of Gaza for causing their own genocide, Israel’s defenders are actually promoting grotesque acts of collective punishment (illegal under international law) that have nothing to do with “who voted Hamas into office.”
I am sorry, but my fellow Christians who are now defending Israel’s actions in Gaza have lost touch with the mind of Christ, if in fact, they ever possessed it.
On this matter, they have lost connection to the Head, the Lord of the Church.
Their failure to speak out, to protest against Israeli war crimes, makes them complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.
May God have mercy on us all.
Below is a lengthy excerpt from a recent article at the Grayzone. titled “Zionist Think Tank Publishes Blueprint for Palestinian Genocide.” It is written by Kit Klarenburg.
The article is both shocking and entirely believable.
What we are watching today in Gaza is a modern instance of genocide. The goal is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, and eventually from the West Bank, as well.
The excerpt begins here:
As Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza entered its third week, leaving over 5000 dead and at least one million residents displaced, a Tel Aviv-based think tank published a blueprint for self-proclaimed Jewish state’s final solution.
In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.
Published in Hebrew on the organization’s website, the paper was authored by
Amir Weitman, “an investment manager and visiting researcher” at the Institute who also leads the libertarian caucus of Israel’s ruling Likud Party. The document began by noting that there are 10 million vacant housing units in neighboring Egypt that could be “immediately” filled with Palestinians. Weitman then assured readers that the “sustainable plan…aligns well with the economic and geopolitical interests of the State of Israel, Egypt, the USA and Saudi Arabia.”
Weitman’s ethnic cleansing proposal echoes forced transfer plans advanced in recent days by former Israeli officials while capitalizing on evacuation orders delivered to the entire civilian population of northern Gaza by the Israeli military.
Weitman’s sinister blueprint imagined Israel purchasing these properties at a cost of $5 – 8 billion dollars, a whopping price-tag that reflects just 1 – 1.5 percent of Israel’s GDP.
“These sums of money [required to cleanse Gaza] in relation to the Israeli economy, are minimal,” Weitman posits. “Investing individual billions of dollars to solve this difficult issue is an innovative, cheap and sustainable solution.”
Weitman acknowledged that his plan virtually amounts to Israel “buying the Gaza Strip,” arguing the move would be “a very worthwhile investment” for Zionists because it would “add a lot of value over time.” He asserted local “land conditions” in the area would provide “many” Israeli settlers a high standard of living, therefore allowing for an expansion of settlements in Gush Dan near the Egyptian border, giving “a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”
In December 2021, Tel Aviv approved plans to establish four settlements in the Negev to house 3,000 settler families.
Though Egypt has so far rejected Israeli pressure for a mass exodus of Gaza
residents through the southern Rafah crossing, Weitman argued Cairo will welcome the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees as “an immediate stimulus” that will “provide a tremendous and immediate benefit to al-Sisi’s regime.”
Weitman claimed that Cairo’s major creditors — including France, Germany and Saudi Arabia — are likely to welcome a revitalized Egyptian economy, courtesy of “Israeli investment” in the Palestinians’ permanent removal. He surmizes that Western Europe will welcome “the transfer of the entire Gaza population to Egypt,” because it will significantly “reduce the risk of illegal immigration…a tremendous advantage.” Meanwhile, he expects Riyadh to embrace the move because the “evacuation of the Gaza Strip means the elimination of a significant ally of Iran.”
The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would mean an end to “ceaseless, repeated rounds of fighting, which inflame the fires of hatred against Israel.” Moreover, “closing the Gaza issue will ensure a stable and increased supply of Israeli gas to Egypt and its liquefaction,” from the vast reserves seized by Israel near Gaza’s shores.
Palestinians in turn are expected to jump at the chance to be forcibly transferred from their homes rather than “living in poverty under the rule of Hamas.” It is therefore necessary for Israel to “create the right conditions” for them to “immigrate” from Gaza to Cairo. Weitman noted that Gaza’s two million inhabitants “constitute less than 2% of the total Egyptian population, which today already includes 9 million refugees. A drop in the ocean.”
The paper ominously concluded: “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.” . . .
. . . In 2004, Zionist demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University laid out detailed plans for the isolation of Gaza directly to Ariel Sharon’s government. This entailed withdrawing Israeli forces from the area entirely and constructing a stringent system of surveillance and security to ensure nothing and no one went in or out without Zionist proviso. He predicted a perpetual bloodbath:
“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today…The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”
The Institute has put forward a clean and easy fantasy of achieving the same goal put forward by Sofer. For it to succeed, all Palestinians have to do is put down their weapons and head toward the desert of permanent exile. . .
Read the entire article here.
This is my second post made in response to an article by Dr. Russell Moore, 
of Christianity Today magazine. My first response, issued quickly late last Wednesday night, was a reply to Moore’s previous editorial, “American Christians Should Stand with Israel Under Attack.”
Now I am at it again.
Several days ago, I received a request from my friend Steve, who pastors a church in Northwest Washington. He sent me a new article from Russell Moore’s Newsletter and asked if I might write a response. Dr. Moore’s second article is titled “’Bothsidesism’ About Hamas Is a Moral Failure.”
Although Dr. Moore does not clearly define what he means by “bothsidesism,” he does clearly insist that there is only one moral position to take when viewing the current war between Israel and Hamas: Hamas is a terrorist organization that launched “a vicious and unprecedented attack” against Israel. Any attempt to explain Hamas’ motivations, anything that sounds like excuse-making or a justification for terrorism, has entered “a morally dangerous place” leading to “hackery,” according to Moore.
So, please excuse me while I put on my hackery hat for a moment.
One of the first lessons I learned in graduate school is that I cannot pretend to understand an issue until I have first examined all of the evidence available for all sides of a question. Knowing only how to defend one side – my side – of an argument demonstrates that I do not understand the argument well enough to talk about it. What are the strengths of the opposing views? Why are others convinced of things that I am not? Why do I think that my arguments are sufficiently convincing that I can, in good conscience, persuade others to share my opinion rather than anyone else’s?
It’s called being educated. Others may call it bothsidesism. I call it the essential foundation of a well-considered opinion.
Only after I am sufficiently educated on a subject (whether a question of war or a doctrinal controversy) am I in a position to then form a moral judgment about the matter at hand. Ill-informed, knee-jerk judgments are cheap and easy, especially when they keep us singing the same moralistic tune as all the other folks in our favorite community choir.
Condemning a well-considered educational process as bothsidesism is only a high-falutin, moralistic sounding way of dismissing the importance of knowing what one is talking about.
Explanation is not the same as making excuses. To excuse Hamas is one thing – a completely unacceptable thing. But explaining the motives behind Hamas terrorism is another thing altogether; something that can easily coexist with moral outrage over Hamas’ actions.
So, on the one hand, Dr. Moore is right. Our first response to Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians can only be condemnation. All the innocent victims, their families and friends deserve our deepest sympathies and whatever humanitarian assistance we can provide in their hour of need.
On the other hand, I am able to walk and chew gum at the same time. My second response is to insist that we apply the terrorism label even-handedly.
Terrorism is commonly defined as the use of violence against civilians to achieve a political or military aim. By that measure, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a massive act of terrorism. Firing Hamas rockets (which typically lack a guidance system) into Israeli territory is terrorism.
But it is pure, unadulterated, blind prejudice not to recognize that the Israeli government practices terrorism against the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and has done so for decades. Israeli leaders boasted about their deliberate terrorism when their defense minister promised to “wipe out” the “human animals” living in Gaza.
Israel commits terrorism when they slaughter over 3,000 human beings, including more than 1,000 children, while bombing the residential neighborhoods of Gaza.
Israel has committed crimes against humanity for over 16 years by imposing a strict military blockade around Gaza, reducing the population to extreme, dehumanizing living conditions as an act of collective punishment.
The Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, once described Gaza as “the largest concentration camp” in the world. Can you blame the inmates of a concentration camp for eventually attacking the prison guards who starve them, bomb them, and dehumanize them daily?
Israel is a settler-colonial, apartheid state that continues the state-sponsored land theft begun in 1948. The official government term is
“Judaization.” All throughout Israel and the West Bank “legal” mechanisms are applied to dispossess Palestinian land-owners and replace them with Jewish settlers, settlers who frequently attack and kill innocent Palestinian civilians. (For more on the role of the Israeli military in Israel’s Judaization process, see my book Like Birds in a Cage.)
I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Moore has ever expressed the same moral clarity in writing an editorial condemning Israeli war crimes as he now possesses in condemning the recent Hamas attacks. At several points in his essay, he offers the bland bromide that we cannot grant “unthinking acceptance of anything the modern state of Israel does,” but when and where has Dr. Moore ever publicly criticized Israeli actions in the way he now justifiably criticizes Hamas?
I am happy to be corrected, but I suspect that he never has. In general, Israeli crimes are quietly accepted. Only Palestinian crimes are condemned.
So, excuse me while I find Dr. Moore’s warnings about bothsidesism to be a one-sided excuse for poo-pooing those who are working to describe an educated appraisal of the way war crimes beget war crimes.
It’s long past time to extend our criticisms even-handedly to both sides. For Hamas and Israel are both guilty. While Israelis and Palestinians are all suffering.
The Rev. Stephen Sizer is a vicar with the Church of England who has been a strong advocate for Palestinian human rights for many years.
He is also a staunch disciple of Jesus Christ who vividly examplifies what it means to love one’s enemies.
As a result of Stephen’s witness to loving his neighbors in Palestine, he has also suffered a great deal of persecution and unjust suffering at the hands of the pro-Israel lobby in England.
I was pleased as punch when he asked me to do an interview about my new book with him on his podcast. Take a look:
