RSS
‘We’ll Be Seen as Losers if We Don’t Complete the Job:’ Israeli Historian Benny Morris Addresses the War Against Hamas
Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza. Photo: IDF via Reuters
“I dislike Benjamin Netanyahu intensely; he’s a crook,” the Israeli historian Benny Morris said, when asked about the future direction of the present war triggered by the pogrom executed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. “But he’s right that the war should continue until Hamas is crushed, if only because around the region, we will be seen as losers if we don’t complete the job.”
That observation about Israel’s prime minister, offered during an extensive telephone interview with The Algemeiner on Thursday, underlines the near impossibility of neatly slotting Morris’ views into any particular camp. One of Israel’s leading public intellectuals, who is a Cambridge University graduate, a former professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the author of the seminal study The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, first published in 1988, Morris expresses opinions associated with the left at one moment, and with the right in the next. Ideological partisans might regard this as a contradictory; more flexible thinkers, perhaps including Morris himself, would see this as a net positive, reflecting both the Middle East’s complexity and the futility of reducing national and political conflicts to mere slogans.
For Morris is an opponent not just of Netanyahu and the right-wing coalition gathered around him; he remains, in principle, a supporter of the two-state solution as well as a longstanding critic of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. On the other hand, he doesn’t articulate any faith in the willingness of the Palestinian factions to reach a permanent settlement with Israel, and he believes that the true villain of the piece is the Iranian regime, which this week has again been trumpeting its ability to assemble a nuclear weapon, and which continues to support terrorist organizations committed to Israel’s destruction, from the Houthi rebels in Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“What is certain is that Iran has forged with its proxies a circle around Israel, an alliance of anti-Israeli and anti-western forces,” Morris remarked. “Above and beyond all of this is the Iranian nuclear threat, which is certainly on the minds of Israelis, and also on the minds of American leaders and generals. This is the main threat, way beyond the threat posed by Iran’s proxies.” He makes no secret of his view that Israel should neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions as soon as possible. “It’ll be more expensive to do it later,” he argued. “If the Iranians acquire a nuclear arsenal, the region will probably come under Iranian domination.”
Morris is a little more sanguine when it comes to Israel’s other adversaries in the region. The conservative Arab Gulf states, some of whom signed up to peace treaties with Israel through the so-called “Abraham Accords” of 2018, will continue, according to Morris, balancing their need to pay “lip service” to the Palestinian cause with the imperative of retaining the protection and goodwill of the US, still Israel’s main ally. “Without America, countries like Bahrain or Qatar risk being dominated by the Iranians,” he said.
Turkey — the focus of of Morris’ 2019 book, The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities 1894-1924, co-authored with his fellow historian Dror Ze’evi — is similarly unlikely to escalate tensions with Israel on the military front, even as its Islamist leadership engages in a fresh round of political demonization of the Jewish state. “Turkey, like Russia, is a dictatorship with the trappings of democracy,” Morris said. “They hold elections, but these are meaningless.” He nevertheless regards Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a shrewd operator who makes strategic calculations, despite his evident detestation of Israel. “Turkey has other axes to grind — the Kurds, northern Syria, potentially Iran, so they have had the sense to remain outside the conflict,” he said. “I think that will continue.”
Further afield, Morris doesn’t see a significant threat from US rivals China and Russia, at least not immediately. “China is not in the game at all. China is interested in expanding in the Pacific Rim,” he said. Given its military backing for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad during that country’s torrid civil war, Russia is a more likely candidate for involvement in the Middle East, but Moscow is for the time being hampered by its ongoing aggression against Ukraine as well as the robust sanctions imposed by western powers. “The situation [for the Russians] is not as it was during the Cold War,” Morris said. “Today, they are not as involved and their interests are not as bound up.”
With the US maintaining its role as the leading outside power in the region, talk of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been revived, causing tensions between Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden’s Administration. Morris believes that a Palestinian state alongside Israel is theoretically the correct solution, but he doesn’t see a “roadmap” — the phrase much used by successive US administrations in their peacemaking efforts — for getting there.
“The problem is that the occupation is immoral and bad,” he said. “It was forced upon us, but we didn’t do enough to get out of it.” Meanwhile, in the wake of the Hamas atrocities, Israelis have become hardened. “The Israeli public is staunch in its desire to destroy Hamas and pay them back for what happened,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of revenge, it’s understanding that without that, Israel will appear weak.”
As Morris explains it, the dilemma for Israel revolves around how to withdraw from the West Bank without turning it into a Hamas stronghold. Israel has been able to weather two decades of rocket and missile attacks from Gaza, but similar salvos from Ramallah, which is just a short drive from Tel Aviv, would amount to an “existential threat,” Morris said. “In the West Bank, there is no way of assuring the benign nature of a Palestinian state,” he said. “The want all of Palestine. That’s the essence of the problem.” Additionally, Morris has little faith in international guarantees, citing Hezbollah’s refusal to move its armed forces north of Lebanon’s Litani River, as part of a broader disarmament process envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of Aug. 2006, as an example of the difficulty of implementing compromises that are not enforced.
“The sense among Israelis is that, along with the rapes of Oct. 7, Israel itself was raped,” Morris said. “The world didn’t seem to care about that, and there was an instant rise in antisemitic abuse and anti-Israel rhetoric even before the military response.” The political context is also changing, he observed. “The further away the western world gets from the Holocaust, particularly the younger generations, they less they know and care about World War II,” he said. At the same time, “Islam contains a large antisemitic element” that stems from the bombastic accounts in the Qur’an of the battles in the seventh century between the Jewish tribes of Hijaz and the prophet Muhammad and his followers. “There’s this inherent anti-Jewish element that’s been reinforced by Israel’s existence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Morris said. “Israel is an innovation in that sense — a Jewish state projecting power at the Muslims. That was not the situation for 1400 years since the rise of Islam.”
Israel’s future moves in this environment will be largely determined by its government. Morris does not believe that elections, which are not due for another three years, will be called early, blaming that on the “combination of crooks and cowards supporting Netanyahu.”
New elections will be elusive because those Knesset members supporting Netanyahu fear the loss of their seats, Morris said. “Most liberal and left Israelis would love to see an election now, and if one was held, Netanyahu would lose large,” he stressed. “But he’s not going to resign, and his allies aren’t going to abandon him.”
Morris is an admirer of Biden, whom he regards as “an old-style real Zionist who admires and respects Israel but doesn’t like Netanyahu.” He dreads the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House following November’s critical election. “I don’t trust Trump further than I can see,” he said. “He has no morals and he doesn’t care about Israel as [Bill] Clinton and [George W.] Bush did.” Asked about Trump’s decision while in office to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Morris was cynical, asserting that the “embassy should be in Jerusalem, because it’s Israel’s legitimate capital. So that made sense, but it didn’t turn [Trump] into an Israel-lover.” A Trump victory in November would be “very bad for Israel,” he emphasized.
Benny Morris will feature on an online panel titled “Hamas and the Origins of Islamic Antisemitism” sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on Monday, Feb. 26. To register for this event, please click here.
The post ‘We’ll Be Seen as Losers if We Don’t Complete the Job:’ Israeli Historian Benny Morris Addresses the War Against Hamas first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
New York Times Reader Comments Shows a Global Readership Shifting Against Israel
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In March 2022, the New York Times unveiled a global strategy that spoke of targeting “every curious, English-speaking person” and playing “an even bigger role in the lives of tens of millions of people around the world.” It didn’t speak of being a New York or American newspaper.
The paper was following through on an effort it announced in 2016 as “an ambitious plan to expand its international digital audience and increase revenue outside the United States.”
The Times reported then, “Just as The Times pushed beyond its local boundaries to become a national newspaper in the 1990s, the executives said in the memo that they now saw the “opportunity to become an indispensable leader in global news and opinion’ by expanding its presence outside the country’s borders.”
How far has the Times gotten toward achieving its objective of shifting its prototypical customer from a housewife in the Westchester County, New York, suburb of Scarsdale to some college professor in Berlin or bureaucrat in Brussels?
An indication is available in the reader comments on a Times news article headlined “Autopsies of Gaza Medics Killed by Israeli Troops Show Some Were Shot in the Head.”
Many of the Israel-bashing comments on the article come from readers based outside of the United States.
“There appears to be no law at all when it comes to Israel’s prosecution of war. No constraints. No real international pressure to try and contain these all too frequent violations,” writes a Times commenter identified as Richard Smith from Edinburgh, U.K. He called Israel’s behavior “sickening.”
Another Times commenter, Hélène Volat of Paris, writes, “each time I thought of having seen the worst, Israel surprises me.”
Another commenter, “Melan” from Berlin, writes to call for sanctions on Israel similar to those on Russia: “Freeze assets, ban travel, and block arms deals for officials behind the killings.”
A Times commenter Michelle from Montreal writes, “I will never buy anything made in Israel ever again.”
Times commenter “Steve” from Toronto writes, “I really wish the USA would stop supporting this country. Have you no morals?”
Another Times commenter, Denis Coakley from Ireland, contends, “Israel has descended to the level of Hamas… Sadly this is a result of the blank-cheque given to Netanyahu by his fellow tyrant in the White House.”
The Times staff is becoming increasingly international just as its readership is. The bylines on this story include those of Christoph Koettl, a graduate of the University of Vienna, according to his LinkedIn profile, who spent eight years as an employee of or consultant to the anti-Israel advocacy group Amnesty International and its affiliates; and of Bilal Shbair, who previously worked in Gaza as an English teacher for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Reporting was also contributed by “Abubakr Abdelbagi and Naziha Baassiri,” who don’t have biographies available on the New York Times website.
The Times article says the autopsies “were performed by Dr. Ahmad Dhair, the head of the Gazan health ministry’s forensic medicine unit,” without telling readers that the health ministry is controlled by the Hamas terrorist organization, or that Hamas restricts what reporters inside Gaza can report.
Having maxed out of anti-Israel readers on university campuses that provide enterprise-wide Times access to students, faculty, and staff, the Times is now trying to increase its revenues by chasing anti-Israel readers all the way to Europe and Canada. As a business growth strategy it may make some sense. The tradeoff, though, is turning the newspaper’s comments section into an anti-Israel sewer, and also allowing the news section of the paper to be used as a platform for stories that seem calculated to fuel anti-Israel animus. That comes at some cost to whatever is left of the Times’s fading credibility with whatever readers remain from the days when the Times was a New York newspaper, or a proudly American one.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
The post New York Times Reader Comments Shows a Global Readership Shifting Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Not Just Hamas: PA Religious Leaders Agree That Islam Prohibits Israel’s Existence
Palestinians walk at the compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque, known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City May 21, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
One mistake made by world leaders and even many Israeli leaders, is to see the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a secular Muslim leadership that rejects religious war for Allah — as opposed to Hamas. But this is a fundamental misreading of Palestinians and the conflict.
Fundamentally, the Palestinian Authority’s political leaders, like Hamas’ leaders, and like most of the Palestinian population, are religious Muslims first and Palestinians second.
The message of all PA religious leaders — some appointed by Mahmoud Abbas himself — is to deny Israel’s right to exist on religious Islamic grounds.
According to PA belief, Islamic law states that land that was once under Muslim rule must be liberated from the infidels as a mandatory religious obligation. Since the land of Israel was under Muslim Ottoman rule for four centuries, the PA is prohibited from making a permanent treaty with Israel that it intends to keep.
PA Shari’ah Judge Nasser Al-Qirem explained this “fact” to worshippers at a mosque in Ramallah during a Friday sermon that was broadcast by official PA TV:
PA Shari’ah Judge Nasser Al-Qirem: “The Shari’ah legal law of this land, for anyone who doesn’t know, is that it is a waqf land … from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River, this is its Shari’ah law, from its sea to its river.
The laws of this waqf determine that its status cannot be changed, not by sale and not by purchase, not by collateral and not by exchange… not by addition and not by subtraction… As for the [end] date of this waqf: It is forever and ever, and for all eternity, until Allah inherits the earth and those on it.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Feb. 14, 2025]
Following other PA religious leaders, Al-Qirem taught listeners that “Palestine” — including all of the State of Israel — is a waqf. A waqf is an inalienable religious endowment in Islamic law.
Palestinians define all of Israel as waqf, and thereby Israel exists on Islamic holy land. Palestinian leaders have explained that under Islamic law Muslims are commanded to free the waqf from non-Muslims.
Similarly, PA Supreme Shari’ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who is also PA leader Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, has taught that the Western Wall is exclusively Islamic — according to Allah -– and that Muslims are obligated to fight anyone who challenges this right:
Al-Habbash: “Islam is truth that is indivisible… The rights are indivisible – Give me 60% or 70% of my rights, and tell me: ‘That’s it, that’s yours, take it.’ Perhaps temporarily, yes. [But] strategically, no! … Our rights are non-negotiable. They want to negotiate over Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque – then by Allah, it is better [to be dead] in the belly of the earth than to be on its surface…
There is no negotiation on one millimeter of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, including the Al-Buraq Wall [i.e., the Western Wall of the Temple Mount[, which is an exclusive permanent Islamic waqf according to Allah’s decree… This is our right, and whoever fights us over our right is an oppressor, and it is a duty to resist the oppressors.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Jan. 20, 2023]
Repeating that Jews have no rights on Temple Mount, Al-Habbash encouraged the “Islamic nation” to “liberate Al-Aqsa with all means,” saying it was their “duty” because it is a waqf:
Al-Habbash: “The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a pure Islamic right. It is an exclusive Islamic waqf for Muslims (i.e., an inalienable religious endowment), and it is an exclusive right of the Muslims… At the UN podium, [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas spoke explicitly about the Muslims’ legal claim to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and [said] that non-Muslims have no right to it… [Israel] knows that it has no right to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and that the Jews have no right to the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. But they are only fanning the fire of hostility and the fire of religious war…
The duty lies on the Islamic nation and the Arabs in general, with the governments, regimes, states, bodies, religious and popular sources of authority and [all] the peoples, to participate in defending the noble Al-Aqsa Mosque, starting with coming to it… and ending with liberating the Al-Aqsa Mosque by all possible means (i.e., including terror).” [emphasis added]
[Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Facebook page, Oct. 1, 2024]
Already a decade ago, Palestinian Media Watch exposed that Al-Habbash considers all of Israel a waqf:
Al-Habbash: “The entire land of Palestine is [Islamic] waqf and is blessed land … It is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 22, 2014]
The author is the founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch.
The post Not Just Hamas: PA Religious Leaders Agree That Islam Prohibits Israel’s Existence first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
This Jewish Rapper Should Be Praised for His Passover Pride
Rapper Kosha Dillz, dressed as Moses, leading a Passover seder at Coachella in 2022. Photo: @chrism_arts.
Antisemites in America — and especially in New York — are trying to make Jews feel fearful of going about their regular activities. One infamous video that went viral had anti-Israel protestors screaming that Zionists should get off the subway.
Jewish rapper Rami Matan Even-Esh — known as Kosha Dillz — decided to have a Subway Seder despite some negative comments he got last year when he did it. Dillz has visited Israel and performed for released hostages and families of hostages, as well as wounded soldiers.
“I love doing the Subway Seder because it was a breath of fresh air and some people joined in who weren’t having their own Seders,” Dillz told me in an interview.
He said his group did it on the Q train at Union Square in Manhattan at about 6 o’clock on Friday.
“People are glued to the Internet waiting for bad news, so it was nice to do something like this,” he said, adding that he dressed as Moses. “There were Black and Hispanic community members who asked what we were doing and they were receptive that we were taking pride.”
Dillz showed the Jewish pride that we all should, and he was unbowed by the threats he faced. He said showing Jewish pride and fearlessness is important in the wake of rising antisemitism.
“Last year, someone gave me the middle finger,” he said. “This year, we had no problems. Though, of course, online people will do their thing, and someone commented that we were colonizing the train. You have to laugh at them.”
Despite the Passover seder being mentioned prominently in the Christian Bible, Dillz said that many people asked him what Passover was and were unfamiliar with the holiday. He also rapped as part of the event.
“We gave the people dinner and a show,” he said, adding that there was both matzah and gefilte fish. “I think there were some worried about safety but we didn’t have one negative comment at all.”
Dillz, who will soon be releasing a documentary called Bring The Family Home about his trips to Israel since October 7 said the Israeli hostages often get forgotten in discussions, and he hopes they will somehow be returned.
Dillz, who has been a cast member of Wild ‘N Out and performs both music and comedy, said whenever possible, people should look at the bright side of things.
“I think as Jews, when we embrace our culture, we show that we are united and we’re not gonna run away in fear as our enemies might like,” he said.
Dillz, who made a music video against Kanye West when he went on an antisemitic rant, said that there should have been more outrage over the arson attack against Jewish Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence on Passover.
The rapper has taken to the streets recently not only to rap, but also to ask questions of people at anti-Israel rallies, where he calmly asks their opinions, often revealing that they have little knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dillz said that he is genuinely curious to know what they think, but at times people responded by showing ignorance and at other times, they would simply respond with chants designed to intimidate.
As for his Subway Seder, covered by Fox 5 New York, he said it was a success.
“It was really great we could do this,” he said. “When we show our positivity and joy, it’s something that I think is really powerful.”
The author is a writer based in New York.
The post This Jewish Rapper Should Be Praised for His Passover Pride first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login