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nakba
Israel’s War with Iran Exposes the Fragility of Jewish Supremacy
Netanyahu’s government is ceding violence against its own people in order to obscure its lack of political power.
Jun 18, 2025
I arrived in Jerusalem last Thursday evening.
Twelve hours later, I awoke to the news of the Israeli military’s attack on Iran—having slept through the sirens in the night. I am an American Jewish activist and researcher; I have spent time on and off in Israel/Palestine throughout my life. But this visit has been unlike any other. Four days in, I have found my eyes opened by the breathtaking recklessness of the current Israeli government. The attacks on Iran are but the latest action by a political leadership that, lacking public legitimacy since the October 7 attacks, seems determined to use terror to resecure a public mandate for its otherwise vulnerable project of Jewish supremacy.
Power and violence, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued, are negatively correlated. “Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost,” she noted in her 1969 treatise, On Violence. “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.” Arendt’s argument rests on the insight that a government’s power is constituted through public support and participation. Violence can sustain regimes that otherwise lack public legitimacy, but at tremendous cost. If the cost of Israeli state violence has been borne by Palestinians for decades—and with untold brutality since the October 7 Hamas attacks—Israel’s new front with Iran signals the Netanyahu government’s willingness to use its own public as bait for Iran, in a desperate bid to resecure legitimacy with that very public.
The currency of the Netanyahu government’s military gambles are human lives across the Middle East.
By initiating this confrontation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are knowingly courting a situation in which Israelis will be terrorized by Iranian missiles. Less than a week ago, this same government narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence; now, that threat has been preempted by the war. Yet the dynamic at hand runs deeper than electoral politics. To understand this, it’s worth considering past episodes of mass anti-Palestinian violence and expulsion. For instance, the late historian Alon Confino argues that in the run-up to 1948, there emerged in the Jewish public a “shared conception of Jewish sovereignty with fewer Palestinians.” By conditioning Jewish sovereignty and self-determination on Jewish ethnic homogeneity, the Zionist movement created a Jewish public appetite for the Nakba.
There is a similar, but shifted, logic at play today. As in 1948, there is apparently widespread Israeli-Jewish support for anti-Palestinian expulsion and killing. But today, this support is modulated through the neoliberalization of Israeli society—a shift Louis Fishman identified back in 2021. Jewish sovereignty may still be the rationale of the state, but it is also now at least partially instrumental for ideals of personal safety, material comfort, and enrichment. (Fishman notes that the entrenchment of these ideals into the Israeli-Jewish political imaginary is one of Netanyahu’s signal accomplishments.) As such, I think it is worth considering how ideals of Jewish sovereignty and supremacy are more limited in their ability to induce the kind of active support the current Israeli government would need to fully implement its extremist vision of anti-Palestinian dispossession and removal. If in 1948, as Confino argues, the “dream of an ethnonational state” was a strong enough incentive to induce Jews into expelling their own neighbors, now a stick is needed to complement the carrot of Jewish sovereignty.
It seems clear that the current “stick” is Israeli experiences of terror, induced by the Iranian missile attacks. As in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, the Israeli government is apparently hoping that these missile attacks will induce sufficient terror and trauma amongst its own public to underwrite support for both an extended campaign in Iran and continued mass violence in Gaza. To return to Arendt’s parlance, we might reckon with how the government is ceding violence against its own people in order to obscure its lack of political power. This is a depraved gamble by the Netanyahu government that rests on the dehumanization of Palestinians. Gaza may now be a “secondary arena” for the Israel Defense Forces, but continued mass violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is the implied byproduct of the war with Iran.
But this approach endangers Israeli Jews, too, even if the scale of destruction between Tel Aviv and Gaza is not remotely comparable. Growing numbers of Israelis have already been injured and killed in the missile attacks. Those numbers may seem small from afar, especially in comparison to the IDF’s crimes in Gaza. But there is no guarantee that those numbers won’t rise dramatically over the course of the war. The currency of the Netanyahu government’s military gambles are human lives across the Middle East.
As I walked towards a bomb shelter on Saturday night, I saw the glowing streaks from missile interceptions: it felt like the sky itself had come alive. Within the shelter, kids and parents slept in the corners. Others sat refreshing their phones amid intermittent cell service. Jerusalem, at least as I have known it in the past, now feels like it is in a suspended state.
Continued escalation is not inevitable—although it can certainly feel that way to me here. But to change direction, I think we as Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora have to overcome investments in the current frameworks of Jewish supremacy and sovereignty. This is no small feat in a moment when the Israeli political leadership is invested in mobilizing Israeli and global Jewry toward precisely those ideals.
But an alternative is always possible. Even now.
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Independence Day, Nakba Day, and the Starvation of Gaza
This year’s May 14 and May 15 will be remembered by a particularly horrendous proof that international law has been shattered: A state is intentionally starving an entire population.
May 14, 2025
May 14 is celebrated in Israel as “Independence Day,” since it marks the end of British colonial rule over what had been the British Mandate of Palestine, and the proclamation of the new state of Israel. One day later, May 15, Palestinians commemorate the violent expulsion of around 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland, that started with the attack on Tiberias City on December 22, 1947. By January 3, 1949, 437 cities and villages had been destroyed and depopulated: 295 of them were obliterated through assaults or expulsion orders by Zionist troops,106 were depopulated in the midst of psychological warfare caused by the fall of neighboring villages or towns, and 36 fell victim to outright massacres committed by Zionist fighters. Many of the refugees fled to Gaza.
Palestinians refer to these 13 months as the beginning of the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe.” Every year since 1998, it has been commemorated on May 15 with the “Palestinian March of Return.” This year, however, the Association for the Defense of the Rights for the Internally Displaced Persons in Israel was forced to cancel the March. Organizers were informed that a crowd larger than 700 people or the presence of Palestinian flags would lead to “immediate police intervention.” Already since 2011, the “Nakba Law” made the commemoration ever harder, prohibiting the allocation of funds to all institutions that engaged in academic, cultural, artistic, or political activities that observe the Palestinian Nakba Day as a day of mourning. But things have become much worse.
After October 7, 2023, in May 2024, Sabreen Msarwi, a middle school teacher in Tayibe, was fired for participating in the March, and last April, in Tel Aviv, Meir Baruchin, a 62-year-old high school teacher who had been teaching history and civics for 35 years, was arrested for his Facebook posts that pleaded against the dehumanization of Palestinians: “For most Israelis, if you say Palestinian, they automatically think terrorists. They have no name, no face, no family, no hope, no plans—nothing.” For no other reason than refusing to engage in this multi-leveled erasure, for no other reason than defending Palestinian human and political rights, Baruchin was locked up for four days as a “high-risk detainee” in solitary confinement, while his apartment was ransacked by Israeli authorities.
As American citizens, whose tax dollars fund this moral abdication whether we consent to it or not, how do we face this reckoning?
It is particularly calamitous that the State of Israel, whose government claims to speak for all Jews worldwide, criminalizes remembrance, when, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his pathbreaking book Zakhor (Hebrew for “Remember!”) teaches us, remembrance is a religious commandment in the Torah, especially the remembrance of Exodus, the liberation from captivity and enslavement. Moreover, as the historian Enzo Traverso has argued, the “civil religion” of Holocaust memory has for decades “served as a paradigm for the remembrance of other genocides and crimes against humanity.” Traverso warns that if this “sacred and institutionalized memory serves only to support Israel and attack the defenders of the Palestinian cause on the pretext of antisemitism, our moral, political, and epistemological bearings will become unmoored, with devastating consequences.”
Yet, this is exactly what is happening. In a recent article, the renowned Israeli-American scholar of Holocaust studies Omer Bartov charges that the “memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.” How is it possible, he asks, “well into the 21st century, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this ‘crime of crimes’?”
It is then not only the denial of “the right to remember, to speak and to mourn” that marks this year’s 77th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel and the onset of the Nakba. This year’s May 14 and May 15 will be remembered by a particularly horrendous proof that international law has been shattered: A state unconditionally supported by the most powerful Western country, the United States, and by other Western countries, is intentionally starving an entire population. As of this writing, at least 57 Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza as a direct consequence of Israel’s 10 weeks long brutal blockade of food, water, and any other critical aid to the Palestinian population. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, estimates that 66,000 children in Gaza are now suffering from “severe malnutrition” due to the total siege which Sean Carroll, the president and chief executive of the nonprofit group American Near East Refugee Aid, has condemned as an “engineered system of deprivation.” This is, Carroll writes, “the moment of moral reckoning […]. When we talk about peace, we must ask: What kind of future are we envisioning if an entire people is left to suffer starvation?”
As American citizens, whose tax dollars fund this moral abdication whether we consent to it or not, how do we face this reckoning? It is high time to pressure our government to vigorously work toward a solution in which Israelis and Palestinians have equal political rights and security, and to support a vision offered by Israeli-Palestinian civic groups like Zochrot, Salt of the Earth, Standing Together, and A Land for All.
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Israel Preparing to Seize Ethnically Cleansed City of Rafah as Part of Permanent Buffer Zone
"The entire city of Rafah is being swallowed up," warned one Israeli human rights group. "The massive death zone... continues to grow by the day."
Apr 09, 2025
The Israel Defense Forces is preparing to permanently seize the largely depopulated Palestinian city of Rafah—comprising about 20% of Gaza's land area—and incorporate what was once the embattled enclave's third-largest city into a borderland buffer that IDF troops have described as a "kill zone" rife with alleged war crimes.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Wednesday that "defense sources" said an area from the so-called Philadelphi corridor along Gaza's border with Egypt and the Morag corridor—the name of a Jewish colony that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis—will be incorporated into the buffer zone that runs along the entire length of the Israeli border.
The affected area includes the entire city of Rafah—which is thousands of years old—and surrounding neighborhoods, which were home to more than 250,000 people before Israeli launched what United Nations experts have called a genocidal assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
As Haaretz's Yaniv Kubovitch reported:
Expanding the buffer zone to this extent carries significant implications. Not only does it cover a vast area—approximately 75 square kilometers (about 29 square miles), or roughly one-fifth of the Gaza Strip—but severing it would effectively turn Gaza into an enclave within Israeli-controlled territory, cutting it off from the Egyptian border. According to defense sources, this consideration played a central role in the decision to focus on Rafah...
It has yet to be decided whether the entire area will simply be designated a buffer zone that is off-limits to civilians—as has been done in other parts of the border area—or whether the area will be fully cleared and all buildings demolished, effectively wiping out the city of Rafah.
In recent weeks and for the second time during the war, IDF troops forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands residents from Rafah and other areas of southern Gaza in an ethnic cleansing campaign reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, or "catastrophe" in Arabic, through which the modern state of Israel was founded. Most Gaza residents today are Nakba survivors or descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from other parts of Palestine in 1948.
Earlier this month, Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to seize "large areas" of southern Gaza to be added to what Katz called "security zones" and "settlements."
Jewish recolonization of Gaza is a major objective of many right-wing Israelis. Last month, Katz announced the creation of a new IDF directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing northern Gaza, which Israeli leaders euphemistically call "voluntary emigration." Katz said the agency would be run "in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump," who in February said that the United States would "take over" Gaza after emptying the strip of its over 2 million Palestinians, and then transform the enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East." Trump subsequently attempted to walk back some of his comments.
Earlier this week, the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence published testimonies of IDF officers, soldiers, and veterans who took part in the creation of the buffer zone. Soldiers recounted orders to "deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions."
Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally, were targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. One officer featured in the report told The Guardian: "We're killing [men], we're killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We're destroying their houses and pissing on their graves."
Most of Gaza's more than 2 million residents have been forcibly displaced at least once since Israel launched the war, which has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Widespread starvation and disease have been fueled by a "complete siege" which, among other Israeli policies and actions, has been cited in the ongoing South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
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