1/ I cannot praise the US for stopping arms shipments to Israel. The Biden administration has taken its time and its hands are stained with innocent Palestinian blood. Still, this is the first time Israel has heard a negative reaponse from Washington. ---> 2/ Israel's case for using 1 ton bombs in Rafah is as morally decrepit as it was for Gaza. Is Israel executing a plan to kill all the Palestinians and take over Gaza? I doubt it. Such a plan may exist in the devious minds of settler leaders. Most Israelis just don't care. --->

1/ I have seen the Israeli military and political machine falter before, on the verge of being forced to end past wars. I believe this is what is happening now. Israel is putting on a show meant mostly for domestic consumption. ---> 2/ Netanyahu and his cronies and accessories, particularly those with military experience (Gantz and Eisenkot), want to tell the Israeli Jewish public (that overwhelmingly supports the "war") that Israel has "operated" in Rafah. There is nowhere else to go in the Gaza strip. --->

1/ הטקסט הזה הוא חרפה מתועבת ---> 2/ אני עוזב לשניה את העובדה שמדובר ברצף של שקרים (זו לא אותה תורה, חמאס לא נאצים, ״הם״ לא אותם ״הם״ כמו ש-״אנחנו״ לא אותם ״אנחנו״). אני מבקש להשאר רק במשמעות שנגזרת מתוך התועבה הזו לגבי המשמעות והאחריות של מדינת ישראל בעשור השמיני לקיומה. --->

1/ Why has Israel lost the "war", despite destroying Gaza and the Gazans? There are several answers. They all begin with the same discrepancy: Israel and Hamas were not fighting the same war. You cannot win a war on parallel planes. Victory requires a defree of consensus. ---> 2/ Hamas put all it had into one strike against Israel. Even if it declared its intention to destroy Israel, it physically could not. Hamas wanted to wreak havoc, to shock Israel and to kill as many Israelis as possible, to sow fear and reveal weakness. Hamas succeeded. --->

1/ Historical truths may be established this evening. As things stand, Israel is refusing to stop the war. That is the main demand Hamas is making, a demand accepted by Egypt and the US and legitimized by the reality on the ground. Gaza is no more; Israel has lost the war. ---> 2/ Continuing the "war" practically meanins perpetrating a genocide on the people of Gaza. Israel has made it clear, through action and statement, that it has no plan of stopping the geocide (Hamas infrastructure!) and that it does not believe there are bystanders in Gaza. --->

1/ It doesn't matter how supportive Israeli Jews might be towards a hostage deal. It doesn't matter how opposed Israeli Jews might be to Binyamin Netanyahu. Ultimately, Israeli Jews continue to support the "destruction" of Hamas, which means continuing the "war". ---> 2/ The "debate" about campus protests in the US serves the American culture wars. It also serves Israel's hectic campign to establish itself as eternally singular. The references to Germany in the 1930s, ridiculous and shameful, have not been made accidentally. --->

1/ the most disturbing thing about the Israeli obsession with "operating" in Rafah (as though Israel has not been bombing Rafah and killing civilians by the dozen on a daily basis) is the fact that all of it has to do with domestic Israeli concerns. Palestinians are absent. ---> 2/ The Israeli military leadership is clamoring for an operation. That is not surprising. This "war" has been an abject failure in military terms. Not only has Hamas remained viable and its senior leaders alive, Israeli security is at an all-time low with 100000 DPs. --->

1/ Current sentiment in Israel and among supporters of Israel is that campus protests in the US and across the world reveal a profound truth- Antisemitism never died out and it is a viable threat to all Jews today. I'd like to suggest a different truth: things change. ---> 2/ The strangest aspect of the past six months in Israel is the denial of time. I've written about this here but am still amazed by the intensity. The past is meaningless, canceled by the cruelty of the massacre. The future is revenge. It is always October 7th. --->

1/ One of the reasons life in Israel is so exhausting has to do with the funky nature of time here over the past six months. The past preceding October 7th is obscure at best, dangerous at worst. Israeli history led up to October 7th and began on October 7th. ---> 2/ Now we have license to be perennial victims. The world will never doubt us now. The Holocaust was dissolving into cliches and narratives. The October 7th massacre revalidated our credentials. The debt we are owed will never be repaid, so at least sit back and let us work! --->

1/ The jacarandas are entering full bloom in Israel. A wise twitter friend once proposed that when one free state exists from the river to the sea all of its holidays should be nature oriented. The feast of the jacaranda blooms was to be the main holiday of the year. ---> 2/ Why? Because it is so out of place among the hardy vegetation of the region. The purple filigree of the jacaranda is so delicate it seems to shimmer. Its bloom is so short-lived it falls almost immediately to the ground, covering the sidewalks in periwinkle. --->

1/ A day of engaging with my countrymen on this platform has left a powerful impression. My mental image of Israel has for some time been one of implosion. I saw noise and drama and horrendous timelines unfold. But Israel is not imploding. Israel is contracting. ---> 2/ This is true even outside twitter. Israel is disappearing from the global map. It is more and more difficult, for example, to find flights from and to Israel. The flights you can find are long, arduous and expensive. Israel is no longer a destination or a point of origin. --->

1/ The 18 year old sister of a good man, one of the best I've met here over the past few months died of sunstroke. She was walking down a "safe corridor" with her mother after they had secured passage to Egypt. She just dropped. Her mother went into a coma from the shock. ---> 2/ They had lost their father in December, after he could not receive medicine in the church where 600 parishioners had taken refuge. I have experienced myriad feelings throughout this "war", from anger through guilt to exhausting frustration. I have not felt such shame. --->

1/ My wisest friend read me on hopelessness and admonished me. He said that most Israelis have no use for hope because we feel ourselves to be the manifeststion, the fulfillment of hope. "By their fruits you shall know them", says the apostle. We are the fruit. ---> 2/ Peace was never on the table here, apparently. We could live in peace only with those who recognized our right to live separately, under our own conditions. That means both separate and supreme, sharing space but placing insurmountable barriers. So deals, but no peace. --->

1/ I spoke with a wise woman yesterday, a journalist who wanted my take on the political situation in Israel. The first and last question she asked me were identical. Could I identify a political voice that articulates an alternative or any kind of hope? I simply said "no". ---> 2/ She returned to the question, I think, because something in her rebelled against my decisive answer. How could there be no hope? How could things be so
bad in Israel (this isn't about Gaza for a second) without an aspiring politician positioning herself as an alternative? --->

1/ This evening Israel enters Passover, the holiday of freedom and liberation. It does so without the great majority of the hostages taken on October 7th. Feasible reports suggest that dozens have died in captivity from Israeli strikes or worsening conditions. ---> 2/ Demonstrations calling for the return of the hostages take place on a weekly basis. Their families wander the globe, raising support for this return. Everyone knows the price Israel must pay: A ceasefire leading to the end of hostilities is the beginning. --->

1/ While it continues to decimate Gaza and the Gazans, Israel is slowly beginning one of its patented denial routines. No one is seriously denying the shedding of Palestinian blood. Very few care about that. The dance of denial is performed in-house. Palestinians are props. ---> 2/ Who is denying and what are they denying? Israel's professional and intellectual elites are denying the root cause of Israel's moral and strategic failures, the rotten core of the Israeli condition. How are they doing this? By claiming "their" country was "hijacked". --->

1/ Today is an angry day. I'm angry at how easy it is for my country to continue shedding Palestinian blood. Israel continues to bomb Rafah, killing dozens of innocents every day while pretending it is mulling over the question of "operating" and shedding even more blood. ---> 2/ I'm angry at the international community for eagerly joining the game initiated and played by the masters of war, the game about Israel and Iran's nuclear program. This is a charade, full of grainy images and technical jargon and doomsday predictions. --->

1/ The arrest of Prof. Nadera Dhalhoub Kevorkian, an arrest made because of academic articles she published, has been thrown out by a lower court judge. Advocates of individual liberties were aghast at the attmepted curtailing of academic freedom and rallied to her defense. ---> 2/ But the cognitive dissonance that is the Israeli left fails to see that this shameful arrest came from the same "defense establishment" that authorized the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, all in the name of the "war on terror". They are close kin. --->

1/ This tweet by a prominent Israeli intellectual and scholar of religion has made me think rethink my position on whether Israel's crimes in Gaza should be considered Genocide. The clip of Gazans at the beach is accompanied by one word - Genocide. --->

https://twitter.com/TomerPersico/status/1780650233560465904

2/ This man has already written about Senator Warren's public statements on her belief that Israel's actions in Gaza will amount to Genocide. What he wrote, basically, was that such sentiments are an abomination reflecting a hatred for Jews. Why is this post egregious? --->

1/ I am a member of various messaging groups alongside scholars, pundits and civil servants. Since the Iranian strike on Israel I am seeing the resurgence of a sentiment that held sway after October 7th but one I thought had died down since. It has not died down. ---> 2/ Israelis- smart, savvy opinion-shapers- are denying both present and future and are actively embracing the past. After October 7th, this made immediate sense. We were all stuck in our trauma, in the massacre and the ungraspable number of the dead and the hijacked. --->

1/ This is a seesaw. When you consider the current standoff between Israel and Iran, you could think both countries see themselves as occupying opposite seats on the seesaw, each ascending when the other descends, winning when the other loses. You would be wrong. ---> 2/ Israelis don't see themselves on one side of the seesaw. Israelis see themselves as the fulcrum, the tip of the triangle upon which the entire seesaw is balanced. It doesn't matter if the enemy is Iran or the Palestinians. Israel by its very presence ensures equilibrium. --->