#the jewish onslaught

[eretzyisrael]

by Mark Oppenheimer

Black Classic also offers numerous books by the late Hunter College historian John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998), who shared Welsing’s homophobia. Clarke’s detractors often mention his antisemitism, but his homophobia is sometimes overlooked. On YouTube, you can see him cheered on as he tells an audience that Africans “had a healthy attitude toward things other people made unhealthy and made filthy and dirty.” Scornfully, he denies the possibility of gay Africans in antiquity. “Show me one case of sexual deviation before the coming of foreigners!” Elsewhere, Clarke, who blamed the “Jewish educational mafia” for multiculturalism, wrote an introduction to an edition of Michael Bradley’s 1978 book The Iceman Inheritance, which argues that white people are genetically predisposed to higher levels of racism and aggression than other groups, and speculates that Jews might be the ultimate “Neanderthal-Caucasoids.” 

He also wrote the foreword to Bradley’s 1992 work Chosen People from the Caucasus: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deceptions and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization. This last work argues that the people known as Jews today are descended from eighth-century converts to Judaism, having usurped the tradition from a group that had been practicing Judaism for more than two millennia; these late-arriving Jews, including today’s Ashkenazi Jews, have uniquely high levels of Neanderthal aggression, which has helped them dominate other groups.

In 2001, Clarke told an interviewer that “the European uses this religion”—Judaism—“as the handmaiden of his imperial desires. I strictly mean the Europeans who answer to the word Jew. He reads the word Jew into ancient history, where the word didn’t exist. When the European Jew didn’t exist.” In an interview you can find online, Clarke told an audience, “If Jews want to dominate something, it’s very easy to dominate us. So that’s what they do.”

The idea that “white” Jews, whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi (Iberian), or Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African), are somehow impostors or usurpers—with the “real” Jews coming from the Nile River Valley or other parts of Africa—is a poisonous myth deployed to subvert the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It’s a lie presented as a given within a certain strain of Afrocentric thought, and embraced not only by Clarke but by the aforementioned “Dr. Ben”—Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan—who, like Clarke, is well-represented in the offerings of Black Classic Press, which publishes 12 ben-Jochannan titles. These include We the Black Jews: Witness to the “White Jewish Race” Myth and African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.”

In 2015, shortly after ben-Jochannan’s death at 96, The New York Times reported that for decades he had deceived employers about his credentials, telling Cornell and other institutions that he had degrees from Cambridge, in England, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Neither school had a record of his enrollment. “ ‘People condemn me for not being an intellectual of the Ph.D. type,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan once said, reacting to questions later raised about his résumé,” the Times wrote. “While he used the ‘white man’s credential’ to go ‘certain places,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan said, he refused to ‘let the white man certify’ his work.”

As far as I can tell, Coates has nowhere discussed the allegations against ben-Jochannan, his longtime intellectual partner—and a writer who remains a source of revenue for the press. To the contrary, Coates has always spoken of ben-Jochannan with reverence. “In 1978, when we started publishing, three elders were inspirations and gave their support—John G. Jackson, John Henrik Clarke, and Yosef ben-Jochannan,” writes Coates on the Black Classic website. “His books have revolutionized the way Black people relate to Africa and the Nile Valley.” After ben-Jochannan’s death, Coates told the Times, “I consider Dr. Ben the greatest of the self-trained historians.” Ta-Nehisi told the Times that ben-Jochannan’s example “runs through everything I do.”

Along with Clarke and ben-Jochannan, one of the authors best represented in Black Classic’s offerings remains Tony Martin. The Jewish Onslaught may be gone from the website, but several of his other books are still there, including a pamphlet, published in 1998, containing the text of a lecture given in Trinidad called The Progress of the African Race Since Emancipation and Prospects for the Future. Although largely about the Afro-Caribbean experience, Martin takes time to explain that “[p]seudo-scientific racism had been around since at least the 4th or 5th century AD when the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, pioneered the notion that Africans were recipients of the curse of Ham.” The Talmud makes no connection between Noah’s son Ham and Africa—that is a later, mainly Christian tradition, seen in early church theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea (CE 260-340) and Bede (CE 673-735). 

But Martin, though a professor at Wellesley for many years, isn’t making a scholarly argument. He is making an indictment. This is also what he is doing when he writes:

“When President Clinton becomes president, he goes to Geneva and he bows down before the World Jewish Congress. When the African American woman Myrlie Evers-Williams became head of the NAACP the other day, she went straight to Geneva and bowed down before the World Jewish Congress.” This is fiction, of course—neither of them went to Geneva to genuflect before Jews—but hardly surprising coming from Martin, who elsewhere in his pamphlet calls the World Jewish Congress “a body organized on a racial or religious or whatever-the-Jews-are basis.”

One has to ask: Why is Coates selling this? 

[fortunatelychaoticphantom]

Lol @nerdreamer is this you?

Nothing I love more than finding an "anti-nazi's" rampant Jew-haterad ❤️❤️. I'd say sometimes the call is coming from inside the house, but we all know it always has and always will.

[thatangryjew]

Hey antizionist Jews. So do you fucking get it yet? That gunman had NO idea his two murder victims were members of the Israeli embassy. He had no idea they were at a peace building, interfaith event. He saw two people exiting a Jewish museum and opened fire. He killed two people in cold blood because he saw two presumably Jews (he had no idea Yaron was a Christian) and wanted to kill them. For being Jews at a Jewish museum. He went there to kill Jews.

If you had been there at that time, if you had been in front of him, HE WOULD HAVE KILLED YOU TOO. He would have had no idea or even care if you were antizionist. Do you think he stopped to ask if Yaron and Sarah were Zionist or Israeli? (Sarah was American btw)

BECAUSE ITS NOT ABOUT PALESTINE. ITS ABOUT DEAD JEWS.

THIS DID NOTHING TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE. HE DID IT BECAUSE STOKED BY THE ONGOING ONSLAUGHT OF ANTISEMITISM THAT YOU HAVE HELPED PASS ON, HE WANTED TO MURDER JEWS.

Do you fucking get it yet? How many more Jews need to die before you understand that they do not like you either and they will murder you too if given a fucking chance.

You are not safe. You are a token and tokens get spent.

(Obviously this doesn’t apply to nonzionist or postzionist Jews. The ones who don’t tokenize themselves to the extreme left. I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the few actually Jewish JVP “asajews” and the ones who are cheering on Hamas and call murder resistance and all that shit.)

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

I’ve talked about how, as a goy, speaking up against the appalling onslaught of antisemitism that permeates every facet of society now often feels like yelling into an abyss, because most people either just don’t care or are actively participating in it.

And then it hit me like a brick to the face. People who speak up in support of Jews, Israelis, or for the wellbeing of the hostages often get accused by the extremist “antizionists” as “manufacturing consent for genocide.”

And that is EXACTLY what they are doing. The sheer level of dehumanisation and demonisation of Jewish communities, of Israelis, has reached a point where if a large scale horror like the Holocaust were to happen again, a terrifying amount of people would shrug their shoulders, turn away, and say “it’s just Zionists, they deserve it anyway.”

[gingerswagfreckles]

I just want all the gentiles who are continuing to ignore the ongoing onslaught of hatecrimes against Jews to know that all the top voted posts on r/Jewish right now are about whether or not Jews need to be fleeing the country yet.

[girlactionfigure]

Rescued hostage Noa Argamani has become one of the most recognizable figures symbolizing Israeli resilience against the incessant jihadist onslaught that seeks to destroy the Jewish people.

Argamani was named this week to Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people over the past year.

[a-very-tired-jew]

I've seen Ta-Nehisi Coates touted as an authority for years, and I honestly never looked into his background.

As he has all the attention of Jumblr and the Jewish community right now, I decided to actually do a cursory look.

Bruh.

Someone who is touted and lauded as a great expert and authority by the Left actually has no credentials whatsoever?! He went to Howard for 5 years and then dropped out to start his journalism career.

Coates states that "Howard trained him intellectually" and just.. no. No it did not.

You didn't finish an undergrad degree my guy. That's barely giving you any training in intellectual thinking and rigor.

It honestly appears that Coates has been given an "authority" pass because he is speaking as a Black Man on Black history and Black issues that currently effect or have effected Black people.

But now?

Now he's taken that "authority" and is using it to speak on issues that he has no relation to beyond traveling to the area for a small amount of time in 2023. He has no understanding, relationship, or education on anything relating to Israel, Palestine, or the Levant. It's reminiscent of Nobel Disease, where an well regard authority in one subject matter starts talking out their ass about something else (e.g. Linus Pauling and vitamin C).

Now, some of you are going to attack me for this because something something privilege and academia and I'm talking about someone who is arguable well regarded. But I'm sorry, dropping out after 5 years to pursue your career, not even have the credentials for said career, and now take that uncredentialed pseudo-expertise and apply it to something you have no relationship to at all?

That's just asinine.

I honestly think this tweet by Montefiore sums it up nicely.

Let's also not forget that Ta Nehisi Coates was taught by his father, Paul Coates, to be antisemitic and literally view this entire situation through America's Issues. Paul Coates was a member of the Black Panthers, which for all the good they did do and have done you also have to remember that antisemitism is baked into the group. The BPP was influenced by the Nation of Islam and Marxism-Leninism and Mao, so they were literally influenced by some of the most antisemitic organizations, groups, people, and rhetoric in the 20th Century outside of Nazis. This means that Ta Nehisi Coates likely grew up with antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy being prevalent and accepted throughout his life. For example, take this excerpt from his book The Message:

Now also consider that his father's publishing company was also caught republishing an extremely antisemitic book that spreads conspiracy, hate, and misinformation.

So yeah.

Sorry folks.

But Ta Nehisi Coates is just spouting NOI and Tankie antisemitic conspiracy and rhetoric wrapped in progressive pseudo-academic professional language.

[ind1g3n0us-lev1t3]

Just a friendly reminder that within Israels Declaration of Independence, there is these paragraphs:

"WE APPEAL — in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months — to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East."

Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-declaration-of-the-establishment-of-the-state-of-israel

[darcylightninglewis]

So I’m sending this to you cause I have no clue how anyone else would react but: DR ROBBY BEING JEWISH JUST MAKES SO MUCH SENSE FOR HIS CHARACTER

Especially when matched with Dana’s Christianity. Like counter balances almost.

Cause I’m sorry even before we know he’s Jewish, Robby just gives the vibe in being too cynical about things beyond regular being jaded by experience.

Like the self deprecation alone when he’s talking to Abbot about jumping during his shift wouldn’t be cool. 

(Also the fact he gets funnier when stressed is just such a vibe one existing as a Jewish person has.)

IT ABSOLUTELY DOES.

Dana's acceptance and openness vs his self depreciation and closed offishness is just so good.

That he keeps on his Magen David, but not on display says so much. But finds comfort/solace in the silent questioning of why?? and also give me strength. It's so deeply Jewish and Noah just knocks it out of the park. It gives so much more depth to his emotions.

Seriously when he had that conversation with her I nearly lost it. It's such dark Jewish humor, is2g I can easily imagine my Dad saying that (he was a hospital doc too)

And you made my day with this. I was ready to delete the onslaught of spam asks and nearly missed it! <333

[chanaleah]

So this is a great example of a fundamental misunderstanding of history!

In 1948, the land that is now Israel/Palestine was controlled by the British Empire. It wasn't owned by either Jews or Arabs in its entirety, and additionally there had not been an independent state in the land since the Jewish Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Roman Empire in 63 CE.

Secondly, the pre-State of Israel agreed to a UN partition partition plan in 1947 that guaranteed an Arab state and Jewish state in the borders shown on the map below:

On May 14, the State Of Israel declared independence within the borders shown in blue on the map. Rather than accepting an Arab state and a Jewish state, the armies of surrounding Arab states, including Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, attacked the nascent State Of Israel with the intention to destroy it in favor of an Arab state in the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine.

Before it was attacked, the State Of Israel had no intention to fight the Arab states or hurt the Arabs living in the borders of Israel. This is shown clearly in Israel's Declaration of Independence.

WE APPEAL — in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months — to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions. WE EXTEND our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

Direct quotes from Israel's Declaration Of Independence.

However, during the 1948 War* the majority Palestinians living in Israel fled out of fear or were kicked out. Similarly, all of the Jews living in Judea & Samaria/the West Bank were kicked out by the Jordanian army.

Massacres were committed by both sides during the war, including the Deir Yassin massacre, in which many Palestinians were killed by right-wing Zionist militias and the Gush Etzion massacre in which many Jews were killed by the Jordanian army.

Both Palestinians and Jews had to flee/were kicked out of places in which they had resided for centuries - some examples being Lydda/Lod (for Palestinians) the Old City of Jerusalem, specifically the Jewish quarter which was later looted by the Jordanian army (for Jews).

Israel ended up winning the war -- and winning more territory than had originally been given to them. This was what the map looked like after the Armistice Agreement at the end of the 1948 war:

At the end of the war, Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea & Samaria/the West Bank. There was no Palestinian state.

During and in the aftermath of the 1948 War, 700,000 Palestinians became refugees from Israel, and between 17,000 and 40,000 Jews became refugees from Judea & Samaria/the West Bank and Gaza, and about 1 million Jews became refugees from the rest of the SWANA region.

This post is in no way an exhaustive or authoritative history, but it shows clearly the history of the 1948 War is much more complicated than "forcefully took that land from them".

If you would like me to make a post about history pre-1948 I can do that as well.

*I chose to call this war the 1948 war so as to be impartial as possible. Other names used include the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel's War Of Independence, and the 1948 Palestine War.

Keep reading below the cut for sources.

SOURCES:

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Melanie Phillips

For the longer term, Israel is now preparing to wean itself off US military aid. It’s realised its mistake in having become dangerously complacent about American support. It’s re-learning the ancient lesson the Jewish people must teach itself — that it’s a lethal illusion to imagine that it can afford to rely on anyone else.

For their part, diaspora Jews are now starting to understand that their acceptance into Western countries, which for decades they had taken for granted, is also a mirage.

They find themselves caught up in a maelstrom in which they are under sustained attack as Jews because an entire political class, civil society and even some of their own friends and family members are turning viciously against Israel. And that’s because they are falling for the serial lies being told about it as unchallengeable truths.

This week, there have been three successive days of claims that the Israel Defence Forces have been “massacring” Gazans queuing for food provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the new aid distribution centre operated by America and backed by Israel.

Those claims, which have been debunked by the available evidence, are effectively blood libels against Israel. It’s Hamas that has been killing Gazan civilians and trying to stop them from receiving this food aid, and Hamas operatives who have been killed by Israel as a result.

Hamas is desperate to stop Gazans from obtaining this newly organised aid because it has the capacity to destroy its power over the population. Accordingly, it’s been provoking gun battles with the IDF and then claiming these are massacres by Israel of those queuing for food.

This has been uncritically regurgitated by Western media outlets, which have been channeling such Hamas propaganda ever since the atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023.

As a result, countless people now believe that Israel is wantonly killing Gazan civilians, starving Gazan babies and even committing genocide. All these allegations are the opposite of the truth and defy reason itself.

The outcome is an atmosphere of hysteria and incitement in which the cause of “Free Palestine” and “End Zionists” — the slogans shouted by an Islamist who last Sunday tried to burn Jews alive when he firebombed a weekly march in Boulder, Colorado supporting the Israeli hostages — has led directly to murderous attacks against Jews in America.

We’ve never seen anything like this onslaught before. And this lunacy is now gripping various Western governments formerly considered to be Israel’s allies.

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

Every single person who has refused to condemn or stayed silent in the face of the onslaught of rising global antisemitism, your silence is deafening and now we’re at the point of pogroms in European cities.

Never Again is Now.

I stand with the Jewish people in solidarity, today, every day, proudly, unhesitatingly and unapologetically.

[beardedmrbean]

In truth, Jew-hatred is a shape-shifter. It isn’t practised by one ideology — it’s embraced, at different moments in history, by every ideology, right and left. It is an ideology unto itself, in fact, one that is older than capitalism, communism, and all the other isms.

It adapts, it changes with the times. It endures, like a pestilence for which we have no cure.

But in the 600 days since Oct. 7, 2023 — when Hamas and Palestinian civilians slaughtered 1,200 Jews in Israel, raped 200 women and girls, and kidnapped 250 Jews and non-Jews — antisemitism has been overwhelmingly seeping out of just one side of the ideological spectrum: The left.

Readers of this newspaper won’t be particularly surprised by that. Since October 7, my colleagues and I have been writing about the unspooling of sanity in the West, and documenting the delusional psychosis that has seized the new generation of Jew-haters: Gen Z and Millennials who overwhelmingly classify themselves as “progressives.”

There’s nothing “progressive” about hating someone because of their faith, race or sexual orientation, you might say, and you’d be right. But the youthful leftist Israel-haters have seemingly convinced themselves that they are opposing a colonialist, settler, white supremacist apartheid state — and, ipso facto, they aren’t antisemites. They’re fighting racism.

It’s no longer a theory, too: It’s a fact.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) is a loose coalition of about 700 mostly American organizations who, as the name implies, oppose antisemitism. It has been critical of antisemitic politicians on both sides of the ideological spectrum — from Democratic Rep. Ilan Omar to Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — and has been attacked by Iranian state media, always a good sign.

Article content

In their just-released report, Echoes of the Past and a Warning for the Present, CAM studied the unprecedented rise in antisemitism around the world in 2024. CAM summarized their findings in this way:

“We are now facing the most severe wave of antisemitism since the end of the Second World War, a phenomenon that demands urgent global attention. Jewish communities worldwide have been subjected to an unrelenting onslaught of violence, harassment, and systemic discrimination, fuelled by a fusion of far-left, far-right, and Islamist extremism.”

But the vast majority of the hate, concluded CAM, is now coming from the left. Some of their key findings:

“Far-left incidents surged by 324.8 per cent compared to 2023, rendering the far-left the dominant ideological camp of antisemitic incidents. Radicalized social movements, media disinformation campaigns, and efforts to target Jewish communities under the guise of anti-Israel activism have primarily fuelled this increase.”

“Far-right incidents dropped by 54.8% from 2023, suggesting that while the extreme right remains a threat, it has been eclipsed by the radicalization of leftist movements.”

“Islamist-motivated incidents increased by 44.3% from 2023, underscoring the dangerous convergence of far-left antisemitism and militant Islamist propaganda. This rise can be traced to coordinated propaganda networks, extremist religious teachings, and recruitment efforts targeting vulnerable individuals susceptible to radicalization.”

What is fascinating, and ominous, is how far-left and Islamic extremists have partnered around the world — as they do, for example, every weekend at Dundas Square in Toronto. Marxists and pro-Hamas zealots have made common cause since October 7, and their unholy alliance, CAM reports, has “evolved into a global force, leveraging anti-colonial narratives, certain critical theories, and anti-Zionist propaganda to fuel hostility toward the Jewish state and Jewish communities worldwide.”

Grimly, they point to the most shocking evidence of this of all: The assassination of two young Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. last week — allegedly carried out by a Jew-hating fanatic long associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. A group that trades in far-left, antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Article content

The worst places for the explosion in antisemitic hate? The United States and then Europe, unsurprisingly, given their relative populations. But the country that has had nearly as many antisemitic crimes as all of the rest of the world? Canada.

Concludes the Combat Antisemitism Movement:

“The rise of antisemitism … is not a historical aberration — it is a defining moment in modern history. If the world fails to act now, we risk entering a new dark era in which antisemitism is not only tolerated but condoned, allowed to fester and become institutionalized. Such a process creates a downward spiral, as hate begets hate, and calls for the extermination of the Jewish state can quickly transform into actions designed to harm and to kill Jews.

“We must act decisively, forcefully and without hesitation. The Jewish people have endured persecution for centuries — but they will not stand alone. The time for action is now.”

Article link

[girlactionfigure]

Three Unlikely Heroes

To celebrate reaching 700 subscribers, I’ve decided to regale you with an extra long article about three civilian heroes of October 7; one Druze, one Jew, and on Muslim.

Nasreen Yousef 

Nasreen is a Druze woman who lived with her family in the predominantly Jewish town of Yated in the Gaza envelope. 

During the Black Saturday, her town was attacked by dozens of terrorists. Many were killed by armed locals (including her husband), some were captured, and more were hiding around town, waiting in ambush. 

Nasreen left her shelter and went to interrogate the captured terrorists, who were tied with strings and cables in her yard. Through a combination of intimidation and guile, she managed to wrestle out of the drugged-up killers the location of their compatriots, which the locals then took care of.

Later, the phone of one of the terrorists rang and Nasreen picked it up. She told the Hamas commander who called that she was an Arab woman sheltering his warriors. Pretending that she wanted to arrange enough supplies for the gunmen, she asked how many more were on their way, and from where. This allowed her to gain valuable intel which helped the IDF save many lives.

She later said, "Even in my worst dream, I never thought I’d have a conversation with a Hamas member, in my language, which I’m not ashamed of, and that I’d manage to save a lot of people and stop all of those monsters."

Inbal Liebermann

In December 2022, Inbal became the first ever female security coordinator in a kibbutz. Some minor politician even came to shake her hand.

On the morning of October 7, Inbal heard unusual noises outside the kibbutz. She quickly distributed weapons among the 12 members of a "quick response group" created from the inhabitants of the Kibbutz, and placed them in strategic positions to defend their tiny town.

She and her Kibbutzniks held their position for three hours, killing as many as 25 terrorists before the IDF arrived. Nir Am was the only border town not to suffer any casualties during the Simchat Torah massacre.

Youssef Ziadna

Youssef Ziadna is a Bedouin driver from the Bedouin city of Rahat in southern Israel.

On the morning of the attack, Ziadna received a frantic call from a passenger at the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re'im, where hundreds of civilians were caught in the onslaught. Without hesitation, he drove his minibus rockets and bullets. In a desperate bid to save as many lives as he could, he packed 30 festivalgoers—far exceeding the capacity of his 14-seater vehicle—before navigating them to safety through perilous roads and fields. 

While his actions saved lives, he also suffered personal losses: a cousin was killed, and four relatives were taken hostage by Hamas. He later faced threats from extremists angered by his decision to rescue Jewish civilians.

URI KURLIANCHIK

FEB 27

[antisemitism-us]

This is what happens when politicians and the media support the protesters calling for the murder of Jews, instead of treating them as the vile blood-thirsty antisemites they are.

--- A Pakistani man was arrested in Canada this week and accused of plotting a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught that sparked the war in Gaza, federal authorities in the United States announced Friday.

The would-be attacker had shared with undercover agents his plans to attack a Chabad center in Brooklyn, where the Hasidic sect is headquartered.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Muhammad Shahzeb Khan had attempted to travel from Canada, where he lives, to New York City with the “stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible.”

[gael-garcia]

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. Drawing together writers, editors, and other culture workers, WAWOG hopes to provide ongoing infrastructure for cultural organizing in response to the war. This project is modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam, an organization founded in 1965.

Statement of Solidarity

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project. 

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, buttogether we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. 

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.  

Signed,

WAWOG Interim Organizing Committee

Hannah Black

Ari Brostoff (Senior Editor, Jewish Currents)

Elena Comay del Junco

Kyle Dacuyan (Executive Director, Poetry Project)

Kay Gabriel (Editorial Director, Poetry Project)

Kaleem Hawa

E. Tammy Kim

Shiv Kotecha

Wendy Lotterman (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Muna Mire

Perwana Nazif

Brendan O'Connor

Alex Press (Staff Writer, Jacobin)

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Dylan Saba

Zoé Samudzi (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Jasmine Sanders

Claire Schwartz (Culture Editor, Jewish Currents)

Janique Vigier

Harron Walker

Chloe Watlington

Gabriel Winant (Department of History, University of Chicago)

Audrey Wollen

Hannah Zeavin (Founding Editor, Parapraxis)

Signed, In Solidarity

Fatimah Warner (Noname)

Saul Williams

Susan Sarandon

Janeane Garofalo

Gael García Bernal

Danez Smith

Ocean Vuong

Aria Aber

Saidiya Hartman

China Miéville

+ full list here