THE FURTHER CORRESPONDENCES OF MARC SUSSELMAN PART 12

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21 November 2023

MS said:

[Below is an email which a friend of mine shared with me which he received from his cousin in Israel. It is heart-breaking beyond words, and reveals aspects of Israeli life which are not being publicized.]

Please forgive my silence, but I've found that writing has become too painful for me. The atrocities of October 7th were a breaking point, but the rings of ruin continue expanding outwards, out to the rest of the world and out towards the future, and every day is worse than the last. Nor did this ruin start on October 7th: the foundations had been rotting for years, but October 7th brought to light so much hidden ugliness – by which I mean, not merely historical injustices but just how corrupt and corruptible people and societies still are – that there seems to be no direction I can turn to for hope.

Twitter, which had once been my primary source of information, has become instead mostly a source for pain and abuse. Instead of information and discussion, people are pouring out horror and hurt, and all too often do this vindictively, with an aim to inflict more and more hurt around them. Testimony of horrors from one side is bashed with testimony of horrors from another, as though they could ever balance out, as though one justifies the other.

Evidence is meaningless when two people look at the same horrors and see opposing realities. The same footage of people lying dead on the side of a road - refugees from North Gaza, we are told, who attempted to escape to the South – once source says the IDF shot them, another says Hamas shot them. What use is the evidence then, if people ultimately judge by what they want to believe? We all have preconceptions, we all also have a need to cling to a truth that will sustain us and guide us. I feel like this has become nearly impossible to do.

At the same time I am shocked by what people are willing to believe and what they are willing to deny, what they are willing to justify and who they are willing to exonerate. Bin Laden was right? Really?! It was IDF Apache helicopters who killed all those Israelis on October 7th? Are you insane?! Did the helicopters also rape women? Oh, oops, a sexual assault center in Canada has ascertained that no Israeli women were raped, regardless of mountains of testimony, unequivocal forensic evidence, and footage uploaded by the rapists themselves. People are so eager to frame Hamas as heroic freedom fighters that they will deny crimes that Hamas themselves filmed, posted and boasted of. But people in Israel have also gone off the deep end, pushing narratives such as that the left orchestrated October 7th knowingly in order to sabotage Netanyahu's political career, which to them is the one true and most tragic victim of this war. (And yet we're still saddled with him.)

It does not help that "my side" is not my side. That Israel is headed by a prime minister whose every statement is a lie, who is motivated only to save his own skin, and whose personal interest is to extend the war in Gaza indefinitely. Yes, Hamas uses civilians as human shields and even worse: bases its strategy on maximizing risk to civilians and gains from civilian deaths in Gaza. But the Israeli government, a government of extremists, racists and thieves, has also written off Israeli civilian hostages as expendable, or worse, dead weight. Netanyahu's interest is for these people to die – preferably as gruesomely as possible at the hands of Hamas, for PR – and he's what's taken as "my side".

I'm used to being called a traitor, a fifth column, hysterical, an alarmist, a demoralizer, a fat pig, in need of a f**k, a whore for Arafat, a whore for Hamas, a whore for attention, Ashkenazi scum, Hitler's unfinished job, a bleeding heart, a hypocrite, a Karen, a colonizer, a settler, an oppressor, privileged, ignorant, stupid, complicit, a dirty Jew, an anti-Semite, not a real Jew, not a real Israeli, not a real human, a usurper, an enabler, a contaminant, a cancer, and especially a whiner – all these and worse, I've heard it all before. The despair is that this is now what replaces conversation. That the people saying these things think they are taking a stand for what's right and contributing to the world – and that there are just so many of them.

The ugliness from all sides looks the same from here. The one who famously proclaimed that he's "proud about the 6 million who burned" and that "Hitler should have finished the job" was Itzik Zarka, a Likud activist, railing against the hundreds of thousands of protestors who had been demonstrating here against Netanyahu's government every week, from February to October. In July Zarka was lightly reprimanded by Likud and shown the door; by September all was forgiven and he was welcomed back to the fold and Netanyahu's personal embrace.

When Vivian Silver was pronounced dead, the vilest comments came from Israelis. Silver deserves a post of her own. She was a true peace activist, a person of deeds as well as words, the best of us – and so little of her remained after Hamas terrorists entered her home, that it took six weeks just to identify pieces of her from the ashes. Her death was celebrated gleefully and disgustingly by the kind of extremist anti-peace and anti-tolerance Israeli voices that are sitting in our government right now. Also targeted by Netanyahu supporters are families of abductees and victims who are demonstrating in tents pitched outside of the Knesset: anyone who protests against Netanyahu is subjected to the vilest abuse, including wishes of more unspeakable atrocities for them and their loved ones.

Supporters of Ben Gvir sound exactly the same as supporters of Hamas, flip sides of the same coin. Somehow in internet-land I merit abuse hurled at both sides of that coin, a legitimate target for wishes of violence, murder and rape. And it seems I deserve all this primarily because of my identity, only secondly for my insistence that both sides are terrible.

So much hate, and willful falsehood, has made the online space unbearable for me. Not that there is much to escape to. In my desperate search for empathy and consolation, I, too, have fallen in traps of spreading false information. I let my biases decide for me what must be true and what must be false. I shared a false rumor about a Gazan peace activist who was killed in Israeli bombings: it seems he had many friends in the peace camp in Israel, who grieved at his death and eulogized him on Twitter. The next day a tweet on his timeline: "I'm not dead! I don't know who started this rumor! I'm still here!" This week, I shared the name and picture of a woman rumored to be the Israeli hostage who had given birth in captivity in Gaza, a Thai field worker who was abducted together with her fiancée; seeing her sweet, young face, and having a name to attach to this abstract persona, flooded me with emotion. The Israeli Hotline for Refugees and Migrants later published a request not to attach this woman's name to reports of the hostage birth, as it is not confirmed that she was pregnant when she was abducted. The false news I have helped to circulate is perhaps not as cruel as much of what is out there, but it is damaging nonetheless, if only because it further undermines the truth.

I need to be more careful. At the same time, how can I not speak out? It's damned if I do, damned if I don't, with every paragraph I write. I wrote pages and pages this week that I did not end up sharing. I looked at it all and felt it was just more pain and noise at a time when all I want is respite.

But neither can I shake the reports I read that demonstrate the price of shutting out the voices of dissent. In Ha'aretz this weekend, Yaniv Kubovitz published a gut wrenching article about the female IDF soldiers whose post was surveillance at the Gaza border fence. For months these surveillance soldiers warned that they were seeing unprecedent activity, including active drills of Hamas forces, but their warnings were brushed off as female hysterics by their older, male superiors in the army, who even went as far as to threaten them with a court martial if they continued to submit such nonsense in their reports. Many of these young women paid with their lives.

Earlier this week, journalist and radio host Keren Neubach interviewed Menachem Gida from Kibbutz Netiv Ha'asarah, who for decades has been listening on Arab networks through satellite equipment for several hours a day and conveying his findings to the IDF. For the past three years he had been warning about Hamas drills practicing crossing the fence, abducting civilians and conquering Jewish outposts, until about six months ago the military decided they no longer wanted to hear from him, and confiscated some of his equipment.

"For the past six months we were blind. We could only track social media, no listening to comms, we couldn't hear what they were planning, and I understood that the IDF had also stopped listening. We gave warning, soldiers gave warning, local security chiefs gave warning. But the army said, 'what can you tell us that we don't already know?' On September 12 [my partner] Raphael issued a document stating that Hamas were planning activities in the northwest and in the east of the Gaza strip. We gave this warning 3 weeks in advance and no red lights went off for anyone in the army."

Neubach asks, "Why was that? Why didn't they listen to you?" and Gida answers, "because there was no one there to say the opposite of what everyone thought."

Confirmation bias, leaving us blind to what our eyes see. So dangerous when it erases warnings, so cruel when it erases suffering. My only hope is that confirmation bias is also what's blinding us to a way out right now, to the kindness and goodness of other people, to the chance we still have to collaborate and push through these horrible times into a better future.

I don't know. I don't mean to concern anyone, I have my family and I'm surrounded by loving people who take care of me and whom I need to care for, too. But I am so utterly depressed. I can't promise I will keep writing, it has been too much for me in the past few days. But I appreciate each and every one of you who reached out to ask and support me. Thank you.

I don't know what you can do to help. As always, my advice is primarily: be kind.

I can tell you that I for my part have decided to learn Arabic (I learned a bit in high school, but I was pretty bad at it), and met today with a teacher for the first lesson. We continue on Thursday.

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Michael said:

Reading the above letter was heart wrenching to me. Let us all be thankful during the holidays for the blessings that we do & still have. For the suffering that happened to our neighbor or fellow citizen can just as easily happen to ourselves as well.

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23 November 2023

MS said:

"https://www.google.com/search?q=U+of+M%2C+Ohio+football+game%2C+television&oq=U+of+M%2C+Ohio+football+game%2C+television&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIH"

Go Blue!

Happy Thanksgiving!

May the remaining hostages be brought home alive.

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MS said:

Yes, really. And you obviously do not know, or are ignoring, the history of how the West Bank was acquired and the numerous efforts Israel has made over the last 50 years to return the West Bank to the Palestinians via numerous peace settlement negotiations – aimed at realizing the two-state solution – which have repeatedly broken down because the Palestinian leadership has insisted on the right of return, not only of the original Palestinian refugees, but all of their two generations of off-spring, a condition which Israel cannot accept if it is to remain a state with a Jewish majority. So, should Israel just give the West Bank back, which it acquired in the 1967 war in which it was attacked by four Arab nations vowing to “drive the Jews into the sea,” without any agreement by the Palestinians to a cease of hostilities? Why would Israel, or any nation, agree to such terms? After Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, it was rewarded with constant rocket fire into Israel from Gaza. Why should Israel take this risk again with the West Bank?

And s. wallerstein, we have been through this before. Israel initiated its pre-emptive strike based on intelligence that Egypt was about to launch its own invasion of Israel. As for the international condemnation of the “occupation,” they have as much validity as the UN’s biased resolutions against Israel, where it is outnumbered by the Arab members of the UN.

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MS said:

From

"https://www.britannica.com/event/Six-Day-War"

Egyptian Pres. Gamal Abdel Nasser had previously come under sharp criticism for his failure to aid Syria and Jordan against Israel; he had also been accused of hiding behind the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed at Egypt’s border with Israel in the Sinai. Now, however, he moved to unambiguously demonstrate support for Syria: on May 14, 1967, Nasser mobilized Egyptian forces in the Sinai; on May 18 he formally requested the removal of the UNEF stationed there; and on May 22 he closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, thus instituting an effective blockade of the port city of Elat in southern Israel. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan arrived in Cairo to sign a mutual defense pact with Egypt, placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command; shortly thereafter, Iraq too joined the alliance.

Main events of the war

In response to the apparent mobilization of its Arab neighbours, early on the morning of June 5, Israel staged a sudden preemptive air assault that destroyed more than 90 percent Egypt’s air force on the tarmac. A similar air assault incapacitated the Syrian air force. Without cover from the air, the Egyptian army was left vulnerable to attack. Within three days the Israelis had achieved an overwhelming victory on the ground, capturing the Gaza Strip and all of the Sinai Peninsula up to the east bank of the Suez Canal.

An eastern front was also opened on June 5 when Jordanian forces began shelling West Jerusalem—disregarding Israel’s warning to King Hussein to keep Jordan out of the fight—only to face a crushing Israeli counterattack. On June 7 Israeli forces drove Jordanian forces out of East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank. Photos and films of Israeli troops taking control of the Old City of Jerusalem have proved to be some of the war’s iconic images.

If someone comes to kill you, kill him first.

---Sandedrin, 72a

If a thief is seized while tunneling his way into a house during the nighttime and is smitten so that he die, there is no bloodguilt

---Exodus 22:1

Makes sense to me. But not to liberal, fair-minded Jews, who would rather wait until their throats are cut before they act in self-defense.

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26 November 2023

MS said:

Further evidence that the universe is unjust and that the world is being turned upside down.

Yesterday, the University of Michigan, with a record of 11-0, played Ohio State, also with a record of 11-0. Ohio State was ranked by the NCAA 2nd in the nation; U of M was ranked 3rd in the nation. U of M defeated Ohio 30-24. This morning, the NCAA still ranks Ohio 2nd, and U of M 3rd, in the nation. In what universe does the loser get ranked higher than the winner? Things are out of kilter, and this is a bad omen for the 2024 election.

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MS said:

Post Script:

Trump won Ohio in 2020; Biden won Michigan.

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MS said:

In Case You Had Any Doubts

Prof. Wolff disparagingly compares the Israeli families’ heart-warming embrace of released Israeli hostages, with Israel’s suppression of celebrations in the West Bank, welcoming the release of Palestinian prisoners, as if the release of innocent Israeli civilians equates to the release of Palestinian prisoners, women and teenagers, who were arrested for physically assaulting Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers. One of the Palestinian women released was arrested for wearing a suicide-vest as she tried to enter Israel from the West Bank, who then detonated a bomb as she was being arrested. But none of the Israeli hostages seized by Hamas engaged in terrorist activity aimed at killing Palestinians. More false moral equivalency espoused by a liberal Jew dedicated to proving how fair-minded he is.

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27 November 2023

MS said:

Zimmerman,

This is another example of your warped, Orwellian use of language, not a positive attribute for someone who purports to be an objective academic.

I do in fact pay attention to every article which you and other commenters on Wolff’s blog reference. Paying attention means reading and comprehending. It does not mean necessarily agreeing, which is your warped definition of “paying attention.”

This is another biased article by Juan Cole, who repeatedly distorts facts and language, which you find attractive. For example, he states that on Oct. 7 Hamas “killed 1200 persons, 1,000 of them innocent non-combatants.” This means that the remaining 200 persons, presumably members of the IDF, were combatants, and therefore, ipso facto, not “innocent,” as if all soldiers defending a country, e.g., all the soldiers who belong to the U.S. army, are automatically not “innocent.” Welcome to the world of Orwell’s 1984, which took a bit longer getting here.

Cole proceeds to distort the meaning of the word “hostage” for propaganda purposes. The word “hostage” is defined by the Columbia dictionary as follows: someone who is taken as a prisoner by an enemy in order to force the other people involved to do what the enemy wants.

Under this definition, all of the individuals kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7 – including the members of the IDF who were kidnapped – qualify as “hostages.” None of them has been charged with a crime or received a trial, even an unfair trial.

All of the prisoners whom Israel has released in exchange for the release of Hamas’s hostages were charged with a crime and received a trial, including all the Palestinian women and teenagers, some of whom have committed acts of terrorism, e.g., wearing suicide vests which they were unable to detonate; throwing rocks at Israeli citizens and members of the IDF, rocks which have injured and even killed their targets. They all received a hearing, presided over by a jurist. I would grant that not all of the trials would qualify as fair under U.S. constitutional law, but there is a difference between an accused wrongly imprisoned and a hostage. None of the Palestinians have been imprisoned in order to exact a price from the Palestinian community. Now, this may be a nuance that you either do not understand, do not appreciate, or choose to ignore, but it is a distinction nonetheless, and distinctions in the use of language matters, and should matter, particularly for a person who claims to be a professor of philosophy whose stock in trade is the correct use of language. The misuse of language for propaganda purposes does not advance the pursuit of truth, which is supposed to be the objective of philosophy, at least when practiced by objective practitioners.

By the way, I asked the history professor who teaches the Israeli-Palestinian course at the University of Michigan how Cole is regarded in the History Department. His response – he is scoffed at and regarded as a laughing stock.

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MS said:

Because we are discussing a very serious subject - the survival of the only Jewish state in the world, and rising anti-Semtism against those who are defending it. Given the seriousness of the subject, I resent, and it angers me, when supposedly educated people make flippant, ignorant remarks about this serious subject. Wolff has spent year educating himself regarding the philosophy of Kant, and the theory of Marx, but he can't take a few days or weeks to educate himself about the history of the Jewish people and the history of the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, and instead resorts to frivolous moral equivalent statements which have no basis or justification. And it pisses me off.

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MS said:

There is much more to the history of the Jewish people than the parables contained in the Tanakh, and I am fairly confident that Wolff and most of the cultural Jews who comment on his blog know very little of it.

Being a Zionist is not, of course, a prerequisite for being Jewish. But being an anti-Zionist is hardly an integral part of being a Jew. Zionism consists in the belief that the Jewish people, who have been oppressed and persecuted for centuries are entitled to have a nation of their own in which they are a majority and can defend themselves from persecution and oppression. A corollary of this belief is that the nation should be located in Palestine, where the Jews did, in fact, have their own nation for 800 B.C.E. until 17t C.E., and where they continued to live even after the Diaspora. This is no different than the right which the French, British, Italians, Saudis, Iraquis, Syrains, Nigerians, Chileans, etc., etc. claim a right to. Why should it be different for the Jews?

Just what makes a secular/cultural Jew Jewish? Is it simply that one or both of their parents were Jewish? If one is an atheist and never attends services at a synagogue or temple; cannot read Hebrew or only reads it phonetically, and rarely does so; does not keep kosher; is an anti-Zionist; knows a few Jewish jokes - is this what constitutes being Jewish?

Ilan Pappe's book Ten Myths About Israel, is not a book about the history of the Jewish people and their historical bond to Palestine. It purports to be a history of the State of Israel from 1948 forward. What he claims are myths are not as apocryphal as he claims, for reasons I do not have time to go into at the moment. But even if they are not myths, do they mean that Israel does not have a right to exist, and that the Jewish people are not entitled to have a nation in Palestine in which they are the majority, and can defend themselves against the oppression and persecution to which they have been subjected ever since they rejected Jesus as the Messiah?

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Michael said:

It is worth noting that the Jewish people were exiled from Israel after the 3rd Jewish revolt against the Romans in the 2nd century. That during & before that time Christianity was struggling (and small) and its followers were persecuted by the pagan Romans & didn't become a state religion for another 200 years until the reign of Constantine. Marc probably knows this but I wanted to stress these points for the clarification & knowledge of the reader. It was after this Bar Kova revolt that Jewish religious leaders got together and wrote the precious Mishnah. Or a written down scripture of the Jewish Oral Law. I own a paperback version of the Mishnah translated by Herbert Danby into English in the 19th century. Herbert Danby's 19th century translation of Jewish biblical texts like the Mishnah brokered a start of interest & empathy towards Jewish scholarship by many Christian preachers that has lasted up to the present day.

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MS said:

Zimmerman,

I stated, “They all received a hearing, presided over by a jurist.” This is true, even with respect to administrative hearings:

“Individuals held in administrative detention must be brought before a military judge within eight days – either of the original detention order or of its extension. The judge may uphold the order, reject it, or shorten the period of detention stipulated in it. Whatever decision the military judge makes, both the detainee and the military commander may appeal it to the Military Court of Appeals, and thereafter, to the High Court of Justice (HCJ). Hearings on administrative detention orders are held in camera, and the judges are permitted to set aside ordinary evidence law. In particular, judges may ‘accept evidence in the absence of the detainee or their counsel and without disclosing it to them”, if they are convinced that disclosing the evidence may ‘harm regional security or public security’.”

None of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas has even been afforded an administrative hearing. Administrative hearings are also widely used in the U.S., particularly in the context of public employment and disciplinary charges, including termination, against public employees. They are referred to as Loudermill hearings.

Now, I do not expect you to “pay attention” to any of this, since paying attention to facts when it comes to Israel is not your forte. You have already made up your mind that whatever Israel does is morally and ethically wrong, despite the fact that you cannot demonstrate this in your meta-ethics theory.

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The End.