Violence at UCLA: Open Letter to Chancellor Gene Block

3 May 2024

Chancellor Gene Block
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Dear Chancellor Block:

On the night of April 30, just before 11 PM, a violent and armed mob comprised of something like 100-150 “outside instigators” or “counter-protestors” entered the Palestine Solidarity Encampment which had been built at Dickson Plaza on the UCLA Campus, and unleashed horrific violence on the students, faculty, and staff in the encampment. According to multiple reports from various news outlets, none of which are disputed, this mob used sticks and other objects to beat the protestors who were offering nonviolent resistance and threw fireworks and metal barriers into the barricades in an attempt to breach the barricades. This grisly violence went on unchecked for nearly four hours. It is also not disputed, and once again this claim is attested to reports by multiple witnesses, that the campus police stood by idly while violence was being let loose upon the students.  Such an egregious dereliction of duty, indeed encouragement of violence, must be weighed against repeated assurances given by you that you value nothing more than the safety of students and everyone else from the “Bruin community”. You apparently called the mayor of Los Angeles around 1 am on May 1^st and it is not until 3 am that the LAPD and other police offers moved in and sought to separate the mob from the protestors in the encampment.

This round of violence, in which the complete abdication of duty and moral responsibility on the part of the UCLA administration headed by you is all too transparent to any observer, and to which I shall return momentarily, was followed by the events of the morning of May 2^nd starting around 2 am.  For nearly the entire day of Wednesday, May 1, the campus had been turned into a garrison or police state. I was on campus for most of the day and left the campus around 12:40 am and saw well over 150 policemen armed to the teeth and apparently prepared for civil war.  Then, about 2 am, this horde of policemen moved in, and over the next two hours they deployed rubber bullets, stun grenades, and flash-bang devices to forcibly remove the protestors, place them under arrest, and dismantle the encampment. Rubber bullets, in case you are not aware, have been used in intense political disturbances such as “The Troubles” in Ireland.  Apart from a miniscule number of minor skirmishes, all the protestors nonviolently submitted to arrest. It is necessary for me to add that, in describing them as nonviolent protestors, I am speaking as a scholar of the history of nonviolence who has been writing and teaching on these matters for close to four decades. I am aware that, weighed against the most stringent and rigorous conception of nonviolent resistance, the protestors may not always have passed the test, but all scholars and students of nonviolence are equally mindful of the fact that we cannot apply a wholly purist conception of nonviolence to every situation. There is not an iota of doubt in my mind that the protestors displayed an extraordinary and disciplined adherence, all the more remarkable for their youth, to the principles of nonviolence.

The events at UCLA have shocked not merely the campus community and the city of Los Angeles but many others around the world who are aware of the reputation of the university and have been following the student protests.  There are many reasons for the outbreak of violence and the events the last 60 hours, and there is certainly much blame to go around, but there is one person, and one person alone, who is principally responsible for this tragic turn of events—and that one person is you, Chancellor Gene Block. You cannot run away from this fact, however much you have tried to do so and will doubtless continue to do so, but it is important that everyone understand your culpability. Your naked partisanship towards Israel and Zionism, and your scarcely disguised indifference to, if not contempt for, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims has been transparent since you arrived on this campus ten years ago, and has become painfully visible to everyone in the aftermath of the horrific attack launched by Hamas against Israel on October 7.

I shall turn, very briefly, to some considerations to make known to the world the way you abandoned UCLA’s students to the wolves.  You’ve spoken often in your usual anodyne language of “shared values”, the “Bruin community”, the “Bruin family”, and so on, but let us consider whether such language has ever been anything more than sheer humbug and chicanery.  Consider, for instance, your statement to the “Bruin Community” of October 13.  The subject heading was, “Reflections at the Close of a Difficult Week.”  The first sentence begins with an expression of your desire to share some “reflections” on a “challenging week”.  You then mention that “six days ago” a “heinous assault was perpetrated upon Israeli civilians by the terror organization Hamas, a despicable attack that included the killing of children and the elderly as well as the taking of innocent hostages.” I concur with you entirely, but you then point out this what happened on October 7 was “the largest one-day killing of Jews since the end of the Holocaust.”  This is not the time and place for a history lesson, but let me alert you to the fact that even many of the most reputable scholars of the Holocaust, and you are most emphatically not one, have pointed out how inadvisable it is to make such a comparison, and many have even argued that there is grave peril in exploiting the narrative of the Holocaust to confer perpetual immunity to the state of Israel for any and every kind of action it deems fit. But let us ignore all this: by October 13^th, Israel had already inflicted massive and illegal collective punishment on the Palestinians, destroyed large chunks of Gaza, and killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.  Yes, I suppose all this made for a “difficult” and “challenging” week. Indeed, your very framing of the mass killings of Palestinians as producing a “challenging” time, while of course the attack perpetrated by Palestinians was “heinous” (which, let me reiterate, it indeed was), is an incitement to hatred for Palestinians.  As for the “hostages”, I will not refer to the tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them but boys, who have been languishing in Israeli jails under the grossly inhumane practice of administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold them in confinement for indefinite periods of time without charging them.

Let me, however, turn to the chronology of the last 2-3 days alone. You declared the encampment “unlawful” and “unauthorized” on the afternoon of April 30, and less than twelve hours later the violent mob tore into the protestors at the encampment.  It is not at all difficult to imagine that they construed your declaration of the encampment as “unlawful” and the warning to the students to take it down as a green light to proceed to expedite the outcome that you desired. As I have suggested, you have persistently been throwing dog whistles at Islamophobes, racists, and Zionists, and it is also remarkable that repeated letters addressed to you by faculty concerned about this incitement to hatred against Palestinians and Muslims were never answered.  Perhaps you think that it is beneath you to reply to faculty, though you periodically mouth the customary platitudes about “shared governance”. Did you take the faculty into consideration before you declared the encampment “unlawful” and threatened that it would be taken down? I am not aware that you did. And, similarly, did you consult with the faculty before you summoned a massive police force—an ungainly sight if there ever was any, and one that should mortify anyone who thinks of the university as a home to the exchange of ideas and as “temple” of learning—to take down the encampment and arrest the students? But, to return to the chronology of events, the newspapers reported just a couple of days ago that you have been summoned to testify before the US Congress on May 23 on anti-Semitism at the UCLA campus.  You saw, as we all did, how a McCarthy-like inquisition was unleashed upon the presidents of three Ivy League institutions a few months ago, and the painful consequences two of them had to bear as a result of the congressional hearing.  You were determined to prove that you could stand up to the protestors.  And so, of course, this meant that you were determined to show to the students that you meant business.

Many canards and fabrications have been floated by you, your acolytes and the extreme Zionists on this campus.  One of those canards, which constitutes the principal justification you have advanced for your actions, is that many students were blocked from entering classrooms or were obstructed in their day-to-day business around campus.  No evidence has been furnished by you or anyone else: one student appears in nearly every media video showing that he was obstructed, and one might even allow for the possibility that a few were, but those of us who have been teaching on the campus and speaking with others have witnessed no such incidents nor have we heard of any. This is yet another instance of the cheap, instrumental, and deplorable use of the term “anti-Semitism”—which, let me be very clear, is a real problem in this country—to tarnish protestors.  The sad part of the story is that the protestors understand very well, as you apparently do not, the difference between anti-Semitism, which I agree should be condemned unequivocally at every turn, and anti-Zionism.  The fabrication about the threats being experienced by Jewish students became one of the principal justifications for deploying a massive police force on campus and terrorizing and intimidating students. No one can fail to notice that, when the police were needed on the night of April 30, they were nowhere to be found; when they were not required at all the following night, had the protest been allowed to continue, they were deployed with your authorization. As Nithya Raman, Los Angeles City Council member for the 4^th District has noted, “The police actions at USC and UCLA have implied that the response protestors get from law enforcement is dependent on their politics, not their actions.”  Senator Bernie Sanders has described what is happening in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing”. I will allow you to draw your own inferences on what I might possibly mean in invoking Senator Sanders in describing the turns of events on our campus.

You, doubtless, are aware of the clear-headed editorial of May 1 published in The Daily Bruin which describes the attack by the police on student journalists and the “complicity” of the UCLA administration.  Please do not rub salt into the wounds of the students by arguing, as you have been doing all along, that you are acting to protect the campus from anti-Semitism and to ensure the “safety” of the students.  “The whole world is watching”, says the editorial, and the whole world also knows the donors and politicians to whom you are beholden.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the audacity, several days ago, to demand that the National Guard be called in to crush the protestors and you evidently appear to have been all too happy to take your marching orders from this much-reviled foreign leader.  You may wish to reflect on the indubitable fact that there has throughout been a significant presence of Jewish faculty, staff, and students in the encampment, and Jewish voices for peace have been important in ensuring that the world understands that the war in Gaza is a war against humanity.  Many of the Jewish protestors, it appears to me, are speaking from an awareness of the deeply rooted ethical traditions in their faith and an attack on them is, in fact, the real anti-Semitism in which you may be complicit.  Nothing gives the lie to the claim that the protests were marked by anti-Semitism as much as the solidarity of Muslim and Jewish protestors, though what is equally remarkable is the extraordinary commitment to the cause displayed by people from all walks of life, nationalities, religious backgrounds, and ethnicities who are not being driven by a narrow-minded conception of identity politics. If you have seen the videos of the encampments at UCLA and at other university campuses, and videos on the anti-war protests more broadly, you could not have failed to notice the very large, indeed I would say almost dominant, presence of women and female students of color from all backgrounds. They have been at the forefront of this movement which, quite rightly, speaks of an alternative and better future.  It is precisely this aspiration that the administration has sought to crush at UCLA.

Since, in the tradition of nonviolence, I do not like to use the language whereby one makes demands of others, and who am I in any case to make demands of a powerful person such as yourself, I would like to invite you to take the steps enumerated below if you have any sense of contrition.  Though I have no expectations in this regard, I invite you to (1) issue an unconditional apology to the entire UCLA community, and specifically to those in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment who have been harmed; (2) issue whatever rejoinders you can muster in the form of an open letter; (3) pay for the medical treatments borne by the students who were injured in the violence; and (4) tender your resignation, effective immediately.  I would be amiss if I did not suggest to you, considering that you end nearly every letter to the “Bruin community” with suggestions about counseling resources, that you undertake intensive sensitivity and anti-racist training.

Yours sincerely,

Vinay Lal
Professor of History and Asian American Studies

Israel, US, the same old

Note (28 April 2024): On March 28, I received an email from one of the opinion page editors at The Indian Express asking if I might write an essay on the US vote of abstention in the Security Council on a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and whether such a vote could be interpreted as a shift in the American position towards Israel. The resolution passed 14-0, with the United States, which is of course a permanent member of the Security Council, casting the only vote of abstention. But the US had, uncharacteristically, not vetoed the resolution, as it had done repeatedly in the past. I submitted my essay a week later but it was published, both in print and online, on April 14 on p. 11 (or see the online edition where it appeared under the title of “The US support for Israel, contrary to opinion, is as strong as ever”). As the online title suggests, I argued that the various opinions that had been voiced suggesting that the US support for Israel was diminishing or might no longer be taken for granted were entirely mistaken and overblown. Events since March 25 and indeed down to the present day have established, as I argued, that the US support for Israel remains, to use the words of Biden and countless number of officials of his administration, “iron-clad”. To think that it might be otherwise, if the US is provoked to breaking-point by Israeli intransigence or arrogance, is to show little understanding of the American establishment’s rigid attachment for Israel. To be sure, some–and some only, let it be clear–of these officials are, in private, anti-Semitic; but their Islamophobic sentiments run still deeper. Similarly, one can be certain that we will continue to hear American officials voice “uneasiness” with Israel’s policies, “discontent” and “dismay” at Israeli arrogance and the impunity with which Israel will continue to ignore the entire world and do what it pleases, and so on. All of American expressions of displeasure are hot air, and just that. A few will object to my remarks with the observation that it is only US restraint that stopped Israel from clobbering Iran. That observation may not be without merit, but to concede that much is not to admit that the US does in fact exercise real restraining power over Israel. One cannot ignore the much larger geopolitical implications of an outright war between Israel and Iran. In any case, the essay below is the slightly longer version of the piece that was published in the Indian Express: as noted above, it is dated only in the sense that other events since in the last few weeks amply demonstrate that the US remains unflinchingly supportive of Israel and therefore complicit in the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

On March 25, during a discussion in the UN Security Council, the United States did something highly unusual:  it abstained from a resolution that had been introduced calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The United States had vetoed similar resolutions in the past, arguing that it would not permit any step that might impede Israel’s right to self-defense.  When it last exercised its veto power on February 20, the US justified its action with the observation that any call for a ceasefire perforce had to be linked to the release of all Israeli hostages from Palestinian custody.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, immediately pronounced the US abstention a “retreat” from the unstinting support that Israel has received from the onset of the present iteration of a conflict that effectively goes back to the founding of Israel in 1948.  As a mark of his displeasure, indeed of his alleged surprise that the US should in any way be signifying a shift in its position of unfettered support towards Israel, Netanyahu cancelled a planned visit by an Israeli delegation to the US to discuss Israel’s imminent invasion of Rafah. Netanyahu and Israel’s military planners have argued that the assault on Rafah is required to eliminate Hamas’s remaining battalions; the United States, importantly, questions not Israel’s right to defend its integrity as a nation-state, but only whether Israel has put into place a comprehensive plan that would guarantee the safety of Palestinian civilians.

Many commentators point to the US vote of abstention, as well as other recent developments such as criticism of Netanyahu by US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his call for elections in Israel—angrily dismissed by Netanyahu in a sharply worded rejoinder, “We are not a banana republic—as significant milestones in what is alleged to be an evolving relationship between Israel and the United States.  The diplomatic editor of the highly regarded The Guardian, for instance, described the American decision to abstain as far more than a ruckus over “some words in the text of a UN resolution: it marks another moment in the painful, almost anguished US diplomatic distancing from its chief ally in the Middle East.”

The terrain appears to have shifted quickly and considerably in the last several weeks: having vetoed UN Security Council resolutions thrice, the US was doubtless finding that it, too, was repeatedly being pushed alongside Israel into being part of a miniscule minority.  Indeed, before it abstained from the resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, the US had introduced its own resolution—only to see it being shot down by China and Russia, which pointed out that the American initiative was more of a condemnation of Hamas rather than a demand for a ceasefire. Tensions have been rising between Israel and the US over the pace and scope of humanitarian aid, especially in the face of the imminent starvation of Palestinians on a large scale. Most recently, the death of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in a targeted strike by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has ratcheted up the American pressure against Israel. 

Might one conclude, then, that something significant has altered in the special relationship that Israel has enjoyed with the US since its founding?  Reportedly, even as these lines are being penned, and following on what has been described as a tense call between Biden and Netanyahu, Israel has finally succumbed to the US pressure to open up new aid routes to Gaza. There is ample reason to think that American frustration with Israeli intransigence has been growing and some suspect that Israel may no longer enjoy unconditional support in the United Nations and more broadly the court of world public opinion. Moreover, the brute fact is that, as an electoral democracy, political parties are subject to the vagaries of shifting political sentiments.  The more “progressive” sections within the Democratic party have been arguing that arms sales to Israel must be tied to the immediate cessation of hostilities and much higher standards of accountability on the part of Israel. University campuses have been rocked by unrest over the Biden administration’s policies; more importantly, both recent polls and Democratic primaries being held in the run-up to the presidential election in November suggest that Biden is in grave danger of losing the support of Arab-American constituencies.

I would argue, however, that analyses which portend a significant shift in the US support of Israel are not merely premature but have failed to capture the pulse that animates the US-Israel relationship. Israel has, previous to this war, been the recipient of over $150 billion in American largesse, or something like $3.8 billion annually; it also has access to advanced American war technologies and weapon systems. If the pro-Palestinian demonstrators have appeared to make a splash on university campuses, it is only because the forces that lobby for both Jewish and Israeli interests have so long dominated the American university system that one barely heard of support for Palestine.  The charge of anti-Semitism remains the most potent weapon that can be deployed on behalf of Israel. The indubitable fact is that Israel is held up, by Democrats and Republicans alike, not merely as the only real friend it has in the Middle East but as the only democracy in the region. It is immaterial to this argument whether Israel is, in fact, a “democracy”:  the fact that some of its citizens have enjoyed liberties ordinarily associated with democratic states cannot obscure the other reality, namely that Israel has been an occupying power for decades and that Palestinians exist in a state of manifest and dire subjugation.

There is another and yet still more vital consideration.  I have elsewhere argued that there is a certain synergy between Israel and the United States as settler-colonial states. A messianic spirit has long informed American self-perception and guided US foreign policy: as every post-World War II American president has declared at one time or the other, the belief that America is “the one indispensable nation” is intrinsic to American exceptionalism. Israel is far from having the gumption of saying the same explicitly about itself, but the state of Israel conducts itself with the supreme confidence that it exercises a moral purchase over the rest of humanity. It does so, of course, on the presumption that the murder of six million Jews gives the Jewish state of Israel a special place in history—and the unconstrained and unquestioned right to oppress others in the name of “self-defense”.  Given this synergy, it is doubtful in the extreme that anything substantive has at all changed in the US-Israel relationship or is even likely to change in the near future.

Israel: A Pitiable, Pathetic, Paper Tiger

Vinay Lal

Israel has long flaunted its military prowess and much of the world has believed it. After all, the small Jewish state, foisted upon the Palestinians by a Europe that could not find a way to accommodate the gifted, liberal, often supremely enlightened, and enterprising Jewish people, defeated a coalition of Palestinian Arabs, Syrians, and Egyptians in 1948-49 and secured its independence. Then, in 1967, in what is called the six-day war, Israel took the wind out of the sails of the Arab states—largely Jordan, Syria, and Egypt—and rightfully claimed a conclusive and momentous victory, even taking the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula into its possession. Though its military triumphs would scarcely be as decisive in more recent decades, and Israel and Hezbollah fought to a standstill in 2006 after a bitter monthlong war, Israel’s military has nonetheless continued to enjoy a reputation as a great disciplined and professional force.  The reputation that Israel enjoys as a no-nonsense state, one that allegedly knows how to deal with terrorists, may be gauged by the fact that its retired generals enjoy sinecures and consultancies in countries such as India.

However, the present conflict between Hamas and Israel shows Israel for what it truly is:  a pitiable, pathetic, paper tiger. Such a description will appear surprising, perhaps somewhat absurd, to most considering that, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel at once declared war and in quick order began a relentless attack from the air upon the entire population of Gaza. By the end of 2023 alone, Israel had dropped, according to the Gaza Media Office, 45,000 bombs weighing more than 65,000 tons, or more four times the tonnage of the atomic bomb that eviscerated Hiroshima.  Moreover, less than a month after Hamas went on the offensive, Israel commenced operations on the ground.  By January 24, on the World Bank’s estimate, 45% of the residential buildings in Gaza had been destroyed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), though The Times of Israel reported, on 30 December 2023, that 70% of the homes in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged.  Now, in early March, that figure is certainly much higher; indeed, as many reports suggest, Gaza is practically uninhabitable.  This appears to be the response of an aggressive, vengeful, muscular nation-state, not a paper tiger.

Let us, nevertheless, consider what Israel’s short-term war aims have been and whether its achievements thus far, as well as it military actions, have been congruent with those war aims. We will not take into consideration the precipitous decline of its international reputation, if only because Israel, to be blunt about it, is largely indifferent to its reputation. It has habitually considered most of the world to be hostile to both the Jewish state and Jews, though of course many who are not sympathetic to the Jewish state do not hold the same views with regards to the Jewish people; more importantly, it is arrogant enough to think that its virtuous righteousness is enough to sustain it in the face of an onslaught from the rest of the world.  We may, thus, confine ourselves to Israel’s stated war objectives, the two principal ones being the rescue of the hostages taken by Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) and the complete annihilation of Hamas.  In early February, Israel reported that it had destroyed 17-18 out of Hamas’ 24 batallions, and Netanyahu has on several occasions boasted that Israel is well on the way to “total victory”.  The BBC reported at the end of February that the Israeli embassy in the UK estimated that it had killed 10,000-12,000 Hamas fighters.  Hamas has not corroborated those figures and the verification of estimates provided by IDF is nearly impossible, all the more so since just who constitutes a “Hamas fighter” is far from clear.  Let us recall that none other than the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, less than a week into the war, declared at a press conference that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”:  if there are no innocent civilians, then one reasonable inference is that, from the Israeli standpoint, every civilian is a potential terrorist—and that, moreover, every civilian is a legitimate target. It is not hard to fathom why Israel can, on this reasoning, conduct a merciless war against civilians with the self-assurance of utter impunity, but let me return to this point later.

Just exactly how fighters are to be distinguished from civilians is but one problem.  Let us now, however, turn to the conduct of the war and assess Israel’s “achievements”.  A few days after the onset of the war, I wrote on the very pages of this blog an article suggesting that, with or without the support of the United States, Israel would exact a terrible vengeance and pulverize Gaza. Of course, to conduct a protracted war, Israel must doubtless rely on a continuing supply of arms and ammunition from the United States. Hamas has similarly been aided with occasional rocket launches fired by Hezbollah, but unlike the state of Israel, which for its size has a formidable army and receives the highest-grade weapons from the US, Hamas has neither any aircraft nor any tanks. The first intifada of 1987-1993 is also known as the “stone intifada” for nothing:  it was waged largely by the young with stones and captured the world’s imagination. The present resistance has gone well beyond stones, even if Hamas has in other ways displayed the ingenuity of the besieged Palestinians, but it is still nevertheless true that the gulf between the military power that Israel has brought to bear upon the Palestinians and the resources that Hamas can wield is enormous.  Hamas is practically a guerilla fighting force and, as countless number of articles have shown, it developed an extraordinary—one might call it, purely from the engineering standpoint, wondrous—system of tunnels which appear to constitute a veritable city.  These tunnels, running for hundreds of miles, were used to ship arms, ferry people from one part of Gaza to another, and much else:  as the Modern War Institute at West Point points out in a report, “Israeli forces have unearthed massive invasion tunnels two and a half miles long, underground manufacturing plants, luxury tunnels with painted walls, tile floors, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, and a complex, layered, labyrinth underneath all areas of Gaza.”

Underground Gaza, as it is sometimes called, was built under the noses of the Israelis. The failures of Israeli military intelligence have obviously been colossal:  what to speak of the fact that Hamas literally blew its way into Israeli settlements, Israel appears to have had little knowledge of the complexity and enormity of Hamas’s tunnel city.  Besides aircraft, sophisticated drone systems, missiles, radar system, the Iron Dome air defense system, tanks, and military intelligence, Israel is also an apparent pioneer in cyberwar, and there is good reason to think that Israel was responsible for the cyberattack that disabled the electricity grid in portions of Iran some weeks ago.  So, considering the vast arsenal that Israel has at its disposal, just what has it achieved of its stated war goals?  First, as I have already suggested above, there is little reason to believe that Hamas has been nearly obliterated. If it has been, one might also ask why north Gaza, where IDF spent three months flattening the landscape and reducing the population into starvation, is seeing renewed fighting.  It is certainly far too early to speak of a decisive military defeat; indeed, a “decisive” military defeat is wholly illusory, unless one is prepared to believe that tens of thousands of Palestinians, moving into the future, will not arise from the graveyard to which Gaza is being reduced and will not be prepared themselves to offer resistance even unto death.  Secondly, five months into the war, Hamas (and, perhaps, Islamic Jihad) continue to hold a hundred Israeli civilians and soldiers captive.  There is little reason to believe that the IDF or Israeli military intelligence even knows where these captives are being held.  Israel’s inability to rescue the hostages is striking, and we can anticipate that Israel’s response is that it is somewhat handicapped in its response since Hamas does not fight a fair war, or, to put it in more dramatic language, Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization that uses civilians as shields. Israel expects victory to be handed down to it on a platter, but its argument is all the more bizarre considering that it has a massively disproportional advantage over Hamas. And this is apart from the question that almost no one has dared to ask: why is that we should not view the thousands of Palestinians held in Israel’s jails as “hostages”.

Thirdly, none of Hamas’s senior political leadership has been apprehended.  Israel declared Hamas’s most important political leader, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking”, but five months into the conflict Sinwar has proven to be adept in keeping even his whereabouts unknown to the outside world.  Israel has eyes and ears on the ground, but its celebrated intelligence has been unable to pick up either Sinwar, Marwan Issa—whose son Muhammad was killed in an IDF strike in late 2023—or Mohammed Deif, the head of the al-Qassam Brigades who has survived repeated assassination attempts and earned the nickname, “the cat with nine lives”. Deif was arrested by the Palestinian National Authority at Israel’s request in May 2000 but escaped several months later; he is believed to be the “mastermind” behind the surprise attack of October 7^th, and the IDF sought to exact vengeance by targeting Deif’s father home with an airstrike which killed three family members, including Deif’s brother.

Having been unable to obliterate Hamas, capture or kill its senior leadership, or rescue the hostages, Israel has set out to criminalize, terrorize, and pulverize Palestinians. That has been the sum of its verifiable achievements:  the widespread infliction of pain, suffering, and death on a largely defenseless population; the elimination of large sectors of the Palestinian intelligentsia, the destruction (in whole or in part) of all twelve of Gaza’s universities, and cultural genocide; the deliberate starvation of the Palestinians as a means of waging war; the forcible and repeated displacement of a people, and most unforgivingly to areas that have falsely been promised as safe havens; and much else that defies the imagination. Israel will say in its defense that it is only doing what every nation-state has a right to do, namely mount self-defense against an enemy that does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. Whether everything Israel has can be done can be forgiven or even grudgingly justified in the name of self-defense is one thing; it is also an ethical and philosophical question whether self-defense allows the wanton and widespread killing of a people.  It is still another question, one those who lend their support to the Palestinian cause, whether Hamas does not bear some responsibility for the death and destruction of the Palestinians. Hamas surely would have known that Israel would exact a deadly even monstrous price from the Palestinians for its savage attack of October 7^th, and that innocents, including children, would shoulder most of the burden of this vengeance.  None of these considerations, however, exculpate Israel.

If Israel is, as I submit, a paper tiger, we have to logically ask what happens to paper tigers. Most readers will be unaware that it was Chairman Mao who first used the term in contemporary times in an interview that he gave to the American journalist, Anna Louis Strong, in August 1946.  “The atom bomb is a paper tiger”, Mao said, “which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons. All reactionaries are paper tigers.” That people decide the course of war may sound fanciful, but Mao had in mind the experience of the Chinese people and the history of anti-colonial struggles.  Less than two decades later, the ignominious retreat of America from Vietnam would once again suggest the merit of his view.  Israel is a paper tiger because, having been humiliated by a new type of guerrilla armed force, and unable to subjugate its enemy, it chooses to wage a war against a civilian population; in doing so, it has yet to understand that the story of Palestinian self-determination will eclipse any narrative that Israel may put forward.

Israel and the United States: The Catastrophic Synergy of Two Settler Colonial States

Of all the remarkable and still unfolding geopolitical aspects of the present war in Palestine, what stands out most is the unstinting support given to Israel by the United States from the very moment that the barbaric attack carried out by Hamas in Israel came to the attention of the world.  The US was not alone in unequivocally condemning Hamas, but President Joe Biden, characterizing the terrorist attacks as “pure, unadulterated evil” in a speech delivered on October 10, made it known that the “United States has Israel’s back”:  “We’re with Israel.”  Days later, in an extraordinary demonstration of just how “rock solid” American support of Israel is, Biden took the risk of traveling to Israel. By this time, at least 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, had also been killed in the relentless, indeed merciless, aerial bombing of Gaza. Biden met with Jewish survivors of Hamas’s attack, holding some of them to his chest in a warm and consoling embrace; but, not surprisingly, he made no pretense of any similar commiseration with Palestinians.  Throughout, the United States vetoed resolutions in the United Nations calling for a cease-fire.  Since Hamas carried out its attack nearly two months ago, some 16,000 Palestinians, the greater majority of them women and children, have perished in a devastating orgy of fire, wrath, and destruction.

Gaza, Bombed Out of Existence: “An Empty Land” in colonialist Thinking, Now a True Wasteland

It is not only with Britain, but with Israel as well, that the United States has long had a “special relationship”.  On 14 May 1948, less than an hour after Israel proclaimed its independence, the US became the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Ever since, Israel has been backed by American arms, recently to the tune of $3 billion every year, and the two countries have celebrated their ties as an enduring partnership of two democracies allegedly inspired not merely by mutually shared interests but by the love of liberty.  Several commentators have pointed to the great many sources of this unusual relationship.  The US has the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel, but there are several other, lesser explored, aspects of this relationship, not the least of them being the fact that the modern American university, and nearly every sphere of scientific and humanistic inquiry, has been disproportionately shaped by Jewish intellectuals.

However, in all the vast commentary on the unwavering support that Israel has received from the United States in the last 75 years, the most critical factor has been rarely discussed.  Both Israel and the United States are settler colonial states. Though the idea of “settler colonialism” is now a staple of scholarly discourse, it has made scarcely any inroads into the common understanding of colonialism.  School textbooks down in the United States down to the present day do not use the term “settler colonialism”, and here I will not take up the matter of whether the extermination of American Indians has received even remotely the kind of recognition that it needs.  (“Recognition” barely gets us to the question of “justice”, but that is still more remote a possibility.)  But it behooves us to have at least an elementary sense of how settler colonialism provides another lens on the more general phenomenon of colonialism. The British in India, to take a well-known example of colonialism, absorbed ever greater parts of the country into British India after their initial conquest of Bengal in 1757, and some British families put down roots in India extending over the course of several generations. Though the relationship was often exploitative in the extreme, the British did not seek to exterminate the population and generally did not treat the local population merely as slave labor.

Settler colonialism is an altogether different phenomenon.  It is, in the first instance, predicated on the legal fiction, one that the Europeans boldly even merrily advanced, of terra nullius—that is, the notion that the lands they had encountered were “empty”. These lands were construed as sparsely populated, and that too by those viewed as savages bereft of civilization, and otherwise as unproductive.  Europeans thought nothing of claiming these lands as their own: however, it is not merely when they encountered opposition that they killed the indigenous people, since extermination was but a blood sport. Indigenous populations were nearly wiped out, but many of the natives were also taken into slavery.  Settler colonialists could not countenance even remotely the idea of accommodation and, without exception, settler colonialism resulted in the replacement of Europeans for the indigenous populations.  The other word for this phenomenon is genocide—even if, in the aftermath of the Second World War and especially in the last few decades, the world has settled upon a more capacious understanding of what constitutes “genocide”.

The United States, much like Australia, has evolved from being a settler colonial state into becoming a fundamentally immigrant society, but the periodic recrudescence of virulent white nationalism in both countries suggests that they continue to be guided by the instincts of settler colonialists.  There is but no question that the origins of the modern nation-state of Israel lie precisely in a similar kind of settler colonialism.  The founding of Israel was only made possible by the mass expulsion of Palestinians who term their displacement, and the dispossession of their lands, as nakba. Even as astute, learned, and sensitive a philosopher as Martin Buber was susceptible to the idea that it was given to Jewish settlers alone to make the land productive: “This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us.” The land had thus far been unproductive, merely waste land: as Buber opined in an open letter to Mahatma Gandhi on 24 February 1939, “The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively.”  Buber had at least the decency, utterly wanting in the present generation of Israeli leaders and their unthinking supporters in the United States, to add that “we do not want to dominate them; we want to serve with them …”

Palestine does not exist: one American, and not merely Israeli, politician after another has pronounced this as an unimpeachable fact over the last several decades. At my own university, the Chancellor, in his first message to the university community days after October 7^th, while deploring the “heinous” attack by Hamas, found himself incapable of even mentioning Palestine. A week after his first message, and that at a time when a few thousand lives in Gaza had already been snuffed out, the Chancellor of UCLA could only muster up enough “courage”, if that is the word for so supine and cowardly a gesture, to say that what was happening in Gaza was “troubling”.  If Palestinians cannot even be named, they certainly do not exist.  The United States and Israel together have woven a dance of death which has been catastrophic for their own countries and will undoubtedly prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the entire world.

First published in the Indian Express (online), 27 November 2023, as “Israel and the United States: The synergy of two settler-colonial states, a disaster for the world“

Tagore’s Dak Ghar in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Art of Living in the Art of Dying

Something remarkable happened exactly this time of the year, perhaps almost to the day, in 1942.  A play by Rabindranath Tagore, Dak Ghar, would be performed, of all places, in the Warsaw Ghetto.  Some days later, in early August, the Nazis started to empty out the ghetto with the transportation of its residents to Treblinka, among the most notorious of the extermination camps in the vast, almost incomprehensible, labor and death camp universe created by the Nazi regime. The children who acted in the play and its director, who headed the orphanage in the ghetto, all went to their death in Treblinka and disappeared without a trace.  Some will say, therefore, that what happened was not so much remarkable as ordinary:  those who vanished into the darkness of the night were only among the six million who suffered a similar fate, and whatever “light” the play may have cast was soon extinguished. One of the difficulties in comprehending the Holocaust, of course, is that the scale of the killings renders each death, the death of six million, remarkable–as in noteworthy, calling itself to our attention–and ordinary at the same time.

Monument to Janusz Korczak, Warsaw.

The fact that Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician, writer of children’s literature, and advocate of children’s well-being, should have chosen to perform Dak Ghar [the post office] in the face of death is in itself of singular importance and presents something of a puzzle. Just why did Korczak seek to mount something like a spiritual resistance to oppression by resorting to a play by an Indian writer?  Did he seek to prepare the children under his charge for death?  Did he think that the art of dying is just as important as the art of living?  Did his embrace of Tagore at this juncture signify his willingness and indeed aptitude to transcend the barriers of time and space?  The circumstances under which Korczak was moved to embrace the play are best comprehended with brief considerations of the origin of the ghetto, the outline of Tagore’s play, and the worldview that Korczak most likely came to adopt.

Poland capitulated to the German blitzkrieg just days after the country was attacked on 1 September 1939 and the Nazis at once enforced draconian anti-Semitic measures besides subjecting many Jews to forced labor.  In October 1940, the Nazis announced the establishment of a Jewish ghetto, and by the following month nearly all the 375,000 Jews in Warsaw—constituting a third of the city’s population—had been forced into the ghetto, which occupied just 2.4 percent of the city’s surface area and was fenced off from the rest of the city by a wall that Jews were forced into building. The ghetto was designed to keep Jews isolated from the world, and not only from the rest of the city; economic activity was largely branded illegal and food was in such short supply that deaths from disease and starvation mounted.  The ghetto would, doubtless, have been eliminated in time, considering that at least by 20 January 1942, when the Nazi leadership struck upon the plan euphemistically if not chillingly coined as the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference, the idea had taken root that all of Europe’s Jews would be put to death.  In 1943, following an uprising, the Warsaw Ghetto was razed to the ground; however, months before, in July 1942, the transportation of Jews to the killing center known as Treblinka, 60 miles to the northeast of Warsaw, had commenced.

Among the ghetto’s residents Janusz Korczak, born in 1878 as Henryk Goldszmit, was doubtless among the most recognized figures in Warsaw.  A pediatrician by profession, he had by his late 20s already gained something of a reputation as a writer of children’s books, and in 1911-12 he assumed the position of director of an orphanage for Jewish children.  Korczak embraced a conception of childhood that was breathtakingly radical: while he allowed children every latitude as children, recognizing childhood as a special form of dispensation, he also saw children as entirely capable of exercising their own agency.  Children were treated as the equals of adults, and rights and duties were assigned to them as they were to adults; according to the US Holocaust Museum online “Holocaust Encyclopedia”, the orphanage was “run as a ‘children’s republic.’  The young residents  regularly convened a court to hear grievances and dispense justice.”

Korczak with children.

When all Jews including Korczak were forced into the ghetto, the number of children under his charge grew as disease and starvation rendered more of the children orphans.  His principal concern throughout remained sheltering them from suffering, though life in the ghetto scarcely permitted such an outcome, and Korczak strove to maintain their physical and mental well-being.  On the eve of the commencement of the deportations to Treblinka, his friends offered to help him escape; reportedly even some of the German officers who were admirers of his work claimed that they could help Korczak to safety.  Korczak refused all such offers of assistance and insisted that he would have to remain by the side of the children.  In “A Generation” (1956), the first film by the master of Polish cinema, Andrej Wajda, Korczak is seen leading the children in singing a song as they march, almost merrily, to the deportation site (umschlagplatz).

It may be said that Korczak’s other response to offers to help him avoid the fate of other Jews was to stage Tagore’s Dak Ghar.  But why this play?  The protagonist of Tagore’s play is an orphaned boy, Amal, who has some terminal illness; though his adoptive uncle and aunt have brought him up lovingly, on the doctor’s advice he is prevented from going out in the open air and is confined to a room within the house.  Amal spends most of the day by the window, looking out on the world; he strikes up conversations, through the window, with passers by, among them a group of boys, a flower girl, and the village watchman.  He fantasizes about places that he would like to visit and the journeys that he might yet undertake.  Across the road, a post office is being built, and Amal hopes to receive a letter one day from the King; as the play nears its end, Amal believes that the letter has arrived.  The King’s herald enters with a splash and lets it be known that the King himself will make a regal entry at the stroke of midnight, and the King’s physician then follows in anticipation of the visit of His Majesty.  Seating himself by Amal’s bedside, he commands everyone to be silent and whispers:  “Sleep is coming over him.  I’ll sit by his pillow; he’s dropping into slumber.  Blow out the oil-lamp.  Only let the star-light stream in.  Hush, he slumbers.”

Izaak Celnikier, “Umschlagplatz (Korczak)”, another title: “Death of Janusz Korczak (detail). Izaak Celnikier (1923-2011) was a ward of the Korczak Orphanage from 1934 to 1938. He survived several concentration camps. This is how he imagined Korczak’s arrival at the Umschlagplatz. Collection: Jewish Historical Institute.

In his preface to The Post Office (1911), William Butler Yeats recognized “deliverance as the theme of the play”:  though Amal dies at the end, he does so not merely with dignity but almost regally.  The room may have confined him physically, but it could not constrain his imagination.  Indeed, death is but a deliverance:  though on the base level it is the freedom from the shackles of an existence where generally the development of the soul is crippled, the imagination fettered by petty thinking, and life reduced to a series of misfortunes, deliverance may also be actively courted as the very affirmation of life—even as, paradoxically, the only form of eternity.  In the stuffy and still life of the cramped quarters of the ghetto, with hundreds of children to one Amal, it would have been an enormous challenge to stage the play and bring the light of a starry night to tender souls whose lives had been blighted by those who had forsaken their own humanity.

The Warsaw Ghetto would, the year after Korczak and the children under his care were sent to their death at Treblinka, erupt in an uprising.  The Nazis retaliated in the language to which they were accustomed and with the tools of their trade:  they killed thousands of Jews in retaliation, bombed and burned every building in turn, released gas into the sewers, booby-trapped manholes, and more.  The ghetto was reduced to rubble, yet not to naught:  from dust we come to return to dust. Here, in the staging of the play, Korczak by contrast sought to play with the very idea of defiance, showing that defiance may express itself in more than the customary languages of defiance.  There is, unquestionably, something remarkable—no, let us describe the phenomenon by a more glamorous, more telling word, and call it wondrous—that, practically on the eve of their death, the children at Warsaw Ghetto would be guided into staging a performance of The Post Office.  Korczak had conveyed two subtle and yet inexpressibly messages that he sent through the post office. In the art of dying is the ultimate art of living.  And, secondly, victory may be more catastrophic for the victor than for the defeated. We are, it seems, yet to receive those letters.

This is a slightly modified version of an article first published under the same title at abplive.in on 20 July 2023.