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“In the midst of our grief and pain, let’s remind each other who we are.” .

These are the words of Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She goes on: “We are people committed to tikkun olam, the repairing of the world. The Israeli government and U.S. government are justifying massive atrocities, tearing this world further apart, and doing so in the names of us and our beloved families. When we say never again, it includes Palestinians, and it means right now.”

Israel had the perfect plan for Gaza - in fact, for all Palestinians, when it decided to redeploy its forces around the Occupied Gaza Strip in 2005.

 Despite statements made, back then, by Israeli officials that the 'disengagement' plan aimed at severing Israel's legal and other responsibilities from its role as an Occupier, the actual story was different.

At one time, the ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ was Arab and Israeli. Over the course of many years, however, it was rebranded. The media is now telling us it is a ‘Hamas-Israeli conflict’. 

 But what went wrong? Israel simply became too powerful. 

 The supposedly astounding Israeli victories over the years against Arab armies have emboldened Israel to the extent that it came to view itself, not as a regional superpower, but as a global power as well. Israel, per its own definition, became ‘invincible’. 

 Such terminology was not a mere scare tactic aimed at breaking the spirit of Palestinians and Arabs alike. Israel believed this. 

With a Sunday matinee plus Monday night performance, this is the last week for serious lovers of drama to see Rogue Machine’s repeatedly extended Heroes of the Fourth Turning at the Matrix Theatre. Playwright Will Arbery’s unique play first produced in 2019 is like Dogma – Kevin Smith’s 1999 philosophical excursion into obscure church doctrine – meets The Turner Diaries, a 1978 fictitious account of a racist rightwing insurrection (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was inspired by and carried a copy of this terrorist novel). 

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hellbent on genocide, people keep sharing a scandalous article from 2015 called “Netanyahu: Hitler Didn’t Want to Exterminate the Jews.” I’m afraid it may give people the wrong idea. Netanyahu’s lie was that a Muslim cleric from Palestine convinced Hitler to kill Jews. But when Netanyahu said that Hitler originally wanted to expel Jews, not murder them, he was telling the indisputable truth. The problem is that it wasn’t a Muslim cleric who convinced Hitler otherwise. And it isn’t any secret who it was. It was the world’s governments.

If you were to listen to people justifying WWII today, and using WWII to justify the subsequent 75 years of wars and war preparations, the first thing you would expect to find in reading about what WWII actually was would be a war motivated by the need to save Jews from mass murder. There would be old photographs of posters with Uncle Sam pointing his finger, saying “I want you to save the Jews!”