Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (2022). What a gloomy title! I am overwhelmed by the horrors of Gaza, all the boringly excruciating details of genocide, our helplessness. For some reason, I ordered this book from the library and finally forced myself to open it. When I got to the detailed comparisons of apartheid South Africa and Israel, I was hooked. I get goosebumps realizing how close we are now to a rivetting, deja vu replay of that glorious struggle leading to victory. Saree Makdisi shows beyond a doubt that Israel’s shipwreck-of-state is sinking under its phony, slipshod ‘Jewish-democratic-state’. How can it be both Jewish and a ‘state-of-all’? Of course, it can’t. Q.E.D.
But Tolerance gets better and better.
Makdisi does a brilliant number on pinkwashing-Eurovision (I didn’t realize they are Siamese twins), and then the evil — and at the same time hilarious — boondoggle, the yet-to-be-completed Museum of Tolerance which was supposed to be designed by Gehry, but descended into scandal and corruption. If you want a truly uplifting day of reading, complete with schadenfreude, get Tolerance, or keep reading here. I haven’t felt this fired-up and optimistic since the first few hours after 10/7.
Palestine: Land of ghosts
Makdisi starts by lambasting liberal Zionists like Amos Oz (and the entire West) for talking about returning to 1967 borders, but ignoring the slaughter of 15,000 civilians and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of 100,000s in 1948. Now that we have the world’s attention, it is time to remind everyone that the Day of Reckoning (we’re getting there slowly but surely) is for the Nakba. There was no ‘good Israel of 1948’, just a younger version of the gangster/ terrorist we witness today.
We have to deprogram ourselves from the Zionist sickness. Even black legends such as WEB du Bois, MLK, James Baldwin initially expressed sympathy for the Zionist cause. Baldwin lived long enough to be labelled anti-semite (to his honor). Not Malcolm X ever. Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Bernard-Henri Levy. Not Jean Genet ever. Republicans only recently with the resurgence of right-wing populism, racism and Christian Zionism, with very different values from the liberal Zionist cause of the 1960s-70s. Hail Malcolm X and Genet! It’s time to do some braincleansing, to undo Jewish brainwashing.
We have laws in goydom that insist that Zionism = Judaism, that Israel really is the Promised Land, and Jews really are the Chosen People. The Zionist have performed brilliantly, fooling almost all of the people all of the time. Until the genocide. Israel has turned Jews into Untermenschen, inhumans, which Hitler did too, but in doing so turned himself into one, dooming his 1000-year reich and spawning a whole nation of bona fide Untermenschen.
Now a majoitiy of young Jews in the collective West are anti-Israel, which makes them anti-Jewish by definition. Negation of their settler-colonialism pushes Jews to renounce Judaism-Zionism both inside and out. Israel has become a religious state like Iran or Saudi, but with genocide as its ‘basic law’. Laws that bind women to the will of her husband, even if Israelis manage unofficial workarounds. No room for principles of inclusivity and tolerance. Instead, a state founded on the premise of exclusion and intolerance.
The 1948 murders and ethnic cleansing left ghost villages which took years to destroy and replace by (highly flammable) European pines and eucalyptus trees and is still ongoing. Thousand-year old villages take a long time to die. The ‘forests’ are to prevent Palestinians from returning, and as settlers steal more land, Palestinians are pushed into the few, crowded, remaining cities and Gaza as open-air concentration camp. Makdisi documents this with pictures ‘before and after’. Goosebumps.
The illegal wall[1] (ICJ 2003) is carefully hidden on the Israeli side with trees, landscape, even murals of aquaducs and scenery. When I asked my still-Zionist friend Syd, back from a visit to his aliyah friend in Tel Aviv, ‘What about the wall?’ he said, ‘What wall?’ Proof of Makdisi’s denial of denial. Now you see it [on Palestinian side], now you don’t.
From South Africa to Israel
Having disposed of ‘Jewish democratic state’, Makdisi gets to the meat and potatoes. The strategy from 1948 has been to exterminate Palestinians, deny they exist. Which means, according to Israeli demographer SoFer, ‘We will have to kill and kill and kill … all day, every day'[2] The trouble is, he mulls, how do you make sure your soldiers (the entire nation) don’t go crazy in the process?
South African apartheid was honest, relatively benign. Blanke/nie blanke. In American English, White/ Negro. Only denial. The human mind can deal with one degree of bigotry. And its easier to dismantle that bigotry when it’s in-you-face. It took a century after the US civil war for that to happen but it finally did.
- South Africa’s Group Areas Act 1950 assigned different areas for residential use of different racial groups. In Israel, this is the system of formal and informal regulations which determine access to land inside Israel and territories. Palestinian are barred from living on land held by ‘national institutions’ such as the JNF, the overwhelming majority of it Palestinian property violently expropriated in 1948. Blacks were free to travel out of their bantustans, unlike Gazans and, except for work, West Bankers.
- Bantu Education Act 1953 created separate and unequal education systems. In Israel, there are systems for Jewish and nonJewish citizens. Palestinian schools are underfunded. In theory you can attend a Jewish school but that is torture for the few Palestinians who manage. Indoctrination, learning and spouting lies about yourself, intense bullying … Turn your child into a bitter neurotic? Why not bilingual schools as everywhere else? Only a handful of Jews bother to learn the native language, and mostly to interrogate unfortunate Palestinians or otherwise abuse it.
- Prohibition of mixed marriages Act 1949 laws in South Africa are reproduced in one of the few written discriminatory laws, preventing Jews from marrying nonJews, deny civil marriage. Most of Israel’s apartheid is clumsily hidden, using ‘veteran’, colour-coding in passports, ‘security’, ‘public lands’, etc.
- Natives (urban areas) consolidation act 1945 and Black (native) amendment act 1952. This required blacks to carry passes and regulated access to urban areas. Various Israeli laws regulate and control the movement of Palestinians but not Jewish settlers. ID cards and passports are colour-coded for levels of discrimination. Palestinians can’t travel freely even in occupied territories, Gazans live under a permanent blockade.
- Public safety act 1953. Israeli military regulations permit long-term detention with trial of Palestinians but not Jewish settlers in occupied territories. There are entirely different legal systems in the same territory. Settlers have very relaxed Israeli civil law (killing a Palestinian is self-defense), Palestinians military law (even touching a Jew is terrorism).
- Promotion of Bantu self-government Act 1952 and Bantu Homelands constitution act 1971. This is equivalent to the Oslo Accords, the creation of the Palestinian Authority to partially manage Palestinian affairs. The South Africa minority oppressing the majority, i.e., undemocratic (if you define democracy as ‘tyranny of the majority’ and see that as hunky-dory). Supposedly not in Israel, as Jews are nominally a majority, but this ignores the huge exiled population (7m) and the occupied territories (4m), i.e., 12.5m Palestinians vs 6m Israeli Jews. So Israel can’t claim even ‘tyranny of majority’. Sorry, you are a minority in your Jewish homeland. (Which is cool if the majority are Muslim, as Jews always lived and prospered under Muslim majoirity rule. Ditto South Africa and black majority rule.)
What to do? Deny Palestinians exist. Golda Meier (in)famously argued there are none, only ‘Arabs.’ The 20% of Israelis who managed to remain in Israel are dismissed as Israeli Arabs and cannot marry Jews or Palestinians in the occupied territories or they lose their (second class) Israeli citizenship. A similar law was passed in South Africa in 1980 but dismissed by a South African judge as an unacceptable violation of black people’s right to family. Not in Israeli, where the High Court upheld it in 2006 and ever since.
A UN report in 2017 describes how second-class citizenship, occupation and enforced exile constitute one comprehensive regime developed for the purpose of ensuring the enduring domination over nonJews in all land under Israeli control. The reality is clearly apartheid and no one is really fooled, except the Israelis themselves and their diaspora cheerleaders, who ignore the reality and believe government lies. B’tselem calls it ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea’, giving the Palestinian chant a gruesome meaning. Mandla Mandela, grandson of the father of free South Africa: “the Palestinians are experiencing a far worse form of apartheid than we ever experienced.”
Mandla Mandela Otto Weininger
The term apartheid is not slang or an expletive. The Apartheid convention (1973) article II: inhuman acts committed for purposes of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group. This led to a UN resolution ‘Zionism is racism’ (1975), rescinded in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. I wonder why? The 2009 Goldstone report dared to use the A word but was quickly disowned by Goldstone himself in the NYT. I wonder why? The Russell Tribunal in Cape Town in 2011 gave fuel to the 2017 UN report by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley. Which the new UN General Secretary Gutierrez purged from UN websites. I wonder why? Now de facto overturned by ICJ/ICC rulings in 2024. We KNOW why.
It was in South Africa’s interests to keep blacks healthy for work. Israel tries not to use Palestinians for work, imports Filipino maids, Indian and Chinese workers, intentionally leaves Palestinians without work. Contrast the racism of exploitation vs racism of extermination, identical to Nazi Germany. Racism carried out in practice. Racism without racism.iii Denial of denial.
Jews and gaylib?
Tel Aviv was marketed as a hub of global gay culture in the 2000s, culminating in Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv in 2019.
Why Israel, geographically a non-European country, is the biggest fan of the European Song Competition (ESC), how it insinuated itself there, as it did in the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), why some airlines consider Tel Aviv a European destination – that’s for another essay. The ESC was a relatively minor event until recently. Few winners have gone on to prominence: ABBA, in 1974, and Celine Dion [a Canadian] were the exceptions.
In the 2000s it became a large-scale event and evolved into the celebration of queer camp, as Europe was embracing gaylib. Now ‘gay-friendly’ is a strict rule of the EU and US. Israel is thus embraced as a European state, surrounded by barbarism, displacing the discourse from real racism against blacks/ browns/ asians/ Roma. France, Italy and other EU countries with the pretense of homophilia.
Even women’s rights take second place to force-feeding gaylib on third world countries as the litmus test of a civilized state, worthy of western ‘help’ (just ask African Anglican archbishops). This continues the strategy from the very founding of Zionism in 1897 when Zionist elites, especially Rothschilds, emphasized their status as (sort of) white Europeans talking to other white Europeans about nonwhite Others. As if the EU is complicit with Israel in real racism (it is! European racism is growing by leaps and bounds), covering it with gaylib and mass sports (blacks are fine there as the exception that proves rule). Denial of denial.
Israel has won Eurovision four times (Transgender Dana International 1998, Netta Barzilai 2018), as though its prominence here could redeem it from other sins. In 2019, Tel Aviv hosted Eurovision. It was to be a kind of apotheosis. Only 6,000 visitors arrived, far fewer than 20,000 expected. Organizers gave tickets away to Israelis who were already committed, i.e., had their denial of denial down pat already. The Icelandic band Hatari flashed a Palestinian flag, Madonna’s dancers had Israeli and Palestinian flags on their costumes. The Israel foreign minister harrumped: ‘You cannot mix politics at a cultural event.’ The pinkwashing rhetorical strategy that deploys Israel’s supposed enlightenment toward LGBTQ issues to deflect criticism of its abuses and war crimes and build support among western liberals[7] failed miserably.
Each year now witnesses a mass campaign to exclude Israel from the ESC. The 2024 contest in Malmo, Sweden was overshadowed by the crowds of protestors outside, and slick sound editing was needed to minimize the protests within. During the opening act of the first semi-final, (Swede) Eric Saade, whose father is Palestinian, performed wearing a keffiyeh. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) stated that his keffiyeh was a political symbol and that it regretted Saade’s choice to “compromise the non-political nature of the event”. During the finale, the Portuguese entrant Iolanda wore nail art featuring Palestinian symbols, and said “peace will prevail” at the end of her performance.
In the 2025 contest, 72 former Eurovision contestants signed a letter calling for Israel’s exclusion, including former winners Charlie McGettigan and Salvador Sobral. The previous edition’s winner Nemo and this edition’s winner JJ later publicly joined calls to exclude Israel. During the introductory postcard preceding Israel’s performance in the second semi-final, RTVE’s commentators Tony Aguilar and Julia Varela mentioned the number of casualties of the war. Following a complaint filed by the Israeli broadcaster Kan, the EBU warned RTVE it would be fined if its commentators ‘mention the Gaza conflict again’. Ahead of the finale, RTVE aired a message that read When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and justice for Palestine. During the finale, Israel’s performance was met with booing by the audience; the Swiss host broadcaster SRG SSR replaced this in the television broadcast with pre-recorded applause.
Israel ultimately won the televote and finished in second place overall, prompting a number of participating broadcasters to call for a rework of the televoting system while also highlighting concerns over Israel’s participation.[8] AVAAZ has organized a worldwoide petition to ban Israel in 2026.
Re homophilia, the sordid reality is Israel was anti-gay until the 1990s, right up there with West Germany. Palestine? There was no anti-gay law in Muslim times,iv but the British introduced a ban in the 1936 criminal code and Israel used this till 1977. The law against sodomy lasted until the late 1980s. Note: it changed just in time to embrace the gay-friendly new Europe and ESC.[9] And why not use bikini-clad sex kitten soldiers and virile male lion soldiers as models, even pose with western straight/gay tourists?
So gaylib is co-opted into racism, denigrating barbaric Arabs as anti-gay, even suggesting ‘Arabs’ (Palestinians don’t exist) flee to Israel as a haven (impossible as apartheid). Palestinian queer activism, such as it is, is inseparable from resistance to Zionism. I.e., Israel denies Palestinian homosexuality and affirms gay Jewish Israelis, denying the reality, smugly denying its previous denial of Israeli gays — all to improve Israel’s image in the gay-friendly West.
Nota bene: State support for gays is still within the apartheid regime. And there is no role for lesbians in this hasbara, as they are insignificant compared to gay men, so who cares? All this gay-friendly promotion is conducted by cold-blooded, homophobic Israeli men, whose lie is that Israel’s homophilia should somehow exonerate them from oppressing 100% of Palestinians. There is even an official gay faction in the Likud party. So gaylib is poisoned by imperialism, but then by becoming mainstream, that makes any such civil rights movement complicit in the system, i.e., imperialism.
In 2009 gay pornographer Michael Lucas made Men if Israel. Where spilling of seed is just fine, no longer for reproduction but as a symbol of territory captured, and seed as an end in itself. Tell that to Onan. All this is completely beyond the pale for ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are busy trying to become the majority of Jews to bring all the secular schemes to a halt.
Lucas followed up with Undressing Israel: Gay men in the Promised Land and gay tours with a bonus ‘visit to an IDF base and memento picture with a sexy soldier.’ It’s as if it is necessary to put the army front and centre in the gay imagination, appealing to macho, even S&M, to get past the blatant inhumanity of the Israel project. But western gay promiscuity and porno, disreputable though they may be, didn’t seem able to incorporate Israeli apartheid. S&M is more at home with Nazi paraphernalia., i.e., good clean fascism.
The state even backed a campaign to have World Pride (launched in 2000) held in Israel, called ‘Love without borders’ (sic). It was postponed due to the siege of Gaza and the parade part of the postponed festival was canceled in 2006 because of carpet bombing and invasion of Lebanon. All the time clouded by global calls for boycott by QUIT (Queers undermining Israeli terrorism). Which stated these rights should not be placed in competition with the long struggle of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian LGBTQ people, for self-determination and struggle against apartheid. So again, blowback.
Israeli Pride Month was bizarrely launched in San Francisco in 2010 by the Israeli government. Stands promoting gayness in Israel were mounted at other Pride festivals (Berlin, Stockholm, Toronto). Pride Toronto was infiltrated by Israeli agitators who failed to have Queers Against Israeli Apartheid banished, and even tried and failed to have Pride Toronto’s funding revoked ‘to silence Palestine solidarity voices.’ Also in 2010, the Israeli Tourism Ministry branded Tel Aviv as an international gay vacation destination, spending almost $100m. Israel is without a doubt the best country in the Middle East for gay and lesbian individuals to live. Much like it fixed Eurovision polls, it managed to rig online polls in 2012 to ‘prove’ this with Tel Aviv’s 43% vs London 5%, legendary San Francisco 0%. The fact that only Jewish gays are welcome to live in Israel is denied by omission.
The first Tel Aviv Pride was held in 1998. The first Jerusalem march was held in 2002, but in 2005 Yeshai Schlessil stabbed marchers and when released in 2015 stabbed more and killed one, after which the parade is held under tight police protection and attracted only 10,000 by 2024 during the genocide. Ironic, gay-friendly Israel chalks up the first murder at a gay pride march. Just as gay pride marches in the West have run out of steam, with Trump disdain for especially trans accelerating the process of decline.
2019 was supposed to be moment of consolidation of Israel as ‘gay capital of the Middle East’ but Israel has become increasingly unpopular after 1967, rated at bottom of all charts, tied with Sudan, Iran and North Korea.v Attempts to draw positive attention merely give prominence to a country which people associate with violence, conflict, religious zealotry, concrete landscapes, and ‘middle-aged ultra-Orthodox men’, which has zero appeal for younger and more liberal demographics.vi
Intolerable tolerance
In 2004 the Museum of Tolerance broke ground, the project of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a clone of the LA museum, which is really just a history of Zionism. California Governor Schwarzenegger told his Jerusalem audience, ‘This building will be a candle to guide us.’ Rabbi Hier called it ‘a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility.’ This was until a legal challenge stopped work in 2006 when human remains were found during excavation. The Independent: “Israel plans to build ‘museum of tolerance’ on Muslim graves.” Built on the site of largest and most important Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, still in use. It was established in the 7th century, the burial place of companions of the Prophet Muhammad and martyrs from the Crusades in the 11th century. Instead of declaring it a historic site and turning it over to archaeologists, Israel had already turned part of it into Independence Park and built two parking lots.
The Gehry that never was
The Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance hit the jackpot when LA-based superstar Frank Gehry agreed to design it. Choosing Gehry with his titanium-clad non-Euclidean curves, swirls and blobs, was intentional: form over content, ‘clothes make the man’. Surrounded by 16 pillars of tolerance ($1m per donor) and a Grand Hall ($10m for donor’s name). Who cares what’s inside? Just buy a postcard and have a bagel in Independence Park. It’s a Gehry!
But not so fast. Makdisi published a devastating essay detailing the infamy of this grotesque project in Critical Inquiry, to which Gehry replied angrily and had the museum directors and their Israeli advisors in spring 2010 do the same. Gehry was understandably furious when he realized he was a Trojan Horse for Israeli apartheid, that the museum had nothing to do with tolerance, was rather history of Zionism, an obsessive and narcissistic self-regard at the expense of the disappeared Other.
Gehry ate some humble pie, withdrew, and the project collapsed, mired in corruption and infamy. A decade later, a half-built modest building, white as in innocence – a fitting metaphor for the unfinishable Israeli project of the Jewish democratic state, and the unseen reality of untold thousands, millions of dead Palestinians – remains, the cemetery completely destroyed. Now ‘Independence Park’ and the two parking lots are complemented by a subdued windlowless white muffler. Denial of denial, as if ashamed of itself, rather than trumpeting some phony tolerance.
What are the messages of the LA and Jerusalem museums? The hatred and intolerance we are concerned about is hatred of Jews. Jews are history’s scapegoats, always misunderstood and victimized unjustly. This slippage from universal to particular is so subtle in the LA Museum of Tolerance that one hardly notices it, but the ‘us’ and ‘we’ addressed is really about Jews, and an end to anti-semitism means the liberation of all. There is no Other. Zionist teleology in terms of universal values rewrites Zionism as a universal value. Jew-worship means tolerance. Tolerance means acceptance of Zionism as a universal, giving Jews their Promised Land, and resistance is intolerance.
Tolerance is redefined as exclusive rather than inclusive. The Other, requiring our tolerance, is not present except as the intolerant enemy, incapable of tolerance so excluded. UNESCO’s Declaration of Principles on tolerance defines tolerance as the appreciation of diversity, the ability to live and let others live …. without infringing on those of others. It should be used to admit the particular into the universal; here, it is used the other way round. The LA museum and its Jerusalem twin are not about the Other at all: they are about the self, a Self constructed in a formerly Other space from which the Other has been systematically eradicated.
The Jew becomes the universal man. Radical ideologies and terrorism refer not to ideologies and violence directed against just anyone, e.g., directed by Israel against the Palestinians, i.e., universal phenomena, but against Jews and Israel in particular, now recoding the particular as the universal. There is no cemetery, there are no Palestinians. Then deny the denial.
The museum in Jerusalem denies it is denying this, just as the one in LA by omission denies there were American natives (possible even sacred burial sites) where it was built, and would dismiss any claim to the contrary. America was virgin land, settled by Europeans. Instead, the Museums of Tolerance in LA and Jerusalem promote the Jews, the Chosen People as the universal. And tolerance, ending bigotry, racism in the first place means ending anti-semitism. If we crack that problem, the promise is there will be no more racism. US-Israel becomes the paradigm of universal brotherhood.
Just as gays and Eurovision fans refuse to be a Trojan Horse for genocide/fascism, so Gehry. The clever schemes of Zionists just keep coming to grief, the Israel ship of state more like the ship-wreck of state.
Even as the controversies around Eurovision and the Museum of Tolerance were swirling in 2004-06, over 400 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem were demolished. No Palestinians are allowed to build, so they build illegally, which makes them terrified that they can face demolition at any moment. No ‘tolerance’, no ‘vision’ of peace and harmony for them. There are no Palestinian homosexuals, just happy, liberated Jewish gays and cool Euro-Israeli Jews. No (ethnically cleansed) Palestinian villages, just pretty eucalyptus groves with a few ‘ancient ruins’. No bigotry and intolerance, only civilized Euro(sorry) Jews and barbaric ‘Arabs’ who hopefully will find a home among other Arabs and stop whining about a history that doesn’t exist.
But the game is up. Eurovision is for Europeans and is bound to boot Israel out. There really are ghost Palestinian villages, lovingly documented, awaiting their honouring, even resuscitation. There is no tolerance in the Museum of Tolerance, which when it finally opens will be revealed as a tedious, fake museum of Zionism, depicting Israel’s woes as an embodiment victimized Jews throughout history, always persecuted unjustly, but enduring, tolerating, but which in fact is intolerance dressed up as its opposite, convincing to no one but Zionists themselves, who are sold on the dream and don’t dare question it.
Reality – All the king’s lawyers and all the king’s sexy soldiers …
The crowning tribute to (Jewish, universal) tolerance was built on one of the oldest enduring cemeteries in the world, the Other to Zionism. It both denies this – there are no Palestinians – and tries to convince us that tolerance of Jews is what really matters. If only people would stop hating Jews, there would be no intolerance. Jews would be Schwarzenegger’s ‘candle to guide us’. This is the museum’s message. ‘Tolerance through strength’, like ‘peace through strength’ or more precisely ‘peace through war’. ‘We’ll show them and they better tolerate us or else.’ Affirmative denial, denial of denial, cognitive dissonance. Sofer is right. This phony ‘negation of negation’ leads to insanity, nihilism. This explains why the most strident defenders of Israel are liberal American Jews who have no real commitment to Israel, never visit, don’t have to murder Palestinians every day, but still insist Israel/Jews are blameless and unjustly victimized. The truth is too painful so it must be denied or their worldview collapses.
Over time, Israel has lost whatever support it had as a refuge for persecuted Jews, through its blatant theft and cruelty, while sympathy for Palestine has reached an all-time high despite Israel’s slick propaganda and lies, plus western leaders and media all being gung-ho supporters of Israel’s terror. The US has used its UN veto 70+ times, mostly for Israel, the rest in support of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1970s. 9/11 gave Israel a boost, though many suspect it was involved, and its horrendous record since then has nullified its free pass. Prominent Jewish commentators such as Peter Beinart have renounced Zionism, abandoning the traditional two-state solution in favour of equal rights for all.
Israel is now widely seen as apartheid. It seems to have embraced the in-your-face South African version, abandoning its ‘denial of denial’ policy, counting on the rise of right-wing populism in the West (Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Modi) as the new norm, as Israel courts these parties, with British, French and German far right-wingers seemingly safe in Israel’s pockets too. But those countries still have genuine elections, and already since Tolerance was published, Bolsonaro is in jail for an attempted coup, Duterte was arrested by the ICC, accused of crimes against humanity of murder, torture, and rape. French and British (Zionist) political leaders’ popularity has tanked. Until he brokered the Gaza ceasefire, Trump’s poll numbers were in free fall.
Can Israel survive as a rogue state, possibly abandoned by the US itself? Broad support for Palestinians by artists and masses in the West, the growth of BDS, flotillas to Gaza – all tell a different story. Makdisi opts for the one-state solution as the two-state is no longer viable. The question is what kind of state – apartheid or democratic? Jewish-and-democratic is an oxymoron. So join the struggle. Be on the right side of history.
ENDNOTES:
1. As ruled by the ICJ IN 2004
2. Israel’s leading demographic alarmist Arnon Sofer in interiew ‘It’s the demography stupid,’ Jerusalem Post, 20/5/2004.
3. David Theo Goldberg, ‘Racisms without racism,’ PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008).
4. hough homosexuality was frowned upon and was practiced only in the shadows where it belongs.
5. Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland, 74.
6. Ibid., 74.
7. Ali Abdunimah, Electronic Intifada, 7/7/205.
8. RTVE, VRT, and RTÉ additionally called for an independent audit of their countries’ televoting results; the Spanish and Belgian televote awarded 12 points to Israel, while the Irish televote awarded 10. Eurovision News Spotlight, a fact-checking and open-source intelligence initiative by the EBU, published an investigation which found evidence that the Israel Government Advertising Agency had conducted a cross-platform advertising campaign and utilised official state social media accounts to encourage public support for Israel’s entry in the contest, specifically providing instructions on how voters could cast all 20 of their allowed votes for Israel. The advertisements received more than over 68 million total impressions. The Israeli government had previously admitted to deploying the same strategy during the 2024 contest.
9. See Makdisi, 82.
