(This explanation takes two minutes to read.)

Quoting Dan Steinbock’s The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, pages 17–8:

In May 1948 Israel’s Provisional Council of State passed an ordinance that gave the Council power to declare a state of emergency, which the Council did immediately. Since its very establishment, Israel has seen itself as facing conditions justifying the declaration of a state of emergency, although its rationale was formally acknowledged only in 1991:

Since its establishment, the State of Israel has been the victim of continuous threats and attacks on its very existence as well as on the life and property of its citizens.

These have taken the form of threats of war, of actual armed attacks, and campaigns of terrorism resulting in the murder of and injury to human beings […]

In view of the above, the State of Emergency which was proclaimed in May 1948 has remained in force ever since.⁴⁷

Due to the continuous state of emergency, Israel has been able to apply a set of extraordinary provisions, which were initially adopted for Mandatory Palestine by Great Britain. These emergency regulations have a long colonial history.

In the 19th century, the British had used a variety of legal and institutional approaches in Ireland, which refused to submit to British authority. Subsequently, these repressive measures were exported to other parts of the empire, including India, South Africa, and Nigeria. In each case, they served to reduce and displace the potential for more direct violence by the indigenous populations, but at the cost of legitimizing repressive practices.⁴⁸ In Palestine, the British Army had already deployed them with devastating effect in the suppression of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, following its “long tradition of pacification.”⁴⁹

After World War II, the British used such emergency laws to suppress independence fighters in their colonies; this was portrayed as a struggle against communism during the early Cold War. Effectively, the repression was war. However, the term “emergency” was preferred since London’s insurers did not pay out in instances of civil war.⁵⁰

In Mandatory Palestine, the emergency laws permitted detention without trial along with deportation, curfew, and suppression of publications. First propagated in 1945, the British repealed the regulations before withdrawing from Palestine in 1948. Nonetheless, most were incorporated into Israel’s domestic legislation. The state of emergency was originally authorized under Section 9 of the 1948 Law and Administration Ordinance and has been in continuous effect since.

As amended, these regulations form a central part of the legal system in the West Bank, permitting military tribunals, prohibitions on books and newspapers, house demolitions, indefinite administrative detention, extensive powers of search and seizure, the sealing off of territories and the imposition of curfews.⁵¹

(Emphasis added.)

Consider this a reminder that—and I can’t stress this enough—Zionism is a European ideology, not a ‘Jewish’ one. To blame Judaism would not only grossly oversimplify matters, it would effectively let European colonialism off the hook. (Indeed, using religion as a moral alibi itself has precedents in the British Empire.)

I’ve been a bit dislocated from my Judaism, as my family who were most practicing have passed and I moved to a place where there aren’t really synagogues or Jewish community.

I’m wondering if there are any online services or community spaces that anyone would recommend? Ideally reform spaces that are inclusive etc. can anyone recommend? Thanks in advance.

​

Im sitting here within the Green Line, fighting for the Palestinian people. All my privilege.. taking a break to watch TV. So surreal what happens a few km away.

And I feel hopeless.

I'm a traitor. I'm a nut. That's what I'm called for speaking out.

I don't think people outside Israel understand just how strong the propaganda is here.

The brainwashing is everywhere. It's in the news, in conversations, in families, in the way people justify things that should be unimaginable.

The videos? So many are uploaded by the occupiers themselves.

If you dare speak about soldiers using dogs to rape Palestinians, if you dare compare these atrocities to things even the Nazis did, you're branded a traitor.

And I feel like a Nazi enabler myself. Because I'm surrounded by people who support this genocide, and every day I have to exist alongside them, talk to them, and watch them justify it.

I know that opposing it doesn't make me responsible for every action committed by others. But accepting this as normal, even for a second, feels like complicity.

They are doing this IN MY NAME.

I try. And I try. A million times.

You document. You work behind the scenes. You protest.

And it just keeps getting worse.

I recently watched a video uploaded by a soldier playing with Palestinian children's toys. Toys belonging to children who had been killed or displaced.

Then another video, showing a house being burned with a mother and son inside.

And then another soldier, whose family I actually know, standing in a Palestinian home and saying, "One round down, how many more to go?"

But what broke me was something so small.

A piece of artwork, still hanging crookedly on the wall.

A remnant of the lives that were there. Of people who had a home, belongings, memories, ordinary days.

And don't forget, this shit started in the 40s.

This isn't something that suddenly began. It's an escalation of what has already been happening for generations.

More than 70 years of occupation, by people who should know better.

And I don't think people understand how isolating it is to live in a society where opposing this makes you the enemy.

I know my suffering is minuscule compared to what Palestinians are enduring. I know that.

But the mental toll is compounding every single second.

Every video. Every testimony. Every atrocity. Every conversation with someone who thinks it's justified.

I feel like I'm losing my ability to function under the weight of it all.

I'm not asking anyone to center my pain over theirs. I'm not asking for absolution or reassurance that I'm one of the good ones.

I'm asking for someone to hear me.

I desperately need support right now.

Please, I'm not here to debate whether Palestinians deserve human rights. I can't handle another argument about whether the things I'm witnessing are justified.

I just need someone to talk to.

Jacob Israël de Haan — Dutch poet, lawyer, Orthodox Jew — arrived in Jerusalem in 1919 as a Zionist. What he saw turned him into the movement's loudest critic. On 30 June 1924 he was shot leaving a synagogue on Jaffa Road: the first political murder in the Jewish community of Palestine. The man who fired later said the order came from Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel's second president.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h7SWqDKd6ds

AMA in r/JewsOfConscience with Pulitzer Prize winning author Benjamin Moser, whose new book is "Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History." 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗲: 𝟭𝟬/𝟮𝟵, 𝗧𝗵𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝘁 𝟭𝟬 𝗔𝗠 𝗘𝗦𝗧.

Pro-Israel extremists are once again seeking to have Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah removed from Adelaide Writers’ Week, after a similar lobbying campaign led to the collapse of this year’s festival.

A WhatsApp group has circulated an AI-generated email campaign urging supporters to lobby South Australian politicians and arts officials in a bid to exclude Abdel-Fattah from the festival in 2027.

Messages shared in the Pen Power Australia WhatsApp group, seen by Deepcut, urged members to click on an “Activist Mailer” link to generate a complaint opposing Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to the literary festival.

The automatically-generated email is addressed to Adelaide Writers’ Week director Rosemary Milsom, executive director Julian Hobbs, artistic director Matthew Lutton and Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton. It also copies South Australia’s premier, Peter Malinauskas, as well as state ministers, the opposition leader and shadow ministers.

The email calls on the festival to withdraw its invitation to Abdel-Fattah – a strident critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – accusing her of “antisemitic conduct”.

In comments to Deepcut, Abdel-Fattah condemned the lobbying effort and called on “every institution they target to stand firm against such malicious campaigns”.

“Despite the collapse of Adelaide Writers’ Week and Bendigo Writers Festival, these genocide cheerleaders continue their targeted racist campaigns, buoyed on by a political environment that has acquiesced to the pro-Israel lobby and punished the pro-Palestine movement,” she told Deepcut.

Murdoch media follows Abdel-Fattah’s UK book events

The Pen Power Australia email comes in tandem with a Murdoch media campaign that targeted Abdel-Fattah’s UK tour promoting her book, Discipline.

The email labelled Abdel-Fattah’s remarks in the UK “particularly disturbing”, claiming she “described Australians as ‘nut cases’ and Australian institutions as ‘white supremacist’”.

This appears based on a Daily Telegraph article referencing the remarks.

Murdoch outlets in Australia, which have staunchly supported Israel as it slaughters civilians en masse and causes devastation throughout West Asia, ran repeated headlines attacking Abdel-Fattah while on tour. Another article in Adelaide Now sought to provoke controversy around the author’s UK book tour, and tie it to Abdel-Fattah’s upcoming appearance at Adelaide Writers’ Week.

Abdel-Fattah called the Murdoch media campaign a “shameless obsession”.

“To hunt me down at every public event in the UK and maliciously cherry pick my lines to feed into a media and lobby machine that will do anything to try to silence me only goes to show how desperate these barrel-scraping reporters and pro-Israel lobbyists are,” she said.

The Murdoch media blitz comes two months after incessant media attacks led to the death of British scholar Jason Arday. Murdoch’s UK outlets were found to have published the most articles attacking Arday, in what was roundly condemned as a bullying campaign that uniquely targeted the academic due to his African heritage.

Louise Adler condemns campaign

The new Pen Power Australia campaign follows the festival’s dramatic collapse earlier this year, with Adelaide Festival apologising to Abdel-Fattah in January and acknowledging that its decision to exclude her from the 2026 program had been a mistake. Organisers then invited her to participate in the 2027 event.

Louise Adler, director of the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week, resigned after the Adelaide Festival Board decided to cancel Abdel-Fattah’s appearance despite her strong opposition.

“I’m not surprised that the Israel lobby is once again agitating for Dr Abdel-Fattah to be disinvited from Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2027,” she told Deepcut.

“I would, however, be very surprised if the new board of Adelaide Festival capitulated. It would cause irreparable reputational damage to Australia’s premier literary festival with a heritage of over 60 years.”

The decision to remove Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 event followed a letter from South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas to the festival’s chair, in which he stated he was “deeply concerned” that the organisers were not prepared to remove her. Deepcut later revealed Pen Power Australia’s lobbying role to have Abdel-Fattah excluded from the 2026 lineup.

Her cancellation prompted a mass boycott by writers and artists, with more than 180 writers withdrawing from the festival. The controversy also resulted in the resignation and replacement of the festival’s board.

Emails obtained under freedom of information by ABC News revealed that the festival’s executive director had warned that as many as 80 to 90 writers could withdraw if Abdel-Fattah were disinvited.

Pen Power Australia has previously coordinated campaigns targeting public figures and institutions that have openly criticised Israel for its genocide in Gaza. The pro-Israel group has also coordinated mass complaint campaigns to the ABC regarding their coverage of the Gaza genocide.

A vigil for the dead for some. ‘Subhuman ghouls’ to Murdoch’s goons

Backed by their cheerleader-in-chief, Chris Minns, when you thought Murdoch writers couldn’t stoop any lower, they did. Andrew Brown was there.

On October 7, the Daily Telegraph told Sydney that “subhuman ghouls” were gathering again to celebrate a slaughter of innocents. I was at that gathering. It was a candlelight vigil at Town Hall, organised by Jews Against the Occupation ’48. About 200 people came, mostly older Australians.

They prayed for the Jewish and Palestinian dead.

Chris Minns called the vigil “heartless”. Four days later, last Sunday, October 11, thousands marched for Gaza, and Minns called them “disgraceful”. Alex Ryvchin of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry called the marchers “obsessive, extreme and hateful”.

He then announced that “the only attempt at racial extermination occurred on October 7 and was carried out by Palestinians”.

Arsen Ostrovsky of the Israel lobby AIJAC used the Telegraph to brand the rally a hate march and to blame such marches for the Bondi massacre.

Their evidence is a handful of placards. Against it stands a United Nations finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, more than 72,000 Palestinian dead, and an estimated 300,000 Australians who crossed the Harbour Bridge.

“Social cohesion?”

The mourners are not wrecking social cohesion. The men who call grief hatred are wrecking it, and they are pushing a narrative Israel spends $730 million a year to spread.

The Telegraph’s front page read SYDNEY’S DAY OF SHAME. Below, it said subhuman ghouls gathered in 2023 to celebrate a slaughter, and “they gather again”. Page four carried the headline “Vile rallies ‘celebrating the slaughter’ of Jews”. The paper went to print before a single candle was lit. It convicted us without waiting to see what we did.

Subhuman. A Sydney newspaper pinned that word on older Jewish Australians gathering to mourn. The word has a history, and every editor at Holt Street knows it.

Chris Minns has a word for candles. Heartless. He lit the Opera House for Israel’s dead within days. The sails have never been lit for Gaza’s. Hind Rajab was six. She begged rescuers for hours from a car full of her dead relatives until Israeli fire killed her too. Minns never called that heartless.

American Jewish surgeon Dr Mark Perlmutter treated Gaza’s children for sniper wounds. The United Nations inquiry on which Australian Chris Sidoti sits found Israeli forces deliberately targeted children. Children had limbs amputated without anaesthetic while a doctor sang them a lullaby. Minns never called that heartless either.

Then 200 people prayed for the dead of both peoples, and he found the word.

This is compassion rationed by nationality.

Minns is no peacekeeper. He is a partisan with a police force, and the Jewish group behind the vigil has taken him to the Supreme Court over his laws against protest. Were all 300,000 on the bridge ghouls too, Premier?

“Lewd gatherings”

Ryvchin called Sunday’s rallies “lewd gatherings”. He said the marchers cannot oppose war “because the war is over”. Then he blamed October 7 on Palestinians. Not on Hamas. On Palestinians.

That is collective guilt, the exact offence he accuses the marchers of committing against Jews. If a marcher said Jews carried out the destruction of Gaza, Ryvchin would call it antisemitism. He has done the same thing to another people.

In the same sentence, he denied the genocide a United Nations commission of inquiry found in September 2025.

Ryvchin looked at 72,000 graves and announced that nothing happened there.

I answered him in public. Declaring the war over does not resurrect a single child. Accountability does not expire when Alex Ryvchin decides the public should stop caring.

If a marcher promotes an antisemitic conspiracy, name the conduct and condemn it. Smearing an entire movement is lazy, and it poisons the cohesion he claims to defend. He offered contempt where evidence was needed and collective blame where precision was essential.

Blaming the blameless

Then Ostrovsky, who runs the Sydney office of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. He wrote that marches like Sunday’s built the Bondi massacre one chant at a time.

Ostrovsky survived Bondi, and his grief is real, but his claim is a smear without evidence. He ties the gunmen to people who want children to stop dying, and he uses the Bondi dead to do it.

The Australian prints the line and Sharri Markson broadcasts it nightly.

News24 reported the backlash to our vigil before it began.

The hasbara campaign

None of this is spontaneous. Israel has budgeted $730 million this year for hasbara, its global campaign to shape foreign opinion. The narrative is designed there. Palestinians and all who stand with them are the enemy. Israel is the only victim.

Our Premier, the Israel lobby and the Murdoch machine push that narrative here. Whether by instruction or by instinct, they do its work.

The Telegraph has discovered that a day of mourning is sacred. Every January 26 First Nations people mourn invasion and dispossession, and every January 26 the Telegraph cheers the party on. Its columnist Anthony Dillon dismissed “attempts to shame us” for celebrating. At Holt Street,grief is sacred when it serves Israel and a nuisance when it belongs to Aboriginal people.

These men cheapen the word antisemitism at the very moment Jewish Australians need it to mean something.

I stood among the ghouls. They prayed for every child killed since that day, Israeli and Palestinian alike.

The Telegraph looked at that and saw something less than human. That tells you nothing about the vigil.

It tells you everything about the Telegraph and those who work there.

Letting you all know they’ll be screening NAZA in London on the 19th and 20th of October. The 19th screening has been sold out already.

Did anyone else attend Jewish currents live in person or virtually? What did you think?

I attended 3 panels virtually and I found them all engaging.

How do you seek a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist in such case. If you’re going be considered by them crazy by the fact of you having your opinions.

How are you opening up in such case. I can’t image that at all.

It won’t be clicking.

Yet the therapist should understand the context. Otherwise, you have to immerse someone from outside country into context. Which is very hard and problematic and too dangerously costly in time and money resources.

One of the psychologists I attended to was a sohnut worker and I came to complain share that I was brought here as a teen and how I suffer of things related to that. Then she discovered me she was a sohnut worker.
Some other psychologist I met, I already sensed how the abyss of different worldview between us. I just couldn’t say things I need to say.

What do you? How you seek a professional psychologist in such case?

.
Would be grateful for your help, ideas and thoughts.
Thanks.

Hi everyone,

We're excited to announce an upcoming AMA in r/JewsOfConscience with Pulitzer Prize winning, Jewish-American author Ben Moser.

Ben is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy.

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and Sontag: Her Life and Work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.

The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters appeared in 2023.

He completed Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

https://www.benmoser.com/anti-zionism

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History has earned praise from other esteemed writers like Nathan Thrall and academics like Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, who says:

I met Ben when he gave a talk upstairs at the Coleman Center when he was a fellow there, which is where he wrote the book, as you just heard.

I was somebody who's followed Israel, Palestine, Zionism my entire life, since I was a child. That's what I heard at the dinner table.

And I was struck immediately by how deep were his insights into the way in which Zionism went from a highly contested minority opinion in the Jewish world, and in the West generally, to its hegemonic position today in both Jewish communities and in the Western world.

This is, to my way of thinking, one of the very best books that traces that evolution, how people were viscerally opposed to Zionism by overwhelming numbers in the Jewish community, and how that changed, and some of the ways in which that changed.

• Anti-Zionism, A Jewish History: Benjamin Moser with Rashid Khalidi | Cullman Center

Feel free to leave your questions here in advance, if you cannot make it on the day-of.

It's ok to ask in advance and still participate on the day-of too.

Thanks and hope to see you all there!

I'm starting to not like Ihab anymore, I have no problem of him criticizing Hamas, but he's misguided

An Isreali news source even confirmed it.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-11/ty-article-magazine/.premium/whats-wrong-how-israel-trained-and-armed-an-isis-linked-gazan-crime-militia/00000197-5aa3-deed-a9bf-5fef7d990000

Source:

JNS TV - Israeli Parties Go Head-to-Head in Fiery Election Debate

Article:

Jewish New Syndicate - Zionist parties unite against Palestinian state in JNS election debate

I don’t like throwing around the label “nepo baby,” even though I might qualify as one in certain circles. But maybe I do. My father, Ori Goldberg, died this past Sunday after a long battle with colon cancer. He was 50.
For the past three years, he devoted his energy and strength to exposing the injustices of Zionism, and spoke out against the genocide in Gaza in every way he could. His death takes from us one of the few Israelis who still had any semblance of a conscience.
He won’t write anymore. But I know there’s nothing that would make him happier than knowing that even after his death, he’s reaching new readers.
If you read him on Twitter over the past few years, my family and I thank you, and we love you. If you didn’t, read the profile of a man who stood more or less against his entire country and society, trying to explain to them that they were wrong.
And if you don’t want to read it, we love you anyway.
His twitter: https://x.com/ori_goldberg?s=11

Three Years of the Gaza War through the Eyes of Soldiers: "The Rule Was: 'Shoot Everyone You See'" - DER SPIEGEL

Very tough read... had me in tears. Can read on archive if paywalled.

It's everyone's favorite day of the week, "Ask A (Anti-Zionist) Jew" Wednesday!

Ask whatever you want to know, within the sub rules, notably that this is not a debate sub and do not import drama from other subreddits. That aside, have fun! We love to dialogue with our non-Jewish siblings.

Please remember to pick an appropriate user-flair in order to participate! Thanks!

Hey there! As a leftist I see a significant portion of activism as actively calling out bigotry, racism, and other forms of hatred. Now, one of the fundemental principles of Jewish spirituality, as put in the book of mishlei -

כַּמַּיִם הַפָּנִים לַפָּנִים כֵּן לֵב הָאָדָם לָאָדָם

And reflected in teachings of Ba'al shem-Tov, Rambam, and other great spiritual leaders, is that all evil you see in other people is evil that exists within you. Do you see those two as conflating? How do you navigate that?