Notices by Raphael Mimoun רפאל מימון (raph@social.coop), page 3

While Israelis were being beaten in Amsterdam, in the Gaza Strip dozens of people were killed indiscriminately, including many children, as they are every day. The daily pogroms in the West Bank and of course the war in Gaza were not compared to the Holocaust; the chair of Yad Vashem was not interviewed about them; no rescue force was dispatched to save their victims; Israel's foreign minister and Knesset speaker did not view them as a chance for a photo op.

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These pogroms happen every day and no one bothers to report most of them to you.

Israel set another record Thursday for the self-victimization it so very much enjoys, and the media set another record for the incitement, exaggeration, fearmongering and, above all, the concealment of information that doesn't fit the narrative, that its consumers enjoy. Amsterdam provided an unmissable opportunity: Once again, Jews are beaten in Europe.

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A Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fan related that just the day before he had visited the Anne Frank House – what a spine-chilling coincidence – and the radio host almost burst into tears. The right-wing, ultranationalist, German Israeli propaganda correspondent in Germany, Antonia Yamin, explained that "Europe does not understand the problem":

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In the last year, 300 members of a family from Khan Yunis came to Berlin and some of them are already known to the police. Gaza is to blame in Amsterdam, too. Yamin forgot, of course, to mention the hell this family had come from and who created it.

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That's how it is when you live in the warm, cozy bubble, completely disconnected from reality, in complete denial, that the Israeli media builds for us: We are always the victims and the only victims; there was a massacre only on October 7; all of Gaza is to blame; all of the Arabs are bloodthirsty; all of Europe is antisemitic. Do you have any doubt? See Kristallnacht in Amsterdam.

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An ugly, criminal pogrom against Israeli soccer fans took place in Amsterdam on Thursday. Similar pogroms, carried out by settlers, take place almost daily in the West Bank. The pogroms in Hawara, for example, surpassed in their scope and violence even Holocaust II in Amsterdam. The day after the pogrom in the Netherlands, violent settlers rampaged in Surif; two days before it, they rampaged in Al-Maniya.

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Full statement by Erev Rav, a Dutch Jewish group, about the violence in #Amsterdam that took place on Thursday night:

The city of Amsterdam deserves better. Erev Rav strongly condemns the Amsterdam police’s handling of recent events involving football fans over two consecutive nights in the city.

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We are deeply concerned that instead of restraining groups who caused disturbances in the city – including tearing down Palestinian flags from private residences and engaging in racist chanting – the police allowed the situation to escalate into widespread street violence. It is troubling that arrests were selective, primarily targeting local Moroccan youth who confronted these groups, while Maccabi fans who initiated provocations faced no consequences.

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There is such a thing as *the* correct take on what happened in Amsterdam, and this opinion piece by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy is the correct take. Pasting the whole text here for easy access.

The Amsterdam Attack Shows Israelis' Denial of the Reality They Created

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#Amsterdam #Israel #Palestine #Gaza

The Nakba didn't end in 1948, with the end of the war. Israel continued to enact it on Palestinians to assert its dominance, solidify its hold over the land, and judaize Israeli territory.

Just after 1948, Israeli colonization rested on 4 principles:

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#Israel #Palestine #Zionism #Nakba

Almost a century later, Kohn was right: Israel is a militaristic society that can only fathom responding to Palestinian grievances not with bayonets, but with M16s and F-35s.

Before Israel was born – before the Nakba, military occupation or settlements – Kohn had put a finger on why Zionism was bound to fail. This is what many anti-Zionist Jews are saying today, and what millions of Palestinians have been saying for a century.

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After resigning from the Palestine Foundation Fund, Kohn left Brit Shalom, an organisation he had cofounded 5 years earlier to advance the idea of a Jewish-Arab binational state. In 1934, he left Palestine for the United States, never to return.

Leaving Zionism was not easy. Kohn wrote: “Today I am almost forty years old, twenty of which – the very best years – I have devoted purely to Zionist work and thought. In a certain sense, thus, I feel orphaned. I do not know where to begin.”

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Kohn's experience speaks to me and so many other Jews turning away from Zionism: even after decades or work and commitment to a cause, we retain our freedom to step away, especially if we realize it to be unjust. Our commitment to justice can always take precedence over what our past selves believed, even if our community – and our loved ones – still believes in that cause.

But abandoning Zionism needn’t mean abandoning hope. Kohn called for future Jews to forge alternatives:

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Kohn continues:

“Having come to this country, we were duty bound to come up with constitutional proposals which, without doing serious harm to Arab rights and liberty, would have also allowed for our free cultural and social development. But for twelve years we pretended that the Arabs did not exist and were glad when we were not reminded of their existence.”

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In these circumstances, Palestinian violence – including the more gruesome acts committed during the riots – did not surprise him:

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Kohn continues, lashing out at the Zionist movement’s inability to learn from the horrors of the uprising:

“In the midst of this crisis, it was still possible to turn over a new leaf and to adopt a fresh attitude after the shock: to reappraise the moral and spiritual foundations of Zionism and to attempt a new solution. This opportunity has been missed. The overwhelming majority of Zionists feel justified in pursuing a course which I cannot follow.”

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Kohn foresaw that by responding to Palestinian grievances with armed force, the Zionist movement would become stuck in a downward spiral of violence and repression from which it would not be able to extricate itself:

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The British set up a commission to investigate the roots of the violence and concluded that Arab animosity was due to the fear that "by Jewish immigration and land purchases they may be deprived of their livelihood and in time pass under the political domination of the Jews".

In other words, the ambitions of the Zionist movement to promote mass Jewish immigration and take control of as much land as possible went against Palestinian aspirations to self-determination in their own country.

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The intensity of the violence shook Zionists. It was becoming clear that the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine was going to be a violent process.

One Zionist leader who was particularly shaken by the events of 1929 was Hans Kohn.

Kohn was born in Prague in 1891. He was a devoted Zionist by age 17, worked for Zionist groups in Europe, migrated to Palestine in 1925, and became a director at the Palestine Foundation Fund (financial arm of the World Zionist Organization).

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Three months after the riots, Kohn wrote a resignation letter to his colleagues at the Palestine Foundation Fund. This was months before the British investigative commission into the causes of the uprising, Kohn had already reached the same conclusions:

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