On the nationalists - Adam Sutcliffe in TLS:

‘Israel has always struggled to find friends in the formerly colonized world, but since October 2023 the politics of the Middle East conflict have, Mishra argues, become more starkly racialized. Western leaders have been far more responsive to the suffering of Ukrainians than that of Gazans. In the American congressional primaries last year, pro-Israel organizations spent more than $25 million on campaign adverts to bring down Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, leading Black supporters of the Palestinian cause. At Harvard and many other American universities, campaigns to shut down pro-Palestinian activism, in response to allegations of antisemitism, have intertwined with opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, on the grounds that DEI prioritizes anti-Black over anti-Jewish prejudices.’

(…)

‘American Jewish leaders mostly followed their lead, ascribing to Hamas responsibility for all the killing on both sides. In many American Jewish communities, Beinart writes, “suggesting that October 7 stems from anything but Hamas’s pure evil is a ticket to excommunication”. The murders and abductions of that day have been recalled repeatedly in rabbinical sermons and at community events, while the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths are mentioned little, if at all. The implied message, says Beinart, is that “our lives matter in a way that theirs do not”.’

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‘The overwhelmingly dominant call since October 2023 has been for the IDF to leave Gaza and stop bombing it. (There is much less agreement on what should happen after that.) Horvilleur mentions briefly, alongside Israeli suffering, the “sobs of Palestinian mothers” and “the ruins of Gaza”, but she doesn’t discuss the actions – egged on by the far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet – that led to the sobbing and the ruination. It is not clear how literally we should take her hearing of “Free Palestine” as a call for the mass killing of Jews, given her self-diagnosis as being gripped by “Jewish paranoia”.’

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‘If Jews presented Judaism as a humdrum hobby, this approach might even, Kahn-Harris suggests, dial down the relentless global attention on the Middle East conflict, contributing to a calmer environment more conducive to peacemaking.’

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‘Israel, while asserting its normality, also used to project itself as “a light unto the nations”. Its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, used this phrase from the Book of Isaiah to trumpet his country’s moral exemplarity and its bridging role between continents and civilizations. Today, however, Israel is a light unto the nationalists. Its admirers on the far right watch with fascination as it treats the Palestinians with a level of force that they can only dream of meting out to their own minorities. For Indian Hindu supremacists, Israel has become, in Mishra’s words, “an example of how to deal with Muslims in the only language they understood: that of force and more force”.
This increasingly stark political alignment is uncomfortable for many instinctually Zionist Jews and is intensifying the intellectual and ethical civil war that is dividing diaspora communities. This dispute most fundamentally pits the “light unto the nations” conception of Jewishness – the idea that the universal betterment of humanity lies at the core of Jewish values and purpose – against the single-minded focus on Jewish strength and self-assertion that makes the policies of Netanyahu’s government such an alluring model for nationalists everywhere.’

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‘In the darkness, Pankaj Mishra salutes “two beacons”. One is PalFest, which brought him to Palestine in 2008 and has since organized an annual literary festival there, expanding the awareness of visitors and challenging the isolation of Palestinians. The other is Jewish Voice for Peace, which rallies American Jewish Palestine solidarity activism behind the slogan “never again for anyone”.’

Read the review here.

Yes, what is Jewishness, especially when religion has become a ‘hum drum hobby’. Of course, there is the Shoah, and the celebration of your own paranoia, this peculiarity can also be found among other minorities, perhaps Jewishness is universal humanism plus Hanukah and Passover? Indeed, humanism is universal by nature, at least in theory.

As to the beacons of hope, I hope for better beacons.

And never again for anybody is a beautiful, but also: tell this to the people in Congo.

The best line is this, Israel has become a light unto the nationalists.
Carl Schmitt would have been proud to be an Israeli in 2025.

The heritage of the Shoah turned out to be not soft power and brotherly love for refugees.
But let’s say, quite the opposite.
As a political scientist said, after three generations memory fades away and people a ready for a new war. In the case of the US perhaps we should add: the Americans are ready for a new empire.

They became bored with being the center of the universe.