Well, the latest of these incessant polls concerning the Nov. 4 election for the mayoralty of New York are in, having arrived Thursday, Oct. 30, and if the story has changed it is only for the better. A new Emerson College survey puts Zohran Mamdani, front runner from the start, 25 percentage points ahead of Andrew Cuomo, his nearest challenger. This is a gain of 7 percentage points since the previous Emerson poll, conducted in September.

The other survey, run by Marist University, has Mamdani leading by 16 percentage points in a race against Cuomo and, yet farther back on the track, the beret-sporting Curtis Sliwa. If the latter drops and his voters migrate as expected, Cuomo stands to narrow Mamdani’s lead to 7 points. But a margin of this size looks good only against Mamdani’s gaping lead over many months. These polls were published, to finish the point, six days before the election, early voting having already begun. Good night and good luck, you have to say to the politically shopworn Cuomo, who chose to run as an independent once it was clear there was no point contesting Mamdani to head the Democratic ticket.

We all remember the shock when, nine Novembers ago, Donald Trump triumphed and the Clinton campaign had to send all the Champagne back to the liquor store. For those of a certain age, there is the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman� headline the Chicago Tribune ran the morning after Harry Truman upset Thomas Dewey to be elected, 77 Novembers ago, America’s 33^rd president. These things happen.

But I haven’t heard of anyone who does not expect Mamdani to be declared New York’s newest mayor come next week.

Democratic Socialist, “progressive� par excellence, conscientious Muslim, exclusively educated offspring of a scholar noted for his anticolonial, anti-imperialist writings (under whom I briefly studied decades ago), altogether an intellectual in a nation what don’t like them intellectuals: You would not think such a figure would do well on the hustings, especially amid the gritty cut-and-thrust of New York City politics. And it has indeed been a slog, at times not short of brutal, since this 34–year old state assemblyman serving a working-class district in Queens began his run for City Hall a year ago last month on Oct. 23, 2024.

Altogether properly, Mamdani’s essential platform rests on those issues any serious candidate owes it to voters to address. In his case these have to do in large part — no surprise here — with how New Yorkers might still afford to live in a city, theirs, whose character and survivability have been transformed for the worse by real estate, financial and corporate interests. In this respect the 2025 race for the mayor’s office comes to a confrontation. There are a lot of ways this election has never been about New York’s five boroughs alone, and this, the sharpening contradiction between capital and society you find all over the country, is one of them.

Free bus lines, city-run grocery stores, free childcare, an ambitious housing program, a $30 minimum wage by the end of the decade: These are the prominent planks in Mamdani’s platform, and they, a menu of “progressive� causes, account for much of his appeal. And this alone was enough to get the capitalist class out of their seats from the very start of Mamdani’s campaign.

But there were, also from the beginning, larger matters on Mamdani’s mind, mentioned often in his speeches and interviews. He is vigorously supportive of the Palestinian cause. Lately he has spoken forcefully against the Islamophobia still abroad among us. “Genocide� is a term he uses often and without hesitation. Early on he said that, when he made it to City Hall, New York would arrest Bibi Netanyahu were the Israeli prime minister to set foot inside the city limits. Mamdani’s reasoning is significant on this last question. “This is a city that believes in international law,� he said while the U.N. General Assembly was in session last August. There is a largeness in this we ought not miss.

This side of Mamdani also drew voters to his side, especially but not only young ones. Max Blumenthal put it this way in an interesting interview with Nima Alkhorshid’s Dialogue Works program the other day: “New York is a magnet for young people who see Palestine as the moral test of our time. You have this new class, along with many native New Yorkers, who are rejecting the Zionist politics of the past, which have predominated in New York for decades.�

Mamdani’s mildly social democratic plans for the city and his position on what a lot of us consider, but precisely, the moral test of our time have got him two things. He has earned a ferociously loyal following, with campaign volunteers numbering in the tens of thousands, that has used social media and ordinary doorstepping to nickel-plate his lead. And he has precipitated what I count the most shamelessly debased smear campaign in New York politics in my (somewhat lengthy) lifetime.

Raw racism, Red-baiting — believe it, President Trump calls Mamdani a communist and says he should be deported — are by now common fare among Mamdani’s evidently desperate adversaries. Yet more so is the egregiously Islamophobic propaganda — offensive and risible in roughly equal measure but also (see the above numbers) hopelessly ineffective. American Zionists, Israeli Zionists, American–Israeli Zionists and Zionist symps of all sorts have been especially panicked, given New York has more Jews than any other city in the world and as such serves as the epicenter of the Zionist presence in the United States (unless we count AIPAC’s offices in Washington).

There are two patterns here worth noting.

One, and as others have remarked, the Zionist lobbies appear to have given up urging the world to like Israel and so have turned four-square to urging the world to hate Muslims. The Islamophobic campaign against Mamdani — more vicious, I would say, than anything we saw after the 9.11 attacks — reflects this.

Two, as the election day draws near, the freak-out in that dreadful nexus of Zionist fanatics and capitalist greedheads has reached a point of near-incoherence — Mamdani will impose Sharia law on New York; Mamdani would welcome another 9/11 attack; the antisemitic Mamdani’s victory will imperil Jews everywhere: It is all out there. The New York Post is a cesspit of this stuff. Its headline slang for Mamdani, true to right-wing tabloid style, are “Zo� and “Mam.� Better get used to it.

The taker of the cake for my money is an AI–generated video the Cuomo campaign put out Oct. 22, featuring a collection of the crudest imaginable racist caricatures labeled “criminals for Zohran Mamdani� — a drug dealer, a black shoplifter in a keffiyeh, a pimp, and so on — all minorities or underclass white “deplorables,� of course, all delighted that Mamdani will be their mayor. Cuomo’s people quickly deleted the video, but it’s the thought that counts, as they say. It seems to have been captured numerous times and continues to circulate. So it should: This guy is unadulterated gutter grime; Cuomo’s father, the mostly honorable Mario, must be spinning.

28 OCTOBER—Catherine Connolly has such a sweet Irish face—broad and open, bright eyes with a touch of sadness about them, always either smiling or about to give the world one. She has Irish politics, too, this daughter of Galway: Ireland’s tenth president, elected last Friday, draws directly from the collective memory of Britain’s long, cruel colonization of her people when she condemns apartheid Israel’s long, cruel colonization of Palestinians. So do her voters: She had the support of 63 percent of them.

History does this sometimes, providing power does not bury it: Its bleak, violent chapters can induce among the living a heightened consciousness of and commitment to justice. This is among the many things that distinguish the Irish. Connolly calls the Zionist regime’s genocide just what it is and recognizes Hamas as “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people�—a liberation movement by any other name. Could she have expressed such an understanding so forthrightly had the Irish Republican Army not been part of the fabric of the Irish people all those years?

I read Connolly’s rise from the Dáil (where she was deputy speaker) to the Irish presidency as marking a progression in global politics we ought not miss. How to put this? The world has been turning against the Israeli terror regime since it began its spree of murder and starvation two Octobers ago. Now it is doing so decisively, so finding its collective voice at last. What you have heard ever more loudly on many streets these past two years you now hear at the highest levels of government. There is momentum, I mean to say, and it is in the right direction. Only in America is this not so—a point to which I will return.

Connolly’s election has reportedly prompted many Israelis to pledge never to set foot on the Emerald Isle. Brilliant: Israeli Zionists are joining in the urgent work of isolating Israeli Zionists. However many stay away, Ireland will be better off for each one.

There is a fleck of history here, too. As you may recall, the Irish were very quick to denounce the Israelis’ campaign of terror two autumns ago. By the end of 2023 there were left-wing calls in the Dáil to expel Dana Erlich, Tel Aviv’s predictably repellent ambassador. A few months later, in May 2024, Ireland formally recognized Palestinian sovereignty. At the end of that year the Netanyahu regime finally gave up. Its Foreign Ministry cited “the extreme anti–Israel policies of the Irish government� as it recalled Erlich and closed its embassy in Dublin.

Ireland’s anticolonial, anti-imperialist tradition and its reflexive sympathy for the oppressed are impossible to miss and, notably, never seem to bend in the wind. This makes me think Connolly’s voice is likely to prove especially strong—is “acute� my word?—on the Palestine question. But she jumps onto a moving train, let us not forget. The momentum just noted has been gathering for some time and now appears to be reaching critical mass.

My routine wanderings around “X� are a daily reminder of this reality. Here is a catalog—random, of greater and lesser magnitude, incomplete, in no particular order—gathered just over the past few days:

¶ Norway and Bibi’s arrest warrant. Twenty-two hours before I began this piece Norway reportedly issued “a strong call for the immediate arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.� I do not know who constitutes “Norway� in this case, but I think we can count this so: The Foreign Ministry has put out a statement confirming Oslo’s commitment to the rulings of the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu last November. Reminder: The Ministry announced in August, as Bibi was preparing to overfly Europe en route to the U.N. General Assembly, that it would arrest him if he set foot in Norway.

¶ Starmer is named. In Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime, a report issued by the U.N. on 20 October and signed by Francesca Albanese, the British prime minister is specifically cited for his complicity in Israel’s terror campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. “On 9 October 2023, immediately after Israel announced a tightened siege on Gaza,� the report reads, “key Western leaders expressed support for the ‘self-defence’ of Israel… British opposition leader Keir Starmer defended Israel’s right to cut off water and power to civilians.�

¶ Spain’s arms embargo in action. Spain just opened a criminal investigation into Sidenor, the Spanish steelmaker, for selling product to Israel Military Industries, a subsidiary of the infamous Elbit Systems. This is the first major enforcement of the comprehensive arms embargo the Spanish Parliament just passed into law.

¶ The noose tightens. Late last week Banco Sabadell, a major Spanish institution, began freezing the accounts of Israelis, requiring them to sign declarations confirming they do no business with Israeli settlements. A bank official said all transactions involving Israelis must henceforth be approved by the bank’s compliance department.

¶ B.D.S. in action. Pizza Hut U.K. has announced it has closed 68 shops and 11 delivery sites: A boycott of the company in response to its business in Israel has forced it into a restructuring.

¶ The dual-loyalty scam. “People who serve in the Israeli military should be deported,� Tucker Carlson declared in an interview Wednesday. “You can’t fight for another country and remain American.� Finally it is said.

¶ A critical mass. Priests Against Genocide, which represents 1,200 Roman Catholic clerics, recently organized a march on the Italian parliament, where one priest said Mass while draped in a Palestinian flag. His sermon matched his vestments.

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If these items seem a touch all-over-the-place, this is by design. My intent is simply to suggest what shapes up as a sort of all-of-society swell of objection we find in one or another form in many places. Any reader can add many of his or her own simply by skating around social media.

Catherine Connolly joins others in the highest offices—notably but not only Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, and the wonderful Gustavo Petro, the former liberation fighter now serving so honorably as Colombia’s president. Connolly’s ascent to their ranks signals that we are at the brink of a takeoff point, to borrow a term from the economists. This is my judgment. When we speak of a worldwide anti–Israel movement, we speak of one that begins to accumulate the power of nations behind it.

As we assess the current circumstance, we ought to bear the South African case in mind. When the Afrikaner regime finally fell, in 1994, it was primarily because its internal contradictions had become too many and too formidable. The apartheid system was no longer sustainable. The anti-apartheid movement accumulated its power gradually over many years—the movement against the Zionist state has gathered force much faster, if not fast enough—but the anti-apartheid cause eventually proved its effectiveness. The international pressure it exerted was among the stresses the Afrikaners could no longer bear.

Let us take the lessons this history offers.

The empty chairs at the table belong to the Americans. While Connolly joins Petro, Sánchez, et al. in high office, look at the Trump regime. The president, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and the others on Trump’s foreign policy “team� are by comparison monsters diametrically out of touch with the world, the zeitgeist, of another time, of another cause—a cause other than the human cause.

What a big game Volodymyr Zelensky talked before his latest little while in the Oval Office last Friday.

The Ukrainian president (who is no longer legitimately the Ukrainian president) arrived for another summit with President Trump with a shopping list of air defense and weapons systems worth $90 billion.

Yes, $90 billion. This compares with $128 billion the United States has already given Ukraine since the Russian intervention began in February 2022, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report dated July 15, 2025.

Playing to Trump’s penchant for keeping everything business, Zelensky said Ukraine would purchase all the new hardware in what he called “a mega deal.� What nonsense. Kiev is flat broke. How could the regime possibly pay for new weapons and matériel?

Would Kiev write Washington a check out of funds Washington has previously sent? Or does Zelensky mean NATO, which is supposed to buy American weaponry to pass on to Ukraine, will finance his shopping list? Zelensky now speaks for the European end of the Atlantic alliance, is it?

The only other thought I have is that the Zelensky regime intends to pay for the new gear with the billions of euros the Europeans promise to send Kiev — the billions, that is, the Europeans now plan to steal from Russia’s frozen assets. But that money is supposed to keep Kiev in pencils and paper clips for a short while longer.

Oh, what tangled webs these people weave. Or propose to weave.

But the hopelessly corrupt Zelensky had more than a 70 percent raise on his mind when he arrived in Washington. The master importunist also wanted an unstated number — let’s just say a lot — of Tomahawk missiles atop this.

Tomahawks, long-range missiles capable of a nuclear payload, go for $2 million to $2.5 million apiece, and by the reporting I have seen the idea was Trump would send these gratis. Reflecting Zelensky’s confidence that the Trumpster would oblige him, he, Zelensky, actually visited Raytheon, the Tomahawk’s maker, before his session at the White House.

This is a crook with nerve: You have to give Volodymyr this much.

More weapons, fewer talks: This was the Kiev regime’s clever-sounding but very stupid formula as Zelensky prepared to shake the bowl once again. Time to start hitting Russian targets relentlessly. It is the only way to get Moscow seriously to negotiate an end to the war. This is the latest line.

In the event, Zelensky’s time in the Oval Office was not as awkward as that mess he made when he first met Trump last February. But it was in that direction. The protocol people seated Vlod so his back was to the journalists covering the event — a subtle but unmistakable dis, this. And when Zelensky briefed media afterward, they made him do so outside the White House.

Trump Axes the Tomahawks

No Tomahawks for Volod, then, at least none now. Trump made this clear before, during and after his time with the Ukrainian mooch. The fate of the rest on Zelensky’s list is unclear, but my guess is Kiev will get what the Europeans buy from U.S. weapons makers and send south across the Polish border.

The decisive moment in this — the decisive two hours, this is to say — came a day before Zelensky’s White House visit, when Trump took a call from Vladimir Putin and spent as many hours talking to the Russian president. By all accounts Trump’s then-pending decision on the Tomahawks question took up a considerable part of the exchange.

Trump’s comments afterward testify to this. “Tomahawk is a vicious, offensive, incredibly destructive weapon,� he said immediately following the call. “Nobody wants Tomahawks shot at them.�

Speaking just as he began talks with Zelensky, Trump remarked, “Hopefully we will be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks.�

The argument is commonly made that Donald Trump thinks and believes what the last person he has spoken to tells him is so. And fair enough: Trump is plainly a man of shallow intellect and has no sound judgment in matters of state.

The easy out for this kind of person is to repeat with faux-conviction the views of anyone whose judgments, whatever they may be, are respected. But to suggest that Putin has an easy time “playing� Trump in this fashion, as do mainstream media and those whose views these media faithfully reflect, is a cynical dodge.

You get cast into the darkness for saying this, but never mind that: Vladimir Putin is a demonstrably accomplished statesman, and he is the only principal in the Ukraine crisis who makes a credible case for an enduring settlement — this not only between Moscow and Kiev but between Russia and the West.

The security of one nation cannot be established at the expense of the security of any other nation: This is basic to sound diplomacy and is the core of Moscow’s case. This is what Putin and those in his national security circle mean when they insist on addressing root causes.

As the late Stephen F. Cohen taught me years ago, Russia’s position vis-à-vis the West is not about spheres of influence, which we can count a 19^th century anachronism: It is about spheres of security, and you cannot name a nation that does not shape its foreign policies with this as an objective.

Tomahawks & Perilous Escalation

As to the Tomahawks, Putin, as well-reported, advised Trump that shipping Tomahawks to a regime as irresponsible as Kiev would fundamentally damage any prospect of a restoration in U.S.–Russian relations and force an escalation of the war.

This is so, not least but not only because the Russians would not be able to tell if an incoming missile bore a nuclear warhead. It would take Americans, equally, to operate them as the Ukrainians cannot do so on their own.

Tell me, was it sensible of Putin to urge Trump not to send the Ukrainians Tomahawks, or are we supposed to think of this some other way?

It is very tiresome at this point to read the mainstream press describe the Russian position. “Monotonous� may be my better word.

The Washington Post: Russia manipulates Trump “by continually dangling hopes of peace deal while it ramps up attacks.� And: “Russia rules out a ceasefire so that fighting can continue.� And: “Putin has refused to offer concessions.�

The New York Times: “Russia rebuffs President Trump’s diplomatic push.� And: “… Moscow’s decision to spurn negotiations while ramping up deadly attacks.�

None of this is true, of course — not an f–ing word of it. All this repetitive language is deployed merely to avoid stating Moscow’s true position. It is too sound for that — too much in the cause of a peace to the benefit of all sides.

I do not like the sound of that $90 billion number Zelensky and his people put about before the Oval Office encounter last week. The extravagance of it suggests that the Zelensky regime and the Europeans — and the Euros serve as his North Star now, given they are mutually delusional — intend the war with Russia to go on indefinitely, never mind Ukraine and its Western sponsors lost it a long time back.

Life on Desperation Row, let’s call this.

Trump is now scheduled to meet Putin for another summit in two weeks’ time, this one in Budapest. I see little coming of it.

In my read, the Trumpster may have grasped the validity of the Russian view of the war and its resolution as far back as the Alaska summit in mid–August. There is no knowing this, of course.

The grim reality is that it is unlikely to matter either way: There are too many constituencies with an interest in keeping the Ukraine conflict going.

It is one of those cases wherein it would be a very good thing to be wrong.

I have been reading a lot these past days about how the Israelis treated those they detained when they illegally boarded the vessels that comprised the now-famous aid flotilla that never made it to Gaza’s shores. The Irish — naturally, given their bitter familiarity with imperial aggressions — gave fulsome accounts of the gratuitous brutality they endured while in Ktzi’ot Prison. Barry Heneghan, a member of the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish legislature, reported afterward that he was “treated like an animal.� Liam Cunningham and Tadhg Hickey, actors and activists, described how they were kicked, spat upon, slapped, zip-tied and left in the beating Negev Desert sun.

Nothing comes close to the account of her detention Greta Thunberg gave on Oct. 15 to Lisa Röstlund, a reporter for Aftonbladet, a Stockholm daily. This comes to me via Caitlin Johnstone, that Australian force of nature, who published machine-translated extracts in her newsletter the same day Röstlund’s interview with the courageous Swedish activist came out. I had already read of the dehydration, the purposely foul prison food, the bedbugs, the refusal of medical care. Now Thunberg gives the world a long list of “monstrous abuses� — Johnstone’s summarizing phrase — that is beyond infra dig.

Dragged by her hair, incessantly punched and kicked, stripped naked, wrapped in an Israeli flag, sexually humiliated in her own language (lilla hora, “little whore;� hora Greta, “Greta whore�), threatened with gassing (revealing detail, this), uniformed guards all the while taking “selfie� photographs as they stand next to her laughing and jeering: What is this about, what the purpose here?

“They’re like five-year-olds!� Thunberg exclaimed to Röstlund as she recounted all this. No, that’s not it, Greta. They’re like Zionists.

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As I read Thunberg’s account of her surely criminal mistreatment, my mind went to what may seem the unlikeliest places. I thought of that racist rampage Zionist spectators set themselves upon when they were in Amsterdam a year ago next month to cheer on Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli soccer club, as it faced off with Ajax. (The famous Dutch side trounced Maccabi, 5–0.) And then I thought of Bibi Netanyahu, who has the habit of boasting that he can control the United States and, lately and more specifically, Donald Trump. Al Jazeera reported on this 15 years ago. Max Blumenthal has more recently published various analyses to this effect in The Grayzone. And then I thought of all the terror Israeli soldiers and pilots have inflicted in plain view on the Palestinians of Gaza.

I described the treatment of Greta Thunberg and the other aid flotilla sailors detained at Ktzi’ot as “gratuitous brutality.� I take this back. There was nothing gratuitous in the conduct of Israeli prison guards in that case. Neither was there anything gratuitous about the frenzied riot of Israeli spectators in Amsterdam last November 8 and in days following. Nor in the Israeli prime minister’s more or less public boasts of the power he exerts over the White House. Nor, for that matter, in the stomach-turning spectacle of Israeli soldiers taking delight in their crimes against Gazans.

No, there is a public-display dimension to all of these cases of overreach and barbarism. The conduct of Zionists is meant to be seen — the more unacceptable it may be to civilized sensibilities the more this seems to be so. Those who tormented Greta Thunberg and her colleagues knew the world was watching and wanted the world to watch. When Maccabi spectators ran amok through Amsterdam’s streets shouting “Kill the Arabs,� “Fuck you, Palestine,� “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,� “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs� and other such niceties, they wanted the world to hear them.

So far as I understand the term, these are examples — extreme cases, surely, but cases nonetheless — of what was known in ancient Hebrew as khátaf, later coming out in Yiddish as khutspe and then entered English (apparently in the late 19^th century, just as the Zionist movement gained momentum) as chutzpah. This term describes a certain kind of conduct toward others and has lots of different definitions. Those possessed of chutzpah are variously impudent, brazen, audacious, abusive or, as the saying goes, have a lot of gall. Arrogance and the presumption of superiority are implicit in the term.

I will add another connotation for the sake of my point, although I think it holds up well beyond my point. To display one’s chutzpah is to display one’s impunity. By this I mean the person of chutzpah is indifferent to norms. And, just as there is no point to chutzpah if no one can see it — of what use would that be? — the implication here is that one’s impunity must be perfectly evident to all others and the person of chutzpah must be indifferent to what all others may think.

In history chutzpah has been variously cast as an admirable trait in the mode of “gotta be me,� and alternatively as an odious disregard for others. I have always been of the latter persuasion. I find chutzpah in any manifestation — whether it is a case of table manners, the conduct of public discourse, or any other small thing — repellent. It is one thing to liberate oneself from deadening orthodoxies. It is altogether another to hold oneself, garishly and abusively, above others.

There are many ways to think about what the Zionist regime has done these past two years, or about what prison guards did to Greta Thunberg, or how Israeli soccer fans behaved in Amsterdam or how Bibi shows off his power over the United States. There is history, there is politics, there is geopolitics, there is the inherent insecurity of a small nation in a region hostile to it since the violence associated with its founding. There is no dismissing any of this.

But I have been convinced these past two years that something larger is at issue. Israel proposes to live and act in the community of nations, I mean to say, not according to law or what we know as morality or common forms of decency but according to what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination in the name of a righteous presumption of superiority. And with Zionist-nationalist fanatics now in control of the country’s direction, Israel has chosen this moment to insist that the world beyond its borders swallow this project as legitimate in the 21^st century.

This is the ultimate in chutzpah, in my interpretation, and as a psychological and characterological question we ought to understand it as such. This phenomenon cannot be understood as distinct from Israel’s idea of itself as exceptional and as the earthly expression of a chosen people. What we know as chutzpah reflects both.

In this connection, the events in Amsterdam a year ago confirmed for me what had been until then an inchoate judgment. As I wrote at the time (in the above-linked piece) of the Israeli soccer hooligans and the vigorous local demonstrations against them:

Headline in the Sunday editions of The New York Times: “A New Test for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?�

What a question. Let us set aside our indignation and think about this.

The piece below this head is by David Halbfinger, whose trade over the years has been to appear balanced when covering the Zionist state while glossing its past, which is wall-to-wall condemnable, and faithfully apologizing for its present, which — need this be said — is also wall-to-wall condemnable.

David Halbfinger, who has just begun his second tour as the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, in action:

“The war in Gaza may finally be ending, after two years of bloodshed and destruction. But among the damage that has been done is a series of devastating blows to Israel’s relationship with the citizens of its most important and most stalwart ally, the United States.

Israel’s reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on college campuses or among progressives….

The question is whether those younger Americans will be lost to Israel long- term — and what Israel’s advocates will do to try to reverse that.�

Halbfinger proceeds to quote none of “those younger Americans,� or anyone else of any age who stands forthrightly against “the Jewish state� in response to the campaign of terror, murder and starvation it has conducted against the civilian population of Gaza these past two years.

No, his sources are professors, think-tank inhabitants and, of course, Israeli Zionists, American Zionists and in two cases Israeli–American Zionists — the good old divided-loyalties crowd.

Halbfinger quotes Shibley Telhami, an Arab–Israeli scholar with safe harbors at The Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland, to this effect:

“We now have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a Pearl Harbor generation. There’s this growing sense among people that what they’re witnessing is genocide in real time, amplified by new media, which we didn’t have in Vietnam. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as a villain. And I don’t think that’s likely to go away.�

This is an astute bit of historical context, I find — worthy of further exploration. And I am with Telhami: There is no persuading Americans — a majority, to go by recent polls — that the atrocities of the past two years are to be forgiven and forgotten. The thought is ridiculous.

But Halbfinger takes Telhami’s interesting observation no further. It stands only as what we can call “the problem.� He, Halbfinger, devotes the rest of his report to the thoughts of those trying to figure out how to make the Zionist regime look good again — or rid it of “a bad odor,� as one of these people puts it.

One of Halbfinger’s sources — Halie Soifer, chief exec at the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which supports Democratic political candidates “who share our core values� — is looking for “a bit of a reset in the way Israel is viewed.� Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli–American scholar, thinks “there is room for a bounce-back.�

Professor Scheindlin elaborates:

“People tend to overestimate how bad the damage has been. Just stopping the slaughter will allow some people to go back to their comfort zone of being supportive.�

Jeez, if I may invoke one of history’s most famous Jews. Bouncing back to the comfort zone, is it?

You see what is going on here, I trust.

I have anticipated for many months — no great insight in this — that when something like the end of Israel’s terror in Gaza comes there will be no thought among its allies in the West, and certainly none among its Zionist supporters, of any kind of reckoning in the name of justice.

No, a “war� will be over, not a racist campaign of annihilation, and certainly not a genocide. The highly honorable Cost of War Project at Brown University put out a paper on Oct. 7 reckoning total casualties in Gaza (killed and injured) at 236,505, “more than 10% of the pre-war population.� These are responsibly researched facts.

We know these facts. “It doesn’t take rocket science to grasp the picture,� Norman Finkelstein said in a lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts five days before the Netanyahu–Trump “peace plan� was announced.

He said: “Everyone at this point knows the picture — unless you have a material stake in lying to yourself and lying to others.�

‘Everyone Knows the Picture’

Yes, we know the picture and the facts, and we are invited to live with these facts without any kind of investigation, truth and reconciliation project, such as post-apartheid South Africa conducted in the late 1990s, or any other effort in behalf of restorative justice.

No, the invitation is to go back to our comfort zones while a regime of racist murderers continues on its way.

The liars propose to prevail, to put this point another way.

Whatever other purpose this commentary may serve, I use it to raise my voice in protest against this… this desecration of the human cause.

When I consider the project of the liars now my mind goes back to al–Nakba — further, indeed. David Ben–Gurion and others of his time acknowledged the injustice and the violence on which the State of Israel was founded in July 1948. “We have come and we have stolen their country,� Ben–Gurion remarked.

[“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?�

Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.]

There is no putting the point more truthfully. And all that has occurred since is the outcome of this, a covering up, a denial of the original sin.

And now again.

I do not mean to single out David Halbfinger — although by his record he arguably deserves it for all the blurring of the truth you find in his reporting on the Palestine question.

What he put in last Sunday’s Times is altogether what is going around now: another covering up, another denial of what a lot of people on both sides call “the second Nakba,� the sin atop the original sin. This is my point.

As if on auto-pilot, my mind goes to that famous remark Hegel made in the Introduction to his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

“But what experience and history teach is this,� the German giant wrote at some point shortly before he died in 1831, “that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.�

What we learn from history, in the common mis-translation, is that we do not learn from history. And now, as I say, once again.