De Sade at Sde Teiman: When Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal

The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.

As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of Palestinian hostages.

From Knesset members to the distinguishably dumb panelists who festoon that country’s TV networks, “Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian [hostages] shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide.”

The crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over — these Israel has already de facto legalized in what passes for law in that thugocracy.

By the Middle East Monitor’s telling, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers.… One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”

Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by.

According to Truthout.org, at July’s end, the Knesset — Israel’s lawmakers, no less — was debating whether or not sexual abuse à la de Sade Teiman was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.): “Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the [rapist] reservists.”

I say Palestinian hostages, because most of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held indefinitely in Israel’s Gulag-like prison complex are held without charge under administrative detention — absent conventional due process of law. Originating in “English common law, and even the Magna Carta in 1215, due process encompasses procedural and substantive requirements,” and is very much an element of international law. Essentially, “no state” may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

To its patsy press, the AP, The Israeli military said Monday, July 29, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.”

Next, via Democracy Now’s account, “A right-wing mob, including members of the Knesset, broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.”

When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about mass rape by their enemies (read “Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film”), and raping Palestinian prisoners — the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law.

Halachic Right to Rape?

In both word and deed, Israelis have systematically and systemically agitated for the legal right to gravely mistreat their enemies, justifying the twisted sensibilities of their military and a plurality of their countrymen.

The canvassing I conducted in “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?”, a May essay, is seconded by Oren Ziv of the +972 Magazine. Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the [pro-rape] riots, and the apathy of the military police, all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ [rape] charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are ‘mainstream’ views in Israeli society.”

Mainstream approval in Israel of genocide, rape, and snuff-film production explains why one of the reservist rape perpetrators, like so many members of the Israeli security establishment, proudly pleads his case on a YouTube video. In Israel, he is a patriot. Crime is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the Israeli army. Yes, do not dub a first-degree felony a “war crime.” A crime is a crime is a crime. A criminal is a criminal. A serial killer, state or lone actor, must be stopped.

Across the occupied territories, the Israel Security State summarily detains people absent due process, often deploying rape as a weapon to shame traditional men and women, and it loots and demolishes their homes. You see, Lockean homesteading principles, by which many Palestinians have come to own ancient land, flouts the Israeli Administrative State. The Israel security forces commonly also steal Palestinian money at checkpoints, as Middle East Eye editor Daniel Hearst has attested in conversation with award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Both veteran reporters vouch for the veracity of the shakedown routines.

Silver-tongued Israelis and their Hasbara office at Foggy Bottom (The U.S. Department of State), in the persons of Matthew Miller for Crime Boss Antony Blinken, continue to deny this existential Palestinian reality, framing it as outlier cases. The “most moral military in the world” will investigate — itself.

But Israel is a lattice of lies.

A deception embedded deep in this lattice of lies is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself. Indeed, a new report authored by the aforementioned +972 Magazine, “for the human rights group Yesh Din, shows how the main role of Israel’s military law-enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”

In this case, the greater goal of Israel’s legal apparatus and jurisprudence is to fend off charges of genocide and war-crimes in international courts of law. Be mindful, then, that any investigation ever launched or any arrests made by Israeli authorities are symbolic, cursory, and inconsequential, part of a well-established strategy to safeguard the greater criminal enterprise.

Essentially, expect the Jewish State’s stooges (Alan Dershowitz in the lead) to be trotted out to huff and puff indignantly at the very notion that a manifestly lawless thug of a state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of unfathomable thuggery and cruelty, is incapable of investigating itself. Antisemitism.

Ultimately, Israel has become adept at narrative, at manufacturing mantras about its unsurpassed morality; this, as it is mired in illegality and criminality. (Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW,” in the essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged in the Mother of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting a Right to Genocide”.)

Metaphysically, the Midrashic force behind rape and the rest of the crimes informally institutionalized in this de Sade society often comes from the halachic top, from movers and shakers in Israeli moral precincts. In my June, 2024 essay “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-law Principles vs. National-interest Statism,” the delightful Rabbi Colonel Eyal Karim made a cameo:

“His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that ‘as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to … satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will….’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s own YnetNews.com.” Before Rabbi Karim, there was Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safad, who “urged a genocide in Gaza and excused rape by soldiers.”

As lamented in the opening to this essay you are reading, “One day flows into another, each indistinguishable from the next in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.” Hipper and more happening than the rape of Palestinians in Israeli prisons — that’s old news — is the use of Palestinian civilians, often children and the elderly, to clear potentially booby-trapped tunnels in Gaza. “Our lives are more important than theirs,” boasted members of the low-inhibition, atavistic Israeli death squads, just the other day.

Israel Einsatzgruppen’s horror du jour comes courtesy of a Haaretz investigation, which reveals that “Gazans not suspected of terrorism are detained and sent as human shields to search tunnels and houses before IDF soldiers enter, with the full knowledge of senior Israeli officers.” So say “several sources.”

Agile liars that they are, the “IDF claims this practice is forbidden.” (So it happened, and then was mildly protested?)

The things the Israelis tell us are so much eyewash: These people — this “bizarre specimen of moral laxity” — think that all of us lack the mental equipment to detect crude circular reasoning, such as that which Major Nir Dinar, an Israeli military spokesman, served up to the corrupt, sub-intelligent New York Times: The Israeli “military acts upon ‘operational necessity,’” Dinar vaporized in reply to an atrocity query. It “follows laws of war.” “Every target that is being eliminated, there is a good reason for that elimination.”

Major Nir Dinar is deploying Israel’s penchant for the backward-reasoning fallacy. To wit, if a Palestinian is dead by IDF, it is because he deserved to die, was a “terrorist.” But, “Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” observed Dr. Thomas Young, a philosopher, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”

The Nuremberg Defense

I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators all, express sadness over the fact that the IDF death squads will invariably suffer years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Please don’t! There is a glut of legal evidence for serving arrest warrants on hundreds of individual Israeli soldiers. If only there were some imaginary UN Marshal to enforce customary, international humanitarian laws prohibiting mass murder and genocide.

Neither should the Nuremberg defense, “I was only following orders,” be floated in mitigation of the IDF. The evidence is conclusive. IDF shoot and loot for fun. Pleased to dilate upon their crimes, IDF common criminals shared with the +972 Magazine that they “fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.” (I translated from the more brutal Hebrew version of the magazine article, whose Hebrew URL cannot be transposed here.)  

Nobody ordered the IDF to shoot kids in the head; they do it for the love of it, because of who they are. American volunteer surgeons Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa are the latest angels of mercy and morality to attest that “without a doubt” and with steeliness of purpose, Israeli ace snipers deliberately shoot Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at hearts and heads.

With every incriminating, choreographed TikTok or Instagram upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By volition, by the numbers. “What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans” was curated by the New York Times, belatedly. New snuff films come online every day courtesy of IDF dreck. “There is a new film,” announces one sneering Jewish supremacist. He names it “Crushed.” (Revealing is the soldier’s greeting, ahlan wa sahlan. It’s Arabic for “welcome.” To be cool, second handers like this soldier must culturally appropriate the local patois from the indigenous people.)

That the “Goyim” are clearly repulsed is no deterrent. The “Most Moral Army in the World” had been operating an “exclusive-content” “channel to share the gruesome killing of Palestinians.” This IDF-run public war-porn channel, out of Israel, served up content in which murder was sauced-up or overlaid by sex talk.

Essentially, snuff films.

As I had remarked before, such patterns of arousal — the commingling of serial killing and sex — are tied to psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among IDF soldiers. The channel, which catered to Israeli audiences, was called “72 Virgins – Uncensored.” The revelation came via Ha’aretz, an august Israeli news source.

The latest instantiation of Israeli society’s impenetrable, clannish sense of entitlement, borne of an imagined grant of divine rights, comes courtesy of journalist Mehdi Hasan’s documentary “Israel’s Reel Extremism.”

There is the familiar fare — IDF joyously vaporizing Palestinians, individuals, and building blocks as though in a video game; mocking their victims, invading their homes; filching from their businesses, and rummaging through the piteous intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed. Some acts of defilement are too lewd to recount.

Saturating the new “Reel Israel” IDF interviews is an attendant pride in criminal conduct. IDF hubris is expressed in snide, supercilious, self-satisfied, supremely confident, asinine quips. These speak to an unadulterated, manifestly unfounded sense of Jewish supremacy:

“I don’t see any problem with humiliating the Palestinians.“

“I don’t think there should be life in Gaza on the day-after.“

“If we have to kill a million [Palestinians]; then it’s a million.“

“Naturally, there is a sense of superiority. Daily I go about with a sense of superiority to Gaza. Who would not feel superior to the people of Gaza?“

Rape of hostages held in detention without charge, and the use of Palestinian children and the elderly, in combat, to clear Hamas tunnels — these IDF grotesqueries bleed “nicely” into extra-judicial assassination.

Ismail Haniyeh, formerly the fourth Palestinian prime minister and a leading political leader representing the Palestinians of Gaza, was executed extra-judicially — how else? — by rogue state Israel at the end of July.

As polls clearly show, Haniyeh enjoyed wide support among the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well, and was widely viewed among the people of the Arab world — not their ruling elites, who are puppets of the Axis of Genocide — as a political moderate and a uniter of Shia and Sunni. Haniyeh was also beloved of his immediate neighbors in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp, where he was raised.

According to historian Ilan Pape (starting at around 18 minutes into this Electronic Intifada interview), such repulsive executions have been part of the Israeli State’s founders’ modus operandi since its inception, and before. Here is a likely inexhaustive Wikipedia list of the “zombie state killer’s” extra-judicial kills over the years. “Eight other times had Israel been accused of assassinations in Iran.”

From diplomatic attachés, to university professors, to scientists, to thinkers and mere men of words — as in activists — to military men, to jailed prisoners, to resistance figures and fighters, and some just “unknown” collateral-damage, for-fun kills: You name them, Israel has targeted them.

As I pointed out in “The U.S. as the Globe’s Judge, Jury and Executioner,” a 2020 column dissecting the murder of Qassim Soleimani by America, “blind patriotism stateside is predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.”

Some say war criminal Netanyahu pushed for the 2020 murder of Soleimani, an Iranian major general. On the Axis of Genocide, with respect to extra-judicial, illegal assassinations, it is safe to say that, while America emulates Israel, Israel is a kingpin crime boss on this front. Israel is unmatched in picking off legitimate leaders with whom it doesn’t wish to liaise diplomatically. Theoretically, that is almost everyone.

Ismail Haniyeh, “who served as the third political leader of Hamas … [hailed] from a family of refugees expelled from historic Palestine during the Nakba in 1948. [H]e grew up in northern Gaza’s beachside al-Shati refugee camp. Haniyeh ascended through the ranks of Hamas, starting as the secretary to the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, and eventually leading its political bureau.”

“Israeli forces [had] bombed members of Haniyeh’s family in the al-Shati refugee camp twice, killing at least three of his sons, two grandchildren, his sister and around 10 other relatives.” (Middle East Eye) Yet, to publicly express sadness over the gratuitous taking of Palestinian life is verboten by the Axis of Genocide. Righteous commentators on the side of justice thus confine their comments to the strategic aftershocks of Haniyeh’s murder by the rabid-dog state — that he was, for example, also lead negotiator in the matter of the hostages, Palestinian and Israeli.

Alas, the saga of the Palestinians and their relentless leaders is also terribly sad. Haniyeh had lost upwards of 60 members of his family. He knew the risks of resistance and took them. Haniyeh’s murder, on Iranian territory, “came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on the Tuesday evening, killing three civilians,” as well as murdering another human being, “Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official and its leader Hasan Nasrallah’s close confidant.”

Hizballah represents a large swathe, not exclusively Shia, of Lebanese society. Established to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon — an aspiration shared by most Lebanese — Hizballah is a political party with a presence in the Lebanese Parliament and the unity government. It has become “a mainstay in the Lebanese polity.”

When Ismail al-Ghoul, a young Gazan journalist, and Rami al-Rifi, his cameraman (both “terrorists” by Israeli backward logic, given that they were between 16 and 50) went to report from Haniyeh’s humble home in the al-Shati refugee camp, where kids had congregated to commemorate their neighbor and the political leader of their resistance, Israel bombed the two to bits. As is the case with all journalists targeted by Israel, they were “in a clearly identifiable press vehicle when a missile directly hit them. It killed both reporters and a young boy walking by. The strike left young Ismail al-Ghoul headless.” (Mondoweiss)

Al-Ghoul’s colleague, Al Jazeera’s Gaza-based reporter Hind Khoudary, a reserved young woman whose courageous reporting I’ve watched for 10 months, broke down on air, inconsolable. Hind’s hopeless despair was that of one who has followed the rules, but found that those were no deterrents to Israel’s wanton — clearly intentional — vampiric slaughter of Gaza’s best, brightest, and bravest, young people in the full flowering of their vitality.

How could any half-decent woman who has born a child — Hind is but a child — watch this girl weep and not yearn to comfort her and keep her safe? A philosopher at Mondoweiss ventured something quite simple. Truth is often simple. “If someone … could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw.… If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.” (Good enough, although “awful” is toddler-level vocabulary.)

The Do-nothing BRICS (Except South Africa)

An “act of assassination”: China was quick to condemn the murder of Hamas’ political leader Haniyeh, who, as mentioned, had been acting as Israel’s lead interlocutor in hostage negotiations.

An “unacceptable political assassination,” seconded Russia’s foreign ministry. Türkiye’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, “condemned the assassination in Tehran and said the killing would not break Palestinians’ will.” (Reuters)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had pointed out, on July 17, 2024, that,

Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine on both sides of the conflict over the past 10 years since the [U.S. sponsored] state coup in February 2014. [Emphasis added.]

Correction, sir: These are the confirmed deaths, where Gaza’s pitifully diligent government has managed to faithfully tally each individual with his or her remains, so that relatives may lovingly shroud the bodies, some so tiny, weep over them and inter them.

At last count, then, more than 40,000 Palestinians had been murdered, 92,401 maimed, and more than 85 percent of the population displaced from their homes many times over. These are direct, confirmed casualties. In character, and ever late to its obligations, as I remarked in November of 2004 during America’s onslaught on Iraq — the august British medical journal The Lancet has finally, 10 months into a genocide, awoken to the Truth:

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. [Emphasis added.]

American Israel Idolaters are still claiming that all this is a tidy lie via the “Hamas-run government.” Coincidentally, this remnant of the government in Gaza is obviously “Hamas-run”; much like Israel’s government is Netanyahu-run, and as America’s government is Genocide-Joe fronted. The first is a crime boss, a Neolithic beast of a man. The last is a degenerate, corrupt, and demented old git. More so than these putrefying men does Hamas legitimately represent the Palestinians of Gaza — that is, if we are to listen to what Palestinians tell us.

Conditions in Gaza belie what our “lying eyes” tell us. I continue to recommend to you, dear reader, a variation on Richard Pryor’s wry wisdom about he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. The reader must thus believe his eyes, not the lying Israelis. The Israelis and their Israel-First American enablers are, plainly put, lying.

Gaza’s landscape is Gothically grotesque for what is says about the agents of destruction who’ve reduced it thus. It is also apocalyptic, IsraeHell having demolished most dwellings and displaced most of Gaza’s inhabitants many times over. The nylon dome is now their home.

Believe the evidence before your eyes, such as the July 2024 satellite imagery via of UNOSAT. “Gaza Strip 8th Comprehensive Damage Assessment,” imagery and analysis courtesy of the United Nations Satellite Centre, is already obsolete.

Once the “runaway Zombie Killing Machine” (Rami Khouri‘s coinage) is stopped, I believe it quite possible, given the scale of destruction, that as many as half-a-million Palestinians will have been exterminated, with America at Israel’s elbow, and only the faintest protest. The IDF, with near-full acquiescence from a plurality of its own countrymen, has, so far, likely killed hundreds-upon-thousands of Palestinians, directly, via blitzkriegs ongoing, and indirectly. And it continues to murder daily guided by a quest for a Final Solution to its Palestinian Problem.

BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with BRICS announcing the admission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia as new member states) might want to consider an urgent course of action to stop Israel — an amoral, pornographically violent terrorist state by any other name — or their leaders will be next. I venture that dissidents, activists, or writers (whose careers have not yet been destroyed decades ago by Israel First neoconservatives), are in danger, all, of death by demon state.

“Topography of Cruelty”

With Israeli flesh merchants inflicting a new level of the grotesque on the Palestinians every day, the totem nouns and adjectives used to describe Israel fail.

Thus, as is the custom in these essays of mine, let us cede to the heroes who help bear witness to some of Israel’s handiwork.

Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa have witnessed the Israel-created “topography of cruelty” and the deliberate creation of famine in Gaza. Picture, if you can, the static sight of “thousands and thousands of semi-trucks parked alongside the highway for nearly 30 miles … convoys of lifesaving aid turned into static walls.”

By Israel.

Upon that “topography of cruelty” these two humanitarian surgeons have laid healing hands in the operating room:

We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.” [Emphasis added.]

In just a couple of weeks, Mark Perlmutter said he saw more carnage inflicted upon civilians than he had in the combined total of his previous 30 years of humanitarian visits to war-zones around the world.

The account rendered by these humanitarian surgeons is titled “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.” Images accompany the account. Yes, little Juri is beautiful. The oxygen mask does nothing to conceal the delicate sweep of her dark eyebrows, which frame the largest eyes imaginable, fringed with black lashes. Should she survive debridement and be given the many surgeries she requires, Juri will live with a colostomy and “a lifetime of severe and permanent disability.” Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s teaching hospitals, and specialized pediatric Intensive Care Units. Juri’s chances and those of tens of thousands like her are slim. (Juri shown below, photo by Feroze Sidhwa.)

The next screen-picture captures the devolution of Tamer, a young Palestinian nurse, over three encounters with Israel. In the first image, Tamer’s leg has been blown to bits, but he is still otherwise youthful, handsome. In the next two images, following detention and torture by his Israeli tormentors, we see a husk, a man who is a shadow of the first image. An eye is missing. The man in the wheelchair’s wasted legs can no longer ambulate. (Images from Tamer’s Facebook feed.)

Some of What Palestinians Taught Me

In Mehdi Hasan’s “Israel’s Reel Extremism,” the new documentary mentioned, Israeli society’s best and brightest reveal their staggering pomposity. With jollity and bonhomie, 33 seconds into the Reel Israel’s trailer, a smug young Israeli invites us to stare into a … cavernous emptiness. He says:

“Naturally, there is a sense of superiority. Daily I go about with a sense of superiority to Gaza. Who would not feel superior to the people of Gaza?”

Far from feeling superior to the People of Gaza, I am humbled by them. In my homeward journey away from all things Israel, since October 7, I have made it my mission to learn all I can by observing Palestinians and Israelis through every prism available to me. I’ve studied both peoples as closely as is humanly possible for 10 months.

In the process, I have learned as much as I have unlearned about both peoples.

My matured impression is that Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians are temperamental opposites. Jewish Israelis — they truly hate Palestinians — give vent to their loathing in the hurried cadence of the histrionic. They are excitable, congenitally irrational, and pathologically solipsistic in their me-me; us-vs-them monomania. It is fitting that Israel’s verbally flatulent “cognoscente” and TV vulgarians (I watch i24 Hebrew so you don’t have to) — their accents so broad and guttural, their Hebrew so anglicized and pidginized — are incapable of disgorging a single ennobling or original thought.

On the other hand, Palestinians — in Palestine and the diaspora — do not voice a hatred of Israel, their nemesis. Rather, they describe Israeli actions toward them, as they cradle their destroyed limbs and dead children. They look to the heavens and ask, “Where is the world, where are the Arab nations?” They do not question their God, but simply say He will deliver them. Although they must be seething inside; Palestinians seem of a quiet, thoughtful, stoic temperament. They exude a self-containment, in contrast to the irrational emotional abandon of the Israeli type, to which I, a Jew who grew up in Israel, was always temperamentally unsuited. Gaza’s Palestinians behave as a dignified, reserved, and refined people would, superior to the vulgar Israelis in every way.

In the process of learning as much about the Palestinians as I’ve unlearned, I’ve learned about myself. I now know why I fled Israel, aged 19, never to return.