Daniel, thank you for continuing to offer your testimonies and analyses. I find myself resonating not only with your description of Israeli society — from my own lived experience there — but also with your explanation of why things are the way they are.
We both know that Israel will not suddenly see the light and reform from within. In fact, in allowing the Religious Right to advance its take over of Israeli society, and creating what Ilan Pappé refers to as the ‘Kingdom of Judea’ — that country is moving even further down its murderous path. It will of course lead to Israel’s downfall (read *Israel On The Brink*) but how many Palestinians it will take with it and how it will impact on the rest of the world is frightening. Israel doesn’t care about the rest of humanity. The Palestinians are at the top of the list of the hated other, but we both know that Israeli society has no respect whatsoever to anyone who is not, in their definition, Jewish. That’s why Israel must be stopped from outside, and I don’t see any signs of this happening from the mainstream of our world at the moment. What a sorry species we are. But thank you for your contribution. I love your writings. Although they’re painful to read, they are truth.
Thank you for this. Everything you wrote resonates. The trajectory is clear, and still, I believe the only place any of us can start is with our own painful seeing. We can't control the outcome. We can only stand in truth and offer what we have. Something in me refuses to believe it's fully set in stone, not out of naive hope, but because the same force that moves through this destruction also moves through awakening. I don't know what happens next. I just know I can't unsee what I've seen, and I won't stop saying it. Thank you for reading and for your words.
Free will requires awareness, and awareness is exactly what these systems are designed to prevent. I'm not describing people who consciously choose complicity. I'm describing what it's like from the inside, when the conditioning is so complete that it doesn't feel like conditioning, it just feels like reality. That's how consent manufactures itself. Not through active agreement, but through the absence of the awareness needed to disagree. This doesn't absolve anyone from responsibility. But the point isn't to assign blame. The point is to understand the mechanism clearly enough that transformation becomes possible. You can't heal what you can't see.
Heartbreaking and just incomprehensible cruelty. Here in Australia we are being told that to call out the Zionists for what is happening is antisemitism, especially after what happened at Bondi. But the words in those comments are disgusting and must be called out. The genocide in Gaza must be called out. What happened in Bondi was horrific and that is indisputable but our media is confusing anti-Zionism with antisemitism and Jewish people here in Australia who have a more nuanced and thoughtful response to what happened in Bondi and are critical of Israel’s role in the genocide are not getting a voice here.
Thank you for this. What you're describing is part of how the system protects itself. Zionism has created a situation where we can no longer distinguish what's real from what's manufactured, what's caused by the violence from what's a response to it, and it thrives in this confusion. Meanwhile in Israel, the substrata of systemic genocidal mania has taken root at the highest levels and is no longer hidden. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and the conflation silences the exact voices that need to be heard. Sending you strength as we navigate this together.
For thought. No doubt all anti-semites are anti zionists. Not all anti zionists are anti semites but a proportion of them are. I am a Jew who is a zionist in the old sense , in that I believe Jews need a home to feel safe in and that is logically the place we call Zion, the area otherwise known as Israel or Palestine. 3000 years ago when my people sat by the Rivers of Babylon we wept to go back to Zion. It is where we as Jews can practice Judaism without fear. So yes there is a need for a Jewish home. I also do not believe this counters a possible position where two people, Jews and Palestinians live side by side on the same land in the same country as equals. I tell my Australian friends., like when the English came to Australia in 1775 the country was not Terra Nulius. Nor was Palestine. I am totally against the government and right wing religious zionists in Israel. I am devastated by what seems to be a large percentage of Israeli disregard to their neighbours suffering. I clicked the link to see the response in the comments section and I am mortified. We can only hope that Israel can breed a leader who wants peace more than military might. Israel needs to face its demons and analyse what has gone wrong for 100 odd years and make a change in its strategy in dealing with its neighbours and living in the region in peace.
By your measure, you should be standing next to any people who have been displaced from their place of origin. There is no higher people. I am sure you agree, as you can see, all over the world people who “ believe “ to be higher and have power, destroy lives and land. Until the day that we come to understand what we really are, what we came out of and not what we came into and were told to be, we will kill for belief. There is no home but the heart, the being of all, which we share. There is no land there either, there is love for the land, and it will nurture us as we nurture it, for it is as sacred as us. You can be whatever you want to be or believe to be, but in the core of the essence of your heart, you are no different, no smaller, no grander, nor worth any less than any being.
Daniel, thank you for showing us the consequence of years of hate-filled propaganda - truly shocking. And how much is due to weaponising the Nazi Holocaust?
27 January was Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. Whether the commemoration adopts an exceptionalist response (never again for the Jews), a universalist response (never again for anybody) or a hybrid response (never again for anybody except the Palestinians, the Armenians and descendants of enslaved Africans), I find myself feeling heavy and depressed. I wonder what benefit there is to telling ourselves the Holocaust story every year except to retraumatise ourselves and prevent any possibility of healing.
Why must we never forget the unbelievably terrible things that happened? Clearly, the annual mantra of Never Again has had NO effect whatsoever on the incidence of yet more unbelievably terrible things happening. Maybe it has actually led to more genocides. Certainly in Israel an unbelievably large proportion of Jews have failed to develop empathy and love towards their neighbours, the Palestinians, and are in fact continuing to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing which they began as soon as the State of Israel was established in 1948, a few short years after the Holocaust.
There are other ways to peace. At this moment in the USA, a group of Vietnamese and SE Asian Buddhist monks are walking (often barefoot) 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington DC. https://www.facebook.com/groups/walkforpeaceusa/ They walk in silence. They walk for peace. People gather in their thousands, lining the roads to see them pass, following behind them as the monks walk through their communities. When they stop for the night, they give a talk to the assembled crowds urging people to find peace in their hearts. They don't remind people of atrocities. People weep, unaccountably touched by their presence. I cry every time I watch the videos. I feel uplifted, expanded, hopeful, at peace.
If we really, really want the unbelievably terrible things never to happen again, we must find a better way than the Holocaust Memorial Day events.
From my experience, Holocaust Memorial Day was one of the most powerful tools in the conditioning. Retraumatization as policy, fear as fuel. "Never again" became "therefore anything is justified," and that mechanism has produced exactly what you describe.
For those interested in a legal explainer on why it’s Genocide—and debunking the mostly irrelevant arguments made on the other side—check out my Substack; I hope it’s useful!
This can be seen in all aspects of life (and relationships) in Israel for decades. For many decades. It is like their field of vision of normalcy is infinitely wide, anything is accepted as normal because if you accept that X is abnormal immediately a cascade of abnormality must ensue. So there may be a fleeting moment when the mind registers something as abnormal but survival instincts mustn’t allow the mind to dwell on this and the result is simply to move on with the madness.
Still unfolding with sharing the story, but this resonates. There was always a part of me, even from a young age, that noticed. A quiet voice that said really, that's a bit much, that's off. But the survival instinct buries it because the cost of seeing clearly is too high. You keep moving with the madness because stopping means facing everything at once which can feel like dying while you're still alive.
I spoke from the heart as I knew that as an Israeli you will know exactly what I meant. How tragic is this. Not a day passes for me that I do not ponder on the enormity of this and how was it possible for a whole nation to be swallowed by this for so long. It is gut wrenching to think about it.
I also know of all the broken families and despair that children need to go through growing up like this. They try not to think about this. They try to go to Tel-Aviv and forget it - to forget all the lies. To forget at all cost.
The mind knows - so many more years - decades - will be needed for healing. If ever.
I hear you. It can feel enormous and overwhelming, yet "who knows if this is the moment you were placed here for?". The irony isn't lost on us. The biblical aspect of this is real, just upside down from what we were taught. And here we are, in this moment, with eyes that can see. I don't believe we'd be facing this if we weren't ready or meant to face it. The healing is why we're her, it's all unfolding as it needs to, and we can't go wrong by standing in truth.
Israelis (in the 50's) were sure they were building an ETHICAL (Israeli-Jewish) man/woman. They were SURE they had the right formula for educating the next generation(s) on "Jewish ideals & values" - and they still think so today(!)... But there were those who knew very well this is all a con.
No doubt this will be (in future, some day) a huge area of interest to sociologists and psychologists.
Sometimes I imagine that I could travel into the future and see how this story ends, so i imagine myself going into a time machine and transporting myself say, 200-300 years, forward to visit "Israel" to check if people have gone over the mindset they were immersed in - and what has come of it, how did it move on...
Born in mid 60s. Left 30 years ago. From young age felt there are many things that are not talked about. Lots of inter-relationship tensions. Attitude to Arabs was unexplained. Many contradictions in Israeli society. Lots of indoctrination and fear. No one really to talk to about these things. Education only leads you to the army. All the great stuff... People are offended very easily from small things and hold grudges forever... Crazy reality. Read Leibowitz in my 20's and decided to leave as soon as I could after completing education. Tried to forget my past and for 10-15 years everything was fine until 911 when Israel came back into world attention. Since then observing (from a distance) how this mess gets, sadly, only worse.
Daniel, the dehumanization we witness, made casual and normalized, isn't just a symptom of violence — it’s the engine driving it. It’s always been this way for certain people, certain racial profiles, etc. But that is spilling into the West, and it’s interesting that this is what makes a lot of Americans and Brits wake up. Your call to confront these uncomfortable truths is urgent, and it's something we must all heed. Silence isn't safety, it's complicity.
Wait… so now genocide (that ever malleable and expanding definition) now includes some portion of the two million people in Gaza (whose population actually INCREASED) during the war) enduring a storm?
FFS, what next - “Gazans forced to walk outside in the glaring sun… Vitamin D genocide!!” 🤦♂️ 😂
And I invite you or anyone else to prove by the standards of international law (not what Amnesty International wants it to be) that there is a genocide in Gaza.
Yes I do. And yours, but not in a way that hurt the skull. It was simply my expression of my anger at your way of thinking. I was raised in a cult. I could rage quite a lot really.
The anger I feel for you not waking up to all the harm you are doing with the way of thinking is off the charts. Completely off the charts.
It’s like observing the effects of a mass mental illness when I hear people (like you) reply to my largely fact-based comments with nothing but insults and invective, while simultaneously projecting their own anger and emotional outbursts onto me. Where did you guys all contract this same disease?
Daniel, thank you for continuing to offer your testimonies and analyses. I find myself resonating not only with your description of Israeli society — from my own lived experience there — but also with your explanation of why things are the way they are.
We both know that Israel will not suddenly see the light and reform from within. In fact, in allowing the Religious Right to advance its take over of Israeli society, and creating what Ilan Pappé refers to as the ‘Kingdom of Judea’ — that country is moving even further down its murderous path. It will of course lead to Israel’s downfall (read *Israel On The Brink*) but how many Palestinians it will take with it and how it will impact on the rest of the world is frightening. Israel doesn’t care about the rest of humanity. The Palestinians are at the top of the list of the hated other, but we both know that Israeli society has no respect whatsoever to anyone who is not, in their definition, Jewish. That’s why Israel must be stopped from outside, and I don’t see any signs of this happening from the mainstream of our world at the moment. What a sorry species we are. But thank you for your contribution. I love your writings. Although they’re painful to read, they are truth.
Thank you for this. Everything you wrote resonates. The trajectory is clear, and still, I believe the only place any of us can start is with our own painful seeing. We can't control the outcome. We can only stand in truth and offer what we have. Something in me refuses to believe it's fully set in stone, not out of naive hope, but because the same force that moves through this destruction also moves through awakening. I don't know what happens next. I just know I can't unsee what I've seen, and I won't stop saying it. Thank you for reading and for your words.
Consent never 'manufactures itself'.
*
To consent is an active decision. You choose to say "yes!" You participate.
Free will requires awareness, and awareness is exactly what these systems are designed to prevent. I'm not describing people who consciously choose complicity. I'm describing what it's like from the inside, when the conditioning is so complete that it doesn't feel like conditioning, it just feels like reality. That's how consent manufactures itself. Not through active agreement, but through the absence of the awareness needed to disagree. This doesn't absolve anyone from responsibility. But the point isn't to assign blame. The point is to understand the mechanism clearly enough that transformation becomes possible. You can't heal what you can't see.
Thanks Chomsky for your meaningless contribution.
Did you fall off the chair again?
Heartbreaking and just incomprehensible cruelty. Here in Australia we are being told that to call out the Zionists for what is happening is antisemitism, especially after what happened at Bondi. But the words in those comments are disgusting and must be called out. The genocide in Gaza must be called out. What happened in Bondi was horrific and that is indisputable but our media is confusing anti-Zionism with antisemitism and Jewish people here in Australia who have a more nuanced and thoughtful response to what happened in Bondi and are critical of Israel’s role in the genocide are not getting a voice here.
Thank you for this. What you're describing is part of how the system protects itself. Zionism has created a situation where we can no longer distinguish what's real from what's manufactured, what's caused by the violence from what's a response to it, and it thrives in this confusion. Meanwhile in Israel, the substrata of systemic genocidal mania has taken root at the highest levels and is no longer hidden. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and the conflation silences the exact voices that need to be heard. Sending you strength as we navigate this together.
For thought. No doubt all anti-semites are anti zionists. Not all anti zionists are anti semites but a proportion of them are. I am a Jew who is a zionist in the old sense , in that I believe Jews need a home to feel safe in and that is logically the place we call Zion, the area otherwise known as Israel or Palestine. 3000 years ago when my people sat by the Rivers of Babylon we wept to go back to Zion. It is where we as Jews can practice Judaism without fear. So yes there is a need for a Jewish home. I also do not believe this counters a possible position where two people, Jews and Palestinians live side by side on the same land in the same country as equals. I tell my Australian friends., like when the English came to Australia in 1775 the country was not Terra Nulius. Nor was Palestine. I am totally against the government and right wing religious zionists in Israel. I am devastated by what seems to be a large percentage of Israeli disregard to their neighbours suffering. I clicked the link to see the response in the comments section and I am mortified. We can only hope that Israel can breed a leader who wants peace more than military might. Israel needs to face its demons and analyse what has gone wrong for 100 odd years and make a change in its strategy in dealing with its neighbours and living in the region in peace.
I think there are lots of antisemites around the world, especially christian nationalists in the US, who are zionists.
By your measure, you should be standing next to any people who have been displaced from their place of origin. There is no higher people. I am sure you agree, as you can see, all over the world people who “ believe “ to be higher and have power, destroy lives and land. Until the day that we come to understand what we really are, what we came out of and not what we came into and were told to be, we will kill for belief. There is no home but the heart, the being of all, which we share. There is no land there either, there is love for the land, and it will nurture us as we nurture it, for it is as sacred as us. You can be whatever you want to be or believe to be, but in the core of the essence of your heart, you are no different, no smaller, no grander, nor worth any less than any being.
So devastating, heartbreaking. Thank you for speaking up, not giving up.
💔 One candle can light all the others. We carry this separately and together.
Daniel, thank you for showing us the consequence of years of hate-filled propaganda - truly shocking. And how much is due to weaponising the Nazi Holocaust?
27 January was Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. Whether the commemoration adopts an exceptionalist response (never again for the Jews), a universalist response (never again for anybody) or a hybrid response (never again for anybody except the Palestinians, the Armenians and descendants of enslaved Africans), I find myself feeling heavy and depressed. I wonder what benefit there is to telling ourselves the Holocaust story every year except to retraumatise ourselves and prevent any possibility of healing.
Why must we never forget the unbelievably terrible things that happened? Clearly, the annual mantra of Never Again has had NO effect whatsoever on the incidence of yet more unbelievably terrible things happening. Maybe it has actually led to more genocides. Certainly in Israel an unbelievably large proportion of Jews have failed to develop empathy and love towards their neighbours, the Palestinians, and are in fact continuing to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing which they began as soon as the State of Israel was established in 1948, a few short years after the Holocaust.
There are other ways to peace. At this moment in the USA, a group of Vietnamese and SE Asian Buddhist monks are walking (often barefoot) 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington DC. https://www.facebook.com/groups/walkforpeaceusa/ They walk in silence. They walk for peace. People gather in their thousands, lining the roads to see them pass, following behind them as the monks walk through their communities. When they stop for the night, they give a talk to the assembled crowds urging people to find peace in their hearts. They don't remind people of atrocities. People weep, unaccountably touched by their presence. I cry every time I watch the videos. I feel uplifted, expanded, hopeful, at peace.
If we really, really want the unbelievably terrible things never to happen again, we must find a better way than the Holocaust Memorial Day events.
Here you go -
https://open.substack.com/pub/dzyk/p/breaking-the-ten-commandments
Thank you for sharing all of this.
From my experience, Holocaust Memorial Day was one of the most powerful tools in the conditioning. Retraumatization as policy, fear as fuel. "Never again" became "therefore anything is justified," and that mechanism has produced exactly what you describe.
I wrote about the idea of never again here:
Could you share the piece you wrote about the idea of never again? I'd like to read it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/dzyk/p/breaking-the-ten-commandments?r=cd2ad&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
The holocaust should never be forgotten! Ever
I agree. I am interested in what you think should never be forgotten about the holocaust.
For those interested in a legal explainer on why it’s Genocide—and debunking the mostly irrelevant arguments made on the other side—check out my Substack; I hope it’s useful!
Honest and sensitive, as always. Much appreciated.
Thank you, Lena, I appreciate you.
Likewise. Truly.
This can be seen in all aspects of life (and relationships) in Israel for decades. For many decades. It is like their field of vision of normalcy is infinitely wide, anything is accepted as normal because if you accept that X is abnormal immediately a cascade of abnormality must ensue. So there may be a fleeting moment when the mind registers something as abnormal but survival instincts mustn’t allow the mind to dwell on this and the result is simply to move on with the madness.
Still unfolding with sharing the story, but this resonates. There was always a part of me, even from a young age, that noticed. A quiet voice that said really, that's a bit much, that's off. But the survival instinct buries it because the cost of seeing clearly is too high. You keep moving with the madness because stopping means facing everything at once which can feel like dying while you're still alive.
I spoke from the heart as I knew that as an Israeli you will know exactly what I meant. How tragic is this. Not a day passes for me that I do not ponder on the enormity of this and how was it possible for a whole nation to be swallowed by this for so long. It is gut wrenching to think about it.
I also know of all the broken families and despair that children need to go through growing up like this. They try not to think about this. They try to go to Tel-Aviv and forget it - to forget all the lies. To forget at all cost.
The mind knows - so many more years - decades - will be needed for healing. If ever.
I hear you. It can feel enormous and overwhelming, yet "who knows if this is the moment you were placed here for?". The irony isn't lost on us. The biblical aspect of this is real, just upside down from what we were taught. And here we are, in this moment, with eyes that can see. I don't believe we'd be facing this if we weren't ready or meant to face it. The healing is why we're her, it's all unfolding as it needs to, and we can't go wrong by standing in truth.
Israelis (in the 50's) were sure they were building an ETHICAL (Israeli-Jewish) man/woman. They were SURE they had the right formula for educating the next generation(s) on "Jewish ideals & values" - and they still think so today(!)... But there were those who knew very well this is all a con.
No doubt this will be (in future, some day) a huge area of interest to sociologists and psychologists.
Sometimes I imagine that I could travel into the future and see how this story ends, so i imagine myself going into a time machine and transporting myself say, 200-300 years, forward to visit "Israel" to check if people have gone over the mindset they were immersed in - and what has come of it, how did it move on...
What is your story? Feel free to shoot me a message as
Born in mid 60s. Left 30 years ago. From young age felt there are many things that are not talked about. Lots of inter-relationship tensions. Attitude to Arabs was unexplained. Many contradictions in Israeli society. Lots of indoctrination and fear. No one really to talk to about these things. Education only leads you to the army. All the great stuff... People are offended very easily from small things and hold grudges forever... Crazy reality. Read Leibowitz in my 20's and decided to leave as soon as I could after completing education. Tried to forget my past and for 10-15 years everything was fine until 911 when Israel came back into world attention. Since then observing (from a distance) how this mess gets, sadly, only worse.
Daniel, the dehumanization we witness, made casual and normalized, isn't just a symptom of violence — it’s the engine driving it. It’s always been this way for certain people, certain racial profiles, etc. But that is spilling into the West, and it’s interesting that this is what makes a lot of Americans and Brits wake up. Your call to confront these uncomfortable truths is urgent, and it's something we must all heed. Silence isn't safety, it's complicity.
Wait… so now genocide (that ever malleable and expanding definition) now includes some portion of the two million people in Gaza (whose population actually INCREASED) during the war) enduring a storm?
FFS, what next - “Gazans forced to walk outside in the glaring sun… Vitamin D genocide!!” 🤦♂️ 😂
I invite you, or anyone reading this, to read the article again, and then read this comment again.
And I invite you or anyone else to prove by the standards of international law (not what Amnesty International wants it to be) that there is a genocide in Gaza.
I swear I wish I could just take a hammer and bash your head to wake people like you up. He’s not even talking about definitions of Genocide.
You don't want genocide but you want to bash his head with a hammer? What is this rhetoric?
Yes I do. And yours, but not in a way that hurt the skull. It was simply my expression of my anger at your way of thinking. I was raised in a cult. I could rage quite a lot really.
The anger I feel for you not waking up to all the harm you are doing with the way of thinking is off the charts. Completely off the charts.
He implies them throughout. Pay attention…
The point he is writing is not that you heartless robot
FFS read the title of the article. What do you think he’s writing about, kittens? 🤦♂️
As your anger grows, your fear which fed, keeps feeding. You are alive and well and only your anger, as you attack others, feeds your demise.
It’s like observing the effects of a mass mental illness when I hear people (like you) reply to my largely fact-based comments with nothing but insults and invective, while simultaneously projecting their own anger and emotional outbursts onto me. Where did you guys all contract this same disease?