What is going around now is another cover up, another denial of what a lot of people on both sides call “the second Nakba,” the sin atop the original sin.
Gaza rubble, 2023-2025. (Jaber Jehad Badwan /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
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.
A mock copy of The New York Times from the march against the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine along the National Mall in Washington, D.C., May 2025. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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’
Pro-Palestine rally in Austin, Texas, 2023. (Larry D. Moore/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
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.
Along with everyone else, I do not know at writing whether the Gaza Peace Plan, as it is billed, will hold or when — the better question at this point — it will fall apart like all those that have preceded it.
But — grim knowledge — I know this: It will not end well if the events of the past two years are buried as the events of the past seven and some decades have been buried. The human spirit simply does not work that way.
It will not, indeed, end at all.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
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Precisely, the truth and the massive extent of the attempted genocide now lies buried in the utterly despoiled earth of Gaza, waiting to be uncovered!!
And yet all that the Israeli’s and Americans want is to pave over the truth for all eternity, unspoken.
Netanyahu and Trump, absolute equals. There can’t be a cease fire if there hasn’t been a war. The last 2 years have been an expedited mass demolition project to make way for a mass construction project. Mass murder and mass terror against a displaced people is the reality, to go along with stolen land, natural resources, and human dignity. There is no horror the likes of these two would not perpetrate and cover up at the same time. Read Trump’s very recent address to the Knessett. These two are Satan’s brothers. Think about that.
I agree with every single comment above. In my long & eventful life I have never felt as much revulsion as I do now for the regime which conducted this ethnic cleansing operation out in the open; and whose functionaries (& their Western acolytes) celebrated it in real time on public platforms as a “moral” undertaking. It’s one think to make comparisons to atrocities committed by the Nazis & the Bolsheviks, to the Armenian genocide, Dresden, Hiroshima and so on. But we learned about these after the fact in a time before mass communication. This genocide happened LIVE in REAL TIME! and it’s perpetrators on the ground gloated daily on social media. Norman Finkelstein is 100% correct: to “grasp the picture” all that was required was an IQ higher than room temperature! The crude attempt by the Israeli government & its billionaire sycophants to repaint the picture by buying up all the information portals in the US is doomed. There are too many people now who will never forget or forgive. And their number is growing.
The Palestinian view will undoubtedly prevail eventually. Hopefully by then the Palestinians won’t be as thoroughly defeated as the native Australians. Unlikely I think, but I personally would be trying to escape.
What do the rest of us who don’t believe all the NYT BS do about this? We can’t afford to be lulled into compacency.
Israel, the US and western governments want us to forget and for the people of the world to rejoice and sing “Hava Nagila”.
I hope that will not happen.
jack
Mainstream corporate media like the New York Times (Crimes?) is so discredited at this point that no amount of lies and reshaping will have any effect on the image of genocidal “Israel” because nobody much is reading those newspapers or watching those “news” programs, especially not the younger people who are the ones that are going to shape the future.
“Israel” is committing genocide and suicide simultaneously in Gaza (and the West Bank increasingly). The Zionist entity will not recover from this and as soon as the US government concludes that the costs of its “iron-clad” relationship with “Israel” outweigh the benefits it will cast its Zionist allies aside just has it has so many other “friends” with “shared values” before such as Ngo Dinh Diem, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, etc., etc. Loyalty means nothing the American leaders when there is a buck to be made (or stolen), wars to fight and democratically-elected and popular governments to overthrow. With popular opinion in the US and all over the world decidedly against “Israel”, the Americans will soon decide that even AIPAC millions are not worth the trouble.
As long as the opposition remained on the fringes of the far left, “Israel” was all right, but, now that even young conservatives hate the Zionists, it will not be much longer before “Israel” is Palestine again.
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I am an 80 year old American, and I will never forget or forgive what Israel and the U.S. has done to the Palestinians. Israel Zionists took a play out of the Nazi playbook and the U.S. joined in just like we did with the Nazi regime. I doubt most people know this latter statement, but they should do a little research and learn.
Patrick Lawrence is exactly right about this. As if to prove him right, the NYT headline right this moment is “The Return of Israel’s Living Hostages From Gaza Signals a Time to Heal.” This is already insulting to our collective intelligence, but to make the insult even more outrageous, the article’s introductory sentence oozes in ultra-flowery language:
“With the releases, Israelis basked in a joyous moment of unifying national redemption after months of agonizing polarizing war.”
The Times writes as if only Israelis suffered. They call it a “war” when it has really been a one-sided massacre, violating every conceivable standard of human rights & “international law.” Note that it’s only the Israelis, in the Times’ telling of, who are doing the “basking.” It’s only the Israelis — those who committed the genocide — that get to experience a “joyous moment of unifying national redemption.” The Palestinians rate no such mention.
The article is embellished with photos of young well-fed Israelis dancing for joy, celebrating, waving Israeli flags, and young Israeli women laughing merrily as they look at their iPhones.
I might add, Israel’s leadership are unlike my Jewish friends here who agree with me.
Bravo, and thanks particularly for reference to the burial of the Vietnam experience, which I am beginning to believe started in 1963 with the composition of “Sounds of Silence.” Perhaps it is this older generation, some at least, who will hear again, “Hello darkness, my old friend …”
Thank you Patrick for another unflinching look at those who do the genociders’ dirty work of glossing over flagrant atrocities in the name of colonization, greed and careerism. I think this time, this younger generation is lost for good to them. Their hearts have not been hardened by a lifetime of official propaganda. They don’t watch TV or read corporate owned newspapers. They are independent thinkers. The scariest people in the world to authoritarians. Ever forget. Never forgive.
My heart (I was born in 1948) has not hardened. I opposed the Vietnam War and all of the American wars of imperialism since. I oppose the genocide. I oppose NATO and Ukraine. I gave away my television in 2012 and removed that brain washing machine. I listen to independent journalists like Patrick Lawrence, the GrayZone, Brian Berletic and many other political outlets. I forgive none of the capitalist warmongers.
I didn’t mean to imply all of us who grew up in the television era have hardened hearts. I have watch too many of my generation who demonstrated against the Vietnam War get their degrees and move into well paying jobs and big fancy homes forget what they claimed to stand for. I do think TV had a role to play in that. They are now the loyal Democrats who brought us to this place in our history. As far as I’m concerned, those hearts have hardened. I believe this generation will be different.
Mr. Lawrence always lays out the truth. There is something that can stop Israel: Other countries sending armed warships to break into Israel and save the Palestinians. Force is the only thing they understand. It should be ASAP. No amount of talk will change the racist Jews in leadership, nor in the West. Only force.
ANYONE WHO SUPPORTS ISRAEL IS A MONSTER.
Exactly right on all points!
I second that.
Rob. I totally agree.
However, let’s recall how Israel is able to do what it does. Without the support of MONSTERS, Israel would be a different place.