(A woman stands with an Israeli flag during a two-minute siren in memory of victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem, May 6. (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)

Yuval Noah Harari is the author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Unstoppable Us” and a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Some Excerpts;

In recent years, however, Israel has been ruled by governments that turned their back on the moderate forms of Zionism. In particular, the coalition government established by Netanyahu in December 2022 has categorically rejected the two-state solution and the Palestinian right to self-determination, and instead embraced a bigoted one-state vision.

Like the anti-Israel demonstrators around the world, the Netanyahu coalition believes in the slogan “from the river to the sea.” In its own words, the founding principle of the Netanyahu coalition is that “the Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of Eretz Yisrael” — Eretz Yisrael is a Hebrew term referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects. This is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.

Some people argue that the Netanyahu coalition’s extremism is the inevitable fruit of Zionism. Yet this is akin to arguing that patriotism inevitably leads to extremism, and that anyone who begins by displaying the national flag at home must end by fomenting hate and violence. Such historical determinism is empirically unfounded and politically dangerous, since it grants extremists a monopoly over people’s national feelings. Patriotism isn’t bigotry. Patriotism is a feeling of love for one’s compatriots, grounded in a deep connection to a national culture and its evolving traditions — which prompts citizens to take care of one another, for example, by paying taxes and financing welfare services. In contrast, bigotry is a feeling of hate for foreigners and minorities, grounded in the conviction that we are superior to them.

In the immediate Israeli context, failing to separate patriotism from bigotry plays into Netanyahu’s hands and implies that there is no political alternative to the Netanyahu coalition. If Israeli patriotism requires hatred and persecution of non-Jews, then Israeli patriots must go on voting for Netanyahu. Netanyahu himself has been arguing for years that Israeli patriots must support him, but Zionist opposition parties still have a chance to displace him and lead Israel in a more tolerant and peaceful direction.

There is a lot at stake here, not just for Israel, but for Jews all over the world. If Netanyahu and his political allies cement their hold over Israel, it would spell the end of the historical bond between the Jewish people and ideas of universal justice, human rights, democracy and humanism. Judaism would instead make a covenant with bigotry, discrimination and violence. Jews in London and New York might wish to argue that they have nothing to do with Israel, and that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t represent the true spirit of Judaism. But they would be in an analogous situation to British and American communists in the 20th century, who tried in vain to argue that what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union wasn’t really communism.

The main problem for non-Zionist Jews is that, unlike Buddhism or Protestantism, Judaism is a collectivist rather than individualistic religion, and building the state of Israel has been the most important collective enterprise of the modern Jewish people. If Israel is conquered by bigotry, it would become the face of Judaism worldwide.

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Some excerpts;

Love it or hate it, the United States has an imperial presidency, and in his first term, Donald Trump demonstrated a record of using such powers with noted relish on the world stage. As in many areas, he does not have a conventional approach to global relations. But it may turn out that, like Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush before him, Mr. Trump enjoys engagement with foreign policy.

His particular style of politics can be provocative, of course, but also effective. Mr. Trump’s approach to America’s place in the world is pragmatic or unpredictable or both, and it could offer surprising opportunities for peace.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, his results in foreign affairs have generally been underrated. For a “madman,” there were real accomplishments: no new foreign wars, the Abraham Accords between Israel and a handful of Sunni states that many experts on the subject thought were impossible, a focus on China that is now bipartisan, putting allies on notice that they had to more than vaguely contribute to their own defense.

But Mr. Trump likes to occupy two identities at once: threat and negotiator. And as he showed in a recent interview with Time magazine, he has a shrewd understanding of how to manage his team in negotiations. For example, he said in the interview that Mr. Bolton “served a good purpose” because “every time he walked into a room, people thought you were going to war.”

You can apply Mr. Trump’s two-positions-at-once approach to various other hot spots. Take Israel. In his recent interview, he reiterated that he would “protect Israel” if war broke out with Iran but also said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “rightfully has been criticized for what took place on Oct. 7.”

He said the Jewish state should “get the job done” in Gaza but also concluded that Israel has managed to lose the public relations battle in this war. You can imagine Mr. Trump, as president, unreservedly supporting Israel in its military campaign in Gaza. But you can equally imagine him speaking in far harsher terms against Mr. Netanyahu than President Biden has, perhaps in pursuit of a cease-fire.

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Raphaël Lemkin, Originator of the word “genocide” and leader of the global movement to outlaw genocide at the United Nations.

Raphaël Lemkin did not define genocide as an act of mass killing. He saw genocide as a type of conflict that sometimes escalated into direct violence, but not always. In Lemkin’s analysis of genocide, we find a theory of group destruction that involves systems of repression and oppression, direct and indirect violence, structural and cultural violence, a direct link between the economic destruction of targeted groups and their cultural suppression, and the denial of the victims’ right to exist because of their social identity—all in an effort to eradicate group identities from the fabric of society.

Yet, genocide was often committed by people who did not think they were committing genocide, and often held no hate in their hearts. For Lemkin, what made genocide so difficult to prevent was that it involved “countless small and different actions that, when taken separately, constituted different crimes, or sometimes did not constitute a crime at all, but when taken together constituted a type of atrocity that threatened the existence of social collectivities and threatened the peaceful social order of the world.”

genocide is a gradual process and may begin with political disenfranchisement, economic displacement, cultural undermining and control, the destruction of leadership, the break-up of families and the prevention of propagation. Each of these methods is a more or less effective means of destroying a group. Actual physical destruction is the last and most effective phase of genocide”

— Lemkin, Introduction to the Study of Genocide

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“I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of essays and artwork by the historian Nell Irvin Painter, captures her wide-ranging interests and original mind.

As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has learned over the course of her eight decades on this earth, inspiration can come from some unlikely places.

In 2000, she happened across a news photograph of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which had been bombed into rubble during the long stretch of devastating wars between Russia and the Caucasus. The photo prompted Painter to wonder how “Caucasian” became a term for white people; that in turn led her to an 18th-century German naturalist who picked out five skulls to embody the five “varieties” of mankind. What he deemed “the really most beautiful form of skull” belonged to a young Georgian woman and would therefore represent Caucasians, whom he called “the most beautiful and best formed of men.”

From a photograph of bombed-out Grozny to the absurd methodology of a German naturalist: Painter’s research for the best-selling “The History of White People” (2010) was born.

“It was as though I lost my head, you boiled off all the flesh and the brains and eyeballs out of it, and you called it ‘New Jersey Variety of Mankind,’” she writes about the Georgian’s skull in “I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of her essays and artwork that includes a number of such characteristically irreverent asides. Painter was a historian at Princeton before enrolling in art school at the age of 64. In 2018, she recalled the experience in a freewheeling memoir. “I Just Keep Talking” presents Painter in full, gathering personal reflections, scholarly essays and images spanning several decades to convey the range of her interests and ambition.

Painter went on to study that hurt in depth, writing about slavery’s persistent legacy of violence. But she has also emphasized the historical importance of Black resourcefulness and creativity. One of her books traced the Exoduster migration of formerly enslaved people to Kansas in 1879; another told the life story of the antislavery activist Sojourner Truth. Born enslaved, the charismatic Truth knew she had to be canny when it came to her self-presentation. One photograph she circulated included her statement: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”

This discrepancy between one’s sense of self and how that self is received and remembered has long fascinated Painter. One essay in “I Just Keep Talking” explains why the line most associated with Truth — “Ar’n’t I a woman?” — is something that Truth almost certainly did not say; it was more probably the fabrication of a white antislavery writer, who added the phrase in her account in order to portray Truth as a “colorful force of nature” and amp up the drama. Painter doesn’t deny that the theatricality was effective, dovetailing with Truth’s own deployment of a “naïve persona,” but it also flattened her into a caricature, obscuring the quiddity of the woman she actually was.

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