Jonathan Cook✓

NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Read my latest here:

RT @PulaRJS: The Butcher of Beirut – Israel’s alternative to Netanyahu. Peter Oborne – just returned from almost a month in the Occupied Territories – came into the Double Down Newswatch studio to talk about the Israeli election, Britain’s feeble surrender to the Israelis over the consulate in East Jerusalem and the ongoing horror in the West Bank and Israeli prisons. Plse share/1

RT @medialens: The @BBCNews correspondent describes Netanyahu as 'slick, experienced, media-savvy'. How about: 'subject to an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes in Gaza'? BBC 'News' = propaganda by omission.

The BBC’s Middle East correspondent frames the Israeli elections as Netanyahu against “leftist” and “centrist” figures like Eisenkot, whom she describes as “softly spoken” and “lowkey”. What she leaves out is that he’s a former general and the architect of the Dahiyeh Doctrine, which calls for disproportionate force and deliberate targeting of civilians and their infrastructure. In what world is that left wing?

RT @PulaRJS: Watch this. Lubna Speitan, author of the Greens4Palestine motion “Zionism is racism”, spells out the central obscenity of our age – the grotesque inversion whereby the victims of ethnic cleansing, Apartheid and genocide must constantly fend off accusations from their tormentors that it is they who are the racists. “We as Palestinians are being silenced and gaslit and vilified [as we] witness the annihilation, the cold-blooded murder of our families, of our people… our children burnt with phosphorus, having to endure amputations with no anaesthetic, having their limbs torn and shredded, their bodies burnt by phosphorus, being starved to death … And to have to sit here … and try to bury my feelings so I can eloquently and diplomatically shield my anger, my rage, my anguish that every Palestinian is feeling, is an insult.” /1

RT @newscord_org: The reality of the "independent" review telling every school in England to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism: its author, Sir David Bell, was being paid by a government agency while he wrote it, and a pro-Israel charity has listed him on its council for ten years. The government told the public he was "independent of Government" and had "no conflict of interest". Neither is true. What we found: - Bell was paid £20,000 a year as vice-chair of Skills England, a government agency, in a seat the Department for Education gave him. He held it until August, through most of the review. - The Academic Study Group on Israel and the Middle East has listed him on its council since at least 2016. Its website says its one firm policy is opposing boycotts of Israel. It gives talks on Israel in schools, which is exactly what his review was asked to judge. - In 2005, as chief inspector of schools, he singled out Muslim schools as a challenge to "our coherence as a nation". The chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools called it Islamophobia, and his own inspectors said he had presented a personal view as inspection evidence. Then we followed the money: - The department's £1.3 million antisemitism training contract had one bidder, according to the tender record. It went to Palace Yard, a company set up in 2022 by the former Labour MP Natascha Engel. - That contract says all its training must use the IHRA definition "as a foundation". It was signed eight months before Bell was appointed. His review then recommended IHRA. - Two of the people who advised Bell, from Partnerships for Jewish Schools and the Antisemitism Policy Trust, now sit on the group putting his recommendations into practice. - The Union of Jewish Students, also on that group, holds a contract worth almost £1 million to train universities. Its own policies include "UJS to advocate for Israel within UK Policy and International Law". - UK Lawyers for Israel* (UKLFI) and the Campaign Against Antisemitism* (CAA) both say the review adopted their recommendations. *For context, UKLFI once justified the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli occupation as "good for obesity". Both these groups have staunchly defended Israel throughout its perpetration of a genocide in Gaza, and regularly conflate Jewish people with the apartheid state. This matters because the review decides how every school treats what pupils and teachers say about Israel, and the IHRA definition it recommends treats some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. A review with that power should come from someone with no pay from government and no tie to a pro-Israel charity. Bell had both. The government put one in a footnote and left the other out. We mapped every link, each with its source, explaining just how far this review is from "independent":

In the past few days, Israel has banned entry to five foreign journalists working for publications seen as critical of Israel. What does that say about the rest? That Israel knows it can trust them to pull their punches. They'll be even more careful about what they say from now on.

How Yemen, the Arab world's poorest state, took on Israel and the West's military-industrial complex – and won. Watch here:

RT @PulaRJS: The Bell report on antisemitism in schools is just the latest example of manipulation of statistics to spread alarm and fear. The claim Jewish people are 9x more likely than Muslims to suffer hate crime is also untrue. My latest for Double Down Newswatch.

RT @ZackPolanski: Basic education piece: Not all Jewish people are Zionists. Lots of Zionists aren't Jews. The Board of Deputies largely self identity as Zionists. The Media often report the Board of Deputies as the opinion of Jewish people. Yet many Jewish people say #NotInOurName

RT @PulaRJS: The claim in Sir David Bell's report that 3 in 5 Jewish students have experienced antisemitism was based on just 29 people - and was untrue. My latest for Double Down Newswatch.

I spent three years watching the horror of Gaza, three years writing about it, and three years protesting it. NAZA does none of that. It's an updating of the famous Milgram experiment in social obedience. It's a foretaste of the terrifying dangers of the AI rollout. And it's a case study in the human capacity for evil. If you want more of the *what* of Gaza, NAZA will disappoint. If you want the *why*, seek it out. My full review in the reply post below ⬇️

Why are western audiences stunned into silence by the new film NAZA? Because it shames us. It shows us who we are. It tells us exactly what the pillars of our western “civilisation” stand on. Read my latest here:

RT @rarepepenews: The unsettling lesson of NAZA, and the writings of Arendt, Milgram and Browning, is not that we would all have become Nazis. It is that ordinary people are not immune to becoming perpetrators. Through obedience, conformity and the surrender of moral judgement. “I would never do that” is a comforting belief, not a safeguard. The harder question is whether we would recognise the moment to refuse when our own leaders, institutions and peers insisted we were doing the right thing. Circumstances do not erase responsibility. They are where it is tested.

There was a deeper reason why the film NAZA left the entire audience speechless. This film isn’t about the tangible, visible horror of Gaza. It was about something more hidden, something far closer to home. This was about the horror lurking within each of us. What the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. We were stunned, I think, by the realisation that the 24 Israelis up on the screen – each of whom admitted, often dispassionately, sometimes a little proudly, carrying out the most monstrous of crimes – could have been our son or daughter, our brother or sister. The only reason to applaud, as happened at the Venice Film Festival, it seemed to me, was to drown out the still, small voice of one’s conscience asking, “Might I have done as they did? Might my children?” NAZA is a gut punch not because it tells us anything we did not already know or suspect about Israel and Gaza. The enclave’s Palestinian journalists showed us daily the evidence of the genocide, before each was picked off by Israel’s AI machinery – in the largest slaughter of media personnel ever recorded. No, the film tells us something far more shaming. It tells us who we are. It tells us exactly what the pillars of our western “civilisation” stand on. Today’s western privileges were built on a long history of naked, racist colonialism – of greed, of pillage, of slavery, of genocide – that we have never truly renounced or forsaken. Israel continues that tradition for us, both in sharpening colonialism’s technical efficiency with endless, murderous experimentation on a captive Palestinian population and in obscuring our own complicity in this barbarity. That is the reason why it was so effortless for our leaders to collude in Israel’s genocide: to supply the bombs, to pass on the intelligence, to provide the diplomatic cover, to excuse the “excesses”, to crush the protests. NAZA silences us not because of the monstrosity of what Israel did but because it serves as irrefutable proof of our own monstrosity. Our societies watched it all and did nothing. We are all guilty. This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️

Some people are responding to the headline of my latest article on the film NAZA with: "There's no evil lurking in me. It's just those Israeli soldiers." There are two things that make any of us capable of committing evil acts: 1. Finding ourselves in circumstances that, we are persuaded, call for evil. 2. Lacking the capacity for deep self-reflection. Those of us who have never found ourselves in the first situation have never really been tested on whether we have that second capacity. If you're absolutely certain that you could never do what those Israeli soldiers did in Gaza, then you have either done a lot of self-reflection or none at all. We have faced one test already: whether we protested the Gaza genocide with all our might or stayed quiet. But that test is the lowest bar there is. Would we still keep our humanity if we were persuaded the stakes were personally much higher for us and our loved ones, as many Israelis were persuaded in relation to Gaza. NAZA works, at least for western audiences, because on one level it makes us identify with the Israeli soldiers – they look and sound like our own children – while on another it shows the utter depravity of what they are rationalising to themselves and to us. It pulls us in and repulses us at the same time. It causes huge cognitive dissonance in western audiences – the reason most people walk out in stunned silence. That may lead to the kind of deeper self-reflection needed before western publics refuse to allow their leaders to collude in genocide. But it may also lead some, those less able to self-reflect, to entrench in their connivance with evil. We can't blame NAZA for that. The film offers us a chance to open our eyes. But each of us must decide whether we are willing to see or remain blind. If you want to read beyond the headline, you can find a link to my article in the reply post below ⬇️

NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. My latest:

RT @medialens: The conclusion to this piece is one of the finest things Jonathan Cook has written, and it is exactly right.

NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Read my latest here:

NAZA silences us not because of the monstrosity of what Israel did, but because it serves as irrefutable proof of our own monstrosity. Read my latest here:

Was the stunned silence at the end of NAZA's screening our discomfort at the soldier who readily confessed that Israel had committed a “genocide” in Gaza – and that from the outset his goal, and that of everyone he worked with, was to kill as many Palestinians as they could get away with. In his words, he personally used Israel’s military AI systems to oversee the killing of “thousands” of Palestinians. He called this period of his military career “insanely fun”. Another interviewee who was responsible for the mass-murder of Palestinians observed that, not only was he serving in Israel’s most prestigious intelligence unit, 8200, but that he had secured one of the unit’s most prized jobs. He noted how envious other officers were of his position in the automated killing machine. Was the stunned silence our revulsion at the fact that interviewee after interviewee rationalised their participation in the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands Gaza’s children with variations of the excuse “I was just following orders”? One called himself a “small cog” in the machinery of murder. Was the stunned silence our unease at the participant who noted that he had been raised to hate Germans because of the Holocaust, but then admitted that he was now struggling to see the difference between what the Nazis did and what he had done in Gaza? Was the stunned silence borne of audience recognition that AI’s frictionless, impersonal acts of surveillance, target selection and execution in Gaza are already being rolled out much closer to home? That clever, career-minded, obedient young people, just like the ones who engineered Israel’s AI system of absolute control, of inescapable surveillance, of unfeeling murder are designing the same automated system of judge, jury and executioner for us? What we see on the screen is the prototype for a new kind of AI-enhanced security state, one that will serve as a Pitiless Panopticon in which we are all prisoners. One where even the democratic pretence of rulers being accountable to the ruled collapses. This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️

NAZA shows us the prototype for a new kind of AI-enhanced security state, one that will serve as a Pitiless Panopticon in which we are all prisoners. One where even the democratic pretence of rulers being accountable to the ruled collapses. My latest:

Unlike the Venice Film Festival, where the documentary NAZA received a record 25-minute standing ovation, the sold-out screening I attended greeted the film's end with stunned silence. The credits rolled. The lights went up. We traipsed to the exit. No one said a word. That seemed a much more fitting response than the one in Venice. Ever since, I have been pondering what exactly our stunned silence meant. Was it shock at the horrors inflicted on Gaza? Not really. Barely any of the destruction and mass-killing was shown. We have seen far, far more of the genocide live-streamed on our phones. Was it the fact that none of the interviewees appeared to regard the official figure of nearly 75,000 dead in Gaza, and more than 175,000 maimed, a Hamas-inspired fiction, as the Israeli government continues to claim, with the western media following suit? In fact, the strong impression conveyed by the military insiders interviewed by the film-makers is that the true death toll is likely to be far higher. Was it the astonishing lack of self-awareness and reflection among most of the interviewees, who spoke drily – mostly indifferently – about the technical aspects of Israel’s innovative AI systems, which drove target selection to destroy homes and kill Palestinians on an unprecedented, industrial scale? Selected from more than 100 Israeli military personnel who spoke to the film-makers off camera, the chosen 24 included some who had helped engineer what they called a “factory” for murdering Palestinians. Others operated this production line, killing by algorithm, as though, in their words, they were playing a “video game“. According to the interviewed soldiers, for every person suspected of being in Hamas, however junior their status, Israel authorised the killing of between 20 and more than 100 NAZA – the Hebrew acronym for Palestinian bystanders, including women and children. When Hamas carried out its one-day attack on Israel in October 2023, the Israeli military claimed the group had around 30,000 fighters. In addition, Israel – and its AI machinery – connected a far larger portion of the population to Hamas, if only because individuals worked for the Gaza government’s political, bureaucratic and administrative arms, from school teachers to doctors and nurses. The film’s interviewer, Yuval Abraham, put to one interviewee a simple observation about the maths. According to the logic of Israel’s NAZA doctrine – permitting potentially dozens of civilian deaths for every Hamas-linked target – almost the entire 2 million inhabitants of Gaza were viewed as acceptable “collateral damage”. The intelligence official mulled this point for some time, as though it had never occurred to him, before agreeing. This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️