10/2/2026

 Friday, October 2, 2026

1904 German General Lothar von Trotha issued an order to exterminate the native Herero and Namaqua peoples of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia); the 1st genocide of the 20th Century, killed 65,000 Herero and 10,000 of the Namaqua tribe

1919 US President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed

1928 "Prelature of the Holy Cross and the Work of God", known as Opus Dei, was founded by the Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá in Madrid, Spain

2020 President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19; Trump was hospitalized later that day

2025 Two people were killed and 4 others injured in a vehicle-ramming and mass stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester, England. The perpetrator and a victim were shot dead by police

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:30, up at 4; 0410 202.2 112/66/67. 124; 52/45/62/49, mostly sunny day ahead.

Morning meds at 5:45 a.m.  Entresto at 5 a.m. and p.m.  Trulicity injection at 12 p.m.

Text exchange with Andy last night:

Hi, Son.  I received a polo shirt and jacket from the Honor Flight folks in today’s mail and I’m wondering if you’ve heard from them.  I can hardly believe it’s only about a week away.  I’m still a little anxious about it, wondering if I made a mistake accepting the invitation.

Yes, we had guardian training last week to go over what to expect and get our own polis and jackets so we are easily identifiable. I’ll be taking a backpack with us to carry things and I’ll also bring a pad for your wheelchair, unless you have one you want to bring and I’ll carry that when n 

I hadn’t thought about a pad, but now that you mention it, it’s great.  I’ve had to use a wheelchair a few times at the VA and they are hard on the butt.  I’m afraid I will be spending quite a bit of time on a chair in D.C. so a pad may be a real butt-saver. I do have a couple of pads that are pretty good, but we’d have to check this weekend or next week to see if they would fit in your backpack,.  BTW, Sarah is here this weekend, in from Austin.  I found out today also that we’ll be with the 6 a.m.group rather than the 5 a.m. group.  Hallelujah!

Yes, so I’ll plan on picking you up around 5:30 AM. I can drop you off at the departure area and a volunteer there will take you up to the upper level where I can meet you after parking.

Great.❤️

Early morning blues.  Another insufficient night's sleep.  It took me extra long to get to sleep after I hit the sack at (:30. I ended up turning on the Torch Songs playlist on my iPhone, on law volume, and eventually fell asleep at some unknown time, but woke up with a head full of unwanted throughts sometime after 3 and got out of bed before 4.  I got to wondering whether a mild tranquilizer might help, though I am loathe to take any prescription-strength psychotropic drug.  I've taken NyQuilPM twice and had decent night's sleep afterward, but I know that can become habit-forming and ineffective after some time.  The Honor Flight a week from tomorrow has me a bit worked up, indeed too worked up.  As I sat in Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix in 2022 waiting to return to O'Hare and then  and it wasMilwaukee, I told myself that would be my last airliner travel and it was, until this Honor Flight thing came up.  I probably should have just declined the invitation, but it's too late now.  I'd have a hard time living with the guilt of having deprived some other old vet of the opportunity by backing out late.

More on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism.  There is a long review in the current New York Review of Books titled Where Hatred Lies by Omer Bartov, a "nuanced new history by Mark Mazower [that] reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic."  Mazower's book is titled On Antisemitism, A Word in History.  In Bartov's review, he reminds us that until the 1970s and 1980s, antisemitism was largely a phenomenon associated with right-wing politics.

At that time [the inter-world-wars period]no one would have disputed that antisemitism was a specifically right-wing and fascist hatred, intent on reversing Jewish emancipation and all that it stood for as a symbol of humanism, enlightenment, and the equality of all members of humankind.

None of this would need stating if, several decades after the end of World War II, the meaning of antisemitism in the West had not undergone an odd transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the US and Western Europe, ever more commentators and intellectuals started maintaining that, in Mazower’s words, “antisemitism was the same as opposition to Israel, and that it was therefore chiefly a problem of the Left rather than the Right.” To many in the American Jewish establishment, “a new form of antisemitism” seemed to have arrived on the scene, constituting, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would later put it, “vicious efforts to demonize the Jewish state and deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination.” 

Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the association between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become ubiquitous. A growing range of scholars and other observers seem to agree with Mazower that even if “some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiments, much of it does not.” But most major American Jewish organizations have stayed attached to the assumption that the main source of antisemitism in the world today is the anti-Israel left. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) contends that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) defines anti-Zionism as “inherently bigoted” and claims that, because its “end goal…is to undermine and eliminate Jewish rights,” the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is driven by “antisemitic motivations.”

Various factions of the political right, meanwhile, have been quick to turn these assumptions to their advantage. Some have used allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left in order to, in Mazower’s words, “police the universities, end long-standing anti-discrimination and diversity initiatives, reassert ‘Western values,’ and reaffirm the role of religion in American life.” Others have conscripted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric into the service of a notion of “Western values” rooted explicitly in Christian nationalism, expressing suspicion and hostility toward American Jews rather than opportunistically claiming to protect them.

There can be no doubt that, as Mazower puts it, “Jews continue to be among those groups who are targeted these days for who they are.” [Many exammples are cited, including the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018.]

Precisely because it remains “an ongoing problem,” Mazower writes, “anyone who takes antisemitism seriously” ought to be “dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning.” How did it “come to seem unassailable common sense to a lot of people” today that a prejudice once central to the ideology of far-right anticommunism now resides primarily on the left? And if that common sense is wrongheaded, how might we better understand the workings of this all-too-present bigotry?  (My emphasis added.]

Is that "common sense wrongheaded"?  Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?  I can't accept that without damning myself, but what does Zionism mean today, and what does anti-Zionism mean today?

 Israel has been in existence as an independent state for 78 years.  It is recognized by all the other countries of the world, with the exception of the 15 Arab League countries, 11 other Muslim-majority countries, and North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.  It has been a member of the UN since a year after its declaration of independent statehood. It is home to millions of people.  Out of more than 7.5 million Jews in Israel, more than 3/4 were born there. Of the more than 2 million Arabs in Israel, virtually all were born there.  Israel is not just the dream of Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists; it is a long-existing de facto and de jure nation.   Zionism today means, therefore at least that the country has the right to exist in its historic form as a Jewish-majority, Jewish-dominated, and governed state.  Anti-Zionism means a belief that Israel does not have a right to exist as is.  What it means beyond that is not easy to ascertain, and I'm reasonably confident that I'm not up to defining it.  

Anti-Zionism cannot mean the expulsion of Jews "from the river to the sea," any more than the notion of the expulsion of Arabs "from the river to the sea" can be justified.  No "ethnic cleansing."  It can only mean, I suspect, some form of a "one-state solution" to the seemingly intractable "Palestine Problem."  One state with equal rights for all inhabitants, where full citizenship is not based on ethnicity or religion. Jews and Palestinian Arabs would constitute two populations of approximately equal size within a single country of about 15–16 million people. Neither would have a decisive demographic majority.  Looking at how such a state would be constituted politically, however, leads one into seemingly an endless morass.

 

 

10/1

October 1, 2026

1867 Karl Marx published "Das Kapital" in Berlin, a description of the capitalist system, its instability, and its tendency toward self-destruction

1918 World War I: Combined Arab and British forces under T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, captured Damascus from the Turks

1932 Oswald Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists

1946 12 Nazi war criminals were sentenced to death in Nuremberg

1949 People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao Zedong and the Republic of China (Taiwan) formed on the island of Formosa

1955 Jackie Gleason's sitcom "The Honeymooners" debuted on CBS, replacing his variety series

2019 Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was taken to a hospital after suffering a heart attack

2021 US COVID-19 death toll passed 700,000, with daily deaths averaging 1,900 a day

In bed at 9:30, up at 4; 0425 202.8 116/67/66; 65/67/58, rain all day.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.   Entresto at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.

I'm feeling a bit wiped out today.      I haven't slept very well the last 3 nights, and I'm feeling it.😴😪 

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser.  I'm making slow progress with this book, but not because it isn't interesting and informative, just because I don't even have the energy to read the last couple of days.  I'm almost a third of the way through it, having finished the most interesting chapter so far, which deals with the history behind the (in)famous Balfour Declaration.  Most interesting to me has been the degree to which Herzl's Zionism was much more supported by anti-semitic Christians than it was by largely assimilated European Jews.  

Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary who issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, had a documented record of expressing anti-Jewish prejudice and supporting restrictions on Jewish immigration.  In 1905, when Balfour was prime minister, his government enacted the Aliens Act, Britain's first modern immigration restriction. Although the legislation was not explicitly directed at Jews, its principal targets included impoverished Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution, particularly in the Russian Empire. In parliamentary debate, Balfour argued that even industrious, patriotic Jewish immigrants might remain a distinct community that would be difficult to assimilate into British society. The legislation and his remarks have been cited by historians as evidence of the anti-Jewish assumptions underlying his immigration policy.

The idea that Jews constituted a distinct people, rather than simply British, French or German citizens who practiced Judaism, was shared by many Zionists. But it also reinforced the prejudices of people who regarded Jews as perpetual foreigners.

Several considerations shaped British support for Zionism, including wartime diplomacy, Britain's strategic interests in the Middle East and sympathy for Jewish national aspirations. Historians differ over the relative importance of these motives and the extent to which Balfour's personal attitudes toward Jews influenced his position, but it seems clear that it wasn't based on any love by the British elites for Jews.  Indeed,  a prominent Jewish member of Balfour's own government accused it of antisemitism. 

Edwin Montagu was Secretary of State for India and one of the few Jewish members of the British Cabinet.  In August 1917, during the deliberations preceding the Balfour Declaration, he circulated a memorandum titled The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government.  Montagu feared that declaring Palestine the national home of the Jewish people would undermine the position of Jews who regarded Britain as their homeland. Other countries might use the declaration as justification for treating their Jewish citizens as foreigners.  He insisted that British Jews were entitled to be regarded as Britons, not as members of a foreign nationality residing in Britain.

The fight over whether Jews constitute a separate nation, a separate "people", or even a separate "race," seems to be an eternal one.  Many right-wing anti-Semites in America include Jews among those they smear as not "real Americans," that mystical group that Sarah Palin could identify as distinct from the rest of us.  We may be forgiven for wondering whether J. D. Vance includes Jews in New York or Los Angeles among those he seems to see as more American than the rest of us.  The more basic question of Jewish identity - who is a "real Jew"? - still divides people.  Yeshayahu Leibowitz devoted some very serious writing to it.  Leibowitz was himself a Zionist.  He supported Jewish political independence as a means of freeing Jews from foreign rule.  What he rejected was the assertion that modern Jewish nationhood necessarily continued the religious identity that had historically constituted the Jewish people.   He therefore distinguished between two understandings of collective Jewish identity.: historical Jewish peoplehood based on observance of Jewish Law (halakah) and modern secular Jewish nationalism.  For Leibowitz, the existence of the second did not make it identical to the first. Nor did Jewish sovereignty endow the state with religious sanctity.  This raises a particularly interesting implication of his thought: if Jews no longer share religious observance, language, territory, or a common political allegiance, on what basis do they continue to constitute one people?  He regarded that as a genuine problem of modern Jewish identity, rather than a question conclusively settled by invoking either common ancestry or the State of Israel.   Leibowitz was concerned not only with the state's authority to define an individual Jew, but with the much more fundamental question of what, following the separation of Jewishness from Judaism, continues to bind Jews together as a people.  For me, it raises the question of by what "right" do Jews from Russia, Singapore, New York, Liverpool, Buenos Aires, or East Chibichiland, any of whom may be Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, atheist, or agnostic, have a right to their own sovereign state in the land in which their very remote ancestors resided millennia ago, and to exclude from it people who lived on the land as recently as 1948?  I cannot come up with any satisfactory answer to that root question.

In any event, I wonder whether it isn't Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel, at least as much as any other factor, that contribute to modern anti-Semitism, at least since the occupation of the conquered territories after 1967 and the near-total dominance of right-wing political parties, and Benjamin Netanyahu, since the assassination of Rabin in 1995.  For most people worldwide, Netanyahu has become the face of Israel.  He never misses a chance to suggest that he is the spokesman for all Jews in the world, and to conflate anti-Zionism or opposition to his government's racist and oppressive policies with anti-Semitism.