Oh, look. Ed Sheeran has joined the show.
Luckily, I don’t need to write about it because there are endless Substack posts covering that part of the news. If you’re not familiar with it, just Google “Ed Sheeran.” Or look at your Substack feed. I guarantee that you won’t miss the story.
The Free Palestine movement has become the nexus of a controversy involving a rich oligarch, the owner of stadiums, censoring a rapper while Ed Sheeran looks on.
As for the rapper, a fella who calls himself Macklemore, two things can be true. You can be against anti-Semitism and still be against Netanyahu, who is a godless monster.1
The world seems to be run by wag-the-dog maniacs these days. Russia’s Vladimir Putin mastered the art of deflecting domestic criticism years ago, first with his ruthless bombardment of Chechnya, then with his attack on Ukraine, which is now steaming through its fifth year of World War One-style trench warfare.
Trump, of course, is doing it now with Iran. He’s such a dumbass that he thought he could repeat the “success” of the immoral kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro with, I suppose, an easy bomb and run operation in Iran. Instead, the Islamic Republic, run by hooligans who kill their own citizens like it’s a sport, is about to do Americans a huge favor by handing the Midterm elections to Democrats.
Thanks, I guess?
But this whole mess started as a classic wag-the-dog2 moment that began when Trump firestarter Pete “KegsBreath” promised salivating Magats that the U.S. would conquer Venezuela and hand its riches over to them:
Speaking to CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Americans will benefit from the capture of Nicolás Maduro. “We can ensure that we have access to additional wealth and resources, enabling a country to unleash that, without having to spend American blood,” he said.
This is a real quote from the New York Times on the Saturday of the attack on Venezuela.3
Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a classic move taken from the book written by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu, when cornered, foments violence against Palestinians, which brings his inner circle closer together and breaks what little opposition there is within his party. Like crime family chief Trump, he’s been facing criminal prosecution for years.
The Trump regime has done the same thing. Cracks were forming around Trump’s base over Epstein (he even lost Marjorie Taylor Greene!), so he turned to a classic wag-the-dog trick that has blown up in his face and will probably turn Congress over to his most feared opponents. They have gavels, and everything!
One of the ingredients to this kind of wag-the-dog maneuver is that the target is often not a model of benign grace. Hamas are monsters. So are the Islamic Republic’s chief operatives.
As a result, it can be hard for those of us simply wishing for a sane world to speak out against one human atrocity that might involve putting a stop to another human atrocity. It’s just one circle of competing atrocities. What’s a person with conscience supposed to do?
To understand all this, we once again need to tolerate a brief bit of recent history.
So sit back, enjoy a vodka martini or twelve, and read on.4
The birth of Israeli genocide
In 1995, a far-right extremist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had embarked on a promising peacekeeping mission.
Two years before his assassination, Rabin was shaking hands with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. He and Arafat were on the verge of crafting an end to the endless Palestinian/Israel conflict.
The Oslo Accords, imperfect as they were, were forged through a combination of bloodshed and diplomacy. We can argue for years about the potential efficacy of the accords, but we know one thing for certain: We have never been so distant from such promise. The promise vanished, shot apart by an assassin’s bullet.
The extremist who killed Rabin was part of a right-wing terrorist group that included a fella named Itamar Ben-Gvir, he of the headline of this essay, who is now Israel’s minister of national security.
Before I go any further, I’m going to ask you to chew on that fat gristle of horror for a moment. Next, ponder this: The U.S. is now governed by the same group of insurrectionists who tore through the Capitol building with the intent to hang Mike Pence for not formally stealing the 2024 election on behalf of a known sexual predator.
What a world.
The process is the same. Understanding the success of terrorists in transforming governments is not as simple as saying that good is better than evil. There’s more complicated stuff going on.
This is why I so often turn to history, both recent and ancient.
History teaches us patterns of human behavior that we can, if we only are willing, to then flip over, like Jesus at the money exchange tables that poisoned his temple. History repeats itself only if we let it.
So, next, I’m going to ask you to walk with me into the life of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who threatened Rabin on live television shortly before Rabin’s assassination by Ben-Gvir’s cohort.
You see, one of the problems in the USA is the blind rage that occurs when we consider Gaza. Under normal circumstances, it’s not unreasonable to react to 60,000 deaths and the decimation of a people’s habitat in a variety of ways, ranging from closing our eyes to protesting outside the student union or refusing to vote in the latest election.
Most of us don’t look upon Netanyahu’s reaction to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, by saying, “Great stuff, there, Benji.”
Some people do. People who desired revenge after the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, are happy. That’s another topic, one for other people, because revenge at that level speaks to a darker side than I have the expertise to address. Most of us, though, have been appalled, although not enough to do much about it.
This is why history is so important. Patterns. Human behavior etched into the ancient walls of the Middle East.
None of it is simple, almost none of it is pure good versus pure evil. Before Yitzhak Rabin was a peacemaker, for example, he was a warrior with his share of black marks.
When he was a teenager, he joined a Zionist commando group called the Palmach. In his twenties, to help enforce UN-mandated Jewish and Arab boundaries on behalf of Israel, he participated in an operation in the Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramle, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that resulted in the massacre of several hundred Palestinian villagers. In all, fifty thousand Palestinians were removed from those towns in an ethnic cleansing operation that was typical for its era.
His political career trajectory did not scream, “Peace now!”
But, as I say, it’s complicated. Israel in those days was surrounded by hostile Arab countries that wanted to oversee its obliteration. The world, exhausted by World War Two, was faced with the dilemma of preventing another Holocaust, which cost six million Jewish lives.
The horror of that led to the state of Israel, which, in turn, cost many Palestinians their homeland. Something had to be done. Maybe hindsight is an unfair way to look at things, but there’s no doubt that the solution world leaders came up with didn’t work out well.
Who is Itamar Ben-Gvir?
Itamar Ben-Gvir belonged to a right-wing terror group that executed what some might consider a rare feat: a political assassination (of Rabin) that accomplished its goal. I’d argue that feat is not as rare as many think it is.
The poster child for the failures of political assassination is probably Gavrilo Princip, who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which fired up World War I. That was a catastrophic failure. What Princip and his team of fellow assassins had in mind was a new Slavic state ripped from the rump and eastern quadrants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead, they got a nasty world war.
John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln. That was not as much of a failure, at least not for American racists, who still thrive in part because of Booth’s success. I’d actually argue that it continued the Confederate War all the way until today.
Before the nation had a chance to recover from Lincoln’s assassination, Charles J. Guiteau killed James A. Garfield, who worried that Blacks, newly freed from slavery, would struggle to achieve economic independence without a substantial effort from the federal government to provide education. You can’t oppressively chain people up for a couple of hundred years, keep them apart from books, then expect them to thrive without some help.
That dream died when Garfield did. Garfield wanted to enact a series of reforms for newly freed slaves, and worked on getting a few Blacks, such as Frederick Douglass, into his administration.
Guiteau’s wasn’t a political assassination. He was the equivalent of today’s disturbed incel: not quite right in the head, in a constant state of desperation, an ink stain on his family, and, unlike many people who struggle through life, unable to climb out from the large trenches he dug for himself.
No matter how one views the historic success rate of political assassination, the success of Rabin’s assassination has been clear. The right wing in Israel has, like the right wing in the United States, patiently built its base since the 1990s.
Note: I have much more to say on the endless scourge of right-wing racism in an upcoming post.
Likud, Israel’s far-right wing party, has been in power for the most part ever since Rabin’s assassination, aside from a few cameo appearances by the Labor Party, which has apparently been euthanized.
These days, Likud forms all of Israel’s governments by allying itself with the darkest, seamiest underbelly of Israeli Zionism.
Just like in the U.S., a guy like Itamar Ben-Gvir would have been a fringe player two decades ago. His overall stance on life in the Holy Land is, “The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian,” and he has the track record to back it up.
Not long before Rabin was assassinated, Ben-Gvir threatened him on live television. Ben-Gvir was known for hanging a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, an American/Israeli, in his living room. Goldstein slaughtered 29 Palestinian people in Hebron in 1994. Both men were supporters of a Zionist terror group named Kach, which was placed on a list of terror groups by the United States and the European Union.
Ben-Gvir was generally credited with inciting violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinians in East Jerusalem in 2021, and causing tension by trying to force his way into the al-Aqsa Mosque, considered sacred by Muslims, at the Temple Mount in 2023.
He was denounced by the Biden administration when he said in 2023 that Arabs had no right to travel in Israel because “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.”5
Read that again to make sure you caught everything. These are the kinds of people running Israel today. They are the people running its war against Gaza.
Israel has never been farther away from a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians. The people that Netanyahu needs to form a government want genocide (not that Netanyahu needs to be egged on in that regard). Most people in Israel don’t, but they are stuck with a system of government that renders it immobilized unless Likud plays nice with the kinds of people it once rejected.
Quoting Christopher Armitage regarding the “question” of genocide in Gaza:6
Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, he was born in Israel, and he served in its army. He wrote in the New York Times in November 2023 that what he was seeing did not yet rise to genocide. He changed his mind in stages over the following year, in the Guardian in August 2024, on CNN that December, then again in the New York Times on July 15, 2025, where he wrote that by May 2024, after the army ordered about a million people sheltering in Rafah to the beach at Mawasi and then destroyed much of the city, his conclusion had become that Israel was in fact committing genocide. A man who studies the crime for a living, who resisted the word against his own background and his own earlier judgment, followed the evidence to it anyway.
Atrocities become a circle of death. Six million Jewish people were murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies during the Holocaust. Many defenders of the current genocide cite the difference in numbers as justification for Netanyahu’s and Ben-Gvir’s actions, as if a smaller body count somehow matters.
History will judge all of these people. But wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, we did that instead, while it was happening?
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Footnotes
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Wag-the-dog is a phrase popularized by a movie, “Wag the Dog.” It refers to a deflection by a nation’s leader, generally a war, to prevent a population from thinking about what a crappy leader he is.
Bateman, Tom. “US Condemns Israeli Minister Ben Gvir’s ‘Inflammatory’ Palestinian Comments.” Bbc.com. BBC News, August 25, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66614459.
Since I don’t drink, I’ll need you to do it for me. And twelve vodka martinis seem like a good number during these dark days. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.
Bateman, Tom. “US Condemns Israeli Minister Ben Gvir’s ‘Inflammatory’ Palestinian Comments.” Bbc.com. BBC News, August 25, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66614459.
Armitage, Christopher. “On Palestine and Genocide.” Substack.com. The Existentialist Republic, September 16, 2026. https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/on-palestine-and-genocide.