What's On My Mind Today

The Obscenely Obsessive Focus on Gaza and Israel

The Obscenely Obsessive Focus on Gaza and Israel
By Phyllis Chesler

I am, as usual, enraged by the entire world's obsessive focus on Israel as the most evil nation in the world. I feel compelled to share a bit of what's crossed my screen--pure poison, all of it. Writing about it helps get it out of my system.

The world's insanity and Jew hatred continue on and on....as I've written many times before (forgive me, I'd rather be writing about other subjects but it is what it is), Israel has become
the uber-symbol for the concepts of colonialism, apartheid, racism, Islamophobia, settler-ism, genocide, war crimes, etc. These allegations are simply not true about Israel but they are true about so much of the rest of the world, about which the wokesters do nothing.

That would be too big a job, tackling evil for real, obsessively, and in every way possible. Thus, the only thing they can do is to scream for the elimination of Jews and the Jewish state, as if that will solve the entire world's every problem. Even now, citizens of forty four nations are planning to sail to Gaza on August 31st, in order to break the alleged Israeli blockade and deliver food to Gaza. If these fools were serious about this, they would lobby Hamas, Qatar, Iran, the EU and the UN to allow the massive amount of food that Israel has been sending in to be allowed through. But that will not serve their purpose.

This bunch, have accused Israel of stealing the land away from the indigenous people, aka: the "Palestinians." Really? Honestly?

Recently, I reviewed an extraordinaby book by Doron Spielman at the American Specatator which documents the archeological excavation of the City of David. Titled "When the Stones Speak." It is beyond clear that Hebrews/Jews/Israelis have been there for more than 3,600 years; in other words, for many millennia before the rise of Islam and before an Arab group, about one hundred years ago, chose a new identity: "Palestine," expressly to drive the Jews out of the land.

Israel's alleged crime of not being indigenous to the region fuels all these other mad views; of "occupying" another people's land.

I therefore urge you to real a most interesting article up at Tablet by David Jager titled "What Real Decolonization Looks Like." North American indigenous voices are "challenging anti-Israel dogma, drawing on their shared historical experiences to stand with the Jewish state." They understand that Israelis/Hebrews/Jews are the only "indigenous people" of the Holy Land and they "have a right to be there." Two representative authors write that: "We are Anishanaabe Zionists. Hateful anti-Israel camps disrespect our lands." They condemn the pro-Palestinian protests....we hear the words 'colonizer,' 'settler' and 'decolonizer' to justify terror, violence, kidnapping, rape, and targeted civilian massacres." For your information, the Anishinaabe represents First Nation tribes that are settled around the Great Lakes finger region: the Chippewa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi.

What disgusted me the most about the opera "The Death of Klinghoffer," at the Metropolitan Opera, was not even the awful music or the biased theme--it was the production itself, one in which the Jews are shown as all white Europeans, bringing along with them plants in little pots while the "Palestinians" are shown as indigenous, rooted to the land, as if they were an indigenous Greek chorus, a "forever" presence. (The opera concerns the hijacking of the passenger liner, Achille Lauro, by the Palestine Liberation Front, a terrorist group, and their throwing a wheel-chair bound, American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard. The composer and librettist's sympathy was entirely for the terrorists who, after all, had no better recourse. Like Oct 7, the PLO was driven to it.

Talk about the hijacking of opera itself! Britain's Royal Ballet and Opera company have just cancelled their upcoming performance of "Tosca" in Tel Aviv. And why? Because of the "humanitarian crisis in Gaza." Apparently 182 members of their staff signed an open letter protesting Israel's "genocide" in Gaza. Celebrity artists who also signed include musician, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens aka Stephen Demetre Georgiou), playwright Caryl Churchill, actress Mariaim Margolyes, author Pankaj Mishra, actress Tilda Swinton, author Marina Warner, the ever-present musician, Roger Waters, and the director of the film based on "The Death of Klinghoffer," none other than Penny Woolcock.

No surprise there.

The demand that art and artists be held accountable for the actions of their government; that an artist and his or her work should be boycotted for failing to mouth the politically correct line; that a work of art must be judged and censored as a function of the artist's private life are hugely important topics which I'll address elsewhere.

Such pro-Gazan/anti-Israeli flotillas, cancellations, boycotts, censorship, and celebrity signatories are entirely due to the sixty+ years of Soviet, Arab, left-wing propaganda. Their brains have been fried--deep fried. They all read the NYT and their counterpart media in the West and in the Islamic world. Captive to hysterical hyperbole, and the repetition of Big Lies, they are zombie actors on the world stage.

Despite overwhelming, objective evidence to the contrary, they sail on, they sign on, they keep repeating the same memes.

For example, on August 9, 2025, the New York Anti-Zionist Times, ran no less than seven articles in their section A, (almost four full pages), four graphs, and 10 photos, once again painting Israel as evil, and Gazans as suffering starvation and genocide due to Israel's actions in a war of self-defense.

Today, on August 10th, 2025, they ran two front section articles--an entire page --with the same lies; in addition, columnist, Ezra Klein, was allowed a full page in the op-ed section--an interview with Mahmoud Khalil. The headline: "It Felt Like A Kidnapping." It is a dangerously clever interview with a pro-Hamas activist who, on video, once claimed that "we couldn't avoid Oct 7 attack," and who was a prominent figure in the pro-"Palestine" protests on campuses.

As yet, the Paper of Record has not given such an lengthy interview to any of the kidnapped, wounded, and tortured Israelis. Nor have they as yet, posted a four column front page photo of a suffering Israeli mother or one of the horrifying photos of two really starving Israelis buried alive in tunnels, photos that Hamas diabolically shared on Tisha B'Av. Once it was proven that their photo of an allegedly starving Gazan child, was indeed a carefully crafted photo of a child born with cerebral palsy and not one being starved by Israelis--their correction was purposely non-prominent and merely stated that the child was born with "health issues."

We are up against a tsunami of lethal lies and we must stay the course. Our mantra should be "Let Our People Go" not "Bring them Home." And we should allow, nay, support, the IDF et al to pursue the utter destruction of Hamas. Any other plan is sheer folly.