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Newsletter 147
June 2, 2026
S.O.S. ISRAEL
S.O.S. PALESTINE
Latest echoes :
Former commander of Beaufort Ridge warns against romanticizing operation, holding outpost
Amir Bohbot, The Jerusalem Post, May 31, 2026
Trump said to yell at Netanyahu: ‘You’re f**king crazy. You’d be in prison if not for me’
Jacob Magid, Nava Freiberg, The Times of Israel, June 2, 2026
Where can we go from here ? Silence and dismay do not apply.
Dear Nobel/noble mind and friend,
Always grateful for your echoes, up to the last one, of May 11 : « Dark those prospects are, but you, Yacov, have faced such darkness before. Keep working for peace.
And there are moments of hope and joy… »
I know you have faced much darker times than I ever have, as an infant during such a terrifying period of humankind. Yuval Harari, in his 2018 essay 21 Lessons for the 21st century, claimed, to start the WAR chapter : « The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history » – but the subtitle is Never underestimate human stupidity. He is rated as one of the most brilliant minds worldwide. So maybe he should be listened to in his latest interview – have you read it ?
Notably that part which says : “If you look at the way that Israel is treating the Palestinians, not in Gaza but in the West Bank, there is no security justification for that,” he said. “They did not attack Israel on Oct. 7. And by Israel’s actions, the chance that there will be a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians is decreasing.”
Daniel Edelson, YNet News, May 27, 2026
Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion
Ezra Klein, The New York Times, May 26, 2026
The way that Israel is treating the Palestinians in the West Bank ? The day we met in Tel Aviv, March 7, 2025, when I left you, so happy feeling we could have met, I received a call from Nablus : the most important mosque there, the Al Naser mosque, had been torched in the night by a rogue platoon.
Did you hear about it ? Did anyone in the West hear about it ?
Al Naser mosque ? Think of the Sacred Heart in Paris, Saint Paul in London.
Not just the fact that it had been raided and set fire to, but that this was not covered by the media.
There are supposed to be ceasefires across the Middle East, but the fighting is worsening
Sam Metz, AP News, June 2, 2026
In Iran the ceasefire was agreed on April 8, almost two months ago. Is this what a ceasefire feels like ? In Gaza, the ceasefire was decreed on October 10, 2025. Eight months ago.
Over nine hundred persons have been killed in Gaza since the day of that ceasefire. Forty of them children and women.
Gaza: 26 killed over Eid holiday, UN rights investigators report
UN News, May 29, 2026
How do we know what we know ?
If not by going there, crossing the lines, from keeping our mind open to a number of sources : The Jerusalem Post, The New York Times, The Times of Israel, Ynet News, UN News, but also L’Orient Today, the BBC, Al Arabiya, Haaretz, China Global, the Tehran Times, the Jordan Times… Open the range, not to remain trapped in any one zone of comfort.
Not « only » the people, a vast majority of civilians, killed and maimed in Gaza after the ceasefire, but over two million human beings surviving in rubble and pestilence. « Nearly the entire population remains displaced and concentrated “into a progressively narrower strip of land”, with multiple displacement orders issued in recent days. « (UN News, May 29, 2026).
I know Gaza. I know Gazans. As a civilian myself.
Over a quarter of a century I have been involved in Israel and Palestine. My first pilgrimage, voyage was in the late eighties during the First Intifada. I spent time in Gaza then. The level of hatred was so high. Gaza was a dangerous place to be in the eighties for a stranger. Who remembers the War of Stones ? Now we have gone from stones to drones, and they fly from the North.
Who remembers that this first uprising lasted five years and nine months, to be concluded with the Oslo Accords in September 1993, opening the way to a solution of Palestinian sovereignty within five years – before the end of the century ?
What have the children born since the start of the Second Intifada, September 2000, known ?
Who remembers this second uprising lasted four years and four months ?
How many times did the army rush into the Gaza Strip, with full might, tanks and bombers, shells and missiles ? Four wars are recalled. 2008-2009. 2012. 2014. 2021. To culminate in 2023-2025.
What have the Gaza children born after the 2005 Israeli disengagement known ?
Gaza was a dangerous place in the eighties, but when I returned, for a few years, from 2008 to 2013, with an Israeli permit, it was different. I loved Gaza. Simply. Its people, its youth, their good-natured smiles, their seriousness, their warmth. Blockaded as it was, it still was a happy place – in between army raids. The 2014 war burnt the bridge for me.
Yet, the peace seeds we planted there, as a humanitarian non-governmental organization, seemed to sprout in 2018. It was even printed in the New York Times. David Halbfinger wrote about it, April 15, 2018. « It was a striking tableau… » said he. Gardeners missing down the line though.
We’re all taught the codes and languages of business, management, math, physics and all, but where do they teach the basic lexicon and grammar of listening and coexisting ? Where on earth ?
This is what we find in Gaza today, both soldiers and civilians :
Dead animals, tetanus and rabies: IDF soldiers stationed in Gaza face extreme conditions – report
The Jerusalem Post, May 25, 2026
Plague of rats and insects provides latest challenge for war-shattered Gazans
Khaled Mohamed, UN News, April-May 2026
Has the world forgotten Gaza amidst the smoke of war with Iran?
Hasan Dajah, The Jordan Times, May 20, 2026
Thousands of bodies trapped under Gaza’s rubble
ABC, May 17, 2026
Have I known such darkness before ? Not in my years. Through the murderous insanity in Bosnia in the nineties, in Kosovo at the turn of the century, during the Second Intifada into 2005, then in Algeria, the « dark decade » – this being the field of my personal experience in war zones – no, I have known nothing of the sort. Never known such spreading darkness.
Bosnia 1993-1996, Kosovo 1999, Palestine & Israel 2000-2005, Algeria until 2002, the pits of evil somehow were filled again with rationality, and the warring groups came to a closure, for the sake of survival and common sense. Kosovo was even torn away from Serbia, and decreed a sovereign state in 2008, recognized as such by 110 countries worldwide – ever since, peace has prevailed between Serbia and sovereign Kosovo.
Here, the evil that flared up in October 2023 with the Palestinian attack from Gaza has culminated in some seventy five thousand deaths, some fifty thousand of them women and children. In February-March 2026, this horrifying evil has metastasized into more war, more devastation, into Iran, and Lebanon, to this very day.
3,371 people killed, over ten thousand wounded, in Lebanon, since March 2. 1.2 million people ‘displaced’, were forced away from their homes, out of six million – can you imagine ? Twenty percent of Americans, that would mean close to seventy million people on the roads, or sixteen million Germans for that matter. You tell me what it means.
So, you bomb and displace, North and South, just because you have the means to do it, without the least shred of awareness, awareness of consequences ? And you cover up reality, under the guise of speeches about freedom vs terrorism ?
Treating people like abstract pawns in a video game, like cattle to the slaughterhouse.
Is this how you define the defence of democracy in a free society ?
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In loving memory of Vivian Silver (center front) who died an atrocious death in her burning shelter on October 7, 2023.
This picture was taken in October 2016, when Women Wage Peace walked through Israel, from North to South, East to West, from Dimona to the Gaza Wall here. I was there, with them.
Eighteen months before the preceding picture, taken behind the wall, within the Gaza Strip, with Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mandela. Ismael Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, 2024.
How long till we all become blind, from the Eye for an Eye virus ?
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