The Disappearing People that Will Not Disappear…

How Palestinians withstand the onslaught of Israeli death machines, oppression, collective punishment & genocide, and still won’t go quietly into the night…

Peter Winn-Brown
23 min readMay 22, 2024
Former Israeli President Chain Herzog & David Ben Gurion look up at the Western Wall.
Chaim Herzog & David Ben Gurion at the Western wall. “We, in Israel, have endeavored to create a society which strives to implement the highest ideals of society — political, social and cultural — for all the inhabitants of Israel, irrespective of religious belief, race or sex. Show me another pluralistic society in this world in which, despite all the difficult problems among which we live, Jew and Arab live together with such a degree of harmony … in which freedom of speech, of movement, of thought, of expression are guaranteed.” This was part of, then President Chaim Herzog’s response at the UNGA in 1975 to the UN resolution that said Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Image from Haaretz, by Meir Freundlich, GPO.

‘The twentieth century saw the most momentous changes in Jewish history since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. The annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis during World War II, and the founding of the Jewish State of Israel shortly thereafter, have radically changed the position of Jews in the world. The result has been a transformation of relations amongst Jews themselves and between them and the other peoples of the world. Though inextricably linked, the Holocaust and the Jewish State raise two different sets of questions. The Holocaust is the end of an era of Jewish existence and therefore raises questions about the past-how and why it happened. The Jewish State is the beginning of a new era and therefore raises questions about what it means to be a part of the Jewish people today and in the future. Of course, the answers to the second set of questions have been and must be influenced by the answers to the first, whether explicitly articulated in thought or implicitly contained in action. The task of trying to understand how and why the Holocaust happened and what has-or should…

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Peter Winn-Brown
Peter Winn-Brown

Written by Peter Winn-Brown

The past can illuminate the present if we shine the light of inquiry openly, truthfully, with attention to detail & care for the salient facts.

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