Former Foreign Service Officer
Washington, DC
Joined September 2010
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Richard retweeted
So proud of my brave and brilliant friend Ben Moser
“I think that at a time of genocide, you can either sit on the sidelines and exempt yourself from criticism,” he said, “or you can, as they say in Brazil, give your face to be beaten.”
theguardian.com/world/2026/o…
Richard retweeted
“You have 2 minutes to leave your home. If you don’t leave, we will shoot everyone.”
-Zionism, summarized in 16 words by Ahmad Imraish, from Hebron, Palestine.
Richard retweeted
Trita is right that this is not a fringe minority or a marginal view in Israel. This is especially so among Israeli youth (18-22 yr olds) like this woman. It's instructive to put some representative numbers behind this claim.
Here are the results of a recent Ynet poll (Oct 2026) conducted among a representative sample of 543 Israeli voters aged 18 to 22:
• Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party would win 8.88 % of the vote, translating to 15 Knesset seats.
• Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist alliance would receive 8.09 %, or 14 seats.
• Together w/ Ofer Winter's party (Amcha Yisrael), nearly 20% (or 1 in 5) of young Israelis would vote for these far-right parties whose platforms espouse policies in line with this woman's beliefs.
Keep in mind that Ben Gvir's party outpolled Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party (8.75%, translating to 15 seats), Netanyahu's Likud (7.95%, equivalent to 14 seats) and the Democrats alliance (the successor to the Labor Party, which polled at 4.99%). Only Naftali Bennett’s Together alliance outpolled Ben Gvir's party (8.98% or 16 seats).
Of course, all these parties are ultra-Zionist & different flavors of right wing, but the point is that this woman is not some fringe extremist in Israel like some are trying to make her out to be.
A young blonde woman with an American accent in Israel says that all the Arabs must be kicked out of Gaza because it is "our land" since "God commanded us to take it."
The Palestinians should be kicked out to any other Arab state, she continues, except Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, "because they are ours."
"Or we will kill them," she adds
Can we stop pretending that this is a marginal view in Israel? That these are the comments of a fringe minority?
They are not. Israel has been on this path for quite some time.
Western governments know it fully - yet they continue to fund and enable Israel's genocidal policies.
Richard retweeted
💥Enlightening & interesting conversation between Israeli journalist @RavivDrucker & top Biden official @PhilGordonDC. Incidental, but the day Netanyahu responded to Joe Biden with🖕, and thus sealed the fate of living Israeli hostages the US was trying to save, was July 4, 2024.
Richard retweeted
Please don't post paywalled articles. Use archive.is instead:
archive.is/8hkxO
Richard retweeted
Oh, I see. It's a gift. I sincerely thank you, but I'd rather not give them my email address for spam.
More importantly, everybody should be able to read the article. Use the archive.is article above instead.
Richard retweeted
"The Peace" (2023) by Palestinian (Gaza) artist Dina Mattar
There's something almost unbearably cruel about the fate of this painting.
It is called The Peace.
Palestinian artist Dina Mattar painted a world overflowing with the things she has returned to throughout her work: women, flowers, birds, colour, memory, tenderness and the stubborn insistence of ordinary Palestinian life.
And then, in 2023, The Peace was left beneath the rubble of Gaza.
Mattar was born in Gaza in 1985 and studied art at Al-Aqsa University. For years she worked within Gaza's extraordinary community of artists, becoming part of the Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, an independent space where Palestinian artists exhibited, taught, experimented and created.
Mattar once explained that although Gaza had become known to the outside world through sorrow, war, siege and instability, she remained determined to make art there, to speak through it for people who simply wanted to live in safety and peace.
That matters when looking at this painting.
Her colours were never merely decorative.
Flowers, trees, birds and the patterns of Palestinian embroidery repeatedly entered her paintings. Women occupied their centre. Beauty itself became a language: an insistence that Gaza was not merely the destruction endlessly photographed by the outside world, but homes, mothers, children, gardens, memory, imagination and life.
Then came 2023.
The Eltiqa gallery in Gaza City was destroyed. Mattar and her husband, Palestinian artist Mohammed Al-Hawajri, would later search through rubble trying to recover what remained of their work.
Much had been lost.
And somewhere beneath that devastation remained this painting.
The Peace.
There is an awful poetry in that title now.
A painting imagining peace buried beneath the ruins of the place whose people had been denied it.
Yet perhaps there is another way of seeing it.
Because the rubble did not erase the painting completely.
We still have its image.
We still know its name.
We still know the woman who painted it.
And so The Peace survives in another form, carried beyond the place where the physical work was lost, reproduced, remembered and seen by people its artist may never meet.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet powers of Palestinian art.
A house can be destroyed.
A studio can be destroyed.
A gallery can be destroyed.
A painting can disappear beneath rubble.
But the idea it carried can escape.
And somewhere beyond the ruins, The Peace is still being seen.
Richard retweeted
Israel’s extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir closed an English-language town hall in Tel Aviv by congratulating one of his deputies for “doing hasbara around the world” and by painting Tuesday's election as a choice between two different Netanyahu governments.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could govern with Gadi Eisenkot, he told the crowd of English-speaking Israelis, or with Ben-Gvir in what he called "a full right-wing government."
Eisenkot is a former Israeli army chief of staff who now leads the Yashar! party. Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman has accused him of seeking a government with Netanyahu, though he is widely seen as Netanyahu’s main rival in the election.
Richard retweeted
Last week, on a panel with my friend @PeterBeinart, I made a point similar to Sohrab's here: the problem with Israel isn't simply its ethnonationalism—such states exist; I pointed to Japan as an example. The problem is that it exists as an ethnonationalist state on top of the Palestinians, on their land, and at their expense.
Richard retweeted
I've been thinking again about the cancellation by the Herbert Park Hotel of the hotel booking for the antisemitism conference. Following various comments made, I've been looking further into SECCA, the event organisers, I've changed my mind and have deleted my post last week.
SECCA is not just an affiliate of the World Jewish Council (WJC) but it is a direct initiative convened by the WJC - it is a WJC event. The WJC has defended Israel's completely disproportionate response (incl. the killing of 21,000 children) to Oct 7th in the following ways:
- It conducts media advocacy to defend the strategic and legal rationale behind IDF operations.
- It defends the legality of the IDF's conduct under international humanitarian law.
- It amplifies official IDF findings and intelligence to counter allegations of misconduct.
- It heavily advocates against the unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood.
- It lobbies against UN resolutions, commissions of inquiry and mandates that target Israel.
- It leads global campaigns to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
- Its leaders meet with heads of state to build support for Israeli foreign policy objectives.
- It publicly honours its Israeli members and fellows who serve in the IDF reserves.
- It promotes the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which draws controversy for including criticisms of Israel in its examples.
In order to counter allegations of war crimes the WJC quotes intelligence, legal perspectives & operational narratives put forward by the IDF and communicates these to global leaders & the public.
The WJC stands four-square behind Israel and its military actions, despite numerous major war crimes carried out by Israel. It has lobbied that countries don't comply with the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. WJC is like a diplomatic shield for Israel regarding the West Bank because it consistently opposes international efforts to force an end to the occupation. Its position goes beyond general solidarity with Israel
This runs down through to SECCA where Katharina von Schnurbein, who was the European Commission Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism and SECCA co-chair. On 29 May 2025, she made the ludicrous statement that bake sales raising money for the Palestinian Red Crescent made Jews in the EU feel uncomfortable. She said that, while the EU was going to review of its preferential trade agreement with Israel, it should rest on verified evidence rather than "rumours about Jews". Clearly this review was in reaction to Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza and not "rumours about Jews". She promoted Israel's line in relation to the supply of food to Gaza at that time. Just a couple of months later a MUAC survey suggested that 10's of thousands of children had severe malnutrition.
So taking all that into account, is it possible for an individual or organisation to take a stand against WJC/SECCA on the basis that it defends Israel's disproportionate attack on Palestinians and its ongoing occupation of the West Bank, without it be rooted in antisemitism? Having looked into the background of the organisation involved, I think so. It's a pity because antisemitism does need to be confronted, but as long as organisations position themselves firmly in support of the military actions of Israel, then protests are legitimate.
Richard retweeted
Kristallnacht, but without the broken glass.
Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian families from their homes in Hebron in the occupied West Bank overnight Friday, taking control of the properties, marking houses with X signs and hanging Israeli flags from balconies. Troops also blocked roads and closed a nearby checkpoint, restricting movement in the neighborhood as the military expanded its presence in the area.
The operation followed an attack Friday in which two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three others before being shot dead by Israeli forces. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had threatened a major military offensive following the attack.
Richard retweeted
The mechanisms of Israel's control of the narrative among Americans are varied. But here's just one example.
This post is from @dinakraft, a journalist who reports on Palestine and Israel for mainstream outlets like @csmonitor.
She is one of the many Jewish American zionists who exercised their Jewish privilege to become Israeli colonizers on occupied Palestinian land, who are paid to "report" news from the region as if they were impartial journalists, rather than the ideologues they are.
Others like her include @Heidiphotos, who has been in the news lately for getting beaten up by Jewish settlers in the West Bank. She admits that Palestinians saved her life, but she doesn't seem to know their names, nor does she appear to have made any effort to find out who they are, or thank them. I'm also told by a reliable source that she lived (and may still live) in an old villa that was made into four apartments (likely stolen from the original Palestinian owners, as it sits immediately adjacent to a confirmed stolen Palestinian home).
AP's news director for Israel-Palestine, Josef Federman, is another one. The @TheGrayzoneNews reported on leaked files that showed him on a panel aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative” at an Israeli government event dedicated to destroying the BDS movement.
Isabel Kershner writes for the @nytimes. Like the "western reporters" there, she's a zionist colonizer whose children served in Israel's military.
There are still dozens more; too many to name, including some who are colonizers in West Bank colonies.
Are we supposed to believe there are no non-zionist journalists in the entirety of the American population who can report on this issue?
These aren't just reporters who "happen to be Jewish." They are literal zionist ideologues who live as Jewish colonizers and who get to determine the fate of this land while the actual indigenous people there do not.
Richard retweeted
Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli centrist seeking to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday’s elections? What would his election mean for Israel's policy toward the Palestinians?
I asked @ShiraEfron of @RANDCorporation:
Richard retweeted
There is something terribly wrong with a world in which we must keep explaining why killing innocent people is wrong.
They went to a funeral. Now their families must bury them, too.
My heart is with Jordan tonight.
Human life should never be the price of anyone’s beliefs.
#Jordan
Richard retweeted
“You will not speak Arabic here. Get out of our country.”
These were the words that sparked a violent attack on three young Arab men at a nightclub in Tel Aviv yesterday. All three are Israeli citizens. The confrontation continued outside the club, where one of them was stabbed and rushed to the hospital with serious injuries.
I keep thinking about these young men. I keep thinking about what must happen to a society before the language a person speaks becomes a reason to reach for a knife.
Such a moment does not create itself. Years of nationalist incitement and racism have helped make it possible. When Palestinians and Arabs are continually portrayed as threats, no one should imagine that the consequences will remain confined to Gaza or the West Bank.
In Gaza, we have endured years of bombardment, displacement, starvation, and the destruction of our hospitals. I have witnessed firsthand what political and military decisions mean for the people who must live with them: dead bodies, wounded children, entire families wiped out.
In the West Bank, settlements continue to expand, settler violence persists, and Palestinian lives become increasingly restricted as more of their land is taken over.
And now, in Tel Aviv, three young men are attacked for speaking their mother tongue.
I cannot regard these events as disconnected. Nor can I believe that replacing a single government will, by itself, undo what decades of political decisions and incitement have created.
In three days, Israelis will go to the polls.
For everyone who feels ashamed or outraged by what Israel’s political and social landscape has become, this moment demands an honest examination of what those feelings require of you.
You may condemn racism in a conversation. You may condemn incitement in a post. But what does that condemnation accomplish if the policies that continue to fuel them remain unchanged?
I have no illusions that a single election will end extremism. But political change does not begin with silence. And outrage that never moves beyond our phone screens leaves the people who suffer its causes exactly where they were.
The question is no longer simply whether you oppose what is happening. It is what you are prepared to do to prevent it from continuing.
The consequences of political decisions do not end at the ballot box. They enter people’s homes. They shape the futures of their children. For many, they determine whether there will be a future at all.
What you decide today will shape more than your own future. Its consequences will reach millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, people who have had no voice in those decisions but who may nevertheless be made to pay for them with their homes, their freedom, and their lives.
#Israel
Richard retweeted
Christian Zionism began more than a century before Jewish Zionism. Much of Jewish Zionist ideology is taken from it.
As early as 1585 Reverend Francis Kett, a Christian from Cambridge, published a book called "The
Glorious and Beautiful Garland of Man’s Glorification Containing the Godly Misterie of Heavenly Jerusalem," where he mentions the “Jewish national return to Palestine."
In 1609, the English Anglican priest, Thomas Brightman, wrote a pamphlet called "Apocalypsis Apocalypseos," describing the process of the Jews’ “return” to the Holy Land and their conversion. In it he called for creating a Jewish state in Palestine for the prophecies of his religion to be fulfilled. He said only if this happens would England be blessed by their
god. (He also predicted the conversion of the Jews to Christianity in the year 1650.)
In 1621 a member of the British Parliament, Sir Henry Finch, published "The World’s Resurrection or The Calling of the Jews. A Present to Judah and the Children of Israel that Joined with Him, and to Joseph (that valiant tribe of Ephraim) and all the House of Israel that Joined with Him," which called for
the Jews to invoke their rightful claim to the Promised Land, re-establish themselves there, and convert to Christianity.
In 1649, Joanna Cartwright and her son Ebinezer, English Puritan Christians who lived in Holland, petitioned the English Parliament of Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews into England (all Jews were expelled from England by King Edward in 1290 and prohibited from returning), so that England, with help from Holland, could then transport the Jews to Palestine, where they needed to be according to their interpretation of Christianity.
In 1655 Paul Felgenhauever wrote that there would be a “permanent return of the Jews to their own country eternally bestowed upon them by G-d through the unqualified promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
The Danish pietist, Holger Paulli (1655-1714), professed the belief that the Jewish national return to the Holy Land was a requirement for the Second Coming of Jesus. He even lobbied the kings of England and France to conquer Palestine from the Ottomans and give it to the Jews to establish a national homeland there.
(from The Empty Wagon, by Rabbi @yaakov_shapiro )
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🇮🇱🇺🇸 A Pulitzer winner says Zionism began as a Protestant fantasy a century before Herzl, and the Jews who warned it would bring endless war were branded self-hating... a new book brings them back from exile
Palestine was 95 to 97% non-Jewish when the movement began, and one early leader's goal was to make it as Jewish as England is English, so Jewish critics called the project a catastrophe from day one.
Benjamin Moser, whose grandfather fled Nazi Germany in 1938, says:
"Zionism has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Zionism exploited the Holocaust."
Benjamin says Hannah Arendt hinted at Zionist dealings with the Nazis in Eichmann in Jerusalem and was hounded so completely that the Jewish press barely marked her death.
He argues a Star of David on every tank means the backlash to Israel's conduct puts all Jews in grave danger, which is why the anti-Zionist Jews he writes about are screaming themselves hoarse to say this is not us.
@WeTheBrandon
Richard retweeted
Someone who lies to cover up her country's role in aiding and abetting genocide (by sending arms and mercenaries to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary in Sudan) should NEVER be UN secretary general. That's United Arab Emirates diplomat Lana Nusseibeh. xitter.cf/Amgad_Fareid/status/21…
In July 2024, Lana Nusseibeh publicly and categorically rejected the UN Panel of Experts’ findings of credible evidence that #UAE supports the atrocities and genocide committed by the Rapid Support Forces (#RSF) militia in Sudan.
Confronted on CNN, she declared: “No. Those allegations are categorically untrue.” Asked directly whether she disputed the UN experts’ findings, she replied: “Yes, absolutely.”
Now, Ms. Nusseibeh seeks to lead the very institution whose findings she so emphatically dismissed in defence of her government. How can she possibly be entrusted with that responsibility? The fundamental question is not whether Nusseibeh was entitled to defend her regime. It is whether someone who placed that defence above the credible findings of UN experts can genuinely be entrusted with upholding the independence, integrity, and authority of the United Nations.
Why should the world trust her judgment when the UN’s findings conflict with the interests of the very government that nominated her? The UN highest office is not for protecting a criminal regime from scrutiny and accountability. The seat of the UN Secretary-General should not be for sale!
Richard retweeted
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are not aberrations on the margins of Israeli politics.
They reflect a strain of Zionism deeply embedded in the Jewish Israeli electorate.
A March 2025 survey reported in Haaretz found that 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the forced expulsion/ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, while 56% supported expelling Palestinian CITIZENS of Israel.
Those figures shatter the comforting illusion that the problem begins and ends with a handful of extremists.
The three leading contenders—Naftali Bennett, Gadi Eisenkot, and Netanyahu—share broadly similar positions on Gaza, the occupied West Bank, illegal settlements, and the systematic repression, subjugation, and oppression of all Palestinians. The central issue is not personality but policy, rooted in Zionist ideology: different leaders, substantial continuity.
Any debate over the Abraham Accords must confront this same underlying reality. The Arab countries’ joint statement identifies Israel’s illegal military occupation as the principal source of regional insecurity and instability.
On five occasions, Israel has rejected offers of normalization and security guarantees involving all Arab countries and additional Muslim states because those offers required an end to its brutal military occupation, now in its 59th year.
The fundamental obstacle is not the absence of a diplomatic opening. It is Israel’s REFUSAL to end the MILITARY occupation.
Replacing its prime minister is no substitute for changing that policy—and without that change, a new leader would represent continuity, not a break with the status quo.
I said I wasn’t going to weigh in on who should be prime minister of Israel as that is a decision for Israeli citizens. I did, however, want to share one point of view from the perspective of someone who has an understanding of how Israel is perceived in America.
Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have caused Israel enormous reputational damage with their statements and actions which are presented in the global media as representing the voice and will of all Israelis.
As such, a government formed without Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will send a message to the rest of the world that Israel is turning a new page.
This will allow Israel to rebuild lost credibility, increase the opportunity for an expansion of the Abraham Accords, and enjoy a better relationship with Democrats and Republicans and Americans at large.