The recent assault on Gaza and raids on Palestinian NGOs reflect an emerging Israeli policy of preemption, or what might be tentatively called the “Gantz Doctrine.”

Israeli politicians’ thin pretext for the latest attack on Gaza doesn’t add up, and the willing media doesn’t seem to care.

Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general who is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, praises onslaught on Gaza that killed 15 children as an “exceptional achievement.” Yadlin was protested at Harvard earlier this year. But he is excited now that PM Yair Lapid has passed the manhood test.

Hundreds of Israeli settlers set out across the occupied West Bank on Wednesday to take part in an unprecedented effort to erect a number of illegal settlement outposts in the territory. Led by Daniella Weiss, a leader of the religious-Zionist and settler movements and an advocate of an “Arab-free” Jewish state, the plans started as a goal of establishing “10 Evyatars” – named after the Evyatar outpost in Beita, what the group considers to be one of its most successful settlement projects in years. Although technically illegal under Israeli law, the new campaign appears to have tacit government support, and is bringing a new wave of violence against Palestinians along with it.

Ayanna Pressley leads US lawmakers in calling for Biden to reject Israel’s blacklisting of human rights groups

Nine European Union states announced their support for the Palestinian civil society organizations that were arbitrarily deemed “terrorist institutions” by the Israeli government last year. The EU states rejected the Israeli designation, citing lack of proof.

In a dramatic day for the Israeli parliament, legislators failed to renew the extension of an emergency order that affords Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank civil governance, while Palestinians in the same area are governed by military rule. This is one of the most blatant Apartheid laws, regularly renewed every five years since Israel began its 1967 occupation. When Palestinian lawmaker Mazen Ghanaim voted against it Nir Orbach of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s party charged at him and shouted that “the experiment with you has failed!” “You” is of course Palestinians in general, and the experiment is the idea of including Palestinians in government.

Israeli leaders are going crazy over the display of Palestinian flags– of course, because Israel is a Jewish state not a democracy. And an intellectual leader of the Israel lobby, Michael Koplow, admits the failure of Zionism in the reaction. “If waving a flag threatens Israel’s existence, then not only is Israel in far bigger trouble than anyone understands, but Zionism itself has failed.”

“The army and the settlement enterprise are one and the same” — a general in Israel’s occupying army says the quiet part about Zionism out loud. It has always been a messianic religious movement to establish Jewish supremacy in as much land as it can conquer. Gen. Roy Zweig was later reprimanded for speaking out, on Jerusalem Day.

‘Haaretz’ runs two articles attacking Israeli Zionism as a hateful dead-end, urging the world to take action. The authors’ scathing words would never make it into an American newspaper. Contemporary Zionism is a “Jewish mutation,” Amira Hass writes in despair. While B. Michael writes that Zionism has created a “small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation” of “Jew-oids” who have taken the “wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.”