On Presumptuous Pride: Netanyahu Castigates Europe

While conducting a genocide and even a holocaust in Gaza from 2023 through at least the summer of 2025, the Israeli government was in no position to launch diplomatic threats against either the E.U. or any of its states for recognizing a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state.[1] At the time, the warrants issued by the ICC for the arrest of Netanyahu and a former defense minister were still outstanding, and no doubt more warrants would be issued for other culprits in the Israeli government and military. I applaud Jews around the world, and especially in Israel, who have had the guts to protest publicly on behalf of human rights in Gaza and against Israel's savage militaristic incursion into Gaza and the related death of tens of thousands and starvation of millions. The human urge of self-preservation is astonishing in that as of August, 2025, so many residents of Gaza were still alive. So, for Netanyahu to charge government officials in the E.U. with being antisemitic is not only incorrect and unfair, but highly presumptuous given the severity of the atrocities unleashed by Netanyahu and his governmental cadre. Regarding both the Israeli protesters and the Netanyahu government, distinguishing the ethical from the theological domains, which are admittedly very much related, is helpful.

The full essay is "On Presumptuous Pride." 

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1. Tal Shalev et al, “Israel Launches Diplomatic Attacks on Its Western Allies Ahead of Palestinian Statehood Recognition,” CNN.com, August 20, 2025.

The E.U. on Ukraine: On the Human, All Too Human

On August 17, 2025, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U., as a precursor to both of them meeting with Don Trump, president of the U.S. on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Von der Leyen had decided to accompany Zelensky to Washington in part to potentially play interference should the U.S. president again publicly berate Zelensky to his face and in part to protect Zelensky should Trump’s position/pressure be too pro-Russia (i.e., pro-Putin). To virtually all Europeans and to many Americans, Trump’s verbal outburst at Zelensky in the Oval Office had been shocking, especially as it seemed to be pre-meditated and orchestrated. Taking emotional advantage of the head of a state being invaded by the empire-scale Russia can assuredly be reckoned as being a bad host, and even low class for the president of the empire-scale United States. International relations do indeed contain a very human element, and in fact leaving it out of an analysis of an international situation is nothing short of negligent.

Our political entities are, after all, artifacts made by us and thus can at best restrain our most base instincts. Even as such, as Hobbes points out in Leviathan, living under a sovereign is much preferable to being in the brutish state of nature. It is important to remember in assessing international relations that Hobbes’ state of nature is not completely extinguished or blocked by the establishment and maintaining of government. As for Hobbes’ social contract, I would be surprised if there even was a group of humans living in proximity without some hierarchy of power, and thus de facto government, in which case the scenario of a number of free individuals social-contracting from nothing, ex nihilo, to form a government is, as Aristotle wrote of Plato’s theory of the Forms, “beautiful but false.” By the way, Plato eventually rejected his own theory wherein forms, or pure ideas, are metaphysically real.

Lest I be presumed to have digressed, my point with all of the historical philosophy was not to put you to sleep; rather, I contend that Von der Leyen’s presence with Zelensky in Washington is not only to be analyzed in terms of Europe’s geo-political interests in countering any plans that Russia’s president might develop to invade any of the E.U.’s eastern states, but also of the human, all too human—to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche—element. The latter is also highly relevant to the E.U. president’s trouble with the governor of the E.U. state of France, whose efforts to upstage the federal president as the figurehead of the E.U., including in speaking for the E.U. rather than just for his own state, have not gone unnoticed in Europe. By the way, the U.S. avoids such a pitfall by making foreign policy an exclusive competency, or enumerated power, of the U.S., such even the governor of California or Texas cannot publicly state a foreign policy for the United States.

In stating after his meeting with Von der Leyen that Europe “needs to stand united in any further negotiations to stop Moscow’s all-out war in Ukraine, Zelensky was essentially saying that the governors of even large E.U. states should get behind the president and foreign minister of the E.U. rather than go it alone in foreign policy with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Moreover, because Russia is on the scale of an empire whereas E.U. states are “kingdom”-level, the E.U. is needed to face off against President Putin of Russia, especially of the president of the empire-scale U.S. leaned in Putin’s favor to end the invasion even if that means rewarding an invasion with additional territory. On this point, Von der Leyen stated, “Our position is clear: international borders cannot be changed by force; these are decisions to be made by Ukraine . . . and not without Ukraine at the table.”[1] To be sure, this statement can be viewed as naïve, for it omits any mention of the E.U.’s role in safeguarding Zelensky from being faced with intense political pressure from Trump and military threats from Putin to “help” Zelensky make the “right” decision. Considerable military and political pressure from two empire-scale polities can be brought to bear on a single kingdom-level polity. Hence, Zelensky also said after his meeting with Von der Leyen, “It’s crucial that Europe is as united now as it was at the very beginning, as it was in 2022 when the full-scale war began.”[2] Ukraine desperately needed the support of at least one empire-scale polity, especially if the American and Russian empires were actually on the same side. 

American support for Putin would mean that America was at the time in favor of two invaders: Russia and Israel. There was a time when the U.S. stood for freedom-fighters rather than bullies. Whether a person or the head of a militarized polity, a bully is a bully. That is to say, the human, all too human element should not be left out of the equation. 

I submit that militaries around the world, whether voluntarily or through a semi-sovereign world federalism, as discussed by Kant in Perpetual Peace and has seemed definitively necessary after Russia’s unimpeded invasion and Israel’s genocide and holocaust in Gaza, should try to counter rather than enable or ignore the worst of human nature. We cannot assume that Hobbes’ infamous state of nature has been, or even would be, replaced by the institution of government, especially in international relations, but our species could do much better, and it is not at all utopian to say so.

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1. Malek Fouda, Sacha Vakulina, and Aleksandar Brezar, “Zelenskyy Urges Europe to Remain United Against Russia’s ‘Anti-European’ War in Ukraine,” Euronews.com, August 17, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Trump Meets Putin on Ukraine: On the Exclusion of the E.U.

Like proud male birds dancing for a female for the chance to reproduce, U.S. President Trump and Ukraine’s Zelensky engaged in public posturing ahead of the negotiations set to take place between Trump and Vlad the Impaler Putin of Russia in Alaska on August 15, 2025. For the public, to take the postures as real positions, set in stone, would be nothing short of depraved naivete. Missing in action in all this posturing was E.U. President Van der Leyen and the E.U.’s foreign minister. Instead, the governors of two, albeit large, E.U. states were busy making demands as if their respective political bases were more powerful than the E.U. as a whole. In short, Van der Leyen missed an opportunity to join the dance of posturing.

After a virtual meeting with Trump, Zelensky postured by saying, “Putin is bluffing that the sanctions do not work, that they are nothing. In fact, sanctions are hitting the Russian economy hard.”[1] The Ukrainian president added that Putin had not changed his military goal with respect to occupying “the whole of Ukraine.”[2] Meanwhile, Trump was rattling his saber by warning Putin that there would be “very severe consequences” if Putin does not agree to a ceasefire.[3] This warning is sheer posture; no one should assume that Trump was saying what would actually happen, so protests against Trump unleashing World War III would be unfounded and based on a failure to distinguish negotiating posturing from announcing a new policy.

Different from posturing were demands from the governor of a large E.U. state, including that a ceasefire “must be at the very beginning. Later, there may be a framework agreement. Third, . . .”[4] A leader of an E.U. state who was not to be included in the upcoming negotiation between Trump and Putin, whose respective federations are empire-scale and consist of states and regions, respectively, that are themselves the size of E.U. states, was making demands as if that leader were to be a participant in the negotiations, for otherwise to make demands would not make sense; all that could be offered would be suggestions.

As the de facto head of state for the E.U., and de jure president of its executive branch, the European Commission, President Von der Leyen would have had more sway with Trump and Putin were she to have made suggestions; it would have been improper for her as a non-participant to make demands. So E.U. foreign minister Kallas overstepped in stating, “Any deal between the US and Russia must have Ukraine and the EU included.”[5] Even though Kallis’s rationale, that “it is a matter of Ukraine’s and the whole of Europe’s security,”[6] is a valid argument for why the EU rather than a governor of even a large EU state should be included in the negotiations, her demand is but from the sidelines of the playing field on which negotiations take place, and thus her making a demand only shows her weakness as being situated as such. That the E.U. had stood a better chance of edging its way into the Trump-Putin negotiations was undone by state officials jumping in for Von der Leyen in meeting before the negotiations with Trump and by Kallas’s deference to state officials in her own meeting with them. That the E.U. state of Hungary blocked an E.U. foreign policy supporting Ukraine also reflects on the weakness of the E.U. in not having sufficiently resisted opposition by governors to getting rid of the necessity of unanimity on foreign-policy (and other significant) matters at the federal level.

Between the lack of respect for the federal officials by state-level governors and foreign ministers, and the continuing inherent weakness at the points of state involvement in federal institutions, blame for the E.U. being sidelined by Trump and Putin applies at least partially to the Europeans themselves. Merz and Macron should have made way for Von der Leyen stand for the EU being the European to meet vicariously with Trump a few days before the negotiation in Alaska, and the foreign ministers at the state level should have respected the necessary role of consensus, as unanimity is difficult to achieve with 27 states, so Kallas could have made E.U.-wide suggestions for Trump and Putin. There is indeed a very practical cost in world affairs that Europeans pay in refusing to expand qualified majority voting in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., and for not increasing the power of the European Parliament, which represents E.U. citizens rather than states. Although it would be unwise to cut state involvement off at the federal level as has happened in the U.S., that just one governor can paralyze the E.U. in foreign policy is indication enough that the state governments have too much power at the federal level—much more than is necessary to safeguard the interests of state government from being eclipsed by a much more powerful federal government, as has happened in the U.S., keine Zufall, especially after state governmental institutions ceased appointing U.S. senators to Congress in the early 20^th century. The state governments in the E.U. could give up the ghost on the principle of unanimity at the federal level without worrying about unfettered encroachment from the federal institutions. State governments should continue to be represented in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., but on the basis of qualified majority voting rather than unanimity. The result, I contend, would be that the E.U. would be better able to muscle its way into negotiations between the E.U.’s counterparts: The U.S., Russia, and China.

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1. Sacha Vakulina, “’Putin Is Bluffing,’ Zelenskyy Tells Trump as European Leaders Push for Ukraine Ceasefire,” Euronews.com, August 13, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Sacha Vakulina, Aleksandar Brezar, and Alice Tidey, “Trump Warns of ‘Very Severe Consequences’ for Russia if Putin Does Not Stop War in Ukraine,” Euronews.com, August 13, 2025.
4. Sacha Vakulina, “’Putin Is Bluffing,’ Zelenskyy Tells Trump as European Leaders Push for Ukraine Ceasefire,” Euronews.com, August 13, 2025.
5. Jeremy Fleming-Jones, “Kallas Calls Snap Meeting of EU Foreign Ministers on Ukraine on Monday,” August 10, 2025, italics added.
6. Ibid.

Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu

Israeli state officials met on August 7, 2025 to debate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to expand the presence of the IDF, Israel’s military, to include all of the territory in Gaza, which had been under Israeli occupation anyway for many decades. With Gaza already under Israeli occupation, characterizing Netanyahu’s plan as being “to conquer all or parts of Gaza not yet under Israeli control” is strange.[1] Similarly, mischaracterizing the E.U. as a bloc even though that union has the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial is odd. The media’s artful way of reporting is without doubt superficial relative to Netanyahu’s unvirtuous decisions and their respective consequences to which the labels of genocide and holocaust have justifiably been applied around the world. Behind the relevant vice lies an extreme egocentricity that the ethical theory of Sikhism describes quite well, even to the level of ontology or metaphysics.

The full essay is at "Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu."

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Israel’s Security Cabinet Debates Expanding Gaza Operation Despite Opposition,” Euronews.com, August 7, 2025.

Maimonides on Netanyahu

On August 5, 2025, Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he “hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly 22-month war.”[1] Roughly thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of 2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity, whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.

The full essay is at "Maimonides on Netanyahu."

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1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.

The Gaza Holocaust

I contend that the genocide in Gaza being committed by the Israeli government can also be termed a holocaust. This is actually not much of a leap; what is surprising is that American mercenaries—retired U.S. Army officers working as subcontractor security forces at food distribution sites in Gaza—have also enjoyed the sport of shooting adult and even children Gazans under the reasonable assumption of impunity. As the funder of the subcontractor, the U.S. Government can be considered as an accomplice even more directly than in merely supplying Israel with the weapons to use to kill off the population of Gaza. The sheer inertia of the American electorate and the intractability of the federal representatives can itself be viewed as a subtle accomplice in the ongoing atrocity of the Gaza Holocaust. Even in the E.U., the electorate and its federal representatives have been slow to adjust, as for instance E.U. President Von der Leyen made an excuse in July of 2025 not to end the trade agreement with Israel. With the U.S. so ethically compromised, the world wisely looked to the E.U. and even to China to step in and stop the holocaust, especially after an American who had witnessed the killing publicly described the horrendous role of both the Israelis and Americans providing “security” at the food-distribution sites.

Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Army employee who had served a quarter century in the Special Forces as a Green Beret, worked as an independent subcontractor for UG Solutions as armed security for GHF, which is funded by the U.S. Government to manage food-delivery sites in Gaza. So he is very credible. He ended his contract on June 14, 2025 “after witnessing his fellow security officers and soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces repeatedly open fire on Palestinian civilians who had trekked to GHF’s four aid hubs. Armed officers often celebrated hitting civilians at the sites, where the United Nations says more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed.”[1] That is, a retired U.S. Army employee working as a subcontractor witnessed not only Israeli soldiers, but also American mercenaries, carry out atrocities “against starving Palestinians trying to access aid.”[2] The IDF lied that soldiers have used their guns at the sites only to “deliver warning shots for unruly crowds. But Aguilar said that officers attacked civilians with tank rounds, mortars and fully automatic weapons with at least 210 rounds each of green-tipped armor-piercing ammunition designed to kill.”[3] Aguilar has stated, “(a)ll four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone.”[4]

In other words, it is no accident that Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries have shot so many Gazans at the food-distribution sites. Perhaps it could even be said that the idea for the sites was part of a wider strategy in the Israeli government to kill as many Gazans as possible while seemingly placating objections by other governments that Israel had been deliberately starving Gazans under the ethically-discredited notion of collective justice. Similar to the Nazi strategy of representing the concentration camps as labor camps, the Israeli strategy seems to be to turn a humane response—food distribution sites—into a means of shooting even children under the false claim of “crowd control.”

The Israelis’ Gaza Holocaust and the Nazi’s Jewish Holocaust resemble on another in that extermination of a people (i.e., people who group-identify themselves in a particular group) can be said to be the goal. In fact, the Israeli leveling of entire cities in Gaza goes beyond the Nazi’s Jewish ghettos. Put another way, whereas the Israeli government has sought to render Gaza as uninhabitable so the residents would suffer for an extended period of time before dying, the Nazis did not render the ghettos uninhabitable before the Jews were taken to the camps. In this way, the Gaza Holocaust is actually worse, assuming that it is unethical to intentionally make people suffer, especially if severely. An Israeli government official even stated that death is not bad enough for what the Gazans deserve, as if even the children were culpable for Hamas’ attack back in 2023. Perhaps therein lies the real difference between a genocide and a holocaust.

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1. Sanjana Karanth, “’Nothing Is Going To Buy My Soul’: GHF Whistleblower Reveals Horrors In Gaza,” The Huffington Post, July 31, 2025.

2.Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Passive Aggression on Campus: Redefining Hate-Speech

Besides using social pressure and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable, the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different, even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust (and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).

Hirsch had been using Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem; he was convicted of the war crime of forcing Jews in Hungary to march to a death camp in Poland so as many as possible would die on the way and thus reduce the killing needing to be done at the camp. Arendt, a Jew, is critical in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, of Israel’s illegal kidnapping of Eichmann in Argentina. Even mentioning that text, or explaining why Arendt criticized Israel’s founding, could run afoul of Columbia’s 2025 revision of antisemitism, “which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech.”[1] That’s pretty heavy language, and the penalties would surely go beyond getting fired from the university. So it is worthwhile to unpack the claim that criticism of Israel constitutes hate-speech.

For criticism of Israel to be taken as antisemitic, hence anti-Jewish, speech, the criticism would have to pertain to Jews generally, but to criticize Israelis is not to criticize Jews who are American and live in the United States, for example, unless they hold dual citizenship. Moreover, to conflate citizenship, which is a political designation, with a religious or social designation is to commit a category mistake, for the categories are distinct. To criticize another country is not to criticize a world religion (or even religion itself, as it is a distinct category).

Once we have properly identified criticism of a foreign government (or country) as political in nature, we can see that such criticism is acceptable in international relations; people criticize other countries all the time. It can even be said to be the human condition, and we are all in trouble if that is criminalized. It would be like making the breathing of air illegal. In short, criticizing other countries is so normalized in international relations that to make criticizing only one country illegal while another other country or government thereof is “fair game,” would be highly unfair. It would be especially unfair were that country’s government exterminating a people within its territory, for to not criticize such a country could be considered inhuman or at least insensitive to the desperate plight of other human beings.

That both Hirsch and Arendt are/were Jewish and yet included criticism of Israel should be enough to dispel the notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. So it is ironic that Hirsch, whose very parents died in the 20^th century holocaust, thought she might have to leave Columbia university to be able to continue to include Arendt’s political criticism of Israel in courses. This is not to say that Columbia’s new “definition” of antisemitism is itself antisemitic because both Hirsch and Arendt could be expunged for being in violation.

I contend that any government, and thus any country, is “fair game” in terms of being the recipient of political criticism, and that this does not constitute hate speech. In criticizing Israel’s role in the Gaza Holocaust, no hatred is being directed at or even implied to pertain to any Jews in America who are not Israelis. That Israelis in Israel can be criticized for their government’s policies and actions is fair because that country’s political system is democratic.  Even in an autocratic state such as Russia, the people can be criticized for not standing up sufficiently to an unprovoked invasion of another country. Perhaps Vatican City would be a closer parallel to Israel, but even in criticizing a political stance of the Pope or a public policy of Vatican City, a person is not criticizing being Catholic in terms of its religious culture or beliefs. Vatican City is recognized internationally as a country and thus as a political entity, and thus political criticism is fairly done without being labeled as hate speech against Catholics. Also, to criticize them for regarding the Virgin Mary as a divine being in being born without sin and being bodily assumed into heaven does not constitute a political criticism of the Vatican as political entity. It is not as if the Virgin Mary were president of Vatican City.

For the governments of Israel and the United States to wield antisemitism as a club so to curtail adverse political speech—and Columbia’s new definition doubtlessly came from pressure from the Trump Administration—represents a category mistake that is ethically and politically unfair, especially if a legitimate basis exists to criticize a policy and/or action of the Israeli government. The Gaza Holocaust evinces such a basis. In fact, ethically, it can be argued that it is the duty of every human being on the planet to criticize a government (or country) for being in the process of starving, shooting, and bombing an occupied population of people, who, unlike in the case of a war, could not fight back. In the 20^th century as news of the Nazi holocaust broke, criticism of Nazi-Germany or even Germany itself was not “redefined” as anti-German hate speech because a legitimate reason for even harsh criticism existed. True to American culture, therefore, it is best to side with free political speech in international relations.

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1. Jeff Offenhartz, “A Columbia Genocide Scholar Says She May Leave over University’s New Definition of Antisemitism,” The Associated Press, July 25, 2025.