This makes a lot of sense and I think is horrendously depressing to some Jewish people in my life right now. Even shattering to them. Just putting it together with the blanket rejection of their beliefs about themselves by their own president in favor of some other beliefs they don't see as true at all--I want to know what they think of this connection of yours but I am not sure I will send it to them for awhile.
One misfortune is that they are as uninvolved in Israel's fate as any other American (so the same involvement as all of us in our nightmare foreign policy) but because they are Jewish, are burdened with some inexplicable implied responsibility--similar situation as Muslims after 9/11 maybe? It's so screwed up.
I can only understand it second-hand in the sense as an American, we are all stained with something terrible once again. It seems worse this time somehow though maybe Iraq and Afghanistan was the same and I just forgot how constantly sick one feels when innocent people are slaughtered with American bombs. (I was pregnant and postpartum then and people kept telling me that was why I was much more distressed than they were.)
The blanket narrative about Israel as the key to Jewish identity is completely bizarre. How can this many Jewish people have no voice at all about who they are? They are erased. Even people who might not agree with everything here but have complex ideas about Judaism are erased-people who run Jewish Studies Departments or Holocaust Studies or are Rabbis have no voice at all. Biden's view is the only reality presented. How did this happen?
It's deeply disturbing but it seems evidence for the claim some make that Israel is the handmaiden of US interests in the Middle East. All this hardly seems in our real interest but is our interest as perceived by the people calling the shots. So not ours, but somebody's. Nationalism is such a lie and such poison.
It's complicated by the fact that a lot (not all! but a lot) of Jewish people and esepcially institutions in the US *do* see Zionism and Israel as central to Jewish identity, which is probably why there hasn't been a ton of pushback against Biden's statements here.
There's a generational shift there, and it's not uniform, but it's still pretty depressing.
Of course many do, and that makes sense. But one of the things I find perplexing is how many historical events and past outlooks and prior belief systems get erased when it comes to Israel—not just events of dispossession or violence that someone wants to cover up (often successfully in Israel’s case) but whole complex perspectives get smoothed away.
Apologies as I’m not a historian so I can’t rattle things off like an historian. I wasn’t reading things about Israel or people’s views about Israel to ‘have a view on Israel’ but just reading all the time, sometimes about Israel. There’s a generational shift for sure but my impression is there was a robust diversity of opinion about Israel that existed not so long ago even among politically conservative American Jews, even among rabbis. It has faded so utterly that maybe people don’t remember that some prominent people resisted a monolithic narrative even after the Holocaust and after the founding of Israel. E.g., awhile back I stumbled across several discussions in the newspapers as recently as the 80s by different American rabbis complaining about the ways a monolithic narrative about Israel was erasing American Jewish identity—but this is only one of the things I read like this over the years. (One of my hobbies is to read newspaper archives. Possibly because erasure of past realities freaks me out but also because I enjoy it.) It would take me forever to find these because I didn’t make much note of them. Maybe if I can find them again, I will post them on substack.
When I see the sort of slogans and narratives people throw up to explain and justify everything about Israel I wonder if this makes sense of the continual forgetting. These narratives contain powerful tropes, and perhaps when a very simplistic and easily remembered trope is repeated over and over this can take the place of nuance and complexity. Then, people have trouble remembering what it was they believed. Something like the Illusory Truth Effect.
Likely the violence of the Second Intifada had the effect of binding diasporic Jews to Israel as well. I am sure there were many things that corralled complicated views into the simplistic one that Biden repeats.
I’m not saying a whole bunch of Jewish people were down on Israel in the recent past exactly but just some pretty staid non-radical people objected to the expectation they should defer to Israel about what Jewish identity was, and resented various implications of that idea.
If you are correct, and I think you are, the way some people agonized about zionism from its inception all the way up to the founding of Israel (and somewhat beyond for certain of them) might be extremely prescient. I think a number of people back in the day predicted the problem you describe.
Maybe what is happening now with younger generations is that people are discovering facts that puncture the simpleminded outlook that the pro-Israel slogans offered them, and are trying to figure how to think about this all over again. (This could be me projecting my view that the 2020s are a struggle to the death to determine which version of very divergent realities we’re going to live in but I think there is a struggle like this happening about the issue in your piece.)
Thinking about all the ways nuanced views got memory-holed is alarming. It’s hard not to get the impression is that many sincere inquirers and morally concerned people completely lost this struggle when it previously occurred. But I guess it could also be encouraging that you can’t keep certain questions buried forever—they will re-occur.
Piggybacking off Noah's comment, remember Biden was technically born before Israel existed. So he entered politics when it was still a very new and constantly threatened phenomenon. It's easier to see Biden's thinking when he sees Israel through the lens of the Yom Kippur war rather than through the lens of propped-up regional power.
I get why Biden thinks in those terms—to an extent, so do I as somebody who was born in the mid-1950s, and grew up hearing every Arab voice (that we heard in America, anyway) swear they were going to "push the Jews into the sea!" Worse, it was with the aid of Soviet tanks and planes and bombs, so there was an air of Cold War Us V. Them to it all—if you didn't support Israel's Right to Exist, then you must be a Communist!
With the end of the Cold War, and Israel's increasingly expansionist agenda, the justice of Israel's actions became less obvious, and the concern that they were doing exactly what the Arabs threatened to do to them grew. It's a difficult needle for non-Jewish allies like myself, and I suspect Joe Biden, to thread—I support Judaism and Jewish people's right to exist and to a homeland, but not their right to kill off other people to do so.
If they're going to kill you, then you don't really have a choice in the matter—but most of the Palestinians in the Gaza WEREN'T looking to kill Jews, they just wanted a homeland, too. Those that DO want to kill Jews join groups like Hamas or Hezbollah—but Netanyahu isn't really going after them except incidentally, because what he wants is to push Palestinians into the sea, and this is his excuse!
I assume being paid by AIPAC to support Israel, or being beholden to those who are, is part of the reason for Biden's foot-dragging when it comes to what's being done by Netanyahu in the Middle East. I more suspect, especially now that he's stepped away from running for a second term, that the cognitive dissonance of supporting Israel when Israel is so flagrantly in the wrong is breaking him up inside. Let Kamala Harris deal with it—she's two decades younger and her worldview isn't warped by all the Cold War justifications for Protecting Israel at All Costs!
I just read Noura Erakat Justice for Some, which I think makes a very strong case that Israel has always been very expansionist. https://www.sup.org/books/law/justice-some
She also argues that US security policy in the middle east, since LBJ, has been based on the idea that Israel should be militarily strong enough to defeat any state or combination of states. so that's a big part of Biden's stance. I think that for him and many in the US, US virtue is ideologically built around our actions in WWII, and defending Israel therefore seems like a key democratic virtue.
Yeah, that sounds about right—at least the U.S. Security Policy in the Middle East part does.
A part of me still wants that, because No More Holocaust! Never Again! Fuck Hitler! Fuck Stalin!
But...that's starting to sound awfully hollow looking at Netanyahu's actions against Palestine, and his short-term alliances with the rest of the Arab world, which come off a lot like "The act of saying 'Nice Doggy' while looking for a big rock to hit the dog with". It really feels to me like this "Fortress Israel" approach is less popular these days even with Israelis—at least the younger ones who would be just fine, mostly, living with Palestinians as equals. It's mostly carried along by demagogues in the Likkud Party and older Israelis who still remember The Holocaust....
One of my pet peeves is what has happened to the word "nauseous." It USED to mean "the cat urp that caused you to have nausea, or be nauseated." Now people use it to describe themselves.
Why do I mention this? Because WORDS CHANGE in meanings. You can't freeze them, even by fiat or, lord help us, legislation. The current situation in Israel NEEDS a word to distinguish ordinary Israelis who just want to live in Israel peacefully, and those who want to expand into the West Bank and ,as of today, clearly Gaza. There was a meeting today, and Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that Israel "will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens." For a lot of people, that word for expansionists is--Zionist.
It has nothing to do with antisemitism, any more than condemning Putin is Anti-Orthodox Christianity. Only a very few who use the word to deplore Bibi's actions actually oppose the idea of Israel as a nation. (One can deplore the policies you mention that amount to apartheid, which seem to be baked into the treatment of Palestinians who actually live within the State of Israel. But we deplored apartheid in South Africa, too, and no one accused those who did so of advocating for the end of the nation of South Africa).
But Israel has been expansionist for most of my adult life. And it keeps, well, pushing. Somehow the Bidens of this world condemn expansionism when Putin invades another country's territory. As of June 2024, the State of Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state by 146 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, or just over 75% of all UN members. Just because it isn't recognized by the US doesn't make it "not a country" and "up for grabs."
The same is obviously true of Lebanon and guess what, the Golan Heights is in fact part of Lebanon--with some uncertainty about the part that might be Syria. What it ISN'T is part of Israel and howling about rockets being sent by Hezbollah there are not, in fact, attacks on Israel. Hezbollah is sending rockets against what are actually invaders.**
I used "pushing" advisedly. The stereotype of the "pushy Jew" is obviously an antisemitic exaggeration. Yet Israel's government seems to be hell bent on living up to the stereotype, embracing it as righteous in the case of its relentless moves to put settlers in other folks' territory.
Be as ethnonationalist as you want in your own country. That's what Christian Nationalists want for the US. But we as a country don't have to support it with weapons need for EXPANSION. I have no trouble with defensive weapons, though the sudden NEED to boost the Iron Dome is in part because Israel's government has basically incited attacks from Lebanon, not to mention Iran, by its own actions.
Oct 7 was a horrible massacre. So was Wounded Knee and innumerable other massacres of the indigenous. The disproportion of the past years killings is despicable.
If Jews want to keep Zionist as somehow essential to the Jewish People, they need to come up with a word that can be used to distinguish the peaceful essentialism they try to make "Zionist" into from what the government is doing in their name. Let us know: we'll use it.
I completely support the concept of a Jewish homeland. How it governs ITSELF is its own business. But using the word Zionist to describe the invasion of other countries with the aim of annexation or supporting settlers in Palestinian territory is just what the word MEANS now in common usage.
To claim that it is somehow necessarily antisemitic is to play the "we're always the victim" card and that makes me, well, nauseous.
I'm a devoted reader of Discourse Blog and Defector (both rising from the ashes of the various Gawker Media disasters), and I'm always a little uncomfortable when they write about Gaza, even though I otherwise agree with their (and your) politics.
I think it's because they don't address the issue with the nuance that you bring here. They talk about Israel as if it has forfeited the right to exist, which I can't agree with. I want Israel to exist, and think it needs to, especially with our history in the world, and despite the fact that it was kind of plopped on top of people who were already there. But I also don't want it to be an embarrassment and/or a horror show, like it is now.
I don't know man, I wish there was a good answer to any of this, but I feel like it has to start with acknowledging that everyone involved is a human being. It seems like that gets lost in all the mishegas of this stupidity.
Israel is there, and the Jewish people there aren't going anywhere, so then the question is, what next? How do you ensure freedom and justice and security for everyone living there? And that's not a question of whether Israel has a right to exist; it's a question of how Israel is going to ensure the rights of people it currently rules over. And so far, Israel has just shown no interest in ensuring the rights or safety or flourishing of Palestinian people, and has pretty emphatically rejected both two state and one state solutions.
I was about to be a Reply Guy, v then I looked back at my comment and realized I did say something about Israel's right to exist, and then I facepalmed at myself.
Maybe Israel does exist because of people like me, who aren't very happy with how it acts but not unhappy enough to question whether it deserves itself. It's a weird feeling.
Israel exists because Zionists conquered the territory, basically. (after decades of complicated maneuvering with regard to various imperial powers.) the US has given it tons of weapons for reasons that have something to do with US public opinion, but also with security calculations (which may or may not be silly in themselves, but no one wants to rethink them.)
It kind of depends on what "right to exist" means. We live in what is supposed to be an international order, stronger than in other eras after WWII. No matter how a country was FOUNDED, the idea of international order basically says that within what are recognized by the international community to be its borders, the area is a state with a right to exist. Someone else horning in is an invader. Certainly NATO is based on that idea. It is clearly imperfect in execution, but better than what the world was like under colonialism and "empire" or the actual invasions by Germany under the Nazis.
This makes a lot of sense and I think is horrendously depressing to some Jewish people in my life right now. Even shattering to them. Just putting it together with the blanket rejection of their beliefs about themselves by their own president in favor of some other beliefs they don't see as true at all--I want to know what they think of this connection of yours but I am not sure I will send it to them for awhile.
One misfortune is that they are as uninvolved in Israel's fate as any other American (so the same involvement as all of us in our nightmare foreign policy) but because they are Jewish, are burdened with some inexplicable implied responsibility--similar situation as Muslims after 9/11 maybe? It's so screwed up.
I can only understand it second-hand in the sense as an American, we are all stained with something terrible once again. It seems worse this time somehow though maybe Iraq and Afghanistan was the same and I just forgot how constantly sick one feels when innocent people are slaughtered with American bombs. (I was pregnant and postpartum then and people kept telling me that was why I was much more distressed than they were.)
The blanket narrative about Israel as the key to Jewish identity is completely bizarre. How can this many Jewish people have no voice at all about who they are? They are erased. Even people who might not agree with everything here but have complex ideas about Judaism are erased-people who run Jewish Studies Departments or Holocaust Studies or are Rabbis have no voice at all. Biden's view is the only reality presented. How did this happen?
It's deeply disturbing but it seems evidence for the claim some make that Israel is the handmaiden of US interests in the Middle East. All this hardly seems in our real interest but is our interest as perceived by the people calling the shots. So not ours, but somebody's. Nationalism is such a lie and such poison.
It's complicated by the fact that a lot (not all! but a lot) of Jewish people and esepcially institutions in the US *do* see Zionism and Israel as central to Jewish identity, which is probably why there hasn't been a ton of pushback against Biden's statements here.
There's a generational shift there, and it's not uniform, but it's still pretty depressing.
Of course many do, and that makes sense. But one of the things I find perplexing is how many historical events and past outlooks and prior belief systems get erased when it comes to Israel—not just events of dispossession or violence that someone wants to cover up (often successfully in Israel’s case) but whole complex perspectives get smoothed away.
Apologies as I’m not a historian so I can’t rattle things off like an historian. I wasn’t reading things about Israel or people’s views about Israel to ‘have a view on Israel’ but just reading all the time, sometimes about Israel. There’s a generational shift for sure but my impression is there was a robust diversity of opinion about Israel that existed not so long ago even among politically conservative American Jews, even among rabbis. It has faded so utterly that maybe people don’t remember that some prominent people resisted a monolithic narrative even after the Holocaust and after the founding of Israel. E.g., awhile back I stumbled across several discussions in the newspapers as recently as the 80s by different American rabbis complaining about the ways a monolithic narrative about Israel was erasing American Jewish identity—but this is only one of the things I read like this over the years. (One of my hobbies is to read newspaper archives. Possibly because erasure of past realities freaks me out but also because I enjoy it.) It would take me forever to find these because I didn’t make much note of them. Maybe if I can find them again, I will post them on substack.
When I see the sort of slogans and narratives people throw up to explain and justify everything about Israel I wonder if this makes sense of the continual forgetting. These narratives contain powerful tropes, and perhaps when a very simplistic and easily remembered trope is repeated over and over this can take the place of nuance and complexity. Then, people have trouble remembering what it was they believed. Something like the Illusory Truth Effect.
https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5
Likely the violence of the Second Intifada had the effect of binding diasporic Jews to Israel as well. I am sure there were many things that corralled complicated views into the simplistic one that Biden repeats.
I’m not saying a whole bunch of Jewish people were down on Israel in the recent past exactly but just some pretty staid non-radical people objected to the expectation they should defer to Israel about what Jewish identity was, and resented various implications of that idea.
If you are correct, and I think you are, the way some people agonized about zionism from its inception all the way up to the founding of Israel (and somewhat beyond for certain of them) might be extremely prescient. I think a number of people back in the day predicted the problem you describe.
Maybe what is happening now with younger generations is that people are discovering facts that puncture the simpleminded outlook that the pro-Israel slogans offered them, and are trying to figure how to think about this all over again. (This could be me projecting my view that the 2020s are a struggle to the death to determine which version of very divergent realities we’re going to live in but I think there is a struggle like this happening about the issue in your piece.)
Thinking about all the ways nuanced views got memory-holed is alarming. It’s hard not to get the impression is that many sincere inquirers and morally concerned people completely lost this struggle when it previously occurred. But I guess it could also be encouraging that you can’t keep certain questions buried forever—they will re-occur.
My understanding (and I could be wrong) is that there was a major pro Zionist shift following the 67 war.
I actually remember my Jewish summer camp shifting to a more open pro Zionist stance…probably in like around 1979?
Piggybacking off Noah's comment, remember Biden was technically born before Israel existed. So he entered politics when it was still a very new and constantly threatened phenomenon. It's easier to see Biden's thinking when he sees Israel through the lens of the Yom Kippur war rather than through the lens of propped-up regional power.
I get why Biden thinks in those terms—to an extent, so do I as somebody who was born in the mid-1950s, and grew up hearing every Arab voice (that we heard in America, anyway) swear they were going to "push the Jews into the sea!" Worse, it was with the aid of Soviet tanks and planes and bombs, so there was an air of Cold War Us V. Them to it all—if you didn't support Israel's Right to Exist, then you must be a Communist!
With the end of the Cold War, and Israel's increasingly expansionist agenda, the justice of Israel's actions became less obvious, and the concern that they were doing exactly what the Arabs threatened to do to them grew. It's a difficult needle for non-Jewish allies like myself, and I suspect Joe Biden, to thread—I support Judaism and Jewish people's right to exist and to a homeland, but not their right to kill off other people to do so.
If they're going to kill you, then you don't really have a choice in the matter—but most of the Palestinians in the Gaza WEREN'T looking to kill Jews, they just wanted a homeland, too. Those that DO want to kill Jews join groups like Hamas or Hezbollah—but Netanyahu isn't really going after them except incidentally, because what he wants is to push Palestinians into the sea, and this is his excuse!
I assume being paid by AIPAC to support Israel, or being beholden to those who are, is part of the reason for Biden's foot-dragging when it comes to what's being done by Netanyahu in the Middle East. I more suspect, especially now that he's stepped away from running for a second term, that the cognitive dissonance of supporting Israel when Israel is so flagrantly in the wrong is breaking him up inside. Let Kamala Harris deal with it—she's two decades younger and her worldview isn't warped by all the Cold War justifications for Protecting Israel at All Costs!
I just read Noura Erakat Justice for Some, which I think makes a very strong case that Israel has always been very expansionist. https://www.sup.org/books/law/justice-some
She also argues that US security policy in the middle east, since LBJ, has been based on the idea that Israel should be militarily strong enough to defeat any state or combination of states. so that's a big part of Biden's stance. I think that for him and many in the US, US virtue is ideologically built around our actions in WWII, and defending Israel therefore seems like a key democratic virtue.
Yeah, that sounds about right—at least the U.S. Security Policy in the Middle East part does.
A part of me still wants that, because No More Holocaust! Never Again! Fuck Hitler! Fuck Stalin!
But...that's starting to sound awfully hollow looking at Netanyahu's actions against Palestine, and his short-term alliances with the rest of the Arab world, which come off a lot like "The act of saying 'Nice Doggy' while looking for a big rock to hit the dog with". It really feels to me like this "Fortress Israel" approach is less popular these days even with Israelis—at least the younger ones who would be just fine, mostly, living with Palestinians as equals. It's mostly carried along by demagogues in the Likkud Party and older Israelis who still remember The Holocaust....
What a marvelous teasing apart of threads which are so easy to smoosh together for various nefarious purposes.
Thank you 1 million.
One of my pet peeves is what has happened to the word "nauseous." It USED to mean "the cat urp that caused you to have nausea, or be nauseated." Now people use it to describe themselves.
Why do I mention this? Because WORDS CHANGE in meanings. You can't freeze them, even by fiat or, lord help us, legislation. The current situation in Israel NEEDS a word to distinguish ordinary Israelis who just want to live in Israel peacefully, and those who want to expand into the West Bank and ,as of today, clearly Gaza. There was a meeting today, and Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that Israel "will encourage the voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens." For a lot of people, that word for expansionists is--Zionist.
It has nothing to do with antisemitism, any more than condemning Putin is Anti-Orthodox Christianity. Only a very few who use the word to deplore Bibi's actions actually oppose the idea of Israel as a nation. (One can deplore the policies you mention that amount to apartheid, which seem to be baked into the treatment of Palestinians who actually live within the State of Israel. But we deplored apartheid in South Africa, too, and no one accused those who did so of advocating for the end of the nation of South Africa).
But Israel has been expansionist for most of my adult life. And it keeps, well, pushing. Somehow the Bidens of this world condemn expansionism when Putin invades another country's territory. As of June 2024, the State of Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state by 146 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, or just over 75% of all UN members. Just because it isn't recognized by the US doesn't make it "not a country" and "up for grabs."
The same is obviously true of Lebanon and guess what, the Golan Heights is in fact part of Lebanon--with some uncertainty about the part that might be Syria. What it ISN'T is part of Israel and howling about rockets being sent by Hezbollah there are not, in fact, attacks on Israel. Hezbollah is sending rockets against what are actually invaders.**
I used "pushing" advisedly. The stereotype of the "pushy Jew" is obviously an antisemitic exaggeration. Yet Israel's government seems to be hell bent on living up to the stereotype, embracing it as righteous in the case of its relentless moves to put settlers in other folks' territory.
Be as ethnonationalist as you want in your own country. That's what Christian Nationalists want for the US. But we as a country don't have to support it with weapons need for EXPANSION. I have no trouble with defensive weapons, though the sudden NEED to boost the Iron Dome is in part because Israel's government has basically incited attacks from Lebanon, not to mention Iran, by its own actions.
Oct 7 was a horrible massacre. So was Wounded Knee and innumerable other massacres of the indigenous. The disproportion of the past years killings is despicable.
If Jews want to keep Zionist as somehow essential to the Jewish People, they need to come up with a word that can be used to distinguish the peaceful essentialism they try to make "Zionist" into from what the government is doing in their name. Let us know: we'll use it.
I completely support the concept of a Jewish homeland. How it governs ITSELF is its own business. But using the word Zionist to describe the invasion of other countries with the aim of annexation or supporting settlers in Palestinian territory is just what the word MEANS now in common usage.
To claim that it is somehow necessarily antisemitic is to play the "we're always the victim" card and that makes me, well, nauseous.
I'm a devoted reader of Discourse Blog and Defector (both rising from the ashes of the various Gawker Media disasters), and I'm always a little uncomfortable when they write about Gaza, even though I otherwise agree with their (and your) politics.
I think it's because they don't address the issue with the nuance that you bring here. They talk about Israel as if it has forfeited the right to exist, which I can't agree with. I want Israel to exist, and think it needs to, especially with our history in the world, and despite the fact that it was kind of plopped on top of people who were already there. But I also don't want it to be an embarrassment and/or a horror show, like it is now.
I don't know man, I wish there was a good answer to any of this, but I feel like it has to start with acknowledging that everyone involved is a human being. It seems like that gets lost in all the mishegas of this stupidity.
I don't really think states have a right to exist; as Coates said, states are established via force, not because of rights. (I talked about this here a bit https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/the-right-to-a-state-and-states-rights)
Israel is there, and the Jewish people there aren't going anywhere, so then the question is, what next? How do you ensure freedom and justice and security for everyone living there? And that's not a question of whether Israel has a right to exist; it's a question of how Israel is going to ensure the rights of people it currently rules over. And so far, Israel has just shown no interest in ensuring the rights or safety or flourishing of Palestinian people, and has pretty emphatically rejected both two state and one state solutions.
I was about to be a Reply Guy, v then I looked back at my comment and realized I did say something about Israel's right to exist, and then I facepalmed at myself.
Maybe Israel does exist because of people like me, who aren't very happy with how it acts but not unhappy enough to question whether it deserves itself. It's a weird feeling.
Israel exists because Zionists conquered the territory, basically. (after decades of complicated maneuvering with regard to various imperial powers.) the US has given it tons of weapons for reasons that have something to do with US public opinion, but also with security calculations (which may or may not be silly in themselves, but no one wants to rethink them.)
It kind of depends on what "right to exist" means. We live in what is supposed to be an international order, stronger than in other eras after WWII. No matter how a country was FOUNDED, the idea of international order basically says that within what are recognized by the international community to be its borders, the area is a state with a right to exist. Someone else horning in is an invader. Certainly NATO is based on that idea. It is clearly imperfect in execution, but better than what the world was like under colonialism and "empire" or the actual invasions by Germany under the Nazis.
PREACH!