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Sept. 16, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:48
6) Max Blumenthal - “Ukraine: Europe’s ‘Big Israel’”

Ukrainian president Zelensky has said that he intends to make Ukraine a "big Israel" in Europe - meaning armed to the teeth and ready for battle. Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone tells the Ron Paul Institute DC Conference why that is a very bad idea.

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Time Text
Max Blumenthal: Resident Communists 00:02:16
I am very happy to have with us someone whose work I have admired for years, who again, what a power duo, happens to be Anya Parampil's husband.
Max Blumenthal is someone who I've admired.
I only first met in person at the February rally, but his outlet, the Gray Zone, if you don't read it, you should read it every day, because they come up with exposés that are just unbelievable.
They do what no one else is really doing, certainly not the mainstream media, which is to really dig and find the truth.
And that is fearless.
And I think they've just suffered for it as well.
I think GoFundMe ripped them off and took the money.
I'm sure Max will mention something about this.
This is what happens.
This is what I mentioned in the beginning about being disappeared if you go against the grain on these things.
I am very happy to have for the first time speaking at a Ron Paul Institute event Max Blumenthal Thank you Thank you, Daniel.
It's an honor to be here, along with Anya, as your resident communists.
No, okay, she's not.
I have my card.
And yeah, McAdams wanted me to do stand-up comedy, but I had a really good bid on invading Canada, but I heard this is a family-friendly event.
So I'm going to talk about Ukraine.
It'll be stand-up tragedy.
And I mean, it was kind of, in a dark way, funny to hear this June, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, I call him Tony Blinkskrieg, declare that Russia was not only the second strongest army in the world, but it was the second strongest army in Ukraine.
Ukraine's Contractors 00:15:12
He was predicting imminent catastrophe for Russia as Ukraine was preparing its vaunted counteroffensive.
And now here we are, just a few months later, in August, and it's pretty obvious that the counteroffensive has been a gigantic failure.
We all knew that.
And if we were listening to Colonel McGregor, we would have known that even before June, unfortunately, he's not in the room anymore at the White House or Pentagon.
The Ukrainians have captured Robotinia.
That's what we're hearing.
They've captured Robotinia, this tiny depopulated village that most Americans would mistake for a bottle of cough syrup.
And we're supposed to cheer about this.
There's very little good news from the Ukrainian front.
And Blinken, Biden, and the Ukrainian Congress, they are the ones who led, as John Mearsheimer said, led Ukraine down the primrose path to war and now have brought them to societal disaster.
Wasting the lives and bodies of over 150,000 men.
That's according to a very conservative estimate from the Pentagon.
We conducted our own estimate at the gray zone based on the number of reported Ukrainian men, according to the Wall Street Journal, who had lost one or more limbs.
That's 20 to 50,000.
Now in World War II, about 40,000 British citizens lost limbs and something like 67,000 Germans.
And so if you extrapolate from that number, according to the total death toll of World War II, the number of Ukrainians who've lost limbs, the number of Ukrainian casualties could be as high as 500,000.
And so I look at Congress, I look out at the Capitol every day from my rooftop in Anacostia, and I think of the words that Senator George McGovern said in the Senate in 1970, this chamber reeks of blood.
That chamber reeks of blood.
They have wasted Ukrainian society on the mantle of anti-Russia on the mantle of anti-Russian hysteria.
And now Russia has no incentive to negotiate with Ukraine.
If it's wasting a frontline NATO army, why would they suddenly step back and negotiate when they could actually push forward?
Who knows?
Through Odessa, build the land bridge to Transnistria?
Maybe the U.S. should have agreed to negotiate in April instead of sending Boris Johnson to sabotage the negotiations in April 2022.
Maybe more people would be alive.
But that's not how business works in this town, and that's what I want to talk about today.
As the conflict grinds on indefinitely, even as Ukrainians die and fail on the battlefield, and Ukrainian Defense Minister Dmitry Koleba goes on US TV and tells his patrons to shut up and stop giving him advice, there is a victory of sorts.
And it's the victory for the Beltway bandits that we saw, whose glass office towers we saw on our way here on Route 66, which I call the corridor of death.
Kimaniks, Dyncorp, Rand, Lockheed, Raytheon, BAE systems.
You can see them all on your way here, and they have won.
They're the winners of this war.
And the people they fund on K-Street's neoconservative think tanks.
And the politicians whose legislation they author.
Nikki Haley, who's got a future on the board of Raytheon or Lockheed.
And they have actually put forward a very disturbing vision for Ukraine for the long term.
Ukraine as an ethno-nationalist, Spartan, hyper-militarized bastion armed to the teeth by NATO, existing for years in a state of permanent war for Russia, and us, the taxpayers, nothing we can do about it.
Zelensky articulated this vision in a chilling statement this April.
Here's what he said.
We cannot talk about being a Switzerland of the future, but we will definitely become a big Israel with its own face.
A big Israel.
We will not be surprised that we will have representatives of the armed forces of the National Guard.
In all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons.
I am sure that our security issue will be number one in the next 10 years.
And by the time Zelensky said that in April, NATO leaders were already imagining a, quote, Israeli-style security agreement for Ukraine that would, quote, give priority to arms transfers and advanced technology.
This was reported in May by the Wall Street Journal, entailing multi-year commitments to provide funding and weapons and well into the future, as the Washington Post reported.
As my colleague Aaron Matei explained, such agreements would prevent the public from having any say in how their tax dollars were spent, as it would, quote, also serve to insulate Ukraine from major political shifts in the West, read the potential Donald Trump coming to power, or intensified calls to curtail aid, read protests from the public.
So in order to defend democracy in Ukraine, and I'll come back to this in the end, democracy must first be curtailed at home.
This is what big Israel means.
And Blinken has blocked diplomacy at every path to guarantee the consolidation of this vision.
Over the coming months, he declared in a speech in June, some countries will call for a ceasefire.
And while ceasefires sound sensible, he said, a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place and enables Putin to control territory would reward the aggressor and punish the victim.
And in the same breath, he called for long-term funding to shape Ukraine into that big Israel.
What Alexander Haig said of Israel would be America's unsinkable aircraft carrier, not in the Middle East, but in the heart of Europe.
That's the vision.
Now over at the Atlantic Council, right around this same time, before the counteroffensive, the Atlantic Council being the unofficial think tank of NATO down on K Street, funded by arms manufacturers, the U.S., UK, Gulf states, and Hunter Biden's former employers at Burisma.
That's right, they took $200,000 from Burisma.
Someone named Daniel B. Shapiro authored a roadmap for how to transform Ukraine into a big Israel.
Who is Shapiro?
He's the former U.S. ambassador to Israel under Obama, who actually stayed with his family in Israel after his tenure ended and took up several jobs advising some of the most malicious Israeli spy tech companies.
He's also part of the Biden clique.
He was put forward as a Mideast liaison despite residing in Israel, not the U.S.
And he embodies the liberal political class that is both financially and emotionally invested in Project Ukraine, which will soon become the Big Israel.
Shapiro, in his first guideline for turning Ukraine into big Israel, stated, technology is key.
Of course he would say that.
Now first of all, Daniel Shapiro, he was a consultant for West Exec Advisors, a consulting firm founded by Tony Blinken, now Secretary of State, to hump in contracts from tech companies through the Pentagon.
So it's very lucrative for him to have another tech center in Ukraine that's in a perpetual state of war.
He also worked with the NSO group, the Israeli company, which has been responsible for spying on dozens and dozens of journalists, human rights activists, common citizens, was even allegedly involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
This guy likes tech.
He likes tech for very specific purposes.
Tech is, of course, central to the Big Israel project and the actual Israel project, because what has Israel been able to do?
What value does it present to the tech world?
Well, it holds close to 7 million indigenous Palestinians effectively hostage under its occupation and system of apartheid, and it's able to test some of the most innovative tech systems through its cyber warfare division, Unit 8200 on them.
Then it takes it and it exports it abroad.
And if you're looking for spy tech, well, you want it to be tested on a rest of population.
So they have that ability.
So the world turns to Israel.
Ukraine is next.
Anya and I, a few months ago, went to a Hollywood-style rollout event at the Warner Theater in downtown, hosted by USAID director Samantha Power and Visa and I don't know what other companies were there.
It was a public-private partnership presenting a new app called DIA.
Google was there.
And DIA was marketed by the Minister of Technology in Ukraine on stage as a state in an app, or a state in a smartphone.
Over 30 governing functions are provided to you, and actually you're required to use them with this app.
So you can present your digital vaccine passport to get into restaurants.
You can present your digital ID.
You can make financial exchanges with your digital currency.
And you can snitch on your neighbor with a new function called e-enemy.
It's literally called e-enemy.
And you can snitch on your Russian-speaking neighbor, have him turned into the SBU, and he'll turn up in a mass grave in a ditch by Sunday.
Isn't that amazing?
That's what they literally presented.
You can even report Russian positions for drone strikes.
So tech in a war zone like Ukraine will accelerate the fourth industrial revolution and the great reset that World Economic Forum Director Klaus Schwab said would merge the digital with the biological.
Countries like Ukraine and conflict zones are necessary, just as Israel is necessary, a state in permanent war.
It's disaster capitalism or what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine back before she was a participant in the new shock doctrine.
Key to big Israel, according to Daniel B. Shapiro, point two, maintain military partnerships.
That's kind of like soft language for what former NATO General Secretary Alexander Vershbo said, called arming Ukraine to the teeth.
That's just basic.
As long as Ukraine is at war, we will dump F-16s and advanced weaponry there.
We've seen that the Bradleys are ineffective.
The F-16s won't be able to land on any landing strip in Ukraine.
It's not about that.
It's about, again, contractors.
Over 60% of the military budget, according to CBS's 60 Minutes, not exactly anti-war.com, goes to the Beltway bandits and the military contractors.
So Ukraine, as with Israel, will just be a giant repository for recycling or laundering U.S. aid and sending it back into the pockets of the upper middle class and the upper class and building more McMansions in Northern Virginia for the Lockheed and Raytheon CEOs.
The Russians are dying.
It's the best money we've ever spent, said Lindsey Graham.
And that's what he means.
And that's where the project of Ukraine as the big Israel fits in.
And so we can't have peace.
We can't have negotiations when war is incentivized to this point.
And it's the same for Israel.
Israel must maintain a perpetual occupation to justify the $4 billion in aid, which goes straight back to the contractors in Texas and Colorado and Arizona.
That's why we're blocking peace.
That's one reason.
But there's also an ideological aspect to the construction of Ukraine as a big Israel, just as there is a passionate attachment between many Americans and Israel.
Now, if Israel made peace with its neighbors, its domestic support in the U.S., whether they're Christian Zionists or Jewish Americans, they'd have nothing to do.
There'd be no AIPAC conferences to attend, no Christian United for Israel conferences to attend, no Jewish national fund trees to donate.
It would be boring, and their identity would fade.
So they need Israel to be in perpetual war.
And it's the same with Ukraine.
As we reported at the gray zone, the trans-neocon, trans-partisan neocon, Bill Kristol, all neocons are transpartisan, they go between parties, is attempting to establish a domestic Ukraine lobby which pledges to boost or destroy candidates based on their support for Kiev, just like APAC.
Ukraine at peace, Bill Kristol can't raise money anymore.
These operatives lose opportunities.
And as with Israel, so and as with Israel, as I said, there is a passionate attachment among many Americans for this whole project, for this war.
You can just go to any affluent neighborhood in the DMV and you will see Ukrainian flags fluttering over elegant townhomes, whether it's Alexandria, Capitol Hill, wherever you go.
And some of those people, they have skin in the game.
They're involved in the business.
They're contractors.
But they're true believers too.
And some of them are conservatives.
They're like the people who watch Sean Hannity.
I don't know who watches Sean Hannity in the moment, but that's who they are.
They still see Russia and the Soviet Union as indistinguishable, and they approach world affairs through a Cold War-era lens.
They're jingoistic, and they therefore support Ukraine on that basis.
But as polls show, most of the people who are ideologically, emotionally invested in Ukraine are liberal Democrats.
It's really interesting.
If you look at support for Ukraine and support for Israel, it's inverted among the parties.
For the first time, according to Pew polls, most Democrats do not support Israel over Palestine.
And if you look at the polls on Ukraine, most Democrats overwhelmingly support continuing to send billions in military aid to Ukraine, while most Republicans do not, which makes it kind of difficult to be an independent in this country and connect both of them.
Now, there are a lot of reasons for liberal support, the passionate support for Ukraine.
Biden, it's Biden's war.
I mean, if it was Bush's or Trump's war, they might be against it.
They still believe Russia hacked the voting machines in 2016, so Russia needs to be attacked because they installed the bad orange man in power.
And they're consuming a steady diet of clockwork orange propaganda every day from Rachel Maddow and Rachel Maddow impersonator Chris Hayes.
It's just sad because these are the people who opposed Bush's war on Iraq.
There are more subtle factors guiding support for Ukraine.
For many Jewish American liberals that I know, who once identified with the Zionist project during its laborite, kibbutz-focused, early phases, when it was a plucky little country fighting for its existence, supposedly, now it's run by Netanyahu, a card-carrying Republican presiding over an occupation empire.
Culture Wars Distortion 00:03:50
It's branded as an apartheid state by Amnesty International.
It's no longer deserving of their support.
But then there's Zelensky.
Zelensky, the act, the former satirical actor, who suddenly discovered his Jewish heritage when Russia invaded his country, and who poses as a savior of democracy and liberalism against Russia, which many liberals view as the engine of global hyper-conservatism.
This warped justification for pro-war cheerleading was distilled perfectly by one of the most progressive members of Congress, someone I know who's from one of the most socially progressive areas of the country near where I grew up.
It's Tacoma Park.
I grew up on the DC side of the border.
Used to be peace signs everywhere.
They declared it a no-nuclear zone under Reagan.
And now you see these Victorian homes inhabited by aging hippies and woke yuppies.
And they have Ukrainian flags on them.
And then they have a BLM sign on their lawn.
Like the two somehow go together perfectly.
Jamie Raskin has a Ukrainian flag on his home, the congressman, star of the J6 committee.
And he perfectly symbolizes, by the way, just as a side note, the deterioration of the anti-war liberal left in the U.S. because his father, Marcus Raskin, actually founded the first anti-war think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.
And his son, who tragically took his own life, was an intern for the Libertarian Institute, I believe, wrote for anti-war.com and was a harsh critic of Russia Gate before he left us.
Jamie Raskin is reaping opportunities in Washington by emerging as one of the biggest progressive warmongers on Capitol Hill.
And here's how he framed the war.
This is how it's understood.
Ukraine's struggle embodies a democratic future.
Its military leadership is young and diverse.
Its president, who is Jewish and thus belongs to a small national minority, was elected with 73% of the population.
Blah, blah, blah.
Thousands of Ukrainian women are fighting on the front, and a woman serves as deputy minister of defense.
Sexual minorities are represented within the Ukrainian armed forces.
Ukrainian soldiers routinely speak two languages.
Ukraine has displayed a striking degree of toleration and decency during the war.
I don't know what Telegram channels he's following.
Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes.
It's a world of anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export.
In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views and supporting democratic pluralism.
So what he's done, and what progressives in Congress have done, is they have militarized the culture wars, portraying Ukraine as the woke side versus Russia, the anti-woke, hyper-fascist, anti-trans bully, which is a complete distortion of reality.
It's a fantasy.
And I gotta say, his words kind of reminded me of a lot of the liberal Zionist Paians' homages to Israel after 1967, which contrasted it with its autocratic terrorist Arab neighbors and painted it as Theodore Herzl described, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.
The reality on the ground in Ukraine is completely different.
I mean, this is just a marketing ploy.
Just as it always was in Israel, it was always an apartheid state.
Ukraine's Israeli Connection 00:08:59
Even from 1948 to 1966, Palestinians lived under a kind of military occupation.
No one talks about that.
Today in Ukraine, 18 opposition parties are formally banned.
Their members are imprisoned, brutalized, tortured.
The chief opponent of Zelensky, Medvedchuk, was captured by the Ukrainian SBU and tortured and humiliated on camera.
The Russian Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has faced SBU attacks as well, and Ukraine has formed a schismatic church with the help of the U.S. to separate itself from Russia.
And they're treating priests as effective criminals across Ukraine.
Ukrainian opposition media is formally banned.
Anti-war activity in Ukraine is formally banned.
It is illegal to encourage people to avoid conscription, and we'll talk about that more.
This is what actually makes Ukraine the big Israel.
It's the undemocratic and ethno-nationalist qualities of post-Maidan Ukraine that the U.S. has constructed there that make it most like Netanyahu's Israel, not its thin democratic patina, which, as with Israel, which markets itself as a Jewish and democratic state in the face of the reality experienced by Palestinians, this democratic veneer must be deployed to maintain support,
particularly among liberal lawmakers and influential liberals in the West.
And paradoxically, while Daniel Shapiro in his Atlantic Council blueprint for building the big Israel in Ukraine calls for Ukraine to fight for democracy, he urges it to emulate Israel's ultra-militarized society.
He writes that the whole population must play a role.
Most young Israelis serve in the military and many are employed in security-related professions following their service.
The widespread mobilization of Ukrainian society and collective defense suggests that the country has this potential.
This is the ultimate recipe for the breeding of anti-democratic, xenophobic, authoritarian attitudes among the young.
Now consider how Israel has transformed over time psychologically and politically.
It is moving to the extreme right, and that is a result of the full conscription of every Jewish-Israeli citizen at age 18, including women.
Israel doesn't need them all to be conscripted.
They don't need women to be in the army.
They could have a professional army like the U.S. and still carry out the same kind of operations they do.
The purpose of the army is mass indoctrination.
And it's no wonder that as the Israeli filmmaker showed in his documentary Defamation, which is a must-watch for everyone, Israeli youth are sent, many of them, close to 40% at age 16, to Auschwitz.
Not to learn the universal lessons of the Holocaust, never again to anyone, but to actually terrorize them into believing that they could be next unless they go to the army and fight.
And the Israeli Education Ministry takes polls on those youth before and after they go on that trip and finds that their attitude towards Palestinians becomes more hostile after the trip and their attitude towards the army becomes more positive after the trip.
This is how we're transforming Ukrainian society and Ukrainian youth as well.
And you can see so many Israelis have left Israel if they have the means.
Berlin is filled with Israelis.
Italy is filling up with Israelis.
The U.S., you see them in malls trying to sell you Dead Sea mud everywhere.
Many of them don't want to be there.
And Ukrainians are voting with their feet as well.
The New York Times has reported that tens of thousands of Ukrainian men are maintaining telegram groups on how to get out of conscription, how to get out of the army.
There was just a major scandal with the draft board in Ukraine where the draft board was taking $10,000 bribes, so anyone of means can get out.
This is a rejection of the war.
I recently interviewed one of the most hated men in Ukraine other than Vladimir Putin.
He is a Ukrainian from western Ukraine named Ruslan Qotsaba who has been put on trial in Ukraine, brutally attacked in the streets by neo-Nazis connected to the state because he is the head of the Ukrainian Pacifist League.
And he has had to leave Ukraine for New York where at his Orthodox Church, Ukrainian members are now circulating a petition to extradite him for his activity in helping Ukrainian men escape.
And he told me of many who have died of exposure seeking to get over the border.
Our interview will be up soon, so check it out at the gray zone.
The point is, it's not a happy scenario for a country to become a big Israel.
We should not be encouraging this.
It certainly will not be democratic.
And then what does that mean for us as Americans?
And what does it mean for whatever's left of our democracy?
Well, we can look at Israel and how it's interfered in our elections and interfered in academia, interfered in all realms in order to maintain this special relationship.
In his book, Weaponizing Anti-Semitism, the British journalist Asa Winstanley documents how not only the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, but the Israeli embassy itself intervened to destroy the insurgent labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, because of Corbyn's sympathies for Palestinians.
It was an open interference by the Israeli government.
And one of the countless cases of Israeli meddling, less well known, is that Kiev, the post-Maidan government of Kiev, intervened in our 2016 election.
For instance, by hosting Hillary Clinton advisor Milan Verveer at the Ukrainian embassy for a campaign event, supplying the dubious black ledger which helped convict Paul Manafort, while DNC operative and Ukrainian nationalist Alexandra Chalupa helped launch the campaign to portray Trump as a vehicle for Russian influence.
Just imagine what Kiev will do if Trump emerges as the Republican nominee.
The Israel lobby is notorious for its attacks on free speech in the West.
I've experienced this personally.
Everywhere I went to talk about my book Goliath, they were there to try to stop it.
And now I'm facing it from the Ukrainian government.
How do we know this?
We got a Twitter file.
Aaron Matei, my colleague, received a Twitter file showing that the Ukrainian SBU Security Service went to the FBI and told them, here's a list of people we want taken off Twitter.
And the FBI went to Twitter and said, take them off.
And they included Aaron.
And Twitter, even though this is the pre-Elon era, said, this is too much for even us.
I mean, these are just Americans and Canadians stating their views.
Are you crazy?
But here you have a foreign government telling Americans what they can and can't say on American-owned, American-based social media platforms and the FBI playing along.
That's what I think happened to us, Daniel, at GoFundMe as well, when they paused our fundraiser to hire new staff about two weeks ago on the grounds of some external concerns.
Well, who could those external concerns be?
Could it be the same people who had me and Aaron Matei removed from a major tech conference where we were due to speak in Lisbon, Portugal, because Vladimir Zelensky's wife was a surprise headline speaker?
We learned that Vladimir Zelensky personally intervened to get us kicked out of that conference.
I think it is.
Then we have the kill list.
Colonel, are you on the kill list?
Anya's on the kill list.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry maintains a kill list called Mirot Vorets of politicians, academics, writers who need to be targeted.
And when Daria Dugina, the Russian nationalist geopolitical analyst, was killed in a Ukrainian terrorist attack outside Moscow that also targeted her father, she was marked on this list, liquidated.
And now we have American Scott Ritter's on the list.
I'm not on the list, which makes me even more worried.
We need to ask questions about whether they will take the project of assassination and terror that has been employed inside Ukraine against critics of the Maidan government, even in Russia, and bring it here.
We have to ask those questions.
And we've already seen them, according to the official German investigation, not according to Cy Hirsch, but according to the official German investigation, we've seen Ukraine carry out the biggest act of industrial sabotage ever in history with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.
Now this was aimed at Germany and German Kuckmeister Olaf Schultz has had nothing to say about it.
Questions About Ukraine's Memorandum Understanding 00:02:29
They know that Germany will simply roll over for the U.S.
This has presented a great opportunity for U.S. liquid natural gas producers.
But it shows the potential of Ukraine to attack its allies if they are seen as going against its wishes.
So as with Israel, which has spied on us, we all know about the USS Liberty, but that's just a small slice.
We won't know when we consolidate the project of big Israel whether we're wagging the tail or the tail is wagging us.
And that is very dangerous.
And now, finally, in closing, I just want to alert you to how this project will begin to be consolidated.
The Wall Street Journal has just reported, and this is a quote, Western officials are looking for ways to lock in pledges of support and limit future governments' abilities to backtrack amid fears in Ukrainian capitals that Donald Trump, if he recaptures the White House, would seek to scale back aid.
Trump has said, I'll end it in 24 hours.
I think it might take a little longer than that, but I like the spirit.
A U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that one proposal being considered for Ukraine would be a memorandum of understanding, which would not require congressional approval.
President Biden has floated the idea of an Israel model for Ukraine.
And Israel receives its $4 billion a year under the same kind of memorandum of understanding.
So as we've seen, there are the same financial and ideological incentives to enact a memorandum of understanding, which completely negates your voice as peace-loving Americans and forces you to foot the bill for an endless war that will come back to the United States, further de-democratize our society while wasting more Ukrainian and Russian lives.
They are trying to take your voice away.
They are trying to silence us with this memorandum of understanding.
And so we're here today to redouble our efforts to reignite the call that was issued at Rage Against the War Machine this February to end all military aid to Ukraine.
If we can't do that, what democracy, what voice do we have left?
The project of big Israel in Ukraine will be at least as disastrous as the project of actual Israel already is.
And so we must stand in the way.
Thank you.
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