Prisoners of Context Part Two—An Analysis (24 March 2026) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I — Background
Back in December 2023, I put up a blog entitled “Prisoners of Context.” It described how we are all enmeshed in context. Each day we live in and act in a context. Indeed, a long lasting context can create parameters for our thought and action—thus, placing us in a closed intellectual environment. In the 2023 blog, I exemplified this by referencing three cases depicting the behavior of Israeli children:
— In July 2023, a report that Israeli Jewish teenage volunteers had helped the IDF destroy a village of 200 Bedouin, who were Israeli citizens albeit not Jewish.
— In October 2023, a YouTube video of Israeli children making fun of Gaza child victims. The Israeli kids mimicked the Palestinian children dying or starving. They wore racially offensive makeup. They laughed and danced while celebrating Israel depriving the people of Gaza of power, potable water and food.
— In November 2023, a video broadcast of Israeli children singing a weirdly entitled “Friendship Song 2023,” describing the Gaza Arabs as “the swastika-bearers” and predicting “Within a year we will annihilate everyone and then we will return to plow our fields.” This song was sung against the visual backdrop of the mass bombing of Gaza City.
Part II — Gershon Baskin’s Students
Since 2023, Israeli’s long-standing anti-Palestinian context has led to genocide in Gaza and murderous pogroms in the West Bank. Just as telling, such savagery has not caused any reconsideration of the Israeli consciousness at all. Indeed, the context reflects the country’s blinkered racist culture and, unless Israel suffers an upheaval that creates doubts about that culture, it will not be questioned except by a minority.
This fact was recently confronted by Gershon Baskin (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881817 ), a longtime Israeli peace activist and columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He was addressing forty students—many of them veterans—at one of Israel’s universities on the topic of “how to make peace between Israel and Palestine – two states for two peoples.” His reception was not encouraging. What Baskin realized (and it should not have been a surprise) was that “the experience of being an Israeli soldier in Gaza over the past two years leaves little room for considering alternative thinking. There is a strong need to justify to oneself what they did in Gaza over two years, and October 7 [2023] is a strong motivation for believing that what was done by Israel in Gaza was entirely right.” In other words, their longstanding context created parameters for their thinking and precluded any self doubt.
As far as the reader can tell, these Israeli soldier students had given no thought as to why the Gaza Palestinians attacked on that October 7th. Indeed, in order to maintain a position that what Israel had done in Gaza was “entirely right,” they could not seriously consider such a question. But then, most Israelis do not have accurate information to do so, even if they wanted to. Israeli Jewish education and media has essentially censored out justifying Palestinian perceptions. This is how Baskin puts it: “It is…difficult to challenge the common thinking (very much groupthink) because almost all of the Israeli mainstream media is an echo chamber for the IDF spokesperson and members of the Israeli government.” That “echo chamber” is supported by a lifetime of Zionist education and nationwide segregation which makes sure that, in the vast majority of cases, that education is complimented by a lifetime of little or no contact outside of the Jewish community.
Part III — Charlottesville Conclave
The problem of a warping context is a ubiquitous problem, found to one extent or another in all countries. Here in the USA, citizens are presently self-destructing due to unexamined contextual parameters of thought. Take for instance, the Unite The Right rally that took place over August 11 and 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. This effort involved disparate extremist groups including: the Ku Klux Klan; the American Nazi National Socialist Movement (Nazi flags were flown side by side with the Confederate flag); Anti-Communist Action; Virginia Minuteman Militia; and League of the South. Hundreds of white supremacist and Christian nationalist supporters showed up representing thousands of other like-minded Americans. Two goals brought them all together: 1) the strategic goal of uniting the white nationalist movement and 2) as a tactic facilitating that end, preventing the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park.
Most of these participants were born and raised in the American South or Midwest. In most cases, they grew up in segregated environments that allowed for very little exposure to non-white and non-Christian citizens. In other words, there is a white cultural context that creates racist parameters for their thinking. Their environment is also built around a sense of grievance—that somehow they’ve been “done wrong” by history and a federal government that until recently has paid more attention to the demands of east coast liberals and poor non-whites than to them. That Washington has too long taken their tax dollars and spent them on something other than their local needs. This sense of grievance has been linked to the Civil War and its aftermath. Their real or imagined predecessors lost a historically white dominant society secured by slavery and they, the successors, have been suffering culture shock ever since.
To the above can be added the secular progression of American society. Here the historical highlight is the Scopes trial of 1925 that was seen as a blow to the American Christian character. Ever since, American culture has been perceived by fundamentalist Christians (whose stronghold is the American south and midwest) as increasingly evil.
Donald Trump has made all these folks part of his political base. He caters to their sense of grievance. And they expect him to exact recompense for alleged harm suffered. The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally was the most recent expression of this cause.
Part IV — Commonalities
Question: What do the Unite The Right protesters at Charlottesville have in common with Gershon Baskin’s students?
Answer: Both have “mythologized” the past in roughly similar ways.
The white supremacists in the U.S. imagine their past in terms of a lost patrimony. The monuments to Confederate soldiers and leaders being removed under pressure from white liberals and the Black community has become a symbol of that loss enacted in real time. The events that led to that pressure, such as the 2015 attack on a Black church in Charleston, S.C., are conveniently ignored or forgotten.
Modern Israeli Jews also believe in a lost patrimony. In this case, however, they believe that, through their own efforts, that birthright has been reclaimed. Yet, they also experience a constant fear that this patrimony is still under threat. The reason why this might be so is never deeply analyzed. Much of this scenario is understood through biblical analogy and the subsequent history of antisemitism. The displaced Palestinians play the part of conquered pagan peoples of biblical Canaan. Their contemporary resistance plays the role of an extreme expression of antisemitism—an alleged effort to ruin world Jewry through the destruction of the Israeli state. Destruction here does not have to be in the form of a counter conquest. The transformation of modern Israel into a more democratic secular state, with all citizens having equal rights, would be enough.
So how are the modern Israeli Jews reacting to this alleged threat? They have taken up the attributes of their alleged biblical ancestors who, instructed by God, supposedly went about killing all the men, women, and children of the “Canaanite nations.” In other words, modern Israeli Jews are replaying biblical genocide in today’s Gaza.
Obviously the Charlottesville reaction to a sense of lost patrimony was less severe (only one person murdered) than that generated by the Israeli fear of re-losing patrimony (a minimum of 70,000 murdered in Gaza). Nonetheless, the Unite The Right folks recognize a commonality and confirm this by seeing Jewish Israel as a desirable model. In other words, America’s white supremacists see the Israeli state as a model for a “white American ethnic state.”
The parameters to thought dictated by racism in Jewish Israel has led to an apartheid state. It has also allowed for Nazi-like behavior in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that similar parameters to thought amongst the Charlottesville crowd would not encourage similar behavior if they ever gain power. President Trump is a frightening step in that direction as revealed by his reversal of the definition of civil rights and his corruption of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
As Dorothy says to Toto, “I have a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.”
