Some eight decades after the end of World War II and the trial of the Nazis before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” today known as the Holocaust, remains an almost incomprehensible mega-crime, unique in its nihilism, its mission-like execution, its mechanisms of concealment and secrecy, ultimately in […]

The post What Did Germans Know About the Holocaust? What Do We Know About the Gaza Genocide? first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.

The settlers have a lot to celebrate these days. In the span of a single month, an unauthorized outpost overlooking Beit Sahour—on land once zoned for a Palestinian children’s hospital—was transformed from a handful of mobile homes into a state-sanctioned settlement: guarded by soldiers, connected by roads, publicly embraced by senior ministers, and folded into Israel’s newly redrawn map of the West Bank.

The pipeline from violent land seizure to official authorization has never run more smoothly. It’s only a matter of time before groups selling homes there are welcomed into synagogues across the U.S.

Even as the IDF itself reports a steep drop in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank—57 incidents in 2025, down from 258 the year before—it continues to claim a heightened risk of an October 7–style attack from a population it has largely disarmed, and from resistance groups it has systematically decimated. That claimed threat now justifies permanent deployments in Jenin and Tulkarm: new roads carved through refugee camps, buildings leveled, and residents treated as removable obstacles to “security”—all of it paving the way for resettling the north.

Meanwhile, the real growth curve is on the settler side: 867 Jewish attacks in 2025, a 27 percent increase from 2024, including 128 severe incidents—shootings, arson, and serious physical violence—up more than 50 percent year over year.

The settler pioneers, as their allies in government call them, are building new frontiers. A new outpost has popped up near Qusra—the deepest yet inside PA-controlled Area B—and it’s already been used as a base for settler attacks. Israeli forces have responded by tear-gassing the Palestinian village under siege.

To top it off, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir approved gun permits for residents of eighteen West Bank settlements this week, extending a firearms policy that has rapidly militarized civilian settlers.

In light of all this exciting news, the Knesset hosted an actual celebration. On Monday, MK Limor Son Har-Melech held a tribute ceremony for the Hilltop Youth—the loose moniker for the most violent settlers at the front lines of land seizure—billed as a “Great salute to the pioneers of the settlements, the hills and the farms.”

Subscribe now

Among those honored was Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the settlement movement, who proudly tells anyone who’ll listen that she feels no empathy when Palestinian children are killed, and who closed her eyes when a reporter tried to show her my footage of a settler clubbing a Palestinian grandmother.

Also in attendance at the Knesset ceremony was Elisha Yered, who was suspected of involvement in the murder of a Palestinian teenager in 2023. I highlighted Yered in my piece Good Settler, Bad Settler, documenting how he functioned as a central ideologue and organizer within the hilltop movement, bridging violent outpost builders with the senior politicians and ministers who protect and empower them.

Here is Yered on X after the ceremony, waxing poetic about how far the settlement movement has come—from state alienation to full embrace, and from the myth of “good” versus “bad” settlers to open unity (emphasis mine):

Just back now from a historic and moving event held today in the Knesset. An official tribute ceremony in the Knesset building to the pioneers of settlement, the hilltop outposts and farms, every minute of which was like a healing balm for the wounds of the past that refused to heal until this day.

Years of persecution, of scorn and contempt, of lack of recognition for the life’s work of those who stubbornly kept the ember alive, carved deep wounds also in the hearts of the toughest among the activists.

And after them came other years of awakening and breaking forward. The contempt was replaced by awe and support, but alongside them grew a disgusting selection by certain elements who tried to divide between the settlement movements, between the pioneers and their comrades, between those worthy of government support and those whose blood is fair game, between those carried on shoulders and those deserving of condemnation and hostile treatment.

And here came MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who from her very first day in office refused to toe the line with those who tried to sow division and discord, to divide and conquer. At the tribute and appreciation conference she launched today for all the pioneering movements, we sat there together. Activists from the hilltops alongside members of the Nahala movement, farm residents alongside veterans of the young settlement. Jews filling different roles in the campaign, but all fighting for the same goal and even joining hands many times.

The Knesset members and ministers who came to express their support and appreciation repeated the same message again and again. You are the ones on the front lines of settlement, pulling the State of Israel forward to its Zionist values that it forgot over the years. Every boy, woman or father sitting here—they are soldiers in every sense. And not just them, also members of the second circle and the supporting environment without whom nothing would have succeeded in happening.

He then goes on to thank many members of the Israeli government who attended the ceremony.

As I often say, I truly appreciate the settlers for their candor. They understand the assignment laid out from the earliest days of Zionism, and have no patience for the pretense of “peaceful coexistence.”

Here’s what I wrote in The Baffler about Bezalel Smotrich—the finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank—who has done more than anyone to pave the way for the current explosion in settlement growth:

Smotrich has always understood the origin of the current propelling him. “I believe that the yearning of generations for this land, and the confidence in our ultimate return thereto, are the most profound driving forces of the progression of the Return to Zion which led to the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote in the 2017 plan. On the inconvenient reality of the land’s current inhabitants, he added, “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect. It worked fine for the State of Israel, and it needs to work in the same way for Judea and Samaria.”

For Zionism, Smotrich knows, the formula has never changed: the founding myth will drive you forward, force will deliver the promise.

And the end of my article in The Drift about Israel’s archaeological warfare:

Aharon Tavger, another settler archaeologist at Ariel University, contends that the law around the occupied territories has never made much sense. “If we accept the recognition of Israel — the Israeli state,” Tavger said, “because of the historical right, or the connection of the people of Israel to the land, there is no difference between Tel Aviv and Sebastia.” He continued, “And I can say even the opposite: The heartland of Israel, of the ancient Jewish land, is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank — much more than Tel Aviv.” The whole argument against excavating in the West Bank, in his view, raises a thornier question.

“In 1948, Israel also occupied territory,” he said. “So what’s the difference?”

This is not a story about excesses or deviations, but the logical extension of a project that has always depended on ethnic cleansing to sustain itself. The fantasy that liberal Zionism could restrain or civilize it has fully collapsed.

Over the past several years, Democrats and liberal institutions in the United States have cheered on, amplified, and ultimately helped operationalize what had long been a far-right smear campaign against UNRWA, the largest aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, effectively equating it with Hamas.

On Tuesday, that campaign reached its logical conclusion, as Israeli bulldozers tore through its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating equipment, expelling guards, and raising an Israeli flag over the ruins. Israeli ministers arrived on site to celebrate. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called it “a historic day.”

Created in 1949, UNRWA exists to serve Palestinians displaced during Israel’s founding and, in doing so, to preserve their status as refugees. That role alone makes it intolerable to a political project committed not just to removing Palestinians from the land, but to erasing the fact that they were ever there. In recent years, UNRWA has functioned as a lifeline in both Gaza and the West Bank—running schools, clinics, food distribution, and basic infrastructure where no substitute exists. In Gaza in particular, dismantling UNRWA has meant dismantling the only system capable of delivering food at scale, directly leading to the starvation crisis last year.

In early 2024, Israeli officials alleged—without publicly verifiable evidence—that twelve UNRWA employees, out of a workforce of roughly 30,000, had participated in the October 7 attacks. A U.S. intelligence assessment later characterized those claims with “low confidence” and could not independently confirm them. Even so, the damage was already done. Major U.S. outlets—most notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—treated the accusations as credible breaking news, splashing them across front pages while burying caveats deep in the text. The timing was exquisite: the allegations broke just hours after the International Court of Justice found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

Dozens of Western governments initially froze funding to UNRWA. Most quietly resumed it once the claims collapsed. The United States did not. Instead, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan spending bill that extended the UNRWA funding ban, backed by Democratic leadership including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

That complicity continues to this day, including from presidential hopeful Rep. Ro Khanna, who, just last week, voted for a bill that defunded UNRWA while sending security assistance to Israel. Days later, he offered a textbook display of liberal hypocrisy by circulating a strongly worded letter condemning Israel’s actions in the West Bank. (In September, Khanna also signed onto a letter decrying “man-made mass starvation,” apparently without noticing what policies were helping produce it.)

Here’s a remarkable exchange I had with Khanna last week, presented without comment:

The UNRWA precedent is now metastasizing. Israel has moved to shut down Doctors Without Borders clinics in Gaza, demanding staff lists, restricting speech, and barring supplies—explicitly citing the group’s use of words like “genocidal” as grounds for expulsion. Patients interviewed inside these facilities say that without these clinics, they will not survive. Amputees will lose access to physical therapy needed to walk again; burn victims will miss daily wound care that prevents infection and death; surgical wards performing dozens of operations a day will simply disappear. In a territory where Israel has already destroyed most hospitals, there is no backup system waiting to take over.

This is not an attempt to absolve Republicans. I take for granted that they will do what they have always done: inflict harm on brown people, wherever they are in the globe. What demands scrutiny are the “Good Liberals” who launder smears into respectable discourse, cast votes behind closed doors to codify them into law, and then retreat into moral language while the consequences unfold.

To be perfectly clear: countless mainstream Democrats and liberal institutions helped deliver Itamar Ben-Gvir one of his lifelong dreams—the destruction of the largest aid agency for Palestinians. That is whose team they’re on.

Whatever one thinks about Israel’s history, the comforting versions of that story no longer do any explanatory work. What matters is what Israel is today. The Israel that has thrown its full support behind the most violent settlers in the West Bank. The Israel that is dismantling critical aid networks for Palestinians just because it can. The Israel that, on Wednesday, violated the “ceasefire” for the umpteenth time by killing three Palestinian journalists in Gaza while they were documenting life in displacement camps.

In the United States, as we sink deeper into fascism, the way our bipartisan consensus on Israel intersects with this trajectory has become impossible to ignore. Figures like Jonathan Greenblatt, Bari Weiss, and Chuck Schumer have systematically downplayed the rise of literal Nazism on the American right in favor of targeting critics of Israel. (A Justice Department official who resigned in May put it plainly: “There was no interest in antisemitism unless it involved protests of Israel or the war in Gaza.”) Last week, Israel dispatched officials across the U.S. to pressure institutions into banning the term “West Bank” in favor of “Judea and Samaria.”

This is why, as I wrote last year, Trump was so savvy to deploy a crackdown on pro-Palestine activists as the vanguard of his assault on the Constitution, one that was facilitated every step of the way by Democrats. America’s unwavering support for Israel—the “beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” where millions can’t vote or claim basic rights—has long been one of its central contradictions. It was only a matter of time before an authoritarian cashed in.

It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s tactics increasingly resemble the IDF’s: executing civilians in broad daylight with impunity, blocking medical care, and issuing bald-faced lies about the circumstances of these killings. This is not to suggest that one is derivative of the other, but that this is what a fascist crackdown looks like, whether it’s carried out at home or abroad.

Today, support for Israel means support for a far-right, antidemocratic movement that is killing and displacing Palestinians and Arabs across the region, while feeding into the erosion of civil liberties here in the United States. And as if we needed further proof of that connection: On Thursday, Haaretz reported that U.S. authorities chartered a private jet owned by an Israeli-American businessman and close friend of Donald Trump to deport eight Palestinians living in the United States to the West Bank. Days earlier, Israel deported an American Jewish activist due to his “leftism,” citing as evidence a photo of him protesting against Nazis in Charlottesville.

The through-line is no longer subtle. A single political logic now runs from hilltop outposts to humanitarian strangulation, from Gaza to the West Bank, and straight into the heart of American institutions—where many of the same Democrats who maintain steadfast support for Israel now caution against the push to abolish ICE. This is the end of the story liberals told themselves: that power could be outsourced without consequence, violence compartmentalized, and moral language made to stand in for material reality. What remains is a single, expanding architecture of force. History will not be confused about who made that possible.

A few final notes before I sign off:

• In case you missed it, I had what I thought was an excellent conversation with Mouin Rabbani about Israel’s endgame in the West Bank. You can watch it here.

• Columbia Journalism Review interviewed me about how I navigate the line between reporting and activism.

• I’ll be joining an online panel discussion on the West Bank hosted by the Arab Center Washington DC on January 29 at 10 a.m. EST. You can register here.

• And some rare good news: after a sustained global pressure campaign, Israel called off plans to demolish a youth soccer field in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank.

See you next time.

I often find myself searching on the FIAF database for the location of archive film prints. The database isn’t definitive, but it is often a helpful indicator. Anyone searching for archive copies of Abel Gance films would likely have spotted an entry for Le nègre blanc (1912). Click further and you would have seen that the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf was listed as holding a 16mm print of this film. I think I’ve known, vaguely, of this FIAF listing for many years. It had never occurred to me to investigate it further. Why? Well, I supposed that something so rare would have long since been checked and confirmed by another researcher. I also suspected that the copy might be so fragile that it was unavailable for viewing. The fact that the recent Gance retrospective at the Cinémathèque française did not include this film in its “complete” screening schedule seemed to confirm this (see my four posts from September 2024). But the question remained, lodged in my brain.

In the last few years, I have felt more willing and able to venture onto the continent in order to pursue various strands of my research. With a prospective trip to Germany planned for December 2025, I decided in advance that I should investigate this mysterious print in Düsseldorf. Over the autumn, there followed a long exchange of emails with various archivists, and the team at Düsseldorf kindly agreed to check their print in advance of my visit. I received the startling information that they had two prints of this title: one on 16mm and another, shorter, copy on 9.5mm. The former was approximately the length one would expect for an early two-reel film; the latter was clearly an abbreviated version of a single reel. My curiosity grew (as did my doubts), but I knew I must hold my excitement until someone had checked the prints to confirm their identity. Before I reach the inevitable (and I’m sure not surprising) conclusion of this search, I should say why the very idea of this film’s existence is so interesting. Interesting to me, anyway…

For a start, this print of Le nègre blanc would be the earliest surviving film directed by Gance. Some of his earlier appearances as an actor are preserved in films by others, but La Folie de Docteur Tube (1915) is his earliest known work as a director to exist. That this is so is something of a miracle, as the film was never commercially released. It is also frustrating, since all of Gance’s two- or three-reel films that did get released in 1912-15 are considered lost. These are the films that earned him enough success to make the more substantial features of 1916-18, films which anticipate so much of the dramatic and aesthetic qualities of his masterpieces of the next decade. What was Gance like as a filmmaker before 1916? We simply don’t know. So to find a print of any Gance film from 1912 would be of enormous interest.

Secondly, Le nègre blanc is of interest for its subject and stars. The earliest synopsis I have to hand is in Sophie Daria’s Abel Gance, hier et demain (1959), which was based on a number of conversations with Gance. As a result, it is often inaccurate and evasive – but certain details are found nowhere else. The book offers a brief sketch of Le nègre blanc, adding that “it was never projected” (44). Having searched the major film journals and major newspapers of the period, I can indeed find no evidence of a public screening. But that the film was actually made is indicated by the survival of a document from 16 April 1912, citing payment for Gance’s performance from Le Film français, the company which produced Le nègre blanc. (They paid him 500F. You can see below an image of this document, taken from the auction catalogue of 1993, at which Nelly Kaplan sold her huge collection of Gance’s personal papers. Happily, the highest bidders were two French state archives.) And before you ask, yes, Gance did play the lead role of the titular black character, so presumably would appear on screen in blackface. To what end? Well, a little more information on Le nègre blanc is given in Roger Icart’s biography of Gance from 1983:

A black boy goes to school with white children. Cold-shouldered and ridiculed by his classmates, he decides to make himself look like them by painting his face and body white. His appearance thus disguised provokes a redoubled dose of mockery, while he dies, his body slowly poisoned by his naive stratagem. (49)

As I discovered when I searched for the phrase, “le nègre blanc” (which I hope you don’t need me to translate) had a remarkably wide circulation in the early twentieth century. It appeared in any number of cultural and political contexts, as a derogatory term, a term of entreaty, of warning, of classification. In using it for the title of his film, Gance was clearly tapping into a phrase that was common enough on people’s lips. Sophie Daria cites the film as “anti-racist”, while Roger Icart cites it as “anti-racist(?)”. I like the hesitancy of Icart’s parenthetical question mark. Clearly, the film can be read both as a parable about the poison of racism – but might also hint at something less palatable about the insurmountable nature of race. Added to these murky cultural waters is the fact that, in the 1930s, Gance was identified by some as Jewish and vilified as such. (The right-wing press in France mounted numerous vile attacks on his films and him. The label “Jew”, for them, could be applied to anyone they didn’t like. Chaplin, too, was called a “Jew” by like-minded fascists in this period.) That Gance was adopted seemed to hint at family secrets, and the figure of a fatherless male seeking to rebuild (or adopt) a family is a recurrent theme throughout his films. However crude, Le nègre blanc is surely an important marker of this interest in lone men seeking identity and belonging – a kind of destiny – and being destroyed by it.

But Gance was not the first to use this title for a film. Le nègre blanc was the title of one of the numerous “Rigadin” comedies starring Charles Prince, this one being produced by Pathé in 1910 (some sources say 1912). This film (viewable online) follows much the same plot as Gance’s, though its comedy is less touched by tragedy. In the Pathé version, a black man is mocked at a high society party when he proposes to a white woman. Rejected because of his colour, he finds a potion to turn himself white. In this form, he returns to the woman – but she is now engaged to another man. In revenge, he slips her some of his potion and she turns black. Rejected by her fiancé because of her colour, she tries to seek solace with Rigadin. But now he has the last laugh and rejects her because she is “black” and he is “white”. Like Gance’s synopsis, the Pathé film is an awkward satire on the idea of race – and (in its casting and use of blackface) a perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Perhaps the very existence of this contemporary film discouraged Gance’s producers from releasing his version.

Whatever the reason, the theme of Le nègre blanc reappeared in one of the few Gance films of this period about which we have a fuller description: Le masque d’horreur (1912), starring Édouard de Max. In this film, an artist has spent years trying to create a lifelike mask expressing the greatest fear imaginable. Driven almost to the point of madness, he decides at last to become his own model. He sits before a mirror, takes poison and cuts his wrist. (As the artist smears his blood over the lamp that lights his face, so Gance tinted his film red to mimic the gruesome aesthetic.) As the artist dies, so the mask becomes more and more lifelike. He embraces his creation, and dies. Like Le nègre blanc, therefore, Le masque d’horreur portrayed a figure seeking self-transformation through the creation of a mask – and the adoption of this mask caused his death. Unlike Le nègre blanc, however, Le masque d’horreur was actually shown. After a processing error botched the first print struck of the film, it was seemingly reprinted and projected in May 1912. This brief foray into the public realm did not stop the film’s disappearance. Like everything else from this period of Gance’s directorial work, it remains lost.

Returning to Le nègre blanc, another major interest is the fact that it was made in the year Gance married his co-star in this film, Mathilde Thizeau. About Thizeau, I know frustratingly little. Though she was his first wife and starred in at least two of Gance’s films in 1912, she is a virtual non-entity in most accounts of the filmmaker. Sophie Daria cites the existence of this woman in a carelessly off-hand way: “the young cineaste had married a journalist older than himself: Mathilde, a good and simple girl with whom he lived in harmony for a few years” (65). Ouch. Given that Daria certainly got her information from Gance himself, this is quite an insult. (Of course, by 1959 he was married to Sylvie (née Marie Odette Vérité), his third wife.) The truth is that Mathilde Thizeau was only five months older than “the young cineaste”: they were both 23 when they married in 1912. Furthermore, Gance’s biographer Roger Icart offers a far fairer (though no less brief) account of Mathilde as “a young journalist of great spirituality, like [Gance] enamoured by art and philosophy, who would participate in all his endeavours and inspire him to write numerous poems, dedicated ‘to my Thilde’. Above all, she would reinforce his ambitions as an author” (23).

But who was Mathilde Thizeau? Where did she come from? What was her background? Who were her family? All I know is drawn from the scant evidence of her name in some contemporary journals. Thus on 28 October 1912, the Journal des débats announces the marriage of Abel Gance, “dramatist”, to Mathilde Thizeau, “journalist”. I am re-reading Proust at the moment, and today reached the last part of Swann’s Way (1913), in which the narrator recalls his childhood love for Gilberte. They often play together on the Champs-Élysées, and while the narrator waits in hope of Gilberte’s arrival, he makes friends with an old woman who comes loyally to sit on a bench. Here, she passes the time – come rain or shine – by reading what she calls “my old débats”. To this scene, set one imagines sometime in the early 1880s, an old woman expresses her fondness for her old journal. Proust’s novel was first published the year after the announcement of Gance’s marriage. What a strange world this is, and how charmingly old-fashioned, even then, to announce one’s marriage in the Journal des débats.

Searching for anything written by Thizeau, I eventually found my way to the issue of Le Gaulois du Dimanche published on 31 August 1912, two months before her marriage. There – among the pretty pictures, the silly adverts, the coverage of Massenet’s death and the latest crisis in the Balkans, the photos of cats and dogs, the latest women’s fashions, and a sentimental song – is Mathilde Thizeau’s piece: “La Rose qui a vu jouer ‘Héliogabale’”. A curious title, and it took me a little while to identity the “Héliogabale” it cites. It seems that Héliogabale (the Roman emperor Elagabalus) was the subject of a small number of artistic works in France around the turn of the century – there were a few plays, plus Louis Feuillade’s film Héliogabale (1911). Thizeau quotes a line from act I, scene ix of her particular source: “…et les plafonds ouverts / Sur eux laissent tomber les roses une à une…” (“…and over them the open ceilings / Let fall the roses one by one…”). I eventually found these enigmatic lines in the libretto of Déodat de Séverac’s eponymous opera of 1910. I knew Séverac by his lovely piano music, as well as by his charming opera Le Cœur du moulin (1908). He was from Languedoc in southern France and portrayed the landscapes and people of this region in his music, so it’s no surprise to learn that Héliogabale was first performed in Béziers. This took place in August 1910 in a huge arena populated by 15,000 spectators. Despite its place in a festival in high summer, the opera was a financial disaster and swiftly disappeared. But it was revived for a small number of performances at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in February and April 1911. It was here, one presumes, that Mathilde Thizeau experienced it.

Thizeau’s short prose poem takes inspiration from the scene in which Héliogabale arranges that his enemies, whom he has invited to dine, be smothered by thousands of rosebuds and petals emptied from the rafters. In Thizeau’s text, a rose watches the performance of this scene in the opera as the blossoms smother the banqueters below. She marvels at what she imagines to be the revenge of the roses against the men who have cut them from their stalks. At night, she decides to take her own revenge on the beetle which seeks to steal the nectar from her heart. When the beetle finally crawls into the flower, she “bleeds” herself to death: emptying her nectar into a delicious pool that the beetle drinks until it is insensible. Then the rose lets herself die, her petals falling over the beetle and entombing it in blossom. Thus ends the only piece of writing I have ever read by Mathilde Thizeau. What to make of it? Well, it’s very fin-de-siècle, and the imagery of male predator entombed inside a female flower is very… well, familiar. But it’s charming for how particular it is, and the fact that the story is taken from the perspective of a flower is curious. It’s a sidelong glance at a tiny corner of the world of 1912, and it’s an animistic close-up of nature.

I suppose it interests and charms me because it makes me want to know more. Did Thizeau see this opera with Gance? What was his reaction? And did they write together? Gance was performing in the theatre as well as being involved in the cinema. In the 1910s, he appeared in some important productions of D’Annunzio’s exotic, multimedia French plays – including Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1911) and La Pisanelle ou La Mort Parfumée (1913). The latter ends with the protagonist being suffocated while inhaling the heady scent of roses, so not so far away from the world of Héliogabale. (And I have written about the links between D’Annunzio and Gance elsewhere.) So here we have this newly married couple, thinking and living theatre and music, within touching distance of the heady world of late romantic art. Such a world must have seemed far in advance of some of the films they were able to make in 1912-13, and Gance abandoned cinema for a year or more in 1913-14 in order to complete his own epic, multimedia stage drama La Victoire de Samothrace. How much of Mathilde lies in this piece, and what kind of life did they lead in these years? Sometime in 1914, Gance met Ida Danis, a secretary working for his new production company, Le Film d’Art. He fell in love with her and divorced Mathilde in 1919. Of course, Ida died in 1921 during the production of La Roue, leaving the filmmaker with a lifelong sense of loss. (Never having married Ida, he married her sister Marguerite in 1922. The marriage ended in turmoil in 1930, by which point Gance had met Sylvie…)

All of which is to say that Gance’s choice of film over theatre was echoed in his choice of Ida over Mathilde. Film history knows all about Ida as Gance’s “great love”, which only makes Mathilde’s fate the more poignant to me. Here are the limits of history. I know when Mathilde was born and died, and when she married and divorced Gance. But I don’t know her: her interests, her ambitions, what animated her soul, what drew her to Gance, or how they fell in love. I don’t even know what Mathilde looked like. Perhaps there is a photo somewhere in the archives, but when I did my research in Paris many years ago, I didn’t think to inquire. She died in 1966, but of her life after her divorce from Gance I know nothing. Did she know or care what happened to him – or see his films? Did he know or care what happened to her? And what did she do with her life?

For all these reasons, therefore, I was keen to know if the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf did indeed hold one or even two prints of Le nègre blanc. Eventually, the prints were located and examined. I received my answer… As I’m sure you’ve guessed, neither print was of Gance’s 1912 film. Instead, they were reduced versions of a film by the same name from 1925. This was made by Serge Nadejdine, Nicolas Rimsky, and Henry Wulschleger for Films Albatros. (I told you that title had surprising circulation in the early twentieth century.) At some point in the past, decades ago perhaps, the wrong iteration of this particular title was selected and recorded on a database. So no lost oddity for me, and no lost oddity for you.

But this wild goose chase offers another valuable lesson in the problems of film history. Evidently, we rely on a lot of unverifiable data. Scholars (including myself) copy and paste much of our information on a film’s cast, crew, length, date etc. without being able to check it against primary sources. (I discussed this same issue in my frustrated search for Der Evangelimann (1923).) And many films like Le nègre blanc do not survive for us to test our information or assumptions. But my experience chasing after a false entry on the FIAF database demonstrates that it’s always worth asking archives directly about what they possess. Material from this period is often sketchily catalogued on archival databases, let alone centralized platforms like FIAF. And the archivists themselves are a necessary and inspiring set of guides through the unique material they hold. If I did not get to see Le nègre blanc, I’m sure there are plenty of other surprises out there, waiting to be discovered.

Paul Cuff

My thanks to Andreas Thein and Thomas Ochs of the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, and to Oliver Hanley for oiling the wheels of communication.

References

Sophie Daria, Abel Gance, hier et demain (Paris: La Palatine, 1959).

Roger Icart, Abel Gance, ou Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: l’Age d’homme, 1983).

Jupiter Castillo, a UC Santa Barbara graduate and healthcare worker, shares his experience of detention and deportation.

The post Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: What Happens After an ICE Arrest appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

Francesca Albanese - by Mr. Fish

Subscribe now

NICE, France — It is a late November afternoon. I am driving to Genoa, Italy with Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. We are traveling to join striking dockworkers. The dockworkers call for a moratorium on weapons bound for Israel and a halt to the Italian government’s plans to increase military spending.

We speed past the inky waters of Baie des Anges on our right and the razor-backed French Alps on our left. Châteaus and clusters of houses with red-tiled roofs, shrouded in the fading light, are perched on the rolling hillsides. Palm trees line the seafront road.

Francesca — tall with flecks of gray in her hair and wearing large black-framed glasses and hoop earrings — is the bête noire of Israel and the United States. She was placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the U.S. Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.”

The OFAC list — weaponized by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in clear violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to U.N. officials — prohibits any financial institution from having someone on the list as a client. A bank that permits someone on the OFAC list to engage in financial transactions is banned from operating in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment systems.

In her report, Francesca lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.

The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s “forever-occupation” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech — providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”

You can see my interview about the report with Francesca here.

Francesca, whose previous reports including “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Genocide as colonial erasure” along with her empassioned denunciations of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, have made her a lightning rod. She is excoriated every time she deviates from the approved script, including when pro-Palestine demonstrators stormed the headquarters of the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa while we were in Italy.

Francesca condemned the incursion and property destruction — protesters scattered newspapers and spray-painted slogans on the walls such as “Free Palestine” and “Newspapers complicit with Israel” — but added that it should serve as a “warning to the press” to do its job. That qualification expressed her frustration with the media’s discrediting of the reporting of Palestinian journalists — over 278 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7 along with over 700 of their family members — and uncritical amplification of Israeli propaganda. But it was seized upon by her critics, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to lynch her.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on Francesca in July.

“The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur,” the State Department’s press release read. “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West. That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.”

“She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC [International Criminal Court ] pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives,” it went on. “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

The sanctions followed those imposed in February and June on the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan along with two judges for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.

Subscribe now

Francesca is barred from entering the U.S. even to appear at the United Nations in New York City, to present one of her two annual reports. The other is delivered at the United Nations Office at Geneva.

Francesca’s assets in the U.S. have been frozen, including her bank account and her U.S. apartment. The sanctions cut her off from the international banking system, including blocking her use of credit cards. Her private medical insurance refuses to reimburse her medical expenses. Hotel rooms booked under her name have been cancelled. She can only operate using cash or by borrowing a bank card.

Institutions, including U.S. universities, human rights groups, professors and NGOs, that once cooperated with Francesca, have severed ties, fearful of penalties established for any U.S. citizen who collaborates with her. She and her family receive frequent death threats. Israel and the U.S. have mounted a campaign to get her removed from her U.N post.

Francesa is proof that when you stand steadfastly with the oppressed, you will be treated like the oppressed.

She is unsure if her book, “When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine,” which has been translated into English and is expected to be released in April next year, will be distributed in the U.S.

“I’m a sanctioned person,” she says ruefully.

But she is not cowed. Her next salvo will be a report that documents the torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. While torture, she says, was “not widespread,” before Oct. 7, it has now become ubiquitous. She is collecting testimonies of those released from Israeli detention.

“It reminds me of the stories and testimonies I read from Argentina’s dictatorship,” Francesca tells me. “It’s that bad. It’s systemic torture against the same people. The same people are taken, raped and brought back, taken, raped and brought back.”

“Women?” I ask.

“Both,” she answers.

“To have women tell you they have been raped, multiple times. They’ve been asked to masturbate soldiers. This is incredible,” Francesca says. “For a woman to say that. Imagine what they have endured? There are people who have lost their words. They cannot talk. They cannot speak after what they’ve endured.”

Establishment media organizations, she says, not only dutifully parrot back Israeli lies, but routinely block reporting that reflects negatively on Israel.

“In April, I reported the first cases of sexual harassment and rape that had taken place in January and February 2024,” she says. “People didn’t want to listen. The New York Times interviewed me for two hours. Two hours. They didn’t write a line about it.”

“The Financial Times had — because of the relevance of the topic — an embargo’d version of ‘From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,’” she says. “They didn’t publish it. They didn’t even publish a review, an article, days after the press conference. But they did publish a critique of my report. I had a meeting with them. I said, ‘This is really depressing. Who are you? Are you paid for the work you do? Who are you loyal to, your readers?’ I pushed them. They said, ‘Well, we didn’t find that it was up to our standards.’”

This, I tell her, is how the New York Times would spike stories by reporters that editors deem too incendiary.

“They discredit your sources regardless of what your sources are,” I tell her. “That becomes the vehicle by which they don’t publish. This isn’t a good faith discussion. They’re not giving a fair analysis of what your sources are. They are categorically dismissing them. They’re not telling you the truth, which is, ‘We don’t want to deal with Israel and the Israel lobby.’ That’s the truth. They don’t say that. It is always, ‘It’s not up to our standards.’”

“There is no free media, no free press in Italy anymore,” Francesca laments. “There is, but it’s fringe or on the margins. It is an exception. The main newspapers are held by groups connected to big powers, financial and economic powers. The government controls — directly or indirectly — much of Italian TV.”

The drift towards fascism in Europe and the United States, Francesca says, is intimately tied to the genocide, as is the emerging resistance.

“There is a brewing anger and dissatisfaction with political leadership in Europe,” she says. “There is also a fear that lingers in many countries because of the rise of the right. We’ve been there. There are people who have living memories of fascism in Europe. The scars of Nazi-fascism are still there, even the trauma. People cannot process what has happened and why it’s happened. Palestine has shocked people. Italians in particular. Maybe because we are who we are in the sense that we cannot be silenced that easily, we cannot be scared as has happened to the Germans and the French. I was shocked in France. The fear and repression is incredible. It is not as bad as Germany, but it’s much worse than it was two years ago. The minister of education in France cancelled an academic conference on Palestine at the Collège de France — the highest institution in France. The minister of education! And he bragged about it.”

Francesca says our only hope now is civil disobedience, embodied in actions such as strikes that disrupt commerce and government or the attempts by the flotillas to reach Gaza.

“The flotillas created this sense of ‘Oh, something can be done,’” she says. “We are not powerless. We can make a difference even in shaking the ground, rocking the boat. Then the workers have come in. The students have already been mobilized. There has been a sense through the various protests that we can still change things. People have started to connect the dots.”

Francesca presented her 24-page report “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” to the U.N. General Assembly in October, a report that had to be delivered remotely from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, because of the sanctions.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, following her presentation, said, “Ms. Albanese, you are a witch and this report is another page in your spellbook.” He accused her of trying to “curse Israel with lies and hatred.”

“Every page of this report is an empty spell, every accusation, a charm that does not work, because you are a failed witch,” Danon continued.

“It triggered a moment of enlightenment.” Francesca says of the insults. “I connected it to the injustice that women have suffered through the centuries.”

“What is happening to the Palestinians and to those who are speaking out for the Palestinians, is the 2025 equivalent of burning witches in the public square,” she goes on. “It was done to scientists and theologians who didn’t align with the Catholic Church. It was done to women who held the power of herbs. It was done to religious minorities, to indigenous people, like the Sámi people.”

“Palestine,” Francesca says, “has opened a portal to history, to where we come from and to what we risk if we don’t pull the brakes.”

Share

In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible  donation.

By Emran Feroz Originally Published by Truthout.

After two National Guard soldiers were shot in Washington, D.C. last week, several U.S. pundits and politicians were quick with their descriptions of the alleged attacker. They erroneously assumed that he brought his “culture” or “society” to the United States.

“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies… At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on X.

Miller’s assumption about the “great lie of mass migration” was dead wrong. When I saw the suspect’s name, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, I immediately recognized that he used to work as a U.S.-trained militiaman, and it was the United States that destroyed his childhood, his life, and his home country. Lakanwal came to the United States in 2021 as a longtime member of one of the CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units. For years, Lakanwal was treated as a U.S. ally and equipped with many resources from the U.S. military and intelligence service to do some of the most brutal work on behalf of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

The Zero Units were among the most aggressive instruments of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Though some units were formally tied to Afghan intelligence, they were in practice created, trained, armed, and directed by the CIA. They operated outside Afghan law and far beyond any realistic oversight. And they became known inside the country as some of the most feared armed actors of the war.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented at least 14 major cases of abuse committed by these forces between 2017 and 2019 alone, including unlawful killings, disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. The real number is almost certainly higher; many areas where the Zero Units operated were inaccessible to journalists and rights monitors due to massive restrictions and repression.

In Khost Province, where Lakanwal came from and where I reported extensively in 2017, residents described repeated arbitrary detentions, killings, and notorious night raids, in which civilian homes were brutally targeted by soldiers and militiamen. In one incident, the clandestine fighters of the Khost Protection Force, another CIA-backed militia similar to the Zero Units, killed 14 civilians, including women, during a single operation. Afghan officials could not intervene, because the units did not answer to Kabul. “Don’t let them catch you,” several friends of mine in Khost told me when I was investigating U.S. war crimes in the region back then.

According to multiple sources from his home district, Lakanwal’s unit also carried out operations in Kandahar, where war crimes occurred and even members of the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces were killed. These actions never resulted in consequences for the Zero Units or their American handlers. Impunity was an operational fact, not a malfunction.

Before the return of the Taliban in 2021, Afghan officials told me repeatedly that their government had no authority over these CIA-built militias. This was widely understood inside Afghanistan: If Zero Unit fighters arrived at your home at night, no Afghan court, police officer, or ministry could protect you.

Washington designed the units this way. The U.S. wanted a rapid-response force unconstrained by local bureaucracy, political negotiations, or legal limits. The long-term risks — political, social, and psychological — were all ignored.

When the Taliban took over Kabul four years ago, the Zero Units abruptly lost the protection they had relied on for years because their U.S. backers withdrew. For good reason, their fighters feared that their history of killings would make them immediate targets for the incoming Taliban regime. During the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, members of those units were assigned to secure the Kabul airport. Witnesses have described Zero Unit members beating back crowds and taking large sums of money from Afghans desperate to reach evacuation flights.

Yet the United States evacuated the Zero Units and other de facto war criminals anyway. Not selectively, not cautiously — but comprehensively. A militia built for a shadow war was relocated to American suburbs without any public accountability process — not internationally, or within the U.S. or Afghanistan — and without a plan to address the extensive trauma its members carried.

According to different sources, Rahmanullah Lakanwal was between 14 and 16 years old when he became a militiaman. Many others, including former soldiers I am in touch with, started their war journeys as minors too. Once in the United States, some former fighters found themselves isolated, without language support, community ties, or psychological care. According to sources in both Khost and the U.S., Lakanwal had long struggled well before he left Afghanistan. Several media outlets reported that he had been deeply traumatized by the operations he conducted under U.S. direction. His work as an Amazon delivery driver did little to change that reality.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s promises of mass deportations and rising bipartisan anti-immigrant racism left many Afghan evacuees, including former Zero Unit fighters, fearing removal to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. For someone like Lakanwal, deportation was not a theoretical concern. It was a death sentence.

The United States must acknowledge what this shooting represents. It is not a failure of immigration vetting or a surprise act of radicalization. It is the direct outcome of a U.S. military strategy that relied on militias empowered to kill without consequence — and then attempted to fold those same fighters back into society, and a completely new society at that, without addressing their history.

The U.S. built a war in which Afghan partners were encouraged to operate outside the law, and sometimes outside basic norms of human conduct. It then evacuated many of them with no structure for accountability, no mental health support, and no acknowledgment of either what they had done or endured.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal did not bring a foreign ideology to American soil. He was shaped by the U.S. counterterrorism system itself. The violence he carried out in Washington, D.C. is linked to the violence he carried out in Afghanistan — not because he shared the Taliban’s goals, but because he shared the CIA’s operational environment. His violence is among the many monsters that the U.S. created during the “war on terror.”

If U.S. policy makers want to understand how a man trained and empowered by their own security apparatus ended up killing two American soldiers near the White House, they should start with a basic admission: When you run a shadow war for two decades, eventually it stops staying in the shadows.

Emran Feroz is an Afghan-Austrian journalist, writer and activist currently based in Germany. He is the founder of Drone Memorial, a virtual memorial for civilian drone strike victims. 

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!