Prefatory Note by Michael Roberts in Adelaide, 7 June 2025
Brian Victoria was a colleague teaching Japanese in the Asian Studies Department when I moved to Adelaide Univerisity Anthropology in 1977; and we got to know each other at seminars and in faculty corridors. He moved abroad subsequently. While his expertise probably lies in political issues in the Pacific theatre, one of my brainwaves — rare nowadays — led me to seek his appraisal of the deadly, devastating and unholy conflicts occurring in recent years in Gaza, Palestine, Israel,and their surrounds (an issue piercing TPS because of a sharp division of opinion between two of my friends, David Schokman and Arlen van Der Wall).
Since writing this Prefatory Note, Wikipedia indicates that Brian was [f]rom 2005 to 2013, “a professor of Japanese studies and director of the Antioch Education Abroad “Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions Program” at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, OH.[2] Since 2013, he is a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford and a visiting research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.[6]
SEE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Victoria
BRIAN VICTORIA’s MEMO, 6 June 2025
Dear Michael, Thanks for the invitation. My sympathies are almost entirely with the Palestinians who have had their homes and ancestral lands taken away from them by force without justification (i.e. it was not they who committed the Holocaust against the Jews). I did write one article on this issue, focusing on what I call the ‘struggle for the Jewish soul’. If you haven’t seen the article, it is attached below. For the moment I have little to add other than to say that, at least as far as the majority of today’s Israelis are concerned, it is clearly the tribal, and genocidal, dimension of Judaism that has ‘won’ the struggle. Though, thankfully, there is strong resistance against Israeli genocidal policies among non-Israeli Jews. Though I am not Jewish, I am nevertheless a member of an organization known as the “Jewish Voice for Peace.” For more about this organization and its position toward Israeli policies, see:
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/05/21/israels-final-solution-for-palestinians/
Please compare the above article with the Israeli politician who recently said this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCEsuOtiLpU
And, in addition, I found this historical comparison illuminating:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/22/from-cortes-to-netanyahu-the-conquest-never-ends/
Nevertheless, as is said, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness!” That said, I do condemn current Israeli policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing!
Best wishes, Brian
My own article available here:
https://www.juancole.com/2024/02/judaism-tribalism-universalism.html
Attachments area
Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin: “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy”
ALSO SEE
https://ocbs.org/brian-victoria/
…. AND REFLECT UPON ….
The history of God is as old as Man. Except for Judaism’s Holy Book no other has advocated the evil of slaughter.
However, you must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. You must completely destroy them – the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite ….” (Deut. 20:16-18)
“Now go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything they have. Do not spare them. Kill men and women, infants and nursing babies, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Sam 15:3)
How can the Israeli’s escape evil?