Israel Is Starving Gazan Children to Death / by Seraj Assi

_{^{Seven-month-old Palestinian baby Fayez Abu Ataya, who died due to malnutrition, being carried by his father in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on May 30, 2024. (Ashraf Amra / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

A seven-month-old child, Fayez Abu Ataya, starved to death yesterday in central Gaza. He lived his entire brief life under Israeli siege. How many more Palestinian children must die?

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Fayez Abu Ataya, a newborn from Gaza, had been wasting away for days from lack of milk and medicine as a result of Israel’s crippling blockade and deliberate starvation of Gaza. A bone-chilling video showed the child dying in real time.

Yesterday morning, Abu Ataya succumbed to starvation, dying in his father’s arms at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. Held by his weeping father, he resembled a bare skeleton. Aged seven months at the time of his death, he was born and died in genocide.

In a heartbreaking interview with Al Jazeera, the grieving father said:

Thank God, he was born in the war, at the school (shelter), and he was martyred here at the hospital. We found him this morning in this condition, like a flower. We had asked to move him out but were denied travel as the crossings were all closed. A medical delegation had operated on him. All he wanted was milk, food, necessary nourishments, and clean air. He became a skeleton because of the siege.

“The infant Fayez Abu Ataya has died as a result to malnutrition and lack of medical treatment in Deir al-Balah,” a medical source told reporters. He added that “Fayez was born during Israel’s war on Gaza and suffered from lack of treatment due to Israel’s closure of all the crossings to Gaza.” He further lamented that “Baby Fayez needed special milk and medication, which both are no longer available in Gaza.”

The Al-Aqsa Hospital itself is on the brink of collapse as Israel continues to deprive hospitals in Gaza of the fuel necessary to operate the generators.

Following Abu Ataya’s death, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, posted: “We apologize for sharing such a graphic image, but this is the daily reality of the genocide that President Biden is enabling in violation of US law, which forbids arming foreign governments that block US humanitarian aid.”

Abu Ataya was not the first child to die of starvation in Gaza. In March, Yazan al-Kafarneh, a ten-year-old Palestinian boy, died in his mother’s arms at a local hospital in Rafah, after lying in bed for weeks with a skeletal body, sunken cheeks, bare bones, and hollowed eyes. He weighed eleven pounds when he died. A month before, Mahmoud Fattouh, a two-month-old Palestinian boy, died from starvation in northern Gaza, having gone days without milk.

So far, over thirty Palestinian children and newborns have perished due to starvation because of Israel’s inhumane blockade of Gaza — and more such deaths are imminent due to Israel’s cruel denial of milk and medicine to starving Palestinian children in the besieged strip. Aid groups warn that humanitarian aid in Gaza has plunged since Israel invaded and occupied the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s last link to the outside world. The World Food Programme (WFP) reports that humanitarian operations in Gaza are nearing total collapse, warning that “if food and humanitarian supplies do not begin to enter Gaza in massive quantities, desperation and hunger will spread.”

This is a war against humanity. Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians like Fayez Abu Ataya makes a brutal mockery of international appeals to allow aid into the besieged enclave.

Last month, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issued a damning report warning that Israel was manufacturing famine in Gaza, and thus committing the crime of starvation. “The severe hunger that has developed over recent months in the Gaza Strip is not a result of fate, but the product of a deliberate and conscious Israeli policy. It has been openly declared by decision makers, including a member of the Israeli war cabinet, from the very beginning of the war.”

Abu Ataya’s death comes amid reports that the United Nations may finally put Israel on its “list of shame” of child-killing states, which is unlikely to stop Israel from starving more children in Gaza. Emboldened by the United States’ unconditional support, Israel has sealed off all the seven land crossings to Gaza, including the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Israel has destroyed all bakeries in Gaza and the southern city of Rafah and routinely bombed Palestinians seeking food aid for their starving families. The Guardian reports that Israeli soldiers have backed settler groups blocking, attacking, and looting aid trucks bound for Gaza. The Israeli army has destroyed and burned food supplies in Gaza, while Israeli soldiers have film ed themselves stealing humanitarian aid bound for starving Palestinians in Gaza.

Western governments, led by the Biden administration, are complicit in Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe. Instead of forcing Israel to open the land crossings before the queuing humanitarian convoys, the Biden administration has acted powerless. Embarking on political theatrics, the United States built a floating aid pier off Gaza, which has only made matters worse for starving Palestinians, as observers believe that Gaza was receiving more aid before the US aid port was built.

People in Gaza are looking down into the abyss. Without real global action to stop it, more children will die if Israel’s inhumane starvation of Gaza is allowed to continue.

_{Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in Washington, DC, and the author, most recently, of My Life As An Alien (Tartarus Press).}

On Gaza, the Media Constantly Parrots the US Government Line / by Liza Featherstone

_{^{Displaced Palestinians leave an unsafe area in Rafah on May 15, 2024, as Israeli forces continue to bombard the southern Gaza Strip city. (AFP via Getty Images)}}

Our mainstream media is acting like state propaganda for an authoritarian regime when it comes to Israel and Gaza. Here are six of the worst examples

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

During the Cold War, the go-to example of authoritarian media was Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, whose name means “truth” in Russian. It was a running joke that Soviet media repeated the government’s line on everything, without presenting an alternative point of view. Headlines about purges during the Joseph Stalin era included bangers like “Squash the Reptiles” or “For Dogs: A Dog’s Death.” After Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, Pravda no longer used the word “fascist” to describe the Nazi regime.

When American media covers this type of state media in other countries — the Soviet Union, China, Iran — it’s always from a position of smugness: that could never happen here. Maybe we shouldn’t be so smug.

The US mainstream media’s coverage of the recent campus protests of genocide in Gaza has often been virtually indistinguishable from state media under an undemocratic regime. The White House narrative is recycled nightly and relentlessly, especially in the elite print media and on the liberal or centrist broadcasts, in ways that don’t feel much different from authoritarian societies.

Am I exaggerating? Well, take a look at some of the most egregious recent examples and decide for yourself.

Language Police

According to a memo leaked to the Intercept, the New York Times has banned its journalists from using the words “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” to describe the genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza. Times writers are also supposed to avoid using the terms “occupied territory” or “Palestine.” The memo also cautioned against other words that, to any feeling person or even one who simply cares about accuracy, rightly characterize what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians, including “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “carnage” — warning that such language conveys “more emotion than information.”

This is Orwellian. What else would you call the mass killing of 112 Gazans attempting to collect flour in March? How could the killing of more than fifteen thousand children in seven months be anything less than “carnage”? The paper of record is sanitizing one of the bloodiest and most one-sidedly brutal wars of the twenty-first century thus far.

Unhinged Joe

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton faced plenty of pushback for her predictably condescending comments about student protesters’ supposed lack of historical knowledge during her recent appearance on the MSNBC talk show Morning Joe. But the host’s own comments preceding Clinton’s received less attention but were far worse.

In a lengthy windup to his question for Clinton — one of those self-indulgent rambles that journalists engage in during interviews that make us entirely forget that there even was a question — Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman, sounded like some kind of crazed right-wing McCarthyist from the 1950s.

He railed about “mainstream students getting radicalized by their professors or by communist Chinese propaganda on TikTok.” He couldn’t believe that students were calling the president “genocide Joe” and the Clintons war criminals. He was shocked that professors were taking part in the protests — shocked the way a normal person might be to see children dying because of the actions of a president they voted for.

The rant then expanded into a kind of generalized outrage at popular anger toward other American imperial crimes: Scarborough was also deeply appalled that some students somewhere don’t want a university building named after Madeleine Albright. How dare they call her a war criminal, he rants: she was the first woman to serve as secretary of state.

“Mainstream college students have this radicalized view,” he laments, calling the situation “distressing.” We can’t have them learning, he insists, that “American leaders are war criminals.”

Wow, we can’t have that! (Even if, as I have written, Albright was indeed a killer.) While MSNBC is happy to rail against Republicans who don’t want children to learn about the history of racial oppression in school, there’s clearly a hard limit when it comes to American foreign policy — and no limit to the kind of embarrassingly unhinged whining Joe Scarborough is willing to utter on national television in defense of US warmaking abroad.

Equating Peaceful Student Protesters With Nazis

Apersistent talking point from the White House and the Israeli government is the absurd charge that the student protests are antisemitic. In fact, many of the student protest leaders are Jewish, a reality that has been deliberately ignored by most of the elite media. What’s more, many of the reported incidents of antisemitism have been debunked (here’s just one example) or rest on the false premise that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, a premise widely rejected by progressive Israelis and Jews.

In this vein, CNN host Dana Bash emoted on camera, with no context or caveat, that “making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable. And it is happening way too much right now.”

She panted, referring to protests on the UCLA campus, “2024 Los Angeles [is] hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe, and I don’t say that lightly.” While saying this, she dishonestly showed a clip in which women in keffiyehs are blocking other students from walking into a building. Bash’s voice-over accompaniment to that footage implied — falsely — that the women were singling out Jewish students for exclusion, when there was no visual evidence to support that.

Dana Bash is going to be one of the moderators of the presidential debate; it’s tempting to say that by fanning this state-sanctioned moral panic over “antisemitism on campus,” she has disqualified herself from such a role. But in the eyes of mainstream media power brokers, maybe the opposite is true.

Another Anointed Ghoul

Another presidential debate moderator: Jake Tapper. Tapper has consistently sought to justify the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel.

In one particularly appalling moment, he narrated the global outcry against genocide from the Israeli’s point of view, editorializing that the Israelis “hear all the calls for a cease-fire. What they do not hear is anyone in the international community proposing any way for them to get back their 240 hostages that Hamas kidnapped.” They “don’t hear anyone proposing any way for Hamas to be removed from the leadership of Gaza.”

As Belén Fernández pointed out in Al Jazeera, this “analysis” by Tapper drew praise from Brit Hume of Fox News. “As Tapper continues to audition for the role of Israeli military spokesperson, an immediate ceasefire needs to be called on bloodthirsty journalism.”

It’s clear that Dana Bash and Jake Tapper have been chosen to moderate the debate for one reason: the rank impossibility that either will ask Joe Biden or Donald Trump tough questions about Israel or the enabling role of the United States in this slaughter.

False Rape Accusations

The New York Times also ran a lengthy article cataloguing the gruesome details of alleged systematic rapes by Hamas on October 7, which has been repeatedly invoked as justification for the subsequent slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including by policymakers. In a podcast interview reported on by the Intercept, the main “reporter,” Anat Schwartz, a filmmaker with no journalism experience, admitted that she was unable to confirm any of the incidents described in the article despite extensive efforts. A United Nations team found circumstantial evidence that some rapes occurred on October 7 but concluded the specific stories in the Times article were “unfounded.”

While that article has since been debunked from every possible angle, incredibly, the Times has never retracted it.

Fifty journalism professors signed a letter asking the Times to review the article, citing factual contradictions with the paper’s own reporting, a reliance on inexperienced freelancers with a clear bias — Schwartz had a history of publicly “liking” eliminationist tweets, including one that said of Gaza that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse” — and the profound real-world effects this misinformation has had.

While no one doubts that some individual rapes may have occurred on October 7, and that any use of rape in combat is indeed a war crime, the Times story appears to have an almost QAnon level of rigor and accuracy.

The false rape narrative is important in a larger sense, as atrocity propaganda to justify Israel’s assault, demonizing Palestinian men and making a case that they deserve death. It makes a feminist virtue of Israeli and United States propaganda; indeed, critics of the Times mass rape story have been branded as “rape denialists” in the Atlantic, Ms., and the New York Times. More generally, in American establishment media, a trope of Arab or Muslim men as monstrous violent misogynists is often used to shore up feminist support for US violence against them. (Sa’ed Atshan has written about how this has played out in Gaza discourse.)

Journalists focus primarily on the deaths of “women and children,” a calculus that implies the men deserve their fate, because they are after all Hamas terrorists. (Even this is a step up from the abundant coverage that has quoted Israeli officials calling the entire Palestinian population “monsters,” “human animals,” and other dehumanizing names, without any criticism or opposing viewpoint.)

Censorship

Despite the mainstream media’s efforts to mimic totalitarian propaganda, Americans have only to look at their social media feeds to find out what’s going on in Gaza and reach their own conclusions. That’s probably why a majority of Americans support a cease-fire. But the Biden administration, not content with the Tappers and Bashes doing its bidding, is working to solve that problem.

Ken Klippenstein reported Friday that the administration is cooperating with social media companies like Meta to suppress pro-Palestinian information. The State Department seeks to counter Hamas propaganda, it says, but it’s also working with the private companies to suppress “Hamas-linked” accounts — a far more ambiguous category that apparently includes the racial justice activist Shaun King.

Meta has an alarmingly expansive policy against “dangerous organizations and individuals.” Human Rights Watch reports more than 1,200 examples of censorship of Gaza-related content by Facebook and Instagram.

Censored content had one common theme: sympathy with the Palestinians, expressed in nonviolent language. Examples included posts about Palestinians losing their homes, or the children killed by Israeli military action.

This is happening at the same time as the bipartisan move to ban TikTok, where so many content creators are challenging the mainstream media and government narratives on Gaza, as Caitlin Clark has noted in Jacobin. It’s clear that in addition to helping American tech companies, the move is inspired in part by the government’s irritation at alternatives to its own line on the problem.

In fact, they’re not even pretending otherwise. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has lamented that social media has made it harder for the government to fool the people on Gaza, euphemistically saying that it has a “very, very challenging effect on the narrative.” Senator Mitt Romney was more explicit, stating bluntly that it was important to ban TikTok because of the “number of mentions of Palestinians.”

As alarming as the mainstream media is, this effort to censor social media may be even scarier, reflecting the Biden administration’s awareness that many people no longer depend on the likes of Jake Tapper or the New York Times for their news.

RIP Democratic Media

Walter Lippmann pointed out early last century that one of the main functions of the media in a democracy is to tell us what is happening in places we can’t visit. Without accurate information, he reasoned, how do we manage our civic duty to make decisions about foreign policy when we go to the polls? Looking at the state of the mainstream media and the concerted attack on its alternative, it’s easy to conclude that this is exactly what the foreign policy elite is trying to thwart us from doing.

_{Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.}

Israel’s War Is Not About Bringing Down Hamas / by Guy Laron

_{^{Israeli tanks move near the Gaza border on October 12, 2023. (Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

Israel clearly has little interest in recovering the hostages taken on October 7. The real objectives: protecting West Bank settlements, further eroding the judiciary, rehabilitating the military’s image, and simple revenge

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

If we judge the military operation in the Gaza Strip by the measure of the objectives that the government presented to the Israeli public, it is clearly an absolute failure.

After six months of combat, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have not accomplished their primary mission: eliminating Hamas rule in Gaza. The IDF has put out of action an estimated one-third of Hamas’s fighting force and has detonated approximately 20 percent of its tunnels. That is a hard blow but not a fatal one. Hamas is not just still functioning but managing to take over new swaths of territory upon the IDF’s departure, using them to launch rockets into Israel.

Moreover, the additional objective set for the operation, returning the hostages, has not been accomplished. The vast majority of hostages were released thanks to a deal that exchanged them for Palestinian prisoners. Only three of the hostages were freed as a result of the military operation.

What’s worse, three of the hostages were shot to death by IDF forces, and a still-unknown number of hostages have been killed as a result of indiscriminate bombing by the IDF (based on statements that Hamas ordered the hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to recite in a recently released video, it appears that Hamas estimates the number of hostages killed in such a manner at seventy).

The cabinet that made the decision to go to war included two retired IDF chiefs, a former general, and a prime minister who has approved and conducted multiple military operations. In addition, the chief of the IDF pushed and pressured the cabinet to approve the ground maneuver in the Gaza Strip. These people knew full well what the operation they were about to approve could and could not achieve, yet pushed ahead with it anyway.

Evidence of that effect can be found in the interview that Gadi Eisenkot, a minister in the current government, gave for Ilana Dayan. The battle-tested general cogently explained to the veteran journalist why the operation had no chance of freeing the hostages: the hostages are not being held on the surface in an isolated target such as a plane or a bus, Eisenkot said; they are being hidden in tunnels that the IDF would struggle to get at. If that is indeed the case, one can conclude that the objectives of the operation as they were presented to the public aimed to garner support and were not the real objectives that the government sought to achieve.

If so, what were the real objectives of the operation?

West Bank Settlements

The first is to protect settlements in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlers’ leadership enjoys representation in key ministries of the current government: finance, defense, and internal security. The judicial coup that the coalition put forward sought to bring about a unilateral annexation of the West Bank without bestowing the rights of citizenship on the Palestinians living there. In that way, the state could guarantee the property rights of settlers to the houses they built there.

In the decade and a half preceding the Hamas attack, Netanyahu articulated a security doctrine that guided his actions and rhetoric as prime minister. One of the principles of the “Netanyahu Doctrine,” which he reiterated as often as he could, was that the occupation carried no price. Israel, Netanyahu told the electorate, could become a technological powerhouse and forge ties with countries throughout the Arab world despite the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

The key, explained the prime minister, was to preserve the division between the West Bank and Gaza that resulted from each of these territories being ruled by antagonistic and competing Palestinian organizations. Apparently, Netanyahu thought that funding by the petro-emirate of Qatar to Hamas made it in the latter’s interest to play ball with Jewish colonialism in the West Bank. The Hamas attack on October 7 upended all the presuppositions of the Netanyahu Doctrine.

Hamas used Qatar’s money to build a sophisticated war machine and turned Netanyahu into a laughingstock, both in Israel and abroad. Had Israel restrained itself to a limited reaction against the attack and focused instead on upgrading the security fence as well as reaching a hostage deal, then the public would have had time to discuss the collapse of the Netanyahu Doctrine and demand the fall of the government. With the decision to start a military operation, the government bought itself precious time and postponed public debate on the price of settlement in the West Bank.

The prolongation of the war and the government’s de facto refusal to bring it to a close continue to serve this purpose. By rejecting yet another hostage deal, the government takes off the agenda any debate concerning “the day after” — i.e. the political settlement required to ensure quiet along Israel’s borders, a solution that the government fears will necessitate the evacuation of some of the settlements.

The government is not only acting to protect existing settlements but also striving to broaden the settlement project through actions intended to destabilize the West Bank. That is why, for example, the government is refusing to allow laborers from the West Bank to return to work in Israel and withholding funds that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is entitled to according to the Paris Accords. Thus the West Bank has been put in an economic chokehold, and the PA’s ability to pay its police officers has been compromised. Settler militias seek to damage the property of Palestinians, whose expulsion has continued even after October 7.

A Judicial Coup

As combat wears on, the government is acting to advance its second real goal: the judicial coup.

Since January 2023, Netanyahu’s coalition attempted to ram through a set of laws that would annul the courts’ independence. Among other things, the government sought to have the power to appoint judges, restrict judges’ ability to pass a verdict, and give Parliament the authority to cancel verdicts. Had these laws passed, the coalition would have gained the freedom to legislate without any judicial oversight.

The judicial coup aims not only to restrict the space for democracy but also the wholesale privatization of all government services. The government is acting to subject these services to market forces while paying off sectors of the population. These are complementary processes: restricting the freedom of expression and the right to protest are ways to suffocate protests against the collapse of the welfare state. Those most striving to this end are the ministers from the Religious Zionist Party.

Thus, for example, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, can go on making appointments to the upper echelons of the police and turning it into a partisan militia. Increasingly, the police shed the semblance of impartiality. Frequently, police officers have made arbitrary arrests of protesters and their leaders, shoved opposition members of parliament who participated in the demonstrations, turned a blind eye to violence inflicted on the protesters by pro-government thugs, and ignored settlers’ activity to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

At the same time, Ben-Gvir is privatizing national security by granting tens of thousands of gun permits to civilians. In this way, the police lose to local militias their position as guarantor of law and order. Providing personal safety becomes a task for the individual rather than the state.

Meanwhile, the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, hands out funds to sectors of the population allied with the government such as the settlers and the strictly orthodox Haredim. Each day newspaper readers learn about a new motion just approved by the government to pass hundreds of millions of shekels to the orthodox education system, municipal authorities of West Bank settlements, rabbinical services, and religious associations that perform charity work. All of this is happening at the same time that health, education, and transport services are facing budgetary strangulation. Becoming a settler or a Haredi is turning into the only option for those hoping to receive education and health services in the wake of the collapse of the education and health systems serving the general public.

Rehabilitating the IDF’s Image

The third real objective of the operation is to rehabilitate the IDF’s image and experiment with land warfare technology in which the army heavily invested during the last decade.

No organization so thoroughly internalized the Netanyahu Doctrine as much as the army. Its main task in the last decade was to maintain the occupation of the West Bank at the lowest cost possible by harnessing the latest military technology. The army’s devotion to this mission explains in part its dismal performance on October 7.

The IDF identified the educated bourgeoisie’s discomfort with the mission of policing the West Bank and thus handed this mission to low-income sectors of the population who served in units like Kfir and Netzah Yehuda. These battalions performed the humdrum tasks of the occupation such as securing the settlements’ perimeter, patrolling Palestinian towns, confronting Palestinian protests, and making arrests. The children of the educated bourgeoisie were enlisted into high-tech units aimed at making possible the management of the conflict with a relatively small amount of manpower.

As a result, the IDF was able to transfer the bulk of its ground forces to security detail in the West Bank, leaving a far smaller number of troops along the northern and southern borders. The army convinced itself that its intelligence capabilities and the robotic technology deployed along the southern border would ensure that it would never be taken by surprise. Were that ever to happen, the army supposedly would be able to respond right away.

The army so bought into the Netanyahu Doctrine that senior officers in the intelligence services refused to believe the obvious signals that a surprise attack was in the offing. Even when on-the-ground soldiers brought convincing evidence of an impending Hamas attack, the colonels sitting in the halls of the intelligence branch plugged their ears. The surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 uncovered the army leadership’s incompetence.

To contend with the shock and fear among the Israeli public, the army latched on to an armed offensive in Gaza as a quick fix to the reputational damage it suffered on October 7. Since 2006, the Israeli General Staff, led by officers drawn from the ground forces, invested in the technological capabilities that would allow the ground forces to improve over their pathetic performance during the Second Lebanon War. The land operation in Gaza, ominously codenamed “Swords of Iron,” has handed generals the opportunity to check if this investment has borne fruit, putting the troops and the technology to the ultimate test on the battlefield.

Revenge

Once those same generals realized that the ground operation would not bring about the defeat of Hamas, a fourth real objective for the operation was born: the mission of revenge.

Despite knowing that such images would create serious problems for Israel with the international court system, the General Staff and officers on the ground allowed soldiers to upload videos and pictures that could sate the public’s desire for revenge and help them to forget that that operation was bound to fail at bringing down Hamas.

Thus the ground operation in Gaza became a military failure and a political success. Under its cover, the army and the coalition are winning back their status among the public and advancing their interests. Their political egotism expresses itself through their willingness to ignore Israel’s difficult problems: the country’s transformation into a pariah state, the never-ending conflict in the Gaza Strip, economic hardships, and intensifying internal division.

The ministers and the general are heading toward a forever war. After them, the deluge.

_{Guy Laron is a senior lecturer in international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.}

Israel Is Waging a War on All Palestinians, Not Just Gazans / by Madeline Hall

_{^{Palestinians evacuate following an Israeli air strike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo by Mahmud Hams /AFP via Getty Images)}}

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is part of its war of annihilation against the Palestinian people carried out with increasing fervor across historic Palestine, including the West Bank, under the most right-wing government in Israeli history.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

As it lays waste to Gaza, slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians and forcing nearly two million people to flee their homes, the Israeli government is also barreling toward de facto annexation in the occupied West Bank.

Settlement expansion and killings by the Israeli military and settlers have skyrocketed in the months following October 7. In this context, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as part of its larger war of annihilation against the Palestinian people, one being carried out with increasing fervor across historic Palestine under the most right-wing government in Israeli history.

Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the United Nations (UN) started counting the dead, in 2005. After October 7, that violence only got worse: 299 of the at least 507 Palestinians murdered in the West Bank in 2023 were killed by Israeli forces and settlers between October 7 and December 31. In the seven months since the Gaza genocide began, Israeli forces and settlers have murdered over four hundred Palestinians, more than one hundred of whom were children.

Illegal Israeli settlements are also expanding at lightning speed. Between November 2022 and the end of October 2023, the Israeli government advanced over twety-four thousand illegal housing units in already-existing settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said “risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian State.”

The months following October 7 have seen an explosion in settler activity, with nine new settler “outposts” established in the last three months of 2023 alone. These outposts are illegal even under Israel’s warped conception of international law, but that hasn’t stopped its ultra-right-wing government from “legalizing” a record number of settlement outposts.

In April 2024, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who once remarked that there is “no such thing as the Palestinian people,” announced that an additional sixty-eight outposts were to be treated as so-called legal settlements, despite the fact that all settlements on occupied Palestinian territory are illegal under international law.

As illegal settlements expand across the occupied West Bank, settlers are being emboldened by Israel’s government to take up arms against Palestinians and steal their land. When the Israeli government launched its genocidal war on Gaza, it called up over five thousand settler military reservists, armed them, and assigned them to “defend” the West Bank, giving them free rein to terrorize and murder Palestinians with impunity.

In the months following October 7, settlers have carried out hundreds of attacks, displacing over 1,200 Palestinians across over a dozen different communities. Seven Palestinian communities in the West Bank have been completely uprooted as a direct result of settler violence. Hundreds of other Palestinians were displaced after the Israeli government demolished their homes because they lacked government-issued building permits, which are notoriously difficult for Palestinians to acquire.

A War on All Palestinians

Israeli violence against Palestinians is getting worse, but this violence is not new. Yet the US government insists on treating this violence as an aberration from, rather than the center of, the Zionist colonial project.

Earlier this month, ProPublica revealed that US secretary of state Antony Blinken had been balking for months at recommendations from fellow State Department officials to cut US funding to an Israeli military battalion that committed rape, murder, and other grave violations against Palestinians.

Almost immediately, reports emerged that the State Department would soon announce a ban on US funding to Netzah Yehuda, the Israeli battalion in question, in accordance with the Leahy Law, which prohibits the transfer of US weapons to foreign militaries accused of serious human rights violations.

In December 2023, the State Department said it was adopting a “new visa restriction policy” targeting individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security, or stability in the West Bank.” In February, the State Department imposed financial sanctions on four Israeli settlers, and in March, it sanctioned an additional three settlers and two settler outposts.

As welcome as these steps toward accountability are, the administration’s piecemeal approach belies the systematic nature of Israeli crimes against Palestinians. As if to prove that very point, war cabinet minister Benny Gantz immediately condemned reports that the State Department may cut US funding to Netzah Yehuda, insisting that it was an “inseparable part” of the Israeli military.

An indefinite military occupation cannot be maintained without extreme violence. Though this violence has become more pronounced since the most right-wing government in Israeli history took power, and especially after October 7, it is not unique to the current Israeli government, nor is it unique to the last seven months.

Some of the most well-known abuses committed by the Netzah Yehuda Battalion — the murder of an eighty-year-old Palestinian American man and the rape of a Palestinian teenager in their custody, for example — took place in 2021 and 2022, shattering any illusion of “peace” before October 7.

In one settler pogrom last June, Illinois state representative Abdelnasser Rashid was forced to barricade himself inside his family home as hundreds of armed settlers, accompanied and protected by Israeli soldiers, rampaged through the Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya, shooting live rounds and setting homes and cars on fire. A twenty-seven-year-old father of two was killed.

The State Department was quick to condemn the attacks in Turmus Ayya and demand “full accountability” for those responsible, but Palestinians aren’t counting on it. Why should they? For seven months, the US government has armed and funded their butchers.

What’s happening in Gaza cannot be understood outside the context of the war being waged against Palestinians across historic Palestine. Instead of sanctioning individual extremists, the US government should cut off the state arming and enabling them.

_{Madeleine Hall is a digital editorial coordinator at Jewish Voice for Peace.}

The U.S. Corporations Profiting from the Israeli Occupation / by Nick French

_{^{An Israeli army battle tank moves along the border between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip on January 31, 2024. (Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)}}

It’s not just defense contractors—many U.S.-based companies are profiting from business with Israel, directly or indirectly enabling the Israeli state’s crimes against Palestinians.

_{Reposted in Dollars and Sense}

Since it began in mid-October of last year, Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of 29,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians—including 19,000 women and children. Israeli government ministers have made statements that strongly suggest they are aiming at the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, and South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which ruled on January 26 that Israel may be in violation of the United Nations’ Genocide Convention and ordered it to immediately cease violations, including its killing of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, despite increasing evidence of Israeli war crimes, the U.S. government has offered unconditional support to the offensive, apart from perfunctory pleas that Israel exercise “restraint” and respect human rights. The Biden administration has requested $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel from Congress, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion in aid the United States already sends annually.

That aid has been held up in Congress; but in December 2023, President Joe Biden twice circumvented the legislature to sell weapons to Israel, with a total value exceeding $200 million. All this is taking place in the context of decades of occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a proliferating and increasingly violent settler movement that continues to displace Palestinians, and what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations have described as a system of apartheid.

The long-standing Israeli occupation and the current war on Gaza is big business for many U.S.-based defense contractors. But beyond military suppliers, many U.S. corporations have substantial investments in Israel. These companies are also complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses—and as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long recognized, putting pressure on these companies may be crucial to changing Israeli policy.

The Defense Racket

The U.S. corporations with the most direct complicity in Israeli crimes, of course, are military contractors. According to Molly Gott and Derek Seidman, writing for the investigative news website Eyes on the Ties, five of the six biggest weapons manufacturers in the world are based in the United States. Those are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon).

Disturbingly, but unsurprisingly, many of these companies saw their stock prices shoot up when Israel’s war on Gaza began, Gott and Seidman reported. And weapons company executives have been publicly enthusiastic about the opportunities for profit opened up by the war. Discussing the conflict on an earnings call on October 24, RTX CEO Greg Hayes declared, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking.” On General Dynamics’s earnings call the following day, the company’s CFO and Executive Vice President Jason Aiken said, “If you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”

There can be little doubt that Israeli forces are using these weapons to commit war crimes against Palestinians. As Stephen Semler reported in Jacobin, many of the specific weapons that the Biden administration has sent to Israel have been repeatedly used to commit war crimes in the past. This includes Hellfire missiles, artillery shells, and assault rifles that have been used to kill clearly identified civilians. It also includes white phosphorus, which Semler describes as “a brutal incendiary weapon capable of burning straight through flesh, bone, and even metal” that is outlawed for use near civilians by Protocol III of the Geneva Conventions. Israel has used white phosphorus repeatedly, including in the current war.

Profiting From War, Occupation, and Apartheid

Looking beyond weapons companies and their investors, plenty of other U.S. corporations are profiting from the brutal assault on Gaza and the Israeli occupation and apartheid more generally.

The BDS movement is targeting a number of international corporations for consumer boycott campaigns, which are “carefully selected due to the company’s proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid,” according to a statement on the BDS website. Among the companies based in the United States are Hewlett-Packard (and its enterprise and government services spin-off Hewlett-Packard Enterprises), Chevron, and real estate company RE/MAX.

Hewlett-Packard provides computer hardware and other technology to the Israeli military, police, and government offices. Hewlett-Packard Enterprises provides servers for the country’s Immigration and Population Authority, which BDS says Israel uses “to control and enforce its system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Energy giant Chevron, meanwhile, extracts gas claimed by Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean; according to BDS, it provides the Israeli state with billions of dollars in revenue in gas licensing payments. In addition, according to BDS, Chevron is:

implicated in Israel’s illegal transfer of extracted fossil gas to Egypt through a pipeline illegally crossing the Palestinian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in Gaza, owing Palestinians millions in transit fees. It is also potentially complicit in Israeli pillage of Palestinian gas reserves offshore the occupied Gaza Strip, a war crime under international law.

In 2017, SOMO, an Amsterdam think tank that investigates multinational corporations, produced an extensive report on Noble Energy’s involvement in the violation of Palestinian rights connected to its extraction of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean—the company was acquired by Chevron in 2020. In addition to participating in illegally blocking the Palestinian Authority’s access to its small gas reserves off the coast of Gaza via collaboration with Israel’s navy, SOMO reports that its extraction activities in Israeli gas fields could be draining Palestinian gas reserves as well.

“By failing to make efforts to assure Palestinian consent to gas extraction from [Israeli gas fields contiguous with Palestinian gas reserves],” SOMO concluded, “Noble Energy has failed to comply with the OECD Guidelines [for Multinational Enterprises] and [the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights] and conduct appropriate human rights due diligence to identify and prevent potential adverse human rights impacts.” Their report continues:

The company has also potentially contributed to a violation of the collective right of self-determination. Furthermore, if Palestinian natural gas was indeed drained . . . it could be argued that Noble Energy participated in an act of pillage, in violation of international humanitarian and criminal law.

RE/MAX markets and sells property on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely viewed as illegal under international law. The Israeli settler movement has long committed violent attacks against Palestinians, often with the implicit or explicit blessing of the Israeli armed forces. It has only grown bolder and more violent since the start of the war. Other U.S. corporations that do business in Israel and have been singled out by BDS for divestment or other forms of pressure campaigns (though not complete boycotts) include Intel, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Airbnb, Expedia, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Papa John’s.

Following the example of other successful boycott and divestment campaigns, BDS selects only a handful of companies as targets in order to maximize the impact of its campaigns. But these companies are only the tip of the iceberg. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) maintains a more comprehensive list of companies complicit in various aspects of Israeli occupation and apartheid. Plenty of U.S.-based corporations are, no surprise, to be found on their list as well.

Leaving aside weapons suppliers, among the other prominent and particularly egregious offenders is Caterpillar Inc., the construction machinery and equipment manufacturer, whose D9 armored bulldozer is frequently used by the Israeli military. Israel has deployed Caterpillar D9s to destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and other buildings in the occupied territories, as well as in attacks on Gaza that kill civilians. In 2003, U.S. activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by one of these bulldozers “as she attempted to defend a Palestinian home from being demolished while the family was still inside,” according to the AFSC.

ExxonMobil Corporation and Valero, not to be outdone by Chevron’s violations of human rights, provide fuel for the Israeli aircraft that have been relentlessly bombarding Gaza for the past few months. Motorola Solution Inc., the communications and surveillance company, has long provided the surveillance technology that Israel uses to monitor Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements and at separation walls and checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Travel and tourism company TripAdvisor, meanwhile, is involved in the occupation in a more mundane way: like Airbnb, its websites frequently list and act as booking agents for properties in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights.

Overall, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, in 2022 the United States exported $20 billion worth of goods and services to Israel, accounting for 13.3% of the latter’s total imports. Israel in turn exported $30.6 billion to the United States, with that figure amounting to 18.6% of all Israeli exports. U.S. trade with and investments in Israel play a significant role in Israel’s economy, constituting a potentially powerful source of leverage on the Israeli state.

The Importance of Economic Boycotts

The BDS movement is partly inspired by the decades-long anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa’s system of apartheid. The boycotts began when African National Congress leader Albert Luthuli called for them in 1958, and the U.K.-based Boycott Movement (later the Anti-Apartheid Movement) was founded the next year. It initially called for a boycott of South African goods, but expanded to demand total disinvestment from and economic sanctions on South Africa.

Eventually, the international pressure created by the Anti-Apartheid Movement helped bring an end to South African apartheid. The hope of BDS supporters is that a similar movement might one day help bring about an end to Israel’s oppression of Palestine.

Right now, the prospects for ending Israeli occupation and apartheid anytime soon look quite dim. The immediate demand that advocates for Palestine are pushing in the United States is a permanent cease-fire in Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza; some activists have also been protesting and attempting to disrupt U.S. weapons sales to Israel. In the long run, though, achieving justice in Palestine will likely require pressuring our own government, and the many U.S. companies who are currently complicit in Israeli crimes, to change course.

_{^{SOURCES: Tia Goldenberg, “Harsh Israeli rhetoric against Palestinians becomes central to South Africa’s genocide case,” AP News, Jan. 18, 2024 (apnews.com); Nicole Narea, “The US may be flouting its own laws by sending unrestricted aid to Israel,” Vox, Dec. 22, 2023 (vox.com); “State Department circumvents Congress, approves $106 million sale of tank ammo to Israel,” CBS News, Dec. 9, 2023 (cbsnews.com); Li Zhou, “The argument that Israel practices apartheid, explained,” Vox, Oct. 20, 2023 (vox.com); Carolina S. Pedrazzi, “In the West Bank, Israel’s Apartheid Rule Results in Everyday Violence,” Jacobin, Oct. 7, 2023 (jacobin.com); In These Times editors, “What You Need to Know About BDS,” In These Times, Nov. 19, 2020 (inthesetimes.com); Molly Gott and Derek Seidman, “Corporate Enablers of Israel’s War on Gaza,” Eyes on the Prize, Oct. 26, 2023 (littlesis.org); Oded Yaron and Ben Samuels, “Revealed: The Munitions U.S. Supplied Israel for Gaza War,” Haaretz, Nov. 16, 2023 (haaretz.com); Ken Klippenstein, “Leaked List of Weapons the U.S. Secretly Sent Israel,” Nov. 15, 2023 (kenklippenstein.com); Andrew Perez, Nick Byron Campbell, Joel Warner, and Lucy Dean Stockton, “‘The Israel Situation Is Going To Put Upward Pressure On Demand,’” The Lever, Oct. 25, 2023 (levernews.com); Stephen Semler, “US Weapons Shipments to Israel Are Enabling War Crimes,” Jacobin, Nov. 22, 2023 (jacobin.com); Palestinian BDS National Committee, “Act Now Against These Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People,” BDS Movement, Jan. 5, 2024 (bdsmovement.net); Zack Beauchamp, “What are settlements, and why are they such a big deal?” Vox, Nov. 9, 2023 (vox.com); Mustafa, Luna, Mariam, Ghassan Najjar, and Sabri, “Dispatches From the West Bank,” Jewish Currents, Oct. 20, 2023 (jewishcurrents.org); “Occupations,” Investigate, A Project of the American Friends Service Committee (investigate.afsc.org); Israel Country Data, International Monetary Fund, October 2023 (imf.org); “Israel,” Office of the United States Trade Representative (ustr.gov); Chris McGreal, “Boycotts and sanctions helped rid South Africa of apartheid—is Israel next in line?” The Guardian, May 23, 2021 (theguardian.com); “The Boycott Movement,” Forward to Freedom (aamarchives.org); Josh Marcus, “Protesters target weapons manufacturers supplying Israel-Hamas war,” The Independent, December 1, 2023 (independent.co.uk); SOMO, Beneath troubled waters: Noble Energy’s exploitation of natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, May 2017 (somo.nl); Mike Corder and Raf Casert, “Top UN court orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but stops short of ordering cease-fire,” AP News, Jan. 26, 2024 (apnews.com). WTO Trade Profiles 2023: Israel, World Trade Organization (wto.org); Annual Summary of Foreign Investments and Investment Treaties 2022: FDI trends, policy, and developments in investment and trade agreements, Israeli Ministry of Finance (www.gov.li).}}

_{NICK FRENCH is an associate editor at Jacobin magazine.}

Recognize Palestine — and Impose Sanctions on Israel / by Harrison Stetler

_{^{A man waves a Palestinian flag as people demonstrate in support of Palestine in front of the city hall in Madrid, Spain, on January 27, 2024. (Javier Soriano / AFP via Getty Images)}}

Even as the Biden administration vetoes Palestinian statehood, several European states are moving toward full recognition. Their dissent is a welcome crack in the West’s pro-Israel line — but they should back it up with sanctions to punish Israeli apartheid.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Recognition of Palestinian statehood has long been one of the fault lines of global politics. In fact, the main Western powers are often outliers in this regard. Today an overwhelming majority of countries, including a near-solid band stretching from the bottom of South America up through the Caribbean and onto Africa, the Middle East and South and East Asia, recognize the Palestinian state. The United States and Canada stand outside this consensus — joined by other holdouts across the Pacific.

Western Europe is also an exception. In this region only Iceland, the Vatican, and Sweden recognize Palestine, thanks to decisions made in 2011, 2013, and 2014, respectively. They joined the former Eastern Bloc countries that recognized Palestinian statehood after the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence penned by poet Mahmoud Darwish and proclaimed by Yasser Arafat.

Underscoring this divide, on Thursday, the United States again used its veto to block a draft United Nations resolution on admitting Palestine as a full member. And yet, faced with Israel’s ongoing colonization and massacre in Gaza, it looks like Western monolithism on this question is today fracturing. A growing number of European countries may soon recognize Palestinian statehood.

First Movers

Western doctrine has long premised such recognition on reaching a more general solution through the Oslo Accords framework. This has allowed Israel to simply veto progress by alleging the absence of a credible interlocutor on the Palestinian side — and, more specifically, digging its heels in over border demarcations and the future status of its settlements. Short of an overall deal, recognition of Palestinian statehood will surely have little more than symbolic value. But it is a sign of growing exhaustion in Europe with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, and its decades-old stonewalling of the “peace process” through colonization and apartheid.

Spain was among the first states in the European Union to call for a cease-fire late last October, and its government is again pushing for a shift in the bloc’s diplomatic position. In early March, social democratic prime minister Pedro Sánchez told a conference in Bilbao that he would soon propose that parliament recognize Palestinian statehood. Already in 2014, Spain’s Congress approved a nonbinding resolution calling for the recognition of Palestine. It was stalled by the prime minister of the day, the conservative Mariano Rajoy; but even his successor, Sánchez, had, up till the current crisis, maintained that recognition must be a collective EU initiative.

In Spain’s bid to drive a wedge within the EU on the subject, this March 28, Sánchez met with the heads of government of Ireland, Malta (which recognized the 1988 Independence Declaration), and Slovenia on the sidelines of a European Council meeting. These four EU member states cosigned a communiqué claiming a joint “readiness to recognize Palestine,” albeit with the qualification that the move should come “when [recognition] can make a positive contribution and the circumstances are right.”

That could come sooner than it may seem. Madrid’s declared timeline is to move ahead with diplomatic recognition by this July. In Ireland, Simon Harris replaced center-right Taoiseach (premier) Leo Varadkar in a government reshuffle earlier this month but has vowed to pursue with his predecessor’s call for recognition. During the April 9 session of the Dáil, the Irish parliament’s lower house, vice prime minister, and foreign secretary, Micheál Martin, said, “We have agreed that the undermining of the Oslo Accords and therefore the agreement to create two states has reached a point where the Accords’ approach of recognition after a final agreement is not credible or tenable any longer.” Before flying to Dublin for an April 12 meeting with Harris, in which the two stated they would push the issue of recognition in the next European Council summit, Sánchez was in Oslo where Norway — though not a member of the EU —appeared ready to join the Spanish and Irish-led initiative.

Faced with Israel’s paralysis of the Oslo framework, which Western states have largely ignored since the late 1990s, these moves toward unilateral recognition are symptomatic of a shift in favor of Palestinian rights in some sectors of European opinion. Amid the current crisis, however, immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood has not been one of the main demands of groups like the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). It has prioritized calling for more direct moves to isolate Israel through economic sanctions — demands that the Irish government has thus far resisted. Nonetheless, IPSC chairperson Zoë Lawlor sees the government’s new stance on recognition as the effect of the mass mobilization seen since October.

“We’ve had thousands of people take to the streets in the whole country, up and down, north and south,” Lawlor told Jacobin, pointing out that spurious allegations of “antisemitism” lobbed against critics of Israel elsewhere in the EU have little sway in a country that is itself influenced by a history of colonization. Upwards of 70 percent of the Irish population believe that Palestinians live under a system of apartheid, according to a recent study by Amnesty International Ireland. “Weekly vigils, marches, protests and solidarity actions have really pushed the government,” said Lawlor.

“European states have been somewhat trapped by their own passivity since the Oslo Accords,” says Franco Palestinian jurist Rima Hassan, a France Insoumise candidate for this summer’s European Parliament elections. “There were 100,000 settlers then, and nearly ten times as many today. There is a symbolic dimension to recognition, but above all I think this emergency reaction enables certain states to escape from their position of passivity. However, there’s still the problem of the concrete materiality of the Palestinian state.”

According to Hassan, one possible silver lining in unilateral recognition is that it could represent a foreclosing on the final-status negotiations stipulated in the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to be held within five years of this document’s 1993 signing. Recognition could thus amount to an implicit refusal of Israeli colonization in the occupied territories. “In no way can it be said that this resolves the problem of colonization,” Hassan told Jacobin. “On the other hand, it’s a diplomatic and political way of recognizing that Palestinians are sovereign over the territories where colonies are located. It’s a rejection of the annexationist policy of the Israeli state and a way of saying, ‘Officially, we do not and will not recognize your sovereignty over these territories in the short, medium or long term.’”

From Rhetoric to Reality

But an implicit condemnation is no replacement for applying concrete pressure to reverse colonization, let alone force Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to end its current war. For example, the Irish government’s allegedly imminent formal recognition of Palestine contrasts with its feet-dragging on adopting sanctions against the Israeli state.

Irish activists want to see Harris’s government bring two pieces of legislation to final adoption. Voted in 2018, the Control of Economic Activity Bill, also known as the Occupied Territories Bill, would effectively criminalize Irish business activities drawn from Israeli operations in occupied Palestinian territory. More pointed against Israel, the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill (IISD) would order the Ireland’s state investment fund to withdraw from business in Israeli settlements. But the Irish government has stalled the enactment of the Occupied Territories Bill and has warned that adopting the IISD risks turning Ireland into an “international outlier.”

“That the Irish government is making this gesture at all shows the power of our mass movement, but unless it’s backed up with action that ensures the Palestinian right to self-determination, it’s just symbolism,” says Lawlor, urging the final enactment of those two pieces of legislation. “We want the government to cut off all trade with Israel and call for the European Union to suspend commercial ties.”

“There’s no point in recognizing the state of Palestine if we don’t do everything in our power to isolate Israel for its policy of occupation and colonization — above all by adopting sanctions,” says Hassan, noting that the European Union is Israel’s leading commercial partner. The EU was the source of nearly 32 percent of imports to Israel and purchased over 25 percent of its exports in 2022. “If you recognize the state of Palestine today and want to defend anything that might resemble a viable state, you have to completely isolate Israel,” Hassan continued. “We have to do to the Israeli state what we did to South Africa.”

Sanctions

The push for recognition by some European states shows that they are willing to go out ahead of Berlin and Paris, however. The latter have maintained that any recognition of Palestinian statehood needs to be first grounded in an agreement with Israel — a blatantly untenable stance given Israel’s ceaseless colonization beyond its 1967 borders and the blunt statements by Israeli officials against the creation of a Palestinian state. In a faint nod to the growing pressure for recognition coming from elsewhere in the bloc, French president Emmanuel Macron acknowledged in February that the subject is not a “taboo” for France.

Germany is likely to remain the stiffest obstacle, despite it coming under growing pressure for its support of the Israeli military — and the international embarrassment caused by its clampdown on pro-Palestine solidarity and organizing. In mid-March, Nicaragua filed a complaint against Germany before the International Court of Justice, alleging that Berlin’s continued military support for Israel makes it liable for “plausible” complicity in genocide.

The Hague court heard initial arguments on April 8 and 9, days after an April 2 report released by the Berlin-based NGO Forensis revealed that 185 of the 308 export licenses for transfers of military matériel to Israel in 2023 were authorized after the onset of the current war. Amounting to 47 percent of conventional weapons delivered to Israel for the whole of 2023, the €326 million of transferred hardware places Germany in second place globally behind the United States, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

A possible rupture within Europe in favor of recognition is a sign that popular organizing and pressure is starting to make inroads — forcing some governments to live up to their rhetorical commitments to a Palestinian state. But compared to the obduracy of the United States and Europe’s leading powers, they’re only slight cracks in the West’s long-standing and unequivocal backing for the Israeli state.

_{Harrison Stetler is a freelance journalist and teacher based in Paris.}

Americans Are Outraged About the War on Gaza. Will Elites Listen? / by Oren Schweitzer

_{^{Tens of thousands of protesters rally in front of the White House to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza on January 13, 2024. (Mostafa Bassim / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

From street protests to the vote uncommitted movement to Aaron Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation, millions of Americans have been voicing outrage over Israel’s assault on Gaza. Government unresponsiveness threatens to worsen our epidemic of political despair.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

On Sunday, February 25, a US Air Force serviceman lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, in protest of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and US support for it. Twenty-five-year-old Aaron Bushnell declared that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” before self-immolating. He succumbed to his injuries the same day.

Bushnell’s extreme act of protest followed months of elites dismissing growing antiwar opinion in the US as Israel’s assault became increasingly horrific; it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and that the US government is complicit. Bushnell, like many other young people around the United States, had been inundated for months with the brutal images, videos, and stories coming out of Gaza — of residential blocks leveled, hospital patients massacred, hungry Palestinians shot dead trying to get access to aid, a ten-year-old boy starving to death.

Two days after Bushnell’s death, some voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary engaged in a much more prosaic act of dissent. In the weeks leading up to the February 27 primary, disaffected voters organized a movement to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary, instead of for Joe Biden. The effort, dubbed Listen to Michigan, won over 100,000 votes, 13 percent of the primary vote share.

Since then, grassroots efforts in other states to vote uncommitted have followed Michigan’s lead. Efforts to vote uncommitted or leave ballots blank in protest garnered roughly 19 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Minnesota, 8 percent in Wisconsin, 12 percent in New York State, and 14.5 percent in Rhode Island.

The movement to vote uncommitted — like, in another way, Bushnell’s self-immolation — is a manifestation of widespread desperation and exhaustion. Americans who see the need to end Israel’s war on Gaza do not have a presidential candidate or political party to vote for. The normal political avenues for expressing disgust with Israel’s war and US complicity seem to be blocked. After countless emails and calls to congresspeople, mass street protests, and civil disobedience — anything, seemingly, any of us can think of — the images of wholesale starvation and slaughter keep beaming through our phones.

Though the uncommitted vote counts are impressive, the efforts are also a rather depressing reflection of the bind facing antiwar forces: as far as formal electoral politics go, we can do little more than raise a symbolic middle finger to Biden. Our most compelling option in this presidential primary is to vote, literally, for no one.

Our political institutions seem rigidly unresponsive to progressive demands in general, not just disapproval of the war in Gaza. Despite years of protest, there has been no meaningful action on climate change, economic inequality, or mass incarceration. If Democrats continue to dismiss or ignore nonviolent protest as well as attempts to register dissent at the ballot box, would it be a surprise if we see more young people tragically resorting — as Bushnell did — to drastic and violent measures?

Deepening feelings of political nihilism are a rational response to depressing political conditions — and also incredibly dangerous. Overcoming them will require a political movement that offers a compelling alternative to the status quo that actually addresses the needs and aspirations of working people, with a plausible path to victory, capable of moving millions more into grassroots activity to challenge corporate power and imperialist foreign policy.

This is far easier said than done, though. Right now, despair seems to be winning.

Bubbling Discontent

Though the most acute fissure between the Democratic Party’s base and its elected officials right now is due to Biden’s Israel policy, dissatisfaction with Biden and the Democrats began long before the current war. During the 2020 election, Biden pledged to address the climate crisis, end America’s forever wars, and oppose nativistic anti-immigrant policies. Instead, he has granted new public land and offshore drilling permits, embroiled the United States in another conflict in the Middle East, and pursued Trumpian border crackdowns.

To be sure, Biden’s tenure has not been without achievements: COVID-era welfare expansions, investments in domestic infrastructure, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a remarkably prolabor National Labor Relations Board. But for millions — particularly young people and Arab and Muslim Americans — these accomplishments pale in comparison to his failures, especially his support for the obscene war in Gaza.

Young people’s disillusionment with the Democratic Party did not begin with Biden. The recent defections represent the acceleration of a trend dating back to Barack Obama’s presidency. Despite a powerful mandate for change in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Obama mostly delivered more of the same.

Obama’s term and the intervening years also saw growing demonstrations of popular discontent — Occupy Wall Street, two Black Lives Matter uprisings, the teachers’ strike wave, and Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs. Young people have come of age in a climate of disappointed expectations but also heightened protest and political activity.

But the conditions that gave rise to these protests largely remain in place. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street popularized slogans decrying the power and wealth of the top 1 percent. Today, over ten years since Occupy, the bottom 50 percent of Americans own just 3 percent of national wealth, while the top 1 percent holds more than a third.

When Greta Thunberg led the world’s largest climate protest, with six million participants globally, in 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just warned of a quickly shrinking window of time to rapidly reduce carbon emissions and avoid a catastrophic rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC issued yet another “final warning” last year, reporting that world temperatures have already risen 1.1 degrees; US emissions have barely budged. Meanwhile, two massive protest waves have done little to change our brutal, racialized system of policing and mass incarceration.

The impotence of this popular discontent appears to be driving a general loss of legitimacy for political and economic institutions in the eyes of young people. Sixty-five percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine think the American political system is not working too well, or not working at all; 83 percent say that most elected officials don’t care what people like them think.

Most Americans seem resigned to this. Though just 4 percent of Americans believe our political system is working well, more powerful than the erosion of faith in the American government are pervasive feelings of pessimism and exhaustion. Nearly a supermajority of Americans describe politics as “exhausting.”

Vast majorities support ideas like Medicare for All, taxing the very wealthy, and a cease-fire in Gaza. But few people believe our government will actually deliver on those kinds of policies. Even though 61 percent of Americans believe that there is too much economic inequality, 81 percent pre dict that by 2050, “the gap between the rich and poor will grow.”

These are the sentiments of people with little hope that the future will get better or that their own opinions make a difference.

Even Democratic Party politicians, who claim to be the last line of defense against attacks on US democracy, seem eager to justify popular disempowerment. On ABC in early March, discussing public support for a cease-fire in Gaza, Democratic senator Chris Murphy said he hoped Biden “doesn’t make decisions about what to do in Gaza or the Middle East based upon how the votes line up. . . . These issues are too important to be dictated by the polls.” That a sitting senator can confidently reject the idea that public opinion should guide state policy, apparently without political repercussions, is a testament to how little power American voters have.

Without a break in this impasse, there’s no reason to think that political exhaustion and despair won’t also continue to spread. The authoritarian far right on the march, working people increasingly abstaining from political participation, Aaron Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation — these are all morbid symptoms. More are likely to come.

Desperate Measures

Efforts around the country to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” are an attempt to channel the outrage over Gaza that’s been expressed in street protests across the country into a formal electoral challenge. But though the number of protests has remained relatively constant over the past four months, the number of participants has fallen.

It’s worth asking, as elites continue to ignore popular opinion and protests, whether more people won’t resort to desperate measures. In his best-selling book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm suggests that activists concerned with fighting climate change ought to escalate to sabotaging fossil-fuel infrastructure. “To appeal to [elites’] reason and common sense,” Malm writes, “would be evidently futile. The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time.”

Malm recalls that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate movement had been growing into the “single most dynamic social movement in the Global North” — millions participated in 2019’s Fridays for Future school strikes, while others implemented blockades, occupations, sit-ins, and took direct action by temporarily shutting down fossil-fuel infrastructure. Despite this explosion of mass-movement activity, Malm laments, elites’ feet remain glued to the gas pedal of carbon extraction and emission.

He concludes that the movement must “escalate” by engaging in direct sabotage and destruction of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Unlike some who advocate sabotage and other forms of guerilla action, Malm doesn’t think blowing up pipelines is a substitute for mass-movement activity. He describes his theory as “the radical flank effect”: the idea that the more reform-oriented mass movement requires a more militant and violent radical wing, whose attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure incentivize elites to address the demands of reformists.

Yet Malm does not discuss escalations that can actually involve millions of people. Risky campaigns of direct sabotage are typically the province of small groups of committed activists. The poorer one is, the more personally ruinous the effects of arrest, especially for something as serious as bombing or setting fire to fossil fuel infrastructure. Workers and the less affluent will probably tend to avoid participating in Malmian sabotage.

Whether sabotage will help bring about significant climate action is far from clear, but it seems even less likely to effect a change in government policy when it comes to the war in Palestine. Military bases and defense suppliers are less accessible and far riskier targets than those in the energy-production supply chain, and attacks on them are even more prone to invite a violent response by the state rather than a substantive change in policy.

Direct sabotage would also provide the state an excuse to repress left-wing organizations broadly, and draw the attention of committed activists away from organizing that brings larger numbers of people into action. Still, it isn’t unreasonable to think that approaches like Malm’s will start attracting more politicized young people who are despairing, and for whom there is no clear path to the change they seek.

The United States and other Western countries were rocked by this kind of far-left political violence in the ’70s. Infamously, amid the implosion of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the government’s seeming immunity to widespread outrage over the Vietnam War, the Weather Underground emerged and initiated a series of bombing campaigns against government buildings, military installations, and banks.

The turn to guerilla-type violence was not effective in achieving its goals; but it did give the federal government greater cover to ramp up its persecution of leftists. The formation of the Weather Underground (aka the Weathermen) and similar groups represented the beginning of the end for the New Left, as activists gave up attempts on building a movement with a mass base in favor of extreme tactics that isolated them from the broader public.

Mark Rudd, a leader of the Weathermen who first rose to prominence in the 1968 student protests at Columbia University, told Jacobin that he and others in the group, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, had seen the need to “destroy SDS . . . and start a revolutionary guerrilla army.” According to Rudd, they abandoned what had actually been their source of power at Columbia — “organizing and coalition building” — in favor of the militancy of a few activists, detached from a mass movement. SDS at its height was home to one hundred thousand activists across four thousand campuses. The Weather Underground started with five hundred members; by the end of its life, the organization claimed only two hundred.

Perhaps as likely as the rise of Weather Underground–style bombing, and a more disturbing prospect, is that Democratic intransigence on Gaza will continue to facilitate our country’s descent into authoritarian right-wing rule. Democratic elites’ refusal to entertain either an alternative course of action in Palestine or an alternative nominee to the remarkably unpopular Biden makes a second Donald Trump presidency look increasingly probable. Trump has already promised to aggressively prosecute political opponents, use the army to suppress big protests, crack down on trans and labor rights, ban leftists from entering the country, and carry out a mass deportation campaign.

Young people, and those who care about stopping war and climate catastrophe, are not irrational for wanting better options. The campaigns around the country to vote uncommitted in the Democratic primary are a relatively polite expression of this desire; Bushnell’s was literally incendiary. If the polite expressions continue to be dismissed or ignored, shouldn’t we expect more fires?

_{Oren Schweitzer is a member of New York City DSA.}

The Gaza Massacre Is Undermining the Culture of Democracy / by Enzo Traverso

_{^{The Israeli flag flutters in the middle of the European and German flags in front of the Reichstag building hosting the Bundestag, the German lower house of parliament, in Berlin, October 12, 2023. (Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images)}}

Israel’s supporters have repeatedly invoked the memory of Nazi genocide to legitimize mass murder of civilians in Gaza. Historian Enzo Traverso warns that the cynical misuse of Holocaust remembrance poses a grave danger to our global democratic culture.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Those who thought that Orientalism was dead in the global world of the twenty-first century made a big mistake. The basic Orientalist assumptions that Edward Said analyzed more than forty years ago are visible everywhere.

All of our statesmen have gone on pilgrimage to Tel Aviv to assure Benjamin Netanyahu of their unconditional support for Israel. There is no debate, they tell us, when morality and civilization are at stake. Even now that these traditional assumptions are deeply shaken in Western public opinion by the daily spectacle of famine and the massacre of children, they combine their pleas for moderation and humanitarianism with reaffirmations of Israel’s status as a victim that must defend itself.

No one ever mentions the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves against an aggression that has lasted for decades. While Israel obstructs any terrestrial delivery of humanitarian and medical assistance, Western governments (with few exceptions) imperturbably continue to support a genocidal power both financially and militarily.

After October 7, the threshold of tolerance has greatly increased, and the number of children killed under the bombs is no longer counted. Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, including eight hundred civilians; Tzahal, the Israeli military, has killed at least thirty-three thousand Palestinians to date, including no more than five thousand Hamas fighters.

Everything is planned: the destruction of roads, schools, universities, hospitals, museums, monuments, and even cemeteries erased by bulldozers; the interruption of water, electricity, gas, fuel, internet; the denial of displaced people’s access to food and medication; the evacuation of more than 1.5 million of the 2.3 million people living in Gaza to the south of the strip, where they are again bombed; disease and epidemics. Unable to eradicate Hamas, Tzahal started the elimination of the Palestinian intelligentsia: scholars, doctors, technicians, journalists, intellectuals, and poets.

The UN’s International Court of Justice, one of the products of the Western international order, issued a warning that the Palestinian population of Gaza is being subjected to an organized and relentless slaughter, uprooted and deprived of the most basic conditions of survival. The Israeli war in Gaza is taking on the features of genocide. Orientalism, however, is stronger than the juridical legacy of the Enlightenment.

Bastion of Europe

When Orientalism was born, Jews were part of the West as ungrateful guests, excluded, humiliated, and despised, usually pushed to the margins. Even the most prominent and powerful Jews were stigmatized and considered to be vulgar parvenus. Jews embodied the European critical conscience.

Today, they have crossed the “color line” and become part of the so-called Judeo-Christian civilization, loved and adulated by those who once despised and persecuted them. In Europe, the fight against antisemitism has become the banner behind which all postfascist and extreme-right movements coalesce, ready to fight against “Islamic barbarism” even before they have shed their old antisemitic prejudices.

In 1896, Israel’s spiritual father Theodor Herzl published the founding text of Zionism, The State of the Jews, in which he defined this future state as “a bastion of Europe against Asia, a sentinel of civilization against barbarism.” In 2024, the terms of the question remain substantially unchanged, but Netanyahu is much more respected and widely heard than Herzl was more than a century ago. Herzl begged for the help of some European powers; Netanyahu is not afraid of appearing arrogant and ungrateful to them.

Israel has been violating international law for decades, and today it is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza with weapons provided by the United States and several European countries. These Western powers could stop the war in a few days, but they are unable to deny their support to a corrupt, extreme-right government of war criminals because this government is part of them, so they confine themselves to recommendations and pleas for moderation.

All the major Western media outlets have unreservedly endorsed a Zionist narrative that shamelessly celebrates the history of some and ignores or denies that of others. In Europe and the United States, as Said once noted, Israel is never treated as a state but rather as “an idea or talisman of some sort,” internalized to legitimize the worst abuses in the name of high moral principles.

Decades of military occupation, harassment, and violence thus appear as the self-defense of a threatened state, and Palestinian resistance a manifestation of antisemitic hatred. Reinterpreted from an Orientalist perspective, Jewish history unfolds as one long martyrdom awaiting a well-deserved redemption, and the Palestinians become a people without history.

Reason of State

Pro-Palestinian students are depicted as rabid antisemites in much of the mainstream media. In several US universities, they have been blacklisted or threatened with sanctions because of their participation in demonstrations against the Gaza genocide. In Germany and Italy, rallies have been brutally repressed, while the French prime minister Gabriel Attal announced severe measures against pro-Palestine activists.

The memory of the Holocaust is ritually celebrated as a civil religion in the European Union, and the defense of Israel has become, as Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz have repeatedly affirmed, the “Staatsraison” of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Today, Germany invokes this memory to justify the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. After October 7, the country is pervaded with an atmosphere of witch-hunting against any form of solidarity with Palestine.

Yet Germany is only the paroxysmal expression of a broader tendency. This explains why, especially in the United States, many Jews have raised their voices to say, “not in my name.”

The references to “reason of state” are both curious and revealing as an implicit admission of moral and political ambiguity. As any scholar of political theory knows, this concept reminds one of the dark and hidden sides of political power. Usually identified with Niccolo Machiavelli’s thought, even if the term itself does not appear in his writings, raison d’état means the transgression of law in the name of superior imperatives of state security.

It is by invoking raison d’état that the secret services of states that have abolished the death penalty plan the execution of terrorists and other people who threaten their social and political order. From Machiavelli to Friedrich Meinecke and Paul Wolfowitz, raison d’état alludes to a “state of exception,” the immoral side of a state that transgresses its own laws. Behind raison d’état stands not democracy but Guantanamo.

Thus, when the FRG backs Israel by invoking Staatsraison, it implicitly admits the immorality of its policy. Today, Germany’s unconditional support to Israel compromises the democratic culture, pedagogy, and memory that had been built over the course of several decades, and particularly after the Historikerstreit in the middle of the 1980s.

This policy throws a dark shadow on the Holocaust Memorial that stands in the heart of Berlin, which does not appear anymore as the expression of a tormented historical consciousness and the virtues of remembrance, but rather as an imposing symbol of hypocrisy.

The Sanction of Justice

In 1921, the French historian Marc Bloch wrote an interesting essay on the propagation of false news in wartime. He observed how, at the beginning of World War I, just after the invasion of neutral Belgium, German newspapers published innumerable reports on unbelievable atrocities. “A false news item is always born from collective representations that predate its birth,” Bloch wrote, drawing the following conclusion: “The false news is the mirror where ‘the collective conscience’ contemplates its own features.”

Reading Western newspapers after the Hamas attack of October 7, historians had a curious feeling of déjà vu. This time, however, the oldest antisemitic mythologies were suddenly mobilized against the Palestinians. Bloch stressed that false news and legends had always “filled the life of humanity.” Many historians of inquisition and antisemitism have carefully described the role played by the myth of “ritual murder” from the Middle Ages to late Czarist Russia. The rumor that Jews were killing Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes was widely spread before carrying out a pogrom.

After October 7, most Western media, including many prestigious and supposedly serious newspapers, published news about pregnant women disemboweled and children beheaded or put in ovens by Hamas fighters. These inventions spread by the Israeli army were immediately accepted as evidence — both Joe Biden and Antony Blinken repeated them in their speeches — whereas their refutation was only whispered at the margins a few weeks later. Myths are performative, as Bloch observed: “The moment an error becomes the cause of bloodshed it is irrevocably established as truth.”

After World War II, many communist Resistance fighters who had been deported to the Nazi camps denied the existence of the Soviet gulags. They had deeply internalized a powerful syllogism: the USSR is a socialist country, socialism means freedom, therefore concentration camps cannot exist there and must be a product of US propaganda.

A similar denial is widespread today among people convinced that Israel, a country risen from the ashes of the Holocaust, cannot perpetrate a genocide. In their eyes, Israel is an authentic democracy and the occupation of Palestinian territories a necessary protection against a vital threat. Believers create their own truths, truths that do not disturb their faith. Zionist true believers do not differ very much from Stalinist true believers.

Western media outlets comfort these prejudices by spreading lies. Orientalism is the breeding ground of myths, denials, and false news. Reversing reality, a paradoxical narrative has thus been drawn up that transforms Israel from oppressor into victim. According to this narrative, Hamas wants to destroy Israel, anti-Zionism is antisemitism and denies Israel’s right to exist, and anti-colonialism has finally revealed its anti-Western, fundamentalist, and antisemitic matrix.

The struggle against antisemitism will be more and more difficult after it has been so ostentatiously misunderstood, disfigured, weaponized, and trivialized. Yes, the risk exists of trivializing the Holocaust itself: a genocidal war waged in the name of Holocaust remembrance can only offend and discredit that memory itself. The memory of the Shoah as a “civil religion” — the ritualized sacralization of human rights, anti-racism, and democracy — will lose all its pedagogical virtues.

In the past, this “civil religion” has served as a paradigm for building up the memory of other crimes and genocides, from the military dictatorships in Latin America to the Holodomor in Ukraine, right up to the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. If this memory were to be identified with the Star of David worn by an army carrying out genocide, the consequences would be devastating.

For decades, Holocaust memory has been a driving force for anti-racism and anti-colonialism, used to fight against all forms of inequality, exclusion, and discrimination. If this memorial paradigm were to be denatured, we would enter a world where everything is equivalent and words have lost their value. Our conception of democracy, which is not just a system of laws but also a culture, a memory, and a historical legacy, would be weakened. Antisemitism, which is historically declining, would experience a spectacular resurgence.

The Force of Desperation

The Hamas attack of October 7 was atrocious and traumatic. It was intended to be so, and nothing justifies it. But it should be interpreted and not merely deplored, even less mythicized and surrounded with an aura of diabolic atrocity.

There is an old debate on the dialectic between goal and means. If the goal is the liberation of an oppressed people, there are means that are incompatible with such an objective: freedom does not harmonize with killing civilians. However, these incongruous and despicable means were used in the course of a legitimate struggle against an illegal, inhuman, and unacceptable occupation.

October 7 was the extreme outcome of decades of occupation, colonization, oppression, humiliation, and daily harassment. All peaceful protests have been suppressed in blood, the Oslo Accords have always been sabotaged by Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, utterly powerless, acts in the West Bank as the police adjunct to Tzahal. Israel was preparing to “negotiate peace” with the Arab states on the backs of the Palestinians, and its leaders openly acknowledged the goal of further expanding colonies in the West Bank.

Suddenly, Hamas put everything back into play. Its attack revealed the vulnerability of Israel, which could be attacked within its own frontiers. Through Hamas, Palestinians have appeared capable of attacking and not just suffering. Palestinian violence has the force of desperation. It is not a question of sharing that desperation, but it is necessary to understand its roots.

To date, on the contrary, any effort to understand it has been eclipsed by an absolute and unwavering condemnation that was quickly turned into a pretext to legitimize a war against Palestinian civilians far more lethal than the Hamas attack. This explains the popularity and support for Hamas, which is certainly not reducible to its coercive authority, particularly among young Palestinians of the West Bank.

Murdering and injuring civilians was harmful for the Palestinian cause. The inescapable reprobation of these means of action, however, does not put into question the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, a resistance that implies the recourse to arms. Terrorism has frequently been the weapon of the poor in asymmetrical wars. Hamas corresponds well to the classic definition of the “partisan”: an irregular fighter with a strong ideological motivation, rooted in a territory and a population that protects them.

The Israeli army takes prisoners, including teenagers and family members of fighters whose administrative detention can last months or years, while Hamas can only take hostages. Hamas launches rockets, while Israel inflicts “collateral damage” during its military operations. Its terrorism is merely a counterpoint to Israeli state terrorism. If terrorism is always unacceptable, that of the oppressed is usually engendered by that of their oppressor, which is far worse.

Jean Améry wrote that, when he was tortured as a Resistance fighter by the Nazis in the fortress of Breendonck, he wished to give “concrete social form to his dignity by punching a human face,” the face of his oppressor. One of the most difficult tasks, he observed in 1969, consisted in transforming sterile, vengeful violence into liberating, revolutionary violence. His arguments, reflecting on the work of Frantz Fanon, deserve a lengthy quotation:

Freedom and dignity must be attained by way of violence, in order to be freedom and dignity. Again: why? I am not afraid to introduce here the untouchable and abject concept of revenge, which Fanon avoids. Vengeful violence, in contradiction to oppressive violence, creates equality in negativity: in suffering. Repressive violence is a denial of equality and thus of man. Revolutionary violence is eminently humane. I know it is difficult to get used to the thought, but it is important to consider it at least in the nonbinding space of speculation. To extend Fanon’s metaphor: the oppressed, the colonized, the concentration camp inmate, perhaps even the Latin American wage slave, must be able to see the feet of the oppressor in order to be able to become a human being, and, conversely, in order for the oppressor, who is not human in this role, to become one as well.

From the River to the Sea

October 7 and the Gaza war set the seal on the failure of the Oslo Accords. Far from laying the foundation for a lasting peace based on the coexistence of two sovereign states, these agreements were immediately sabotaged by Israel, becoming the premise for colonizing the West Bank, annexing East Jerusalem, and isolating a corrupt and discredited Palestinian Authority.

The failure of the Oslo Accords marks the demise of the two-state project. Still vaguely contemplated by Europeans and Americans — without consulting any Palestinian representatives — for a postwar reassessment of the region, today this essentially means one or two Palestinian Bantustans under Israeli military control. The two-state hypothesis has become impossible, although in the circumstances of the genocidal war in Gaza, a binational state is hardly imaginable, either.

Twenty years ago, Edward Said thought that a binational, secular state capable of guaranteeing its Jewish and Palestinian citizens complete equality of rights was the only possible path to peace. This is the meaning of the slogan today claimed by millions of protesters around the world (including a great number of Jews), “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” although most mainstream media persist in considering it antisemitic.

Of course, the future of Israel-Palestine must be decided by the people who live there. Self-determination, however, should not avoid some historical lessons. Today, a two-state solution could only work through a process of cross-ethnic territorial purges. This would be an irrational solution in a land shared by the same number of Jews and Palestinians.

Even supposing the creation of Palestine as an authentically sovereign state, which is highly improbable, this would not be satisfactory in the long run. A Zionist state beside an Islamic one would be a historical regression that could not provide a home to any dialogue or exchange between cultures, languages, and faiths. As the twentieth-century history of Central Europe and the Balkans tells us, this perspective would result in tragedy.

Many therefore see a binational state in which Jews and Palestinians would coexist on equal bases as the only solution. Today this option seems impracticable, but if we think in the long term, it appears logical and coherent. In 1945, the idea of building a European Union by gathering together Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands looked odd and naive. History is full of prejudices that are abandoned and retrospectively appear stupid. Sometimes tragedies serve to open new perspectives.

Twenty years ago, Said asked with concern “where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, of the white writers in South Africa who spoke out unequivocally and unambiguously against the evils of apartheid?” This silence is equally deafening today, broken by a few isolated voices. But the situation has profoundly changed. Israel has revealed itself to be vulnerable and above all, through its destructive fury, devoid of any moral legitimacy.

The Palestinian cause has become a banner of the Global South and of large swathes of public opinion, especially young people, in both Europe and the United States. What is at stake today is not the existence of Israel but the survival of the Palestinian people. Should the Gaza war end in a second Nakba, it is Israel’s legitimacy that will be permanently compromised. In this case neither American weapons, nor the Western media, nor German Staatsraison, nor the misrepresented and reviled memory of the Holocaust will be able to redeem it.

_{Enzo Traverso teaches at Cornell University. His most recent book is Revolution: An Intellectual History.}

Workers Can Halt the War Machine / by Nick Troy

_{^{Soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces stand with weapons as smoke rises from bombardments on Gaza on March 4, 2024, in southern Israel near the border with Gaza. (Amir Levy / Getty Images)}}

In 1974, Scottish workers refused to fix the fighter jets of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. As the West continues to supply Israel with arms, unionized workers could again refuse to stop the flow of weapons of mass murder.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

History is often understood through the stories of “great men,” reflecting capitalism’s encouragement of the individual and suspicion of the collective. Socialists, understandably, have traditionally sought to reject such narratives; a famous example is in the final address of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who, before his death in Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, assured listeners that “history is ours, and the people make history.”

The postindustrial area of Nerston, East Kilbride, echoes this sentiment half a century on. This town on the outskirts of Glasgow is not known for its monuments to famous generals or statesmen; instead, there is a humbler tribute to an alternative history that was, until recently, largely forgotten. In 1974, six months after Pinochet’s coup against Allende’s elected government, three thousand members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) in the Rolls Royce plant in Nerston, led by Communist Party member Bob Fulton, “blacked” a batch of Hawker Hunter jet engines that were to be returned to Chile after repair. Nowhere else were engineers qualified to repair those engines.

At a union branch meeting, the workers had already voted to condemn the coup. “The people being tortured and murdered, they were just like us — trade unionists,” explained Stuart Barrie in a 2018 interview with the Guardian. In the same interview, John Keenan outlined how crucial organization was to AUEW members at Rolls Royce, who had a history of taking political action: “The only reason we could do what we did was because we were organized. We took strike action for the [National Health Service], the Shrewsbury pickets, you name it.”

When the boycott came, it lasted four years, and workers were able to significantly undermine the capacity of the Chilean Air Force. Their action, alongside actions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)’s members’ refusal to allow a Chilean warship to dock in Oakland, California, became part of a global community of workers whose defiance of tyranny is accredited with the release of tens of thousands from Pinochet’s prison cells and torture chambers.

Today, as we watch on as incomprehensible barbarism is unleashed by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, much of our response is stifled by illusions of helplessness and despair. The Rolls Royce workers shattered that illusion in 1974 and showed us the best way to combat tyranny, whether in Chile or Palestine: through industrial action in our workplaces.

Imperialism and the Workplace

In Allende’s final broadcast to the nation, as Pinochet’s Hunter jets rained hell upon the Presidential Palace, he detailed the reality of the coup that had toppled Chilean socialism and outlined the role of imperialism in the assault against democracy:

At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition . . . hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

Allende was right. It was the United States, fearful of Chile’s reformist program of nationalization and Allende’s firm friendship with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, that orchestrated the coup with the aid of Chile’s ruling elite and its military allies. The imperialist world system — led then, as it is today, by the United States — intrinsically links the source of extraction to the imperial metropole. It was the United States’ interest in exploiting Chilean natural resources that made Allende’s government a target, just as it was Britain’s manufacturing capacity — itself sustained by imperialist exploitation — that brought Chilean-owned jets to the workshops of East Kilbride.

If these links are the source of imperial power, then the ability of workers to undermine them in their workplaces is also a major pressure point. The action taken by Fulton and his comrades illuminated the tangible impact workers in the imperial core could have on the lives of those in the Global South.

Today, we can also contextualize our own workplaces in the imperialist system and pinpoint its weaknesses. This is critical to building a more effective, dynamic movement for Palestinian liberation in Britain. Israel — itself a heavily militarized outpost of US imperialism — is fundamentally tied to the Western economies that keep it afloat. By understanding those ties in our own workplaces, we can begin to organize workers in the same vein as Fulton and his comrades.

Workers Against Genocide

Today, Scotland’s industrial base is comprised in large part by weapons manufacturers. The work of groups like Palestine Action and Workers for a Free Palestine in shutting down these factories should be applauded, but we must also ask what comes next. The 1974 Rolls Royce boycott lasted four years — considerably longer than any direct action, and with the collective power to protect workers from the state repression we see now. Sustainability is a principle from 1974 that we must carry forward to inform our strategy today.

At present, our tactics disrupt the running of weapons plants short-term, without the support or endorsement of the workers inside. To develop a movement of workers that is truly anti-imperialist, we must build in stages and engage proactively with workers in weapons factories, with the aim of organizing sustainable, long-term boycotts inside these factories themselves. Building inside weapons manufacturing facilities like BAE and Thales in tandem with a wider drive to organize Scottish workplaces around cultural and economic boycotts of apartheid Israel has the potential not only to bolster our campaigning on Palestinian liberation, but also to strengthen our movement industrially and reestablish its foundations.

The British trade union movement is still traumatized by the shattering defeats of the Margaret Thatcher era. Timid ideas of service-model trade unionism have grown alongside a reluctance to branch into the political sphere beyond the parameters set by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Thatcher’s victory over organized labor was embellished with a wave of legislation that has hampered the ability of unions to politically intervene, with the threat of financial and legal reprisals often hanging over them.

Lay-members must consider an organized offensive against this repression as a critical factor in workplace organizing around Palestine and beyond. The broad public support for an immediate cease-fire in Palestine should provide trade unionists across the British economy with fertile ground upon which to nurture a politicized trade unionism that can raise British workers’ empathetic response toward Palestine into a political one that engages people in their daily lives.

Elsewhere in Scotland, workers are already showing the potential of their power. Unite Hospitality’s Glasgow branch has recently launched the “Serve Solidarity” campaign, which is organizing worker-led boycotts of apartheid produce in the city’s social and cultural spaces. The successful campaign by workers at the Stand Comedy Club has led to the boycott’s enforcement in all three venues. From Belgium to South Africa and India, transport workers’ unions have refused to touch arms shipments destined to Israel, while garment workers in Kerala will no longer make Israeli police uniforms.

The proximity of these industries to imperialism, and Israel in particular, will naturally vary. What is key is their contribution to a wider global movement taking sustained, material action to halt the ongoing genocide. Leonardo Cáceres, a radio broadcaster on the day of Pinochet’s coup, said in an interview for the 2018 documentary Nae Pasaran that, although the Rolls Royce trade unionists might have seen their gesture as “something small,” it was in fact extremely valuable: “They proved to the dictators in Chile that despite the support of certain governments, their actions were condemned by the majority of human beings.”

Rebuilding Internationalism

What Fulton and his comrades at Rolls Royce were able to demonstrate was not solely the collective power of workers in the international arena, but also that the workplace is a weakness of the imperialist world system. They proved to the world that acts of defiance can undermine a seemingly insurmountable enemy, while illuminating the material relationships that link workers and their interests everywhere.

When the workers of Rolls Royce extended the hand of solidarity from East Kilbride to Santiago, it removed fascist planes from the sky. Our movement must now do the same for the people of Palestine and use our own hand of solidarity to shatter the reactionary, insular ideas that have seen our movement become weak and disorganized, and redirect it toward being a force that can challenge imperialism and change the world.

_{Nick Troy is the chair of the Glasgow branch of Unite Hospitality.}

Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine / Tom Dale

_{^{Rachel Corrie, then twenty-three, speaks during a mock trial of US president George W. Bush on March 5, 2003 in Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. (Abid Katib / Getty Images)}}

This day in 2003, the IDF killed American activist Rachel Corrie as she defended homes in Rafah from destruction. As Israel threatens to invade the city, a volunteer who stood alongside Rachel writes on her legacy — a call for steadfast solidarity with Gazans.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Today there may be no town on Earth denser with misery and foreboding than Rafah, pushing up against Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Since mid-October, Israeli forces have already bludgeoned their way through Gaza City and Khan Younis, massacring, destroying homes, and leaving starvation and terror in their wake. More than one million Palestinians fled south to Rafah, swelling its population to seven times its earlier size.

But now, Israel’s sights are set on Rafah itself — threatening a devastating invasion.

Rafah is today a sprawling city of canvas and plastic sheeting as much as concrete; cold and often sodden, hungry and distraught. Disease is spreading, as people barter what little food they have for medicine, and women tear scraps from tents to use as sanitary towels. Orphans — there may be as many as ten thousand in Rafah — fend as best they can.

Last year, Israel dropped leaflets over Khan Younis telling Palestinians to go to “shelters” in Rafah, to escape the fighting. But there are no shelters, and there has been no escape. Early in the war, a friend lost thirty-five members of his extended family in a single air strike on the town. Most were women and children.

More frequent than attacks on Rafah itself, the sound of air strikes echo from the north, an ominous reminder that the worst may yet be to come.

Last month, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that a failure to invade Rafah would be tantamount to his country’s defeat, and that he would order an invasion even if all the Israeli hostages were released.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said that Washington will not support an invasion of Rafah without a “clear” plan to protect civilians, and that no plan has been provided yet. Israeli officials are reported to be working on a scheme to transfer Palestinians in Rafah to “humanitarian islands” to the north — where, already, food and medicine are scarcer still, and people have starved to death.

President Joe Biden has said that an invasion of Rafah would be a “red line,” but promised no consequences if Israel crosses that red line, as it has crossed so many others. Netanyahu, as he has before, responded with contempt: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them,” he said.

“Razed and Bullet-Riddled and Bare”

At the height of the second intifada, in 2002–03, I lived in Rafah as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization that supports nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Among my colleagues was Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer from Olympia, Washington State, in the United States, with a zany sense of humor that belied a seriousness about life — and the purpose of it — that I would not fully understand until reading her writing years later. Later to join the group was Tom Hurndall, a talented photographer who was shot through the head by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper in April 2003, and died the next year after a nine-month coma.

***_{^{Rachel Corrie. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)}}***

Rafah, even then, was “razed and bullet-riddled and bare,” as Rachel put it in a message to her parents. We spent most nights in the houses of families near the border with Egypt. Israel had been creating an empty strip of land there, demolishing homes to create a free-fire zone, and so a tactical advantage for their troops who occupied positions along the border. Sometimes they warned families to leave with bullhorns. Sometimes they shot into the homes until the families fled. And at any moment of day or night, demolition or not, they might rake the homes on the border’s edge with gunfire.

Not every bullet fired at a wall penetrates the building — but some do, especially those fired from more powerful weapons. Everyone who stayed at our friend Abu Jamil’s house, including Rachel, could not but notice, as they played with his children, the pockmarks left by bullets that struck the interior wall, at head height, over the kitchen sink.

When Palestinians called us, we used to go out to protest Israel’s armored bulldozers as they worked along the border strip, watching them and trying to intercede if they moved to demolish a home. We slowed them down a few times, made it more awkward, gave a family here or there a respite of a few days, or weeks. Perhaps we dragged the global spotlight onto that strip of land more frequently than if we hadn’t been there. But the demolition rumbled on. And the world had other preoccupations: the invasion of Iraq was looming.

***_{^{Cynthia and Craig Corrie, parents of Rachel, with the Nasrallah family. (Courtesy of the Corrie family)}}***

On March 16, 2003, a little after 5:00 p.m., I watched as one of Israel’s US-made bulldozers, huge and hulking, turned toward the house of Dr Samir Nasrallah and his young family. Rachel, a friend of Dr Samir’s, placed herself between the bulldozer and the house. As the bulldozer started toward her, it began to build up a roiling mound of earth in front of its blade. As the mound reached Rachel, she began to climb it, struggling to keep her footing on the soft earth, steadying herself with her hands, until her head was mostly over the level of the blade. The driver might have looked her in the eye. But he ploughed on, and she began to lose her footing.

A few weeks before that day, Rachel had a dream about falling, which she recorded in her journal:

_{. . . falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything — just react . . . And I heard, “I can’t die, I can’t die,” again and again in my head.}

The soil on the Rafah border, an uneven mixture of clay and sand, has a warm hue, not so different from that of the Utah cliffs. From across the years, like much of Rachel’s writing, the nightmare seems to have the quality of a premonition.

Try though she did, Rachel could not keep her footing; the bulldozer pushed on, it dragged her under, pushed her into the earth, crushed her insides. She died as I held her hands in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital. In my initial account of the event, written two days later, I noted that ten Palestinians had been killed across Gaza since Rachel, largely without notice beyond the enclave itself.

***_{^{Rachel Corrie stands in front of an IDF bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, on the day she was killed. (Courtesy of ISM Palestine)}}***

My own friendship with Rachel aside, there is a discomfort in relating this that it is necessary to acknowledge, especially today, in the light of the devastation that Rafah faces. Part of our aim, all those years ago, was to exploit a racist structure of violence, and the racist structure of attention that sits alongside it, in order to undermine those same structures. Some people might believe that such an attempt was always quixotic, or that any bid to exploit such a racist structure, such as our effort to pull international eyes to Gaza, is inevitably to affirm that structure.

Regardless, having made my choice, more than two decades ago, I am committed. Whenever I am asked to speak about Rachel, I do so, not only to honor a friend, but on the theory that perhaps her story is a way to render comprehensible to some people, far from Palestine, broader truths about the violence of occupation, and the politics that make that violence possible. And that those truths lead us ultimately back to Palestinians, and back to Rafah. I believe they lead other places too.

Israel’s military operates under the assumption of impunity. So, when some exceptional event, such as the killing of a non-Palestinian, raises the prospect of accountability, the system is ill prepared to respond. The result is often a series of bizarre lies. In Rachel’s case, the authorities could have stuck to disputing details of our eyewitness testimonies. Instead, they also fabricated the claim that Rachel had “hid behind an earth embankment” and was hit by a falling concrete slab. Our photographs of the scene, both before and after Rachel was killed, showed that she was standing in open ground.

In a familiar pattern, the official response was, in approximate order: we didn’t do it, we did it but it wasn’t our fault, even if it was our fault we aren’t liable, and anyway they were terrorists. The IDF’s commander for the southern Gaza strip at the time of the killing told a Haifa court, presumably with a straight face, that “a terror organisation sent Rachel Corrie to obstruct IDF soldiers. I am saying this in definite knowledge.” Observers of the current war will recall a series of similarly “definite” pronouncements.

Israel’s Impunity Is an American Export

Volunteers who travel to a place of war to stand with those on the front lines have always been at the heart of the internationalist tradition. And that remains true today, whether accompanying shepherds and olive-pickers in the hills of the West Bank, running supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the war with Russia, giving medical support to the revolutionaries of Myanmar, or fighting the so-called Islamic State group alongside the People’s Protection Units in northeastern Syria. These endeavors, and the people who undertake them, shouldn’t be idealized. But the deep solidarity and connection they embody are unique.

Still, this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. And it doesn’t need to be. The solidarity of volunteers needs to be joined to a complementary project that seeks to mobilize the power of states — especially the United States — toward the same ends. That’s something most people can get involved in somehow. In the case of Palestine, it starts by building public support and political pressure toward a cease-fire and a halt to military aid to Israel. That includes unrelenting pressure on Biden and the defense of congressional advocates of a cease-fire from those who want to punish their stance.

The United States underwrites Israel’s occupation through massive military and financial aid, and it is underwriting the present war on Gaza. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official, told the Washington Post that the administration had facilitated “an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support.”

The result, always painfully evident in Rafah, is that Israel’s impunity is an American export. But a withdrawal of support will, in all likelihood, not be enough. Sanctions designed to coerce the recognition of Palestinians’ fundamental rights will be necessary. They will need to go far beyond targeting individual settlers or their supporters.

The call for sanctions is a direct challenge to the main, unspoken tenet of US policy toward Israel. Biden and his subordinates will speak about the need for a Palestinian state, and the need for Israel to show restraint. But their main principle, which has held absolute for three decades and was predominant for decades before that, is that Israel must never be forced to make such concessions. Israel may be cajoled, flattered, persuaded, and nudged, but never compelled. The result is that Palestine is held in a permanent state of exception.

A relative of Dr Nasrallah, the pharmacist whose family home Rachel was defending when she was killed, told me that he felt as though Rafah had been sucked into a “black hole, where international rules do not apply, and the world cannot see or feel us.”

He describes returning home one afternoon to a scene of carnage, the aftermath of an air strike on a neighboring building, in which at least two families were entirely wiped out and another lost two children. (Friends of the Nasrallahs are raising funds to help them out of harm’s way.) The relative, who asked that his name not be used, said that it was now common to see men breaking down in tears at the slightest defeat, unable to provide for their wives or children. “We speak,” he said, “about a fine line between life and death.”

An invasion of Rafah, which may be several weeks away, would be a disaster “beyond imagining,” United Nations doctors say. As Rachel put it a few weeks before she was killed: “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”

_{Tom Dale is a writer who has worked in civilian protection, conflict analysis, and journalism in the Middle East. Follow his work at @tom_d_.}

Israel’s Flour Massacre in Gaza Is a Horrific War Crime / by Seraj Assi

_{^{Palestinians mourn following an early morning incident when residents rushed toward aid trucks in Gaza City and were met with Israeli gunfire on February 29, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)}}

Continuing the relentless assault on civilians in Gaza, Israeli troops killed more than 100 starving Palestinians waiting for flour from aid trucks yesterday. Emboldened by US complicity, Israel persists in acting with impunity in Gaza.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

On Thursday at dawn, Israeli troops unleashed a barrage of gunfire on a crowd of starving Palestinians waiting for aid trucks in Gaza City, killing over one hundred people and wounding more than one thousand others. The death toll is expected to rise as most hospitals in Gaza have ceased operating, having run out of fuel, medicine, and blood.

Footage shows Israeli soldiers firing indiscriminately at thousands of civilians who gathered at al-Nabulsi roundabout at al-Rasheed Street to receive flour from aid trucks. Medical sources report that most victims were shot directly in the head, chest, or stomach. Jadallah al-Shafei, the nursing director at al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera: “All injuries result from gunfire and artillery shells; [Israeli] claims of a stampede are entirely fabricated.”

Israeli tanks ran over dead and wounded bodies. Many victims were brought to hospitals in donkey carts, as ambulances could not reach the scene to collect all the dead and wounded.

The scene resembled a slaughterhouse. Most of the victims were children. A heartbroken mother was heard screaming through the crowds: “My girl is gone; she’s been starving for seven days.” A woman at Kamal Adwan hospital was pleading with the world: “We are under siege. Take pity on us. Ramadan is coming soon. People should look at us. Pity us.”

The massacre is a war crime on top of a war crime, as Israel slaughtered Palestinian civilians whom it has been starving for months, and whose only crime was queuing up to receive flour for their families. Palestinian officials have described the carnage as a “cold-blooded massacre.” Palestinians have dubbed it the Flour Massacre — or perhaps more fittingly, the Red Flour Massacre, in reference to the bloodstained flour left scattered on the ground.

The UN Security Council has convened an emergency meeting. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) chief described “another day from hell” in Gaza, while UN aid chief, Martin Griffiths, lamented the “life draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.” Following the massacre, Colombian president Petro Gustavo has suspended arms purchases from Israel, saying: “The whole world should blockade [Benjamin] Netanyahu.”

Meanwhile, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, hailed the soldiers who committed the massacre as “heroes,” pledging total support for Israeli troops in Gaza. Using US-made drones, Israeli forces recorded the carnage from the air for fun. Israeli Telegram channels have celebrated the massacre of starving Palestinians, cheering the prospect of cannibalism. Many Israelis have been advocating for starving Palestinians in Gaza.

The Palestinian death toll has now surpassed thirty thousand, most of them women and children. Over seventy thousand people have been wounded. Nearly two million civilians have been displaced. Half of the population are starving. Several hundred thousand Palestinians are believed to remain in northern Gaza despite Israeli orders to evacuate the area; many have been reduced to eating animal fodder for survival. Footage of bone-thin children vomiting animal food and then dying has shocked observers. Gaza doctors have been warning that growing famine in Gaza is “turning children into skeletons.”

The world is witnessing the brutal dehumanization of an entire people unfold in broad daylight, as thousands of starving Palestinians have been crowding daily along the Gaza beach, waving desperately for aid planes as they air-drop food far and deep into the sea.

International organizations are acting helpless. Aid groups say it has become nearly impossible to deliver humanitarian aid in Gaza because of the presence of the Israeli military. Early this month, the World Food Program announced that it was pausing deliveries to the North because of the growing chaos and relentless bombing, despite having warned that “famine is imminent.”

For nearly five months, and despite international appeals to allow aid into Gaza, Israel has deprived the besieged Strip of food, water, and medicine. It has sealed the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, while Israeli settlers and soldiers continue to block aid trucks at Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing. Meanwhile, crowds of Israeli settlers, who have been demanding to be allowed to resettle Gaza, have breached the Erez Crossing near the border wall with Gaza in an attempt to build settlements on the ruins of displaced Palestinians.

Paying lip service to Palestinian lives, US president Joe Biden has said that killing more than one hundred Palestinians near aid trucks will complicate cease-fire talks. But the truth is that the Biden administration has itself to blame for these atrocities, having vetoed three UN resolutions calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, while deploying US Air Force teams to Israel to assist in its war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

The United States has also been a partner in starving Palestinians in Gaza, which constitutes a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an act of genocide. The Biden administration continues to halt aid to UNRWA, even as US officials have been warning that Gaza is “turning into Mogadishu.” Acting helpless before Israel, the United States is now exploring the possibility of “air-dropping” food from US military planes into Gaza — rather than attempting to stop the assault that makes those airdrops necessary.

The Rasheed Street massacre underscores Israel’s flagrant mockery of international justice. It comes one month after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its “plausible genocide” in Gaza. It comes barely one day after the European Parliament called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

Emboldened by US complicity, Israel continues to act with impunity in Gaza, in a blatant violation of international laws and norms. But as Israel continues to enjoy the unconditional support of the Biden administration, it’s hard to see why it should stop massacring Palestinians.

_{Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in Washington, DC, and the author, most recently, of My Life As An Alien (Tartarus Press).}

Western Governments Share Responsibility for Israel’s Crimes / by Hamza Ali Shah

_{^{A view of the heavily damaged Al-Huda Mosque as a result of Israeli attacks on Rafah, Gaza, on February 14, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

Israel is preparing to launch a ground assault against the Palestinian town of Rafah, where one million refugees are sheltered. It will likely mean a surge in civilians deaths — for which the US and other Western governments also will be culpable.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

On Sunday night, the Israeli army carried out a series of intensive strikes in multiple locations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Political commentators referred to the strikes as “diversion” tactics, intended to cover a rescue operation that reportedly brought two Israeli hostages home.

For Palestinians, the experience was one that has become familiar: a “night full of horror.” More than a hundred people were killed, including entire families. Journalists were once again hit: Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail Abu Omar was forced to have his right leg amputated, adding to what has already been dubbed an “amputee crisis” in the enclave.

This was just the precursor. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have set their sights on a full-blown invasion of Rafah. The plans are justified by robotic recitations about the need to eradicate Hamas, a call now synonymous with the constant waves of horrific violence being unleashed against Gaza’s civilian population.

More than four months of the onslaught have already passed, but the bloodbath in Rafah — previously designated a “safe zone” — is likely to be on a scale beyond what we have seen thus far. There are more than a million Palestinians in Rafah, many of whom have already fled homes multiple times to escape Israel’s bombardment. In the process the city has turned into the largest refugee camp on Earth. The UN has sounded the alarm about the “slaughter” on the horizon.

Complicity in Genocide

In these circumstances, Western political figures seem to have miraculously discovered their spines. US president Joe Biden has cautioned that “a major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than one million people sheltering there,” while the UK government declares itself “very concerned,” and the Labour Party calls the prospect of an offensive in Rafah “unacceptable.”

Despite these words, nobody should be under any illusions. The atrocities committed in Rafah already and those to follow, both there and across the wider Gaza Strip, would not be possible without the unconditional support these leaders and parties have provided to Israel and are still providing, even as the language changes.

“Israel has the right to defend itself. We must make sure they have what they need to protect their people,: Biden announced on October 22. By that point, nearly five thousand Palestinians had already been killed, and evacuation orders for hospitals had been issued, in what amounted to “death penalties” for patients according to the Red Crescent.

The Israeli military was making no effort to obscure its intentions. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” boasted one former Isreal Defense Forces general. “There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell,” declared another. These goals were acted on swiftly: a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned in November that Gaza had already become “hell on Earth.”

What should have been a prompt from the UN and plenty of other humanitarian bodies for the West to intervene and try to stop the bloodshed didn’t even shift the dial. Biden bypassed Congress twice in December to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel. Repeated calls from human rights organizations for the British government to suspend arms sales were ignored (Britain has exported £489 million worth of arms to Israel since 2015), and the British government has continued to provide training to Israeli military officers.

Meanwhile, whenever an opportunity to apply global pressure on Israel to end the violence presented itself, it was closed off by Israel’s Western allies with predictable rapidity. When a United Nations Security Council resolution demanded an immediate cease-fire, the United States used its veto power to ensure it did not pass. In the UK, a motion put forward by the Scottish National Party calling for an immediate cease-fire was comprehensively rejected in the House of Commons by a majority of 168. When Israel was facing global isolation as South Africa presented a meticulous case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide, the German government was quick to dismiss the accusation, and when the interim ruling confirmed a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza, a British foreign office spokesperson expressed “considerable concerns” with the ICJ’s case.

Perhaps worse than the political cover is the conscious decisions these states have taken to make life worse for Palestinians suffering the onslaught. Following allegations from the Israeli government — which remain unsubstantiated — that employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were involved in the October 7 attacks, numerous Western governments including Australia, the UK, the United States, Italy, Austria, and Germany suspended their funding, crippling one of the refugees’ few remaining lifelines.

Amnesty International has since denounced the states’ “cruel” decision. The UN agency is the main humanitarian relief provider in Gaza and was already struggling to cater to the needs of Palestinians, especially given only a “trickle of aid” has been entering Gaza as the bombardment goes on. The UN aid chief described Gaza as the worst ever humanitarian crisis back in December: now, Palestinians on the ground are resorting to eating grass and animal feed and drinking polluted water, while newborn babies are dying from hunger and disease as famine looms.

Only after all this — when 175,000 homes or 50 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed, when close to thirty thousand have been killed, when twenty-five thousand children have been orphaned, and when more than ten children are losing limbs every day — have these supposed defenders of human rights and democracy begun to shift their tone.

In this context, it is hard to understand cautionary statements about the Rafah offensive as motivated by genuine concern for the safety of Palestinians: Western leaders have already proved themselves to have none. Instead, we should understand them as an attempt by the politicians who offered “unqualified support” to the Israeli military and encouraged collective punishment to absolve themselves of their obvious and overwhelming responsibility in the devastation.

The most obvious evidence of this is that these cautionary statements are unaccompanied by any threats to withdraw the political and moral support on which Israel depends. The Biden administration has already stated it won’t reprimand Israel for failing to protect civilian safety. With domestic demands for action opposing Israel’s crimes growing, the change in tone is not borne out of conviction but political expediency.

The genocide in Gaza is unique in that every devastating chapter has been documented extensively and made available for the world to see. Every crime has played out exactly as boasted about by its perpetrators. Despite all this, the Western world has persisted and continues to persist with the material and political support that has made it all possible.

Tentative rhetoric about safety unbacked by material change now will not cut it. The Palestinian blood on the hands of our politicians will never wash away.

_{Hamza Ali Shah is a political researcher at a think tank and a masters student at King’s College London.}