Telling the ‘Untold’ Stories of Palestinian Lives, Dreams, and Hopes—in Gaza and Beyond / by April M. Short

_{^{Palestinian solidarity mural in Belfast, Ireland. Image credit: PPCC Antifa/Flickr}}

The media collective Untold Palestine gathers the stories mainstream media doesn’t tell about Palestinians—videos, photographs, and written accounts from Palestinian people about their culture and daily life.

_{Reposted from ZNet}

After a decade of struggling with infertility and undergoing IVF procedures, 27-year-old Alaa gave birth to her first son, Kareem—an “energetic and brilliant child” with a “sweet” soul who “filled the house with joy.” Two years later she had another child, Ahmed, nicknamed Moudi, who was “the funniest kid ever with his words and stories.”

Maram Al Masri, the aunt of the boys, shared their story on Instagram, which was posted by the media collective platform, Untold Palestine, on March 18, 2024. On January 8, 2024, Kareem and Ahmed Al-Masry were killed by an Israeli artillery shell. “It took away Kareem and Ahmed, the children we had longed for over many years… vanished in the blink of an eye.”

Kareem and Ahmed are two of more than 13,000 children killed by Israel’s attacks on Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to figures provided by UNICEF on March 17, 2024.

A Book Full of Stories

Ibrahim Sha’ban loved life. He was “like a book full of stories and memories, laughter and joy” and “the best engineer in Gaza,” writes his brother, Mohammad Sha’ban, in a note shared by Untold Palestine on Instagram on March 13. “He was also my teacher for mathematics, physics, and Arabic and the keeper of my secrets. He filled us with his kindness, happiness, and love,” adds Mohammad. Ibrahim and his wife Aya, his “soulmate in kindness and happiness,” had many projects and travels planned with their two children—the youngest not yet three months old—when the four of them were all killed by Israel on October 24, 2023.

As of March 2024, the Sha’ban family was among the more than 30,000 victims killed by Israel since the war began, in what UN experts have called a genocidal campaign. Despite ongoing, mass protests worldwide, and a ruling in January 2024 by the International Court of Justice ordering Israel to do everything in its capacity to prevent death, destruction, and any acts of genocide in Gaza, Israel has continued constant military bombardment in the region and prevented food and aid from reaching people in refugee camps in Gaza. Experts warned that millions of people in Gaza were on the brink of famine due to Israel’s actions, PBS reported on March 19.

Thwarting International Law

Beyond its brutality in Gaza, Israel’s military, as well as informal settler militias, have thwarted international law with violent attacks that have increased at an “unprecedented rate” throughout Palestine since October 7. For example, every morning, 42-year-old Lina Amr gets her children ready and takes them to school, “saying goodbye with a heavy heart, as if it might be our last farewell.” She works as an ambulance officer at the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Hebron, and since October 7, “the dangers and fears have increased on this job,” she writes in a post Untold Palestine shared on Instagram on March 21, 2024.

“We often face settler attacks and obstacles from checkpoints, settlements, and challenges by the Israeli occupation army, which threaten our lives and hinder our work. Sometimes, soldiers give us a minute to leave before opening fire, which has sadly happened,” she writes, noting that while paramedics were once protected in Israel (as they are supposed to be, by international law), they are now being directly targeted.

Untold Palestine

The personal narratives above were collected and shared by Untold Palestine, an independent digital media platform, organized as a collective, which has been working since 2019 to share stories of Palestinian life, told by Palestinian people by way of photos that are accompanied by these stories on social media (shared in both Arabic and English).

As its website states, the stories they share “are people-centered.” “[W]e shed light on their personality, interests, and passions.”

In this way, Untold Palestine aims to connect the Palestinian diaspora throughout Palestine and around the world, and “to create a multifaceted image of the Palestinian people in all their diversity. Our platform is an open space, and we want to make it accessible particularly… [for] those whose voices are usually not heard due to marginalization, racism, and exclusion.”

In addition to social media channels, Untold Palestine offers learning opportunities for artists and journalists—including photography trails for professional and amateur photographers.

Photographer Mohamed Badarne, who works with the Untold Palestine collective, spoke with me for the Independent Media Institute 160 days into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. He says that the Palestinian people are typically portrayed in much of the western media through racist stereotypes—and are often either presented as the victims of violence or perpetrators of violence and terrorism. While in the Arab media, they are often shown as heroes in the context of the struggles and clashes they witness almost on a daily basis. He says the Untold Palestine platform was established to paint a more accurate picture of Palestinians and to give people of the region a way to take back ownership of their stories. In this way, the platform might help humanize Palestinian people in the eyes of the world.

Badarne, a Palestinian from Haifa who is now living in Berlin, has been involved in social activism since he was a teen. He worked as a human rights organizer and teacher for years, before becoming a photographer when he was 35 years old. He has experience sharing the stories of those who have been overlooked or oppressed. His exhibition, the Forgotten Team, documented the treatment of 2022 FIFA World Cup workers in Qatar.

He says as a Palestinian person he always has to fight for his rights and safety. After facing years of racism in Israel, he moved to Berlin in 2012, but has faced more difficulty and racism living in Berlin.

“I work as a photographer and I hold workshops here for refugees and women,” he says. “All of my work is focused on photography and storytelling for social change.”

Badarne says the Untold Palestine platform started out by sharing everyday stories about the hopes, dreams, art, and activities in Palestine—across ethnicities and ages. The idea was to help people in Palestine to reclaim how they were portrayed. And the hope was that it would inspire people in other places in the world where narratives are often co-opted into stereotypes, to take back their own stories as well.

“We don’t often have the chance to tell our story as we want because the international media and western media tend to control our stories—our photography, our videography, and our scenes… we don’t have the chance, oftentimes, to bring our voices out,” he says. He adds that telling stories from everyday life can help people find shared humanity with Palestinians.

“People can be in solidarity with us when we bring our normal photos to the world,” he says. “One of the very problematic things is that regimes, like the Israeli regime or western regimes, don’t see us as human. They don’t see that we also like to dance, to swim, and to read books. And if you go to our platform, you will find hundreds and hundreds of doctors, teachers, engineers, women, children, and so on… and see that they have a life.”

He says one of the platform’s challenges has been that while the idea is not to tell political stories but personal ones, they are often political by nature due to the realities of everyday life for Palestinians. He shares the example of a teacher who has to cross seven checkpoints on his way to school each day.

“He is the same teacher as everywhere in the world—he has the same dreams—but in the end his story is different,” Badarne says.

He says the goal of Untold Palestine is to give ownership of the Palestinian story back to its people—and that means their photos and stories need to be freed up to the public. Badarne says that Palestinian photographers and journalists seldom have the chance to publish their photos as they would like because they lack the access and funds necessary to reach larger media platforms.

“We established [Untold Palestine] because we believe that not just the Palestinians, but everyone who is under occupation, must have the right to tell their story as their own,” he says.

He says they aim to humanize as many victims as possible, telling their stories, in hopes of increasing solidarity with Palestinians, and with all those people who are fighting for freedom.

We Are Not Numbers

Badarne says if you scroll back through the Untold Palestine platform before October 7, 2023, you will find photos and stories of women, children, artists, culture, beauty, and life in Gaza and beyond.

“Now, we show the life that Israel destroyed,” he says.

He says that even before the war began on October 7, it was not always easy to convince photographers, journalists, and others in Palestine to share photographs and stories that had messages of hope, because so often, they were focused on commemorating oppression and clashes. However, over time, Untold Palestine collected stories from all around Palestine, as well as from Palestinian people living around the world, which showed inspiring and humanizing moments from daily life.

In the aftermath of October 7, 2023—due to the level of bloodshed and violence Palestinians have been experiencing on a daily basis—the collective came to the decision to shift the focus to telling the stories of the lives of victims before they were killed.

This is what the collective has been doing since the war began, and the stories of the lives of victims have received millions of views. Badarne says that through the stories of the victims’ lives, people around the world may be better able to connect with the realities of what is happening at a human level—rather than seeing them as just numbers.

“People can be in solidarity with us not just when we are killed, not just when we are bloody… this is a kind of solidarity with the small details in life,” he says.

In fact, “We Are Not Numbers” is the title of Untold Palestine’s Instagram posts, which provide the stories of victims’ lives shared by their friends and families.

The text at the top of these posts reads: “With each martyr and martyr raised, it increases our responsibility to document their stories and lives, and ensure that they do not become just numbers,” followed by an invitation for people to send in photos and stories of those they’ve known who have been killed during the war.

“I think the kind of story that we publish has more effect than learning about ‘30,000 people killed,’” Badarne says. “I think about all the photos from Gaza that people see of tanks or bombing—now there are photos of life; these are photos and stories of the people, and details about people we care about.”

In addition to the stories of victims, the platform continues to share stories of those living in Palestine—like that of Lina Amr—including a daily post that often provides insights into the lives of people living in refugee encampments.

Badarne says the platform has inspired other groups to create similar platforms to share the life stories of people who are victims of war and violence, in various languages around the world.

The Work of Storytellers

Every day since October 7, Badarne says he or other members of the Untold Palestine collective team learn about a personal friend or relative who has been killed and/or receive an overwhelming number of stories from the friends and relatives of victims.

The work “is not easy”—and it’s unending, because the violence is unending, and the stories continuously keep flooding in.

“We publish stories about the lives of our friends and people that we know… and we don’t have the time to be sad about our friends,” he says. “All the time you must publish news.”

He notes that Untold Palestine’s photographers in Gaza are working under very difficult conditions.

“They suffer on two levels: First, they are photographers and they must [keep] storytelling, and tell the stories of other people,” he says. “Second, they must also care for their families—and themselves are victims.”

He says working as a media collective, rather than a top-down media channel, allows Untold Palestine’s storytellers, photographers, and videographers to mutually support and uplift each other.

“We try to give our photographers [on the ground in Gaza] power and support,” he says. “We work with them; we try to help them. We try to work together… to spotlight their photos and stories,” he says.

The Untold Palestine team mostly comprises people from Gaza and the West Bank, and most work as volunteers, while the organization is funded by donations. They operate under the umbrella Yura, a nonprofit based in Berlin. He says the collective is a mix of media and art, and that it hopes to increasingly fund itself through its own art rather than relying on outside funders.

For example, he shares that there was an exhibition in Berlin in early 2024 where they sold the photos of their photographers.

“While our goal is to become self-funded through art projects, donations play a critical role in the sustainability of our operations,” he says. “In addition, we have partnerships with organizations such as the IMS [International Media Support], the EED [European Endowment for Democracy], and the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation of Support to Human Rights Defenders, as well as individual donors and grants from other organizations.”

Badarne says another hope of the collective is to expand on the concept to include other places. He imagines organizations such as Untold Sudan, Untold Morocco, Untold Africa, and so on.

“Our goal is to bring this kind of model to other places, and also to bring more voices about people and life everywhere because we think that solidarity is the main way to change the narrative,” he says. He thinks the only real solution is to free Palestine, and the only way to do this is through global solidarity. And, according to Badarne, solidarity has poured in from everywhere as the platform continues to share people’s stories.

After sharing the stories of the lives cut short in Gaza, “still more people are killed” each day. This can be disheartening. Badarne says it is difficult at the moment for him and the Untold Palestine team, and that the situation has taken a toll, but that there is no time or room to rest and feel it or mourn, as the requests to share stories keep pouring in.

“You can’t rest, you can’t just cry for your friends that you’ve lost—and it is very sad every day to [read] messages and there are people telling you, ‘Please talk about my family,’ or ‘Talk about my brother, talk about this…’” he says. “This work is really a responsibility. You can feel so bad about the situation.”

Badarne thinks with time, the power dynamics will change. He says little changes have already given him hope and gives the example of mass protests against Israel’s actions in the U.S. that have been led by Jewish people, as well as protests around the world that are fighting for human rights and basic freedoms of the Palestinian people.

“My team and I, we think about it as this: we did our best; we did everything to bring the stories [to the world],” he says. “Every day that I see a new story on our platform, I believe more that we have hope. And because of the people that are still in Gaza, there is no way to stop talking about Palestine.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

_{April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications.}

‘War Crimes, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide’: If you were Palestinian, how would you respond? / By John Raby

_{^{Palestinians carrying some belongings walk past ammunition containers left behind by Israeli troops as they flee Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on Feb. 2, 2024. Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP}}

_{Portland, Maine}

As this column goes to press, the Israeli government has just charged members of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza with being active in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, has fired the people so charged and pledged a through investigation to determine the accuracy of Israel’s allegations. None of this news negates what is not a case of strange arithmetic, though it may be a case of strange fruit. The details follow.

Since last October’s start of the current war between Israel and Palestine, the Israeli armed forces have killed over one percent of Gaza’s population, with 63,000 wounded. Forty percent of the dead are children. Add the women killed, and the proportion rises to 70 percent. Among those still living, everyone is food insecure, and one-half are starving. Ever since December, easily preventable contagions have been spreading. Almost all their homes have been reduced to rubble. Ever since the Israeli authorities began restricting food, fuel, and medical supplies to Gaza starting in 2007, anemia and stunted growth among Gaza’s children have been commonplace. In one particularly grisly incident in December, an Israeli detachment ran bulldozers over sick and injured people who were taking refuge from bombardment in a hospital, crushing them to death. Among the dead were children.

If you were Palestinian, how would you respond? Imagine the same proportions in the United States: 9,300,000 wounded and 3,900,000 dead; of the dead, 1,500,000 children and 1,200,000 women; nationwide, all of us food insecure, with 165,000,000 starving. With almost all our hospitals flattened and almost no food, fuel, clean water, or medical supplies allowed in, how would we minister to our ill-fed, sick, and wounded? How would we deal with increasing disease? With almost all our homes destroyed, where would we shelter, now that it’s winter? Where would we put the corpses, and who would be left strong and available enough to bury them? As an American, how would you respond?

Then there’s the West Bank. Ever since 1967, Israeli settlers have been steadily shoving Palestinians off the land, demolishing their homes, uprooting their olive orchards, and from time to time shooting to kill or merely blow away their knees. This has been going on under the protection of the Israeli armed forces, who have joined in the shooting every so often, and who arrest and detain Palestinians without a formal indictment or due process as a matter of routine. Those so detained have often spent years in prison. It should come as no surprise that from time to time, desperate Palestinians have replied with gunsmoke of their own, on a scale far smaller than what Israeli settlers and the IDF have wrought.

In response, the UN General Assembly passed a series of resolutions in 1982, with only the United States and Israel voting no. Here are excerpts from those resolutions:

_{· That Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and from the destruction of their shelters.}

_{· That Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan, are illegal.}

_{· That all measures and actions taken by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory are in violation of the Geneva Convention.}

_{· That Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, its diversion of water resources, its depletion of natural and economic resources of the occupied territories, and its displacement of the population of those territories, are without legal validity.}

_{· That the Israeli occupation is contradictory to the basic requirements for the social and economic development of the Palestinian people. That hunger constitutes an outrage and a violation of human dignity.}

_{· That historical injustices have contributed to the poverty, marginalization, social exclusion, and instability that affect many people in the world.}

_{· That no derogation from the prohibition of racial discrimination, genocide, and the crime of apartheid is permitted.}

Lest all the foregoing seem like special pleading, consider this: how many of you have donated to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, or the International Red Cross? All five of these organizations see the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as war crime, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Meanwhile, the United States continues its unrestricted weapons shipments to the Israeli armed forces, all paid for with American taxpayers’ money. It all adds up. As was once written long ago, where our treasure is, there lie our hearts also.

_{John Raby is a retired history teacher and conscientious objector who is currently co-chair of Peace Action Maine. From 2014 to 2021, when he lived in New Hampshire, he was active with New Hampshire Peace Action and wrote the clean energy policy for New London, New Hampshire. He centers his activism around war and peace, environmental, and social justice issues.}

Why Israel’s War Is Genocide — and Why Biden Is Culpable / Seth Ackerman

_{^{Smoke rises during Israeli bombardment on the Gaza Strip on November 12, 2023 | Fadel Senna / AFP via Getty Images}}

Israel has made no secret of it: it has embarked on a genocidal plan to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” And Joe Biden is its accomplice.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Since October, Israel has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, an estimated 70 percent of them women and children, in what a leading scholar of aerial bombing has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Israel has been killing more than five times as many Gazans per day as the Nazis did, per capita, in the London Blitzkrieg. It killed roughly fifteen times as many children in the war’s first two months alone as Russia did in Ukraine in the invasion’s first eighteen months.

The Associated Press, citing analysts who specialize in mapping wartime bombing damage, reported that “the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.” Israel’s campaign has destroyed the homes of a third of Gaza’s residents, damaged almost two-thirds of all dwellings, and displaced 85 percent of its population, or 1.9 million people, through forced evacuations. More than ten Gazan children per day, on average, are estimated to have lost one or both of their legs.

The carnage is entirely deliberate. As a leaked analysis by the Dutch defense attaché in Tel Aviv put it, Israel “intends to deliberately cause enormous destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers”; this is what explains the “high number of deaths” among civilians.

Israel’s claim that the civilian destruction is the inadvertent consequence of strikes targeting Hamas fighters is merely “a fig leaf for harming the civilian population,” according to a detailed investigation of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) targeting protocols published jointly by the Israeli news sites +972 and Local Call. Citing “conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community,” journalist Yuval Abraham reported that the IDF’s established procedure is to identify the type of civilian site it wishes to destroy, such as a residential high-rise, and then afterward search a database to find some link to a militant group.

Within the IDF, strikes of this nature are called “power targets.” “If you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,” explained a former intelligence official quoted in the report. Official claims that such targets are tied to Hamas are “an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza,” said a source who was involved in developing targets in previous rounds of fighting in Gaza. “That is what they told us.”

“It Doesn’t Get Any Worse”

In the current conflict, Israel has devoted special effort to destroying hospitals — which it openly admits to targeting. Of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals, only sixteen remain partially functional, with occupancy rates “reaching 206 per cent in inpatient departments and 250 per cent in intensive care units,” the UN reports. “What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned. It was a plan to close down all the hospitals in the north,” said Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders.

In the first half of January, aid groups planned twenty-nine critical missions to deliver emergency medical supplies to the northern Gaza Strip; twenty-two of them were refused by Israel. As a result of its attack on Gaza’s health system, “doctors operate on screaming children without anesthetic, using mobile phones for light,” the UN’s top human rights official said in Geneva.

In addition to direct attacks, “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” Human Rights Watch reports. “Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.” Israeli inspectors turn away aid trucks without providing a reason, and “if a single item is rejected,” the New York Times reported, “the truck must be sent back with its cargo and repacked to restart the inspection process.” The security alibi is bogus: as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem notes, Israel is prohibiting humanitarian organizations from purchasing food from Israel itself, a step that would obviate the need for security inspections.

Alex DeWaal, a leading expert on humanitarian crisis response at Tufts University, wrote that Israel’s starvation of Gaza “surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years” in terms of “the rigor, scale, and speed” of its blockade of needed supplies and destruction of humanitarian infrastructure. According to the UN’s famine prevention unit, the proportion of Gaza households experiencing a life-threatening lack of access to food is currently “the largest ever recorded” by the organization, and if current conditions continue, by May a minimum of twenty thousand Gazans per month will likely be dying of famine. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed,” said Arif Husain, chief economist of the UN World Food Program. “It doesn’t get any worse.’’

He is not alone in that view. “Officials at humanitarian and health-care organizations with lengthy experience in major conflict zones said Israel’s war in Gaza was the most devastating they had seen,” the Washington Post reported in December. “For me, personally, this is without a doubt the worst I’ve seen,” said Tom Potokar, a Red Cross chief surgeon who has worked in conflicts in South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Ukraine.

“What’s happening right now in Gaza is beyond any disaster that I’ve witnessed at least in the last 15 years or so,” said Zaher Sahloul, a doctor who heads a humanitarian medicine NGO and worked in Aleppo during the battle for the city. Martin Griffiths, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, called it “the worst ever,” adding: “I don’t say that lightly. I started off in my twenties dealing with Khmer Rouge . . . I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before, it’s complete and utter carnage.”

“Stay and Starve, or Leave”

The reason the carnage is as great as it is is that Israel is trying to kill or expel as much of the Palestinian population of Gaza as possible. Its direct attacks on civilians are part of a larger plan: to create “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” as Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland, an adviser to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, put it. “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf,” the adviser wrote in October.

In the policy jargon of the Israeli government, this is referred to as “voluntary emigration.” It will be presented as a choice: in Eiland’s words, “The people should be told that they have two choices: to stay and to starve, or to leave.”

The “voluntary emigration” plan is not just a hypothetical scenario. It is government policy — although, as the pro–Benjamin Netanyahu newspaper Israel Hayom reported in December, “It is not discussed in these forums [official meetings of the Security Cabinet] due to its obvious explosiveness.” The plan was explored in an October 17 paper by an influential think tank close to the Netanyahu government, which spoke of “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip.”

The same conclusions were advanced in an internal Intelligence Ministry paper, which found that the “transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai” could “provide positive and long-lasting strategic results.” According to Israel Hayom, the prime minister has tasked his confidant, Ron Dermer, the minister of strategic affairs, to “examine ways to thin out Gaza’s population to a minimum.” At a party caucus meeting of Knesset deputies in late December, Netanyahu personally pledged that he was working to “ensure that those who want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so,” according to news site Israel Hayom, adding that the matter “needs to be settled” because it had “strategic importance for the day after the war.”

These objectives are widely understood within the Israeli government and military. “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future,” said the deputy head of the Civil Administration, Col. Yogev Bar-Shesht, on November 4. “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately,” said Energy and Infrastructure Minister Yisrael Katz on October 13. “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” said Avi Dichter, the former head of Israel’s internal security agency, on Israel’s Channel 12 news, in a reference to the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians.

By law, Israel’s supreme authority in national security matters is the inner ministerial grouping known as the Security Cabinet; its decisions are binding policy. Dichter and Katz are currently members, as are Netanyahu and Dermer. Adding the two extremist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, at least six of the fourteen members of the Security Cabinet are on record as being in favor of “voluntary emigration”; only three are generally believed to be opposed to it — Gadi Eisenkot, Benny Gantz, and Yoav Gallant.

“A Textbook Case of Genocide”

There is a consensus among scholars of genocide that ethnic cleansing does not automatically imply genocide, but that the two often go together. According to Omer Bartov, an Israeli American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, “Functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past.” From this he concludes that “the possibility of genocide is staring us in the face.”

There are many signs that this is already happening. Reports are multiplying of point-blank field executions of civilians by Israeli troops, such as a December 13 incident in which, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to Al Jazeera, “women, children, and babies were killed execution-style by Israeli forces” while they were sheltering inside the Shadia Abu Ghazala in northern Gaza. Or a December 19 incident, confirmed by the UN, in which soldiers “summarily killed at least 11 unarmed Palestinian men in front of their family members in Al Remal neighbourhood, Gaza City”:

The IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least 11 of the men, mostly aged in their late 20’s and early 30’s, in front of their family members. The IDF then allegedly ordered the women and children into a room, and either shot at them or threw a grenade into the room, reportedly seriously injuring some of them, including an infant and a child.

These reports can hardly be surprising: the Israeli command authorities have clearly communicated to their troops that the objective of the war is to rid Gaza of Palestinians. The defense minister has announced, “I have released all the restraints.” Moshe Saada, a member of Netanyahu’s party who sits on the National Security Committee of the Knesset, recently rejoiced that even left-leaning Israelis now agree on the need for a policy of extermination: “Former colleagues who once “fought with me on political matters,” he said, now “tell me, ‘Moshe, it is clear that all the Gazans need to be destroyed.’”

This is why other genocide experts, such as the Israeli historian Raz Segal, endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University, are more definitive than Bartov. “What we’re seeing in front of our eyes is a textbook case of genocide,” Segal said. The same terms were used by Craig Mokhiber, the New York director of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a thirty-year veteran aid official, who called Gaza “a textbook case of genocide” in his October 28 resignation letter. Fifteen UN special rapporteurs — senior independent experts who are neither employed by the UN nor nominated by any government — released a statement in November calling the situation a “genocide in the making.”

Biden’s Complicity

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli negotiator who has served several prime ministers, urged the Biden administration to exercise “the very real diplomatic and military leverage at its disposal” to push Israel to accept a cease-fire. “That demand cannot be one of rhetoric alone. The administration should condition the transfer of further military supplies on Israel ending the war.” The former Israeli ambassador to France, Élie Barnavi, made a similar point in an interview last month: “You know, we can’t make war without munitions or replacement parts for our planes,” he noted. “Either a solution will be imposed or there won’t be one. The Americans, upon whom we’re extremely dependent, can force our government.”

Joe Biden, however, has made his choice, however reluctantly: he’s supporting Israel’s operation. On December 29, his administration approved an emergency weapons sale to Israel using a legal loophole allowing it to go around Congress — the second time it had done so that month. “Despite Netanyahu’s defiance, Biden is committed to persuading him through private appeals,” the Washington Post reported last week. “There is no serious discussion inside the White House about changing the strategy in any significant way, according to several senior admin officials and outside advisers.”

The choice Biden has made has earned him the sobriquet “Genocide Joe” in some quarters — an epithet many consider unfair. They have a point. There should be no rush to judgment. Like Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, and the state of Israel itself, he is fully entitled to his day in court.

_{Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin.}

Pingree among House Democrats condemning forced transfer of Palestinians / by Dan Neumann

_{^{Rep. Chellie Pingree speaks on the House floor. | Via C-SPAN}}

^{Reposted from the Maine Beacon}

Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree is among a group of 57 House Democrats urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to affirm the United States’ strong opposition to the forced transfer of Palestinians from Gaza.

Last week, Democrats, led by Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, sent a letter to Blinken outlining concerns about the Biden administration’s mixed messages regarding its stance on whether it will allow Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

The letter comes as some in the Israeli government are floating proposals to forcibly and permanently transfer 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It also comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly rejected calls by the Biden administration for the future establishment of a Palestinian state, calling for Israel to be in control of the region from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

“Israel and Hamas are no closer to peace than when I called for a ceasefire months ago,” Pingree said in a statement. “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reported recent statements badly undermine the only path for lasting peace: a two-state solution. These statements call into question his government’s ability to end this war and achieve peace.”

Pingree joined the growing list of federal lawmakers who have called for a ceasefire in November, weeks after protesters were arrested in her Portland office demanding the First District Congresswoman take a stand. Pingree is the only member of Maine’s federal delegation who has called for a ceasefire.

Pres. Joe Biden and his administration have expressed their opposition to the forced displacement of Palestinians, which can constitute a crime against humanity under international law. Blinken emphasized this earlier this month, stating, “Palestinian civilians must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow. They cannot, they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.”

However, despite Blinken’s words, the Biden administration has refused to place any conditions on diplomatic and military aid for Israel, which enables the ongoing siege against Gaza where the death toll has surpassed 25,000 — 70% women and children. Earlier this month, South Africa initiated a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

Citing the worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, House Democrats urged Blinken to support the increase of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip.

“Due to the ongoing conflict, over 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly 80% of the population, have been internally displaced in the Gaza Strip,” the lawmakers wrote. “Worsening sanitary conditions, shortages of food, water, fuel, and medicines, and thousands of cases of acute respiratory infections, diarrhea and chicken pox reflect an increasingly dire humanitarian crisis.”

In the letter, the lawmakers also sought clarification from Blinken regarding Biden’s supplemental request for humanitarian and security funding, sent to Congress on Oct. 20. The request specifically sought funds to address the potential needs of Gazans seeking refuge in neighboring countries.

“In light of the President’s recognition of the importance of preventing Palestinian displacement, we aim to prevent any confusion or misinterpretation that this funding request could in any way signal U.S. support for potential transfer of Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip,” the lawmakers continued. “We ask for a clarification of the U.S. position on this question and that you continue to make clear American opposition to any forced transfer of population to both the Israeli government and the Palestinian people.”

_{Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.}

The Willful Distruction of a People / by Greg Godels

_{^{via MLT}}

_{Reposted from ML Today}

The US corporate media has maintained a near unanimous support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza– the home of 2.2 million Palestinians. While pundits engage in parlor games over what degree of violence is “justified” by the Hamas attack upon Israel, while public intellectuals fall in line with the gutless unconditional support of Israeli punitive actions, tens of thousands of Palestinian people– largely men, women, and children going about their day-to-day lives– have been killed, maimed, wounded, or terrorized.

Corruption, racism, and cowardice come together to produce a rare near-total US ruling-class consensus behind the brutal action of the ultra-right, ultra-nationalist, and racist Israeli government.

The enforcement of this consensus is unprecedented and a truly appalling sight to behold.

The highly publicized clash over even an embarrassingly tepid pushback by elite administrators at elite universities over free speech– a normally sacrosanct intellectual fallback– underscores the complete, unconditional freedom-of-action that Israel enjoys with the rich and powerful in the US.

While the machinations of donors and administrators at Harvard, Penn, and MIT should be of little more than entertainment value for most of us, the raw, public exercise of the power of wealth in shaping academic institutions should cause many to recoil. Those who naively believed in the independence and integrity of academia should be chastened accordingly.

Black Harvard President Gay would learn that neither her own elite background nor the thin armor of the faddish liberal DEI mutation of anti-racism would protect her from the vulgar bullying of wild-eyed Zionist billionaires and rightwing witch hunters.

Christopher Rufo, puffed up with his own role in bringing down Harvard’s Gay, concedes that he couldn’t have done it without the collaboration of the center-left that accepted any excuse to enforce support for Israel.

Despite the crude editorial endorsement of and overwhelming official enthusiasm for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, a different message has gotten through to the US populace. Whether it is the heart-rending pictures of death and destruction, the cracks in the carefully hedged and vetted news stories, or the alternative media, a bold, determined movement against Israel’s vicious assault on Gaza has emerged to challenge the ruling-class monolith. Risking economic reprisals, future status, and public shaming, hundreds of thousands– overwhelmingly youth– have stood and marched for life and a future for Gaza and Palestine.

It is truly a remarkable moment of crass opportunism, slavish conformity, and viciousness confronted by high principle, self-sacrifice, and courage. It is this kind of moment that forces people to examine how their words and self-styled image cohere with reality.

The facts are effective in awakening people to the brutal fate of Palestinians as a people. Because the Israeli government is so blatantly indifferent to international outrage, The Wall Street Journal is embarrassed to report the truth-on-the-ground in Gaza. Whether reluctantly or not, a recent front-page news story– Gaza’s Destruction Stands Out In Modern History (softened in the online edition to: The Ruined Landscape of Gaza After Nearly Three Months of Bombing) — describes an almost unimaginable living hell. Its lead is worth quoting in full:

_{The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.}

_{By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.}

_{Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.}

While most media mention the 22,000 or more deaths or the over 80,000 total Palestinian casualties, they dutifully treat the facts as allegations and with vastly more than warranted skepticism. Nonetheless, the numbers have shocked millions around the world.

But the WSJ article goes further, offering comfortable, secure readers a taste of what life is like for those not physically harmed by Israeli bombs:

In the south, where more than a million displaced residents have fled, Gazans sleep in the street and burn garbage to cook. Some 85% of the strip’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes and are confined by Israeli evacuation orders to less than one-third of the strip, according to the United Nations…

According to analysis of satellite data by remote-sensing experts at the City University of New York and Oregon State University, as many as 80% of the buildings in northern Gaza, where the bombing has been most severe, are damaged or destroyed, a higher percentage than in Dresden [the site of murderous firebombing in WWII].

The WSJ presents a set of facts and expert observations that are nothing if not damning of the Israeli tactics:

• Robert Pape, political scientist at the University of Chicago: “What you are seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history.”

• ” Some 85% of the strip’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes and are confined by Israeli evacuation orders to less than one-third of the strip, according to the United Nations.”

• ” He Yin, an assistant professor of geography at Kent State University in Ohio, estimated that 20% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed. Winter wheat that should be sprouting around now isn’t visible, he said, suggesting it wasn’t planted.”

• ” A World Bank analysis concluded that by Dec. 12, the war had damaged or destroyed 77% of health facilities, 72% of municipal services such as parks, courts and libraries, 68% of telecommunications infrastructure, and 76% of commercial sites, including the almost complete destruction of the industrial zone in the north. More than half of all roads, the World Bank found, have been damaged or destroyed. Some 342 schools have been damaged, according to the U.N., including 70 of its own schools.”

• Where the US dropped 3,678 munitions on the entire nation of Iraq in seven years, Israel has dropped 29,000 on tiny Gaza in a little over two months.

• On Gaza city: “‘It’s not a livable city anymore,’ said Eyal Weizman, an Israeli-British architect who studies Israel’s approach to the built environment in the Palestinian territories. Any reconstruction, he said, will require ‘a whole system of underground infrastructure, because when you attack the subsoil, everything that runs through the ground—the water, the gas, the sewage—is torn.’”

• ” The level of damage in Gaza is almost double what it was during a 2014 conflict, which lasted 50 days, with five times as many completely destroyed buildings, according to the Shelter Cluster. In the current conflict, as of mid-December, more than 800,000 people had no home left to return to, the World Bank found.”

To those seduced by a gutless media and a bought-and-sold political establishment, this picture constructed by one of the US’s most conservative papers should bring Israel’s crimes against Gaza into sharper relief; it should be painful to even imagine living under such conditions; it should remove the Gaza question from the realm of political debate to the basic issue of human dignity and survival.

Is there any humane answer beyond: Cease Fire Now!?

_{Greg Godels grew up in a working-class family in a rural coalmining community in the United States. He joined the Communist Party in 1975 and wrote frequently for the Daily World and other Communist Party papers as well as Political Affairs and Nature, Society and Thought. Articles by him have also appeared in numerous publications, including Communist Review (London), People’s Voice (Vancouver) and Socialist Voice (Dublin). He was joint founder of the website Marxism-Leninism Today and writes a highly regarded blog under the pen name Zoltan Zigedy}

‘Nothing Justifies Collective Punishment of Palestinians in Gaza’ – UN Chief

_{^{UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. (Photo: U.S. Mission, Eric Bridiers, via Wikimedia Commons)}}

_{Reposted from The Palestine Chronicle}

UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has said the onslaught on Gaza by Israel over more than 100 days “has unleashed wholesale destruction and levels of civilian killings at a rate that is unprecedented” during his tenure.

Speaking to the press on Monday, Guterres said “Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

The humanitarian situation in Gaza, Guterres stressed, “is beyond words. Nowhere and no one is safe.”

The UN chief criticized the flow of humanitarian assistance into the besieged enclave, saying “Life-saving relief is not getting to people who have endured months of relentless assault at anywhere near the scale needed.”

“The long shadow of starvation is stalking the people of Gaza — along with disease, malnutrition and other health threats,” Guterres warned.

He said he was “deeply troubled” by the “clear violation of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing.”

Security of Utmost Importance for Aid Delivery

Last week, Under-Secretary-General Sigrid Kaag began her work as Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza — in line with the Security Council resolution that demands “the safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

Guterres appealed to all States and parties to the conflict for their full cooperation as Kaag works with members of the Security Council and regional actors to deliver on the mandate set in the resolution.

152 @UN staff members have been killed in Gaza since 7 October – the largest single loss of life in the history of our organization.

Still, aid workers, under enormous pressure and with no safety guarantees, are doing their best to deliver inside Gaza. pic.twitter.com/2crouB2FqO
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) January 15, 2024

He explained that an aid operation in Gaza requires certain basics, foremost being security. Therefore, “the United Nations and our partners cannot effectively deliver humanitarian aid while Gaza is under such heavy, widespread and unrelenting bombardment.”

“We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. To ensure sufficient aid gets to where it is needed,” he said.

Only 7 of 29 Missions to North Gaza

Since October 7, 152 UN staff members have been killed in Gaza, “the largest single loss of life in the history of our organization — a heart-wrenching figure and a source of deep sorrow.”

Guterres also criticized the “significant hurdles” at the Gaza border, saying that vital materials, including life-saving medical equipment have been rejected with little or no explanation.

He also said the aid operation faces major impediments to distribution within Gaza, including “repeated denials of access to the north”, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain.

Since the start of the year, just 7 of 29 missions to deliver aid to the north have been able to proceed, he stressed.

“Large stretches of agreed routes cannot be used due to heavy fighting and debris, with unexploded ordnance also threatening convoys.”

He called for the release of hostages to be facilitated, warning that “the longer the conflict in Gaza continues, the greater the risk of escalation and miscalculation.”

Concerned about “a broader escalation between Israel and Lebanon” which could affect “regional stability,” Guterres concluded that “We cannot see in Lebanon what we are seeing in Gaza. And we cannot allow what has been happening in Gaza to continue.”

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 24,285 Palestinians have been killed, and 61,154 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.

Palestinian and international estimates say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

_{^{The Palestine Chronicle website was established in September 1999 and has grown in its importance and scope of coverage mostly because of the support it received from socially conscious and progressive scholars, writers, activists, readers and communities around the world.}}

Despair is the currency of massacre / by Lital Khaikin

_{^{All Out for Gaza demonstration in Montréal, Tuesday, October 17, 2023. Photo by Lital Khaikin.}}

How deflecting from the Palestinian humanitarian crisis to the ‘Israel-Hamas’ war enables continued apartheid

_{Reposted from Canadian Dimension}

“More than 20,000 Palestinians have perished in the new war,” reads a newspaper photo caption citing December’s death toll since the beginning of the Israeli siege. A young girl reading in a café remarks to her father, “Why? They call it a war, but it was an attack. Israel completely demolished Gaza.”

When Israel predictably bombs Palestinians every year, the episodic tragedy beckons many back to the writing of academic and literary critic Edward Said. Beyond documenting the cyclical nature of Israeli apartheid since the Nakba, Said’s essays anchor the politicization of emotion within the history of crisis in Palestine. What Said saw unravelling from the neglect—internationally and by Palestine’s own elected officials—of Palestine’s humanitarian crisis and the continuity of Israeli apartheid in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, has never been more urgent. The inability to address the racist and classist policies of repressive states is only adding fodder to reactive extremism and eroding ideological diversity in anti-imperialist resistance.

The Palestinian humanitarian crisis has long since been reduced to a story of periodic suffering and a media sandbox topic for the perfection of algorithms. Canadian policy-makers pay marginal attention to the daily reality of the IDF’s detention and murder of Palestinian civilians at Israeli checkpoints, inhumane medical and living conditions, targeting and murder of journalists, bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, and restricted mobility in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, now reduced to rubble.

In response to the massacre of around 1,200 Israelis by Hamas militants at a music festival, Israel launched the opening salvo of its assault on Gaza in October. In the months since, the siege has been rebranded as the “Israel-Hamas war.” A status update from the Times of Israel in December assures the world that the war is “almost half done,” while months of continued fighting are still expected. With December’s campaign against Hamas through a siege on northern Gaza, Israel is pursuing “full operational control” to continue expanding its illegal settlements. The Times founding editor David Horovitz has transparently described this as “a situation that is supposed to enable the beginning of a return and rebuilding of communities in sovereign Israel.”

For a nation pushed day after day against Israel’s wall of execution, this past year is on record as the deadliest since 2005, when the United Nations started systematically documenting Palestinian casualties. In the week of October 13 alone, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported the killing of at least 1,900 Palestinians and the injury of 7,699 people in Gaza.

Following the bombing of al-Alhi Hospital, Ramallah-based human rights organization al-Haq denounced the continued carpet-bombing of Gaza. Human Rights Watch called out the IDF’s use of white phosphorous munitions in Israeli airstrikes targeting Gaza and Lebanon in October. In light of this, Israel has still not signed and is not bound by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons which prohibits the use of the chemical weapons in areas with dense civilian populations.

Predictably, the United States rushed to provide a $14.3 billion (USD) military aid package to the IDF, one of the world’s most technologically advanced and well-funded militaries. And despite Justin Trudeau decrying Israel’s “killing of women, of children, of babies” in Gaza, Canadian military exports to Israel are nearly as high as during the First Intifada. Last year alone, Canada exported over $21 million (CAD) worth of military goods including bombs, torpedoes and missiles, aircraft, and electronic equipment.

In the initial weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza, protests in downtown Montréal shut down the streets from the US embassy to the steps of the Israeli embassy. On Friday, October 13, the groups Palestinian Youth Movement, Al Raya Dawson, SPHR Concordia, Academics for Palestine, and Montreal4Palestine organized emergency protests as Israel issued an evacuation order to civilians in Gaza.

Essential services have long been a weapon in the IDF’s arsenal, and, true to form, Israel cut off water and electricity to Gaza in October. While IDF Colonel Elad Goren proclaimed that there was enough water to satisfy humanitarian needs when Israel reopened pipes and about half the usual supply of water in October, Gaza had depended on Israel supplying roughly 49 million litres of water per day on average prior to the siege. Contrary to the IDF’s claims on fulfilling humanitarian needs, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) continued to report a shortage of food and water through November, and an outbreak of waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid.

With this dependency on Israeli infrastructure and vendors, Palestinians have long lacked sufficient access to clean drinking water. Some communities in northern Gaza, like areas of Beit Lahiya, have historically lacked access to safe drinking water for the majority of their citizens. Electricity blackouts are simply routine.

Médecins sans frontières (MSF) called for an end to the “egregious level of collective punishment currently being meted out to the people of Gaza” and for restoring “unconditional humanity,” emphasizing that medical workers and emergency responders cannot work safely in Gaza. The MSF reported that surgeons at al-Shifa hospital had been operating without painkillers. Medical and emergency supplies could not pass through the Rafah crossing in and out of Egypt, although it was eventually opened. Impeding the free movement of medical staff and supplies in conflict zones is in violation of the Geneva Fourth Convention and has been condemned by the UN Third Committee.

In the wake of the bombing of al-Alhi Hospital (Al-Maamadani) on October 17, Palestinian organizers called supporters to strike. In December, calls for a strike in Montréal continued. Several actions have taken place since, including sit-ins, vigils, the national march on Ottawa, and independent strikes like a Gazette columnist putting her collaboration with Postmedia on hold to protest Canadian media coverage of Palestine.

Palestinian trade unions—including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (Gaza), the General Union of Palestinian Teachers, and the General Union of Palestinian Women—have called on unions globally to refuse manufacturing and transporting weapons to Israel, and to lobby their governments to end military trade with Israel. Members of the CSU/SCP (the Canadian Staff Union, working at CUPE) passed a resolution to respond to the call from Palestinian trade unions, and to protect workers from being punished or silenced for opposing the Israeli occupation.

World Beyond War has called for an end to Canadian companies profiting from Israeli apartheid through the export of weapons, weapon components and military technologies. Labour Against the Arms Trade and Labour 4 Palestine have taken actions like blockading the facilities of Toronto-based INKAS, a company specializing in security technologies and armoured vehicles that sells supplies to Israel.

Many community groups and arts organizations across Montréal have shown continued solidarity through an open letter initiated by CERAS (South Asia Forum), with supporters including South Asian Diaspora Action Collective (SADAC), Québec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG), Climate Justice Montréal, and the Québec Writers’ Federation.

But ask solidarity groups for a comment on the current siege, and you’ll receive a statement that could very well have been unchanged for years, worn out by being ineffectually trotted out to the media. Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) shared a link to a statement decrying the distortion of Judaism in the service of Israeli apartheid: “It is time to draw a distinction between Zionism—the cult of right-wing Jewish supremacy—and Judaism, the Jewish religion of transcendence and tolerance.” Following the censure over the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in November, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) published the statement: “It cannot be inherently violent to call for your own dignity to be respected, and to label the Palestinian quest for freedom as inherently antisemitic or actively violent is Islamophobic and a form of anti-Palestinian racism.”

Year after year, the Palestinian humanitarian crisis continues to be mired in a war of rhetoric and the tired conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and the defence of Palestinian human rights with “terrorism.” Year after year, human rights groups like Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemn Israel’s permanent state of apartheid that continues without censure or penalty as the international community watches the Zionist state play bingo with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’s checklist of war crimes.

**_{All out for Gaza demonstration in Montreal, Friday October 13, 2023 | Photo by Lital Khaikin.}**

Why is there silence around the extrajudicial killings and political assassinations carried out by the Israeli right-wing fundamentalist Zionist government as it pursues the eradication of Hamas and rounds up Palestinian “military-aged” men—including Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab) correspondent Diaa Al-Kahlout—for detention, interrogation and torture at Beersheba prison? Does the targeting of Gaza’s Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, or the assassination of the West Bank’s Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouiri in Beirut, not deserve the same scrutiny by the UN as the extrajudicial assassination of Iranian military general Qassem Souleimani?

In Canadian media, Palestine cannot be said to exist as an autonomous political entity with an internal complexity of class struggle, labour rights, women’s rights, electoral politics, and its own renditions of political corruption. Hamas is only part of this story. Despite the exaggerations of Palestinian support for the extremist right-wing Islamist party and the discomfort it provokes, there are deeper roots to the past decades’ gradual shift in popular support toward Hamas.

A recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) reported that support for Hamas has risen in the West Bank; its leadership is more appealing than the prospect of governance under the Palestinian Authority, even without President Mahmoud Abbas at the helm. While Gaza burns, the West Bank has only flickered through the headlines as Israel killed more civilians between January and October than in any year since 2005. The majority of respondents want the current Palestinian president to resign.

That the name of Abbas has not even been uttered for almost a decade at Canadian solidarity protests is an echo of the disillusionment with political leadership in Palestine. Nor is it an accident that protest organizers in Montréal did not once invoke the UAE or Saudi Arabia when roll-calling representation from the Arab states at demonstrations this fall. The Gulf states are understood to be aiding and abetting US imperialism and the genocide in Yemen, and participating in the resource race for key trade corridors in the Horn of Africa.

The discontent of younger generations born after the Oslo Accords was apparent in a statement by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) in 2020 that called for the mobilization of young Palestinian voters and international youth movements against the incompetence of the Palestinian government under Abbas: “to affirm that the leadership of the Palestinian Authority does not represent our people and is outside the ranks of our national struggle.”

Abbas is keenly aware of the lack of support from the people he is supposed to be representing and defending: he derailed the anticipated May 2021 elections when he sensed an erosion of voter support in the wake of Sheikh Jarrah and Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza. Israel’s bombing of Gaza that month took out four residential high-rises and damaged thousands of civilian buildings, with growing incidents in Israeli settler violence reported the following year.

Arafat was similarly derided for being holed up in Ramallah as his government lost the faith and respect of Palestinians in the years leading up to the majority election of Hamas to the Palestinian parliament in 2006. In 2001, Edward Said wrote: “It is a self-sacrificing spirit of human and moral solidarity with his people that Arafat’s leadership so fatally lacks. I am afraid that this terrible absence has now almost completely marginalized him and his ill-fated and ineffective Authority.”

“It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings and cause,” he wrote the following year, days before Israeli forces razed the villages of ‘Abasan and Khuza’a. “There is thus no strong moral centre in the Arab world today.”

In the absence of international accountability for Israeli genocide and daily conditions of apartheid, it is no wonder Palestine has increasingly rallied behind the leadership of Hamas. After all, only one form of self-defence is justified: that of the oppressor defending their right to oppress. This much has been made clear in the Israeli and US refusal of Abbas’ negotiations for a ceasefire without “the destruction of Hamas,” as Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan described it.

Back in October, an open letter by the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Students stated: “The unfathomable crime of silence and complicity perpetuated by the entire world— including Arab and Muslim regimes under the oppressive power of American impositions—are openly supportive of genocide or mute witness to the crimes of settlers.” That silence has been decades long. Is it not a deeply Jewish question to ask how much longer a people are supposed to remain complacent in their own destruction?

The open letter ends with the observation: “[…] Now that our resistance has used guerrilla war tactics, we have now become the oppressors?!” This refers to the criminalization of Palestinian resistance to the apartheid conditions imposed on people in Gaza and the West Bank since the Nakba, and to the sustained dependency on the Israeli state for essential services, the right of movement, and even the fundamental right to exist. That the Birzeit letter refers to “guerilla war tactics” speaks volumes about frustrated and fruitless efforts to hold Israel accountable for decades of illegal settlements and police-state brutality, and the absurdity of the occupying state playing the victim.***

The unstable growth of support for Hamas is a negation, not an affirmation: the Islamist party’s religious fundamentalist core contributes to bolstering the Israeli state agenda of eradicating the last remnants of Palestinian autonomy and further incentivizing regime-change in the Middle East and North Africa.

Said predicted the erosion of secular resistance to Israeli imperialism in the years following the Oslo Accords—when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) renounced terrorism and Israel recognized its leadership. Said saw hardline religious fanaticism gaining power in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, emerging out of the corruption and ineptitude that shook faith in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.

“How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics, and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world,” he wrote, “as roundly and earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West?”

Despite acknowledging the reality of growing religious fundamentalism in the Palestinian liberation movement, he wrote on the conflation of criticizing US and Israeli imperialism with condoning terrorism: “Intellectually, morally, politically, such an attitude is disastrous since the equation between understanding and condoning is profoundly wrong and very far from being true.” Such conflation erases empathy and denies the “common sense of anguish” of people living in literal entrapment in the Palestinian territories.

As the Israeli siege continues through the Judeo-Christian holiday season, mainstream media has been turning its attention from the plight of ordinary Palestinians to the “Axis of Resistance,” a union of Sunni and Shiite militant groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (or Houthis). When the Houthis targeted Israeli-owned or -bound ships in the Red Sea with rockets and drones, this attack was described by journalist Rami Khouri as the “first serious coordinated battlefield action” by the Axis of Resistance beyond Gaza.

The most recent deflection from the Palestinian struggle for liberation toward the war against Hamas and the “Axis of Resistance” recalls the use of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as, in Said’s words, “stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination”. In the weeks preceding the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, Canada, Australia and other NATO allies, this association resulted in an “inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances.”

This fall in Montréal, lofty rhetoric of anti-terrorism spawned from the “Israel-Hamas” war followed the well-worn grooves from government statements and media language guidebooks to the streets. After a protest in October, drunken passersby on Sainte-Catherine street point and laugh at “les terrorists”: a group of laughing young women in hijabs walking with Palestinian flags.

Since October, weekend protests have become routine in downtown Montréal—another event to attend with friends on the weekend. Shoppers no longer linger as long beside the Palestinian flags, banners and keffiya patterning the blocks between the Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Victoria’s Secret storefronts.

Said was correct when he wrote back in 2001 that the US war against terrorism was stirring things up in “ways that might not be containable”. Where he was incorrect, however, was in his optimistic evaluation that “there is no way to continue indefinitely a thirty-five-year-old occupation.”

So it is that year after year, it takes the spectacle of massacre to bring attention to the indignity of life under Israeli occupation. While the written word itself is not enough to stop bombs, it is a conduit of memory, continuity and dignity in crisis. The written word preserves names when rubble is cleared, faces uncovered, and flags disintegrated. It exists to find sense in the senseless. It lends numbers to crimes, letters to politicians, and hope—as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “the twin of despair.” Darwish, who had criticized the extremist elements of Hamas, knew well what words, verses and songs meant in the face of inhumanity battling inhumanity.

There is no nation smaller than its poem
But weapons make words too big for the living
and the dead who inhabit the living
And letters make the sword on the dawn’s belt glitter
til the desert becomes parched for songs or drowns in them.

_{Lital Khaikin is an author and journalist based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). She has published articles in Toward Freedom, Warscapes, Briarpatch, and the Media Co-op, and has appeared in literary publications like 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Tripwire, and Black Sun Lit’s “Vestiges” journal. She also runs The Green Violin, a slow-burning samizdat-style literary press for the free distribution of literary paraphernalia.}

Six challenges for a tough year ahead / by Max Elbaum

_{^{Scenes of destruction in Gaza resulting from Israeli bombings with use of U.S. weapons are endangering support for Biden in his race for re-election. | Hatem Moussa/AP}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

A mass slaughter of genocidal proportions backed by the current administration is taking place in Gaza. A candidate espousing U.S.-style fascism has energized his base and makes no secret of his dictatorial day-one agenda. The opposition to MAGA is divided (on Gaza and immigration policy especially) and is not displaying the momentum anti-MAGA displayed at this stage of the 2020 campaign.

The people-power, energy, and savvy exist to regain the initiative. Different parts of the social justice movement will contribute in different ways. Here are six challenges that I think progressives must take on if we are to emerge from 2024 stronger than we are today.

Hammer home the danger—and look to what we can gain.

Keep sounding the alarm about the danger of MAGA while giving every component of the anti-MAGA majority a positive reason to vote against Trump.

Ignore all the pseudo-scientific polls—they are really just “punditry in disguise.” Instead, follow Michael Podhorzer’s lead and look at the results of the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections to understand the behavior of the Trump-era electorate. The key takeaway is that there is an anti-MAGA majority in this country that wins elections when it is motivated to turn out.

One part of providing that motivation is hammering home the nature and danger of the MAGA agenda: The GOP “Mandate for Leadership” plan promises to overhaul government policy across the board to serve an agenda of “all wealth to the wealthy”; to-do lines include plans to expand use of fossil fuels, and to use the Justice Department against political opponents (which includes rounding up leftists). It’s not just Trump: Liz Cheney’s new book reports in detail on the depth and breadth of the Republican drive to break laws and overturn what remains of U.S. democracy.

But fear of MAGA will not be enough. We will also need to convey what can be gained by a Democratic victory over MAGA and the ways defeating MAGA can increase the clout of grassroots-based and progressive organizations. To be effective, this kind of messaging must be focused and specific, sector by sector. For example, for winning workers of all racial backgrounds to vote against MAGA, stressing the pro-worker nature of the current NLRB and the prospect of it becoming an even more powerful defender of union organizing can be an important tool and something for other sectors to learn from.

On some issues, we can only make a strong case that there are gains to be made with a Democratic victory if we can push the Biden team to the left. Immigration policy, where the administration is considering caving to Republican pressure, and Biden’s “bear hug” backing of Israel (see next section) must be a focal point of progressive attention in the coming days and weeks.

These issues are of special concern to constituencies that have made decisive contributions to the anti-MAGA front in the last few elections: Arabs and Muslims, youth and especially Black youth, peace and immigrants’ rights advocates. Only a broad progressive movement that throws down in the spirit of “an injury to one is an injury to all” can move the Democratic leadership on these issues, and thus help bring the energy of these too-often-marginalized sectors into the high-stakes 2024 electoral battle.

Ceasefire now!

Intensifying pressure on Biden to join the rest of the world in demanding that Israel halt all military operations—with consequences if they don’t—is imperative. The pro-ceasefire movement continues to shift public opinion, and new initiatives such as the January 12-13 Emergency Summit for Gaza initiated by Jesse Jackson will squeeze the administration further.

Stepping up for elected officials who have come out for a ceasefire will be an essential piece of this fight. As of this writing, 56 representatives and four senators—all Democrats—have defied the administration and embraced the ceasefire demand.

AIPAC and other Israel Lobby organizations, fearful that they are losing the “bipartisan consensus” that has long sustained blank-check-for-Israel policies, plan to spend over $100 million to defeat the most outspoken of these (Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar) in Democratic primaries. As primary season comes closer, we can expect other pro-ceasefire representatives to be targeted too.

These primary battles will be the next major test of strength for the Palestine solidarity movement. If AIPAC’s assault can be beaten back, it will undermine the “fear factor” that is largely responsible for the big disconnect between sentiment at the base of the Democratic Party and the majority of its congress members. Such a victory would not just defend the foothold pro-Palestine sentiment already has in Congress, but provide a springboard to taking the offensive.

Gains in this battle would also bolster the case being made by this writer and others that our chances of beating MAGA are diminished unless Biden either changes course or steps aside in favor of a nominee not complicit in Israel’s genocide.

Don’t cede the fight against anti-Semitism.

Apologists for Israel—realizing that defending the country’s actions is a losing proposition—are steadily amplifying charges of anti-Semitism against the Palestine solidarity movement. In beating back those attacks, the Left has necessarily spent a lot of time and energy debunking the charge that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. In doing so, however, we have too often let ourselves get locked into purely defensive posture, which has made it easier for the apologists to advance the false charge that anti-Zionists care about what happens to Palestinians but don’t care about what happens to Jews.

We need to break this dynamic and go over to the offensive, making the case that the forces who are backing Israel today include the most diehard and dangerous anti-Semites: Christian Zionists who see Israel as prelude to a “rapture” when Evangelicals will go to heaven and Jews to hell, and white nationalists who see Jews as part of a “globalist” conspiracy to destroy America via “great replacement” through immigration. Further, the program of even the most liberal elements in the Zionist camp—a state in which Jews have special privileges and exclusive control the military and police—is inherently flawed.

It is the anti-Zionist Left—we who fight for equal rights for all in racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse societies—who are the most consistent opponents of anti-Semitism. It is our program, not theirs, that in actual practice as well as in theory means more safety for Jews.

The Israeli ethno-state —supposedly a guarantee of Jewish safety—provides no such thing, as its dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians is a recipe for constant violence and war. Diverse societies where fights for racial, gender, and religious equality have made even incomplete breakthroughs are safest for Jews. And it is these very gains that are now under attack in the US by white Christian nationalists who boast of how pro-Israel they are, as if this immunized them from being anti-Semitic

A lot more work is required to turn these thoughts into a coherent program and, more important, an action strategy. But now is the time to get serious about it.

Build internationalism.

The unprecedented upsurge of pro-ceasefire activism does even more than create conditions for a major leap forward in building a more unified and broad-based Palestine solidarity movement.

As the first sustained movement at scale with internationalism at its center in more than a decade, it underscores both the need and the potential to make an internationalist vision and practice integral to the life of progressive groups focused on domestic issues. It also has thrust the militarist and anti-human rights character of U.S. foreign policy in general into the spotlight, spurring discussions of how to revitalize peace and anti-militarist activism in general.

Again, a lot of thought and work will be required to take advantage of these opportunities. But the door is open at this moment in a way that it has not been for many years.

Seize history to explain our present and light our future.

The capacity to “shape people’s conscious and unconscious understandings of the world, of what is politically possible, and of their own place in the world” is integral to the fight for political power. Developing and popularizing a compelling narrative about this country’s past, present and future—one that “makes meaning” out of people’s disparate experiences and points in a liberatory direction—is imperative for a Left that aims to lead a coalition that can govern the country.

The rise of MAGA has led to new experiments in crafting such a narrative, often building on W.E.B. DuBois’ work centering the experience of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and on lessons from the Second Reconstruction embodied in the 1950s-‘60s Civil Rights breakthroughs. Peniel Joseph’s book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century, makes a major contribution. A new effort directly tied to grassroots activism, Two Americas on Contested Terrain: Constructing a White Supremacist Nation vs. Reconstructing a Rainbow Democracy, comes from Carl Davidson.

As we work towards strategic clarity and engage in the battle over the story of this country and its future, work in this direction has a lot to offer.

Keep hope alive: courage is contagious!

It will be difficult to meet all the challenges flagged here as well as others that face us in the tough year ahead. We will have to be real about the power of our enemies while remaining confident that appealing to the majority’s “better angels” can create a force that overcomes that power. In this effort, stories of what individuals can do in the face of adversity tend to have more power than even the most insightful analysis of each side’s strengths and weaknesses. We are in a moment when such stories abound:

Palestinian journalists working in Gaza are paying “a staggeringly high price these last two months for the twin perils of being Palestinian and covering the war. Those who have dedicated their lives to uncovering and sharing the stories of people who have suffered a 16-year blockade and have seen their Western and Palestinian colleagues killed, maimed, and imprisoned by the Israeli military and censored by its tech allies…‘It’s time for Gaza’s Journalists to be treated like the heroes they are.’”
“A young Israeli man was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days behind bars for refusing to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces as it wages a genocidal assault on Gaza, a war the teen condemned as ‘a revenge campaign… not only against Hamas, but against all Palestinian people.’“
“Black mother-daughter Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stood strong against the most vile life-threatening danger” after Trump toady Rudy Giuliani and a host of right-wing media outlets falsely accused them of ballot tampering. “People called for the two to be hung at the Capitol where witnesses could ‘hear their necks snap.’” They may never receive any of the $148 million the jury awarded them, but they faced down their defamers and won.

These stories gain even more power in the context of the collective courage being displayed week after week by people standing up, sitting in, speaking out, risking their comfort and careers—and in Gaza simply struggling to keep their families, neighbors and themselves alive. All these stories bring our inspiration and hope. Let’s lift them up.

_{Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board, and the author of “Revolution in the Air,” reissued by Verso Books. He is also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of “Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections” (OR Books, 2022).}

Unmitigated Horror: Guernica, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Now Gaza / by Melvin Goodman

_{^{Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY-SA 4.0}}

_{Reposted from Counterpunch}

_{^{“Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”}}

_{^{– Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2023.}}

_{^{“The painful commonality between the tragedies of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto is the utter disregard for human lives in a war setting by the citizens of even the most enlightened countries. Such disregard is so much more painful when it is committed by ‘our own people,’ whether it be American soldiers in Vietnam and Iraq or the Israeli soldiers in Gaza.”}}

_{^{– Alex Hershaft, A Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Washington Post, December 22, 2023}}

_{^{“Yes, how many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?”}}

_{^{– Bob Dylan, “Blowing in the Wind,” 1962}}

The Nazi bombing of Guernica, a Basque town in northern Spain, took place in 1937 during the Spanish civil war. The Germans were testing their new air force, and their bombs killed or wounded one-third of Guernica’s five thousand residents. Guernica’s agony was captured in a painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso; it is considered the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. The painting shows the suffering caused by modern war and brought the atrocities of the Spanish civil war to an international audience.

For Gaza, a Picasso would presumably use Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals to depict the terror and horror of Israel’s use of heavy ordnance. Just as the Nazi bombing of Guernica had a casual aspect, Israel’s use of its air force is casual in its destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, indeed Gaza itself. The use of U.S.-supplied one thousand and two thousand pound bombs puts the lie to Israel’s claim that the primary objective of the war is to destroy Hamas. The primary objective of Israel’s war is to destroy Gaza itself; it is the latest step in Israeli efforts over 75 years to displace Palestinian populations from the river to the sea. Israel’s right-wing war cabinet and Israeli Defense Forces are not taking aim at the West Bank, where the death count is climbing.

The Warsaw Ghetto housed 350,000 Jews who—like Gazans—were surviving hunger and disease, when the Nazi’s began their campaign of liquidation. In the wake of the roundup of Jews, the Nazis deployed tanks and heavy artillery to destroy the remaining 50,000 survivors and level every building, until the Warsaw Ghetto was no more. The Israeli destruction of Gaza is designed to ensure that Palestinians will have no place to live.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have put the lie to Israel’s claim that Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital was directly involved in Hamas activities and that the buildings of the al-Shifa complex sat atop underground tunnels that were used to direct rocket attacks and command fighters. The Post analysis demonstrated that “the rooms connected to the tunnel network…showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas;” “none of the five hospital

buildings…appeared to be connected to the tunnel network;” and that there was “no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.” The Israels lied, and the Central Intelligence Agency corroborated the lies.

Overall, the mainstream media continues to assist Israeli propagandists in making their case to an international audience. U.S. media consistently refer to last month’s killing of three Israeli hostages by Israeli defense forces as “accidental.” There was nothing “accidental” about the killing; it was intentional with the hostages being shirtless, carrying a white flag of surrender, raising their hands, speaking Hebrew, and posting SOS notices as well as scrawling “Help! 3 hostages” in Hebrew on nearby walls. The shooting may have been “mistaken,” but it was not “accidental.” The Israeli soldiers intended to kill the three men; they just didn’t know they were Israelis. The father of one of the victims poignantly asked why the IDF didn’t just shoot his son in the leg.

The killing points to an ethical failure in the IDF, according to Ron Ben-Yishal, senior national security columnist for the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, who has reported on all of Israel’s wars since the Six-Day War in 1967. These failures are predictable in view of Israeli racism toward Palestinans. Former Prime Minister Golda Meir’s dismissed Palestinians as “roaches” prior to the October 1973 war. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has described Palestinians as “human animals,” and “we are acting accordingly.” In this way, Gallant justifies the Israeli war crime of cutting off food and water to the residents of Gaza.

U.S. media have supported Israel’s line that the shooting of the hostages was due to the “fear and confusion” caused by Hamas’s “war of traps and trickery,” which meant that Israeli “troops were spooked and too fast to fire.” (The Washington Post, December 24, 2023, p. 1) At least, the Israelis are investigating the killing, and will have the assistance of an IDF combat dog with a GoPro camera that recorded the voices of the three victims. Of course, if the victims had been Palestinian, there would have been no publicity, let alone an investigation. We will never know how many innocent Palestinian men have been murdered in similar fashion.

The United States itself provides support for Israel by vetoing or abstaining from every UN Security Council resolution that is critical of Israel. Since the October War of 1973, the United States has vetoed more than 50 measures. When the Obama administration abstained from a 2017 resolution that declared Israeli settlements on the West Bank illegal, there was considerable congressional criticism. The United States last month even abstained from a UN resolution that merely supported additional humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Meanwhile, the United States has offered no criticism of Israel’s killing of more than 70 journalists and media workers, mostly Palestinian, marking the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Israelis have also killed more than a dozen Palestinian writers and poets. More than a hundred international aid workers have also been killed—some of the along side their extended families.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, one of Israel’s leading apologists, has merely stated that “we want to make sure that that’s investigated, and that we understand what’s happened and there’s accountability.” The killing of journalists is an Israeli attempt to ensure that the rough draft of Israel’s war is not recorded accurately. Even the Post referred to Blinken’s remarks as a “nothing burger of a response.”

Netanyahu’s legacy is secure. When Guernica, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Gaza are discussed and analyzed in the future, the Nazis and Benjamin Netanyahu will be similarly condemned.

Meanwhile, there is much for all Americans to learn. President Biden should think about Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election because of his belated opposition to the Vietnam War. And for a better understanding of Israeli apartheid and the miserable life of Palestinians on the West Bank, read Nathan Thrall’s “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Autonomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

_{Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.}

Commentary: The Death of Israel / by Chris Hedges

_{^{Birth of a New Nation – by Mr. Fish}}

_{Reposted from The Chris Hedges Report}

Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.

Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”

Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.

The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.

The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.

As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Infectious diseases brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.

The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.

Israel is a pariah state. This was publically on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.

_{Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.}

The Erasure of Palestinians / by Munazza Humayun

_{^{A man mourns as the shrouded bodies of loved ones killed during Israeli bombardment arrive at a Rafah hospital in the southern Gaza Strip on December 29, 2023 | Photo: AFP via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“The Arab’s” range of emotion is limited to frothing, fanatical rage. We refuse to see his grief.

At the trial of God, we will ask: Why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: Why did you allow all this?
-Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

It’s jarring to see someone you’ve broken bread with—a former colleague, an acquaintance, a friend—suddenly become a cheerleader for ethnic cleansing. It’s an experience I have had repeatedly since October 7. People who I had believed were thoughtful and kind were now sharing social media posts calling for Israel to bomb mosques, schools, and hospitals in Gaza. They responded to any whisper of a cease-fire with wrath. And their zeal for collective punishment of Palestinians has not abated over time.

The moral certainty of these people, completely ahistorical, is crazy-making. As I try to make sense of the madness, I keep returning to one word: erasure. How else to explain a roomful of people hissing at and shouting down a rabbi who did nothing more than call for a cease-fire? If the Palestinians—the humans with full lives who love and are loved and feel pain—don’t exist (or are synonymous with Hamas), we don’t have to complicate our care for the lives of Israeli civilians with care for the lives of Palestinians. Erasure quiets cognitive dissonance, and anyone who calls for a cease-fire can then be demonized as someone who doesn’t care about the only lives that are seemingly at stake: Israeli lives.

The erasure of Palestinians isn’t new, whether viewed in the context of their own history or as one example among many of the erasure of Indigenous peoples in various settler-colonial projects.* But there’s not just erasure. There is also a construction (or perhaps you could call it a form of erasure), the accretion of images, stories, and insinuations that create the Frankenstein’s monster living in our heads as “the Arab” (especially, but not exclusively, the Arab man). “The Arab” is the terrorist, not a brother or a friend or a nurse or a tween or a poet or a grocery store worker who feels terror when deafening explosions reduce his apartment building to a pile of rubble in the middle of the night. “The Arab” is never the kindergartener with the Spider-Man backpack. “The Arab” is unworthy of our empathy no matter how young, because—we’re told—he’s taught to hate from the moment he leaves the womb, taught to cheer the killing of Jews.** “The Arab’s” range of emotion is limited to frothing, fanatical rage. We refuse to see his grief.

The powers-that-be… want history to begin on October 7, 2023, to sever the event from all that came before.

The New York Times has published numerous stories about October 7. Reading them, one learns the names and ages of those killed or taken hostage in the October 7 attacks. You learn the names of their family members, what their lives were like before the attacks, and the details of what they endured during the attacks. You come face-to-face with their fear and their trauma. But there are hardly any such stories about the over 21,000 Gazans who have been killed since October 7. For more than a month after October 7, nearly every NPR story I heard about the October 7 attack began with the words “Hamas’s brutal attack.” I searched in vain for instances of the word “brutal” being used to describe what Israel is doing to Gaza’s civilians. Instead, I found an article entitled “The Brutal Calculus of War: Is the Killing of Civilians Ever Justified?” It does not characterize the massacre of Gazans as “brutal” (or as a “massacre”). Instead, it says this:

Targeting civilians is a war crime. But what if there are civilians in or near a legitimate military target? This is where something in the laws of war called “proportionality” comes into play. As in, the military advantage must be proportionate to the loss of civilian life.

This just about sums up the discourse. Wholesale killing of Israelis: brutal. Wholesale killing of Palestinians: well, sometimes these things are inevitable, aren’t they, so the correct question to ask is about proportionality. The reaction to the killing of Israelis: visceral. The reaction to the killing of Palestinians: wrapped carefully in euphemism, almost mathematical. The “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity” of a people that Edward Said described 45 years ago, continues.

Erasing a people also requires erasing history and memory. When you’re effectively banned from chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” what you’re being told is this: Don’t bring up anything pre-1948, or pre-1967, for that matter. Because if you start talking about history, you might start to see (among other things) the parallels between how Haifa was forcibly depopulated in 1948 and how Gaza is being forcibly depopulated in 2023: the warnings to leave, backed by the threat (soon carried out) of imminent indiscriminate bombing. Which is why, to borrow Arundhati Roy’s phrase, the powers-that-be always want to be the ones to “decide the most convenient place on which to airdrop history’s markers.” In this instance, they want history to begin on October 7, 2023, to sever the event from all that came before.

What do you do, then, faced with all of this? Do you close your eyes to the death and destruction being rained down on 2 million people? Do you quibble over whether activists should continue using a slogan that has become “controversial”? Do you accept as unremarkable the near-total absence of the Palestinian from the dominant narrative of what we’re witnessing? Or, do you use what you have—your voice, your body, money, access—to refuse to participate in the collective amnesia and erasure?

*For a history of Israel’s manifest-destinying itself into Palestine, facilitated by a consistent denial of the peoplehood of Palestine’s Indigenous population, see Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.

**What you won’t hear from those who dehumanize even Palestinian children this way, is that no group of people has a monopoly on tribal hate and indoctrination. See, for example, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, which chronicles a horrific school bus accident outside Jerusalem in 2012 and the apartheid that bred conditions ripe for such an accident and the resulting deaths. Thrall writes about Israeli middle school and high school students who openly expressed glee on social media when they heard that the accident had burned several small Palestinian children to death.

_{Munazza Humayun lives in Minneapolis.}

The Anatomy of Zionist Genocide / by Yoav Litvin

_{^{Image by Taylor Brandon}}

Reposted from Counterpunch

On October 7, Hamas fighters breached the Gaza prison fence, launching a coordinated attack on at least seven Israeli military installations and more than 20 surrounding residential communities. Over 1000 Israeli citizens, both civilian and military, as well as dozens of foreign nationals, were killed in the attack. Some 240 others were taken captive. Caught off guard and in disarray, the Israeli military responded to the attack in a frenzy, firing indiscriminately on breached localities, slaying Israeli captives alongside Hamas fighters in the process. It took the Israeli forces nearly a day to recapture all lost territory and secure the Gaza perimeter.

Following Hamas’s unprecedented incursion, Israel’s public relations apparatus launched a misinformation campaign aimed at inciting fear and fury and began to spread unverified atrocity propaganda. The campaign, involving tales of babies being “beheaded en masse”, “burned” and “hung on a clothesline”, helped transform the Israeli public’s shock into genocidal tribalism and diverted attention from Israel’s political, intelligence and military blunders that paved the way for the attack in the first place. The campaign also helped the government garner crucial public support for mass mobilisation of reserve units which made the consequent full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip possible.

After securing unconditional military, political and diplomatic backing of its imperial sponsors in the West, most notably in Washington, and under the pretext of countering Hamas and rescuing captives, Israel then initiated what has since been accurately described as an AI-guided “mass assassination campaign” in Gaza.

Ten weeks on, most of Gaza is now destroyed, nearly 20,000 Palestinians are dead with many more still under the rubble, and the world continues to watch a genocide unfold in real time. Examining these events through a behavioural-neuroscientific lens could offer insights into the Zionist settler colonialist dynamic in general and the particular motivations behind Israel’s current genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as potential paths forward.

The pillars of Zionist propaganda

In response to historical trauma, Jewish people have a deep fear of anti-Semitism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this fear, along with disdain for oppressors, led to the formation of autonomous Jewish self-defence groups in various geographies.

Zionism, a European colonial movement, recognised the potential of this dynamic. It syncretised Jewish longing for safety and self-defence with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies. This synthesis birthed a new, nationalist Jewish identity that equates Jewish safety with the construction of an exclusivist homeland in Palestine through the displacement of the region’s Indigenous populations.

Settler colonial endeavours typically depend on depicting the targeted territory as “uninhabited”, and its existing inhabitants as inhuman barbarians unworthy of any land.

This portrayal allowed Zionists to displace the Indigenous population of Palestine without moral qualms, portraying the establishment of Israel not as the destruction of a people but as the construction of a “villa in the jungle”.

Within the Israeli society grounded in land and resource theft, offensive aggression under the guise of “self-defence” (as in “Israel Defence Force”) has been rewarded and reinforced from the very beginning and consequently became a routine part of life. By reinstating fear and hijacking trauma associated with past and present negative experiences of Jewish people, Zionist leaders ensured the settler population’s continued support for aggressive, expansionist, hegemonic, genocidal policies and shielded their corruption and other criminal endeavours from public scrutiny.

To maintain Israel’s violently oppressive status quo and expand the territory of the settler colony, Zionists opportunistically conflated their colonial ideology with Judaism.

Citing divine dispensation, radical, far-right settlers have been encouraged to seize hilltops on Palestinian land, expel those living there, and form illegal outposts. These outposts are later fortified by the Israeli military and eventually “legalised” by the Zionist state.

Beyond justifying violent land theft, the conflation of Zionism and Judaism serves to delegitimise Indigenous resistance by equating any criticism of Zionism or Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians as an attack on Jews. Further, it hinders anticolonial resistance by portraying a political struggle over land and resources between occupying settlers backed by imperial forces and an Indigenous-occupied people as a supposed ancient religious “conflict” between equals.

This conflation encourages Zionist appropriation and exceptionalisation of Jewish victimhood. Israeli hasbara presents the Holocaust as an unparalleled genocide, granting Jews special victim status. This narrative justifies privileges, discounts and allowances for Israel as the “Jewish state” constructed to ensure the safety of Jews, at the expense of Indigenous Palestinians. Notably, Zionist revisionism often neglects and downplays Nazi crimes against other oppressed groups, including communists, socialists, Roma, disabled individuals, LGBTQI and African Germans.

The liberal wing of Zionism serves to whitewash the reactionary core of the movement and conceal its true objectives – expansionism and apartheid. Misleadingly, Liberal Zionists portray Zionism as an ideology aligned with democratic, progressive values and human rights, falsely projecting a genuine commitment to peace, justice and full integration into the Middle East.

Fear and genocidal fervour

Until October 7, Israel upheld its founding aspiration, enforcing a doctrine of endless occupation while oscillating between implicit and explicit forms of genocide, the latter often described as “mowing the lawn” in reference to Israel’s periodical attacks on Gaza since its 2005 “withdrawal” from the besieged Palestinian enclave. During this time, Israeli Zionists reaped the benefits of Palestinian land and its resources in a modern, affluent, supposedly democratic consumer paradise, fostering robust connections and identification with white US and Europe and oil/cash-rich Gulf monarchies, rather than its immediate neighbours.

On October 7, intense fear and shock gripped Israeli society, presenting Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government with a golden opportunity to quash rising dissent against corruption, and please his coalition membe rs with a genocidal land grab.

Fear in Israel is sustained through militarisation, anti-Palestinian narratives, reframing resistance as “terrorism,” remembering past atrocities, focusing on perceived threats and promoting segregation, ie, apartheid. Chronic fear induces symptoms akin to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), making the Israeli population prone to aggression masked as “self-defence”.

The toxic mix of fear, dehumanising propaganda, rewards for aggression and intense apartheid has bred a lack of empathy in Israelis toward Palestinians. Despite claiming the Gaza conflict as “self-defence”, Israeli leaders openly blame Palestinian society as a whole, essentially sanctioning collective punishment of civilians. Daily, Israeli institutional leaders mock Palestinian culture and cheerlead the torture, displacement and annihilation of Palestinians, revealing a disturbing genocidal mindset.

The path forward

On October 7, the carefully constructed Zionist facade of incremental genocide within a liberal/democratic framework collapsed, exposing Israel’s genocidal and fascistic core. Zionists in Israel and beyond did not mourn the end of this charade, and instead celebrated their newfound freedom to kill and destroy Palestinians without any restraint or pretence. This development not only poses a threat of elimination to the Palestinian people but since the Occupied Territories are used as a laboratory for the development and testing of new military technology and strategies, it could also set the stage for similar violent escalations against oppressed communities in the Global South as well as against BIPOC and immigrant communities within the Global North.

Israel’s genocidal behaviour in Gaza and elsewhere in historic Palestine resonates with patterns seen in the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience study. In the latter, individuals, swayed by authority, had administered potentially lethal shocks to other participants.

For Zionists to break their addiction to aggression, they would need to go through a process of deprogramming and decolonisation. This would require them to embrace the truth about the history and nature of Zionism, commit to sincere accountability, recognise the humanity of Palestinians, and empathise with their suffering and plight. Once the oppressive structure, Zionism, is disassembled, it can be effectively dismantled, paving the way for a process of rehumanisation and reconciliation through the use of empathy. Liberation, reconciliation and an end to Israel’s genocidal violence can only be achieved within a steadfast and unwavering anti-Zionist framework that aligns with wider leftist, antiracist, anticolonial values.

_{Dedicated to the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer.}

_{This piece first appeared on AlJazeera}.

_{Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience. For more info, please visit yoavlitvin.com/about/}