The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - October 2024 - Vol. XLIII No. 6
118TH CONGRESS HALLS OF FAME AND SHAME
A child's drawing from an Anera psychosocial support session in Gaza, created in response to a request from counselors to draw their daily experiences.
Over 625,000 children in Gaza have lost an entire school year. Instead of learning math and science, reading and writing, playing sports and musical instruments, they are fearing for their lives. Fleeing in a game of tag turned into fleeing bombs and military incursions. Multiplying and dividing in the classroom turned into calculating how much water their families needed to survive. This is no life anyone — let alone a child — should have to live.
“When we were forced to evacuate, we ended up living in a tent and I lost everything—my toys, my books, my home. My only wish is to return home and for the war to end.” – Mohammad
On Middle East Affairs
U.S. ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE
Resistance to Israel’s Colonial
Comes to Congress and the White House (or Leni Riefenstahl Without Choreography)
Voting Records: Congress Overflowing With AntiPalestinian Animus Jack McGrath
52 Israeli Forces Continue Their Assault on West Bank Palestinians with Impunity—Three Views —Kimberly Shamey, Gideon Levy, Amal Wahdan
From “Peace Talks” to Ceasefire Negotiations: How Israel’s Tactic of Political Deception Is Backfiring —Dr. Ramzy Baroud 17 Israel Killed More than 40,000 People in Gaza. What Does That Look Like? Al Jazeera Labs 18 Daily Life and Shattered Dreams in Gaza—Young Writers Share Their Stories—Four Views—Jumana Taiseer, Abdallah Nasrallah, Faress Arafat, Huda Skaik
72 Leila Hasan Al-Awawda: “Something Has to Change” for Palestinians—Eliza Dahlkemper
Workers Call Out Sector’s
Genocide Calls for Revolutionary Disruption in U.S. —Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler
“A Beautiful Vision”—A Conversation With Miko Peled —Matthew Vickers
ON THE COVER: Children head back to school everywhere in the world except Gaza. A boy wearing a packpack and pushing a bicycle with another bag on the handlebars walks past rubble and damaged buildings in the Tuffah district east of Gaza City on July 8, 2024. (PHOTO BY
Other Voices
The ICJ Finds That BDS Is Not Merely a Right, but an Obligation, Craig Mokhiber, mondoweiss.net
Israel Is in No Place to Talk About “Red Lines,” Belén Fernandez, www.aljazeera.com
My Dear Friend, How Did You Become a Story?, Tareq S. Hajjaj, mondoweiss.net
Sadistic Violence in War: The Israeli Aggression in Gaza,” Dr. Samah Jabr, www.middleeastmonitor.com OV-42
Israel’s Assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah Leaders Will Backfire, Ibrahim Al-Marashi, www.aljazeera.com OV-43
DEPARTMENTS
Compiled by Janet McMahon
The End of Israel’s Economy, Shir Hever, mondoweiss.net OV-44
AIPAC Had Some Recent Wins But It Isn’t Invincible, Aaron Sobczak, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-46
Canada Set to Revoke Jewish National Fund’s Charitable Status, Yves Engler, www.yvesengler.com
Gaza and the Death of Western Journalism, Mohamad Elmasry, www.aljazeera.com
Sonic Booms—The Psychological Warfare Israel Uses to Sow Fear in Lebanon, Mat Nashed, www.aljazeera.com OV-49
U.S. Soldiers Injured in Raid During “Non-Combat” Mission In Iraq, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-51
Students do homework after lessons at their tent school built on the rubble of their teacher’s home, in Khan Younis, Gaza on Sept. 3, 2024. See story on p. 22
October Marks a Year....
American
Publishers’ Page
We cannot sit idly by as the Israeli government deliberately commits genocide, starves civilians, repeatedly displaces 75 percent of Gazans and destroys everything that communities need—homes, schools, hospitals, water, sewage, communication, roads and power infrastructure. Israel is using our tax dollars and weapons to bomb Palestinians back into the Stone Age. The Leahy Law prohibits the U.S. from providing arms or military assistance to foreign militaries that violate human rights. Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) has filed a lawsuit demanding the U.S. Department of State release documents to the public related to allegations of human rights abuses by the Israeli military. It is in the American public interest for the State Department to do so.
We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know
While Israel has prevented U.S., international and even Israeli journalists from reporting from the Strip and killed more than 110 Gazan journalists and influencers, the news is available. The Washington Report publishes articles and photos from Gaza on our website <www.wrmea.org> and selects many to print in our magazine (pp. 1823). Ethnic cleansing is also ongoing in the West Bank, as well as land grabs, home demolitions, arrests and other atrocities (see pp. 52-57).
What Did You Do During a Genocide?
Students returning to university campuses resumed their peaceful protests and encampments this fall, reminding their classmates, “while you’re learning, Gaza’s burning.” School administrators welcomed students back to campus with new policies, changed their student code of conduct rules, barred protests near university buildings or other public areas on campus, or
banned protests that require individuals to gather overnight. According to the American Association of University Professors, these new policies “discourage or shut down freedom of expression” to “appease politicians” who call for a crackdown, putting campuses once again at the center of bitter free speech debates. Young people and their pursuit of justice and equity are unlikely to be deterred—and they’ll be voting in November.
Pro-Palestinian Protesters
Massive crowds of protesters went to the Republican and Democratic national conventions to urge candidates to stop the genocide. In the few weeks left until November elections, voters must continue to show up at every rally for every candidate to demand a permanent ceasefire and a ban on weapons transfers to Israel. Tell them to block the recent agreement to send $20 billion in fighter jets and advanced air-to-air missiles to Israel. We urge you to turn to pp. 26-38 and see how your legislators voted on recent bills.
Check Out the Congressional Scorecard
And then take action. Flood legislators’ inboxes, call, write letters, set up meetings and show up at rallies. If they are listed in the “Hall of Shame,” confront them and hold them accountable; if they are in the
“Hall of Fame,” send them a check with a thank you note to show your appreciation for their efforts to do the right thing in a hostile Congress. For a list of the pro-Israel PAC donations that steered these shameful votes, visit <www.wrmea.org>.
Protests In Israel
Israelis are also taking to the streets, demanding their government end the war on Gaza and bring the hostages home. In fact, this war is destroying Israel’s economy (see p. 44). Nearly 46,000 Israeli businesses have been forced to shut down and Israel is now a “country in collapse.”
It’s “Beyond Catastrophic,”
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, lamenting that more than 1 million people in central and southern Gaza did not receive any food rations in August. We mourn nearly 41,000 people killed in Gaza, the 94,454 wounded, as well as the endless ordeals faced by Israeli and Palestinian hostages. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is using time-tested delaying tactics (see p. 14), adding one condition after another to ensure that the deal doesn’t resemble the one Biden put forth, and Washington gamely (and disgracefully) goes along.
“Other Voices”—It’s Essential
Since the war in Gaza began, we’ve been including our “Other Voices” supplement in every issue of the Washington Report. Readers are urging us to keep that up, and thanks to our angels (see p. 90) we will! You are also making it possible to renovate and expand Middle East Books and More so we can do even more. (We hope construction will be complete before the holidays.) We must all work to build a better world in which justice, respect for diversity and the rule of law prevail and in which the dignity and rights of all people are respected. Together we can...
Make a Difference Today!
Palestinians search for survivors after an Israeli airstrike on the Safad School, where hundreds of displaced people sheltered, in Gaza City on Sept. 1, 2024.
Executive Editor: DELINDA C. HANLEY
Managing Editor: DALE SPRUSANSKY
Senior Editor: IDA AUDEH
Other Voices Editor: JANET McMAHON
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Middle East Books and More Asst. Dir.: JACK MCGRATH
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NETANYAHU’S USEFUL IDIOTS IN THE U.S. CONGRESS
The official death count from Israel’s war on Gaza approached 40,000 as a joint session of Congress repeatedly gave Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu standing ovations on July 24. Netanyahu defended Israel’s Gaza offensive and failed to provide any vision for ending the war. Nancy Pelosi tweeted, “Binyamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
But what did she expect? Netanyahu did not come to the U.S. Congress to end the war, but to prolong it. It mattered little to the applauding congressional members that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide—an order that Israel continues to brazenly ignore. They also ignored the ICJ’s advisory opinion that Israel’s 57year-old occupation of Palestinian territories contravenes international law. Even as Netanyahu delivered his speech, the civilian death toll in Gaza, made possible with U.S. supplied weapons, steadily climbed, including more than 15,000 children killed.
Yet, U.S. support continues to Israel, the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid—grossing $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance since its founding. On July 24, seven labor unions representing six million workers published an open letter to President Joe Biden demanding the elimination of military aid to Israel until it ends its brutal assault on Gaza. Congressional members and presidential aspirants should likewise heed this demand or otherwise deserve the title of Netanyahu’s useful idiots.
John
T. Fussell, West Hartford, CT
REMEMBER PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES
Next in importance after a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war is the release of hostages. But it is critically important to identify the hostages accurately.
The “hostages” include, of course, those captured by Hamas fighters in October 2023. However, as I see it, they also include all Palestinians held anywhere as prisoners by Israel—including those held now on the Gaza battlefield. This would include prisoners held without trial in “administrative detention,” as well as all Palestinians—including the hundreds of Palestinian children—held after some kind of “trial” for some kind of “crime,” as defined by Israel’s apartheid laws. Most are political prisoners, clearly hostages in Israel’s long war against the people of Palestine.
Consider that Israel is now criminalizing criticism of its Gaza war even by Israeli Jews. If Israel is criminalizing protest by Israeli Jews, think how “generous” Israel is about defining crimes under which to convict Palestinians. Until all Palestinians held prisoner by Israel are freed—and Israel agrees not to punitively arrest any more Palestinians, ever again—it cannot truthfully be said that all hostages have been released.
Peter Belmont, Brooklyn, NY
See p. 76 for more on how Israel treats the 500-700 Palestinian children it detains.
ISRAEL’S PROVOCATIONS AND HUMAN SHIELDS
Israel assassinates a Hezbollah commander in Beirut, Lebanon—and a Hamas political leader in Tehran—and the world is expected to believe that these are not provocations toward a wider war? Are we also expected to believe that Israeli forces can kill with deadly accuracy and flawless intelligence human targets in distant locations and yet “mistakenly” kills journalists, international aid workers, medical staff and helpless civilians close at hand in Gaza and the West Bank?
Meanwhile, there is always talk about Hamas and Palestinians using their citizens as “human shields.” On closer inspection, one could argue that Israel uses its entire population as “human shields”— although no one ever mentions it. While Hamas is embedded in Gaza, Israel’s entire armed forces are embedded
throughout the country. Its military headquarters is located in the center of civilian Tel Aviv. Israel pushes illegal settlers and settlements deep into Palestinian territory as front-line human shields against peace and a Palestinian state, and then protects and heavily arms them.
The main difference would be that Israel can strike Hamas and West Bank Palestinians with impunity, equipped with the world’s most sophisticated weapons, all mostly financed by the United States and Western Europe. Meanwhile, Hamas strikes back with inaccurate, mostly antiquated homemade missiles, stones and slings, burning rubber tires, fiery kites and sadly now a poorly conceived, chaotic and unjustifiable border attack with machine guns, bazookas, small vehicles and motorcycles.
It is sad and deplorable that Hamas walked into such a trap that exposed its inhumane and disorganized brutal side for all to see. This has simply provided Israel with the justification to decimate the entire Gazan population, to upscale its attacks and demolitions in the West Bank and to even spread the conflict into neighboring countries.
By claiming the right of “defending itself,” Israel deflects the inhumane brutality of its own actions, and the world looks the other way. If Hamas was as wellequipped as Israel’s armed forces and rained death and destruction upon Israel at the level that Israel does to Gaza, would people claim that Israel is using its own people as human shields? One must wonder.
Ken Green, Cooper Landing, AK
For an alternative view, see Ida Audeh’s article on p. 8, which defends the Palestinian resistance.
JNF’S LOSS OF CANADIAN CHARITABLE STATUS
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) has operated in Canada for over 100 years, accepting charitable donations from Canadians who support the state of Israel, its goals and actions. While the JNF does raise funds to plant trees and build infrastructure in Israel, its main objective is buying so-called state land in Israel and restricting its sale and use to Israeli Jews. Much of the JNF-owned land had previously been seized from Palestinian farm-
KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS COMING!
Send your letters to the editor to the Washington Report, P.O. Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009 or e-mail <letters@wrmea.org>.
ers under obscure Ottoman-era laws, allowing the state to declare fallow fields to be abandoned by their owners.
Many of the over 500 Palestinian towns and villages destroyed in 1948, 1967 and later are covered by trees and vegetation of European origin, possibly to obscure the former cultivation of olives, citrus fruit and other plants by Palestinian farmers driven off by Zionists.
It is not so-called antiJewish racism that caused the JNF’s loss of charitable status, but its active role in supporting questionable and often illegal Israeli territorial seizures.
Morgan Duchesney, Ottawa, Canada
For more on Canada’s decision to revoke the JNF’s charitable status, see Candice Bodnaruk’s article on p. 64 and Yves Engler’s article in “Other Voices” on p. 47.
THOUGHTS ON ISRAEL’S BLACK PANTHERS
Matthew Vickers’ review of Israel's Black Panthers was very interesting and informative. I look forward to more writing from Mr. Vickers’ pen. I was, however, left with a couple of questions about the scope of the book:
Does it describe what motivated Arab Jews from Morocco, Iraq, Egypt or elsewhere to move to Israel? It’s my understanding that very few of them believed in Zionism. Rather, they were driven out of their home countries by the polarization generated and stoked by Zionist ethnic cleansing of non-Jews during the Nakba and ever after.
Second, how does the book explain why the Panthers’ cause fizzled in the end—to the point where Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews became particularly notorious in their hostility to Palestinians, who would have been happy to help them fight Israel’s anti-Arab racism?!
Given Vickers’ persuasive endorsement of author Asaf Elia-Shalev’s book, these questions just make me more eager to pick it up.
Steve France, Cabin John, MD ■
OTHER VOICES is an optional 16-page supplement available only to subscribers of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. For an additional $15 per year (see postcard insert for Washington Report subscription rates), subscribers will receive Other Voices inside each issue of their Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Back issues of both publications are available. To subscribe, telephone (800) 607-4410, e-mail <circulation@wrmea. org>, or write to P.O. Box 292380, Kettering, OH 45429.
Palestinian Resistance to Israel’s Colonial Dismemberment of Palestine
By Ida Audeh
A wife and children mourn 0ver a body brought to the al‐Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for burial in Deir al‐Balah, Gaza on Aug. 18, 2024.
I told them Ali is 6 years old. They gave me an 18 kilogram bag of body parts.
—A parent who survived the Gaza City massacre at al-Tabin school, Aug. 10
You Arabs, I don’t know what to say about you. Children are dying under the rubble. Their hands are severed, their legs are torn, their heads are crushed. To every Arab and foreigner who sees us: What blood runs in your veins? From what clay are you made?...I have one word to say: I will not forgive you in this life or the next.
—A child who witnessed the Al-Daraj massacre in Gaza City on Aug. 10, reported on Resistance News Network
Israel’s agenda—of leaving historic Palestine empty of Palestinians—has been advanced from an ultimate, distant goal to an urgent, immediate one.
—Jonathan Cook, writing in Middle East Eye on July 19
FOR NEARLY A YEAR, the world has watched in horror and disbelief as Israel has bombed, executed and starved the besieged
Palestinians in Gaza and demolished everything they have worked so hard to create—universities, hospitals, homes, neighborhoods, institutions, communities and neighborhoods. Much of that horror stems from incredulity that countries that might have stopped Israel’s genocidal rage have chosen to either passively do nothing or, like the United States and Germany, actively aid and abet the genocide by providing the ammunition and offering diplomatic protection to the killers. In such a sickening context, it is no surprise that the people around the world sympathize with the Palestinian people—how can they not, when citizens turned journalists are, at great personal risk, livestreaming their own genocide, sending videos and images out to the world in hope that they will arouse the world to act?
People around the world stand in solidarity with Palestinians at this moment of tremendous suffering. But solidarity that does not support the Palestinian resistance misses the meaning of this moment and is no solidarity at all.
Palestinians are doing more than enduring a savage, ongoing genocide, unprecedented in recent times. They are also waging an anti-colonial struggle. It is truly remarkable that from the Gaza Strip— a piece of land only 139-square-miles large, besieged and blockaded for 17 years and under repeated assault even before this genocide—fighters have emerged who are determined to ensure that their people take their place among the nations of the world. During the first month of the war, Israel dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on Gaza. And now, one year later, the Palestinian resistance is still strong; no area of the Gaza Strip is safe for Israeli soldiers to roam. Not a single Israeli war aim has been achieved.
ISRAEL UNMASKS ITSELF AS A RUTHLESS KILLING MACHINE
An Electronic Intifada story published on July 15 tells of Muhannad al-Jamal, who was detained by Israeli soldiers, together with his mother, who was on a stretcher. Her stretcher was placed on the ground, and he watched as an Israeli tank ran over her. When he was able to escape, he returned to his mother and found that wild dogs were eating her flesh.
Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report
PHOTO BY ALI
By December 2023, UNICEF estimated that at least 1,000 Palestinian children had lost a limb—a limb that was amputated without anesthesia, because Israel has denied medical supplies to Gaza’s hospitals. On average, 10 children a day undergo amputations in Gaza without anesthesia.
And in a concentration camp set up in Israeli territory just outside the Gaza Strip, Palestinian captives are tortured and starved and also undergoing amputations of limbs—by Israelis who are not surgeons, and who have access to anesthesia but prefer not to use it when operating on Palestinian bodies.
Israel has been brutal in the way it has dismembered the land of Palestine. It severed 78 percent of the territory when it created the state in 1948, and in 1967 it focused on the remaining 22 percent, severing Gaza from the rest of Palestine, making Jerusalem inaccessible to most Palestinians, and fragmenting the West Bank through a combination of control and land grab mechanisms: more than 200 Jewish-only colonies, more than 700 checkpoints and road barriers, and a Separation Wall that encloses communities and separates Palestinians from one another. All of these mechanisms make it easy for Israel to lay siege to Palestinian towns and villages as it is doing right now.
But if Israel has been brutal in its desecration of the land of Palestine (and the current war in Gaza rises to the level of ecocide), it has been positively savage in the ways it has dismembered and otherwise abused Palestinian bodies. It is hard to get reliable data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza because so many bodies are buried in the rubble. The Palestinian Health Ministry gives an estimate of almost 40,000 dead as of Aug. 1. However, a June 19, 2024 article published in the Lancet argued that the true figure could be higher than 186,000, if one considers direct and indirect deaths (e.g., deaths caused by conditions that would not be fatal under normal circumstances). If that estimate is correct, and assuming a prewar population of 2.2 million, Israel killed a whopping 8 percent
Body bags are unloaded from a truck to be buried in a mass grave at Tel al
Sultan Cemetery in Rafah, Gaza on Dec. 26, 2023. Israeli forces used the Karm Abu Salem border crossing to release the bodies of 80 Palestinians they had killed and kept after ground assaults in Gaza.
of the population of Gaza in 10 months of livestreamed genocide aided materially and enthusiastically by the United States and Germany, two unrepentant countries with several genocides under their belts.
Israel appears to be toying with more than 2 million residents in Gaza, ordering them around from one area of the Gaza Strip to another, claiming that one area is safe and then strafing it when it reaches capacity, declaring (to one another, but not to Palestinians) that some areas are no go zones and then killing Palestinians who wander into them. Wherever Israel goes, it burns and dismembers Palestinian bodies—in displacement camps, U.N. shelters, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques and churches.
A little girl, no older than 10, looks into the camera and tells how her father left the family to get flour one day: “He was gone for a long time. My cousin came to us and told us that the tower had been bombed and my father and uncle had been martyred. The next day their bodies were brought to us. My father’s eyes had been gouged, his tongue cut.”
—Quds Feed (Telegram channel), January 22, 2024
Children as young as five express a preference for death, the head of Doctors Without Borders told the U.N. Security Council in February. Many have seen their family members dismembered before their eyes. It is common to see adults carrying bags of body parts for burial.
HELPING THEMSELVES TO PALESTINIAN BODY PARTS
On Nov. 26, 2023, the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel was stealing bodies from mass graves and then returning them. Medical professionals who examined the returned bodies found that some of them were missing organs—livers, kidneys, hearts and corneas.
In fact, reports of organ theft date at least to the First Intifada, when Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli occupation army and then released to the family hours or days later, only after securing promises that the burial would be conducted quicky and at night. In her 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies, Israeli doctor Meira Weiss disclosed that organs taken from dead Palestinians were used in medical research. The former head of Israel’s Abu Kabir Institute
of Forensic Medicine, Yehuda Hess, reported that Israel helps itself to “human tissues, organs and skin” from Palestinians it kills. Back in 2008, CNN reported that Israel is a key player in the global (and illegal) trade in human organs. It is a safe bet that many of those organs are taken from Palestinians it kills—which demonstrates Israeli ingenuity in finding ways to turn its killing of Palestinians into a money-making venture.
DEMANDING THE RIGHT TO RAPE PALESTINIAN BODIES
There is no way to sugar coat this: Israelis openly assert the right to rape Palestinians.
In Sde Teiman, a torture center in Israel, Gazan men are tortured, often to death— not to extract information about the resistance (which they are unlikely to have anyway), but as an end in itself. Sometimes Israeli civilians are invited to film the torture on their phones.
In these black sites, Palestinians are beaten, urinated on, experimented on, operated on without anesthesia, starved and raped. Reports have surfaced, not only from released Palestinians but also from Israeli whistleblowers, that Palestinian men are raped with sharp objects. In one publicized case of a gang rape that was livestreamed, Israeli civilians and Knesset members rushed to free the alleged rapists from where they were being held for questioning, defending the rights of Israeli soldiers to do that and more.
Electronic Intifada reported in 2017 that the Chief Rabbi of Safad, Shmuel Eliyahu, had advocated in 2002 that Israeli soldiers be allowed to rape non-Jewish women during wartime, apparently as a way to keep their morale high. The same rabbi was equally tolerant of genocide. What differs today is that Israelis are willing to take to the streets and to discuss in the Knesset their right to rape, in yet another indication of the depraved Israeli national psyche. Israel is alone among nations where its army’s savagery is known to and fully endorsed by the majority of the population.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE
The Palestinian militias resisting Israel’s killing machine in Gaza include several groups operating under a joint command: Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, by far the largest fighting force; the Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades; Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades; the Popular Resistance Committee’s Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades; and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s National Resistance Brigades. In the West Bank, the Lions’ Den and Mujahideen Brigades are active as well.
Axios reported on May 14, 2024 that Hamas had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters at the beginning of the war and cites “Israeli intelligence assessments” that claim that 18 out of 24 fighting battalions have been dismantled. A June 6, 2024 article published on the Reuters site cited U.S. officials who claimed that the resistance relies on only 9,000 to 12,000 Palestinian fighters in Gaza. It is not clear what these assessments are based on; certainly the performance of the resistance does not suggest a diminished fighting force. In fact, a study by CNN in early August found evidence of a Hamas resurgence; using Israel’s estimate of 24 Hamas battalions, CNN analysts studied 16 of them in northern and central Gaza and found that only two had been “destroyed.”
The resistance claims that it cannot absorb all the volunteers wanting to fight since the war began. This sounds credible: since Israel targets civilians, one is equally likely to be killed in a displacement camp as in combat, so taking up arms to defend your community against the invaders does not expose you to additional risk. And then, there is the rage factor: Israel believes that killing civilians puts pressure on the resistance to accept unfavorable conditions for a ceasefire, when in fact the opposite is true. The fighters are local, not foreign imports (and according to some reports, 60 percent of them have been orphaned in previous Is-
raeli assaults on Gaza); their families are being slaughtered, their children starved, their towns demolished, and everywhere the stench of decomposing bodies hovers. All of these conditions fuel rage and stiffen the backbone. If Israel unleashes such demonic savagery when it faces resistance, one can imagine what it is capable of doing if its power were not being challenged.
The resistance has been sustained for almost a year already, and there is no evidence of combat fatigue, as there is in the demoralized Israeli army. Israeli soldiers are effective demolition forces, dynamiting universities and hospitals, and they wantonly destroy homes and take selfies with blindfolded Palestinians, but they cannot find the Israeli prisoners of war and show no sign that they are even trying to.
The Palestinian resistance in Gaza is nothing short of epic. It uses weapons it makes locally, which bear the name of leaders who helped develop them or those it wishes to honor. In the operations videos released by the resistance, discussed in weekly Electronic Intifada podcasts by military analyst Jon Elmer, we see that fighters plan complex operations meticulously and are deliberate about their choice of weapon, displaying confidence. We see the fearlessness with which they place explosives on tanks, making it back to their base before the tank explodes. We see the skill with which they use the massive rubble created by Israel’s destruction of buildings to hide their advances. We see them hold their fire when medical evacuations take place, even though the enemy has made it a point to destroy hospitals, commandeer sections of them for variable lengths of time, and leave mass graves in its wake.
PALESTINIANS FIGHT FOR MORE THAN JUST AN END TO THE GENOCIDE
Some supporters of Palestinians who are appalled by the genocide in Gaza may be reluctant to vocally support the Palestinian resistance because it is led by Islamist parties. It is past time that such supporters get
over their squeamishness. Palestinian society, by and large, is not a secular society, and so it is unlikely to produce a secular resistance that gains widespread traction, as the Islamists have managed to do. If one truly supports Palestinian rights and opposes colonialism, then one must support the fighters who put their lives on the line to defend those rights against the combined forces of Israel, the U.S., Germany, and other weapons suppliers and political allies.
The reasons for that reluctance need to be examined. Some people might have genuine differences with the political ideology of Islamists, but even that is not sufficient reason to withhold support from movements that are fighting a savage enemy against such overwhelming odds. Others, perhaps the majority, think of themselves as secular and thus as a matter of principle can’t support those with an ideology rooted in faith. Such people need to explore whether their “principled opposition” is really just another way of saying that they share their government’s disdain for Islam. Finding oneself on the
side of the U.S. government on a foreign policy issue should give one pause: the U.S. government has never supported any people’s just rebellion against an oppressive regime. Even Israel’s killing of 234 unarmed Palestinian civilians during the 2018-19 Great March of Return in Gaza did not prompt the U.S. to rebuke Israel. No form of resistance by people in the Global South against Western hegemony, whether armed or unarmed, is acceptable to the U.S.
This is precisely the moment to break out of the parameters of discourse permitted in Western countries. People are rebelling against all structures and policies that keep them oppressed and that benefit only the ruling class, ranging from unending wars to income inequality, racialized policing, and environmental catastrophe. The attempt to hold up Hamas as a bogeyman to be defeated must be rejected out of hand, because the twin genocidaires promoting this propaganda line— Israel and the United States—cannot be trusted: they will always demand acquiescence to their power.
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The Palestinian resistance fights for a cause—an end to foreign colonization, an end to Israeli impunity, which threatens every single non-Jew in historic Palestine. They fight to free the more than 9,000 Palestinians being tortured in Israeli prisons and to relieve the torment of their families. They fight to live freely on their land and to watch their loved ones thrive. Israelis on the other hand fight to maintain the principle of Jewish supremacy in Palestine—a principle that never made sense in the Arab world and cannot be defended in the 21st century.
Palestinians are tired of being at the mercy of a vicious and supremacist entity that kills, maims, rapes, starves and immobilizes them and desecrates the land. They are determined to end this foreign domination now. It is past time to bring such an unnatural regime to an end. Just as apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany were stripped of the ideologies that made them so toxic, Palestinians fight for a country free of the toxicity of Zionism, from the river to the sea. It is a just goal, a noble goal, and it is within sight. ■
Netanyahu Comes to Congress and the White House (or Leni Riefenstahl Without Choreography)
By Bruce Fein
In revenge for the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich (a principal architect of the Holocaust) by Czech underground fighters on May 27, 1942, Adolph Hitler’s forces annihilated the Czech town of Lidice, on June 10, 1942, shooting dead the men and transferring the surviving women to a concentration camp. The 90 surviving children were screened, found “racially pure” and were dispersed through Germany to be renamed and raised as Germans.
LENI RIEFENSTAHL’S 1935 German Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” is the apotheosis of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. That is what comes to mind in perusing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Joseph Goebbels-like jumbo lies to a starstruck Congress on July 24, followed by White House visits, both intoxicated with the vision of campaign contributions and expenditures courtesy of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The lies, distortions or misleading omissions gushed like Niagara Falls. Even prominent Israelis, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, advised against the congressional invitation in a New York Times column on June 26, 2024.
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and author of American Empire Before The Fall . He is currently an international and constitutional lawyer <www.law officesofbrucefein.com>.
Netanyahu’s opening sentence sets the stage: “We meet today at a crossroads of history.” Really?
Not the United States. We face no existential threats. We boast “the most powerful arsenal in the world. The United States sports a $1.5 trillion annual national security budget. Our closest rival is not within shouting distance. All our threats are self-generated— searching abroad for hornets’ nests to break open and then shrieking for trillions of dollars to fight the enemies we awakened. We can slash military spending by at least 50 percent and become the safest country in the world by returning to the Constitution’s policy of invincible self-defense and exacting neutrality in all foreign conflicts. The United States survived and flourished for more than 150 years before Israel’s birth in 1948—and that included two world wars. And Israel was useless to the United States during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.
Israel created a headache for the United States with the Arab world by its ill-conceived military misadventure with the United Kingdom and France to oust Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956. Not to mention Israel’s responsibility in 1967 for an air and sea attack on the USS Liberty, which killed 34 and wounded more than 170 Americans. Israel’s victory in 1967 created a steady stream of crises for the U.S., which have cost it politically and diplomatically.
In other words, our fate is not tied to Israel’s, unless we stupidly make it so, the classic case of the tail wagging the dog.
Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu does stand at a crossroads. Its democratic credentials are crumbling by the minute. The International Court of Justice has preliminarily found Israel guilty of genocide in Gaza. It has advised that Israel is illegally occupying and exploiting the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has charged Netanyahu with war crimes. An independent judiciary and rule of law in Israel are likely to become faint memories. The prime minister confronts multiple corruption and abuse of power charges. Apartheid in the West Bank is indistinguishable from the South African variety before Nelson Mandela’s presidency; some South Africans believe it is much harsher. Zionism has proven the enemy of Judaism—a form of idolatry elevating worship of the nationstate, aka, the Golden Calf, above obedience to the Torah and Talmud. Allying with Netanyahu is like buying a ticket to fly on the Hindenburg. Intoxicated with power, Netanyahu is destroying Israel. He has ignored Nietzsche’s admonition, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” Why should the U.S. collaborate with Israel in a suicide mission? Moreover, Netanyahu’s Nostradamuslike prophecies have proven disastrous for the United States. He exhorted Congress
in 2002 to support illegally invading Iraq and ousting arch-villain Iraqi President Saddam Hussain over imaginary weapons of mass destruction and hoping to upend despotism in the Arab world. He avowed with the certainty of Newton’s laws of motion that “Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons.” And once that happens, he claimed, “the terror network will have nuclear weapons.” By eliminating Saddam’s regime, Netanyahu claimed bombastically, “I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region...And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
The trillion-dollar destruction of Iraq by
Allying with Netanyahu is like buying a ticket to fly on the Hindenburg.
the United States begot Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It turned the majority Shi’a nation into an Iranian puppet calling for the exit of U.S. troops. It fueled Iran’s ambition for nuclear weapons to deter a revisiting of the U.S. 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of the brutal, corrupt, dictatorial Shah Pahlavi. Iraq remains formally at war with Israel.
So much for Netanyahu’s clairvoyance! Like so many sitting at the apex of power, Netanyahu is terrifying because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Acclaiming an ignorant megalomaniac is never a good idea.
Netanyahu’s rule of engagement in Gaza is to kill or destroy everything in sight indefinitely as he speciously claims to be trying to rescue Israelis abducted by Palestinian militants on October 7. After more than 300 days of merciless warfare by Israel, Hamas is yet to be
crushed. Even Netanyahu’s truculent Defense Minister Yoav Gallant believes Netanyahu is fantasizing about exterminating Hamas like an infectious disease. Netanyahu repeats his fanciful objective in Gaza as “total victory,” insisting like the Bellmen in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” that what he says three times must be true.
President George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 warned against excessive fondness toward any foreign nation:
[A] passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions, by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
Heedless of President Washington’s sage warnings, the United States doltishly does whatever Israel declares.
Continued on page
From “Peace Talks“ to Ceasefire Negotiations: How Israel’s Tactic of Political Deception Is Backfiring
By Dr. Ramzy Baroud
the
FORMER ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Ehud Barak has been one of the loudest critics of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his war tactics, his rejection of a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, and more.
Among his frequent censures of Netanyahu, Barak wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in March that the Israeli war on Gaza “has revealed the staggering strategic incompetence of the Israeli government” and has exposed the “astonishing leadership vacuum on the top.”
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book, co‐edited with Ilan Pappé, Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, is available from Middle East Books and More. Dr. Baroud is a non‐resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is <www.ramzybaroud.net>.
In an article published in Haaretz in June, he argued that the Israeli war on Gaza is “the least successful war” in Israel's history, due to the “strategic paralysis in the country’s leadership.”
Barak has advocated an end to the war through a prisoner exchange, early elections in Israel and a fundamental change in course. Those who are not familiar with Barak’s legacy could easily mistake the former army general for a peacenik. The opposite is true.
Barak made his way into politics on the strength of his bloody heroics against Palestinians, and the tactics he criticizes in Netanyahu’s government today are a copy of his own past strategies.
U.S. President Bill Clinton walks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (l) and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (r) July 11, 2000 at Camp David during peace talks. The tactics he criticizes in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government today are a copy of his own strategies of
past.
PHOTO
FICTITIOUS NARRATIVE
Throughout his long career in the military and government, Barak served in many leadership positions, leading the army as its chief of staff between 1991 and 1995 and the government itself between July 1999 and March 2001.
His tenure as prime minister lasted less than two years, but it was filled with crises, some of which serve as important contexts to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the brutality of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the brewing war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
Due to stiff Lebanese resistance throughout the 1990s, Barak was forced in May 2000 to end his country’s military occupation of most of South Lebanon, though he lacked the courage to withdraw from the Sheba’a Farms and the Kfar Chouba Hills. The consequences of his decisions have led to continued tensions and the subsequent failed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 2006. Although the return to war last October was directly linked to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the issue of the Israeli occupation of parts of south Lebanon has once more resurfaced as a top priority for the Lebanese resistance, particularly Hezbollah.
The same can be said of his political blunder at the Camp David Summit in July 2000, which led to the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, of September that same year. The failed talks demonstrated to Palestinians that Israel had no intention of reaching a peace agreement and that the so-called peace process was a facade for Israel’s continued colonization of the West Bank. Nearly 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed as a result of Barak’s fraudulent politics during that time.
Barak, his government, the U.S. and their political circles invested massively in the molding of a fictitious narrative about the Camp David talks, one in which Yasser Arafat, then the president of the Palestinian Authority, derailed the talks, not Barak. To bolster Israeli lies, U.S. corporate mainstream media came to the rescue. Commenting on the subject in Fair.org,
Seth Ackerman wrote in 2002 about the deliberately misleading language that was used widely by almost all major U.S. media, all speaking of the Palestinian leadership’s rejection of Barak’s “generous offer.” The language used by pundits in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Salon, USA Today and many other newspapers seemed to be custommade through the same set of talking points: Israel “offered extraordinary concessions,” “far-reaching concessions,” “unprecedented concessions,” “most farreaching offer ever,” and so on. They all blamed Arafat for the collapse of the talks, also using similar words and phrases.
But there was no “generous offer.” According to Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinians were not presented with any written proposal, generous or otherwise. Israel simply was not in the mood to offer any “concessions” over the status of occupied East Jerusalem, the refugees, border issues, or the refugees. Facing elections and to save his government from collapse, Barak chose the most predictable yet cowardly path—scapegoating the Palestinians, and Arafat personally.
Barak’s and Israel’s political narrative on the talks prevailed, thanks to the blind support of the Clinton administration and the cheerleading of corporate media. That triumph, however, was short-lived. The uprising reinstated the significance of the Palestinian people as an important political actor, forcing Israel into early elections, and ending Barak’s career.
But even now, 24 years later, Barak’s political tactics continue to be manifested through Netanyahu. The latter, too, uses negotiations as a pressure tool to extract concessions and buy time, to break the will of the Palestinians, distract from his genocidal war in Gaza and the rapid colonization of the West Bank and, ultimately, the political failure of his government.
Though Barak, like other Israeli leaders, used this very strategy in the past, he is now serving the role of the wise Israeli elder. However, this wise man, too, had done everything in his power to torpedo
any chances of reaching an agreement, took no responsibility for his misdeeds and spent years rewriting history by assigning blame on the purportedly ungrateful and uncooperative Palestinian leadership.
SAME TACTICS, NEW FACES
Netanyahu and the Biden administration are now the latest version of the BarakClinton duo. They are playing the same game, using comparable language and largely agreeing that the obstacle to any ceasefire deal is the Palestinians. This victim blaming strategy is as old as U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Since the Hamas assault on the Israeli military command in the “Gaza Envelope’’ region on Oct. 7, and the subsequent Israeli genocidal war on the Strip, Israel has resorted to similar negotiation tactics to those used in the past: constant delays, adding new conditions, altering the reality on the ground while prolonging the war with the hope of achieving different outcomes. The same way that Barak hoped to save his government in 2000, Netanyahu is desperate to save his far-right coalition now. The former failed, the latter, too, is likely to fail. But the plot, this time around, is far more convoluted.
On May 31, for example, U.S. President Joe Biden gave a baffling speech from the White House. He meant to communicate an Israeli, not an American, proposal for ending the war in Gaza. It consisted of three stages, which would start with an exchange of some prisoners, a truce and the increase of aid to the famine-stricken Strip. The last phase, at sleast in theory, would bring a permanent end to the war and the rebuilding of destroyed Gaza.
After some delay, Hamas accepted the supposed Israeli overture as communicated by Biden. Oddly, though not entirely surprising, Israel did not, thus rejecting its own proposal. Netanyahu’s office nonchalantly explained the rejection based on the claim that Biden’s remarks were “inaccurate.” Instead of smoothing out the supposed points of contention, Israel moved forward to change the nature of the war in Gaza with the hope of creating more po-
litical obstacles, ultimately rendering the initial proposal completely irrelevant.
These new Israeli obstacles include the expansion of the Netzarim corridor, a military zone Israel has created in central Gaza to divide the small region into north and south. It also, on June 7, occupied the Gaza Philadelphi Route, a 14-kilometers narrow strip of land, located along the border between southern Gaza and Egypt. This was coupled with the takeover, then the burning, of the Rafah crossing and the creation or expansion of various buffer zones all around Gaza to ensure the total besiegement of the Strip.
The Israeli action in Gaza was largely consistent with the political discourse emanating from Tel Aviv. Netanyahu insists that he will not “compromise on full Israeli control” over Gaza and that Israel is “not ready to stop” the war.
Palestinians, however, continued to return to the indirect negotiations under the auspices of the three mediators, the U.S., Egypt and Qatar. The Palestinian negotiators were driven mostly by the urgent need to end the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the resultant famine and other humanitarian crises. But Palestinians must have always known that Netanyahu had no in-
tention of reaching a negotiated ceasefire, due to his persisting illusion that his army could still achieve “total victory” in Gaza.
This conclusion became even more obvious with time, especially on July 31, when Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hamas’ top political leader and Palestinian chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. By killing the top Palestinian negotiator, Netanyahu made it clear that he was not seeking a negotiated settlement but total surrender, a similar objective shared by virtually all Israeli negotiators in the past, no matter how they marketed the negotiations.
Evidence for this claim is provided by examining the news in the lead up to or immediately after all rounds of negotiations held in Doha, Cairo or even Rome. In most of these instances, Israel would carry out one or more massacres, targeting displaced Palestinian refugees somewhere in Gaza. Israel has always been guided by the belief that killing Palestinian civilians can be used as a form of political pressure. Netanyahu has used this tactic repeatedly in the current war, as Barak and, later, Ariel Sharon used it to punish Palestinians for rejecting the “generous offer” of 2000.
However, if Israeli violence in the 2000 uprising—when Palestinians were at their weakest point—failed to achieve its intended results, Netanyahu’s pressure tactic is unlikely to succeed now. Palestinian and Arab resistors are stronger than they have ever been, and a new unity around Palestine is taking shape, not only in Palestine, but globally as well.
Though Israel’s history of political negotiations reflects a long trajectory of deception and political manipulation, today’s circumstances are essentially different from those that prevailed during Barak’s tenure as prime minister. Israel no longer holds all the cards: time, the economy and the “invincible army” are not in its favor. Israel is increasingly viewed as a pariah state, accused of genocide and extermination; its economy is in a downward spiral and its army is demoralized and undisciplined. Eleven months into Israel’s genocidal war, and it has managed to kill many more Israeli captives than it has rescued. By employing the same negotiation tactics of the past, Netanyahu is clearly failing to truly appreciate the changes of the political map under way. He is engaging in a futile game that will ultimately backfire. In fact, it already has. ■
Israel Killed More than 40,000 People in Gaza. What Does That Look Like?
By Al Jazeera Labs
It’s hard to visualize 40,000 dead Palestinians. If they all joined hands to form a human chain, it would stretch for 60 kilome ters, or more than 37 miles—long enough to surround the island of Manhattan. For more visual storytelling visit <www.aljazeera.com/author/ajlabs>.
ISRAELI ATTACKS have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the 320 days since Oct. 7. This includes almost 17,000 children.
That’s 2.6 percent of all children in Gaza who are now dead.
At least 53 children have been killed every day since Oct. 7, and 72 men and women are killed in Israeli strikes, every single day.
At least 10,000 are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead.
VISUALIZING 40,000 PEOPLE
Madison Square Garden in New York City is a landmark indoor arena. Its total capacity is 19,500 people. The number of people killed in Gaza would fill up Madison Square Garden twice.
If 40,000 people were standing tightly next to each other in Paris, the first person would be at Notre Dame and the last would
Published by Al Jazeera Labs on Aug. 27, 2024. AJLabs publishes the latest maps, charts, infographics, data and visual stories from Al Jazeera's data journalism unit.
be in Versailles. The line would be 24 kilometers long.
If 40,000 people joined hands, standing apart, to form a human chain, they could surround the entire island of Manhattan.
It would take an average person walking at 5 kilometers per hour 12 hours to walk from the beginning of that chain to the end.
Driving those 60 kilometers would take a sedan car driving at 50 kilometers per hour about 72 minutes to pass the entire line.
That’s more than an hour of drive time.
Of the 40,000 people killed, 18.4 percent are women, and 33 percent are children.
In Gaza’s pre-Oct. 7 population of two million, almost half were children.
Of the more than 40,000 people killed, nearly 17,000 are children. They could fill up 550 classrooms.
More than 500 schools being used as shelters have been targeted by Israel, and most have been damaged or destroyed.
In the 10 months of war, an entire school year has been missed by Palestinian children in Gaza. ■
Four Views
Daily Life and Shattered Dreams in Gaza—Young Writers Share Their Stories
There was nothing Hossam’s carpentry couldn’t create from wood until an Israeli missile strike destroyed his store and his dreams. Today he sells food in a street stall.
Gazans Returning to Ground Zero: Carpenter Hossam Maghari
By Jumana Taiseer
PRIOR TO OCT. 7, Hossam Maghari, 36, was a man with a plan. A resident of Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central province, Maghari could take pride in what he had managed to accomplish. He learned his trade in his uncle’s carpentry shop, and by 2017 he was ready to open his own business. He poured all his savings
Jumana Taiseer graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Language and works as a content writer in Deir al‐Balah, central Gaza. Well‐versed in journalism and media writing, she focuses on realistic human stories.
into his shop and borrowed money from others. His reputation spread; there was nothing he couldn’t create or shape from wood. And with each piece of wood he worked on, he made plans for his family’s future.
“I built many dreams once my work and income stabilized. I wanted to move from the small house where I lived with my wife and three children to a larger one, and I started saving to achieve this. And I wanted to repay the money I borrowed to start my own business. But Israel had other plans.”
On the evening of Nov. 16, three Israeli missiles struck his carpentry shop around 6 p.m. The missiles entered through the window of the apartment above the shop and then exploded in his shop.
The door and walls of the shop were blown away, and his tools were destroyed—the saw, the compressor, the planer, the contour machine, workbenches, the electrical motor, along with all the car-
pentry tools, drills, and screwdrivers. He had just completed special orders for customers, including furniture for newlyweds and a children’s bedroom set. He estimates that between the completed orders, the supplies, and his carpentry equipment, he lost about $30,000. Everyone who knew him understood how hard he had worked to achieve what he did.
When he heard about the missile strike, he told the Washington Report, “I hurried to my carpentry shop, the place I had poured my heart and soul into. In that moment, the perilous situation and the random missiles raining down from Israeli planes didn’t matter to me at all. My eyes filled with tears, my legs trembled at the sight of it. Nothing was intact, literally nothing. I struggled to get up and wipe the dust off the destroyed tools and equipment. I don’t know why I did that, but that’s what I thought to do at the time.”
When he returned to his family, he was covered in dust and said only, “Thank God. Money can be replaced. The important thing is that we are safe. Thank God. May God give me the strength to replace what was lost. Thank God.”
Where did he find such patience and fortitude?
Today Hossam sits at a small stall, trying to sell canned food, water and dried beans to support his family.
He is responsible for 13 people—his wife, three children, his parents and six siblings. Two of the children need diapers, which are scarce and very expensive. Food is limited. So are medical supplies.
Hossam’s story is not unusual. A Reuters article published on April 5 cites International Labor Organization statistics that 90 percent of private sector jobs were lost in the first six months of the war. That would be a staggering loss for any society; for Gaza, weakened as it has been by a 17-year siege and blockage prior to Israel’s genocidal war, the result is the forced destitution of 2 million people, the deliberate transformation of a society into a humanitarian catastrophe. ■
Gaza is the New Panem
By Abdallah Nasrallah
FOR YEARS, THE HUNGER GAMES franchise has captivated my heart and imagination, immersing me farther into its dystopian world with each viewing. Initially, I saw these movies, based on the Suzanne Collins trilogy, as pure fiction, far removed from reality. Little did I know that the lines between fantasy and our own reality in Gaza would one day blur.
In the movies, events are set in Panem, a fictitious nation dominated by the iron grip of a tyrannical regime known as the Capitol. Panem is divided into 12 districts, each marked by its own shade of poverty. While the districts grapple with exploitation, oppression and despair, the Capitol basks in excessive wealth. The ones in
Abdallah Nasrallah is a dedicated Palestinian with a deep passion for basketball, which has been his lifelong companion and solace during challenging times. His love for learning extends to exploring languages and various forms of art, including fashion, music and drawing. He trained with We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers.
Children in Rafah having fun on New Year’s Eve. Gazan children, like those in the Hunger Games, hold onto hope amidst poverty, war, hunger and destruction.
charge maintain power by controlling the food supply. They starve the people of the districts and turn them against one another to compete for survival in the Hunger Games.
From the fictional divisions of Panem to the all-too-real landscapes of Palestine, the themes of the film continue. When the war on Gaza began on Oct. 7, Avichay Adraee, the spokesman for the Israeli army, posted a photograph of the Al-Remal neighborhood on his official Facebook account, warning residents to leave because Israeli soldiers were going to wipe out the whole place: the heart of Gaza, where I had lived my entire life. We had no other option but to evacuate. We took refuge in my sister’s apartment at the edge of Al-Remal, along with relatives from both sides of the family. We stayed there for five days, hoping it would be over soon and we could return home. And we did return! But it would be the last time we would ever see our home again.
Adraee posted another photo on his Facebook page, a new map. When I saw it, I felt as though my soul was being sucked out of my body. The map showed the Gaza Strip divided into blocks, purportedly directing civilians to safety. But to me, Gaza was being turned into Panem, only worse.
When the Israeli authorities directed everyone on the northern side of Gaza to head south, the mass panic that spread among the people made it impossible for us to find transportation or shelter. With 75 family members, the two cars my uncles had were not nearly enough. We managed to squeeze all the women into the cars and crammed all the men onto a flatbed trailer we attached to one car. We arrived in Khan Yunis and stayed in a very old events hall that a family friend allowed us to use. It had a broken
bathroom, which was full of bugs. We managed to repair it, but since the bathroom was in a deserted backyard, we were afraid to go out there after dark. Israel targets anything that moves at night. So everyone, including the elderly and children, had to bear the urge to go to the bathroom until sunrise, causing some of us serious health problems.
We stayed in Khan Yunis for 60 freezing days of misery and terror, with a leaking ceiling and inadequate portions of barely drinkable water. We kept telling ourselves it would end soon, but the war gave us no break. Israel forced us to evacuate yet again, this time to Rafah. There, they said, we would find stability, security and safety. The Israeli authorities acted as if they were sending us to District One! In the film, District One is the wealthy, luxuryproducing area of Panem, whose citizens actually take pride in being chosen for the Games and make careers of training to participate in them. But Rafah is nothing like District One.
Our fear was less intense because in Rafah we had an apartment to stay in. Unfortunately, only 50 of us fit in the apartment, while the others had to stay in tents. I was one of the lucky 50.
My mind began to link the dots. The Israeli government follows the same strategy as the fictional Capitol in Panem: dividing us into districts, starving, humiliating and dehumanizing us. They wanted us to feel lucky to be stuffed into a tiny apartment and to subsist on too little of everything: too little space, too little food and water, no waste disposal, no electricity.
Rafah is not District One: it’s worse. By prosperity, Israelis mean allowing limited food aid into the city, but obtaining it depends on luck. If we aren’t lucky, we face starvation or have to spend all our
savings to buy overpriced canned beans. All over Gaza, people are starving. And by safety and security, they mean that the possibility of being bombed is high, but not as high as in the north, where death is simply inevitable.
In “The Hunger Games,” the death of a contestant is announced by firing cannon shells, displaying the person’s picture, name and district. It was morbid when the world first watched the movie. However, even such recognition has been denied to us Gazans. The Israeli army kills Palestinians more cruelly all over Gaza than the Capitol ever does in Panem. In Gaza, mass shootings and mass graves are not even the worst of it: bodies of dead people are left in the streets for animals to eat; human skeletons fill the streets; soldiers shoot people and leave them dying as bait for others to come save them, and then they kill them all.
Moreover, when a contestant in “The Hunger Games” dies, not just the family, but all of Panem is notified. If a Gazan gets killed in the north and their family or friends are in the south, the family may not know for days or weeks due to the forced telecommunications blackouts. And if they do learn of their loved one’s death, they don’t have the privilege of burying them. Most bodies are burned, dismembered, crushed or decomposed.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? How the dead in the movies have dignified burials, while here in this gruesome reality, we can’t even bury them in one piece?
In the movie they have a lissome heroine named Katniss, who defies the grotesque rules of the Game to protect her loved ones, and rallies her people to triumph over the tyrants.
Katniss is bold and beautiful, with blue eyes and brown hair aligning with Western standards, resolute and unwavering. But here is where the parallels between the movie and reality end.
In Gaza, our heroines are numerous but largely go unsung. Every woman, mother and girl is a heroine here, fighting for a future by enduring the horrific present and continuing to help, protect, teach and care for their loved ones.
They are not all courageous with blue eyes or blonde or brown hair, or brilliant strategists like Katniss in the film. And they don’t all survive. But they maintain their humanity even when their hearts are quaking or broken by loss; they show the world that love, family, respect and faith are their truth.
Unlike a movie, our nightmare has no clear end, and we don’t know how many lives will be lost before it does. We urge the
(L) Actor Jennifer Lawrence on the set of the film, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II,” in Berlin, Germany, in 2013.
PHOTO BY MURRAY CLOSE/GETTY IMAGES
world to stop watching us as if we are an entertaining spectacle, much like Capitol citizens watching contestants fight for their lives. Israelis view us similarly. As their defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed.” He continued, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Dear humane world, I guess we’ve had enough. Our lives are not a film, and this war is not intended to amuse you. It is a nonstop horror that is not supposed to make you feel grateful for your own privilege. And if you must see it this way, are you grateful now? If so, then...you’re welcome! Now can we end this? Close the blood-soaked curtain? Or are we asking too much? ■
300 Days of War. Are We Still Alive?
By Faress Arafat
pation Forces (IOF) have broken all the rules of warfare, and they target paramedics. As a nurse, I began to know many paramedics, some of whom are now friends and have remained in northern Gaza, working to save people’s lives with the limited capabilities available to them.
I finally succeeded in making a video call with my friend Amer, a 25-year-old who worked as an ambulance officer (dispatcher) before the war began and continued his work throughout the war. He has been at it ever since. I worked with Amer before the war on routine transfers of patients to other hospitals or departments. He was energetic and always had a smile on his face. In the ambulance, he would never stop trying to make patients smile. But when I called him in early August, his face was tired and pale and his eyes were teary. I suspect he has severe anemia. He has changed a lot since the last time I saw him, which was when I was working at Al-Shifa Hospital.
I asked him how he was doing. Amer smiled and told me that he lost about 10 kilos and he was suffering from severe stomach pain with no treatment available, clean water to drink, or healthy food—only canned food like peas and mushrooms. The sounds of gunfire and drones were very loud in the background. I asked him whether he was in a safe place, and he just laughed and said, “Don’t worry, the army just ordered people to evacuate. They are now moving toward us. We don’t know where to go, and if we leave, how will we help the people?” His eyes conveyed regret and pain, as if to say that while international laws protect ambulance personnel, in Gaza they are captured and killed on sight.
MORE THAN 300 days have passed since the war began in the Gaza Strip, resulting in more than 130,000 deaths and injuries, the majority of which were children and women. Unknown heroes face the danger of death every hour and perhaps every minute: the paramedics who respond to the call for help. The work of first responders is dangerous all over the world, but in the Gaza Strip it is considered deadly because the Israeli Occu-
Faress Arafat graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in October 2023. He trained with We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a project to amplify the voices of young Palestinian writers. After living in a tent with his family and working in a medical facility in a camp in Rafah, he evacuated to Cairo.
Ambulances operate under direct fire. Every day, the ambulance department in northern Gaza receives dozens of calls for help, but in many cases they are unable to go to rescue the injured because they will be shot. I recall Amer telling me at Al-Shifa Hospital that he was fortunate to escape death when a bomb fell directly on the ambulance he had been driving and had stepped out of before it was bombed. But now it is even more dangerous and the work pressure has increased exponentially. At any moment, the IOF may storm the northern Gaza Strip, commit massacres and leave. Amer tells me that one day, after the IOF withdrew from western Gaza City, he and his colleagues went in ambulances to check for injured and dead bodies. They found decomposed and burned bodies, some of which had been food for dogs and cats. The scene was very frightening.
I had hoped that paramedics might receive some privileges, such as food or resources so that they can continue their work, but Amer told me his colleagues collapse from malnutrition while moving the injured and martyrs. Yet despite everything, he remains committed to his work. Today only about 20 ambulance officers cover all northern Gaza. He told me that if he did not die in the
Children receive the polio vaccination in Deir al Balah, Gaza, on Sept. 1, 2024. The campaign plans to reach 640,000 children under the age of 10, across all regions of Gaza during humanitarian pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas.
There’s No Such Thing as Back to School in Gaza, Just Uncertain Futures
By Huda Skaik
THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN Human Rights Monitor reports that the ongoing Israeli genocide has paralyzed education throughout the Gaza Strip.
Five out of six universities—The Islamic University, Al-Azhar University (main campus and Maghraqa branch), Open University of Jerusalem, Al-Israa University and Al-Aqsa University—were leveled by airstrikes. More than 95 university deans and professors have been killed in airstrikes. Over 93 percent of Gaza’s schools are damaged or destroyed, according to U.N. experts. Many have been turned into displacement centers.
To understand the effects of the disruptions to students’ schooling, the Washington Report spoke to a high school teacher and to three students who are dealing with catastrophic disruptions.
ambulance, he would probably die at home, so he chose to continue working.
The most painful aspect for Amer is being away from his family of seven for weeks at a time. Recently his brother was seriously injured in his feet and hand in one of the massacres that took place in Al-Shati camp. He worries that he may have to transport injured people and then find out they are his relatives. He has become increasingly nervous and struggles to control his emotions; even small things rattle him. He needs medication to sleep at night. Every day, he sees decomposed and charred corpses, some of which have been eaten by animals, and their horrific smell lingers in his mind. He returns to the ambulance station each day haunted by the images of the dead in white shrouds. Sometimes he hears screams but doesn’t know their source. He is troubled by fears that the war will never end and that the few remaining medical teams in northern Gaza will be killed. If that happens, all the residents of northern Gaza will die.
I am acutely aware of the trauma Amer has endured, which is becoming more apparent the longer we talk. I try to reassure him that he will receive appropriate treatment after the war, and he asks wearily when the war will end. Frankly, I don’t know. To turn the conversation to more hopeful topics, I ask Amer about his future dreams. He paused and said he wants the war to end, for everything to be rebuilt, and then he hopes to start a family and a home. He dreams of a stable life, free from wars, killing and destruction, and he wants his family to remain safe. Amer’s dreams are basic human rights, but in Gaza, even the smallest rights are achieved only after immense suffering and hardship, if at all.
I do not know how medical teams will recover from the successive shocks of loss, displacement, fear and the awful carnage they have been witnessing for the last 10 months.
Bisal Sharaf, who teaches English at a high school, put the issue in context. Gaza’s students have been grappling with formidable educational obstacles in recent years, exacerbated by the COVID19 pandemic. Over the past decade, the region has endured a series of relentless wars, from the 2014 war to the devastating genocide of 2023. Each step forward in education is frequently reversed by the next disaster. Prolonged school closures and a reliance on ineffective online learning have intensified the difficulties. Students are advancing from one grade to the next without fully grasping the skills from their previous level, which hampers their educational development.
For elementary school students, this has damaging consequences. Their curricula are designed to support their psychological well-being and social integration. The ongoing crises hinder these developmental opportunities, further affecting their overall growth and learning experience.
“The interruption of continuous learning disrupts students’ ability to connect and apply acquired skills,” Bisal observed. “Long breaks erase prior learning, pushing teachers to skip essential skills and rush through new material, resulting in fragmented understanding. The lack of time only worsens this issue.” The impact on social development is also severe. Students don’t have an opportunity to form bonds with teachers and their classmates, and they risk losing the discipline of meeting assignment deadlines and preparing for their classes.
The three students who spoke to the Washington Report should have been celebrating big milestones this past summer. Two had expected to graduate from university, and one from high school. No graduation ceremonies were held; instead, Gaza’s universities lie in ruins, libraries have been reduced to ashes, and schools are used as shelters for displaced people. Students find themselves trapped in Gaza's devastation, their futures shrouded in uncertainty.
Huda Skaik is an English literature student, a writer and a video maker.
Amer fills the ambulance’s tank with fuel because it is not available in the station’s fuel tanks.
PHOTO COURTESY F. ARAFAT
Approximately, 88,000 students have been deprived of continuing their university education, and 555 students have been unable to take up scholarships abroad.
Donia Ashour, 19, was brimming with anticipation for her high school graduation. She had always envisioned that she would excel academically and celebrate her high school graduation with her family, but the war shattered those dreams.
Two months ago, instead of preparing for her final exams, she and her family were displaced yet again within Gaza. Meanwhile, her peers outside Gaza were completing their final year and planning for their futures. “You know what has been the hardest feeling? It was seeing others succeed while I was struggling. That was incredibly difficult for me,” she admitted.
The destruction of her school during the war deeply hurt her, because it was a place of cherished memories. The war claimed the life of her beloved teacher, Areej Almidana, who was killed on Oct. 20. For Donia, Areej was not just an educator but a mother and friend.
Donia just wants the war to end so she can resume her studies and work toward the dreams that have been derailed: “I want to pursue my lifelong dream of becoming a doctor.”
In September 2023, Khaled Alhissy, a senior studying English Language and Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, was looking forward to his final year at the university and working as an assistant professor. He and his friends were discussing how they wanted to celebrate their graduation at the end of the academic year. “My friends Khaled and Mohammad (may he rest in peace)
and I were eager to graduate and we were discussing whether to have a small gathering or a graduation party at a chalet,” he told the Washington Report.
The war obliterated those plans, together with the university itself. “When I lost the university, I felt like I lost my entire life—all the hard work of three years seemed to go up in smoke,” Khaled lamented.
To make matters worse, Khaled, 23, was diagnosed with cancer. He is now undergoing treatment in Jordan, a process expected to last at least two and a half years.
Khaled mourns the loss of 14 family members and several friends. “On Nov. 24, Israel killed my dear friend, Mohammad Hamo, 23, who was studying English language and translation. We were supposed to graduate together,” he said sadly.
The assassination of Dr. Refaat Alareer on Dec. 6 profoundly affected him. “Dr. Refaat’s killing by Israel has created millions of Refaats—each of us now embodies his spirit and values,” Khaled asserted.
Despite the devastation, Khaled remains committed to returning to Gaza after his treatment, even if it means living in a tent. “Gaza is where I belong. I want to continue Dr. Refaat’s mission by advocating for justice and sharing his legacy.”
Dima Ashour, 22, was a senior at the Islamic University of Gaza, majoring in English Language and Translation. Before the war, she had participated in department exhibitions and was socializing with more people in the university. She and her friends eagerly anticipated graduation and starting their careers in translation and writing.
Her passion for her major grew under the guidance of Dr. Refaat Alareer, a significant source of inspiration for Dima. His encouragement and belief in her writing motivated her to develop her skills. She too felt his assassination as a profound loss. "I felt we lost more than just our professor; he was a friend, mentor, guide and inspiration. We learned so much from him, and I consider myself fortunate to have been taught by him,” Dima said sadly.
There have been other losses, too: an uncle, a cousin, and her sister’s husband. She is currently displaced in Deir Al-Balah, and she is struggling with the lack of internet access. That makes it hard for her to manage online study.
She misses the university a lot and was deeply sad when it was destroyed, as it took with it so many memories. She is eager for the war to end so she can return to her home, find a way to resume her studies, and recapture a sense of normalcy. ■
Teacher Alaa Abu Mustafa gives lessons at a makeshift tent school built over her house, which was destroyed by Israel, in Khan Yunis, Gaza on Sept. 3, 2024.
HANI ALSHAER/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES
Top Instagram Accounts for Insights on the Gaza Genocide
By Diana Safieh
IN A WORLD where information is often filtered through political agendas, finding the truth about what is happening on the ground in Gaza can be challenging. Misinformation, propaganda, biased reporting and flat-out fake news often obscure the reality, leaving those who seek to understand the situation struggling to find reliable sources, and often giving up. However, several Instagram accounts provide a direct and unfiltered view of life in Gaza, sharing personal stories, images, and testimonies that bring the human side of the conflict to the forefront.
In addition to the more prominent institutions, like Al-Haq, Combatants for Peace, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence and Jewish Voice for Peace, which work tirelessly to counter official propaganda promoted by the mainstream media, lesser known grassroots organizations and individuals on the ground provide invaluable insights into the daily lives of the Gazan population and cut
Diana Safieh is a writer and podcaster whose areas of expertise are Palestine, true crime and anything even slightly unusual. She currently works with St John Eye Hospital and the Balfour Project in the UK. She was recently invested as a member of the Order of St. John for her efforts, just like her father, Ambassador Afif Safieh, and great uncle.
through the noise of propaganda and misinformation.
The people of Gaza deserve more than just our sympathy—they need our support, our attention and our commitment to advocating for an end to the genocide and a just resolution to this conflict. In a world where the narratives around Gaza are often shaped by those far removed from the lived experience, these Instagram accounts remind us of the humanity at the heart of this conflict and the ongoing need for solidarity with those who are still living through its consequences.
VOICES FROM GAZA
@mohammedasad.84 Mohammed Asad is a photojournalist whose work captures the stark realities of life under blockade and conflict. His images often highlight the resilience of the people and the ongoing struggle for survival in Gaza.
@ahmed_alnaouq Ahmed Alnaouq is a writer and human rights activist who offers a mix of personal reflections, news updates and advocacy for Palestinian rights, giving followers a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the people of Gaza.
@reem.kassis Reem Kassis is an author who shares stories of life in Gaza, often focusing on the cultural and culinary heritage of the region. Her account provides a unique perspective on how the conflict affects daily life, particularly for women and families.
@wael_eldahdouh Bureau chief of Al Jazeera in Gaza Wael El-Dahdouh provides real-time updates and insights into the situation in Gaza.
@hossamwaill Hossam Waill is a content creator who shares powerful images and stories from the region, offering a unique perspective on life under occupation.
@hindkhoudary Hind Khoudary is a journalist and human rights advocate whose account offers real-time updates and critical insights into the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
@saleh_aljafarawi Saleh Al Jafarawi is a photographer who provides a visual narrative of the daily life, struggles and resilience
Mohammed Asad is a photojournalist and filmmaker in Gaza whose Instagram account is mo ‐hammedasad.84.
PHOTO BY JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
of Palestinians during the genocide.
@wizard_bisan1 Bisan Owda is a journalist from Gaza whose work is a mix of art, activism and personal stories that reflect the cultural and political struggles of Palestinians. Her documentary “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive” is nominated for an Emmy Award.
@adnan.barq Adnan Barq is a social media activist known for his engaging and informative videos about life under occupation. His account is a blend of humor, activism and education, making complex issues more accessible to a broad audience.
@thelastturtle The Last Turtle is an account that uses powerful imagery and storytelling that highlight the ongoing struggles of Palestinians.
ORGANIZATIONS IN GAZA
@seen.palestine Seen Palestine shares stories and visuals that highlight Palestinian culture, history and the ongoing struggle for freedom. The account is a source of inspiration and education for those interested in the Palestinian cause.
@translating_gaza Translating Gaza shares stories from Gaza translated into English, aiming to bridge the gap between Arabic-speaking Palestinians and the global audience. The account provides a platform for voices that are often unheard in the international media.
@eye.on.palestine Eye on Palestine is a widely followed account that documents human rights violations and provides realtime updates and powerful visuals on the struggles faced by Palestinians.
@cravingpalestine Craving Palestine showcases Palestinian culture, particularly its rich culinary traditions, as a form of resistance and identity. The account celebrates Palestinian heritage while also addressing the socio-political issues faced by the community.
@amplify_gaza Amplify Gaza Stories shares personal stories and experiences of people living in Gaza, bringing the human side of the conflict to light and offering a glimpse into the everyday realities faced by Gazans.
AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS
@adalahjusticeproject Adalah Justice Project is an American-based organization that advocates for Palestinian rights and justice. Their account focuses on activism, education and advocacy for ending the occupation.
@imeupolicy The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) provides resources and commentary on the Middle East, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They have a particularly powerful profile bio: “In Congress and at the ballot box, we fight for Palestinian freedom and human rights for all.”
@ifnotnoworg IfNotNow is a movement of young American Jews calling for an end to U.S. support for the occupation and advocating for peace and justice in Israel-Palestine.
NOTEWORTHY MENTIONS
@humansofmasaferyatta Humans of Masafer Yatta shares personal stories and images from the residents of Masafer Yatta, a region in the West Bank that is experiencing ethnic cleansing.
@voicesforpalestine Voices for Palestine is a collective platform that amplifies Palestinian voices and shares content on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. The account features celebrities who have spoken out publicly in support of Palestine.
@visualizing_palestine Visualizing Palestine creates data-driven infographics, reports and educational materials to visually communicate Palestinian experiences to inform and mobilize audiences around the world.
@yesh_din Yesh Din is an Israeli human rights organization that focuses on documenting and advocating against human rights violations in the West Bank. Their Instagram account shares updates on their work, including legal battles, field reports and stories from Palestinian communities affected by the occupation.
@jewishvoiceforpeace Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the United States and has played a prominent role in pro-Palestine protests.
@codepinkalert CODEPINK is an antimilitarist women-led activist group that shares information about protests and advocacy campaigns.
@wrmea The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs has provided informative analyses of U.S.-MENA policy, Palestine and the Israel lobby since 1982.
@mondoweiss Mondoweiss is a news source for breaking news and coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
@growingpalestine Growing Palestine is a grassroots organization that supports farmers and sustainable agriculture in Palestine. ■
Voting Records: Congress Overflowing With Anti-Palestinian Animus
By Jack McGrath
IN THE 11 MONTHS following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Congress has taken unprecedented steps to enable Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza and punish pro-Palestinian sentiment in the United States. While Washington’s outpouring of support for Israel after the deadly assault was to be expected, members of the House and Senate have flooded Congress with a multitude of letters and legislation that show unbridled contempt for international law, the First Amendment and Palestinian existence. With the November elections fast approaching, the Washington Report presents its scorecard for the 118th Congress. Special thanks to Lara Friedman’s legislative roundups at the Foundation for Middle East Peace and Julia Pitner’s “Congress Watch” articles in the Washington Report, which are invaluable resources.
For the House, five of the most abysmal bills, amendments and resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine were chosen for the scorecard. Given the sheer volume of egregious items passed in the chamber, narrowing the list to five items was no easy feat. Dishonorable mentions include H.Res. 894, which “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” and passed 311-14; H.R. 6679, which bars any member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from entering the U.S. and passed 422-2; and H.R. 8034, which provides Israel with billions in military aid and bans funding to UNRWA and passed 366-58.
Recognized as members of the “Hall of
Jack McGrath is assistant director of Middle East Books and More and a Washington Report staff writer.
Fame” are the 28 representatives who did not vote for any of the chosen legislation, two of whom—Reps. Jamaal Bowman (DNY) and Cori Bush (D-MO)—subsequently lost their primary elections to candidates bankrolled by pro-Israel PACs. The 179 House members marked as voting for all five items are listed in the “Hall of Shame.”
This year’s “Hall of Shame” is by far the largest in recent history, a testimony to the clear lines that have been drawn in the sand over the past year and the extraordinary (and often absurd) lengths lobbyfunded politicians have gone to boost Israel and demonize Palestinians. While the issue of Israel is perhaps more partisan than ever, there are still some Democrats in the “Hall of Shame,” reflecting the deep hold the lobby has over the party. On the other hand, Republican libertarian Thomas Massie (KY) was the sole Republican in either chamber to make the “Hall of Fame.”
For the Senate, the five chosen items consist of a motion to table a human rights investigation and a series of public letters primarily addressed to the Biden administration. Senators received a mark if they voted to table the resolution, signed a negative letter (such as a call to sanction the International Criminal Court) or did not sign the positive letter regarding Palestinian statehood. The nine senators who received zero marks are listed in the “Hall of Fame,” while the 12 senators who received marks in all five columns can be found in the “Hall of Shame.”
The Issues: HOUSE:
Denying the Death Toll Introduced by Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) to appropriations bill H.R. 8771, Amendment 1052
prohibits the State Department from using allocated funds to cite statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry. While President Joe Biden publicly cast doubt on the ministry’s casualty figures, its accuracy is attested to by the U.N., WHO and Human Rights Watch. Even Israeli intelligence officials find the ministry to be a credible source. Nonetheless, the amendment passed 269-144. Supporters of the amendment are marked in column 1.
Targeting NGOs H.R. 6408 amends the Internal Revenue Code, ostensibly to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist-supporting organizations.” However, it was already illegal for U.S. charities and non-profits to support terrorist organizations before the bill’s passage. As Lara Friedman notes, H.R. 6408 could be weaponized to revoke the non-profit status of organizations that aid or advocate for Palestinians without any due process. The bill passed 382-11. The House members who voted for the legislation are marked in column 2.
Censuring Tlaib. H.Res. 845 censured Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian member of Congress. Supporters of the resolution charged the congresswoman with “promoting false narratives” about the Oct. 7 attack due to statements made by Tlaib that acknowledged Israeli apartheid, opposed U.S. military support for Israel, blamed Israel for the Oct. 17 AlAhli Hospital bombing and defended the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” No such censure motion has targeted the myriad members of Congress who have made openly racist and genocidal anti-Palestinian statements since Oct. 7. The resolution passed 234-188. The legislators who voted for the censure are marked in column 3.
Sanctioning the ICC. H.R. 8282, or the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” demands that the U.S. sanction the ICC if it makes “any effort to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies,” presumably including Israel. The House passed H.R. 8282 with a vote of 247-155. House members who voted for the act are marked in column 4.
Facilitating Military Aid to Israel in a Standalone Bill The Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act (H.R. 6126) provides Israel with $14.3 billion in emergency funding without any allocation for Palestinian humanitarian relief. The legislation passed the House 226-196. Representatives who voted for the bill are marked in column 5.
SENATE:
Preventing a Human Rights Investigation. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced S.Res. 504 to force the State De-
partment to publicly determine if Israel’s human rights practices comply with the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits military aid to states that consistently commit human rights abuses. The Senate voted 72-11 to table the motion. Senators who voted to table are marked in column 1.
Opposing the ICC. Senators have issued four letters attacking the ICC for its investigation of Israeli war crimes and threatening ICC prosecutor Karim Khan after he requested arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The 26 senators who signed at least one of these letters are marked in column two.
Urging a Framework for U.S. Recognition of Palestine. Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) and 18 other senators published a letter urging the Biden administration to “establish a bold public framework for the U.S. to recognize a non-militarized Palestinian state.” The 81 senators who did not
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sign the letter—thus refusing to give Palestinians even an impotent state—are marked in column 3.
Expediting Arms Shipments. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and 47 of his colleagues released a letter accusing the Biden administration of “deliberately delaying the delivery of weapons, ammunition and equipment to Israel.” The senators demanded that the administration “use every available emergency authority” to expedite all arms transfers approved by Congress. The letter’s signatories are marked in column 4.
Denying Entry to Refugees from Gaza. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) led 34 other senators in demanding that the Biden administration cease preliminary plans to accept Palestinian refugees with immediate family members in the U.S. “and focus your attention instead on securing the release of U.S. hostages held by Hamas.” Senators who signed the letter are marked in column 5. ■
REPORT CARD FOR THE 118th CONGRESS
REPRESENTATIVES
Alabama
Aderholt, Robert (R)
Carl, Jerry (R)
Moore, Barry (R)
Palmer, Gary (R)
Rogers, Mike (R)
Sewell, Terri (D)
Strong, Dale (R)
Alaska
Arizona
Peltola, Mary (D)
Biggs, Andy (R)
Ciscomani, Juan (R)
Crane, Eli (R)
Gallego, Ruben (D)
Gosar, Paul (R)
Grijalva, Raúl (D)
Lesko, Debbie (R)
Schweikert, David (R)
Stanton, Greg (D)
Arkansas Crawford, Eric (R)
Hill, French (R)
Westerman, Bruce (R)
Womack, Steve (R)
California Aguilar, Pete (D)
Barragán, Nanette (D)
Bera, Ami (D)
Brownley, Julia (D)
Calvert, Ken (R)
Carbajal, Salud (D)
Cárdenas, Tony (D)
Chu, Judy (D)
Correa, Luis (D)
Costa, Jim (D)
DeSaulnier, Mark (D)
Duarte, John (R)
Eshoo, Anna (D)
Fong, Vince (R)
Garamendi, John (D)
Garcia, Mike (R)
Garcia, Robert (D)
Gomez, Jimmy (D)
Harder, Josh (D)
Huffman, Jared (D)
Issa, Darrell (R)
Jacobs, Sara (D)
Kamlager-Dove, Sydney (D)
Khanna, Ro (D)
Kiley, Kevin (R)
HOUSE KEY:
HALL OF FAME. Does not appear in any column.
HALL OF SHAME. Appears in all five columns.
REPRESENTATIVES
California
Kim, Young (R)
LaMalfa, Doug (R)
Lee, Barbara (D)
Levin, Mike (D)
Lieu, Ted (D)
Lofgren, Zoe (D)
Matsui, Doris (D)
McClintock, Tom (R)
Mullin, Kevin (D)
Napolitano, Grace (D)
Obernolte, Jay (R)
Panetta, Jimmy (D)
Pelosi, Nancy (D)
Peters, Scott (D)
Porter, Katie (D)
Ruiz, Raul (D)
Sánchez, Linda (D)
Schiff, Adam (D)
Sherman, Brad (D)
Steel, Michelle (R)
Swalwell, Eric (D)
Takano, Mark (D)
Thompson, Mike (D)
Torres, Norma (D)
Valadao, David (R)
Vargas, Juan (D)
Waters, Maxine (D)
Colorado
Boebert, Lauren (R)
Caraveo, Yadira (D)
Crow, Jason (D)
DeGette, Diana (D)
Lamborn, Doug (R)
Lopez, Greg (R)
Neguse, Joe (D)
Pettersen, Brittany (D)
Connecticut Courtney, Joe (D)
DeLauro, Rosa (D)
Hayes, Jahana (D)
Himes, James (D)
Larson, John (D)
Delaware Blunt Rochester, Lisa (D)
Florida Bean, Aaron (R)
Bilirakis, Gus (R)
Buchanan, Vern (R)
Cammack, Kat (R)
Castor, Kathy (D)
Cherfilus-McCormick, Sheila (D)
Diaz-Balart, Mario (R)
Donalds, Byron (R)
Florida Dunn, Neal (R)
Frankel, Lois (D)
Franklin, Scott (R)
Frost, Maxwell (D)
Gaetz, Matt (R)
Gimenez, Carlos (R)
Lee, Laurel (R)
Luna, Anna Paulina (R)
Mast, Brian (R)
Mills, Cory (R)
Moskowitz, Jared (D)
Posey, Bill (R)
Rutherford, John (R)
Salazar, Maria (R)
Soto, Darren (D)
Steube, Gregory (R)
Waltz, Michael (R)
Wasserman Schultz, Debbie (D)
Webster, Daniel (R)
Wilson, Frederica (D)
Georgia Allen, Rick (R)
Bishop, Sanford (D)
Carter, Earl (R)
Clyde, Andrew (R)
Collins, Mike (R)
Ferguson, Drew (R)
Greene, Marjorie Taylor (R)
Johnson, Henry C. (D)
Loudermilk, Barry (R)
McBath, Lucy (D)
McCormick, Rich (R)
Scott, Austin (R)
Scott, David (D)
Williams, Nikema (D)
Hawaii Case, Ed (D)
Tokuda, Jill (D)
Idaho Fulcher, Russ (R)
Illinois
Simpson, Michael (R)
Bost, Mike (R)
Budzinski, Nikki (D)
Casten, Sean (D)
Davis, Danny (D)
Foster, Bill (D)
García, Jesús (D)
Jackson, Jonathan (D)
Kelly, Robin (D)
Krishnamoorthi, Raja (D)
LaHood, Darin (R)
Miller, Mary (R)
HOUSE KEY:
HALL OF FAME. Does not appear in any column.
HALL OF SHAME.
REPRESENTATIVES
Illinois
Quigley, Mike (D)
Ramirez, Delia (D)
Schakowsky, Janice (D)
Schneider, Bradley (D)
Sorensen, Eric (D)
Underwood, Lauren (D)
Indiana
Baird, James (R)
Banks, Jim (R)
Bucshon, Larry (R)
Carson, André (D)
Houchin, Erin (R)
Mrvan, Frank (D)
Pence, Greg (R)
Spartz, Victoria (R)
Yakym, Rudy (R)
Iowa
Feenstra, Randy (R)
Hinson, Ashley (R)
Miller-Meeks, Mariannette (R)
Nunn, Zachary (R)
Kansas Davids, Sharice (D)
Estes, Ron (R)
LaTurner, Jake (R)
Mann, Tracey (R)
Kentucky Barr, Andy (R)
Comer, James (R)
Guthrie, Brett (R)
Massie, Thomas (R)
McGarvey, Morgan (D)
Rogers, Harold (R)
Louisiana Carter, Troy (D)
Graves, Garret (R)
Higgins, Clay (R)
Johnson, Mike (R)
Letlow, Julia (R)
Scalise, Steve (R)
Maine Golden, Jared (D)
Pingree Chellie (D)
Maryland Harris, Andy (R)
Hoyer, Steny (D)
Ivey, Glenn (D)
Mfume, Kweisi (D)
Raskin, Jamie (D)
Ruppersberger, C.A. Dutch (D)
Sarbanes, John (D)
Trone, David (D)
Massachusetts Auchincloss, Jake (D)
Clark, Katherine (D)
Keating, William (D)
Lynch, Stephen (D)
Massachusetts
McGovern, James (D)
Moulton, Seth (D)
Neal, Richard (D)
Pressley, Ayanna (D)
Trahan, Lori (D)
Michigan Bergman, Jack (R)
Dingell, Debbie (D)
Huizenga, Bill (R)
James, John (R)
Kildee, Daniel (D)
McClain, Lisa (R)
Moolenaar, John (R)
Scholten, Hillary (D)
Slotkin, Elissa (D)
Stevens, Haley (D)
Thanedar, Shri (D)
Tlaib, Rashida (D)
Walberg, Tim (R)
Minnesota Craig, Angie (D)
Emmer, Tom (R)
Finstad, Brad (R)
Fischbach, Michelle (R)
McCollum, Betty (D)
Omar, Ilhan (D)
Phillips, Dean (D)
Stauber, Pete (R)
Mississippi Ezell, Mike (R)
Guest, Michael (R)
Kelly, Trent (R)
Thompson, Bennie (D)
Missouri Alford, Mark (R)
Burlison, Eric (R)
Bush, Cori (D)
Cleaver, Emanuel (D)
Graves, Sam (R)
Luetkemeyer, Blaine (R)
Smith, Jason (R)
Wagner, Ann (R)
Montana Rosendale, Matthew (R)
Zinke, Ryan (R)
Nebraska Bacon, Don (R)
Flood, Mike (R)
Smith, Adrian (R)
Nevada Amodei, Mark (R)
Horsford, Steven (D)
Lee, Susie (D)
Titus, Dina (D)
New Hampshire Kuster, Ann (D)
Pappas, Chris (D)
HOUSE KEY:
HALL OF FAME. Does not appear in any column.
HALL OF SHAME. Appears
REPRESENTATIVES
New Jersey Gottheimer, Josh (D)
Kean, Thomas (R)
Kim, Andy (D)
Menendez, Robert Jacobsen (D)
Norcross, Donald (D)
Pallone, Frank (D)
Pascrell, Bill (D)
Sherrill, Mikie (D)
Smith, Christopher (R)
Van Drew, Jefferson (R)
Watson Coleman, Bonnie (D)
New Mexico Leger Fernandez, Teresa (D)
Stansbury, Melanie (D)
Vasquez, Gabe (D)
New York Bowman, Jamaal (D)
Clarke, Yvette (D)
D'Esposito, Anthony (R)
Espaillat, Adriano (D)
Garbarino, Andrew (R)
Goldman, Dan (D)
Jeffries, Hakeem (D)
Kennedy, Timothy (D)
LaLota, Nick (R)
Langworthy, Nicholas (R)
Lawler, Michael (R)
Malliotakis, Nicole (R)
Meeks, Gregory (D)
Meng, Grace (D)
Molinaro, Marcus (R)
Morelle, Joseph (D)
Nadler, Jerrold (D)
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (D)
Ryan, Patrick (D)
Stefanik, Elise (R)
Suozzi, Thomas (D)
Tenney, Claudia (R)
Tonko, Paul (D)
Torres, Ritchie (D)
Velázquez, Nydia (D)
Williams, Brandon (R)
North Carolina
Adams, Alma (D)
Bishop, Dan (R)
Davis, Donald (D)
Edwards, Chuck (R)
Foushee, Valerie (D)
Foxx, Virginia (R)
Hudson, Richard (R)
Jackson, Jeff (D)
Manning, Kathy (D)
North Carolina
McHenry, Patrick (R)
Murphy, Gregory (R)
Nickel, Wiley (D)
Ross, Deborah (D)
Rouzer, David (R)
North Dakota Armstrong, Kelly (R)
Ohio
Oklahoma
Balderson, Troy (R)
Beatty, Joyce (D)
Brown, Shontel (D)
Carey, Mike (R)
Davidson, Warren (R)
Jordan, Jim (R)
Joyce, David (R)
Kaptur, Marcy (D)
Landsman, Greg (D)
Latta, Robert (R)
Miller, Max (R)
Rulli, Michael (R)
Sykes, Emilia (D)
Turner, Michael (R)
Wenstrup, Brad (R)
Bice, Stephanie (R)
Brecheen, Josh (R)
Cole, Tom (R)
Hern, Kevin (R)
Lucas, Frank (R)
Oregon Bentz, Cliff (R)
Blumenauer, Earl (D)
Bonamici, Suzanne (D)
Chavez-DeRemer, Lori (R)
Hoyle, Val (D)
Salinas, Andrea (D)
Pennsylvania Boyle, Brendan (D)
Cartwright, Matt (D)
Dean, Madeleine (D)
Deluzio, Chris (D)
Evans, Dwight (D)
Fitzpatrick, Brian (R)
Houlahan, Chrissy (D)
Joyce, John (R)
Kelly, Mike (R)
Lee, Summer (D)
Meuser, Daniel (R)
Perry, Scott (R)
Reschenthaler, Guy (R)
Scanlon, Mary (D)
Smucker, Lloyd (R)
Thompson, Glenn (R)
Wild, Susan (D)
HOUSE KEY:
HALL OF FAME. Does not appear in any column.
HALL OF SHAME. Appears
REPRESENTATIVES
Rhode Island Amo, Gabe (D)
Magaziner, Seth (D)
South Carolina Clyburn, James (D)
Duncan, Jeff (R)
Fry, Russell (R)
Mace, Nancy (R)
Norman, Ralph (R)
Timmons, William (R)
Wilson, Joe (R)
South Dakota Johnson, Dusty (R)
Tennessee Burchett, Tim (R)
Cohen, Steve (D)
DesJarlais, Scott (R)
Fleischmann, Charles (R)
Green, Mark E. (R)
Harshbarger, Diana (R)
Kustoff, David (R)
Ogles, Andrew (R)
Rose, John W. (R)
Texas Allred, Colin (D)
Arrington, Jodey (R)
Babin, Brian (R)
Burgess, Michael (R)
Carter, John R. (R)
Casar, Greg (D)
Castro, Joaquin (D)
Cloud, Michael (R)
Crenshaw, Dan (R)
Crockett, Jasmine (D)
Cuellar, Henry (D)
De La Cruz, Mónica (R)
Doggett, Lloyd (D)
Ellzey, Jake (R)
Escobar, Veronica (D)
Fallon, Pat (R)
Fletcher, Lizzie (D)
Garcia, Sylvia (D)
Gonzales, Tony (R)
Gonzalez, Vicente (D)
Gooden, Lance (R)
Granger, Kay (R)
Green, Al (D)
Hunt, Wesley (R)
Jackson, Ronny (R)
Jackson Lee, Sheila (D)
Luttrell, Morgan (R)
McCaul, Michael (R)
Moran, Nathaniel (R)
Nehls, Troy (R)
Texas
Pfluger, August (R)
Roy, Chip (R)
Self, Keith (R)
Sessions, Pete (R)
Van Duyne, Beth (R)
Veasey, Marc (D)
Weber, Randy (R)
Williams, Roger (R)
Utah
Curtis, John (R)
Maloy, Celeste (R)
Moore, Blake (R)
Owens, Burgess (R)
Vermont Balint, Becca (D)
Virginia Beyer, Donald (D)
Cline, Ben (R)
Connolly, Gerald (D)
Good, Bob (R)
Griffith, Morgan (R)
Kiggans, Jennifer (R)
McClellan, Jennifer (D)
Scott, Robert (D)
Spanberger, Abigail (D)
Wexton, Jennifer (D)
Wittman, Robert (R)
Washington
DelBene, Suzan (D)
Gluesenkamp Perez, Marie (D)
Jayapal, Pramila (D)
Kilmer, Derek (D)
Larsen, Rick (D)
McMorris Rodgers, Cathy (R)
Newhouse, Dan (R)
Schrier, Kim (D)
Smith, Adam (D)
Strickland, Marilyn (D)
West Virginia Miller, Carol (R)
Mooney, Alexander (R)
Wisconsin Fitzgerald, Scott (R)
Grothman, Glenn (R)
Moore, Gwen (D)
Pocan, Mark (D)
Steil, Bryan (R)
Tiffany, Thomas (R)
Van Orden, Derrick (R)
Wyoming Hageman, Harriet (R)
SENATE KEY:
HALL OF FAME. Does not appear in any column.
HALL OF SHAME. Appears in all five columns.
SENATORS
Alabama Britt, Katie Boyd (R)
Tuberville, Tommy (R)
Alaska Murkowski, Lisa (R)
Sullivan, Dan (R)
Arizona Kelly, Mark (D)
Sinema, Kyrsten (I)
Arkansas Boozman, John (R)
Cotton, Tom (R)
California Butler, Laphonza R. (D)
Padilla, Alex (D)
Colorado Bennet, Michael (D)
Hickenlooper, John (D)
Connecticut Blumenthal, Richard (D)
Murphy, Christopher (D)
Delaware Carper, Thomas (D)
Coons, Christopher (D)
Florida Rubio, Marco (R)
Scott, Rick (R)
Georgia Ossoff, Jon (D)
Hawaii
Warnock, Raphael (D)
Hirono, Mazie (D)
Schatz, Brian (D)
Idaho Crapo, Mike (R)
Risch, James (R)
Illinois Duckworth, Tammy (D)
Durbin, Richard (D)
Indiana Braun, Mike (R)
Young, Todd (R)
Iowa Ernst, Joni (R)
Grassley, Chuck (R)
Kansas Marshall, Roger (R)
Moran, Jerry (R)
Kentucky McConnell, Mitch (R)
Paul, Rand (R)
Louisiana Cassidy, Bill (R)
Kennedy, John (R)
Maine Collins, Susan (R)
King, Angus (I)
Maryland Cardin, Benjamin (D)
Van Hollen, Chris (D)
Massachusetts Markey, Edward (D) Warren, Elizabeth (D)
Michigan Peters, Gary (D)
Stabenow, Debbie (D)
Minnesota Klobuchar, Amy (D)
Smith, Tina (D)
Mississippi Hyde-Smith, Cindy (R)
Wicker, Roger (R)
Missouri Hawley, Josh (R)
Schmitt, Eric (R)
Voted Against Investigating Israel's Human Rights Violations Signed Letter Attacking the ICC Did Not Sign Letter Recognizing Palestinian State Signed Letter
SENATORS
Montana Daines, Steve (R)
Tester, Jon (D)
Nebraska Fischer, Deb (R)
Ricketts, Pete (R)
Nevada Cortez Masto, Catherine (D)
Rosen, Jacky (D)
New Hampshire Hassan, Margaret Wood (D)
Shaheen, Jeanne (D)
New Jersey Booker, Cory (D)
Menendez, Bob (D)
New Mexico Heinrich, Martin (D)
Luján, Ben Ray (D)
New York Gillibrand, Kirsten (D)
Schumer, Chuck (D)
North Carolina Budd, Ted (R)
Tillis, Thom (R)
North Dakota Cramer, Kevin (R)
Hoeven, John (R)
Ohio Brown, Sherrod (D)
Vance, J.D. (R)
Oklahoma Lankford, James (R)
Mullin, Markwayne (R)
Oregon Merkley, Jeff (D)
Wyden, Ron (D)
Pennsylvania Casey, Robert (D)
Fetterman, John (D)
Rhode Island Reed, Jack (D)
Whitehouse, Sheldon (D)
South Carolina Graham, Lindsey (R)
Scott, Tim (R)
South Dakota Rounds, Mike (R)
Thune, John (R)
Tennessee Blackburn, Marsha (R)
Hagerty, Bill (R)
Texas Cornyn, John (R)
Cruz, Ted (R)
Utah Lee, Mike (R)
Romney, Mitt (R)
Vermont Sanders, Bernie (I)
Welch, Peter (D)
Virginia Kaine, Tim (D)
Warner, Mark (D)
Washington Cantwell, Maria (D)
Murray, Patty (D)
West Virginia Capito, Shelley Moore (R)
Manchin, Joe (I)
Wisconsin Baldwin, Tammy (D)
Johnson, Ron (R)
Wyoming Barrasso, John (R)
Lummis, Cynthia (R)
Voted Against Investigating Israel's Human Rights Violations Signed Letter Attacking the ICC Did Not Sign Letter Recognizing
OTHER VOICES
FROM THE MIDDLE EAST CLIPBOARD
Compiled by Janet McMahon
The ICJ Finds That BDS Is not Merely A Right, but an Obligation
BY CRAIG MOKHIBER
Israel and its lobby have, for years now, been engaged in a frenzy of activity to further insulate Israel from accountability by using their influence in the West to effectively outlaw organized opposition to Israel. Foremost among these efforts has been the Israeli campaign to penalize calls to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its gross violations of human rights. As a result, countless laws and policies are now on the books across the U.S. and the broader West, trampling on core constitutional principles and internationally guaranteed human rights in defense of Israeli impunity. But an advisory opinion issued last month by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) should help to turn that around.
In its historic ruling, the ICJ found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza is entirely unlawful, that Israel practices apartheid and racial segregation, and that all states are under a duty to help bring this to an end, including by cutting off all economic, trade and investment relations with Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory. In other words, as a matter of international law, all countries are obliged to participate in an economic boycott of Israel’s activities in the occupied Palestinian territory and to divest from any existing economic relations there.
Because the court was bound by the parameters of the request from the U.N. General Assembly that triggered its findings, it did not address duties and obligations relating to activities inside the 1948 Green Line. However, the court’s authoritative statement of the requirements of international law makes clear that proponents of BDS
have not only the moral high ground but also a firm grounding in international law.
The court’s advisory opinion in July comes on the heels of the commencement of genocide proceedings against Israel in the ICJ last December, and a request in May by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for arrest
VOL. 27 ISSUE 6—OCTOBER 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The ICJ Finds That BDS Is Not Merely a Right, but an Obligation, Craig Mokhiber, mondoweiss.net OV-39
Israel Is in No Place to Talk About “Red Lines,” Belén Fernandez, www.aljazeera.com OV-40
My Dear Friend, How Did You Become a Story?, Tareq S. Hajjaj, mondoweiss.net OV-41
Sadistic Violence in War: The Israeli Aggression in Gaza,” Dr. Samah Jabr, www.middleeastmonitor.com OV-42
Israel’s Assassinations of Hamas And Hezbollah Leaders Will Backfire, Ibrahim Al-Marashi, www.aljazeera.com OV-43
The End of Israel’s Economy, Shir Hever, mondoweiss.net OV-44
AIPAC Had Some Recent Wins But It Isn’t Invincible, Aaron Sobczak, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-46
Canada Set to Revoke Jewish National Fund’s Charitable Status, Yves Engler, www.yvesengler.com OV-47
Gaza and the Death of Western Journalism, Mohamad Elmasry, www.aljazeera.com OV-48
Sonic Booms—The Psychological Warfare Israel Uses to Sow Fear in Lebanon, Mat Nashed, www.aljazeera.com OV-49
U.S. Soldiers Injured in Raid During “Non-Combat” Mission In Iraq, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, www.responsiblestatecraft.org OV-51
warrants for the Israeli prime minister and the defense minister for crimes against humanity, including extermination. Together, they represent a historic shift away from 76 years of Western-sponsored Israeli exceptionalism and impunity, feeding hope of a new era of accountability.
Recognizing this, Israel, as well as its Western allies accused of complicity in Israel’s international crimes (chief among them the U.S., UK, and Germany), have been scrambling to oppose, delay and obstruct action by these courts, both by intervening in court proceedings and, in some cases, by threatening court officials. And, indeed, the ICC warrant process has already been inordinately delayed when compared to previous cases. Nevertheless, for its part, the ICJ advisory opinion was both timely and uncompromising in its application of international law to Israel.
Israel and its allies also defensively claim that advisory opinions of the ICJ are “non-binding,” and, indeed, the court cannot compel a state to comply with its findings. But what this tactic ignores is that the laws to which the court refers in its authoritative opinion are, in fact, binding on all states. For example, the court observed that the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, their rights under international human rights and humanitarian law, and the prohibition of Israel’s acquisition of territory by force impose so-called “erga omnes” obligations, that is, binding obligations that apply to all countries.
Among these obligations are the duty not to recognize or assist the occupation in any way, and the duty to take action to realize the equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. It follows that any policies or acts by a Western country that in any way recognize Israel’s occupation, assist Israel in that occupation (economically, militarily, diplomatically, etc.), or prohibit persons under its jurisdiction from respecting international law by boycotting or divesting from Israel’s illegal occupation, would be unlawful.
Of course, the U.S., which has long ignored the constraints of international law and invested decades of effort in carving out an exception for Israeli impunity, is likely to reject the court’s findings and oppose the implementing resolution of the U.N. General Assembly, which is expected to follow. Some other Western states invested in the Israeli axis, like the UK and Germany, may follow suit. But it is likely that most countries, including other Western states, will adjust their policies to ensure legal compliance.
Groups and individuals targeted by efforts to penalize BDS or to compel people to reject it will now have an important new tool in their legal arsenal as they assert their rights either administratively or judicially. They can now invoke the authoritative ruling of the World Court to credibly assert that participating in boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid is not only a moral imperative and constitutional and human right, but also an international legal obligation.
On Saturday, July 27, at least 12 children from the Druze community were killed in a rocket attack on the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel blamed the strike on Hezbollah, declaring that it constituted “the crossing of all red lines.” Hezbollah, which generally has no qualms owning up to its handiwork, vehemently denied the accusation.
Regardless of who is responsible, it is no less than ludicrously obscene that Israel should fancy itself qualified to talk about “red lines” when the Israeli army is presently perpetrating straightup genocide in the Gaza Strip. Since Oct. 7, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have officially been killed in Gaza. A recent Lancet study suggests the true death toll could exceed 186,000.
Israel’s education minister, Yoav Kisch, called on his government to respond “with full force” to the Majdal Shams attack and threatened the possibility of “all-out war” with Hezbollah. Again, it takes a special sort of logic to threaten war in retaliation for an attack on a territory you are illegally occupying.
But, hey, that’s how Israel rolls. Aggressor becomes victim, occupier becomes rightful owner, genocide becomes self-defense.
As for the threat of “all-out war” in Lebanon, it bears mentioning that Israel has killed more than 500 people in the country since October, including more than 100 civilians. It seems pretty “all-out” already.
Not that this is the first time Israel has gone on a mass Lebanese killing spree. Recall the 34-day Israeli war on Lebanon in July and August of 2006, which reduced the country’s population by approximately 1,200 people and produced the so-called “Dahiyeh Doctrine,” defined by the Times of Israel as a “military strategy that advocates the use of disproportionate force against a militant entity by destroying civilian infrastructure.”
In other words, never mind international law and those things known as the Geneva Conventions.
The doctrine was named for the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, an area the Western media delight in defining as a “Hezbollah stronghold.” Hitchhiking through Lebanon in the aftermath of the 2006 war, I myself wit-
nessed the outcome of the “disproportionate force” used on Dahiyeh and other parts of the country. I saw apartment blocks converted into craters and villages reduced to rubble.
One can only assume that, in any forthcoming conflict, the Dahiyeh Doctrine will be the name of the game.
In addition to razing civilian infrastructure in 2006, Israel also undertook to saturate swaths of Lebanon with millions of cluster bombs, many of which failed to explode on impact and which continue to kill and maim even in the absence of, um, “all-out war.”
Then there were such incidents as the 2006 Marwahin massacre, in which 23 people—most of them children— were slaughtered at close range by an Israeli helicopter while obeying evacuation orders issued by the Israeli army. That sounds like a “red line” if there ever was one.
Or rewind the clock to 1996 and Israel’s charmingly titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” in which the Israeli army massacred 106 civilians sheltering at a United Nations compound in the southern Lebanese city of Qana.
Rewind even further and you’ll find the very event that spawned Hezbollah in the first place: the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. This overlapped with the 22-year torturehappy Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which came to an ignominious close in May 2000, thanks to the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance.
Now, Israel’s bellicose talk in response to the Majdal Shams incident has fueled fears of a major regional escalation. Governments have warned their citizens against travel to Lebanon and various airlines have cancelled flights in and out of Beirut—a fair precaution seeing as Israel repeatedly bombed the Beirut airport in 2006. On Monday Israeli drone attacks on south Lebanon reportedly killed two people and injured a child.
In its statement on Hezbollah’s alleged “crossing of all red lines” in Israeli-occupied Majdal Shams, Israel’s Foreign Ministry declared: “This is not an army fighting another army, rather
it is a terrorist organization deliberately shooting at civilians.” If we didn’t know the speaker of these words or the context, we might think they were referring to Israel’s own behavior in Gaza. Which brings us to the rhetorical question: if Israel cares so much for the civilians inhabiting the territories it occupies, why is it slaughtering Palestinians?
In June 2006, the Israeli army unleashed its romantic “Operation Summer Rains” on the Gaza Strip, an assault U.S. scholar Noam Chomsky and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé have described as “systematic slaughter” and the “most brutal attack on Gaza since 1967.” Just weeks later, the Israelis decided Lebanon could also use some rain, and—voilà—the July war was born.
As they say, when it rains genocide, it pours. And Israel may have found a convenient pretext to move the storm into Lebanon, too.
Not for a single time did I think that the war would bring up memories from my childhood and damage them, too, as it damages the present and future for myself and
hundreds of thousands of families in Gaza.
I was catching up on the news on Tuesday, Aug. 13, and was shocked to see my friend, Muhammad Abu alQumssan. He is from Tal al-Hawa, west of Gaza City, and has evacuated with his family several times. I met him almost every day in the market in Rafah when we both evacuated there, and I also met him in Khan Younis. But I never saw him that broken.
Muhammad was showing up on social media in videos, screaming and crying like a child, distraught by his misfortune; people around him tried to hold him still, but he evaded them, trying to reach his family, who were killed in an Israeli airstrike. His brother hugged him and held him still, and people around him started praying to God to grant him patience.
Muhammad became a father to two beautiful twins on Aug. 10. He went to the hospital to issue their birth certificates. He was eager to return home and show them to his family and celebrate with them, but he was too late.
“I did not have time to be happy with them,” Muhammad said with unstoppable tears.
I know Muhammad from school. He always had a beautiful smile on his face, even during the war. I remember he was a good singer at school.
When I saw his photos, I could not believe that it was the same person. I called him immediately, and he was almost unable to speak.
“There’s no one left for me, Tareq. They killed everyone. I couldn’t even see their faces to say goodbye.”
Muhammad could not come up with any reasonable reason for why his wife and newborn twins were targeted in their apartment in Deir al-Balah. They were alone in a house that Muhammad had been able to rent during the war instead of living in a tent. He had his pregnant wife’s well-being in mind when he secured the apartment, wanting to offer her as much safety as he could in light of the genocide.
He brought his babies everything he could before they were born. In a time
when everything was mostly impossible to get, Muhammad had, over the months, collected clothes, a baby crib, soap, diapers, baby formula, a feeding bottle, and everything else that a baby needs.
“There was no time. I just left the house to go to the hospital, and that was the last time I saw them. My relatives near me called me when I was about to get back home. They asked, ‘Are you okay?’ I got worried and asked them what happened. They said, ‘your place was bombed and your family is moving to the same hospital that you’re in.’ I went to see them, but the hospital staff would not even let me see them. They were burned beyond recognition, and there were no faces to see.”
Muhammad’s wife, Dr. Jumana Arafah, was a physician working at the hospitals and published posts on her social media page showing children targeted by Israeli snipers.
The airstrike only killed Muhammad’s family in the building. People in Gaza considered this crime as part of the ongoing pattern of killing anyone exposing Israel’s crimes in Gaza, and Jumana was one of them.
Sadistic Violence In War: The Israeli Aggression In Gaza
BY DR. SAMAH JABR
Prisoners have recounted being paraded before the Israeli public in cages, being spat at and
having bananas thrown at them. Human rights and recent press reports detail instances where soldiers inserted a mobile phone into a prisoner’s anus and then called it, laughing as it rang inside his body. Soldiers have also taunted prisoners by claiming they were playing soccer with their children’s heads in Gaza. These instances provide only a glimpse into the sadistic behavior exhibited by Israelis against Palestinians during times of genocide.
Sadism is defined as deriving pleasure or psychological gratification from inflicting pain or suffering on others. Some individuals find pleasure in engaging in sadistic acts themselves, while others are satisfied with watching or indirectly participating. Sadists may inflict physical pain, humiliation or emotional manipulation to derive pleasure. Examples include taunting prisoners with threats of sexual violence against their wives, displaying the underwear of Gazan women, or denying prisoners access to toilets to belittle or emotionally scar them.
A key indicator of sadism is the absence of guilt or remorse. This is evident when settlers and Israeli Knesset members defend soldiers accused of sexually abusing prisoners during interrogations, claiming the military establishment has the right to commit any form of abuse against Palestinian prisoners in wartime. This suggests that these acts are not isolated incidents but are rather institutionalized and supported by Israeli legislation.
During the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has lasted over 10 months, countless monstrous scenes have emerged that defy the boundaries of law and morality. These acts reveal the brutal reality of violence and challenge Israeli claims that their army is “the most moral in the world.”
One form of sadistic behavior is random attacks. Most residential areas in Gaza have faced indiscriminate shelling, leading to the destruction of homes and loss of life. This contrasts sharply with the precision of Israeli military operations targeting individu-
als on their hit list, as seen with the assassination of Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, where he was in a highly secured residential compound. Another form is the forced displacement of civilians from their homes. Thousands of families have been uprooted to unsafe or overcrowded areas. Gaza, already one of the most densely populated regions in the world, faces severe damage from these displacements. Many residents have been displaced multiple times since the aggression began, some more than 10 times. These displacements lack any security justification and serve merely to inflict suffering. They reflect a sadistic dimension by causing severe psychological and physical harm.
The policy of collective punishment is another manifestation of Israeli sadism. This includes inflicting starvation and deprivation of basic necessities. Such deliberate acts of violence have led to the deaths of children and even driven animals to feed on dead human bodies. This policy, enforced by the highest levels of Israeli governance, reinforces institutional sadism and encourages settlers to act out their cruelty, such as attacking food trucks headed for Gaza.
Some of the most egregious sadistic practices occur during detainment and arrest. Numerous reports document arbitrary arrests and torture of Palestinian detainees, who often face extreme physical and psychological torment designed to maximize their suffering. Prisoners have reported soldiers phoning their girlfriends and relatives to witness the abuse inflicted on them, highlighting the pleasure and exhibitionism of these acts. Other abuses include denying basic rights to food, hygiene and medical care, while subjecting prisoners to violent beatings, mandatory strip searches, blindfolding for days, forcing them to eat with their hands tied and even physical assaults by medical staff.
Several underlying reasons contribute to sadistic behavior in times of conflict, reflecting the complex nature of human psychology and broader political and social contexts.
In prolonged conflicts like the Israeli occupation of Palestine, dehumanizing Palestinians justifies endless violence without guilt. When a group is viewed as subhuman, sadistic acts become easier to rationalize. This is evident in statements made by Israeli officials who have referred to Palestinians as “cockroaches” or “human animals.”
IMMUNITY
Military and political institutions can either encourage or condone violent behavior. Policies targeting civilians or inflicting harm may serve political or strategic goals, fostering a culture of violence within these institutions. Israel’s disregard for accountability and its guarantee of amnesty embolden soldiers and settlers to commit crimes openly, without fear of repercussions. If individual crimes like the killings of Mohammed Al-Durrah and Shireen Abu Akleh go unpunished, how can the mass killing of nearly 30,000 children and women be prosecuted?
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF OCT. 7
The defeat suffered by the Israeli army on Oct. 7, 2023 has led to widespread humiliation. Israelis are attempting to dispel this through vengeful actions, channeling their anger toward anything Palestinian.
POLITICAL JUSTIFICATION AND PROPAGANDA
Propaganda shapes perceptions of conflict. When the enemy is portrayed as extreme or dehumanized, it reinforces societal acceptance of violence. Military attacks on Palestinian civilians are often justified as necessary for Israel’s security, supported by propaganda depicting Palestinians as a constant threat. This legitimizes violence and humiliation as a means of control. This analysis of Israeli sadism toward Palestinians may explain the surprising reactions of Israeli prisoners released in exchange deals during this aggression, such as shaking hands with their cap-
tors. Some view this behavior as Stockholm Syndrome, but it may better reflect a clash between the occupier’s sadistic tendencies and the humanity of those struggling for liberation.
Conflicts, especially prolonged ones, can foster sadistic behaviors when internal deterrents—such as respecting the dead and the sanctity of human life—are absent. It is crucial to continually align actions with values and seek redemption, rather than unleashing violent instincts. This distinction underscores the difference between civilization and barbarism.
Dr. Samah Jabr, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, is head of the Palestine Ministry of Health’s Mental Health Unit and assistant clinical professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor. This article was first posted at <www. middleeastmonitor.com>, Aug. 14, 2024, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Reprinted with permission.
Israel’s Assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah Leaders Will Backfire
BY IBRAHIM AL-MARASHI
In recent weeks, Israel has been on an assassination spree, killing several high-profile Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in quick succession. Yet there is reason to believe these killings, widely celebrated as a show of power now, will serve to embolden these groups and prove harmful to Israel’s security and the region’s stability in the long term.
The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran’s capital, Tehran, on Wednesday, for example, silenced a moderating voice in the Hamas leadership and
likely pushed the group to assume an even harder, less compromising stance against Israel. The head of the group’s political wing, Haniyeh was widely seen as a pragmatic political operator. He had negotiated cease-fires in the past and was attempting to achieve another one before he was killed.
We have seen in the past how a highlevel assassination can have a hardening effect on the group.
Twenty years ago, in March 2004, Israel assassinated Hamas’ aging, wheelchair-bound founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as he was leaving a mosque in Gaza City after dawn prayers. Under Yassin’s tutelage, Hamas was aligned with Saudi Arabia and had limited access to high-grade weaponry.
After Yassin’s killing, Khaled Meshal, a more hawkish figure, took control of Hamas and moved the group closer to Iran. Unlike the Saudis, Iran was willing to provide Hamas with rocket designs and other military technology. By the time Haniyeh took over the political leadership role from Meshal in 2017, Hamas was fully under Iranian influence and had built a formidable arsenal of high-grade weaponry.
The same thing happened when Israel targeted the leader of Hezbollah.
In 1992, Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and 6-year-old son, in southern Lebanon. The killings only hardened the group’s resolve. AlMusawi’s successor, Hassan Nasrallah, proved to be much more charismatic, eloquent and effective. He increased the group’s power and regional influence significantly. Nasrallah was also responsible for the rise of Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander who is believed to be responsible for obtaining the bulk of the group’s more advanced weapons, from precision-guided missiles to long-range rockets.
A day before Haniyeh’s killing in Tehran, Israel assassinated Shukr in Beirut. And on Thursday, it claimed to have killed Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in an air raid on southern Gaza on July 13.
Looking at the unintended consequences of past assassinations, there is little reason to believe the killing of either military commander, or Haniyeh for that matter, would make these groups less formidable foes to Israel.
History shows every single Israeli assassination of a high-profile political or military operator, even after initially being hailed as a game-changing victory, eventually led to the killed leader being replaced by someone more determined, adept and hawkish.
Indeed, Israel’s counterterrorism strategy over the past 40 years, which has been highly dependent on assassinations, has proved to be a colossal strategic failure.
The 1992 assassination of al-Musawi, for example, was considered a strategic mistake on the part of Israel by many even before it happened. In his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Ronen Bergman documents how even some Israeli military figures had opposed the assassination, believing “Hezbollah was not a one-man show, and Musawi was not the most extreme man in its leadership” and warning he “would be replaced, perhaps by someone more radical.”
Of course, they were right.
Under al-Musawi, Hezbollah was a small militia. Its most powerful weapon was suicide bombings, and it could not effectively repel the Israeli military from Lebanese territory. Once Nasrallah took over, he put Shukr in charge of stepping up the group’s efforts, and staging sophisticated guerrilla attacks, including rocket attacks, on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. Shukr’s attacks compelled the Israelis to withdraw in 2000, marking their first loss against an Arab military force.
However, Israel did not learn its lesson about assassinations after the killing of al-Musawi led to Nasrallah’s rise to power. In 2003, it tried to assassinate Yassin and his then-assistant, Haniyeh. They narrowly escaped a building in Gaza City before it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike. A year later, Israel managed to kill Yassin, lead-
ing to the rise of Meshal, who pushed Hamas into an alliance with Iran, which proved disastrous for Israel.
It is not surprising—in fact, almost expected—that when Israel kills a political or military leader of Hezbollah or Hamas, he is replaced by a more hardline leader, seeking revenge, not compromise.
The history will likely repeat itself. Meshal is now expected to return to power as Haniyeh’s replacement. He is likely to be much less accommodating in his negotiations with the Israelis. [Haniyeh was in fact replaced by Yahya Sinwar.—ed.]
Israel’s assassinations often have adverse consequences beyond paving the way for more hard-line leaders, and these most recent ones are no different.
By killing Haniyeh in Tehran, for example, Israel has prompted Iran to strike back.
In April, when Israel assassinated two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals in Iran’s diplomatic facility in Damascus, Tehran retaliated by firing a salvo of 300 Iranian drones and ballistic and cruise missiles, the first state to strike Israel in the 21st century. Despite all the help it received from its powerful Western allies and Arab neighbors, at least five ballistic missiles breached Israel’s defenses.
Israel has now struck a high-profile target in Tehran in an open insult to Iran’s sovereignty. With this act, it also communicated its ability to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran is compelled to restore deterrence.
Furthermore, Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was touted as a leader who could pivot Iran toward the West. The assassination gave the hardliners in Iran skeptical of rapprochement a reason to undermine the new president’s vision a day after he was inaugurated.
Ultimately, with its high-profile assassinations, Israel has scored a symbolic victory but also encouraged its adversaries to assume more hawkish positions and set the region up for a wider war.
Over the past 40 years, Israel insisted on trying to debilitate non-state actors
staging attacks against its forces and people by assassinating their leaders rather than addressing the root causes of political violence, such as the occupation, apartheid, failure of governance, loss of hope, despair and anger among Palestinians. The aftermath of Oct. 7 was another opportunity that Israel missed to change direction. Assassinations have served only to embolden, anger and make more determined Israel’s foes in the past, and they will continue to do so in the present.
It is unheard of when the headlines of Israel’s mainstream newspapers and the slogans of the BDS movement are almost identical. No state on Earth has been able to inflict so much damage to the Israeli economy as the State of Israel itself, and the result is growing indications that the Israeli economy has reached an impasse, with no path forward as long as the state remains an apartheid Zionist state rejected by the whole world except the U.S. and Germany. When Israeli protesters against the government carried a huge sign with the BDS slogan “From startup nation to shutdown nation” it was nothing short of a copyright violation. But this was in
February 2023. After Oct. 7 everything changed.
Israel’s genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, more than 15,000 children and may well have doomed over 146,000 additional Palestinians from Gaza to die in the upcoming months from health complications due to injury, starvation and disease. The war has ruined the lives of 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip, and of thousands in the occupied West Bank. Estimates by the U.N. are that 70 percent of the houses were destroyed, and that the rubble will take 15 years to clear. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the Palestinian survivors of the genocide, though traumatized, impoverished and mourning their lost family members and friends, will eventually rebuild and recover, however long it may take.
The physical destruction in Israel inflicted by the war is minimal in comparison, and yet one thing has been destroyed: the country’s future.
The economic indicators speak of nothing less than an economic catastrophe. Over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, tourism has stopped, Israel’s credit rating was lowered, Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost “junk bonds” levels, and the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60 percent in the first quarter of 2023 (as a result of the policies of Israel’s far-right government before Oct. 7) show no prospects of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds was diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds and insurance funds or their own savings to be tied to the fate of the State of Israel. This has caused a surprising stability in the Israeli stock market because funds invested in foreign stocks and bonds generated profit in foreign currency, which was multiplied by the rise in the exchange rate between foreign currencies and the Israeli shekel. But then Intel scuttled a $25 billion investment plan in Israel, the biggest BDS victory ever.
These are all financial indicators. But the crisis strikes deeper at the means of production of the Israeli economy. Israel’s power grid, which has largely switched to natural gas, still depends on coal to supply demand. The biggest supplier of coal to Israel is Colombia, which announced that it would suspend coal shipments to Israel as long as the genocide was ongoing. After Colombia, the next two biggest suppliers are South Africa and Russia. With-
out reliable and continuous electricity, Israel will no longer be able to pretend to be a developed economy. Server farms do not work without 24-hour power, and no one knows how many blackouts the Israeli high-tech sector could potentially survive. International tech companies have already started closing their branches in Israel.
Israel’s reputation as a “startup nation” depends on its tech sector, which in turn depends on highly educated employees. Israeli academics report that joint research with universities abroad has declined sharply thanks to the efforts of student encampments. Israeli newspapers are full of articles about the exodus of educated Israelis. Prof. Dan Ben David, a famous economist, argued that the Israeli economy is held together by 300,000 people (the senior staff in universities, tech companies and hospitals). Once a significant portion of these people leaves, he says, “We won’t become a Third World country, we just won’t be anymore.”
Data on the actual numbers of Israelis leaving the country is confusing and self-contradictory. In a time of great uncertainty, when Israeli newspapers are pumping disinformation about a global wave of anti-Semitism, as if Jews would be more at risk in Europe or North America than they are in Israel, many Israelis are still opting for emigration—families are taking extended vacations, and other Israelis explore options for work and study abroad. Still, the estimates of the number of Israelis who have already left vary wildly.
The two sectors of the Israeli economy that do not report a crash are the arms companies, which are reporting high sales (although most of them are domestic, arming the genocide), and the “exits”—as international corporations scavenge the carcasses of Israel’s tech sector looking for bargains. Even Google expressed interest in buying the Israeli cyber security company Wiz, founded by Israeli intelligence officers who are eager to sell their company to Google in order to be able to leave Israel.
Israeli economists are expecting the Israeli government to take urgent action to deal with the crisis, end the war, cut public spending, raise taxes, restore public trust in Israel’s public institutions, and repair Israel’s foreign relations, especially with the countries that it depends upon for trade—the EU, Turkey and Colombia. The Israeli government is instead implementing plans to destroy the Palestinian economy not only of Gaza but also of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. It adopts a belligerent approach toward any state that criticizes its policies and has passed a last-minute and unrealistic budget for 2024.
In the age of the information economy, the economic prospects of states are neither determined by raw materials nor the quality of the workforce. Instead, we live in an era of an “economy of expectations.” The hype of Israel’s “startup nation” has turned into a #Shutdownnation. Two senior Israeli economists, Jugene Kendel and Ron Tzur, published a secret report in which they predict that Israel will not survive to its 100th year. The report is kept secret because they do not want it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but they gave interviews about it. On Israel’s 76th Independence Day, Haaretz published an editorial on both its English and Hebrew editions with the headline, “Will Israel survive to celebrate 100 years? Only if Netanyahu resigns.” The Hebrew edition was published without the qualification. Almost four months have passed and Netanyahu shows no signs of relinquishing power and is sabotaging negotiations for a cease-fire in order to prevent elections.
Three Israeli historians, two Zionists and one anti-Zionist, have declared that the Zionist project has come to an end. When a critical mass of Israelis, regardless of their political opinions, become convinced that Israeli apartheid has become unsustainable, they will no longer agree to invest energy and money and risk their lives and their families for the sake of the Zionist project. They will seek out a better future for themselves, as every sane person
would, either by leaving Israel or, better yet, by working toward a new and democratic political system in Palestine. One person, one vote, and a future in which everyone of every religion and ethnicity can have a stake.
AIPAC Had Some Recent Wins but It Isn’t Invincible
BY AARON SOBCZAK
America’s most influential proIsrael lobby group, AIPAC, has been boasting about its success in recent congressional primary elections. Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) loss on Aug. 6 was the second instance of a socalled “squad” member losing their primary against an AIPAC-backed candidate this election season, following Rep. Jamal Bowman’s (D-NY) defeat on June 25.
AIPAC and its partners have spent over $24 million so far this year to influence elections and has enjoyed a series of successes all summer, bragging on X that 100 percent of the Democratic candidates it endorsed have so far won their primaries, a narrative that may cause many aspiring politicians to see AIPAC as a force they cannot afford to cross.
But that may be more a function of AIPAC simply opting not to intervene in races in which it is unlikely to win, even if it means allowing critics of the U.S.-Israel relationship to coast to victory.
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) primary this week, for example, appears to be a race that AIPAC would prefer not to call attention to. AIPAC hasn’t offered significant support to Omar’s Democra-
tic challenger, former Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels, who has pleaded for AIPAC’s assistance. And judging from AIPAC’s social media activity and public statements, the lobby group is largely signaling it has no interest in this race, which could unseat one of the most outspoken critics of U.S. arms transfers, foreign aid and political support for Israel in Congress today.
Indeed, at times, AIPAC has pulled the trigger and misfired. For example, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)—a member of the House Liberty Caucus, and a strong defender of non-intervention overseas—has been critical of how much American aid goes to Israel, and other nations, and spoke out against anti-Semitism laws proposed in Congress this year as potential violations of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. AIPAC spent roughly $400,000 in an effort to defeat him in his primary in May. Rather than succumbing to AIPAC’s efforts, Massie trounced his opponent, pulling in over 75 percent of the vote.
A few Democrats who have criticized America’s relationship with Israel have also successfully dodged AIPAC’s wrath. It doesn’t appear that AIPAC tried to unseat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) during her first re-election campaign in 2020, perhaps realizing it would be a lost cause and thus tarnish its stellar endorsement record. OcasioCortez won almost 75 percent of the vote in her 2020 primary, went unchallenged in 2022, and won 82 percent in the 2024 primary.
Another strong critic of Israel is Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). Tlaib, who won her first race in 2018, was the first Palestinian-American to be elected to the United States Congress. Detroit City Councilwoman Brenda Jones challenged Rep. Tlaib’s first re-election campaign during the 2020 primary, but Tlaib won the nomination with over 66 percent of the vote, despite AIPAC spending more than $600,000 in an effort to defeat her.
Tlaib defeated three other candidates in 2022 with almost 64 percent of the
vote. One of her challengers that year, Janice Winfrew, received support from AIPAC, as well as from a new organization largely funded by out-of-state billionaire pro-Israel donors, the Urban Empowerment Action PAC. After her victories in 2020 and 2022, Tlaib ran unopposed in 2024 and appears to be on a safe glidepath to another term, with no AIPAC intervention, in November.
Omar used to be a big target of AIPAC. Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, an AIPAC-connected PAC, spent around $2.5 million trying to defeat her during her first re-election campaign in 2020, but she still won 58 percent of the vote. The 2022 Democratic primary would prove to be much more competitive—in that case, Omar won by just two percentage points against Don Samuels, the former Minneapolis City Council member who is also running against her this year. United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-connected group, quietly spent $350,000 via a shadowy group, Make a Difference MN, to assist Samuels in the final weeks of that campaign which ultimately proved ineffective. UDP is a group largely funded by pro-Israel Republicans seeking to influence Democratic primary races.
Over the past week, however, mysterious anti-Omar mailers have shown up in her district, sent by Make a Difference MN. The group has spent around $90,000 on anti-Omar mailers in the last days of the primary this week, an amount that is unlikely to affect the election outcome.
AIPAC does like to brag about its successes, and will largely persist in [attacking] candidates who criticize Israel in ways that AIPAC considers too harsh or too effective. But in choosing not to invest heavily to defeat Omar, apparently to avoid an embarrassing loss, it seems that the purportedly all-powerful pro-Israel lobby group knows its limits.
The electoral victories of Reps. Massie, Omar, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez should offer some hope to lawmakers who, for example, do not believe that the U.S. should continue providing bil-
lions of dollars in aid to Israel without conditions. Perhaps AIPAC isn’t so invincible after all.
Canada Set to Revoke Jewish National Fund’s Charitable Status
BY YVES ENGLER
Score a significant victory against apartheid, genocide and Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession. The powerful Jewish National Fund of Canada has reportedly had its charitable status revoked.
Under pressure from Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and others, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) instigated an audit of the JNF in 2018. JNF Canada was eventually forced to differentiate itself from its parent organization in Israel and to stop “co-mingling” its funds with that organization. JNF Canada was also instructed to stop assisting projects in the illegally occupied West Bank and initiatives supporting the Israeli military. But apparently it failed to fulfill the Revenue Agency’s requests, and now the CRA has rescinded its ability to grant donors tax credits.
Revoking JNF Canada’s charitable status has been long in the making, and has come at some cost for many individuals. Born in a West Bank village demolished to make way for the JNF’s Canada Park, Ismail Zayid has been
complaining to the CRA about its charitable status for four decades. For years Lebanese Canadian Ron Saba has been “writing to various Canadian government departments and officials, corporations, and media to” denounce what he calls the “racist JNF tax fraud.” During the Liberal Party convention in 2006 Saba was widely smeared for drawing attention to leadership candidate Bob Rae’s ties to the JNF. Saba put in multiple Access to Information requests regarding the JNF, demonstrating government spying of its critics and long-standing knowledge of the organization’s dubious practices. Under the headline “Event you may want to monitor,” Foreign Affairs spokesperson Caitlin Workman sent the CRA a communication about a 2011 IJV event in Ottawa stating: “author of the Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Yves Engler, will give a talk on Canada and the Jewish National Fund.” At the Green Party convention in 2016 Corey Levine pushed a resolution to revoke the JNF’s charitable status because it practices “institutional discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.” The effort brought the issue into the mainstream though she, IJV and the entire Green Party were smeared as “hard core Jew haters” for even considering the resolution.
Seven years ago IJV and four individuals filed a detailed complaint to the CRA and Minister of National Revenue over the JNF. For over two decades activists across the country have picketed local JNF fund-raising galas, and Canadian campaigners have also benefited from many supporters in Palestine/Israel as well as the international Stop the JNF campaign.
Losing its charitable status is a big blow to the 110-year-old organization with powerful allies. In recent years Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Irwin Cotler and other top politicians, as well as many titans of corporate Canada, have appeared at JNF fund-raisers. The campaign to revoke the JNF’s charitable status has always been about more than just winning the specific demand. It has drawn attention to the
racism intrinsic to Zionist ideology. In control of 13 percent of Israel’s land— and with significant influence over most of the rest—the JNF openly discriminates against the over 20 percent of Israelis who aren’t Jewish.
The JNF campaign has also been about exposing Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession. 200+ registered charities send over a quarter-billion dollars a year to Israel, which has a GDP per capita equal to Canada’s. Many of these groups assist the Israeli military, racist organizations and illegal colonies in violation of CRA rules, and the Revenue Agency has received formal complaints detailing a dozen Israel-focused organizations’ violation of charities’ rules.
The Canada Revenue Agency revoking the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund of Canada is an important victory against apartheid and Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.
Yves Engler is a Montréal-based activist and author who has published 12 books. He played an important role in the successful campaign to oppose Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and is a founder of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. This article was first posted at his blog, <www.yvesengler.com>, July 25, 2024.
Gaza and the Death of Western Journalism
BY MOHAMAD ELMASRY
On Wednesday, the Israeli army killed two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi were working when they were struck by Israeli forces in Gaza city.
Al-Ghoul, whose Al Jazeera reports were popular among Arab audiences, was wearing a press vest at the time he was killed.
The latest killings bring Israel’s worldrecord journalist kill total to at least
113 during the current genocide in Gaza, according to the more conservative estimate.
No other world conflict has killed as many journalists in recent memory.
Israel has a long history of violently targeting journalists, so their Gaza kill total is not necessarily surprising.
In fact, a 2023 Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report documented a “decades-long pattern” of Israel targeting and killing Palestinian journalists.
For example, a Human Rights Watch investigation found that Israel targeted “journalists and media facilities” on four separate occasions in 2012. During the attacks, two journalists were killed, and many others were injured.
In 2019, a United Nations commission found that Israel “intentionally shot” a pair of Palestinian journalists in 2018, killing both.
More recently, in 2022, Israel shot and killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank.
Israel attempted to deny responsibility, as it almost always does after it carries out an atrocity, but video evidence was overwhelming, and Israel was forced to admit guilt.
There have been no consequences for the soldier who fired at Abu Akleh, who had been wearing a press vest and a press helmet, or for the Israelis involved in the other incidents targeting journalists.
CPJ has suggested that Israeli security forces enjoy “almost blanket immunity” in incidents of attacks on journalists.
Given this broader context, Israel’s targeting of journalists during the current genocide is genuinely not surprising, or out of the ordinary.
However, what is truly surprising, and even shocking, is the relative silence of Western journalists.
While there has certainly been some reportage and sympathy in North America and Europe, particularly from watchdog organizations like the CPJ, there is little sense of journalistic solidarity, and certainly nothing approaching widespread outrage and uproar
about the threat Israel’s actions pose to press freedoms.
Can we imagine for a moment what the Western journalistic reaction might be if Russian forces killed more than 100 journalists in Ukraine in under a year?
Even when Western news outlets have reported on Palestinian journalists killed since the start of the current war, coverage has tended to give Israel the benefit of the doubt, often framing the killings as unintentional casualties of modern warfare.
Also, Western journalism’s overwhelming reliance on pro-Israel sources has ensured the avoidance of colorful adjectives and condemnations.
Moreover, overreliance on pro-Israel sources has sometimes made it difficult to determine which party to the conflict was responsible for specific killings.
A UNIQUE CASE?
One might assume here that Western news outlets have simply been maintaining their devotion to stated Western reporting principles of detachment and neutrality.
But in other situations Western journalists have shown that they are indeed capable of making quite a fuss, and also of demonstrating solidarity.
The 2015 killing of 12 Charlie Hebdo journalists provides a useful case in point.
Following that attack, a genuine media spectacle ensued, with seemingly the entire institution of Western journalism united to focus on the event.
Thousands of reports were generated within weeks, a solidarity hashtag (“Je suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie”) went viral, and statements and sentiments of solidarity poured in from Western journalists, news outlets and organizations dedicated to principles of free speech.
For example, America’s Society of Professional Journalists called the attack on Charlie Hebdo “barbaric” and an “attempt to stifle press freedom.”
Freedom House issued a similarly harsh commendation, calling the at-
tack “horrific,” and noting that it constituted a “direct threat to the right of freedom of expression.”
PEN America and the British National Secular Society presented awards to Charlie Hebdo, and the Guardian Media Group donated a massive sum to the publication.
The relative silence and calm of Western journalists over the killing of at least 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza is especially shocking when one considers the larger context of Israel’s war on journalism, which threatens all journalists.
In October, around the time the current war began, Israel told Western news agencies that it would not guarantee the safety of journalists entering Gaza.
Ever since, Israel has maintained a ban on international journalists, even working to prevent them from entering Gaza during a brief November 2023 pause in fighting.
More importantly, perhaps, Israel has used its sway in the West to direct and control Western news narratives about the war.
Western news outlets have often obediently complied with Israeli manipulation tactics.
For example, as global outrage was mounting against Israel in December 2023, Israel put out false reports of mass, systematic rape against Israeli women by Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7.
Western news outlets, including The New York Times, were suckered in. They downplayed the growing outrage against Israel and began prominently highlighting the “systematic rape” story.
Later, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures against Israel.
Israel responded almost immediately by issuing absurd terrorism accusations against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
Western news outlets downplayed the provisional measures story, which was highly critical of Israel, and spot-
lighted the allegations against UNRWA, which painted Palestinians in a negative light.
These and other examples of Israeli manipulation of Western news narratives are part of a broader pattern of influence that predates the current war.
One empirical study found that Israel routinely times attacks, especially those likely to kill Palestinian civilians, in ways that ensure they will be ignored or downplayed by U.S. news media.
During the current genocide, Western news organizations have also tended to ignore the broad pattern of censorship of pro-Palestine content on social media, a fact which should concern anyone interested in freedom of expression.
It’s easy to point to a handful of Western news reports and investigations which have been critical of some Israeli actions during the current genocide.
But these reports have been lost in a sea of acquiescence to Israeli narratives and overall pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian framing.
Several studies, including analyses by the Center for Media Monitoring and the Intercept, demonstrated overwhelming evidence of pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian framing in Western news reportage of the current war.
IS WESTERN JOURNALISM DEAD?
Many journalists in the United States and Europe position themselves as truthtellers, critical of power, and watchdogs.
While they acknowledge mistakes in reporting, journalists often see themselves and their news organizations as appropriately striving for fairness, accuracy, comprehensiveness, balance, neutrality and detachment.
But this is the great myth of Western journalism.
A large body of scholarly literature suggests that Western news outlets do not come close to living up to their stated principles.
But Israel’s war on Gaza has further exposed news outlets as fraudulent.
With few exceptions, news outlets in North America and Europe have abandoned their stated principles and failed to support Palestinian colleagues being targeted and killed en masse.
Amid such spectacular failure and the extensive research indicating that Western news outlets fall well short of their ideals, we must ask whether it is useful to continue to maintain the myth of the Western journalistic ideal.
Sonic Booms— The Psychological Warfare Israel Uses to Sow Fear In Lebanon
BY MAT NASHED
Beirut, Lebanon—The first time Eliah Kaylough, 26, heard the thunderous blast, he was so terrified, he instinctively ran for cover. On Tuesday this week, he had just started his shift as a waiter at a restaurant on bustling Gemmayze Street in east Beirut when he was suddenly startled by the sound of a major blast.
For Kaylough, it immediately triggered memories of the massive port explosion in 2020, and he was terrified the city was either experiencing a new explosion or that it was under attack.
But as he was racing out of the restaurant, a man from a nearby shop stopped him and explained that Beirut wasn’t being bombed. The sound, Kaylough discovered, was a sonic boom, a thunderous noise caused by
an object moving faster than the speed of sound.
Israeli jets have been increasingly triggering these sonic booms over Lebanon since Oct. 7 last year, following the attack on southern Israel by Hamas. But the booms which sounded over Beirut on Tuesday were the loudest that had been heard in the city, several residents told Al Jazeera.
Kaylough said that it was the first time that he had heard one, since Israel tends to launch sonic booms in other parts of the country and city.
“The sound was terrifying and I really thought we were under attack,” Kaylouh told Al Jazeera on Thursday evening at the restaurant, where he was back working a shift. “I remember putting on my hat and grabbing my bag and I was ready to close up shop.”
Since October, the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in a low-level conflict. On Friday, Israel stepped up its attacks, killing Hamas official Samer al-Hajj in a drone attack on the coastal city of Sidon, about 50 km. (30 miles) from Lebanon’s southern border.
Throughout the Gaza war, however, Israel has been launching sonic booms by flying jets at low altitudes over Lebanon in an apparent effort to intimidate and terrify the population, analysts and residents told Al Jazeera.
“We are concerned about the reported use of sonic booms by Israeli aircrafts over Lebanon that has caused great fear among the civilian population,” said Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Parties in armed conflict should not use methods of intimidation against a civilian population.”
Indeed, sonic booms heard earlier this week occurred just two days after the anniversary of the Aug. 4, 2020 Beirut-port explosion, which devastated large swaths of Beirut, killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. The blast was caused by a fire in a warehouse where a stockpile of highly combustible ammonium nitrate was being stored.
Tuesday’s sonic boom was triggered
just moments before Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was about to begin a speech. Last month, tensions between the foes escalated after Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s senior commander, Fuad Shukr, in Lebanon and Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran’s capital, Tehran.
SYSTEMATIC USE OF “SOUND TERROR”
The use of sonic booms is part of a broader trend of psychological warfare that Israel wages against the Lebanese population, according to Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a sound expert and the founder of Earshot, a nonprofit that conducts audio analysis to track human rights abuses and state violence.
Abu Hamdan said that since the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, which lasted 34 days and left 1,100 Lebanese nationals and 165 Israelis dead, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese airspace with its fighter jets to scare civilians.
“Since the truce of 2006, there have been more than 22,000 Israeli air violations of Lebanon. In 2020 alone, there were more than 2,000 [air violations] with no response from Hezbollah,” Abu Hamdan told Al Jazeera.
Abu Hamdan believes that, since last October, Israel has also been using sonic booms as an “acoustic reminder that [Israel] can turn Lebanon into Gaza at any point.”
He said Israel’s increasing use of sonic booms reflects the escalation in conflict with Hezbollah over the past several months.
“There is an escalation and we are seeing that escalation in sound. The next phase to the escalation is, of course, material destruction,” Abu Hamdan said.
Beirut resident Rana Farhat, 28, said Israel’s scare tactics are having the desired effect. She heard the Aug. 6 sonic booms while having dinner with her family at a restaurant in a town north of Beirut.
They were startled when they heard the sound of an explosion, but her parents tried to reassure her and her siblings that Beirut was not being at-
tacked. Everyone quickly checked their phones to find out what was going on.
“We were all checking the news to see if it was an explosion or not,” Farhat, 28, said, while smoking shisha in a Beirut cafe on Thursday night. “There were little children in the restaurant and they were clearly scared. They don’t understand what such sounds mean.”
RECURRING TRAUMA
The murmur of fighter jets and other blast-like noises can re-traumatize populations that have survived previous explosions and wars, Abu Hamdan said.
Over the long term, recurring jet and blast sounds can even increase the risk of stroke and deplete calcium deposits in the heart, according to medical studies he cited.
“Once you have been exposed to [jet or blast] sounds that have produced the sort of fear that they have in this country, then whenever you hear it— even quietly—it will produce the same stress response [in an individual],” Abu Hamdan explained.
Kaylough said that the sonic booms he heard on Tuesday this week transported him back to the Beirut port explosion. That day, he was working in a mall when a sudden blast shattered the glass around him and blew the doors off the hinges of the store he was working in.
“The sound was so loud. I remember people were screaming, but I couldn’t hear them,” he told Al Jazeera.
After the initial shock, Kaylough felt a sudden pain and realized that a large piece of metal was wedged into his lower leg. He was rushed to the hospital and eventually treated by doctors.
While Kaylough suffered no longterm physical injuries, he says the sonic booms are triggering the trauma he experienced that day.
“The [sound from] the sonic boom did take me back to the moment of the blast, but I’m just trying not to think about it,” he said.
Farhat said the sonic booms also remind her of the 2006 war.
At the time, her neighborhood was not directly being hit, but she remembers watching coverage of the war on television with her parents. As a 10year-old, she realized that the scenes of collapsed buildings and rubble she was seeing were being filmed just a short drive from her home.
She also recalls hearing the sound of Israeli fighter jets flying over Beirut to bomb the southern suburbs. While Farhat does not know if another war is looming over Beirut right now, she insisted that Israel’s scare tactics won’t compel her to leave her beloved city.
“They are just trying to scare us, but I take it as a sign of weakness,” she told Al Jazeera. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to leave home and I won’t. I was born here, raised here and I will stay here.”
U.S. Soldiers Injured in Raid During “NonCombat” Mission In Iraq
BY KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS
Seven U.S. soldiers were injured raiding a suspected ISIS hideout in western Iraq on Thursday, according to a Centcom press release late Friday.
According to U.S. Central Command, 15 ISIS fighters were killed in the raid, which was “partnered” by U.S. and Iraqi forces. The ISIS fighters, according to Centcom, were holed up with “numerous weapons, grenades, and explosive ‘suicide belts’” in the early morning hours of Aug. 29 when the raid occurred.
Officials said there were no civilian casualties. In an X post, a spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Defense said the raid happened in the “Anbar desert in the Al-Hazimi area east of Wadi AlGhadaf.”
According to the Associated Press, a U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity “to discuss details of the operation yet to be made public, said that five American troops were wounded in the raid, while two others suffered injuries from falls during the operation. One who suffered a fall was transported ‘out of the region’ while one of the wounded was evacuated for further treatment, the official said,” according to the wire service.
The U.S. has some 2,500 troops still in Iraq, and their presence, since the Iraq war officially ended in 2011, continues to be a constant source of debate. And while they are supposedly there in an “advise and assist” capacity, it is clear when we hear about these raids that they are still fighting a war, albeit a low grade one that runs far beneath the American people's radar.
The raid reported Friday “shows that ISIS remains a latent albeit manageable threat in less populated areas of Iraq,” said Adam Weinstein, a Middle East fellow for the Quincy Institute, who published research in April with colleague Stephen Simon entitled “Troops in Peril: The Risks of Keeping U.S. Troops in Iraq and Syria.”
“But it also demonstrates that the U.S. advisory mission in Iraq isn’t entirely advisory—U.S. troops are still involved in combat here and there,” he added.
In December 2021 the Pentagon announced that Operation Inherent Resolve was successfully transitioning from a combat role against ISIS to an “advise, assist, and enable” mission. “According to the agreement, there would be no U.S. forces with a combat role in Iraq by Dec. 31, 2021. Iraqi forces, operating on Iraqi bases, protect Coalition personnel who are invited guests. While Coalition personnel do not have a combat role, they maintain
the inherent right of self-defense,” the Pentagon said.
Those words have become fairly fungible as the U.S. has had to engage its own missile defense capabilities to combat militant attacks at U.S.-occupied bases in Iraq consistently since 2020, and conduct intermittent ground raids by U.S. and Iraq forces (as well as more frequently reported ones by U.S. troops against ISIS in Syria).
“It’s important that jargon not get in the way of reality. Direct combat isn’t exactly an advisory mission,” noted Weinstein.
The two governments came together in Washington to talk about an agreement for withdrawal this summer but did not come to any conclusions at the end of the summit. Meanwhile, voices here in the U.S. continue to question whether a) the anti-ISIS [campaign] is still worth putting U.S. service members in harm's way on the ground, and b) whether they will get swept up in broader violent currents in the Middle East generated by the Israeli war in Gaza.
“The continued U.S. presence in Iraq and Syria needlessly risks Americans’ lives in pursuit of objectives not tied to America’s national interest, while raising the likelihood that the U.S. will get dragged into a larger regional war,” Dan Caldwell, public policy adviser for defense priorities, who is also a U.S. veteran who served in the same region as Thursday’s raid, told RS.
“The reality is that the scattered remnants of ISIS pose a greater threat to Iran and its proxies than the U.S. Therefore, it is pointless to risk American lives pursuing them in the most desolate parts of the Anbar desert.”
Israeli Forces Continue Their Assault on West Bank Palestinians with Impunity
The West Bank Too is Under Attack: What I Saw
By Kimberly Shamey
WATCHING EVENTS UNFOLD in Palestine this last year was an incredibly painful experience for me. Coming from an Arab American background and having worked as an activist for Palestine for nearly 20 years, I feel this cause deeply. After October 7, I knew the Palestinians were going to suffer collective punishment of the worst kind, and I knew the corporate media would justify Israel’s actions and portray the Palestinians as somehow deserving of this suffering.
I decided to travel to Palestine this summer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization of volunteers whose mission is to protect Palestinians from attacks and harassment by settlers. International activists from ISM try to prevent settler attacks and to document Zionist settlers’ encroachment upon Palestinian land and theft of their livestock. Settlements are illegal under international law and yet the international community has turned a blind eye on their continual construction. At this point, there are 600,000 illegal settlers living on Palestinian land, many of them coming from the United States and Europe.
I spent time in the Jordan Valley and stayed with Mohammed, a Bedouin shepherd who is under constant threat of having his land, farm animals and livelihood stolen by settlers. One evening Mohammed woke me up in a panic as settlers were driving by casing his property. He urged me to stand in front of his home and record as the settlers drove by. A disturbing truth is that he
The Israeli army supervising and enforcing the destruction of a well in Masafer Yatta.
PHOTO BY K. SHAMEY
Kimberly Shamey is a Spanish teacher and activist committed to fighting for justice for Palestinians.
is less likely to be harassed or attacked by these settlers if a Westerner stands with him, even though he is indigenous to the land he toils. Such attacks are on the rise.
I went with other international activists to a village in Masafer Yatta, in the southern part of the West Bank, to document the destruction of a well, the only source of water for that particular village. Many of the Palestinians we met were missing limbs or had been maimed in other ways from attacks by settlers or the Israeli army. As I recorded the demolition, I asked an Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) soldier why they were doing this, and he replied that the well was “illegal.” How could it be illegal if it is on Palestinian land? When I asked for evidence, one soldier replied, “this is for October 7.” These acts of retribution and collective punishment against a defenseless population happen all the time, and the army is never asked to produce any support for its claims.
I had the opportunity to spend time at the Jenin, Nour Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps. For many months now, and in some cases before October 7, the IOF has been battling Palestinian resistance militias there. There too I saw many Palestinians maimed in all different kinds of ways. It was clear when talking with one man in particular that he had suffered extensive burns in different parts of his body. Another man walking around the camp appeared to have one eye sewn shut. The evidence of physical torture that these men have endured is gruesome and hard to fathom. The IOF raids the camps to seize young men who join the resistance, and they inflict collective punishment on the entire camp. Walking through the camps, all I saw was destruction and rubble. I was told that the home of a neighbor of a resistance fighter had been deliberately targeted by the IOF to teach a community a lesson and to send a message to anyone thinking of joining resistance movements.
all around the world. What Palestinians are doing on the ground to organize and to provide a better future for the next generation is a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit. More than ever before, people are coming together to end this occupation and to stand up for Palestinian rights.
Ahmad, 11, has become a YouTube sensation with many fans who watch his videos denouncing Israel and the conditions in which Palestinians are forced to live. Recently the IOF warned his family that if he doesn’t stop, their home and the homes of their neighbors will be hit. The ability to inflict this kind of harm with zero accountability is one of the more troubling realities that one is faced with when spending time in Palestine. I often found myself asking what is even the purpose of having international law if it can be broken so easily and without consequence?
Despite these grim experiences, I left Palestine with a sense of hope that I didn’t have when I arrived. When I was documenting the destruction of the well in Masafer Yatta, a Jewish American girl named Dottie was standing right beside me filming the destruction and broadcasting it live for the world to see. When I was with Mohammed in the Jordan Valley, a group of Israeli activists took turns to stand guard and to protect his property from theft by settlers. The ISM volunteers that I spent time with were from
On my return flight home from Madrid, I was seated next to an Israeli man who identified as a Zionist. I was sure it was going to be the longest eight-hour flight of my life after seeing the way he flinched when I mentioned I had been in Palestine prior to visiting Spain. Instead we spoke for the entirety of the flight in what was one of the most meaningful conversations I have ever had with another person. I told him about everything that I had seen in Palestine. I told him about the stories of Palestinians that I met like Laith, who has always dreamt of seeing the sea but is unable to because the very basic freedom of movement is not afforded to him. By the end of the flight, the Israeli man told me that he never really considered the things I told him about and could imagine that if he were Palestinian, he too would want to break free from the chains that is life in the occupied territories, in any way possible. I know that whatever I was able to accomplish this summer was just a drop in a very big ocean. The important thing, I feel, is to do something.
I feel renewed with a sense of purpose as I add my voice to the growing tide of people pushing past all the bullying tactics and standing up for the day when the Palestinian people live in dignity in a free Palestine. ■
The remains of a home in Tulkarm refugee camp in the occupied West Bank after a raid by the Israeli army—one of many examples of collective punishment.
PHOTO BY K. SHAMEY
A Palestinian activist holding a national flag crosses a street damaged by a bulldozer during an Israeli raid in the center of Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Sept. 2, 2024. In Jenin, the streets were largely deserted and most shops were closed, after residents heard loud explosions and clashes during the night and Israeli bulldozers damaged roads and infrastructure including water systems.
For 11 Months, Israel’s Boot Has Mercilessly Pressed Down on West Bank’s Neck
By Gideon Levy
SURPRISE, SURPRISE! Violent Palestinian resistance in the West Bank is raising its head. The human monsters have woken up from their slumber and started exploding. Suicide bombers have returned and the host of Israeli pundits have a learned explanation: It’s the Iranian money. Without it, the West Bank would be calm. With it, people are willing to commit suicide just to get their hands on some. It’s all the Iranian octopus. How easy it is to attribute everything to Iran. Israelis love doing it. There is a devil and he’s Iranian, and he’s to blame for everything. Maybe there is Iranian money, maybe there isn’t, but the intensified struggle is the most predictable, understandable development, given what has been taking place in the West Bank over
the 11 months of the Gaza war. The only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.
Over the 11 months of war, Israel has ripped up the West Bank, just as it is now doing to roads in Tulkarm and Jenin; nothing is left of them. This is the hardest period the Palestinians have experienced since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, even harder since it’s taking place in the shadow of another attack, a more barbaric one, in Gaza. In contrast to Defensive Shield, the current assault has no reason or justification. Israel has exploited the war in Gaza to cause turmoil in the West Bank. The response was late in coming, but it has now arrived.
The Israeli assault has two arms this time: the army, Shin Bet and Border Police on one hand, and violent settler militias on the other. The two arms are coordinated; they don’t get in each other’s way. Sometimes they blend into each other, when the stormtroopers from the outposts don uniforms—these are the “emergency response teams,” which grant legitimization to every pogrom. The army takes care not to interfere, neither in small nor large incidents.
In this context, a statement by a senior military source who warned about settler violence over the weekend expressed unbelievable gall. “Jewish terror is causing great damage to security in the West Bank,” said the source, whose forces could and should have stopped Jewish terror a long time ago. There has
not been a pogrom in which soldiers weren’t present and did nothing to stop it. Occasionally, they take part in it—and the senior officer dares lament it.
October 7 was not just a day of calamity for us, it was one for the Palestinians as well. There are no more words for describing what Israel has wrought in the Gaza Strip, but it didn’t hold back in the West Bank either, with the encouragement of the Kahanist cabinet members and the silence of the prime minister, other ministers and the public.
In recent weeks I have visited Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Ramallah and Hebron. Nothing resembles the reality of October 6, even though the West Bank played no part in the October 7 attack. On October 8, three million Palestinians there woke up to a new reality, not that the preceding one had been humane or legitimate. With a passion for vengeance and for seizing opportunities, the Israeli boot mercilessly pressed down harder on the West Bank’s neck.
Tens of thousands of acres were expropriated and robbed over these months; there is hardly a hill left in the West Bank without an Israeli flag or outpost that will one day be a city. Roadblocks have also returned in full force. You cannot move from one place to another in the West Bank without encountering them, waiting there, humiliated, for hours. You cannot plan anything in a reality in which at least 150,000 people have lost their livelihood, after work in Israel was completely closed to them. Everyone there has been penalized for Oct. 7. Eleven months without wages leave their mark. What did you expect?
There is now a new kid on the block: the drone. Under the shadow of war, the air force has started firing into the densely populated West Bank. According to U.N. figures, 630 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war began, 140 of them in 50 airstrikes. What is permitted in Gaza is now permitted in the West Bank. Soldiers have internalized this fact, and their conduct toward Palestinians has changed accordingly. If we’re not in Gaza, at least let us behave as if we were. Ask any Palestinian what he’s gone through. Despair has never been greater.
And after all that, there’s not going to be terror? ■
The Silent War on the West Bank Has Become Deafening
By Amal Wahdan
WE HAVE TO REMIND the world over and over again that the root cause of the current outrageous Israeli colonial fascist aggression against the Palestinian people of the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, stems from the mere fact that the Palestinian people are not willing to surrender their
Amal Wahdan is a political veteran and activist, the editor of the Arab Gazette E ‐ Newspaper, the chairperson of Shaikh Hasan Foundation for Culture and Science, and coordinator of the Museum of Palestinian Memory.
Israeli bulldozers tear up a street during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Sept. 1, 2024.
rights as demanded by the Zionist project, which has been accelerating in recent years.
The world has been ignoring the agony and the cries of the Palestinian people for 76 years, and during that time they have been subjected to a systematic measure of genocide, mass killing and ethnic cleansing. According to credible Palestinian historians, more than 900,000 people were uprooted forcefully from Palestine in 1948; 30,000 of them were displaced from their villages but remained in neighboring villages. In 1967, when the rest of historic Palestine fell under Israeli control, another 350,000-400,000 Palestinians became refugees, some for the second time in less than 20 years.
It is through this lens that people should look at Israel’s ongoing campaign of extermination against Palestinians in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and the less dramatic war that has been going on in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, for many years, turbocharged during the past two years under the coalition government of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the Zionist religious fascist parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
The level of killing and destruction that preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948, though massive, is dwarfed by the scale of death and destruction and the sophistication of the Israeli arsenal unleashed on Gaza today. Today, the target of the Israeli colonial regime is to finish up the incomplete job of 1948: exterminating all Palestinians by lethal weapons, starvation, or epidemics in Gaza, forcing the expulsion or confinement of Palestinians in the West Bank, and annexing the West Bank and settling it with Israeli Jews.
This explains the stagnation of negotiations between the Israeli colonial regime and the Palestinian resistance. Netanyahu claims
that he will exterminate Hamas, but he knows that the resistance cannot be exterminated. And his top military and security officials know this; they openly disagree with him and understand that pursuing such goals could endanger the very existence of the state.
THE PALESTINIAN DOMESTIC FRONT
The Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza have been fighting furiously and inflicting on the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) major losses in terms of dead and injured soldiers and damaged equipment. The prolonged war, now in its 12th month, has caused the economy to deteriorate and forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli colonists to migrate.
In the West Bank, and long before Oct. 7, Israeli soldiers and Jewish colonizers (the latter acting for all practical purposes as part of the army) have been on a rampage. Thousands of dunums have been confiscated to build more colonies, hundreds of thousands of farmers have been suffering due to continuous attacks on their homes and groves, and thousands of olive trees have been set on fire. The Palestinian farmers have been left to deal with these armed settlers (colonists) on their own. But for several months now, Palestinian militias in the northern cities have been confronting the IOF and settlers. And they have stood their ground.
REGIONAL AND GLOBAL RESISTANCE
Two weeks into the war on Gaza, the regional axis of resistance in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Iran declared a military support front, which proved to be very effective militarily. In the north, the Lebanese Resistance Movement has been attacking intelligence
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and surveillance towers and military headquarters of the northern brigades on a daily basis, causing direct damage and mass evacuations of northern towns.
The Yemeni resistance has effectively shut down the Bab alMandeb strait to all ships heading toward Israel, and it has paralyzed the commercial activity of Israel’s Um al-Rishrash (Eilat) port, causing it to declare bankruptcy. These actions have given a boost to the global efforts of isolating, boycotting and sanctioning Israel, which is regularly called out for its genocidal actions and its apartheid structure.
On the global arena, the multipolar new world order supports Palestine. The unipolar system led by the U.S., which has shipped 50,000 tons of military equipment since Oct. 7, 2023 with 500 air flights and 107 sea shipments, is seen by growing numbers of people as a partner with Israel in its genocide of Palestinians.
The level of destruction that these weapons have caused is unprecedented compared to the size of the Gaza Strip and the population size.
JENIN, A SITE OF ONGOING RESISTANCE
Jenin is by no means the only arena of resistance in the West Bank, but it provides a sample of the Israeli onslaught faced by other parts of the West Bank.
The ongoing destruction of Jenin carries with it echoes of Gaza. The invasion of Jenin and the refugee camp by the IOF reveal the same scorched earth strategy and the same extensive destruction
and damage to the infrastructure as has been on display in Gaza for the past year.
Against the largely civilian population, the IOF uses drones, Apache helicopters, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and snipers perched on rooftops. By early September, the Jenin Municipality reported that the IOF had demolished more than 70 percent of the city’s streets, creating craters of approximately one to oneand-half meters over a 20-kilometers stretch. The technical teams were unable to repair the damaged networks because they were subjected to Israeli gunfire. As a result, water had been cut off to 80 percent of the city and the entire camp.
The central vegetable market was also burned by the Israeli forces and severely damaged. Hundreds of homes and vehicles have been destroyed as well.
And as it has targeted hospitals in Gaza, the IOF has besieged the Jenin Government Hospital and blocked water trucks from reaching it, which resulted in a suspension of the kidney dialysis services. It also damaged the electricity supply line to the hospital, which eventually led to an air conditioning shutdown. And in Jenin as in Gaza, Palestinian Red Crescent Society crews have been unable to retrieve the dead from the streets.
Al Jazeera reported on Sept. 2 that the IOF killed at least 24 Palestinians in Jenin over a 5-day period; throughout the West Bank, it killed at least 675 Palestinians since Oct. 7. During the same period, more than 10,300 Palestinians have been arrested and detained by Israeli forces. ■
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United Nations
Israel’s Obsessive Campaign Against UNRWA
AT THE PANIC-STRICKEN request of the U.N. and UNRWA, the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) investigated 19 UNRWA staff for their alleged involvement in the Hamas raid of Oct. 7, 2023. Since the raid Israel has persistently made such allegations yet has consistently failed to produce any evidence when asked. In a spectacularly misjudged move, UNRWA, which has demonstrably lost ten times as many staff to Israeli military murders, had announced the summary dismissal of accused staff.
This was a stupidly disastrous move. Guilt by denunciation is always an unjust principle—but in this case UNRWA’s acceptance was possibly fatal for the organization and the stigmatized staff. It paints a personal target on the back of workers in addition to their general vulnerability as Palestinians and as aid workers, blazoning them as fair game for Israeli drones and murderers.
It was not as if this treacherous act took pressure off the organization. Donors foolishly albeit understandably took this as confession of collective guilt and promptly suspended funding for the or-
U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).
By Ian Williams
ganization, just as its services were in peak demand by Palestinians who were being ethnically cleansed by the Israeli blitzkrieg
To suggest innocence for the accused was tantamount to dropping in on Salem Town Hall with a pointy hat and broomstick. Only the brave did. It took months before donors looked harder and noticed the complete absence of evidence, and by that time, to everyone other than Joe Biden’s and Antony Blinken’s press teams, it was clear that Israeli evidence was the stuff that perjury was made of.
One hesitates to see a conspiracy, but with remarkable synchronicity, pro-Israeli lobbyists and plants in ministries all across the Western world immediately popped up demanding immediate defunding. In subsequent months hitherto panicked politicians in donor capitals drew breath and noticed that Israel was very economical with its evidence. Some of the less flustered remembered that Israel and its acolytes had been fighting a grudge feud against UNRWA for years.
They might even have remembered the story about the little boy who cried “wolf!” Although it loses its effect when redacted to the “the country that continually shrieks ‘wolf’,” it is sobering that so many politicians don’t seem to notice the subsequent absence of vulpine predators advertised.
International diplomats did their own studies and could not substantiate Israeli claims, and too slowly donor countries shamefacedly backed down. Few would admit that Israel had hoaxed them—after all that would be anti-Semitic—but they resumed support for the agency.
And then came the latest OIOS report commissioned by the U.N.—and it has found no evidence at all for the staff member’s alleged involvement, while in nine other cases, the evidence was “insufficient to support” the allegations.
In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the al-
Palestinians inspect the site after an Israeli attack on a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) school in Gaza City, Gaza on July 18, 2024.
PHOTO BY DAWOUD ABO
legations of the staff member’s involvement, while in nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff members’ involvement. With respect to these 10 cases, appropriate measures will be taken in due course, in conformity with UNRWA regulations and rules.
For the nine not proven cases, “the evidence obtained by OIOS indicated that the UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the armed attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. The employment of these individuals will be terminated in the interests of the Agency.”
The decades long obsessive campaign against UNRWA and all its work is going to continue even in the unregrettable absence of Gilad Erdan, the most recent Israeli pseudo-diplomat ambassador to the U.N., who has presumably seen the writing on the wall for his former patron Binyamin Netanyahu. He is hightailing it back to the “homeland” to position himself as head kapo in Camp Likud to replace his former patron. It is not too churlish to suspect that he returns with bundles of pledged campaign donations from his fanatic American Zionist fans. But his replacement is also his predecessor, Danny Danon, who had been equally hostile to the institution, although he might offer his equally outrageous opinions in a slightly less gratuitously hostile manner.
Confirming this obsession, UNRWA USA has revealed that Israeli government sites, with Google’s connivance, had been trolling UNRWA with misinformation in order to head off donations.
So no matter who represents Israel, Israeli “diplomacy” will continue its obsessive campaign against UNRWA, which has been shamefully left swinging by apologetic U.N. officials and diplomats who do, in fact, know better but do not have the courage to stand up.
UNRWA is the institutional memorial to the pledges made by the international community that the victims of the collective betrayal represented by the Partition resolution still have claims to return or restitution—and for assistance.
Thoughtcrime is the theme of the times. It is a major and punishable heresy, even at the U.N., to state manifest truths about Oct.
7: that babies were not dismembered and put in ovens, that many of the Israeli casualties were in fact victims of indiscriminate mayhem from the Israeli forces, that the evidence of mass rape is exiguous, and above all that there is more substantial evidence of individual mayhem by the Israeli soldiers than from Hamas.
It is also worth stating, loudly, publicly and often, that it is not a crime for UNRWA employees to be supporters of Hamas or other Palestinian organizations, any more than it is for USAID workers to be American Republicans (or indeed Israeli Likud supporters). We may doubt the motives and indeed motivation of people like Republican Cindy McCain (widow of Republican Party leader John McCain) being head of the World Food Program, but one listens in vain for voices in the U.N. insisting that her support for a party pledged to diehard support of Israeli aggression precludes her from employment in the U.N. organization.
It does not take a long memory to recall when no one was allowed to talk to the PLO or the African National Congress, for example, but it is amazing how media and ministers forget that time. The actual names of the non-organizations change, but the constant is that “everybody” knows that the only Palestinians we should give ear to are those who are likely to give Israel what it wants, whenever it wants.
Faced with prima facie (indeed, in flagrante delicto) evidence of Israeli crimes, and despite Israel and its supporters being outed as habitual recidivist perjurers, it is remarkable how the Israeli campaign against UNRWA lurches on. No matter how often the accusations against UNRWA are knocked down, like Rasputin, they keep coming back.
Even more disturbingly, UNRWA and the U.N. itself, let alone the Western funders, are diffident in their defense of the agency. They treat Israeli complaints as legitimate and worthy of consideration instead of dismissing them out-of-hand as figments of an overheated imagination.
Erdan had successfully inculcated the U.N. system with Israeli military justice standards in which the accusation alone con-
firms guilt, which transfers by association to anyone who quibbles about the inquisitionary process. In an attempt to be candid, Deputy U.N. Spokesman Farhan Haq cautioned, “since information used by Israeli officials to support the allegations has remained in Israeli custody, OIOS was not able to independently authenticate most of the information provided to it.”
U.N. officials are indeed in a bind. They have to accept statements from all member states, no matter how redolent of taurine excreta. But Israel has long exceeded its bullshit ration. The answer lies with the members to recall the former Yugoslavia in mid-genocide or South Africa during Apartheid. They refused to accept the credentials of the perpetrators. If they do not have the courage to actually expel Israel, they can vote in the General Assembly to refuse to seat the delegation. Danny Danon could then concentrate on fundraising for Likud and marshaling the Israel lobby without the distraction of international law or the U.N. Charter. Indeed Erdan’s flamboyant shredding of the charter should be taken as an implicit withdrawal from the organization. Other countries, notably the U.S. and Russia, have sought to reinterpret the charter, but none have gone as far Israel in macerating it in word and deed. ■
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Morocco Prevents North African Countries From Taking a Unified Position on Gaza War
By Mustafa Fetouri
lift placards and Palestinian flags during a protest in
Israel’s ongoing attacks. On July 10, 2024, Rabat agreed to
from Israel Aerospace Industries.
IN
JULY 2024, Morocco signed a $1 billion deal with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to purchase advanced satellites used mostly for spying and monitoring purposes. The deal, according to various news reports, was to further enhance the military relations between Rabat and Tel Aviv within the larger context of normalization of ties between the two sides within the even bigger U.S.-initiated and backed project of further integrating Israel into the region even as it commits genocide in Gaza.
When the Moroccan deal became known, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) had already used IAI weapons to kill more than 37,953 Palestinians, injure around 87,266, displace more than 1.9 million people and threaten about 495,000 with starvation. These figures have since grown by several thousands and continue to rise.
IAI produces all kinds of war equipment, some of which is exclusively supplied to the IOF. Among the products are the Zibar
Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic and freelance journalist. He received the EU’s Freedom of the Press prize. He has written extensively for various media outlets on Libyan and MENA issues, and has published three books in Arabic. His email is mustafa fetouri@hotmail.com and Twitter: @MFetouri.
tactical utility vehicle and Z-MAG vehicles for the IOF’s elite forces. It is on the hood of one such vehicle that IOF soldiers strapped wounded Mujahed Azmi in Jenin, using his body as a human shield, and drove away last June.
IAI turned the war in Gaza into a huge marketing opportunity as it tries to capitalize on the Ukrainian war and sell more weapons to European clients. What IAI’s drones are doing in Gaza provided a perfect promotional showcase of IAI’s capabilities. IAI CEO Boaz Levy bragged that “the HERON UAS [drones] family played a pivotal role” in Israel’s Gaza destruction. He used Gaza as an example when he told Politico on June 4 that Europeans “need the kind of air defences that have done so well protecting Israel from the rockets and missiles fired by Hamas and Hezbollah.” To drive the message home, he added, “we are bringing to the table a proven system.” He did not say anything about what his drones have done to Palestinian children, their mothers, their grandparents and their U.N. shelters since most homes are now rubble.
CONTENTIOUS MOROCCO
By signing such a huge deal at this particular time with this particular Israeli company, Rabat is literally investing in the destruction of Gaza and the murder of its population.
Morocco is the only country in North Africa that has normalized ties with Israel, which raises serious questions about its increasingly divisive role in the region. Morocco’s eastern neighbor Algeria has accused Morocco of being used to threaten its own security. Algiers, with its history of support for Palestine, believes Rabat’s open arm policy toward Israel is intended to punish Al-
Moroccans
Rabat, on Dec. 24, 2023, in solidarity with Gaza amid
purchase two Israeli spy satellites for $1 billion
geria for that position. Defenders of Morocco argue that Rabat was pushed to cozy up to Israel because of Algiers’ support for the Polisario in the Western Sahara issue. This claim does not hold water: the Western Sahara has always been a contentious issue between the two countries and never, particularly in recent years, has it become an urgent problem requiring normalization with Israel. Many observers also think normalization with Israel is unlikely to help Morocco in its claims of the Western Sahara, but it does complicate any potential reconciliation with Algeria.
VIOLATION OF UNION ARTICLE
Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia are founding members of the Arab Maghreb Union founded in 1989, better known by its French acronym (UMA), as a regional vehicle to create common markets, share resources, cooperate on security issues and guarantee freedom of movement to its over 100 million inhabitants.
Among UMA members, only Morocco recognizes Israel, and all of them reject the idea of normalization unless the Palestinian issue is solved. Many believe the Rabat–Tel Aviv rapprochement runs counter to the general principles of UMA whose founding treaty bans any member from any commitment that runs contrary to the treaty. Algeria and Tunisia see normalization with Israel as incompatible with article 16 of the UMA founding treaty. Both hold Rabat responsible for the consequences.
The Moroccan government has been under enormous public pressure since it normalized ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the U.S.-driven Abraham Accords deal. The overwhelming majority of Moroccans reject deals with Israel and have been calling on their government to cancel them. Since Israel launched its genocide campaign in Gaza in October 2023, this has been the demand of the almost weekly demonstrations sweeping the country.
Yet King Mohammed VI of Morocco, believed to be personally responsible for
the relations with Israel, is turning a deaf ear to his people’s wish. Shamelessly, he tried to claim credit for the delivery of aid to Gaza as a positive outcome to his government’s relations with Israel when, in fact, most aid is rotting on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing since Israel took control of the Palestinian side of the border last May. A single planeload of Moroccan aid was delivered through Israel’s Ben Gurion airport back in March, but this cannot be spun as offering meaningful assistance to Palestine.
THE MAURITANIA EXAMPLE
Back in 1999, Mauritania was the only UMA member that openly recognized Israel and had diplomatic relations with it, despite consistent popular opposition. Under pressure from its own people and regional partners, particularly Libya, Nouakchott was forced to suspend all ties with Israel. In March 2009 the late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi demanded that all Israeli diplomats should leave the capital Nouakchott before he visited the country. He had been urging Mauritania for years to sever all diplomatic relations with Israel, and the government finally did so, five days before his arrival on March 11, 2009.
PARALYSIS OF THE UMA
The Moroccan position on the Israeli genocide in Gaza as well as its ties to Israel further complicate the efforts to revive the dormant UMA. The union has been already frozen because of the Algeria-Morocco rivalry and differences over the Western Sahara; normalization between Israel and Morocco and the increasing military ties between them adds another difficult hurdle. The heads of state of Algeria, Libya and Tunisia met in Tunis last April to try to breathe some life into the union but were unsuccessful: Morocco did not attend the meeting and neither did Mauritania, apparently unwilling to antagonize its northern neighbor.
Despite all its shortcomings, the UMA might have provided a collective platform for all five members to express a unified
position about the central Arab cause, Palestine, during one of its most dangerous phases. But with Rabat as the holdout, the UMA could not even agree on a joint statement condemning the Israeli genocide against Gazans.
ROYAL TITLES NOTWITHSTANDING MOCKERY
Moroccans see themselves as part of the Palestinian struggle for independence and statehood. That their government, with the blessing of the king himself, has seen fit to normalize ties with Israel and sign military deals with the same country that is massacring thousands of Palestinians is a source of deep popular anger and humiliation. Anti-normalization demonstrations throughout the country have demanded that Morocco expel the Israel ambassador.
Moroccans are well aware that part of King Mohammed VI’s religious legitimacy is based on his role as Chairman of AlQuds Committee, set up by the Organization of Islamic Conference (now Organization of Islamic Cooperation) in 1975 to care for al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestinians living in the Old City of Jerusalem, who face daily harassment at the hands of rabid Israeli settlers wanting to expel them. The king also has another title, ameer al-mu'mineen (Commander of the Believers). Inherited from his late father, King Hassan II, both titles have huge religious connotations and both are rooted in the claim that the Moroccan royals trace their roots to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The titles are widely used in the local media when reporting on the king’s activities, reminding citizens of his important Islamic roots—making Palestine part of the royal brand.
The same king seems oblivious to the contradiction of titles and claims when he orders his government not only to normalize with Israel but to refrain from openly and strongly supporting Palestine, home to al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam—which his title suggests he has a responsibility to protect and which now desperately needs protection. ■
General Election in the UK: Pro-Palestine Voters Deliver Message to New Government
By John Gee
THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY trounced its Conservative rivals in the July 4 general election, winning 412 seats of a total of 650. The Conservatives retained 121. Nevertheless, there was some disquiet within Labour over its loss of support due to its stand on Palestine and, in particular, leader Keir Starmer’s strong initial support for Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
Until the war in Gaza put the policies of British parties toward Palestinians and their national rights under a spotlight, the Labour Party had been able to take overwhelming support from British Muslims for granted. With its position on the war almost indistinuishable from that of the Conservative government, it faced independent candidates who made support for the Palestinians the central plank of their platform in a number of English constituencies, most of which have substantial Muslim minorities. Four of them won election. Shockat Adam, one of those victors, could have spoken for all when he declared, “This is for Gaza!”
John Gee is a free ‐ lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.
The northern industrial town Blackburn, which had voted Labour for the previous 69 years, was one of the seats won by a pro-Palestinian independent.
These were not the only seats where pro-Palestinian candidates made a mark. Faiza Shaheen, who dropped out as a Labour candidate shortly before the election despite years of building support in the constituency of Chingford and Woodford Green, stood as an independent, with the result that the Conservative incumbent held on to his seat over a divided opposition. In North London, Jeremy Corbyn, long-serving member for Islington North and former party leader, held his seat as an independent with a majority of over 7,000 votes, despite a protracted campaign to falsely portray him as an anti-Semite.
Northeast of London in Ilford North, young British Palestinian Leanne Mohamad proved a very effective candidate when she stood against prominent Labour politician Wes Streeting (now Secretary of State for Health and Social Care); he held the seat by just 528 votes. Mohamad resigned from the Labour Party after Starmer made his notorious statement that Israel had the right
Pro‐Palestinian protesters surround the car convoy carrying Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on July 7, 2024, as he leaves Bute House in Edinburgh following his meeting with First Minister of Scotland John Swinney during the PM’s tour of the UK following Labour’s victory in the 2024 General Election.
to deny power and water to the Gaza Strip.
Keir Starmer himself faced an effective pro-Palestinian candidate in the form of Andrew Feinstein, who won 18.9 percent of the votes (7,312 votes) in Starmer’s London constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras, where he had lived since moving to Britain from South Africa in 2001. Feinstein was elected as an African National Congress candidate to the first postapartheid South African parliament in 1994 and retained his seat until resigning in 2001 over the failure of the party to investigate allegations of corruption against party leaders. He decided to stand against Starmer chiefly because he was appalled by his stand on Palestine. Feinstein has said that his political views were strongly influenced by his mother’s experiences under Nazism: many relatives were murdered during World War II, and his mother survived by living in hiding in Vienna.
Starmer’s personal vote was down 17 percent from the previous election; he took 48.9 percent of the total vote and Feinstein came second.
The election results underlined the growing strength of pro-Palestinian feeling among the electorate. Contrary to the impression purveyed by much of the media, this goes far beyond Muslim communities. A growing awareness of this change exerted pressure on Labour to adjust its stand on Palestine and call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip after initially refusing to do so. Before the election, it committed itself to restoring support for UNRWA, withdrawn following the spurious claims by Israel of UNRWA staff being involved in the October 7 attacks. Along with the U.S. government, Britain had held out against restoring funding even after other countries resumed their support when Israel failed to produce evidence to support its claims. That election pledge was kept.
Shortly after the election, the new government announced that it would not submit a challenge to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) when it came to delivering judgments on
Israeli citizens responsible for war crimes against the Palestinians of Gaza. Britain is a signatory to the ICC, and the United States and Israel, which are not, had pressed it to maintain its opposition to the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. At the beginning of August, it was reported that civil servants had suspended the processing of arms export licenses for sales of weaponry to Israel while a policy review took place. Government ministers do not appear to be seeking a ban on arms exports to Israel; they want only to bar certain exports, deemed to be offensive rather than defensive.
While these moves by the new government are positive, they are limited: they move Britain further away from lockstep with Washington but fall far short of supporting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their homeland.
RACIST RIOTS TARGET MUSLIMS
When three young girls were murdered and others wounded in an attack in the northwest England town of Southport on July 29, far-right activists disseminated online the claim that the lone culprit was a Muslim asylum seeker who had recently arrived by boat from mainland Europe. A ragtag collection of largely middle-aged men descended on the town, supposedly to protest against violence by asylum seekers. They soon turned their attention to a local mosque, breaking down garden walls to supply themselves with rocks and bricks to throw at the building and at the police who sought to restrain them.
In an effort to avert further violence, information about the killer was made public: he was a 17-year-old who was born and raised in Britain. However, in the following days, far-right activists mobilized mobs in more than 20 towns, who, while attacking mosques and hotels where asylum seekers were reported to be sheltered, in some cases engaged in general property destruction, looting and assaulting the police. The authorities had arrested more than 700 of them by mid-
August and were quickly bringing them to trial.
Even publications like The Daily Mail, which has stoked Islamophobia and hostility toward migrants over the years, condemned the rioters strongly. However, at the time of writing, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who in 2023 labelled as “hate marches” the peaceful marches in solidarity with the Palestinian people that called for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the orderly participants as a “mob,” has yet to use such language about the racist, violent, life-threatening gangs who caused mayhem in numerous British cities. Instead, as the first rioters were brought to trial, she and fellow Conservative Robert Jenrick issued a call for the words “Allah Akbar” (God is the greatest) to be criminalized.
Claiming that right-wing law breakers were treated more harshly than those from minorities, Elon Musk called the British premier “Two Tier Keir,” but that claim, common on the far right, was belied by a research-based report issued by the Royal United Services Institute, which found that “Far right-motivated violence is often classified as mere ‘thuggery’ or hooliganism, while similar acts motivated by Islamist extremism would likely be swiftly labelled as terrorism.” This has influenced how seriously it was regarded and detracted from the political will to combat it.
After the first far-right riot, anti-racist protesters took to the streets wherever the racists rallied to block their access to the communities and institutions that were the subject of their attacks and show their condemnation of them. The media in general applauded the thousands who turned out to oppose racist violence, but seemed to prefer not to notice that there was a sprinkling of Palestinian flags in many of these crowds. No doubt it is inconvenient to acknowledge that many of those hailed as heroes when protesting far-right thuggery in Britain are the same people who were panned for protesting Israeli army thuggery in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ■
Canada Calling
Canadian Healthcare Workers Call Out Sector’s Silence on Gaza
By Candice Bodnaruk
Group members at Portage and Main, Winnipeg’s famous intersection. Today the organization is known as Manitoba Healthcare Workers for Palestine.
A GROUP OF Manitoba healthcare workers is pressuring Manitoba healthcare unions to end their silence on Gaza and to call for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid in the region.
Manitoba Healthcare Workers for Palestine (previously known as Manitoba Healthcare Workers for a Ceasefire) was formed in November 2023 in response to targeted attacks on healthcare workers and healthcare infrastructure in Gaza. Organizers say solidarity with healthcare workers in Palestine links them together.
The group says the response from the public to their advocacy has been “overwhelmingly” positive. The organizers point out that despite the call by international humanitarian organizations for a ceasefire, healthcare organizations in Manitoba remain shamefully silent on the issue. “The blatant inaction and polarized stance taken by universities and professional bodies in Manitoba is alarming,” members said, in a statement to the Washington Report
Nursing unions in other provinces as well as the Canadian Federation of Medical Students have released statements in support
Candice Bodnaruk has been involved in Palestinian issues for the past 14 years through organizations such as the Canadian BDS Coalition and Peace Alliance Winnipeg. Her political action started with feminism and continued with the peace movement, first with the No War on Iraq Coalition in 2003 in Winnipeg.
of a ceasefire, but healthcare unions in Manitoba such as the Manitoba Nurses Union, Doctors Manitoba and PARIM (Professional Association of Residents and Interns of Manitoba) have not.
“There has been shameful silence on the part of employers, regulatory bodies and unions on the atrocities being carried out in Gaza, especially notable when compared to the vocal response and solidarity readily expressed with Ukraine,” Manitoba Healthcare Workers for Palestine said, adding that the “blunting” of academic freedom in Manitoba is noticeable.
Across Canada other healthcare unions are taking a stand. On May 29, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions issued a statement supporting a ceasefire in Gaza and condemning the ongoing targeting of health care workers and infrastructure. The Ontario Nurses Association issued a statement back in October calling for peace and a ceasefire “to halt the extreme level of suffering in the region,” and the Canadian Federation of Medical Students also issued a statement at that time.
“We also want to see unions and elected officials step up and do more to ensure the safety of healthcare workers and students on their paths of advocacy—we have a moral and ethical duty to speak up against what is happening and should be supported to do so,” Manitoba Healthcare Workers for Palestine said.
Two healthcare workers who have advocated for Palestine have been ostracized and censured. Last November a University of Manitoba fourth-year nursing student was removed from her program for advocating for Palestinians in Gaza; her suspension was overturned in January. Dr. Gem Newman was criticized for his May 16 medical school valedictory address at the University of Manitoba where he called out the Canadian Medical Association, Doctors Manitoba and PARIM for their silence on Gaza.
Ernest Rady, a University of Manitoba graduate and major donor to the university’s medical school, wrote a letter of complaint to the university and demanded the school take down the video of the speech. Peter Nickerson, the college of medicine dean, also called Newman’s remarks “divisive and inflammatory.”
By contrast, physicians in the province who have endorsed antiPalestinian, Islamophobic rhetoric and publicly doxxed colleagues
for their advocacy have not faced major consequences.
“The organization encourages all healthcare workers to consider their code of ethics and the reasons that they became healthcare workers and to participate in whatever capacity they can,” members of Manitoba Healthcare Workers for Palestine said.
The organization said an ongoing culture of silence is associated with the atrocities occurring in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. “We can hazard a guess that unions, which are normally quick to show their support for a variety of causes, are fearful of the pushback from the unfortunate and inaccurate rhetoric that any critique of Israel is anti-Semitic. It goes without saying that those advocating for Palestinian justice are not anti-Semitic; any hint of such would be immediately condemned,” members said, adding that there are many Jewish members of the movement.
Manitoba Healthcare Workers for Palestine invites people to become active in their collective and to continue to attend demonstrations and other actions and participate in the ongoing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. Collective members also encourage everyone sympathetic to the cause to continue to pressure their elected officials to speak out against the genocide and demand a lasting ceasefire and immediate arms embargo: “Speaking out is paramount, not only as healthcare workers but members of humanity. We may be far away from the ongoing genocide, but every voice speaking for justice matters.”
CANADA REVENUE AGENCY REVOKES JNF CANADA’S CHARITABLE STATUS
Years of grassroots advocacy and organization have finally paid off for Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and its supporters.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) Charities Directorate announced this past summer that it was revoking the Jewish National Fund (JNF) Canada’s charitable status. For years IJV Canada members and their allies have been campaigning to have the federal government do just that.
Protesters gather to protest the annual Jewish National Fund Canada gala in June 2024.
This past June people gathered in Winnipeg once again to protest the heavily guarded annual JNF Canada gala.
“Independent Jewish Voices is thrilled to have contributed with our allies to this major blow to Canada’s illegal Zionist charities,” Sue Goldstein said in a press release about the CRA decision provided to the Washington Report
Over the past 18 months, the CRA has received detailed complaints requesting that it investigate a dozen more Israel-focused charities.
The JNF Canada has been under audit for years by the CRA for supporting the Israeli military and illegal settlements. In 2017, IJV Canada assisted four complainants in submitting a comprehensive complaint to the CRA which prompted the CRA to investigate. At the time, IJV’s 85page report documented more than 50 years of tax law violations by the JNF Canada. When IJV Canada was formed in 2008 it identified the Jewish National Fund Canada as one of the primary pillars of Zionism that has long been involved in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and it launched its Stop the JNF campaign.
The JNF Canada is appealing the CRA decision. The organization has taken legal action in the Federal Court of Appeal to challenge what it calls the CRA’s “wrongful
and unjustified” decision to revoke JNF Canada’s charitable status. The appeal also states that the CRA review process was flawed and fundamentally unfair. On the JNF Canada’s website, the organization asks supporters to write to Ottawa and challenge the court’s decision.
What the CRA ruling means is that the charity may no longer issue tax receipts for donations and no longer qualifies for exemption for income tax as a registered charity. JNF has one year to wind down its business and dispose of assets or pay 100 percent tax on millions of dollars in assets. A notice on JNF Canada’s website under the donation tab reads “Please note, due to the recent revocation of our charitable status by the CRA, we cannot issue charitable tax receipts for your donation.”
It’s not the first time the JNF Canada has come under CRA scrutiny. Charity Intelligence Canada posted a donor advisory back in 2019 that the CRA Charities Directorate had notified JNF that it intended to revoke its charity status because it no longer met conditions for charitable registration.
In 2022 the JNF Canada received $13.2 million in donations.
Scott Weinstein of IJV pointed out that Canadian prime ministers such as Stephen Harper, along with media personalities, millionaires and corporations regularly sup-
STAFF
PHOTO C. BODNARUK
ported JNF gala fundraisers, which IJV regularly protested.
“Canadians strongly demonstrated that we opposed our tax dollars benefiting an organization that has supported Israel’s ethnic cleansing, apartheid and now genocide,” Weinstein said.
Political leaders are also speaking out. Niki Ashton, the New Democratic Party revenue critic, recently called on the Liberal government to investigate Canadian charities that allegedly funnel taxpayer money to support Israel’s military operations and illegal settlements in Palestine.
In 1972, the JNF supported and funded the creation of Canada Park in the West Bank. The park is located on top of the ruins of three Palestinian villages: Yalu, Imwas and Beit Nuba. The villages were destroyed and their residents expelled in 1967.
Goldstein said although the federal court ruling may not stop the flow of Canadian funds to Israel, the CRA decision demonstrates a change in attitude toward support for the Zionist project.
Along with the JNF, the CRA also revoked the charitable registration of the Ne’eman Foundation of Canada, which has operations in Israel and the U.S. The charity has funded organizations assisting in illegal settlements and the Israeli military. According to charitydata.ca, the Ne’eman Foundation of Canada lists its purpose as “advancement of religion.”
The organization’s mission statement says it guarantees funds comply with the requirements of Canadian tax legislation. In 2022, the JNF Canada granted $324,000 to the Ne’eman Foundation and the foundation issued just under $1 million in charitable receipts that same year.
In a statement, the JNF Canada said it will continue its charitable activity, collecting donations and distributing funds while the legal challenge is before the Federal Court of Appeal.
CUBA PEACE TOUR FOCUSES ON SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE
The North American director of the Cuba Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) was in Winnipeg recently for the
“Cuba and the Struggle for Peace” tour. Leima Martinez spoke at the Ukrainian Labour Temple about Cuba’s relationship with Palestine, specifically Cuba’s longtime solidarity with the Palestinian people and support for Palestinian medical students training in Cuba. The 10-city tour was organized by the Canadian Peace Congress, Mouvement Quebecois Pour La Paix and Table de Concertation de Solidarite Quebec-Cuba. The Winnipeg portion of the tour was hosted by the Manitoba Cuba-Solidarity Committee.
Martinez explained that the Cuba Movement for Peace was founded in the 1940s and was inspired by the belief that a different world was necessary. Cuba was one of 13 countries that opposed the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan of Palestine.
Martinez reflected on Che Guevara’s visit to Gaza in 1959, when “he was welcomed there by hundreds of Palestinian people.” One of them approached him, asking him not only to visit again but to take the voice of the Palestinian people to the U.N. and the U.S. “There are beautiful stories of Che Guevara in Palestine,” Martinez said. He was there to carry the message of the new revolution in Cuba and also to listen to the stories of Palestinians in Gaza.
Martinez told the audience that Che committed to spreading information about the situation in Palestine and to renouncing Israel and the horrors the Palestinian people were living. “Unfortunately, more than 40 years have passed, and the very same situation is happening in Gaza,” Martinez said. She reminded the audience that Fidel Castro said in 1979, “the basis for a just peace in the region begins with the total and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from all occupied Arab territories and for Israel to respect the Palestinians’ national rights.”
She spoke of how Che and Fidel worked on specific projects to support the Palestinian people, including providing access to many educational opportunities in Cuba. Today more than 200 Palestinian students are training in Cuban medical schools with the long-term goal of return-
ing to their land to offer medical services to their people.
She called the stories of the Palestinian medical students now studying in Cuba “heartbreaking,” adding that since October ICAP has attended rallies with the students as well as celebrations of Palestinian culture. “It is a commitment from ICAP to keep working with those students in their schools,” she said. Many Palestinians are working in Cuba’s hospitals and schools and are part of the international solidarity movement. Palestinians in Cuba work with ICAP to organize demonstrations and solidarity events. In November 2023, Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, led thousands of protesters in a pro-Palestine march. That same month Palestinian students presented a keffiyeh to Diaz-Canel and the Cuban president then joined the Palestinian students at Jose Marti Memorial Square where they raised the Palestinian flag.
Martinez argued that the U.S. blockade against Cuba itself is an act of genocide. Cuba demands an end to Israel’s genocide and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people. She stressed the urgency of bringing an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people “which is taking place before the eyes of the world.” She ended her remarks with a rousing “Free Free Palestine!” chant. ■
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Gaza Genocide Calls for Revolutionary Disruption in U.S.
Reverend Graylan Hagler, pastor emeritus of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, DC, spoke on Aug. 25, 2024 at the Islamic Community Center of Potomac, MD on the topic “Solidarity with Gaza.” His speech has been edited for space:
TODAY WE ARE engaged in a struggle together as we offer prayers for peace in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. I come out of the Black community here in the United States and know all too well Jim Crow and apartheid, what it looks like, what it feels like.
I was born and raised in Baltimore. When I was a teenager, we moved into a new neighborhood that was predominantly white. My
Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, pastor emeritus of Plymouth Congre‐gational United Church of Christ in Washington, DC, is also the director of Faith Strategies, cochair of the DC Poor People’s Campaign and an adviser for the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler
mother sent me and my brother to the store at twilight, and as we were walking, a station wagon came upon us at full speed. My brother, who was older, screamed, “Run!” and he took off. Grown men got out of the station wagon in full Klan regalia, robes and hoods. We were 15 and 16 years old, looking at grown men 45 and 55. They beat me unconscious. My brother came back to help me. They beat him unconscious. Ironically, the only thing that saved us that night was a cop car, by accident, that came upon the scene. The officer asked the Klansmen, “What’s going on?” And they responded, “These ni**** tried to rob us.” The officer put us in handcuffs, and that’s what saved us that night.
That experience alone helps me understand what is going on in the West Bank and what now is taking place in Gaza. It helps me to understand that there’s nothing new under the sun. The same folks who have been powering white supremacist ideology in the United States are the same folks that have been stealing land in
Israeli forces use tear gas and live fire to disperse peaceful Palestinian protesters during the “Great March of Return” at the Israel‐Gaza border near Al Bureij Refugee Camp in Gaza City, Gaza on Dec. 20, 2019.
Gaza and the West Bank. It is the same mentality.
And I recall another experience. As a young pastor in 1979, I started a little storefront church, in Roxbury, MA. I had the luxury of walking out of my office, going upstairs to the office that was occupied by people from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Next door to them were representatives of the African National Congress. Next door to them were organizers around the independence movement in Puerto Rico. And next door to them were organizers for Sinn Féin of the Irish Republican Army. As a young man, fresh out of seminary, this situation gave me a unique perspective on the world. International oppression is a reflection of domestic oppression.
In the United States, people come to me and ask, “Now, why can’t Palestinians be non-violent?” My response is, “Do you know how many non-violent actions Palestinians have engaged in?” For nonviolence to be successful, you must have a population that is moved by what they see and what they hear. Without them, nonviolence is a weakened exercise. If you don’t see it, if you don’t hear it, if you don’t have an affinity toward it, then it doesn’t happen. This dilemma goes back to that old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does it make a sound?” We may immediately say, “Of course, it makes a sound.” But that misses the point. This question is raising the issue of perception. What if there are no ears to hear the vibration, the rustle of the leaves, or the crumbling of the wood?
When the Great March of Return took place in 2018, and Palestinians were killed marching, for resisting, for making a non-violent movement in Gaza, I didn’t hear many people in this country cry out. I didn’t hear many people challenge the U.S. administration for providing the bullets that Israeli snipers used to kill 217 and injure 36,100 Palestinian non-violent protesters at the Great March of Return. It was as if the tree fell in the forest and there was no one to perceive it falling. Everybody got upset on Oct. 7, 2023. And yes, death of any kind is a horren-
dous thing. But I had to ask, “Where were you in 1948, in 1958, in 1967, and on the day before Oct. 7, 2023?” Nobody had much of a word to say then. It seemed that people did not see and could not hear—or at least didn’t want to.
How do you get justice? You’ve got to speak out and stand up, whether the time is right, or whether the time is not right. You’ve got to stand up when it is convenient, and when it is inconvenient. You’ve got to stand up and speak out and challenge folks on what their eyes don’t want to see, nor their ears want to hear. The U.S. is sponsoring slaughter, torture, war crimes, and that is the issue right now.
Haven’t you seen enough of the horror of genocide happening in Gaza? I know I have. I don’t need anybody else to legitimize what Palestinian reporters and agencies are telling me. I don’t need to wait for the voices of Western reporters or politicians to interpret for me what my own eyes have seen or what my ears have heard. Journalists critical of the genocide in Gaza or the occupation in the West Bank have been targeted by Israeli soldiers. At least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023. This is another way to keep ears from hearing and eyes from seeing. This is a way to deny the tree falling in the forest.
In other words, there’s a tendency by the oppressor to lessen any account of atrocities perpetuated against those who are oppressed. There is a tendency in the oppressor class to deflect criticism, to not listen, and to never believe the concerns of those who are oppressed. For the oppressor
class, others do not hurt in the same way. They don’t believe others grieve in the same way, and they don’t believe others die in the same way. For the oppressor to feel justified in their oppression, there is a need to deny all aspects of humanity in the other. These narratives of dehumanization, when effectively narrated, keep us from identifying with those who are oppressed, and lull us into accepting the harsh measures of the oppressor as justified.
Sisters and brothers, we’ve got to continue to cry out right now. Lift up this cause of Palestinian human rights, right now. We got an election going on. There’s a lot of noise. I’m going to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket, but it’s not because I believe Kamala Harris is my savior. I’m more afraid of Donald Trump than I am of her; Trump, whose son-in-law unilaterally moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, who cared nothing about what Palestinians felt or thought. But I say this: The day after Harris wins, we’re going to need to kick her butt. Don’t behave like we did after we got Barack Obama elected. Back then, we went home thinking that we had done something. We relaxed. The fact is, Harris claims to hear us, but let’s make sure she does. Shout. Stand up. Demonstrate for it. Sit-in about it. Harass them, disrupt them until your voice is heard. Don’t let them get away with anything. Because one thing that happens in the U.S.–we elect somebody, then we think, “Oh, we’ve done it.” No, you ain’t done jack. The military industrial complex is still making money. The oppressors are still oppressing. The imperialists are still stealing land. ■
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“A Beautiful Vision”—A Conversation With Miko Peled
By Matthew Vickers
IN MID-JULY, I had the opportunity to interview Miko Peled, a leading anti-Zionist activist and author of The General’s Son. We discussed his work as president of Dar Alhurriya: Palestine House of Freedom (PHF), a new Washington, DC-based initiative founded earlier this year that supports the creation of a single, democratic state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. During our conversation, Peled also shared his thoughts about the one-state solution, the student movement and the future of Palestine.
Matthew
Located on Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill, the PHF has tasked itself with the mission of dismantling Israeli apartheid and establishing a single state in all of Palestine as a resolution to more than 76 years of occupation and dispossession. Toward that goal, it builds ties between organizers, activists and movement builders.
One of the main objectives of the PHF is to counter the skewed political education that many Americans receive through an aggressive Zionist educational campaign targeting everyone from lawmakers, staffers and the media to the general public. The PHF argues that establishing a free democratic Palestine from the river to the sea with equal rights for all inhabitants is the way to dismantle apartheid and achieve Palestinian liberation—peace with justice. “When it comes to the state of Israel, to Judaism, to the Holocaust, to ancient times, biblical stories, Americans are quite familiar with that,” Peled said. “They get it in school, get it in their churches, other faith institutions, and so on. But Americans learn nothing about Palestine.”
One of the PHF’s first projects has been disseminating the findings of the 2022 Amnesty International report, which found that Israel’s system of domination in the West Bank, Gaza and within Israel’s own borders fulfills the legal criteria of apartheid, defined under international law as a crime against humanity. “We’ve taken the apartheid report, the Amnesty report, and we’ve spliced it in a way that people can just look at it and see the different avenues, the different ways in which apartheid is operating, and then some specifics,” Peled explained.
Projects such as these show that the PHF embraces a movement-based approach to politics, defined in its mission as “circumventing traditional politics through creative strategy.” Indeed, Peled spoke at length about how he hopes the PHF office can be utilized as a physical space for all sections of society—students, workers, lawyers, faith leaders and everyday citizens— to celebrate, discuss and fight for Palestine.
Vickers is an undergraduate student at Occidental College, where he is majoring in diplomacy and world affairs. He was an intern at the Washington Report this summer.
(L‐r) Northern Virginian nurse Lana, who served as an emergency room trauma nurse in Gaza in January 2024, Miko Peled and Medea Benjamin, co‐founder of CODEPINK, at the flag‐raising ceremony at Dar Alhurriya on July 23.
The conversation moved to long-term objectives, namely what a just solution for a “free Palestine” would look like. In seeking to dismantle the formal system of apartheid, Palestinians and Arab states have advanced numerous proposals, but since the Second Intifada, the one-state solution has slowly been embraced (mostly by scholars and activists) as an instrument to surmount military occupation, formal discrimination and the permanent exile of Palestinian refugees. In polling, Palestinians have shown that they both view the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution unfavorably.
Peled believes the one-state solution would “improve the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, it’s a beautiful vision.” He acknowledges that “it’s a tall order, but it must be done. The conversation has to take place…or else we’re never going to see the end of the violence, we’re never going to see the end of the oppression.” Israeli lawmakers and voters have rejected any proposal for the establishment of any Palestinian state, let alone a one-state solution. Indeed, in mid-July the Knesset overwhelmingly passed a resolution that rejected the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
While the one-state solution seems far off, Peled sees immediate hope in this year’s campus uprisings in support of Palestinian liberation, termed by some as the “Student Intifada.” Starting in April 2024 with the arrest of a coalition of proPalestine students at a selfconstructed liberated zone on campus, the movement exploded internationally with hundreds of other encampments, culminating in over 3,000 arrests in the U.S. Peled praised the contributions of students,
saying, “[the] liberated zones…created on campuses will be remembered as the highlights of student activism.” Describing his time visiting the encampments, he reflected, “you almost came out speechless, the display of humanity on these campuses was just incredible.” Peled hopes the PHF can serve as an incubator for future student organizing, inviting students fighting for Palestinian liberation to utilize the space for organizing, as well as community celebration of Palestinian life, art and humanity.
Regarding the relative silence in the U.S. mainstream media on the dire situation in the West Bank, Peled spoke about his own friends who had been thrown in Israeli prisons and his experiences with Bedouin Palestinians in the Naqab (more commonly known as the Negev in English) who have long protested the occupation and Israel’s treatment of the Bedouin. Referring to the West Bank, Peled said, “It is miraculous that they have lasted as long as they have. But at the
end of the day, with killing, the arrests, the torture, the destruction of homes, horrific oppression in terms of life, in general, I mean, every aspect of life….There’s only so much that people can do.”
With factors such as deadly raids by the Israel Defense Forces, settler vigilantism, the imminent fiscal collapse of the Palestinian Authority and announcements of new settlement projects, a reckoning has to be near, Peled believes. However, the question remains: at one point, will the situation become truly unbearable?
Peled concluded that the genocide would continue as long as apartheid remains, calling on a renewed movement to adopt reconfigured realities. “There’s no reason to expect this is going to end unless the apartheid regime is brought down…It’s up to us. It’s not going to come as a result of a particular candidate or a particular president.” Speaking to me directly as a student organizer, Peled confidently advised, “If we don’t force it to end, it’s not going to end. And so it really comes back to us.” ■
Leila Hasan Al-Awawda: “Something Has to Change” for Palestinians
By Eliza Dahlkemper
THIS SUMMER the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs spoke with Leila Hasan Al-Awawda, 63, co-founder of Women in Hebron, a cooperative of more than 150 artisans that aims to empower Palestinian women by providing an economic platform to sell tatreez (embroidery) and jewelry. During her 9-day visit to Washington, DC, Awawda sat peacefully on a couch in the back of Middle East Books and More, bagging earrings, handing out dates and chatting with customers as they browsed the array of colorful items she laid out on the table. The welcoming atmosphere made for a stark contrast with the grim realities Awawda faces in Palestine, where she has lived her entire life.
Since Awawda’s last visit to the bookstore in 2019 (see June/July 2019, pp. 54-55), Women in Hebron has struggled to
Eliza Dahlkemper recently graduated from Tulane University with degrees in International Development, Middle East and North African studies, and the Arabic language. She was an intern at the Washington Report this summer.
recover from the economic downturn caused by COVID-19. The losses it sustained during the pandemic were compounded exponentially after Oct. 7, as tourism dissipated and Israeli forces escalated their militarization of checkpoints between Palestinian towns and villages, impeding mobility.
Tatreez is a skill passed down through generations, often from mothers to daughters, and is an instantly identifiable component of Palestinian culture. Awawda’s mother taught her to embroider when she was just 7. The significance of tatreez as a cultural practice highlights Women in Hebron’s vital role in preserving Palestinian culture. In 2021, Palestinian embroidery was placed on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage for Humanity under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) trusteeship denoting its “outstanding universal value.”
Awawda began her career as an embroiderer in the late 1990s with the Melia Art Center in Jerusalem, home to a fair-trade women’s cooperative. Embroidery helps Palestinian women become independent wage earners and it’s also “a kind of therapy,” Awawda said. However, during the Second Intifada (20002005), Israel constructed a wall, which in many locations separated West Bank villages from their agricultural land and isolated Palestinian towns and cities from one another. Shortly after the wall was completed, Israeli forces occupied the route between Awawda’s house in Hebron and the art center in Jerusalem. Unable to get to her workplace, confined to her compound and searching for economic stability, Awawda turned to what she knew best: embroidery. Three years later, Women in Hebron was born.
Awawda’s expertise lies in creating new styles for the cooperative to embroider. Every week, Awawda brainstorms unique de-
Leila Hasan Al‐Awawda watches an IOF soldier outside Women in Hebron in 2023.
signs that align with historical practices and mesh with the modern tastes of foreign travelers. “It’s a new generation. They are looking for a new style,” Awawda explains. Before Oct. 7, Awawda would invite tourists into her shop to discuss the status of Palestinians in the West Bank under Israeli occupation. Once Israeli militarization intensified, the old city of Hebron became inaccessible to women in the surrounding villages, necessitating the closure of Awawda’s storefront.
According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) has jurisdiction over the area where Awawda’s shop is located in Hebron’s Old City. Awawda has witnessed the arrest of her 15-year-old son and the detrimental effects that Israeli imprisonment had on her uncle. As of March 2024, B’Tselem reports, the Israel Prison Service is holding 8,611 Palestinians in custody, almost double the number in March 2023. Awawda emphasizes the importance of witnessing life in Palestine first-hand. “I believe it’s different, what you hear and what you see. We are not terrorists. We are not fighting for religion.” Rather than seeing Palestinians as terrorists, she insists, Americans need to reevaluate their assumptions. “Palestinians are freedom fighters. There is a difference.”
At the age of 63, Awawda has lived through nine wars, with the genocide in Gaza marking the 10th. Awawda is originally from Deir Sammit, a village that is 8 km (about 5 miles) away from Hebron. Awawda speaks highly of the town where she was born, which only contained a handful of houses during her childhood and is now home to about 8,000 individuals. She recalls growing up in a very peaceful village surrounded by other children. Things quickly changed after the June 1967 war erupted. Awawda spent ages 6 to 12 in constant terror, looking for food to eat, hiding in caves to escape the army and witnessing family members defend themselves against Israeli sexual assault. Along with societal changes, the political landscape of Awawda’s village trans-
formed during the 1967 war. In the 1990s it was classified as part of Area B, where the Palestinian Authority controls civil matters and Israel retains security control.
Awawda acknowledges the inability of the Palestinian Authority to bring about necessary progress toward a Palestinian state. “They [the PA] are not able to help us. They are not able to pay their workers.” With the last election held 18 years ago, in 2006, Awawda stresses that a new government or international body should promote elections in Palestine. She concedes that “no one can give us our freedom,” but she insists that Americans have a vital role to play because their government is funding Israel’s inconceivable destruction of Gaza.
In addition to the destruction in Gaza, there is “a lot of demolition in the West Bank,” she noted. “Look at the camps: Jenin camp, Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron. How many young people they kill every day.” According to Al Jazeera, over 500 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed since Oct. 7 as a result of increased settler violence and Israeli military raids.
Amid the daily horrors and injustices, Women in Hebron acts as a catalyst to help women become more independent. “It’s not enough, but it’s good,” Awawda says. But how long will the cooperative be able to survive in the face of Israeli annexation and settler violence? Awawda’s message is clear: “Something has to change.” ■
Netanyahu’s Visit
Continued from page 13
An Oct. 3, 2001, report by Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) News gives the game away: An acrimonious argument erupted during an Israeli cabinet session between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his foreign Minister Shimon Peres. According to Israel radio Kol Yisrael, Peres warned Sharon that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a ceasefire with the Palestinians would
endanger Israeli interests and “turn the U.S. against us.”
An infuriated Sharon shouted, “every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.”
In his exordium, Prime Minister Netanyahu takes ahistorical propaganda to a new level. He claims with the confidence of Napoleon marching on Moscow in the winter of 1812, “[W]hen [America and Israel] stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose.”
Where are the United States victories in the Middle East? The mullahs in Iran on the edge of a nuclear capability? Squandering one trillion dollars in Iraq to make it a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran? U.S. bombing of Syria, still in the grip of the merciless dictator Bashar alAssad? A failed state in Lebanon dominated by Hezbollah in the south? The blowing up of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 killing 241? Resurgent Ansarallah (Houthis) fighters interrupting maritime commerce in the Red Sea and convulsing Yemen? An Egyptian dictatorship rivaling North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and flirting with Russia?
And then there is Hamas, listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States. Israel surreptitiously supported Hamas via Qatar to weaken the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. That support turned out to be a lose-lose for both the United States and Israel.
The time is long overdue for the United States to heed the advice of President George Washington and end its swooning over Israel and doing its bidding abroad. The United States should re-embrace invincible self-defense combined with scrupulous neutrality in all foreign conflicts. That will be our deliverance from the monstrous multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex that magnifies fleas into elephants to justify perpetual war. ■
MUSIC & ARTS
Museum of the Palestinian People Affirms Identity and Art
Last year, the Museum of the Palestinian People conceptualized a street festival celebrating Palestinian culture, but then Oct. 7 happened, and while the staff didn’t want to cancel the event altogether, they realized that they had to rethink the original plan. The result was the event held at the Festival Center in Washington, DC on July 12-13, “Preserving Palestinian Identity: Art as Resistance,” attended by 1,500-1,600 people.
It was less of a celebration and more of an affirmation of Palestinian culture; as director of programs and operations Julia Pitner told the Washington Report, the idea was to connect through culture and to assert the existence of the Palestinian people, living and remaining on their land. The theme clearly resonated with the community. The event offered something for everyone—dance, poetry, art, children’s storytelling, food, face painting and henna When they weren’t attending readings, participants browsed the artwork and photography on the walls (by Aya Zaqout, Ahmed Mansour and Heidi Naguib) and shopped at the many vendor tables offering embroidery, books and ceramic items, among other options.
The opening program included poetry, a fine dabke performance by the local allwomen group Malikat Al Dabke, and musical performances by Mohamed Karzon and Fuad Foty. Three poets read from their work for about 15 minutes each: Trauma therapist and poet Lenna Jawdat, who has roots in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, each of which has been marinated in trauma over the past several decades; Gaza poet Mohammed Arafat; and City of Alexandria poet laureate Zeina Azzam, author of Some Things Never Leave You. Her poem “Write My Name,” about writing the names of Palestinian children on their limbs so that they can be identified in the event that their parents have also been killed, went viral soon after it was first published and has been read at anti-war demonstrations and translated into at least half a dozen lan-
guages. She described one of the poems she read at the event, “To My Senators,” as an angry letter to elected officials “who keep voting for billions of dollars of additional military aid to Israel, as the bombings and genocide continue.”
Azzam told the Washington Report, “It was a beautiful evening of poetry, music and dabke. I saw so many people I didn’t know, especially young people, which filled me with hope, that there is a large and growing generation of people who are passionate about Palestinian culture and Palestinian rights. The solidarity in the room was palpable.”
Poetry readings continued into the second day of the event. If Latin American writers are associated with magical realism, the style of Palestinian literature and films is closer to traumatic realism, poet Sharif Elmusa informed the audience. “Gaza inhabits us,” he said. Gaza provides the evidence that “the human experiment has failed / metaphors out of fuel.” How could it be otherwise, when the carnage is beyond words, beyond comprehension? Among the poems he read was “Epitaph for a Mass Grave with Sabra and Shatilla,” written for another atrocity, now 42 years old, and “Moons and Donkeys,” written after a stay in Gaza in 1997. It includes these lines: The war is said to be over, the price paid, and will be paid further.
A torpid peace is settling in. What were the Prophets smitten by?
The final poetry reading of the event was by Samar Najia, who in addition to being a published poet is also a memoirist who has written about the intergenerational trauma rooted in the Nakba: the forced rupture from the nurturing land and neighborhoods and the repercussions of that rupture. Among the poems she read was the haunting “Haram Alaikum, It Is Forbidden,” which includes these lines:
Are the orphans not most treasured for being the most wretched, Do you not see them shaking like leaves at every rain drop
Roaming the streets their feet cracked and blistered
Haram alaikum, wallah haram
The dirgelike “Haram alaikum, wallah haram,” repeated after every atrocity listed in the poem, conveys that Israel’s wanton killing is sinful, an act forbidden by God. The program made provisions for young attendees, too. Children were shown how to make kites, and they gathered on the floor to listen to stories. Simon Sakkab, author of several books, including the newly published children’s book Palestine A to Z, was on hand. Chefs Jinan Deena (Bayti) and Marcelle Afram (Shababi) provided delicious food for purchase.
Ida Audeh
One of the many vendors at the “Preserving Palestinian Identity: Art as Resistance” event organized by the Museum of the Palestinian People in July.
WAGING PEACE
The 2024 Election and U.S. Foreign Policy
The Quincy Institute held a webinar on Aug. 28 to muse about how the outcome of the Nov. 2024 presidential election could alter the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. The general consensus among panelists was that there is little chance of either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump overseeing a fundamental reimagining of how the U.S. engages the world.
Moderator Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, editorial director at Responsible Statecraft, noted that both major candidates have not articulated a clear foreign policy vision. Vice President Kamala Harris never outlined substantive foreign policy positions during her time in the Senate and the White House, she noted. Meanwhile, Vlahos described Donald Trump as a “mixed bag,” often vacillating between the pro-restraint and militaristic wings of his party. His first term foreign policy was defined by “a constant struggle between the aggressive impulses of his party and his appointees, and his long-stated goal of talking to adversaries and ending America’s role as the world’s police,” she said.
George Beebe, director of the Grand Strategy program at the Quincy Institute, argued that Trump’s ascendency can in part be attributed to the ruling elite’s inability to be “in touch with ordinary Americans and understand their needs and concerns and act as agents on their behalf.” Trump’s 2016 campaign particularly emphasized this theme vis-à-vis foreign policy, criticizing the Iraq war and other interventions that diverted resources away from home. “If you look back to 2008, every winning presidential candidate has to one degree or another run in opposition to some significant foreign military intervention,” Beebe noted.
That being said, Beebe does not foresee Trump—or Harris—criticizing massive U.S. funding for Israel’s assault on Gaza during this election season, as they both view the topic as thorny. “For both Harris and Trump, they don’t want to be too specific about what they’re going to do on this
issue,” he said. “Harris doesn’t want to alienate anybody, and Trump wants to try to attract Democrats who are pro-Israel who would ordinarily vote Democratic but are concerned [about growing opposition to Israel within their party], but he doesn’t want to undermine his own ability to appeal to people in the swing states who are concerned about the pro-Israel tilt the White House has taken.”
Daniel Bessner, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, took a largely pessimistic view, arguing that the outcome of the election will have minimal impact on U.S. policy. “I think it’s going to be more of the same, more of the status quo with those administrations,” he said. “I think it’s a pretty grim moment. I don’t think there’s much to look forward to.” While he acknowledges the growing anti-war movement within the Republican Party, he doubts they have enough power to reorient U.S. policy on issues such as Ukraine, or the desire to challenge their party’s ardently pro-Israel views. As for Harris, he believes she will simply outsource her foreign policy to Washington, DC insiders who are disinterested in change. “My guess is Kamala is going to go in there [the White House] and not be especially interested in foreign policy,” he said.
Emily Jashinsky, UnHerd’s Washington, DC correspondent, said the divergent views within the Republican Party regarding for-
eign intervention can be seen within the Trump campaign. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo remains a close adviser, she noted, but so does former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who is significantly more critical of foreign wars. During his prior tenure in office, “Trump reportedly enjoyed and thought he benefited from watching those different viewpoints duke it out in meetings,” Jashinsky noted, and she believes “that we will see a redo of that if Donald Trump is elected.”
Pinning Trump down on specific policies is difficult, she added, due to his constant desire to “make a deal,” which could cause him to change course if he believes a good offer is on the table. One additional caveat, she added, is that Trump is easily wooed by charismatic personalities and quite likely to lend his ear to the adviser he finds most endearing, rather than the one with the most articulate vision.
Dale Sprusansky
The Future of the Student Movement for Palestine
The “Student Intifada,” inaugurated by a coalition of Columbia University students this spring, spurred unprecedented global action in solidarity with Palestine on college campuses.
While the movement paused for the summer months, essential questions regarding strategy, tactics and the future of
Pro ‐ Palestine protesters march near the United Center, the site of the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, IL, on Aug. 22, 2024.
JIM VONDRUSKA/GETTY IMAGES
Students walk out of George Washington University’s commencement ceremony in Washington, DC on May 19, 2024, in solidarity with Palestine and to demand that the university divest from Israel.
campus organizing remained. On July 3, Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, hosted an online policy lab examining the “key lessons” from the student movement and discussing paths forward.
Kylie Broderick, a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at the University of North Carolina, emphasized the centrality of divestment as a student demand. Divestment, she said, is a favored tactic due to its direct impact on Israel’s ability to access the capital it needs to fund its oppression of Palestinians. Although few universities have agreed to divest, Broderick pointed out that the struggle for financial transparency has been broadly successful, with numerous public and private universities disclosing their investments for public scrutiny.
Broderick said that the student uprising directly responded to the reluctance of university administrators to engage with student demands, challenging the implicit hierarchies of university education. “The student encampment movement was a result of the intractability of university administrators” and their lack of interest in “actually having a university be run by democratic values,” Broderick observed. “Instead, they exercised their long authoritarian arm in order to try to crush the movement.”
Nour Joudah, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), spoke about the tactical considerations of organizers in the student movement, especially when negotiating demands with university administrators. She observed that organizers have recognized the shallowness of deals struck with administrators, leading to the realization that “increased intransigence is needed to some degree” in order to secure real change.
Joudah also highlighted the ties between universities and private security, local law enforcement, Zionist organizations and even federal agencies, and how those relationships were used to target student protesters. In speaking about her experience at UCLA, Joudah described the high levels of police presence on campus, often alongside Zionist counterprotesters who physically attacked students throughout the encampment—with little to no police response.
While divestment remains the main driver of the movement, Joudah said student organizers also see success through the prism of uplifting the people of Palestine, especially Gaza. While clear victories on campus remain difficult to achieve, there is no doubt Palestinians have seen images and videos of the campus movement and
been uplifted by the overwhelming display of solidarity.
The policy lab also discussed the ideology of the protests, which centered anti-imperialist, intersectional and decolonial ideas. Broderick and Joudah said the movement made impressive connections to transnational and local drivers of oppression, creating a distinctive liberatory language and analysis. “We understand from the Ferguson moment that the tear gas that is used over there is the same tear gas [used on Americans],” Broderick articulated. In reflecting on the future of the student movement, Broderick and Joudah extolled its accomplishments despite the enormous personal costs endured by students and faculty participants. Both shared a cautious optimism for further student action for Palestine, praising the communal and inclusive nature of past mobilizations and the ethics of the encampment model. “I don’t think that there is any doubt that this isn’t over,” Broderick stated. “Students are still emboldened to continue and are not afraid of the court cases that are being levied on them, so that’s a success.”
Both panelists expect to see ample action surrounding Palestine and Israel on campuses as the new academic year begins. “The summer, hopefully, was an opportunity not to scale back or quit anything, but to regroup and think about what comes next,” Joudah said. Matthew Vickers
Two Kids Per Day: Israel’s Detention of Children
Most years, 500 to 700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12, are arrested, interrogated, tried in an Israeli military court and imprisoned for months, often without charges. Most of these detained children are from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since Oct. 7, 2023, however, such arrests have doubled throughout all of occupied Palestine.
“While the news media has reported Israeli forces detaining and torturing Palestinian men, women and children from the Gaza Strip, little to no information is available about these detainees, their locations or when they will be released,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program direc-
MOSTAFA BASSIM/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES
Palestinian kids inspect the damage to their home after it was attacked by Jewish settlers in the village of Jit, in the northern occupied West Bank, on Aug. 16, 2024. Jewish settlers burned homes and cars, destroyed public property, killed a Palestinian and injured dozens of others in the village.
tor at Defense for Children InternationalPalestine in an April 2024 report. “There are an unknown number of Palestinian children detained from Gaza, likely being tortured by Israeli forces at Israeli prisons in southern Israel.”
At a June online film salon hosted by Voices From the Holy Land (VFHL), Eqtaish was one of three panelists who explored Israel’s military “justice system” for Palestinian children through two documentaries. “Two Kids a Day” featured leaked video from four interrogations, and “Caging Childhood” asked whether Israel’s military detention of children is a system of justice or a tool for controlling the Palestinian population.
“Our information about child prisoners, especially prisoners from Gaza, is very limited because Israel will not share any information about child prisoners from there,” said Eqtaish. “Both Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations are now incapable of documenting violations… Prison authorities have stopped all family visitations. Child prisoners participate in their court sessions through a video link where the child is inside the prison and the judge, prosecutor and the lawyer are in the courthouse. It was difficult before, but now it is unimaginable.”
Mohamad Babai, co-producer of the documentary “Two Kids a Day,” is a Palestinian and an Israeli citizen born in Jaffa. He spoke about the general lack of awareness surrounding the issue. “Many Israelis found it very hard to believe that their army could do such crimes. There were demonstrations in Herzliya and Tel Aviv against the screening of our documentary. But in general, most people wanted to see the movie. And they had many questions. Of course, after the Oct. 7 attacks, we can’t stream the film here in Israel. Worldwide, however, the film has had many successful showings.”
A third panelist, Moria Shlomot, is chief executive officer of an Israeli organization, Parents Against Child Detention. “We cannot live with the knowledge that these things are happening in our name, just a few kilometers from where I live,” she said. “Our main goal is to recruit Israeli society. If we cannot do that, then we will not have a solution at the end of the day. We must not give up that possibility. There are five million Palestinian children that right now are suffering from hunger, from disease, from bombs, from fire, from terrible things that are happening. We are struggling to make a small crack in the Israeli heart for the kids.
That’s why it’s so important to continue reporting the photos, the stories, the testimonies and the data—the number of children that are being killed in Gaza and that have been detained from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
“There’s something that you don’t see in these films,” noted Babai. “When I asked the kids about their experience, they tried to be macho and tell jokes. Nobody really told me about their feelings. When kids are in prison, there is a Palestinian adult prisoner who is in charge of them, who takes care of the kids. I asked one of these men, after he was released, about the kids. How do they behave in prison? He said many of the kids cry at night or wet their beds, and they ask for their mom or their father. When they get released, many of these children never go back to school.”
Bassam Haddad, associate professor and founding director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at George Mason University, moderated the discussion. He asked the panel, “In this system of extreme exploitation of human beings and children under apartheid and settler colonial rule, what is the PA, the Palestinian Authority doing to push back?”
Eqtaish replied, “I think that the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing because they can’t intervene in the Israeli military legal system.” Babai added, “To be honest, if the international community can’t stop the genocide in Gaza, do you think the PA can protect its own people? This is a terrible situation.”
Haddad concluded, “Today, everything is destroyed! There’s no going away from this crisis. It is incumbent upon us—not just as human beings, but also for those of us who are citizens of the United States, which is actually funding the decimation of life in Gaza—to be active. We cannot just ‘move on’ this time. It’s incumbent upon us to keep going in ways that we haven’t done before.”
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East and Defense of Children International-Palestine were co-sponsors of the June VFHL salon. The collection of 50 salons is free online at <www.voicesfromtheholyland.org/salonrecordings>. —Steven Sellers Lapham
Dr. Alice Rothchild Educates Educators in DC
Dr. Alice Rothchild, a retired obstetriciangynecologist, author, activist and filmmaker, held riveting talks and book readings while she was in Washington, DC this summer to attend the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University Summer Institute for Educators 2024. Her Georgetown lecture topics included “Teaching the History of Palestine and Israel in the K-12 Curriculum: Standards-Based Approaches and Resources” and “If I Include Palestinians, Will I Be Labeled Anti-Semitic?” She also spoke at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, addressing, “Critical Condition: Advancing Health Equity Amid the Maternal/Child Health Catastrophe in Gaza.” Making the most of every minute she had in Washington, DC, Rothchild discussed the “Absence of Palestine in Children’s Literature and Why This Matters,” at the Jerusalem Fund on July 30 and again at Potter’s House bookstore on Aug. 4. At each venue, listeners had the opportunity to purchase her latest kid’s books Old Enough to Know and Finding Melody Sullivan, as well as her other titles. She is now working on a memoir in verse for young adults, exploring her childhood in the 1950s and 60s and her development as a feminist physician and activist.
The Jewish Voice for Peace-DC Metro chapter hosted Rothchild at the TenleyFriendship Neighborhood Library. She and Palestinian author Ramsey Hanhan also held a “Conversation on Palestine” at Elkridge Branch Library in Maryland. Her talk on the “Health and Human Rights Consequences of War on Gaza” at the Islamic Center of Maryland on Aug. 2 was the most compelling and thoroughly researched talk on Gaza I’ve heard. Rothchild urges viewers to use her slides and information to speak out as they work to stop the genocide in Gaza and improve access to educational materials in schools. Her talks are all available to watch online, posted on her website: <https://alicerothchild.com/audio-video/>.
—Delinda C. Hanley
Turkish government that, at the beginning of the Syrian crisis, was championing and actively working toward regime change in Syria,” he noted. Ülgen said this policy change is partially a practical acknowledgment that President Bashar al-Assad has won the civil war. However, domestic considerations are also motivating this shift. While the status of the 3.2 million Syrian refuges in Türkiye has not been a political hot button issue over the past decade, it has recently “become a losing proposition for the government,” Ülgen said. This is in large part due to the economic downturn in Türkiye, which has made locals worried about continuing to provide for the needs of refugees. For this reason, the return of refugees to Syria is one of the core components of discussions between Damascus and Ankara.
Critiquing Rapprochement With Syria
The Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center held a virtual discussion on Aug. 8 about recent efforts to reintegrate Syria into the regional fold.
Sinan Ülgen, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, noted that after years of extreme tension, Ankara is finally willing to discuss rapprochement with Damascus. “This is somewhat of a 180-degree turn for the
“That being said, [negotiations] are not moving very rapidly,” Ülgen noted. Syria initially insisted as a prerequisite to talks that Türkiye agree to withdraw its forces from Syria and end its support for militant groups in Syria, particularly the Free Syrian Army. However, that rhetoric has since softened, with Damascus now signaling its willingness to negotiate these topics as part of formal talks.
Abdullah Baabood, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, discussed Syria’s relations with the Arab world
Dr. Alice Rothchild reads from Finding Melody Sullivan, her coming‐of‐age and learning ‐ about ‐ Israeli ‐ occupation book, at Potter’s House in Washington, DC, on Aug. 4, 2024.
People take part in a demonstration against the Assad regime in rebel‐held Idlib, Syria, on Aug. 23, 2024.
after being readmitted into the Arab League last year. “It is still very early to judge where the normalization with the Arab countries is going,” he said. The Gulf states in particular want to move toward de-escalation for their own internal reasons, “to ensure they are going to fulfill their economic development plans for the future” as they move toward a post-oil economy. Conflicts with Iran, Yemen, Syria or others only jeopardize the economic vision of leaders—particularly those in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, he said. However, there are geopolitical realities at hand as well. The Arab Gulf states hope that improved relations with Damascus will hinder Iranian influence in the country and help “bring Syria back to the Arab fold,” Baabood said. There is also hope that better relations will mitigate the flow of Captagon, a drug mass-produced in Syria that has had a devastating impact across the region.
Sawsan Abou Zainedin, the Chief Executive Officer of Madaniya, a Syrian NGO, argued rapprochement has not altered the behavior of Damascus, noting that Iran’s influence in the region has only grown thanks to the Gaza war, and the drug trade has not abetted. She also emphasized that refugees must not be forced to return to Syria. “We keep seeing documented cases of enforced disappearance, detention and torture against those who were forcibly deported by Lebanon to Syria,” she noted.
Zainedin also worries Türkiye withdrawing from Syria could alter realities on the ground in a dangerous way. This “can only result in a reconfiguration of the geopolitical structure of Syria on military grounds, and that’s worrying because at least a third of the Syrian population currently resides in northeast and northwest Syria,” which are not controlled by Damascus, she said. “I think we’re talking about a huge shift, not just for the civilians, but also for the opposition who have been largely adopted by Türkiye, and for the armed groups who have largely been funded and administered by Türkiye.”
Rather than focusing on shuffling power structures or even economic revival, attention must be placed on constructing an
overarching vision for Syria, Zainedin emphasized. “We’re rebuilding [Syria] over mountains of unaddressed, severe grievances that can only break into new cycles of violence in the future,” she said. “Recovering things at the socio-economic level, in a superficial way, I worry will only lead us to a Gaza example in the future, because these efforts are not taking into consideration the long-term peace building prospects of the country, given the massive human rights violations committed by this regime.”
Dale Sprusansky
HUMAN RIGHTS
Calls for Reform on 10th Anniversary of Yazidi Genocide
As the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine continue to dominate global headlines, the Yazidi religious minority community solemnly commemorated this summer the tenth anniversary of their all-but-forgotten genocide in Iraq. Between 2014-2017, Yazidis were subjected to massacres, rape and forced conversion by ISIS. More than 5,000 Yazidis were killed, and at least 2,000 are still missing.
On July 30 at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, a panel of four experts discussed their policy paper, “Ten Years After Genocide: The Yazidi Struggle to Recover and Overcome.” The paper was described by co-author Pari Ibrahim, executive director of the Free Yazidi Foundation, as a
“guiding document of what the Yazidis want,” based on the thoughts and concerns of community members.
In his opening comments, former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) called for the creation of a special U.S. envoy for security and justice for the Yazidis impacted by ISIS’ genocide. He believes the U.S. government “has failed the Yazidi people and also the Christian community” in Iraq. Wolf, who was instrumental in creating the Baker-Hamilton Commission (aka the Iraq Study Group), author of the International Religious Freedom Act and voted for the Iraq war, noted these communities “still face severe difficulties.” These conditions have resulted in an estimated 120,000 Yazidis leaving Iraq for Europe and the U.S.
Wolf referenced the “lack of security, damaged or destroyed homes, minimal job opportunities, lack of healthcare, education and access to drinking water” as motivating factors for the exodus. He also emphasized the need for Yazidis to assume “leadership positions at the federal level in Baghdad,” describing them as an “underrepresented minority.”
Murad Ismael, president of the Sinjar Academy, elaborated on the critical issue of safety. He noted that an estimated half of the Yazidi population remains displaced due to continued security concerns. Many still consider the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar in Northern Iraq a “conflict zone” due to the presence of Kurdish and Shi’a paramilitary groups, he added. Ismael further
Protesters at the White House call attention to the injustices still faced by the Yazidi community in Iraq.
stated that “Iraq does not know what it wants to be,” and offered two versions: one of a peaceful nation “where everyone lives in dignity…a state of law and order,” or one run by militias.
Ibrahim raised the issue of refugees. “The Iraqi government wants to close down the [refugee] camps” housing 280,000 internally displaced Yazidis, where people have lived in tents for the past 10 years, she noted. “While people do want to leave the camps,” their return needs to be “voluntary, dignified and safe,” she emphasized.
Despite wanting Yazidis to leave the camps, Baghdad has done little to revitalize their decimated homeland, she insisted. “Sinjar is not being rebuilt, [but] Mosul has been receiving reparations and is being rebuilt,” Ibrahim said. She described this as a “very visible [sign] that Yazidis are not wanted.”
BOOKS
Then‐Sen. Bob Menendez (D‐NJ) exits Manhattan federal court in New York City on July 16, 2024, after he was found guilty of taking bribes from the Egyptian government.
Phil Pasquini
Foreign Lobbying and U.S. Policy
Foreign countries are responsible for an estimated 25 percent of all the money spent on lobbying in the U.S. In his new book, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, Casey Michel, director of the Combating Kleptocracy program at the Human Rights Foundation, explores how this spending jeopardizes the American national interest and skews the thinking of policymakers.
Michel joined Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, for a webinar on Aug. 29 to discuss key findings from his research.
Michel began by discussing Ivy Lee, also known as “Poison Ivy,” the father of the public relations industry, who “should also be considered the father of the foreign lobbying industry.” While Lee began his career in the early 20th century issuing press releases and doing crisis management for domestic clients, he eventually expanded his work abroad, engaging in public relations work for clients such as Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, the Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany. Lee set the precedent—which endures to this day—of working for any type of government as long as the pay is good. “At the end of the day, there is so much money to be made from these regimes,” Michel noted.
Doing spin work for even the worst of foreign governments is entirely legal, as it is protected by the First Amendment. However, Lee’s entrepreneurship prompted Congress to create the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires those working for a foreign client to disclose who they are lobbying on behalf of and how much they are being compensated for their work. FARA quickly fell to the wayside, however, and did not begin to be seriously enforced again until the past decade, according to Michel.
The most prominent recent case involved former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who was forced to resign in August 2024 after being found guilty of serving as an unregistered foreign agent for Egypt, violating his oath of office. Michel is hopeful this case indicates the government is taking FARA laws seriously. “If the DOJ [Department of Justice] is willing to go after a figure like that, then I am optimistic that we will see similar prosecutions moving forward,” he said. Menendez was chair of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations at the time of his indictment.
While countries of all types—both democratic and authoritarian—employ agents to directly lobby Congress, many also fund
think tanks as a way to influence policy without having to disclose their efforts. Unlike money spent on direct lobbying, money sent to think tanks does not fall under FARA, meaning it does not need to be disclosed. “It is a complete black box of financing that does not have to comply with even the bare-bones registration and disclosure requirements that other American lobbyists have to follow,” Michel noted. “It’s kind of this perfect creation if you want to affect policy without anyone having any idea what you’re doing.”
In return for funding their work, foreign clients such as Azerbaijan, Hungary, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates expect think tanks to issue policy recommendations favorable to their interests—or to simply tonedown or suppress criticism of their countries. “There’s a whole world of think tanks in and around Washington, DC that are constantly hosting events, hosting conferences and especially issuing white papers on what American foreign or domestic policy should be,” Michel noted. These recommendations often have an influence on policymakers. “For legislators that are strapped for time, energy and resources, those white papers can absolutely be a Godsend for certain policy decisions; it makes things very, very easy for them.” What these policy papers often don’t provide, Michel noted, is an honest analysis of U.S. national interests or an acknowledgment of who funded the research.
Dale Sprusansky
THE WORLD LOOKS AT THE MIDDLE EAST
Correio Do Povo, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Cartoon Movement, Leiden, Netherlands
Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore
El Diario de Coahuila, Saltillo Coah, Mexico
Cartoon Movement, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Khaleej Times, Dubai, UAE
Middle East Books Review
All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1101
I Found Myself in Palestine: Stories of Love and Renewal From Around the Globe
Edited by Nora Lester Murad, Olive Branch Press, 2024, paperback, 256 pp. MEB $20
Reviewed by Ida Audeh
This collection of 22 essays written by men and women who chose to move to Palestine describes the many ways in which they found a sense of belonging despite being aware of their foreignness. Editor Nora Lester Murad describes the type of personal journey that most interested her while seeking contributors: “I wanted to highlight the stories of foreigners who have worked hard, with humility and sincerity, to show Palestinians a different kind of foreigner— one who could become part of the Palestinian community and be changed by it.” Their reflections are varied and fascinating.
The collection is framed by an essay written by political analyst Mariam Barghouti, who discusses what ajnabi (foreigner) means in the Palestinian context: some are well-intentioned visitors, others are malevolent Zionists, and then there are, unfortunately, Palestinian ajanib whose estrangement is due to Israel’s policies that deny Palestinians entry to their native country and distort the land until it is unrecognizable. Why would 22 Westerners spend years of their lives in Palestine, enduring dangers and difficult living conditions? Their reasons generally fall into one of four categories: marriage, work, political commitment or an interest in discovering personal heritage. The title, I Found Myself in Palestine, plays
with the writers’ sense of finding: the contributors “found” themselves in Palestine, almost as though it happened without any action on their part. And then they “found” themselves in another sense—they learned more about themselves as they navigated an unfamiliar environment, and about others who turned out to be not that different after all. And the experience was enriching because of the human connections they made with others, whose struggle they came to understand and to honor.
Almost half of the accounts are written by women who married Palestinian men, generally in the United States, and then moved with them to Palestine. Where marriage prompted the move, all of the accounts, without exception, credit inlaws for making the transition successful. Their new families embraced them and facilitated their acceptance by society at large. Some of the accounts describe the author’s awareness of the new identities she acquired by virtue of her relation to others in the extended family. In every case, the sense of rootedness and connections gained outweighed the occasional inconveniences, such as lack of privacy. As Helene Furani puts it, “life [in
Palestine] is real, genuine, solid, grounded.”
For Saul Jihad Takahashi, a U.N. staffer who worked in Jerusalem, an ordinary drive from the airport to his office marked a turning point in his life, when he heard the afternoon call to prayer: “It was difficult not to be awe-struck by its sheer power.” This moment began a several-year-long journey that culminated in his conversion to Islam. Jihad Takahashi was impressed by the “enormous strength” that the Palestinian Muslims—and Christians—he encountered drew from their religion.
About seven contributors found themselves in Palestine for reasons that can broadly be considered political. Among them is Steve Sosebee, co-founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, who was drawn to Palestine during the first intifada and then remained committed to it through his marriage to a Palestinian woman, who died young, leaving two daughters he was determined to raise as Palestinians. In his words, “I feel in my heart ties to Palestine that seem deeper than blood. I wasn’t born into the struggle; I chose it and have lived it for 30 years.”
Pam Bailey, founder of the Gaza-based organization We Are Not Numbers, also felt a political connection to Palestine: “This is an injustice that now feels like an open wound in my own soul—one I must work to heal, not only for my Palestinian family, but for myself.” Award-winning independent journalist Jonathan Cook was drawn to the Arab world, noticing that people there “seemed more alive, more engaged, than me or anyone I knew.” That led to academic work, which resulted in a dissertation that he chose to write about Palestinians in Israel, which required residence there. He eventually married a Palestinian. What he describes as a personal quest “for a moral code to cure me of my lifelong sense of alienation” was satisfied by “solidarity and empathy,” which he found in Palestine.
A final essay by Mariam Barghouti provides a reflection that one senses all contributors would agree with, irrespective of their reason for moving to Palestine: Palestine gives foreigners the resilience to reclaim rootedness, one “entrenched in recognition and justice.” Whatever their reasons for moving to Palestine, their lives
Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report
were forever altered (and enriched) by the experience of living among a threatened people and yoking their own fate with that of their new communities and families, formed by marriage or choice.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
By Nathan Thrall, Metropolitan Books, 2023, hardcover, 272 pp. MEB $29.99
Reviewed by Chris
Carpenter
Palestine tends to enter international consciousness—and American media—only during episodes of extreme violence, before fading back into the background. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, written by journalist Nathan Thrall, pushes readers to dig deeper than superficial news coverage.
The book tells the story of a 2012 school bus crash in Jerusalem that killed six Palestinian children, including Milad Salama, Abed Salama’s 5-year-old son. Far from a simple “accident,” Thrall convincingly argues this tragedy was made possible by decades of policies designed to marginalize Jerusalem’s Palestinian population while consolidating Israel’s control over the area.
Israeli policy in East Jerusalem has resulted in a fragmented landscape of settlements, segregated infrastructure and limitations on movement. Abed Salama’s hometown of Anata, lying on the outskirts of Jerusalem, demonstrates this clearly. Surrounded by Israel’s separation wall and illegal settlements, the community is isolated from its surroundings and receives lackluster public services, even though its residents are forced to pay Israeli taxes.
No event takes place in a vacuum, and it is only possible to understand the central tragedy of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama in the context of decades of occupation.
The window into modern Palestinian history opened by Abed Salama’s life story begins in the late 1980s with the first intifada. Thrall pays particular attention to Israel’s mass imprisonment of Palestinians in these
years, which Abed Salama experienced firsthand as an activist in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The Oslo era and its aftermath were defined above all by increasing restrictions on movement for Palestinians in the occupied territories. Such restrictions made it difficult to access public services and led to dire economic consequences, including high unemployment and poverty.
The years of the second intifada witnessed the continuation and intensification of the policies of separation, closure and restriction on movement that marked the previous decade. Around Jerusalem, there was no more glaring example of this than the separation wall, which incorporated Israeli settlements while further isolating Palestinian enclaves. Thrall underscores Israel’s central goal, “to include as few Palestinians as possible on the Israeli side without conceding an inch of territory.” This left several Palestinian neighborhoods cut off from the rest of the city.
To call conditions in these ghettoized neighborhoods dire would be an understatement, and Thrall describes them in chilling detail. Education was severely limited: the only public school on the Palestinian side of the wall was housed in a former goat pen. Public infrastructure was similarly abysmal. While Israel continued to expand settlement infrastructure, Palestinians were forced to make do with dangerous roads and near-nonexistent emergency services. This new form of occupation created immense desperation in Palestinian neighborhoods, but it did so in a way that rendered its effects easy to ignore in Israel and around the world.
All of this context, these years of occupation and marginalization, brought about the tragedy at the heart of the book. Although Milad Salama and the other victims of the crash were not directly killed by Israeli forces, they were victims of the architecture of occupation built up over the course of decades. Traveling on a poorly maintained road, their school bus was hit by the reckless driver of a large truck. Thrall captures the ensuing horror, as emergency services failed to arrive quickly and bystanders risked their lives to save those on the bus.
The nearby military base, Thrall and many of his Palestinian interlocutors observe, would have quickly dispatched soldiers in the event of any threat to Israelis, yet the lives of Palestinian children seemed to elicit far less concern.
The anguish of the story continues long after the initial crash, as the occupation’s byzantine system of checkpoints and movement restrictions left desperate parents scrambling to find their children, scattered between different hospitals. In the end, despite a short prison sentence for the driver of the truck, there was no justice, no change to the oppressive conditions under which Palestinians are forced to live.
In the story of just one tragedy, Thrall presents an intimate, human portrait of the cold, impersonal violence of Israel’s occupation.
Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan
By
Karen Culcasi, University of Chicago Press, 2023, paperback, 200 pp. MEB $40
Reviewed by Eliza
Dahlkemper
Directed toward a range of readers, from academics to individuals with no prior knowledge of refugee populations in the Middle East, Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan contextualizes the lives of the 2.7 million
Eliza Dahlkemper was an intern at the Washington Report this summer. She recently graduated from Tulane University with degrees in International Development, Middle East and North African studies, and the Arabic language.
Chris Carpenter is an undergraduate history student at George Washington University.
refugees living in Jordan and explores how they are impacted by evolving state policies. Karen Culcasi deftly utilizes her platform to highlight the experiences of refugees without positioning herself “as an ‘all-knowing’ expert and belittling the knowledge of the people who shared their insights.” Demographic standings are intentionally left out of the book, as the author aims to remove negative connotations that may be associated with an interviewee’s social group. In doing so, the refugees’ lived experiences are personalized, encouraging readers to look past generalized narratives of displaced individuals.
Culcasi also deliberately shifts focus away from the so-called “European refugee crisis” to the harrowing experiences of asylum seekers. By redirecting the focus on the refugees, Culcasi humanizes individuals who are all too often deemed a “threat” to the Global North—and does so in an organized and coherent manner. Chapters begin with a thorough introduction that outlines its sections, each with subsections to organize the subject matter, followed by a concise conclusion. Chapters become less dense as the text progresses.
Chapters 1-3 explore theories of territory, refugee histories in Jordan and durable solutions to issues such as voluntary repatriation, integration and resettlement.
Culcasi notes that territorial borders were implemented by “imperialist powers within their own interests and for their own benefit.” She provides a brief yet thorough background on Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) before French and British rule for readers unfamiliar with the region’s pre-imperial makeup. Culcasi notably rejects “imperialist” terms used to define the region, such as “the Middle East and North Africa (MENA),” which is a British-centric framing of the area’s location. Initially, the book can be difficult for American readers to grasp, as much of Culcasi’s research is based on maps that “differ from Western imaginings of the division of the world into discrete state-territories and world regions.” For ex-
ample, Culcasi draws on the historical social structures of the Ottoman Empire and Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria), comprised of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. However, by providing 17 figures throughout her research, Culcasi does an excellent job of introducing non-Western concepts. Importantly, these chapters encourage readers to think about refugees and migration beyond the framework of the region’s Western-drawn national borders.
Encapsulated within the last four chapters are the experiences and senses of belonging among Jordan’s Syrian and Palestinian refugees. The ambiguity of Palestine’s in-
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ternationally recognized borders over the past 75 years differentiates the experience of displaced Palestinians from that of Syrians in Jordan, therefore determining how they exist within Jordan’s borders. Seven decades of displacement have led Palestinians to transform designated “temporary spaces” into lively homes and communities. Evolving encampments are attainable because Palestinian camps have open borders, allowing individuals to leave freely.
On the other hand, Syrian refugees are not provided with the agency to move around within Jordan’s borders. Za’atari and Azraq, the country’s largest Syrian refugee camps, are highly securitized and obstruct refugees from leaving or returning. “Compassionate repression” describes the seemingly contradictory functions of Syrian refugee camps, Culcasi observes, as they offer humanitarian services, yet deliberately control and contain the individuals inside.
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Culcasi provides multiple first-hand accounts from Palestinian and Syrian refugees. Individuals as young as 17 and as old as 70 were interviewed, providing a range of perspectives. She explores the concept of “hybridity,” which emphasizes the connectedness Palestinian refugees in Jordan feel toward both their adopted and ancestral homes. However, even though feelings of belonging in Jordan are present, Palestinians who were displaced at a young age by Israel expressed their strong connection to Palestine, which overruled any affinity for Jordan. In contrast to Palestinians, who feel quite connected to Jordan, many Syrian refugees lack a sense of inclusion in the country. Displacing Territory convincingly argues that refugee policy should prioritize the experiences of displaced persons over state-centric concerns, and that effective measures must be taken to alleviate the suffering of refugees worldwide. Individuals interested in pursuing refugee policy work in the SWANA region are highly encouraged to read Culcasi’s wonderfully written and engaging book.
Bent Toward Justice: A Novel Inspired
By True Stories
By Steven R. Feldman, Rand-Smith Books, 2024, paperback, 220 pp. MEB $20
Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld
As Israel’s assault upon Palestinian civilians proceeds in Gaza, more and more Jewish Americans are coming to understand that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, from 1948 onward, has been in violation of Jewish moral and ethical values.
Dr. Steven R. Feldman, professor of dermatology, pathology and public health sciences at the Wake Forest School of Medicine came to this realization many years ago. A native of Washington, DC, he attended the Hebrew Academy of Washington and Beth Shalom Congregation, institutions that his grandfather and father helped to found. As a child he collected dimes to plant trees in Israel via the Jewish National Fund. He believed Jews had come to an uninhabited land and made the desert bloom.
As an adult, he learned that more than 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948 as a result of ethnic cleansing. That seemed odd, he thought: “If Jews had come to a land of empty swamps and deserts, as I had been taught as a child, how did so many Palestinians become refugees?” Feldman has worked tirelessly for justice since learning about this history.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism
Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic by Ilan Pappé, Oneworld Publications, 2024, hardcover, 608 pp. MEB $40 In his new book, esteemed scholar Ilan Pappé, director of the European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, unveils how over a century of aggressive lobbying changed the map of the Middle East. Pro-Israel lobbies convinced British and American policymakers to condone Israel’s flagrant breaches of international law, grant Israel unprecedented military aid and deny Palestinians rights. Anyone who questioned unconditional support for Israel, even in the mildest terms, became the target of relentless smear campaigns. Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic shows us how an unassailable consensus was built—and how it might be dismantled. Pappé’s books, such as The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and A History of Modern Palestine, have been flying off the shelves of Middle East Books and More since Oct. 7. His latest work is equally critical reading for students of the Palestinian struggle against Israel and its Western funders and supporters.
Coca-Cola, Black Panthers and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973 by Oz Frankel, Stanford University Press, 2024, paperback, 392 pp. MEB $35. In the late 1960s, Israel became more closely entwined with the United States, not just as a strategic ally, but also through its intensifying intimacy with American culture, society and technology. Coca-Cola, Black Panthers and Phantom Jets shows how transatlantic exchanges shaped national sentiments and private experiences in a time of great transition, forming a consumerist order, accentuating social cleavages and transforming Jewish identities. Nevertheless, there remained lingering ambivalence about, and resistance to, American influences. Rather than growing profoundly “Americanized,” Israelis forged unique paths into the American orbit. Taking an expansive view of Israeli-American encounters, historian Oz Frankel reveals their often unexpected consequences, including the ripple effects that the rise of Black Power had on both extremes of Israeli politics, the adoption of American technology that fed the budding Israeli military-industrial complex and the cultural performances that lured Israelis to embrace previously shunned diasporic culture. In ten chapters, this book argues that the American presence in Israel back then, as it is today, was multifaceted and contradictory.
Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children edited by Heidi Morrison, University of Georgia Press, 2024, paperback, 320 pp. MEB $45. Through the case study of Palestinian children, contributors theorize children’s resistance as an embodied experience called “lived resistance.” A critical aspect of the study of “lived resistance” is not just documenting what children do, but specifically how scholars approach the topic of their resistance. The diverse group of chapter authors in this study examine Palestinian children’s art and media, imprisonment, parenting experiences, bereavement, neoliberalism, refugee camps and protest movements as aspects of their collective and individual political power. Through these outlets, the book shows consistencies and contends that these children’s relationship to political power operates from an inclusive model of citizenship and is social justice oriented, symbolically oriented and contingently based. Given the ongoing Israeli targeting of children, Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children is a sobering but incisive read.
In Bent Toward Justice, based upon his own experience, Feldman tells the story of the fictional Murray Schwartzman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and escaped to America, settling in WinstonSalem, NC. Here he encounters a Jewish doctor, someone much like Feldman, who forces Schwartzman to confront his beliefs about Palestinians being the enemy of the Jewish people.
A letter to the editor of the local North Carolina paper appears from a Dr. Friedman. He quotes Rabbi Hillel, who described the central tenet of Judaism some 2,000 years ago (around the time of Jesus) as, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” Dr. Friedman adds, “Israel was created by expelling hundreds of thousands of peaceful Palestinian men, women and children from their homes and villages, an act completely inconsistent with the foundation of our Jewish beliefs.”
This letter angered the local Jewish community, which considered it antiSemitic. Schwartzman was outraged. He decides to meet with Dr. Friedman, who encouraged him to attend a Jewish Voice for Peace meeting and later to visit Israel to observe for himself how Palestinians are treated. Visiting the occupied West Bank, he learned, among other facts, that Jewish settlers have easy access to water, while Palestinians do not.
On his visit to Hebron, Schwartzman is taken to Kahane Park, named after Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of a banned far-right Israeli political terrorist organization. Kahane had argued that a Jewish state and a democracy were incompatible, that Arabs should be paid to leave Israel or be forcibly expelled, and that intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews should be banned. Feldman writes, “Murray wondered, was this the Jewish KKK? How is restricting marriage between Jews and non-Jews any different from restricting marriage between whites and blacks?”
Israel reminded Schwartzman of his own experience with the Nazis in Germany: “‘heavily armed soldiers patrolling over young children. Have we become like the Germans were to us?’ It sickened him to his core…‘I am a Jew with the utmost respect
for my people, my tradition…and I will tell you that ruling and oppressing and humiliating millions and millions of people for so many years without any democratic rights is not Jewish…being against it is not antiSemitic. It is human.’”
Steven Feldman has performed a notable service with this book. He shows us how American Jewish institutions, in particular Jewish schools, have presented a false narrative of Israel as a democracy. He is an example of how people, confronted with the truth, can change their perspective.
Bent Toward Justice ends in a new, transformed Israeli society, in which men and women of all religions and backgrounds are fully equal. That day, Feldman believes, will inevitably be reached.
We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World
By Alex Rowell, W.W. Norton & Company, 2023, hardcover, 416 pp. MEB $30
Reviewed by Matthew Vickers
Former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser is perhaps the preeminent figure of 20th century Arab politics. A pan-Arab icon to some and the original Arab military dictator to others, opinions of Nasser remain sharply divided over a half-century after his death. In We Are Your Soldiers, Alex Rowell, a Lebanon-based English journalist, joins the ranks of Nasser’s critics, arguing that his most significant impact on the region was establishing a template for coup d’états, political persecution and violent repression, paving the way for dictators such as Hafez al-Assad, Saddam Hussain and Muammar Qaddafi.
Passionately researched and sourced from interviews, memoirs and novels, Rowell demonstrates his intimate knowledge of Nasser’s leadership. Citing the works of communists and Arab opposition critical of the Nasser regime, We Are Your Soldiers is not a resentful imperial tract, despite the author’s British origins.
From his humble beginnings in the quasiindependent kingdom of Egypt, Nasser wielded his considerable charm and sharp political acumen to become the definite leader of the military state born out of the 1952 Free Officers coup. Quickly becoming
a tour de force and the living embodiment of Arab politics after the Suez Crisis with Israel, Nasser’s posture grew to dominate Egypt, where he used his popularity to secure Egypt’s leadership position and export his revolutionary program to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.
As the book progresses, Nasser’s image transforms from an anti-colonial idol who soundly defeated the imperialists at Suez to a paranoid, obsessive strongman who imposed an iron fist in domestic and international affairs.
At the same time, Rowell highlights Nasser’s ideological shifts over time. The initial Free Officers movement, composed of nationalists, communists and Islamists, was wholly concerned with domestic priorities. Only after anathematizing the 1955 Baghdad Pact between Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Türkiye and the United Kingdom did Nasser swerve toward pan-Arabism. He marked his enemies in Iraq, Jordan and the Gulf states as imperialist collaborators, inspiring officer conspiracies and popular revolt alike. However, Nasser also showed ideological flexibility, hashing out deals with Britain and the U.S. and burying the hatchet with mortal enemies, such as Jordan’s King Hussein.
From 1952 onward, with some exceptions later in his rule, Nasser’s greatest ire was reserved for his left-wing opposition, singling out communism as an existential threat that he often labeled as “foreign” and a principal threat to the Arab nation. As Rowell ostensibly lays out, Nasser was instrumental not only in the liquation of the communist opposition but also assisted and presided over the annihilation of Iraqi and Syrian communism.
When he died from a heart attack in 1970 after brokering a deal between Palestinian factions and Jordan, Egypt had “a widespread, grassroots disillusionment with the entire Nasserist system,” Rowell writes, due to his crippling defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 and grim economic realities stemming from his gross mismanagement of the move toward “Arab socialism.” His influence remains darkly relevant today, the author argues, particularly in Yemen, where Egyptian forces deployed chemical weapons against civilians in support of the Republican faction amid the country’s civil war. In Rowell’s narrative, Nasser’s towering figure appears far less bright and is overwhelmingly responsible for the “long political winter” that haunts the Middle East.
While Rowell’s book is compelling throughout, the author occasionally overstates his case. If one weren’t already familiar with some of Nasser’s accomplishments while reading this book, it would be safe to assume that brutality was his sole legacy. Many achievements characterized the Nasser years, including agrarian reform, free education through college, universal healthcare, women’s rights and the construction of the Aswan Dam. Unusually, Rowell also doesn’t give much mention to forces working against Nasser, notably the U.S. and Israel. Though well-articulated and reasoned, such broad assertions undermine the author’s otherwise carefully constructed storytelling. Nevertheless, the lengths of repression under Nasser haven’t been fully reckoned with, a fact made more meaningful by Rowell’s observation that no critical biographies of Nasser exist in Arabic.
We Are Your Soldiers is a well-documented study that argues broadly against the mythos around Nasser. It brings understudied aspects of Nasser’s worst tendencies to a popular audience, allowing for a more inclusive reading of Nasser’s legacy, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring. At times going too far in his critiques, Rowell’s book remains an excellent survey of the man, the region and the historical legacy of Arab nationalism.
Matthew Vickers is an undergraduate student at Occidental College, where he is majoring in diplomacy and world affairs. He was an intern at the Washington Report this summer.
Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy by Jonathan Marc Gribetz, Princeton University Press, 2024, paperback, 408 pp. MEB $29.95. In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete library to Israel. Palestinian activists and supporters protested loudly to international organizations and the Western press, claiming that the assault on the Center proved that the Israelis sought to destroy not merely Palestinian militants but Palestinian culture as well. The protests succeeded: in November 1983, Israel returned the library as part of a prisoner exchange. What was in that library? Much of the expansive collection the PLO amassed consisted of books about Judaism, Zionism and Israel. In Reading Herzl in Beirut, Jonathan Marc Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983. Gribetz explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO’s relationship to Israel.
The Coin: A Novel by Yasmin Zaher, Catapult, 2024, hardcover, 240 pp. MEB $27. The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags. But America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly. The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging—all while resisting easy moralizing.
Silken Gazelles: A Novel by Jokha Alharthi, Catapult, 2024, hardcover, 272 pp. MEB $27. Ghazaala is devastated when her friend Asiya is forced to leave their small mountainside village following a tragic circumstance. It’s a separation that haunts her into adulthood, and she never gives up on finding a love that might replace the bond they shared. Years later, Ghazaala’s family moves to Muscat, Oman, where she falls in love with a professional violinist. She completely surrenders herself to his charm and, despite her parents’ opposition, runs away from home to marry him. While balancing the duties of a new wife—caring for her husband, their home and, before long, their twin boys—Ghazaala resumes her education and enrolls in university. Ghazaala’s sharp wit catches the attention of another student, Harir. In the pages of her diary, Harir recounts the story of her deepening, transformative friendship with Ghazaala over the course of ten years. The elusive, ghostly existence of Asiya exerts a force over both their lives, yet neither Ghazaala nor Harir is aware of the connection. This is a tale of childhood friendship, and how its significance—and loss—can be recalibrated at different stages of life.
Other People’s Mail
Compiled by Dale Sprusansky
NO ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ISRAEL
To the Chicago Tribune, Sept. 5, 2024
Terry Hansen’s letter (“Withholding Israel criticism,” Aug. 30) shows that our constantly proclaimed American values of freedom, democracy, human rights and justice are very selective—they do not apply to Israel. Grave injustice and gross violations of human rights by Israel are routinely ignored or explained away by our politicians and media under the pretext of fighting terrorism. The Israel lobby ensures that criticism of Israel is withheld, choking our freedom of expression for justice and human rights. We timidly and foolishly accept this curtailment.
Full-page ads in major newspapers by Israel supporters divert attention from the core issues of illegal occupation; mass killings; demolition of hospitals, schools and homes; and gross violation of human rights.
Humanists in Israel, such as B’Tselem, speak out boldly to expose the inhuman atrocities that are being inflicted daily on the Palestinian people, but here we are scared to speak out. The irony is that we are giving our tax dollars and arms to Israel, but we are helpless in stopping Israel from committing the atrocities.
The world sees that we are helping Israel to commit atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. When will we put our national interest ahead of Israel’s designs?
Imtiaz Uddin, Darien, IL
U.S. COMPLICITY IN GENOCIDE
To the Daily Camera, Sept. 6, 2024
A day doesn’t pass where I don’t feel the majority of people I see and/or with whom
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS
1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20500
COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111
WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT
ANY MEMBER: U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, DC 20515 (202) 225-3121
I interact are either uninformed or misinformed about what’s going on with Israel and Palestine.
I’m not sure what or who to blame, but it’s more than clear to me that the United States is both complicit and a direct participant in the mass murder of tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.
I’m a Jewish American man. I grew up with Zionists and had prominent American Zionists in my family. In 2006, I attended protests at the U.N. against Israel’s brutal occupation and murderous behavior toward the Palestinian people; standing with a portion of the Orthodox Jewish community who feel just as I do, and also reject the proposition that opposition to the genocide occurring right now, as we speak, qualifies any of us as anti-Semitic.
It’s sick, absurd and harmful to Jewish people everywhere that the U.S. Congress, administration and mainstream media are pushing a false and fraudulent narrative equating anti-Zionism with antiSemitism.
The road to a better world is not, in my opinion, lined with the bodies of Palestinian children; and no amount of absolutely clueless messages about “joy” being in our future, as delivered with psychotic aplomb by members of the Democratic Party at its recent convention, will ever eventually result in some sort of authentic happiness or satisfaction for anyone living anywhere.
With the people of Palestine facing forced starvation, criminally insane bombings and the non-stop torture of Palestinians taken prisoner, now would be the time to not give up. Easier said than done, but it’s still the only chance we have at a better
SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 2201 C ST. NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20520
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world—“lesser evil” presidential and congressional candidates be damned. Rob Smoke, Boulder, CO
HARRIS ECHOES BIDEN ON GAZA
To the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber, Sept. 5, 2024
On Aug. 30, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were interviewed by journalist Dana Bash. Harris emphasized the Biden line on the Gaza-Israel war: ceasefire, return of hostages and two-state solution. Sounds good. The problem is, Biden doesn’t do what’s required to make it happen.
Our presidents have called for a twostate solution for many years. When Bash asked Harris about an arms embargo on Israel, she responded, no, she will not stop the arms flow. Her response was as brief as possible before returning to talking about a ceasefire.
Translation: The massacre of people, including more than 16,000 children according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the genocide, now allowed illegally by Biden, would be allowed by her if she is president. An appropriate name for that policy would be “The Talk and Kill.” Biden talks and Israel kills—to be replaced by Harris talks and Israel kills.
Shelley Simon, Vashon, WA
PUT YOURSELF IN GAZA
To The Daily Progress, Aug. 12, 2024 I recently heard the head of the Ramallah Friends School in Palestine speak about the horrors that surround and penetrate their school community. She talked about deliberate starvation and genocide. With tears in her eyes, she shared how hard it is to comfort a child who has been
maimed, especially when nothing comforting can be obtained.
Our country must stop supporting Israel in this rampant murdering of innocent people. We must stop the shipment of weapons. Would you place your young child, grandchild, niece or nephew in a situation where they couldn’t get medical care, food, a safe place to sleep or even the simple comfort of a soft toy or blanket? No. Then why should a child in Palestine experience this?
There must be an immediate cessation of violence, a complete exchange of prisoners of war and a mutually acceptable way for everyone in the Middle East to live in peace.
It won’t be easy, but neither is the alternative.
Linda Goldstein, Charlottesville, VA
LETTER TO BIDEN ON ISRAEL
Aug. 30, 2024
Dear President Biden,
Ever since you withdrew from the presidential race, met with Binyamin Netanyahu at the White House and witnessed Congress give 52 standing ovations by the GOP (and some Democrats) to this genocidal war criminal, you have gone silent. Your public admonitions to the Israeli government have ceased. The American people and taxpayers have listened in vain to hear you demand the entry into Gaza, under safeguards, of thousands of trucks with food, medicine, water, etc. for the millions of starving, sick, injured civilians.
Your silence combined with your continuing shipment, unconditionally, of weapons to Netanyahu is a green light to expand his death and destruction of the innocent Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Netanyahu hopes to draw you into a larger regional war. You know this very well. So why are you mute?
More puzzling, while you constantly talk about no one being above the law, six federal statutes conditioning deliveries of weapons to foreign countries on various grounds are being violated. And you are the violator.
Then there is the vast undercount of Palestinian fatalities and injuries by both
Hamas and Netanyahu, for different reasons, that is well known by the State Department, which possesses credible evidence for a casualty toll multiple times the 41,000 figure. On July 25, a detailed letter was sent to you by 45 American physicians and nurses detailing the horrors they saw while volunteering in Gaza. These medical professionals believe that “the death toll from this conflict is many times higher than what is reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health.”
Aristotle wrote that “Courage is the first virtue because it makes all the other virtues possible.” That recognition should steel your spine.
Why aren’t you listening to Dr. Jill Biden who in December, upon seeing pictures of slaughtered Gazan children, reportedly said to you, “Stop it, Stop it now, Joe.” Where is your touted empathy when it comes to hundreds of thousands of innocent children, mothers and fathers in Gaza, and now expanding into the West Bank, who had nothing to do with Oct. 7?
Ralph Nader, Esq.
Bruce Fein, Esq.
IRISH SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE
To the Irish Examiner, July 12, 2024
Last Saturday, more than 700 people marched through Cork City in support of the beleaguered Palestinian people. Organized by the Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign this was the 39th weekly march since Israel began its horrifying bombardment and invasion of Gaza. It is an incredible display of indefatigable solidarity and human empathy from the extraordinary people of Cork.
Back in 2003 and 2004, as chairperson of the Cork Anti-War Campaign, I was involved in organizing several large marches in Cork against the U.S. war on Iraq. People still talk about the numbers that came out at that time, including a reported 100,000 at one anti-war march in Dublin in February 2003. Thousands also attended anti-war marches at Shannon airport. These were indeed impressive demonstrations, but are nothing like the relentless and huge anti-war mobilizations that we have seen across Ireland and internation-
ally over the past nine months in reaction to the ongoing Gaza massacre. Certainly, the 39 consecutive marches in Cork— sometimes involving hundreds of people, sometimes thousands—will forever be a landmark in the history of anti-war activism in that city. And they continue. Limerick has a similar weekly march. Moreover, solidarity vigils, pickets, marches and other gatherings are happening every week across Ireland in villages, towns and cities.
The depth and breadth of feeling in Ireland is clear. But is the Irish government listening?
People are demanding more than words and symbolic gestures, welcome as these may be. The government here surely must understand at this late stage that Israel will respond only to purposeful sanctions. Why has Ireland not yet, for example, enacted the Occupied Territories Bill? It should do so immediately and also continue to push for a formal review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Israel is a rogue state that routinely breaches international humanitarian law and should be treated as such.
The horror in Gaza cannot be allowed to 67continue.
Fintan Lane, Lucan, Ireland ■
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Ahmad Abu Amsha, 42, a music teacher who had to flee Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip, entertains children in a war‐devastated neighborhood in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on Sept. 1, 2024. Amsha, the father of 5, volunteers teaching music to young people displaced by Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
