radiofree.asia

Author: Kathy Kelly

  • We Were So Close: Life After Conscience and the Abraham Accords

    Image by Ahmed Abu Hameeda.

    “We were so close,” Cassandra Dixon wrote, from Malta -where she had hoped to board Conscience, the aptly named Freedom Flotilla ship which two weaponized drones bombed on May 2, 2025, almost certainly launched by Israel. Cassandra had traveled to Malta after spending six weeks in Masafer Yatta, the West Bank region where, for two months, she lived among villagers whom local Israeli settlers constantly persecuted.

    In a blog post entitled Hard Days in Masafer Yatta, Cassandra told of villagers stunned and bewildered by round after round of violent attacks. Vehicles torched, olive trees destroyed, wells poisoned. Settlers barged into homes, beating villagers who had been sound asleep. With their vehicles destroyed, villagers relied on a hostile Israeli military for transport to emergency rooms and intensive care units. The military would then arrest dozens of young villagers for indefinite detention without trial.

    In a recent letter, Cassandra wrote about a man who lay on the ground, bleeding, after attacking settlers shot his leg. Soldiers chatted amiably with the settlers before finally arresting him, shackling him to a gurney, and taking him to an Israeli hospital where a surgeon amputated his leg.

    During a 2023 sojourn among villagers in the south Hebron hills, a settler fractured Cassandra’s skull with a heavy stick. Not one to draw attention to herself, she persisted with a court case in hopes of building precedents to protect vulnerable Palestinians.

    She and her companions aiming to reach Gaza insist on breaking the siege. Their effort to deliver food, fuel, medicine, tents, and water represents international sanity, a symbolic, challenging effort to nonviolently resist Israel’s savagery.

    They long to reach Gaza’s shore with supplies for victims of Israeli bombardment, knowing the victims’ skin grafts will not heal without adequate nutrients. They want to help doctors in Gaza’s hospitals treat diabetes patients denied insulin by the Israeli blockade. They know the heart-wrenching consequences when hospitals lack cardiac catheters, blood pressure medicines, and potable water. They shudder when they hear reports of women fueling ovens with old sneakers, or Doctors Without Borders assessments that Gaza’s main desalination plant now produces potable water at only 10 percent of its former capacity.

    “Chose life, that you and your descendants might live,” (Deuteronomy 30), speaks to their deepest values.

    Urgently, onlookers must conscientiously choose between the rhetoric of unarmed peacemakers and the ugly threats of Israel’s leaders.

    “They need to starve,” said Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu on May 6, 2025, speaking about Gaza to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “If there are civilians who fear for their lives, they should go through the emigration plan” – (a term for ethnic cleansing into tent refugee cities).

    “Whoever harms us will be harmed by us, sevenfold,” Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a May 5 statement, vastly understating the brutal disproportionality of Israel’s escalating regional violence.

    In fact, Mr. Katz is securing deepened isolation for Israel, a country now surrounded by populations it has remorselessly bombed and bullied. With nuclear weapons bunkered at the Negev desert’s Shimon Peres Nuclear Research Center, among other locations, Israel’s defiance of international law incalculably intensifies the nuclear threat throughout its region and the world.

    Now, lead Trump envoy Steve Witkoff hints at an upcoming expansion of the Abraham Accords, a set of bilateral treaties between Israel and U.S. allied autocracies which essentially serve as massive arms deals in exchange for normalization of relations with Israel. To date, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan have entered into these agreements which leave the issue of Palestinian safety and self-determination totally out of thepicture. One by one, the Arab countries entering into the Abrahamic Accords abdicate meaningful solidarity with Palestine in exchange for economic deals and access to state-of-the-art U.S. weapons which they use to subjugate domestic dissent and engage in foreign wars.

    Pressing forward with the Abraham Accords will embolden Saudi Arabia to seek nuclear technology from the United States. So far, Mohammad bin Salman has refused cooperation with UN oversight agencies, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has assured the world that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will also get them.

    The Abraham Accords are not a peace deal: they represent a confederacy of killers.

    Why should countries that have sown havoc and suffering throughout the region be exalted as brokers of peace? The nations of the world should be forging strong bonds to resist Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing by suspending Israel from the General Assembly, halting all weapon shipments to Israel, and ending all trade with illegal Israeli settlement industries. The United Nations Security Council should be invoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter to set up a peace-keeping entity tasked with ensuring delivery of food and humanitarian aid to Palestinians now being starved by Israel.

    President Trump and his envoy Steven Witkoff understand real estate transactions. Bludgeoning opponents, in their undereducated views, will lead to success. Hence, it seems the Abraham Accords will imminently be signed. These accords normalize Israel’s bloodthirsty refusal to acknowledge Palestinian human rights, including the right to live.

    In contrast to the sluggish, dull response of the world’s political leaders, I think of Pope Francis, who, before his death, asked that the specific “Popemobile” he had used to criss-cross Palestine during his final visit there be turned into a mobile health clinic.

    Rev. John Dear tells about French peace activists who sought Pope Francis’s advice, a few years ago. “Start a revolution,” Pope Francis responded. “Stir things up. The world is deaf. You have to open its ears.”

    Last spring, a worldwide student movement for Gaza led us closer and closer to conversion, turning away from greed and fear, extending the hand of friendship to those who are most in need, telling the truth to, and about, the powerful, and exposing the sins of militarism.

    In the Old Testament we are told that when Father Abraham had raised his arm, bearing a knife, to slay his son, Isaac, an angel appeared to him, saying “Do not lay a hand upon the boy.” In Wilfrid Owen’s interpretation of the story, the angel continues: “Behold, / a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; / Offer the ram of pride instead.”

    This is the Abraham Accord that should be enacted, releasing all captives, making reparations for suffering caused, and vowing to end to all wars.

    The post We Were So Close: Life After Conscience and the Abraham Accords appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace

    In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.

    Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, twelve years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”

    As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”

    Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.

    “Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”

    Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Towards a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

    On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a ceasefire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”

    +++

    During the current war, beginning in 2023, Pope Francis developed a strong relationship with parishioners of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza. By holding virtual gatherings with the hundreds of people sheltering in the church,  he was able to stay in daily touch with the realities they faced under Israel’s siege and bombardment. On days when he learned that the bombing was particularly heavy, Pope Francis would call to check in on them as many as five times a day.

    Pope Francis carried his antiwar message to the seats of power in places around the world. In September 2015, exasperated by the superpowers’ desire to control others through militarism, he posed a simple question to the U.S. Congress: “Why,” he asked, “would anyone give weapons to people who use them for war? . . . The answer is money, and the money is drenched in blood.”

    Pope Francis emphasized the stewardship so vitally needed for future generations to have a habitable planet, sounding an alarm about the need to address climate change. “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” he stated in a magisterial document released in October 2023. “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over, or relativise the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident.”

    The Pontiff likewise denounced the use of atomic energy for the purposes of war, and declared possession of nuclear weapons to be immoral, asking: “How can we speak of peace even as we build terrifying new weapons of war?”

    In accordance with his wishes, Pope Francis will be buried in a basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a place he went to pray before and after each of his forty-seven “apostolic missions.” The Basilica of Saint Mary Major is located in one of Rome’s poorer neighborhoods, a church in a neighborhood with refugees. Francis has entrusted himself to the protection of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

    I’d like to think that those words, “Todo, todo, todo,” will break down the barriers creating illusory divisions between us, leading us toward true egalitarianism, embracing Earth and one another, grateful always for the chance to “choose life, so that you and your descendants can live.”

    Beloved Franciscus, “Oremus.” Let us pray.

    The post Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace

    He spoke out against war, militarism, and the ravages of climate change.

    This post was originally published on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.

  • The Real Outrage in Yemen

    Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024

    Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

    The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

    Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

    President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

    In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

    As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

    *****
    On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets …. This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

    The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

    Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

  • A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive.
    • The post The Real Outrage in Yemen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Real Outrage in Yemen

    Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024. Photo credit: Hideko Otake.

    Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

    Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

    The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

    Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

    The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

    Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-levelTrump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries sayingthat what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

    President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

    In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

    As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

    On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

    According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets … This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

    The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

    Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

    A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

    The post The Real Outrage in Yemen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Real Outrage in Yemen

    As Democrats decry the Trump Administration’s national security lapse, the United States is engaged in an actual killing campaign.

    This post was originally published on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.

  • Resisting Riviera of the Middle East

    Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

    “There is something sick and rotten about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.”

    – Pankaj Mishra, January 30, 2025

    At a February 4th, 2025, press conference in Washington, D.C., President Trump, standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, announced U.S. intent to turn the Gaza Strip into something that could be phenomenal…the Riviera of the Middle East.

    Reading from prepared notes, he stated “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” He said Palestinians in Gaza would be relocated to other countries, and he later questioned why they would ever want to return. He went on to say that he would decide about Israeli annexation of the West Bank in the next month.

    According to international law, forcibly transferring people from their land is a crime against humanity. Annexation violates people’s right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of international law.

    States and societies around the world harshly condemned President Trump’s total disregard for international law. And yet, every member state of the United Nations General Assembly has a duty, now, under international law, to abstain from any actions enabling the Israeli military to continue its illegal occupation of the Occupied Palestine Territory.

    This means every state must stop shipments of weapons to Israel. The U.S., for instance, is required not to send the one billion dollars’ worth of bombs, rifles, ammunition, and Caterpillar bulldozers which President Trump had readied to send Israel.

    In the past, Democrats in positions of power allowed President Biden to provision Israel with massive arms sales, enabling a killing spree, over the past 15 months, which has left Gaza in ruins. In June, 2024, following intense pressure from the Biden administration, the U.S. Congress moved forward on an $18 billion arms sale to Israel.

    Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, sadly describes the bleak reality of international weapon peddling. “There is something sick and rotten,” Mishra writes, “about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.”

    Throughout the world, grass roots groups struggle to uphold international law and resist governments which support the wholesale Israeli slaughter and destruction of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestine Territory.

    In Ireland, activists across the country hold weekly demonstrations insisting Ireland must not allow use of Shannon Airport for transport of weapons or equipment to Israel’s military.

    A flier announcing an upcoming action at Shannon airport on February 9, 2025 calls for protest against “the use of Irish airspace to deliver arms, tech and logistical support to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel that has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians over the past 15 months, including more than 17,000 children, while more than 100,000 have been maimed. In the West Bank, more than 800 people have been killed, and Israel’s brutal illegal occupation continues…”

    European human rights activists emphasize that the European Union is Israel’s biggest trade partner, accounting for 28.8% of its trade in goods in 2022. Israel is also among the EU’s main trading partners in the Mediterranean area.

    Now, a coalition of over 160 human rights organizations, trade unions, and civil society groups is calling on the European Commission to take immediate action to ban all trade and business with Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The coalition’s demand follows a landmark advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024, which reaffirmed that:

    “Pending an end to Israel’s occupation, third states must immediately stop all forms of aid or assistance that help maintain the unlawful occupation, including halting arms transfers to Israel and ceasing all trade with illegal settlements.”

    Robert Jereski, an attorney in NYC, works with Code Pink and a coalition of activists campaigning for UN member states to suspend Israel from the United Nations because it has murdered Palestinians and driven them off their land. Jereski and his colleagues note that Israel’s renewed offensives in the West Bank mark a shift in the tactics of genocide rather than an actual ceasefire. Israel’s bombing of Jenin has led to the forced displacement of 26,000 Palestinians. The Israeli military has escalated widespread arrests and restrictions while settlement expansion continues at an unprecedented pace, with frequent approvals for new outposts and housing.

    President Trump’s most recent statements, coupled with his withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, underscore the urgent need for the United Nations General Assembly to hold an emergency meeting. The UNGA should judge whether the United States fails to be an impartial arbiter and is, instead, party to the genocide in Gaza. Further, the UNGA should decide whether to suspend the United States veto power at the Security Council visavis matters pertaining to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

    Mindful of Pankaj Mishra’s observation that there is something sick and rotten in the act of enabling and profiting from mass killings, we must vow never to stop clamoring for the United Nations member states to fulfill their obligations under international law and live up to the UN’s founding mission: to eradicate the scourge of war for future generations.

    This article appeared in The Progressive Magazine

    The post Resisting Riviera of the Middle East appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • International Community Expresses Outrage at Donald Trump’s Latest Real Estate Plan

    President Donald Trump stated his intent to turn the Gaza Strip into what he called “The Riviera of the Middle East.” Nations around the world harshly condemned Trump’s total disregard for international law.

    This post was originally published on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.

  • International Community Expresses Outrage at Donald Trump’s Latest Real Estate Plan

    President Donald Trump stated his intent to turn the Gaza Strip into what he called “The Riviera of the Middle East.” Nations around the world harshly condemned Trump’s total disregard for international law.

    This post was originally published on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.

  • Martin Luther King Jr. Denounced Merchants of Death in a Prophetic Warning

    Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death 

    Photograph Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer – Public Domain

    Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference will announce the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.

    Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on   specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.

    What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?

    Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s military.

    Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world’s most crucial international human rights groups for testimony.

    On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”

    On December 19, 2024  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) stated that “repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the health care system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza.” The report says there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing” by Israel as it wages war in Gaza.

    Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination.

    Corroborating the testimony of health care workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis’s January 9, 2025, message to international diplomats. Pope Francis denounced Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave “very serious and shameful.” Pope Francis referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of Israel’s destruction of infrastructure: “We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.”

    Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal:  “With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life”.

    Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers would re-evaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9th, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.

    Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There was no mention of President Biden’s order to send eight billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is referred to as “The World’s Most Exclusive Club.”  Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so many?

    On April 7, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice – “Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence” – in which Dr. King said:  “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

    Dr. King’s verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first anniversary of which he was taken from us, was that “This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

    The four defendants before our Tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King’s warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice and love would be to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations.

    The post Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death

    Image credit: Unseen Histories.

    Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference will announce the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of 10 international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.

    Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.

    What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?

    Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment.

    They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s military.

    Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world’s most crucial international human rights groups for testimony.

    On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.”

    On December 19, 2024 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) stated that “repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the health care system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza.” The report says there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing” by Israel as it wages war in Gaza.

    Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination.

    Corroborating the testimony of health care workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis’s January 9, 2025, message to international diplomats. Pope Francis denounced Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave “very serious and shameful.” Pope Francis referenced the loss of children who froze to death because of Israel’s destruction of infrastructure: “We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.”

    Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal:

    “With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life”.

    Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers would re-evaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9th, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.

    Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There was no mention of President Biden’s order to send eight billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is referred to as “The World’s Most Exclusive Club.” Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so many?

    On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice – “Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence” – in which Dr. King said:

    “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

    Dr. King’s verdict, in this speech exactly one year before his assassination, was that:

    “This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

    The four defendants before our Tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King’s warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice and love would be to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations.

    The post Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • On the Maryhouse Stage: Power Politics and War

    Image from the Reap What You Sow playbill, courtesy of Robert Shetterley.

    In mid-November, New York’s Catholic Worker community, located in lower Manhattan, opened their sizable auditorium to host “Reap What You Sow: Don’t Lose Heart!” a two act play with two actors which debuted, for two nights, on the Maryhouse stage.

    Prior to the performance, preparations included selecting the sturdiest wooden chairs for audience seating, carefully cleaning furniture and floors, and rearranging the space so the next issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, stacked and ready to mail, wouldn’t interfere with access to the theater. Producers created a set which included curtains made of sheets, an assemblage of donated lights, and a small coffeemaker complete with loud gurgles.

    Above were the exposed beams of a building which once functioned as a music school in turn-of-the-century New York City before Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker, appropriated it for works of mercy, feeding hungry people and, as much as possible, housing people in the building’s former musical practice rooms.

    It was a fitting spot for the play’s debut. Jack Gilroy, the main author, had created earlier versions. Now the play, authored by Gilroy, zool Zulkowitz, and Olivia Gilroy incorporates the dynamics of “living theater” as actors and activists have fed Gilroy their edits.

    The audience were mainly elders who knew one another. Catholic Workers welcomed  Maryknoll Mission sisters, Veterans For Peace, Raging Grannies, and people from Peace Action, World BEYOND War, Code Pink and FOR.

    A sprinkling of students from Columbia U. and Fordham, along with a prof from Manhattan College, accompanied by his small son, were also in attendance.

    Before the play began, producer zool Zulkowitz played the Beatles’ iconic song, Imagine. Following this came Olivia Rodrigo’s song, Brutal.

    Ellie (played by Grazia Saporito) then broke into athletic, riveting dance moves to open the play.

    She and her mother, Major Mom, (played by Pat Russell), were winning characters. Tears glistened on Major Mom’s cheeks when she spoke of her experiences as a mother, a widow, and a woman warrior who deeply regretted having killed civilians during missions in which she piloted weaponized drones. The audience learns she was married to Lieutenant Colonel Sean Golden, a marine who died during combat in Iraq. The Major eagerly awaits a promotion to full “Bird Colonel.”

    Showing remarkable patience, Major Mom listens to Ellie divulge childhood disappointments, teenage angst, and her current rage over the roles her parents played in “service” to the U.S. military. At one point, Major Mom says “Whoa,” and accuses Ellie of going too far in her accusations.

    But Ellie, a debate team champ, doesn’t back down. She has evidence to show that her mom’s “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric and revitalization of World War II themes don’t stand up to actual events in the recent past.

    In a way, the play’s two characters are each proxies for fully developed viewpoints. Major Mom represents the Merchants of Death who develop, store, sell and use vast arsenals of weaponry. Ellie champions viewpoints laid out in Howard Zinn’s comprehensive historical outlay, “A People’s History of the United States.”

    With Ellie rebelling against revival of World War II rhetoric, the play becomes quite timely. She insists that the good Germans who supported Nazis have counterparts in the U.S. militarists who “take out” women and children in multiple war zones. The claim, “I was only following orders,” eerily enters the script.

    Many of the people in the audience have, in the past, supported activists who were recently imprisoned in U.S. federal lockups for having trespassed at a U.S. base harboring nuclear weapons. One of the activists, Carmen Trotta, came to both performances. Plowshares activists literally beat swords into plowshares, damaging nuclear weapons and pouring their own blood over the decommissioned weapons. They believe in making sacrifices, themselves, on behalf of nonviolence, a theme which recurs in Gilroy’s play.

    During a dynamic talk back session, actors, producers, and audience members grappled with questions about conscience and pragmatic steps forward. Ellie, still acting in character, urged people to use their imagination and practice empathy. Art, she said, will be the force that carries us through to a new, safe time. Major Mom, (Pat Russell) pointed to the damage caused by structural and systemic violence. Audience members repeatedly voiced outrage over U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians, noting that democrats dared to warn of fascist encroachment while at the same time enabling and provisioning Israel’s mass killing spree, across the Middle East. Israel’s usage of weaponized drones prolongs and exacerbates a war waged by a racist, far-right, nuclear armed, apartheid regime, one to which the U.S. continues to pledge unwavering support.

    It seemed all could agree that, as Adam Tooze, writing for the London Review of Books observes:

    “We should be under no illusion: there has been nothing like this level of threat since the dangerous final phase of the Cold War in the early 1980s. With China committed to a rapid buildup of its nuclear arsenal, we are well on the way to an unprecedented 3-way nuclear standoff.”

     The characters in Reap What You Sow recognized pivots in their relationships and their interactions, and they assiduously preserved caring relationships. Powerful elites in our world have comprehensively failed to find means for collaboration, opting instead to demonize enemies for their own political gain, pouring energy and resources into the coffers of people whose “top crop” is weaponry. President Biden refuses to negotiate with Putin, and Ukraine has already fired long range missiles, supplied by the U.S., into Russia, sowing ominous seeks which Putin has stated could yield a nuclear exchange.

    I hope the play will awaken numerous people, in audiences across this country and beyond, to the crucial question: how can we learn to live together without killing one another? And the follow-up: how can we abolish war?

    Reap What You Sow, Don’t Lose Heart is the first production of the Rising Together Talkback Theater Company. The production is available, for FREE, to churches, schools, peace and justice organizations, and other community groups. The company is booking dates for a Summer 2025 “Reap!” Tour. For more information, contact Zool (zoolTheArtAndPolitics@hotmail.com) or text 718-964-7643.

    The post On the Maryhouse Stage: Power Politics and War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • On the Maryhouse Stage, Power Politics and War

    Art work by Robert Shetterly, taken from the playbill for “Reap What You Sow”

    In mid-November, New York’s Catholic Worker community, located in lower Manhattan, opened their sizable auditorium to host “Reap What You Sow: Don’t Lose Heart!” a two act play with two actors which debuted, for two nights, on the Maryhouse stage.

    Prior to the performance, preparations included selecting the sturdiest wooden chairs for audience seating, carefully cleaning furniture and floors, and rearranging the space so the next issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, stacked and ready to mail, wouldn’t interfere with access to the theater. Producers created a set which included curtains made of sheets, an assemblage of donated lights, and a small coffeemaker complete with loud gurgles.

    Above were the exposed beams of a building which once functioned as a music school in turn-of-the-century New York City before Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker, appropriated it for works of mercy, feeding hungry people and, as much as possible, housing people in the building’s former musical practice rooms.

    It was a fitting spot for the play’s debut. Jack Gilroy, the main author, had created earlier versions. Now the play, authored by Gilroy, zool Zulkowitz, and Olivia Gilroy incorporates the dynamics of “living theater” as actors and activists have fed Gilroy their edits.

    The audience were mainly elders who knew one another. Catholic Workers welcomed  Maryknoll Mission sisters, Veterans For Peace, Raging Grannies, and people from Peace Action, World BEYOND War, Code Pink and FOR.

    A sprinkling of students from Columbia U. and Fordham, along with a prof from Manhattan College, accompanied by his small son, were also in attendance.

    Before the play began, producer zool Zulkowitz played the Beatles’ iconic song, Imagine. Following this came Olivia Rodrigo’s song, Brutal.

    Ellie (played by Grazia Saporito) then broke into athletic, riveting dance moves to open the play.

    She and her mother, Major Mom, (played by Pat Russell), were winning characters. Tears glistened on Major Mom’s cheeks when she spoke of her experiences as a mother, a widow, and a woman warrior who deeply regretted having killed civilians during missions in which she piloted weaponized drones. The audience learns she was married to Lieutenant Colonel Sean Golden, a marine who died during combat in Iraq. The Major eagerly awaits a promotion to full “Bird Colonel.”

    Showing remarkable patience, Major Mom listens to Ellie divulge childhood disappointments, teenage angst, and her current rage over the roles her parents played in “service” to the U.S. military. At one point, Major Mom says “Whoa,” and accuses Ellie of going too far in her accusations.

    But Ellie, a debate team champ, doesn’t back down. She has evidence to show that her mom’s “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric and revitalization of World War II themes don’t stand up to actual events in the recent past.

    In a way, the play’s two characters are each proxies for fully developed viewpoints. Major Mom represents the Merchants of Death who develop, store, sell and use vast arsenals of weaponry. Ellie champions viewpoints laid out in Howard Zinn’s comprehensive historical outlay, “A People’s History of the United States.”

    With Ellie rebelling against revival of World War II rhetoric, the play becomes quite timely. She insists that the good Germans who supported Nazis have counterparts in the U.S. militarists who “take out” women and children in multiple war zones. The claim, “I was only following orders,” eerily enters the script.

    Many of the people in the audience have, in the past, supported activists who were recently imprisoned in U.S. federal lockups for having trespassed at a U.S. base harboring nuclear weapons. One of the activists, Carmen Trotta, came to both performances. Plowshares activists literally beat swords into plowshares, damaging nuclear weapons and pouring their own blood over the decommissioned weapons. They believe in making sacrifices, themselves, on behalf of nonviolence, a theme which recurs in Gilroy’s play.

    During a dynamic talk back session, actors, producers, and audience members grappled with questions about conscience and pragmatic steps forward. Ellie, still acting in character, urged people to use their imagination and practice empathy. Art, she said, will be the force that carries us through to a new, safe time. Major Mom, (Pat Russell) pointed to the damage caused by structural and systemic violence. Audience members repeatedly voiced outrage over U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians, noting that democrats dared to warn of fascist encroachment while at the same time enabling and provisioning Israel’s mass killing spree, across the Middle East. Israel’s usage of weaponized drones prolongs and exacerbates a war waged by a racist, far-right, nuclear armed, apartheid regime, one to which the U.S. continues to pledge unwavering support.

    It seemed all could agree that, as Adam Tooze, writing for the London Review of Books observes:

    We should be under no illusion: there has been nothing like this level of threat since the dangerous final phase of the Cold War in the early 1980s. With China committed to a rapid buildup of its nuclear arsenal, we are well on the way to an unprecedented 3-way nuclear standoff.

    The characters in Reap What You Sow recognized pivots in their relationships and their interactions, and they assiduously preserved caring relationships. Powerful elites in our world have comprehensively failed to find means for collaboration, opting instead to demonize enemies for their own political gain, pouring energy and resources into the coffers of people whose “top crop” is weaponry. President Biden refuses to negotiate with Putin, and Ukraine has already fired long range missiles, supplied by the U.S., into Russia, sowing ominous seeks which Putin has stated could yield a nuclear exchange.

    I hope the play will awaken numerous people, in audiences across this country and beyond, to the crucial question: how can we learn to live together without killing one another? And the follow-up: how can we abolish war?

    Reap What You Sow, Don’t Lose Heart is the first production of the Rising Together Talkback Theater Company. The production is available, for FREE, to churches, schools, peace and justice organizations, and other community groups. The company is booking dates for a Summer 2025 “Reap!” Tour. For more information, contact Zool (moc.liamtohnull@scitiloPdnAtrAehT) or text 718-964-7643.

    The post On the Maryhouse Stage, Power Politics and War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Will the General Assembly Suspend Israel?

    Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

    The Biblical Book of Job chronicles a string of catastrophes relentlessly plaguing the main character, Job, who loses his prosperity, his home, his health, and his children. Eventually, an agonized Job curses his own existence as well as the god that created him. Issues of evil, justice, and divine wisdom are explored, and while the Book of Job surrenders divine wisdom to God, it recognizes that the work to be done here on earth is our own.

    Numerous interpretations of the story exist, and more than one version has circulated through the ancient Near East. One version concludes with Job avowing repentance. “I know that my redeemer liveth, and so I repent in dust and in ashes.”

    The Latin root for the word ‘repent’ is pensare – to think. ‘Repent” suggests an effort to rethink.

    Job’s surprising repentance has been on my mind as calls increase, in 2024, for the United Nations to rethink its relation to Israel as a member state. Increasingly, civil society groups are pressuring Permanent Missions to the UN to eject Israel as a voting member of the General Assembly.

    To paraphrase Pankraj Mishra, writing for the New York Review of Books, a stunned world has watched with disbelief as the United States provisions Israel with weapons enabling a mass murder spree across the Middle East.

    Palestinians in the West Bank have recently urged all organizations demanding UN compliance with the International Criminal Court ruling of July 2024 to sign a letter available at World BEYOND War which urges Member States of the United Nations General Assembly to fulfill their duties.

    Following up on the potential of this letter, a new coalition, “Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine” has issued a letter to His Excellency Mr. Philemon Yang, the President of the United Nations General Assembly asking him to convene an urgent meeting of the General Assembly to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, establish and secure humanitarian aid corridors and ensure the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

    The letter additionally requests:

    + The revival of the UN Committee Against Apartheid to address systemic violations of international law and human rights in the OPT.

    +  Consideration of targeted boycotts, sanctions, and divestments, particularly against illegal operations in the OPT.

    + The establishment of an arms embargo on Israel.

    + Exploration of suspending Israel from the General Assembly until it complies with international law.

    To further support these efforts, the letter calls for the establishment of an unarmed UN peacekeeping mission in the OPT under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to ensure the safety and dignity of all civilians.

    In a way, Israel has already removed itself from norms maintained by the UN Charter as it has consistently flouted UN treaties, Resolutions and Advisory opinions. We must not forget that Israel refuses to acknowledge to the UN its possession of nuclear weapons.

    I felt startled, during an initial planning call held with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, when one of them spoke of the evacuation he and his family faced, that very day, and said, “We are facing the final solution. Israel is imposing the final solution on us.” Other participants spoke of having shuddered during bombings, day and night.

    Journalist Mehdi Hasan,  writes movingly  in the Guardian of how absurd it is that the United Nations’ General Assembly agrees to seat Israel as a U.N. member nation.

    Israel’s abusive repudiation of the very idea of the United Nations, its escalating and lethal violation of countless international norms, its repeated, deadly attacks on U.N. sanctuaries and peacekeepers justifies its expulsion. Hasan reminds us that Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations shredded the UN charter while standing at the General Assembly podium. This is the Charter that declares the UN mission to eradicate the scourge of warfare for future generations.
    It is time for the clouds to part above the burning lands of West Asia – for the suffering there to be comforted and their pitiless accusers rebuked by the gathered voice of humanity, by the agent that created Israel and can, when it wishes, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  The work here is ours and so let our United Nations demand, and not beg, humanity from Israel and from its imperial sponsor, the United States.

    The post When Will the General Assembly Suspend Israel? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • When Will the General Assembly Suspend Israel?

    The Biblical Book of Job chronicles a string of catastrophes relentlessly plaguing the main character, Job, who loses his prosperity, his home, his health, and his children. Eventually, an agonized Job curses his own existence as well as the god that created him.

    Numerous interpretations of the story exist, and more than one version has circulated through the ancient Near East. One version concludes with Job avowing repentance. “I know that my redeemer liveth, and so I repent in dust and in ashes.”

    The Latin root for the word ‘repent’ is pensare – to think. ‘Repent” suggests an effort to rethink.

    Job’s surprising repentance has been on my mind as calls increase, in 2024, for the United Nations to rethink its relation to Israel as a member state. Increasingly, civil society groups are pressuring Permanent Missions to the UN to eject Israel as a voting member of the General Assembly.

    To paraphrase Pankraj Mishra, writing for the New York Review of Books, a stunned world has watched with disbelief as the United States provisions Israel with weapons enabling a mass murder spree across the Middle East.

    Palestinians in the West Bank have recently urged all organizations demanding UN compliance with the International Criminal Court ruling of July 2024 to sign a letter available at World BEYOND War which urges Member States of the United Nations General Assembly to fulfill their duties.

    Following up on the potential of this letter, a new coalition, “Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine” has issued a letter to His Excellency Mr. Philemon Yang, the President of the United Nations General Assembly asking him to convene an urgent meeting of the General Assembly to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, establish and secure humanitarian aid corridors and ensure the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

    The letter additionally requests:

    • The revival of the UN Committee Against Apartheid to address systemic violations of international law and human rights in the OPT.
    • Consideration of targeted boycotts, sanctions, and divestments, particularly against illegal operations in the OPT.
    • The establishment of an arms embargo on Israel.
    • Exploration of suspending Israel from the General Assembly until it complies with international law.

    To further support these efforts, the letter calls for the establishment of an unarmed UN peacekeeping mission in the OPT under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to ensure the safety and dignity of all civilians.

    In a way, Israel has already removed itself from norms maintained by the UN Charter as it has consistently flouted UN treaties, Resolutions and Advisory opinions. We must not forget that Israel refuses to acknowledge to the UN its possession of nuclear weapons.

    I felt startled, during an initial planning call held with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, when one of them spoke of the evacuation he and his family faced, that very day, and said, “We are facing the final solution. Israel is imposing the final solution on us.” Other participants spoke of having shuddered during bombings, day and night.

    Journalist Mehdi Hasan,  writes movingly in the Guardian of how absurd it is that the United Nations’ General Assembly agrees to seat Israel as a U.N. member nation.

    Israel’s abusive repudiation of the very idea of the United Nations, its escalating and lethal violation of countless international norms, its repeated, lethal attacks on U.N. sanctuaries and peacekeepers justifies its expulsion. Hasan reminds us that Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations shredded the UN charter while standing at the General Assembly podium. This is the Charter that declares the UN mission to eradicate the scourge of warfare for future generations.

    It is time for the clouds to part above the burning lands of West Asia – for the suffering there to be comforted and their pitiless accusers rebuked by the gathered voice of humanity, by the agent that created Israel and can, when it wishes, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The work here is ours, and so let our United Nations demand, and not beg, humanity from Israel and from its imperial sponsor the United States.

    The post When Will the General Assembly Suspend Israel? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hanging On with Gaza

    During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with twelve different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19th advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.

    In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.

    It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus – it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.

    “You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.

    My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.

    Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.

    In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends…feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out…it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”

    Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance – avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children – while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?

    Bartov continues: By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that …Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, … as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, … Israel was acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, the Palestinian population in Gaza, ‘as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction’”.

    How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.

    When we can, we must act.

    We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.

    From September 10 – September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions which flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.

    We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

    We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than a thousand Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, many of them women and children.

    Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.

    And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.

    Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a ceasefire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.

    We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.

    The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.

    It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “uniting for peace” resolution.

    As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”, said, “Never again means never again!”

    We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/

    • A version of this article first appeared on World BEYOND War’s website. https://worldbeyondwar.org/hanging-on-with-gaza/

    The post Hanging On with Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s Genocidal Violence Must Be Stopped — Before It’s Too Late

    Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.” “Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  •  We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late

    Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.”

    “Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.

    The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

    Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.

    Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.

    Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

    We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

    Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

    A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

    Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with which it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

    In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

    The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

    “Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

    This article first appeared in The Progressive.

    The post  We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late


    Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.”

    “Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.

    The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

    Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.

    Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.

    Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

    We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

    Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

    A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

    Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with which it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

    In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

    The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

    “Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

    This article first appeared in The Progressive.

    The post We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late

    A failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gambles with the fate of humanity as a whole.

    This post was originally published on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.

  • Unfurling Love from the Window

    On April 30, when Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” dropping a large banner out the windows above the building’s entrance. This was a hall famously occupied by students in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and against Jim Crow racism in the United States. The students are risking suspension and expulsion, and a very real blacklist has already been generated against them, with Congress joining in to define criticism of genocide as a form of antisemitism that state universities and state-linked employers will not be allowed to tolerate.

    I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.

    If our civilization survives a looming ecological collapse that is helping to drive catastrophic nuclear brinkmanship, I hope future generations of students will study the “Hind’s Hall” occupation in the way that students of the civil rights movement have studied the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the story of Emmett Till. Hind’s story is tragically emblematic. Her cruel murder has befallen many thousands of children throughout the decades of Israel’s fight to maintain apartheid. Just in our young century, from September 2000 to September 2023, Israel’s B’tselem organization reports that 2,309 Palestinian minors were killed by Israelis and some 145 Israeli minors were killed by Palestinians, with these numbers excluding Palestinian children dead from deliberate immiseration via blockade or traumatized as hostages in prisons. We hear reports that thirty-eight Israeli children and some 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered since October 7, deaths which can all be laid on the doorstep of the ethnostate project so lethally determined to keep one ethnicity in undemocratic governance.

    No six-year-old poses any threat to anyone. Like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death during the U.S. imposition of economic sanctions against Iraq, none of these children could be held accountable for the actions of their government or military.

    Hind Rajab committed no crime, but she was made to watch her family die and wait for death surrounded by their corpses. When the ambulance crew asked safe passage to come rescue her, she was used as bait to kill them as well. Her story must be remembered and told over and over.

    As Jeffrey St. Clair writes, Hind was a little girl who liked to dress up as a princess. She lived in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City.

    “Hind Rajab was in her own city when the invaders in tanks came,” St. Clair notes. “What was left of it . . . Hind’s own kindergarten, from which she’d recently graduated, had been blown up, as had so many other schools, places of learning, places of shelter and places of safety in Gaza City.”

    On January 29, when the Israelis ordered people to evacuate, her mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set off on foot. Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and three cousins who traveled in a black Kia automobile.

    The uncle placed a call to a relative in Germany which initiated the family’s contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). After the initial connection with the PRCS switchboard, the car was targeted and hit, killing Hind’s uncle, her aunt, and two of her cousins.

    Hind and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, were the only survivors.

    Switchboard operators handling the phone contact with Layan had immediately notified ambulance workers that the little girls needed to be rescued.

    But it would have been suicidal for a rescue crew to enter the area without first working out coordinates with the Israeli military.

    Similar to the World Central Kitchen workers killed on Monday, April 1, they waited hours for the coordinated rescue plan.

    On the audio tape shared by the PRCS workers, Layan’s petrified voice can be heard. The tank is coming closer. She is so scared. A blast is heard and Layan no longer speaks. PRCS workers call back and Hind answers.

    She pleads, “Please come and get me. I’m so scared.”

    St. Clair writes, “The [PRCS] dispatched an ambulance crewed by two paramedics: Ahmed al-Madhoon and Youssef Zeino. As Ahmed and Youssef approached the Tel al-Hawa area, they reported to the Red Crescent dispatchers that the IDF was targeting them, and that snipers had pointed lasers at the ambulance. Then there was the sound of gunfire and an explosion. The line went silent.”

    The tank-fired M830A1 missile remnant found nearby had been manufactured in the United States by a subsidiary of the Day and Zimmermann Corporation. Day and Zimmermann prides itself on having once received the U.S. National “Family Business of the Year” award—an Internet search for the award chiefly produces references to this company. The company states that it believes in civic and community service, with core values of safety and integrity; emphasizing their success as a team that hits its targets. But since last October, their business has been killing families like Hind’s.

    Although Israel predictably insists that Layan and Hind, and the additional slain paramedics, were all lying with their final breaths and that no IDF tanks were present to attack them, Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite images taken at midday on January 29 corroborates the victims’ accounts and puts at least three Israeli tanks just 270 meters (886 feet) from the family’s car, with their guns pointed at it.

    When rescuers were finally allowed to approach the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction.

    Hind’s mother couldn’t go to the site until February 12.

    On May 5, Israel raided the offices of Al Jazeera at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and moved to shut down the television network’s operations in Israel.

    To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.

    Universities should, in theory, be places to learn things of importance, and we can learn from the students of Hind Hall to throw comfort and ambition out the window while keeping hold of love, as the students clung to that banner and to the name of Hind Rajab. We can learn to keep hold of our humanity. We learn by doing, as these students are learning to do, drawing wisdom from people like Phil Berrigan who famously said, “Don’t get tired!”

    The list of Gaza solidarity encampments grows each day. Conscious of increasing famine in Gaza, students at Princeton University launched a water-only fast on May 4 as they continue to call for their University to divest from corporations selling weapons to Israel. The United Nations warns of a potential collapse of aid delivery to Palestinians with Israel’s May 7 closure of the two main crossings into Gaza. These crossings are critical entry points for food, medicine, and other supplies for Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The disruptions come at a time when officials say northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine.”

    With thousands of innocent lives in the balance, promoters of peace should take advantage of this crucial opportunity to follow the young people, learning alongside the students whose hunger for humanity reveals stunning courage.

     Hind Rajab (Image provided, family photo)

    Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew (Photo Credit: PCRS)

    • This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

    The post Unfurling Love from the Window first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Unfurling Love from the Window

    Photograph Source: عباد ديرانية – CC0

    On April 30, when Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” dropping a large banner out the windows above the building’s entrance. This was a hall famously occupied by students in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and against Jim Crow racism in the United States. The students are risking suspension and expulsion, and a very real blacklist has already been generated against them, with Congress joining in to define criticism of genocide as a form of antisemitism that state universities and state-linked employers will not be allowed to tolerate.

    I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.

    If our civilization survives a looming ecological collapse that is helping to drive catastrophic nuclear brinkmanship, I hope future generations of students will study the “Hind’s Hall” occupation in the way that students of the civil rights movement have studied the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the story of Emmett Till. Hind’s story is tragically emblematic. Her cruel murder has befallen many thousands of children throughout the decades of Israel’s fight to maintain apartheid. Just in our young century, from September 2000 to September 2023, Israel’s B’tselem organization reports that 2,309 Palestinian minors were killed by Israelis and some 145 Israeli minors were killed by Palestinians, with these numbers excluding Palestinian children dead from deliberate immiseration via blockade or traumatized as hostages in prisons. We hear reports that thirty-eight Israeli children and some 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered since October 7, deaths which can all be laid on the doorstep of the ethnostate project so lethally determined to keep one ethnicity in undemocratic governance.

    No six-year-old poses any threat to anyone. Like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death during the U.S. imposition of economic sanctions against Iraq, none of these children could be held accountable for the actions of their government or military.

    Hind Rajab committed no crime, but she was made to watch her family die and wait for death surrounded by their corpses. When the ambulance crew asked safe passage to come rescue her, she was used as bait to kill them as well. Her story must be remembered and told over and over.

    As Jeffrey St. Clair writes, Hind was a little girl who liked to dress up as a princess. She lived in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City.

    “Hind Rajab was in her own city when the invaders in tanks came,” St. Clair notes. “What was left of it . . . Hind’s own kindergarten, from which she’d recently graduated, had been blown up, as had so many other schools, places of learning, places of shelter and places of safety in Gaza City.”

    On January 29, when the Israelis ordered people to evacuate, her mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set off on foot. Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and three cousins who traveled in a black Kia automobile.

    The uncle placed a call to a relative in Germany which initiated the family’s contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). After the initial connection with the PRCS switchboard, the car was targeted and hit, killing Hind’s uncle, her aunt, and two of her cousins.

    Hind and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, were the only survivors.

    Switchboard operators handling the phone contact with Layan had immediately notified ambulance workers that the little girls needed to be rescued.

    But it would have been suicidal for a rescue crew to enter the area without first working out coordinates with the Israeli military.

    Similar to the World Central Kitchen workers killed on Monday, April 1, they waited hours for the coordinated rescue plan.

    On the audio tape shared by the PRCS workers, Layan’s petrified voice can be heard. The tank is coming closer. She is so scared. A blast is heard and Layan no longer speaks. PRCS workers call back and Hind answers.

    She pleads, “Please come and get me. I’m so scared.”

    St. Clair writes, “The [PRCS] dispatched an ambulance crewed by two paramedics: Ahmed al-Madhoon and Youssef Zeino. As Ahmed and Youssef approached the Tel al-Hawa area, they reported to the Red Crescent dispatchers that the IDF was targeting them, and that snipers had pointed lasers at the ambulance. Then there was the sound of gunfire and an explosion. The line went silent.”

    The tank-fired M830A1 missile remnant found nearby had been manufactured in the United States by a subsidiary of the Day and Zimmermann Corporation. Day and Zimmermann prides itself on having once received the U.S. National “Family Business of the Year” award—an Internet search for the award chiefly produces references to this company. The company states that it believes in civic and community service, with core values of safety and integrity; emphasizing their success as a team that hits its targets. But since last October, their business has been killing families like Hind’s.

    Although Israel predictably insists that Layan and Hind, and the additional slain paramedics, were all lying with their final breaths and that no IDF tanks were present to attack them, Al Jazeera’s analysisof satellite images taken at midday on January 29 corroborates the victims’ accounts and puts at least three Israeli tanks just 270 meters (886 feet) from the family’s car, with their guns pointed at it.

    When rescuers were finally allowed to approach the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction.

    Hind’s mother couldn’t go to the site until February 12.

    On May 5, Israel raided the offices of Al Jazeera at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and moved to shut down the television network’s operations in Israel.

    To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.

    Universities should, in theory, be places to learn things of importance, and we can learn from the students of Hind Hall to throw comfort and ambition out the window while keeping hold of love, as the students clung to that banner and to the name of Hind Rajab. We can learn to keep hold of our humanity. We learn by doing, as these students are learning to do, drawing wisdom from people like Phil Berrigan who famously said, “Don’t get tired!”

    The list of Gaza solidarity encampments grows each day. Conscious of increasing famine in Gaza, students at Princeton University launched a water-only fast on May 4 as they continue to call for their University to divest from corporations selling weapons to Israel. The United Nations warns of a potential collapse of aid delivery to Palestinians with Israel’s May 7 closure of the two main crossings into Gaza. These crossings are critical entry points for food, medicine, and other supplies for Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The disruptions come at a time when officials say northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine.”

    With thousands of innocent lives in the balance, promoters of peace should take advantage of this crucial opportunity to follow the young people, learning alongside the students whose hunger for humanity reveals stunning courage.

    This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

    The post Unfurling Love from the Window appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Unfurling Love from the Window

    A banner and a name remind student protesters for whom they are fighting.

    This post was originally published on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.

  • When Starvation Is a Weapon, the Harvest Is Shame

    In a work entitled “Irish Famine 4,” Palestinian-American journalist and artist Sam Husseini combined grass and paint to commemorate a bitter time in Irish history when starving people died with their mouths stained green because, according to historian Christine Kinealy, their last meal was grass. Shamefully, British occupiers profited from exporting out of Ireland the food crops so desperately needed. During a seven-year period beginning in 1845, one million Irish people died from starvation and related diseases. It was a deliberate mass killing, employing one of the most horrific means of execution imaginable—an excruciating descent of weeks’ duration into despair, delirium, and bodily immobility while one’s attention, one’s character, is gradually reduced to little more than appetite and pain.

    Now, in the occupied Gaza Strip, as weapons dealers benefit from increasing military shipments to Israel, Palestinians have resorted to eating mixtures of grass and animal feed. The past five months of Israeli siege, bombing, and displacement have killed more than 31,000—mostly women and children—but a process of famine long underway is clearly about to expand that number exponentially, particularly among children.

    Human Rights Watch says the Israeli government is starving civilians as a method of warfare in Gaza. Aiding and abetting this war crime, the United States has approved 100 military sales to Israel over the past five months. U.S. bullets, bombs, and guns have helped keep crucially needed aid from reaching millions of Palestinians. The bombs have buried or destroyed much of the food supplies which could have mitigated this horror, and they have forced vast populations to flee attacks and huddle in the city that is Israel’s latest target: Rafah. The United States continues providing the muscle behind a starvation genocide.

    On March 11, eight U.S. Senators signed a letter to President Joe Biden insisting that ongoing weapons shipments violate U.S. laws forbidding military aid to regimes that are obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid.

    Twenty-five prominent humanitarian and human rights organizations delivered a letter to the President echoing the Senators’ message.

    Even as Israel faces mounting pressure from world leaders to stop impeding humanitarian relief shipments, Israel turned back another aid truck, this time because it contained children’s medical kits. These kits included scissors useful for applying bandages or cutting away clothing to reach shrapnel.

    The Israelis forbade the scissors as a potential dual-use weapon. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send guns and bombs to Israel.

    Each day brings new reports of Palestinians, 40 percent of them children, succumbing to disease and death because they are deprived of food, fuel, clean water, medicines, and shelter. Hellish conditions worsen as infectious contamination spreads from decomposing bodies and the chemical contaminants from thousands upon thousands of Israeli and Western-supplied bombs that have been dropped on Gaza.

    Occupiers in Representative Jim McGovern’s office in Massachusetts, March 14, 2024.

    In Northampton, Massachusetts, six activists are on the third day of an occupation of the office of Representative Jim McGovern, demanding that he call on the President to immediately halt all weapons shipments to Israel and stop the United States from vetoing United Nations cease-fire resolutions.

    “These are desperate times,” says Peter Kakos, one of the occupiers. “We must call for immediate action, and nothing less.” He’s particularly mindful of 17,000 Gazan children who are estimated by UNICEF to be currently unaccompanied or separated from their parents.

    We talk about the mental harm on children caused by COVID-19 lockdowns. A March 12, 2024, report by Save the Children draws our attention to what five months of carnage, flight, starvation, and disease, on top of nearly seventeen years of apartheid conditions, will have permanently done to the children of Gaza who survive the brutality now afflicting them.

    The post When Starvation Is a Weapon, the Harvest Is Shame first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Starvation is a Weapon, The Harvest Is Shame

    Irish Famine 4, Sam Husseini.

    In a work entitled “Irish Famine 4,” Palestinian-American journalist and artist Sam Husseini combined grass and paint to commemorate a bitter time in Irish history when starving people died with their mouths stained green because, according to historian Christine Kinealy, their last meal was grass. Shamefully, British occupiers profited from exporting out of Ireland food crops so desperately needed. Over a seven year period, beginning in 1845, one million Irish people died from starvation and related diseases. It was a conscious mass killing. One of the most horrific means of execution we can read about or imagine was employed. The result, an excruciating descent into despair, delirium and bodily immobility while one’s attention, and character, is gradually reduced to extreme hunger and pain.

    Now, in the occupied Gaza Strip, weapons dealers benefit from increasing  military shipments to Israel. Palestinians, like the Irish, have resorted to eating mixtures of grass and animal feed. The past five months of Israeli siege, bombing, and displacement have killed more than 31,000 people – mostly women and children. The onset of famine will expand that number exponentially, particularly among children.

    Human Rights Watch says the Israeli government is starving civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip. Aiding and abetting this war crime, the U.S. government has approved 100 military salesto Israel over the past five months. U.S. bullets, bombs and guns have helped prevent crucially needed aid from reaching millions of Palestinians. The bombs have buried or destroyed much of the food supplies which could have partially mitigated this horror. Continued attacks have forced vast populations to flee, huddling in the occupation force’s next target, Rafah. The United States continues providing resources and support for this genocide.

    On March 11, eight U.S. senators signed a letter to President Biden insisting that ongoing weapons shipments to Israel violate U.S. laws forbidding military aid to regimes obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid.

    Additionally, 25 prominent humanitarian and human rights organizations delivered a letter to the President echoing the Senators’ message.

    Even as Israel faces mounting pressure from world leaders to stop attacking people in Gaza awaiting relief and stop impeding humanitarian relief shipments, Israel turned back another aid truck. The reason? The shipment included children’s medical kits with scissors useful for applying bandages or cutting away clothing to reach shrapnel.

    The Israelis forbid the scissors as a potential dual use weapon. Meanwhile the United States keeps sending Israel guns and bombs which present a far greater threat.

    Each day brings new reports of Palestinians, 40 percent of them children, succumbing to disease and death because they are deprived of food, fuel, clean water, medicines, and shelter. Hellish conditions worsen as infectious contamination spreads from decomposing bodies and the chemical contaminants from the shell casings of thousands upon thousands of Israeli and western-supplied bombs dropped on Gaza.

    In Northampton, Massachusetts, six activists are on day three of occupying the office of Representative Jim McGovern. They are demanding he call on the president to immediately halt all weapons shipments to Israel, even if Israel allows humanitarian aid into Gaza. And they want Rep. McGovern to publicly call for the  United States to stop vetoing U.N. cease-fire resolutions.

    “These are desperate times,” says one of the occupiers, Peter Kakos. “We must call for immediate action, and nothing less.” He’s particularly mindful of 17,000 Palestinian children in Gaza who are estimated by UNICEF to be currently unaccompanied or separated from their parents.

    Save the Children’s March 12, 2024 report questions what five months of carnage, flight, starvation and disease, on top of nearly 17 years of  apartheid blockade, will do to the children in Gaza who survive the brutality now afflicting them.

    During a recent visit to Amman, Jordan, I witnessed the anguish and frustration felt by many Palestinians denied any means of relieving the suffering of loved ones.

    They had this response to photo-ops taken of U.S. aid drops.

    “Are you going to feed starving people so that they can then face genocide from the Israeli Army with a full stomach?” asked my host. “What’s the logic in that? The only humanitarian thing to drop would be to drop all support for Israel’s war on the people of Gaza.”

    In May of this year, an Irish NGO called AFRI (Action From Ireland) will hold an annual “famine walk ” to commemorate when hundreds of desperate people trekked in cold and stormy weather to beg mercy from British officials designated to assess who would qualify for small portions of food or tickets to enter a workhouse.

    “The weather was terrible,” notes County Mayo’s official record, “with wind and hail beating down upon them. When they arrived in Delphi the Guardians refused them food or their tickets to the workhouse. Needless to say many of them perished on the return journey as fatigue and exhaustion from hunger took hold. Some of those that had energy to start the journey back to Louisburgh were swept into the lake by the heavy squalls.”

    Each year, the organizers of AFRI’s famine walk focus on a place in the world afflicted by famine. “This year’s famine walk will focus on the unspeakable horrors being visited on the population of Gaza,” says AFRI’s coordinator, Joe Murray, “with ‘Irish’ President Biden forgetting his history and playing the part of a ‘Black and Tan’ in providing the means to obliterate an entire population.”

    It’s heinous to ignore the plight of starving people as was done by the British relief officials in the spring of 1847. But how much crueler is it to bomb the people you are deliberately starving, forcing people to wonder if they will face a quick death or a long and tortuous one?

    Yes, these are desperate times. People in the United States ought to occupy local offices of every elected official, denouncing all forms of violence, insisting on an immediate end to any support for Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. It’s time to acknowledge the futility of war and call for a collective home to be shared by Muslims, Jews, Christians, Bahais, Druze and many others in a secular democratic state encompassing Israel and Palestine. Similarly, the elected representatives should occupy the Oval Office until the President takes action.

    This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine.

    The post When Starvation is a Weapon, The Harvest Is Shame appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • When Starvation Is a Weapon, the Harvest Is Shame

    As Palestinians die of starvation under occupation, it brings grim echoes of another famine nearly two centuries ago in Ireland.


    This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support

    Photograph Source: Wafa (Q2915969) in contract with a local company (APAimages)‏‏ – CC BY-SA 3.0

    Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of “War of the Worlds” or some other sci-fi fantasy.

    Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone launched laser guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, health care workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.

    Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as twelve additional surgeries.  Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives?

    He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed health care workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”

    According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped forty to forty-five doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three health care professional organizations have issued a statement  expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

    On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”

    Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

    The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate NY who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”

    In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to  Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors and then he stopped.  “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”

    Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.

    From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X:: “Thescary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”

    At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.  Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7th, cannot – even if believed – justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.

    The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisors make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality and human dignity.

    What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.

    If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no-one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.

    A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

    The post Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support

    Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of “War of the Worlds” or some other sci-fi fantasy.

    Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone launched laser guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, health care workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.

    Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as twelve additional surgeries.  Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives?

    He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed health care workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”

    According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped forty to forty-five doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three health care professional organizations have issued a statement  expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

    On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”

    Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

    The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate NY who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”

    In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to  Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors and then he stopped.  “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”

    Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.

    From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X:: “The scary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”

    At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.  Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7th, cannot – even if believed – justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.

    The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisors make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality and human dignity.

    What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.

    If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no-one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.

     Smoke rising after an Israeli air strike on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on January 3, 2024
    Photo Credit:  Shutterstock

     Palestinian Red Crescent first aid waiting to receive bodies from Al-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, on January 10, 2024
    Photo Credit: Shutterstock

    • A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

    The post Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hospitals Should Be Places of Healing — Not Military Targets

    Many decades ago in Chicago, I operated the telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Security at the hospital…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.