On Wednesday, Israeli forces sent a shipping container to Gaza that contained bodies of 88 Palestinians that were decomposed to the point that they were unidentifiable, sparking horror over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians even after death. Israel delivered the Palestinians’ bodies in a large yellow container loaded on a truck, with no identification or information about how…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and two other senators have introduced resolutions that will force the Senate to undertake the first-ever vote in Congress on blocking weapons to Israel. On Wednesday, Sanders introduced six resolutions blocking six sales of different weapons contained within the $20 billion weapons deal announced by the Biden administration in August. The sales include many of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This post was originally published on IndigenousX.
Boeing Headquarters, Chicago
December 14, 2023
On the last night night of Chanukah, you stand on a bridge, alongside twelve others, blocking traffic. You hold a black rectangular posterboard with the letter “I” lit up in small holiday lights bright against the dark matting. You are letter seven in the phrase CEASEFIRE NOW! “F” stands to your left, “R” to your right. You check in with each other, smiling. Each one of you, each letter, is a necessary part of the entire demand.
On the sidewalk, a rally with speeches, singing and chanting continues, a determined, spirited din to accompany your blockade. Through the crowd, you see the face of your rabbi holding a mic, but it’s hard to distinguish his words.
A row of police officers stands in front of you, and another row behind them, and a third behind the second, their faces impervious. They are young. Many of them are not white. They are too far away for you to read the last names on their badges, but you imagine they contain all the identities of contemporary working-class Chicago, all the ethnicities from which CPD now amply recruits.
You note their guns, their batons, their body armor, their pepper spray. You are not inexperienced with police and are fairly certain that at this moment, the situation is under control. There will be no tasering, pepper spraying or shooting. Still, with the cops, there are no guarantees– those words spoken at your training last week come back to you -and you could imagine the situation unraveling and getting rough, but you don’t. You feel calm, strong, completely certain, no second thoughts or doubts. Your parents, of blessed memory, taught you how to face the police.
You are about to be arrested.
Standing on this bridge and blockading traffic had taken more maneuvering than you expected. The group had to line up in reverse order on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway without attracting police attention. Keeping police focused on the rally in front of Boeing headquarters would give you the space needed to figure out how to spell backwards, get in formation, cross the bridge on the green light and stop. You spread out and took position, resting the four-foot letters on the asphalt in front of you, your message shining: CEASEFIRE NOW! You stopped traffic in a matter of seconds. Now drivers wanting to head east onto the Washington bridge are stuck and their horns, blaring from behind the police line, make it clear that you’ve made a lot of people angry.
You wear many layers. Underneath, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece. On top, a parka and insulated vest. Wool socks, zippered boots, no strings-you’ve prepared for what you will be allowed to keep in your cell, which will be cold. Woolen hat, gloves, and of course, an N95 mask. You won’t be able to put it on later, so you’re wearing it in advance. Your ID is in the zippered vest pocket. You’ve made sure to get to a bathroom before the rally, since no one knows how long it will take for the police to clear everyone from the bridge. You wonder if the much younger people blockading the street with you have had the same concern. Probably not.
Your underlayer, the lightweight cotton t-shirt, nestles against your skin. You bought it at the Yiddish Book Center last spring, after a week-long language class there. It is black, and has der aleph-beis, the alphabet, printed in white letters across the back. No one can see your shirt, but you know it is there and you feel the language of your ancestors sprawled across your ribcage. Yiddish is buried deep inside you, protecting you. Khof curls like a reverse C, a strong spine protecting the top and bottom as they open to the left, like two outstretched arms in a battering wind. The sound of khof, its friction against the back palette, is easy for you to pronounce. You’ve heard it since you were a child, words like Khanike and kholem and Khelm, the town in Ashkenazi Jewish lore known for its harmless, charming simpletons. Snuggling your back, mid-alphabet, khof lies somewhere near the bottom of your lungs and when you breathe, it comes to life, a seed germinating and sprouting inside you, rising from the black Galician soil where your grandmother raised her gardens.
But now is not the time to dwell in your past. Not the time to lament how this language was passed on to you only as a relic, not something alive and breathing, even though your grandmothers were born into it, lived and loved and birthed their own children in it.
You are here to protest what is happening right now. Today, the civilian death toll from the Israeli bombing of Gaza stands at 18,000. Among the dead, there are at least 8,000 children. You are standing on this bridge to disrupt, to say there can be no business as usual, that your tax dollars will not pay for meting out slaughter. You are blocking this bridge to call out the death company whose headquarters you stand in front of, the company that supplies the fighter jets and the bombs delivering this assault. On this last night of Chanukah you are saying not in our name, the slogan written in stark white letters across the black t-shirts worn by many in the crowd of protestors. By now, two months into public, continuous protest around the country, these t-shirts have become a familiar outfit.
Squad cars arrive, blue lights flashing, followed by paddy wagons. The lieutenant in charge is angry and frustrated by your surprise move which changed the scene from a rally easily monitored by officers on bicycles into one that would require much more. He warns you that your action is illegal, and you are subject to arrest. As if you didn’t know. As if this were not intentional.
The arrests happen quickly. The lieutenant approaches you one at a time, starting with C, unraveling the demand for ceasefire from its beginning. He gets close in your faces and repeats what he has already said -your action is illegal. He asks if you will agree to leave and walk off the bridge on your own, then asks if you understand that you are about to be arrested for disorderly conduct and obstruction. R, to your left, seems subdued, maybe nervous. He is young, likely has a job to get to tomorrow or an interview for something next week, something consequential. Most of your group is young. They are all putting themselves at risk. But no one breaks rank.
No, I am not walking off this bridge. Yes, I understand I am going to be arrested and charged.
You watch as the police detain C,E,A,S,E and F. The same procedure for all –several officers tie their hands behind their backs, capture their wrists in zipties. Each one is led from the bridge past the crowd towards the paddy wagons. The crowd cheers and sings and sends love.
It’s a parade of sorts and you wonder why the police have chosen to march people on this side of the bridge right past the rally, when they could have walked all of you on the other side where you would be far less visible to your admiring comrades. It is dramatic and theatrical.
As your turn approaches, you remember your daughter’s advice, from her own arrest last month in New York. “Have them tie you up in front. It’s your legal right if you ask. It will be easier on your shoulders, Mom.”.
Lately, your shoulders have been bothering you. You’ve been aware of your rotator cuffs in a way you weren’t before. When the lieutenant approaches you, you have already seen and heard six people arrested and you are ready. After he asks you if you will leave on your own, warns you of your imminent arrest and tells you the charges, you hold your wrists in front of you and make your request. To your surprise, though he is snarly and clearly tired of all of you, he agrees.
And off you go, zip-tied in front, masked, bundled in layers, past the cheering crowd. A friend and her daughter stand on the sidelines, taking pictures and a video you will watch later, over and over again, seeing yourself taken to a paddy wagon by the Chicago police.
If your parents were still alive, they’d be in the crowd giving you the thumbs up. If they could have heard another friend shout “Free Palestine,” as you were marched by, they would have agreed.
Eventually, there are seven of you in the paddy wagon. You’ve been sorted by perceived gender, or perhaps by what’s on your IDs. You’re careful about what you discuss. Nothing about your action. There is only one other woman in your age range, and so when the conversation turns to music, you are pretty much lost.
You sit in the wagon for a long time before it bounces off towards wherever you are heading. There don’t seem to be any shock absorbers in the wagon, and no seat belts. You all agree that you are heading east over the same bridge you’ve been blocking, though of course you can’t see outside. Chicagoans internalize a sense of the grid. Zip-tied and jostled, you sit in two rows, lined up against either side. After a short ride, the wagon comes to an abrupt halt. You wait, perhaps fifteen long minutes, or more, no idea where you are. “They are probably getting dinner,” your companion to the right says. She has an extensive arrest record and says it wouldn’t be the first time the cops stop for pizza while the protestors in the wagon wait.
This remark leads to an exchange about previous arrest experiences, even though music is a safer topic. Surveillance. When one of your wagon mates asks you if you’ve been arrested before, you say no, only tear-gassed, but you note that you’ve been protesting your entire life, even while still in utero, at least according to family lore. Whatever was being protested in 1958 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin before your birth month of October, well, you were there along with your mom. There was plenty to protest. The sixties were in their prequel and your parents were certainly not too happy about the fifties either.
“And how does it feel now to be arrested?” she asks.
“Overdue,” you say.
This will become your go-to phrase when people ask you about the arrest. You are not inclined to say that it is the least you can do, that it is nothing compared to the death and destruction raining down upon the people of Gaza, because it sounds trite, but, given your long protest history, it really is how you feel. The least you could do. And certainly overdue.
In the collective holding cell at the precinct jail, you share stories. You bond. Seven women in a cell for an undetermined period, of course it happens. Demographically, there are obvious ways to distinguish the group.
Two of you are in your sixties. The rest, much younger.
One of you is Christian, a minister. The rest, Jewish.
Three of you are well versed in the Frankfurt School. The rest, not so much but they do get the basic concepts. Everybody in this cell has at least an undergrad degree.
Four of you work at non-profits. Two are professors (or retired, you, specifically.). And then there’s the one minister.
Six of you have tattoos. Only one does not. You. So you feel inadequate and explain that for five years, you and your daughter have been trying to decide on a mother-daughter tattoo. You both can be indecisive, debating people and so it hasn’t happened yet, because you haven’t agreed on a design yet, but you will. Maybe a monarch on you, a milkweed pod on her. Or loons and canoes. She has some nostalgia for the Midwest, despite her decision to trot off to New York.
And then, on this night of a Chanukah protest and arrest, the next division raises one of your important foundational stories. Of the six Jewish women, five have had a painful, conflictive break with Zionist ideology and the communities and families in which they were raised. Only one has been raised as an anti-Zionist. Only one has never supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish ethnostate at the expense of Palestinian freedom and self-determination. Only one has been raised as an American Jewish minority within a minority. You.
“You are lucky,” someone tells you. The others agree.
You think about this before responding.
On the one hand, you admire people who break with the ideas they have been raised in, if those ideas are unjust. You admire people who can make a break with received wisdom. There is liberation in that act. Rejecting at least some part of one’s parents’ thinking is usually necessary. Each generation should be an improvement upon the preceding one, you often say to your kids, when they let you know that their ideas about something are different -i.e., more advanced-than yours.
At many moments in your life, certain aspects of your parents’ Old Left beliefs have been a constraint. Perhaps shackle. But you have always agreed with their most basic premises, certainly those about justice and equality and the evils of capitalism. And you have always admired their consistent walking the walk, the life of protest and boycotts and political actions, your upbringing among Black and brown people in hyper segregated Milwaukee, their clear, lived intention to provide you with something other than whiteness. But it was not an easy way to grow up.
And especially on the topic of Israel, the basic tenet in which they raised you–no, there should not be a Jewish ethnostate-one you have never broken with, has made it hard for you to find community with other American Jewish people, including your extended families.
“Yes, lucky,” you agree. There is nuance in everything, but not always.
You’ve just heard the heartache of someone who told her rabbi that he had taught her a pack of lies. They avoid each other. Another whose parents have told her that they are deeply ashamed of her. And another, whose parents haven’t spoken to her in years, speaks with resignation about their rupture.
The stories are painful.
At some point, you leave the topic of Zionism and return to tatoos. Show and tell begins. But it is winter in Chicago and are dressed warmly, to have stood on a bridge in the cold, so you are all wearing long sleeves and warm leggings and sweatpants. Someone rolls up the left sleeve of her shirt. But how to show the upper arm? Some minor undressing occurs. Another rolls up the leg of her sweatpants to show off the art on the back of her calf. But how to show the thigh? Pull them down! Finally, a cellmate rolls up her shirt to show you a tattoo that extends from her neck along her spine, almost to her butt, a gorgeous breathtaking tattoo that elicits oohs and aahs from the entire group. Along with the tattoo we see her belly and bra, her ribs and backbone. This escalation of the undressing is enough for the officers watching you from outside the thick glass windows of the collective cell. Enough story-telling, enough female bonding, enough revealing of the artwork on covered limbs and backs. More than enough. The show is over. One by one they call you out, dissemble the collective. They “process” you, take your fingerprints, your mug shot, take you to another are of the jail where there are individual cells, each one of you on her own. You spend the rest of your time, another seven hours, in a cold cell with bright lights, a camera, a hard bench, an open toilet and sink combination with a trickle of water to wash hands and take a drink, left alone to ponder. You sit in solitary, counting the cinder blocks of your cell, with lots of time to go over the shared stories, the laughter, the tears, the determination.
At 3:30 a.m. you are released. The jail support team is waiting for you outside the precinct door to offer hugs, smiles, sufganyot, the jelly-donuts you eat at Chanukah, and a ride home. They’ve been waiting outside half the night. Now the other half is yours.
You wonder, where did this story begin? Where will it take me? How do I tell it?
The post Chanukah 2023 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As the death toll continued to climb in Lebanon amid Israel’s attacks on the country this week, President Joe Biden suggested in an address to the UN that Israel’s bombing campaign is legitimate, even as other officials in the chamber have warned that Israel’s massacres amount to war crimes. In his final address to the UN General Assembly as the U.S. president on Tuesday…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel killed 356 people across Lebanon in a massive bombardment on Monday, Lebanese health officials report, with Israeli forces launching hundreds of airstrikes and ordering forced evacuations across the country as officials signal an intent to occupy large swaths of Lebanon. Lebanese health officials said that the attacks injured 1,200 people. The Israeli military reported that it has…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel escalated attacks on Lebanon on September 23, marking the deadliest day of conflict between the two countries since 2006. Israel’s strikes in southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as the capital city of Beirut, left a death toll of at least 274, including women, children and paramedics. The Israeli military targeted “medical centres, ambulances and cars of people trying to flee…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On September 18, students walked out of a job fair at Cornell University, one of the elite universities that organized an unprecedented student movement in solidarity with Palestine and that also experienced a strike last month. Their motive was to bring attention to the presence of Boeing at the job fair as Boeing is one of the world’s largest aerospace manufacturers and defense contractors…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The International Day of Peace is marked around the world each year on September 21. But this year, as we mourn the deaths of more than 41,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, I am struggling to find the words to express my grief. What is there to say that has not already been said — and ignored — millions of times in these last 11 months? How do we honor these lives and continue our…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it’s unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from two different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.
The Israeli soldiers killed, mutilated and humiliated the bodies of three Palestinians in Qabatia ( Jenin area) today and threw their bodies from a high building to the ground in a savage and inhuman manner. pic.twitter.com/0umG45ZhPH
— Mustafa Barghouti @Mustafa_Barghouti (@MustafaBarghou1) September 19, 2024
AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.
Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately: even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)
Remember, that same media never fails to highlight – or simply make up – any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent “beheaded babies”.
AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a “pattern of excessive force” by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.
That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP’s preferred characterisation of the group’s reference to a pattern not of “excessive force” but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
AP makes sure to give Israel’s pretext for why it is committing war crimes: “Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy.”
But it forgets yet again to mention why that “militancy” exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it – once again illegally – has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.
AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel’s occupying soldiers, including “militantly”.
Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as “terrorism”, but that’s not how it is seen in the international law codes that western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.
It’s also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by “Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem”.
As is true with many other western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.
Western news outlets doubtless privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is “sensitive” to Israel’s perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.
Which is precisely the problem. The bias in western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel – in the midst of a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court – which means it’s entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.
It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel’s war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.
UPDATE:
Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn’t been “independently verified” – whatever that means. There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.
The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.
And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is “another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting”. No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.
The post The more definitive the proof of Israeli atrocities, the less they get reported first appeared on Dissident Voice.The BBC runs a report on Israeli soldiers pushing Palestinian bodies off the roof of a building & the presenter then remarks that the footage is an example of the many fronts Israel is fighting on
No, its an example of the IDF committing war crimes. pic.twitter.com/9GHtbNNXXh
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) September 20, 2024
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The House passed a bill on Wednesday to label products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as originating from “Israel,” essentially recognizing Israel’s annexation and ethnic cleansing of the region in what opponents of the bill say is a “hateful” attempt to erase the very existence of Palestinians in Palestine. The bill would make permanent an extremist Donald Trump…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The United Nations is warning about widespread human rights abuses in Burma as the military regime intensifies the killings and arbitrary arrests of tens of thousands of civilians since seizing power in a coup over three years ago. A new report from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights says many of those detained by the Burmese military are children taken from their parents, with dozens of minors dying in custody. “What it paints is an extremely disturbing picture of Burma descending into this human rights abyss. If you’re living there, it’s a complete living hell,” says Burmese scholar, dissident and human rights activist Maung Zarni. He also discusses his recent visit with faith leaders to the West Bank and the border of Gaza, drawing parallels between Burma’s and Israel’s human rights abuses. “Israel has taken the practices and policies of genocide to a whole new level,” says Zarni.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.
The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.
The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.
This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.
We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.
https://x.com/BBCWorld/status/1832047105801683068?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1832047105801683068%7Ctwgr%5Eb7c9fe5da4bf390397c10bbf078320352b533c1c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jonathan-cook.net%2F2024-09-13%2Fwar-gaza-israel-western-fascism%2F
After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.
And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.
No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.
The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.
Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.
In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.
Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”
According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.
A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.
Pulling punches
The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.
Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.
Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.
Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.
Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.
But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.
What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.
Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.
Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.
What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.
Campaign of intimidation
The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.
The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.
Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.
What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.
The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.
Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.
This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists, including the western media, run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.
No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.
The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.
Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.
Allowable thought
The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.
The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.
The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.
Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.
That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.
Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.
Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.
The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.
Pressing the button
What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.
It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.
The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court.
Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.
Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.
Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.
One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.
In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.
They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”
Relentless depravity
It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.
The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.
It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.
After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.
In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.
?SHOCKING?
Israel is quite possibly the only nation in the world where it is permissable and commonplace to go on TV and openly declare that the RAPING of prisoners should be a LEGITIMATE and OFFICIAL POLICY of the state and must be widely implemented.
pic.twitter.com/1PyRXk8fxU— Niz (@NizMhani) August 7, 2024
One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.
Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.
None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.
After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.
The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.
Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”
‘Heroic soldiers’
This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.
What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.
In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.
Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.
"We can be proud of the state of Israel, what it represents .. what Israel is doing is the most outstanding thing a decent responsible country can do for its citizens”
British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis praises Israeli forces at a recent talk at Cranbrook United Synagogue… pic.twitter.com/QjSEs76dLf
— 5Pillars (@5Pillarsuk) January 10, 2024
He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.
Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.
Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.
In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.
There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.
Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.
Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguingthat those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.
He clearly meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.
Inner fascist
Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.
His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.
Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.
Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.
Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.
His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.
The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.
The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.
Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.
Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.
The genocide party
That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.
On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.
7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.
Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.
The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.
The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.
Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.
All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.
All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.
7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) formally announced that he is preparing to introduce legislation that leverages U.S. law to block the Biden administration’s massive $20 billion weapons sale to Israel, citing Israel’s “illegal and indiscriminate” massacres of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Sanders is planning to file the resolutions next week…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months, affirming a recent International Court of Justice opinion that deemed the decadeslong occupation unlawful. The Palestine-led resolution, co-sponsored by dozens of nations, calls on Israel to swiftly withdraw “all its…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This post was originally published on IndigenousX.
Israeli officials are denying visas to humanitarian groups and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has warned — an attempt not only to disrupt aid in Gaza, but also to undermine Palestinians’ refugee status and their right to return to their homeland. On Tuesday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Top United Nations human rights experts have condemned Western nations for supporting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, urging the world to stop an unfolding genocide in Palestine. This comes as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, is accusing Israel in a new report of carrying out a deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza. “What we are witnessing in Gaza is the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Israeli military has admitted that one of its own airstrikes is likely responsible for killing three Israeli captives whose bodies were recovered from Gaza last year, confirming what Hamas officials had said about the hostages’ deaths at the time. In a release on Sunday, the Israeli military said that an investigation into the deaths of the three captives found there was a “high…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A moment of prayer and meditation at the opening of the UN General Assembly, September 10, 2024 (Photo credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
On September 18th, the UN General Assembly is scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within six months. Given that the General Assembly, unlike the exclusive 15-member UN Security Council, allows all UN members to vote and there is no veto in the General Assembly, this is an opportunity for the world community to clearly express its opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
If Israel predictably fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further.
It could convene an Emergency Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.
The September 18 resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”
The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.
Israel’s President Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories, or make them part of Israel.
While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too.
Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.
Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed at least 700 people, including 159 children.
The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.
In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre were to end soon.
Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”
President Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.
By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.
This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while, in fact, remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.
In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.
China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.
Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.
As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.
Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.
The ability of one Permanent Member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system.
When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”
The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.
Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.
For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people.
In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.
The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.
The U.S. role is greater than complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.
And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.
Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.
It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action.
But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As Israeli forces launch repeated attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, expand their deadly incursion into the West Bank and threaten retaliation for strikes by Hezbollah and Houthis, we discuss ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas with Palestinian writer Amjad Iraqi and former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. Despite apparent divisions among Israeli leadership over the terms of an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets in recent days to demand that their government secure a deal that would release Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Nearly two-thirds of Israelis support such a deal — if not to put an end to the genocide, to at least put an end to the war for the sake of their own population. Why won’t their government listen? U.S.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Sunday released a document containing the names and ages of Palestinians killed by Israel’s assault since the Hamas-led October 7 attack, an incomplete list that nonetheless runs 649 pages — the first 14 of which are filled with the names of babies. The list, published to the health ministry’s Telegram account, is limited to those for whom Gaza officials had…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In The Black Image in the White Mind, historian George M. Frederickson writes, “In the years immediately before and after 1800, white Americans often revealed by their words and actions that they viewed [Black people] as a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population.” Within the context of white American domination, anti-Black racist stereotypes framed Black people as inherently…
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Emad, a thirty-five-year-old Palestinian man, has a dog named Shuhaybar. He’s a small, white fluffy guy with hair hanging over his eyes. Americans call him a West Highland White Terrier. Emad calls him a friend. He looks completely out of place in Gaza, yet somehow he fits. Maybe it’s Emad’s handmade chamois sombrero that he places on the dog to protect him from the sun. Or the piece of silver tarp he uses as a dog collar. Whatever the reason, this snowball, nose to the ground, never complaining canine, who accompanies Emad wherever he goes—bread lines, water lines, charging lines…et cetera—would rather die than run away from his master.
Emad documents their times together with videos and photographs on social media. Shuhaybar walks, plays and sleeps like any other dog, but these simple activities have taken on a new meaning. From the bodies and the rubble at the edge of Khan Yunis, to the pieces of cardboard, wood and plastic strung together that form the barest of shelters, Emad lives a life made of misery. Yet Shuhaybar makes us laugh, and humor is a relief for Emad, his Facebook friends and me. Its momentary lapse of reason transcends the daily scenes of death and destruction, and for an instant we see nothing but the beauty of Palestine and the love of its people.
Reem Bandaged
That’s important for Emad, because his wife Abeer (Arabic for aroma) and three-year-old daughter Reem (Arabic for graceful) went to live with their aunt after the shelter they shared burned down in an airstrike on June 7th, 2024. The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has chased them from place to place, but this is the first time his family’s been separated and it hurts. I can tell by studying his selfies that he’s lonely. At least I think that’s true, but I’m not always right. I used to think that Emad was naturally thin. Then I saw photographs of him before the war. He’s lost forty kilograms (eighty-eight pounds) since the war began. I now realize why his wife and child look so skinny. They’re starving! And Emad’s losing hope, just like he’s losing weight. His eyes and face radiate a sadness I see throughout Gaza: the look of an oppressed population desperate to be free.
A mutual online friend led Emad to me. He has a lot of things to say about what’s going on behind the scenes. But, like many refugees, he understands that sometimes it’s better to say nothing, less you offend the powers that be. So I go to the place where he finds relief: Shuhaybar. Two days after losing his wife and child indefinitely, he gained a canine companion—a faithful animal sent by God to ease his suffering.
But some pains cannot be healed overnight. And Emad’s pain is immense, for he has lost far more than the scent of his beautiful wife and the gracefulness of his three-year-old daughter. He has another child. Heba is her name. No one knows if she’s alive or dead. In February, when she was born, she had trouble getting oxygen to her brain. She remained in the NICU at the Emirati hospital in Rafah throughout the spring. In May, the Emirati evacuated its patients to the Indonesian hospital. Then the Israelis came. At the end of the month Emad called the new hospital to check up on his daughter.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any records of your daughter ever being here,” they told him.
Those words sound like something you hear in a horror movie. But this is a horror movie. Emad fears the occupation took her. They did. They took her away before she was even born, before she was thought of, before her parents were born or thought of. In 1948 her great-grandparents were taken out of their homeland during the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinians from the places they had lived in for centuries. They were placed in an internment camp called the Gaza Strip, a jail-state protectorate, obedient first to Egypt, then to Israel, and then to a blockade as they were told “Now you’re free!” Free to work as day laborers on Israeli farms like paid slaves.
A colonial system arose. Palestinians who had been forced from their own land, now returned to it in order to eke out a nominal living. Before October 7th, 2024, the lucky awoke before sunrise and returned late at night after toiling under the blazing heat. After October 7th, those working in Israel would be detained and tortured before being released back into Gaza or the West Bank. The unemployed were the focus of the Occupation who, with midnight raids, removed any trouble makers as they pilfered their homes before bulldozing them to pieces. This is a common experience among Jews in the Ghettos colonized people.
What’s worse is that the Israelis have taken, by some accounts, two thousand bodies out of Gaza. For what? Their organs? Medical experiments? They sound psychotic. What would they want a baby’s body for? To humiliate the Palestinians? Let us go back to our current nightmare.
Emad posts slices of a half-lived life throughout early summer. The sound of jet engines, drones and gunfire moves unimpeded through the atmosphere, while Shuhaybar huddles in the corner seeking shelter and shade. Is he shaking? Does his canine mind think the remains of a corner wall will protect him from the bombs as well as the sun? Emad posts a video of Shuhaybar eating breadcrumbs. It’s a good thing dogs are omnivores just like us, because it’s been nine months since either man or beast has eaten meat.
Abeer keeps Emad updated on his daughter’s life. Photos show Reem’s healed from the head wound she got in an explosion. Now she’s wearing a pink fisherman’s hat to protect her from the summer’s heat. Reem smiles and plays, dancing in the streets. That’s all a father really needs to hear about his child for his mind to be at peace.
Emad posts the same photograph of Heba over and over again, still hoping she’ll be found. She’s rail thin. I’ve never seen a baby that’s just skin and bones. With all of their belongings destroyed, this photo will be all that remains to say she even existed.
On July 2nd, the IDF dropped leaflets foretelling another exodus. Run as fast as you can to get away from thee, the papers seem to be proclaiming. Panic spreads like a disease. Mother and daughter must flee. Chaos reigns on desiccated streets. Emad searches for his family relentlessly. No landmarks, no street signs, no shops, no homes, just avenues of dirt and rubble. In a miracle he finds them. Photos reveal the joy of their reunion. Reem beams with glee, and looks good considering she’s been running for her life. Abeer’s eyes peer out from behind her face covering in an expression of happiness and relief. For a moment their suffering has ceased.
Emad finds a place to erect a new home of tarps and twine in a small grove. Reem plays in a basin of water underneath the canopy of a lemon tree. Olive trees, the symbol of Palestinian fortitude, mill in the background, waiting to be harvested. An orange cat keeps Reem company. Soon, she will stumble upon a cotton candy vendor with her father. The delights of Gaza fill just a slender paragraph.
A few days later Emad posts a photo of his missing daughter with a caption: “Praise be to God… It seems my daughter Heba, after her disappearance, has sent us a gift from Heaven. We have just discovered my wife is pregnant.”
But the celebratory mood is soon over, because Emad now faces the issue of feeding his family. Between his loved ones and his faithful friend, any choice will hurt. Luckily, the dog’s owner has recovered from his injuries, and wants him back. Emad makes a final video bidding farewell to his companion as he walks with him. The caption reads: “Goodbye, my friend Shuhaybar. I am sorry that I can not provide you with enough to eat. I am sending you to a safer place where you will find food, water and a veterinarian.”
And, like the ending of an old Western, our canine hero walks off into the sunset.
You can learn more about Emad here.
The post The Canine and the Refugee first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeated an unverified Israeli claim about its killing of at least 18 people, including six UN employees, in its strike of a school in Gaza this week — even as he supposedly called on Israel to do more to protect humanitarian sites in its genocide of Palestinians in the region. On Thursday, Blinken said, “we need to see humanitarian sites protected…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News
West Papuan independence advocate Octo Mote is in Aotearoa New Zealand to win support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for more than 60 years.
Mote is vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and is being hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a “hero” for West Papua.
He spoke at a West Papua seminar at the Māngere Mountain Education Centre tonight.
ULMWP president Benny Wenda has alleged more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed since the occupation, and millions of hectares of ancestral forests, rivers and mountains have been destroyed or polluted for “corporate profit”.
The struggle for West Papuans
“Being born a West Papuan, you are already an enemy of the nation [Indonesia],” Mote says.
“The greatest challenge we are facing right now is that we are facing the colonial power who lives next to us.”
If West Papuans spoke up about what was happening, they were considered “separatists”, Mote says, regardless of whether they are journalists, intellectuals, public servants or even high-ranking Indonesian generals.
“When our students on the ground speak of justice, they’re beaten up, put in jail and [the Indonesians] kill so many of them,” Mote says.
Mote is a former journalist and says that while he was working he witnessed Indonesian forces openly fire at students who were peacefully demonstrating their rights.
“We are in a very dangerous situation right now. When our people try to defend their land, the Indonesian government ignores them and they just take the land without recognising we are landowners,” he says.
The ‘ecocide’ of West Papua
The ecology in West Papua iss being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction. Mote says Indonesia wants to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.
He says he is trying to educate the world that defending West Papua means defending the world, especially small islands in the Pacific.
West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, bordering the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea has the world’s third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and it is crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.
Mote says the continued deforestation of New Guinea, which West Papuan leaders are trying to stop, would greatly impact on the small island countries in the Pacific, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change.
Mote also says their customary council in West Papua has already considered the impacts of climate change on small island nations and, given West Papua’s abundance of land the council says that by having sovereignty they would be able to both protect the land and support Pacific Islanders who need to migrate from their home islands.
In 2021, West Papuan leaders pledged to make ecocide a serious crime and this week Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a court proposal to the International Criminal Court (ICJ) to recognise ecocide as a crime.
Support from local Indonesians
Mote says there are Indonesians who support the indigenous rights movement for West Papuans. He says there are both NGOs and a Papuan Peace Network founded by West Papuan peace campaigner Neles Tebay.
“There is a movement growing among the academics and among the well-educated people who have read the realities among those who are also victims of the capitalist investors, especially in Indonesia when they introduced the Omnibus Law.”
The so-called Omnibus Law was passed in 2020 as part of outgoing President Joko Widodo’s goals to increase investment and industrialisation in Indonesia. The law was protested against because of concerns it would be harmful for workers due to changes in working conditions, and the environment because it would allow for increased deforestation.
Mote says there has been an “awakening”, especially among the younger generations who are more open-minded and connected to the world, who could see it both as a humanitarian and an environmental issue.
The ‘transfer’ of West Papua to Indonesia
“The [former colonial nation] Dutch [traded] us like a cow,” Mote says.
The former Dutch colony was passed over to Indonesia in 1963 in disputed circumstances but the ULMWP calls it an “invasion”.
From 1957, the Soviet Union had been supplying arms to Indonesia and, during that period, the Indonesian Communist Party had become the largest political party in the country.
The US government urged the Dutch government to give West Papua to Indonesia in an attempt to appease the communist-friendly Indonesian government as part of a US drive to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.
The US engineered a meeting between both countries, which resulted in the New York Agreement, giving control of West Papua to the UN in 1962 and then Indonesia a year later.
The New York Agreement stipulated that the population of West Papua would be entitled to an act of self-determination.
The ‘act of no choice’
This decolonisation agreement was titled the 1969 Act of Free Choice, which is referred to as “the act of no choice” by pro-independence activists.
Mote says they witnessed “how the UN allowed Indonesia to cut us into pieces, and they didn’t say anything when Indonesia manipulated our right to self-determination”.
The manipulation Mote refers to is for the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a national referendum, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1025 West Papuan “representatives” to vote on behalf of the 816,000 people. The representatives were allegedly threatened, bribed and some were held at gunpoint to ensure a unanimous vote.
Leaders of the West Papuan independence movement assert that this was not a real opportunity to exercise self-determination as it was manipulated. However, it was accepted by the UN.
Pacific support at UN General Assembly
Mote has came to Aotearoa after the 53rd Pacific Island Forum Leaders summit in Tonga last week and he has come to discuss plans over the next five years. Mote hopes to gain support to take what he calls the “slow-motion genocide” of West Papua back to the UN General Assembly.
“In that meeting we formulated how we can help really push self-determination as the main issue in the Pacific Islands,” Mote says.
Mote says there was a focus on self-determination of West Papua, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti. He also said the focus was on what he described as the current colonisation issue with capitalists and global powers having vested interests in the Pacific region.
The movement got it to the UN General Assembly in 2018, so Mote says it is achievable. In 2018, Pacific solidarity was shown as the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu all spoke out in support of West Papua.
They affirmed the need for the matter to be returned to the United Nations, and the Solomon Islands voiced its concerns over human rights abuses and violations.
What needs to be done
He says that in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government accountable for its actions in West Papua. He also says outgoing President Widodo should be held accountable for his “involvement”.
Mote says New Zealand is the strongest Pacific nation that would be able to push for the human rights and environmental issues happening, especially as he alleges Australia always backs Indonesian policies.
He says he is looking to New Zealand to speak up about the atrocities taking place in West Papua and is particularly looking for support from the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori for political support.
The coalition government announced a plan of action on July 30 this year, which set a new goal of $6 billion in annual two-way trade with Indonesia by 2029.
“New Zealand is strongly committed to our partnership with Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said at the time.
“There is much more we can and should be doing together.”
Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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