Category: israel

  • Israeli soldiers attacked UN peacekeepers at an observation post in south Lebanon who were observing the military’s nearby raids, the UN said Friday, as Israeli forces appear to be targeting people documenting their assault on the country. In a statement, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said that peacekeepers were at a permanent observation post near Dhayra on Tuesday…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In an extended interview, Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha discusses the situation in Gaza and his new book of poetry titled Forest of Noise. He fled Gaza in December after being detained by the Israeli military, but many of his extended family members were unable to escape. He reads a selection of poems from Forest of Noise, while sharing the stories of friends and family still…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, has said the ‘darkest moment’ of Israel’s war is unfolding in northern Gaza as the ‘Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and starvation, as well as being forced to choose between mass displacement and being trapped in an active conflict zone’. Türk called on the international community to uphold humanitarian law

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Oct. 23, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

    Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians across northern Gaza have been forced on a death march by the Israeli army since Monday, October 21. Northern Gaza is being emptied of its inhabitants, and one of Israel’s strategies in achieving this goal is to take out the area’s few remaining social institutions: hospitals.

    As part of its ongoing offensive on northern Gaza, the Israeli army has been trying to clear out the entire area north of Gaza City for the past 18 days. At least 200,000 people continue to stay there, many of them fearing, according to local testimonies, that they will be targeted on the way south or in Israeli-designated “safe zones,” which have been consistently bombarded over recent months. The ongoing siege includes a second siege-within-the-siege on the Jabalia refugee camp, accompanied by a massive bombing and shelling campaign that is forcing tens of thousands of people to leave their homes. Many of them have headed to Beit Lahia, and particularly to Kamal Adwan Hospital. Over the past 18 days, the hospital has been issuing daily calls for help, warning of an imminent humanitarian catastrophe.

    The Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia is one of three functioning hospitals in the northern Gaza governorate. The hospital is the only fully functional medical center in the north, with a specialized neonatal section for newborns.

    The two other hospitals in Gaza are barely functional. The Indonesian Hospital in the town of Sheikh Zayed went out of services last week after Israeli troops besieged it and invaded its surroundings. Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, smaller in size, has suspended most of its services and only functions at a limited capacity. On Tuesday, October 22, the al-Awda Hospital’s director, Bakr Abu Safiyeh, told al-Ghad TV that Israeli quadcopter drones were opening fire directly on the hospital.

    Dr. Baker said that Israeli quadcopters were also opening fire on anybody moving in the streets, including ambulances. According to the hospital director, an Israeli strike targeted an ambulance carrying a mother who had just given birth. The mother was killed, Dr. Baker said, and the baby was later found alive by rescue teams and was taken to Kamal Adwan Hospital’s neonatal section.

    Why targeting hospitals is the key to emptying northern Gaza

    Named after Kamal Adwan, a Palestinian resistance leader assassinated by Israel in Beirut in 1973, the hospital has become a central destination for the wounded and the displaced. Like most other hospitals in Gaza over the past year of genocidal war, Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only remaining public space in northern Gaza that offers services and provides shelter, representing the backbone of Gazan civil society and social cohesion. That is why Israel is targeting it, with the aim of forcibly expelling the population in service of the Israeli plan to empty the north. This has now come to be called “the Generals’ Plan.”

    Two weeks before Israel began the current siege, Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers that he was considering the “Generals’ plan,” so named for the proposal put forward by senior Israeli army officials in early September based on the vision of retired Israeli general Giora Eiland, who wrote an Op-Ed a year ago explaining how northern Gaza should be emptied of the entire population through mass starvation and extermination.

    The plan is an enhanced version of what Israel has already been doing for the past year, including targeting and forcibly evacuating hospitals. Israeli forces raided al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for the first time in November, when the compound and its surroundings were crowded with displaced families, and forced medics, patients, and displaced people to leave. But in February, when Israeli forces began to withdraw from parts of Gaza, including Gaza City, Palestinians returned to al-Shifa and began to operate parts of it again as displaced families began to take over its spaces once more.

    Then, in April, Israeli forces invaded al-Shifa a second time in a raid that lasted several weeks with the purpose of accelerating social collapse in Gaza City. The Israeli army combed the hospital building by building and floor by floor, destroying equipment and, according to survivor testimonies gathered by Mondoweiss at the time, executing hundreds of civil government employees and separating people into differently-colored bracelet. At the end of the operation, Dr. Marwan Abu Saada, Deputy Director of al-Shifa, told UN News that the destruction of al-Shifa “took out the heart of the health system in the Gaza Strip,” adding that “al-Shifa is finished forever.”

    In December 2023, two months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces raided the Kamal Adwan hospital and forced medical staff, patients, and displaced civilians to evacuate. The hospital resumed partial services in July after joint efforts by the World Health Organization and other international parties, coupled with pressure on Israel to allow limited quantities of humanitarian aid into the north.

    As Israel set its eyes on Gaza’s northernmost governorate to execute Eiland’s plan, Kamal Adwan Hospital is now the last bastion of Palestinian steadfastness in the north. This makes it a prime target in the ongoing Israeli offensive. Kamal Adwan came close to completely shutting down multiple times, mainly due to the lack of fuel for power generators, saved every time by intensified pressure by international parties on Israel to allow limited quantities of fuel to pass through.

    Kamal Adwan Hospital weathers siege and overcapacity

    “We need blood units, shrouds for the dead, doctors, and food,” Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, told the media on Wednesday, October 23, signaling that Israeli forces had cut off internet services from the area.

    The day before, on October 22, Dr. Abu Safiyeh told the media that the hospital had run out of blood units, had a shortage of medical staff, that the available staff was hungry and exhausted, and that the power generators were about to run out of fuel.

    Dr. Abu Safiyeh also indicated that the hospital was treating 130 wounded, including 14 on ventilators, and that medics were unable to evacuate the wounded from the streets because of the risk of being targeted by Israeli quadcopter fire. He also called upon international entities to open a humanitarian route to evacuate the wounded, and described his hospital as “a mass grave.”

    A week earlier, on October 16, Dr. Abu Safiyeh posted a video he took inside the Kamal Adwan Hospital’s newborn children’s section. The video showed babies inside incubators and Palestinian nurses caring for them. “These are children with difficult cases, and more cases are on the way, as we have scheduled cesarean births for tomorrow,” he said while filming.

    “This baby girl here arrived after her family was targeted by [an Israeli] strike,” said Abu Safiyeh while filming one particular newborn. “Her mother and father were martyred, as well as her grandmother, and she is now alone with a wound to the head and a secondary inflammation,” he explained. “If fuel doesn’t arrive [for power generators] there will be a humanitarian catastrophe for these children,” he warned.

    In the hospital’s sections, the medical staff described their working conditions. “There are cases of burning, internal bleeding, skull fractures, and limb amputations,” Dr. Ameen Abu Amshah, serving at Kamal Adwan, told Mondoweiss. “Out of every 10 to 15 wounded we receive at once, an average of seven are urgent cases for surgery. We just don’t have the capacity for all this, and we are forced to prioritize the cases that can be saved” said Dr. Abu Amshah.

    “The occupation army has been ordering doctors to leave, including through phone calls,” said Abu Amshah. “This is an extermination. Northern Gaza is being exterminated, Jabalia is being exterminated, and Kamal Adwan hospital is being exterminated, but we will not leave.”

    Forced death march

    On Tuesday, October 23, Israeli drones dropped leaflets and aired voice messages at Palestinians who remained in the surroundings of Kamal Adwan and inside its premises, ordering them to leave. Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinians were being gathered and forced to move out of other shelters after arresting men among them. Thousands were left stranded in the street far away from the last standing public facilities and forced to take the road yet again at gunpoint, as shown by footage aired by the Israeli army.

    Dr. Abu Amshah at Kamal Adwan, however, told Mondoweiss that he knows one thing; that despite the lack of food, exhaustion, the siege, and Israeli drones, “we Palestinian doctors will not leave. We will stay for our people.”


    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In the ever-unfolding context of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, the players more astutely silent in its preceding months have come very much to the fore of discussion in the British and American legacy media. One of these regional players is, of course, Iran.

    Iran: at the centre of a geopolitical storm

    Iran’s foreign policy towards Israel has been greatly exaggerated in terms of its forcefulness and commitment, especially when discussing instances such as the April bombardment of Israel by Iran and the later launching of missiles towards the nation just mere weeks ago.

    A largely ineffective gesture of retaliation against the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, it killed no Israelis and minorly-injured few others – acting as a direct challenge to the media’s often-touted view of Iranian diplomacy and wider polity as one motivated by extremism and hyper-religious fervour.

    Persia, as it was known until 1930, can perhaps be said to have a brighter life ahead of it than the one it currently leads. Yet clearly the West, in its framing of Iran’s recent history and current events, have analysed it incorrectly, and for a clear reason.

    The filthy legacy of the War on Terror has elevated crackpots into public intellectuals and political hawks into great statesmen, who comment incessantly on the subject of Iranian life and politics. Their spew of pseudo-intellectual nonsense on the barbarism of the nation of Iran misses a much easier critique.

    A modern tyranny

    The Iranian state system is not, as they would believe, suicidally committed to antiquated ideas of Pan-Islamism, Sharia, and the like, but instead a deeply unprincipled and inefficient modern tyranny.

    It is a system which can and eventually will be toppled, for it is a certified gerontocracy, whose arthritic puppet-masters grow increasingly unpopular, especially with the youth of Iran. And whilst indeed one can grant the danger they pose to the nominal “international order” we supposedly maintain, they are not exceptional in this due to their religious configuration, and are no more dangerous a regional power than the Israeli state or that of the House of Saud.

    The discourse surrounding Iran for the period following the 1979 Revolution has been one focused on the movement of so-called “Islamic Fundamentalism”. This in itself is a misnomer, as the preferred term of the more orthodox movements of political Islam themselves prefer the term Tadjid, or revivalist Islam – suggesting, in its right-wing formulations, a more palingenetic strain.

    These movements, which in their European parallels were often historically aligned with fascistic ones, have sought to reclaim pasts which as political scientist Oliver Roy points out, were never materially realised.

    This blundering misunderstanding, that ultra-orthodoxy has inordinately effected the politics of the MENA region, has dramatically influenced Western foreign policy and the way it is discussed for the worse.

    Diminutive figures

    More convincing is the argument that while the revival of a pan-Islamic ideology may have had some sway in the rhetoric of political leaders following the humiliation of 1967, the states themselves are much more turgid, and as much committed to the geopolitical advantage-gaining of their given nation-state.

    From the first two years of the post-revolutionary euphoria, the Ayatollah Khomeini was making compromises on the supposed Islamification of his nation. The constitution, derived as it is from the 1906 Iranian one and the constitution of the Fifth French Republic, has deeply secularised principles enshrined into its foundations.

    And whilst the Islamic Republican Party cracked down on virtually all leftist and other Tadjid opposition to the point of their extinction following the bombings of 1981, the acceptance of that party and its descendants to recognise and placidly concede to the demands of modernisation and industrialisation is demonstrable.

    This compromising attitude is shown today in the diminutive figure of Ali Khomeini, 3rd President of the Islamic Republic and current Supreme Leader.

    This man, one who stands as a veritable pilchard next to the great white Ruhollah, frequently sides, and therefore gives his authority to, the conservative forces in the Majles (Iranian Parliament).

    He holds this power under the Veleyat e Faqih, the principle of the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, which gives him the divinely anointed final say on Iranian law in his withered hands – with nominal political impartiality.

    This is not an Iranian problem

    There is however, no discernable partiality towards theology shown in his governance, and in himself he tells of the true nature of revivalist conservative movements in Iran and the wider Islamic political sphere. Contrary to standing on first principles, divinely bestowed and communicated, these men are deeply compromised and compromising figures.

    Of course, the characteristic is shown to some extent across all states globally. Focusing regionally, however, and the corruption of the Israeli state can be shown to be similarly dangerous, as the Knesset members slaughter tens of thousands in the Gaza strip and light up the Lebanese hills with bombings.

    Similar is the reputation of the disgraceful ruling family of Saudi Arabia, who despite their 70+ year long ties with the United States, regularly exploit foreign workers, and proceed to lock up, torture, or otherwise silence opposition in their borders and beyond them.

    Iran is no exception in the region, as even their funding of ‘proscribed’ ‘terror’ organisations can be paralleled in the funding of mad Israeli settlers in the Occupied West Bank by the Israeli government.

    If Iran is no anomaly in their diplomatic licentiousness, as they have their moral equivalents mere miles away, then all should be held to account by governments and the media equally, especially in the West with its history of supposed ethical superiority.

    A society on the edge

    As for Iranian society itself, what can be said is a great deal. The movements of the West, whilst important, will not organically and prosperously drive the Mullahs from power in Tehran. To this point there appears a ground-swell in Iranian society which shows the potential to wrench the current iteration of the state from power.

    The Women’s movement, one which has shown great promise in recent years after the hospitalisation of Mahsa Amini and Arezou Badri, is gaining even greater momentum.

    On the subject of Iranian womanhood – and the broader subject of which Fanon speaks in Algeria Unveiled – despite the pearl clutching and hand wringing of didactic Western liberals, Iranian women have shown that they are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.

    They’ve denied objectification by the Western press by doffing their hijabs in defiance of the authorities, leading protests and demonstrations in their own right. Their demands for autonomy for the women within Iranian society, and their refusal to stand silently whilst the authorities punish them for their mere existence as subjects with thoughts outside of conservative values is inspiring.

    Similar manifestations of this growing tide can be seen in the movement for Kurdish liberation in the nation, subdued as it may be in comparison to that of other Kurdish movements elsewhere. The movement has its members imprisoned and sentenced to death in Iran, and fought for its own emancipation not only during the days of the British empire, but since long after the arrival of white supremacist armies in their territory.

    Iran: don’t be fooled by the West – or Iranian leadership either

    This drive of righteous men and women will likely come topple what remains of the Shia orthodoxy, illegitimate as it is in the eyes of many young Iranians, and deserves our support as leftists.

    We cannot be led astray in believing, for example, as some do, that the support for resistance against the state of Israel itself grants an excuse to act in flagrant disrespect and contempt of the independence of religious and ethnic minorities, and other oppressed groups on the domestic front.

    Iranian society is seeking and will continue to seek a higher point than the one which sees an ostensibly divine government ruling cynically over a subdued public.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By James Horton

    This post was originally published on Canary.


  • This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Palestine Action has probably just caused a global internal panic for a PR firm that lobbies on behalf of Israel weapons manufacturers. Because the last time the group targeted company APCO, it caused it to go into a tailspin.

    Palestine Action: taking on APCO again

    On Friday 25 October, activists from Palestine Action blockaded the London headquarters of ‘APCO Worldwide’, registered political lobbyists for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons firm:

    Returning to the APCO site after a September action of the same effect, activists locked-on to block the office’s main entrance, the premises sprayed in red paint:

    Police swarmed onto the scene, but were unable to do anything for several hours after Palestine Action’s 8:30am wake up call to APCO:

    Eventually cops arrested the actionists – but not until they’d been there for around four hours:

    At a time when Elbit System’s weapons are being used to commit genocide in Gaza, and a genocide within a genocide in north Gaza, APCO is working to represent Elbit in the halls of the British parliament and government.

    APCO: lobbying for genocide

    APCO is a provider of consultant lobbying services to ‘Elbit Systems UK’, a major exporter of drone components to Israel and a subsidiary of ‘Elbit Systems Ltd’ which provides for the vast majority of Israel’s military drone and ground vehicles.

    Among APCO’s staff is ‘Lord Stuart Polak’, whose own lobbying firm ‘TWC’ was purchased by APCO in 2018, six years after TWC was reported to have conducted a “secret campaign” to secure a £500m Ministry of Defence contract for Elbit, according to the Sunday Times.

    However, Palestine Action had previously managed to disrupt the ‘business as usual’ of APCO. As it tweeted, after its last action in September, the company went into meltdown – cancelling internal meetings. It was because there had been disquiet from employees in the Middle East over APCO’s involvement with Israel:

    APCO Worldwide is doubtless also concerned with Elbit’s relationship to MoD procurement, particularly as Elbit Systems Ltd looks to internationally market its “battle-tested” new products, – including new lines of missiles, and its ‘quadcopter’ drones recently displayed for the British market at Elbit’s Bristol HQ.

    Palestine Action: 16, not out

    Currently, 16 Palestine action prisoners are jailed across Britain, ten of whom have been detained and investigated using powers under the ‘Terrorism Act’, breaches of which they were not subsequently charged with.

    These individuals have been imprisoned using powers abused at the request of Israel’s war machine. FOI information shows that not only Elbit, but the Israeli Embassy, have lobbied the British state to take greater repressive action against Palestine Action activists.

    Its lobbyists have certainly pushed for the same repression.

    Featured image and additional images via Martin Pope

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.


  • This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel’s genocide has so devastated every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure and economy that it would take centuries just to restore the Gaza Strip’s GDP back to the already-depressed level from 2022, the UN has found in a report. Based on the growth rate of Gaza’s economy under Israeli blockade between 2007 and 2022, it would take 350 years to restore Gaza’s GDP from before the genocide…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • First responders have been forced to completely halt operations in north Gaza, officials have announced, as Palestinians say that there is nothing left but death in the region as a result of Israel’s horrific siege. The Gaza Civil Defense agency, the government’s first responders, said that recent Israeli attacks on its workers have forced it to suspend its operations in the north.

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • On Wednesday, Israel issued a clear threat to six journalists who are among the only journalists left documenting atrocities in north Gaza as Israel carries out its extermination and ethnic cleansing campaign against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the region. In a post on X, the Israeli military accused six Al Jazeera journalists of being affiliated with “Hamas and Islamic Jihad…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Multiple Jewish-led organizations on college campuses across the country marked the end of the religious holiday of Sukkot this week by calling for their universities to divest from Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Sukkot commemorates the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering the wilderness, led by Moses, after they were freed from enslavement in Egypt. The holiday is often…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel is escalating its bombardment of Lebanon, leveling numerous buildings, including the offices of Lebanese news station Al Mayadeen. The Israeli military has also attacked the ancient city of Tyre, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site, and killed three Lebanese soldiers in a strike in southern Lebanon, all while continuing to defy international calls for a ceasefire. “What we’re seeing is…

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    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.

  • Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is blasting the Biden administration for its refusal to investigate an Israeli attack on a group of journalists, including an American, for over a year, and is urging the administration to open a probe. In a letter sent to President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, Sanders and 11 other members of Congress said…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Seg1 rima tyre ancient city

    Israel is escalating its bombardment of Lebanon, leveling numerous buildings, including the offices of Lebanese news station Al Mayadeen. The Israeli military has also attacked the ancient city of Tyre, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site, and killed three Lebanese soldiers in a strike in southern Lebanon, all while continuing to defy international calls for a ceasefire. “What we’re seeing is a complete degeneration into a war that has no rules, that respects no international conventions. There’s one side in this war that has complete impunity,” says Lebanese sociologist Rima Majed in Beirut. “Israel is targeting civilians in most cases. … This is just terrorism.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Declassified UK’s Matt Kennard spoke at Transform’s 2024 conference on Saturday 19 October. And he focused in particular on the struggle to stop Britain’s participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    As Declassified has reported, covert US flights have been leaving from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And dozens of British warplanes have flown to both Israel and Lebanon. British spy flights have also been passing intelligence to Israel.

    This, he told conference attendees:

    is not a country which is complicit in what is happening in Gaza. It’s a country which is participating. A direct participant.

    British politicians who have allowed this, he insisted, should face arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC). If they don’t, then “the law of the jungle” will reign in the world.

    The mainstream media could expose, and end, British participation in genocide. But it won’t.

    Matt Kennard didn’t let the mainstream media off the hook, either. It has been complicit in Israel’s genocide in two key ways, he argued. One is that the mainstream media “enforce the propaganda of the Israelis”:

    And they’re doing that in a system where they won’t go to prison. They might lose their job if they start doing proper journalism, but they won’t go to prison.

    The second way is that “they do not report the reality of what our role is in Gaza”. He said:

    If the mainstream media reported it, there would be pressure on the government from a wide part of the society and the population to bring it to an end. Those spy flights would be grounded within a week… We’re a small website, Declassified. Four people work there. And we’ve created an absolute storm in Cyprus… And that’s just four people. Can you imagine if the resources of the BBC or the Guardian were used to actually expose that role? They’d have to ground those planes in a week.

    He emphasised that:

    The government is aware of all this, which is why they are launching a massive crackdown on journalists and activists who are exposing their role.

    These authoritarian efforts, he asserted, are:

    a sign that they know that they have lost control of the population. They’ve lost control of the narrative, despite owning the mainstream media.

    And by trying to intimidate journalists and campaigners:

    The signal they’re trying to send is to scare us into submission, to scare us to stop speaking out. But it should have the opposite impact.

    Matt Kennard: “the empire has never been this exposed”

    In a comment that should rally British socialists to unify around a common mission of peace and justice, Matt Kennard insisted:

    The empire has never been this exposed. The media has never been exposed. So in that sense, the door is ajar, and we need to kick it in.

    The 2003 invasion of Iraq, another key moment in recent history, was different. The reason for this is that “social media wasn’t around, so the media propaganda was much more [saturated]. It was very hard to circumvent that system and reveal the truth.” In 2024, on the other hand:

    you just need to look at your phone and you’ve got citizen reporters in Gaza who are giving us the information, risking their lives.

    Now is not just the time to push for a united left-wing movement because Keir Starmer and co have destroyed any hope for transformative change under the Labour Party. It is also the time to unite because we are witnessing a key Western ally commit genocide in real time on live stream. As Kennard says:

    Personally, I did always think: What would I have done during the Nazi Holocaust if I’d known what was happening? Would I have taken on myself to try and stop it and do everything I can. Well now, I say to people, ‘well, you know what you would’ve done in the Nazi Holocaust, because it’s what you’re doing now to stop what’s going on in Gaza’.

    Keep an eye out for our other articles from the Transform conference 2024.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • In a post on X on Wednesday 23 October, Israel’s military claimed it had found documentation “confirming military affiliation of six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad terrorist organizations, including personnel tables, lists of terrorist training courses, phone directories, and salary documents for terrorists”.

    The IDF added that these alleged documents “serve as proof of the integration of Hamas terrorists within the Qatari Al Jazeera media network”, and claimed that “most of the journalists that the IDF has exposed as operatives in Hamas’ military wing spearhead the propaganda for Hamas at Al Jazeera, especially in northern Gaza”.

    In response to these claims, the network released a statement saying:

    Al Jazeera categorically rejects the Israeli occupation forces’ portrayal of our journalists as terrorists and denounces their use of fabricated evidence’. It also said the claims were ‘a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide.

    The Canary showed the IDF’s alleged ‘evidence’ to someone from Gaza who is Arabic speaking. They concluded that the evidence was ‘falsified’, as the Arabic was “weak”, and not written in a way that a natural Arabic writer would.

    Our source also concluded that all this means Israel intends to assassinate the journalists.

    Israel’s wider campaign against Al Jazeera

    The six named journalists, whose photos also appear on the post, are Anas al-Sharif, Talal Aruki, Alaa Salama, Hosam Shabat, Ismail Farid, and Ashraf Saraj.

    This is part of a wider campaign against the network and its journalists, with Netanyahu previously branding Al Jazeera a ‘terror channel’, and accusing it of harming national security and actively participating in the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel.

    The channel has been banned from reporting inside Israel and also the West Bank where last month, its bureau in Ramallah – which, according to the Oslo Accords, is under Palestinian control – was raided by heavily armed soldiers and closed down for 45 days. Staff were given 10 minutes to leave.

    A statement released yesterday by the Committee to Protect Journalists said Israel:

    has repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing credible evidence.

    Al Jazeera is one of only a few news organisations still broadcasting from Gaza, and its journalists have been the target of many Israeli attacks, simply for reporting on the endless atrocities they witness on a daily basis.

    In August, Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul was also accused by the IDF of being a Hamas operative who took part in the 7 October attacks. The network denied these allegations and said the IDF had not provided “any proof, documentation or video” of its claims, and the allegations highlighted “Israel’s long history of fabrications and false evidence used to cover up its heinous crimes”.

    Al-Ghoul was decapitated by Israel when the car he was travelling in was bombed.

    Killing journalists

    Earlier this month, freelance journalist Hassan Hamad was killed in an Israeli airstrike which hit his home in Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza.

    Al Jazeera reported Hamad’s killing and stated the journalist was warned by an Israeli officer to stop filming in Gaza.

    Al Jazeera cameraman Ali Attar was hit by an airstrike in central Gaza and the next day Fadi al-Wahidi, also a cameraman, was shot in the neck by an Israeli sniper while covering the attacks in Jabalia, in Northern Gaza. Both journalists are in a critical condition and awaiting Israel to approve their evacuation for medical treatment. All approvals from receiving countries are in place, but no more can be done until Israel takes action.

    Meanwhile, al-Wahidi, who became paralysed after the shooting, has now fallen into a coma. And still they await evacuation.

    Israel, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza, since the beginning of this genocide. Only those embedded with the IDF are currently permitted entry into the strip, but they only get to see what the military wants them to see.

    So, Gaza’s journalists are the world’s eyes and ears and risk their lives to draw our attention to Israel’s crimes and the resulting human suffering. They, like the rest of the population, are struggling to survive, but they still continue with their work.

    Without them we would have no idea what is happening in the enclave. They too have been displaced, have no electricity, are hungry, thirsty, and have lost family members. Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif earlier this week discovered, while live on air, that Israel had killed his relatives.

    Israel: yet more war crimes

    Al-Sharif has already received several threats. Once by phone last year, from the Israeli military, ordering him to stop his coverage and leave Northern Gaza. Then, in August, IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee accused him of “presenting a lie” in his coverage of an Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of people in a school building.

    The spokesperson also insinuated the journalist had ties to Hamas, without providing evidence.

    In a further attempt to silence the truth, al-Sharif, along with the other five journalists named by the IDF yesterday, now stand accused of being ‘terrorists’. Their lives will surely be in imminent danger, yet while the genocide continues so will their stories, as they continue to hope the world will listen.

    According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 123 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since 7 October, more than at any other time since the organisation began gathering data in 1992. As of yesterday, 69 journalists have been reported arrested, and there have also been multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and targeted killings of family members.

    The deliberate targeting of journalists is a war crime, yet they are frequently coming under attack despite being clearly identifiable in jackets and helmets marked ‘press’, or travelling in well-marked press vehicles.

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza. Following the first two complaints, the office of International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan assured RSF that crimes against journalists are included in its investigation into the situation in Palestine:

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ITV reality show Big Brother has found itself at the centre of a storm – all because it caved in to the pro-Israel lobby over… wait for it… a watermelon.

    Big Brother: what’s occurring?

    On Wednesday 23 October, viewers were left wondering what was going on, as ITV pulled Tuesday 22’s episode from ITVX:

    It was previously shown on both TV and streaming. However, something had clearly got ITV bosses concerned – as an official account confirmed it had removed the episode form ITVX due to “compliance reasons”:

    People began speculating why. If you also happen to watch Married At First Sight, you’ll know reality TV this season has a problem with toxic masculinity (but that’s for another article):

    https://twitter.com/SH4UNIE/status/1849136903737446485

    A lot of X users thought they knew what the problem with the Big Brother episode was:

    And unfortunately, they were right:

    Watermelons worse than an actual genocide

    Ali was indeed wearing a t-shirt with a watermelon. As Bon Appetit wrote:

    In 1967, during the Six-Day War fought between Israel and neighboring countries including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the Israeli government banned displays of the Palestinian flag within its borders to curtail Palestinian and Arab nationalism. The ban lasted until 1993, when the Oslo Accords loosened restrictions on Palestinians inside of Israel.

    In the time between the war and the accords, the watermelon became a protest symbol. A sliced watermelon, with its bright red fruit, green-and-white rind, and speckling of black seeds, contains all of the colors of the Palestinian flag. The fruit was also readily available for use in demonstrations against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, where protesters carried wedges of watermelon in place of the flag.

    The watermelon has remained a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israel illegal – yes, illegal – occupation of their territories. However, clearly ITV and Big borther thought Ali showing solidarity with people currently being subjected to Israel’s “plausible” genocide is also illegal.

    Well, it is if you’re pro-Israel lobby group Campaign Against Antisemitism. Because it kicked off (misrepresenting the watermelon symbol in the process). It claimed it had complained to Ofcom (the broadcast TV regulator). Which is probably why ITV then edited out Ali’s watermelon:

    However, earlier in the series security violently ripped a Palestinian flag out of an audience member’s hands. Not connected?

    As users on X pointed out, all housemates’ clothing is checked before they go into the Big Brother house. So, clearly Ali’s tee wasn’t a problem before:

    Lobby group Campaign Against Antisemitism has repeatedly weaponised criticism of the Israeli government and state by calling it antisemitic – which it is not. This is another perfect example of that.

    Also, Big Brother is an entertainment show – not a news programme. Therefore, rules around impartiality are far more loose – and it is unlikely Ali’s tee did breach Ofcom standards. Yet, ITV still caved in.

    Big Brother. What a mess.

    As one user rightly summed up:

    Israel has slaughtered over 40,000 people in Gaza, including around 16,500 children. As the world saw, it burned the 19-year-old Shaban Al-Dalu alive. He was sheltering in a tent in the compound of Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital with his parents and five siblings when an Israeli bomb hit, one of many such attacks.

    A fireball engulfed him whilst he was still attached to an IV drip. Images of this atrocity have gone viral around the world.

    But yes – tell me again about watermelons, Big Brother?

    Featured image via screengrab

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 22, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Israel Defense Forces troops recently forced their way into a United Nations peacekeeper base in southern Lebanon and fired white phosphorus munitions in close enough proximity to injure 15 U.N. personnel, according to a report published Tuesday.

    The Financial Times reviewed “a confidential report outlining a dozen recent incidents in which the IDF attacked international troops in Lebanon.” The newspaper said the report was prepared by a country contributing troops to the 10,000-strong U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

    UNIFIL forces and facilities have been repeatedly attacked by Israeli troops since the IDF launched a ground invasion of Lebanon earlier this month amid heavy aerial bombardment that has killed or wounded thousands of Lebanese. UNIFIL has condemned attacks on its positions and personnel as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

    According to the confidential report, Israeli forces began directly firing on UNIFIL bases on October 8. Two days later, two Indonesian peacekeepers were injured when an IDF tank fired on an observation tower.

    In a separate incident that same day, IDF troops opened fire on a UNIFIL bunker where Italian peacekeepers sought refuge.

    “This was not a mistake and not an accident,” Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said following the incident. “It could constitute a war crime and represented a very serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

    On October 13, UNIFIL said two IDF tanks crashed through the main gate of one of its bases and fired on a watchtower, destroying cameras and damaging the structure. The tanks left the base after about 45 minutes, following complaints by UNIFIL officials.

    However, the report states that within an hour, IDF troops fired what UNIFIL believes were white phosphorus rounds approximately 100 meters, or 328 feet, north of the base, injuring 15 people.

    Israel denies deliberately targeting UNIFIL troops and claims without evidence that U.N. peacekeepers are being used as human shields by Hezbollah, which has launched nearly relentless volleys of rockets and other projectiles at Israel in solidarity with Gaza. Israel has demanded the U.N. evacuate its peacekeepers from southern Lebanon. UNIFIL and countries contributing troops to the mission have steadfastly refused.

    “Despite the pressure being exerted on the mission and our troop-contributing countries, peacekeepers remain in all positions,” UNIFIL said on Sunday. “We will continue to undertake our mandated tasks to monitor and report.”

    White phosphorus is banned for use in civilian areas but is commonly deployed on battlegrounds as a smokescreen or to smoke out enemy forces. It burns as hot as 1,500°F. Water does not extinguish it. Upon contact, white phosphorus burns thermally and chemically straight through to the bone.

    It can also enter the bloodstream and cause organ failure. Dressed injuries can reignite when bandages are removed and the wounds are reexposed to oxygen. Relatively mild white phosphorus burns are often fatal. Survivors often suffer various physical disabilities.

    Israeli forces have used white phosphorus in Gaza and Lebanon since last October, when Israel retaliated for the deadliest-ever attack on its soil by obliterating the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave in a war for which it is now on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.

    Israel has also used white phosphorus in past wars, including during the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and at a United Nations school during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza. Responding to a 2013 petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice filed by human rights groups including Human Rights Watch, the IDF said it would no longer use white phosphorus in populated areas, with “very narrow exceptions” that it would not disclose.

    Other nations also use white phosphorus, including the United States, whose forces fired munitions containing the chemical agent during the invasion of Iraq and elsewhere across the region during the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terrorism.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • This Saturday 26 October, people from Bristol together with groups from around the region, will gather to express their horror over the continuing death toll caused by Israel’s genocide in Palestine – by drawing a RED LINE over the Zionist’s entity’s actions.

    The RED LINE for Palestine in Bristol

    A group of campaigners from Bournemouth will be bringing the “RED LINE” which consists of 1.5m wide rolls of red fabric with a total length of kilometre which will be carried on the march. Organisers have hired a drone to capture spectacular footage as the red line snakes around the city.

    The RED LINE March will assemble at 11.30am at the western end of the Bristol Cathedral at the end of Deanery Road, College Green BS1 5TL. A feeder march organised by the group “Queers for Palestine” will also march from the University of Bristol to College Green.

    Following speeches on College Green, the march will start at about 12.00/12.30pm.

    The march will set off using the “ramp” in front of the Council House proceeding to the Centre, Nelson Street, Broadmead Shopping Centre, Broad Weir & Newgate, and will finish for a rally at the Bandstand in Castle Park BS2 0HQ.

    Each 100-metre section of the fabric will be carried by “blocks” representing concerned citizens and professionals.

    These include academics/educators, medics, media-workers, a group pushing empty child buggies representing the enormous death-toll of children, faith groups, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Extinction Rebellion and environmental campaigners, the group Queers for Palestine, and many others.

    This should not have been crossed

    A spokesperson for Bristol Palestine Alliance said:

    The kilometre of Red fabric represents the “Red Line” that civilised society says should not be crossed – yet daily we see Israel crossing every conceivable humanity red line.

    Speakers at the rally will include:-

    • Feda – Bournemouth Red Line.
    • Khaled Fandi – Palestinian activist.
    • Benazir Jatoi – lawyer and activist.
    • Dizraeli – Bristol rapper and poet.
    • Nick Bilborough – Hands Up Project.
    • Neezo – Award winning humanitarian and human rights activist.

    Leading the RED LINE will be a banner bearing the name Shaban Al-Dalou. Footage taken by witnesses on mobile phones showed 19-year-old Shaban Al-Dalou, who was being treated for an injury, lying on his back on a bed, attached to an IV drip, in a makeshift tent hospital, frantically waving his arms before being engulfed by flames ignited by an Israeli bomb.

    These images have gone-viral on social media and have been viewed by millions around the world since the attack.

    The horror in Palestine must stop

    A spokesperson for Bristol Palestine Alliance said:

    It can be hard to comprehend the enormity of over forty thousand deaths in Gaza. But the video of this young man burning to death, seen by millions around the world now, shows us the horrific suffering of just one person in a way we can immediately connect with. Hopefully this will open more people’s eyes to the suffering and injustice of what is happening in Palestine, and together we bring it to a halt.

    In every protracted struggle against injustice there comes a galvanising moment, for instance the Amritsar, Sharpeville, or Soweto massacres, when the world wakes up and takes notice of the enormity of the injustice taking place and moves to halt it. We can only hope this horrific death can be that wake-up call.

    Featured image supplied

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israeli forces have attacked UN peacekeepers in Lebanon at least a dozen times in recent weeks, including one attack in which 15 peacekeepers were injured by white phosphorus, according to a new report. The Financial Times says there have been a dozen Israeli attacks on UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers, damaging bases and wounding peacekeepers, according to a leaked report by…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The health of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced children in Lebanon is at risk, Save the Children warns, as health officials have detected a case of cholera and Israel continues attacking health care centers and workers in its assault on civilians in the country. On Tuesday, Save the Children reported that overcrowding in shelters and a lack of resources for basic hygiene are…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A United Nations report published Tuesday estimates that Israel’s relentless bombardment and siege of the Gaza Strip has erased nearly seven decades of human development progress in just over a year, jeopardizing “the future of Palestinians for generations to come.” The report, produced by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israeli forces are only allowing a handful of aid trucks to enter north Gaza each day after weeks of a total aid blockade, the UN reports. With crucial supplies depleted, the estimated 440,000 Palestinians still trapped in the region are simply “waiting to die,” one UN official said. According to World Food Programme (WFP) country director for Palestine Antoine Renard, Israel is allowing a…

    Source

    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.

  • More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, who says a “trauma industry” has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country’s expansionist wars and human rights abuses. “Though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Young Jewish Americans are playing an outsized role in the movement for Palestine—but not without facing consequences. In a recent article for In These TimesShane Burley investigates the ways anti-Zionist Jews are facing persecution from community institutions they once called home. Burley joins The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion on the growing divide over Zionism in Jewish communities, and the role of youth in this process.

    Studio Production: David Hebden
    Post-Production: Alina Nehlich


    Transcript

    Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you with us. And this is another show in our series Not in Our Name.

    Once again, we’re going to talk to Shane Burley, who’s joined us before. He’s an activist and is co-author of numerous books: Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism; Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse; and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. His work has appeared in NBC, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, Daily Beast, In These Times, Jacobin, Jewish Currents, MSNBC, YES!, and many more places. And his recent article in In These Times, “US Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists”, was an amazing article, really powerful. And he joins us now.

    Shane, good to see you again.

    Shane Burley:  Hey, thanks for having me back, Marc.

    Marc Steiner:  Always. It’s always good to talk to you. We find ourselves in a really strange time, especially in the Jewish world, it seems to me. There’s this gigantic split, which you really focused on in your piece here, that’s taking place. It’s generational, but it’s also political. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the divide inside the Jewish world to be so deep and so profound as it is at this moment.

    Shane Burley:  Yeah, I mean, this is about as difficult… It’s certainly as difficult as it’s been in my lifetime. I can’t think of a moment of Israeli aggression that really split people this profoundly. [Inaudible] led in 2009, there’s really no other moment.

    And frankly, it’s because it’s so severe, as we have a sort of consensus that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide and the unwillingness of a lot of mainstream Jewish institutions to even say that word or acknowledge the reality.

    This is something that’s going to break apart communities. And as I talked about in the article, oftentimes it’s breaking apart progressive Jewish communities where young people and folks who are involved in Israel-Palestine solidarity organizing simply can’t sit by while their leadership either ignores or actively aids Israel’s project.

    Marc Steiner:  So what you covered in this piece literally was major Jewish institutions and the number of people being pushed out of those institutions because of their activities against the war in Gaza, because of their activities around Zionism or not being Zionists.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before where people… I mean, I go back a long way, so I remember in the ’60s the Jewish institutions were at the forefront of civil rights. The majority of white civil rights workers in the South were Jews. And there’s a contradiction that has erupted that this article really touches on deeply, about the divide inside the Jewish world. Talk a bit about what you discovered in that realm in terms of what you wrote here.

    Shane Burley:  Yeah, so I think these lines existed around Zionism for a while, and I talk about that a bit in the book. For example, the Hillel standards of partnership created during the Second Intifada became the standard for most Jewish organizations. And those standards of partnership included you cannot partner with an anti-Zionist organization. And they define it in a little bit more verbose language, but that’s essentially what it’s saying, and that’s become more ubiquitous.

    The difference, I think, now is how serious they are about this, how uncompromising they’ll end up being and how deep they go into people’s personal lives. It’s not just like, for example, if you work at Hillel you can’t just partner with Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization, in your job, you may not be able to do it in your personal life either.

    And so it’s essentially drawing these hard lines. And it’s also part of, I think, how a lot of Jewish organizations are reunderstanding anti-Zionism as beyond the pale, basically that an anti-Zionist or a non-Zionist position is actively hostile to Jewish lives, which I don’t think is always how it has been framed. It is in certain parts of the Jewish right, but now that seems to be where a lot of these mainstream institutions are going to draw their lines and they’re going to cut out large portions of the Jewish left.

    Because we’re not just talking about people who are engaging in BDS organizing and stuff, we’re talking about really, in a critical voice, it feels like their position in these communities or in these jobs is now becoming vulnerable.

    Marc Steiner:  There’s an interesting line here I want to explore with you. You wrote that the interviews you collected with Jewish professionals and other reporting information collected by In These Times illustrates what appears to be a radical rightward turn in mainstream Jewish organizational life over the past year. Talk a bit about that. You literally put it down to this past year. Talk about that right wing turn, why you see it developing, and what it has meant.

    Shane Burley:  I mean, there’s a number of reasons for this. There is the conservatization of these large Jewish organizations which has happened over decades, Israel playing a main role in it, but also just their entrenchment in US politics and how they build their economic base from wealthy donors, things like that.

    Kind of like what we’ve seen in a lot of nonprofit spaces that become more conservative over time. But also the Jewish electorate, still leaning way to the left, also has gotten more conservative over that time. It’s where we get the phrase, “Progressive except for Palestine,” Where there might be progressive positions across the Jewish world except when it comes to Palestine, which, oftentimes, you take a much, much more right-wing turn.

    But what’s happening here, I think, is that the left is now seen as actively hostile in a lot of these mainstream Jewish organizations because they didn’t just line up in support of Israel after Oct. 7. So a lot of organizations that straddle the line, maybe they were leftist Jewish organizations but they still had a good relationship with the larger federations or Jewish organization network, now they are starting to be treated the way Jewish Voice for Peace was or other openly anti-Zionist organizations were in the past.

    So we’re seeing that in basically every one of these relationships. We’re seeing people get kicked out of their local Jewish council. Some congregants and donors are leaving or being kicked out of other places. It’s basically a shift that’s happening. And it’s not just in civic organizations, it’s not just in synagogues, it’s not just in day schools. It’s happening across all of them, as the politics of Israel-Palestine become more entrenched, and more defining, and also slowly shift to the right.

    So much so that all of what Israel’s done in the last year has been reduced simply to whether or not you support Israel’s right to exist in the shadow of Oct. 7. So I think that is now becoming the defining point.

    And so in that way, dissent is not just seen as part of the various constellations of Jewish thought, it’s seen as undermining the very basis of Jewish identity and safety. And so I don’t know that that is going to shift back. This is a really profound change, and it’s defining out huge portions of the young Jewish community.

    Marc Steiner:  So I’m going to read this one other piece from your article here and just explore it a bit more. This is Lizzie Burdock, which is a pseudonym, correct?

    Shane Burley:  It’s a pseudonym, yeah.

    Marc Steiner:  Which I want to talk about that too, the fear that this person had to have not to use their own name. And what this person said to you was, “We are all working in the Jewish community because of how much we care about the Jewish people,” Lizzie Burdock, a former school director at a synagogue in New England who asked to use a pseudonym. Then says, “This is one of the key issues that our generation is navigating, and one that keeps so many Jews away from Judaism and out of the shul.”

    So I mean, the fact that this woman had to use a pseudonym, was frightened to use our own name, says a great deal. And this shift is profound. If you look at the polling even, the growing numbers of younger Jews in this country who just, whether they call themselves non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, but oppose what Israel is doing with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Let me ask you this, as you’re an observer of all this: how profound is the shift? How deep does it go? What does it portend for the future?

    Shane Burley:  This is a situation when the rank and file and the leadership of organizations are going in exact opposite directions. So when you talk about someone like the person you mentioned, this is a working Jewish professional who got into participating in Jewish professional life, they became a Jewish professional directly because they care so profoundly about this. They want to be a part of the next generation of Jewish life.

    And that commitment also comes from their politics too, like the reclamation of ancestral traditions, fighting against assimilation, really creating a multicultural society by maintaining Jewish traditions and customs. So in doing so, they’ve really invested their whole life in this and now find themselves basically at odds with the political ideas that are happening at the top or from certain congregants, things like that.

    And so now the question is, is this committed person, well-educated, really invested in the community, are they now not allowed to be here because they were litmus tested about this one political issue that frankly, doesn’t actually play out in their position all that often?

    And this is happening across the Jewish world at the same time that there’s a leadership vacuum, or people are retiring from these jobs and they can’t get them refilled. It’s harder to hire rabbis, less people are becoming rabbis. It’s harder to hire Jewish educators. It’s harder to hire these people. And so at the same time as they’re having trouble reproducing these organizations, they’re kicking out the people that are often the most tied in, the people that are most involved in it.

    And when you look at the polling, like you mentioned, where an increasing number of young Jews are either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist or just very critical of the status quo in Israel, those are exactly the people that they need to take over these organizations. So kicking out this educated and committed class of folks is one that creates this really dialectical problem in the organizations. And I don’t know how they’re going to start filling those roles if they make this the new standard.

    Marc Steiner:  One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your piece for In These Times was, historically, how these contradictions have been created and what they mean for the future of the Jewish people, but for the future beyond that.

    Because what’s happening in Israel-Palestine at the moment affects the entire globe. It’s very explosive, obviously. We’ve seen now well over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed. The attack on those two kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip were actually, as a point of digression, was where my family lives. Part of my family lives on those kibbutzim. And they were left-wing kibbutzim. That’s part of the contradiction. Some of these people who were attacked in those kibbutzim were people who were working for Israeli-Palestinian peace, and those are the places that were attacked as well. This is loaded with contradictions from the very beginning.

    And you’re seeing, I think, a paranoia inside the Jewish world of people hating Jews, that plays a role in this. But also the oppression that’s been created by the right wing in Israel has heightened those contradictions. I think we’re in a very dangerous and complex moment.

    Shane Burley:  The image of Israel as a national home that everyone can take pride in, that has not just eroded, but it’s completely unfamiliar, I think, to young generations of folks. We’ve had right-wing entrenchment in Israel that’s only gotten more severe in the last 40 years.

    Marc Steiner:  Yeah, yes.

    Shane Burley:  We’re talking about a state that is so overwhelmingly to the right. When you compare, for example, the number of far-right parties in Israel to Europe, Israel is much larger, but also that doesn’t even factor in Likud, which has become this sort of radical far-right ethno-nationalist party itself. And so you’re looking at, basically, this large right-wing base there that’s so much further to the right than you’re actually going to encounter in most countries.

    So what connection do people have to that? Can they actually see themselves in that? Is this a force for Jewish protection and safety? And I don’t think that intuitively makes sense to young folks. Sometimes with older folks that maybe had a different image of growing up, maybe it’s harder to lose that image. But young folks never really started with that perception.

    Marc Steiner:  Right.

    Shane Burley:  Particularly if they come from the left. So we end up with a situation where the protection of Israel feels so far from their normal sense of how you would create safety or how you create political progress, things like that.

    But one thing I think that’s also important is that a lot of these people also talked about their politics in Israel-Palestine, where it’s also about caring about Jewish safety and Israeli Jewish safety. The situation is untenable for Israeli Jews, like you’re talking about. You have the kibbutzim with left-wing Israelis, they get attacked by Hamas Oct. 7. This is coming from a long, long history of the dispossession of Palestinians, it’s creating a volatile, violent situation.

    I don’t look at Israel and think to myself, oh, what a tremendously safe place for Jews. And so if that was the part of your concern, this is obviously not working out the way that you thought it would.

    So all these people are coming in with these complex ideas because of their feelings about Jewish safety, because of their commitment to the continuation of the Jewish people. Those are the motivating issues. And so they’re getting litmus tested on these politics, but not really understanding that their values actually are there. They’re coming in because they care about those things that these organizations claim to care about as well.

    Marc Steiner:  So what did you learn from all these younger Jews who have been kicked out of organizations for merely saying something that’s anti-Zionist, for merely standing up for Palestinian people? Literally being thrown out of these organizations in huge confrontations. What happens to them, and what do you think that portends for the future?

    Shane Burley:  Well, one of the things, I think, that was really important is that, particularly if people went to school specifically to do this kind of work, say they became a rabbi or something, this is really frightening. Because if you have, let’s say, hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, which sometimes people will to become a rabbi, a five, six year graduate program, and then all of a sudden you’re fired because of these commitments you’ve had and maybe public statements you’ve made, or maybe even the organizations are public about it, that could mean that that degree or that history is now null and void and your employment. And that’s really frightening to people.

    People invested lots of their lives, sometimes their whole career in this. And if all of a sudden 95% of the places you’re going to work won’t have you, that puts you into a really crisis situation.

    I think also for folks who have what are, frankly, really common left-wing politics on Israel-Palestine, you often have to build your own organizations, and that is not financially stable enough to actually pay a career salary. You can’t really pay the bills creating a small synagogue where you’re the anti-Zionist rabbi, it’s really tough.

    So all of the economic factors are against you speaking out on Israel-Palestine. It’s really, really a high cost here. That’s part of what I learned about it.

    Another thing too is that a lot of people felt like they had good relationships with the people at work, and that sometimes those people knew about their politics, and it was fine until Oct. 7. Sometimes they did the didn’t ask, didn’t tell. But it was really frightening to people how quickly that relationship dissolved when their opinions about what Israel’s doing in Gaza became public. And that was something I think some people would’ve guessed, but other people were really surprised that that’s what ended up happening.

    I think also the low level of offense that a lot of these situations happen. So for example, one person fired from a Hillel chapter for, ultimately, liking Instagram posts from Jewish Voice for Peace. They weren’t accused of being a member, they weren’t really accused of even public activism. Liking the posts. And those posts were then printed out and handed to them when they’re being terminated.

    So we’re not talking about people being disciplined for going above and beyond, doing something really profound or loud. It’s often very quiet things.

    I think another thing is that a number of these people aren’t going to go back. They don’t want to work in Jewish life anymore. And that’s really sad. And it’s sad for them because this was such an important part of their lives and it provides a lot of meaning.

    And I think also a lot of these people liked the organizations they worked with. A number of people talked about, hey, I really liked this place. There’s things about it that were really fantastic, congregants are great, students are great, whatever it is. And so that’s being taken away from them too, even though it was so symbiotic, they worked so well with those people.

    Marc Steiner:  Maybe the example you just brought up was Atlas Kluse? Klus, Kluse?

    Shane Burley:  Yeah, Atlas Klus.

    Marc Steiner:  Who’s a social justice fellow at Chicago Hillel. And then in the article about him, it said that Klus shared with you that he received a document that he must agree to not to be any of these three things: a Nazi, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and part of an anti-Zionist group or effort. When I read that, it was like, what? What? How do you put those things together? How do you say, if you’re supporting Palestinian life, you’re somehow allied or like a Ku Klux Klanner. What? That blew me away.

    Shane Burley:  Yes. Yes. So this is part of their hiring process, and something they were reminded of several times is that they couldn’t be a member of these various organizations understood to be threats to Jews. So a Nazi, a Klansman, and then anything that supports this organized anti-Zionist movement, or even a movement that’s critical of Israel, say BDS, something like that. Those are sort of assumed to be, by this phrasing, it’s assumed to have some relationship to one another.

    And this gets back to how a lot of large organizations like the Anti-Defamation League define things like antisemitism and threats to Jews. They assume that there’s a shared understanding of Jewish flourishing we all have; of course, it’s Israel. Whether or not Jews are safe and successful depends on how successful and safe Israel is. And so anything that’s a threat to that is a threat to Jews and therefore de facto antisemitism.

    So they’re operating on this framework that when you see this language in support of Palestinian liberation, it must be understood as a continuity of threat to Jewish safety. It can only be understood in that framework. And so that ends up being this line that, in this era of such Jewish unsafety, anything that comes even close to that now becomes verboten. It’s too much.

    And so when they look at this connection, they see something where it was specifically about a ceasefire resolution in Chicago from the mayor’s office, it was like Jewish Voice for Peace celebrating that and Atlas Klus liking that, that was seen then thrown into this larger continuity of the increase of antisemitism, the threatening fear of Jewish students, all these things that feel to us so bizarrely different, but they’re always relegated down to this: anything that’s a threat to Israel is a de facto threat to Jews.

    Marc Steiner:  When you raised Chicago in the article, if I remember correctly from the article, the vote to call for a ceasefire in Chicago was a 24-24 split down the middle, and then the mayor was the deciding vote?

    Shane Burley:  Yeah, something like that, yeah. And this is something that the local federation and JUF and large organizations played a big role in pushing back on that. They understood a lot of these statements as antisemitic if they were too supportive of Palestine in it, and they played a political role in trying to push on these ceasefire resolutions.

    That’s part of what ends up happening here, is that a lot of these organizations are political organizations, they have a political agenda. So speaking out in favor of a ceasefire resolution may be speaking out against the political orientation of the people employing you.

    Marc Steiner:  This whole situation that we’re facing right now with the slaughtering of Palestinians in Gaza, the utter destruction of everything in Gaza, leveling it, people being killed in the West Bank as well, the deepening divide inside the Jewish community as well as America.

    I think I said this earlier, but it makes me think of the biblical story of Masada, where we as Jews committed suicide because we were under attack and we destroyed ourselves. And we seem to be doing it again in this divide around Israel-Palestine. And plus, I do think it allows antisemitism to erupt, at the same time the struggle is correct to fight for the rights of Palestinians. There’s so many contradictions in this.

    Shane Burley:  I think history is very clear that Jewish life flourishes when Jewish diversity and Jewish freedom of conscience flourishes as well. And also in a cosmopolitan, multicultural society where difference is respected and all communities are protected. Historically, Jewish communities are often safest when partnering with other communities who have been threatened by the far right or by the state or things like that.

    So we’re undermining exactly that history with this very isolationist, nationalist narrative. And we’re cutting out the very forces, activists, community organizers, anti-fascists, that have protected us in the past. So we’re breaking that continuity really distinctly.

    And then shifting us into this basically understanding our protection only in this ethnocratic model, and one that sees itself very far away from other communities, that has a political agenda alone that focuses on insularity.

    All of those elements do not have a history of keeping Jews safe, and instead far-right movements, wherever they happen, tend to have antisemitic areas, which is, for example, all across Europe the same parties that Likud are partnering with in a lot of cases often holds huge numbers of antisemitic activists. So this is not exactly a very safe way of dealing with the problem of antisemitism.

    Marc Steiner:  Yes.

    Shane Burley:  And like you said, antisemitism has increased really dramatically in the last year. There’s no other way to understand that. It’s just not happening on college campuses, really. It’s happening across the returning growth of the neo-Nazi movement. It’s happening in the GOP, where antisemitic conspiracy theories have become so endemic that it’s part of how they actually speak to the working class now. It’s like part of how they take their working-class anxieties and give it a narrative that’s friendly to them.

    All of these things are true. And then we have this crisis in Israel-Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, that increases tensions even more and gives people a lot of ammo when you have these antisemitic actors trying to pull people or recruits over. None of this is helpful. None of this is actually a helpful situation for Jewish safety. And entrenching these ideas further, kicking people out, creating more division only weakens our hand on this.

    Marc Steiner:  I think we’re at a very critical juncture on a number of levels here, whether it’s how this affects this election in the United States where the neofascist right could seize power in America completely.

    And you mentioned earlier, just for our people listening, Likud, which is the right-wing political party in Israel that has now taken over with all its allies in that country and in Israel.

    So I mean, when you see the masses of young Jews who are in the streets saying, no, not in our name, when you see this huge split, I think, both in terms of domestic politics and what’s happening in Israel-Palestine at the moment, I think we’re at a fundamentally deep contradiction, a fundamental deep contradiction that could really explode, and it could hurt Jews, it could hurt the entire world.

    I’m not explaining as well as I want to. What I’m saying is I think what’s happening at this moment in Israel-Palestine, and the movements in this country backing Palestinian liberation and freedom go way beyond Jews, go way beyond Israel-Palestine. I think we’re seeing a massive contradiction coming to the fore here, and it could spill over into many directions beyond just that one struggle. That’s what I’m saying.

    Shane Burley:  I think, obviously, the international solidarity movement with Palestine is probably the biggest social movement of the last year. It is overwhelmingly numerically, but also the level of participation on campuses, things like that.

    So it actually puts us in relationship with Black Lives Matter, anti-fascist movements, the Occupy movement, basically movements of the last 15 years that had a really big groundswell that were bigger than the organizations that were involved in organizing them. It’s a mass participation.

    And all of those movements also signify a break between young people and status quo establishment politics, whether it’s the politics of the right or the Democratic Party, whatever it is. But these are revolutionary movements. They have a revolutionary core to them. And so this is true here as well.

    And you have Jewish communities, young Jewish communities participating at a much, much higher rate than the general public. And there’s a certain element where they’re saying, yeah, these Israel politics have actually been… They’re not just status quo of the country, but they’re status quo of my home, of my synagogue, of the places I was educated.

    So there’s a revolutionary sort of rebellion happening there, and I don’t think it’s just about Israel-Palestine. I think a revolutionary movement, whether they focus on one topic or another, there’s a whole complex of ideas that are underneath that. Because I think people’s experiences fighting against police violence or fighting against the effects of colonialism in other places, all that influences why they’re here now. This is not happening in isolation.

    As much as a lot of organizations like the ADL try to paint Palestine organizing as being sort of in isolation, people don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re doing it because it’s trendy, that’s actually not really true. It is very, very connected to other social movements.

    So all of this, I think, shows a big generational shift on these politics. I think, at the same time, that what only will make that more intense is this dialectic of them becoming more repressive on the organizational side. The more right-leaning these organizations become, the more rebellious the young, revolutionary spirit will likewise respond as. And then that creates the real break.

    I think it’s also important though to note that this is not actually particularly new. It’s particularly severe in this situation, but it’s not new in Jewish life. The Jewish new left of the ’60s, ’70s rebelled specifically against these established organizations. Sometimes it was on Israel, sometimes it was not funding Jewish education or prioritizing rich Jewish communities, but they went after them the same way. The Jewish Renewal movement, in a lot of ways, was the rebellion against that. And you have earlier generations, Bundist, socialist, Communist Party —

    Marc Steiner:  Bundists versus the Zionists. Exactly.

    Shane Burley:  Right, yeah. So there were always the rebellious elements that come around generationally, where young Jews are basically looking at the leadership and saying, hey, you betrayed what I understand to be the mission of the Jewish people. So that’s a pretty standard part of it.

    I think the question now is whether or not that young group of people will take over these organizations and move them in that direction, or they will abandon them. And I think what’s happening is that they’re actually not given the choice because they’re being abandoned by the leadership.

    Marc Steiner:  Well, I think that the voices that you allowed us to hear in your article are the voices that need to be heard.

    Shane Burley:  Oh, absolutely.

    Marc Steiner:  Because their stories are important for the world to hear. And I really do look forward to more conversations with you, but also with some of the folks that you interviewed in your article that we can do together to bring their voices out because they need to be heard. They’re the ones who were attacked. They’re the ones who are fighting for their beliefs. They’re the ones who are going to be the engine that pushes the revolution of change inside the Jewish world, I think.

    Shane Burley:  Yeah, I think them speaking out and having their perspectives heard is part of what will shift this. By other people hearing, okay, I’m hearing a critical voice from a rabbi or from a Jewish communal leader that’s been fired, I share that with them, that makes it easier for somebody else to speak out.

    And when you have the density of folks — And this is actually part of how I got plugged into the article, is that people were connecting people who had been fired or had been pushed out or being threatened to be fired because they needed that solidarity because it was happening in isolation.

    But when people speak out like this, you end up basically echoing that solidarity across the entire country or across the world because more people are able to see that there are strong voices speaking out. They hear stuff that reflects their values, that kind of thing.

    So I think the more that we can highlight that it actually makes folks safer when these things happen. And it also signifies the size of the critical community, whether they’re anti-Zionist or non-Zionist or however they define it. The size of it then makes the case that we need organizations of our own or that we’re actually a sizable constituency of these organizations. It counters the idea coming from these major organizations that these are marginal and threatening voices.

    Marc Steiner:  Shane Burley, A, I want to thank you for doing this conversation with us today and for the work that you do. And remind people listening today to check the link below and read the article, “US Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists”. It’s a month-long investigation, found even the smallest sense of dissent is often met with unemployment. It’s well worth the read, really wrestle with and look at, and we’ll be examining this a great deal more in the coming weeks together.

    And Shane, once again I want to thank you so much for the work you do and for always being willing to come on and talk. Always good to see you.

    Shane Burley:  Yeah, I’m always glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

    Marc Steiner:  Once again, let me thank Shane Burley for joining us today. And we’ll link to his article from In These Times, “US Jewish Institutions Are Purging Their Staffs of Anti-Zionists”. Well worth the read.

    And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, and audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible.

    Let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Shane Burley for joining us today.

    So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Human rights group Amnesty International said on Tuesday 22 October that Israel’s bombing of branches of Lebanon financial firm Al-Qard al-Hassan should be “investigated as a war crime”.

    Al-Qard al-Hassan attacks: another Israel war crime

    The Al-Qard al-Hassan firm, a lifeline for many Shiite Muslims and other Lebanese in the face of a years-long financial crisis, is sanctioned by Washington, which accuses Hezbollah of using it as a cover to gain access to the international financial system.

    Israel accuses the charity of financing “Hezbollah’s terrorist operations”, and the Israeli military hit branches of the organisation across Lebanon late Sunday and early Monday.

    Amnesty said in a statement that “the Israeli military’s targeting of branches… likely violates international humanitarian law and must be investigated as a war crime”:

    Under the laws of war, branches of financial institutions are civilian objects unless they are being used for military purposes. Therefore, these attacks likely constitute a direct attack on civilian objects.

    The financial firm, officially registered as a charity, has been offering customers credit in exchange for gold deposits on an interest-free basis since the 1980s.

    The United Nations on Monday condemned the Israeli strikes targeting Al-Qard Al-Hassan, saying they also caused “extensive damage” to civilian property and infrastructure.

    Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif told reporters that the charity was “a completely civilian institution registered by law, whose services are for all Lebanese without exception”.

    Wiping out Shiite Muslim’s access to money

    A senior Israeli intelligence official, briefing journalists on condition of anonymity, said the strikes were meant “to affect the trust between Hezbollah and a lot of the Shiite community that uses this system”.

    Amnesty’s Erika Guevara Rosas said the Israeli military had “targeted an institution that serves as an economic lifeline for countless Lebanese civilians”.

    “This, along with an evacuation warning issued less than 40 minutes before the start of the strikes, shows Israel’s disregard for international humanitarian law,” she said in the statement.

    “An international investigation into the attacks [on Al-Qard al-Hassan] must be urgently initiated”, she said.

    Featured image via the Canary 

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Against the backdrop of a seemingly endless genocide with absolute impunity provided from Israel’s Western partners, it can feel like the fight is hopeless as fatigue sets in. Fatigue is human, and arguably it is what our governments are counting on as they drag their feet in opposing the murder and brutalisation of an entire population – indiscriminate of guilt, age, or gender.

    We have to prepare for this fatigue and restore our energies both individually and collectively if we want to realise an end to arm sales and an unconditional ceasefire, especially when Lebanon is now facing the same threat of destruction and Israel’s attempts to plunge the West into an unjust war across the Middle East.

    An ‘Assembly for Palestine’

    In Warrington, we organised an ‘Assembly for Palestine’ where we openly invited those in our community to gather in our grief and anger over one-year into this horrific aggression. Our language and how we communicate ourselves matters and it must mirror the true extent of Western involvement, and how we organise ourselves must require a long-term framework of activism to ensure we are consistently advocating for our brothers and sisters in Palestine.

    As Matt Kennard of Declassified UK states on X, following Declassified UK revealing the surge under Starmer in US special ops flights to Israel using our UK base in Cyprus:

    We are not complicit in the genocide. We are participants. The shame should never leave us.

    It is a damning indictment of our political class that we are left so devoid of representatives who are prepared to speak to the conscience of their constituents, instead choosing to tow the lines of power and party over basic principles of humanity and international law.

    Just as the silence of our leaders can breed silence amongst the masses, courageous voices have the power to breed courage and confidence amongst passers by and those they meet. It is through our own dogged determination that others will seek to understand, with more joining the movement as time goes on.

    What we have to say is worth taking responsibility for.

    Collectively we can make ourselves heard

    Lee Hunter, brigade secretary for the Fire Brigades Union for Merseyside and acting regional chair for the North West, stated:

    The dehumanisation of the Palestinian people by Israel has been ongoing since well before October 2023. They have been left without a voice. Assemblies are a way of us collectively being that voice for them.

    I have been imploring people not to look away when we are faced with what is happening, as horrific as the images are. Instead we must use the anger and upset that we feel and turn it into a positive force to speak out against the inactions of our elected leaders.

    One voice may be lost in the crowd, but collectively we can make ourselves heard and speak for the Palestinian people.

    Following initial speeches, those in attendance at the Assembly for Palestine were split into four groups, each sat in a circle.

    We then invited discussion on the lessons learned from other actions seen across the world. This prompted a passionate and informed discussion, from those in our Muslim community and from those who have spoken and fought for Palestine for decades through their activism, such as with the Stop The War Coalition.

    An ‘uplifting’ Assembly for Palestine

    Jacqui, who attended, spoke to her direct connections to Palestine and the Nakba of 1948, when her Palestinian-Christian family were forcibly displaced from their homes, walking mile upon mile to find safety and shelter.

    As a child of a Christian-Palestinian woman displaced in the Nakba, it fills me with immense sadness that history is repeating itself. I know how painful it was for my family then, so I can only imagine what it’s like for the people of Gaza today.

    What I have found heartwarming though is how so many have got behind Palestinians over the past year, seeing the protests and the flag being waved. The Assembly for Palestine in Warrington was uplifting, seeing people of all ages and backgrounds coming together for a common cause.

    I am excited to see how we join together and plan events to keep our voices heard!

    These discussions led to identifying the biggest issues that we needed to confront in our communities. These were the systematic and deliberate dehumanisation of Palestinians, the lack of education around the history of Palestine, fatigue, and finally the feeling of being powerless.

    This enabled further conversation about how we could combat this, with ideas put forward to have a ‘Fair for Palestine’, celebrating the culture and educating communities on the rich and diverse history of Palestine. This would seek to combat the efforts to dehumanise and demonise Palestinians and their resistance.

    It was also decided that more effort should be put into informing and educating people so that they can understand the conflict through their own eyes, rather than through the biased reporting of mainstream media.

    This will be carried forward as a stand in our town centre, every week, for people to approach and encourage dialogue. It is only through embracing the difficult conversations that we can make progress in breaking through the normalisation of western aggression in the Middle East spanning decades.

    People have the power. So, focus it.

    The assembly also provided the means of identifying individual strengths, with the ability to coordinate letters to MPs and other leaders amongst a group of volunteers who aren’t active on social media. This ensures that energy is maintained, with maximum impact on MPs’ inboxes as a result of a coordinated campaign.

    In addition to this, we also agreed that we should focus on a fixed, visual, and interactive protest in our town centre and look to work with other networks for Palestine to fortify the resistance against Israel’s onslaught and to highlight the importance of international law for global peace.

    The people have power, and if we organise assemblies in our hometowns we help people find and focus that power.

    At a time when many seek to divide our communities, we must come together to realise the kind of world we need to see.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Maddison Wheeldon

    This post was originally published on Canary.