Score a significant victory against apartheid, genocide and Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession. The powerful Jewish National Fund of Canada has reportedly had its charitable status revoked. Under pressure from Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and others the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) instigated an audit of the JNF in 2018. JNF Canada was eventually forced to…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I assure the children that Ahmad is fine, that he’s coming back soon, but to live through this war, the constant displacement, the bombing and also have to fight to know where your husband is, not to hear his voice, is like a war within the war.
–Alaa Muhanna, interview with Amnesty International
Horrific testimonies continue to emerge from Palestinian civilians captured by Israeli forces in Gaza and taken to Sde Teiman, Israel’s makeshift torture facility.
Our latest visual illustrates the testimony of Fadi Bakr, a law student from Gaza City, who was captured by Israeli soldiers in early January and spent more than 30 days in Sde Teiman. He was then released without charge back into Gaza to face an ongoing genocide.
By the end of May, approximately 4,000 Palestinians from Gaza, many arbitrarily rounded up from their homes, UN shelters, or while fleeing south, had spent up to three months in Sde Teiman. They were held hostage under Israel’s “Unlawful Combatants law,” where they are denied access to lawyers and their location is kept secret from rights groups and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). This form of incommunicado detention is a flagrant violation of international law and may amount to enforced disappearance. At least 36 Palestinians have died at Sde Teiman that we know of so far in the context of systemic torture and medical neglect.
The abuse of Palestinian detainees is not limited to Palestinians from Gaza. In the West Bank, Israel has arrested 9,430 Palestinians since October 7, of which 3,380 are held under administrative detention without charge or trial, and subjected to torture and inhumane and degrading treatment.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a series of apparently coordinated arson attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network. No one has claimed responsibility yet. Before the games, protests highlighted the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities as “social cleansing.” We go to Paris for an update with…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The UK government will drop its challenge to arrest warrants sought by an ICC prosecutor for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Downing Street confirmed on Friday 26 July.
Former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s government had told the International Criminal Court (ICC) it intended to submit a challenge to prosecutor Karim Khan’s request in May for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The UK had until 26 July to submit its questions to the court in The Hague, but the recently elected Labour Party government has confirmed it will not follow through with Sunak’s plan.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said:
This was a proposal by the previous government which was not submitted before the election, and which I can confirm the government will not be pursuing in line with our long standing position that this is a matter for the court to decide on.
I think you would note that the courts have already received a number of submissions on either side, so they are well seized of the arguments to make their independent determinations.
Of course, Israel’s top ally the US is still set to challenge the court’s authority to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu.
As well as Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan is also seeking warrants against top Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif, on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
If granted by ICC judges, any of the 124 ICC member states would technically be obliged to arrest Netanyahu and others if they travelled there. However, the court has no mechanism to enforce its orders.
The UK is still allowing arms to be sold to Israel. However, Middle East Eye reported on 25 July that the government was expected to place some restrictions on sales.
However, right-wing lobby group the British Board of Deputies hit back. It said:
We are concerned that the cumulative effect of these announcements, in quick succession, signal a significant shift in policy, away from Israel being a key UK ally. This would not only be a strategic error but a moral one.
Reacting to Labour’s ICC decision, director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ben Jamal said:
Ben Jamal, PSC Director said,
We welcome the Government’s decision to drop the intervention mounted by Rishi Sunak’s Government, designed to prevent any move by the ICC to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu.
This intervention was based on spurious legal arguments that amounted to suggesting that Israeli leaders could never be held to account by the ICC for any action in Gaza, no matter how monstrous.
We thank all of those who lobbied the Foreign Secretary and MPs on this issue, including thousands who signed PSC’s e-action. We welcome the Government’s statement that it intends to fully respect the independence of the international courts and the rule of law.
Going forward this needs to translate into full support for the rulings of the ICC and the ICJ including those which call upon all third-party states not to continue to act in any way which risks aiding or abetting crimes under the Genocide Convention or supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
As immediate first steps this requires an arms embargo and ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements.
Featured image via the House of Commons and the Canary
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
In Gaza, after nine months of Israel’s relentless assault, blockade, and starvation, farmers have become crucial to ensuring food security for the population. However, in potential breaches of international law, Israel has also damage or destroyed vast swathes of Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure. To mitigate the impact of the massive displacement crisis affecting Gaza’s entire population of 2.1 million people, Action Against Hunger has intensified its support to local farmers.
The charity’s efforts include food distribution, the promotion of local agriculture, and the implementation of training programmes aimed at enhancing the productive capacities of families still able to farm. These initiatives are essential in sustaining the agricultural backbone of Gaza and providing much-needed food to its residents.
It said that:
Gaza’s agricultural sector has faced immense disruptions in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukrainian crisis, protracted conflicts in the Gaza Strip, and climate change.
However, since 7 October Israel has caused the situation to ‘worsen to an unprecedented level of deterioration’, explains a food security expert from Action Against Hunger in Gaza.
Action Against Hunger is prioritising several key areas to support Gaza’s farmers:
Its teams are also focusing on renewable energy installations, water conservation, and smart agricultural technologies to build a resilient agricultural sector capable of withstanding current and future crises.
Giulia Pizzicannella, a food security expert with Action Against Hunger’s emergency team, said:
Our food security activities in Gaza have two main objectives: to provide food for a balanced diet and to support the recovery of the agricultural sector to restore livelihoods and dignity.
Israel has put thousands of lives at risk as communities struggle to access basic foodstuffs due to disrupted supply lines and market access, increasing dependency on humanitarian aid. Israel’s destructive invasion of Rafah in early May exacerbated the conflict’s impact, dismantling local markets and making access to basic commodities nearly impossible.
Most remaining farmers cannot access their land, and those who can find it damaged or destroyed.
Approximately 41% of Gaza’s territory is agricultural land. According to UN satellite imagery analysis from May 2017 to 2024, over half (57%) of Gaza’s crop fields and arable land have deteriorated, with significant damage to orchards (61%), vegetables (19%), and cereals (20%).
Israel has also damaged agricultural infrastructure: 33% of greenhouses, 46% of wells, 65% of solar panels, and over 2,300 agricultural structures have been partially or totally destroyed. This destruction violates international humanitarian law, including UN Security Council Resolution 2417, which condemns starvation and denial of humanitarian access as weapons of war.
Even if hostilities cease today, the damage to agricultural land will have long-term negative consequences due to soil contamination and unexploded ordnance. Clearing Gaza of unexploded bombs could take up to 14 years, according to UN experts.
Massive population displacements have devastated agricultural production and led to a significant increase in food prices. Many farmers have lost access to land they have tended for decades, losing not only their livelihoods but also a piece of their history. Despite these adversities, some farmers continue to produce limited crops.
Pizzicannella said:
The entry of agricultural tools and materials into Gaza is crucial to preserve the continuity and resilience of Gaza’s agricultural sector. After nearly nine months of closure, local markets are depleting essential supplies like nylon sheeting used for greenhouses, now repurposed for tents. This shortage, coupled with limited humanitarian aid, has put immense pressure on local agricultural activities to maintain food security.
An alarming analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) at the end of June indicates that the entire population of the Gaza Strip is highly food insecure and at risk of famine, with families facing totally inadequate access to nutritious food.
Even if a ceasefire is achieved, restoring agricultural production to pre-conflict levels will be a long and complex process, requiring ongoing support to rehabilitate land and rebuild livelihoods. This support must address not only agricultural needs but also housing, health, and psychological well-being.
Action Against Hunger implements crucial interventions to support local farmers, including the rehabilitation of greenhouses and agricultural land. Staff seek suppliers to ensure access to seeds and other essential inputs, such as fertilisers and insecticides. This effort is vital to ensure farmers can grow staples of the Palestinian diet, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and aubergines.
It said:
Our long-standing relationship with local farmers, forged over twenty years of working in the occupied Palestinian territories, has been instrumental in understanding needs and providing necessary support.
The challenges facing Gaza’s farmers include damage and destruction of land, severe fuel and electricity shortages, and water contamination. Even before the war, the blockade of the Gaza Strip made access to essential agricultural inputs, fuel, electricity, and drinking water difficult.
Now, securing fuel supplies and exploring alternatives like solar energy for irrigation is more challenging than ever.
Featured image supplied
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Don’t be fooled. The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful is earth-shattering. Israel is a rogue state, according to the world’s highest court.
For that reason, the judgment will be studiously ignored by the cabal of western states and their medias that for decades have so successfully run cover for Israel.
Doubters need only watch the reception Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives during his visit to the United States this week.
Even though he is currently being pursued for war crimes by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the US Congress will give him a hero’s welcome when he addresses its representatives on Wednesday.
The warm handshakes and standing ovations will be a reminder that Netanyahu has had the full backing of western powers throughout the nine-month slaughter of at least 16,000 Palestinian children in Gaza – with another 21,000 missing, most of them under rubble.
The welcome will be a reminder that western capitals are fully on board with Israel’s levelling of Gaza and the starvation of its population – in what the same court concluded way back in January amounted to a “plausible genocide”.
And it will serve as a heavy slap in the face to those like the World Court committed to international law – reminding them that the West and its most favoured client state believe they are untouchable.
Western politicians and columnists will keep emphasising that the World Court is offering nothing more than an “advisory opinion” and one that is “non-binding”.
What they won’t point out is that this opinion is the collective view of the world’s most eminent judges on international law, the people best positioned to rule on the occupation’s legality.
And it is non-binding only because the western powers who control our international bodies plan to do nothing to implement a decision that doesn’t suit them.
Nonetheless, the ruling will have dramatic consequences for Israel, and its western patrons, even if those consequences will take months, years or even decades to play out.
‘Top secret’ warning
Last week’s judgment is separate from the case accepted in January by the ICJ that put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza. A decision on that matter may still be many months away.
This ruling was in response to a request from the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 for advice on the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation.
That may sound more mundane a deliberation than the one on genocide, but the implications ultimately are likely to be every bit as profound.
Those not familiar with international law may underestimate the importance of the World Court’s ruling if only because they had already assumed the occupation was illegal.
But that is not how international law works. A belligerent occupation is permitted so long as it satisfies two conditions.
First, it must be strictly military, designed to protect the security of the occupying state and safeguard the rights of the occupied people.
And second, it must be a temporary measure – while negotiations are conducted to restore civilian rule and allow the occupied people self-determination.
Astonishingly, it has taken 57 years for the world’s highest court to deliver a conclusion that should have been staring it – and everyone else – in the face all that time.
The military nature of the occupation was subverted almost from the moment Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in June 1967.
Within months, Israel had chosen to transfer Jewish civilians – mostly extreme religious nationalists – into the occupied Palestinian territories to help colonise them.
Israel knew that this was a gross violation of international law because its own legal adviser warned it of as much in a “top secret” memo unearthed by the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg some two decades ago.
In a declaration enlarging on the ICJ’s reasoning, Court President Nawaf Salam specifically referenced the warnings of Theodor Meron, who was the Israeli foreign ministry’s legal expert at the time.
In September 1967, his memo cautioned that any decision to establish civilian settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. Those provisions, he added, were “aimed at preventing colonization”.
Nine days later, the Israeli government rode roughshod over Meron’s memo and assisted a group of young Israelis in setting up the first settlement at Kfar Etzion.
Sham peace-making
Today, hundreds of illegal settlements – many of them home to what amount to armed militias – control more than half of the West Bank and much of East Jerusalem.
Rather than protecting the rights of Palestinians under occupation, as international law demands, the Israeli military assists Jewish settlers in terrorising the Palestinians. The aim is to drive them off their land.
In the words of the Israeli government, the settlements are there to “Judaise” Palestinian territory. In the words of everyone else, they are there to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.
Which brings us to Israel’s second violation of the laws of occupation. In transferring hundreds of thousands of settlers into the occupied territories, Israel intentionally blocked any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.
The settlements weren’t makeshift encampments. Some soon developed into small cities, such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, with shopping malls, parks, public pools, synagogues, factories, libraries, schools and colleges.
There was nothing “temporary” about them. They were there to incrementally annex Palestinian territory under cover of an occupation that Washington and its European allies conspired to pretend was temporary.
The whole Oslo process initiated in the early 1990s was a switch-and-bait exercise, or a “Palestinian Versailles”, as the Palestinian scholar Edward Said warned at the time.
Israel was never serious about allowing the Palestinians meaningful statehood – a fact the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, admitted shortly before he was killed by a far-right settler in 1995.
Oslo’s sham peace-making was designed to buy more time for Israel to expand the settlements – while also binding the Palestinians into endless contractual obligations that were never reciprocated by Israel.
In his incensed response to the court’s decision last week, Netanyahu gave the game away. He said: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], our historical homeland.”
His is a bipartisan view in Israel. All the Jewish parties in the Israeli parliament take the same position.
Last week they voted to reject any possibility of creating a Palestinian state on the grounds it would be an “existential threat” to Israel. Only a handful of legislators – all belonging to Israel’s Palestinian minority – dissented.
Apartheid rule
The World Court’s ruling is most significant in that it permanently blows apart western states’ cover story about Israel.
The judges point out that Israel’s permanent occupation of the territories, and its transfer of Jewish settlers into them, has necessitated the development of two separate and distinct systems of laws.
One is for the Jewish settlers, enshrining for them the rights enjoyed by Israelis. Palestinians, by contrast, must submit to the whims of an alien and belligerent military regime.
There is a word for such an arrangement: apartheid.
Over the past decade, a consensus had already emerged in the world’s human rights community – from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch – that Israel was an apartheid state.
Now the world’s highest judicial body has declared that it agrees.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity. This means that Israeli officials are war criminals, quite aside from the crimes they are currently committing in Gaza.
That was why the Israeli media reported panic inside the Israeli government at the ICJ ruling.
Officials fear that it will leave the International Criminal Court, its sister court, with no option but to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as already requested by its chief prosecutor.
It is also likely to strengthen the ICC’s resolve to prosecute more senior Israeli officials for crimes associated with Israel’s settlement programme.
A former Israeli foreign ministry official told the Haaretz newspaper that the World Court ruling had punctured Israel’s claim to be a western-style state: “The democratic aura is no longer protecting us as it did before.”
Acts of aggression
The ICJ has concluded that Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians – as well as the ethnic cleansing policies implemented by its settler militias – are acts of aggression.
The West’s depiction of a “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, with efforts to resolve this “dispute”, is wilfully muddled. Its depiction of Israel’s rampage in Gaza as a “war against Hamas” is a lie too, according to this ruling.
The ICJ has effectively ridiculed the claim by Israel and its western allies that the occupation of Gaza ended when Israel pulled its soldiers to the perimeter fence and soon afterwards instituted a siege on the enclave by land, sea and air.
Israel is judged to be fully responsible for the suffering of Palestinians before 7 October as well as after.
It is Israel that has been permanently attacking the Palestinians – through its illegal occupation, its apartheid rule, its siege of Gaza, and its incremental annexation of territory that should comprise a Palestinian state.
Palestinian violence is a response, not the inciting cause. It is the Palestinians who are the ones retaliating, the ones resisting, according to the judgment. The western political and media establishments have cause and effect back to front.
There are further consequences to the ICJ’s ruling. You don’t compromise on apartheid. No one suggested meeting apartheid South Africa halfway.
The racist foundations of such a state must be eradicated. Apartheid states must be reconstituted from scratch.
The World Court demands that Israel not only pull its occupation forces out of the Palestinian territories and halt its settlement expansion but also dismantle the settlements in their entirety. The settlers must leave Palestine.
The judges call too for “reparations” for the Palestinians for the enormous harm done to them by decades of occupation and apartheid.
That includes allowing those Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed since 1967 a right to return to their lands, and it requires Israel to pay large-scale financial compensation for the decades-long theft of key resources.
Complicit in war crimes
But the implications don’t just apply to Israel.
In referring the case to the ICJ, the UN General Assembly requested the court advise on how its 192 member states should respond to its findings.
If Israeli leaders are war criminals, then supporting them – as western capitals have been doing for decades – makes those states complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.
For western powers, the ruling makes their continuing arms sales, diplomatic cover and the preferential trade status they give Israel collusion in the crime of prolonged occupation and apartheid.
But there’s more. It also means that western states must not only stop harassing, and even jailing, those who seek to penalise Israel for its crimes – supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – but should take up that very cause as their own.
They are now under an implied legal obligation to join in such actions by imposing sanctions on Israel for being a rogue state.
Already, Britain’s weaselly new Labour government has tried to shift attention away from the ruling and onto discursive terrain that better suits Israel.
It responded with a statement that “the UK is strongly opposed to the expansion of illegal settlements and rising settler violence”.
But as former British ambassador Craig Murray noted, that was not what the ICJ decided. “It is not the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements that is at issue. It is their existence,” he wrote.
Similarly, the Biden administration bemoaned the court’s ruling. In an act of spectacular mental gymnastics, it argued that ending the occupation would “complicate efforts to resolve the conflict”.
But as noted previously, according to the ICJ’s judgment, there is no “conflict” except in the self-serving imaginations of Israel and its patrons. There are occupation and apartheid – permanent acts of aggression by Israel towards the Palestinian people.
Further, the US warned other states not to take “unilateral actions” against Israel, as the ICJ ruling obliges them to do. Washington claims such actions will “deepen divisions”. But a division – between the upholders of international law and lawbreakers such as Israel and Washington – is precisely what is needed.
The World Court’s ruling upends decades of linguistic slippage by the West whose goal has been to move the ideological dial in favour of Israel’s incremental annexationist agenda.
It is vitally important that activists, legal and human rights groups keep holding the feet of the British and US governments to the ICJ’s fire.
The fog clears
Israel’s supporters will take comfort from the fact that an earlier judgment from the World Court on Israel was roundly ignored by both Israel and its western patrons.
Asked for an advisory opinion, the judges ruled in 2004 that, under cover of security claims, Israel was illegally annexing swaths of territory by building its 800km-long “separation wall” on Palestinian land.
Israel did not dismantle the wall, though in response it did re-route parts of it and abandoned construction in other areas.
But that two-decade-old ICJ ruling was much narrower than the present one. It was restricted to a specific Israeli policy rather than address the entirety of Israel’s rule over Palestinians. It did not impugn Israel’s political character, identifying it as an apartheid state. And there were few obvious implications in the ruling for Israel’s western patrons.
And perhaps most importantly, Israeli officials were in no danger 20 years ago of being put in the dock by the International Criminal Court charged with war crimes, as they are now.
The World Court decision tightens the legal noose around Israel’s neck, and makes it hard for the ICC to continue dragging its feet on issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials.
And that will put multinational corporations, banks and pension funds in an ever harder legal position if they continue to ignore their own complicity with Israel’s criminality.
They may quickly find themselves paying a price with their customers too.
Adidas could be one of the first victims of just such a backlash after it caved into Israeli pressure on 19 July to drop the Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid as the face of a new ad campaign – paradoxically, on the same day the World Court announced its ruling.
There will also be ramifications for domestic courts in the West. It will be hard for judges to ignore the World Court’s opinion when their governments seek to punish Palestinian solidarity activists.
Those promoting boycotts and sanctions on Israel, or trying to stop companies supplying Israel with weapons, are doing what, according to the World Court, western governments should be doing of their own accord.
But, maybe most importantly of all, the ruling will decisively disrupt the West’s intentionally deceitful discourse about Israel.
This ruling strips away the entire basis of the language western powers have been using about Israel. A reality that’s been turned upside down for decades by the West has been put firmly back on its feet by the World Court.
The occupation – not just the settlements – is illegal.
Israel is legally defined as an apartheid state, as South Africa was before it, and one engaged in a project of annexation and ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinians are the victims, not Israel. It’s their security that needs protecting, not Israel’s. They are the ones who are owed financial assistance, in the form of reparations, not Israel.
As a result, the West’s pretend peace-making stands starkly revealed for the sham it always was. Continuing with this kind of duplicity – as British leader Keir Starmer, for example, appears determined to do – will serve only to highlight the bad faith of those engaged in such exercises.
On the flip side, western powers that help Israel continue its work of segregating, dispossessing and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians will be exposed as complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Words have power. They are our route to understanding reality. And the World Court has just cleared away the fog. It has wiped clean the mist on the window.
The West will do its level best once again to shroud Israel’s crimes. But the World Court has done the Palestinians and the rest of mankind a service in unmasking Israel for what it is: a rogue, criminal state.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Dozens of U.S. doctors and nurses who have returned from volunteer trips to Gaza say in a scathing new letter that Israel’s assault, along with the famine and epidemics raging across Gaza, have killed a conservative estimate of at least 92,000 Palestinians so far — over double the widely-cited official death count by health officials. In their message sent to President Joe Biden…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In his speech to Congress on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a direct appeal to U.S. lawmakers to send Israel more weapons, vowing, chillingly, that the weapons shipments would enable Israel to “finish the job faster” in Gaza. Netanyahu drew one of the clearest lines yet between the supply of U.S. weapons and Israel’s genocidal assault of Gaza…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This episode of The Project Censored Show originally aired on Project Censored on July 22, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Ten months in, the US role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza goes far beyond complicity. Israel is butchering Palestinians with US bombs, funding, and political and military support, and some members of the US military are resigning in protest. In this episode of the Project Censored Show, which is now syndicated by TRNN, host Eleanor Goldfield speaks with Palestinian-American Mohammed Abouhashem, who on Oct. 21 of last year left the US Air Force after 22 years of service. Abouhashem discusses his decision to leave amidst the murder of six of his family members in Palestine. He describes the ongoing genocide through a lens of military experience, highlighting how Israel and its ally the US are well aware of the civilian casualties—an awareness that, for Mohammed, made any further military service impossible.
In the second segment of the show, Goldfield speaks with filmmaker Kym Staton about his film ‘Trust Fall,’ which was recently released in the US. The documentary chronicles the personal and professional life of Julian Assange as well as the US case against him. Staton makes clear the importance of this story and case, even after Assange won his freedom, and offers insight into the remarkable smear campaign against him and how people power is the key to not only combating misinformation, but in freeing one of the most significant political prisoners of our time.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Welcome to the Project Censored Radio Show. I’m your host this week, Eleanor Goldfield. In the first half of the show I speak with Palestinian-American, Mohammed Abouhashem, who on October 21st of last year left the US Air Force After 22 years of service.
Mohammed discusses his decision to leave amidst the murder of six of his family members in Palestine. He describes the ongoing genocide through a lens of military experience highlighting how Israel and its ally, the US, are well aware of the civilian casualties, an awareness that for him made any further military service impossible.
Next up, I speak with filmmaker, Kym Staton, about his film Trust fall that has just come out in the United States. Trust Fall Chronicles the personal and professional life of Julian Assange, as well as the US case against him. Kym makes clear the importance of this story and case, even after Julian’s freedom, and offers insight into the remarkable smear campaign against Julian and how people power is the key to not only combating misinformation, but indeed freeing one of the most significant political prisoners of our time. All this and more coming up now on Project Censored.
Speaker 1:
… minds collapsing. All the prisons filled to capacity, citizens in the times for the master thief. Divide and conquer, still a masterpiece. Open your eyes and realize what’s happening. Time’s running out to reach our potential, fame, at the table, then you’re probably on the menu. We won. We got that [inaudible 00:01:36] with our brothers and our sisters. We won. The people [inaudible 00:01:37]-
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thanks everyone for joining us at the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to welcome to the show Mohammed Abouhashem, a Palestinian-American veteran, former Air Force Senior Master Sergeant of the US Air Force, having served 22 years, before submitting his separation request from the government on October 21st, 2023.
He was previously a fifteen-year mechanic on cargo tanker aircraft that provided rapid global mobility. And for the past seven years, he has served in different leadership roles in six military readiness units, including reconnaissance and aircraft readiness. He has lost six family members since October in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Mohammed, thank you so much for being here.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Thank you for having me.
Eleanor Goldfield:
So I’d like to start with a question that I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot, which is why now? Or why then? Why was that the moment that you felt that you needed to walk away from those 20-plus years of service?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Well, the main purpose originally when I joined the Air Force was right after 9/11. As a young 18-year-old, I was scared for the family that I have here in the US, and I wanted to join because I wanted to make sure that they were protected. That was the main reason.
But I almost got out after four years of service, but the only reason why I stayed in was after talking to some relatives, I had family members that convinced me that this could be an opportunity that I could stay in and use my voice as a Palestinian-American. We don’t have a lot of representation. Representation matters. Knowing that my family’s lineage from Palestine and how they went through the 1948 war and the 1967 war as well, I could have used my voice, and that’s why I decided to stay in the 22 years.
But everything in October, obviously, once I finally had the opportunity and I started having those conversations, I found out only three days into the conflict that my aunt was killed in an Israeli airstrike. And immediately, obviously, I started gathering the data that I needed in order for me to provide to the intelligence community.
Luckily, I was working in the District of Washington where I had members, even my direct report, who saw oversight over the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was great for me because I knew that the intelligence that I was going to provide on the location of where my family’s home and who lived in those apartment complexes was going to make it directly to our intelligence community and was hopefully going to raise a lot of red flags into what Israel was doing.
But unfortunately, I was met with complete silence. I never received a response back. And it took me two weeks to realize that I’m probably not going to receive a response. And even moreso, after I submitted my request to part ways from the military, when I started seeing members from the State Department themselves leave because they were advising the Biden administration of the same kind of actions that Israel was taking and our complicity to our own US laws and international law, I knew right then that there was no specific rank I was going to reach that would’ve made my impact more meaningful. So I had to use my voice in a different way.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m curious about that intelligence that you said that you shared. Is that common practice for people then to share with higher-ups intelligence about, “Hey, there are civilians here”? Or, “Hey, we actually know these people here”? Whether that be in a place like Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan, is that typical practice?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
It is typical practice. I can sit there and speak on everyone that has went through several conflicts in the past, whether they had direct ties to the conflict with family members that are being the ones that are being slaughtered by Israel and US-made bombs.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And indeed, I found you through a joint open letter titled Service in Dissent that was released on July 2nd. And in one part of the letter, it states, that, quote, “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership, and decision-making, that have characterized this administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity,” end quote.
So you mentioned that you were just met with silence. Has there been any kind of side door, or, “Hey, I wish I could help you, but I just can’t,” kind of conversations? Or could you talk a little bit more about that kind of reaction or conversations that you’ve had?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
No. To be honest with you, I’ve had several leaders that extended their hand on a personal level of how they can help me get through these times.
But beyond what our own intelligence community, what the administration, no one within the higher military echelons even reached out. No one contacted me directly. It was mainly my own peers or leadership team that I worked for directly that ever reached out to me and continued to reach out to me to make sure that everything was okay.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You had this information, and I’m assuming this intelligence that you then shared was not heavily classified, or you had to have some kind of high, top-secret pass in order to read it, right?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Correct.
Eleanor Goldfield:
So then it would then suggest very obviously that the United States is well-aware of what Israel is doing, and it’s not under the impression that Israel is actually actively trying to minimize civilian casualties?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Absolutely. And it’s difficult to say that all the intelligence that we’re sharing with them, the amount of reconnaissance that we’ve flown in the past in that region and continue to fly in that region, we have enough intelligence to share with them what they’re doing.
But not only the United States. I mean, you see what’s going on around the globe of all the different countries joining the ICJ case because they see enough evidence themselves of the complicity in a plausible genocide.
So it’s not far from anyone to say that we as the United States are seeing what’s going on, on the ground. I’ve had members from the intelligence community, and I quote, state, what we’re seeing, what me and you are seeing, what the common public are seeing, they’re seeing twofold.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Which is absolutely horrifying. And of course, we’re recording this on Monday, July 8th, and the Lancet recently just came out with a report that says that the death toll conservatively, according to their research, is actually more like 186,000 people. And of course, the State Department has announced that they’re not going to count the dead anymore, so they’re just going to continue with this genocide denial in a really stark and overt way.
And I’m curious, this open letter was not just signed by you, but it was signed by several people who had left their posts not just in the Air Force but in a variety of places. Could you speak to how did you guys find each other? Was there just some internal memo like, “Hey, this person quit”? How did you find other people that were in a similar position as you?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Eventually, we started connecting with each other through the first members that started to leave the State Department, with Hella and Josh. I reached out to Josh directly in regards to his resignation and just asked him about how I should approach certain situations, and he started connecting me with other members of the media.
Because when I first made my decision on 21 October, I was going and trying to reach out to the media myself, but unfortunately, I wasn’t getting anywhere. And so I wasn’t able to voice my opinion until later in June, once I finally started connecting with all the right people. And Josh kind of brought us all together as a team to start having those conversations together.
Because you see the reports. Even in the letter, we talk about how we all had our different levels of the departments that we worked on, yet we all felt the same exact dissent towards what was happening. And multiple different military members, you have myself, Riley, and Harrison, Harrison serves in the army, and both myself and Riley are in the Air Force in completely different departments.
If multiple different people from different departments are noticing the same thing, you’re talking about advisors that are advising our government on the complicity that we might be facing in this genocide, it should send a red flag to most Americans that this impacts our national security on a level that we have not seen, and it’s concerning to us. Although we decided to walk away from our positions, we swore an oath to this constitution, so we are continuing to serve the American people just in a different capacity.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And could you talk a little bit about that capacity? What do you feel like your role is now?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
My role personally obviously is to try to help people understand the military readiness aspect of what’s happening. For me, this is one of the discussions that I had with members of the media about my fear as a first sergeant and how this has impacted our service members to include our junior members. It’s a little bit concerning to me.
I’ve had multiple service members that were asking about how to submit the conscientious objector package. I’ve had members come up to me and say this is affecting their health, this is affecting their anxiety. They’re watching a genocide happen live. There’s nothing that we can hide anymore. Every social media platform is broadcasting this live.
And additionally, in only a few cases, I’ve had members that wanted to leave the service no matter what, and they were going to drastic measures. In one case that I know of, a member turned to legal drugs in order for them to separate, because it’s incompatible with military service.
And to me, this is concerning because if this is happening within our military community, you’re talking about all our NATO allies, all nations. The junior service members, they’re watching this and they are thinking the same thing: how in the world are we letting this happen?
Eleanor Goldfield:
And kind of circling back to what I asked you personally about why now? I’m curious what you’re hearing from other service members, because we’re seeing the first live-streamed genocide in the world, which is horrifying, but also very powerful in terms of its effect on how people are dissenting.
But of course, the US has committed atrocities in Iraq and in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and going back quite some time. So why do you feel that this in particular is affecting service members differently or moreso than what happened in the past?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
In the past, to include even when I was serving back in 2003, it’s a huge difference when every single member of the military is watching these atrocities live on their phone. There is no hiding what is going on anymore. There is no hiding how many people are being killed.
It’s imperative for them to see all these things, because they have to make a decision for themselves on whether they feel that our service is illegal, immoral, or unethical. And each person engages their morality a little bit differently. But this is something that we are taught in the military all the time. We continue to say, “You follow all orders unless they’re illegal, unethical, or immoral.” And unfortunately, I found right from the beginning that all three have been crossed, and that’s why I had to step aside.
But I continue to have the young service members reach out to me asking me what they should be doing. And I continue to ask them those questions. Do they feel that this is immoral in their own ethics? And some of them have to make their own decisions on whether they value their morality over what’s going on.
Eleanor Goldfield:
But I’m also curious with that as somebody who’s never served in the military, when they say morals and ethics, what are the morals and ethics that they instill in you? Because I’ve been a peace activist since I was 14, so I’m obviously not talking about it from a military perspective.
But what do they instill in you in terms of that? Is it kind of strictly going by the constitution? Or could you talk a little bit about more of those moral and ethics that the military then suggests are ones you should follow?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
So the military doesn’t really deep-dive into which morality you should follow or which ethics you should follow. We have basic guidelines, but those are basic guidelines. Each person in the military comes from a different perspective, different background, different part of the world where they view morality and ethics a little bit differently from each other. That’s what makes us diverse.
So in the case of some members, they see and view this as morally wrong, while others may not, and that’s where it’s just a guideline for the military. But we’re all given that same guideline. We have to look within ourselves.
And that’s why anytime any military member reach out to me, I ask them those questions: do they feel as if their morality or their ethics are being violated? Do they feel like what we are doing and what we are helping Israel accomplish as illegal? And if they do, then those are the choices that they have to make personally.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You’re listening to the Project Censored Radio Show. I’m your host this week, Eleanor Goldfield. We’ll now continue our conversation with US Air Force veteran, Mohammed Abouhashem.
There’s also in that Service in Dissent letter, a place where you talk about a message to former colleagues. Could you talk a little bit about that? And in case there are any people that are still in service in the military listening to this, what would a message be that you’d share with them about this situation?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
If I can share any message with them is they don’t have to suffer in silence. We know that there’s a lot of people that are still currently serving that have a major issue. There were members that I know of personally that resigned silently. They did not come out publicly to resign, but they’ve called me directly and told me that the reason was because of the conflict. And unfortunately, we’ll never know what number that is because each one of us has made our choice whether we were going to come out publicly with the matter or go silently.
But what we are hoping to call on our colleagues to do is, if they are still in, to use their power to try to pressure the administration, because things have not changed. We’re in July, and the complicity in genocide has not changed. The plausible that this may be a genocide has not changed.
For them, they can use their power still while they’re still serving, and if they cannot find any alternate means, they can reach out to any one of the 12 members. They can find us on our social media platforms and reach out to us directly if they feel like coming forward or if they feel like resigning publicly. We can help them with those matters so that they don’t feel the same thing that I went through back in October where I felt that I was not able to reach out to anyone directly or any news media outlets because no one really knew how big this was going to be back then.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And this is a bit of a personal question. Being a Palestinian-American, do you feel that there’s a splintering of your identity? Do you feel that it’s difficult to be an American at a time like this because you are also a Palestinian? Just like somebody who is from the former Yugoslavia might find it difficult to have been American at the time that NATO was destroying Yugoslavia or Iraq or Afghanistan, do you feel this splintering happening with your identity?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I do in a sense of obviously what is going on in the Gaza Strip mean? We’re talking about a 25-mile strip. And what has gone on in Palestine for the past 76 years, it definitely affects how I approach certain situations, but I’m also an American, right? When we moved here, this is what I’ve known my entire life, this is what I’ve known for the majority of my life, is how to be an American.
So what I can make as a change and what I can implement is the changes to the US policies that continue to drive these kind of actions in Gaza from Israel. And those are the things that I’m focusing on. I can’t change the policies of Israel, so unfortunately, even though it is, as you stated, splintering between being Palestinian and being American, I can’t change what Israel is doing.
And unfortunately, as an American, this is what I know and this is what I can change. I can help the American people understand how this affects their national security and how it impacts their every-single-day life when they watch the majority of our allies turning towards the ICJ in the case against genocide from Israel. And if we are complicit in this, it does affect them. And we’ve seen it even in the letter that we wrote, how we affected our soldiers in Jordan, with the three members that were killed.
This only paints a target on the American people. So in two ways, I’m affected because I have direct ties and I have my people that are being affected in Gaza, but at the same time, my people here in America are being affected by our policies and blind complicity in genocide that our administration continues to go with.
I talked about the bombing of my family’s home, of my aunt’s home, and I talked about how the Israel military’s response, when I finally received the response, was that it was a Hamas operational structure. Which I quickly rebutted that, because we know the members that live in that family. They’re regular family members, they are teachers, they are market owners. There’s nobody in there that anyone does not know. There were 12 children killed in that same building, yet it doesn’t equate to what the law of armed conflict, specifically proportionality, of if you’re targeting a Hamas operational structure.
Most of the family members, when they heard the Israeli military, the initial what they call a roof knock, they stepped outside of the building, and they were outside the building for 90 minutes waiting, and when nothing happened, they went inside. From my uncle, from my cousins, basically what they said is the minute that they entered the living room, by the time they made it into the apartment and into the living room, that’s when the building was struck, and they found themselves underneath the rubble.
So if it was a Hamas operational structure, why did Israel military decide not to attack it when all the people were out of it? And we questioned their response. And when we asked them again to explain how it was a Hamas operational structure, they declined to answer. That, to me, is important, because it shows that they are not willing to give a direct response or intelligence on anything.
And I don’t know what they’re concerned about. If they’re saying it’s a Hamas operational structure, they should not worry of explaining to the people how it was used in that way to cover themselves. But the fact that they declined to answer and the fact that they’re refusing to give anything more than the blanket statement that they continue to give the media of Hamas operational structure, it doesn’t cut it, and it doesn’t cut it in a ICJ case as well.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And did you reach out as an Air Force veteran? Or did you reach out as a civilian?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
As a civilian through the media outlets.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And so then they responded to you via the same media outlets?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
They responded through different media outlets, declining to answer.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Wow. And I’m also curious now that you mentioned that, because Hamas is the government in Gaza, and so to say that something is a Hamas structure, isn’t that kind of like saying it’s a government structure, which could be anything? It feels purposefully vague.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
It does feel purposefully vague. You’ve heard them multiple times. A school is a Hamas operational structure. A hospital is Hamas operational structure.
Well, if you look at the laws of war, when you’re defining how to strike a school, it has to have an imminent threat to you or your personnel. You can’t say that it’s just a Hamas operational structure and we struck it. That’s not how the laws of war work. You have to define that this was an imminent threat and it was used that way.
Well, what imminent threats have we noticed when every single hospital and every single school has been destroyed? No one is talking about, well, there were missiles fired from the school at Tel Aviv, or there were missiles fired from this hospital at another city in Israel. So what imminent threat were they facing exactly?
They use this blanket statement so that they can justify that they can destroy this building. They’re going to have to try to defend themselves in the ICJ case that what they’re doing was right, and unfortunately, I don’t see how that’s going to work.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Well, an imminent threat, you can’t compare the firepower of the Palestinians against Israel. It’s literally like comparing rocks and tanks.
And I’ve used the example, let’s say that there were an active shooter in a school here in the US, if the cops then bombed that school, would everyone be like, “Yay, we did it”? You’d be horrified that that would be the response. That’s not how you deal with a threat. If there were one in a school, you would try to pointedly address that threat, and yet it’s okay if it’s done in Gaza.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
We can even look at it even further. The international community continues to say that we’re trying to help out minimize civilians. Gaza is a 25-mile stretch with 2.2 million people. Gaza is not its own country that’s separated from Israel. It’s inside Israel.
If you were really trying to minimize civilian population, just like if we were to say that there was a terrorist threat in Texas and they’ve embedded themselves among civilians, the first thing we would start to do is try to minimize the civilian casualties by getting them out of the state of Texas.
If you remove the civilian population from Gaza into Israel, because that is their country, and they could have had the multiple coalitions of forces helping them with maintaining the population right outside of Gaza so that they can go in and get the hostages safely. There is no reason that anyone should believe that they were protecting the hostages when they were firing almost 6000 rockets per day from the very beginning of the war.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. No, of course.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I want to say this also. I mean, this is a comment from some of the Palestinian people, to include my family members. They always say, “Let them bomb the buildings. We can rebuild buildings. It’s fine. Why are they bombing the people that are in the buildings?”
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. And of course, unfortunately or fortunately, I think it’s necessary for people to learn the history of Israel. If you do, then you realize that the whole goal is ethnic cleansing and genocide. So it’s not about Hamas, because Hamas has only existed for the past 30-some-odd years.
So when you were talking, I was thinking about something else, because obviously, you understand military operations, which I don’t, and I think a lot of listeners being civilians who have never served, don’t either. Do you think the understanding of how things could be done differently in a military sense is also pushing US service members to dissent because they know you could have done it differently?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I do believe so. I’ve had certain conversations with some of my colleagues regarding that fact. But even moreso that we know that Israel had the intelligence on the 5th and 6th, and they could have prevented this.
And now from what I can talk about, obviously I can’t talk about the intelligence besides the fact that I received information from within the intelligence community, from some of my colleagues, that told me that they had all the proper intelligence to tell them that they should have been on alert status and they could have stopped Hamas on the 6th of October.
But what I do understand is military readiness, meaning aircraft readiness. Just to use as an example for anybody that’s listening that doesn’t understand, on the 4th of July, when we heard chatter, when the intelligence community heard chatter, that there may be intensified incidents that may raise alarm, and that’s why we raised the threat levels within the military installations overseas, it should give people a reason to understand that when the intelligence community from Israel received credible sources, not only from the intelligence community, but even the outposts near Gaza, their own people stated in an article, it was written, I believe, in the Haaretz newspaper, when they were talking about the Hannibal objective.
They warned that there was a lot of activity happening. Why the alert status of the Israeli government was not at the highest level? Why their aircrafts were not ready to go within 15 minutes? As if everything that we trained on between our coalition forces when it comes to alert status, we train that they can get up in the air as quickly as possible. Why was that not a priority for them? Those are the questions that the people need to be asking of the government of Israel. How in the world did they let this happen? What broke down? What intelligence was not provided to the right people? Or was this done purposefully?
I mean, most of the people can really look into the force protection levels. Everything that I’m saying is all on Google, Wikipedia. We don’t shy away from posting the force protection levels, neither does our NATO allies. This is how we prepare for certain actions and we practice together in Red Flags in Vegas. We practice what alert status and how to quickly get fighter aircrafts into the air. So this isn’t news to anyone of how we operate together as a coalition. How we helped Israel.
Actually, the first time in seven years that they joined Red Flag was last year in 2023, so they know what heightened alert status is. They know what force protection is when it comes to intelligence and where they should be standing.
And I don’t want to be quoted, that I read in one or two news articles that it took almost 8 to 12 hours to respond. How did it take 8 to 12 hours to respond when you had multiple credible sources stating that the threat levels of what Hamas was doing? It shouldn’t be any question in people’s minds that they could have prevented all of this.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Absolutely. Gaza is the most surveilled place on the planet. Israel literally has counted calories for the people who live there. And so the idea that you couldn’t know about this, it’s absurd. If you know anything about how Gaza is run as an open-air prison, it would be like there being a mutiny inside of a prison and the guards didn’t know. It’s ridiculous.
And finally, I’d like to just ask you, there’s a quote, I am going to attribute it to the wrong person, so I won’t even bother, what if they held a war and nobody came? It’s the idea that, well, if the soldiers just didn’t show up to a war that they felt was immoral and unethical, then who would fight it? We’re not going to send Biden to the front lines.
So I’m curious, how do you feel the levels of dissent are? And do you see the military being a powerful and perhaps even primary place where we could shift US policy with regards to Israel?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I do feel like, especially within our senior advisors, especially within our general senior enlisted leaders, the dissent from them would definitely change the course of where the administration is going. You can’t have the majority of your top leaders leaving the military without feeling that maybe we are going a little overboard with the support for Israel.
Those are the questions that the American people need to also be asking of their own politicians, their own congressmen. How we’re blindly supporting Israel with this much aid, with this much money, when we have our own infrastructure that is failing? Our education systems that are not as strong?
Yet Israel, it’s one of the countries that we continue to supply economic aid and defense to, and they provide free education and free medical for all their citizens and subsidized housing. We probably pay for their own government officials on top of that.
This is what the American people need to be asking of their members of Congress, from their candidates. Why are we supporting a country that can support themselves, it seems like, but we continue to provide them weapons when there’s an ICJ case of a plausible genocide on top of that? How are we not helping the American people first and using all this aid to help a country that already knows how to help itself? Who already has a defense system that they state is impenetrable?
Maybe just one more thing. This is more of a personal opinion [inaudible 00:30:07]. So our government officials created this policy for our Department of Defense personnel and their spouses that they can’t accept gifts that are larger than $300 from foreign entities, and the reason why is because it affects or undermines their ability to do their job correctly.
I would definitely question how we’ve created these policies for all our government agencies to not be able to accept money from foreign entities, yet our politicians accept millions of dollars from foreign donors. How does it not affect their ability to perform their job to their fullest ability for the American people?
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. I mean, the fact that AIPAC is allowed to operate is just remarkable. They give billions of dollars to members of Congress who then claim that they are objective in their dealings with regards to Israel. It’s laughable in the most morbid way. Thank you so much, Mohammad. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Thank you so much.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You’re listening to the Project Censored Radio Show on Pacifica Radio. Coming up, I speak with Australian filmmaker Kym Staton about his film Trust Fall, the personal and professional life of Julian Assange, the US case against him, and the power of the people, coming up after this brief musical break. So please, stay with us now.
Speaker 4:
Well now, it’s passed, way fast-forward behind. Oh, it’s a fire. I can feel this burn in my mind. What do you live for if they tell you to kill for all time? Well, the world’s on fire, and I’m going to stand where it burns. We built this pyre, and I’m going to stand where it burns. What will it take to stand right here where it burns?
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thanks everyone so much for joining us, the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Kym Staton, who’s a filmmaker, poet, and musician from New South Wales, Australia. He’s the writer and director of The Trust Fall: Julian Assange, and the founder and director of Films for Change.
He won an award for Best Emerging Director Australia at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in 2023. The Trust Fall comes out in US Cinemas on July 17th. Kym, thanks so much for joining us.
Kym Staton:
My pleasure. And thanks for having me.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Absolutely. And I must congratulate you on a very powerful and beautifully made film. And it must be perhaps the most joyous event of feeling that you might have to do an updated edit of that film?
Kym Staton:
Yeah. The film was made with the aim to add weight to the campaign for Julian’s freedom. And guess what? Here we are. He’s free, he’s with his family. He’s even in my country. He might end up being my neighbor one day.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You would be so lucky. I want to get right into the film, because there’s a lot that I really appreciated about it. But something in particular that I wanted to start with was an interview with Nils Melzer, who’s the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
And he became very outspoken about what was being done to Julian, and yet he highlights how he initially ignored the request to take a look at Julian Assange’s case because he felt, quote, that it was just this hacker, this traitor. And he admits that he didn’t know where he got his negative emotions towards Julian from, that he recognized that he was emotionally convinced, even though he didn’t actually know about Julian’s case.
And he goes on to say that, quote, “If you think that Assange is a traitor, a rapist, a hacker, I don’t blame you, because you have been deceived. And if you think you’ve not been deceived, that’s normal. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be deception,” end quote. And I think that’s such a powerful quote.
And in your film, you cover both his personal life going back all the way to his school days, but also his professional life. And I’m curious, what did you notice in your research and filming that hit with people the most? Was it the personal character assassinations, like, “Oh, he’s just a hacker and a rapist”? Or was it more the professional side, like, “Oh. He’s guilty of so-called treason or terrorism”?
Kym Staton:
Yeah. I like that you picked up on that Nils Melzer statement. I found Nils’ involvement in this was very pivotal being in his role as UN Special Rapporteur on Torture at the time. That he’d visited Julian in prison with two other doctors, one of which we feature in the film, Pau Pérez-Sales. He visited Julian in Belmarsh a few years ago, and they assessed him under the Istanbul Protocol for Torture, and determined that he was a victim of torture.
And that line that you mentioned, Nils says that he felt like he already had an opinion on Assange, but he didn’t know where he had it from. I just felt that was so relevant to so many people. I put that in the film because I felt like, especially at that point where we’ve attempted to debunk and dismantle those smears, those main smears, that Julian is a rapist, a hacker, a traitor, a Russian agent, that he didn’t redact.
Putting that line of Nils’s right there was intended so that the audience could be invited to actually just identify with Nils and say, “Yeah, that’s me. I had that same thought based on his character. I bought into the false narratives that have been created.” So that was placed there so that hopefully it would be a turning point for those people that still had some prejudice or some doubts.
And I think those are still prevalent. Even after his release, we had even the Australian media, these rubbish rags, The Age, and The Australian Newspaper, and Sky News regurgitating, recycling those smears, especially the one about he put lives at risk, and it was just astonishing.
Especially in the actual court hearing, I’m not sure if you heard the audio from Saipan, where the judge literally recognized that no lives were put at risk, and that was part of the acceptance by the US that no one had been harmed, was basically presented as part of the reason that he could have that plea deal. And for them to reduce the indictment, the counts of the indictment, basically from 18 counts down to one count, one single count, that he pleaded guilty for.
So Judge Manglona, this is the quote from what she said in the courtroom in Saipan two weeks ago. Quote, “There’s another significant fact. The government has indicated there is no personal victims here. That tells me the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury.” End quote. And that’s on top of the original debunking of this claim, which occurred in 2013 at the trial of Chelsea Manning in the US at Fort Meade, where the Pentagon had to admit under oath that no lives had been put at risk.
And yet you still had Sky News Australia do their coverage. And the first thing I heard one of the hack journalists say was, “He put lives at risk, however the public are applauding him as a hero, and he’s home, and he’s blah, blah, blah.” So they use that as a preface to their whole segment as if it was fact. And that’s one of many Australian journalists, and I guess the UK as well, and the US, where they’re just using these false narratives repeatedly without doing any research of their own.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to get into that, because I obviously live in the United States, and I’m also Swedish, so I can speak to how people in the US and indeed Sweden view Julian Assange very twistedly.
But I’m curious about how people in Australia, his home country, view Julian? And if that was an impetus to why you wanted to make this film, was it to shift opinion also at home? How has the perspective of Julian been in his own home country?
Kym Staton:
I think in Australia, really, right from 2011, 2012, he’s had massive support. Some people believe some of those smears, but the majority of people knew what was up.
There’s been surveys in the last couple of years, I think two different surveys have been done, I think it was the Australian Assange campaign that did those surveys. So they basically paid a company to do a proper survey on the public opinion, and they basically found that of people that understood the issue and knew what was going on with Assange, that about 80% of them supported his freedom. That was a previous survey. And when I heard about that one, I thought, “Well, what about the people that don’t know about him?”
And so that’s a big part of the aim of the film, is to educate people in the first place, but also those, the other 20%, that think that he should be sent to the US and thrown in a US jail for 175 years, well, why is that? Most likely, it’s because they believe those smears. But definitely massive support in Australia, and it’s definitely grown since he became free, and he basically received a hero’s welcome. The support and the interest has grown even more.
You can sort of see it in the way the film has been embraced. When we first brought it out in Australia, we had no advertising budget, but we were getting full cinemas with hundreds of people. And then when we did take on investors and we were able to advertise, it absolutely blew up. It’s the most-watched Australian documentary of the year in cinemas. We’ve had 350 cinemas across Australia, New Zealand, UK. So we had people going to all kinds of lengths to convince their local cinema to show it, so there’s incredible interest and incredible support.
So interest in Australia and New Zealand has been extraordinary, but the response to the US, from US programmers, it’s been way, way lower. And I think that’s an interesting thing to talk about. To what degree are US people, American people, scared to get behind this?
And to what degree maybe half of them or so feel like Julian was a traitor and he’s anti-American? Which is ridiculous. But there was also a survey in America that showed that 52% of Americans believe that he should be on trial and he should be found guilty. So very different levels of support in America versus Australia, and we’re seeing that reflected in the uptake so far from US cinemas.
But I do hope that this film, especially in light of Julian being freed and all of the documentation of the work that he’s done and so on, that hopefully there’s a changing of opinion in regards to Julian in America. And also hopefully those that see the initial screenings of The Trust Fall in US cinemas, hopefully, the film makes them feel embarrassed as US citizens, that it’s their government responsible for this persecution of an Australian journalist.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. And I think also with that, kind of going back to what Nils Melzer talked about, is what I appreciated about your film is that it didn’t talk down to the people who had had these incorrect perspectives about Assange. As Nils says, “I understand. I was with you, and I was the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.” If you can fool him, then clearly the rest of us have little hope of battling the immense propaganda machine.
And so I really appreciated that you didn’t talk down to people who had that perspective, but instead, you invited them to change that perspective. And this is something that we’ve also seen, for instance, Kevin Gosztola, who wrote the book, Guilty of Journalism, that covers the case of Julian Assange, who’s been a frequent guest on this show as well, highlights that point very well, that the media created, actually, I have to hand it to them, this brilliant campaign, to smear Assange, much like they did with Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and this is what they do. They have a lot of practice.
Kym Staton:
It was an astounding campaign. They had 100 people on the task force to bring down Assange and WikiLeaks. And I think one of the most compelling, powerful examples of the lengths that they went to, to spin this narrative, it’s something we forgot to put in the film.
But about a month before, they knew already that the Ecuadorian government had agreed that they could take Julian out of the embassy, so they had about a month to plan that scene, this bit of theater, where Julian is carried out and put in a van like a criminal. So what they did was somebody stole his shaving equipment, his razor, his scissors, and when they pulled him out, he looks like a hobo. He looks bedraggled, long hair. He looks like a loser. And that’s what they wanted to do. And that’s not how Julian likes to present himself.
And then as soon as he arrived at Belmarsh, I think within a few days, we saw that leaked footage of him inside the prison, and he’d gone back to his usual self. He was clean-shaven, and he’d had a haircut, and that’s how he would prefer to be. It was so much effort that they put into bringing him down and undermining the public opinion of Assange over all those years.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You’re listening to the Project Censored Radio Show. I’m your host this week, Eleanor Goldfield. We’ll now continue our conversation with Australian filmmaker, Kym Staton.
And I want to talk a little bit about that, because having organized in the US for Assange, there was always this conversation with fellow organizers about how much we should spend time on the personal side of things and how much we should say, “Look, it doesn’t matter if you like Julian or not. This is an atrocious way of dealing with somebody who’s a journalist.”
And I wanted to ask you about that, because you go both into his personal side of things. As I mentioned, you talk about him going back to his school days and wanting to use what he’s learning about tech and things like that to really expose corruption and to uncover truth.
What do you think the importance is of uncovering the personal aspect of Assange versus the professional? How important do you think it is that people understand that this is an intensely morally driven person, versus, “Look, it doesn’t matter if you like him or not, but let’s just focus on the fact that he’s a journalist”? What do you think the balance is there?
Kym Staton:
Yeah. Interesting point. That’s something I really considered deeply was to what degree should we spend time in the film revealing the visions, the mission of Assange and WikiLeaks, and also his character?
I thought it was really important because most humans, not everybody, but most people do judge the book by its cover. I’ve heard so many comments from people, and radio people, and journalists, and even very recent articles where there was one, I can’t remember the exact lines, someone described him, I think it was the Australian newspaper who they said something like he’s vulgar, and he eats with his hands. And they were just looking for anything that they could find.
You’ve had journalists criticize his hair because he’s got this unusual appearance because he went gray so early in life. Interestingly, his mother Christine told me over the phone not so long ago that his hair went gray when he went through a separation with his partner, when they had their first child, Daniel, as very young adults.
And the stress of the court case where he was battling for custody of his son made his hair go gray. And Julian’s someone that’s battled with lots of challenges in life, not only because he’s taken on basically every country in the world by exposing their dirty laundry, but also he’s had personal struggles. And you could go right into all of this stuff.
In the film, we chose to start from his university days. I didn’t want to go back too far, because it was already going to be a long film, and you can only fit so much in. We start from his university days, and I wanted to interview his friends at the time, because I wanted them to paint a picture of this young adult, Julian, prior to WikiLeaks. Just before WikiLeaks, what was he like?
And his friend at university, Niraj Lal, who’s now a scientist, described him as further ahead than all classes at university and even ahead of the professors that were teaching it. So we got this picture of Julian as being incredibly bright. Basically a genius is my opinion.
And then the wonderful Suelette Dreyfus, who’s probably the most eminent professor in Australia of encryption at the moment, and she knew Julian from way back in his sort of days as an ethical hacker, as someone that was interested in the creation of the internet in Australia. She met him on online forums, and she described him as quirky. Just an interesting character that didn’t really care about what people thought about him.
And if you look back at some of Julian’s early writings, some of the first books that he put out, and even some of his blogs, he was writing really interesting stuff. You could make a whole film on that stage of his life, but we just wanted to show that he was on a mission. But as Suelette Dreyfus said, and which ended up being one of the main lines in that chapter of which we call Genesis, the Genesis of WikiLeaks, basically, she said that he had this burning desire to expose corruption, and he felt that if that was done, that we could solve the inequity in society.
Suelette Dreyfus also mentioned, which we didn’t get to fit into the film, but she said when he was at uni, he was horrified to discover that the university was receiving funding to do research on weapons. For example, how to make tanks that could drive very comfortably over the top of dead bodies. He was just disgusted that they were using university funds to assist war profiteers. So there’s just an accumulation of all of these things that impel Julian.
I think he was just always searching for something that he could do to make a difference, and when he came up with this idea of an anonymous drop box to protect whistleblowers using encryption, he was an encryption expert, and he just realized that this was in combination with this new thing called the internet, where you could just have mountains of documents spread at little to no cost. And he just put all this together and came up with this invention that changed the world.
So we wanted to simultaneously humanize Julian, show a little bit of what he’s like. He’s an interesting character, an intellectual, but above all, that he is a compassionate person that cares about the state of the world and wants to make a positive difference.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely, and that definitely comes across. And I think what you’re saying also points to something that I highlight as well when I do frontline trainings and things like that, or speaking to folks who are curious about, oh, how do I become an activist? And it’s there’s no such thing as a professional or an expert activist. It’s just people who decide that they care deeply about something or some things. They see injustice, and they want to make it just, and they use whatever skills they have.
You pointed out that he was really good at encryption, so, “Okay. How can I use that to address this idea that I’ve had since I was eight to end corruption? Oh, this is a way to do that.” And so I think it’s just taking the thing that you’re passionate about or that you are really good at and tying that into addressing injustices that you see. And I think that’s a really powerful message as well. And we could talk about this for days, and I would definitely recommend that people take a couple of hours to check out this film, the trailer, and more information about it at thetrustfall.org.
But finally, Kym, wrapping up here, I think a good thing that you kind of prophetically highlighted on that website is Julian Assange will not be saved by the law. He will be saved by the actions of the public.
So just wrapping up here, any final thoughts on kind of the arc of making this film, where you started and he was obviously still imprisoned and being tortured, how do you see this film project with regards to what’s happened with Assange and what could happen moving forward with his continued drive to address corruption?
Kym Staton:
Firstly, it’s just absolutely wonderful that Julian is free, that he’s with his family back in Australia, that he’s alive. This is a victory. Stefania Morizio did a great post on X where she said, “The outcome of this is that we now know that you can expose the crimes of the powerful, including war crimes, really serious crimes, and live, survive.”
He wasn’t assassinated. The CIA plotted to poison him or kill him in some way. They tried to kill him by keeping him in the embassy and in Belmarsh for a combined more than 12 years, but he didn’t lose his mind. He’s still together, he’s still alive, and we’re left with a precedent that’s been set.
It’s a shocking thing that a journalist has been convicted of espionage under the Espionage Act, and this is the first time a journalist has been convicted. They’ve thought about it and tried it before. Now, it’s been used against a journalist and used against the world in that way, because it reduces our ability to know what’s going on.
So this is a precedent that’s been set. It’s really important that the campaign now moves towards pardoning it, getting us a pardon for Assange, and compensation as well for all the suffering that he’s endured and his family. And as Nils Melzer said, they use intimidation, this threat of legal action and jail time against journalists. In the case of Assange, it was to intimidate the whole world. I really agree with that.
And so I think the campaign now will move towards pardoning Assange. That, again, will require more awareness. The Trust Fall can be part of that. The Trust Fall was one small part of creating the pressure that resulted in Julian’s freedom. I think that his freedom, of course there was diplomacy and legal efforts involved, but the main thing was the public support. It was the public pressure, because that was growing day by day, and I think the US knew that. They knew that they couldn’t have a journalist arrive onto US shores in handcuffs leading up to the election. It wasn’t going to look good.
So it was the efforts of many, many people all around the world that created this pressure, combined with the legal battle and the diplomacy, that resulted in saving the life of someone very courageous and very heroic. And now, he has an opportunity, if he so chooses, when he recovers, to be somewhat involved.
And it’d be fascinating to see what he does next, even if it is just to have a quiet life, write a few books, and get back onto his Twitter page and have some sort of voice. Certainly, I said in the film, wherever Julian goes, free speech goes with him, and his voice is going to be louder than ever. We can’t wait to hear it. And if he does decide to go back to some sort of involvement in politics and world events, then that’ll be an exciting thing to see.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Absolutely. And lest we forget the Espionage Act, I would say to folks listening in the US, which is most of our audience, I feel that an important next step is just getting rid of the Espionage Act, because the Espionage Act was created to go after activists. I mean, the likes of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were some of the first people to be in the crosshairs of the Espionage Act. So this was created, like a lot of legislation in the United States, to go after people who go after the empire. So I think that’s an important next step for folks here.
Kym, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Again, folks can go to thetrustfall.org. This film will be out in the United States July 17th. Kym, thank you again so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Kym Staton:
My pleasure, Eleanor. Thank you so much for this coverage of the release in the US of The Trust Fall and also your support of Assange and free speech in general. All of your efforts in that is wonderful, what you’ve done.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thank you. Likewise.
Kym Staton:
Keep up the great work. Take care.
Speaker 1:
We want to smash, crash, bash, smash, blast the system. We want to get it hype, get it loud, get with the mission. We want the crowd loud, fists bumping, rhythm is hitting. We want to-
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thanks so much for listening. That does it for this week’s show. I’m Eleanor Goldfield, and along with Mickey Huff, we are your Project Censored radio hosts.
The Project Censored Radio Show airs on roughly 50 stations across the US. Please follow us on social media and check out projectcensored.org for more rad content. Thanks so much. See you next time on the Project Censored Radio Show.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This episode of The Project Censored Show originally aired on Project Censored on July 22, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Ten months in, the US role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza goes far beyond complicity. Israel is butchering Palestinians with US bombs, funding, and political and military support, and some members of the US military are resigning in protest. In this episode of the Project Censored Show, which is now syndicated by TRNN, host Eleanor Goldfield speaks with Palestinian-American Mohammed Abouhashem, who on Oct. 21 of last year left the US Air Force after 22 years of service. Abouhashem discusses his decision to leave amidst the murder of six of his family members in Palestine. He describes the ongoing genocide through a lens of military experience, highlighting how Israel and its ally the US are well aware of the civilian casualties—an awareness that, for Mohammed, made any further military service impossible.
In the second segment of the show, Goldfield speaks with filmmaker Kym Staton about his film ‘Trust Fall,’ which was recently released in the US. The documentary chronicles the personal and professional life of Julian Assange as well as the US case against him. Staton makes clear the importance of this story and case, even after Assange won his freedom, and offers insight into the remarkable smear campaign against him and how people power is the key to not only combating misinformation, but in freeing one of the most significant political prisoners of our time.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Welcome to the Project Censored Radio Show. I’m your host this week, Eleanor Goldfield. In the first half of the show I speak with Palestinian-American, Mohammed Abouhashem, who on October 21st of last year left the US Air Force After 22 years of service.
Mohammed discusses his decision to leave amidst the murder of six of his family members in Palestine. He describes the ongoing genocide through a lens of military experience highlighting how Israel and its ally, the US, are well aware of the civilian casualties, an awareness that for him made any further military service impossible.
Next up, I speak with filmmaker, Kym Staton, about his film Trust fall that has just come out in the United States. Trust Fall Chronicles the personal and professional life of Julian Assange, as well as the US case against him. Kym makes clear the importance of this story and case, even after Julian’s freedom, and offers insight into the remarkable smear campaign against Julian and how people power is the key to not only combating misinformation, but indeed freeing one of the most significant political prisoners of our time. All this and more coming up now on Project Censored.
Speaker 1:
… minds collapsing. All the prisons filled to capacity, citizens in the times for the master thief. Divide and conquer, still a masterpiece. Open your eyes and realize what’s happening. Time’s running out to reach our potential, fame, at the table, then you’re probably on the menu. We won. We got that [inaudible 00:01:36] with our brothers and our sisters. We won. The people [inaudible 00:01:37]-
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thanks everyone for joining us at the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to welcome to the show Mohammed Abouhashem, a Palestinian-American veteran, former Air Force Senior Master Sergeant of the US Air Force, having served 22 years, before submitting his separation request from the government on October 21st, 2023.
He was previously a fifteen-year mechanic on cargo tanker aircraft that provided rapid global mobility. And for the past seven years, he has served in different leadership roles in six military readiness units, including reconnaissance and aircraft readiness. He has lost six family members since October in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Mohammed, thank you so much for being here.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Thank you for having me.
Eleanor Goldfield:
So I’d like to start with a question that I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot, which is why now? Or why then? Why was that the moment that you felt that you needed to walk away from those 20-plus years of service?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Well, the main purpose originally when I joined the Air Force was right after 9/11. As a young 18-year-old, I was scared for the family that I have here in the US, and I wanted to join because I wanted to make sure that they were protected. That was the main reason.
But I almost got out after four years of service, but the only reason why I stayed in was after talking to some relatives, I had family members that convinced me that this could be an opportunity that I could stay in and use my voice as a Palestinian-American. We don’t have a lot of representation. Representation matters. Knowing that my family’s lineage from Palestine and how they went through the 1948 war and the 1967 war as well, I could have used my voice, and that’s why I decided to stay in the 22 years.
But everything in October, obviously, once I finally had the opportunity and I started having those conversations, I found out only three days into the conflict that my aunt was killed in an Israeli airstrike. And immediately, obviously, I started gathering the data that I needed in order for me to provide to the intelligence community.
Luckily, I was working in the District of Washington where I had members, even my direct report, who saw oversight over the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was great for me because I knew that the intelligence that I was going to provide on the location of where my family’s home and who lived in those apartment complexes was going to make it directly to our intelligence community and was hopefully going to raise a lot of red flags into what Israel was doing.
But unfortunately, I was met with complete silence. I never received a response back. And it took me two weeks to realize that I’m probably not going to receive a response. And even moreso, after I submitted my request to part ways from the military, when I started seeing members from the State Department themselves leave because they were advising the Biden administration of the same kind of actions that Israel was taking and our complicity to our own US laws and international law, I knew right then that there was no specific rank I was going to reach that would’ve made my impact more meaningful. So I had to use my voice in a different way.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m curious about that intelligence that you said that you shared. Is that common practice for people then to share with higher-ups intelligence about, “Hey, there are civilians here”? Or, “Hey, we actually know these people here”? Whether that be in a place like Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan, is that typical practice?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
It is typical practice. I can sit there and speak on everyone that has went through several conflicts in the past, whether they had direct ties to the conflict with family members that are being the ones that are being slaughtered by Israel and US-made bombs.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And indeed, I found you through a joint open letter titled Service in Dissent that was released on July 2nd. And in one part of the letter, it states, that, quote, “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership, and decision-making, that have characterized this administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity,” end quote.
So you mentioned that you were just met with silence. Has there been any kind of side door, or, “Hey, I wish I could help you, but I just can’t,” kind of conversations? Or could you talk a little bit more about that kind of reaction or conversations that you’ve had?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
No. To be honest with you, I’ve had several leaders that extended their hand on a personal level of how they can help me get through these times.
But beyond what our own intelligence community, what the administration, no one within the higher military echelons even reached out. No one contacted me directly. It was mainly my own peers or leadership team that I worked for directly that ever reached out to me and continued to reach out to me to make sure that everything was okay.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You had this information, and I’m assuming this intelligence that you then shared was not heavily classified, or you had to have some kind of high, top-secret pass in order to read it, right?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Correct.
Eleanor Goldfield:
So then it would then suggest very obviously that the United States is well-aware of what Israel is doing, and it’s not under the impression that Israel is actually actively trying to minimize civilian casualties?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Absolutely. And it’s difficult to say that all the intelligence that we’re sharing with them, the amount of reconnaissance that we’ve flown in the past in that region and continue to fly in that region, we have enough intelligence to share with them what they’re doing.
But not only the United States. I mean, you see what’s going on around the globe of all the different countries joining the ICJ case because they see enough evidence themselves of the complicity in a plausible genocide.
So it’s not far from anyone to say that we as the United States are seeing what’s going on, on the ground. I’ve had members from the intelligence community, and I quote, state, what we’re seeing, what me and you are seeing, what the common public are seeing, they’re seeing twofold.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Which is absolutely horrifying. And of course, we’re recording this on Monday, July 8th, and the Lancet recently just came out with a report that says that the death toll conservatively, according to their research, is actually more like 186,000 people. And of course, the State Department has announced that they’re not going to count the dead anymore, so they’re just going to continue with this genocide denial in a really stark and overt way.
And I’m curious, this open letter was not just signed by you, but it was signed by several people who had left their posts not just in the Air Force but in a variety of places. Could you speak to how did you guys find each other? Was there just some internal memo like, “Hey, this person quit”? How did you find other people that were in a similar position as you?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Eventually, we started connecting with each other through the first members that started to leave the State Department, with Hella and Josh. I reached out to Josh directly in regards to his resignation and just asked him about how I should approach certain situations, and he started connecting me with other members of the media.
Because when I first made my decision on 21 October, I was going and trying to reach out to the media myself, but unfortunately, I wasn’t getting anywhere. And so I wasn’t able to voice my opinion until later in June, once I finally started connecting with all the right people. And Josh kind of brought us all together as a team to start having those conversations together.
Because you see the reports. Even in the letter, we talk about how we all had our different levels of the departments that we worked on, yet we all felt the same exact dissent towards what was happening. And multiple different military members, you have myself, Riley, and Harrison, Harrison serves in the army, and both myself and Riley are in the Air Force in completely different departments.
If multiple different people from different departments are noticing the same thing, you’re talking about advisors that are advising our government on the complicity that we might be facing in this genocide, it should send a red flag to most Americans that this impacts our national security on a level that we have not seen, and it’s concerning to us. Although we decided to walk away from our positions, we swore an oath to this constitution, so we are continuing to serve the American people just in a different capacity.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And could you talk a little bit about that capacity? What do you feel like your role is now?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
My role personally obviously is to try to help people understand the military readiness aspect of what’s happening. For me, this is one of the discussions that I had with members of the media about my fear as a first sergeant and how this has impacted our service members to include our junior members. It’s a little bit concerning to me.
I’ve had multiple service members that were asking about how to submit the conscientious objector package. I’ve had members come up to me and say this is affecting their health, this is affecting their anxiety. They’re watching a genocide happen live. There’s nothing that we can hide anymore. Every social media platform is broadcasting this live.
And additionally, in only a few cases, I’ve had members that wanted to leave the service no matter what, and they were going to drastic measures. In one case that I know of, a member turned to legal drugs in order for them to separate, because it’s incompatible with military service.
And to me, this is concerning because if this is happening within our military community, you’re talking about all our NATO allies, all nations. The junior service members, they’re watching this and they are thinking the same thing: how in the world are we letting this happen?
Eleanor Goldfield:
And kind of circling back to what I asked you personally about why now? I’m curious what you’re hearing from other service members, because we’re seeing the first live-streamed genocide in the world, which is horrifying, but also very powerful in terms of its effect on how people are dissenting.
But of course, the US has committed atrocities in Iraq and in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and going back quite some time. So why do you feel that this in particular is affecting service members differently or moreso than what happened in the past?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
In the past, to include even when I was serving back in 2003, it’s a huge difference when every single member of the military is watching these atrocities live on their phone. There is no hiding what is going on anymore. There is no hiding how many people are being killed.
It’s imperative for them to see all these things, because they have to make a decision for themselves on whether they feel that our service is illegal, immoral, or unethical. And each person engages their morality a little bit differently. But this is something that we are taught in the military all the time. We continue to say, “You follow all orders unless they’re illegal, unethical, or immoral.” And unfortunately, I found right from the beginning that all three have been crossed, and that’s why I had to step aside.
But I continue to have the young service members reach out to me asking me what they should be doing. And I continue to ask them those questions. Do they feel that this is immoral in their own ethics? And some of them have to make their own decisions on whether they value their morality over what’s going on.
Eleanor Goldfield:
But I’m also curious with that as somebody who’s never served in the military, when they say morals and ethics, what are the morals and ethics that they instill in you? Because I’ve been a peace activist since I was 14, so I’m obviously not talking about it from a military perspective.
But what do they instill in you in terms of that? Is it kind of strictly going by the constitution? Or could you talk a little bit about more of those moral and ethics that the military then suggests are ones you should follow?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
So the military doesn’t really deep-dive into which morality you should follow or which ethics you should follow. We have basic guidelines, but those are basic guidelines. Each person in the military comes from a different perspective, different background, different part of the world where they view morality and ethics a little bit differently from each other. That’s what makes us diverse.
So in the case of some members, they see and view this as morally wrong, while others may not, and that’s where it’s just a guideline for the military. But we’re all given that same guideline. We have to look within ourselves.
And that’s why anytime any military member reach out to me, I ask them those questions: do they feel as if their morality or their ethics are being violated? Do they feel like what we are doing and what we are helping Israel accomplish as illegal? And if they do, then those are the choices that they have to make personally.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You’re listening to the Project Censored Radio Show. I’m your host this week, Eleanor Goldfield. We’ll now continue our conversation with US Air Force veteran, Mohammed Abouhashem.
There’s also in that Service in Dissent letter, a place where you talk about a message to former colleagues. Could you talk a little bit about that? And in case there are any people that are still in service in the military listening to this, what would a message be that you’d share with them about this situation?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
If I can share any message with them is they don’t have to suffer in silence. We know that there’s a lot of people that are still currently serving that have a major issue. There were members that I know of personally that resigned silently. They did not come out publicly to resign, but they’ve called me directly and told me that the reason was because of the conflict. And unfortunately, we’ll never know what number that is because each one of us has made our choice whether we were going to come out publicly with the matter or go silently.
But what we are hoping to call on our colleagues to do is, if they are still in, to use their power to try to pressure the administration, because things have not changed. We’re in July, and the complicity in genocide has not changed. The plausible that this may be a genocide has not changed.
For them, they can use their power still while they’re still serving, and if they cannot find any alternate means, they can reach out to any one of the 12 members. They can find us on our social media platforms and reach out to us directly if they feel like coming forward or if they feel like resigning publicly. We can help them with those matters so that they don’t feel the same thing that I went through back in October where I felt that I was not able to reach out to anyone directly or any news media outlets because no one really knew how big this was going to be back then.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And this is a bit of a personal question. Being a Palestinian-American, do you feel that there’s a splintering of your identity? Do you feel that it’s difficult to be an American at a time like this because you are also a Palestinian? Just like somebody who is from the former Yugoslavia might find it difficult to have been American at the time that NATO was destroying Yugoslavia or Iraq or Afghanistan, do you feel this splintering happening with your identity?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I do in a sense of obviously what is going on in the Gaza Strip mean? We’re talking about a 25-mile strip. And what has gone on in Palestine for the past 76 years, it definitely affects how I approach certain situations, but I’m also an American, right? When we moved here, this is what I’ve known my entire life, this is what I’ve known for the majority of my life, is how to be an American.
So what I can make as a change and what I can implement is the changes to the US policies that continue to drive these kind of actions in Gaza from Israel. And those are the things that I’m focusing on. I can’t change the policies of Israel, so unfortunately, even though it is, as you stated, splintering between being Palestinian and being American, I can’t change what Israel is doing.
And unfortunately, as an American, this is what I know and this is what I can change. I can help the American people understand how this affects their national security and how it impacts their every-single-day life when they watch the majority of our allies turning towards the ICJ in the case against genocide from Israel. And if we are complicit in this, it does affect them. And we’ve seen it even in the letter that we wrote, how we affected our soldiers in Jordan, with the three members that were killed.
This only paints a target on the American people. So in two ways, I’m affected because I have direct ties and I have my people that are being affected in Gaza, but at the same time, my people here in America are being affected by our policies and blind complicity in genocide that our administration continues to go with.
I talked about the bombing of my family’s home, of my aunt’s home, and I talked about how the Israel military’s response, when I finally received the response, was that it was a Hamas operational structure. Which I quickly rebutted that, because we know the members that live in that family. They’re regular family members, they are teachers, they are market owners. There’s nobody in there that anyone does not know. There were 12 children killed in that same building, yet it doesn’t equate to what the law of armed conflict, specifically proportionality, of if you’re targeting a Hamas operational structure.
Most of the family members, when they heard the Israeli military, the initial what they call a roof knock, they stepped outside of the building, and they were outside the building for 90 minutes waiting, and when nothing happened, they went inside. From my uncle, from my cousins, basically what they said is the minute that they entered the living room, by the time they made it into the apartment and into the living room, that’s when the building was struck, and they found themselves underneath the rubble.
So if it was a Hamas operational structure, why did Israel military decide not to attack it when all the people were out of it? And we questioned their response. And when we asked them again to explain how it was a Hamas operational structure, they declined to answer. That, to me, is important, because it shows that they are not willing to give a direct response or intelligence on anything.
And I don’t know what they’re concerned about. If they’re saying it’s a Hamas operational structure, they should not worry of explaining to the people how it was used in that way to cover themselves. But the fact that they declined to answer and the fact that they’re refusing to give anything more than the blanket statement that they continue to give the media of Hamas operational structure, it doesn’t cut it, and it doesn’t cut it in a ICJ case as well.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And did you reach out as an Air Force veteran? Or did you reach out as a civilian?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
As a civilian through the media outlets.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And so then they responded to you via the same media outlets?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
They responded through different media outlets, declining to answer.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Wow. And I’m also curious now that you mentioned that, because Hamas is the government in Gaza, and so to say that something is a Hamas structure, isn’t that kind of like saying it’s a government structure, which could be anything? It feels purposefully vague.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
It does feel purposefully vague. You’ve heard them multiple times. A school is a Hamas operational structure. A hospital is Hamas operational structure.
Well, if you look at the laws of war, when you’re defining how to strike a school, it has to have an imminent threat to you or your personnel. You can’t say that it’s just a Hamas operational structure and we struck it. That’s not how the laws of war work. You have to define that this was an imminent threat and it was used that way.
Well, what imminent threats have we noticed when every single hospital and every single school has been destroyed? No one is talking about, well, there were missiles fired from the school at Tel Aviv, or there were missiles fired from this hospital at another city in Israel. So what imminent threat were they facing exactly?
They use this blanket statement so that they can justify that they can destroy this building. They’re going to have to try to defend themselves in the ICJ case that what they’re doing was right, and unfortunately, I don’t see how that’s going to work.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Well, an imminent threat, you can’t compare the firepower of the Palestinians against Israel. It’s literally like comparing rocks and tanks.
And I’ve used the example, let’s say that there were an active shooter in a school here in the US, if the cops then bombed that school, would everyone be like, “Yay, we did it”? You’d be horrified that that would be the response. That’s not how you deal with a threat. If there were one in a school, you would try to pointedly address that threat, and yet it’s okay if it’s done in Gaza.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
We can even look at it even further. The international community continues to say that we’re trying to help out minimize civilians. Gaza is a 25-mile stretch with 2.2 million people. Gaza is not its own country that’s separated from Israel. It’s inside Israel.
If you were really trying to minimize civilian population, just like if we were to say that there was a terrorist threat in Texas and they’ve embedded themselves among civilians, the first thing we would start to do is try to minimize the civilian casualties by getting them out of the state of Texas.
If you remove the civilian population from Gaza into Israel, because that is their country, and they could have had the multiple coalitions of forces helping them with maintaining the population right outside of Gaza so that they can go in and get the hostages safely. There is no reason that anyone should believe that they were protecting the hostages when they were firing almost 6000 rockets per day from the very beginning of the war.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. No, of course.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I want to say this also. I mean, this is a comment from some of the Palestinian people, to include my family members. They always say, “Let them bomb the buildings. We can rebuild buildings. It’s fine. Why are they bombing the people that are in the buildings?”
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. And of course, unfortunately or fortunately, I think it’s necessary for people to learn the history of Israel. If you do, then you realize that the whole goal is ethnic cleansing and genocide. So it’s not about Hamas, because Hamas has only existed for the past 30-some-odd years.
So when you were talking, I was thinking about something else, because obviously, you understand military operations, which I don’t, and I think a lot of listeners being civilians who have never served, don’t either. Do you think the understanding of how things could be done differently in a military sense is also pushing US service members to dissent because they know you could have done it differently?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I do believe so. I’ve had certain conversations with some of my colleagues regarding that fact. But even moreso that we know that Israel had the intelligence on the 5th and 6th, and they could have prevented this.
And now from what I can talk about, obviously I can’t talk about the intelligence besides the fact that I received information from within the intelligence community, from some of my colleagues, that told me that they had all the proper intelligence to tell them that they should have been on alert status and they could have stopped Hamas on the 6th of October.
But what I do understand is military readiness, meaning aircraft readiness. Just to use as an example for anybody that’s listening that doesn’t understand, on the 4th of July, when we heard chatter, when the intelligence community heard chatter, that there may be intensified incidents that may raise alarm, and that’s why we raised the threat levels within the military installations overseas, it should give people a reason to understand that when the intelligence community from Israel received credible sources, not only from the intelligence community, but even the outposts near Gaza, their own people stated in an article, it was written, I believe, in the Haaretz newspaper, when they were talking about the Hannibal objective.
They warned that there was a lot of activity happening. Why the alert status of the Israeli government was not at the highest level? Why their aircrafts were not ready to go within 15 minutes? As if everything that we trained on between our coalition forces when it comes to alert status, we train that they can get up in the air as quickly as possible. Why was that not a priority for them? Those are the questions that the people need to be asking of the government of Israel. How in the world did they let this happen? What broke down? What intelligence was not provided to the right people? Or was this done purposefully?
I mean, most of the people can really look into the force protection levels. Everything that I’m saying is all on Google, Wikipedia. We don’t shy away from posting the force protection levels, neither does our NATO allies. This is how we prepare for certain actions and we practice together in Red Flags in Vegas. We practice what alert status and how to quickly get fighter aircrafts into the air. So this isn’t news to anyone of how we operate together as a coalition. How we helped Israel.
Actually, the first time in seven years that they joined Red Flag was last year in 2023, so they know what heightened alert status is. They know what force protection is when it comes to intelligence and where they should be standing.
And I don’t want to be quoted, that I read in one or two news articles that it took almost 8 to 12 hours to respond. How did it take 8 to 12 hours to respond when you had multiple credible sources stating that the threat levels of what Hamas was doing? It shouldn’t be any question in people’s minds that they could have prevented all of this.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Absolutely. Gaza is the most surveilled place on the planet. Israel literally has counted calories for the people who live there. And so the idea that you couldn’t know about this, it’s absurd. If you know anything about how Gaza is run as an open-air prison, it would be like there being a mutiny inside of a prison and the guards didn’t know. It’s ridiculous.
And finally, I’d like to just ask you, there’s a quote, I am going to attribute it to the wrong person, so I won’t even bother, what if they held a war and nobody came? It’s the idea that, well, if the soldiers just didn’t show up to a war that they felt was immoral and unethical, then who would fight it? We’re not going to send Biden to the front lines.
So I’m curious, how do you feel the levels of dissent are? And do you see the military being a powerful and perhaps even primary place where we could shift US policy with regards to Israel?
Mohammed Abouhashem:
I do feel like, especially within our senior advisors, especially within our general senior enlisted leaders, the dissent from them would definitely change the course of where the administration is going. You can’t have the majority of your top leaders leaving the military without feeling that maybe we are going a little overboard with the support for Israel.
Those are the questions that the American people need to also be asking of their own politicians, their own congressmen. How we’re blindly supporting Israel with this much aid, with this much money, when we have our own infrastructure that is failing? Our education systems that are not as strong?
Yet Israel, it’s one of the countries that we continue to supply economic aid and defense to, and they provide free education and free medical for all their citizens and subsidized housing. We probably pay for their own government officials on top of that.
This is what the American people need to be asking of their members of Congress, from their candidates. Why are we supporting a country that can support themselves, it seems like, but we continue to provide them weapons when there’s an ICJ case of a plausible genocide on top of that? How are we not helping the American people first and using all this aid to help a country that already knows how to help itself? Who already has a defense system that they state is impenetrable?
Maybe just one more thing. This is more of a personal opinion [inaudible 00:30:07]. So our government officials created this policy for our Department of Defense personnel and their spouses that they can’t accept gifts that are larger than $300 from foreign entities, and the reason why is because it affects or undermines their ability to do their job correctly.
I would definitely question how we’ve created these policies for all our government agencies to not be able to accept money from foreign entities, yet our politicians accept millions of dollars from foreign donors. How does it not affect their ability to perform their job to their fullest ability for the American people?
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. I mean, the fact that AIPAC is allowed to operate is just remarkable. They give billions of dollars to members of Congress who then claim that they are objective in their dealings with regards to Israel. It’s laughable in the most morbid way. Thank you so much, Mohammad. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us.
Mohammed Abouhashem:
Thank you so much.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You’re listening to the Project Censored Radio Show on Pacifica Radio. Coming up, I speak with Australian filmmaker Kym Staton about his film Trust Fall, the personal and professional life of Julian Assange, the US case against him, and the power of the people, coming up after this brief musical break. So please, stay with us now.
Speaker 4:
Well now, it’s passed, way fast-forward behind. Oh, it’s a fire. I can feel this burn in my mind. What do you live for if they tell you to kill for all time? Well, the world’s on fire, and I’m going to stand where it burns. We built this pyre, and I’m going to stand where it burns. What will it take to stand right here where it burns?
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thanks everyone so much for joining us, the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Kym Staton, who’s a filmmaker, poet, and musician from New South Wales, Australia. He’s the writer and director of The Trust Fall: Julian Assange, and the founder and director of Films for Change.
He won an award for Best Emerging Director Australia at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in 2023. The Trust Fall comes out in US Cinemas on July 17th. Kym, thanks so much for joining us.
Kym Staton:
My pleasure. And thanks for having me.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Absolutely. And I must congratulate you on a very powerful and beautifully made film. And it must be perhaps the most joyous event of feeling that you might have to do an updated edit of that film?
Kym Staton:
Yeah. The film was made with the aim to add weight to the campaign for Julian’s freedom. And guess what? Here we are. He’s free, he’s with his family. He’s even in my country. He might end up being my neighbor one day.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You would be so lucky. I want to get right into the film, because there’s a lot that I really appreciated about it. But something in particular that I wanted to start with was an interview with Nils Melzer, who’s the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
And he became very outspoken about what was being done to Julian, and yet he highlights how he initially ignored the request to take a look at Julian Assange’s case because he felt, quote, that it was just this hacker, this traitor. And he admits that he didn’t know where he got his negative emotions towards Julian from, that he recognized that he was emotionally convinced, even though he didn’t actually know about Julian’s case.
And he goes on to say that, quote, “If you think that Assange is a traitor, a rapist, a hacker, I don’t blame you, because you have been deceived. And if you think you’ve not been deceived, that’s normal. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be deception,” end quote. And I think that’s such a powerful quote.
And in your film, you cover both his personal life going back all the way to his school days, but also his professional life. And I’m curious, what did you notice in your research and filming that hit with people the most? Was it the personal character assassinations, like, “Oh, he’s just a hacker and a rapist”? Or was it more the professional side, like, “Oh. He’s guilty of so-called treason or terrorism”?
Kym Staton:
Yeah. I like that you picked up on that Nils Melzer statement. I found Nils’ involvement in this was very pivotal being in his role as UN Special Rapporteur on Torture at the time. That he’d visited Julian in prison with two other doctors, one of which we feature in the film, Pau Pérez-Sales. He visited Julian in Belmarsh a few years ago, and they assessed him under the Istanbul Protocol for Torture, and determined that he was a victim of torture.
And that line that you mentioned, Nils says that he felt like he already had an opinion on Assange, but he didn’t know where he had it from. I just felt that was so relevant to so many people. I put that in the film because I felt like, especially at that point where we’ve attempted to debunk and dismantle those smears, those main smears, that Julian is a rapist, a hacker, a traitor, a Russian agent, that he didn’t redact.
Putting that line of Nils’s right there was intended so that the audience could be invited to actually just identify with Nils and say, “Yeah, that’s me. I had that same thought based on his character. I bought into the false narratives that have been created.” So that was placed there so that hopefully it would be a turning point for those people that still had some prejudice or some doubts.
And I think those are still prevalent. Even after his release, we had even the Australian media, these rubbish rags, The Age, and The Australian Newspaper, and Sky News regurgitating, recycling those smears, especially the one about he put lives at risk, and it was just astonishing.
Especially in the actual court hearing, I’m not sure if you heard the audio from Saipan, where the judge literally recognized that no lives were put at risk, and that was part of the acceptance by the US that no one had been harmed, was basically presented as part of the reason that he could have that plea deal. And for them to reduce the indictment, the counts of the indictment, basically from 18 counts down to one count, one single count, that he pleaded guilty for.
So Judge Manglona, this is the quote from what she said in the courtroom in Saipan two weeks ago. Quote, “There’s another significant fact. The government has indicated there is no personal victims here. That tells me the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury.” End quote. And that’s on top of the original debunking of this claim, which occurred in 2013 at the trial of Chelsea Manning in the US at Fort Meade, where the Pentagon had to admit under oath that no lives had been put at risk.
And yet you still had Sky News Australia do their coverage. And the first thing I heard one of the hack journalists say was, “He put lives at risk, however the public are applauding him as a hero, and he’s home, and he’s blah, blah, blah.” So they use that as a preface to their whole segment as if it was fact. And that’s one of many Australian journalists, and I guess the UK as well, and the US, where they’re just using these false narratives repeatedly without doing any research of their own.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to get into that, because I obviously live in the United States, and I’m also Swedish, so I can speak to how people in the US and indeed Sweden view Julian Assange very twistedly.
But I’m curious about how people in Australia, his home country, view Julian? And if that was an impetus to why you wanted to make this film, was it to shift opinion also at home? How has the perspective of Julian been in his own home country?
Kym Staton:
I think in Australia, really, right from 2011, 2012, he’s had massive support. Some people believe some of those smears, but the majority of people knew what was up.
There’s been surveys in the last couple of years, I think two different surveys have been done, I think it was the Australian Assange campaign that did those surveys. So they basically paid a company to do a proper survey on the public opinion, and they basically found that of people that understood the issue and knew what was going on with Assange, that about 80% of them supported his freedom. That was a previous survey. And when I heard about that one, I thought, “Well, what about the people that don’t know about him?”
And so that’s a big part of the aim of the film, is to educate people in the first place, but also those, the other 20%, that think that he should be sent to the US and thrown in a US jail for 175 years, well, why is that? Most likely, it’s because they believe those smears. But definitely massive support in Australia, and it’s definitely grown since he became free, and he basically received a hero’s welcome. The support and the interest has grown even more.
You can sort of see it in the way the film has been embraced. When we first brought it out in Australia, we had no advertising budget, but we were getting full cinemas with hundreds of people. And then when we did take on investors and we were able to advertise, it absolutely blew up. It’s the most-watched Australian documentary of the year in cinemas. We’ve had 350 cinemas across Australia, New Zealand, UK. So we had people going to all kinds of lengths to convince their local cinema to show it, so there’s incredible interest and incredible support.
So interest in Australia and New Zealand has been extraordinary, but the response to the US, from US programmers, it’s been way, way lower. And I think that’s an interesting thing to talk about. To what degree are US people, American people, scared to get behind this?
And to what degree maybe half of them or so feel like Julian was a traitor and he’s anti-American? Which is ridiculous. But there was also a survey in America that showed that 52% of Americans believe that he should be on trial and he should be found guilty. So very different levels of support in America versus Australia, and we’re seeing that reflected in the uptake so far from US cinemas.
But I do hope that this film, especially in light of Julian being freed and all of the documentation of the work that he’s done and so on, that hopefully there’s a changing of opinion in regards to Julian in America. And also hopefully those that see the initial screenings of The Trust Fall in US cinemas, hopefully, the film makes them feel embarrassed as US citizens, that it’s their government responsible for this persecution of an Australian journalist.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah. And I think also with that, kind of going back to what Nils Melzer talked about, is what I appreciated about your film is that it didn’t talk down to the people who had had these incorrect perspectives about Assange. As Nils says, “I understand. I was with you, and I was the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.” If you can fool him, then clearly the rest of us have little hope of battling the immense propaganda machine.
And so I really appreciated that you didn’t talk down to people who had that perspective, but instead, you invited them to change that perspective. And this is something that we’ve also seen, for instance, Kevin Gosztola, who wrote the book, Guilty of Journalism, that covers the case of Julian Assange, who’s been a frequent guest on this show as well, highlights that point very well, that the media created, actually, I have to hand it to them, this brilliant campaign, to smear Assange, much like they did with Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and this is what they do. They have a lot of practice.
Kym Staton:
It was an astounding campaign. They had 100 people on the task force to bring down Assange and WikiLeaks. And I think one of the most compelling, powerful examples of the lengths that they went to, to spin this narrative, it’s something we forgot to put in the film.
But about a month before, they knew already that the Ecuadorian government had agreed that they could take Julian out of the embassy, so they had about a month to plan that scene, this bit of theater, where Julian is carried out and put in a van like a criminal. So what they did was somebody stole his shaving equipment, his razor, his scissors, and when they pulled him out, he looks like a hobo. He looks bedraggled, long hair. He looks like a loser. And that’s what they wanted to do. And that’s not how Julian likes to present himself.
And then as soon as he arrived at Belmarsh, I think within a few days, we saw that leaked footage of him inside the prison, and he’d gone back to his usual self. He was clean-shaven, and he’d had a haircut, and that’s how he would prefer to be. It was so much effort that they put into bringing him down and undermining the public opinion of Assange over all those years.
Eleanor Goldfield:
You’re listening to the Project Censored Radio Show. I’m your host this week, Eleanor Goldfield. We’ll now continue our conversation with Australian filmmaker, Kym Staton.
And I want to talk a little bit about that, because having organized in the US for Assange, there was always this conversation with fellow organizers about how much we should spend time on the personal side of things and how much we should say, “Look, it doesn’t matter if you like Julian or not. This is an atrocious way of dealing with somebody who’s a journalist.”
And I wanted to ask you about that, because you go both into his personal side of things. As I mentioned, you talk about him going back to his school days and wanting to use what he’s learning about tech and things like that to really expose corruption and to uncover truth.
What do you think the importance is of uncovering the personal aspect of Assange versus the professional? How important do you think it is that people understand that this is an intensely morally driven person, versus, “Look, it doesn’t matter if you like him or not, but let’s just focus on the fact that he’s a journalist”? What do you think the balance is there?
Kym Staton:
Yeah. Interesting point. That’s something I really considered deeply was to what degree should we spend time in the film revealing the visions, the mission of Assange and WikiLeaks, and also his character?
I thought it was really important because most humans, not everybody, but most people do judge the book by its cover. I’ve heard so many comments from people, and radio people, and journalists, and even very recent articles where there was one, I can’t remember the exact lines, someone described him, I think it was the Australian newspaper who they said something like he’s vulgar, and he eats with his hands. And they were just looking for anything that they could find.
You’ve had journalists criticize his hair because he’s got this unusual appearance because he went gray so early in life. Interestingly, his mother Christine told me over the phone not so long ago that his hair went gray when he went through a separation with his partner, when they had their first child, Daniel, as very young adults.
And the stress of the court case where he was battling for custody of his son made his hair go gray. And Julian’s someone that’s battled with lots of challenges in life, not only because he’s taken on basically every country in the world by exposing their dirty laundry, but also he’s had personal struggles. And you could go right into all of this stuff.
In the film, we chose to start from his university days. I didn’t want to go back too far, because it was already going to be a long film, and you can only fit so much in. We start from his university days, and I wanted to interview his friends at the time, because I wanted them to paint a picture of this young adult, Julian, prior to WikiLeaks. Just before WikiLeaks, what was he like?
And his friend at university, Niraj Lal, who’s now a scientist, described him as further ahead than all classes at university and even ahead of the professors that were teaching it. So we got this picture of Julian as being incredibly bright. Basically a genius is my opinion.
And then the wonderful Suelette Dreyfus, who’s probably the most eminent professor in Australia of encryption at the moment, and she knew Julian from way back in his sort of days as an ethical hacker, as someone that was interested in the creation of the internet in Australia. She met him on online forums, and she described him as quirky. Just an interesting character that didn’t really care about what people thought about him.
And if you look back at some of Julian’s early writings, some of the first books that he put out, and even some of his blogs, he was writing really interesting stuff. You could make a whole film on that stage of his life, but we just wanted to show that he was on a mission. But as Suelette Dreyfus said, and which ended up being one of the main lines in that chapter of which we call Genesis, the Genesis of WikiLeaks, basically, she said that he had this burning desire to expose corruption, and he felt that if that was done, that we could solve the inequity in society.
Suelette Dreyfus also mentioned, which we didn’t get to fit into the film, but she said when he was at uni, he was horrified to discover that the university was receiving funding to do research on weapons. For example, how to make tanks that could drive very comfortably over the top of dead bodies. He was just disgusted that they were using university funds to assist war profiteers. So there’s just an accumulation of all of these things that impel Julian.
I think he was just always searching for something that he could do to make a difference, and when he came up with this idea of an anonymous drop box to protect whistleblowers using encryption, he was an encryption expert, and he just realized that this was in combination with this new thing called the internet, where you could just have mountains of documents spread at little to no cost. And he just put all this together and came up with this invention that changed the world.
So we wanted to simultaneously humanize Julian, show a little bit of what he’s like. He’s an interesting character, an intellectual, but above all, that he is a compassionate person that cares about the state of the world and wants to make a positive difference.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely, and that definitely comes across. And I think what you’re saying also points to something that I highlight as well when I do frontline trainings and things like that, or speaking to folks who are curious about, oh, how do I become an activist? And it’s there’s no such thing as a professional or an expert activist. It’s just people who decide that they care deeply about something or some things. They see injustice, and they want to make it just, and they use whatever skills they have.
You pointed out that he was really good at encryption, so, “Okay. How can I use that to address this idea that I’ve had since I was eight to end corruption? Oh, this is a way to do that.” And so I think it’s just taking the thing that you’re passionate about or that you are really good at and tying that into addressing injustices that you see. And I think that’s a really powerful message as well. And we could talk about this for days, and I would definitely recommend that people take a couple of hours to check out this film, the trailer, and more information about it at thetrustfall.org.
But finally, Kym, wrapping up here, I think a good thing that you kind of prophetically highlighted on that website is Julian Assange will not be saved by the law. He will be saved by the actions of the public.
So just wrapping up here, any final thoughts on kind of the arc of making this film, where you started and he was obviously still imprisoned and being tortured, how do you see this film project with regards to what’s happened with Assange and what could happen moving forward with his continued drive to address corruption?
Kym Staton:
Firstly, it’s just absolutely wonderful that Julian is free, that he’s with his family back in Australia, that he’s alive. This is a victory. Stefania Morizio did a great post on X where she said, “The outcome of this is that we now know that you can expose the crimes of the powerful, including war crimes, really serious crimes, and live, survive.”
He wasn’t assassinated. The CIA plotted to poison him or kill him in some way. They tried to kill him by keeping him in the embassy and in Belmarsh for a combined more than 12 years, but he didn’t lose his mind. He’s still together, he’s still alive, and we’re left with a precedent that’s been set.
It’s a shocking thing that a journalist has been convicted of espionage under the Espionage Act, and this is the first time a journalist has been convicted. They’ve thought about it and tried it before. Now, it’s been used against a journalist and used against the world in that way, because it reduces our ability to know what’s going on.
So this is a precedent that’s been set. It’s really important that the campaign now moves towards pardoning it, getting us a pardon for Assange, and compensation as well for all the suffering that he’s endured and his family. And as Nils Melzer said, they use intimidation, this threat of legal action and jail time against journalists. In the case of Assange, it was to intimidate the whole world. I really agree with that.
And so I think the campaign now will move towards pardoning Assange. That, again, will require more awareness. The Trust Fall can be part of that. The Trust Fall was one small part of creating the pressure that resulted in Julian’s freedom. I think that his freedom, of course there was diplomacy and legal efforts involved, but the main thing was the public support. It was the public pressure, because that was growing day by day, and I think the US knew that. They knew that they couldn’t have a journalist arrive onto US shores in handcuffs leading up to the election. It wasn’t going to look good.
So it was the efforts of many, many people all around the world that created this pressure, combined with the legal battle and the diplomacy, that resulted in saving the life of someone very courageous and very heroic. And now, he has an opportunity, if he so chooses, when he recovers, to be somewhat involved.
And it’d be fascinating to see what he does next, even if it is just to have a quiet life, write a few books, and get back onto his Twitter page and have some sort of voice. Certainly, I said in the film, wherever Julian goes, free speech goes with him, and his voice is going to be louder than ever. We can’t wait to hear it. And if he does decide to go back to some sort of involvement in politics and world events, then that’ll be an exciting thing to see.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Absolutely. And lest we forget the Espionage Act, I would say to folks listening in the US, which is most of our audience, I feel that an important next step is just getting rid of the Espionage Act, because the Espionage Act was created to go after activists. I mean, the likes of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were some of the first people to be in the crosshairs of the Espionage Act. So this was created, like a lot of legislation in the United States, to go after people who go after the empire. So I think that’s an important next step for folks here.
Kym, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Again, folks can go to thetrustfall.org. This film will be out in the United States July 17th. Kym, thank you again so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Kym Staton:
My pleasure, Eleanor. Thank you so much for this coverage of the release in the US of The Trust Fall and also your support of Assange and free speech in general. All of your efforts in that is wonderful, what you’ve done.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thank you. Likewise.
Kym Staton:
Keep up the great work. Take care.
Speaker 1:
We want to smash, crash, bash, smash, blast the system. We want to get it hype, get it loud, get with the mission. We want the crowd loud, fists bumping, rhythm is hitting. We want to-
Eleanor Goldfield:
Thanks so much for listening. That does it for this week’s show. I’m Eleanor Goldfield, and along with Mickey Huff, we are your Project Censored radio hosts.
The Project Censored Radio Show airs on roughly 50 stations across the US. Please follow us on social media and check out projectcensored.org for more rad content. Thanks so much. See you next time on the Project Censored Radio Show.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The mass movement in solidarity with Palestine returned to DC in protest of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. Presenting a citizen’s warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest, the protesters surrounded Congress, joined by a sizable labor contingent that included the UAW. Jaisal Noor reports from DC.
Production: Jaisal Noor
Post-Production: Jaisal Noor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
Free, free, free Palestine.
Speaker X:
Free, free, free Palestine.
Eugene Puryear:
And we are here today to raise our voice against the war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is criminally speaking before a joint session of Congress today. And we did not want to let that moment pass without showing that people here in the United States are overwhelmingly in favor of an immediate ceasefire.
Jaisal Noor:
On Wednesday, July 24th in Washington DC, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint address of Congress. Demonstrators called for the U.S. to end military aid to Israel and for Netanyahu’s arrest.
Eugene Puryear:
That’s why we have the phrase behind this demonstration that we’re going to do a citizen’s arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu because ultimately, if the U.S. government isn’t going to step up to the plate, if foreign governments aren’t going to step up to the plate in terms of actually holding this war criminal to account; we the people are at least going to attempt to hold these war criminals to account.
Jaisal Noor:
The International Criminal Court is seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over Israel’s conduct of the war. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since Hamas’ October 7th attack. Israel has been charged with genocide by the International Court of Justice, and this week the court affirmed Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal.
Daniel Vicente:
The international criminal courts find that genocide is possibly happening, proven to be happening. When we are supporting a government that does not get full rights to certain citizens, we have to speak out. For too long this issue has been going on and I think you can see the tide is staring to-
Jaisal Noor:
Organized labor mobilized a large contingent for the protest.
Parul Koul:
I think it’s a hugely significant moment for organized labor. Earlier on in the genocide, separate unions had signed letters calling for a cease fire. I think it’s really crucial and amazing to point out that the letter that was released yesterday specifically also talks about U.S. ending its funding of Israel and funding arming Israel, which is a crucial step forward. And I feel like it just points to labor starting to take the more broad, bold, independent action from the Democratic Party because I think we’re starting to see the Democratic Party itself doesn’t offer a platform for the Labor Movement or for all people to solve the really crucial problems that we’re all facing right now.
Jaisal Noor:
Dozens of U.S. lawmakers boycotted the speech, including Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democrat’s presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.
Daniel Vicente:
Him stepping down was exactly what needed to happen. The numbers we were looking at, at our own [inaudible 00:02:33] and external polling; he didn’t stand a chance in Pennsylvania, especially after the assassination attempt. And he’s still probably going to get crushed at Michigan. Our hope is that Kamala will take a softer approach to the situation and finally put strings on the weapon systems we’re giving because we have the levers to put… I’m not saying we could stop the conflict tomorrow. We could certainly put pressure on the Israeli government to take a different path.
Speaker 1:
Free, free Palestine!
Speaker X:
Free, free Palestine!
Jaisal Noor:
The uncommitted movement welcomed Biden’s departure and urged Harris to change course on Gaza.
Eugene Puryear:
We do know that Vice President Harris will have a private meeting with Netanyahu. The Israeli press is already briefing from U.S. sources that she will reaffirm the U.S. support for the state of Israel. Historically, throughout her career, she’s been a very strong supporter of Israel, of APAC, of the overall Zionist project. But given the electoral circumstances, given the power of this movement, I think we can at least hope that perhaps some space will open and we will see some shift. But we’re not waiting for it nor are we going to let our foot off the gas.
Jaisal Noor:
For The Real News, this is Jaisal Noor reporting from Washington D.C.
Chabane:
If we don’t extradite this war criminal or alleged war criminal, to the crimes tribunal, then what was the point of international law? Why did we sign this document? So I’m reminding our elected officials that we’re part of the United Nations, aren’t we? And the ICC is cooking and we are accomplices. So if we are abetting this alleged war criminal, then that makes us accountable too, right?
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, in which he defended Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, lied repeatedly about the dire humanitarian conditions on the ground and refused to talk about how to reach a ceasefire to end the bloodshed. Although more than 100 Democrats skipped the speech, Erakat says the jubilant reaction from lawmakers…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
President Joe Biden’s reelection bid came to an abrupt conclusion on Sunday as the president posted on social media, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” Despite speculation from some Democratic officials that Biden’s withdrawal would lead to a “mini-primary” in…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Palestine Action has launched in Germany – and is already taking direct action against Israel’s arms supply.
An autonomous group Palestine Action Germany targeted one of the offices of Elbit Systems, the Zionist weapons manufacturer, in Ulm on Tuesday 23 July for its prominent role in the genocide, occupation, and settler-colonisation of Palestine:
BREAKING: Palestine Action Germany is officially launched and has begun with an action against the Israeli-owned Elbit weapons facility in Ulm.
Israel’s biggest weapons firm is not safe anywhere. pic.twitter.com/AD14905R0I
— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) July 23, 2024
Actionists covered the entrance of the “Bloom Offices” building in blood red paint, symbolising the massacres against the Palestinian people committed by the occupation and its allies, and damaged the windows of the building. Bloom Offices houses the Elbit office in Ulm and Palestine Action Germany demand its eviction.
Elbit Systems is the largest private weapons manufacturer of Israel.
In Germany, Elbit has two locations in Ulm and additional offices in Berlin and Koblenz. Its production ranges from surveillance and telecommunication to ammunition. Elbit is particularly known for their assault drones: more than 80% of the drones of the Zionist occupation army are produced by Elbit.
Meanwhile, according to Elbit’s CEO Bezhalel Machlis, Elbit Systems weaponry is “currently being used extensively by the Israeli military”. The Israeli weapons maker produces 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, ammunition, missiles, digital warfare and training simulators.
During the onslaught of Gaza which the ICJ has ruled is a plausible genocide, Elbit have “ramped up production” to meet the increased demand of the Israeli military for munitions.
Israel has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza since 7 October. The latest toll includes 30 people over the previous 24 hours. Palestinian medical services on Thursday said their teams transported four dead and 12 wounded after a strike on a house in the Gaza City area of the territory’s north.
Palestine Action Germany said:
We support the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian resistance and share their demands: a complete withdrawal of the occupation from Gaza with a comprehensive cessation of the colonial aggression all over Palestine, unrestricted entry of relief and reconstruction of Gaza, lifting the siege in its entirety, freedom for all prisoners, alive and martyred, land back, right of return, and self-determination for Palestinians.
Escalation will be met with escalation.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Featured image via Palestine Action Germany
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Palestinians walk along a street covered with stagnant wastewater near tents sheltering displaced people in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, 22 July. APA images)
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington, where he will deliver a speech to Congress on Wednesday, the Israeli military massacred Palestinians throughout Gaza and forced a new wave of mass displacement in the south of the territory.
The World Health Organization meanwhile warned that there was a high risk of the polio virus spreading within and beyond Gaza due to the public health crisis borne of Israel’s destruction and siege.
The highly infectious virus, mainly affecting children under the age of 5, “can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis,” according to Reuters.
“There is a high risk of spreading of the circulating vaccine-derived polio virus in Gaza, not only because of the detection but because of the very dire situation with the water sanitation,” Ayadil Saparbekov, an official with WHO, said on Tuesday.
“It may also spill over internationally, at a very high point,” Saparbekov added.
WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday that “no paralytic cases have been detected” so far in Gaza. Prior to Israel’s current offensive, “polio vaccination rates in Gaza were optimal,” he added.
He warned, however, that the “decimation of the health system” in the territory, as well as the “lack of security, access obstruction, constant population displacement, shortages of medical supplies, poor quality of water and weakened sanitation are increasing the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.”
A group of Israeli public health professors called for a ceasefire to allow for a “multi-pronged, coordinated and comprehensive” response to stop the disease from spreading, with babies in Gaza and Israel who have not completed their vaccinations at greatest risk.
The detection of remnants of the polio virus in sewage samples tested in Gaza is only the latest indicator of the severe deterioration of public health conditions in the territory.
The catastrophic situation is a predictable if not intentional outcome of Israel’s actions in Gaza. In an op-ed published in Ynet in November, Giora Eiland, a former Israeli military operations chief and head of the National Security Council who is currently serving as an adviser to defense minister Yoav Gallant, called for the deprivation of life essentials in Gaza as a means of biological warfare.
The official death toll in Gaza since 7 October surpassed 39,000 this week, including 16,000 children, though the actual number is likely much higher.
Israeli forces have killed at least 16,000 Palestinian children in Gaza since October 7, according to the latest update from the Governmental Media Office. At least 34 children have starved to death, and the true death toll is feared to be much higher. pic.twitter.com/5SZwYgsL9x
— Defense for Children (@DCIPalestine) July 23, 2024
Thousands of Palestinians remain missing in the rubble or in the streets, or their deaths as a result of secondary mortality such as hunger, thirst and disease resulting from Israel’s military campaign are not reflected in the fatality count.
In a letter published by The Lancet earlier this month, three public health experts conservatively projected “that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Death and displacement in Khan Younis
Israeli tanks rolled back into Khan Younis on Monday and at least 70 Palestinians were killed and 200 injured in artillery shelling and airstrikes in the eastern areas of the southern Gaza district.
Israel had ordered nearly half a million Palestinians in parts of Khan Younis to leave the area, “forcing residents to flee under fire,” Reuters reported. One survivor told the news agency that the situation was “like doomsday” with many “dead and wounded on the roads.”
New evacuation orders today in Khan Younis mean more suffering and displacement. Families had to pack what is left of their belongings and run, amid bombardment, and with nowhere safe to go.
People in #Gaza are exhausted, living in inhumane conditions, with no safety at all. pic.twitter.com/LSYTEBxMRM
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) July 22, 2024
Israel-Gaza: 400,000 residents ordered to leave Khan Younis pic.twitter.com/2XNyyAPK7a
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) July 22, 2024
Nasser Medical Complex, the largest hospital in southern Gaza, struggled to cope with the influx of casualties, warning of dire conditions at the facility and issuing an urgent appeal for blood donations.
The new Israeli orders encompassed part of the so-called “safe zone” that the military had unilaterally declared in al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of Khan Younis where some 1.7 million people displaced from other areas of Gaza are currently concentrated.
This is yet another example of what Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs calls ‘humanitarian camouflage’: Israel's use of IHL terminology—such as ‘evacuation orders’ and ‘humanitarian area’—subverting their protective purpose and legitimising genocidal violence in #Gaza. https://t.co/vhwSbCv0Wy
— Al-Mezan ??????? (@AlMezanCenter) July 22, 2024
The new evacuation orders showed the “safe zone” to now be around 50 square kilometers, down from just under 59 square kilometers, reducing the area by some 15 percent.
“As of 22 July, nearly 83 percent of the Gaza Strip has been placed under evacuation orders or designated as ‘no-go zones’ by the Israeli military,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated.
The office added that the “frequent evacuation orders and relentless hostilities continue to further devastate Gaza’s health system and make it increasingly difficult for repeatedly displaced populations to access essential services, particularly people suffering from chronic diseases.”
Only 60 dialysis machines are available to more than 1,500 patients requiring kidney dialysis in Gaza. “As a result, patients are undertaking only two dialysis sessions of two hours per week, instead of the required treatment of three four-hour sessions a week,” the UN office said.
Meanwhile, only eight partially functioning hospitals and four field hospitals are currently “providing maternal services with more than 500,000 women in reproductive age lacking access to antenatal and postnatal care, family planning and management of sexually transmitted infections,” the UN office added.
Israel tightens vise on Gaza’s north
The UN Human Rights Office condemned the latest displacement of Palestinians in Khan Younis, saying that the new evacuation order “was issued in the context of ongoing attacks … and gave no time for civilians to know from which areas they were required to leave or where they should go.”
“The evacuation order also covered parts of Salah al-Din Road, which has been one of two main routes vital for the transport and distribution of aid,” the UN office added, “raising concerns that delivery and provision of desperately needed humanitarian assistance will be further reduced or prevented.”
The office said that the supposed “safe zone” in al-Mawasi “has little or no infrastructure to support the masses of civilians who have been already displaced there” and has been repeatedly subjected to Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes.
The Israeli military killed at least 90 Palestinians in al-Mawasi on 13 July, in one of the single deadliest incidents in Gaza since October, while claiming to target Hamas’ military chief Muhammad Deif.
The supposed assassination attempt on Mohammed Deif was, as so many Israeli massacres in Gaza are, a test balloon to see how the West would respond to another encroachment on supposed red lines. Now, even the humanitarian zone is getting openly invaded. None of it matters. https://t.co/vYLWgzsDOi
— Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) July 22, 2024
Israel launched a ground offensive in Khan Younis earlier this year, ordering residents out of the area and wreaking widespread destruction. At that time, many people fled Khan Younis to Rafah, which came under evacuation orders in early May.
Meanwhile, “the Israeli military is escalating its targeting of all aspects and basic elements of life in the Gaza [City] and North Gaza governorates, in an attempt to render them uninhabitable and force their citizens to evacuate to the southern governorates,” the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Saturday.
The group added that on Saturday morning, “the Israeli army opened fire on several women who were cooking and filling water containers in their home” in the Zarqa neighborhood in northern Gaza, killing 28-year-old Noura al-Sabbagh and injuring several others, one critically.
Earlier in the month, on 2 July, 10 Palestinians including a child and a disabled person were killed by Israeli artillery fire while they gathered to fill water containers in al-Zaytoun, south of Gaza City.
And in late June, three Palestinians were killed when Israel attacked a group of vendors in downtown Gaza City, according to the Euro-Med Monitor.
Journalist killed, UN vehicles hit by live fire
Also on Monday, an Israeli airstrike hit a tent used by journalists in the grounds of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, killing one and injuring two others. The deadly strike brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since 7 October to 163, according to the government media office in the territory.
On Tuesday, two UN-marked vehicles were hit with live fire while waiting at a holding point near a checkpoint in Gaza, causing no casualties.
“They were en route to reunite five children, including a baby, with their father,” said Adele Khodr, a regional director with the UN children’s fund.
“This is the second shooting incident involving UNICEF cars on humanitarian duty in the past 12 weeks and on both occasions, the humanitarian consequences could have been severe, for both our teams and the children they serve,” Khodr added.
On Sunday, Israeli forces opened fire toward a UN convoy heading to Gaza City in the north, piercing a UN-marked armored vehicle carrying UNRWA spokesperson Louise Wateridge five times while it was stopped at a checkpoint, causing no casualties.
#Gaza
Heavy shooting from the Israeli Forces at a UN convoy heading to Gaza city.
While there are no casualties, our teams had to duck and take cover.This took place yesterday. The teams were traveling in clearly marked UN armoured cars & wearing UN vests.
One vehicle…
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) July 22, 2024
More than 200 UN staff members are among the at least 278 aid workers killed in Gaza since October.
On Monday, a bill declaring UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, to be a terrorist organization passed a first reading in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
Two other bills aimed at preventing UNRWA’s ability to conduct its work already passed the first of three votes required by the Knesset before being enshrined in law.
I am not sure how many other countries have designated through parliamentary law a UN agency as a “terrorist organization” and thus a legitimate military target. This is also the agency that keeps Gaza survivors alive, so genocidal intent is being inscribed in national law. https://t.co/QayABaEBVq
— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) July 22, 2024
Israel has long sought to shut down the agency, which provides government-like services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Several donor countries halted funding to UNRWA in late January after Israel made unsubstantiated allegations that a handful of its staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October attack led by Hamas.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, warned at the time that countries defunding UNRWA could be doing so in violation of the Genocide Convention.
Yemen
While some countries have defunded UNRWA, the organization with the largest humanitarian footprint in Gaza, groups in Yemen and Lebanon upped the pressure on Israel in their support for the Palestinian people and resistance.
On Sunday, Israel said that it had shot down a missile fired from Yemen, where Ansarullah, the resistance group also known as the Houthis, said it had fired several projectiles toward the port city of Eilat.
Israel bombed the Yemeni port of al-Hudayda on Saturday, killing six people, all of them reportedly civilians, and injuring dozens more, after a drone launched by Ansarullah on Friday hit a building in Tel Aviv, killing one.
Breaching Israel’s air defenses and hitting the heart of Tel Aviv marks a major achievement for the Yemeni armed forces and a severe failure for Israel. It served as a reminder that if a drone fired from some 1,400 miles away could target Israel’s economic capital undetected, then the capabilities of Lebanese resistance group Hizballah are likely to be far more lethal.
The exchange of attacks represents an escalation in the regional spillover from Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
For months, Ansarullah has maintained a maritime blockade disrupting global trade to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza.
The US had launched strikes on Yemen in response to the Red Sea blockade but the Israeli attack represents the first direct hit by Tel Aviv in response to Ansar Allah.
The Yemeni strike on Tel Aviv comes after Hizballah pledged to ramp up military deterrence against Israel.
During a speech marking the annual Shia commemoration of Ashura, Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizballah, threatened to strike areas deeper in Israel than it has previously reached.
“If Israeli tanks come to Lebanon, they will not only have a shortage in tanks but will never have any tanks left,” Nasrallah said.
Following days of deadly strikes in southern Lebanon, Nasrallah said that Hizballah, which has so far carefully calibrated its response to avoid a full military confrontation with Israel, would respond more forcefully than it has in the past if the attacks continued.
“The resistance missiles will target new Israeli settlements that were not targeted before,” he said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation in the region and continues to urge all to exercise utmost restraint,” the office of his special envoy for Yemen stated after the exchange of fire between Israel and Ansarullah.
But Amal Saad, an expert on Hizballah, observed that the Houthis – as Ansarullah are also known – “are not constrained in the same way other actors in the Resistance Axis are, nor do they subscribe to the same rules of engagement or red lines as Iran or Hizballah.”
“Their retaliation will potentially target non-military sites in Israel, mirroring Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure today,” she said on Saturday.
If #Israel doesn't reach a ceasefire deal soon, it will face significant attacks on several fronts. The "support front" to #Gaza is about to end and is expected to turn into a "full front".
— Elijah J. Magnier ?? (@ejmalrai) July 22, 2024
Important context :#Yemen’s targeting of #TelAviv today is independent of #Hezbollah, which has yet to carry out its own response/retaliation to the three assassinations yesterday.
But, there is also a deeper message being sent to the Israelis, to the effect that the axis is in…— Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) July 19, 2024
Israeli captives declared dead
On Monday, Israel declared dead two Israelis, including a Polish dual national, who were taken captive during Hamas’ military operation on 7 October and held in Gaza ever since.
Israeli media reported that bombing by Israel is their most likely cause of death.
Some 120 captives are believed to remain in Gaza after around 100 were released during a week-long truce and prisoner exchange in November.
Around one-third of the captives remaining in Gaza have been declared dead by Israel in absentia.
Netanyahu met with the families of Israelis being held in Gaza while in Washington on Monday, telling them that “the conditions to get them back are ripening, for the simple reason that we are applying very, very strong pressure, very strong, on Hamas.”
According to The Times of Israel, “Netanyahu indicated that he would like more time to squeeze Hamas further in order to improve Israel’s negotiating position.”
That should be understood as Netanyahu wanting more time to massacre Palestinian civilians in the absence of a battlefield victory in order to maximize pressure on Hamas, which seeks guarantees that a truce and exchange of captives would lead to a permanent ceasefire – conditions that the Israeli prime minister rejects.
Mati Dancyg, the son of one of the Israeli men declared dead in absentia on Monday, said that his father Alex “didn’t just die – he died for the sake of [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government of destruction.”
Dancyg accused Netanyahu of sabotaging “any chance for a deal” in order “to save his rotten government,” adding that the “sacrificing of the hostages out of political motives is a much, much greater failure than the failure of 7 October.”
Noa Argamani – an Israeli woman who was freed by the Israeli military along with three other captives in a raid that killed at least 274 Palestinians – told Netanyahu during a meeting on Monday that those remaining in Gaza “must be brought home as quickly as possible, before it is too late.”
She reportedly told the Israeli prime minister that “the hardest moment I had in captivity was when I listened to the radio and heard you say the war will be long.”
“I thought, ‘I won’t get out of here.’ It was a breaking point for me,” she said, according to Israeli media.
While Netanyahu is expected to meet US President Joe Biden this week, and a delegation from Tel Aviv is due to arrive in Cairo to resume talks on Wednesday evening, a senior Hamas official said that the Israeli prime minister “is still stalling and he is sending delegations only to calm the anger of Israeli captives’ families.”
• Article first published in the Electronic Intifada
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A UN convoy in Gaza that was carrying a group of five Palestinian children, including a baby, to reunite them with their father was shot at at an Israeli military checkpoint on Tuesday, UNICEF reported. No one was hurt, UNICEF said. One of the two cars in the convoy was hit with three bullets at a designated waiting point near the Wadi Gaza checkpoint, and the convoy was able to continue its…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, has been central in bolstering the country’s apartheid regime and, in the last 10 months, in helping the military carry out what U.N. experts have called a genocidal campaign in Gaza. In the coming months, Elbit Systems will also be critical in the expansion of the Biden administration’s virtual wall — a series of at least 479 surveillance…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands accused of war crimes, and the popular political consensus within the U.S. and Israel suggests he is thwarting an attempted ceasefire in the horrifying war on Gaza for his own personal gain. But he received a hero’s welcome this week from the U.S. Republicans who are eager to stoke divisions among Democrats and animate evangelical voters during an election…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) has said that it is “utterly disgraceful” that Congress has invited “war criminal” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address the chamber as he continues committing genocide in Gaza. In a fiery statement on Tuesday, Tlaib said that Netanyahu should be arrested and sent to the Hague to be tried for war crimes — far from being given the distinction of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Hundreds of Jewish activists were arrested in the U.S. Capitol complex on Tuesday after staging a sit-in to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. and address to Congress this week, carrying signs and wearing shirts with slogans like “Not in Our Name” as they demanded an end to Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Protesters with Jewish Voice…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A leaked report obtained by Drop Site estimates that Israeli forces have killed at least 366 United Nations staffers and their family members in the Gaza Strip since October, an indication of the grave threat Israel’s ongoing assault poses to humanitarian relief workers and the enclave’s broader civilian population. Drop Site’s Ryan Grim reported Wednesday that the confidential figures…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Palestinians inspect the damage following a raid by Israeli forces in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on 23 July ( APA images)
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority held a secret meeting with American and Israeli officials in Tel Aviv earlier this month to conspire on “day after” plans in Gaza that would involve the collaborative body in reopening the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
“Egypt wants personnel from the Palestinian Authority to operate the crossing,” Axios reported. The crossing, when open, is typically operated by Hamas personnel from Gaza’s side, as the political and armed organization governs the interior of the Strip.
“Israel wants people who aren’t affiliated with Hamas to do it, but objects to any official involvement of the Palestinian Authority – mostly for domestic political reasons,” Axios added.
The Palestinian Authority rejected a proposal that would involve it in reopening the crossing in any unofficial capacity, the publication said.
The meeting reportedly included White House official Brett McGurk, the head of Israel’s domestic spying agency Ronen Bar, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee Hussein al-Sheikh and head of the PA’s military intelligence Majed Faraj.
This was the first time that Palestinian officials have met with US and Israeli counterparts “to discuss the day after the war ends in Gaza,” reported Barak Ravid, the Axios writer who is frequently fed information by Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus.
The United Arab Emirates also appears eager to conspire for a day-after plan in Gaza.
The Gulf state, which formalized relations with Israel in 2020, is looking “to deploy a temporary international mission” in Gaza that would establish “law and order,” the UAE ambassador at the United Nations, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, wrote in the Financial Times last week.
“A temporary international presence in Gaza can only result from a formal invitation from the Palestinian Authority,” the ambassador wrote.
The Palestinian Authority was created in the early 1990s following the Oslo accords to act as native auxiliary on behalf of the Israeli occupation. It has performed that role – one that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas calls “sacred” – without interruption since day one.
It wouldn’t be surpring if Israel and its Arab allies sought to copy this model in a post-genocide Gaza Strip.
But in order for Israel to execute its vision in the wrecked coastal enclave, the Israeli military would have to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas as a governing and military presence in Gaza.
This doesn’t appear close to happening.
Meanwhile, Fatah and Hamas agreed to “end the Palestinian national division” after the rival factions held negotiations in China this month alongside other Palestinian political parties.
Notably, the factions “underlined the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation and to end it in accordance with international law,” according to Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen, which obtained a copy of the declaration.
This is not the first time that the parties have made these declarations, and there is no indication that this one will be different.
A Palestinian Authority official said over the weekend that the Palestine Liberation Organization is the sole legitimate representative of Palestinians.
“Leaked news indicating that Washington is discussing plans on the future of the Gaza Strip with some parties will not have any legitimacy and will not be accepted by the Palestinian people,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh is paraphrased to have said, according to Wafa News Agency.
Echoing Israeli propaganda
Following an Israeli massacre in al-Mawasi earlier this month that killed at least 90 Palestinians and injured hundreds of others, the Palestinian Authority issued a statement effectively blaming Hamas for Israel’s slaughter.
“The presidency sees that by escaping national unity, and providing free pretexts to the occupation state, the Hamas movement is a partner in bearing legal, moral and political responsibility for the continuation of the Israeli war of genocide,” PA leader Mahmoud Abbas wrote in a statement.
Another PA official actually used an Israeli propaganda talking point against Hamas.
“Hamas is actually hiding between the residents to protect and save itself,” PA official Munir al-Jaghoub reportedly said.
“If Hamas wanted to fight face-to-face with Israel, it would’ve done so in areas where the army is located, and not in places where there are people.”
We were joined by writer and Birzeit University lecturer Abdaljawad Omar on 17 July on The Electronic Intifada livestream to talk about the situation in the West Bank.
Omar said that the Palestinian Authority “is trying to echo Israeli psychological warfare.”
It is doing so “by attempting to kind of de-link the Palestinian society overall from its resistance, and serving through this severance, serving Israeli war aims, which is to defeat the resistance and render Gaza unlivable.”
“We have this model in the West Bank: that’s what is in the fantasy of every military and political leader in Israel, to replicate some sort of system, a political system, a native authority that serves it, that cooperates with it and collaborates with it and makes the occupation inexpensive,” Omar said.“Not an authority or a governance structure like the one that Gaza had at least before 7 October,” Omar added, which binded armed resistance with the party governing the interior affairs of the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Authority is “most responsible for the continuation of war, for empowering Israel to think that it can defeat the Palestinian people,” Omar added, by producing “this docile, ineffective, corrupt leadership that is running now the West Bank.”
The successes of multiple factions of Palestinian resistance forces on the ground in Gaza are agitating the collaborationist body in Ramallah, Omar suggested, pointing to how the Palestinian Authority did not rise to the occasion following the Hamas operation of 7 October.
“The national challenge that has been opened on 7 October,” is for the Palestinian Authority “to actually participate and attempt, at least, to the best of its capacity to not allow Gaza to go through this war alone,” Omar said.
Not only did the Palestinian Authority abandon Gaza, he added, but it must be blamed “for even the continuation of the war.”
The elite of the collaborationist PA and the comprador class in Ramallah “is betraying the nation in the name of the nation,” Omar said.
“This elite has extreme anxiety over Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the recent resistance groups in Gaza, coming out with significant strategic results from this war.”
Meanwhile, the resistance in the occupied West Bank has been developing and refining its tactics, but this uprising is not happening in all corners of the West Bank.Omar said he would confine the description of a “third intifada” to specific areas.
“I would confine it geographically to the north of the West Bank. So the areas that surround or go from the Jordan Valley upwards to Tubas, Tulkarem, Nablus, Jenin,” Omar said.
“These are the areas that have active militant formations that are engaging in the buildup of [improvised explosive devices], the capacity to resist, and refining tactics,” Omar said, making “it hard for the Israelis to enter freely into these areas.”
Israel responded with devastating revenge on entire communities where resistance emerges from, wreaking widespread devastation, severely damaging electricity networks, water and sewage infrastructure, uprooting roads and destroying homes.
More than 550 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 539 by Israeli forces, according to UN monitoring group OCHA.
Israeli settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians, and another seven were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.
Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 138 were children.
But the “Israelis have not been able to really shock that resistance into a place where it’s defeated or raises the white flag,” Omar said.
On the contrary, “the resistance has been able to actually develop, evolve and and ensure that its defensive posture, or offensive posture has become more deadly for the Israeli forces entering the area.”
Watch the full interview with Abdaljawad Omar on The Electronic Intifada’s YouTube channel, or by clicking on the videos above.
• First published in The Electronic Intifada
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Palestinians inspect the damage following a raid by Israeli forces in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on 23 July ( APA images)
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority held a secret meeting with American and Israeli officials in Tel Aviv earlier this month to conspire on “day after” plans in Gaza that would involve the collaborative body in reopening the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
“Egypt wants personnel from the Palestinian Authority to operate the crossing,” Axios reported. The crossing, when open, is typically operated by Hamas personnel from Gaza’s side, as the political and armed organization governs the interior of the Strip.
“Israel wants people who aren’t affiliated with Hamas to do it, but objects to any official involvement of the Palestinian Authority – mostly for domestic political reasons,” Axios added.
The Palestinian Authority rejected a proposal that would involve it in reopening the crossing in any unofficial capacity, the publication said.
The meeting reportedly included White House official Brett McGurk, the head of Israel’s domestic spying agency Ronen Bar, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee Hussein al-Sheikh and head of the PA’s military intelligence Majed Faraj.
This was the first time that Palestinian officials have met with US and Israeli counterparts “to discuss the day after the war ends in Gaza,” reported Barak Ravid, the Axios writer who is frequently fed information by Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus.
The United Arab Emirates also appears eager to conspire for a day-after plan in Gaza.
The Gulf state, which formalized relations with Israel in 2020, is looking “to deploy a temporary international mission” in Gaza that would establish “law and order,” the UAE ambassador at the United Nations, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, wrote in the Financial Times last week.
“A temporary international presence in Gaza can only result from a formal invitation from the Palestinian Authority,” the ambassador wrote.
The Palestinian Authority was created in the early 1990s following the Oslo accords to act as native auxiliary on behalf of the Israeli occupation. It has performed that role – one that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas calls “sacred” – without interruption since day one.
It wouldn’t be surpring if Israel and its Arab allies sought to copy this model in a post-genocide Gaza Strip.
But in order for Israel to execute its vision in the wrecked coastal enclave, the Israeli military would have to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas as a governing and military presence in Gaza.
This doesn’t appear close to happening.
Meanwhile, Fatah and Hamas agreed to “end the Palestinian national division” after the rival factions held negotiations in China this month alongside other Palestinian political parties.
Notably, the factions “underlined the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation and to end it in accordance with international law,” according to Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen, which obtained a copy of the declaration.
This is not the first time that the parties have made these declarations, and there is no indication that this one will be different.
A Palestinian Authority official said over the weekend that the Palestine Liberation Organization is the sole legitimate representative of Palestinians.
“Leaked news indicating that Washington is discussing plans on the future of the Gaza Strip with some parties will not have any legitimacy and will not be accepted by the Palestinian people,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh is paraphrased to have said, according to Wafa News Agency.
Echoing Israeli propaganda
Following an Israeli massacre in al-Mawasi earlier this month that killed at least 90 Palestinians and injured hundreds of others, the Palestinian Authority issued a statement effectively blaming Hamas for Israel’s slaughter.
“The presidency sees that by escaping national unity, and providing free pretexts to the occupation state, the Hamas movement is a partner in bearing legal, moral and political responsibility for the continuation of the Israeli war of genocide,” PA leader Mahmoud Abbas wrote in a statement.
Another PA official actually used an Israeli propaganda talking point against Hamas.
“Hamas is actually hiding between the residents to protect and save itself,” PA official Munir al-Jaghoub reportedly said.
“If Hamas wanted to fight face-to-face with Israel, it would’ve done so in areas where the army is located, and not in places where there are people.”
We were joined by writer and Birzeit University lecturer Abdaljawad Omar on 17 July on The Electronic Intifada livestream to talk about the situation in the West Bank.
Omar said that the Palestinian Authority “is trying to echo Israeli psychological warfare.”
It is doing so “by attempting to kind of de-link the Palestinian society overall from its resistance, and serving through this severance, serving Israeli war aims, which is to defeat the resistance and render Gaza unlivable.”
“We have this model in the West Bank: that’s what is in the fantasy of every military and political leader in Israel, to replicate some sort of system, a political system, a native authority that serves it, that cooperates with it and collaborates with it and makes the occupation inexpensive,” Omar said.“Not an authority or a governance structure like the one that Gaza had at least before 7 October,” Omar added, which binded armed resistance with the party governing the interior affairs of the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Authority is “most responsible for the continuation of war, for empowering Israel to think that it can defeat the Palestinian people,” Omar added, by producing “this docile, ineffective, corrupt leadership that is running now the West Bank.”
The successes of multiple factions of Palestinian resistance forces on the ground in Gaza are agitating the collaborationist body in Ramallah, Omar suggested, pointing to how the Palestinian Authority did not rise to the occasion following the Hamas operation of 7 October.
“The national challenge that has been opened on 7 October,” is for the Palestinian Authority “to actually participate and attempt, at least, to the best of its capacity to not allow Gaza to go through this war alone,” Omar said.
Not only did the Palestinian Authority abandon Gaza, he added, but it must be blamed “for even the continuation of the war.”
The elite of the collaborationist PA and the comprador class in Ramallah “is betraying the nation in the name of the nation,” Omar said.
“This elite has extreme anxiety over Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the recent resistance groups in Gaza, coming out with significant strategic results from this war.”
Meanwhile, the resistance in the occupied West Bank has been developing and refining its tactics, but this uprising is not happening in all corners of the West Bank.Omar said he would confine the description of a “third intifada” to specific areas.
“I would confine it geographically to the north of the West Bank. So the areas that surround or go from the Jordan Valley upwards to Tubas, Tulkarem, Nablus, Jenin,” Omar said.
“These are the areas that have active militant formations that are engaging in the buildup of [improvised explosive devices], the capacity to resist, and refining tactics,” Omar said, making “it hard for the Israelis to enter freely into these areas.”
Israel responded with devastating revenge on entire communities where resistance emerges from, wreaking widespread devastation, severely damaging electricity networks, water and sewage infrastructure, uprooting roads and destroying homes.
More than 550 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 539 by Israeli forces, according to UN monitoring group OCHA.
Israeli settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians, and another seven were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.
Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 138 were children.
But the “Israelis have not been able to really shock that resistance into a place where it’s defeated or raises the white flag,” Omar said.
On the contrary, “the resistance has been able to actually develop, evolve and and ensure that its defensive posture, or offensive posture has become more deadly for the Israeli forces entering the area.”
Watch the full interview with Abdaljawad Omar on The Electronic Intifada’s YouTube channel, or by clicking on the videos above.
• First published in The Electronic Intifada
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the US in his first trip abroad since Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza, which, according to a new International Court of Justice finding, it already occupied through “effective control” in a land, air and sea blockade, along with restrictions on Palestinians in Gaza’s movement, construction, resources, water, electricity and documents.
In the US, Netanyahu is facing a number of protests and condemnation. That includes one from Jewish Voice for Peace in Congress:
BREAKING: 400 American Jews mark Netanyahu’s arrival by refusing to leave Congress until our government listens to the will of the people and STOPS ARMING ISRAEL! pic.twitter.com/WElpHLMHjn
— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) July 23, 2024
In response, Republican representative Mike Lawler questioned whether the protestors were Jewish. But Jewish Voice for Peace political director Beth Miller called him a “far right racist” for suggesting Jewish people must be loyal to Israel. She continued:
We’re proudly Jewish. We’re proudly Jewish and opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We’re proudly Jewish and demanding Biden and Congress stop funding the slaughter of Palestinians. We’re proudly Jewish and calling for Palestinian freedom.
In another protest, anti-genocide citizens projected a ‘wanted’ sign for Netanyahu on the Watergate hotel in Washington, where he is staying:
Netanyahu is a war criminal! We are making sure the world knows he is not welcomed here! pic.twitter.com/nrEEXjMpxV
— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) July 24, 2024
Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also denounced Netanyahu as a “war criminal”:
It is a dark day in US history when an authoritarian with warrant requests from the International Criminal Court is allowed to address a joint session of Congress.
40k Palestinians are dead.
Hostages aren’t home.
Netanyahu is a war criminal.
I will be boycotting his address.— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 23, 2024
Although, Ocasio-Cortez received criticism for her outright support of Kamala Harris, who is set to replace Biden as the Democrat nominee after he dropped out of the US presidential race. Harris is staunchly pro-Israel to the point where she compared supporting Israel to the US civil rights movement. She is committed to continuing providing Israel with $3.8bn in military aid every year. And she supports Israel’s illegal expansion into Palestinian land, co-sponsoring legislation aimed at undermining a UN resolution condemning it.
Palestinian American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib joined the chorus calling out Netanyahu as a “war criminal committing genocide”:
Netanyahu is a war criminal committing genocide against the Palestinian people. It is utterly disgraceful that leaders from both parties have invited him to address Congress. He should be arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court.
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) July 23, 2024
At least 52 other US legislators have refused to attend Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress on Wednesday afternoon.
Congresswoman Delia Ramirez said allowing Netanyahu to speak in Congress was an obstruction to peace:
Tomorrow, Congress will host an International Court-accused war criminal. We cannot work towards peace while giving Netanyahu the floor.
We must listen to the American people and subject matter experts, like Major Harrison Mann, and demand an end to the atrocities.
Not one… pic.twitter.com/2sFt7WWcfJ
— Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (@repdeliaramirez) July 23, 2024
Congressman Jamaal Bowman said he was “disgusted” at the address:
Netanyahu should be arrested—not honored in Congress.
Like many of you, I am disgusted.
There is no amount of money that can stop us from fighting for everyone’s human rights. Read our op-Ed on it here
https://t.co/IYjTTn4OKn pic.twitter.com/meGi1woQ6Q
— Rep. Jamaal Bowman Ed.D. (@JamaalBowmanNY) July 24, 2024
End the genocide.
Featured image via FOX 7 Austin – YouTube and Jewish Voice for Peace – X
By James Wright
This post was originally published on Canary.
The U.S. has long ignored many commands of international law, but its casual disregard of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has come into sharp focus this week as the U.S. Congress extends a warm welcome to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, just five days after the ICJ notified all UN member states that they have a legal “obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Two months ago, from April 17-21, workers and labor organizers of all stripes convened in Chicago for the bi-annual Labor Notes conference, which overlapped with the Railroad Workers United convention. As the registration website rightly noted, “Labor Notes Conferences are the biggest gatherings of grassroots labor activists, union reformers, and all-around troublemakers out there.” This is not a buttoned up convention of union officials; this is a real grassroots gathering of people on the frontlines of struggle, talking openly, honestly, and strategically about their struggles, victories, and defeats, about what we can all learn from one another as fellow workers and fighters, and about how we can all contribute to growing the labor movement as fellow members of that movement. In this on-the-ground episode, cohosted by Max and Mel Buer, we speak with attendees at the RWU convention, Labor Notes, and participants in the Labor for Palestine protest that took place outside of Labor Notes on April 19.
Speakers include: Johnny Walker, a railroad worker and member of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers—Transportation Division (SMART-TD) Local 610 in Baltimore; Matt Weaver, who has worked on the railroad since 1994, is a member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED-IBT) Local 2624, where he also serves as legislative director for his state; Marcie Pedraza, an electrician at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant and member of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 551; Jacob Morrison, a member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), president of the North Alabama Labor Council, and cohost of The Valley Labor Report; Leticia Zavala, legendary farm labor organizer working with farm workers in Mexico and the United States, and a member of El Futuro Es Nuestro (It’s Our Future), a farmworker caucus within the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, AFL-CIO); Colin Smalley, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 777 in Chicago; Berenice Navarrete-Perez, vice president of the Association of Legislative Employees (ALE); Annie Shields, former journalist and union organizer with the NewsGuild of New York; and Axel Persson, a locomotive engineer in France and general secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) Railway Workers Union in Trappes.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out all the other great shows in our network. And please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we cannot keep going without you.
Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and family members. Share them on social media. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And reach out to us if you have recommendations for stories that you want us to cover or working folks that you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a great episode for y’all today. Two months ago in Chicago, workers and labor organizers of all stripes convened for the biannual Labor Notes Conference, which actually overlapped with the Railroad Workers United convention. So we had quite a lot of workers and organizers and labor advocates all in Chicago at one time, and it was really an incredible moment. As the registration website rightly noted, “Labor Notes conferences are the biggest gatherings of grassroots labor activists, union reformers, and all around troublemakers out there.”
And you know what? They’re not wrong. This was actually my second time attending Labor Notes. And for the second time, I was running around like a headless chicken presenting on panels, attending other panels, hosting events, doing interviews. I mean, it’s such a jam packed couple of days, but man, it really is an incredible experience getting to share space with and talk to and learn from so many working folks from so many industries and unions and labor groups around the US and around the world. This is not a buttoned up convention of union officials. This is a real grassroots gathering of people on the front lines of struggle, talking openly, honestly, and strategically about their struggles, victories, and defeats, about what we can all learn from one another as fellow workers and fighters, and about how we can all contribute to growing the labor movement as fellow members of that movement.
As I overheard a number of attendees saying during the conference, it’s impossible to feel hopeless at Labor Notes. And you know what? I have to agree. And I want to explicitly shout out all the Labor Notes staff and volunteers who worked their asses off to make this experience possible for the rest of us. And I want to also ask everyone out there to please support the work that Labor Notes does, support Railroad Workers United. The work that they do is so important and we desperately need it. And I know many of you feel the same way yourselves about Labor Notes because Labor Notes is one of the very rare places where I actually get to meet a lot of listeners to this show and a lot of folks that I’ve interviewed on the show who I’ve never gotten to meet in person.
And if I’m being 100% honest, that’s actually one of the many reasons I love Labor Notes so much. I mean, it really is a gift, a privilege, and an honor to get to meet you guys in person. And it genuinely means the world to me to have folks come up to me and tell me about how they found the show, what their favorite episodes are, what the podcast has meant to them, but also to hear more about you and about the work that you are doing. That is the magic of Labor Notes.
As someone who’s been hosting this show for many years, never knowing how many people out there were listening and how much of an impact the show is actually having, it’s just truly an incredible experience to get to hear firsthand from you guys in a place like Labor Notes that the show does matter and these conversations do matter, and it is having an impact. And so to all of you who have ever shared those stories with me, reached out to me to share them, like seriously, thank you. We’re all fighting so hard for better lives, better workplaces, better communities, and ultimately, a better world. But that work is punishing, to say the least. It’s exhausting. And it can be really isolating. And in our day-to-day lives, it can feel like it just doesn’t matter, like we’re failing or we’re not doing enough. Like we’re the only ones doing anything and the only ones who care.
But being at Labor Notes is a vital reminder that we are not alone, that we are all in this together. And when you can see so many kindred spirits and fellow fighters together and you can feel the potential that we all have as a movement, it is indeed impossible to feel hopeless. So while it’s impossible to totally communicate that feeling and that experience of Labor Notes in a podcast, we’re going to do our best to take you there today. For this special on-the-ground compilation episode, I spoke to a number of incredible folks at both the Railroad Workers United convention, so you’ll hear updates on the railroad workers struggle, but I also talked to folks throughout the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. And this was all between the span of Wednesday, April 17th, and Sunday, April 21st of this year.
Also, I was there in Chicago with my Real News colleague, Mel Buer. And while I was talking to folks inside the conference, Mel was hustling around doing important coverage and interviewing folks outside the conference at a Palestine Solidarity protest held right outside the hotel by the group Labor for Palestine. As Martha Gravatt wrote at the time for The Militant, “Support for Palestine was strong among the thousands of union activists who attended the Labor Notes Conference in the Chicago area from April 18th to the 21st. Although not an official conference event, a rally organized by the Labor for Palestine National Network on April 19th drew hundreds of people. The crowd blocked traffic for over an hour surrounding a cop car and refusing to leave the street after two people were arrested, chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and let them go. The demonstrators eventually de-arrested the two activists who were released without charges.”
So in this episode, you guys are going to hear interviews from me and Mel with folks inside Labor Notes, the Railroad Workers United convention, and outside at the Labor for Palestine protest. Take a listen.
Johnny Walker:
I am Johnny Walker, SMART Transportation Division, Local 610, Baltimore, Maryland.
Matt Weaver:
Matt Weaver, Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employee. Hired in 1994, so I got almost 30 years out here. Currently, I am a carpenter at the railroad. I won’t name the railroad because whistleblower retaliation is alive and well in the industry. I am the legislative director for BMWE members in Ohio. And it’s been very exciting to see how the ties of legislation, everything we do in the rail labor industry is tied with the politics of it. So we have to be very involved in that. And it’s exciting to be here on the stage with you where we really dig you, appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again.
Johnny Walker:
I think it was just an introduction, not a…
Matt Weaver:
I always go a million miles an hour, man. Yeah, you know me.
Johnny Walker:
[Inaudible 00:09:36] hop on that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, that was awesome, you guys. And it’s like, yeah, that’s what I want folks to hear on this recording, is the voices that they’ve been hearing on the show or the other coverage that we’ve been doing. I mean, folks have seen Johnny out there with his flag, like at Capitol Hill. Matt, I mean, we’ve had you on the show a number of times. You were the first guy I interviewed after the East Palestine derailment. So I think it’s just really exciting that we’re all here. And folks, if you’re listening to this now, just in the background, I mean, we’re at the Railroad Workers United conference here in Chicago overlapping with the Labor Notes Conference. And yeah, I’m sitting 10 feet away from a bunch of the railroad workers that y’all have heard from, including Matt and Johnny over the past few years. And that in and of itself is just really, really cool and exciting. And I wanted to just give listeners a little taste of that.
But also, we were here two years ago. And a lot has happened in those two years. I mean, we were in the midst of the contract fight. This was before Biden and Congress forced the contract down railroad workers’ throats, preempting the strike. And then two months after that, East Palestine happened, yada, yada, yada. But since then, we’ve had developments on two man crews, right? I mean, there was a class action settlement in East Palestine. Not nearly enough, but there’s something. So I just wanted to check in with you guys, and for our listeners, who have gotten invested in what’s going on in the railroads because of you guys, because of the conversations we’ve had.
I just wanted to check in and just, yeah, if you could talk to our listeners about how are things going after the last two years? Where are we on the railroads? Where should listeners have their focus as we head into the next contract fight? Or anything that you feel is kind of flying under the radar from your side of the rails?
Johnny Walker:
Oh, thanks, Max. First off, it’s not just us, it’s our organizations. It’s our membership. It’s the public community and stuff like that that’s really taken the time to come out and really see what’s going on. They supported us 100% when we got the contract. Forced or not, they still supported us. It was more than we’ve ever gotten. And I’ve been out here for going on 21 years in October. We did pass a two-person crew with the help of our coalition unions and SMART, with Jared Cassidy and Greg Hines, our legislative directors and alternate legislative directors. But it’s kind of like we’re storming the beaches in Normandy. Everyone’s happy the day is over. We’re going to be in Berlin in Christmas. Well, there’s still a long fight. There’s only a regulation. It’s not a law. So there’s still more to be there. And currently, my understanding is, the carriers are already trying to fight it.
So I mean, it’s a win. And it was a hard win, but still, it’s just like we landed the beaches of Normandy. It’s still not 1945 and we still got a long fight. And then even if we do win the two-person crew eventually in the future, what’s going to be our next fight? So I mean, that’s the positive side on my side. So I mean, there’s other things. One of the companies that we work for has a better CEO that seems to be a little bit more kind and understanding, but still they’re fighting with Wall Street to try to big profits and other things like that. There is kind of a change, but still, it is the same railroad, just different ownership, so to speak.
So I, in a lot of ways, try to lie to myself saying I’m out here because I love the job and I can protect the public, but ultimately, this is my trade, this is my profession and stuff like that, and I really want to do this. This is what I love. And the way that I justify all the stuff that happens to me and other people where I could deal with it is like I’m kind of a wall that I could service the customer and protect the community. But even that gets harder every day.
Matt Weaver:
It drives me to think that it’s very frustrating to think that we need things like the disaster in East Palestine to happen to get change made. That was the lead in to two-man crew. We’re looking at crossing safety bills. We’ve got many of the crafts have… I think we might be 90% of rail labor has sick days now. That didn’t come from the contract. And so vocal advocacy and cross craft solidarity is the key to making this stuff work. And it concerns me greatly that we are facing a scenario of more cuts. Norfolk Southern is looking to have a hedge fund, buy them out again and have more cuts, PSR 3.0.
And when’s the next disaster going to drive us to get better treatment for rail labor? When are we going to see better inspections for our brothers and sisters in the car shops? When are we going to see… The two-man crew bill is a positive step in the right direction. But there’s still a lot of loopholes in there. And that’s very concerning when you think of the group of rail labor, who are my brothers and sisters, and you have to be involved in politics, and we shouldn’t have to need a disaster to help drive things forward for the men and women in rail labor.
Johnny Walker:
I’d also like to say with Matt, it’s great that I got to meet Matt through the R struggle, with the contract negotiations and stuff like that. The same thing with my friend Devin out west. We were both interviewed by the BBC. We would’ve never been brought together without this strife. So I mean, we’ve been really looking at other things. We’re not looking at our seat at the table, we’re looking at our table for negotiations. So I mean, we wouldn’t have had that without this strife and it’s really starting to pay off in a lot of ways.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that. This will be the wrap up question, right? Because I think folks out there really want to know, after they got really… They got more up to speed listening to you guys over the past couple of years on what railroad workers are really going through, what it’s like to work in this industry under these conditions, under precision scheduled railroading, staff cuts, corner cuts year after year after year, while executive and shareholder payouts are larger than they’ve ever been? So folks are now paying attention.
And they were worried about what they were hearing from the folks in this room about all that loss of talent and knowledge that comes with people being driven out of the industry, and all the problems that could potentially come when the railroads are trying to fill those losses with hiring people off the street who aren’t going to have those relationships with the old timers as much as they did before. So these are the kinds of questions folks are asking me. And so I guess I just wanted to ask, looking back on the contract fight, the last one, what are, you think, takeaway lessons we can all learn and that we can apply to the next contract fight which opens in 2025?
Like, from the railroad side and the public side, what can we learn from that strife to be better prepared this time? And also just have the conditions that we were talking about all these years, like change for your fellow workers. How are folks doing working in the different crafts?
Matt Weaver:
Excellent question. So the best thing that rail labor can do at this point in time is have coordinated bargaining, a rail labor bargaining coalition. We’re all on the same team, just like we ended the last round of bargaining under the AFL-CIO-TTD. Our strength is in numbers, our strength is in solidarity. And we all have to realize, I am my brother’s keeper. So if we can’t come together to start bargaining out at the same position we ended last time, then we might be setting ourselves up for concessions. I’ve got great hopes for us to do something like the Southwest Airlines pilots who got, what, 47.9% pay increases over five years. Teamsters did well with UPS, UAW did pretty well. Let’s build on those wins. And it’s time for rail labor to step up, come together and bargain as a group, one team, good solidarity, and we can do better.
Johnny Walker:
I could agree with what Matt says, but I want to go back to, you were talking about with basically hiring people off the street to replace our veteran railroad workers. Unfortunately, that hasn’t really changed. I mean, we’re getting more people coming into the craft, but because they found out how miserable it was and there’s other options, we’re not getting as high quality people. And the people that come here, they’re not going to put up with it, especially the first few years. I mean, that’s got to change. But I feel that the way that change is, like with all of our apprenticeship programs for the building trades or anything like that, they need to be federally recognized.
Let some of these unions and these other crafts come up with these programs that are standard for the industry. Because even though the company says that we’re looking out for our employees, they’re not always looking out for the employees, we’re looking out for our members. They’re not employees to us, they’re members, they’re our family. So if we get federally recognized apprenticeship programs in the building trades as well as the transportation trades, because right now, we have standardized signals and rules and other things like that, but we don’t have a standardized training program for conductors or engineers. We just have guidelines. And each railroad does it a little bit differently. And it doesn’t matter if you’re working down south or you’re working up north. It depends on who you’re working for, where you get certain standards and they’re met, but they’re not exceeded all the time.
And if we don’t start exceeding some of these standards, 20 years down the way, if some of these people fell through the cracks, we’re going to have even worse issues if we save all these safety concerns. So I mean, coordinated bargaining can help do that, but also federal regulation where we can have apprenticeship programs that are nationally and federally recognized as the end all be all. And we can even do that working with the companies, but they’re not willing to come to the table with us all the time. We’re willing to put out the olive branch, but everyone needs to be able to accept the olive branch on both sides.
Matt Weaver:
Because they answer to the shareholders. So it is driven by shareholder needs. More is never enough when you’re talking about hedge funds. And these stock buybacks and that kind of stuff is decimating the railroads. It’s absurd how what we’re facing as rail labor.
Johnny Walker:
Absolutely. And it’s one of those things where railroads used to be a standard stock that had good returns. Now it’s massive returns. Eventually the top’s going to fall off and everything’s going to go ahead and sink.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Then again, you end up with East Palestine. Right behind you is Chris Albright who lives there. And I was there three weeks ago. And so I guess, I just wanted to ask that as a final quick question, is like, what’s your message to the public about, again, why they should care about this kind of thing? Why they should care that there are two man crews on those trains, that those trains are not as long as they are, that we’re putting more investment in track maintenance? This can all feel in the weeds. But as like Chris is living proof of, as you guys are living proof of, this is not a theoretical thing. We’re talking real shit that directly impacts working people. So I guess, what’s your message to folks out there listening about why they should care about all of this?
Johnny Walker:
Well, quickly, Union Carbide went overseas because there’s less regulation. Union Carbide wiped out Bhopal, the Indian town, where everyone went to sleep and they didn’t wake up. So think about what you’re doing here. You can’t go ahead and send railroads overseas. If you keep deregulating, if you keep just squeaking by, that’s going to happen in your community. So I mean, this is something that directly you could affect and affects you if you’re not paying attention.
Matt Weaver:
And let’s not forget, and we’ve talked about this before, Max, railroads don’t go through rich people’s backyards. So think about how close you live. The train in East Palestine, what, two miles from my home. So the people need to realize, the public needs to realize that there’s dangerous materials going through their backyards. We don’t want them on the highways. We want better regulation. We want our public servants to serve the people and control the safety of shipping on rail so that we know that even though there’s a train in our backyard, we know there will not be a problem like there was in Ohio. That’s very troublesome.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah. So my name is Jacob Morrison. I am co-host of The Valley Labor Report, Alabama’s only union talk radio program and the largest union talk radio program in the South. I’ve started saying that now. Since we’re on four stations in three states, I think we could say that. If anybody else is bigger than us, then somebody should connect us, right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. It’ll be news to me. Well, fuck you, brother. I mean, as y’all listening, you recognize that sweet southern twang. My man, Jacob Morrison is here. We just bumped into Jacob’s amazing cohost Adam Keller. If you guys listen to this show, you know all about The Valley Labor Report. If for some reason you don’t, you need to go listen to it. As Jacob said, not only is it the only, but is the largest union talk radio program in the South. And they’re doing incredibly good work. And I saw my man Jacob walking over here as I’m posting up in Labor Notes, talking to folks on the street. And just wanted to, yeah, check in and see how you guys over there in Alabama are doing. I feel like we’re talking a day after the incredible UAW victory at Volkswagen. Like, shit is going down in the South.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the panels that I facilitated was the Organizing the South panel. And we had on Keyshell Liggins, a Hyundai worker, organizing with the UAW obviously, down in Montgomery. And so that was my first question to her. First question to the panel was, how are people feeling down there? Presumably, you’ve got your finger on the pulse for what’s going on in the Hyundai factory. And she said that her phone has been blowing up. People are really getting a lot of energy from this. I think anybody that’s on Twitter has seen a lot of the videos and pictures of grown men in Chattanooga crying. And you could really feel a lot of that excitement in solidarity in the room, in the Organizing the South panel.
Because down in the South, we know that folks in the labor movement and folks who want to build the labor movement, who want to build the fighting wing of the labor movement, we know that Organizing the South is really a key. It is the key, as Michael Goldfield said, to changing this country. And so that’s, Organize the South, it’s been a slogan on the left and in the labor movement for decades, but nobody has done anything about it. Even Operation Dixie, if you actually take a look at how many organizers they had, how much money they spent, Operation Dixie, which was supposedly a cross sector, cross industry, multi-state thing by the Federation of Unions, they didn’t even have as many people, as many resources, as the Steelworkers drive, decades before in the South.
So I mean, Operation Dixie, I’ve really been reading a lot of Goldfield. And he says that it was just a coda and basically the final attempt to even pretend to do anything to Organize the South. And now, the UAW is really putting some real resources in. And not only real resources because you can throw money at shit and money can’t solve everything, resources can’t solve anything. But they’re throwing resources after importantly winning huge at the big three automakers and actually showing what workers can do when we come together. So proving the case to these folks down south and then putting the resources again, putting your money where your mouth is and giving them the opportunity to organize themselves, it’s an exciting time to be a Southern Union organizer, a Southern Union member. And you could really feel it in that room.
And I’m really looking forward to seeing folks at Mercedes win their election next month, and then folks at Hyundai after that, and folks at Toyota after that. And it’s just going to keep on going. So I’m excited.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re about to do the Howard Dean, and then we’re going to Hyundai.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Jacob Morrison:
That’s right. That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what a difference compared to when we were here two years ago.
Jacob Morrison:
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because then, it was like people were talking about Bessemer.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So there was still hope that what we’re seeing happen would happen. But this is a very different moment of a different phase in that movement down there.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I could hear it. I mean, I was unfortunate enough to be moderating the panel in the room right next to Jacob’s, and I kept hearing people just going nuts in the room next door. They’re like, “Yeah.” and I’m like, “What the hell? Where’s my audience? Why aren’t you guys that pumped up?” But people are fired up. We got the Union of Southern Service Workers walking around here.
Jacob Morrison:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Like we said, we are here the day after the Volkswagen news. I mean, there’s really, do not sleep on the South. And if you want to know what’s going on down there, of course we’re going to keep trying to cover it at The Real News Network and at Working People. But if you want to put your finger on that pulse, you got to go to The Valley Labor Report and check out the weekly report on Southern Labor, the interviews they do with workers down there, the analysis they provide. It’s really invaluable. And I just wanted to ask you, Jacob, by way of rounding out and letting you go, what has it been for you? What has it been like for you being at Labor Notes this time in 2024?
Jacob Morrison:
Oh man, it’s great. This is my second Labor Notes, and just like the first time two years ago. As somebody in the fighting wing of the labor movement, even in union halls, it can get lonely sometimes. It can get lonely, it can get frustrating because you feel like everybody’s vision has been beaten out of them. And even folks who want to build and who want to do good stuff, just so many people in our unions don’t have hope anymore and don’t know what they can do differently. And a lot of people are resigned to hiding behind the fortress and protecting what we have.
And Labor Notes is one of the only places in the country, one of the only times every couple of years where you have thousands of people who believe that shit can be better, who are making shit better, and who are going to continue to make shit better. I mean, it’s just, there’s no other place or event like it. If you’ve never been, you should go in 2026. And especially-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Register earlier than we did, by the way.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s just been so great. There’s so many plans that are hatching. I was on a labor council panel, and we’re passing resolutions to encourage our affiliates to align contracts with May 1st, 2028, right? Shawn Fain has called for the unions to do that. That’s a very important thing, especially with the inability to strike in a contract. If we align our contracts, it makes it easier to do some mass action like that. So Shawn Fain has put that out.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and if folks want to see what… That’s not even a hypothetical. The panel that I was moderating today, one of the people on that panel was the Union Federation leader up in Quebec.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And they had… Effectively, it was called the common front strike, back in November. But it was essentially a general strike in that mode because it was over 500,000 public sector workers across the province of Quebec who were all on strike at the same time because their contracts were expiring at the same time. So that’s the kind of shit that Jacob’s talking about. If you want a general strike, you got to lay the groundwork. You can’t just snap your fingers and it comes out of nowhere. But if you lay that groundwork and sync up those contract expirations, you then have the ability to do what the homies up in Quebec did last year.
Jacob Morrison:
Exactly. And so some labor councils have got together and we’re passing these resolutions to endorse that call by Shawn Fain. And we’re encouraging our affiliates where possible to set their contract expirations for May 1st. North Alabama was the first central labor council to pass that resolution, I’m proud to say. Also, I think Alabama is the only state with two labor councils that have passed the resolutions. Bargaintogether.org is where you can find your materials if you’re on your central labor council and you want to get the draft resolution. So yeah, it’s just exciting. Plans are coming together, plans are being made, folks are executing on them. And I mean, no place like Labor Notes. So it’s great to be here.
Marcie Pedraza:
Hi, I am Marcie Pedraza. I’m an electrician at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant and proud member of UAW Local 551. Also a member of UAW-D.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. So this is exciting, gang. You guys recognize that name. You guys have heard me talk to Marcie through the UAW big three strike. And yeah, you were one of the first people I interviewed after Nick Livick. And…
Marcie Pedraza:
He’s here too.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, I want to meet Nick. But it’s so cool. This is what Labor Notes is about, is we connected virtually. Yours was one of the sites called to stand up and strike. You were such a powerful voice throughout all of that. And now, I get to meet you in person and hear at Labor Notes. So yeah, I just wanted to ask if you could refresh our listeners’ memories a bit about your involvement with the UAW strike, and what it’s like being here at Labor Notes now after that, especially a day after the big UAW victory down in Volkswagen?
Marcie Pedraza:
Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s been so inspiring. And I never would’ve thought that our strike would have this much of an impact, not just with people stopping me seeing my UAW gear, like, “All right, awesome.” One time, I was in the airport, I had a eat the rich hoodie on, and I had a worker in the restroom, was like, “Good job.” She was a CWA worker and followed the whole strike campaign and the strategy as in many people. And just being here at Labor Notes, running into folks like you or other people that I’ve known online or in meetings, virtual meetings for the past couple of years, I’m like, “Oh, that’s you in real life.” It’s been really great.
And then just hearing other folk stories. Like yesterday, I heard a panel. And this was before the announcement of Volkswagen winning their union. A worker was on a panel talking about how. Because UAW tried to organize there before. It was not victorious for production side anyway. But still trades, they were. So he was talking about watching our strike and the gains we got and how that was so inspiring and lit a fire in all of them. And I was like, hell yes. That was inspiring me. And I was like, “We did that?” I don’t know. It’s just so humbling and awesome.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. It is awesome. Because it shows… It’s like, the fight matters. Right? Standing up for what’s right matters. Yeah. You and your fellow members were showing us what it looks like to fight for what’s right. And that’s inspiring, not only because it motivates us and gets us ready to fight, but you’re reminding us that we are the change we’ve been waiting for. And if we’re organized, if we have solidarity, if we are working together strategically, we can move mountains. And UAW, your local, and everyone fighting that fight showed us that last year. And now, just like Starbucks workers have showed us that, just like Amazon workers, Home Depot workers. Everyone here who’s fighting that fight is contributing to that.
But yeah. I mean, is it wild to you, just like Ford electrician, mom, community activist? But now, you’re here and everyone’s like, “Oh, shit. You’re the guy. You are out there.”
Marcie Pedraza:
Yeah. And people have recognized me just from my name or maybe seeing me on some interview. And I’m just like, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.” But it’s definitely been a great experience, humbling, like I said. But yesterday, the first day, I was sitting a few rows behind a couple workers who had their future UAW shirts on. I was like, “Oh yeah, I got to go talk to them.” They’re walking around like a couple of rockstars. I thought they were Volkswagen, but they’re Mercedes. But they’re next. Their vote, I believe, is in May 13th. So we’re going to be on the lookout for that one too. And I was like, “I want one of those shirts.” But I can’t wear it because a current UAW worker.
But anyway, it’s just… Yeah, it’s been really, really inspiring just to hear everybody’s stories. And today, I was on a panel about steering green transition. So we know the fight isn’t over. We have still a lot of work to do, and hopefully more people to join us in the fight.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well say a little more about that and then I promise I’ll let you go, because that was aside when we were talking about UAW and the Stand Up Strike. I know we touched on it a bit, but this is something that is as much a part of you and what your struggle as the UAW and that fight. So yeah, could you just tell us a little more about how you are bringing those two things together here at Labor Notes?
Marcie Pedraza:
Right. I mean, it’s like, all my dreams come true. I’m an environmental activist in my community. So I work on fighting toxic polluters. But I also work in a factory. And these things are all related and intersectional. And as we’re fighting for climate justice, we have to realize that it also means workers’ justice. So this panel, and there was one yesterday too that I was unfortunately unable to attend, but just bringing all these issues together like, when people hear about this green transition, what does that mean? And I don’t really know about that or they might not care about it, but it does matter to workers because workers are worried about losing their jobs.
And as these companies try to make these new products and not necessarily have them be union labor, that’s where they’re trying to cut corners and make more profits. So that’s when I try to tell my co-workers like, “This is our livelihood. If we want to be in the auto industry or just making anything and being union and having these great benefits, we have to make sure we are in these decisions that are being made with our tax dollars that the companies are getting to make these brand new facilities for all electric vehicles and battery plants.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, Yeah.
Marcie Pedraza:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, sister, again, it is so great to finally meet you in person.
Marcie Pedraza:
Likewise.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I guess I just wanted to ask, again, less than 24 hours after the huge victory down south with Volkswagen, and like you said, now this train is moving, any final messages out there to folks who got invested in the UAW and this struggle through the Stand Up Strike and are seeing what we’re seeing? Any kind of final messages you got for folks out there listening?
Marcie Pedraza:
Yeah. Anyone that feels like they don’t like their conditions at work, it’s time to organize and form a union and just look out because UAW is coming and it’s not just going to be the big three anymore. I don’t know what we’re going to call it. Maybe big three in the dirty south, or big four, big five, big six. So it’s just truly inspiring.
Colin Smalley:
So I’m Colin Smalley. I am from Chicago. I am president of the IFPTE, which is the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 777. And so I represent, here in Chicago, workers at the United States Army Corps of Engineers. This is a mixed unit of everything from tugboat crew, to crane operators, lock and dam operators, but we’ve also got engineers and scientists and accountants and economists, the admin workers that keep us all straight. I mean, we’ve got a little bit of everybody in our union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. What is it like to represent a unit that’s that diverse and doing that many essential jobs across your unit?
Colin Smalley:
So you might think that it would be tenser than it is. We work together really well. We actually, through bureaucracy, we were split into two separate unions when I took over, and we combined them. Because it’s like, why are we letting ourselves be split up like that? And the law uses these gross terms of professional and non-professional. Which basically is just like, does the job require a college degree or not? It’s totally demeaning and weird. So we just did away with it. And we’re all one union.
And so right out of the gate, we negotiated new agreements about the schedules of our lock and dam operators. They are 24/7 facilities, and they work 12-hour shifts, swing shifts. So they’re rotating through. We nailed down everything that was important to those guys. We really got it hammered out. So right out of the gate, our blue collar guys could see the power of the union. And then when it came time to bargain about telework, for example, they had the back of the white color workers in the office, even though they’re not teleworking. So the office guys aren’t working swing shift and the operators aren’t teleworking.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh man, that’s so cool.
Colin Smalley:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I want to have you back on so we can really stretch our legs and get a sense of all the different kind of members you’re representing, the jobs you guys are doing, the job specific struggles that your members are facing and all that good stuff.
Colin Smalley:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I don’t want to put you on the spot and make you give that rundown here while we’re standing-
Colin Smalley:
No worries.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… in the Hyatt lobby.
Colin Smalley:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But yeah. I’m curious just how it’s been for you coming to Labor Notes as a Chicagoan doing this, and is this your first time here? Have you been into one before?
Colin Smalley:
It is my first time here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay.
Colin Smalley:
And so, one of the things that I’ve been really thinking about is, I’ve been sitting in these classes and panels and conversations. As federal workers, I think we’ve been indoctrinated that we can’t have a political opinion at work and we can’t have any kind of activism as part of our job, that we have to be this neutral arbiter. But in our union capacity, in our collective capacity, we all are passionate about the things that we do. And whether that’s addressing how changing climate is affecting our people and our neighbors, and especially the most vulnerable neighbors. Because of course, every climate disaster hits the most vulnerable people first. And it’s just the way it always is.
In California, the Army Corps had a failed levee a year or two ago. That, of course, was in a poor neighborhood, because they fixed the levy on the rich side. And we can talk about all that kind of stuff. But yeah. I think that our members are really interested in how can we embrace our expertise and our experience as Army Corps workers and bring that to bear on some of these big issues that affect us. Because we also live in these communities. We also pay taxes. We also are involved in every one of these struggles. And so we’re not this neutral robot.
And another thing, somebody was talking about AI this morning at the keynote. And our headquarters wants to replace our lock and dam operators with automated systems that are controlled from a control center somewhere. And so we’re constantly defending against this corporatist mindset, even in the government, where they’re trying to take over everything. And so we’re trying to… It is just another front in how we’re proving to people that we’re not autonomous robots. And so we’re here at Labor Notes and we’re learning about how is it that we exercise our voice? How do we work out those muscles of bringing everything we can to these struggles?
Maximillian Alvarez:
That was great, man. Anything else you wanted to throw on at the end? Like, where people can find you? What they can do to get involved?
Colin Smalley:
Yeah. So I mean, we’ve got a website at IFPTE777.org. So the other thing is that, I’ll just say that I am running for office for our national executive board with IFPTE. So this is outside of my local capacity, but I’m really pushing for democracy, for a rank and file strategy, a bottom up strategy where we’re going to bring what the workers are interested in and what they want to fight for. And we’re going to bring that to everywhere it needs to be. And so we’re not going to be as worried about, are we stepping on somebody’s toes? But let’s talk to people. Right? Let’s fight the fights that we need to fight.
We’re in this perilous place as federal employees where we’ve got the project 2025 that’s out there. The Heritage Foundation is gunning for our jobs, for our livelihoods. And we’ve got to be ready to fight. And so that’s what me and my colleague, Chris, we’re starting a campaign to really push for that. And I’ll be happy to get you a link for that too, for your show notes.
Leticia Zavala:
My name is Leticia Zavala. I’m an organizer with It’s Our Future. It’s a farm worker caucus of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. And basically, I work for farm workers. They are organizing to improve their working and living conditions in the fields.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Leti, it’s so great to be standing with you here at Labor Notes. It’s such an honor to meet you because you’re… She’s being modest folks. I mean, this woman’s been in the fight for a long time. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your history fighting for farm workers?
Leticia Zavala:
Oh, well, I started working in the fields when I was six years old. I migrated between Florida, Ohio, and Michigan following the different crops. And I saw my first collective action when I was 13 years old. My dad threw himself in front of a tractor in order to stop a supervisor who was harassing and molesting young girls on the farm. And that action really impacted me. We were fired because he took that action. But that’s the reality of a fight, right? From there, I started organizing. I came back to the fields after college, and I’ve been organizing farm workers since.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. And I guess, just for folks listening, because as you know better than anyone else, like sadly, when we talk about the labor movement, we often don’t talk about farm workers, domestic workers. I mean, there’s so many folks who are let out, which is why it’s so amazing that you all have been fighting to organize workers and to help workers who are the most exploited, most vulnerable. But now, you’re here in Labor Notes, part of the union discussions that we’re having. I think that’s so important. But I guess I just wanted to ask for folks listening who maybe don’t know a lot about FLOC, who don’t know about the organizing going on in the farm fields. Could you just say a little bit about what’s going on there? What you’re fighting for? Who you’re working with? And what you see on a week-to-week basis?
Leticia Zavala:
Yes. Well, we’re definitely living a fight. A lot of the workers that we work with are either undocumented or H-2A workers. They’re here on H-2A visas, which means they’re dependent on their employer for housing, transportation, immigration status, and a job. So you can imagine the type of working environment that is there. We haven’t had a harvest without a death since 2020. We are having to work in the fields eight hour, 10 hour, 12 hour days when news are being announced that people should put their pets inside for safety because of the heat. These are the types of the conditions that we’re living day by day.
There’s workers still making $4, $5 an hour on a daily basis. There’s workers that are consistently fired. There’s workers that are afraid to speak up and afraid to go to the doctor because they might not get called back next year. And those are the kinds of things that we’re fighting against. We’re organizing though. We’re educating workers. Workers are taking action. They’re walking out of the fields. They’re signing petitions. They’re creating minor changes at a time with hopes of creating a bigger change that will impact the state and maybe the country.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I mean, it’s so incredible, so important. And what can folks listening to this do to help, to be part of that?
Leticia Zavala:
We are always in need of support. The hardest time is the summer, right? And people can help translating documents, translating petitions that workers write so that they can turn it into their grower. They can help with transportation. We drive a lot trying to visit workers, and we depend on a lot of people to go pick up workers, to bring them to union meetings when we have meetings and when we have part of the democratic process that seeks us to call actions and to do things. So we need gas cards. We need people to show up and drive. We need people to help translate. We need people to send donations and to sometimes call growers and say, “Yo, what’s up? Why did you retaliate against that worker?” Because that’s the type of union that we need. Everybody eats. Everybody has to support our costs.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, and again, while one dipshit presidential candidate is out there saying that we are poisoning the blood of this country, what are we actually doing? We’re filling potholes at night on bridges like our brothers who died in Baltimore. We’re picking the tomatoes that go on your cheeseburgers or in your fridge. Our children are working, cleaning in The Bone Sauce and meatpacking plants. And obviously this is very personal for me and for you all. And I’m just like… I think it’s, again, a real testament to Labor Notes that you guys are here along with the other unions that we hear about. But I wanted to ask, how has your experience been here at Labor Notes? Good and bad. I’m just curious.
Leticia Zavala:
I think it’s been mainly positive. It’s always important. There’s some tough conversations that have to happen. We are a caucus of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee is a member of the AFL-CIO. Right? And unfortunately, sometimes we get too comfortable in a space where we tend to protect the leaders and the institutions rather than the movement, which is why the institution was created. And so we’ve had some tough conversations with some folks, but we’ve also had some very productive educational conversations. We’re learning from unions in Mexico. We’re forming alliances on how they can help us organize our members while they’re in Mexico, and how we can help them educate their members when they’re trying to get across the border or promise visas that sometimes don’t get met.
And so, we are talking to service workers whose parents worked in the fields and want to know the history and want to connect to that part of their heritage. And they want to learn that cause and they want to support our cause. So I think, overall, it’s been positive. It’s been a great experience. It’s always good to learn in exchange. And we’re very thankful for that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just any final messages you have for folks? Anything about where they can find y’all, or any messages about why they should care as much about what y’all are doing as they do about Starbucks or something?
Leticia Zavala:
Definitely. We are on Facebook. We’re on TikTok. It’s Our Future. El Futuro Es Nuestro. There’s always actions for people to take. There’s always a lot of fun stuff that members post about how specific crops are harvested. So please learn more. Support when you can. There’s always calls to action. So if you’re connected, you’re going to… And you can. We hope you can come out and support.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
So, hi everyone. My name is Berenice Navarrete-Perez. I am a currently budget director for council member Christopher Marte. I’ve been a budget director for two years, but I’ve been with City Council since I’ve been 21. I am currently 28. Oh. And I’m also the Vice President of ALE, which is the Association of Legislative Employees.
Matthew Malloy:
Hey everybody. My name is Matthew Malloy. I also work at the New York City Council. I work for council member Shahana Hanif. And we are with the Association of Legislative Employees who have just secured our first contract agreement for New York City Council staff. And we’re really excited to be here today at Labor Notes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Well, it’s so great to connect with you guys and to learn about this struggle, which I myself hadn’t heard about. But I’m so grateful to learn about it now. Tell me more about the Association of Legislative Employees and how this struggle got started. I feel like a lot of folks don’t know. They’re like, “Oh, wow.” People representing city council members are unionizing or working with city council members. That’s wild. A, what is that job like? And how did this union effort get going?
Matthew Malloy:
So, at the New York City Council, there has been a long history of organizing efforts, really probably going back to 2019. But I think what really sparked the wave that got it over the finish line was when New York City Council member, Andy King, who had sexually harassed, sexually abused some council staffers, was essentially given a slap on the wrist. And I think that dynamic of staff feeling that they needed more leverage really was what kicked off the organizing effort, which was a card campaign. And then Covid hit. So then we had to do a second card campaign during Covid. And then we achieved voluntary recognition. That was in ’21.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah.
Matthew Malloy:
And then for the last two years, we’ve been bargaining our contract, which, in mid-April, we ratified. And there are so many great things with this contract. But I think what you would think about it, it sets standard minimum wages at the council. Our lowest paid full-time person used to be at $30,000 a year. Now they’re at 55,000 a year. Paid over time, grievance rights. And most of our council staffers… When you think of a political staffer, you might think of a slick executive type person in a suit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Lanyard wearing motherfucker.
Matthew Malloy:
Yeah, lanyard. And most of these people are working class people, working in district offices, getting people connected with essential benefits like food stamps or helping them with immigration paperwork. So that’s a little bit of the broad background of why we organized, what we won, and the kind of work people are performing at the city council.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
I would definitely say that the side of the job people don’t see is the hours we put into our work. Our day could really start from 9:00 or 10:00 and end at 9:00 at night or 11:00, depending on the meeting that you’re attending. A community board, they run pretty long. They could run from 6:00 until literally 10:00. So there’s something you don’t see or hear about that is happening at city council. There are folks who are working on weekends. I used to work to a point where I had to request a weekend off because that’s how excessively we were working weekends.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
That’s put on the counter. Unfortunately, I can’t work this Saturday or Sunday because I have other things to do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And you guys are an independent union, correct?
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
Yes, we are an independent union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And so being here at Labor Notes, meeting other folks who are going the independent route, ALU, Home Depot workers, I guess, could you say a little more about why y’all went the independent route and how that’s worked for folks on the outside who are listening to this and maybe are thinking about getting something started like that?
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
Well, because no one thought it was possible. And we’ve been able to accomplish something that a lot of folks thought it was impossible, including some of the unions that are here that originally weren’t supportive of our union.
Matthew Malloy:
Yeah. It was not our dream to create a brand new union from scratch. It was a necessity. Just essentially, we went to various big New York City unions. They didn’t see a blueprint. They didn’t see a path forward. They weren’t quite sure if it was legal. And so that’s really why we built our union. And we’re the Association of Legislative Employees. And another effort we took was we started collecting dues pre-contract because we didn’t have that war chest developed from an international to support us. So we asked our members to commit to paying 1% dues in the period during the contract campaign. And I think that was really essential.
And I think, more than anything, I think what we want people to know, people listening to this who are trying to form their own independent union, is just that it is possible. People will tell you that it isn’t, but it’s a grind. But it’s possible. And there are some benefits to it too. Because I think if we had paymasters above us with maybe connections to certain New York City Council members, they may have steered us away from taking some of the more direct actions we took to get this contract. We were picketing the sessions of the city council every two weeks, essentially, which is that’s how often they meet, for three or four months, being very aggressive, really, and trying to point out some of the hypocrisies of a New York City Council member getting on the picket line for Writers Guild and Actors Guild and UAW, and then when it comes time to their own staff union, just essentially being a little removed from that process.
So I think those are some of the benefits of being an independent union and a little bit of history on why we had to go that route.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, I want to have you guys back on for a longer discussion because there’s a story here that I want to hear more about. But I want to be respectful of your time. I want to let you go. You got a lot of other panels to see, people to meet. I just wanted to ask what your experience here at Labor Notes has been like.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
Definitely my experience here at Labor Notes has been fantastic. It’s been good to understand and learn from other unions here who are attending. And our struggle is a struggle amongst other workers. It’s not only in city council, it’s in every sector, the private sector and the public sector. But it’s been wonderful. It’s exciting. And I can’t wait to come back in two years with some new staff members at every level from city council.
Matthew Malloy:
And one thing we’re really excited about is we just had a great conversation with someone who’s very involved in organizing the Congressional Workers Union. We are tonight going to be meeting up with some staff from the Illinois state legislature who are unionizing. We have met folks here at these sessions who are unionizing, the Chicago City Council, the Boston City Council. This is a movement that is really in most states if you look for it, but it’s not a story that’s being told. And I think it’s really primarily about confronting power in the United States, and how labor, and new labor too, not always existing unions, can organize to really deliver for working people, even when they’re up against a really powerful entity like local politicians or Congress members and things like that.
So I think that’s one of the best parts about being here at Labor Notes, is just getting to connect with other people who are trying to organize their state legislature or city legislature or Congress.
Annie Shields:
My first name is Annie, A-N-N-I-E. Last name’s Shields, S-H-I-E-L-D-S. I am a union organizer and I work for the NewsGuild of New York. And I work with The New York Times tech workers on their first contract campaign. So I’ve been there for about two years. Previously, I was a member of the NewsGuild for 10 years and I got into the union through running for office. So I ran on a slate with our current president and on a reform ticket, trying to bring in more militancy and make our union more member led. And she won in a landslide. And then I just got so deep into our local. I had the opportunity for the first time to really see what other shops were doing and what the new organizing looked like. And so it made me want to become an organizer.
So I joined our member organizer program, which is… Member organizer program is a really cool way that we have at the NewsGuild to help members develop organizing skills and actually help the staff out with campaigns. So I was able to take some trainings and then started working side by side with the staffer on some underground organizing campaigns. And then that experience helped me to get the job I have now.
Mel Buer:
That’s great. So we are here outside of Labor Notes. There’s quite a few people outside because we were on a break between workshops. Last night, there was a pretty sizable demonstration outside of Labor Notes where the Labor for Palestine coalition held a rally and some demonstrators were arrested, put into cop cars. And as a result, individuals stopped cars and had a bit of a standoff for an hour until they were like… Now, you had tweeted this morning about what it was like to be a part of and to witness that last night. And I believe you said it was very instructive, almost like its own Labor Notes workshop.
Annie Shields:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
Can you tell me more about that?
Annie Shields:
Yeah, definitely. So I went into it. I had gone to a panel discussion in the morning with some folks talking about Know Your Rights, free speech for all workers, but especially media workers in Palestine. So there’s lots of stories of journalists or other media workers being censored for speaking out about the war on Gaza. And there’s been a lot of concerns about our members’ rights being infringed upon. So we’ve got a lot of really great stuff going on in the NewsGuild to try to push back on that and set a new standard for journalists that really respects their freedom of speech.
So during that panel, somebody told us that there was going to be a rally at 6:30 in solidarity with Palestinian workers and struggle for a free Palestine. And I was definitely interested in going. I thought, okay, great. This is something that’s really important to me. It’s something that I feel very upset about on a daily basis. I know that so many of us do. And often feels like there’s not much we can do about it. And I don’t know what difference the rally will make in terms of the war, but it feels very important to make this a centerpiece of the Labor Notes Conference this year because we’re at a time that feels like a turning point in terms of what Americans are aware of. And I think that’s really important and it’s long overdue.
So I was excited to come to this rally. And I showed up and met a couple of friends. And really it was quite calm. And people were in the street, but this is a dead-end street. There’s really not traffic that comes. Anyone who’s back towards the end of the street would be here to park in a parking garage for this premises. So it wasn’t a big interruption until major traffic. And I was there for probably a half hour. The speakers had been speaking. And I thought, “Okay, I’m going to actually go and grab my suitcase from my car and then come back and bring that up to the room.” And so on my way back, I happened to just walk into this arrest as it was happening. And I saw one person who was being held by the police and then another person get thrown to the ground and really roughed up. It was very disturbing.
Not the first time I’ve seen cops behave that way, but it’s never a good thing to see. So my instinct was to just start recording. So I stayed very close and I recorded the whole thing. And I was in the middle though, and I had this big rolling suitcase, so I thought I better go back inside and get rid of this. So I came back out. And when I came back out, I realized that the crowd had actually gotten bigger and the police car where the… I wouldn’t even call them a protester necessarily, just a rally goer, an attendee was being held. And it became clear to me that we had an opportunity to make it very difficult for the police to leave.
And so it was very spontaneous. I didn’t have really any friends or people that I knew in the crowd. And I think there was a lot of people just coming together, seeing what was happening and deciding, okay, we’re just going to stay here until something… See if we can just make it impossible for them to leave. And so I think there were a lot of other things. But from what I saw, there were some people that were going inside. And I wasn’t involved in that and I can’t speak to it. But outside, it was quite intense. There were people negotiating with one cop. And he was very clear that he didn’t have the power to let them go and it wasn’t going to happen.
But people just kept chanting for an hour. Maybe a half hour. And it was not clear to me what was going to happen. We saw that there were more police coming and then there were some cars that were blocked that wanted to leave. And I think, honestly, there was moments where we in the crowd weren’t necessarily on the same page about what we should do. There weren’t any marshals around. This was not something that was… I’m sure it was planned, but I wasn’t involved in the planning and I hadn’t received any instruction about how are we going to operate. So it’s kind of just like a spontaneous ad hoc self-organization with people in cars who are getting angry and they want to go.
And we’ve seen that people have been emboldened to drive into protesters and things. So there was definitely tension. And it came to the point where there was a car that was trying to go, and we were like… It seemed that if we let the car go, we would lose the leverage to have the person in the police car released. And so it was this interesting… There was a lot of parallels to how you win a contract campaign. Like we’re making it more painful for them to not do what we want than to do what we want. It’s going to be a lot harder for them to get out of here with that person in that car than it is if they let them go. And we really had them surrounded.
And that’s not something that happens every day, and it’s not something that was just naturally going to happen. It was probably the quick thinking and collective action of a handful of people in that crowd to just say, actually no, we’re not going to just let this person be taken away. And actually there were two people, but one of them, I think, was taken inside of a building or something.
Mel Buer:
She was released. Yeah.
Annie Shields:
Yeah, that’s great.
Mel Buer:
Yeah.
Annie Shields:
But yeah, it was sort of like the manifestation of the thing that we try to do all the time in our labor organizing, which is, the more of us that come out here and stand together, the sooner they’re going to let this person go, the more certain that outcome becomes because they can’t mow down hundreds of people in the streets, or probably aren’t going to in this situation anyway.
Mel Buer:
Especially with the mayor speaking.
Annie Shields:
With the mayor inside.
Mel Buer:
Yeah.
Annie Shields:
Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of like one of those impromptu activities where sometimes you’ll get a scenario in a Labor Notes training and you have to jump into it and imagine, “Okay, you’ve got this thing happening and these things are happening too. How do you proceed as an organizer?” And I love those trainings. I’ve learned a lot from them. And this was a real life version of that, a situation that we hadn’t all necessarily planned for. And I’m not entirely sure how to evaluate the success or relative success of the action because it wasn’t really… Mistakes became much higher once they made the arrest.
And I think that’s a good example of, when you try to repress people, it just makes them more upset. I’ve seen that with the workers I work with when I ask them what was the thing in their union campaign that made them decide that they were actually supportive of the union, they were going to vote yes. And so many people tell me, “It was the way that management responded to our campaign. I was actually on the fence. I didn’t even think we needed a union. But then I saw these emails from management and I was like, they’re lying. Why are they lying? And that’s what helped me see things in a different way.” So yeah, we see that act.
I’m not really inclined to be… I’m not a major direct action person. I don’t really go out in the streets that often. But after I saw these people being violently thrown on the ground, it makes anybody want to stay near, especially when you have this community of Labor Notes people where you walk around Labor Notes and it’s like there’s no strangers here. Even if I’ve never met these people, if I’m in line for a coffee, everyone around is making connections and talking about their campaigns and congratulating each other on things they’ve heard about. And it’s a really beautiful space.
And so even though it was a tense and uncomfortable experience and one of pretty serious conflict with what I hear are notoriously rough police in Rosemont, it was also very beautiful. It was a jubilation at the end once they let the person out of the cop car. We opened up the lane and the traffic started flowing and people were running around. And I heard someone say, that’s the first time that’s ever worked, in a really funny moment. And yeah, it was kind of like, holy shit, it worked. Yeah. And it was really cool. It was a really cool experience.
Mel Buer:
How does it feel watching the police car door open and took the handcuffs off [inaudible 01:12:46]? What did that feel like as you were standing there?
Annie Shields:
Yeah. On the one hand, it felt exciting, empowering like, “Of course, you couldn’t get away with this, of course we stopped you. This is what union power looks like.” And at the same time, it occurred to me that, okay, now we’ve come back to a baseline of this person is not arrested, which they weren’t arrested when this started. So the action actually became about something else. And so of course it’s important that these people were not forced to go down to a police station and be processed. That would’ve been completely unnecessary. But at the same time…
Mel Buer:
[inaudible 01:13:31].
Annie Shields:
But it is. There’s still this deep pain, to be honest, that I feel knowing that a really successful and amazing action like this is possible and also would need to be replicated on such a large scale to really make a dent in most of the things we try to change about the world. And so on the one hand, I’m always really pleased by it. On the other hand, I was just reminded we’ve got a lot of work to do to help more people in the working class develop the kind of instincts and assessment of power and analysis and desire to participate in these things and confidence to do so in a collective way. And that’s part of what we try to do all the time in our labor organizing.
So yeah, it was a really cool experience. It was also sad that it had to happen, but also thrilling. And still we have so much work to do to bring justice, some kind of justice, the beginnings of some kind of justice for people in Palestine.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. Is there anything else you would like to say that I haven’t touched on or asked about that you think is important for our listeners to know about the organizing happening here with Labor for Palestine or last night’s action?
Annie Shields:
I guess I would say that I really had a radicalization in 2014 when the war on Gaza happened and I was in a position working at The Nation magazine to work with people who were actually covering it on the ground. And I was truly blown away when I came to understand how little I understood. And I feel like that experience was something that I could never go back after I had that awakening. And I see people in my life having that same experience now. And I’m encouraged by that. And I think we’re in a real big turning point in so many ways. And it’s a little scary, but I’m hopeful that we start changing the tide on this issue in particular.
Axel Persson:
My name is Axel Persson. I’m a locomotive engineer, they say in the US. And I work for the French national state railway, the SNCF. And I’m also, of course, a proud member of the CGT Trade Union. And I’m also honored to have been elected as a general secretary of the CGT Railway Workers Union in the city of Trappes, which is a big railway city located at the southwestern suburbs of Paris.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Axel, it is so great to have you on the show, brother, and to be sitting across the way from you because, as listeners know, we got nothing but love for the CGT. We’ve had our brother Matthew [inaudible 01:16:36] on the show a number of times. You guys know and love Matthew. And it was so cool to hear that Axel was going to be here too. Even if Matthew can’t, we love you, Matthew. Don’t worry, we’ll catch you next time. But yeah. I mean, because of those interviews we were doing with Matthew and other French strikers, the pension strikes last year, the general strike in 2020, 2019, our listeners have really gotten invested in what’s going on over there and they’re learning a lot from what you guys are doing.
So I guess I just wanted to start by asking that. Since the pension strikes last year, or maybe refresh our memory real quick about what you guys were doing last year with the strikes and where things stand now with the CGT with rail workers in France.
Axel Persson:
So last year, during early 2023, we went out on unlimited strike, but not only railway workers, it was workers from both the private and the public sector in order to try to defeat the government and the employers plan to try to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, knowing that the government had tried previously already in 2019 to smash our pension system but had been defeated during a strike there where they had been forced to scrap their pension reform due to a strike that lasted for almost one and a half months. And that was eventually succeeded by Covid and the government decided just to scrap everything and now try to basically have its revenge.
And so what we did was to organize a massive strike, not only in the public sector, but in the private sector. And by the means of strikes because we do think that in these matters, there is no other option but a strike that is as massive as possible for two reasons. Well, the first reason, the most obvious one, of course, is because of the economical impact it has in order basically to force the employers and the government that served that interest to force them to back down because basically the price, the stakes get too high for them. But there’s also another aspect to it is that when you go on strike paradoxically enough, as you manage to halt the wheels of society, as you manage to put society to your standstill, paradoxically enough, society starts to move forwards politically very, very fast.
Sometimes, you can see it in strikes, the consciousness, the political awareness evolves very rapidly. Sometimes, things that would’ve taken decades literally happen in a week. And you see people who change because the entire society is focused as a standstill on what the workers on strike have put on their agenda. Everybody is debating in whether they agree with it or not, but everybody’s debating in the media, everybody’s talking about it in society. And it also is an opportunity there for us to put forth not only our defensive demands, but also to set the groundwork for a future in which we can hope.
Because that is also something we need. We need to be able to take the counteroffensive, to launch a counteroffensive in order to not only reclaim the ground we have lost the past years, but also to set forth a future which we can all envision and have hope in. Because if you don’t manage to do that, those who will reap the benefits of the anger that is rising today will be the far right. It will be politicians with solutions like explaining that it’s the fault of immigrants, it’s the fault of minorities, ethnic minorities, who will use these categories as scapegoats, and they will lay the groundwork for a future in which there is nothing to hope in. So it’s also responsibility not only for economical reasons, it’s also a political duty for us to organize these fight-backs.
Maximillian Alvarez:
This is why I love our French brothers and sisters, man. I mean, I think that’s so beautifully and powerfully put. And I’m curious, having gone through that. Because I mean, unlike 2019, Macron and his cronies weren’t backing down this time. But still, we in the states were watching what you guys were doing with envy and with a kind of like… I don’t know. In some ways, we felt so close to you and your fellow workers on this general strike taken to the streets, the images we were seeing, guys like you and Matthew with the-
Axel Persson:
The flares.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The flares. Just looking badass. But yeah, the joy, the rage, the hope, all of that on the streets. But it felt like we were watching it from the Moon. It did feel like something that just isn’t possible here. And now, you and I are sitting in this room full of railroad workers in the US who, as you saw, as we all saw, were gearing up to go on strike. And then the government said, “Fuck you. Get back to work.” So I guess, what is it like for you, being here talking to US railroad workers? But also what are your thoughts? What would you say to American workers now who feel that way?
Axel Persson:
I would say the feelings of love you have expressed are reciprocated. And I can assure you that every time we see American workers, whatever their industry, taking action, be it strike or other type of action, we feel that because our hearts are attuned to one another and then they beat at the same rate. And this is not only nice words, because we have concrete examples of what internationalist solidarity mean, and that is what we are here to build in a concrete manner, in a very down-to-earth manner. For example, during our strike in 2023, one of the factors, not the only one of course, but one of the factors that led that we could hold out for so long was the internationalist solidarity. Not only statements, of course, which is important, because every time, every day when we hold a general assembly of strikers where we decide whether we pursue the strike or not, of course we start by reading out the international statements of support we receive from all over the world.
But even further than that, for example, we have a network now that we have built through the World Federation of Trade Unions, of which my union is a member. And we have managed, for example, to build an international campaign all across Europe, but also in some other countries where we had, for example, Swedish railway workers, British railway workers who campaigned in their rail yards and gathered money for our local strike funds. And it wasn’t symbolic sums. It was like several tens of thousand of euros. So it means literally to several tens of thousand of dollars.
Maximillian Alvarez:
While the RMT was going on strike itself.
Axel Persson:
Exactly. And the Swedish Railway Union was the same. And that money was sent to us and was immediately distributed to striking workers who therefore could pay the rent and put food on the table for the dependents and so forth. And it also showed in a very concrete manner that internationalism is not only an abstract slogan. It showed that workers who are sometimes separated by thousands of miles of each other, they know instinctively that their interests are the same, their hearts are attuned to another, they beat at the same rate. And we can feel that even though we are separated by thousands of miles, at the same time, we are also no further separated than the five fingers of a clenched fist fighting.
And that is also what we are here to do, is to embody that solidarity and build those links with the American railway workers. And that is the sense of my presence here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, let’s round out on that. Because I don’t want to keep you too long, and I know we got other folks who want to talk to you and all. And we got to build. You got to go around and build that solidarity by talking to folks. So I don’t want to keep you too long. But I guess I just wanted to ask… Yeah. Let’s talk about what concrete international solidarity can look like and why it is such an essential ingredient for all of our struggles.
Axel Persson:
Well, it is essential for many reasons. The first one, of course, the most obvious one is that our enemies, they are organized internationally. Be it economically, they have these international institutions like the International Monetary Fund. In Europe, they have what they call the European Commission where they coordinate their attacks. But they also organize military in order to maintain their power and their dominance over the world. They have military alliances. They have political alliances, and for a good reason. That’s how they maintain the control over the world. And that’s why we need to be at least as good as them, even if it’s a difficult task to ahead, because we don’t necessarily have the same material means. But that is why we need to build the front at the same level as they are fighting their war, which is an international war. So that’s the most obvious reason.
But the other reason also is that, because the struggles of one another, we can learn from them. Even as French workers, we learn from what happens in the US sometimes. I’ve noticed that when I say that to some US worker, they’re surprised because they think that, for some reason, we would be like some kind of elite, which we’re not. We’re really not. We’re just like workers in a country with a specific history. But we learn also from the struggles across the world. And for example, over issues like, in the US, for example, when the murder of George Floyd happened a few years ago, the methods that were used by the movement. For example, Black Lives Matter. But not only them because that was much, much broader than that, inspired activists in France who organized along the same lines using the same methods, and it worked.
So we practically learn from each other. And as we can manage to learn and grow from each other, we will be able to beat our common foes because we realize very often, and especially railway workers, given how capitalism globalize, we actually work for the same companies. I’ve met people here who work for a subsidiary of my company here in France, back in France. So we literally work for the same enemies.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Any final messages for American workers or workers anywhere who are listening to this?
Axel Persson:
I would say the most obvious is that, even though we might not always speak the same languages, we of course have our… Each working class has its own history, its own peculiarities, its own culture, which is fine, which is actually part of what makes it a very interesting word despite the violence of this word and the fact that it’s very harsh. At the end of the day, we share the same interests. And it may sound something obvious, but united we stand, divided we fall. And in order to make that a reality, it only depends upon us. And we cannot expect anybody else to do it for us. It’s up to us. Because the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves, as a famous German philosopher said. Karl Marx.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank all of our amazing guests for taking time out of their crazy conference schedules to talk with us for this episode. And I want to thank the great Mel Buer for co-reporting with me. And of course, I want to give another special shout out and a thank you to the great folks at Labor Notes and Railroad Workers United for the vital work that they do. And I want to encourage everyone out there to follow the links in the show notes, learn more about Labor Notes and RWU, and support them however you can.
And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. We’ve got more coming this summer. So please stay tuned for more there. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots to journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.
Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
A revelation — in order to liberate Palestinians from a century of oppression and prevent their genocide, Jews must liberate themselves from centuries of conditioning that trained them to pose as perpetual victims while victimizing others. This is happening and too slowly; progressive Jews are wrestling with reacting to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people without crippling the Jewish community. Almost entirely anti-Zionist in the 19th century, Zionist advances have enticed the Jewish community to split between Zionists and anti-Zionists. The former have gained control of a community that never had a higher hierarchy. Jew is preceded by an adjective ─ Zionist or non-Zionist. Those with the former adjective have witnessed pockets of hatred against their deliberate deceptions and corrosive actions. Concurrent with Jewish genocide of the Palestinians, hatred of Jews has swelled universally, appearing in Africa and Asia, where relatively few Jewish communities now exist.
The Jews during Zionism’s formation did not believe in or trust Zionism.
Reform Judaism’s Declaration of Principles: 1885 Pittsburgh Conference stated,
We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from Russia ─ 1.7 million to America, 500,000 to Western Europe, almost 300,000 to other nations, and only 30,000 – 50,000 to Palestine. Of the latter, 15,000 returned to Russia. Jews rejected Zionism from its outset.
Despite rejection, Zionist supporters managed to skew Western governments’ policies to favor their mission. A worldwide propaganda machine obscures Identification of Israel as a criminal state that willfully murders Palestinians, steals their lands, has ethnically cleansed them, buried their villages under rubble, and destroyed their history and heritage. Quick to use the expression ‘Holocaust denial” on anyone who questions aspects of the Holocaust, the Zionists impressed upon the Jews the use of “denial” for anything that smacks of Jewish malfeasance, and includes the greatest malfeasance, the act of genocide. Charges of malfeasance by Jews are converted into anti-Semitism, truth becomes denied, anger of Jews against a manufactured hostile world is internalized, and bitterness against hostile Jews is intensified. The Zionists have used debts as collateral, turning valid charges against them into sympathy for their cause.
Start with the beginning of Zionism.
Although antipathy toward Jews and Judaism remained strong in Christian Europe, physical attacks on western European Jews, after a brief episode of the 1819-1826 Hep-Hep riots in Germany, were relatively few.
Often mentioned is the Dreyfus case, where a Jewish military officer in the 1896 French army was twice sentenced and later pardoned for giving military secrets to the Germans. Highlighted as an example of anti-Semitism in a French military, “rife with anti-Semitism,” and psychologically extended to the French populace, the Dreyfus case circulated for a century in American media, whose audience had no relation to the French incident (why?), giving the Dreyfus case a life of its own, and making it seem that there was not one Dreyfus but thousands. The Zionists needed a Dreyfus to substantiate their mission for all time, refusing to recognize that the Dreyfus case contradicted the Zionist mission; being an isolated case, it proved Jews could integrate into European institutions and receive equal justice.
Was the French military rife with anti-Semitism? According to Piers Paul, The Dreyfus Affair. p. 83, “The French army of the period was relatively open to entry and advancement by talent, with an estimated 300 Jewish officers, of whom ten were generals.” Only five African-American officers in the much larger US army in WWII. Why not emphasize the opposite of what the Zionists proffered; French Jews received equal and eventual justice. After the French Revolution, physical attacks on Jews rarely occurred in France.
Imperial Russia was another European community that the Zionists accused of serious anti-Semitism, exaggerating the damage done to Jewish communities in a multi-ethnic nation ravaged with ethnic disturbances. They used a special term, “pogroms,” to characterize attacks on Jews. Note that prejudice to other ethnicities does not qualify for a special term, such as “anti-Semitism,” nor does violence against any of them.
A lack of communications in Russia during the 19th century, a tendency to create sensational news, and a willingness to accept rumors make it difficult to ascertain the extent of attacks on Russia’s Jewish community. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, a reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, is a more objective and authoritative source. Excerpts from their work can be found here.
Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. In Odessa, Greeks and Jews, two rival ethnic and economic communities, lived side by side. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.
After Alexander II became Tsar in 1855, he lessened anti-Jewish edicts, rescinded forced conscription, allowed Jews to attend universities, and permitted Jewish emigration from the Pale. His assassination in 1881 prompted Tsar Alexander III to reverse his father’s actions. Because some Jews were involved in Russia’s revolutionary party, Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), which organized the assassination, the assassination acted as a catalyst for a wave of attacks on Jews during 1881-83.
Typically, the pogroms of this period originated in large cities, and then spread to surrounding villages, traveling along means of communication such as rivers and railroads. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons. In the course of more than 250 individual events, millions of rubles worth of Jewish property was destroyed. The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.
Note that this was one large “pogrom,” which emanated from one incident that touched the Russian nerve, was directed mainly against Jewish property, did not have government support, and faded out. “Michael Aronson has sought to refute the long-standing belief that the regime of Alexander III actively conspired to lead the Russian masses into savage riots against the Jews. In Aronson’s view the pogroms were spontaneous, by which he means not that they happened without cause, but that they happened largely without prior planning or organization.”
Missing from references to the attacks on the Jewish population is that the Tsars inherited Jewish and other populations after the 1791-1795 partitions of Poland and sought means to integrate the new ethnicities into a Russian way of life. Nevertheless, in Tsarist Russia, the principal population to which Zionism should have had appeal, there is no evidence that a massive number of Jews accepted Zionism.
Unwaveringly secularist in its beliefs, the Russian Bund discarded the idea of a Holy Land and a sacred tongue. Its language was Yiddish, spoken by millions of Jews throughout the Pale. This was also the source of the organization’s four principles: socialism, secularism, Yiddish, and doyikayt or localness. The latter concept was encapsulated in the Bund slogan: “There, where we live, that is our country.” The Bund disapproved greatly of Zionism and considered the idea of emigrating to Palestine to be political escapism.
Imperial Russia contained several minorities that economically contested and attacked one another. Economic rivalry was the leading cause of attacks on Jews. From Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 87, Issue 1, January 2020.
Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 1800 and 1927, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms—mob violence against the Jewish minority—broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions.
Violation of any human life can not be underestimated or ignored; Jews suffered in the 19th century Russian Empire, and so did almost everyone else, including native Russians. Placed in context — location, time, comparison of the fate and life of Jews to other minorities, and internal and external factors that favored the Jews — the reasons for Zionists to behave as the rescuer of their co-religionists is dubious.
For others, also not of the Russian Orthodox faith, persecution was magnitudes worse. From Balfour Project:
The Moscow Patriarchate presided over the state religion and other believers were generally disadvantaged, often persecuted, or sometimes driven from Russian lands. The non-Orthodox were despised as unbelievers and thousands of Catholics were deported to Siberia in the mid-19th century. At the same time, around half a million Muslims were driven from the Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, Iran or further afield. At the south-eastern border of the Pale of Settlement began the lands of the Circassians, a mostly Muslim group who had lived since the 14th century along the northern Black Sea coast from Sochi and eastwards into the Caucasus mountains. A long war of attrition ended in the genocide of 1865. According to official Russian statistics, the population was reduced by 97 per cent. At least 200,000, and possibly several hundred thousand people died through ethnic cleansing, hunger, epidemics and bitterly cold weather.
Compared to other ethnicities ─ Native American, slaved Africans, Chinese, Irish, and Catholic in the U.S., and Chinese, Indian, and African during the age of Imperialism, the persecution and distress of European Jews was insignificant. Yet, the Zionists made it appear that Jews were the most suffering people in the world and the world believed it.
Despite the overwhelming verbal and physical rejection of Zionism by worldwide Jewry, a small group of conspirators managed to convince the British government to issue the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which is not an official or legal instrument. It is not even a Declaration. It is a letter from Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild, which has a phrase, “declaration of sympathy,” from which it was given the more lofty description of declaration. Who are these two guys?
Arthur James Balfour, known as Lord Balfour, served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905 and as foreign secretary from 1916 to 1919,
Lionel Walter Rothschild was a British zoologist from the wealthy Rothschild banking family, who served as a Conservative member of Parliament from 1899 to 1910. He was sympathetic to the Zionist cause and had an eminent position in the Anglo-Jewish community.
The letter:
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Why was the letter issued, what did it exactly mean, and why did it have impact? Acceptable answers have not been supplied. One clue is from Minutes of British War Cabinet Meetings
Meeting No. 245, Minute No. 18, 4 October 1917: 4 October 1917: “… [Balfour] stated that the German Government were making great efforts to capture the sympathy of the Zionist Movement.”
Meeting No. 261, Minute No. 12, 31 October 1917
With reference to War Cabinet 245, Minute 18, the War Cabinet had before them a note by the Secretary, and also a memorandum by Lord Curzon on the subject of the Zionist movement. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs stated that he gathered that everyone was now agreed that, from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made.
World leaders failed to recognize the ominous outcomes of their San Remo Peace Conference and the newly formed League of Nations, which created a new international order that sliced the Middle East for the major European powers. Both approved establishment of a Jewish presence in the British Mandate in accord with the Balfour Letter. Despite these achievements, progress for obtaining a central headquarters for Zionism went slowly until US immigration laws and persecution of German Jews renewed Zionist life.
The year 1924 was fortuitous for the Zionists. The US Immigration Act closed the doors to mass Jewish immigration from East European nations and the Act steered Jews to migrate to Palestine. By 1931, Palestine housed 175,000 Jews. The economic depression slowed the migration. The rise of Nazi Germany reinvigorated it.
After the Nazis began their rule, they slowly froze Jewish assets. Although not proven, a principal reason for Germany slowly freezing Jewish assets and engaging in its own boycott of Jewish enterprises was the boycott of German goods, which was organized by Jewish groups in the United States as a response to the confined and sporadic violence and harassment by Nazi Party members against Jews in early 1933. Zionists saw the frozen assets as a means to bring Jews to the British Mandate.
By the Ha’avara Transfer Agreement with Nazi Germany, the Zionists used German Jewish assets, including bank deposits to purchase German products that were exported to the Jewish-owned Ha’avara Company in Tel-Aviv. A portion of the money from the sales of the goods went to the emigrants, who could leave Germany and regain assets after arrival in Palestine and in an amount corresponding to their deposits in German banks. The Zionists enabled the Nazi regime to circumvent the international boycott campaign that its policies had provoked. The Zionist movement, which had become the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany, was able to transfer about 53,000 Jews to Palestine. Again, the Zionists turned catastrophe to the Jews into an opportunity for themselves.
Zionist luck, if that is the proper word for gaining from calamities to others, continued. Revelations of the Holocaust and the plight of Jewish refugees after World War II gained worldwide sympathy for the Zionist cause. About 136,000 displaced Jews came to Palestine, mostly out of desperation and without intention to remain. The Cold War provided the most decisive benefit for Zionism ─ Soviet Union support for an Israeli state drove the United States to compete for Zionist attention. Votes from both nations, bribes, and arm twisting provided a narrow victory for United Nations Declaration 181 and the Zionists established their state.
Because neither state had official names at that time, designations as Arab and Jewish states were used to map out contours of land where the major portions of the ethnicities would live. President Truman recognized the Jewish state, which became Israel just before he approved recognition. The U.S. president failed to observe that, although the state was bi-national, a small Zionist group took control of all apparatus of the new state and did that without consulting Palestinian leadership.
The UN did not create two states; it divided one Palestinian state into two states ─ a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and another mostly Palestinian state composed of about 70 percent who were native to the area (400,000 Palestinians), a small contingent of foreign Jews that had come as Zionists to live permanently in Palestine (200,000), and another larger contingent of foreign Jews (300,000) that arrived for expediency and not with original intentions of remaining in the British Mandate. The Mandate was only a way station for Jews caught in the tragedies during the 1930s and World War II. If neither cataclysm occurred, would these Jews have gone to the Mandate? Without them, how many Jews would have been there in 1947?
David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill- equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare their state, and, with seasoned militia forces — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and Palmach — cleansed the area of Palestinians and established Israel.
The Zionists turned lying, cheating, and deceiving into an accepted ethnic cleansing. During the next years, they continued the lies, cheats, and deceptions to steal more land and oppress Palestinians. Taking advantage of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, the Zionist Jews have embarked on a genocide of the Palestinian people, masking it as a defense of their land against a force that has no offensive power to conquer anything.
The Zionists made the struggle (which they engineered) a zero-sum game of “us” or “them.” The “us” is those who steal the land and the patrimony and the lives of “them.” They forced the Jews into a choice, reasoning that the powers in control will favor “us.” This poses a difficulty for Jews who will not support genocide and, therefore, cannot support “us,” and fear that for the Palestinians to survive the Jews in Israel will not survive. A different look — if the Jews liberate themselves from the conditioned grip that Zionism has on them and differentiate between a liberated Jew and a Zionist Jew, the liberated Jews will lose their paranoid fear and the Zionist Jews will lose their power, which is based upon creating paranoia and fear in fellow Jews.
Unfortunately, the liberation of the Jews is not foreseen and the decimation of innocents will occur — a replay of the story of Purim, “when having obtained royal permission to strike their enemies, including women and children, the Jews kill over seventy-five thousand people! Esther then further seeks permission for another day of massacre.”
Unleashed from subjugation and drowned with power, they seek another day of massacre. Is Joshua, who slew the inhabitants of Jericho, eradicated the Canaanites, and is a hero in Jewish mythology, a clue to the mentality of leaders of the Jewish people? Do the horrors visited upon the Gazans, purposeful and wanton killings and massacres beyond credulity, carry Joshua to modern times and tell a cautious story of the Zionist Jews?
The post The Liberation of the Jews first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.