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  • Labor militancy can’t be stopped: Palestine and Labor Notes 2024

    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…

    • Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

    Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
    Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

    Transcript

    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.

  • The Liberation of the Jews

    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:

    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.

  • Human Rights Groups Call on Biden to Investigate Israeli Influence Campaign Against American Lawmakers

    Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial address to congress, a coalition of more than 30 human rights and faith-based advocacy groups sent a letter on Wednesday urging the U.S. government to investigate several media reports that the Israeli government has been operating a social media influence scheme to sway American lawmakers toward pro-Israeli policies.  

    The letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, references reporting from the New York Times, The Guardian, and Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which, in separate investigations, uncovered an Israeli influence campaign that used fake accounts to pose as Americans in order to disparage pro-Palestinian groups with “deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content,” target student groups and human rights organizations who were critical of Israel, and post pro-Israel content online. The campaign was designed to persuade lawmakers to continue providing military aid to Israel for its war on Gaza, and focused on Black Democratic members of Congress.

    “What this letter asks for is very simple: that President Biden and his administration treat reports of inappropriate Israeli influence operations with the same seriousness that it has allegations of Russian and Iranian influence campaigns.” said Jamal Abdi, head of the National Iranian American Council, referring to separate efforts to interrupt American democracy by Iran and Russia ahead of the 2016 and 2020 elections and earlier this year.  “Unfortunately, what has been reported thus far could just be the tip of the iceberg.”

    The letter, addressed to President Joe Biden and the departments of Justice, State and Homeland Security, arrived hours before Netanyahu is expected to address congress in a joint session, which has drawn a wave of criticism. Signatories include the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the Sikh Coalition, and a number of American Quaker groups.

    Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a letter signee and human rights group founded by slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi, called on the Biden administration to protect democracy and to “end its policy of exceptionalism towards Israel and hold all nations to the same standards.”

    Vice President Kamala Harris has said she will not preside over the address, but will meet with Netanyahu at a later time during his visit to Washington, which began Monday. Hundreds of protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace filled the Capitol rotunda on Tuesday, in protest of Netanyahu’s visit, chanting “Let Gaza Live!” until Capitol police arrested the crowd.

    A growing number of lawmakers are boycotting the far-right prime minster’s address, including senior Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Patty Murray, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen, along with progressive members of the House of Representatives. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, has been the most pointed in her attacks on the address, referring to Netanyahu as “a war criminal committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” in a statement Tuesday, in which she called for his arrest and deportation to the International Criminal Court. She also referred to the event as “a celebration of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and criticized continued U.S. military aid to Israel.

    Last week, a separate letter signed by 230 Senate and House staffers from 122 Democratic and Republican congressional offices called on lawmakers to boycott the address, referring to the ICC war crimes case against Netanyahu. “This is not an issue of politics, but an issue of morality,” the staffers’ letter read.  

    The ICC’s prosecutor requested arrest warrants in May for Netanyahu and his cabinet member and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant on a series of war crimes, including starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the targeting of civilians in its military attacks. The ICC has yet to approve the warrants. Last Friday, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ top court, ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, rife with war crime violations, and amounts to apartheid. A separate ICJ case is considering whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

    Since the start of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the Biden administration has been criticized for its handling of the conflict and its deference toward Israel, which many critics and international law observers see as a double-standard in foreign policy. Despite Biden’s public denunciations of civilian deaths, Israel has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children. Bombardments have intensified in recent weeks with civilian death tolls mounting, even as Israel is engaged in cease-fire talks. The U.S. has continued to send billions in military aid throughout the conflict, with a few temporary exceptions, and has repeatedly upheld Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas.

    Letter signers pointed to recent sanctions by the Treasury Department earlier this year against Russian hackers over a similar campaign influence scheme, and asked Biden for Israel’s program to be treated the same. 



    Israel’s influence campaign received $2 million in government funding and was commissioned by its ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which fosters relationships between Jews across the globe with Israel, according to the New York Times. Both their report and Haaretz’s reporting linked the campaign to Stoic, a Tel-Aviv-based political marketing firm. Stoic created and ran various social media accounts that spread Islamophobic material. One posted that Muslim immigrants posed a threat to Canada and were calling for a Sharia state. Another account highlighting the history of Arab slave traders in Africa, in an effort to sway Black American lawmakers, Haaretz reported.

    “As an Administration that has defined itself as defenders of American democracy against threats from both domestic and foreign state actors, the news of the Israeli government’s attacks on our democracy must be addressed,” the letter urged.

    Wednesday’s letter also outlined previous communications between signatories and State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. Miller declined to comment on the facts around Israel’s social media scheme highlighted in media reports, and instead stated that “we have very clear laws on the books in the United States about foreign influence campaigns. We enforce those laws vigorously and we expect everyone to comply with them.” He did not give any indication that State would investigate the allegations further. 

    The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The post Human Rights Groups Call on Biden to Investigate Israeli Influence Campaign Against American Lawmakers appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • US Teachers Pushed Their Union to Divest From Israel. What Happened?

    As the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention kicked off in Houston, Texas, this week, the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza was top of mind for many in attendance. “We’re going to show up at [the] convention and do everything we can to organize people around doing something about the genocide,” Ted Cooper, executive vice president of AFT-Oregon, told Truthout as he was…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Major Unions Urge Biden to Stop Arming Israel Amid Netanyahu Visit

    A group of seven major unions, including some of the largest unions in the U.S., are calling on President Joe Biden to immediately stop sending military support to Israel amid Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. this week. In a letter sent to Biden on Tuesday, the unions said that ending weapons shipments is the only way to secure the ceasefire deal that U.S.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israeli Forces Post Pictures of Stripped Detained Palestinian Children Online

    Israeli forces have taken pictures of Palestinian children they have abducted into their torture camps and posted them online with humiliating captions, a report finds as Israel holds thousands of Palestinians in detention without charges. A Human Rights Watch review of 37 posts on social media published Tuesday finds that Israeli soldiers regularly post pictures of Palestinians abducted from…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress Is a Desperate Ploy to Rally Support for Genocide

    Congressional leadership’s invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24 was an act of political violence. Since October of last year, the war criminal Netanyahu has ordered the mass murder of at least 39,000 Palestinian people in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Farnborough Airshow facing protests over complicity with Israel’s genocide

    On 24 July, delegates attending the Farnborough Airshow will be met with protesters from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), Greater Rushmoor Action for Peace and East Berkshire Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

    Farnborough Airshow: stop the horror show

    The protest, ‘Say No to the Horrorshow’, is timed with Farnborough’s military day:

    It will highlight the airshow’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as conflicts fuelled by the arms trade across the globe. Local groups are also highlighting the impact the airshow has on the local community, including forcing schools to close early.

    One of the planes marketed at Farnborough Airshow is the F35 combat aircraft. Israel is currently using F35s to bombard Gaza. Since 7 October, Israel has killed 39,670 Palestinian people including over 15,000 children. Save the Children reported in June that on top of the more than 15,000 killed another 21,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. And 4,000 of those are trapped under the debris.

    UK industry makes 15% of every F35 in business that has been worth at least £368m to UK industry since 2016.

    Companies exhibiting at Farnborough Airshow include some of the world’s worst arms dealers, including BAE Systems, Elbit Systems, Leonardo, and Lockheed Martin. All these companies are profiting from, and are complicit in, Israel’s genocide against Palestinian people.

    CAAT’s media coordinator Emily Apple said:

    It is obscene that Farnborough is marketing the exact same aircraft Israel is using in its genocide in Gaza. This is an aircraft that is dropping massive bombs on civilians and devastating lives. Farnborough is a horrorshow; a marketplace for death merchants to peddle their horrific wares and profit from war crimes.

    Julia from Greater Rushmoor Action for Peace said:

    We’re especially worried about the impact on local school children, noting that some schools need to close early because of the event. Speaking as a mum, I worry that children attending the “Pioneers of Tomorrow” day are being influenced to join the arms trade without a clear understanding of what that means.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Jewish American doctor returns from Gaza, says Israel “shredded” Palestinian children

    Jewish American doctor Mark Perlmutter has spoken out about what he saw in Palestine. In an interview with CBS News, Perlmutter said:

    I’ve seen more shredded children in just my first week…missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority.

    Perlmutter, vice president of the International College of Surgeons, also said:

    All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined – 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined – doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.

    Since 7 October, Israel has killed 39,670 Palestinian people including over 15,000 children. Perlmutter continued:

    I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life

    Israel snipers Palestinian children

    Perlmutter also spoke of Israeli snipers targeting Gazan children. CBS correspondent Tracy Smith asked him to clarify:

    You’re saying that children in Gaza are being shot by snipers?

    He responded:

    Definitively. I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.

    CBS also reported that the more than 20 doctors they spoke to had also seen gunshot wounds in Palestinian children. One American doctor said he had to look again at CT scans because he said he “didn’t believe this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head”.

    The Guardian has reported that the foreign doctors working in Gaza that they had spoken to saw a “steady stream” of children and other civilians “with single bullet wounds to the head or chest”. Other doctors told the Guardian they were troubled by the volume of children Israel severely wounded or killed with gunshots.

    In an LA Times piece from February, entitled “I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation”, Irfan Galaria writes:

    On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head.

    Israel sniping Palestinian children did not begin after 7 October, where Hamas launched an attack into Southern Israel. In the Israeli occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank in 2019, an IDF sniper shot a nine year old Palestinian boy in the head after a protest dispersed.

    More destruction

    Save the Children reported in June that on top of the more than 15,000 killed another 21,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. And 4,000 of those are trapped under the debris.

    And it’s not just Palestinian children themselves that Israel is targeting. It’s also their educational facilities. A week ago, Israel struck at least six UN-run schools in 10 days. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said Israel has attacked 120 of their educational institutions since 7 October.

    Featured image via CBS Sunday Morning – YouTube

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ‘Biden’s legacy is—and always will be—genocide’: Palestine advocates react to Biden dropping out of presidential race

    This story originally appeared in Prism on July 22, 2024.

    President Joe Biden announced on Sunday, July 21, that he was ending his presidential reelection campaign after weeks of pressure from party officials, donors, Democratic Congress members, voters, and pro-Palestinian organizers and advocacy groups. In a social media post, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic party’s nominee.

    The move comes months after organizers led a nationwide campaign to vote “uncommitted” during Democratic primary elections to push Biden to end his unconditional support for Israel during its genocide in Gaza or risk losing their vote in the general election. In several states, “uncommitted” or “no preference” received far more votes than other candidates challenging Biden.

    “[Nine] months of saying genocide Joe has got to go, he finally got the message, but not before committing a heinous genocide against the Palestinian people,” Nerdeen Kiswani, an organizer with the Palestine advocacy group Within Our Lifetime, posted on X. 

    “Nothing will erase the fact that Biden’s legacy is—and always will be—genocide,” organizers with the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR Action) said in a statement Sunday. “It was not Biden’s failed debate that showed he is unfit to lead. It was the tens of thousands of bombs he sent to kill Palestinian families. It was his callous, dystopian disregard for Palestinian lives, as he ate an ice cream cone while speaking of a potential ceasefire that he took no action to make Israel agree to. It was his condemnation of thousands of student protesters on college campuses demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

    Biden’s withdrawal from the race follows a particularly deadly month of violence in Gaza. Two Israeli airstrikes killed more than 60 people last week, including in Israeli-designated “safe zones” and at a U.N. school where families were sheltering. Gaza health officials put the official death toll since Oct. 7 at more than 38,900. But, researchers suggested in a recent letter published in the renowned British medical journal The Lancet that the number could be as high as 186,000.

    The U.N.’s top court ruled on Friday that Israel must end its illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, remove settlers from the Palestinian territories, and pay reparations to Palestinians. The court also found that Palestinians under occupation suffer “systemic discrimination based on, inter alia, race, religion or ethnic origin,” and it urged other states to stop supporting Israel in maintaining the current situation.

    “The millions of people who have mobilized in the streets and the voting booth demanding a permanent ceasefire and an end to military funding to Israel have been clear—there is no going back to the status quo,” USCPR Action Executive Director Ahmad Abuznaid said in the group’s statement.

    It remains unclear how differently the next Democratic nominee might approach Israel. Harris, for her part, has repeatedly asserted Israel’s “right to defend itself” while expressing sympathy for Palestinians and calling for at least a six-week ceasefire in March. She is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Washington, D.C., this week.

    In comparison, Trump called Biden a “very bad Palestinian” during this election’s first presidential debate on June 27 for not helping Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza. During his presidency, he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Syrian region of Golan Heights, where Netanyahu named a Jewish-only settlement after Trump.

    But as the genocide in Gaza continues, organizers are quick to point out the Democratic party’s complicity as a whole.

    “We don’t think this is solely a Joe Biden problem. This is an institutional problem,” Hudhayfah Ahmad, spokesperson for the Abandon Biden campaign, said in a phone interview Sunday night. In an online statement, the group invited Harris to meet with its organizers.

    The Abandon Biden campaign was one of the first coalitions to call for Democrats to replace Biden, Ahmad said.

    “We were mocked, denigrated, spoken down to,” he said, but organizers stood firm in their principles as they gained momentum. And they will continue to do so as the “disastrous and criminal” approach to Gaza continues under Biden foreign policy officials Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGurk.

    Ahmad said “Abandon Biden” means abandoning this legacy and the decisions Biden made surrounding Israel. Given the Democratic party “lionizing” the president since his exit from the race, “it’s becoming increasingly clear we may have to extend this to whoever becomes the next nominee,” he said, indicating they will continue to call on voters not to support any candidate who maintains Biden’s blanket support for Israel. 

    “It is clear that the DNC machinery pressured Joe Biden to step down only after losing confidence in his ability to lead due to his cognitive decline. This action came not when he was enthusiastically supporting and sponsoring the genocide in Gaza, but when his declining capabilities could no longer be concealed,” the Abandon Biden group said in its statement, referencing the June debate, during which Biden at times was incoherent. His performance was followed by a wave of calls, including from prominent Democratic Congress members, for Biden to step aside.

    Biden’s departure from the race comes ahead of the party’s upcoming national convention slated for Aug. 19-22 in Chicago. Now, with just over three months before the general election, Harris, whom the Clintons and other Democratic leaders also endorsed, will need to gain the support of the majority of all the nearly 4,000 delegates to win the party’s nomination.

    But for many voters pushing for an end to the Gaza genocide, the path forward remains the same. A coalition of more than 125 anti-oppression organizations said in a statement Monday morning that it is still preparing to gather tens of thousands to march on the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19.

    “When it comes to the genocide in Gaza there is no difference between Biden, Harris, or any of the likely candidates for the nomination. They are all complicit,” the Coalition to March on the DNC said. “This protest is about more than the name at the top of a ballot. It is about stopping the most horrific crime against humanity we have seen this century.”

    The statement said the organizations that joined the coalition “recognize the links between the Palestinian liberation struggle and their own struggles” involving issues like police accountability, immigration, labor, reproductive, and LGBTQIA+ rights.

    “They also recognize that Democratic Party higher-ups often neglect their communities in favor of serving the rich and powerful,” the statement said. “Those responsible for the genocide, and not just Biden, are often obstacles to progress in the same movements they paid lip service to in order to boost their campaigns.”

    USCPR Action said, “The masses of millions of Americans protesting in the streets will certainly not wait for the next president while U.S.-made bombs paid for with our tax dollars are dropping in Gaza. Regardless of who the Democratic presidential nominee and candidate-elect is, the next steps are clear.”

    The group called on all members of Congress to disrupt or protest Netanyahu’s planned address to Congress on Wednesday and urged lawmakers to pass an arms embargo against Israel.

    “As Israel kills a Palestinian every four minutes and escalates regional war, justice cannot wait another day,” the group said.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Oxfam: Israel Has Reduced Water Access in Gaza by 94 Percent Since October

    Oxfam has warned that Israel’s longstanding policy of using water as a weapon against Palestinians has reached its peak amid Israel’s genocide, with water access for Palestinians in Gaza now at a small fraction of pre-genocide levels as Palestinians die of dehydration, starvation and disease. According to a report on Israel’s water deprivation policies by Oxfam, Israel has reduced water…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Advocates Say Biden Must Immediately Act to Stop Polio Outbreak in Gaza

    Advocates for Palestinian rights are demanding that the Biden administration take urgent action to stop a potential outbreak of polio in Gaza after the virus that causes the deadly disease was found in Gaza’s wastewater, threatening an epidemic that would be nothing short of catastrophic. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that Biden bears responsibility to respond to the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Uncommitted Movement: Harris Must Speak Out Against Gaza Genocide

    The grassroots pro-Palestine movement behind hundreds of thousands of protest votes in the Democratic primaries against President Joe Biden is now urging Vice President Kamala Harris to come out against sending more weapons to Israel now that she is likely going to take Biden’s spot as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. “For months, we’ve warned that Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UNICEF Reports Israel Is Killing Kids at Shocking Rates Amid West Bank Assault

    Three days after the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful, the United Nations children’s rights agency said that after decades of being “exposed to horrific violence,” the number of children who have been killed in the West Bank since last October has skyrocketed. Since Israel began its bombardment of…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • CPJ and rights groups: Biden should press Netanyahu on journalist killings, urge media access to Gaza

    New York, July 22, 2024 — President Joe Biden should press the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the unprecedented number of journalists killed in the Gaza Strip and the near-total ban on international media entering the Strip, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and seven other human rights and press freedom organizations said in letters to the White House and U.S. Congressional leaders today.

    The letters call on the United States, Israel’s chief ally, to “ensure that Israel ceases the killing of journalists, allows immediate and independent media access to the occupied Gaza Strip, and takes urgent steps to enable the press to report freely throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” while outlining a series of grave press freedom violations and a response of utter impunity. Netanyahu is expected to meet with Biden on Tuesday and is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.      

    The letters were signed by Amnesty International USA, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Knight First Amendment Institute, the National Press Club, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders, and the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

    Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war last October, the letter said, the Netanyahu government’s actions have created what amounts to a “censorship regime.” 

    “Nine months into the war in Gaza, journalists … continue to pay an astonishing toll,” CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a video message to the Israeli Prime Minister released last week. “More than 100 journalists have been killed. An unprecedented number of journalists and media workers have been arrested, often without charge. They have been mistreated and tortured.”

    Israel’s longstanding impunity in attacks on journalists has also cast its shadow on the rights and safety of two American journalists: Shireen Abu Akleh (murdered in 2022) and Dylan Collins, who was injured in an October 13 strike by Israel on journalists in southern Lebanon that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and wounded others who wore clearly visible press insignia. Investigations by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, AFP and Reuters found the attack was likely targeted.

    On Sunday, Collins joined his AFP colleague Christina Assi—who lost her right leg in the same attack—as she carried the Olympic flame in Vincennes, France, in honor of journalists killed.

    CPJ, which has persistently urged decisive action by the U.S. on journalist safety and media access to Gaza, called on Biden to ensure in his meeting with Netanyahu that the government of Israel takes the following steps: 

    • Lifts its blockade on international, Israeli, and Palestinian journalists from independently accessing Gaza.
    • Revokes legislation permitting the government to shut down foreign outlets, and refrains from any further legal or regulatory curtailment of media operations.
    • Releases all Palestinian journalists from administrative detention or who are otherwise held without charge, including those forcibly disappeared.
    • Abjures the indiscriminate and deliberate killing of journalists.
    • Guarantees the safety of all journalists, including allowing the delivery of newsgathering and safety equipment to reporters in Gaza and the West Bank.
    • Allows all journalists seeking to evacuate from Gaza to do so.
    • Transparently reforms its procedures to ensure that all investigations into alleged war crimes, criminal conduct, or violations of human rights are swift, thorough, effective, transparent, independent, and in line with internationally accepted practices, such as the Minnesota Protocol. Investigations into abuses against journalists must then be promptly conducted in accordance with these procedures.
    • Allows international investigators and human rights organizations, including United Nations (UN) special rapporteurs and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, unrestricted access to Israel and the occupied territories to investigate suspected violations of international law by all parties. 

    The letter also was sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

    Read the full letter here.

    About the Committee to Protect Journalists
    The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Starmer and the Labour government MUST support the ICJ ruling on Israel

    The following article is an open letter from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK)

    MPACUK call upon British prime minister Keir Starmer and the Labour Party to demonstrate a firm commitment to international law by adhering to the recent advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding the legal consequences of Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.

    Israel: multiple breaches of international law

    On 19 July 2024, the ICJ issued a significant advisory opinion in response to a request by the United Nations General Assembly. The court’s findings underscore the legal ramifications of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its impacts on the human rights of the Palestinian people. The ICJ emphasised that Israel’s policies in these territories violate international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention and various United Nations resolutions.

    The court’s opinion highlights several critical points:

    1. Illegality of Settlements: The establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is deemed a violation of international law. The ICJ reaffirms that these settlements have no legal validity and must be dismantled.

    2. Human Rights Violations: The ongoing occupation has led to widespread violations of Palestinian human rights. These include restrictions on movement, access to resources and the destruction of property.

    3. Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian occupied territories: Israel has no claim to sovereignty or to exercise power over any part of the occupied territories of Palestine. “Israel’s security concerns” cannot override the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

    4. Obligations of Other States: The advisory opinion calls on all states, including the United Kingdom, to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and to refrain from recognising or assisting in maintaining the unlawful situation created by these policies. Furthermore, all states are under obligation not to recognise as legal, the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in Palestine, and not to render aide or assistance in maintaining the situation.

    5. Israel has the obligation to make reparations for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the occupied Palestinian territories.

    Labour: uphold principles of justice and equality

    Given these findings, we at MPACUK state, unequivocally, that it is imperative for the UK Government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Kier Starmer, to take concrete steps to become aligned with international legal standards. This includes:

    • Immediate ceasefire: an immediate stop to all military action by Israel. Including the unlawful practice of mass arrests and arbitrary detention.
    • Stop arming Israel: the British Government must stop issuing arms export licenses to Israel, as well as providing any military assistance to Israel.
    • Opening of borders: allowing unfettered access of humanitarian aid to reach occupied Palestinian territories.
    • Condemning Illegal Settlements: publicly denounce the expansion of settlements and order for their dismantlement.
    • Supporting Palestinian Rights: promote the protection of Palestinian human rights through all channels available.
    • Ensuring Compliance: implement robust measures to ensure that UK policies do not contribute to sustaining the unlawful status quo in the occupied territories.
    • Uphold arrest warrants: the British Government must execute the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against prime minister Netanyahu and his defence chiefs.

    We urge the prime minister and the Labour Party cabinet to uphold its principles of justice and equality by taking a decisive stance on this critical issue. Upholding international law is not only a moral obligation but also essential for the promotion of global peace and security.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • “Aligned With Israel’s Propaganda Strategy”: BBC Correspondent Challenges the BBC Director General

    Last November, we reported on an incisive and courageous email that had been sent on 24 October 2023 to Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director General, by Rami Ruhayem, a Beirut-based BBC correspondent. Basing his arguments on considerable evidence and rational analysis, Ruhayem was highly critical of the BBC’s pro-Israel coverage of Gaza since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.

    A former journalist for the Associated Press, Ruhayem has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005. He wrote:

    ‘Words like “massacre”, “slaughter”, and “atrocities” are being used—prominently—in reference to actions by Hamas, but hardly, if at all, in reference to actions by Israel.

    ‘When the BBC uses such language selectively, with the standard of selection being the identity of the perpetrators/victims, the BBC is making a statement—albeit implicit. It implies that the lives of one group of people are more valuable than the lives of another.’ (Our emphasis)

    As we pointed out at the time, this is extremely serious. The state-mandated BBC News organisation is essentially channelling Israeli propaganda that excuses its war crimes while demonising Israel’s victims, the Palestinian people.

    Similar points were made in a 2,300-word letter sent in November 2023 to Al Jazeera by eight BBC journalists who, fearing reprisals, requested anonymity. They accused the BBC of:

    ‘failing to tell the story of the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately, investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage.’

    They said that the BBC is guilty of a ‘double standard in how civilians are seen’, given that it is ‘unflinching’ in its reporting of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

    They noted that the BBC’s interviewers regularly asked Palestinians whether they ‘condemn Hamas’, while interviewees putting the Israeli perspective were not asked the same about Israel’s actions, ‘however high the civilian death toll in Gaza.’

    A notorious example was a BBC Newsnight interview on 9 October 2023 with Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom, who had lost several members of his family during the early days of Israel’s bombing campaign.

    He told presenter Kirsty Wark of his emotional pain. He listed the relatives who had been killed, describing them as ‘sitting ducks for the Israeli war machine’.

    Wark replied:

    ‘I am sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear though, you cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you? Nor the killing of families?’

    No doubt taken aback, Zomlot, who is not a Hamas representative, said:

    ‘No we don’t condone, no we don’t.’

    Wark recently bid farewell to Newsnight after thirty years and was predictably garlanded with praise from across the state-friendly establishment of ‘mainstream’ politics and news.

    Currently, the reported death toll in Gaza is approaching 39,000. But this may be a considerable underestimate, with over 10,000 estimated to be buried under the debris caused by Israeli bombing. A recent study in the prestigious Lancet medical journal points out that there will be many additional indirect deaths caused by destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to Unrwa, the UN’s relief agency for Palestinians. The Lancet authors estimate that the total death toll in Gaza may even exceed 186,000. As a result, reports TRT World, Gaza ‘is turning into an open air cemetery’.

    Israel’s attempt to eradicate Unrwa, and the withdrawal of many Western countries’ financial support for the agency on the basis of non-evidenced Israeli claims that Unrwa staff took part in the 7 October attacks, is a major but under-reported scandal. Israel has hit nearly 70 per cent of Unrwa schools in Gaza since 7 October. Over 95 per cent of these schools were being used as shelters when bombed. 539 people sheltering in Unrwa facilities have been killed. The agency said:

    ‘Nowhere is safe. The blatant disregard for UN premises and humanitarian law must stop.’

    On 1 May 2024, Ruhayem sent a follow-up email to the BBC Director General, which was also sent to several departments of BBC News. This email was leaked to the right-wing UK press and reported the following day (see below). It has now been published in full on the Jadaliyya website, hosted by the Arab Studies Institute, a non-profit organisation.

    The essential conclusion about BBC News coverage of Gaza, wrote Ruhayem, is that of:

    ‘a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy.’ [Our emphasis]

    Moreover, Ruhayem has revealed that BBC management has failed to respond to ‘a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage’ from members of staff. The implication is that there may well be considerable disquiet among many BBC journalists that the broadcaster has been a largely uncritical conduit for Israeli propaganda.

    Although undoubtedly made more stark over the past nine months, this basic feature of BBC News is nothing new. Over many years, we have pointed out the propaganda function of the BBC in books and media alerts, incorporating valuable work by numerous analysts including the Glasgow Media Group. A major figure here was Greg Philo who died recently and whose books with Mike Berry (‘Bad News From Israel’ and ‘More Bad News From Israel’) are vital reading.

    ‘A Dizzying Pace’

    In his 1 May email to the Director General of the BBC, Ruhayem begins by saying that, since his previous email of 24 October 2023, he has examined more thoroughly the ‘editorial failings’ that have characterized the BBC’s coverage of Gaza, and questions whether management is serious about addressing those failings. The evidence of a collapse in BBC journalism standards, in line with Israel’s propaganda strategy, ‘has been pouring in for months at a dizzying pace’.

    Ruhayem collated some of this evidence of pro-Israel bias in two papers (see below) which he sent to management’s feedback email in February. Other BBC colleagues have documented similar problems and presented them in various ways to senior levels within the BBC. What has been the response?

    Ruhayem wrote:

    ‘Management has recognized that many of us have deep misgivings about coverage, and that these should be heard. That seems to be the implicit logic behind the “Listening Sessions” and the feedback emails. But irrespective of what the intention(s) behind this process may have been, it has amounted to little more than a short-lived venting exercise.’

    He added:

    ‘I have participated keenly in every avenue proposed by management that I managed to involve myself in, and more. Silence has been a common response to a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage. Nothing I sent to “feedback emails” has received a response, except once to say that maybe someone will respond, maybe not. Others have had similar experiences.’

    The BBC correspondent then noted that:

    ‘The exceptions to such silence have usually been worse. In one email chain, a senior figure did not answer a simple question: do BBC presenters not have a duty to interject when serious, unverified claims are made on air? Another, when asked about the reasoning behind editorial decisions, saw fit to inform a group of staff that “editors edit”, seemingly in the belief that this should be enough to brush off everything we’d said.’

    Anyone who has ever submitted a complaint to the BBC about its coverage, whatever the topic, will not be surprised by such dismissive treatment. We have lauded all those brave people who enter the labyrinthine den of the BBC ‘complaints system’. This is a soul-crushing experience that even the former BBC chairman Lord Grade once described as ‘grisly’ due to a system that is ‘absolutely hopeless’. So, what hope for us mere mortals? Anyone who makes the attempt is surely forever disabused of the notion that BBC News engages with, or indeed serves, the public in any meaningful way. Long-time readers may recall that Helen Boaden, then head of BBC News, once joked that she evaded public complaints that were sent to her on email:

    ‘Oh, I just changed my email address.’

    It is noteworthy that the Beirut-based BBC correspondent and his colleagues expressing serious concerns about BBC coverage have also been rebuffed. It is perhaps perversely refreshing to hear that BBC management treats its own journalists with similar disdain as it does viewers and listeners.

    Ruhayem told Davie that senior BBC managers would occasionally offer one or two links as counterexamples to serious bias in its coverage:

    ‘The implicit logic would appear to be that a collapse in standards is ok if there are exceptions. Faced with specific examples, senior managers might say it’s inappropriate to comment on individual stories. Faced with analysis that goes back in time to examine content, they might ask for “specific” examples. One of them once referred a group of us back to the unresponsive “News board” feedback email. Another told me they wouldn’t address issues that had already been raised to the News board.’

    Again, we note the Kafka-esque contortions performed by BBC management to avoid proper accountability even to their own journalists.

    One senior manager replied to a group of staff that all the examples of serious pro-Israel bias provided by Ruhayem and colleagues are the result of ‘decisions taken by editors’. This risible response was seemingly intended to preclude further argument.

    Of course, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky observed in Manufacturing Consent, senior editors and managers in ‘mainstream’ news outlets – which, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, very much includes BBC News – have been selected for conformity to state-corporate ideology. Chomsky made the point succinctly to a young, befuddled, pre-BBC Andrew Marr in a now-famous clip:

    ‘I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’

    In his email to Davie, Ruhayem asked whether BBC editors:

    ‘gave instructions to drop requirements for applying scrutiny regarding the most serious, unverified claims that were being repeated by propagandists for Israel? Would they be able to explain why, and offer a defence of such decisions based on BBC values and standards? If that is not the case, would the editors be able to explain why – upon observing these standards being repeatedly cast aside – they did not intervene? In any case, would upper management clarify what it thinks its own duties are in such a situation?’

    Media Lens analysis of BBC News since we began in 2001 reveals that ‘BBC values and standards’ is a doctrinal phrase that has little basis in reality. ‘Impartiality’, ‘objectivity’, ‘balance’ and ‘accuracy’ are largely jettisoned when it comes to the brutal truths behind state and corporate power. The myth that ‘we’ are ‘the good guys’ in world affairs must be maintained at all times.

    Ruhayem goes on to say that the latest trend among BBC editors being challenged by their own journalists about biased Gaza coverage is to ask for ‘recent’ examples.

    ‘This is usually in response to questions about the first weeks/months of coverage, during which Israeli claims about the events of October 7 were given an open, uncritical platform by the BBC. This ignores the fact that – in many cases – examples of this kind of thing were flagged as they were happening but not addressed at the time, or at any time. It also ignores the lasting harm such content is likely to have contributed to causing. In any case, many of us have offered – and continue to offer – feedback that covers all these categories; individual examples, systemic issues, recent examples, not-so-recent examples, without receiving a meaningful response in any instance, at any time, whatever the channel we use, and usually without receiving any response at all.’ [Our emphasis]

    These considered revelations are damning. Senior BBC editors and management are simply not willing and/or capable of engaging with serious scrutiny of the broadcaster’s coverage, even when challenged by their own journalists. At this point, we have to recognise the courage and moral integrity of Rami Ruhayem in being prepared to challenge senior BBC figures; no doubt, with considerable animosity from his line management and some colleagues, resulting in personal discomfort and, indeed, significant risk to his continued BBC employment.

    When his 1 May email was leaked to the right-wing press, the reports downplayed the seriousness and extent of his collated evidence and emphasised the ‘outrage’ of ‘Jewish staff’ with the inevitable and insidious deployment of the ‘antisemitism’ card: The Times (‘BBC correspondent questions “facts” of October 7 attacks on Israel’), The Telegraph (‘BBC may be “complicit in Israeli war propaganda” claims Beirut correspondent’), and The Daily Mail (‘BBC correspondent says the broadcaster has a pro-Israel bias and should be questioning the “facts” of October 7 – sparking fury among Jewish colleagues’). No other newspapers reported the leak, including the Guardian and the Independent.

    In short, Ruhayem is adamant that the problems of BBC coverage of Gaza are ‘evident, unmistakable, and ongoing.’

    ‘Israel’s War on Context’

    So, what are the specifics of Ruhayem’s charges against BBC coverage? The first of two papers that he presented in February 2024 to Davie and senior BBC News staff concerned what the Beirut-based correspondent termed, ‘Israel’s war on context’.

    This was elucidated by Ruhayem’s analysis of 22 interviews with Israeli guests – mostly current officials, a few former officials, army officers, politicians, and a ‘human rights activist’. All the interviews were conducted between October 10 and October 25, 2023 on the BBC News channel. They do not necessarily cover every interview with Israeli guests on the channel during that period.

    His main findings were:

    1. There was no challenge about different manifestations of what appears to be the Israeli government’s drive to destroy any chance of Palestinian self-determination, about Israeli officials in positions of power who had incited extreme violence against Palestinians prior to October 7, or what all of that might suggest about the motivations driving Israel’s conduct of the war.
    2. Ruhayem found one single reference by a BBC presenter to one of the statements mentioned above [i.e. the statements summarised in point 1]. It was the only such mention in 22 interviews that took place over a period of 15 days. In that exception to the rule, the issue was framed in terms of the potential legal and reputational harm to Israel.  In other interviews, Israeli guests repeated claims that are at odds with such statements from top Israeli leaders, without the statements being mentioned by presenters.
    3. The Dahiya Doctrine is not mentioned in any of these interviews.

    The so-called Dahiya Doctrine is essentially an Israeli military doctrine that overrides any sense of ‘proportionality’ in Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. It was articulated in the wake of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, and put into practice later in Gaza. Gadi Eisenkot, at the time head of the Israeli Northern Command and currently a member of the Israeli war cabinet, explained:

    ‘What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases […]. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.’

    Recall that, after the attack by Hamas on 7 October, Israeli leaders, officials and army personnel made boastful statements about how brutally Israel intended to conduct its attacks on Gaza. Defence minister Yoav Gallant said that ‘we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly’ and that he ‘removed every restriction’ on the army. An Israeli army spokesman said that the ‘emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy’.

    The above three findings are, Ruhayem wrote, part of:

    ‘a growing body of evidence indicating that the BBC may have been withholding vital information from the public, contributing to incitement against Palestinians, and spreading and reinforcing Israeli war propaganda.’

    He added:

    ‘There appears to be a ceiling on questioning Israeli officials and propagandists, expressed in the consistent failure of presenters to use crucial evidence to challenge Israel’s west-facing propaganda. Lines of challenge which are obvious to pursue and which would cast doubt on Israel’s west-facing messaging are conspicuously and consistently not pursued by BBC presenters.’

    Ruhayem continued:

    ‘Unfettered by proper challenge, propagandists for Israel can then paint a picture of a peaceful state that has the misfortune of existing alongside pure evil, and present it as the backdrop to the unfolding horror in Gaza.’ [Our emphasis]

    BBC coverage is thus fundamentally compromised, noted Ruhayem:

    ‘The main assumption is that Israel is trying to avoid harming Palestinian civilians as it conducts a war of self-defence. Thus, discussions between BBC presenters and Israeli propagandists are centred on the question of whether Israel is trying hard enough, or acting intelligently enough, to achieve its goal of “crushing” and “dismantling” Hamas without harming civilians – or its reputation. This framework is cemented because evidence to the contrary is erased.’

    Moreover, BBC management have made:

    ‘little meaningful effort to examine our coverage with urgency and transparency in pursuit of evidence-based conclusions.’

    Ruhayem’s second paper sent to senior BBC News staff on 25 February 2024 examined BBC content relating to the events of 7 October. Considerable BBC coverage was devoted to claims of alleged horrific acts carried out by Hamas attackers. These claims included the alleged beheading of babies and the blood-curdling story of a pregnant woman who had her belly cut open, the baby removed from her stomach and beheaded in front of her before she herself was beheaded.

    Ruhayem noted that:

    ‘Claims and testimony that encourage the most extreme portrayals of Israel’s enemies are allowed to be repeated without challenge – regardless of whether or not they’re backed by evidence. Claims and testimony that raise the possibility of Israeli disinformation around the events of October 7 are ignored – despite the evidence.’

    The purpose of Israeli’s repetition of horrific stories, platformed by the BBC and other news media, was clear: to drill into the public ‘the idea that any action Israel sees fit to take is justified’.

    Ruhayem continued:

    ‘By seeking to place Hamas on the most extreme end of the spectrum of evil, propagandists for Israel seemed to believe they’d be able to defend whatever Israel chose to do – and set the stage for more. The seeming suspension of basic standards of scrutiny on the BBC most likely encouraged that strategy.’

    He added:

    ‘Such coverage is likely to have aided Israel’s efforts to ensure political support in the West for its actions, and to intimidate those opposed to them and portray them as supporters of the most hideous atrocities.’

    In summary, the evidence in both papers presented to senior BBC managers and editors by Ruhayem:

    ‘indicates a collapse in editorial standards and values […] which complements, reinforces, and otherwise serves Israel’s messaging. BBC output appears to have aided two pillars of Israeli propaganda: the obliteration of vital context, and incitement against Palestinians.’

    It has, of course, been clear to careful observers since 7 October that BBC News has been, and remains, complicit in Israel’s attempted genocide of the Palestinian people. The particularly noteworthy aspects of the BBC correspondent’s leaked emails is that there is likely significant concern, even dissent, among BBC News staff, and that BBC management refuses to engage in any meaningful way with staff expressing such views.

    Since the full publication of the leaked emails last week by the Jadaliyya website (Part 1 and Part 2), there has been zero coverage in the UK national press, according to our media database searches. The silence sums up the insidious censorship by omission that characterises ‘mainstream’ media when it comes to uncomfortable truths.

    As a closing example of the BBC’s ‘impartiality’, consider the headline of a BBC News online story last week:

    ‘The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome’

    The article, by BBC journalist Fergal Keane, only revealed in the 16th paragraph that Israeli soldiers had set a combat dog on 24-year-old Muhammad Bhar, leaving him to bleed to death. His decomposed body was found a week later by his family who had been ordered to leave their home while Muhammad was locked in a room inside with Israeli soldiers. Muhammad’s brother Jibril said the soldiers likely tried to stop the bleeding, but then left him ‘without stitches or care’.

    After a tsunami of online outrage, the BBC updated its headline to:

    ‘Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC’

    Even this headline blunted the horrible truth. Historian and author Assal Rad, who regularly provides more accurate headlines to ‘mainstream’ news stories on Gaza, observed of the updated headline:

    ‘This was one of the worst stories I’ve heard, and this is how the BBC covers it’

    She suggested a more accurate version:

    ‘Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome after setting a dog on him and leaving him to die’

    This is yet another example of how the BBC routinely sanitises Israeli crimes and helps to ‘normalise the unthinkable’, to use the phrase deployed by the late Edward Herman.

    The post “Aligned With Israel’s Propaganda Strategy”: BBC Correspondent Challenges the BBC Director General first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Glasgow Pride sees radical boycott over sponsors’ ties to Israel

    Hundreds of activists protested Scotland’s Glasgow Pride’s sponsorship ties to Israel by marching in a designated ‘Radical Bloc’, including the Glasgow Greens, the Scottish TUC, and Glasgow Stop the War.

    “No Pride in Genocide”

    Last week, Glasgow Pride’s list of sponsors – including energy company SSE, chemical firm Merck, and multinational finance company JP Morgan Chase & Co – drew heavy criticism from pro-Palestine and climate activists. The coalition of groups and activist demand that Glasgow’s Pride drop their partnerships and collaborations with all companies which are tied to and profit off the Israeli occupation of and genocide in Palestine.

    So, on the morning of Saturday 20 July, hundreds of activists gathered in Festival Park before the start of Glasgow’s Pride march. Instead of joining the main body of the procession, the group arrived to form a ‘Radical Bloc’ within the march:

    Waving Palestine flags and holding signs reading ‘No one is free until we are all free’, the group loudly protested Glasgow Pride’s ‘pinkwashing’ and complicity with the ongoing violence in Gaza:

    Smaller groups of activists also staged banner drops at points along the march route.

    Glasgow Pride: facing heavy criticism

    The bloc was organised by a No Pride in Genocide Glasgow, a broad coalition of LGBTQ+ Glaswegians demanding that Glasgow’s Pride reject companies directly profiting from Israel’s illegal occupation and ongoing genocide in Palestine.

    Glasgow’s Pride official partners Merck and JPMorganChase have have significant financial investments in Israel and profit directly from Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

    Joshua*, who took part in the march, said:

    By allowing these companies into our community spaces – even worse, taking their money – Glasgow Pride as good as condones their connection to the horrors coming out of Gaza. Celebrating them in this way, acting as if their ‘gay-friendliness’ excuses their financial support of a genocide, is the opposite of what Pride is about

    Councillor Holly Bruce, equalities spokesperson for the Glasgow Green Cllr group who gave a speech at the rally at Festival Park, said:

    As a queer woman and Feminist I know the value and proud history of communities standing together in their fight for human rights. I am grateful to have the opportunity to be addressing the radical bloc and will make it clear that whether we’re in the council chambers or marching on the streets Greens will always stand for LGBTQ+ rights and a Free Palestine.

    Earlier this week, the Glasgow Green’s released a statement announcing that they would be joining the Radical Bloc, after an email conversation with Glasgow’s Pride in which they criticised their choice of sponsorship. In the exchange, the Glasgow’s Pride team framed any pro-Palestine presence as being against the LGBT+ community, and informed the Greens that they had passed on the email to Police Scotland.

    ‘Every fight for justice is linked’

    In the days that followed, many groups participating in Glasgow’s Pride, including the Scottish TUC, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Glasgow Stop the War, alongside multiple community organisations and sports teams, announced that they would be joining the bloc.

    Ellie Gomersall, Glasgow Greens committee member and LGBTQ+ activist said:

    Scottish Greens know that every fight for justice is linked. There’s no conflict in standing for a Free Palestine and LGBTQ+ rights, just as there’s no conflict in fighting for a fairer economy as we tackle the climate crisis.

    As members of the queer community, as eco-socialists, as human beings we’ll be proud to march in the radical bloc and lend our voices in support for an end to pinkwashing and complicity in genocide & the climate crisis. There’s no pride on a dead planet and no pride in genocide.

    The Equalities, Diversity & Inclusion officer of Glasgow Sunflowers, a community baseball team based in southside, said:

    Glasgow Sunflowers are marching in the Radical Bloc alongside No Pride in Genocide as we believe in the power and responsibility of queer community and queer liberation. A corporate, pink-washed Pride does not represent us, nor who we are, as Pride began as and will always be a protest. Freedom and revolution are what any pride march should be about.

    The FC Committee of Gender Goals, Scotland’s first football club by and for trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, said:

    Glasgow Pride’s corporate sponsorship conflicts with our principles and values as trans members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Accepting sponsorship from organisations that are reappropriating our queer experiences through pinkwashing, and their refusal to listen to the voices they claim to represent is unacceptable. This is why we have decided to proudly march with our queer kin in the radical bloc, standing firm against the pinkwashing of genocide.

    Glasgow Pride: no pride at all?

    The activist coalition are calling on Glasgow’s Pride to refuse all partnerships, sponsorships, and participation in Pride from companies and organisations that profit directly or indirectly from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They also ask that the organisations sponsorship process be made democratic and community led, and that Glasgow Pride publicly opposes Israel’s war crimes.

    Sophia, an organiser with No Pride in Genocide Glasgow, said:

    Over the past few weeks, Glasgow’s Pride has shown that they are not willing to listen to the concerns and values of the community they claim to represent – to respond to criticism by threatening to call the police on your own queer siblings is inexcusable. Today, we have shown that the queer community of Glasgow will not tolerate our community being used as a cover for corporate greed and international violence, and we deserve a Pride which reflects that.

    Last month, organisers successfully pressured Edinburgh Pride to drop Aegeon sponsorship, and No Pride in Genocide/Queers for Palestine groups have emerged across the UK with activists demanding that LGBT organisations and events cut ties with Israel.

    *Names have been changed.

    Featured image via Glasgow Green Party

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The International Court of Justice finds Israel responsible for apartheid


    This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The International Court of Justice finds Israel responsible for apartheid


    This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Palestine Action just hit TWO Israel weapons suppliers before the sun came up

    Palestine Action has just targeted two weapons manufacturers which supply Israel arms firm Elbit Systems – one in Manchester, and another in Sunbury.

    Palestine Action: conducting its own early morning raids

    Just before 5am on Monday 22 July, one group of Palestine Action activists broke inside Manchester-based arms components manufacturer Dean Group International and dismantled machinery and equipment:

    Police have cordoned off the premises and remain at the scene as activists continue to occupy Dean Group International, Brinell Dr, Irlam, Manchester M44 5BL.

    Then, in Sunbury-on-Thames another group jumped security fences, shattered windows and hardware belonging to an arms supplier, Ametek Airtechnology:

    Both companies supply parts to Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems.

    Israel weapons suppliers

    Dean Group International uses a specialised technique called ‘investment casting’ to manufacture components for arms companies, including Elbit’s Kent-based subsidiary, Instro Precision. According to the manufacturer, “so much from a military standpoint requires investment casting, including weapons, missiles, radar, and communications equipment”. The supply of components to Instro Precision, who’ve held over 80 licenses to export arms to Israel since 2016, was verified when other activists broke inside the Elbit arms factory during an action last month.

    Ametek Airtechnology specialises in designing, developing and manufacturing custom-made thermal and motion control solutions for weapons including missiles, military vehicles and fighter jets. Amongst weapons their products are used for is Israel’s F-35 fighter jets, which are frequently used during Israel’s ongoing Gaza genocide. Ametek’s subsidiary United Electronic Industries lists Elbit Systems as a “valued customer” – a connection which was also confirmed through sightings of deliveries to Elbit’s Shenstone-based subsidiary, UAV Engines Ltd.

    The Israeli military has killed over 38,295 Palestinians since 7 October, most of whom are women and children. Schools, hospitals, refugee camps, residential buildings and general infrastructure is frequently bombed during the ongoing Gaza genocide. In response to the growing demand for munitions by the Israeli military for such attacks on Gaza, Elbit has “ramped up production” of its weaponry.

    Elbit Systems manufactures 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, as well as missiles, ammunition and digital warfare. The Israeli arms company uses Gaza, which was recently confirmed by the International Court of Justice to be illegally occupied territory, as a laboratory to develop their “battle-tested” weapons.

    Shut it down

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said:

    Without suppliers such as Dean Group International and Ametek, Elbit couldn’t make weaponry which is used to commit genocide. Whilst our government continues to facilitate Elbit’s crimes, Palestine Action will continue to use direct action to end the complicity and shut Elbit down. Every link in Israel’s military supply chain will be uncovered and dismantled.

    Featured image and videos via Palestine Action

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Conventional Wisdom: The ICJ Ruling on Israeli Settlements

    The International Court of Justice has again deliberated over the thorn-bloodied subject of Israeli-Palestinian relations.  Its latest advisory opinion, sought by the UN General Assembly early last year, was unremarkably conventional though nonetheless affirming: a finding that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with “the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”

    Given the avalanche of international opinions, deliberation and understanding on the status of the settlements that arose after 1967, the ICJ was merely revising homework and reiterating home truths of international law.  As Eitay Mack, an Israeli attorney working for Palestinian rights in the West Bank told The Intercept, “The court just said the obvious.”

    Various acts and practices are accordingly examined, amounting to what the Court considered annexation of territory Israel had no sovereignty over.  Israel, for instance, treated the Palestinians in East Jerusalem as “foreigners” requiring a valid residence permit and had imposed a strict building permit scheme, violation of which could result in structural demolition and steep fines.  In the West Bank, the Basic Law of 2018 had explicitly stated that Israel “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation”.  Various areas prohibited Palestinian construction, while the expansion of Israeli settlements had burgeoned.

    Israeli control of the occupied territory had been accordingly maintained by such things as the extension of its domestic law to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the maintenance and expansion of the settlements, the construction of relevant infrastructure connected with that aim, the ongoing exploitation of natural resources, and proclaiming Jerusalem capital of Israel.  Such practices were “designed to remain in place indefinitely and to create irreversible effects on the ground.”

    The Court also found that Israeli authorities had failed to “prevent or to punish” the violence of settlers directed against Palestinians, thereby contributing “to the creation and maintenance of a coercive environment”.

    The opinion further notes that Israeli policies and practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem impose a separation between the Palestinian populace and Israeli settlers “transferred” into the territories.  Such a separation was physical and juridical, thereby breaching Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CERD).  As State parties to the CERD expressly condemn both racial segregation and apartheid, undertaking to prevent, prohibit and eradicate such practices in territories under their control, the finding is particularly damning.

    Gaza’s imperilled status also drew the Court’s attention.  While Israel officially withdrew its forces from the strip in 2005 pursuant to its “Disengagement Plan” announced the previous year, Israel maintained effective control over the territory.  “Where a State has placed territory under its effective control, it might be in a position to maintain that control and to continue exercising its authority despite the absence of a physical military presence on the ground.”  In this case, Israel continued to exercise authority over land, sea and air borders, restricted movement of people and goods, controlled the collection of import and export taxes, and exerted military control over the buffer zone.

    It also followed that international bodies such as the UN Security Council, the General Assembly and the international community were under an obligation not to recognise the status of such an occupation, nor supply aid or support in maintaining them.  Israel was also “under an obligation to end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”  All further settlement activities were to cease, and all current settlers in the OPT areas evacuated.

    As a result of its policies regarding the occupied territories, Israel had also incurred obligations “to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

    For countries professing to follow the “rules-based order”, the opinion should have made perfect sense.  But in power politics, rules bend.  Take, for instance, these words from the US State Department to Reuters:  “We are concerned that the breadth of the court’s opinion will complicate efforts to resolve the conflict and bring about an urgently needed just and lasting peace with two states living side by side in peace and security.”

    As for observing international law, the Israeli government continued to prove not only selective but historically parochial.  “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land – not in our eternal capital Jerusalem, nor in our ancestral heritage of Judea and Samaria,” claimed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement.  This was, the PM went on to say, a “historical truth” that could not be contested.

    Some Israeli politicians did acknowledge certain merit in the Court’s decision.  Labor MK Gilad Kariv warned that the policy of “de facto annexation” being pursued in the West Bank, the broader “theft of land” and the refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians threatened “Israel’s status as an accepted democratic country.”

    What the decision amounts to is an excoriation of the occupation, those consequential to it (the settlements), and the bolstering system of segregation that has drawn accusations of apartheid from activists to tribunals. As an advisory opinion, it is non-binding though freighted with persuasive reasoning.  In doing so, the decision further pushes arguments for Palestinian self-determination and eventual statehood.  For Israel, the judgment will be a hard one to ignore.

    The post Conventional Wisdom: The ICJ Ruling on Israeli Settlements first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Bombs Yemen After Houthis Claim Responsibility for Tel Aviv Drone Attack

    Houthi-run media say Israeli air strikes Saturday targeted oil storage facilities in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah and that there are an unspecified number of fatalities and injuries. The attack came a day after the Houthis claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Tel Aviv that killed one person and struck just yards from a U.S. Embassy branch office. Israel’s air strikes will not…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israeli Soldiers Flaunt War Crimes Online. Why Aren’t They Held Accountable?

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza may go down as the first genocide in history where the perpetrators have documented, posted, shared and celebrated their crimes on social media. Over the past 10 months, Israeli soldiers in Gaza have taken photos and videos of themselves while they blew up homes and schools, and tortured captives. To boast of their atrocities against civilians…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: a lot changes in a week and I owe Keir Starmer an apology

    The Canary only had a week-or-so off, and in that short period of time we have seen Donald Trump survive an apparent assassination attempt, Joe Biden addressing the Ukrainian comedy guy as “President Putin”, football fail to come home for the umpteenth time, and the new prime minister Keir Starmer prancing around on the global stage as if little insular Britain is recognised as anything more than a good place to buy arms and launder dirty money.

    I also vaguely recall the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, posing for a photo with a man that is facing an arrest warrant from the Hague for crimes against humanity, but nobody gives a fuck about that because it’s not Jeremy Corbyn dining with the corpse of Osama Bin Laden.

    So, just sixteen days into Keir Rodney Starmer’s prime ministership and I feel like it is time for me to apologise, because I got it wrong.

    Rachael Swindon: an apology to Keir Starmer

    Even I didn’t think Keir Starmer would be enough of an intolerable, foolish shithouse to give the thumbs up to supplying billions of pounds worth of arms to the Ukrainian regime, every year, “as long as it takes”, while so blatantly allowing British children to languish in poverty and hunger, within a week of being in office.

    Is this what you red Thatcherite relics call “patriotism”? To me, it would appear Starmer’s loyalties lie with Washington, Tel Aviv and Kyiv before Warrington, Telford and Kettering even get a look-in.

    The public antipathy towards the deliciously-routed Conservative Party isn’t going to disappear at the drop of a Rees-Mogg bowler hat, but if you are expecting an end to the politics of short-termism, instability, and division, I think you are going to be extremely disappointed.

    Keir Starmer’s quicksand majority could be put to excellent use.

    Plenty of options

    Instead of a Border Force Control, build council houses. Ask not who we can blow out of the water, but what these human beings can offer our exhausted and broken society.

    Instead of arming and enabling war and genocide, lead the way in searching for peaceful and just resolutions to global atrocities. We do not have to slavishly sign up to this bomb-first-ask-questions-later strategy favoured by the neocons. This is a political choice.

    Instead of rubbing shoulders with the elite, try doing a shift in your local foodbank or homeless shelter, but away from the ghastly spectacle of self-serving publicity.

    Starmer doesn’t need to put your future on the never-never with huge corporations when he can adequately tax the same huge, obscenely rich corporations to pay for it.

    The 2024 Taxing Wealth Report demonstrates to Labour just how simple it would be to make some tweaks to existing UK taxes to raise up to £90 BILLION of new tax revenue – every single year.

    Better still, Mr Starmer, these easily-made adjustments would be raised only from those who are already well off or who are absolutely fucking minted, which only applies to people that are lucky enough to be in the top 10% of income earners.

    But you know as well as I do, there’s more chance of Keir Starmer ditching the public-purse-funded private jet — that carried his over-privileged arse to the Euro 2024 final to watch England lose to Spain — than there ever will be of Keir Starmer taking a meaningful bite from the very hand that feeds his lust for power, free from morals, ethics and principles.

    Labour corporatocracy

    This new Labour government has seamlessly picked up the corporatocracy baton from the Tories with an alarming ease.

    Despite promising to “get a grip” of the huge water companies, Starmer has wasted no time in rubber-stamping bill increases of up to 44%. The new prime minister has the majority to crush these disproportionate price hikes, simply by renationalising water companies.

    I am old enough to remember the time Keir Starmer said:

    Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water.

    That was pledge number five of the infamous ten pledges that Keir Starmer put forward to Labour Party members back in 2020.

    Keir Starmer is a proven liar. I give zero fucks for the size of his majority and even fewer fucks if I have to keep calling out this malignant, fraudulent, servant of the immoral elite until I turn blue in the face.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in the UK’s broken ‘justice’ system…

    As reported earlier this week in the Canary, five Just Stop Oil supporters were sent to prison for a combined TWENTY ONE YEARS for doing nothing more than attending a Zoom call.

    Is it not quite incredible that in the week the new government are forced to announce they are having to release some 5,500 prisoners to “avert disaster”, some creepy batshit judge is locking up climate change protestors for having the temerity to attend a Zoom call, or am I missing something blindingly obvious?

    In my humble opinion, and my opinion alone, I believe the judge in question — Judge Christopher Hehir — is a climate-change-denying, paedo-sympathiser, and the fact he is dishing out ‘justice’ is a grave injustice in itself.

    Is this the kind of good old fashioned British justice that Keir Starmer will continue to support without reservation?

    If society begins to accept the imprisonment of climate protestors is of greater importance than the non-imprisonment of a man found to be in possession of three category A images, the most serious type, and five category C images, which depicted victims aged eight to 12, as well as accessing a website known to contain indecent images of children 393 times, would it be wrong of me to suggest we are heading down an extremely dangerous path?

    Same judge, very different sentences.

    I’ll pass on your ‘national renewal’, thanks Keir Starmer

    All of this talk of “change”, “national renewal”, and “doing things differently”, may well convince the 20% of those eligible to vote that voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to run the country, but your average Joe isn’t going to feel, or be any better off than this time last year.

    It should go without saying, we shouldn’t judge Starmer’s tinpot government on what they have or haven’t done in the space of just two weeks, but we can certainly begin to get a good idea of which way the river is flowing, merely reinforcing our judgement of Starmer and his cabal of metropolitan spinners before they managed to get anywhere near the corridors of power.

    If your idea of “change” looks like a guaranteed £3 billion every year for Ukraine to fight a proxy war on behalf of the West, I’m not interested in your idea of change.

    If your idea of “doing things differently” looks like offering out another £700 million worth of NHS contracts to the private sector, I’m not interested in your idea of doing things differently.

    And if your idea of “national renewal” looks like bowing down to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel by refusing to withdraw your objections to the pariah state being dragged kicking and screaming through the International Criminal Courts, you can go to hell.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Rights Group Urges DOJ to Investigate Netanyahu for Genocide

    As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to visit Washington, D.C. next week, an American legal group on Friday pressured the U.S. Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into him and other officials for committing or authorizing genocide, war crimes, and torture targeting Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Since Israel launched its retaliation for a Hamas-led attack…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ICJ Tells Israel to End Occupation of Palestinian Territories, Pay Reparations

    In a landmark opinion issued today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has said that Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip is in breach of international law. The proceedings came out of a UN resolution passed in December of 2022. In the resolution, the UN General Assembly requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Know Your Enemy: Yoram Hazony’s Israeli Model

    Matt and Sam are joined by historian Suzanne Schneider to discuss how Israeli illiberalism is inspiring the global right.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Public Health Authorities Raise Alarm as Poliovirus Is Found in Gaza Sewage

    Poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples at six locations in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization said on Friday, following announcements from both the Israel and Gaza health ministries. Vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 was found in samples taken on June 23 from sites in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. Public health authorities expressed grave concerns about the findings…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel’s settlement policies break international law, UN’s top court finds – video

    The international court of justice, the UN’s top court, has ruled that Israel’s settlement policies and use of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian territories violate international law. The ICJ said: ‘The transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention’

    Continue reading…

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