Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, November 19, 2023

 

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BAY AREA

#CEASEFIRE MASS MEETING

Sunday, November 26

10:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.

Bay Resistance, Center for Political Education, APTP and AROC invite you to connect with allies and community to move into forceful action to stop the genocide in Gaza.

In this critical moment, we offer this mass meeting space to get clear on messaging and deepen our shared understanding of our organizing strategy. There will be space for political education, training on organizing skills, action planning, and spaces for arts and culture.

This event is open to everyone to get plugged in, including new people who want to learn more about this movement and activists who want to find ways to do more. We’ll have special breakout sessions for families and parents organizing at schools and in their districts.

Stay tuned for an RSVP link coming soon!  Check HERE for updated details:

https://www.facebook.com/events/267145765886103

Take Urgent Action Now!

Call Congress to Demand a Ceasefire Now!

https://act.uscpr.org/a/callforgaza?oa_ext=AROC

Email Congress to demand a Ceasefire Now!

https://act.uscpr.org/a/stop-funding-israels-massacres?oa_ext=AROC

AROC is the only organization in Northern California that builds power for our SWANA people by providing critical legal support and social services while organizing our community around issues of justice and equity.

Our team invites you to be part of the fabric that holds our work together, in the spirit of takkaful, by donating to our organization today:

https://araborganizing.networkforgood.com/projects/100246-main-giving-page

Donate to AROC:

https://araborganizing.networkforgood.com/projects/100246-main-giving-page

Copyright © 2023 Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), All rights reserved.

You are receiving this email because you have expressed interest in AROC news and events.

Our mailing address is:

Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC)

522 Valencia Street

San Francisco, CA 94110

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"The Rock" on top of Bernal Hill overlooking downtown San Francisco re-painted October 26, 2023, after pro-Israeli Zionist's destroyed it. 

Palestinians killed and wounded by Israel:

As of November 19, 2023, the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 11,470 (at least 5,000 of them children and 3,130 women) with over 27,490 injured in Gaza—and more than 190 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank in the past month. 

The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed buried in the ruins.

Since October 7, one in every 57 Palestinians living in Gaza has been killed or injured in Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion,

Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told diplomats in Geneva.

Israelis killed and abducted by Hamas: 

A total of 1,200* Israelis killed by Hamas (30 of them children) and 239 abducted on October 7, 2023.

* Israel has revised its official estimated death toll of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, lowering the number to about 1,200 people, down from more than 1,400, a spokesman for the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday night.

NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA  PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!

FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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Protesters calling for ceasefire in Gaza take over base of the Statue of Liberty

Hundreds of protesters affiliated with the group Jewish Voice for Peace staged a sit-in at the National Park Service site at 1:00 P.M., Monday, November 6, 2023 to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/11/06/protesters-statue-liberty-gaza-israel-ceasefire

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Ann Boyer’s Powerful New York Times Resignation Letter

November 17, 2023

Read: The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children, By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html

According to Literary Hub[1], "[Early on November 16, 2023], the news broke that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, Anne Boyer, has resigned from her post, writing in her resignation letter that 'the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone...'"

 

The letter in full is written below:

 

"I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.

"The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

"The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

"Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

"I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

"If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present."

—Anne Boyer

---

[1] https://lithub.com/read-anne-boyers-extraordinary-resignation-letter-from-the-new-york-times/

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Viva Fidel!

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PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD WIDELY!

 

To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2tpd2c62Sh5YEVDOr2vmGWTuQArt-6OPQMDwd2wUnfNi_rQ/viewform

 

To endorse as other, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzWaP1U_KOHlH-ou1R3OD8zsuI5BWW1b9H4gtPoFK_lIQB3g/viewform

 

The list of signers will be updated periodically

Contact: info@laborforpalestine.net

Website: laborforpalestine.net

 

Stand With Palestinian Workers: 

Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!

Labor for Palestine

 

“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)

 

The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”

 

The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.

 

Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.

 

In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:

 

1.     To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 

 

2.     To pass motions in their trade union to this effect. 

 

3.     To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution. 

 

4.     Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.

 

We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). 

 

Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine

(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)

Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild; Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council; Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation; Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat; Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return; Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine; Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired.)

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Join us for an exciting Cuba solidarity event coming up on Sunday, November 12th, 4 pm at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. Liz Oliva Fernández, a Cuban journalist and filmmaker with the Belly of the Beast media organization, is coming to the Bay Area as part of a national tour. She will be showing two new short documentary films exposing what's behind Biden's Cuba policy. This is an important chance for the Bay Area community to learn about current U.S. policy and show support for Cuba. 

Cuba has been outspoken about its solidarity with Palestine/Gaza during the current crisis.

Liz Oliva Fernández

Liz Oliva Fernández is a 29-year old journalist and on-camera television presenter from Havana, Cuba.  She is the award-winning presenter of the acclaimed documentary series The War on Cuba,  produced by Belly of the Beast and executive-produced by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover.  In addition to her journalism and filmmaking, Fernández is a dedicated anti-racist and feminist activist who co-founded Chicas Poderosas Cuba (Powerful Cuban Girls), an initiative that promotes change by inspiring female leadership and gender equality in Cuban society. 

Liz writes: “As a Cuban Black woman, I feel that the reality in which I grew up and still live is reflected in the stories we have told at Belly of the Beast. We challenge clichés – positive and negative – about Cuba and its people. And we are taking on issues that have been ignored or misrepresented by major media outlets both in Cuba and outside.”

Sponsored by Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network

Venceremos Brigade, Bay Area and 

Richmond, CA - Regla, Cuba Friendship Committee

More info: bayareacubasolidarity@gmail.com

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Jewish Doctor Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

“I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

“There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent—that’s what’s called the ‘Nakba’ in Arabic; the ‘disaster’ or the ‘catastrophe.’ There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

“I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then.

“It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit!

“So, then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an ‘outdoor prison,’ which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

“And ‘anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite’ is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true.”

—Independent Catholic News, October 16, 2023

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/48251

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TERRORISM IN THE EYES OF THE IMPERIAL BEHOLDER - a poem

 

the French word

for rabies

is

la rage -

rage or outrage

 

and 

the French have a saying -

a man who wants to get rid of his dog

accuses it of spreading rabies

 

the people of Gaza

treated as inhuman animals

worse than dogs

are charged

with terrorism

 

come to think of it

what an honor !

 

world war two's resistance

against nazi extermination

was designated

as terrorism

by the Axis allies

 

what an honor !

 

Mandela

was monitored

as a terrorist

by the CIA

 

What an honor !

 

Tortuguita

peacefully meditating

near Israeli-funded cop city

was executed

in cold blood

on suspicion

of domestic terrorism 

 

What an honor !

 

in the spirit of Mandela

in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

in the spirit of Tortuguita

in the spirit of Attica

may the anti colonial outrage

of the People of Palestine

contaminate us all -

the only epidemic

worth dying for

 

 (c) Julia Wright. October 17 2023. All Rights Reserved To The family of Wadea Al- Fayoume.

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Ruchell Cinque Magee Joins the Ancestors 

                                                         1939-2023

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors October 17, 2023, after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors last night after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

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The ongoing Zionist theft of Palestinian land from 1946 to now.

77 years of brutal oppression must end!

End all U.S. aid to Israel now!

For a democratic, secular Palestine!

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Leonard Peltier’s Letter Delivered to Supporters on September 12, 2023, in Front of the Whitehouse

 

Dear friends, relatives, supporters, loved ones:

 

Seventy-nine years old. Mother Earth has taken us on another journey around Grandfather Sun.  Babies have taken their first breath. People have lived, loved, and died. Seeds have been planted and sent their roots deep below red earth and their breath to the Stars and our Ancestors.

 

I am still here.

 

Time has twisted one more year out of me. A year that has been a moment.  A year that has been a lifetime. For almost five decades I’ve existed in a cage of concrete and steel.  With the “good time” calculations of the system, I’ve actually served over 60 years.

 

Year after year, I have encouraged you to live as spirit warriors. Even while in here, I can envision what is real and far beyond these walls.  I’ve seen a reawakening of an ancient Native pride that does my heart good.

 

I may leave this place in a box. That is a cold truth. But I have put my heart and soul into making our world a better place and there is a lot of work left to do – I would like to get out and do it with you.

 

I know that the spirit warriors coming up behind me have the heart and soul to fight racism and oppression, and to fight the greed that is poisoning our lands, waters, and people. 

 

We are still here.

 

Remember who you are, even if they come for your land, your water, your family. We are children of Mother Earth and we owe her and her other children our care.

 

I long to turn my face to the sky. In this cage, I am denied that simple pleasure. I am in prison, but in my mind, I remain as I was born: a free Native spirit.

 

That is what allows me to laugh, keeps me laughing. These walls cannot contain my laughter – or my hope.

 

I know there are those who stand with me, who work around the clock for my freedom. I have been blessed to have such friends.

 

We are still here and you give me hope. 

 

I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me. 

 

I love you. I hope for you. I pray for you. 

 

And prayer is more than a cry to the Creator that runs through your head.  Prayer is an action.

 

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

DOKSHA, 

LEONARD PELTIER

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

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Free Julian Assange

Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange

 

Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count.  We are to believe we are represented in this country.  This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well.  Please take this action as often as you can:

 

Find your representatives:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

 

Leave each of your representatives a message individually to: 

·      Drop the charges against Julian Assange

·      Speak out publicly against the indictment and

·      Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges: 

           202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard 

 

Leave a message on the White House comment line to 

Demand Julian Assange be pardoned: 

             202-456-1111

             Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST

 

Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:

             202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line

             202-514-2000 Main Switchboard 

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733

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Updates From Kevin Cooper 

March 23, 2023 

Dear Friends and Comrades, 

This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.

This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.

Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D.   said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...

Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with.   'more later'...

In Struggle & Solidarity,

An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:

Mr. Kevin Cooper

C-65304. 4-EB-82

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, CA 94974

 

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)

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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 

See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

I’m pleased to announce that last week our client, Daniel Hale, was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The “Corner-Brightener Candlestick” was presented to Daniel’s friend Noor Mir. You can watch the online ceremony here. As it happens, this week is also the 20th anniversary of the first drone assassination in Yemen. From the beginning, the drone assassination program has been deeply shrouded in secrecy, allowing U.S. officials to hide significant violations of international law, and the American Constitution. In addition to the lives directly impacted by these strikes, the program has significantly eroded respect for international law and thereby puts civilians around the world in danger. Daniel Hale’s revelations threw a beam of light into a very dark corner, allowing journalists to definitively show that the government's official narrative was a lie. It is thanks to the great personal sacrifice of drone whistleblowers like Hale that public understanding has finally begun to catch up to reality. As the Sam Adams Associates note:  “Mr. Hale was well aware of the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to which other courageous officials have been subjected — and that he would likely suffer the same. And yet — in the manner of his famous ancestor Nathan Hale — he put his country first, knowing what awaited him at the hands of those who serve what has become a repressive Perpetual War State wreaking havoc upon much of the world.” We hope you’ll join the growing call to pardon or commute Hale’s sentence. U.S. citizens can contact your representatives here.

Happy new year, and thank you for your support! Jesselyn Radack Director Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) ExposeFacts Twitter: @JesselynRadack

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Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]

---

[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603

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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

 

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

 

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

 

Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312

San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org

Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811

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Articles

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1) Arab countries won’t send postwar peacekeeping troops to Gaza, a Jordanian official says.

By Vivian Nereim reporting from Manama, Bahrain, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, right, and Brett McGurk, one of the White House’s top Middle East officials, at a regional security conference in Manama, Bahrain, on Saturday. Credit...Mazen Mahdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Arab countries will not participate in any postwar plan that involves sending international troops to secure Gaza, Jordan’s foreign minister said on Saturday, characterizing such an idea as akin to asking others to clean up Israel’s mess.

 

The minister, Ayman Safadi, also argued that agreeing to participate in a post-conflict peacekeeping force would essentially give the Israeli military permission to destroy Gaza.

 

“There will be no Arab troops going to Gaza — none,” Mr. Safadi said at a regional security conference in Bahrain. “We are not going to be seen as the enemy.”

 

Since the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas — the armed group that runs Gaza and, according to the Israeli authorities, killed about 1,200 people — Israel has cut off most electricity, food and water for more than two million Palestinians who live in the territory. Israel’s military has also carried out a steady barrage of airstrikes and launched a ground invasion, battling for control of Gaza street by street.

 

“People are being killed day in and day out, and then we’re supposed to come and clean the mess after Israel?” Mr. Safadi said. “That’s not going to happen.”

 

Some Western officials have floated the idea that a peacekeeping force involving Arab countries could play a transitional role in Gaza after the war, a military campaign that Israeli officials have vowed must wipe out Hamas. But, at least in public, Arab officials have dismissed the notion that they could discuss any postwar plan before a cease-fire is implemented, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed that Israel will maintain security control over Gaza “for an indefinite period.”

 

The division between the United States and its Arab allies over the war was on full display at the conference in Bahrain, where Arab, American and European officials sparred over the cause of the conflict and how to end it. Arab governments, many of them authoritarian, have faced significant pressure from their publics over the war, which has reinvigorated vocal support for the Palestinian cause and stoked anger not only toward Israel, but also the United States.

 

Sitting onstage alongside Brett McGurk, one of the White House’s top Middle East officials, Mr. Safadi said that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was “not self-defense” but “blatant aggression.” He also argued that the international community was failing to hold Israel accountable to international law and was sending a message to people across the Arab world that “Israel can do whatever it wants.”

 

Mr. McGurk, in his own speech, said that the United States supported Israel’s defense while also making it clear “that Israel must comply with international humanitarian law.”

 

“We will not tell another country how to grieve or how to protect itself, but as friends and partners we will do our best, and offer our best advice,” he said.

 

Mr. McGurk also said that a pause in fighting and a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza must be conditioned on Hamas releasing the more than 200 hostages it took from Israel in the Oct. 7 attacks.

 

When the floor opened for questions from the audience, Mr. McGurk was mobbed with critical inquiries about American policy in the Middle East.

 

Speaking on a subsequent panel, Anwar Gargash, a senior Emirati official, said he sometimes wondered whether the war was “another Iraq moment,” rising fears about how the conflict was fueling extremism and radicalization across the region.

 

Asked by audience members about their own countries’ policies for Gaza after the war, he and Abdullatif Al Zayani, the foreign minister of Bahrain, did not give clear answers.

 

“We are within an Arab consensus,” Mr. Gargash said, adding that what Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority want is “extremely important to us.”

 

“We can’t really come and sit down and say the next step will be some sort of a de facto administration over Gaza,” he said. “If we are not guided by the Palestinians, whatever we do will not be legitimate.”

 

Mr. McGurk said that from Washington’s perspective, the United States must “plan now” for the day after, even as the conflict continues.

 

“The Palestinian people and their voices and aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza,” he said. “It is not simply about cleaning up after the war.”

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2) Palestinians and the U.N. report intense strikes in Gaza’s south.

By Karen Zraick, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Destruction after an Israeli strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday. Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press

Fliers over Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday. Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Parts of southern Gaza were pounded by airstrikes on Saturday, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, even as the Israeli military continued to warn residents to evacuate from north to south.

 

Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, reported Saturday both on strikes in Deir Al Balah in central Gaza, as well as Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.  The Israeli military did not immediately confirm the strikes.

 

Israel has declared war on Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, an enclave separate from the West Bank, after an attack that Israeli officials says killed 1,200 people. But there has been growing alarm about the toll of the offensive, which included an unprecedented number of airstrikes on a densely populated area even before Israel began its ground invasion three weeks ago.

 

The Palestinian health authorities say that at least 11,470 people have been killed, including more than 4,700 children and 3,100 women. The statistics do not specify how many of the dead were combatants.

 

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said early Saturday said there had been “intense strikes” by the Israelis in the south as well as “ground clashes” between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups. Those clashes the agency said took place in Khan Younis and near Rafah in southern Gaza, as well as in the north during the previous 24 hours.

 

In Khan Younis — the largest city in southern Gaza — some residents reported seeing fliers said to have been dropped by Israeli planes warning people in outlying villages to evacuate.

 

The fliers, images of which have circulated online for days, were addressed to residents of four agricultural villages north and east of the city, near the border with Israel: Al Qarara, Bani Suheila, Abasan and Khuza’a. The villages are east of Salah al-Din road, the main north-south artery, which people have been using to flee from the north. The origin of the images was not clear and the Israeli military declined to comment on them.

 

The four villages make up a large geographic area in southern Gaza.

 

Maysaa Abu Daqaa, who lives east of the city of Khan Younis, said she had left her home and gone to a hospital.

 

“They told us to leave,” she said of the Israelis. “We can barely sort out our situation.”

 

Photos from Agence France-Presse, the news wire service, showed what it said were fliers being dropped by the Israeli military on Saturday over Rafah, near the border with Egypt. It was not immediately clear what was written on those fliers.

 

Gaza was largely cut off from the outside world this week during a prolonged telecommunications blackout.

 

Abu Bakr Bashir, Ameera Harouda and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

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3) The Israeli military signals its intent to battle Hamas in southern Gaza.

By Ephrat Livni and Victoria Kim, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Palestinians evacuating a wounded woman after an Israeli airstrike in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday. Credit...Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press

Israel signaled on Friday that it was expanding its offensive in Gaza to include the southern half of the territory, after claiming control of the north and taking over a Gaza City hospital it had identified as a priority in its military operation.

 

The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that its troops would continue their offensive “in every place that Hamas is, and it is in the south of the strip.” His remarks appeared to telegraph a new phase in Israel’s war on Hamas, three weeks into the ground invasion and less than three days after Israeli troops entered the grounds of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, saying the armed group had been using it as a command center.

 

The question of whether Israel had secured conclusive evidence of a Hamas operation at the hospital appeared unsettled as of Friday, when the Israeli military took journalists on a tightly controlled visit to Al-Shifa. The military showed them a tunnel shaft on the perimeter of the hospital grounds but said it had not sent troops down it, for fear of booby traps. Israel’s siege on the hospital has drawn intense international scrutiny and criticism for endangering vulnerable patients and other civilians sheltering there.

 

In an evening news briefing, Admiral Hagari said that the Israeli military was operating with “clear goals” but declined to outline what those were, saying only that Israeli forces would move at a time and in a manner that served their purpose.

 

The possibility that Israel will expand its ground operation in Gaza to the south raises the question of where Palestinian civilians have left to flee to.

 

Gazans have been saying for weeks that no place within their borders is safe. Hundreds of thousands followed Israeli directives to leave northern Gaza and move to the south, only to come under fire from Israeli airstrikes. Only foreign citizens, some international workers and a limited number of severely wounded Palestinians have been allowed to leave through the border with Egypt.

 

Weeks of punishing airstrikes and the orders to move have left more than 11,000 people in the enclave dead, including more than 4,600 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Aid groups say that the figures are probably higher and have not been updated in days because of a communications blackout caused by lack of fuel.

 

The U.N. says that more than two-thirds of the population of 2.2 million people are internally displaced and struggling under increasingly dire conditions, many lacking food, clean water and shelter. Last week, the World Health Organization warned of the risk of rampant disease and starvation.

 

Admiral Hagari did not directly respond to a question about where Gazans should go if the south becomes an active war zone.

 

He noted that the Israeli government had agreed on Friday to allow fuel for aid groups into the territory. He said the fuel would help the humanitarian situation as the Israeli military continued its mission.

 

The United Nations will be able to use the fuel in desalination plants to create clean drinking water, among other uses, Israeli officials said on Friday, after dwindling supplies were threatening to shut down humanitarian operations.

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4) Satellite imagery shows a water plant in Gaza City burned down amid a dire water shortage.

By Christoph Koettl, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Satellite imagery captured Friday shows the plant was burned to the ground. Credit...Maxar Technologies

Fire has gutted a water treatment plant on the outskirts of Gaza City, satellite images captured on Thursday and Friday show — the latest evidence of damage to water infrastructure amid an increasingly dire shortage of clean water.

 

A satellite picture from Thursday shows an enormous plume of smoke rising from the fire and hanging over a wide swath of the city. The fire burned for at least four hours. An image from Friday shows the entire plant was destroyed.

 

It was not clear what caused the fire, or how recently the plant had been operating.

 

The fire broke out amid a water crisis in Gaza, with UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, warning that 70 percent of people in the Gaza Strip are drinking contaminated water. With critical infrastructure destroyed and relatively few trucks carrying fuel and water permitted to enter Gaza, the water emergency has only spiraled.

 

On Friday, a U.N. expert urged Israel to allow clean water into the territory, along with fuel to run water treatment systems, and called on the country to “stop using water as a weapon of war.”

 

The expert, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the organization’s special rapporteur on human rights and drinking water, told The New York Times that Israel’s bombing campaign has hit wells, water tanks and other water supply infrastructure. With little potable groundwater, Gaza relies heavily on desalination and water delivered from outside.

 

“But above all, by completely cutting off electricity and fuel supplies, desalination plants, and groundwater pumping, the very functioning of the supply network has collapsed,” he said.

 

Wim Zwijnenburg, a conflict and environmental researcher for the Dutch organization PAX, who shared details from an upcoming report on the destruction of water infrastructure, also said Pax “has identified numerous water facilities that have been damaged or destroyed that deprive civilians from access to clean water.”

 

The infrastructure damage caused by the continuing fighting “poses acute and long-term health and environmental risks” to the people of Gaza, he said.

 

A private company, Abdul Salam Yaseen Company, also called Eta Water Company, operated out of the plant that burned this week. Older images show the words “Water Plant” were written in large letters on the building’s roof, clearly visible from the sky.

 

Eta Water could not be reached, likely because of the continuing communication disruptions in Gaza.

 

Both the company’s website and its Facebook page highlight its work with humanitarian organizations in Gaza. Eta’s last social media post, on Nov. 8, showed the company installing water desalination units it said were funded by UNICEF at a crowded refugee site in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. A September post by the company highlighted a project with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

 

Aid agencies did not immediately reply to questions about whether the destruction of Eta’s facility would have an immediate impact on access to clean water. The Times reviewed satellite images showing water trucks lining up at the plant as recently as Oct. 12, before most residents fled northern Gaza for the south and Israel launched a ground invasion that, along with the Israeli bombing campaign, has left large parts of Gaza City in ruins.

 

There have been street battles near the plant, but it is unclear if any occurred in the area on Thursday. The satellite image from Friday does not appear to show the large impact crater typically left by an Israeli airstrike.

 

Israeli ground forces had been operating nearby; sometime in the 24 hours leading up to the fire the Israelis appear to have bulldozed an area 400 feet from the plant, and new tracks from heavy vehicles were visible. Israeli tanks and other military vehicles were stationed less than a mile away.

 

Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.

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5) The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children

By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html

Khaled Joudeh, 9, mourning over the body of his baby sister, Misk, last month in Deir al Balah, Gaza.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Thousands of children have been killed in the enclave since the Israeli assault began, officials in Gaza say. The Israeli military says it takes “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian deaths.

 

Barefoot and weeping, Khaled Joudeh, 9, hurried toward the dozens of bodies wrapped in white burial shrouds, blankets and rugs outside the overcrowded morgue.

 

“Where’s my mom?” he cried next to a photographer for The New York Times. “I want to see my mom.”

 

“Where is Khalil?” he continued, barely audible between sobs as he asked for his 12-year-old brother. A morgue worker opened a white shroud, so Khaled could kiss his brother one final time.

 

Then, he bid farewell to his 8-month-old sister. Another shroud was pulled back, revealing the blood-caked face of a baby, her strawberry-red hair matted down. Khaled broke into fresh sobs as he identified her to the hospital staff. Her name was Misk, Arabic for musk.

 

“Mama was so happy when she had you,” he whispered, gently touching her forehead, tears streaming down his face onto hers.

 

She was the joy of his family, relatives later said — after three boys, his parents were desperate for a girl. When she was born, they said, Khaled’s mother delighted in dressing Misk in frilly, colorful dresses, pinning her tiny curls in bright hair clips.

 

Through his tears, Khaled bid farewell to his mother, father, older brother and sister, their bodies lined up around him. Only Khaled and his younger brother, Tamer, 7, survived what relatives and local journalists said was an airstrike on Oct. 22 that toppled two buildings sheltering their extended family.

 

A total of 68 members of the Joudeh family were killed that day as they slept in their beds in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, three of Khaled’s relatives recounted in separate interviews.

 

Several branches and generations of the Joudehs, a Palestinian family, had been huddling together before the strike, relatives said, including some who had fled northern Gaza, as Israel had ordered residents to do. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

 

In the end, members of the family were buried together, side by side in a long grave, relatives said, showing footage of the burial and sharing a picture of Misk before she was killed.

 

Gaza, the United Nations warns, has become “a graveyard for thousands of children.”

 

Determining the precise number of children killed in Gaza — in the midst of a fierce bombing campaign, with hospitals collapsing, children missing, bodies buried under rubble and neighborhoods in ruins — is a Sisyphean task. Health officials in Gaza say that 5,000 Palestinian children have been killed since the Israeli assault began, and possibly hundreds more. Many international officials and experts familiar with the way death tolls are compiled in the territory say the overall numbers are generally reliable.

 

If the figures are even close to accurate, far more children have been killed in Gaza in the past six weeks than the 2,985 children killed in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified deaths in armed conflict.

 

The Israeli military says that, unlike the “murderous assault against women, children, elderly and the disabled” by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israeli forces take “all feasible precautions” to “mitigate harm” to civilians.

 

Hamas, the military said, deliberately caused “the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians.” During the attack on Israel, parents and their children were gunned down inside their homes, witnesses and officials say, with children taken as hostages.

 

In response, the Israeli military says, it is waging a war “forcefully to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.” It notes that Israeli forces have told residents to flee to southern Gaza, and says that they issue warnings before airstrikes “when possible.”

 

But the furious pace of the strikes — more than 15,000 to date, according to the Israeli military, including in southern Gaza as well — makes the Israeli bombing campaign on the Palestinian territory one of the most intense of the 21st century. And it is happening in a dense urban enclave under siege with high concentrations of civilians, particularly children, setting off mounting global alarm, even from some of Israel’s closest allies.

 

After initially questioning the death toll reported by health officials in Gaza, the Biden administration now says that “far too many” Palestinians have been killed, conceding that the true figures for civilian casualties may be “even higher than are being cited.”

 

So many children are brought into the morgue at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah that the morgue director, Yassir Abu Amar, says he has to cut his burial shrouds into child-size fragments to handle the influx of corpses.

 

“The children’s bodies come to us broken and in pieces,” he said. “It’s chilling.”

 

“We’ve never seen this number of children killed,” he added. “We cry every day. Every day, we cry while we’re working to prepare the children.”

 

During previous wars, parents in Gaza, a crowded strip with more than two million people, sometimes put their children to bed in different rooms of their homes. If an airstrike damaged one part of the house, the other children might live.

 

Given the scale of the bombardment this time — which many Gazans describe as indiscriminate and without warning — some parents have put much greater distances between their children, splitting them up and sending them to relatives in different parts of the Gaza Strip to try to increase their odds of survival. Others have taken to scrawling names directly onto their children’s skin, in case they are lost, orphaned or killed and need to be identified.

 

In the emergency room of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said that many children had been brought in alone and in shock, with burns, shrapnel wounds or severe injuries from being crushed by rubble. In many cases, he said, no one knew who they were.

 

“They are given a designation — ‘Unknown Trauma Child’ — until someone recognizes them,” he said. “The crippling thing is that some of them are the sole survivors of their family, so no one ever comes.”

 

“More and more, it seems like a war against children,” said Dr. Abu-Sittah.

 

Two weeks ago, the emergency room at Al-Shifa registered “Unknown Trauma Child 1,500,” Dr. Abu-Sittah said.

 

Then, in recent days, Israeli forces stormed the hospital, where thousands of Gazans had been sheltering, saying that the facility sat above an underground Hamas command center. United Nations officials warned that the raid put Gaza’s most vulnerable in even greater jeopardy.

 

International experts who have worked with health officials in Gaza during this and other wars say that hospitals and morgues in the enclave gather and report the names, ID numbers and other details of people who have been killed in the territory. While the experts urged caution around public statements about the specific number of people killed in a particular strike — especially in the immediate aftermath of a blast — they said the aggregate death tolls reported by health workers in Gaza have typically proven to be accurate.

 

The Israeli military says it “regrets any harm caused to civilians (especially children),” adding that it is examining “all its operations” to ensure that it follows its own rules and adheres to international law.

 

But a growing number of human rights groups and officials contend that Israel has already broken that law.

 

After condemning the “heinous, brutal and shocking” attacks by Hamas as war crimes, Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said this month, “The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.”

 

“The massive bombardments by Israel have killed, maimed and injured in particular women and children,” he added. “All of this has an unbearable toll.”

 

Some international officials warn that children are in danger no matter where they go. “There is nowhere safe for Gaza’s one million children to turn,” said Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF.

 

On Oct. 15, Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa said that he was on a 24-hour shift at Al-Nasr Hospital in Khan Younis — south of the evacuation line drawn by Israel — when he heard a loud explosion nearby. He called his wife at home, but when she answered, he said, all he heard were screams.

 

Soon, he said, his wife, 12-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son were brought into the emergency room, bloodied, hysterical and covered in dust from rubble. He tried to comfort them, but panicked when he noticed that his youngest son, 7-year-old Yousef, was not with them.

 

“Where’s Yousef?” he recalled asking.

 

No one would answer.

 

When he pressed again about his son, he said a neighbor simply responded, “May God have mercy on his soul.”

 

Dr. Abu Moussa didn’t want to believe it. Video from journalists at the hospital shows him frantically searching for Yousef. Dr. Abu Moussa recounted how he had asked other departments, including the intensive care unit, whether his son had been rushed there instead.

 

Then, he said, a journalist showed him pictures of their demolished home. Dr. Abu Moussa said he recognized the gray clothing Yousef had been wearing when he kissed him goodbye before leaving the house.

 

With dread, Dr. Abu Moussa walked from the emergency room to the hospital morgue. That’s where he said he finally found Yousef, a jokester with a cheeky smile who stuck out his tongue in photographs. Now, his lifeless body was lying on a gurney.

 

The shock was too much to bear. Dr. Abu Moussa recalled looking away before a colleague embraced him.

 

Multiple relatives said that airstrikes had hit their home without warning, and that Dr. Abu Moussa’s family had been pulled from the rubble. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

 

“Yousef was a very loved child,” said his mother, Rawan, a fitness instructor. “He was always smiling. He loved to laugh and make people laugh.”

 

At home, the boy had wanted to eat every meal next to his father, or in his lap, sometimes even sharing the same spoon.

 

“He would emulate me in everything I did,” Dr. Abu Moussa said, adding that his son had wanted to become a doctor as well.

 

Yousef was not the only one killed. Dr. Abu Moussa’s brother, Jasir Abu Moussa, lost both of his sons and his wife, family members said.

 

Dr. Abu Moussa’s nephew Hmaid, 18, had recently graduated from high school with high marks, the family said. He got his love of cars from his father and, from his mother, a love of poetry and art. He had hopes of studying mechanical engineering in Europe, relatives said, and had begun studying German even as he was studying for his high school exams.

 

His younger brother, Abdulrahman, 8, was even smarter, the family said. He was killed, too.

 

“He was a handful,” Jasir Abu Moussa said of his younger son. “But he was also very smart, and delightful.”

 

Death colors the living, as well.

 

Many children are showing clear signs of trauma, including night terrors, said Nida Zaeem, a mental health field officer with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.

 

“They are waking up shouting, screaming,” Ms. Zaeem said from a Red Cross shelter in Rafah, in the south, where she is staying with her family, including four children. Each night, she added, children in the shelter yell, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die.”

 

“They are shouting, pleading, ‘Please protect me, please, please hide me. I don’t want to die,’” she added.

 

In an encampment sheltering thousands of people around a United Nations center, Hammoud Qadada, 4, tried to focus on a video game inside a tent as the thundering sound of strikes were close enough to shake the ground beneath him.

 

When the soccer players on the screen scored, everyone in the tent — his siblings, cousins and other children from the makeshift encampment — yelled “goooaaal” so loudly that people in nearby tents thought a cease-fire had been announced.

 

Their parents had hooked up a television to a solar panel and, when it seemed safe enough, people played real soccer outside between the tents — trying to distract the children.

 

It wasn’t enough.

 

The next morning, Hammoud’s grandmother said he woke up and said, “I’m going to die.”

 

“I told him no,” said his grandmother Hanaan Jaber, 53. “God willing, you will grow up and you will get married and tell your children what happened with us here, like a story.”

 

Hammoud’s vocabulary has already been shaped by the war. Soon after it started, he asked his parents what “martyrdom” meant. When asked what is happening around him, he answers without hesitation: “Airstrikes. Airstrikes and war.”

 

Gaza, a coastal strip where cabanas and food shacks line the Mediterranean, once had a lively beach culture. Yasser Abou Ishaq, 34, recalled how he used to teach his three young daughters how to swim.

 

“They were always asking me to go to the beach, to the amusement park, to the parks,” he said. “I loved watching them play.”

 

Amal, his oldest, 7, was named after his mother. At school, she was a good student with excellent penmanship, he recalled. At home, she became the teacher who made her younger sister Israa, a 4-year-old who loved chocolate and Kinder toys, play along as the student.

 

When his home was destroyed by what he said was an airstrike, he lost them both, he said. His wife was killed as well, he said.

 

In all, 25 members of his family, 15 of them children, have been killed, he said. Local journalists reported a strike and shared footage of bodies in burial shrouds — members of the Abou Ishaq family, they said — lined up on the ground as relatives cried over them. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

 

Mr. Abou Ishaq said that he and his 1-year-old daughter, Habiba, had been wounded and taken to the hospital. Most of his family, including his wife and Amal, were pulled from the rubble the same day and buried by relatives, he said, while he was still being treated. He never got the chance to say goodbye, he said.

 

The next day, Israa’s body was pulled from the rubble, he said. He was able to see her in the hospital’s morgue and hold her one last time.

 

“I hugged and kissed her. I said goodbye and I cried,” he said. “God only knows how much I cried.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Yuhas, Samar Abu Elouf, Ameera Harouda and Abu Bakr Bashir

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6) Thousands of bodies lie buried in rubble in Gaza. Families dig to retrieve them, often by hand

By Wafaa Shurafa and Samy Magdy, November 17, 2023

https://news.yahoo.com/thousands-bodies-lie-buried-rubble-041957461.html

A home in Deir al Balah was struck on October 15, 2023.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The wreckage goes on for block after devastated block. The smell is sickening. Every day, hundreds of people claw through tons of rubble with shovels and iron bars and their bare hands.

 

They are looking for the bodies of their children. Their parents. Their neighbors. All of them killed in Israeli missile strikes. The corpses are there, somewhere in the endless acres of destruction.

 

More than five weeks into Israel’s war against Hamas, some streets are more like graveyards. Officials in Gaza say they don’t have the equipment, manpower or fuel to search properly for the living, let alone the dead.

 

Israel says its strikes target fighters and the infrastructure of Hamas, the militant group behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel. Hamas often operates in residential areas, and Israel accuses it of using the civilian population as human shields, though it does not explain specific targeting reasons for most strikes.

 

The victims are often everyday Palestinians, many of whom have yet to be found.

 

Omar al-Darawi and his neighbors have spent weeks searching the ruins of a pair of four-story houses in central Gaza. Forty-five people lived in the homes; 32 were killed. In the first days after the attack, 27 bodies were recovered.

 

The five still missing were al-Darawi’s cousins.

 

They include Amani, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom whose husband and four children also died. There’s Aliaa, 28, who was taking care of her aging parents. There’s another Amani, who died with her 14-year-old daughter. Her husband and their five sons survived.

 

“The situation has become worse every day,” said the 23-year-old, who was once a college journalism student. The smell has become unbearable.

 

“We can’t stop,” he said. “We just want to find and bury them” before their bodies are lost in the rubble forever.

 

More than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed buried in the ruins.

 

The missing add layers of pain to Gaza’s families, who are overwhelmingly Muslim. Islam calls for the dead to be buried quickly — within 24 hours if possible — with the shrouded bodies turned to face the holy city of Mecca. Traditionally, the body is washed by family members with soap and scented water, and prayers for forgiveness are said at the gravesite.

 

The search is particularly difficult in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, where Israeli ground forces are battling Hamas militants. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled southward, terrified by the combat and pushed by Israeli warnings to evacuate. In the south, continued Israeli airstrikes and shelling mean nowhere is safe in the tiny territory.

 

The Palestinian Civil Defense department, Gaza’s primary search-and-rescue force, has had more than two dozen workers killed and over 100 injured since the war began, said spokesman Mahmoud Bassal.

 

More than half its vehicles are either without fuel or damaged by strikes, he said.

 

In central Gaza, outside the northern combat zone, the area's civil defense director has no working heavy equipment at all, including bulldozers and cranes.

 

“We actually don’t have fuel to keep the sole bulldozer we have operating," said Rami Ali al-Aidei.

 

At least five bulldozers are needed just to search a series of collapsed high-rise buildings in the town of Deir al-Balah, he said.

 

This means that bodies, and the desperate people searching for them, are not the focus.

 

“We’re prioritizing areas where we think we will find survivors,” said Bassal.

 

As a result, the search for bodies often falls to relatives or volunteers like Bilal Abu Sama, a former freelance journalist.

 

He ticks off a handful of Deir al-Balah’s victims: 10 corpses still lost in what is left of the al-Salam Mosque; two dozen bodies missing in a destroyed home; 10 missing in another mosque attack.

 

“Will those bodies remain under the rubble until the war ends? OK, when will the war end?” said Abu Sama, 30, describing how families dig through the wreckage without tools. “The bodies will be decomposed. Many of them have already decomposed.”

 

On Tuesday, 28 days after an airstrike flattened his home, Izzel-Din al-Moghari found his cousin’s body.

 

Twenty-four people from his extended family lived in the home in the Bureij refugee camp. All but three were killed.

 

Eight are still missing.

 

A bulldozer came three days after the strike to clear the road, then left quickly for another collapsed building. The bulldozer came again Tuesday and helped find al-Moghari's cousin.

 

Al-Moghari then went back into the wreckage in search of his father and other relatives.

 

"I am stunned,” he said. “What we lived through is indescribable.”

 

Gaza has become a place where many families are denied even the comfort of a funeral.

 

Al-Darawi, the man searching for his cousins, understands that.

 

“Those who found their dead are lucky," he said.

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7) Gaza’s largest hospital has become a ‘death zone,’ the U.N. says.

By Vivek Shankar, November 19, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/19/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Patients and internally displaced people in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City earlier this month. Credit...Khader Al Zanoun/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Nearly four days after the Israeli military stormed the biggest hospital in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization described the complex as a “death zone” where several patients had died because medical services had been shut down.

 

There were 291 patients, including 32 babies in extremely critical condition, remaining at Al-Shifa Hospital, the U.N. agency said in a statement late Saturday, after Israeli forces allowed a U.N. team to tour the facility for an hour. Earlier in the day, hundreds of patients and civilians sheltering at the hospital had fled south.

 

The W.H.O. said that that movement came after an evacuation order from the Israeli military. But Israeli officials said that they had agreed to a request from the hospital authorities to allow safe passage for people who wanted to leave Al-Shifa, and that they had brought food and water into the complex.

 

Capturing the hospital — and Gaza City, the largest urban center in the enclave — was a watershed moment for Israel last week. Officials have said that the complex and tunnels underneath have been used by Hamas to shelter fighters and weapons, and to plan for attacks, including the one on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel. Both the Palestinian armed group and Al-Shifa officials have denied the accusation that Hamas had a command center under the hospital.

 

Israel has yet to provide conclusive proof of a subterranean military base at the hospital. The United States has backed the assertion about the tunnels but has also said that Israel must do more to protect civilians as the death toll rises after six weeks of war.

 

Israeli forces are continuing operations at Al-Shifa, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a military spokesman, said in a statement. Their top priority, he said, was uncovering information about the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.

 

Six weeks after that assault, the fate of the more than 200 people identified by Israel as abducted by Hamas and other groups remains uncertain. The United States has been trying to broker an agreement to free some hostages, but a deal remains elusive. And Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza have killed more than 11,000 people, a vast number of them children, according to the local authorities.

 

At Al-Shifa Hospital, Israeli troops discovered a shaft on Friday night and were scouring the underground area it led to, Admiral Hagari said. The military said it plans to release images and video from that operation.

 

Heavy fighting continues near the hospital, according to the W.H.O. It said the U.N. team spent only an hour inside Al-Shifa but found “evident” signs of shelling and gunfire. U.N. personnel also saw a mass grave at the entrance that they were told contained the bodies of more than 80 people, the W.H.O. statement added.

 

The W.H.O. said it was trying make arrangements to move the remaining patients — including the 32 babies in need of urgent care — and the 25 or so health workers still at Al-Shifa to other hospitals in Gaza.

 

“Immediate efforts must be made to restore the functionality of Al-Shifa and all other hospitals to provide urgently needed health care services in Gaza,” the W.H.O. statement said. It again called for an immediate cease-fire, a sustained flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the unconditional release of all hostages and a halt to attacks on health care and other vital civilian facilities.

 

Since the beginning of war, Israel has ordered Gazans to move south, away from Hamas strongholds, saying they would be safer there. But those areas have not been immune from Israeli attacks. On Saturday, airstrikes pounded parts of southern Gaza, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority’s news agency. The Israeli military did not immediately confirm the strikes.

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8) Another 10,000 Gazans have moved south, the U.N. says.

By Vivian Yee, Nov. 19, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/19/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

A satellite image released by Maxar Technologies shows a large crowd heading south on the Salah Al-Din Road in Gaza on Friday. The United Nations said evacuees had described an Israeli checkpoint along the road. Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Getty Images

As the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas engulfs northern Gaza, about 10,000 more people evacuated from the territory’s north to its south on Saturday using a route designated by the Israeli military, according to United Nations estimates.

 

The Israeli military has been opening the route for several hours each day, promising safe passage for civilians to escape the fighting. But evacuees have described the route as a risky journey with an uncertain outcome. Along the way, they brave what they have said is incoming fire and the physical strain of a long trek. Once they reach the south, they have found overcrowded shelters and scarcities of food and water. Israeli airstrikes have pounded southern Gaza, too.

 

The United Nations said in a statement late Saturday that it was increasingly seeing children traveling alone among the evacuees, who were arriving in southern Gaza by donkey carts and buses and on foot.

 

Evacuees have told U.N. staff that Israeli forces established a checkpoint along the main north-south artery, Salah Al-Din Road, where they were ordered to show their IDs and undergo what they described as a facial recognition scan, the statement said. Though Israeli soldiers were not at the checkpoint itself, which consists of two structures, evacuees described being told from afar to file through it, according to the U.N.

 

Satellite imagery taken and released by Maxar Technologies on Friday appeared to support those reports, showing a large crowd of people bottlenecked just before two rectangular gray structures on the road.

 

The United Nations said evacuees had reported the Israeli military making arrests along the road. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military about reports of arrests.

 

The Israeli military said on Sunday that the evacuation corridor was open again, and it urged people to move south for their safety.

 

The relief organization Doctors Without Borders said a convoy trying to evacuate its Palestinian staff members and their families to the south had been stuck at a checkpoint for hours on Saturday when the sound of gunfire prompted it to turn around and head north again.

 

When it returned to Gaza City, an attack on the convoy killed one family member and injured another, the organization said, without specifying who was behind the attack. It called for an immediate cease-fire, “which is the only way for corridors to be implemented in order to safely evacuate trapped civilians.”

 

When asked previously about reports of civilians being shot at and arrested on the road south, the Israel military has said that it is targeting Hamas throughout Gaza and that it takes steps to limit civilian casualties. It maintains that Hamas, not Israel, is preventing people from leaving safely.

 

Southern Gaza is straining from the influx of arrivals from the northern part of the enclave, with doctors saying that the hospitals there are overwhelmed. The United Nations said that shelters are so overcrowded that an average of 150 people share a single toilet and 700 share a single shower, with many displaced people sleeping out in the open against the walls of shelters. Amid the overcrowded conditions, respiratory illnesses and diarrhea are spreading fast, the U.N. warned.

 

More than 1.6 million people have been displaced since the war began on Oct. 7, according to U.N. figures, and more rush from their homes every day amid the fighting in the north and airstrikes throughout the coastal strip. More than half of the homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, affecting housing for more than 1 million people, and at least 200,000 people have no home to return to, the United Nations said on Nov. 7.

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9) Thirty-one premature babies at Al-Shifa Hospital are evacuated to southern Gaza

By Vivian Yee, Nov. 19, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/19/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news#premature-babies-al-shifa-hospital-gaza-evacuation

A Palestinian medic caring for premature babies who were taken to a hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Credit...Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Thirty-one premature babies in extremely critical condition were evacuated from the embattled Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza on Sunday and taken to another hospital in the enclave’s south, the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the World Health Organization said on social media.

 

Emergency medical workers from the Red Crescent and the W.H.O., a United Nations agency, took the infants by ambulance to Al-Helal Emirati Maternity Hospital in Rafah, where they were receiving urgent care.

 

Officials in Gaza and Egypt have said the babies will be transported over the border to Egypt for treatment, though the timing was unclear. On Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry published a list of the 31 infant evacuees and issued a call for their families to go to the hospital to identify them, adding that the parents might be able to join the babies in Egypt.

 

The W.H.O.’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posted a photo on X, formerly Twitter, of a staff member in a blue United Nations helmet and bulletproof vest scooping up a tiny infant. The babies, along with six health care workers and 10 family members of hospital employees, were evacuated “under extremely intense and high-risk security conditions,” he wrote.

 

As Israel’s push to seize Al-Shifa Hospital set off a desperate struggle to survive there in recent days, doctors and health officials warned that nearly 40 premature babies in incubators in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit were at particular risk of dying. Some of them had been born to mothers who had been killed in airstrikes or who died shortly after giving birth, doctors at Al-Shifa have said. Some were the only survivors in their families.

 

Medical workers placed the babies together on beds and hoped for the best as fuel to power the incubators — as well as dialysis machines, ventilators and other lifesaving equipment — dwindled.

 

Since Nov. 11, at least 40 patients, including at least four premature babies, have died in Al-Shifa because of power outages, the United Nations said on Saturday, citing hospital officials.

 

Fighting has raged at and around Al-Shifa for more than a week. More than 2,500 civilians, patients and staff members left the facility on Saturday after receiving an evacuation order from the Israeli military, the W.H.O. said in a statement. The agency called the hospital a “death zone.”

 

But the W.H.O. and health officials in the south have warned that the hospitals there are already stretched far too thin to accommodate new patients evacuating from Al-Shifa and other hospitals in the north.

 

Al-Helal, the maternity hospital where the premature babies were taken on Sunday, posted a video of its neonatal intensive care unit a day earlier in which an unnamed doctor says that Al-Helal, too, would run out of fuel by Monday.

 

For premature babies, “this is a death sentence carried out the moment the electricity is cut off,” the doctor says.

 

Israel has been reluctant to supply fuel to Gaza for fear that it would be used by Hamas, the Palestinian group that runs Gaza, in its war with Israel. Israel recently began allowing small amounts of fuel into the strip, but the U.N. and aid groups say it is far too little to address the growing humanitarian crisis there.

 

Iyad Abuheweila and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

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10) At least 24 people were killed in a strike on Gaza school used as a shelter, the U.N. says.

By Hiba Yazbek, Nov. 19, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/19/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news#premature-babies-al-shifa-hospital-gaza-evacuation

A child waved a white flag as she and other Palestinians fled to the south on Saturday. Credit...Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A strike this weekend on a school run by the United Nations that was being used for shelter by thousands of displaced people in northern Gaza killed at least 24 people, a U.N. official said Sunday.

 

Palestinian officials had said on Saturday that many people were killed and injured in an Israeli attack on the Al-Fakhura school, which was being used as a shelter by adults and children, in the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza.

 

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees, gave a death toll on Sunday and said that there were nearly 7,000 displaced people sheltering in the school when the strike hit. He did not give a number for the wounded or suggest who was responsible.

 

The Israeli military said that it had received reports of an incident on Saturday in the Jabaliya area and that it was under review, adding that it was “committed to international law including taking feasible steps to minimize harm to civilians.”

 

Mr. Lazzarini said that another school, where some 4,000 displaced people were sheltering at the time, in Gaza City, was “directly struck” on Friday, and ambulances “could not reach the school to provide help.” His agency, UNRWA, said it believed that scores of people had been either killed or wounded, but did not have exact numbers.

 

At least 176 displaced people sheltering at schools run by UNRWA have been reported killed and nearly 800 wounded since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign against Gaza on Oct. 7, the UNRWA statement added. Classes have been suspended and the schools have been converted into shelters across Gaza.

 

The agency said that it was still verifying its figures for the numbers of dead and wounded, but that it had confirmed that at least 17 of its facilities have been directly hit.

 

The “large number of UNRWA facilities hit and the number of civilians killed cannot just be ‘collateral damage’,” Mr. Lazzarini said in the statement. The agency’s facilities were clearly marked as U.N. buildings and their coordinates were regularly shared with both sides of the conflict, he said, adding that “This is yet another proof that no one, and nowhere is safe in Gaza.”

 

The Al-Fakhura school was also hit by a strike on Nov. 4, killing at least 12 people and wounding 54 others, UNRWA said.

 

According to UNRWA, almost 900,000 displaced people are sheltering in the agency’s facilities across the Gaza Strip. They include many people who fled northern Gaza following Israeli orders to evacuate the area amid an escalation in ground fighting there.

 

Families who were sheltering at UNRWA schools in the south described overcrowded facilities where food and water were scarce.

 

Ihab Abedrabo said he had been sheltering with his mother, wife, and six children at a school run by the U.N. agency in the southern city of Khan Younis since a strike damaged their home.

 

His family, like thousands of others, had fled to the school hoping that they would be safe. But Mr. Abedrabo said this when a strike hit nearby earlier this week and sent shrapnel into the school, he again feared for his relatives’ lives.

 

“No place is safe,” he said. “However, I can’t think of a safer place to go.”

 

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London.

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11) Hospitals in southern Gaza are becoming overwhelmed, doctors say.

By Hiba Yazbek, Nov. 19, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/19/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news#premature-babies-al-shifa-hospital-gaza-evacuation

A wounded person arriving at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Friday. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

The influx of people wounded in airstrikes and those displaced from the north — many already suffering from injury and illness — is putting increasing pressure on hospitals in southern Gaza, a doctor said.

 

People who evacuated hospitals in the north and arrived at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, in the south, have been met with familiar scenes: Families were sleeping in overcrowded corridors while staff members scrambled to treat people amid a shortage of beds that left some patients on the floor, Dr. Saleh Al-Hamase, the head of nursing at the hospital, said in a phone interview.

 

He added that the hospital had received thousands of displaced people seeking shelter and dozens of patients who fled the north over the last two weeks as Israel has pushed further into Gaza.

 

“We are days away from running out of fuel and collapsing,” said Dr. Al-Hamase. “The scenes at the hospital are tragic, and the bombardment around us is continuous.”

 

The hospital was operating well over its capacity, Dr. Al-Hamase said, and staff members had to reuse disposable medical supplies and ration the remaining fuel by generating power for only essential services. The hospital’s water supply had mostly run out, he said, “due to the pressure on our supply from the huge number of displaced people staying here.”

 

Dozens of wounded people arrived at the hospital last week from Al-Shifa Hospital in the north after a nearly 16-mile journey, many on foot and some in wheelchairs, said Dr. Al-Hamase, while only the most severe cases were brought in ambulances.

 

The hospital was preparing on Saturday to receive another 200 patients arriving from Al-Shifa, Dr. Al-Hamase said in a WhatsApp message.

 

Israeli troops had gradually encircled, then raided the Al-Shifa complex on Wednesday in search of a Hamas command center. On Saturday, patients, medical workers and displaced people began leaving Al-Shifa, witnesses said. Some headed south toward Khan Younis.

 

The general director of Gaza’s hospitals, Dr. Muhammad Zaqout, warned on Tuesday that hospitals in the southern enclave had “begun to go out of service due to the running out of fuel.”

 

The main generator at Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis stopped working on Monday because of a lack of fuel, according to a statement by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, leaving medical staff, 90 patients and around 9,000 displaced people sheltering there to rely on a “very small generator to supply electricity only to the maternity ward and emergency lighting.”

 

“If the displacement crisis continues,” Dr. Al-Hamase said, “the health sector in Gaza will completely collapse.”

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12) The deaths of Israeli Druse soldiers bring a debate about equality back to the fore.

By Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 19, 2023

"For many Druse though, that 'covenant of blood' was fractured five years ago when the Israeli government at the time pushed a highly contentious law through Parliament that enshrined the right of national self-determination as 'unique to the Jewish people.'

 "Hailed at the time as 'historic' by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, the measure — known as the Nation-State Law — was immediately denounced by centrists and leftists as racist and anti-democratic. What was most divisive for Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up about a fifth of the population of more than nine million and includes the estimated 150,000 Druse, was the law’s omission of any mention of democracy or equality for all citizens." [Israeli "democracy"]

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/19/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Friends and family mourn Capt. Jamal Abbas, 23, a soldier from Israel’s Druse minority who was killed in the Gaza Strip, at his funeral in Pekiin in northern Israel on Sunday. Credit...Shir Torem/Reuters

The deaths of at least six Israeli Druse soldiers in the fighting that began on Oct. 7 has reignited a fraught national debate over equality and prompted calls for urgent legislation to acknowledge the place of the minority Druse community in Israeli society.

 

The Israeli Druse, a tiny Arabic-speaking minority, forged an early alliance with the Zionist forces fighting for an Israeli state before it was established in 1948 — one which both groups have called a “covenant of blood.” Like most Jewish Israeli 18-year-olds, Druse men are conscripted into military service. More than 400 Druse soldiers and members of the security forces have died fighting for Israel over the decades.

 

For many Druse though, that “covenant of blood” was fractured five years ago when the Israeli government at the time pushed a highly contentious law through Parliament that enshrined the right of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people.”

 

Hailed at the time as “historic” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, the measure — known as the Nation-State Law — was immediately denounced by centrists and leftists as racist and anti-democratic. What was most divisive for Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up about a fifth of the population of more than nine million and includes the estimated 150,000 Druse, was the law’s omission of any mention of democracy or equality for all citizens.

 

Emotions around the issue have resurfaced since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. The Israeli military said Saturday that two more Druse soldiers — Capt. Jamal Abbas, 23, and Staff Sgt. Adi Malik Harb, 19 — had been killed in Gaza, bringing to six the number of Druse to fall in the war.

 

The Druse community leader, Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, sent a letter to Mr. Netanyahu and to the opposition leader, Yair Lapid, earlier this month urging Parliament and the government to amend the Nation-State Law in light of Druse sacrifices in the war against Hamas.

 

Israel’s social welfare minister, Yaakov Margi, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas party, also called for an amendment to the law when he attended a Nov. 7 memorial for two Druse soldiers killed in the war.

 

The Nation-State Law is one of more than a dozen basic laws that together serve as a kind of constitution for Israel and can be amended only if more than half the members of the 120-seat legislature approve. The current Israeli government has not appeared inclined to amend it.

 

Late on Saturday, as public pressure appeared to mount, Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, and the coalition whip, Ofir Katz, issued a statement saying they would put forward a proposal for an additional law dedicated to “anchoring the important status of the Druse community in the state of Israel.”

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13) What Happens When the Super Rich Are This Selfish? (It Isn’t Pretty.)

By Guido Alfani, Nov. 19, 2023

Mr. Alfani is an economic history professor at Bocconi University in Milan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/opinion/rich-billionaires-philanthropy-covid.html

Bendik Kaltenborn

Throughout much of the Western world’s history, the wealthiest have been viewed in their communities as a potentially unfavorable presence, and they have attempted to allay this sentiment by using their riches to support their societies in times of crises like plagues, famines or wars.

 

This symbiotic relationship no longer exists. Today’s rich, their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, have opposed reforms aimed at tapping their resources to fund mitigation policies of all kinds.

 

This is a historically exceptional development. Helping foot the bill of major crises has long been the main social function attributed to the rich by Western culture. In the past, when the wealthiest have been perceived to be insensitive to the plight of the masses, and especially when they have appeared to be profiteering from such plights (or have simply been suspected of doing so), society has become unstable, leading to riots, open revolts and anti-rich violence. As history has the unpleasant feature of repeating itself, we would do well to consider recent developments, including legislators’ inability to increase taxes on the rich, from a long-term perspective.

 

Let us begin with the consideration that the presence of very rich, or even superrich, individuals has always been somewhat troubling for Western societies. Medieval theologians regarded the rich as sinners and thought that the building of large fortunes should have been discouraged. At the very least, the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy and to provide generous bequests to charitable institutions to the benefit of their souls.

 

But with time, as new economic opportunities in trade and in finance led to the accumulation of fortunes of unprecedented size, the increased presence of extremely wealthy individuals within the community could no longer be dismissed as an anomaly. From the 15th century, and beginning with the most economically developed areas of Europe such as central-northern Italy, the rich were assigned a specific social role: to act as private reserves of money into which the community could tap in times of dire need.

 

Nobody made this point better than the Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini. In his treatise “De avaritia” (“On avarice”), completed in 1428, he argued that  cities that follow the tradition of instituting public granaries to build up food reserves should also be well provided of “many greedy individuals, in order … to constitute a kind of private barn of money able to be of assistance to everybody.”

 

There is abundant historical evidence that for centuries, across the West, the rich have dutifully fulfilled their role of “barns of money” in a variety of ways, which included accepting to pay exceptional taxes during crises or to provide loans to governments. Often, in early modern times, these were technically “forced” loans to ruling authorities, although the fact that they were not a prerogative of absolute monarchies but were also required, usually in wartime, by republican governments such as that of Venice should make us wary of considering them the mere expression of an arbitrary power. Indeed, the rich merchants who were the main “victims” of forced loans were also the rulers of patrician republics and understood they were contributing their private resources to the public good. For example, forced loans were imposed by Venice upon its richest citizens after the terrible plague of 1630 as well as to fund an exhausting war with the Ottoman Empire during 1645-69, although on both occasions the republic was able to raise much greater amounts from its own patricians by means of voluntary loans.

 

This is not altogether different from the patriotism with which many among the rich subscribed to various emergency loans during the World Wars, such as the Liberty Bonds issued in the United States in 1917-18 to contribute to funding the Allied war effort. These loans proved to be a poor investment, as the interest tended to become negative in real terms because of hyperinflation. But in the 20th century as in the 17th, the boundary between free choice and constriction was blurred, as governments welcomed any opportunity to increase the social pressure on those reluctant to contribute. Sometimes they went even further: In Britain in 1917 the chancellor of the Exchequer explicitly threatened the nation’s financiers with confiscation of company assets unless specified minimum amounts of capital were raised by a new, “voluntary” War Loan.

 

In the 20th century, the real novelty in how the rich were required to step up their wartime contribution was the expansion of progressive taxation, with substantial increases in the top rates of the personal income tax (in the United States the historical maximum was reached in 1944-45, at 94 percent for incomes over $200,000) and of estate or inheritance taxes. Of course, historically, wars provide the best possible motivation to ask citizens to contribute more: either with their blood or with their cash. But in the 20th century, also during peacetime economic crises, most notably the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rich were expected to contribute considerably more than the general population to foot the bill of public action. For example, this was explicit in the fiscal package introduced in the United States as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

 

In the past 15 years we have experienced the Great Recession, which in some countries also led to the sovereign debt crisis, followed by the worst pandemic in a century or so, then by an ongoing war in Ukraine and the looming threat of large-scale conflict in the Middle East. Based on history, one would expect that in this period the rich would have been called once again to fulfill their traditional role, and indeed, proposals of this kind have entered the political debate in many Western countries.

 

But so far, in most of them discussion has not been followed by action, and recent fiscal reforms appear to have done little to make the rich contribute more. Recent surveys of fiscal reforms by European countries in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic show that increases in the top rates of the personal income tax or (where they exist) of wealth taxes have been rare and modest. In the United States, proposals by the Biden administration to increase taxation for the richest, such as the “billionaire minimum income tax,” have repeatedly failed to gather sufficient political support.

 

This is troubling, because the rich have stopped fulfilling the social role that has been their own for many centuries, making their position in society somewhat unclear.

 

Related to this, we should also consider whether the exceptional resilience of the rich to recent crises has been obtained in such a way as to make society as a whole less resilient — for the rich, protecting their fortunes from crises also involves protecting them from extra taxation, thus stripping public institutions of resources that could have been used for stronger mitigation policies, including those aimed at abating the sufferings (economic or otherwise) of the poorer strata. To some degree, governments compensated for this by expanding the public debt, which raises the question of who will repay it. Given the fact that many Western fiscal systems do not burden their wealthy to the same degree they once did, it seems probable that the bill for the Covid-19 crisis will weigh on the shoulders of the rich to an extremely low degree relative to the burden during past crises.

 

How could this be, since the public debate across Western countries strongly suggests that in perfect continuity with history, many (including a part of the rich, as shown by the “In Tax We Trust” campaign) considered it rather natural to ask the affluent to contribute more in these exceptional times? Another cultural constant in the history of the West is the widespread suspicion that if the richest components of society become involved directly in politics, they can exert an outsize influence on the political debate. This was clear in the Middle Ages, when across Europe many republican city governments tried to prohibit the richest families from gaining access to top public offices. And in the Modern Age this suspicion resurfaced regularly: Think of the debate about the growing concentration of economic and financial power in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, leading to (largely bipartisan) worries that a few superrich individuals might have determined the national politics as well.

 

But today, in many Western countries the political involvement of the very affluent is basically taken for granted, and in some of them, superrich individuals have even become presidents or prime ministers: Silvio Berlusconi, who was first elected prime minister of Italy in 1994, is an early case. Perhaps the recent attempts to make the rich contribute more during crises have been exceptionally unsuccessful because the rich themselves are so exceptionally well positioned to influence policymaking. After all, as affirmed by many of the superrich, in absolute terms they already pay more taxes than anybody else — an argument that could have come straight from the mouth of a 17th-century Venetian patrician, were it not for the fact that a patrician would not have felt compelled to provide any justification for his privileged fiscal treatment.

 

If the rich have been actively trying to avoid being made to contribute more, then they might not be doing themselves (or anybody else) a favor. In many Western countries, the electoral success of parties with a clear anti-establishment, anti-rich character most likely arises from widespread anger at an economic (and political) elite perceived as self-centered and self-serving. Arguably, this is also because the rich have reneged on a centuries-old social contract, shutting the doors to their barns of money.

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