Day Of Action to Commemorate Murdered Palestinians and All Journalists
Wednesday, December 27, 2023, 12:00 NOON
San Francisco Chronicle
5th and Mission St.
San Francisco
· Stop The War on Palestinian Journalists and People
· Shutdown All U.S. Military and Economic Aid to Israel
· Permanent End to War and Bombing Of Gaza and Targeting of Journalists in Gaza and the West Bank
*‘God Is Under the Rubble in Gaza’: Bethlehem’s Subdued Christmas, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bethlehem-christmas.html
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Labor for Palestine
Thousands of labor representatives marched Saturday, December 16, in Oakland, California. —Photo by Leon Kunstenaar
Video of December 16th Labor rally for Palestine.
Bay Area Unions and Workers Rally and March For Palestine In Oakland
https://youtu.be/L9k79honqIA
Over 1,000 trade unionists from around Northern California rallied and marched in Oakland to oppose the genocide in Gaza. It was announced during the rally that despite bureaucratic obstacles SEIU 1021 which has over 50,000 members had endorsed the rally and resolution. Unions formally endorsed included AFSCME 3299, OEA, UESF, SEIU 1021, ILWU Local 10, Inlandboatmen’s Union SF Region-ILWU, UNITE HERE Local 2, IFPTE Local 21, SF Public Defenders (workers, not union or unit), Stanford Graduate Workers, Trader Joes United (Rockridge), IWW Bay Area, IWW 460-650 - Ecology Center
National or statewide unions or units (with Bay Area members) that have called for a ceasefire: UAW (international), UAW Local 2865 (statewide), UAW Local 2320, APWU, Starbucks Workers United, California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, CIR/SEIU (national) SEIU-USWW (statewide), Staff Union of CIR/SEIU (unit of CWA local 1032).
The rally was sponsored by Bay Area Labor For Palestine and there was also another Labor For Palestine Rally in New York.
For More Information:
bayarealabor4palestine@gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
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Eric Clapton performing in London for Medical Aid to Gaza, December 11, playing a guitar painted with the colors of the Palestinian flag.
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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
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Viva Fidel!
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Stand With Palestinian Workers: Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!
“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-plus million per day) in bipartisan U.S. 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 Black, Indigenous, people of color (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).
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
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.)
The list of signers will be updated periodically.
info@laborforpalestine.net
laborforpalestine.net
The Labor for Palestine model resolution can be found at:
https://laborforpalestine.net
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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
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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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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
Poetic Petition to Genocide Joe Before He Eats His Turkey
Mr Genocide Joe
you have helped broker
a Thanksgiving truce
in Gaza
where your zionist partners
in war crimes
say they will stop
slaughtering "human animals"
for four days
but
Mr Genocide Joe
closer to home
you have your own hostages
taken in the cointelpro wars
who still languish
in cages
treated worse than animals
inhumanely
so
as you pardon
two turkeys
in the White House today
as you get ready to eat your military turkey
and have it too
it would at last be time
to unchain
at least two of your own "human animals" -
Mumia Abu-Jamal
and
Leonard Peltier
(c) Julia Wright. November 25, 2023. All Rights Reserved to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.
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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.
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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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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Letter from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson
November 6, 2023
I’m back at Red Onion. I have no lines of communication. They have me in the B-3 torture cellblock again where there is no access to a kiosk and they’re withholding my tablet anyway. Even if I had it, it’s no use with no kiosk to sync it to and send/receive messages.
This was a hit. Came from DOC HQ in response folks complaining about my being thrown in solitary at Sussex and the planted knife thing. Kyle Rosch was in on it. The warden and AW here said he’s having me sent back out of state. In any case I don’t want be in this racist trap.
They cut all my outstanding medical referrals to send here cuz there’s no major medical facility in this remote region. I was pending referral to the cardiac clinic at MCV hospital (Medical College of Virginia), which is on the other side of the state. Also was pending referral to urology there. They were supposed to do testing for congestive heart failure and kidney problems related to my legs, feet, and ankles chronic swelling, and other undiagnosed issues: chronic cough, fluid weight gain, sweats, fatigue, chest pain. They just cut these referrals all of which I have copies of from my medical files.
They’ve been removing documents from my file too. Like the order I had for oversize handcuffs—which I was gassed the morning I was transferred here for asking the transferring pigs to honor. They took the order out of my file to try to cover their asses. I and others have copies of that too. At this point things are hectic. I’m back in old form now. I was somewhat in hiatus, trying to get the medical care I needed and not provoking them to avoid the bs while that was going on. But the bs has found me once again : ). I need all possible help here. At a level a bit more intense than in the past cuz I need that diagnostic care they cut the referrals for and it’s not available in this remote area. They’d have to send me back to Sussex or another prison near MCU in the VDOC’s Central or Eastern Region. I’m in the most remote corner of the Western Region. My health is not good! And they’re using the medical quack staff here to rubber stamp blocking my referrals.
Although that lawyer may have given you a message from me, she is not helping me in any way. So no-one should assume because a lawyer surfaced that she is working on anything to aid me. Just have to emphasize that cuz past experience has shown that folks will take a lawyer’s seeming presence as grounds to believe that means some substantial help is here and their help is not needed. Again, I need all possible help here….My health depends on this call for help in a more immediate sense than the cancer situation. I’m having breathing and mobility problems, possibly cardiac related.
All power to the people!
Rashid
We need to contact these Virginia Department of Corrections personnel to protest::
VADOC~ Central Administration; USPS—P.O. Box 26963; Richmond, VA 23261
David Robinson Phone : 804-887-8078, Email~david.robinson@vadoc.virginia.gov
Virginia DOC ~ Director, Chadwick S Dotson, Phone~ (804) 674-3081 Email~Chadwick.Dotson@.vadoc.virginia.gov
Virginia Department of Corrections Interstate Compact Liaison
Kyle Rosch, Phone: 804-887-8404, Email: kyle.rosch@vadoc.virginia.gov
VADOC ~Central Administration
Rose L. Durbin, Phone~804-887-7921Email~Rose.Durbin@vadoc.virgina.gov
Red Onion~ Warden, Richard E White, USPS—10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy., Pound, VA 24279
Phone: (276) 796-3536;(or 7510) Email~ rick.white@vadoc.virginia.gov
Red Onion State Prison, Assistant Warden
Shannon Fuller Phone: 276-796-7510 Email: shannon.fuller@VADOC.virginia.gov
Write to Rashid:
Kevin “Rashid” Johnson #1007485
Red Onion State Prison
10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy
Pound, VA 24279
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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
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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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1) ‘We have nothing to keep us warm and dry.' Winter adds to the misery of displaced Gazans.
Hiba Yazbek reporting from Jerusalem, Dec. 24, 2023
Children at a cooking fire between makeshift tents in the Al-Mawasi neighborhood in Rafah, southern Gaza, last week. Credit...Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
At night, amid heavy rains and dropping temperatures, Heba and Ehab Ahmad held their two youngest children tightly, relying on their body heat and a thin blanket to keep them warm as water and gusts of wind blew through the holes in their makeshift tent.
“We have nothing to keep us warm and dry,” said Ms. Ahmad, 36. “We are living in conditions that I could have never in my entire life imagined were possible.”
The Ahmad family is among the 1.9 million Gazans who the United Nations says have been displaced since Israel began its relentless bombing campaign and expanded ground operation in retaliation for the Oct. 7, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
They came to Gaza’s southern Al-Mawasi neighborhood three weeks ago, just as winter crept in. The family of seven took shelter in a small, flimsy tent that they built using overpriced nylon sheets and a few wooden planks, said Mr. Ahmad, 45. They share it with 16 other relatives, he added.
“It’s not even a proper tent,” he joked. “Those who are staying in real tents are the bourgeois in Gaza.”
During the daytime, Mr. Ahmad said, he and his eldest sons attempt to find firewood and cardboard to keep a small fire going, which they use to cook and stay warm. “I’m speaking to you while the smoke from the fire is blinding me,” Mr. Ahmad said in a phone interview on Sunday. In the background, someone could be heard coughing uncontrollably. “The smoke is also hurting our lungs,” he added.
The U.N. and other rights groups have in recent days expressed growing concerns about the further spread of waterborne diseases like cholera and chronic diarrhea in Gaza, with the lack of clean water and unsanitary conditions. Children have been the most severely affected by the increasing rates of infectious disease, according to UNICEF.
Mr. and Ms. Ahmad’s only daughter and youngest child, Jana, 9, had been suffering from severe abdominal pain for nearly two weeks, possibly from extreme dehydration, Mr. Ahmad said. He said he has not been able to take her to a hospital or clinic because the few medical centers that remain functional are completely overwhelmed and hard to reach on foot.
“She’s been screaming in pain, and all we can do is give her some of the rainwater to drink,” Mr. Ahmad said.
The weather was warm when the Ahmads and their five children first fled their home in the northeastern city of Beit Hanoun during the early days of the war. Like many others, Ms. Ahmad said, they did not anticipate being gone for this long and had fled with only some documents and the summer clothes they had on their backs.
“I have been going to look for warm clothes at secondhand street markets,” Mr. Ahmad said, “but they are selling them for insane prices that I can’t afford.”
“For 23 days, we have been trying to find blankets and mattresses,” Mr. Ahmad said. “We have been sleeping on a thin sheet and shaping the sand into a sort of pillow to rest our heads.”
This week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an international partnership of aid organizations, classified Gaza’s entire population as in crisis in terms of access to food.
Like many other displaced families, the Ahmads, who have moved four times since the start of the war, have struggled to find food and water. They have been eating whatever they could forage, mostly wild leafy greens, Mr. Ahmad said. He added that no aid had reached them so far. Distribution of aid has been complicated by fuel shortages, continued airstrikes and a multitude of other logistical challenges.
There is a silver lining to the rainy weather, though — a short break from the family’s daily struggle to find water.
They placed a bucket outside their tent to collect rainwater, which they used to cook and wash themselves and their clothes.
“It is still contaminated water,” said, “but we have no other alternative. We need to adapt.”
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.
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2) Israel’s military says battles are intensifying in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.
By Andrés R. Martínez, Dec. 24, 2023
Smoke rises after airstrikes in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
Israel’s military said battles were intensifying in southern Gaza’s largest city, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave no hint of plans to slow the war against Hamas despite calls from humanitarian groups for a cease-fire and protests at home.
On Sunday, Israel’s military said it had hit about 200 targets in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours. It did not specify where the strikes were focused, though the military had said late Saturday that it was expanding ground operations in southern Gaza.
Soldiers were fighting in a “dense area” above ground in the city, Khan Younis, and more forces would join a division that is working underground there to destroy tunnels operated by Hamas, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the military, said late Saturday. Fighting in the north of Gaza, where Israel says it has gained control of what it described as Hamas strongholds, also has intensified, Admiral Hagari said.
Despite growing calls from most allies for a pause in fighting that would allow more aid into Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu has not backed down from his goal of destroying Hamas, which killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli authorities. President Biden sent his defense secretary and top national security adviser to Israel last week to urge the government to scale back the war.
The government of Israel has said it was planning for a new phase of the fighting, but has not yet provided specifics. The nation’s military leaders have said — both last week and on Saturday — that they were bombing hundreds of targets a day in Gaza and sending thousands more soldiers to southern Gaza.
The Israeli military’s bombardments and ground invasion have killed more than 20,000 Gazans in about 11 weeks of fighting, according to the health authorities in Gaza. International alarm has risen over the plight of the territory’s more than two million people, who are increasingly cut off from the outside world, displaced, cold and hungry.
Last week, the United States prevented the U.N. Security Council from calling for a cease-fire, delaying a vote on a resolution until it included only a mention of the need for more humanitarian aid for Gazans. The United States abstained from the vote on Friday, allowing it to pass 13 to 0. Russia also abstained. After the vote, humanitarian groups said that without a cease-fire there was no way to safely distribute aid.
Mr. Biden said he had a long talk with Mr. Netanyahu on Saturday. He called the conversation with the Israeli leader a private one, but said that he did not ask for a cease-fire.
Johnatan Reiss, Rachel Abrams and Nadav Gavrielov contributed reporting.
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3) Netanyahu Visits Gaza as Palestinians Mourn an Attack That Officials Say Killed Dozens
The Gazan Health Ministry blamed Israeli airstrikes for the deaths, and Israel’s military said it was reviewing the episode.
By Vivian Yee, Ameera Harouda and Nadav Gavrielov, Dec. 25, 2023
Palestinians mourning their relatives killed in an overnight strike on the Al Maghazi area on Monday. Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli troops fighting in the Gaza Strip on Monday, vowing to stay the course of the war even with the death toll mounting. His trip came hours after Gazan health officials reported that a devastating overnight strike on a crowded neighborhood had killed dozens.
The trip was the Israeli leader’s second known visit to Gaza since the war began. Mr. Netanyahu has been facing increasing pressure from the United States to lower the intensity of the war, but he said on Monday that Israel would “deepen” the fighting in coming days.
The strike late Sunday in central Gaza underscored the risk to civilians as fighting intensifies. Gazans were mourningthe victims in the neighborhood, Al Maghazi, where many who have fled fighting in other parts of the enclave have sought shelter.
Photos of the aftermath on Monday showed a gray concrete building gaping with dark holes where rooms used to be. At the foot of the building was a mound of debris, where men appeared to be digging for survivors, or bodies, without the aid of any heavy equipment.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 70 people had died in Sunday’s attacks on Al Maghazi. But the ongoing difficulty of reaching residents in Gaza, where electricity shortages and communications blackouts have frequently obscured the picture of the war’s fallout, meant the details were blurry.
As the Gazan death toll has soared and civilians have been pushed into smaller and smaller corners of the enclave, international calls for a cease-fire have grown. While Mr. Netanyahu’s government has said it is planning for a new phase of the fighting, the Israeli leader has repeatedly insisted that his military would keep up the war in Gaza until all of its goals were achieved.
“We’re not stopping, we are continuing to fight and are deepening the fighting in the coming days,” he said in a statement released by his Likud Party on Monday, adding that “this will be a long battle and it is not close to ending.”
Gazan Health Ministry officials blamed Israeli airstrikes for the deadly attack on the Al Maghazi neighborhood of central Gaza. Israel’s military said Monday it was reviewing the episode.
Israeli forces are pushing deeper into central Gaza while also continuing to battle Hamas fighters in the enclave’s north and south. Many places in central and southern Gaza are crowded with people who have fled their homes.
“These rockets, it’s like they’re made to destroy mountains, not people,” said Mohamed Abu Shaah, who had taken shelter at an acquaintance’s house in Al Maghazi with his wife and seven daughters. In Al Maghazi, he said, the influx of the newly displaced meant that 20 people were routinely crowding into a single room to sleep at night.
It was the fifth time his own family had packed up and rushed to a new place after fighting and airstrikes threatened the place they had taken shelter.
“We are doing everything we can just to run for our lives,” he said.
The rising death toll in Gaza, which health ministry officials have said stands at about 20,000 people prompted Pope Francis on Monday to focus his Christmas address in part on the plight of Palestinians, as well as on Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
He mentioned Bethlehem, the holy city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where officials have largely canceled Christmas festivities in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and pleaded for peace to “come in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where war is devastating the lives of those peoples.”
The pope also called for “an end to the military operations with their appalling harvest of innocent civilian victims,” and “for a solution to the desperate humanitarian situation by an opening to the provision of humanitarian aid.”
Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.
Mr. Abu Shaah said he had just returned from prayer late Sunday night and was about to put his daughters to sleep in the bed that nine of them shared when they heard a loud thud. Afraid they would find themselves under the rubble, they ran downstairs to a scene of devastation.
“We’ve seen a lot, but this is beyond anything we could have imagined,” he said. “Today my family and I are alive, but what about tomorrow?”
Before the war, about 33,000 Palestinians lived in Al Maghazi, an area covering only about a quarter of a square mile, according to the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians. Most families in the neighborhood were originally from villages in the center and south of what was Palestine before they fled or were forcibly displaced in the 1948 war that surrounded Israel’s establishment as a state.
The neighborhood has been hit multiple times before, according to U.N. reports.
Save the Children, an aid group, called the strike on Al Maghazi “another episode of the ongoing horror” in Gaza.
“Families and children are not targets and must be protected,” it said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We need an immediate and definitive cease-fire to end this misery.”
Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Rome.
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4) In Campus Protests Over Gaza, Echoes of Outcry Over Vietnam
The war in Vietnam ignited a protest movement that helped define a generation. Is the war between Israel and Hamas doing the same thing?
By Michael Wines, Dec. 24, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/us/gaza-vietnam-student-protest.html
Students from the Black Students Organization protesting Columbia University’s suspension of the groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
Richard Flacks remembers the challenges of building a protest movement during the Vietnam War as a pillar of the left-wing political and antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s.
“The whole idea of S.D.S. began with the idea of, ‘We need a new way of being on the left, a new vocabulary, a new strategy,’” said Mr. Flacks, who helped write the group’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, in 1962. “We knew we were right, and I don’t think we were arrogant about it.”
Sixty years later, Iman Abid sees similar challenges in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. “For so long, we couldn’t get Palestine to be that issue for people to care about,” said Ms. Abid, the organizing and advocacy director at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which works with pro-Palestinian campus organizations. “But now people care about it because they’re seeing it. They’re watching it on their social media. They’re watching it on the news.”
It is too early to know whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will define this generation as opposition to the Vietnam War did for many young people more than a half century ago.
But to many who have studied or lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels to the Gaza protests are compelling: a powerful military raining aerial destruction on a small, underdeveloped nonwhite land; a generational divide over the morality of the conflict; a sense that the war represented far broader political and cultural currents; an unswerving confidence — critics might say sanctimony — among students that their cause is righteous.
The differences can be glaring, too, beginning with the terrorist attack by Hamas that set this war in motion, for which there is nothing comparable in Vietnam. The Gaza war is not being fought by the American military, unlike Vietnam, where more than 58,000 Americans died and young men faced a military draft.
Miles Rapoport, a former secretary of state of Connecticut, who joined S.D.S. while studying at Harvard in the 1960s, saw similarities but said the two movements and moments differ in a fundamental way: The United States waded into Vietnam in a show of superpower hubris. Israel, he said, is fighting for its existence after a terrorist attack that killed 1,200 citizens. The current war, he said, “has a lot more moral and philosophical nuance.”
That is reflected in pro-Israel marches and demonstrations to a far greater degree now than was common, particularly on campuses, for supporters of the war during the Vietnam era.
Still, both movements, Mr. Rapoport said, reflect “a kind of instinctive and initial solidarity with the underdog.” He added: “And related is a sense of solidarity with people who are fighting to have their own country and be freed from a kind of colonial existence.”
American campuses have protested over countless causes since Vietnam, notably to oppose apartheid in South Africa and racial injustice after police killings of Black men and women in 2014 and 2020. But a sustained antiwar protest like the one against the Gaza invasion has not been seen for decades.
Loan Tran, a 28-year-old Vietnamese American who is national director of the leftist advocacy group Rising Majority, draws a straight line between Vietnam and Gaza. Mr. Tran’s grandfather, whom he never met, was an American G.I. during the war; his grandmother’s friends fought for North Vietnam against American forces.
“When I hear Palestinians making comparisons to Vietnam and the role of the U.S. and colonialism, it’s really striking for me, and it’s a really poignant connection,” he said. “I feel it in my body, and a lot of people in our Vietnamese community feel it in our bodies, to be resisting war, to be resisting occupation.”
To critics of the Gaza protests, the current movement reflects the excesses, not the virtues, of the Vietnam protests, with chants now that to some suggest genocide against the Jewish people, much as some 1960s protests alienated many Americans by backing North Vietnam against U.S. forces. And those critics also accuse the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of hypocrisy — saying that many of the rallies include side issues that would be antithetical to many Palestinians, like women’s issues and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
Many supporters of Israel view the movement with a mixture of horror and consternation. Kenneth L. Marcus, the chairman of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights institution that is not affiliated with Brandeis University, said the campus demonstrations began even before Israel’s invasion of Gaza occurred.
“There may be some people participating in these protests who think they’re supporting Palestinians, but the movement they are advancing is predominantly an antisemitic movement,” he said, adding that it has its genesis in a celebration of violence. Rather than showing moral strength in the face of campus protests, he said, many university administrators “have responded with weakness and cowardice.”
Those protesting the war in Gaza owe their Vietnam-era forerunners for one legacy: the tactics, from die-ins to chants like “How many kids did you kill today?” that energized both movements. “Students didn’t have much in 1960 to emulate,” said Mr. Flacks, now a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “A lot of the tactics invented at that time became part of the tool kit for activism on campuses.”
The degree to which Israel is doing the fighting, not the United States, creates a different dynamic than the protests over Vietnam.
“It’s not a clear conflict which you and I have a stake in,” said Daniel Millstone, a retired lawyer in New York City who was one of the early antiwar crusaders with S.D.S. More students today have seen Israel firsthand, or know students from the region. “But in the last analysis,” Mr. Millstone said, “even if I have family in Israel — and I do — it’s not my show. It’s their show.”
Certainly, the logistics of staging protests are much more manageable today than 60 years ago. Cellphones and social media have simplified the tasks of recruiting and deploying advocates for a cause; to cite just one example, a crowd of antiwar demonstrators descended recently on Grand Central Station in New York, flash-mob style, after getting an electronic alert.
“I compare that to the demonstrations we put on against the war in Vietnam and many other things, which required an enormous amount of top-down planning,” Mr. Millstone said. Modern campus activism is organized via WhatsApp and iMessages. While the major groups protesting over Gaza have national offices, the movement is largely decentralized.
Universities — and the overall makeup of the protesters — are also vastly changed, as are the political pressures and demands on university presidents.
The Vietnam antiwar movement was overwhelmingly white, like most campuses of the 1960s. But campuses in 2023, particularly urban ones, contain far more students of color, many of whom empathize with Palestinians’ status as an embattled population under the control of a more powerful force. And nonstudents are a bigger part of those protesting now.
“Movements don’t come out of nowhere,” said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian who in the 1960s was both a member of S.D.S. and, briefly, its violent stepchild, the Weather Underground. For the Vietnam protesters, he said, the precursors were the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and the civil rights movement. For the Gaza protesters, the antecedents stretch from the anti-Muslim backlash after the Sept. 11 attacks to recent racial injustice protests.
When young protesters descended on Ferguson, Mo., after police officers killed an unarmed Black man in 2014, Palestinians offered advice on social media for coping with tear gas. Today, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and elsewhere, Black and Latino students are among the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement, Professor Flacks said.
And both eras reflect the influence of deeply polarizing political leaders, particularly Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon in the Vietnam era, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whose hard-line conservatism has given oxygen to campus support for the Palestinian cause.
“Those of us who are my age have direct memories of why Israel was a morally positive framework. It was the haven for people escaping from the worst oppression,” Professor Flacks said. But “what the kids in college now see about Israel is a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu,” which they view as a repressive force supported by established Jewish organizations.
Larry P. Gross, an expert on media and culture at the University of Southern California, said Israeli leaders had not adapted their message, much less policies, to a generation that views Israel not as a besieged Jewish homeland, but as the arbiter of freedom in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
“The Israelis and their P.R. arm fundamentally didn’t understand the degree to which they were losing young people,” he said. “They reflexively played the Holocaust card over and over again,” he added, even as “we went from seeing pictures of Russians bombing Ukraine as a war crime to pictures of Israel bombing Gaza.”
Support for Palestinians among the young, he said, “is going to last. I think it’s one of those generational shifts.”
The last time an antiwar movement faced a generational divide, many young people sat out the 1968 presidential election between Mr. Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Mr. Nixon won the Electoral College by capturing four states by fewer than 88,000 total votes.
Professor Kazin recently published an article in the liberal journal The New Republic wondering whether history could repeat itself there, too.
“People like me were opposed to Humphrey, and were happy, in a sense, to see him lose,” he said. “Now, a lot of people are saying they’ll never go for Biden. And it’s not clear who they vote for, if they vote at all.”
Alain Delaquérière, Sheelagh McNeill and Anna Betts contributed research.
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5) Aleksei Navalny Found in Remote Arctic Prison, Easing Fears Over His Safety
Supporters of the Russian opposition leader lost contact with him 20 days ago, fueling concern about his health and whereabouts.
By Ivan Nechepurenko and Anton Troianovski, Dec. 25, 2023
The Russian opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny in an image from a video link during a court hearing in Kovrov, Russia, in 2022. Credit...Yulia Morozova/Reuters
The Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny has been moved to a remote Arctic prison and “is doing well,” his spokeswoman said on Monday, ending a 20-day mystery over his whereabouts that had many supporters fearing the worst.
“We have found Aleksei,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. “His lawyer saw him today.”
Ms. Yarmysh’s announcement ended a frantic search through Russia’s vast prison system for Mr. Navalny, who disappeared on Dec. 5. Mr. Navalny’s exiled allies said that they had found him in the remote penal colony in the Arctic after sending more than 600 requests to prisons and other government agencies.
Ivan Zhdanov, director of Mr. Navalny’s anticorruption foundation, said that Mr. Navalny’s lawyers had also looked through every pretrial detention center.
“From the beginning, it was clear that the government wanted to isolate Aleksei, especially ahead of the election,” Mr. Zhdanov said, referring to the coming presidential race in Russia that President Vladimir V. Putin is widely expected to win.
Mr. Navalny’s new penal colony, officially known as IK-3 Polar Wolf, is in the settlement of Kharp and is among the harshest and remotest prisons in Russia. Inmates endure long, dark, cold winters as well as clouds of mosquitoes in the summer.
Mr. Navalny’s previous prison, in the town of Melekhovo, was only about 160 miles east of Moscow, meaning that his lawyers could drive there in a manner of hours. In contrast, the new prison is some 1,200 miles from the capital. A train to Kharp, called the Polar Arrow, departs Moscow every second day and takes 44 hours to reach the town.
“Aleksei’s situation is a clear example of how the system treats political prisoners, trying to isolate and suppress them,” Mr. Zhdanov said on social media.
Ivan Vostrikov, former head of Mr. Navalny’s office in the town of Tyumen, in Siberia, said he had been to Kharp several times. He described the town as “a very beautiful place with a very tough winter.”
“It is practically impossible to run away from it — on the one side there is tundra,” he said in a post on Telegram, a social messaging app. “On the other, there are rocky mountains of Polar Urals,” he added. “That’s why they put the worst criminals and serial killers there.”
Mr. Navalny’s allies had been expecting his transfer to one of Russia’s stricter prisons — known as “special regime” prison colonies — since September, when he lost an appeal against the 19-year sentence he is serving.
Detainees being transferred to remote prisons in Russia can spend weeks being shuttled between trains in special rail cars and have little or no access to the outside world. But Mr. Navalny’s disappearance made headlines almost immediately because of his high-profile status in the Russian political system.
Mr. Navalny has been in custody in Russia since his detention in January 2021 at a Moscow airport, where he had arrived after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning by a nerve agent. Mr. Navalny and Western governments accused the Kremlin of the poisoning, which Russian officials denied.
Since then, the Russian authorities have brought forth a multitude of new charges against Mr. Navalny. According to Ms. Yarmysh, he is currently a defendant in 14 criminal cases and faces potential sentences of up to 35 years in prison.
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6) 78 Palestine Solidarity Activists Face Charges for Civil Disobedience
By People's Dispatch, December 24, 2023
https://popularresistance.org/78-palestine-solidarity-activists-face-charges-for-civil-disobedience/
Palestinian Youth Movement.
78 Palestine solidarity activists are facing charges following a mass civil disobedience action staged on November 16, in which protesters shut down San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Over 150 demonstrators blocked the Bay Bridge on November 16, while US President Joe Biden was in San Francisco for the APEC Summit. Several activists blocked the bridge with cars, and, highlighting their commitment, proceeded to throw their keys into the San Francisco Bay.
Protesters are facing charges ranging from unlawful public assembly, false imprisonment, refusing to comply with a peace officer, and refusing to disperse a riot and obstruction of a public street.
The Palestine solidarity movement in the Bay Area has been mobilizing to put pressure on San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to drop the charges against the protesters. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Jenkins is unwilling as she claimed that “free speech cannot compromise public safety.” The bridge action required “tremendous public resources to resolve,” she said.
Arraignments for the 78 activists began December 18, and over 200 people rallied in front of the San Francisco Criminal Court to demand that DA Jenkins drop the charges. Following the first day of arraignments, a continuance was granted for February 1 and 2.
One of the activists who was arrested at the Bay Bridge action spoke at a press conference held on the courthouse steps on December 18. “I also join the tens of thousands of people who have taken to the streets of San Francisco to demand a permanent ceasefire, to call on our congressional leaders to truly represent the calls from their constituents, and to not allow our tax dollars to fund the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza,” she said.
“If decision-makers do not heed the calls of our emails, our meetings, our phone calls, and our mass mobilizations, then we must do all we can to ensure that our voices are heard,” she continued. “And that means we must disrupt business as usual.”
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