12/05/2023

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, December 6, 2023



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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 December 5, 2023the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 16,400 (over 900 killed since Saturday, Dec. 2)and more than 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank in the past month. 
8,300 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons. More than 2,000 Palestinians have been arrested since Oct. 7.



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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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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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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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 

By Julia Wright

 

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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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier


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.

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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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

 

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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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

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Articles

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1) Tracing the Deep Roots of Ireland’s Support for Palestinians

In a country with its own history of a seemingly intractable conflict, the majority of people in Ireland are sympathetic to Palestinian civilians, while also condemning the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.

By Megan Specia, Dec. 2, 2023

Reporting from Dublin

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/world/europe/ireland-palestinians-support.html
A large crowd fills a wide street, with some waving Palestinian flags and people at the front holding a banner that reads, “Freedom & justice for Palestine.”

Demonstrators gathered in Dublin in solidarity with the Palestinians last month. Credit...Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters


Under the light drizzle of a Tuesday morning last month, Ríonach Ní Néill and a group of friends set up a small platform in front of the United States Embassy in Dublin.

 

Then they took out a stack of papers. For the next 11 and a half hours, Ms. Ní Néill and others took turns reading out thousands of names — each one a person killed since Israel started bombarding Gaza in the war, according to a list released by the Gazan health authorities.

 

It was an attempt to convey the enormity of the loss of life, she said.

 

“I think the baseline really in Ireland is that human rights are valued, and what’s happening now is the destruction of universal human rights,” said Ms. Ní Néill, 52, an artist from Galway. “This is not something that can be ignored.”

 

In Ireland, support for Palestinian civilians runs deep, rooted in what many see as a shared history of British colonialism and the experience of a seemingly intractable and traumatic conflict, which in Ireland’s case came to a close with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

 

Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people, according to the Israeli authorities, and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza, Ireland has emerged as something of an outlier in Europe for its stance on the conflict.

 

While condemning the Hamas atrocities, lawmakers across Ireland’s political spectrum were among the first in Europe to call for the protection of Palestinian civilians and denounce the scale of Israel’s response, which has left more than 15,000 people dead, according to health officials in Gaza — a rate of casualties with few precedents in the 21st century.

 

Last month, Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, said he strongly believed that Israel had the right to defend itself, but that what was unfolding in Gaza “resembles something approaching revenge.”

 

Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, whose post as head of state is considered above the political fray, described “unanimous revulsion” at the Hamas attacks, but said that Israeli strikes that killed civilians threatened to leave human rights agreements “in tatters.”

 

Those views are mainstream in Ireland. In a poll published last month, about 71 percent of respondents classified Israel’s response as “disproportionately severe.” About 65 percent also said that Hamas should be officially proscribed as a terrorist organization. Tens of thousands have taken part in weekly protests calling for an end to Israeli attacks on Gaza.

 

Jane Ohlmeyer, a history professor at Trinity College Dublin and author of “Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World,” said that the country’s status as a former British colony had “undoubtedly shaped how people from Ireland engage with post-colonial conflicts.”

 

That history sets Ireland apart from a number of other countries in Western Europe, many of which were themselves imperial powers, she added, while giving it common ground with Palestinians.

 

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain was given administrative control over the area then known as Palestine. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, Arthur James Balfour — who was previously Britain’s chief secretary for Ireland, and known for his sometimes brutal suppression of Irish demands for independence — had laid out his country’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

 

A few years later, Britain granted independence to much of the island of Ireland but held on to the six counties that still make up Northern Ireland and remain part of the United Kingdom. That legislation provided the template for partitions in other former British colonies, including India and Pakistan in 1947, “and Israel and Palestine” the following year, said Dr. Ohlmeyer.

 

British officials have drawn their own parallels between the Irish and the Palestinians. Ronald Storrs, who was governor of Jerusalem from 1917 to 1926, wrote in his memoir that if enough Jewish people moved to Palestine, it could “form for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism” — a reference to English settlers who were sent to Northern Ireland in what became known as the “plantation of Ulster.”

 

Maurice Cohen, the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, said in an interview that public sentiment in Ireland had initially supported Jewish efforts to create a state of Israel and the struggle against British rule — a fact that he said was often overlooked in modern Ireland.

 

“Maybe because we have always felt that we are the underdogs here, so we are always rooting for the underdog,” said Mr. Cohen, 73. “When I was growing up, there was always a great affinity to the Israelis, because they were deemed to be the underdog as well.”

 

Yet that support later shifted toward the Palestinian cause, he said, amid rising criticism of the Israeli state’s expansion of settlements and the displacement of Palestinian communities.

 

Ireland has a small Jewish population of about 2,700, according to 2023 statistics, out of a total population of 5.3 million. And Mr. Cohen said that while antisemitic rhetoric online had risen since the Hamas-Israel conflict began, that had not spilled over into major violence in Ireland. In addition, although he mourned that the conversation about the current conflict had lost depth and nuance, he said that the leaders of all of the country’s political parties had assured him “that they will not brook any antisemitism in Ireland.”

 

Yet even as Ireland, like the rest of Europe, has for decades favored a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and engaged with leaders from both sides, its relations with Israel have soured in the weeks since Oct. 7.

 

On Sunday, Israel summoned the Irish ambassador for a rebuke over a post by Mr. Varadkar on the social media platform X in which he described the release of a young Israeli-Irish hostage as “an innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned.”

 

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, suggested on X that the Irish prime minister was seeking to disguise the truth about Hamas’s hostage-taking and had lost his “moral compass.”

 

Many Irish commentators pointed out that Mr. Varadkar’s language was metaphorical and echoed biblical references to being lost and found.

 

In an interview with Ireland’s public broadcaster on Wednesday, President Isaac Herzog of Israel, whose grandfather was Ireland’s chief rabbi, said he disagreed with the foreign minister’s criticism of Mr. Varadkar, but also questioned what he called Ireland’s “indifference to the pain endured by Israelis.”

 

For some who lived through the late-20th-century conflict in Northern Ireland, the war in Gaza calls to mind the trauma of the past but also the possibility of hope. Less than a week after the Hamas attacks, Patrick Kielty, who hosts “The Late Late Show,” the Friday night Irish television staple, offered a message to “all the families whose lives this week have been ripped apart in Israel and Palestine.”

 

Mr. Kielty grew up in Northern Ireland and his father was killed in 1988 by a paramilitary group that supported the territory’s ties to Britain. “There were days when we thought it would never end,” he told the audience.

 

“We are currently living our own miracle on this island, because we are living in peace,” Mr. Kielty added. “For all those in Israel and Palestine tonight, it might not seem like it, but there’s always hope, and we hope that your miracle comes soon.”


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2) Confusing evacuation orders leave Gazans to make painful decisions.

By ivian Yee and Ameera Harouda, Dec. 4, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/04/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

A wounded man is carried by a group of young men through a crowded street.

An injured man is carried through Rafah following Israeli strikes on Sunday. A spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza said 316 people had been killed, and 664 wounded, in airstrikes “in the past hours.” Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Palestinians trying to make sense of a new, confusing round of Israeli evacuation orders were left to make painful decisions on Sunday, as the Israeli military appeared to be setting the stage for a ground invasion in southern Gaza.

 

Abu Yousef, 42, and his family were among those who left the city of Khan Younis on Saturday night and headed to Al-Mawasi, a narrow agricultural area near the coast. They had seen on social media that the neighborhood where they were staying — their second temporary shelter after leaving their home in northern Gaza — might be marked for evacuation, but were not certain.

 

Scanning a map that the Israeli military had provided, he could not tell whether they should go. Then they got a recorded call from the Israeli military ordering them to leave.

 

“You can’t imagine the tough situation,” he said. “Your mind will stop working, because you have children, you have elderly that you have to move.”

 

He wondered: What should they take with them? Water? Batteries? Mattresses?

 

“It’s a lot of thinking,” he said. “And you don’t know where to go.”

 

Other neighbors, clinging to the hope that their homes did not fall under the evacuation orders, decided to stay, he said.

 

Mr. Yousef said his family had already moved twice, from the northernmost part of Gaza to Gaza City and then to Khan Younis, before packing up again for their third displacement on Saturday night. Every time they thought they had found a solution, he said, “you evacuate again.”

 

In Al-Mawasi, Mr. Yousef said his family was staying under a nylon tarp stretched over some wood and sharing one bathroom at a relative’s house nearby. Asked how he planned to get food for his family, he responded: “I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.”

 

On Sunday afternoon, a spokesman for the Gazan health ministry, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, said 316 people had been killed in Israeli strikes “in the past hours.” He said that more than 15,500 people had been killed since Oct. 7, when the war began.

 

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported on Sunday that 60 people had been killed in airstrikes in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, along with dozens more in Jabaliya, a long-established camp, and Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza. It said dozens of others were also killed in Al-Zaytoun and Al-Shuja’iya, both neighborhoods in Gaza City.

 

There was little safety to be found in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have resumed ground operations following a weeklong pause. The aid group Doctors Without Borders said Israeli tanks had destroyed some of its marked vehicles outside of its clinic in Gaza City on Sunday and started a fire that consumed trees and electrical wiring nearby.

 

“My colleagues were in the clinic, and I was afraid the fire could reach them,” an unidentified staff member who filmed the attack said in a video the group shared on social media.

 

“It was a horrible scene,” he added.

 

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.


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3) Israeli forces say they are fighting in ‘the heart’ of Khan Younis.

By Victoria Kim and Shashank Bengali, Dec. 5, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/05/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news




Injured Palestinians were rushed to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis as Israel increased its attacks on the southern Gazan city. (Screenshot)


Israeli troops are fighting in the heart of southern Gaza’s largest city, a military commander announced on Tuesday, describing some of the heaviest combat of the two-month war amid growing concerns that there is almost nowhere left for civilians to flee.

 

After days of warning civilians to leave the city, Khan Younis, Israeli forces stepped up their attacks overnight. Intense bombing was heard early Tuesday from inside Nasser Hospital, the city’s largest, where many Palestinians who have sought shelter were sleeping in hallways.

 

“We are in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation — in terms of terrorists killed, the number of firefights and the use of firepower from the land and air,” the commander of Israel’s southern military command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, said in a statement. “We intend to continue to strike and secure our accomplishments.”

 

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the chief of the general staff in the Israeli military, said on Tuesday evening that Israeli forces had encircled Khan Younis in the south and were continuing to fight to consolidate control over Gaza City and other places in the north. 

 

“We have secured many Hamas strongholds in the northern Gaza Strip, and now we are operating against its strongholds in the south,” he said. He said the fighting had often been house-to-house, and that adversaries were sometimes wearing civilian clothes. “Our forces find in nearly every building and house weapons and in many houses terrorists, and engage them in combat,” he said.

 

It was not possible to independently confirm Israel’s account of the combat. The United Nations’ humanitarian office said that the period from Sunday to Monday afternoon “saw some of the heaviest shelling in Gaza so far.”

 

After Israeli forces ordered civilians to leave northern Gaza in the first month of war, before their ground invasion, the military has issued new evacuation orders for large parts of southern Gaza, including areas of Khan Younis. The warnings have led human rights groups and aid agencies to warn that beleaguered civilians are being pushed into a patchwork of smaller and smaller areas, even then have no guarantee that they will be spared from airstrikes.

 

Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, said early Tuesday that neighborhoods that are home to some 600,000 people were ordered to be emptied.

 

The evacuation could drive an additional half million people to Rafah, along the southern border with Egypt, doubling the number of the displaced sheltering in the already brimming city, he wrote on the social media site X.

 

The U.N. humanitarian office said on Monday that some of the shelters Israel had told people to flee to were “already overcrowded.” With the shelters in Rafah already well beyond capacity, the new arrivals were erecting tents and fashioning makeshift shelters in the streets or whatever empty spaces they can find around the city, according to the daily report from the United Nations’ office for humanitarian affairs.

 

Many Gazans were struggling with the question of where to go. Khalil Ahmed, 53, a chemistry teacher, said in an interview that before the war he was in Egypt with his wife for medical treatment. They decided to return to their house in the Nuseirat refugee community, just south of Gaza City, because they were worried about their children and grandchildren.

 

They crossed the border on the third day of a seven-day truce, he said, carrying as much food as they could. Their community, a former U.N. refugee camp that has been built up over decades, was nearly destroyed, he said. Two buildings next to his were bombed out. The windows of his house had been smashed. No cars were moving on the streets.

 

Everywhere he looked he saw refugees from other parts of Gaza, who had taken shelter in four U.N. run schools there. Pale, shocked people wandered about searching for food and water. There was no internet, and so no news.

 

Since the war resumed last week, he said, the sounds of bombing from drones and warplanes has been incessant, accompanied by din of combat from tanks and infantry. He has weighed fleeing Nuseirat with his family but so far they have stayed put.

 

“As long as so many people remain, I am staying here,” he said. “They are bombing everywhere and where we are seems to be less dangerous than in Khan Younis and Deir El Balah. They are hitting there very hard.”

 

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.


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4) ‘Worse by the hour’: The W.H.O. warns of the likelihood of a humanitarian disaster in the south.

By Nick Cumming-Bruce reporting from Geneva, Dec. 5, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/05/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
Wounded people lie on a bloody, dirty hospital floor.
A scene at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock

Gaza’s humanitarian crisis is deteriorating by the hour as a result of renewed fighting, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, appealing for protection of civilians as tens of thousands of people in southern Gaza moved further south looking for safety and hospitals suffered further casualties and damage in Israel’s bombardment.

 

“The situation is getting worse by the hour,” Richard Peeperkorn, the W.H.O.’s representative in Gaza, told reporters by video link from the enclave. “There’s intensified bombing going on all around, including here in the southern area, Khan Younis and even in Rafah.”

 

Weeks after Israeli forces invaded northern Gaza, they have now moved ground forces deeper into the south and intensified airstrikes there. International pressure has grown not to repeat the level of civilian deaths and physical destruction inflicted in the north, but reports from Gaza show no change in the intensity of Israeli operations or the resulting casualties.

 

The United Nations said Gaza experienced some of the heaviest shelling of the war from Sunday to Monday afternoon. Gaza health ministry, which operates as part of the Hamas government, reported 349 Palestinians had been killed and 750 injured in that period.

 

An Israeli military commander, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, said on Tuesday that the Israeli military was “in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation — in terms of terrorists killed, the number of firefights and the use of firepower from the land and air.”

 

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that 100 dead and 400 injured people had arrived at Al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza’s middle area on those days, and that the unit could barely cope with the number of patients. It said that Nasser Hospital, in the southern city of Khan Younis, which provides surgical care for trauma injuries and burns, was receiving multiple severely injured patients nearly every hour and was now near a breaking point.

 

Israeli airstrikes also hit Kamal Adwan Hospital and Al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza on Sunday and Monday, killing nine people, the United Nations reported. More people were reportedly killed in an Israeli bombardment of areas close to Al-Ahli hospital, it said.

 

Since a seven-day cease-fire ended last Friday, Israel has served evacuation notices to residents of areas in southern Gaza that housed around 470,000 people, the W.H.O. said, and the movement of Gazans fleeing from the middle area to the south had added to the strain on already overcrowded and under-resourced health facilities and resulted in a sharp rise in infectious diseases. The U.N. says that 1.9 million of the enclave’s roughly 2.2 million people have been displaced by the war.

 

Israel has designated a number of “safe zones” to which it says people in Gaza should move to avoid the fighting, but many in the enclave cannot access Israel’s directions because they have no electricity and poor to nonexistent internet and cellphone service. United Nations officials say that nowhere is safe there and that the designated locations lack essentials for survival as required under international law. 

 

“These are tiny patches of barren land, or street corners, or half-built buildings,” James Elder, a spokesman for the U.N.’s children’s agency told a news briefing. “There’s no water, no facilities, no shelter from the cold and rain,.” The circumstances, he said, emphasizing the lack of any sanitation, meant that “these so-called safe zones risk becoming zones of disease.”

 

Dr. Peeperkorn said that the W.H.O. had carried out an emergency evacuation of medical supplies from two warehouses in Khan Younis on Monday, on the advisement of Israeli forces, to save them from being destroyed in the hostilities and to ensure medicines continued to reach hospitals.

 

Israel has denied instructing the W.H.O. to evacuate the warehouses, but Dr. Peeperkorn said staff carried out the “panic” operation after Israeli forces warned that the warehouses were in areas likely to become active combat zones and that they should remove as much of the medical supplies as possible.

 

The W.H.O.’s top priority, Dr. Peeperkorn said, was to get more essential medical supplies into Gaza and then distributed to help its health system, largely crippled after two months of conflict, to cope with soaring health needs. Without that health system, “I want to make this point very clear that we are looking at an increasing humanitarian disaster.”


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5) The U.S. says Israel must do more to protect civilians. Experts see little change.

By Ben Hubbard, Dec. 5, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/05/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
A body in a blanked being passed down a staircase onto a stretcher, as a crowd watches.
Carrying a body in the aftermath of a blast in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Monday. On Sunday, Israel declared one fifth of the city an evacuation zone. Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

In the days since the collapse of a seven-day truce, as Israeli forces have turned their focus to southern Gaza to root out what they say are Hamas fighters holed up there, Biden administration officials have said they had warned Israel to work harder to avoid harming Gazan civilians than it did in the war’s early weeks, and that Israel’s military appeared to be heeding that advice.

 

But more than 300 people were killed in Gaza each day between Saturday and Monday, according to figures released by Gazan health officials, a daily toll that resembled those from the earlier weeks of the war. The U.N. humanitarian office said that the period from Sunday to Monday afternoon “saw some of the heaviest shelling in Gaza so far.”

 

Two experts in the laws of war said they had not seen significant changes in recent days in how Israel was waging its war in Gaza, largely because its warnings to civilians to move out of harm’s way appeared ineffective and the scope of its campaign made it unclear if anywhere in Gaza was truly safe.

 

“I don’t have the sense that the renewed Israeli operations are significantly different than the earlier operations in terms of seeking to minimize the risk of harm to civilians,” Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser at the State Department and now a senior adviser for the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group, said.

 

Since Israel resumed its bombing campaign, with a new focus on southern Gaza, much of its new effort to protect civilians revolves around its publication on Friday of an online map that divides Gaza into hundreds of tiny sectors. In the days since, military officials have posted on social media about which sectors Gazans need to evacuate and where they should go.

 

Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said on Monday that while it was too early to make definitive assessments, the United States saw signs that Israel was implementing changes the two sides had discussed to limit civilian casualties, including reducing mass displacement.

 

Before Israeli forces invaded northern Gaza in late October, Mr. Miller said, they issued a blanket order for the northern region — which had been home to more than a million people — to evacuate their homes. The publication of the map represented “a much more targeted request for evacuations” that was “an improvement on what’s happened before.”

 

But the evacuation orders have confused Gazans, many of whom cannot access the map or Israel’s posted instructions because they have no electricity and poor to nonexistent internet and cellphone service. Some who have followed the orders have found themselves in already overcrowded areas without shelter or toilets.

 

Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said that warnings were an important way to protect civilians from armed conflict and that a more precise map was more helpful in principle than broad evacuation orders. But he said Israel’s new system was not much better that what had preceded it.

 

“There is no reliably safe way to go and no reliably safe place in Gaza, period, so even if they tell you this area is relatively safe, the airstrikes continue to hit virtually all parts of Gaza,” he said.

 

Also endangering civilians, Mr. Shakir said, was Israel’s continued use of bombs and heavy artillery in densely populated areas, a tactic under which “the risk of civilian death is amplified.” In addition, he said, Israel was still bringing down entire apartment blocks without making clear what the military objectives of such strikes were.

 

U.S. officials said they had privately urged Israel to use smaller bombs to collapse Hamas’s tunnel network, but it was not clear that Israeli forces were doing so. An Israeli military spokesman, Peter Lerner, told reporters on Tuesday that he was “not aware of any limitations on the ability to utilize our firepower.”

 

Israel has said that its war seeks to destroy Hamas and that its forces make great efforts to protect civilians. It blames the extent of destruction in Gaza on Hamas, saying its fighters mix in with the civilian population, effectively using them as human shields, and fight from civilian areas.

 

The health authorities in Gaza say that more than 15,000 people have been killed since the start of the war. While they do not distinguish between civilians and fighters, they say that most of the dead are women and children.

 

Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.


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6) How Zionism Feeds Antisemitism

By Dave Zirin, Dec.5, 2023

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zionism-antisemitism-congress/
Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism, despite house resolution 894, david kustoff, max miller
A young person holds a sign that reads: “Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism,” during a “Freedom for Palestine” protest march that drew thousands of participants on November 4, 2023 in Berlin, Germany.


The cynicism of House Resolution 894 “strongly condemning and denouncing the drastic rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world” is boundless. Put forward by two Jewish Republicans, Representatives David Kustoff and Max Miller, it states that the official view of the US Congress is that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” This is unserious, inane, and dangerous. 

 

Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler, also Jewish, replied to HR 894, by saying, "The resolution states that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism. That's intellectually disingenuous or factually wrong… The authors if they were at all familiar with Jewish history and culture should know about Jewish anti-Zionism that was and is expressly not anti-Semitic…. The GOP has shown themselves fundamentally unserious…[they] carefully avoided mentioning any of the obvious instances of anti-Semitism coming from their own leaders… the resolution implicitly compares some peaceful protestors with the January 6 rioters."

 

Good for Nadler for speaking truth in the face of Orwellian absurdity. But it’s not enough. This bill is part of a broad campaign aimed at making people feel unsafe to say that they oppose Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. If you think it is a coincidence that we are getting this “resolution” as the temporary cease-fire ends and as Israel is expanding its killing campaign into the south of Gaza, then, as my Bubbe would say, I have this bridge in Brooklyn you have to buy. If you think that the rash of stories this week where Israeli police are releasing “new information” about the Hamas killings of October 7 just as the bombings move south are also a coincidence, then maybe I could throw in the Manhattan Bridge for free.

 

This is a bill that will receive near unanimous support from antisemitic Republicans and Christian Zionists like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson: the people who love Israel and hate Jews. That any Democrat would link arms, or in Chuck Schumer’s case hold hands, with these people is a mark of shame.

 

But that’s not the only reason to oppose HR 893. We must stand against condemning anti-Zionism as antisemitism, because it will fan the fires that have many in the Jewish community fearful right now. While it’s true, as I wrote in October and as Nadler affirms, that anti-Zionism and antisemitism should never be conflated, it is also true that this kind of ham-fisted, coercive defense of Israel aids and abets antisemitism; an antisemitism that then becomes exploited and weaponized to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s martial agenda.

 

What Netanyahu, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, and Hollywood amplifiers like Juliana Margulies (three people who seem to be trying to “out-racist” one another) push is the idea that criticism and protests against Israel’s policies are inherently antisemitic and therefore need to be silenced through force of the state. Their logic threatens the Jewish community. If politically confronting Israel is branded as antisemitic, then it stands to reason for people new to this movement that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist. Netanyahu has devoted his political life to binding the fate of all Jews to the furtherance of the Israeli state. This is rank antisemitism: the assumption that to be Jewish is to support Israel’s crimes. To be clear: Anyone who attempts to bind a 5,000-year-old religion to a 150-year-old colonial project is guilty of antisemitism. They are pushing the idea that my family, merely because of our religion, supports not only the war abroad but the crackdown of critics at home.

 

It is naïve to think that this won’t cause blowback on the Jewish community. We are already seeing an increasing number of disturbing protests at Jewish institutions throughout the world. If the GOP and many Democrats ruthlessly push the idea that being Jewish means supporting Zionism and its current agenda, then the weight of that will fall on the shoulders of Jews outside Israel’s borders. As leftists, we forcefully oppose the idea of collective guilt or collective punishment of all Jews for Israel’s crimes. If Israel believed the same logic, thousands more Palestinian kids would be alive today.

 

It can’t be surprising that the GOP would be insensitive to the fallout of these kinds of declarations. Their right-wing base is a cauldron of antisemitism and their presidential candidate Donald Trump was our first president to meet with open Nazis. Netanyahu and Greenblatt have never minded this, because Trump has reserved most of his violent ire for “liberal Jews,” a group that many Zionists also hold in great contempt. With every anti-Jewish attack stoked by Trump, from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, Netanyahu steps in to both thank Trump and say that this is proof that Jews need their own ethno-state for protection. The opposite is true. What Jews need is a mass left resistance to antisemitism and that resistance also needs to be against Zionism and for Palestinian liberation. If antisemitism is “the socialism of fools,” then Zionism is Judaism for reactionaries.

 

As a left, we need to fight against any hint of antisemitism in our ranks. But ridding the struggle of this scourge is our job, not the job of a Congress trying to squelch protest and dissent. Every day I am hearing from people whose employment is being threatened over Instagram posts or surreptitiously taped classroom lectures. HR 894 will fuel this suffocating reaction. We need to say no to the war on Gaza and no to the brazen neo-McCarthyism aimed at silencing critics. As Jews, we also need to be aware that our best hope against antisemitism lies in defeating Israel’s dual campaign to raze Gaza and bind our fate to those war crimes.


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7) Many people have been forced to sleep in the street or empty lots, the U.N. says.

By Liam Stack, Dec. 6. 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/06/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

People mill about in an encampment of tents.

Displaced Palestinians in makeshift shelters at a camp in Rafah on Wednesday after fleeing Khan Younis. Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Thousands of Gazans have been fleeing to areas west and south of the embattled city of Khan Younis, including to the southern border town of Rafah, where the United Nations said on Wednesday that shelters were far beyond capacity and many were forced to sleep in the street or in empty lots and other abandoned areas.

 

Humanitarian conditions in southern Gaza have been growing increasingly dire as Israel urges Palestinian civilians to leave their homes for ever-shrinking patches of land and its military fights close-quarter battles with Hamas fighters in Khan Younis, the region’s largest city.

 

The U.N. said that, as of Tuesday night, Rafah was the only area in Gaza where any humanitarian aid had been distributed, because the collapse of the seven-day truce last Friday had largely severed the rest of the Gaza Strip from the border crossing.

 

Israel has been urging civilians to relocate to Rafah or to Al-Mawasi, an agricultural area near the Mediterranean Sea. But strikes have continued in both areas, and Gazans and aid groups say that Al-Mawasi, in particular, does not have the infrastructure necessary to ease the crisis.

 

“Under international humanitarian law, the place where you evacuate people to must, by law have sufficient resources for their survival — medical facilities, food and water,” said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

 

“That is absolutely not the case,” he went on. “They are these patches of barren land, they are streets or corners or any space in a neighborhood, half-built buildings. The common thing they have is no water no facilities, no shelter from cold and rain and particularly no sanitation.”

 

Although the U.N. was able to distribute hundreds of tents in Rafah, desperate people who arrived in Al-Mawasi, found little more than an open-air area, said Yousef Hammash, an employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He said people scrounged to find supplies to build rickety improvised shelters to protect themselves and their families from the elements, fearful of the approach of winter.

 

“Thousands of people are building tents made of wood and plastic,” said Mr. Hammash, who fled Khan Younis with his family. “It doesn’t give any kind of protection but it gives them a sense of safety.”

 

No aid had arrived in Khan Younis and the surrounding area because of the fighting there between Israel and Hamas, the U.N. said, while areas immediately to the north of the city had been cut off because of Israeli restrictions of movement on the main roads. It said all access to northern Gaza, including Gaza City, came to an end when the truce collapsed.

 

Israeli commanders have described house-to-house gun battles over the past two days with Hamas fighters in Khan Younis, in some of the heaviest fighting of the two-month-old war. A military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, on Wednesday warned Gazan civilians not to approach Salah al-Din Road, the main highway that connects Khan Younis to northern Gaza, calling it “a battlefield” and “extremely dangerous.”

 

Gazans attempting to head north to seek refuge should instead use the main coastal road, he said in a post on social media, although it was unclear whether many people would do so given the intense bombardment — or how many could see the information given communications disruptions in Gaza.

 

Satellite imagery captured Wednesday and analyzed by The New York Times show dozens of tanks on either side of the Salah al-Din Road north of Khan Younis, as well as to the east of the city.

 

The Israeli military said its forces were also on the ground “in the heart of Jabaliya” and “in the heart of Shuja’iyya,” two residential areas in northern Gaza, which has been largely depopulated as people flee south.

 

A major hospital in Khan Younis, Nasser Hospital, has run out of space and supplies to treat all the injured people arriving in its emergency room, said Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa, a radiologist. Patients now filled the floors of the hospital, and medical staff rushed from one patient to the next, crouching over them to apply little more than first aid, he said.

 

“There are no words to describe what the situation is really like, the wounded come in the dozens and it’s impossible for us to treat all these victims,” said Dr. Abu Moussa. “It’s not only that we can’t treat them; we can’t even diagnose them.”

 

Conditions in the area are so dangerous that medical workers could not reach the hospital on Wednesday, said Amber Alayyan, deputy program manager for the Palestinian territories for the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders.

 

“The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place for a health care worker in the world today,” she said.

 

Josh Holder and Yara Bayoumy contributed reporting.


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8) Dozens are killed amid heavy bombardment in central Gaza, health officials say.

By Shashank Bengali, Dec. 6. 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/06/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news#dozens-are-killed-amid-heavy-bombardment-in-central-gaza-health-officials-say
A group of people carrying a body covered by white sheeting.
Palestinians retrieving bodies in Deir al Balah on Tuesday. Aid workers have described intense bombardment by Israeli forces. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

Gazan health officials said on Wednesday that dozens of bodies had arrived at a major hospital in the central Gaza Strip, and aid agencies warned of critical shortages at that medical facility amid “unrelenting” strikes in the enclave by Israeli forces.

 

The Gaza Health Ministry said that 73 bodies and 123 injured people had been brought to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, in the city of Deir al Balah, in the past 24 hours. The circumstances of the deaths and injuries were not immediately known, and the health ministry did not elaborate. But aid workers have described intense bombardment by Israeli forces, which say they are advancing on the major southern city of Khan Younis to root out Hamas militants there.

 

On Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a video posted on social media that Israeli forces were closing in on the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.  “Our forces are encircling Sinwar’s house,” he said. “He can escape, but it is only a matter of time until we reach him.”

 

Israeli forces have restricted movement along Gaza’s two main roads and have effectively cut off central Gaza from both the north and south of the territory, according to the United Nations’ humanitarian office.

 

Because of the road closures, “fuel and medical supplies have reached critically low levels at Al-Aqsa hospital,” the aid agency Doctors Without Borders said on Wednesday in a social media post.

 

“The siege must be lifted; medical humanitarian supplies and aid must urgently be supplied to the Gaza Strip in its entirety,” the group’s post said.

 

The agency, which supports operations at the hospital, said that hundreds of patients needed emergency medical care, and that there were dire shortages of medicines, surgical tools and equipment to repair broken bones.

 

“There are 700 patients admitted in the hospital now, with new patients arriving all the time,” the group’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, Marie-Aure Perreaut Revial, said in a statement. “We are running out of essential supplies to treat them.”

 

A Palestinian journalist who has been staying at the hospital for weeks, Mohammed Abu Namous, said that bodies were brought there every day — so many that hospital workers were stacking them atop one another in ice-cream containers.

 

Israeli bombardment in the area “didn’t stop since the beginning of the aggression but its pace has intensified in the last few days,” he said.

 

Israel, which along with Egypt has enforced a 16-year blockade of Gaza, has allowed few humanitarian supplies to enter the territory since war broke out following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, which controls much of the enclave. Since a weeklong truce with Hamas expired last week, Israel has slowed the entry of aid trucks via Egypt.

 

For the past three days, the only aid being distributed in Gaza has been in the southernmost area of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, because of intense fighting and road closures in other parts of the strip, the U.N. humanitarian office said on Wednesday.

 

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

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