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January 13, 1:00 P.M.
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January 14, 1:00 P.M.
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Oscar Grant Plaza
14th and Broadway
Oakland
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We are all Palestinian
Listen and view this beautiful, powerful, song by Mistahi Corkill on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQwuhbLczgI
Greetings,
Here is my new song and music video, We are all Palestinian, linked below. If you find it inspiring, please feel free to share with others. All the best!
Mistahi
We are all Palestinian
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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
For More Information:
bayarealabor4palestine@gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
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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
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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
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Mr. Kevin Cooper
C-65304. 4-EB-82
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA 94974
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system.
See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings
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Sign the petition:
https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/
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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale
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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) Houthis Vow to Respond After U.S. Leads Strikes in Yemen
The Iranian-backed militia and its allies condemned air and naval attacks led by the United States, an expansion of the conflict in the Middle East. President Biden said he “will not hesitate” to act further if the Houthis continue targeting Red Sea shipping.
By Thomas Fuller and Victoria Kim, Jan. 12, 2024
Supporters of the Iranian-backed Houthi militia on Thursday in Sana, Yemen. Credit...Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Iranian-backed Houthi forces and their allies on Friday condemned American-led military strikes in Yemen and vowed to respond, as the Middle East went on alert for retaliatory attacks that could expand the conflict in the region.
After the United States and others launched air and naval strikes against more than a dozen targets linked to the Houthi militia, even some American allies in the Arab world worried that the attacks would not deter the Houthis, but could further inflame a region seething over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Oman, a U.S. ally that has mediated talks with the Houthis, criticized the strikes and expressed its “deep concern.”
The U.S.-led strikes were a sharp escalation of American action against Houthi drone and missile attacks in the crucial commercial shipping lanes of the Red Sea, which the militia has said are in support of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza. A spokesman for the Houthis, referring to the American-led strikes, told Al Jazeera: “It’s not possible for us not to respond to these operations.”
The Biden administration and some allies, which have sought to avert a wider conflict, had issued ultimatums to the Houthis warning of serious consequences if they did not stop firing at ships. Since the Houthis began their attacks in November, global shipping lines that use the Red Sea and the Suez Canal have diverted hundreds of vessels around Africa, adding around two weeks and costs to the journey.
President Biden called the strikes a “clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes.” British warplanes joined the strikes, and the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Bahrain provided logistics, intelligence and other support, according to U.S. officials.
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2) What is the International Court of Justice?
By Isabel Kershner and John Eligon, Jan. 12, 2024
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators watch proceedings on a screen outside of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on Friday. Credit...Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters
The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, held two days of hearings this week in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Here’s what to know about the court and the case:
What is the court?
The court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, was established by the founding charter of the U.N. in 1945 to settle disputes between its member states. Also known as the World Court, the I.C.J. is one of the U.N.’s six main bodies, which include the General Assembly and the Security Council.
The I.C.J. typically has a panel of 15 judges who are elected by the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council. In this case, Israel and South Africa have each appointed an additional judge to sit on the bench on their behalf.
How is it different from the International Criminal Court?
The International Criminal Court is also located in The Hague, but is a distinct court that tries individuals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The I.C.C. opened an investigation into allegations of war crimes by Israel and Palestinian militant groups in Gaza and the West Bank in 2021, and has said it will also investigate more recent allegations of war crimes since Oct. 7, including the killings of journalists.
Israel is not a member nation of the I.C.C. and does not recognize its jurisdiction, so the impact of its investigation is unclear. But both Israel and South Africa are signatories of the Genocide Convention, which paved the way for the case now before the I.C.J.
What comes next in the genocide case?
After two days of public hearings concluded on Friday, with South Africa presenting its case and Israel making its defense, the judges will deliberate behind closed doors. A final ruling will likely take years to come, but the court could issue a decision sooner, perhaps within weeks, on an interim measure seeking to stop Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza within weeks.
The decisions are legally binding with no possibility of appeal, but the court has few means of enforcing them.
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3) The daily death toll in Gaza is higher than in any other recent conflict, Oxfam says.
By Raja AbdulrahimReporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 12, 2024
A hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Wednesday where family members mourned relatives killed in an airstrike. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed an average of 250 Palestinians a day, significantly exceeding the daily death toll of any other major conflict in recent years, the aid group Oxfam has said.
More than 23,000 people have been killed in nearly 100 days of Israel’s bombardment on the tiny enclave, according to Gazan health officials, with strikes hitting mosques, churches and hospitals and leaving no place for Gazans to safely flee. About 70 percent of the victims are women and children.
“The scale and atrocities that Israel is visiting upon Gaza are truly shocking,” said Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East director, in a statement released on Thursday assessing the daily death toll. “For 100 days, the people of Gaza have endured a living hell. Nowhere is safe and the entire population is at risk of famine.”
Using publicly available data, Oxfam said it had concluded that the number of deaths per day in Gaza was much higher than in any recent major armed conflict, including the wars in Syria (96.5 deaths per day), Sudan (51.6) and Iraq (50.8).
More than 150 people were killed by Israeli strikes in the previous 24 hours, the Gazan health ministry said Friday afternoon, noting that the figure only included the bodies that had been brought to hospital morgues.
Israeli strikes on several parts of the Gaza Strip continued on Friday, including in the south, where the Israeli military has ordered much of the territory’s 2.3 million residents to flee.
The risks to Gazans are not just from the Israeli military strikes, Oxfam, other aid groups and the United Nations have said. A three-month Israeli siege, which has cut Gaza off from most water, food, medicines and fuel, has left Palestinians there facing death from hunger and disease.
Winter has made the situation even more dire because there is a shortage of blankets, little fuel for heating and no hot water, Oxfam said.
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4) Accused of Genocide, Israelis See Reversal of Reality. Palestinians See Justice.
Israel stands accused of committing genocide in Gaza. To Israelis, the charge is a perversion of history. But for Palestinians it creates a fleeting sense of historic justice.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 12, 2024
An Israeli tank photographed during an escorted tour by the Israeli military for journalists in central Gaza on Monday. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Whatever its outcome, the accusation of genocide leveled this week against Israel at the world’s top court is an epochal intervention imbued with profound symbolism for both Israelis and Palestinians.
In the granular sense, the case at the International Court of Justice is a chance to assess three months of devastation in Gaza. Israel stands accused of committing genocide against the Palestinian people in a military campaign that has killed roughly 1 in 100 Gazans and displaced nearly two million others.
But the case, brought by South Africa to the court in The Hague, has also taken on a broader resonance: Among both Israelis and Palestinians, it is perceived as a proxy for a far older battle over the legitimacy of their respective national causes.
To many Israelis, the case is the culmination of a decades-long effort to turn Israel into a pariah by holding the country — which was itself founded in the aftermath of a genocide of Jews — to a far higher level of scrutiny than other nations.
They see their invasion of the Gaza Strip as a war of defense against an enemy, Hamas, that inflicted its own genocidal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, prompting the Israeli military to pursue Hamas into Gaza just as any other army would have done.
“It is a deep blow to the Zionist aspiration of normalizing the Jewish people and turning us into a nation among nations,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem.
“What we’re feeling today is that we’re the Jew of the nations,” he said.
By contrast, many Palestinians feel a brief sense of catharsis at the thought of Israeli officials being compelled, as they were on Friday, to defend their country in front of panel of international judges.
To Palestinian eyes, only now, in a courtroom in The Hague, is Israel being treated like any other country — after being protected from scrutiny at the United Nations for so long by the United States and, as Palestinians see it, by most of the world’s news media.
“In this one instance, Palestinians are able to overcome the enormous asymmetry that exists between Israelis and Palestinians, just for this fleeting moment,” said Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the Middle East Institute, a research group in Washington.
The accusations, laid out in South Africa’s 84-page application to the court in December, cites incendiary statements by Israeli officials that it says “constitute clear direct and public incitement to genocide, which has gone unchecked and unpunished.”
Israel’s defense team presented its defense to the court on Friday, a day after South Africa’s lawyers presented theirs.
“There can hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the allegation against Israel of genocide,” Tal Becker, an Israeli lawyer, said in a speech that opened Israel’s response. “Israel is in a war of defense against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people,” he added.
The war began on Oct. 7, when Hamas-led attackers raided Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and abducting some 240 others. In response, Israel launched one of the most intense military campaigns in modern history, one that has killed more than 23,000 Gazans, according to Gazan officials, and displaced more than 80 percent of the enclave’s surviving population, according to the United Nations.
Israel’s lawyers said on Friday that its military had taken significant precautions to protect civilians, giving noncombatants two weeks to leave northern Gaza before Israel invaded the area in late October.
They said it was Hamas that had endangered civilians by embedding its military wing inside residential areas, and they dismissed some of the incendiary rhetoric cited by South Africa as either taken out of context or made by people without executive power over the military campaign.
A verdict in the trial could take years to reach. For now, the court is expected to rule only on whether to order Israel to comply with provisional measures, principally the suspension of its campaign in Gaza, while it deliberates on the case. The court’s decisions are typically binding but still essentially symbolic in nature: Its judges have few means of enforcing their rulings.
But, Mr. Elgindy said, “For Palestinians, it will be a moral victory, regardless of the legal outcome.”
For Israelis, it is a perversion of history to face claims of genocide, both because of the brutality of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks and because of the Jewish people’s long history of oppression.
Their state was founded in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the founders aimed to protect Jews from the same kind of violence with which Israel now stands charged. The concept of genocide was coined in reaction to the Holocaust by a lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael Lemkin, who later promoted the creation of the international convention that Israel is now accused of breaking.
And the judge whom Israel has sent to join the justices assessing the case, Aharon Barak, 87, is a Holocaust survivor who escaped the ghetto of Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania, by hiding in a sack.
“For most Israelis, this is the culmination of a long process of Holocaust inversion — of accusing the Jews of being the new Nazis,” Mr. Halevi said.
But if Israelis feel a historic irony to the case, Palestinians feel sense of a historic justice, however temporary.
A stateless people, Palestinians retain a deep sense of trauma from the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel, when about 700,000 Palestinians — most of the Arab population in the land that was then divided into Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — fled or were expelled from their homes, in a forced displacement known by Palestinians as the Nakba.
That trauma deepened in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza during the Arab-Israeli war that year, capturing the territories from Jordan and Egypt.
And the Palestinians’ pain has been compounded ever since by the gradual erosion of their dream of a state. Israel has built hundreds of settlements in the West Bank and retains military control over it.
Even after withdrawing its troops from Gaza in 2005, Israel kept the territory under a debilitating blockade once Hamas seized control there in 2007, and successive Israeli governments have exacerbated the political and logistical divides between Palestinians in the two territories.
The case in The Hague does not address any of those grievances or bring Palestinians any closer to statehood. But regardless of its outcome, it suspends what Palestinians see as a lack of accountability for Israeli wrongdoing.
“Finally, Israeli officials are brought to a situation where they have to think about their actions,” said Nasser al-Kidwa, a former Palestinian envoy to the United Nations.
Generally, Mr. al-Kidwa said, “They feel that they are above the law and they feel that they don’t have to answer to anything. And now suddenly, you see them trying to answer and to put the best face on their answers. And that’s rare.”
For Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a writer and analyst from Gaza who lost many relatives in a strike in December, the case will do little to salve his sense of loss or the pain felt by those still in Gaza.
“From my point of view, it’s difficult to see how this directly addresses what happened to my family, what happened to the childhood homes that I grew up in, and the suffering that my friends and community and people are experiencing on a daily basis,” said Mr. Alkhatib, who moved to the United States in 2005.
Nevertheless, Mr. Alkhatib, a fierce critic of Hamas and its terrorism, said he hoped that the prominence of the case might encourage more Palestinians to seek diplomatic or legal routes to improve their fate, instead of resorting in desperation to attacks on Israeli civilians.
“It actually is helpful for Palestinians to feel that there are alternatives to violence,” he said.
In turn, that could push both sides toward “a different strategy, a different future, one based on mutual respect mutual humanity and based on dialogue and engagement and based on sidelining those extremist voices that have become so dominant in both parties,” Mr. Alkhatib said.
It was a thought partly echoed by Mr. Halevi, the Israeli author. While rejecting the premise of the genocide accusation, he nevertheless acknowledged the role that offensive statements by far-right Israeli politicians, some of whom have called for a second Nakba, had played in the case against Israel.
“There needs to be an internal reckoning for that,” he said. “We won’t begin the process of healing Israel until this government is replaced and the far right is banished back to the fringes of Israeli politics.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.
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5) Don’t Turn Away From the Charges of Genocide Against Israel
By Megan K. Stack, Ms. Stack, a contributing Opinion writer, covered the Middle East as a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Jan. 12, 2024
Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, this month. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
With the question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza now before the International Court of Justice, the Biden administration has struck a tone of glib dismissal.
“Meritless” seems to be the agreed-upon term among U.S. officials. “The charge of genocide is meritless,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken intoned from a podium in Tel Aviv this week. “Meritless, counterproductive, and without any basis in fact whatsoever,” blustered the National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
The administration’s posture of indifference strains credulity. The 84-page case submitted to the court by South Africa is crammed with devastating evidence that Israel has breached its obligations under the 1948 international genocide convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The document before the court is meticulously footnoted and sourced, and many experts say the legal argument is unusually strong.
Top Israeli political and military leaders have themselves helped to bolster the case against their government. The words of Israeli officials are being offered as evidence of intent: from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging Israelis to “remember” the Old Testament account of the carnage of Amalek (“Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings,” reads one passage); to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowing that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before — we will eliminate everything”; to the minister of energy and infrastructure pledging, “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave this world.” By speaking openly about destroying Gaza and dispersing its residents, Israeli leaders have publicized what has, in other cases of genocide, been hidden or denied.
There’s no telling, of course, how effectively each side will argue, or how the judges will rule. This week’s hearings in The Hague will not answer whether Israel is committing genocide — that will come after a more painstaking collection and presentation of evidence, and could take years. For now, South Africa has asked the court “as a matter of extreme urgency” to order Israel to halt its onslaught in order to protect Palestinians and preserve evidence. The panel of judges has to be convinced only that the accusation of genocide is plausible to order provisional measures in the coming days or weeks.
Even a determination that evidence suggests genocide would oblige the international community to protect the shellshocked, starving people of Gaza by demanding a cease-fire and flooding the Palestinians with aid. In the long run, the case could lay early groundwork for sanctions against Israel or the prosecution of its officials.
The proceedings are meaningful for the United States, too. The Biden administration has been the indispensable sponsor of this war — arming, funding and diplomatically shielding Israel despite increasingly dire reports of Palestinian death and displacement. If the violence in Gaza is found to be genocide, the United States could be charged with complicity in genocide, a crime in its own right. Given the sheer power of the United States and its track record of international impunity, the odds of any significant consequences may be small — but, nevertheless, Americans should understand that the case is both substantial and serious, and that their own government is implicated.
Israel and its U.S. backers will, of course, frame this differently. They will point out, correctly, that Israel suffered an intolerable blow on Oct. 7, when Hamas militants cut a path of atrocities through southern Israel, slaughtering hundreds of civilians and dragging hundreds more back into Gaza as hostages.
Israeli and American officials have repeatedly invoked self-defense to explain the violence in Gaza; self-defense is also expected to shape Israel’s arguments in The Hague.
But self-defense cannot excuse or justify acts of genocide, and Israel’s assault on Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the crimes of Oct. 7. Israel did not promise, nor did it execute, a sharply targeted retaliation against Hamas (whose leaders run their political operations out of Qatar) or a strategic hunt for the hostages.
Israel has rescued only a single hostage — and Israeli soldiers shot dead three Israeli hostages who were waving a white flag and begging for rescue, later explaining they mistook them for Palestinians. Almost all of the 110 Israeli hostages who’ve made it home were released by truce, negotiation and prisoner exchange.
Within hours of the Hamas attack, Israel imposed a brutal blockade on the Gaza Strip, cutting off electricity, water, fuel and food to a trapped population of roughly 2.2 million, about half of whom are children. The blockade itself amounted to the war crime of collective punishment, but that was only the curtain raiser. Within hours, the bombs began to fall — and have continued to this day.
In an Israeli television clip cited by South Africa in its application, Col. Yogev Bar-Sheshet spoke from Gaza: “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth,” he said. “No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”
Israel has killed over 23,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gazan health ministry. More than 9,000 of the dead are children. More than 1,000 children had undergone agonizing amputations, sometimes with no anesthesia available, by late November, UNICEF says. Women giving birth have also been forced to undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia, according to doctors in Gaza. Entire neighborhoods are crushed, and more than 85 percent of the population have been displaced.
To understand this extraordinary spasm of violence as an act of national self-defense, you’d have to accept that Israel’s only chance for safety depends upon Gaza being crushed and emptied — by death or displacement — of virtually all Palestinians.
And, indeed, Israeli officials have said as much.
Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, recently explained to the British TV host Iain Dale that Israel had to lay waste to Gaza because “every school, every mosque, every second house” was connected to a tunnel used by Hamas.
“That’s an argument for destroying the whole of Gaza, every single building in it,” Mr. Dale said.
“Do you have another solution?” Ms. Hotovely replied.
As the arguments at The Hague drew near, Israeli officials tried to soften their image.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military tweeted out a video insisting (in English) that “our war is against Hamas, not the people of Gaza.” Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Mr. Netanyahu warned his ministers to be cautious what they say about the war. “Choose your words carefully,” Mr. Netanyahu reportedly said, despite his own violent rhetoric.
The Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy has repeatedly called the South African case a “blood libel” — a reference to antisemitic European conspiracy theories that have fueled the persecution of Jews since the Middle Ages. “History will judge you, and it will judge you without mercy,” Mr. Levy said, addressing the South African government.
The conviction that South Africa is carrying on an ancient and despicable tradition of antisemitism touches on the extreme sensitivities surrounding this case.
Contemporary notions of war crimes and genocide emerged from the horrors of the Holocaust. To hear the charge of genocide turned against the Jewish state often provokes a visceral disbelief among people — including many Americans — who were carefully educated about the Holocaust while the desperate plight of Palestinians was downplayed or ignored.
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and genocide expert who has argued that Israeli’s actions in Gaza are “a textbook case of genocide,” recently described to me this cognitive dissonance.
“The idea that the Jewish state could commit war crimes, let alone genocide, becomes from the beginning an unthinkable idea,” said Dr. Segal, a professor at Stockton University in New Jersey. “Impunity for Israel is baked into the system.”
Speaking before the tribunal on Thursday, the South African barrister Max du Plessis argued that Israel’s decades-long oppression of Palestinian rights must be regarded as crucial context of the violence in Gaza, which he said “is not correctly framed as a simple dispute between two parties.”
Israel, he pointed out, is an occupying power “that has subjected the Palestinian people to an oppressive and prolonged violation to their rights to self-determination for more than half a century. And those violations occur in a world where Israel for years has regarded itself as beyond and above the law.”
The word genocide rings loudly in our imagination. We think of Rwanda, Bosnia, the Armenians, the Trail of Tears and, of course, the Holocaust. I have heard many people balk at the suggestion that Gaza could be experiencing genocide. The Holocaust, after all, wiped out over 60 percent of European Jews. Israel’s war — instigated, no less, by the murder of Jews — has killed about 1 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza. One percent is terrible, of course, but genocide?
Under the genocide convention, though, the term describes an intent to wipe out a defined group of people and taking steps to achieve that end. There is no threshold of death, or proportion of death, that must be reached. It is possible to kill a relatively small number of people, but still commit an act of genocide.
We should approach this question humbly, because we — Americans, the West — have repeatedly shown that we are good at recognizing genocide only in retrospect. Virtually every cataclysm we now know as genocide, including the Holocaust, was met, first, with doubt and linguistic quibbling until finally — and much too late — a declaration was made.
Rwanda, often mentioned just after the Holocaust in the dirty annals of genocide, was acknowledged as such only after Europeans and Americans wasted precious weeks prevaricating and dragging their feet, leery of intervention, while U.S. officials refused to say the word “genocide” in public. Denial of the Bosnian genocide has continued to this day.
When I read the document assembled by South Africa, my mind reeled: How could it happen? How was it allowed to happen?
The harrowing details from Gaza go on and on. The crushing of the medical system. The slaughter of aid workers. The killing of journalists. The war on libraries, houses of worship and culture. The destruction of families and economic needs and possibility itself.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza. This line is repeated in the South African suit. Most of the people are starving. Around 70 percent of the dead are women and children and two mothers are killed every hour, the United Nations has estimated.
On Thursday, the South African advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi referred to Israel’s denial of fuel and water to Gaza.
“This admits of no ambiguity: It means to create conditions of death of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Mr. Ngcukaitobi said. “To die a slow death because of starvation and dehydration or to die quickly because of a bomb attack or snipers. But to die, nevertheless.”
The destruction of bakeries, water pipes, sewerage and electricity networks. The hoisting of Israeli flags over the wreckage. Calls from Israel’s government to return settlers to Gaza.
I don’t have to wonder how it could have been allowed to happen. It is happening now and we’ve all been watching.
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6) Murder on the U.S./Israel Express
By Bonnie Weinstein, Jan. 12, 2024
We may never know the total number of deaths in Gaza because it will take going through all the rubble created by Israeli bombs trying to match body parts to living families through DNA testing, and some of the dead have no living families left. This horrendous and unconscionable death and destruction was made possible by U.S. bombs provided to Israel with our tax dollars. It has become impossible to keep track of the dead in Gaza.
This is a massacre, a genocide—an immeasurable crime against humanity that dwarfs the horrific Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
Gaza will never be the same. The entire infrastructure has been destroyed—homes, schools, hospitals, power plants, water filtration stations, bakeries—all blown to bits with bodies still buried under the rubble.
An entire generation of Palestinian children and their families—those who have survived—will have to bear the burden of the terror and destruction they have experienced at the hands of the Israel and the U.S. for the rest of their lives.
In the meantime, Israel will continue its war with the full support of the U.S. until the Palestinian and Israeli working class together—with the support of workers across the world—demand an end to apartheid, an end to the separate Jewish state—and establish a free, democratic, and secular Palestine with equal rights for all.
This is the only solution to ending this continuous Israeli bloodbath against Palestinians that has been going on since before 1948.
Israel is an apartheid government
According to Amnesty International:
“The Palestinian experience of being denied a home is at the heart of Israel’s apartheid system…. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, successive governments have created and maintained a system of laws, policies, and practices designed to oppress and dominate Palestinians.
According to Human Rights Watch:
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. ...Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas…these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
The U.S. media coverup of Israeli-Zionist racism and apartheid
The U.S. media consistently uses subtle language to reinforce the Israeli portrayal of Palestinians as less than human—reinforcing Netanyahu’s 2019 statement that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”
In two separate articles on the same day in the New York Times, different language was used to describe Israeli and Palestinian hostages. Israeli hostages were referred to as women and children while Palestinian hostages were referred to as women and minors or teenagers, just as 12-year-old Tamer Rice was referred to as a young Black man after being shot to death November 22, 2014, in Cleveland, Ohio, by 26-year-old white police officer, Timothy Loehmann, within seconds after his arrival on the scene.
The following quotes use different language when describing Israelis and Palestinians in the New York Times:”
“…the release of hostages from Gaza, nearly all of them women and children, in exchange for the discharge of Palestinian women and minors from Israeli prisons…”
And in a different article:
“Anwar and his cousin, Mourad Atta, 17, are among the 180 Palestinian teenagers and women freed from Israeli prisons in recent days, the largest such release of prisoners and detainees in more than a decade. Their freedom is part of a deal in which the Palestinians were traded for 81 hostages, many of them children, captured during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7.”
Racism and apartheid are an essential part of capitalist rule across the globe—in Israeli-occupied Palestine and here in the USA.
Being anti-apartheid is not antisemitic
Calling for the end of Israel as a separate Jewish state and opposing Zionism, which upholds the separate Jewish state, is not antisemitism. The Zionist state of Israel not only brutally occupies Palestinian territory but enforces laws that deem Arabs and Palestinians second-class citizens—and, to the extreme—less than human. It is not antisemitic to oppose apartheid.
Governments that have separate laws and rights that allow people of one religion, race, sex, or class to legally oppress people of another religion, race, sex, or class is an apartheid government—and it’s an international crime against freedom, equal rights, and democracy.
All Israeli territory—established by the forcible removal of the indigenous Arab population in 1948—including the Occupied West Bank and Gaza—is Israeli military occupied territory.
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF)—funded by U.S. tax dollars from the U.S. working class—enforces the separate laws designed to oppress and subjugate Palestinians.
The Israeli army, by law, has the right to incarcerate Palestinians indefinitely without being charged. Any Israeli settler has the right to confiscate the land that Palestinian families have lived on for generations.
If a Palestinian family tries to resist the takeover of their land by an Israeli settler, the IDF will be called to assist the Israeli settler. Palestinians do not have the legal right to own land in the Occupied Territories.
In Israel, the legal system for Jewish citizens is enforced by the Israeli judicial system—including the right to legal counsel, the courts, and police protection. Jewish Israelis certainly cannot be held indefinitely without charge and are not judged, jailed, and condemned by Israel’s military courts. They can also own land—if they can afford it.
How the Israeli “military courts” run by the Israeli Defense Force works.
In a December 2, 2023, New York Times daily update-article by Elena Shao, Karen Zraick, Anushka Patil and Gaya Gupta, titled, “Here is a breakdown of the 240 Palestinians Israel released during the pause in fighting,” they describe how IDF “justice” works:
“Israel detained all of the people on the list [the Palestinian prisoners who were released] for what it said were offenses related to Israel’s security, from throwing stones to more serious accusations like supporting terrorism and attempted murder. More than half of the cases were being prosecuted in Israeli military courts, which try Palestinians in the occupied West Bank but not Israeli settlers who live there. Nearly all Palestinians tried in Israeli military courts are convicted, and those accused of security offenses can be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. …There were 107 teenagers under 18, including three girls. Another 66 teenagers were 18 years old. The oldest person released was a 64-year-old woman.”
Opposing a separate Jewish apartheid state that systematically oppresses Palestinian people because of their religion and race is not antisemitic, it’s anti-apartheid.
Hatred of Jewish people because of their religion is antisemitism and must not be tolerated anywhere—just as racism, sexism and classicism must not be tolerated.
Capitalism champions all forms of oppression and divisions among workers
Capitalism itself is an apartheid, racist, sexist and classist system of oppression by the wealthy elite over the masses of working people—we who create the wealth in the world. And the U.S. is the most militarily powerful, and at the top of that list worldwide.
Laws that govern all capitalist countries are designed and enforced by the capitalist class to oppress the masses by whatever means available to them including war, economic instability, and racism.
Corporations and the wealthy have the resources to hire banks of lawyers to protect their economic interests. They pay into capitalist campaign funds (they routinely donate to all capitalist candidates to ensure all candidates’ allegiances are to them.)
They make the laws that allow corporations to raise prices any time they want while also raising interest rates on credit cards and bank loans. They raise prices on the necessities of life—food, housing, education, and healthcare that workers need to survive.
With their great wealth, the capitalist class controls the police, the courts, and the military.
They rule through the threat of nuclear annihilation at the press of a button. U.S. capitalism, especially, thrives on social injustice pitting workers of all colors, religious beliefs, gender, and sexual preference against each other.
Under capitalism, the only rights workers have is the right to vote for one wealthy capitalist candidate over another. We do not even have the right to a job—that is always up to the capitalist class. Any rights workers do have, have been won by long, hard struggles of workers against capitalist exploitation.
A free and democratic society with equal rights for all is a necessity if we are to survive.
The fight for social justice everywhere must be the cause of a united, worldwide movement of the working class organizing and acting in our own collective defense against capitalist rule—the rule of a tiny elite over the masses of humanity by the threat of death and the destruction of the entire planet.
Fighting against the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestine must become the rallying cry of organized labor in every country.
A united party of the working class worldwide organizing against capitalist aggression, expropriation and domination of Palestine and the world is the only power strong enough to finally end capitalism’s rampage against the world’s working class.
In a December 1, 2023, article in Common Dreams by Jake Johnson, titled, “UAW Becomes Largest U.S. Union to Back Gaza Cease-Fire:”
“Fresh off historic contract victories, the United Auto Workers on December 1, 2023, became the largest U.S. union to endorse a cease-fire in Gaza as Israel resumed its bombardment of the Palestinian territory following a weeklong pause. … Dozens of unions have signed onto a petition launched by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, which demands the release of all hostages, an end to Israel’s siege of Gaza, and a cease-fire that sets the stage for ‘negotiations for an enduring peace.’”
This new resistance against Israel’s relentless killing and destruction in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank is a step forward for labor in the U.S. But it is far short of what is needed to put an end to capitalism’s relentless war on humanity for profit’s sake, which is what this war against Palestine is all about. It’s about who controls the Middle East, its oil, resources, and people.
The U.S. will stop at nothing to maintain their nuclear domination in the Middle East and in the world. That is why they are giving billions to Israel to drive the Palestinians from their homeland and commit genocide against them if they don’t get out of their way.
A democratic, secular world with equal rights for all
A united working class has the power to make the fundamental changes in the world that could bring an end to war. Workers are coming to the realization that capitalism and its relentless pursuit of increasing rates of profits cannot continue without more war, poverty, and oppression everywhere.
Labor’s next step is to work within our communities and our organizations to stop capitalism’s descent back into barbarism leading to the increased threat of nuclear annihilation.
It is capitalism’s pursuit of profits that fuels war and oppression. That is their modus operandi to keep masses of workers from realizing our real power—unity and solidarity in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. If not, capitalism will continue to profit from war while we workers die, whether we are the targets of their bombs, or their cannon fodder. And the rich will get richer.
A party of, by and for the working class is the only viable solution.
A democratically organized and structured party of the working class in opposition to all capitalist parties must be formed—and it will take the united leadership and rank-and-file of daring labor organizations like the UAW to take the lead and break with the Democratic and Republican parties—because they are parties of the capitalist class.
Labor en masse must finally acknowledge that the capitalist class—with its finger on the button—is the enemy of all life on the planet.
Workers need to form a party of our own that represents our interests—to build a world democratically controlled by the majority, based upon social and economic equality and justice. The world’s working class has the power of our numbers and our labor to make war obsolete and make democratic cooperation our modus operandi. It’s called socialism.
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