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18th Annual CODEPINK Mother’s Day Bridge Walk for PEACE!
Sunday, May 12, Noon
11:45: Gather at the Welcome Center Plaza, on the East (Hill) side of the San Francisco end of bridge.
(IMPORTANT: Arrive 30-40 min. EARLY, as “The Authorities” purposely close nearby parking lots to discourage participation!)
NOON: March Begins
1:30 P.M.: Short Rally after the March on the bridge.
In light of U.S. complicity in the ongoing genocide and forced starvation of the people of Gaza, we will put Palestine front and center. With over 12 thousand children killed and tens of thousands of children hungry and near famine in Gaza alone, not to mention the urgent crisis for the children of Sudan, Ukraine, and Haiti, this is an urgent call for the global family to rise up for humanity.
· FOOD NOT BOMBS! DEMILITARIZE NOW!
· FOOD to GAZA, not Weapons to Israel.
· NO TAX $$ for GENOCIDE
· Not Another Nickel, Not Another Dime, No more Money for Israel’s Crimes.
· Diplomacy Not War!
Let’s again pay tribute to the original meaning of “Mother’s Day,” a global call to ABOLISH WAR:
We’ll read: Julia Ward Howe’s (1870) Mother’s Day Proclamation
Bring your mamas and grandmamas, sons, daughters, and grandchildren—the entire family, and friends too! War is not healthy for children and other living things!
Bring your Kaffiyeh’s, Palestinian Flags, and signs that speak for you.
(Note: Authorities may restrict you from taking flags on the bridge—wear it as a cape!)
Signs larger than 2x3 ft. may also be restricted.
Bring a simple treat to share to celebrate 18 years of CODEPINK bridge walks, and our Bay Area community’s commitment to peace and justice.
We’ll sing John Lennon’s Imagine, one of Bay Area Troubadour Francis Collin’s favorite songs!
Francis Collins Presente!
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Source: mondoweiss.net
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Boris Kagarlitsky is in Prison!
On February 13, the court overturned the previous decision on release and sent Boris Kagarlitsky to prison for five years.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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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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Just Like The Nazis Did
By David Rovics
After so many decades of patronage
By the world’s greatest empire
So many potential agreements
Were rejected by opening fire
After crushing so many uprisings
Now they’re making their ultimate bid
Pursuing their Final Solution
Just like the Nazis did
They forced refugees into ghettos
Then set the ghettos aflame
Murdering writers and poets
And so no one remember their names
Killing their entire families
The grandparents, women and kids
The uncles and cousins and babies
Just like the Nazis did
They’re bombing all means of sustaining
Human life at all
See the few shelters remaining
Watch as the tower blocks fall
They’re bombing museums and libraries
In order to get rid
Of any memory of the people who lived here
Just like the Nazis did
They’re saying these people are animals
And they should all end up dead
They’re sending soldiers into schools
And shooting children in the head
The rhetoric is identical
And with Gaza off the grid
They’ve already said what happens next
Just like the Nazis did
Words of war for domestic consumption
And lies for all the rest
To try to distract our attention
Among their enablers in the West
Because Israel needs their imports
To keep those pallets on the skids
They need fuel and they need missiles
Just like the Nazis did
They’re using food as a weapon
They’re using water that way, too
They’re trying to kill everyone in Gaza
Or make them flee, it’s true
As the pundits talk of “after the war”
Like with the Fall of Madrid
The victors are preparing for more
Just like the Nazis did
But it’s after the conquest’s complete
If history is any guide
When the occupying army
Is positioned to decide
When disease and famine kills
Whoever may have hid
Behind the ghetto walls
Just like the Nazis did
All around the world
People are trying to tell
There's a genocide unfolding
Ringing alarm bells
But with such a powerful axis
And so many lucrative bids
They know who wants their money
Just like the Nazis did
There's so many decades of patronage
For the world's greatest empire
So many potential agreements
Were rejected by opening fire
They're crushing so many uprisings
Now they're making their ultimate bid
Pursuing their final solution
Just like the Nazis did
Just like the Nazis did
Just like the Nazis did
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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
Sign the petition:
https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/
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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
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Leonard Peltier Update - Not One More Year
Coleman 1 has gone on permanent lockdown.
The inmates are supposed to be allowed out two hours a day. I have not heard from Leonard since the 18th.
The last time I talked to Leonard, he asked where his supporters were. He asked me if anyone cared about these lockdowns.
Leonard lives in a filthy, cold cell 22 to 24 hours a day. He has not seen a dentist in ten years. I asked him, “On a scale of 1 to 10, is your pain level at 13?” He said, “Something like that.” Leonard is a relentless truth-teller. He does not like it when I say things that do not make sense mathematically.
That is why Leonard remains imprisoned. He will not lie. He will not beg, grovel, or denounce his beliefs.
Please raise your voice. Ask your representatives why they have abdicated their responsibility to oversee the Bureau of Prisons and ensure they adhere to Constitutional law.
Uhuru, The African People’s Socialist Party, has stepped up for Leonard. NOT ONE MORE YEAR.
Fight for Free Speech – YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM8GDeGv90E
Leonard should not have spent a day in prison. Click “LEARN” on our website to find out what really happened on that reservation:
www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
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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Daniel Hale UPDATE:
In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement. We celebrate his release from Marion. He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison. Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year. www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org
More Info about Daniel:
“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison”
https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/
“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?” by Daniel Hale
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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) A Japanese American civil rights group pushes for a cease-fire, breaking with its Jewish allies.
By Amy Qin, May 10, 2024
David Inoue, the executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, next to a painting that depicts a Supreme Court case during the World War II incarceration of people of Japanese descent. Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times
The Japanese American Citizens League, one of the oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organizations, called on Thursday for a negotiated cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, following months of pressure from younger members who believed the group had a duty to advocate for Palestinians.
The organization’s leaders and some older members were reluctant to take a position on the war, in part because of the league’s longstanding ties with prominent Jewish civil rights groups in the United States. In the 1970s, the American Jewish Committee was the first national organization to endorse the push by Japanese Americans for reparations for their incarceration during World War II.
But younger members of the Japanese American group said that Palestinians were suffering from human rights violations and that their organization had long stood up for such victims.
The league, in a statement on Thursday, pointed to the conflict’s “staggering” death toll of Palestinians and Israelis and the immense and continuous humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
As a group “dedicated to safeguarding the civil liberties of not only Japanese Americans but all individuals subjected to injustice and bigotry,” the group said, “we must denounce these egregious human rights violations.”
The organization did not call for an unconditional cease-fire, but instead said it wanted Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement and urged President Biden to advance such negotiations.
The rift within the league was another example of how the Israel-Hamas war has cleaved cultural, academic and political institutions far beyond the Middle East, and not just among groups with direct ties to the region. As in many organizations, the divide within the league has mostly been along generational lines.
In its cease-fire statement, the group did not address one of the young activists’ primary demands: cutting ties with Jewish organizations they labeled “Zionist.” David Inoue, the league’s executive director, said in an interview on Thursday that the group was not considering that option.
“That’s not how we work in coalition,” Mr. Inoue said. “I think it’s inherently unfair for anyone to make demands like that.”
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2) Inside Biden’s Broken Relationship With Muslim and Arab American Leaders
Even as the president piles new pressure on Israel to end the war in Gaza, those who have called most passionately for him to change course say it is too little, too late.
By Nicholas Nehamas and Reid J. Epsteinm, Reporting from Washington, May 10, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/us/politics/biden-muslim-arab-americans-gaza.html
Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of a protest vote movement against President Biden that began in Michigan this year, center, speaking alongside Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn, right, in February. Credit...Jeff Kowalsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Seven months into Israel’s war in Gaza, Muslim and Arab American leaders say their channels of communication with President Biden’s White House have largely broken down, leaving the administration without a politically valuable chorus of support for his significant shift on the conflict this week.
Mr. Biden’s announcement that he had paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel and would not help with a ground invasion of Rafah was a sea change in U.S. policy that Arab American and Muslim leaders have demanded for months. But those who desired it the most have long ago written off the administration as complicit in a war that Gaza officials say has killed more than 34,000 people, arguing it was, essentially, too little, too late.
“The president’s announcement is extremely overdue and horribly insufficient,” said Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of a protest-vote movement against Mr. Biden that began in Michigan this year. “He needs to come out against this war. Period. That would be significant.”
Mr. Biden’s White House aides engaged in considerable outreach at the outset of the Democratic primary season, when the movement to cast protest votes in early states emerged as a surprising political headache. A cadre of high-level aides traveled to Dearborn, Mich., and Chicago to demonstrate their interest in listening, but Arab American leaders told them that without a momentous shift in U.S. policy — such as support for a permanent cease-fire — there was no need to keep talking.
By and large, prominent Muslim and Arab Americans have now concluded that they are irrevocably at odds with the Biden administration over its foreign policy, according to interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the talks. And many of them say they are tired of hearing that they should vote for Mr. Biden simply because former President Donald J. Trump would be worse.
“I have told them frankly: ‘Don’t waste your time anymore unless you have something substantial. This is a waste of time,’” Osama Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News, an influential newspaper in Dearborn, said of White House officials.
The inability to maintain useful lines of communication with groups that represent a vocal, if small, bloc of Democratic voters could pose a significant problem for Mr. Biden’s re-election, given that the contest is likely to be determined by narrow margins in a few battleground states. The protest effort against Mr. Biden garnered double-digit support in some states during the Democratic primaries, although Biden aides believe that voters will ultimately see Mr. Trump as the bigger threat, and that issues like abortion, democracy and the economy will take precedence over Gaza.
Mr. Biden has ensured that the White House, rather than his re-election campaign, handles outreach to Arab and Muslim communities angry about the war in Gaza, since their dispute centers on policy rather than electoral politics. While the White House has designated an official, Mazen Basrawi, as its “liaison to American Muslim communities,” no one on Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has a similar responsibility. Mr. Biden’s campaign aides say they are leaving such outreach to the White House for now at the request of community leaders.
Mr. Basrawi was among the officials in the White House delegations to meet with Arab American and Muslim leaders this year in Dearborn and Chicago. The February meeting in Dearborn took place only after the city’s mayor made a public show of refusing to meet with Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the campaign’s manager.
At the Dearborn meeting, in which a senior White House foreign policy aide expressed regret for the administration’s response to the war in Gaza, Mr. Basrawi apologized for a lack of engagement from the Biden administration with Dearborn officials.
“Just so you all know, we have been engaging with both the Arab community, particularly the Palestinian community and the Muslim community broadly, on a lot of these issues since October,” Mr. Basrawi told the group, according to an audio recording of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times. “To the extent that I’ve neglected to include all of you in my engagement, that’s on me. You know, this is an important community nationally.”
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Basrawi said he was speaking to more officials now than he did before the war in Gaza began.
“My circle of contacts and regular conversations with leaders in the Muslim and Arab communities has grown since Oct. 7 to include more leaders on the local level,” he said.
The White House continues to reach out to Muslim and Arab American groups who remain willing to engage, particularly elected Democratic officials. White House officials met with a group of Lebanese Americans last month in Houston. And the White House’s Office of Public Engagement maintains an email list updating Muslim American leaders on the administration’s work on Israel and Gaza.
“We recognize that this is a painful time for many communities and that people have strong personal views,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House. “It’s why the president remains deeply engaged in securing a hostage deal that would result in an immediate and sustained cease-fire.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is planning to meet with several prominent Arab American groups, according to three people familiar with the meeting who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private planning. But the event has been delayed, at a time when Mr. Blinken’s heavy travel schedule has repeatedly taken him out of the country.
There are limits to the people and groups that Mr. Biden’s White House will engage with about the Gaza conflict. The administration disavowed and cut off communication with the Council on American-Islamic Relations in December after its executive director said that Palestinians in Gaza had “the right to self-defense” but that Israel “as an occupying power” did not. (The group has said the comments were taken out of context.)
A White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said the administration would engage with people critical of Mr. Biden’s handling of the conflict but had cut ties with those who praised the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, made antisemitic statements or questioned Israel’s right to exist.
As the pro-Palestinian movement has spread beyond Arab American and Muslim communities to young people and progressives, those with direct or ancestral ties to the region have tended to carry the most influence in criticizing Mr. Biden and the White House’s outreach effort.
Wa’el Alzayat, the chief executive of Emgage, a group with close ties to the Biden administration that mobilizes Muslim voters, turned down an invitation to attend an iftar dinner at the White House last month.
“We don’t take lightly the opportunity to meet with the president,” Mr. Alzayat said. “But at some point, as organizations that have turned out the vote largely for Democrats, by expecting us to show up to these things and not delivering on policy, they’re actually burning us.”
He called Mr. Biden’s threat to cut off arms shipments “promising and important” and a result of pressure from antiwar leaders, but he said it “might be too late for Rafah,” as Israeli tanks and warplanes continue to bombard the city.
Some Arab Americans who have long had an entree to high-level Democratic politics expressed feelings of deep alienation.
“I’ve never had the feeling of being so shut out as I feel right now,” said James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute in Washington and a Democratic National Committee member since 1993. “And it’s not just me. It’s leadership across the country.”
Mr. Zogby’s most recent letter to the White House, he said, has gone unanswered for three months, alongside numerous text messages and phone calls.
If some voters do break with Mr. Biden over Gaza, they are more likely to stay home or opt for a third party than vote for Mr. Trump. The former president has a long history of using anti-Muslim language, and he banned travel from several predominantly Muslim countries while in office. On Thursday, he voiced support for the invasion of Rafah, saying that Israel had to “get the job done.”
Democratic officials who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and who have engaged in talks with the White House are very careful about how they characterize those discussions publicly, given the anger among Muslim and Arab American voters.
Two mayors with whom White House officials said they had spoken about the Gaza conflict, Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn and André Sayegh of Paterson, N.J., both declined to be interviewed.
Among Democrats who support Israel’s continued offensive in Gaza, Mr. Biden’s threat to halt arms was met with anger and concern. Politically, some worry that Mr. Biden may lose support from Jewish Americans and moderates. Mark Mellman, the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, said in a statement that it was “dangerous” to weaken the U.S.-Israeli alliance.
Although polling has shown that Gaza is not a top issue for most voters, including young people, some Democrats supporting Mr. Biden fear that his Israel policy has alienated activists who could help his campaign on the ground.
“The people who are going to knock on doors and do social media and build the rallies, a lot of them do care deeply about the war,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a surrogate for the Biden campaign. “It’s more than just the polling. It’s how are we going to get our core group of organizers and activists inspired to be fully out there come the fall?”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
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3) Police Make Arrests and Clear Encampments at M.I.T. and Penn
By Matthew Eadie, Mattathias Schwartz and Victoria Kim, May 10, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/10/us/college-campus-protests
Police confronting protesters at the University of Pennsylvania campus, in Philadelphia, on Friday. Credit...Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated Press
The police arrested protesters and cleared pro-Palestinian encampments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania early on Friday, as clampdowns on protests continued ahead of commencement ceremonies on U.S. campuses.
Ten people were arrested at M.I.T., the school’s president said in a letter to the campus. The arrests came after days of escalating tension on the Cambridge campus, including the suspensions of some students who had defied a university deadline to vacate the encampment.
Later on Friday morning, officers in riot gear cleared an encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, arresting 33 people and charging them with defiant trespass, according to a university spokesman. The move followed growing calls, including from Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, to clear the encampment as the university prepares for graduation ceremonies on May 20.
The presidents of Penn and M.I.T. were harshly criticized last year after testifying at a congressional hearing, when they were accused by Republicans of failing to crack down on campus antisemitism. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania resigned in the fallout, as did Claudine Gay of Harvard. M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, also faced criticism but kept her job.
Here are other developments:
· In Washington, the police said early Friday morning that at least one person had been arrested at a protest at George Washington University before demonstrators dispersed. Earlier in the night, police officers shut down a street blocks from the White House as scores of protesters shouted pro-Palestinian slogans and pitched tents in front of the home of the university’s president.
· The University of Southern California held a hastily arranged party on Thursday night in place of its usual universitywide commencement ceremony, amid harsh criticism of how it has handled pro-Palestinian protests on its lush quad. Throughout the hourlong program, there were no mentions of the demonstrations or Israel’s war in Gaza.
· Colson Whitehead, the author, withdrew from speaking at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, after more than 130 demonstrators were arrested there this week. “Calling the cops on peaceful protesters is a shameful act,” Mr. Whitehead wrote in a social media post.
· The president of Cornell University, Martha E. Pollack, said on Thursday that she was resigning, making Cornell the fourth of eight Ivy League universities now undergoing a leadership change. Though there has been controversy on campus over disciplinary action Cornell has taken against pro-Palestinian student protesters, Ms. Pollack said the decision to leave was “mine and mine alone.”
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4) Faculty at The New School set up an encampment.
By Lola Fadulu and Julian Roberts-Grmela, May 10, 2024
Professors pitched their tents inside a building lobby where students had set up an earlier encampment. Credit...Sarah Yenesel/EPA, via Shutterstock
Faculty members at The New School in Manhattan this week set up what may be the first professor-led pro-Palestinian encampment on a college campus since the Israel-Hamas war has prompted waves of protests at schools across the country.
The New School’s urban campus in Greenwich Village lacks the open spaces and green lawns of other universities that have been the site of protest encampments, so the professors set up their camp inside the lobby of a university building on Fifth Avenue.
On Thursday afternoon, eight tents were visible on the same spot where some of the school’s students had previously set up a lobby encampment for several days. The university called in the police last week to remove it and arrest the student protesters.
One green-and-white tent had “faculty against genocide” written in red on it. A number of posters were affixed to the building’s windows, including one that read “All Eyes on Rafah,” an area of Gaza where many have taken refuge and where Israel has made incursions and is threatening a ground invasion.
“We call on faculty across all universities to escalate and take risk in solidarity with the student movement, their demands, and the people of Palestine,” the protesting faculty wrote in a social media post. A spokesman for the group declined to comment further on Thursday.
Faculty unrest at the New School, which has about 10,000 students, has been a feature of the historically progressive university in recent years. Around 90 percent of the school’s faculty are part-time adjunct professors, with some earning about $6,000 per course. A strike by part-time faculty demanding better wages shut down classes for three weeks in 2022.
The New School’s faculty encampment sprang up as more than 2,700 people across the country have been arrested or detained in recent weeks for their involvement in similar encampments on college campuses.
New School students had set up the university’s first indoor encampment last month to show their solidarity with Palestinians and publicize calls for the university to divest from companies connected to Israel, among other demands. In support, New School faculty passed a vote on May 2 in favor of the school divesting.
The next day, New School officials called in the police to quash the student-led protest there, leading to the arrests of 45 students.
University leaders have made some concessions, however. On Thursday, the university’s interim president, Donna Shalala, said in a statement that the school had decided against pursuing criminal charges against the students. She also announced that it would reconstitute a committee on “investor responsibility to provide input to the Board of Trustees.” That committee would include faculty and student members.
Faculty at the New School had earlier passed a vote of no confidence in Dr. Shalala, who has expressed her support for Israel in the past and, in a 2018 interview, said she was opposed to divestment.
The faculty named their encampment after Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian professor and writer who was killed in December 2023 during an Israeli airstrike on northern Gaza. On Thursday afternoon, around a dozen protesters marched in a circle outside the building, the New School University Center. The protesters now refer to it as Bisan Hall, in honor of Bisan Owda, a Palestinian journalist who has been reporting from Gaza.
The demonstrators chanted, “The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be.” It was unclear whether any of those protesters were faculty members.
Later in the evening, several people were arrested outside the school, according to protesters, during an episode in which they said they were sprayed with a chemical and the police wrongfully detained a person thought to have been involved. Police officials said that 13 people were arrested but that they did not have any information about a chemical being sprayed.
Jadyce Wash, 22, a senior fashion student from Patterson, N.J., was leaving the building on Thursday after giving a presentation on bags she had designed. She said she thought it was “amazing” the faculty was standing their ground.”
Ms. Wash, who has not been involved in the protests, said the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian protests were unsatisfying.
“It’s a little intimidating, honestly coming into the building every day and having police on every corner, but I think they should continue,” Ms. Wash said of the faculty protesters.
Dr. Shalala, in her message to the university, said the university had not requested that the police patrol the area, noting that the police “will not enter any university building without our consent.”
Some faculty members have given students the option to attend protests or not attend class during finals week. But a group of students leaving the building were frustrated by the disruption. One first-year student said it felt unfair, both to students and to parents paying money for classes that were then canceled.
The school has also moved some graduation ceremonies off campus.
Trishia Rinaldo, 22, a graduating senior from Honduras who has not been involved in the protests, said it was encouraging to see the faculty encampment. But, she added, graduation was “a touchy subject” because the coronavirus pandemic disrupted her high school graduation in 2020.
“I don’t want to have my graduation canceled,” Ms. Rinaldo said.
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5) Colson Whitehead cancels his commencement speech at UMass Amherst after arrests of protesters.
By Elizabeth A. Harris, May 10, 2024
Colson Whitehead in Madrid last year. Credit...Borja Sanchez Trillo/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead said Thursday that he would not give the commencement address at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on May 18 as planned, citing the administration’s decision to call the police on campus protesters.
“I was looking forward to speaking next week at UMass Amherst,” Mr. Whitehead wrote on the social network Bluesky. “But calling the cops on peaceful protesters is a shameful act. I have to withdraw as your commencement speaker. I give all my best wishes and congratulations to the class of ’24 and pray for the safety of the Palestinian people, the return of the hostages, and an end to this terrible war.”
Michael Goldsmith, a representative for Mr. Whitehead, said the author had no further comment.
The school said that the ceremony would proceed without a commencement speaker.
“We respect Mr. Whitehead’s position and regret that he will not be addressing the Class of 2024,” Ed Blaguszewski, a spokesman for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement.
The police arrested about 130 people at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Tuesday night after pro-Palestinian protesters refused to remove their encampments.
Mr. Whitehead, whose novels include “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” is an extraordinarily decorated author. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, in 2020 and 2017, and was a finalist in 2002. He also won the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is also something of shape-shifter, moving easily between disparate genres. His book “Sag Harbor” was a coming-of-age novel, “Zone One” was a postapocalyptic zombie story, and “The Underground Railroad” followed a young enslaved woman who escapes from a Georgia plantation.
C Pam Zhang, the author of “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” and Safiya Umoja Noble, author of “Algorithms of Oppression” and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, have also withdrawn from commencement speeches this year, according to the website LitHub. Both were scheduled to speak at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.
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6) Isolated and Defiant, Israel Vows to ‘Stand Alone’ in War on Hamas
As the death toll in Gaza has risen, countries have turned their backs on Israel. The consequences of those desertions, from security to economics, risk turning Israel into a pariah.
By Damien Cave, Reporting from Tel Aviv and Safed, Israel, May 11, 2024
Turkey has suspended trade with Israel. The world’s top court is considering whether Israeli leaders have committed genocide. Protests have overtaken cities and campuses worldwide. Ireland and Spain say they will recognize Palestine as a state by the end of the month.
Even the United States — long Israel’s closest ally and benefactor — is threatening for the first time since the war began to withhold certain arms shipments.
Seven months after much of the world pledged its support to Israel following a Hamas-led terrorist attack, the country finds itself increasingly isolated. With a war that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and left Gaza on the verge of famine, any international good will that Israel amassed on Oct. 7 has been all but lost.
Of greatest concern to Israel: splintering relations with the United States. President Biden, once quiet about his expectations that Israel limit civilian deaths and increase access to humanitarian aid, has become more vocal amid partisan political pressure in an election year. This week, Mr. Biden said the United States was withholding delivery of 3,500 high-payload bombs.
His warning on Wednesday that the pause could extend to more weapons was his greatest break yet with Israel’s government. It suggested that the outrage coursing through capitals and campuses would continue to spread, and it has. On Friday, in a largely symbolic gesture, the United Nations General Assembly backed Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership, and thousands of demonstrators in Sweden protested against Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday.
“If we need to stand alone,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday, both acknowledging and seeking to defy his country’s growing isolation, “we will stand alone.”
The backlash, which also extends to Israeli athletes and academics facing boycotts and protests, has stunned and confused Israelis, who are still reeling from Hamas’s October attacks and mostly see the war as justified. Many blame unchecked antisemitism and American party politics for Israel’s isolation. Others struggle to parse reasonable critique from selective virtue signaling.
They ask why more attention is not paid to Israeli victims, and why there are no protests against China’s persecution of Uyghurs or Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
“Most Israelis, and this includes the leadership, are perplexed about the attitude of the world,” said Eytan Gilboa, a communications professor at Bar-Ilan University.
He argued that Israelis have a hard time understanding why some people at the protests on American campuses combine support for a Palestinian state with what he described as “calls for the elimination of Israel.”
“It’s the slow-motion formation of a pariah state,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat.
But the complex, layered reproof from around the world cannot be ignored as just the whims of anti-Israel activists. Israel is facing real consequences, from security to economics.
And while the isolation is partly a byproduct of how Israel has prosecuted the war, analysts and former officials say it also reflects international frustration with the government’s restrictions on food aid, a shift in global politics that has pushed Israel down the priority list and the Israeli public’s narrow focus on its own pain.
Israel has endured the world’s glare before, shrugging off frequent criticism at the U.N. and an Arab boycott that lasted decades. Though Israel governs a spit of land no bigger than Maryland, it has always had a centripetal pull, placing its wars at the emotional center of global politics. But this is not 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 or 2014 — years with previous conflicts.
Before Oct. 7, most of Israel’s allies in the West were focused on Ukraine’s fight with Russia and the challenge of a more assertive China. The Middle East had largely fallen off the radar. Climate change was driving a retreat from oil. Israel and Saudi Arabia were openly discussing normalized relations even as Israel’s democracy had become more polarized and parochial.
At exactly that moment, Hamas struck and Israel retaliated.
Mr. Biden’s first response was complete solidarity: “My administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” he said on the day of the attacks. Other world leaders followed suit. The Israeli flag and its colors were projected on the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street and the Sydney Opera House.
Yet even as horrific details of Hamas’s murders and mutilation sowed nightmares, there were signs of concern about the government of Mr. Netanyahu and its absolutist approach.
Mr. Netanyahu’s promise to “demolish Hamas” struck many military strategists as too broad to be effective. And when Israeli forces began to pummel Gaza’s crowded cities with huge bombs, toppling buildings on families along with militants, support for Israel weakened.
Washington had been warning Israel to better protect civilians. Israel continued bombing. The United States and other countries pushed Israel to create corridors for aid. They demanded a plan for governing Gaza after the fighting. Israel intensified its assault on a territory roughly the size of Philadelphia, densely packed with two million people, many of them children, while keeping out most independent journalists, leaving image sharing to those under attack.
The results were dire: By late November, people were being killed in Gaza more quickly, according to experts, than in even the deadliest moments of the American-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were widely criticized by human rights groups.
Less than two months in, Israel was losing support in Europe and the United States — before student protests escalated into clashes with the police, before calls for divestment, before polling showed the war’s unpopularity affecting Mr. Biden’s chances for re-election.
After seven aid workers, many of them foreigners, from the World Central Kitchen were killed on April 1 and with children in Gaza dying of starvation, words like “genocide” and “evil” became more commonly applied to the campaign that Israel insisted was simply self-defense.
“The poor and impoverished people of Palestine were sentenced to death by Israel’s bombs,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said on Thursday, when he announced that his country, once Israel’s closest Muslim partner, would suspend trade.
Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli official and an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said there was no denying the government ignored both a moral and political imperative by pursuing a “stingy approach” to aid and a war plan with no vision for peace.
“Our government policy failed to live up to its claim that our war is with Hamas, not the Palestinian people,” Mr. Novik said.
The military says aid is slowed by security measures intended to restrict weapons smuggling. On Sunday, Hamas attacked one of the few border crossings from which aid is permitted to enter, killing four Israeli soldiers.
For many, it was a reminder that the context of Israeli life is still colored by the country’s own suffering. What Israelis discuss at dinner are friends called up to fight. What they see are cities and towns covered with the portraits of hostages unreturned, apps sending alerts for regular rocket attacks from Hezbollah along the northern border, and graffiti in Tel Aviv that reads, “Hamas = ISIS.”
“There is a total disconnect between how Israelis view the situation and how the world does,” Mr. Novik said. “Mentally, we are not in the seventh month since Oct. 7. Mentally, we are in Oct. 8.”
Many Israelis believe the international community is willfully ignoring their plight, with soldiers dying and groups widely viewed as terrorists firing on the country. In northern Israel, more than 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes by regular rocket fire. Children are not in school. Deep inside Israel’s borders, air-raid sirens pierce daily routines.
Genine Barel, a New Yorker who moved to Israel in the ’90s and now lives in Safed, the home of Kabbalah, or mystical Judaism, said it hurts to lose international sympathy.
“It would be bad enough if we were just going through this war, and the losses and the heartbreak,” she said, sitting in the empty restaurant of the hotel she owns with her husband where business has completely dried up. “But we are being vilified at the same time.”
“It’s as if you’re being picked on,” she added, “and accused of being a bully at the same time.”
Nathalie Rozens, 37, an actor and writer who grew up in Europe, said the discussion within Israel about the war had evolved to include more criticism. (A poll published Friday showed declining trust in Israel’s military leadership since March.) But outside the country, she said, Israelis are flattened into caricatures.
In her view, Israel’s critics fail to understand its nuances, that this is a place where many people loathe Mr. Netanyahu and lament the killing of innocents in Gaza, but have a sibling fighting there and are just two generations from the Holocaust’s attempted destruction of global Jewry.
Banning Israeli artists from festivals, protesting singers at Eurovision, refusing to fund Israeli films — “the pressure, in a way, hits the wrong people,” she said.
“I don’t feel aligned with this government and I’m Israeli,” she said. “There is no space for my voice inside the country and also not abroad.”
However dangerous Hamas or Hezbollah might be, many believe dwindling U.S. support for Israel would be far more catastrophic for the country. Israel needs America as a patron, and this government has “no patience, no consideration, no understanding of Israel’s status in the world,” said Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily newspaper. “So they choose to ignore it.”
Total isolation still seems a long way off. Israel is not North Korea. Mr. Biden has said he would keep Israel supplied with defensive weapons, and Republicans have sided even more strongly with Israel. However, according to many international analysts, what Israelis want to see as a tremor may become a fault line as agitation with Israel continues to build.
“They’ve lost the young people,” said Ian Bremmer, an adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia and the president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “They weren’t around and don’t know the Holocaust. What they see is an incredibly powerful Israel that is engaging in a war for seven months and is indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians.”
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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7) Israel Issues Wider Evacuation Order in Rafah, Forcing Many to Flee Again
By Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair, May 11, 2024
Palestinians fleeing Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some 300,000 Palestinians in southern and northern Gaza are being forced to flee once again, according to the United Nations, as Israel issued new and expanded evacuation orders on Saturday, but many are unsure about where to go, given that the United Nations has said that nowhere in Gaza is safe.
The expanded evacuation order for Rafah — Gaza’s southernmost tip, where more than a million Gazans have gathered after fleeing Israeli bombardments elsewhere over the past seven months — has intensified fears that Israel’s military is moving ahead with an invasion of Rafah, a prospect that international aid groups and many countries have condemned.
Some 150,000 people have already fled Rafah over the past six days, according to the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians.
“It’s such a difficult situation — the number of people displaced is very high, and none of them know where to go, but they leave and try to get as far away as possible,” said Mohammad al-Masri, a 31-year-old accountant who is sheltering with his family in a tent in Rafah. “Fear, confusion, oppression, anxiety is eating away at people.”
Israel seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Monday in what it called a “limited operation,” and intense bombardment and fighting have continued in and around the city since then. On Saturday morning, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets over parts of Rafah and Jabaliya in the north, ordering people to flee as it expands its military assault.
The Israeli military has said it is carrying out “precise operations in specific areas of eastern Rafah” targeting Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel, but the majority of Palestinians killed in Gaza have been women and children, according to local health officials. Dozens have been killed by Israeli strikes in Rafah since Monday, according to health officials.
Most of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been forced to leave their homes, often multiple times throughout the war, with many now living in ramshackle tents, classrooms or overcrowded apartments.
On Saturday, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “called on the population from additional areas in eastern Rafah to temporarily evacuate to the expanded humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi,” a coastal area north of Rafah.
“So far,” the military added, “approximately 300,000 Gazans have moved toward the humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi.”
Although Israel has characterized Al-Mawasi as a humanitarian zone, the United Nations has said repeatedly that the area is neither safe nor equipped to receive the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already displaced by the war.
“Everywhere you look now in west #Rafah this morning, families are packing up,” Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, wrote on social media on Saturday. “Streets are significantly emptier.”
Earlier in the week, Razan al-Sa’eedi, 18, a university student studying accounting, prepared with her family to leave the UNRWA school in Rafah where they had been sheltering for months. But as they waited for the driver they had arranged to transport them to another city, they got word that his vehicle — a tractor pulling a large cart — had been struck by an Israeli missile, Ms. al-Sa’eedi said. One man was killed, she said.
In a panic, they called local emergency responders but were told that no help was available. Instead, Ms. al-Sa’eedi said, the family members left behind most of their belongings and set out on foot, each person carrying only a backpack.
As they waited outside the school entrance for Ms. al-Sa’eedi’s father and brother, they saw them running with blood streaked on their faces.
“We saw a drone firing around them — we held our backpacks and ran away from that whole dangerous area,” she said.
As they fled, Ms. al-Sa’eedi said, they occasionally stopped to try to flag down passing taxis, but again and again found them full.
After a nearly two-day trek that involved hours of walking and then — finally — a taxi ride, they arrived at Al Aqsa University in the southern city of Khan Younis. Inside the university, the walls of classrooms were scrawled with messages reading “This floor is booked” or “Please do not take any room, otherwise we will kick you out.”
Only a small closet once used to store generators was empty.
“We only have three blankets to use as curtains,” Ms. al-Sa’eedi said. “We don’t have any alternative to this small room.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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8) South Africa again asks the U.N.’s top court to act against Israel in Gaza
By Marlise Simons Reporting from Paris, May 11, 2024
Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, left, and the South African ambassador to the Netherlands, Vusimuzi Madonsela, at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, in January. Credit...Piroschka Van De Wouw/Reuters
Days after an Israeli military incursion into Rafah, in southern Gaza, South Africa once again asked the United Nations’ top court to issue constraints on Israel, saying “the very survival” of Palestinians in Gaza was under threat.
In filings disclosed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Friday, South Africa asked the court to order Israel to immediately withdraw from Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city where more than a million Palestinians displaced by the war have sought shelter, and to “cease its military offensive” and allow “unimpeded access” to international officials, investigators and journalists.
South Africa’s latest move is part of a case the country filed in December in which it accused Israel of genocide. Since then, the court has ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza and ordered the delivery of more humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the face of growing starvation in areas. But the court has not ordered Israel to stop its military campaign against Hamas.
Israel has strongly denied South Africa’s accusations and said that it had gone to great lengths to admit deliveries of food and fuel into Gaza and to lessen harm to civilians. It has also said that its war in Gaza was necessary to defend itself against the Oct. 7 attacks led by Hamas and other armed groups that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and led to the capture of about 250 others.
Friday’s request is the fourth time that South Africa has asked the U.N. court for temporary injunctions. The filings noted that conditions had deteriorated significantly for civilians sheltering in Gaza.
“Rafah is the last population center in Gaza that has not been substantially destroyed by Israel and as such the last refuge for Palestinians in Gaza,” South Africa stated.
The court has not indicated when it will respond to the South African request, but its rules require that it must give priority to petitions for emergency orders. The 15-judge court has no means of enforcing its orders.
The main case, dealing with the question of genocide, is not expected to start until next year.
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9) I Was Once a Student Protester. The Old Hyperbole Is Now Reality.
By Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion Columnist, May 11, 2024
Two police cars idled across the street from the protest rally I was attending in front of the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, their red and blue lights flashing but their sirens silent. The police seemed more bored than annoyed. It was the early 2000s, and I had recently moved from Turkey to study at the University of Texas.
My fellow protesters were outraged. “This is what a police state looks like!” they started chanting.
I turned around, bewildered. Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a whiff of disruption could get Istanbul shut down, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.
When I told my friends back home that Americans thought it was outrageous for the police even to show up at a demonstration, it was considered yet more evidence that I had been recruited by the C.I.A.
“The American police showed up to a protest and did nothing?” one of my friends scoffed. “Just watched? No arrests? No heads bashed in?” Yeah, right.
In the two decades that have passed since then, American protests have changed a bit. America’s response to them has changed a great deal.
Many observers name Sept. 11 as the turning point when America’s police departments started becoming something more like a military force, but really, it was the Iraq War. That conflict turbocharged a policy that allowed police departments to get surplus military equipment at no charge. More than 8,000 local police departments have acquired over $7 billion worth of the kind of heavy equipment — mine-resistant armored vehicles, tactical gear, grenade launchers, weaponized aircraft, assault rifles — normally used in combat.
Why do places like Preston, Idaho (population 6,000), and Dundee, Mich. (pop. 8,000), need armored vehicles designed to withstand mines?
If you acquire it, it will likely be used. Police officers are a lot less likely to sit in cars and watch protests from a distance these days.
I stayed in academia and made political resistance around the world one of my primary fields of study. The one lesson I learned above all else is that a disproportionate crackdown is often a protest movement’s most powerful accelerant.
I saw it in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, when a video of penned-in women being pepper-sprayed at close range turned a little-known demonstration into an idea with nationwide reach. I saw it in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013 when people hoping to save the park from demolition were tear-gassed and arrested, their small encampment burned. It helped generate protests that rocked the nation. I saw it in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, when troopers showing up to a grieving community with armored cars and sniper rifles caused the outrage that fueled a national movement. And just think of what the photographs of police officers turning dogs and hoses on peaceful marchers did for the civil rights movement.
The United States now stands at another such inflection point. Across the country, university administrators — as well as some students, parents, trustees, donors and elected officials — have grown frustrated by protests over the war in Gaza. That’s no surprise; the protests are intended to be disruptive. Will authority figures rise to the moment and respond to the challenge with skilled leadership befitting institutions of higher learning? Or will they panic and enforce crackdowns way out of proportion to any actual threat?
It’s not looking good so far. At the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, state police officers in riot gear carrying M4 carbines — the kind of weapons used in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and chemical-gas launchers were called in to disperse what many onlookers described as a small, peaceful group with a handful of tents. “None of these folks showed up when I lived on campus and white supremacists with tikki torches yelling ‘Jews will not replace us’ marched through campus as I hid my three kids,” Chad Wellmon, an associate professor at the university, wrote on social media.
At Dartmouth, police officers in riot gear were called in within hours after an encampment formed; in the ensuing confrontation they grabbed Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old historian and former chair of Jewish studies, slammed her to the ground and arrested her. Until the Dartmouth community howled its objection, she was briefly banned from the campus where she had been teaching for 34 years. She still faces charges of criminal trespass.
At the University of Texas at Austin, officers in riot gear marched into campus on horses like the cavalry heading into war. At Indiana University, state police snipers were positioned on the roofs of campus buildings. Campus after campus is hosting similar scenes, including many pre-dawn raids on sleeping students. At Columbia University, an officer fired a gun. The N.Y.P.D. said it was an accident, and luckily nobody got hurt, but it’s not a comforting development.
It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. The ferocity of the crackdown exceeds the threat to public interest the encampments are accused of posing. It’s a violation of a longstanding social contract regarding how campuses handle demonstrations and a direct contradiction of the loving way that many colleges now depict campus activism of prior decades.
As hard as this may be to believe, absent the glare of publicity, these protests might have been unexceptional — the stuff of college life, for better or worse. Just last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley occupied a library slated for closing — bringing their tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses — for nearly three months. Congress didn’t see the need to hold hearings about it. In 2019, students at Johns Hopkins occupied a building for five weeks to protest the university’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its push for a private police force. Four students were arrested, but the administration quickly announced that the charges would be dropped. Why? Probably for the same reason that Police Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Ga., once quietly arranged for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be released from the city’s jail — against King’s wishes. He knew the clamor would subside and the protest would roll on to the next city.
I saw the utility of this approach when I was studying in Texas. When first a few dozen and eventually roughly 200 University of Texas students occupied an administration building overnight to protest the end of affirmative action in the state, the school’s administration extended an olive branch: a series of town halls in which to discuss the issue. The offer was good only if the students left the building, and so they did.
It was a de-escalation tactic that also served as an educational experience. The discussions were sometimes charged, but they produced ideas that helped the university expand its strategies to maintain racial diversity. Those strategies helped the university achieve better results than many comparable institutions.
I hear many people say that the current protests have gone too far for such niceties.
When members of a university community feel threatened it’s a serious problem. Antisemitism is real (as is racism against Muslims and Arabs), and some of the protesters’ tactics, like blocking other people’s passage, have clearly crossed a line. Certainly students who’ve been identified making threats of any kind should face consequences. But the solution to problems like these does not arrive wearing riot gear.
The truth is, protests are always messy, with incoherent or objectionable messages sometimes scattered in with eloquent pleas and impassioned testimony. The 1968 antiwar protesters may be celebrated now, but back then a lot of onlookers were horrified to hear people chanting in favor of a victory by Ho Chi Minh’s army. During the Iraq war, I attended demonstrations to which fringe political groups had managed to attach themselves, and I rolled my eyes at their unhinged slogans or crazy manifestoes.
There’s plenty of that going on here, too. I’m not a wide-eyed graduate student anymore. I’m well into the get-off-my-lawn stage of my career (and until recently, my office overlooked the lawn where Columbia’s protesters pitched their tents). I, too, am often tempted to get annoyed at these students — why this slogan, why this banner, why not something with broader appeal? Overall, however, I’ve been impressed by the sincerity of the protesters I’ve spoken to.
Judging from the new encampments springing up around the country, the harsh countermeasures of the last couple of weeks are counterproductive. But more than that, they are dangerous. Overreactions like this can lead to social breakdown — on both sides of the barricade.
In 2014, Hong Kong’s democracy movement was a textbook nonviolent mass protest — the organizers even named their group “Occupy Central With Love and Peace.” Their movement was crushed, and many organizers were given lengthy jail sentences or forced into exile. I was there for the second round of protests, in 2019. The new leaders were so young and so earnest. As the police kept using rubber bullets and tear gas, though, a small portion of the participants stopped talking about love and peace and started making Molotov cocktails.
You can see where all this is going in the astonishingly violent attack at U.C.L.A., where a pro-Israel mob charged at people at the encampment with sticks, chemical sprays and fireworks. (The university and law enforcement did not intervene for hours.) And these dangerous dynamics can spread beyond campuses. On Wednesday, a man in New York was charged with assault, accused of driving his car into a crowd of people holding signs and chanting.
Overreaction is dangerous in another way, too.
The University of Florida has now said that students will be suspended from campus (and employees will be fired) for offenses such as “littering,” building “chairs” and posting “unmanned signs.” I somehow doubt that’s going to be applied to undergraduates taking a nap under a tree or to tailgaters at a football game. Rather, I suspect the point is to prevent protests the administration dislikes. What kind of precedent is that? The first bullet fired at a campus protest was an accident. I worry that the next one may not be.
Around the world, authoritarian leaders and others are watching these developments. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even issued a statement condemning the U.S. for its treatment of “conscientious students and academics including anti-Zionist Jews at some prestigious American universities.” I didn’t know how to react at first. But eventually I had to admit to myself that the comparison to a police state isn’t quite as outrageous as it once seemed.
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10) A Brief History of the 2,000-Pound Bombs Central to U.S.-Israeli Tensions
The one-ton Mark 84 bomb was designed shortly after World War II. Adding guidance kits has kept it in use for more than 70 years.
By John Ismay, Reporting from Washington, May 11, 2024
An unexploded Israeli Mark 80 bomb lying among the rubble in a refugee camp in southern Gaza last month. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
When President Biden threatened to pause some weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the devastating effects of one weapon were of particular concern to him.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” Mr. Biden said in remarks to CNN this week.
He was referring to U.S.-made 2,000-pound aerial weapons, the largest in the Pentagon’s Mark 80 series of bombs.
In the military’s banal lexicon, the Mark 80s are “general purpose” bombs, meaning that they can be used on almost any target the military typically expects to encounter in war. In addition to the 2,000-pound Mk-84, they also come in 250-pound, 500-pound and 1,000-pound versions — the Mk-81, Mk-82 and Mk-83.
The president has already delayed a shipment to Israel of 3,500 bombs in the Mark 80 series that he feared could be used in a major assault on Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians have taken refuge.
A New York Times investigation in December found that American 2,000-pound bombs were responsible for some of the worst attacks on Palestinian civilians since the war in Gaza began after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
According to a U.S. Army office that manages ammunition for the Pentagon, the ideal targets for weapons of that size are “buildings, rail yards and lines of communication.”
However, Defense Department data indicates that U.S. warplanes typically use far less powerful munitions for supporting ground troops engaged with enemy fighters.
The explosive warheads of these bombs have changed little since the U.S. Navy created them shortly after World War II, but the Pentagon has kept them in service by developing new parts and pieces that can be attached for a variety of purposes.
About 40 percent of each one’s weight is composed of a high explosive mixture; the rest comes from its steel case. When detonated, the bomb’s smooth skin shatters into razor-sharp fragments that can shred human bodies and unarmored vehicles alike.
Course guides used in teaching American troops how to call in airstrikes state that anyone within 115 feet of a 250-pound bomb’s impact has a 10 percent chance of being incapacitated or killed. That lethal radius jumps to nearly 600 feet for a one-ton version that explodes just above the ground.
For a time, the United States held a monopoly on these bombs. But now Mark 80s are made and sold by a number of countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Pakistan, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Israel makes its own versions, but export data suggests that the country purchases most of its bombs from the United States through an annual $3.5 billion grant of American taxpayer money.
How have the bombs evolved?
Classified through much of the 1950s, the Mark 80 came fully into public view during the Vietnam War.
Most Mark 80s dropped over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1965 to 1973 were unguided weapons that cost a few hundred dollars each. Under the best of conditions, about half of them could be expected to land within 400 feet of their target.
When they missed, whether because of pilot error or winds pushing them around after being dropped, they sometimes killed American troops in large numbers in addition to killing civilians.
The use of radar signals to better determine the right place to drop these unguided bombs sometimes failed spectacularly, such as one incident when five jets flying in bad weather mistakenly dropped 34 Mark 82 500-pound bombs on the American air base in Da Nang.
But in the late 1960s, Texas Instruments developed a kit called Paveway that gave the Mark 80 far greater accuracy by adding parts to the bomb’s nose and tail that allowed the bomb to steer itself to a target using lasers shined from warplanes above. That shrank the average miss distance to about 10 feet. Because of their high cost, though, Paveways made up only a tiny fraction of the bombs dropped by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War.
These weapons were commonly called “smart bombs” during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the term has endured to describe a host of guided weapons fielded in the decades since.
But the laser-guided weapons often failed in bad weather and sandstorms, leading military officials to develop a new guidance kit for the Mark 80 in the early 1990s. Called JDAM — for Joint Direct Attack Munition — they cost half as much as Paveway and used radio signals from the military’s nascent constellation of GPS satellites in outer space to guide them. They can generally hit within 30 feet of their targets.
How often are 2,000-pound bombs used?
For American forces, not that often.
During the Vietnam War, Air Force warplanes dropped more Mark 82s than all other kinds of aerial weapons combined, including cluster bombs — and usually reserved Mark 84s for destroying large buildings or infrastructure like bridges. In the decades since, the Mark 82 has remained the most commonly used warhead by Americans in combat, especially when combined with a Paveway or JDAM guidance kit.
By comparison, Israel reaches for its 2,000-pound bombs far more often.
In the first two weeks of the war, roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, according to a senior U.S. military official. The rest were 250-pound small-diameter bombs.
Israel also uses a slightly different kind of 2,000-pound bomb called the BLU-109 that can penetrate underground to reach buried targets like Hamas tunnels. Like all so-called bunker-busters, most of that weapon’s weight comes from a much thicker steel case than general-purpose weapons, and it explodes with the force of just 525 pounds of TNT — far closer to the power of the 1,000-pound Mark 83.
Are there even larger bombs?
The United States makes very few conventional bombs larger than 2,000 pounds. Israel has acquired one of them, an even thicker-cased 5,000-pound bomb built for attacking targets deeper underground.
Israel purchased 50 such bombs from the United States in 2015. Each carries the equivalent of just 625 pounds of TNT.
The other two weapons have never been sold or provided to allies.
One is a 21,000-pound bomb called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB, which explodes just above the ground with the force of 18,700 pounds of TNT and can only be dropped from cargo planes. It was used once in Afghanistan in 2017, in what is the sole publicly acknowledged use of that weapon in combat.
The service also has a 30,000-pound bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator capable of punching even farther underground before exploding, but it can only be carried by the B-2 stealth bomber. It explodes with the force of 5,600 pounds of TNT.
What’s the opposition to Israel’s use of the Mark 84?
Many politicians and activists say 2,000-pound bombs are too powerful to be used responsibly in Gaza, a densely populated enclave.
“The U.S. cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont posted on social media on March 29, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “This is obscene,” he added. “We must end our complicity: No more bombs to Israel.”
In May 2021, Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, attempted to block a $735 million sale of American bombs to Israel for similar reasons.
Israel has used these weapons before. Israel relied on Mark 80s during another “all-out war” against Hamas in 2008 and used them again in 2021 to destroy a building in Gaza City that housed the offices of The Associated Press, Al Jazeera and other news media organizations.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to multiple calls and emails asking for comment on transfers of American-made bombs, including questions about the provision of Mark 84s.
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