Free Them All! Free Palestine!
Divest from Israel! Free Torture Survivors, The Wrongfully Convicted, and All Political Prisoners!
Date: Sunday May 19
Time: 3:00 P.M.
Location: 1160 N Larrabee St, Chicago, IL
MARK YOUR CALENDARS. We’re calling a demonstration May 19th at 3:00 P.M. here in Chicago bringing together the struggles to free torture survivors, the wrongfully convicted, and ALL political prisoners with the struggle to free Palestine! Join us as we unite our movements and raise our demands on the powers that be! Free Them All! Free Palestine!
Learn More About the March on the DNC here
Help us sustain our work with a donation
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Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
6353 S Cottage Grove Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
United States
caarpr.org
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‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 223:
Casualties
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) I Was Shot in Vermont. What if It Had Been in the West Bank?
By Hisham Awartani, May 16, 2024
Mr. Awartani is a Palestinian American student at Brown University.
Vanessa Saba
That frigid autumn night in Burlington, Vt., was not the first time I had stared down the barrel of a gun. It was not even the first time I had been fired at. Half a world away, in the West Bank, it had happened before.
On a hot day in May 2021, a classmate and I, both of us 17 at the time, were protesting near a checkpoint in Ramallah. Bullets, both rubber and metal, were flying into the crowd, even though we were unarmed. I was hit with one of the former; my classmate, the latter. Before, we had been students cramming for our chemistry final; then, on the other side of Israeli rifles, we were a mass of terrorists, disqualified from humanity.
So that night in November, when my two friends and I were shot while we were walking on North Prospect Street, I was not particularly surprised to find myself lying on the lawn of a white house and blood splattered across the screen of my phone. Back home in Ramallah, I knew that I was one wrong move away from bleeding out; Israeli soldiers have been known to prevent or hinder paramedics from tending to injured Palestinians. But I had never expected to feel this on a quiet street in Vermont, on a stroll before Thanksgiving dinner.
The shooting of three Palestinian Americans in Burlington has received more sustained coverage than any single act of violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since Oct. 7. Why did reporters and news channels interview our mothers and take our portraits when young men my age have been shot at by snipers, detained indefinitely without trial and treated as a statistic?
It’s a question that has eaten away at me these past months. Was it the shock of such a violent crime in peaceful Vermont? Was it that my friends and I went to well-known American colleges? Did the timing of our shooting during a holiday weekend play a role? I’m sure it did, but to me, the determining factor is the reframing of the crime: Instead of settlements, the Oslo Accords or the intifada, the conversation around our shooting involved terms such as “gun violence,” “hate crimes” and “right-wing extremism.” Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America. Instead of being seen as Palestinians, for once, we were seen as people.
Death and dehumanization are status quo for Palestinians. We grow used to being funneled through checkpoints and strip-searched, assault rifles trained on us all the while. The result is a constant existential calculus: If an unarmed autistic man, an 8-year-old boy and a journalist wearing a vest emblazoned “Press” could be perceived to be such a threat that they were shot dead, then I must accept that by existing as a Palestinian, I am a legitimate target.
This dynamic was so ubiquitous to me that I could not quite put it into words until I left the West Bank to attend college in the United States. My classes gave me the vocabulary to understand dehumanization, the portrayal of the colonized as a violent primitive. I realized that the infrastructure of the occupation — the checkpoints, the detentions, the armed settlers encroaching — is built around the violence I am assumed to be capable of, not who I am.
This system of othering — Israeli-only roads, fenced-off settlements, the “security” wall — is an inherent part of the Israeli state psyche. Yet far from ensuring Israelis’ safety, it instead inflicts mass humiliation on Palestinians. Close to half of the Palestinians alive today were born after the violence of the second intifada, and have interacted with Israelis only in the confines of the security apparatus built in its wake. The military apparatus in my home in the West Bank is a judge, jury and executioner. While settlers in the West Bank are subject to Israeli civilian law, Palestinians are subject to military law. It is as if we are all already combatants.
The dehumanization we face is twofold: Beyond the day-to-day aspects of our lives, it permeates the media coverage of what we experience. In the news, our militancy is presumed, our killers unnamed, and our deaths repackaged into statistics. Somehow, we die without being killed. The very veracity of our deaths is called into question. The extent of the civilian death toll in Gaza should not come as a surprise when Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, can speak unchecked of “human animals.”
My story is one drop in the ocean of suffering faced by Palestinians, and compared to the immense and indescribable suffering of the people of Gaza, frankly trivial. As I wheeled myself down the smooth corridors of the hospital where I received care after the shooting, I thought of those in wheelchairs in Gaza, struggling to navigate the rubble-strewn streets as they fled their homes. I thought of the reports about a woman being shot dead as she held her grandson’s hand while he clutched a white flag. I thought of a 17-year-old shot in the back by settlers in the West Bank. The pain of knowing their fates is fathomless, and it has yet to cease.
I think back to the circumstances in which I was shot with my two friends, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad, and imagine them instead in the context of the West Bank. A Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen shot there could have been left to die. Our names would circulate for a day or two in pro-Palestinian circles, but in the end, we would be commemorated only on a poster in the streets of Ramallah, our faces eventually worn down with time like the countless others I’ve walked past in the streets of my home. If that scenario does not stir the same feelings in you as my shooting, if your first instinct when a Palestinian is shot, maimed or left handicapped is to find excuses, then I do not want your support.
When I was still in the hospital, my family and I were visited by a friend who had just recently made it out of Gaza. He recounted how he saw the beginning of the Israeli bombing from his balcony, and soon after showered and left his house with a prepacked bag. He told me of tents, of hunger, of explosions, but there is one thing that really stood out for me as he recounted his ordeal.
He explained how the only way for him to survive in Gaza was to accept that he had already died. Only after he had come to terms with the realization that his life as he knew it was over could he enjoy a puff of a cigarette and a sip of coffee in the morning. This acceptance is the goal of the Israeli dehumanization complex. To be Palestinian today is to accept this fate.
I have been back on campus since February, and the adjustment has been tough. The man who is accused of shooting me has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder. But my mind is elsewhere. Every morning when I wake up, I check for one number. It has exceeded 35,000. It’s difficult for me to come to terms with the reality of so much loss.
In class, between Mesopotamian myths and commutative algebra, a few thoughts play on a loop in my mind: How can we come back from so much grief? How could we let this happen? What are we supposed to make of the world when Palestinian deaths are excused by talking points, repeated again and again on the news? I yearn to return to my home, to my olive trees, my cats and my family.
I realize, though, that when I cross the King Hussein Bridge from Jordan into the West Bank, I will return to my designation as a potential terrorist. I cease to be a junior at Brown University, a student of archaeology and mathematics, a San Francisco Giants fan, a Balkan history nerd. My entire identity will be reduced to my capacity for violence, not as a human being, but as a Palestinian.
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2) Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into ‘The Unpunished’
Radical forces in Israeli society have moved from the fringes to the mainstream and put Israel’s democracy in peril. Here are the takeaways from our investigation.
By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
Ronen Bergman, a reporter in Israel, and Mark Mazzetti, based in Washington, interviewed more than 100 people, including current and former Israeli government officials, for this investigation, May 16, 2024
(RE: The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel
After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.
By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, May 16, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/takeaways-investigation-settler-violence-impunity.html
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir in Israel’s parliament last year. Credit...Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock
For decades, most Israelis have considered Palestinian terrorism the country’s biggest security concern. But there is another threat that may be even more destabilizing for Israel’s future as a democracy: Jewish terrorism and violence, and the failure to enforce the law against it.
Our yearslong investigation reveals how violent factions within the Israeli settler movement, protected and sometimes abetted by the government, have come to pose a grave threat to Palestinians in the occupied territories and to the State of Israel itself. Piecing together new documents, videos and over 100 interviews, we found a government shaken by an internal war — burying reports it commissioned, neutering investigations it assigned and silencing whistle-blowers, some of them senior officials.
It is a blunt account, told in some cases for the first time by Israeli officials, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of the country’s democracy.
Lawbreakers Become Lawmakers
Officials told us that once fringe, sometimes criminal groups of settlers bent on pursuing a theocratic state have been allowed for decades to operate with few restraints. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government came to power in 2022, elements of that faction have taken power — driving the country’s policies, including in the war in Gaza.
The lawbreakers have become the law.
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and the official in Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank, was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet domestic security service for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He was released with no charges. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student.
Settler Violence Protected, and Abetted
All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.
The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet known commonly as the Jewish Department. But it is dwarfed both in size and prestige by the Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism.
Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial leniency, which has included reductions in prison time, anemic investigations and pardons. Most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause.
The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.
Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet in the late 1990s, told us that government leaders “signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”
But Jews have also been targets of ultranationalists. Prime Minister Rabin was murdered after rabbis passed what amounted to a death sentence on him for his support of the Oslo peace process.
Critics Silenced and Investigations Buried
In 1981, after a group of professors in Jerusalem raised concern about possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities and illegal “private policing activity” against Palestinians in the occupied territories, Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, was asked to lead a committee to look into the issue. Their report found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere.
The minister of the interior at the time responded to their report with a scolding. “I understood that he wanted us to drop it,” Karp told us.
Another report two decades later met a similar fate. Talia Sasson, who was tapped to draw up a legal opinion on the “unauthorized outposts,” found that in a span of just over three years, the Construction and Housing Ministry had issued dozens of illegal contracts in the West Bank. In some cases, the ministry even paid for their construction.
Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues called the separate laws under which they saw the West Bank being administered “utterly insane.”
The report had little impact, powerless against the machine in place to expand settlements.
Threat From the Inside
In the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.
It was always clear, Lior Akerman, a former Shin Bet official, told us, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.”
This past October, according to a classified document we saw, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command responsible for the West Bank, wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism and violence carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.”
Another document describes a meeting in March, when Fox wrote that since Smotrich took office, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.”
Gaza has refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s long inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank, in the hands of emboldened settlers, some of whom are now in power, that the corrosive effects of the occupation on both Palestinians and Israel’s rule of law are most apparent.
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3) Israel Says It Will Send More Troops to Rafah, Defying International Pressure
By Adam Rasgon reporting from Jerusalem, May 16, 2024
Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said on Thursday that the Israeli army would send more troops to Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that has become the focal point in the war between Israel and Hamas.
The announcement signaled that Israel intends to press deeper into Rafah despite international concerns about its ground invasion of the city, where more than a million displaced people had been sheltering.
“Hundreds of targets have already been attacked,” Mr. Gallant said after meeting with commanders in the Rafah area. “This operation will continue.”
Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the city in recent days, many of whom have had to move repeatedly over seven months of an unrelenting war, U.N. officials say.
Until now, Israeli troops and tanks have made only a limited incursion into eastern Rafah, and on May 7 they seized the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, a vital entry point for aid. The crossing remains shuttered, leaving wounded and ill people who need treatment abroad with no way out, and hundreds of aid trucks piling up in Egypt.
Diplomats and Palestinian officials have said the army’s operations in and around the crossing and nearby clashes between soldiers and Hamas fighters have created a dangerous environment for humanitarian workers.
Mr. Gallant, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, also said Israeli troops had destroyed tunnels in Rafah. Two Israeli officials said a key objective of the operation was to demolish tunnels between Egypt and Gaza that have allowed Hamas to replenish its weapons supply over the years.
Egypt and Israel maintain a decades-old peace treaty and close security cooperation, but Israel’s invasion of Rafah has tested the sensitive relationship.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly spoken of the need to destroy Hamas’s battalions in Rafah. In recent days, some Hamas militants have fled the city, according to four Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.
The fighters have headed northward alongside civilians, the officials said. While it was unclear how many militants escaped, their flight underscored that at least some would be left unscathed by Israel’s invasion of the city.
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting for this article.
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4) Families who fled Israel’s offensive find refuge but little else in Khan Younis.
By Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair, May 16, 2024
Children receiving food rations from an outdoor kitchen, in Khan Younis, on Tuesday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ra’fat Abu Tueima, 62, and his family were displaced last week for the sixth time since the war in Gaza began, after Israel launched an offensive in parts of the southern city of Rafah that forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee.
Mr. Abu Tueima, a taxi driver before the war, is staying in a tent inside the courtyard of a United Nations-run school in the city of Khan Younis with his wife, their young son and eight children from his late first wife. Outside the school on Thursday, a few trucks carrying humanitarian aid drove down the street while children tried to grab whatever they could, a few making off with bags of sugar.
Few other relief supplies, including food or tents, are available for the thousands of Palestinians who have fled to Khan Younis over the past week and a half, since the Rafah operation began.
“No one here helped us with anything,” Mr. Abu Tueima said, beginning to break down in tears.
“Life here is not fair at all for us; we want to live in peace like others,” he said. “In Rafah, people and charities offered us a little money, but here, not one single person asked about us. No one even cares about all of those children and women here.”
Israel’s offensive in Rafah has stopped nearly all aid from getting through the two main border crossings in southern Gaza. The United Nations’ World Food Program warned on Wednesday that its food and fuel stocks would run out in a matter of days, saying in a statement that “the threat of famine in Gaza never loomed larger.”
The agency also said it had difficulty reaching its main warehouse in Rafah because of the Israeli offensive and fighting in the area.
Fuel in Gaza has been in short supply ever since Israel announced a “complete siege” of the territory on Oct. 9, two days after the Hamas-led attack. The lack of fuel has threatened the operation of trucks, hospitals, generators, sewage pumping plants, desalination systems and other basic services for 2.2 million people.
At least 600,000 people have fled Rafah in just the last week, according to the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA. Another 100,000 have been displaced from their homes and shelters in northern Gaza amid renewed evacuation orders from the Israeli military, which said it was engaged in intense fighting with Hamas fighters who had returned to the area.
In Khan Younis, “no one is distributing anything, no one is helping, nothing enters to help the people,” said Mohammed Aborjela, who arrived from Rafah days ago. The few goods arriving in the city on commercial trucks are being sold at high prices, he said.
The 27-year-old, a project coordinator with a development organization, said that Palestinians fleeing Rafah and other areas were paying hundreds of dollars for transportation on the backs of trucks and donkey carts, leaving them little money to pay for food or tents, which sell for at least 1,000 shekels (about $270) and as much as twice that.
“People don’t have this money,” he said. “People are sleeping in the streets waiting for aid groups to come and help them build a tent.”
The Tueima family fled Rafah a week ago and managed to bring only blankets and clothes. They had to pay 250 shekels for a van to transport them from the embattled city to the U.N. school in Khan Younis where they are now sheltering.
His wife, Najah Abu Tueima, 42, miscarried with twins days into the war after the family was forced under bombardment to flee its home near the Israeli border.
“We are here on our own,” Ms. Abu Tueima said. “I’m fed up and over-exhausted with the repeated evacuation journeys and suffering.”
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5) Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide
Why the world’s working class must organize a bold defense of our lives if we are to survive
By Bonnie Weinstein
Thousands of labor representatives marched Saturday, December 16, in Oakland, California. —Photo by Leon Kunstenaar
“Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.” —Leon Trotsky, 1940.1
April 18, 2024—Over 34 thousand Palestinians have been killed by the U.S./Israel genocidal war on Palestine—not counting those still missing and buried under the rubble. And the killing goes on with the unconditional U.S. financial and military support to Israel paid for by the taxes collected from us, the working class.
We have no say in how much money is taken from our paycheck, or at the checkout counter, or how our taxes are spent. We have no say on whether to go to war, or how much money our schools get, or how much we must pay for healthcare, or how much we should be paid for our labor.
The capitalist system allows us no control over these issues that affect us so profoundly.
Our only effective option is to organize ourselves into unions and an independent, unified, democratically-functioning organization devoted to fighting for our right to life, liberty, social and economic equality—and finally, an end to capitalism and its perpetual wars for wealth and power.
The war on Gaza—a microcosm of capitalist aggression around the world
With over 34,000 Palestinians killed so far, the ratio between Palestinian and Israeli deaths is 20:1— approximately 34,000 Palestinians to 1700 Israelis2—and the U.S./Israeli genocide is far from over. Biden has promised his unconditional support to Israel because it is, in essence, a strategic U.S. military base in the region.
There are people who believe that Israel controls the U.S. but that cannot be further from the truth. Without U.S. support—both financially (at least $3.8 billion annually) and militarily. The U.S. has massive amounts of U.S. weapons, equipment, and supplies, under their sole command and control, inside Israel. The U.S. has made sure that Israel is the most powerful military force in the region—a region full of oil and other natural resources crucial to U.S. industry—and it is nuclear-armed.
While Biden has cried crocodile tears over the ten’s-of-thousands of Palestinian deaths—including over 14,000 children—he does not waver on his devotion to the apartheid state of Israel, and neither do the Republicans.
The problem with capitalism and the parties that represent them, is that the war and the brutality war brings is felt both by those who do the fighting and those who are their targets—but not to the capitalist class who commands the wars.
They, and their sons and daughters, do not fight and die in war. They command and profit from war and death, and the destruction of their enemies.
Anyone who challenges their power and rule anywhere in the world will not be met with reason and generosity, but with the finality of not just death, but the destruction of the infrastructures of life-support itself—of schools, hospitals, roads, buildings, farms, industry, transportation, water, power—the total ruin of the means of survival.
This is what’s happening to Gaza right now. If the war stopped right now the people of Palestine would still have nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.
And make no mistake about it, it is a warning to the entire world of what the commanders of capital are willing to do to maintain their control of the wealth they have stolen from the masses of working people everywhere.
The plight of the dispossessed
In a March 28, 2024, New York Times article by Emily Baumgaertner, titled, “Health Concerns Mount for Migrant Children at Outdoor Holding Sites,3” I was stunned by a photograph from the article showing a makeshift tent filled with women and children sheltering on a dirt floor. It could have been a photo from Rafa!
The article centers on “…an open-air holding site in San Diego’s rural Mountain Empire, to provide volunteer medical care to asylum seekers who had breached the United States-Mexico border wall and were waiting to be apprehended by American authorities.”
According to the article:
“With the capacity at immigration processing centers strained, migrants, including unaccompanied children, are waiting for hours—sometimes days—in outdoor holding areas, where a lack of shelter, food, and sanitation infrastructure has triggered an array of public health concerns for the most vulnerable.”
The difference between the people in Gaza and the occupied territories, and the people held in San Diego, is that the people in Gaza have no more homes to go to, while the people in San Diego had to flee their homeland to avoid death and brutality. In the end, neither have anywhere else to go.
Tens-of-millions of people across the globe are suffering conditions of war and poverty causing them to flee their homelands.
And, in the countries where they flee to, they suffer, not only from the high cost of living—the high price of food, housing, healthcare and education—but they are also the targets of police violence and racism. They soon find out they only have access to the lowest paying jobs, the most underfunded schools, and the most run-down housing—if they are fortunate enough to have jobs, schools or housing at all.
These are the conditions of the working class, not only in the poorest countries in the world, but in the richest.
These conditions exist everywhere because it is endemic to capitalism—a system based on the economic exploitation of masses of humanity for the benefit of the capitalist class—the elite few who are the owners of the means of production.
They own the land, the factories, farms, and the natural resources needed to operate them. And they own the labor power of the masses of workers who create that wealth with their skill, intelligence, blood, sweat, and tears.
Capitalism depends on antisemitism and bigotry
When a small child asks why there is so much greed, violence, and injustice in the world, they are told that those qualities are part of human nature—they have always been with us and always will be.
But these traits are not natural to humans, they are the direct product of class society.
By blaming these traits on human nature, they are blaming the masses for the crimes against humanity the ruling class has been committing for centuries.
The following quote from the book, The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands, By Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone, sums this up well:
“These were forces of evil that mankind has feared and has tried to rein in with civilization since the dawn of time. Blaming any oppressed group or human nature for oppression itself exonerates the social system from any responsibility.”4
The capitalist class serves itself by pitting workers against each other—getting us to blame others of our own class who suffer the same or worse economic hardships—instead of blaming capitalism’s tyrannical system of economic exploitation and expropriation of wealth from the working masses who create it.
The power of solidarity
A majority of Americans are opposed to Israel’s military actions in Gaza according to a new Gallup poll released March 27, 2024:
“In a survey conducted from March 1-20, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they disapproved of Israel’s military actions—a jump of ten percentage points from four months earlier, Gallup found. Americans’ approval of Israel’s conduct in the war dropped by an even starker margin, from 50 percent in November, a month after the war began, to 36 percent in March…”5
Massive demonstrations here in the U.S. and all over the world show that the U.S./Israel genocide of the people of Palestine is exposing to masses of people the extent to which capitalism—the most powerful dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor that has ever existed—will go to maintain its dominance over land and resources anywhere their economic interests lie, regardless of the mayhem it brings to masses of people, their land, infrastructure, or their well-being, in general.
It’s a class thing
The Democratic and Republican parties are the parties of the ruling class—they do not represent the working class—the overwhelming majority of the people.
Their very existence depends upon convincing us that our only choice is to choose between them—between two capitalist parties whose only interest is to maintain the status quo—keeping us voting for a “lesser evil,” either from the right or the left of the political spectrum.
Then they tell us to believe that this is how it’s always been in America and that this system, whose leaders rule through the threat of death and destruction of the planet itself, is the greatest democracy in the world.
More importantly, they want us to believe human society can’t exist without a ruling class—that because of “human nature,” workers are incapable of democratically controlling the means of production in a way that benefits everyone because war and greed are in our nature.
The opposite is true. And the masses rising up in opposition the U.S./Israeli genocide against the people of Palestine proves that repulsion to war, greed and mass destruction is the natural human condition.
The collective fight against war, racism, sexism, and bigotry of all kinds is dependent upon the creation of independent workers’ organizations dedicated to ending the tyranny of capitalism everywhere it exists in the world.
If we do not end capitalism, it will end us. A socialist transformation of the world is our only hope for building a future for all of us.
1 On the Jewish Question, Paperback, December 31, 1970, by Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press, Out of Print
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0873481577?ref_=cm_sw_r_mwn_dp_D50V3MN54AAC61TKV2CQ&language=en-US
2 As of April 18, 2024, By Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau: Over 34,438 Palestinians (including in the West Bank and all occupied territories)/1,743 Israelis (including those killed on October 7, 2023=19.757887.)
https://mondoweiss.net
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/health/children-migrants-border-health.html
4 The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands, Paperback—January 25, 2024, Page 17
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radical-Jewish-Tradition-Revolutionaries-Resistance/dp/1914143973
by Donny Gluckstein (Author), Janey Stone (Author)
5 “A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, a new poll shows,” By Anushka Patil, March 28, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/28/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
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6) Palestinians Deserve to Survive. The Zionist State—Never
By Chris Kinder
http://socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_24/mayjun_24_04.html
Israeli tanks near the border with Gaza in southern Israel on Monday. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
April 8, 2024—The U.S./Israel war on Gaza rages on, now in its sixth month, and shows no sign of abatement. Israel is pursuing its long-held goal, by any means necessary, of forcing the indigenous Palestinians out of what they view is their land including forced evacuation, starvation, and outright mass murder. And the U.S. government is in this up to its eyeballs, which is why it is a U.S./Israel war. The U.S. doesn’t have “boots on the ground,” but without the funding and supplies of weapons and ammunition and the U.S., there would be no war.
Israel’s many attacks on Palestinians
Although Israel has mounted many attacks including invasions against Gaza which have slaughtered thousands of civilians along with military in the past, this war is for the first time killing more civilians by far than it has fighters. This genocide is a challenge to the whole world: will this mass murder of a whole people, tens-of-thousands killed so far—as you read this going into its seventh month—be allowed to continue unabated?
This would be much harder to do without U.S. heavy weapons sent to Israel soon after the October 7th attack by Hamas, which included 2,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs designed to blow up fortified infrastructure. The U.S. gladly continues to send these bombs, which Israel is using to turn neighborhoods into huge piles of rubble with dead humans buried in them. Meanwhile, Israel has targeted over 60 percent of homes and residential buildings in the Strip. The bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on October 25th killed 101, mostly women and children, and injured hundreds, and it doesn’t avoid refugee camps either, such as its attack on the Jabaliya refugee camp on October.
Israel says its enemies are “human animals”
Israel’s war is a little like prison guards murdering prisoners by shooting them through the bars, because the Gaza Strip—the most densely populated place on Earth—is an open-air prison with no escape route.
So far, Israel has obliterated about 80 percent of medical facilities, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, as well as half of the roads and commercial, industrial, and agricultural centers throughout the Gaza Strip. Most of these facilities were occupied by civilians and had no military value. The municipal and governmental facilities destroyed undoubtedly contained Hamas operatives, but most of them would be government officials, not fighters, as Hamas was duly elected to govern. This fact is ignored in almost all U.S. media reports, many of which refer to Hamas’ rule as the result of a “coup.”
Who do you believe?
The question of Hamas coming to power legally or through a coup d’état is just one more reason to beware of lies told in wars. So, what is the evidence in this case? In 2006, elections were held in Palestine on local levels and for seats in the Legislative Council (PAL), the ruling body of the Palestinian National Authority (PAN). Although Hamas had boycotted the previous election, it entered this one as the “Change and Reform” list against Fatah and five others. Hamas won 74 out of 132 seats as against 45 for Fatah. Independents won four, and most others none. The election was overseen by over 17 thousand domestic observers, complemented by 900 credentialed international monitors.
An exit poll of voters showed that large majorities of those asked said that corruption would decrease under Hamas. Large majorities said that there should be a national unity government, and rejected Fatah’s refusal to support unity, the majority also said yes to “under Hamas, internal security will improve.” Interestingly, majorities said yes to support for a peace agreement with Israel, which is a stark shot away from Hamas’ position that Israel has no right to exist.1
The 2006 election was deemed to be honest by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in partnership with the Carter Center, and a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report to Congress which concluded that the election was free and fair.
A worsening of genocide
As I write this, several events are thought to represent a turning point in this genocidal war. First is Israel’s second invasion of Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, a complex of buildings located in Gaza City in the north. The first invasion of this essential institution happened back in November, which was deadly and horrible, but left the hospital functioning despite the lack medicines, anesthetics, vaccines, and other necessities due to Israel’s prevention of essential aid supplies.
This time it was much worse. Israeli troops stormed at dawn on March 18th, and after two weeks of terror, every single building in this large complex was bombed, burned, and rendered unusable. About 400 were killed—medics and wounded and sick were killed—and 300 arrested. After the abrupt withdrawal of the IDF on April 1st, people from the surrounding area where many live and others have sought shelter went to the complex to check on the damage.
“We did not expect this”
“We did not expect to see all of this…It is crystal clear that the Israeli army is the most unethical army in the world,” said a local journalist on the scene.2 Another said, “The occupation has violated everything in the Gaza Strip, and nobody in the world seems to be determined to stop them. Rather, major global powers are complicit and partners in massacring our Palestinian people.”
“The Al Shifa Medical Complex is the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, and it is the lifeline of the health sector in Gaza,” said one local journalist. He should have said “was,” because now, “everything in the complex is destroyed. All the buildings of the hospital were bombed and are no longer useable. …now, it is destroyed, and the occupation has completely taken it out of service.”3
Three days later, the Electronic Intifada released more eyewitness reports. “Salem Baraka has seen the kind of horror no parent should ever have to endure: The Israeli military killed his son Karim right in front of him.” Like many others, Salem and his son Karim had fled from his home in Jabaliya refugee camp and taken shelter in Al Shifa hospital. They were inside the hospital when it was stormed by Israeli forces on March 18. He said he had spent the following week “waiting to die.” The situation was “worse than hell.”
“Quadcopter drones were firing wildly striking anything that moved,” he said. “The Israelis smashed the glass in the windows and destroyed the walls in the department where we were hiding. A shell fell on us and killed my son in front of my eyes,” he added. “I could not save him. He bled to death.”
Tanks against unarmed victims and their bodies
The Electronic Intifada report goes on: “Among the terrible scenes he witnessed were Israeli tanks driving over the bodies of people who had been killed in the hospital’s courtyard. Because the hospital could not function, infections soared among people who were wounded. In many cases, injured people were devoured by parasites due to the lack of treatment.
After the hospital had been under siege for approximately a week, the Israeli forces used loudspeakers to summon everyone into the courtyard. The Palestinian men were ordered to strip. Then they were beaten. Women were subjected to both verbal and physical abuse, according to Salem.
Salem recalled that he “trembled in horror when one of the soldiers called my name.” He was interrogated for around 48 hours. “I was not allowed to sit down or turn to the left or right,” he said. “My hands were tied behind my back. I was blindfolded and completely naked.” Salem added that he repeatedly heard gunfire and that his interrogator “threatened to kill my wife, who is ill and lives with her family in northern Gaza, if I did not cooperate.”
“Throughout the interrogation, I was thinking about where the soldier would shoot me. In the head, chest, or heart? I did not believe him when he said the interrogation was over. I realized that I had miraculously survived death.” Salem was given a choice of evacuating to southern Gaza or being killed. Salem had to walk to southern Gaza, but he was not allowed to see his son’s body for a final goodbye.
Three strikes kill seven
aid workers
The same day that the Israeli military pulled out from the wreckage of Al Shifa, another earthshattering event happened—seven workers with the World Central Kitchen aid group were leaving after delivering 100 tons of food to a warehouse in central Gaza when multiple Israeli air strikes hit all three of their well-marked cars, killing them. They had communicated with Israeli officials about their mission beforehand and had permission to go.
Another seven dead in six months of fighting that has left hundreds-of-thousands of Palestinians dead and tens-of-thousands more wounded: why is that earth shattering? It’s because six of them were from Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and an American/Canadian dual citizen; and all of whom, except for Poland, were from countries supporting Israel in this war. (The seventh person killed was a Palestinian driver.)
Suddenly, it’s “Houston, we have a problem!” Killing the aid workers was “unacceptable” said Biden. “If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there’ll be changes in our own policy,” (Blinken); and an “outrage” said U.S. defense Secretary Austin, as he was sending more two-thousand-pound bombs and 50 fighter jets (a first) over to “Bibi” Netanyahu in the largest and most expensive military shipment to Israel to date in this one-sided war.
Biden’s administration had plenty of time in the past six months of Israel’s genocidal war to become even more outraged than it was over a targeted murder of seven aid deliverers, but it only managed to mumble something about Israel going “over the top.”
Bunker buster bombs slaughter civilians
The bunker-buster bombs, supposedly used to penetrate to the tunnels below ground allegedly being used by Hamas, are killing everyone in homes and apartments in order to target just a few or even just one Hamas member living there, for which their “human shield” civilians are considered expendable. But except for Israel’s chief backers—mainly the U.S. and German administrations—most of the world knows that this war is a genocidal campaign to kill and/or drive out all Palestinians from their homeland and turn it into a Jewish-Zionist-state.
As Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said just two days into this war, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” To this declaration of the war crime that is this conflict, Gallant might well have added that destruction of all of Palestine’s essential infrastructure, apartment buildings, medical facilities, schools, mosques, are going to be included.
The sight of children digging through the rubble that was once their homes to find food sums it up.
“Why should Israel be allowed to exist?” asks Hamas
The question now is, as Hamas says, why should Israel even be allowed to exist? Nazi Germany created sights of starving children wasting away in concentration camps, and it was abolished, albeit in an unsupportable inter-imperialist war. The Confederate States of America was abolished in a revolutionary war, which was the real revolution in the U.S. that 1776 was not. The monarchial state of Russia was abolished in a two-stage revolution which overthrew the centuries old Czarist state, then smashed capitalism in the first successful socialist revolution—the Bolshevik revolution—in 1917.
Now, we need to see the Palestinians defeat apartheid Israel. We need a socialist revolution in the Middle East and the world, and we need to replace the Zionist state with a revolutionary socialist state of Palestine. But we also must understand how this barbarism by a state dedicated to, and populated largely by a people who were the victims of the Nazi holocaust just nine decades ago, came about. To understand how this incredible crime happened in 2024, we must breakdown the history.
It started before Israel actually existed. A journalist from Vienna named Theodor Herzl came up with a plan in the 1890s to save the Jewish people by moving them from the antisemitism in Europe and around the world, to Palestine. It sounded like a plan to some, but it had a major catch—Herzl wanted to make Palestine a Jewish-only state.
Though he had visited Palestine once (and only once,) Herzl knew very well that Palestine was already occupied. Herzl was known as the author of a book, Der Judenstaat, published in 1896, which made his plan clear, including directions for how to get rid of the native population:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country.” For the elite property owners, Herzl, says that they “will come over to our side,” or be “expropriated.” To make clear that this was to be exclusively Jewish, he insisted his state have the “sovereign right” to control immigration. The Jewish state, Herzl wrote, would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
Herzl gets an answer,
and ignores it
While Herzl was founding the Zionist organization in the late 1890s, he received a letter from a prominent Palestinian who was an acquaintance of Herzl’s, named Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi. Yusuf Diya was conscious of the pervasive Western, and especially Christian, antisemitism, and his letter seemed to appreciate Herzl’s plan, but he insisted that Herzl recognize the fact that Palestine “is already inhabited by others.” He asserted that it was “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take over Palestine, and that “the unhappy Jewish nation” needed to find refuge elsewhere. He concluded with, “In the name of god, let Palestine be left alone.” Herzl’s reply was no reply at all. He didn’t address Yusuf Diya’s argument, and instead established a pattern of dismissing the interests, and even the existence of the indigenous population of Palestine. 4
The violent imposition of the state of Israel on Palestine was still decades away, but capitalist imperialism was an essential element in making it happen from the very beginning. Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, which was an old, multi-national entity, that was only beginning to break up, with national interests in sectors of it emerging. Most of these nationalities were targeted by the European imperialist countries seeking to spread their spheres of interest for exploitation. After lengthy negotiations, the Sykes–Picot treaty5 was agreed to among the powers, chiefly Britain, and France. This agreement was kept secret to prevent the Ottomans, which all these powers knew was going to be completely divided up by them in the “Great War”—World War I—that they all knew was coming. It was officially ratified during the war.
The Palestine region, with a smaller area than the later “Mandate” for Palestine, was to fall under an “international administration,” which effectively meant Britain (which also grabbed Jordan and others, while France got control of Syria, Turkey and more.) Most of the divided up Arab territories became nations, but Palestine remained under British domination.
A solution is difficult,
but necessary
Given what they have had to go through, Palestinians are amazing. They survived British occupation and have survived six wars/invasions counting the 1948 war, in which Israel killed and drove out almost all the Palestinians from their newly formed “mandate.” Israel is now trying to kill or drive out everyone from Palestine. Palestinians deserve to live, while its attacker, Israel, needs to be abolished.
Palestinians and Jews have lived side by side in the past and could do so again. The Jews then were a small minority in the Ottoman Arab state, but they were welcome there, as were Christians and other minorities, and that is true today in Palestine. Israel is the exact opposite, with 1.6 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel (total population of 9.5 million) but who are treated as second-class citizens. What is needed now is a united and free socialist Palestine!
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_election for all the information on the 2006 election. Israel’s wars have prevented elections since then.
2 Abdallah Aljamal,”‘Most Unethical Army in the World’—Palestine Chronicle Assesses the Damage at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital,” Palestine Chronicle, April 1, 2024.
3 The Electronic Intifada credits Doaa Shaheen, a journalist from Gaza, for this report, at: electronicintifada.net. April 2, 2024.
4 These quotes come from Herzl’s diary in 1895, and other writings as reported by Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, A History of settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917—2017. As a descendant in a prominent Palestinian family that goes back to this time, Khalidi has produced here a very informative and essential history of Palestine and its terrifying occupation by the Zionist state.
5 The Sykes–Picot Agreement was a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement
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