Monday, March 25, 2024

GAZA ANTHOLOGIES #16

 

OMNI

GAZA ANTHOLOGIES #16
March 25, 2024

   Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of

Peace, Justice, and Ecology.

(#1: 3-3-08; #2 Nov. 16, 2012; #3 Nov. 17, 2013; #4 May 31, 2014; #5 July 28, 2014; #6 August 30, 2014; #7 April 8, 2015; #8 May 13, 2021; #9, October 15, 2023; #10, October 23, 2023; #11, Nov. 4 and Nov. 7, 2023; #12 , Nov. 16, 2023; #13, Dec. 16, 2023; #14, Jan. 12, 2024).
http://omnicenter.org/donate/

 

CONTENTS

Decomposing Bodies of Premature Babies Discovered in Besieged Gaza. Israel Bombs Pediatric Hospital as Death Toll of Children in Gaza  Surpasses 4,000.
Jamie Stern-Weiner.  Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm.   (book).
Art Hobson.  “World Grieves for Palestine and Israel.“ 
Chris Hedges.  
The Cost of Bearing Witness.”

Progressive Magazine Dec. 23-Jan. 24.     Eight articles,  on Gaza. 

·       “Interview with Phyllis Bennis” by Norman Stockwell.   “’This Is a Very Dangerous Time.” 

·       David Boddiger.  “There Must Be a Ceasefire in Gaza.”

·       Norman Stockwell.  “Our View of an Eye for an Eye.”

·       Bill Lueders.  “Don’t Blame the Squad; End the Killing.”

·       Samer Badawi. “Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War.” 

·       Jennifer Lowenstein.  “The War on Gaza: How a Colonial Mentality Assures Western Failure.”  

·       I. F. Stone.  “On Justice for the Palestinians.”

·       Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman.  “I Protest This Bloodshed.”

·       Edward Said.  “An Exile’s Exile.”

·       Mosab Abu Toha. Poem.  “My Son Throws a Blanket Over My Daughter.”      Author of collection: Poems from Gaza.

Boyd and Mitchell.  Beautiful Trouble:  A Toolbox for Revolution. 

Human Rights Groups Demand ICC Issue Arrest Warrants On Israeli Officials.”

Palestinian Activist Tied Up, Beaten, And Arrested By Israeli Forces.”

Black Agenda Report.Teaching Hatred And Normalizing Violence Against Palestinians.” 

Socialist Project .  Toronto Picketers At Military Contractor Pratt And Whitney.“

Gas, Gaza, and Western Imperialism. “

We need to act fast to stop the situation in Gaza from triggering a wider war in the Middle East.“

The Red Sea Is Now the Second Front in the Gaza War. “

Blood money: The top ten politicians taking the most Israel lobby cash.” 

“ Ann Wright Calls for a Cease Fire in Her Testimony at the UN. “

“UN Leaders Speak Out Against Siege.”

“ADL’s Campaign to Silence Criticism by Calling ‘Antisemitism.’”

“‘Moral insanity’: Biden Admin Bypasses Congress to Rush Tank Shells to Israel.”

Bruce Gagnon.  "Trading in Terror." 

“I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer.”

 “They Stole a Country in Full Bloom’.” 

“Murder.”

The Death Of Israel.” Scheer Post.  

Boycott Switzerland, The Partner In Genocide! 

 “Investigate Reports ‘Israel’ Burying Victims Alive.”

BP, Evergreen Suspend Red Sea Tanker Traffic; Yemen Continues Attacks. “

 

TEXTS

CHILDREN’S HOSPITALS IN GAZA.

What might an individual do to help the people of Gaza? Here’s my reply tonight.  The finest thing a human can do is to try to prevent a war.  If that fails, then try to stop the destruction and slaughter, try to stop the war, care for the wounded.  The US, the world have many excellent peace organizations who beg for your donations and participation.  Use your search engine, and get to work.  And relieve the suffering.  Here’s an idea that might work for you.  What’s the condition of children’s hospitals in Gaza or nearby (Jerusalem?  Egypt?).   Here’s the result of my search that took just a few minutes.  It reveals what we first need to know: the destruction of children’s care by the Israeli invasion of Gaza.  Then, what might we do?  (Hire a techie to help you.)  For example, Does the last pediatric hospital in Gaza still exist?  If it does, what does it need now?  Find out.  If it is closed, where were the children sent?  Who’s the contact.  Let us all know.   Even if your search is futile, your few moves bring you closer to engagement in the facts on the ground essential to action.  And closer to urgent larger questions.  Why instead of providing bombs to Israel has the USA not provided hospitals for the maimed and dying children in Gaza and all around Gaza—in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon?  Senator Bozeman: Compassion for the Children!

“Decomposing Bodies of Premature Babies Discovered in Besieged Gaza Hospital.”  Democracy Now (NOV 30, 2023 ).   https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/30/headlines/decomposing_bodies_of_premature_babies_discovered_in_besieged_gaza_hospital

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said it had discovered the decomposing remains of five premature Palestinian babies who were left to die after Israeli forces ordered medical staff to evacuate and blocked access to the intensive care unit at the al-Nasr pediatric hospital. Shocking footage filmed by the Dubai-based outlet Al Mashhad shows the babies still attached to ventilation and intravenous tubes as they lay lifeless in their hospital beds. Rights groups are calling for an international investigation.

 

Julia Conley.  “Israel Bombs Pediatric Hospital as Death Toll of Children in Gaza Surpasses 4,000.”  November 6, 2023. 

"These children are not worthless casualties," said one advocate. "These children are as precious as any innocent children. They don't just deserve to not die. They deserve to live free."

As journalists in Gaza reported that the Israel Defense Forces bombed the cancer ward of a pediatric hospital in Gaza City on Sunday, advocates for a cease-fire in the blockaded enclave pleaded with powerful Western countries allied with Israel—including the United States—to take action to stop the bombardment that has now killed more than 4,000 children in one month.

Local news outlets Palestinian HadathMayadeenHaya Jadeeda, and Quds Network reported that the third floor of al-Rantisi Pediatric Hospital had been hit by an Israeli airstrike, while Reuters reported that eight people had been killed in the attack.

The Daily Beast reported late last month that medical providers in the ward, which is called the Dr.Musa and Suhaila Nasir Pediatric Cancer Department and is the first and only children's oncology department in Gaza, feared a possible bombing of the hospital, where at least 10 children were receiving in-patient treatment and could not be evacuated when Israeli officials threatened northern Gaza with imminent airstrikes.

"It's an impossible situation," said Dr. Zeena Salman, an American pediatric oncologist who has volunteered at the hospital, told The Daily Beast. "There's a number of patients who are not stable enough to transfer to another hospital. And there may not be enough resources in the hospital."

Al-Rantisi Hospital has also been providing shelter to around 1,000 civilians since Israel's total siege in Gaza began last month.

On Sunday, United Nations agencies representing children, women, refugees, and health services issued a joint call warning that "women, children and newborns in Gaza are disproportionately bearing the burden" of Israel's attack on the enclave, which it commenced on October 7 after Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 200 hostage.

While claiming to be targeting Hamas, the IDF has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians since October 7 as it has bombed hospitals, schools, and refugee camps—all while blaming Hamas for civilian casualties by saying the group is using Palestinian people as "human shields."

"The idea that 'they were being shielded by children so we murdered the children too' is so absent of morality, it's outrageous," said author Gabrielle Alexa Noel last week in response to an MSNBC segment in which anchor Joy Ann Reid also condemned the claim.

The death toll in Gaza, said Khaled Engindy of the Middle East Institute, is now the equivalent of "killing 1.5 million Americans, including 600,000 children, in the U.S. in under a month."

Toby Fricker, spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), toldThe Guardian that while it can take time to verify the number of dead children and adults in Gaza as hundreds go missing under rubble after bombings, "the numbers are obviously catastrophic."  

"Verification doesn't occur in real time, which is why we say 'reportedly killed,' but, generally speaking, in all conflicts we substantiate initial estimates and in Gaza they have tended to be pretty consistent," said Fricker, rebuking claims perpetuated by U.S. President Joe Biden recently that Gaza's health authorities, which are controlled by Hamas, release inaccurate casualty counts.

The U.N. agencies warned that with roughly 50,000 pregnant people in Gaza, children born during the war will be among the most at risk if the U.S. and other countries supporting Israel's siege don't join the growing call for a cease-fire. One hundred and thirty premature babies living in incubators are also at risk.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell also warned last week that for the children who survive the fighting in both Gaza and Israel, the consequences of the trauma they are living through, including the loss of their parents and, in some cases, their entire family will have consequences that "could last a lifetime."

One UNICEF aid worker stationed in Gaza said last week that her children, aged seven and four, have been "begging for drinkable water and showing signs of severe psychological distress and fear."     MORE

 

GET REVIEW OF FOLLOWING

Book: DELUGE: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm.  Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.  https://orbooks.com/catalog/deluge/

Foreword by Avi Shlaim.     “Indispensable . . . a tour de force—Norman G. Finkelstein.  “Eye-opening, compelling, required reading”  —Katie Halper 
“First-rate analysis . . . a truly important antidote”  —John J. Mearsheimer
“Comprehensive and compassionate”  —Cornel West

 

 

 

 

SHORTEN THE FOLLOWING

CHRIS HEDGES.    The Cost of Bearing Witness.”  The Chris Hedges Report.  12-23-23

There are scores of Palestinians writers and photographers, many of whom have been killed, who are determined to make us see the horror of this genocide. They will vanquish the lies of the killers.

 

 

Writing and photographing in wartime are acts of resistance, acts of faith. They affirm the belief that one day - a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never see - the words and images will evoke empathy, understanding, outrage and provide wisdom. They chronicle not only the facts, although facts are important, but the texture, sacredness and grief of lives and communities lost. They tell the world what war is like, how those caught in its maw of death endure, how there are those who sacrifice for others and those who do not, what fear and hunger are like, what death is like. They transmit the cries of children, the wails of grief of the mothers, the daily struggle in the face of savage industrial violence, the triumph of their humanity through dirt, filth, sickness, humiliation and fear. This is why writers, photographers and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war — including the Israelis — for obliteration. They stand as witnesses to evil, an evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They expose the lies. They condemn, even from the grave, their killers. Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers along with at least 67 journalists and media workers in Gaza, and three in Lebanon since Oct. 7.

I experienced futility and outrage when I covered war. I wondered if I had done enough, or if it was even worth the risk. But you go on because to do nothing is to be complicit. You report because you care. You will make it hard for the killers to deny their crimes. 

This brings me to the Palestinian novelist and playwright Atef Abu Saif. He and his 15-year-old son Yasser, who live in the occupied West Bank, were visiting family in Gaza — where he was born — when Israel began its scorched earth campaign. Atef is no stranger to the violence of the Israeli occupiers. He was two months old during the 1973 war and writes “I’ve been living through wars ever since. Just as life is a pause between two deaths, Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.”

During Operation Cast Lead, the 2008/2009 Israel assault on Gaza, Atef sheltered in the corridor of his Gaza family home for 22 nights with his wife, Hanna and two children, while Israel bombed and shelled. His book “The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire,” is an account of Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza that killed 1,523 Palestinian civilians, including 519 children. 

“Memories of war can be strangely positive, because to have them at all means you must have survived,” he notes sardonically.

He again did what writers do, including the professor and poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed, along with Refaat’s brother, sister and her four children, in an airstrike on his sister’s apartment building in Gaza on Dec. 7. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said that Alareer was deliberately targeted, “surgically bombed out of the entire building.” His killing came after weeks of “death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts,” He had moved to his sister’s because of the threats.

Refaat, whose doctorate was on the metaphysical poet John Donne, wrote a poem in Nov., called “If I Must Die,” which became his last will and testament. It has been translated into numerous languages. A reading of the poem by the actor Brian Cox has been viewed almost 30 million times. 

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made,

flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.

Atef, once again finding himself living amid the explosions and carnage from Israeli shells and bombs, doggedly publishes his observations and reflections. His accounts are often difficult to transmit because of Israel’s blockage of Internet and phone service. They have appeared in The Washington PostThe New York TimesThe Nation and Slate.

On the first day of the Israeli bombardment, a friend, the young poet and musician Omar Abu Shawish, is killed, apparently in an Israeli naval bombardment, though later reports would say he was killed in an airstrike as he was walking to work. Atef wonders about the Israeli soldiers watching him and his family with “their infrared lenses and satellite photography.” Can “they count the loafs of bread in my basket, or the number of falafel balls on my plate?” he wonders. He watches the crowds of dazed and confused families, their homes in rubble, carrying “mattresses, bags of clothes, food and drink.” He stands mutely before “the supermarket, the bureau de change, the falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the sweets shop, the toy shop — all burned.”

“Blood was everywhere, along with bits of kids’ toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles and shattered perfume bottles,” he writes. “The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town scorched by a dragon.”

“I went to the Press House, where journalists were frantically downloading images and writing reports for their agencies. I was sitting with Bilal, the Press House manager, when an explosion shook the building. Windows shattered, and the ceiling collapsed onto us in chunks. We ran toward the central hall. One of the journalists was bleeding, having been hit by flying glass. After 20 minutes, we ventured out to inspect the damage. I noticed that Ramadan decorations were still hanging in the street.”

“The city has become a wasteland of rubble and debris,” Atef, who has been the Palestinian Authority’s minister of culture since 2019, writes in the early days of the Israeli shelling of Gaza City. “Beautiful buildings fall like columns of smoke. I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life. Maybe I can do the same this time, I think.”

He leaves his teenage son with family members.

“The Palestinian logic is that in wartime, we should all sleep in different places, so that if part of the family is killed, another part lives,” he writes. “The U.N. schools are getting more crowded with displaced families. The hope is that the U.N. flag will save them, though in previous wars, that hasn’t been the case.”

 On Tuesday Oct. 17 he writes:

I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. Just be done with it, I think. It’s the 11th day of the conflict, but all the days have merged into one: the same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell. On the news, I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear.

In the morning, my phone rang. It was Rulla, a relative in the West Bank, telling me she had heard there’d been an airstrike in Talat Howa, a neighborhood on the south side of Gaza City where my cousin Hatem lives. Hatem is married to Huda, my wife’s only sister. He lives in a four-story building that also houses his mother and brothers and their families.

I called around, but no one’s phone was working. I walked to al-Shifa Hospital to read the names: Lists of the dead are pinned up daily outside a makeshift morgue. I could barely approach the building: Thousands of Gazans had made the hospital their home; its gardens, its hallways, every empty space or spare corner had a family in it. I gave up and headed toward Hatem’s.

Thirty minutes later, I was on his street. Rulla had been right. Huda and Hatem’s building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved; the only known survivor was Wissam, one of their other daughters, who had been taken to the ICU. Wissam had gone straight into surgery, where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand. “What about the others?” I asked someone.

“We can’t find them,” came the reply.

Amid the rubble, we shouted: “Hello? Can anyone hear us?” We called out the names of those still missing, hoping some might still be alive. By the end of the day, we’d managed to find five bodies, including that of a 3-month-old. We went to the cemetery to bury them.

In the evening, I went to see Wissam in the hospital; she was barely awake. After half an hour, she asked me: “Khalo [Uncle], I’m dreaming, right?”

I said, “We are all in a dream.”

“My dream is terrifying! Why?”

“All our dreams are terrifying.”

After 10 minutes of silence, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Khalo. In my dream, I don’t have legs. It’s true, isn’t it? I have no legs?”

“But you said it’s a dream.”

“I don’t like this dream, Khalo.”

I had to leave. For a long 10 minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and end-of-the-world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors. Doomsday on demand. Who could have the courage to tell Hanna, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister had been killed? That her family had been killed? I phoned my colleague Manar and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar. “Say the building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help.”

Leaflets in Arabic dropped by Israeli helicopters float down from the sky. They announce that anyone who remains north of the Wadi waterway will be considered a partner to terrorism, “meaning,” Atef writes, “the Israelis can shoot on sight.” The electricity is cut. Food, fuel and water begin to run out. The wounded are operated on without anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives. He visits his niece Wissam, racked with pain, in al-Shifa Hospital who asks him for a lethal injection. She says Allah will forgive her.

“But he will not forgive me, Wissam.”

“I am going to ask him to, on your behalf,” she says.

After airstrikes he joins the rescue teams “under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn’t see in the sky.” A line from T.S Eliot, “a heap of broken images,” runs through his head. The injured and dead are “transported on three-wheeled bicycles or dragged along in carts by animals.”

“We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket; you find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat,” he writes. “In the past week, many Gazans have started writing their names on their hands and legs, in pen or permanent marker, so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem macabre, but it makes perfect sense: We want to be remembered; we want our stories to be told; we seek dignity. At the very least, our names will be on our graves. The smell of unretrieved bodies under the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air. The more time passes, the stronger the smell.”

The scenes around him become surreal. On Nov. 19, day 44 of the assault, he writes:

A man rides a horse toward me with the body of a dead teenager slung over the saddle in front. It seems it’s his son, perhaps. It looks like a scene from a historical movie, only the horse is weak and barely able to move. He is back from no battle. He is no knight. His eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand and the bridle in the other. I have an impulse to photograph him but then feel suddenly sick at the idea. He salutes no one. He barely looks up. He is too consumed with his own loss. Most people are using the camp’s old cemetery; it’s the safest and although it is technically long-since full, they have started digging shallower graves and burying the new dead on top of the old—keeping families together, of course.

On Nov. 21 after constant tank-shelling, he decides to flee the Jabaliya neighborhood in the north of Gaza for the south, with his son and mother-in-law who is in a wheelchair. They must pass through Israeli checkpoints, where soldiers randomly select men and boys from the line for detention.

“Scores of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road,” he writes. “Rotting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned-out car, as if asking for something, from me specifically. I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car — limbs and precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester.”

He tells his son Yasser: “Don’t look. Just keep walking, son."

In early Dec. his family home is destroyed in an airstrike.

“The house a writer grows up in is a well from which to draw material. In each of my novels, whenever I wanted to depict a typical house in the camp, I conjured ours. I’d move the furniture around a bit, change the name of the alley, but who was I kidding? It was always our house.”

“All the houses in Jabalya are small. They’re built randomly, haphazardly, and they’re not made to last. These houses replaced the tents that Palestinians like my grandmother Eisha lived in after the displacements of 1948. Those who built them always thought they’d soon be returning to the beautiful, spacious homes they’d left behind in the towns and villages of historic Palestine. That return never happened, despite our many rituals of hope, like safeguarding the key to the old family home. The future keeps betraying us, but the past is ours.”

“Though I’ve lived in many cities around the world, and visited many more, that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home’” he goes on. “Friends and colleagues always asked: Why don’t you live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students chimed in: Why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same: ‘Because in Gaza, in an alleyway in the Saftawi neighborhood of Jabalya, there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.’ If on doomsday God were to ask me where I would like to be sent, I wouldn’t hesitate in saying, ‘Home.’ Now there is no home.”

Atef is now trapped in southern Gaza with his son. His niece was transferred to a hospital in Egypt. Israel continues to pound Gaza with over 20,000 dead and 50,000 wounded. Atef continues to write.

The story of Christmas is the story of a poor woman, nine months pregnant, and her husband forced to leave their home in Nazareth in northern Galilee. The occupying Roman power has demanded they register for the census 90 miles away in Bethlehem. When they arrive there are no rooms. She gives birth in a stable. King Herod - who learned from the Magi of the birth of the messiah - orders his soldiers to hunt down every child two years old and under in Bethlehem and the vicinity and murder them. An angel warns Joseph in a dream to flee. The couple and infant escape under the cover of darkness and make the 40-mile journey to Egypt. 

I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.

“Why is this such an important day?” I asked.

“It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.

The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world — the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups — who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

Evil has not changed down the millenia. Neither has goodness.

 

·       Progressive Magazine.   Eight articles on Gaza, a book, and a poem.
“Interview with Phyllis Bennis” by Norman Stockwell.   “’This Is a Very Dangerous Time.”  Progressive (Dec. 23/Jan. 24.)
Phyllis is one of the wisest and most respected of US peacemakers.
David Boddiger, Managing Editor.  “There Must Be a Ceasefire in Gaza.”

·       Norman Stockwell.  “Our View of an Eye for an Eye.”

·       Bill Lueders.  “Don’t Blame the Squad; End the Killing.”

·       Samer Badawi. “Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War.” 

·       Jennifer Lowenstein.  “The War on Gaza: How a Colonial Mentality Assures Western Failure.”   

·       I. F. Stone.  “On Justice for the Palestinians.”

·       Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman.  “I Protest This Bloodshed.”

·       Edward Said.  “An Exile’s Exile.”

·     Mosab Abu Toha. Poem.  “My Son Throws a Blanket Over My Daughter.”      Author of collection: Poems from Gaza.

US and Israeli Information Control

Beautiful Trouble:  A Toolbox for Revolution.    A TOOLBOX FOR REVOLUTION.  Assembled by ANDREW BOYD with DAVE OSWALD MITCHELL

"The current political moment calls for bold leaps of imagination, new forms of organizing and a fearless blend of confrontation and celebration. Beautiful Trouble is a crash course in the emerging field of carnivalesque realpolitik, both elegant and incendiary." —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo

Adobe’s Misleading Images
Forwarded by Joanie Connors.  (Readers of my anthologies have noted the absence of images, which has been my policy from the beginning. I have adhered to texts and, I hoped, evidence and reason.  –D)
The images coming out of the Israel-Gaza war are haunting, and a daily reminder of the need for a lasting ceasefire and an end to the ongoing violence. But one corporation is muddying the issue, making it possible for politicians to dismiss legitimate images because high-quality fakes are also available.

Adobe has been selling AI-generated images of the Israel-Gaza war, and these images have been used on websites without being marked as fake images.  This is more than just irresponsible, it’s extremely dangerous and fuels misinformation during a time when access to accurate news and images from occupied Palestine is paramount.

Adobe must stop selling AI-generated images of war and conflict. Full Stop. Send a message to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen today. >>
. . . . 
Thanks for signing, 
Just Foreign Policy
(I think this originated by Win Without War:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/ai-images-of-war/?source=group-just-foreign-policy&referrer=group-just-foreign-policy&redirect=https://secure.actblue.com/donate/sh-jfp-adobeja&link_id=0&can_id=1a5b0ee21cc28ce92ab60fd9e40383bf&email_referrer=email_2153065&email_subject=adobe-must-stop-selling-ai-generated-images-of-war-and-conflict&refcodeEmailReferrer=email_2153065 )

 

Palestinian Activist Tied Up, Beaten, And Arrested By Israeli Forces By Leila Warah, Mondoweiss. Popular Resistance.org (12-23-23).   On Monday morning in the occupied West Bank, just over 15 people of all ages, many still in their pajamas, were piled into Laila al Waraa’s living room in Aida refugee camp, Bethlehem. While the little room belonging to the 69-year-old family matriarch was accustomed to large gatherings, this time was different. It was about 5:00 in the morning, and everyone was trying to piece together what had happened hours before when the Israeli military conducted yet another overnight raid on the refugee camp. Around 3:00 a.m., the Israeli army loudly and without warning broke into her house, where she... -more-
 

Teaching Hatred And Normalizing Violence Against PalestiniansBy Essam Elkorghli, Black Agenda Report. Popular Resistance.org (12-23-23).   Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there have been numerous Western officials publicly decrying school textbooks in Palestine and how they instill violence against settlers, occupiers, and the Zionist entity. The officials rely in their outcries on reports by a liberal institute that defames Palestinian textbooks, while aggrandizing Zionist entity’s textbooks as harbingers for peace. Since the Al-Aqsa Flood, there have been numerous videos circulating showing young settlers not only being apathetic to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza but also celebrating such atrocity. -more-

 

Toronto Picketers At Military Contractor Pratt And Whitney

By Labour Against The Arms Trade and World Beyond War, Socialist Project. Popular Resistance.org (12-23-23).  On Tuesday morning of December 12, more than two hundred workers and union members from across the Toronto area picketed the Mississauga manufacturing plant of defence contractor Pratt & Whitney Canada. As Israel pursues its deadly assault on Gaza for a third month, the picket lines interrupted business as usual at an aerospace giant that makes engines for aircrafts that the Israeli military is using to carry out its bombing campaign against Palestinian lives and infrastructure. Encountering banners that read “Stop Arming Apartheid” and “Arms... -more-DECEMBER 15, 2023ABELTOMLINSON

 

 

Tara Alami.  Gas, Gaza, and Western imperialism.”  Mondoweiss  on December 20, 2023 .  (Posted Dec 22, 2023).
Capitalism, Imperialism, State Repression, WarGaza, Israel, Middle East, PalestineNewswire.   Editor.  mronline.org (12-23-23).

Control of Mediterranean gas fields is not the reason for the current attack on Gaza, but the theft of Palestine’s natural resources has long been a goal of the Zionist settler-colonial project and its Western sponsors.

 

We need to act fast to stop the situation in Gaza from triggering a wider war in the Middle East.”  Morning Star Online  on December 20, 2023.    by Morning Star Online Editors (more by Morning Star Online)  |  (Posted Dec 21, 2023).   Editor.  mronline.org (12-22-23). 

  Protest, State Repression, Strikes, WarGaza, Global, Israel, Middle East, PalestineNewswire

THE danger signals of a wider war breaking out in the Middle East are now flashing red.   If the most compelling reason for securing a stable and permanent ceasefire in Gaza remains the indescribable suffering of the Palestinian people under merciless Israeli assault, then this danger constitutes a barely less important second one.

 

The Red Sea is now the second front in the Gaza war.  Counterfire  on December 19, 2023 by John Rees (more by Counterfire)  |  (Posted Dec 21, 2023).  Editor.  mronline.org (12-22-23). 

WarAmericas, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine, United States, YemenNewswireGaza War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Operation Prosperity Guardian, President Joe Biden, Red Sea, U.S. Aircraft Carrier Eisenhower, U.S. Navy, USS Carney

Long before it hit mainstream news headlines in the last few days, a conflict has been raging in the Red Sea which could transform Israel’s war on Gaza into a regional conflict. In mid-October, the Houthi movement in Yemen, which controls much of the country, fired drones and cruise missiles at Israel. It took the firepower of the USS Carney, a U.S. warship in the Red Sea, to stop the missiles hitting their target.

 


Ian MacLeod.  “Blood money: The top ten politicians taking the most Israel lobby cash
.”    lan MacLeod (Posted Dec 21, 2023).  MintPress News on December 18, 2023 (more by MintPress News)  | 

Empire, Imperialism, Inequality, WarAmericas, Israel, Middle East, United StatesNewswireChairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Mitch McConnell, President Joe Biden, Shontel Brown, Steny Hoyer, Ted Cruz, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden  Mronline.org (12-22-23).

As the Israeli attack on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria intensifies, the U.S. public watch on aghast. A new poll finds that Americans support a permanent ceasefire by a more than 2:1 ratio (including the vast majority of Democrats and a plurality of Republicans).

And yet, despite this, only 4% of elected members of the House support even a temporary ceasefire, and the United States continues to veto U.N. resolutions working towards ending the violence. Walter Hixson, a historian concentrating on U.S. foreign relations, told MintPress News:

 

 

ISRAELI  REPRESSION LED TO HAMAS  ATTACKS
Ian Williams.     “U.N.  Leaders  Speak  Out  Against  Siege..”
     Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2023.  POSTED ON NOVEMBER 6, 2023.  U.N. Leaders Speak Out Against Siege – Israel-Palestine - WRMEA.

THESE ARE INDEED TIMES sent to try us—and the U.N. The organization makes repeated recommendations—and then those who consistently ignore its advice condemn it, before frequently trying to use it as the cherry picker to help them down from the tree that they climbed up. As the Israeli onslaught continued, the U.N. had gone beyond feeding and educating Palestinians to housing them in its schools and other depots, although history and the twelve dead staffers so far suggest that this is a highly qualified safety.

The U.N. has also followed most countries in seeing a close relationship, indeed an equivalence, between Israeli repression and Hamas’ attacks. 

The eruption/mass-breakout/invasion from Gaza seriously supports Pontius Pilate’s confused query: “What is truth?” But the Roman was not around to ask the very pertinent question. It should be no surprise to see media and politicians looking at the whole thing through blue and white lenses, but after recent patterns of behavior from Israel and the settlers we could have expected a cosmetic attempt at objectivity. You do not have to be an apologist for Hamas—the brutal wannabe theocrats in Gaza—to suggest some cause and effect between Israel’s policies and this eruption.

I do not propose to burn incense on the altar of Israeli victimhood. Dropping bombs on apartment blocks in Gaza, allowing, indeed facilitating Ku Klux Klan-style pogroms in the West Bank, regularizing civilian executions of Palestinians, not to mention apartheid and ethnic cleansing, neither can nor should excuse the mayhem Hamas inflicted on civilians. Holding a music festival near the Gaza fence could be likened to opening a circus within earshot of the Warsaw Ghetto, but that is no reason for emulating a West Bank settler mob on a pogrom by massacring the audience.

But the reality of murders and hostage-takings is no excuse for febrile horror stories of the kind used to incite lynch mobs. The Israeli allegations of beheading babies and mass rape reminded me of the public relations-inspired campaign against Saddam Hussain claiming that his troops emptied babies out of incubators in Kuwait. His army had indeed massacred Kurds and Marsh Arabs, and Iraqi soldiers had indeed invaded Kuwait, but there is nothing like a juicy atrocity to prepare the way for bombing civilians.

These allegations of beheadings of Israeli babies and rapes of women ricocheted through the Internet and almost certainly provided cover for pro-Israeli politicians in the EU to threaten cutting off aid to Palestine. The source of those inflammatory news items appeared to be a report from a Netanyahu-linked TV station based on unsupported statements by an IDF reservist, who, it transpired, was a West Bank settler leader who had inspired the settler pogrom on Huwara in the West Bank (which did not rouse a fraction of the indignation of Kfar Aza kibbutz).

When a serious journalist from Turkey finally checked and asked, the IDF could not and would not substantiate the reports of beheadings even though, recognizing a good atrocity story when they saw one, they could not bring themselves to actually deny it. If Pontius Pilate were looking for truth, he would not go here!

To add flavor, the settler spokesman also referred to rapes, presumably because if you want to incite a lynch mob, rapes and murdering babies are the way to go. Within a day the cycle of unchecked indignation was complete, and even Biden claimed to have seen pictures of decapitated infants, but under more sustained questioning his office later walked that back and said he had seen news reports. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, presidents should not believe everything they read on the Internet.

He was not alone. The reality was bad enough, but the created facts had done their work and the tales had permeated the media miasma enough to occlude the sheer horror and illegality of Israel’s threats against the people of Gaza.   MORE https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/u.n.-leaders-speak-out-against-siege.html

 

ALLAN C. BROWNFELD.   “ADL’s Campaign to Silence Criticism of Israel By Calling it  ‘Anti-Semitism’.”   Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2023.   POSTED ON NOVEMBER 2, 2023.  
IN RECENT YEARS, there has been an effort to redefine “anti-Semitism” to include not simply bigotry toward Jews and Judaism, but also criticism of Israel and Zionism. In May 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), declared that, “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” He argued that groups calling for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel are “extremists” and equated liberal critics of Israel with white supremacists.

This view has been sharply criticized by many Jewish observers. In his book The Jewish American Paradox, Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin notes that, “Since World War ll, institutionalized anti-Semitism [in the U.S.] has virtually disappeared.” Mnookin describes “the alarmist approach by the Jewish advocacy organizations, especially the ADL,” as “often exaggerated.” He points to the ADL’s approach to the 163 bomb threats to synagogues in 2017: “Although virtually all of them had been attributed to the disturbed Jewish teenager in Israel (who has since been indicted), the ADL included them in its ‘harassment’ statistics for 2017 and insisted they were evidence of anti-Semitism. By including these threats in its 2017 report, the ADL was able to claim a dramatic 41 percent spike in harassment cases in just one year…I don’t think the Jewish community is served by such hype.”

In an important assessment of the role the ADL is now playing in the campaign to silence criticism of Israel, Eric Alterman, CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of the book, We are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, published an article in the New Republic on Aug. 21, 2023, titled “What Does the ADL Stand for Today?”

He points out that “The far right is the source of the vast majority of anti-Semitism in the U.S. today…The ADL should be saying so more insistently… Greenblatt had virtually nothing to say about the rise of white Christian nationalism, together with its undeniably anti-Semitic ‘replacement theory’ that has mesmerized so many MAGA supporters and inspired murderous violence against Jews…and other vulnerable members of the population. Instead, he focused his ire on what the ADL calls ‘hostile anti-Zionist activist groups’ like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which loudly criticize and protest against Israel on America’s college campuses, calling them ‘the photo inverse of the extreme right.’”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas noted that Greenblatt ignored the anti-Semitic advertisements that have been featured in many Republican campaigns and the fact that more and more Republican politicians have been turning up at extremist right-wing gatherings.

While Greenblatt assaulted alleged “anti-Semitism” on the pro-Palestinian left, the ADL’s own “Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents 2022” found that the liberal groups he focused on were responsible for just two percent of the “anti-Semitic” actions to which the ADL objected. Lara Friedman, a Middle East policy analyst and frequent critic of the ADL, points out that of these incidents cited, 53 out of 70 were attributable to a single marginal group in Ann Arbor, MI.

The ADL’s overall count of anti-Semitic incidents, Alterman points out, “does not allow for crucial distinctions to be made among them. A tragic massacre like that in October 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh or the Jews held hostage in a Dallas synagogue for 11 hours by a gunman last year, are accorded the same statistical significance in the ADL’s counting as, say, a report of graffiti written on a stairwell of a college dorm. In the ADL’s statistics, they both count the same.”

The motive for promoting the false idea of mounting anti-Semitism is clear. “A major reason for the ADL’s addiction to alarmism,” writes Alterman, “is the same institutional imperative that drives virtually every other issue-oriented nonprofit: Bad news in the world is good news for the organizations committed to fighting it. Climate change catastrophes fill the coffers of environmental groups. Attacks on choice fill the coffers of Planned Parenthood...” 

Alterman continues, journalists who write about escalating anti-Semitism “are sufficiently intelligent to understand this phenomenon, but they tend to ignore it when reporting their stories and therefore pass along the ADL’s skewed and self-interested version of the problem as the political equivalent of scripture.” 

Of course, another motive for focusing on anti-Semitism is to deflect attention from the actions of the Israeli government, soldiers and settlers. Journalists and academics who stray from the ADL’s talking points may find their livelihoods threatened. 

While the ADL and other Jewish organizations promote the idea that there is growing anti-Semitism on American college and university campuses, there is no evidence that this is true. In 2017 four scholars at Brandeis University conducted an in-depth study at four high-profile campuses and found that, “Jewish students are rarely exposed to anti-Semitism on campus. Jewish students do not think their campus is hostile to Jews. The majority of students disagree that there is a hostile environment to Jews on campus.” Scholars associated with the Jewish Studies program at Stanford University found a similar picture at five California campuses.

Some Israelis admit that the equating of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a tactic to silence criticism of Israel. Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize, describes how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”

In an important book, Whatever Happened to Anti-Semitism?, all of this is examined by Antony Lerman, a British specialist on Jewish affairs who has served as director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. He is now senior fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. At the core of the so-called “new anti-Semitism,” Lerman points out, “is the claim that Israel is the (persecuted) collective Jew among the nations.” This has no basis in reality: “a state cannot have the attributes of a human being. Second, it is a heretical corruption of Judaism because it entails an idolatrous deification and worship of the state. Third, it is an anti-Semitic construct because it treats being Jewish as a singular: ‘all Jews are the same.’”

As criticism of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians grow on the part of groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have characterized it as “apartheid,” Israeli historian Neve Gordon notes that, “The Israeli government needs the ‘new anti-Semitism’ to justify its actions and to protect it from international and domestic condemnation. Anti-Semitism is effectively weaponized, not only to stifle free speech…but also to suppress a politics of liberation.”

Joshua Leifer, an editor of Dissent, provided this assessment: “The Israeli government long ago adjusted its public relations strategy for the post-two-state reality…so that today, the Israeli hasbara apparatus’ most active front is the attempted redefinition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, with the goal of rendering any opposition to the occupation or Zionism—or even simply Israeli policies themselves—beyond the pale of mainstream sensibility.”  MORE https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/adls-campaign-to-silence-criticism-of-israel-by-calling-it-anti-semitism.html

 

 

Julia Conley.  ‘Moral insanity’: Biden admin bypasses Congress to rush tank shells to Israel.”   Common Dreams (December 9, 2023).   Mronline.org (12-15-23).

(More by Common Dreams).  Capitalism, Human Rights, Inequality, WarAmericas, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United StatesNewswireArms Control Export Act, Cease Fire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Joe Biden, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, United Nations Security Council, United States Ambassador Robert Wood

Hours after United States Ambassador Robert Wood on Friday acted alone to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the Biden administration again illustrated its growing isolation in continuing to back Israel’s onslaught as it bypassed Congress to send more weapons to the country’s extreme right-wing government.

The U.S. Defense Department posted a notice online Saturday saying U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had informed Congress that a government sale of 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition was moving forward, even though Congress had not completed an informal review of the transaction. 

"Rushing deadly weapons to the far-right and openly genocidal Israeli government without congressional review robs American voters of their voice in Congress," said one   critic.

Bruce Gagnon.   "Trading in Terror."  2023.
Massive leak by the acclaimed investigative reporter, Bruce Gagnon, was just re-posted on the AR Anti-war Alliance's FB/Meta page. A report concerning what appears to be solid evidence that there was prior knowledge of the Oct 7th Hamas attack into Israel by several stock investors & the New York & Tel Aviv Stock Exchanges (NYSE & TASE) brokerage firms. Millions of $ were made by investors "short selling" massive #'s of shares of several Israeli company stocks in the days just before they fell sharply immediately after the attack & then repurchasing them soon after this precipitous fall. Similar to what has been going on in the stock market here in the US for decades by US politicians who frequently generate the news themselves that will make massive changes in the worth of stocks of multi-billion $ corps(e) with the legislation they are crafting. So many similarities between Israeli & US political malfeasance.  MORE  https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2023/12/overwhelming-proof-of-insider-trading.html   Forwarded to me by David Druding.

 

Jonathan Ofir.  I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer. Mondoweiss (Dec. 8, 2023).    

Editor,  mronline.org (12-17-23).

I used to think that Yeshayahu Leibowitz's term "Judeo-Nazis" was too strong to describe Israel. But today, I feel differently.

Originally published: Mondoweiss  on December 8, 2023 by Jonathan Ofir (more by Mondoweiss)  |  (Posted Dec 16, 2023).  Culture, Inequality, Race, WarAmericas, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United StatesNewswireJudeo-Nazis, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Yeshayahu Leibowitz

The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz applied the term “Judeo-Nazis” back in the late 1980s when he referred to former Supreme Court Judge Meir Landau, who effectively legalized torture, by that description. He made his arguments strongly:

The State of Israel represents the darkness of a state body, where a creature of a human form who was the president of the Supreme Court decides that the use of torture is permitted in the interest of the state.

I took it as a kind of moral exaggeration. It was bad–Palestinians were being tortured systematically, but somehow I thought, we’re not quite as genocidal as Nazis.

But today, I feel differently. Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference:

Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, . . .  MORE

 

 

 

 




 

 

Boycott Switzerland, The Partner In Genocide!

By Boycott the Partners in Genocide, Mondoweiss. At a time when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is increasingly met with international condemnation, the world has started to take action to halt the daily massacres against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, most recently with the near-unanimous adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a ceasefire. Still, some international actors have not been fulfilling their roles and obligations, chief among them Switzerland, which has violated its own commitment to neutrality by firmly taking a proactive stand on the side of the perpetrators.  -more-
 

Euro-Med Monitor: Investigate Reports ‘Israel’ Burying Victims Alive

By Palestine Chronicle,  Orinoco Tribune. The human rights organization Euro-Med Monitor has urged to probe Israeli war crimes after reports of Palestinian civilians buried alive at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. In a report published on Saturday, the Geneva-based group said that “an independent international investigation must be opened into these reports.” According to Euro-Med Monitor, “Israeli army bulldozers drove into the hospital (on Saturday) morning and destroyed its southern section, leaving behind massive destruction following several days of non-stop attacks and siege.” -more-
 

BP, Evergreen Suspend Red Sea Tanker Traffic; Yemen Continues Attacks

By News Desk, The Cradle. BP said it will pause all its tanker traffic through the Red Sea following an escalation of attacks on commercial shipping by Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement in response to Israel's brutal bombing campaign in

 

 

 

END GAZA #16

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