Intervention in Gaza

by Paul Larudee / April 29th, 2024

Is there a point at which the genocide in Gaza becomes egregious enough to provoke other countries to directly intervene in the Gaza Strip to prevent further genocide? Can Israel exterminate the entire population without anyone stopping them?

This is not a rhetorical question. Intervention is not merely judgments by the International Court of Justice or resolutions introduced at the United Nations. It is not even shiploads of supplies sent to queue up for delivery into Gaza, pending permission from the Israeli occupying authorities. Rather, intervention means forcing one’s way into Gaza, whether the occupying authorities like it or not, and being prepared for confrontation.

If there is such a point for some countries, what is that point? Half a million deaths, by massacre, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, hyperthermia, exposure and disease? A million? And what are the countries that are willing to take action? Or can Israel exterminate the entire population without any countries intervening to stop the genocide?

The question is essential and not rhetorical, because it is now clear that there is no level of atrocity that Israel is not willing to commit, nor that the United States is not willing to support with all armaments necessary to commit the deed, as well as all aid necessary to sustain the Israeli economy. Israel will not be deterred by economic or diplomatic isolation. It is willing to be boycotted by the entire world other than the US. It cares nothing for legal judgments against it. Whether delusional or not, it sees genocide as its only means of survival, and will pursue it until it is deprived of the means to do so.

It therefore behooves us to ask the question whether there are any countries willing to intervene to stop the genocide, and at what point they will be willing to do so. If there are such countries, they will need to define the tripwire for their intervention and the means that they are willing to use to enforce it. They will need to form a consortium that is prepared to act in concert. The consortium will have to act outside the United Nations, because the US veto will prevent any UN action, other than symbolic.

The intervention need not be belligerent, but it must not accept to be impeded, nor to be attacked by the forces of the Israeli government. It must be prepared to defend itself if necessary. A suggested model for such an intervention may be found at https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/03/gaza-airdrops/, but the participating countries will make their own plans according to their own means and priorities.

The demonstrations, sit-ins, speeches, letters, phone calls, emails, boycotts, flotillas, legal judgments and other actions to apply pressure to stop the genocide are successful in raising awareness, changing opinions, and perhaps even partially forestalling the inevitable. But they have not in the least affected Israeli actions or US government support for them. Direct intervention is the only way that Israel can be made to stop.Facebook

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Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. Read other articles by Paul.

“Workers Have Power”: Thousands Rally in NYC for May Day, Call for Solidarity with Palestine

By Riya Al’sanah, Julia Bannon , Amy Goodman

 May 2, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!

Screenshot

Workers around the world rallied Wednesday to mark May Day, with many calling on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In New York, Democracy Now! spoke to demonstrators who demanded that U.S. unions apply political pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop their government’s arms trade with Israel. “Workers do have the power to shape the world,” said Palestinian researcher Riya Al’sanah, who was among thousands gathered at a May Day rally in Manhattan.

City University of New York Workers Announce Wildcat Sickout After NYPD Arrests Over 100 of Their Students and Colleagues

By Left Voice

May 2, 2024

Source: Left Voice



CUNY workers announced a wildcat sickout after NYPD raided City College’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. It’s the first known job action in the PSC union’s 52-year history.

In the evening of Tuesday, April 30, hundreds of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers from precincts all over New York City assembled in Harlem to raid both Columbia University and the City College of New York. The university presidents had invited the police force onto campus to forcibly remove the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at each school and the students at Columbia occupying “Hind’s Hall,” normally known as Hamilton Hall but renamed by student activists after a 6-year-old girl in Gaza who was killed by Israel tanks while surrounded by her dead family members in their car.

The schools are approximately 20 blocks apart. After police finished their assault on Hind’s Hall, entering through an upstairs window with guns drawn before arresting the student activists, many of them moved uptown toward City College. Activists at both schools estimate at least 100 people were arrested from each one, including students and faculty.

City College is normally an open campus, one that requires City University of New York (CUNY) IDs to enter the buildings but not the grounds. A few days ago, the college set up temporary fencing around all of the entrances that had not already been locked, and last night, they began guarding the exit points, allowing people out but not in. Police violence and arrests occurred both inside and outside of campus.

Marc Kagan, an adjunct faculty member at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, described some of what happened outside the gates in an email sent Wednesday morning:

The police presence was overwhelming. A couple of hundred in riot gear massed on Amsterdam [Avenue] easily broke up perhaps twice as many demonstrators, just surging into the crowd and randomly pulling people out for arrest, then pushing the rest of the crowd this way and that at will. Dozens more were deployed on every side street and far more than that at the two ends of Convent [Avenue].

Monday evening, unionized CUNY workers, organized with the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY, AFT Local 2334), had an assembly to discuss the situation and vote on next steps. The most controversial proposal — which passed after much discussion — was to hold a sick-out on Wednesday, May 1, International Workers Day, if at least 250 members of the bargaining unit scheduled to work that day pledged to do so by 10pm on Tuesday.

In Kagan’s view, “The encampment-faculty/staff meeting the night before [the brutality] was, I think, a preliminary and nascent example of the type of real union/student relationships we would need to build to ever realize the prospect of a People’s CUNY. That is, one that is fully funded and substantially less hierarchical.”

Shortly after 10:00 PM, messages went out through email and on social media: the threshold had been reached, the pledge’s signatories had been verified as members of the bargaining unit, and the sickout was on.

In addition to being the will of the assembly, the action responds to the call from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions – Gaza for the workers of the world to mobilize on their behalf for May Day. As one chant heard at the CUNY encampment goes, “Gaza calls, CUNY answers!”

Under New York State’s Taylor Law, which governs labor relations for public employees in New York City and bans public sector strikes, a sick-out counts as an illegal job action. As far as the PSC members we spoke with know, this is the first job action in the PSC’s 52-year history.

One PSC member who preferred to remain anonymous, upon being released from 1 Police Plaza in the early hours of Wednesday morning, said, “I don’t even give a fuck about being arrested, I care about the first ever PSC job action and that it’s for Palestine!”

It remains to be seen whether the university will choose to pursue legal or disciplinary action against workers participating in the sickout. The PSC has already issued a statement disavowing the action and discouraging members from participating, but the comments on the Instagram version of the statement are almost unanimously negative, with one commenter remarking that “These are the most unanimous comments I have ever read. I hope the PSC is heeding this vote of no confidence in the leadership.” Even after the 10:00 PM deadline passed, more members continued to sign the pledge.

CUNY workers are furious and heartbroken, just as their colleagues across the country whose campus encampments have also faced police brutality in the last two weeks are furious and heartbroken. Many intend to mobilize for the May Day march for Palestine at 4:00 PM this afternoon in Foley Square, alongside other sectors of the working class of New York, including UAW members who work at Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, and The New School.

As PSC members organizing for Palestine love to chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite!”

How Labor Can Aid the Student Movement for Palestine

Despite heavy repression, campus protests in solidarity with Palestine have been spreading like wildfire across the US. The support of organized labor can help the movement grow — and increase its leverage to achieve its demands.

By Caitlyn Clark

May 3, 2024

Source: Jacobin

April 24, 2024 - Texas State Troopers are violently dispersing a peaceful Palestine solidarity protest on the campus grounds of University of Texas at Austin. | Image credit: @RyanChandlerTV

Since April 18, over one thousand students, faculty members, and community supporters have been arrested at college campus protests across the country. Despite fierce repression from university administrators and police, new Gaza solidarity encampments, set up by students protesting Israel’s genocide and demanding their schools divest, are popping up every day.

Students have been threatened with arrest, suspension, and even expulsion for their participation in campus protests calling on their universities to disclose their financial holdings and divest from all financial ties to Israel and weapons manufacturing. On April 30, police in riot gear swept student antiwar encampments at Columbia and City College of New York, arresting nearly three hundred protesters. Violent police attacks on peaceful protesters have gone viral on social media, including harrowing footage of blood being hosed off from the walls at Emerson College in Boston and police tasing a protester while he was pinned to the ground and handcuffed at Emory University in Atlanta.

Last night, a mob of pro-Israel counterprotesters at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) launched an attack on the student encampment, launching fireworks directly into the camp, attempting to tear down students’ barricades, and brutally beating students. Campus security and police officers arrived on the scene but refused to intervene for an hour and a half.

As the situation continues to escalate, the need for support from groups beyond the students is becoming increasingly clear. Organized labor, with its capacity to mobilize wider layers of working people and leverage to shut down universities or even broader sectors of the economy through collective action, can help the protest movement to achieve its demands.

Union Solidarity With Palestine

Several international labor unions — including the United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and the American Postal Workers Union — have publicly called for a cease-fire, in addition to over two hundred local unions. Many have shown up at local rallies and protests, including a rally organized by UAW Region 9A that marched to support the student encampment at New York University on April 27.

These efforts show that more of the labor movement is recognizing the need for solidarity with Palestine. But unions can have their greatest impact in winning a cease-fire and student demands for university divestment when they use their power to strike and carry out other disruptive actions.

During the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of the 1960s, organized labor played a crucial role in supporting the student strike on UC Berkeley’s campus. Joel Geier, a student activist in the International Socialists (IS) during the FSM, recalls:

The local labor movement, including the campus unions — the Building Trades, SEIU [Service Employees International Union], the ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union], and the San Francisco Labor Council — supported the strike. A contribution to shutting down the campus came from an unexpected force: the conservative Teamsters. I led a group of FSMers to meet with Teamster union officials, who agreed with us that crossing our picket lines would be scabbing, and they would prevent all deliveries to the campus. Within an hour, no trucks bringing supplies or food entered the campus, helping to halt the normal functioning of the university. The solidarity of campus workers was outstanding, particularly the underground support from secretaries and clerks of the main university administrators, who acted as part of our intelligence network, providing us with the enemy’s thinking, plans, and memos.

Yet on many college campuses today, union groundskeepers have been tasked with the university’s dirty work of sweeping protest camps, throwing students’ posters and tents in the trash.

Student activists can take a page out of the FSM’s book in building relationships with local unions, especially those representing the groundskeepers involved in universities’ repression of encampments. Many college campuses have pro-labor student clubs that organize solidarity efforts with their local unions, and, increasingly, their own undergraduate student labor unions; these clubs and unions would be the ideal avenues for holding conversations with local unions about supporting the student activists. At the New School in New York City, for instance, student-workers are picketing to simultaneously demand union recognition from the university and to support the Gaza solidarity encampment at the school — a tactic that organizers say has helped stave off more aggressive tactics from police.

As many college students gear up for summer break and a likely demobilization of campus activism, student activists can think of using the summer to develop long-term relationships with local unions, supporting them in upcoming contract fights or labor disputes and in turn sharing why student activists will need their support in the coming fall.

Some union members whose locals or internationals have passed cease-fire resolutions are already starting to take organized action in support of the protests.

Organizers in Los Angeles launched a button campaign, “Button Up 4 Palestine,” on April 30 to show solidarity, while United Teachers Los Angeles members from the rank-and-file-led LA Educators for Justice in Palestine led teach-ins at the student encampment at UCLA. In New York City, bus drivers with Transport Workers Union Local 100 refused to drive city buses to transport arrested protesters from a Jewish Voice for Peace protest during Passover, and public defenders unionized with Association of Legal Aid Attorneys UAW Local 2325 have been providing legal services to arrested protesters. (Local 2325 is itself currently being subpoenaed by Congress for passing a cease-fire resolution last December.) And graduate workers at the University of Southern California organized with UAW Local 872 have filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the university for the unlawful arrest of its members during a peaceful protest on campus.
The Power of the Strike

For most union workers, no strike–no lockout clauses in their contracts restrict them from going on strike over a ULP. But workers who are organizing a union for the first time, fighting for recognition, or working under an expired contract typically can throw up legal picket lines over ULPs. Most union contracts include language protecting workers from having to cross legal picket lines, something often referred to as “secondary boycotts.”

A strategically placed picket line can trigger secondary boycotts that have the power to bring the economy to a screeching halt. On college campuses, this may look like picketing in front of the loading docks of cafeterias, biosciences buildings, and engineering buildings, all of which tend to rely on time-sensitive deliveries. This was a tactic employed by the UAW strike of forty-eight thousand academic workers in the University of California system during their six-week strike in 2022.

Secondary boycotts during an ILWU recognition fight for a small unit of intermodal yard workers at the Port of Tacoma shut down the entire port for a day, costing the company an estimated $5–6 million. The result? The company caved, granting voluntary recognition for the union that eventually won those workers double their pay, up to $80,000 annually from $40,000. The lesson here is that solidarity across bargaining units, job classifications, and unions gets the goods.

Picket lines don’t have to be legal of course. The ongoing Massachusetts public school teachers’ strike wave and the 2018 wildcat teachers’ strikes in West Virginia and Arizona show that sufficiently organized workers can carry out winning strikes even when they are against the law. As West Virginia teachers’ striker Emily Comer said, “It doesn’t matter if an action is illegal if you have enough people doing it.”

Actions don’t have to be as drastic as secondary boycotts or illegal strikes. Both are highly risky, especially in controversial political moments like this one; most workplaces still aren’t at the levels of organization required to pull them off effectively, and governments sometimes respond to illegal strikes with severe repression. But every action counts, like button campaigns or other structure tests that can help union activists build long-term organization of members. Heated moments require flexible tactics, but organizers should be cautious of taking shortcuts.

Workers are behind the operations that keep these universities afloat, from the faculty and graduate students that teach the classes and grade the papers, to the custodial and cafeteria staff that keep the campus clean and fed. If workers choose to stand in solidarity with student protesters rather than the bosses — the universities — they may be able to use their leverage to help students win their demands.

For the students’ movement for Palestine to develop beyond the campus (and to survive the demobilization of summer break), it will have to make inroads into other spheres of society where ordinary people have power. The power of the working class lies in its numbers and its ability to stop the flow of capital through the simple — but by no means easy — act of withholding its labor.

The current student protest wave is a reminder that the shop floor isn’t the only important site of struggles for social justice, as the bravery and courage of student activists facing immense repression has breathed new life into the movement for Palestinian liberation. But to build an effective mass movement for Palestine, we’ll need strategic leverage. We can start with the unions.

‘Unshocked’: Naomi Klein vs the “ideological shackles of Zionism”

By Naomi Klein, Mehdi Hasan

 May 3, 2024

Source: Zeteo

In a conversation with Mehdi for her new contributor segment at Zeteo, called “Unshocked,” Jewish activist, academic, and author Naomi Klein calls for an “exodus from the ideological shackles of Zionism.”  Naomi also reacts to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu comparing student protesters at Columbia University to Nazis, telling Mehdi that when it comes to Netanyahu, “there is nobody more adept at exploiting Jewish trauma, historical trauma, and turning it into a political weapon for his own advantage.” Mehdi also opens up to Naomi about why he decided to boycott the White House Correspondents Dinner. “I can’t call out what Israel is doing to Palestinian journalists with American-made bombs and then go to a fun, comedy-type dinner with the President of the United States — who’s not just responsible for that, but is also not even acknowledging it,” Mehdi told Naomi.  In 2007, Naomi wrote “The Shock Doctrine,” a book that explains what happens when a national crisis throws citizens into a state of shock and how the powerful exploit those moments. Although it may be one her most popular books, Naomi tells Mehdi that she dreams of a day where the Shock Doctrine will no longer be relevant, where people can stay grounded even in times of chaos. 

Antisemitism: The Big Lie Smearing Campus Protesters

Students are being slandered by politicians, the media, and campus administrators.

By Richard Eskow

May 3, 2024

Source: Progressive Hub

Police presence against Gaza encampement at UCLA. Photo credit @lacontroller Kenneth Mejia

Mainstream journalists and politicians have engaged in a campaign of mass slander against US college students protesting the Gaza genocide. Their “antisemitism’ Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

At around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, this was the extent of damaged property that I witnessed outside the college campus. At the same time, New York Police Department officers in riot regalia had amassed in their hundreds, including members of the Strategic Response Group — a unit dedicated to public unrest and “counterterrorism.”

More police had stormed through the school’s neo-Gothic gates less than an hour before, at the behest of the college’s president, to arrest protesting students en masse.

Twenty blocks south, police had locked down and barricaded all streets in a two-block radius of Columbia University, brutally arresting students inside the inaccessible campus.

A newly published survey provides some important context for these protests and undermines the smear campaign against the protesters.

Students Are Not Antisemitic

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a project of the University of Chicago, recently published “Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them,” subtitled “a non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults.” Robert A. Pape, political scientist and CPOST’s director, writes that its findings “are an opportunity to re-center the national discussion around students and away from politics.” Let’s hope so.

Understandably, Pape and his colleagues focus on the steps that should be taken to make all students feel safe on campus, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics. In doing so, their report includes important findings that deserve wider attention.

Is there a “climate of antisemitism” on campus? CPOST’s study found that college students are less Islamophobic than the general population, but they are not more antisemitic. The level of student bias against Jews is the same as their bias against Muslims, but no greater.

Why, then, is there a national debate about campus antisemitism and none about the comparable scourge of Islamophobia? What message does that send to the Muslim students whose fears are being ignored?

The Protests Aren’t Antisemitic, Either

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants a vote on the “Countering Antisemitism Act,” but neither he nor the president have proposed similar safeguards against Islamophobia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that Columbia protesters have begun “to threaten lives and intimidate and harass people,” has an even more draconian antisemitism bill – also without plans to address Islamophobia.

President Biden, like the others, has condemned what he calls “antisemitic protests.” That slur is challenged by the Chicago study. The authors found that “while college students are not more antisemitic than the general population,” they are “more antizionist.” They also found that “prejudicial antisemitism and antizionism are largely separate phenomena,” with an “overwhelming” absence of any overlap between antisemitism and a negative view of Israel.

We’ve know for decades that the lie which equates antizionism with antisemitism serves a political goal by suppressing speech. We now have evidence to back it up.

“From the River to the Sea”

One protest slogan has been cited over and over as “antisemitic,” with accusers claiming it calls for genocide against Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Most students do not use it in anything approaching a genocidal way. The CPOST study found that only 14 percent of Muslim students, or roughly one in seven, interpret that slogan “to mean the expulsion or genocide of Israeli Jews.” That figure is too high, as is the 13 percent of students who believe that violence against Muslims is sometimes justified. But it also tells us that most people who use the slogan are not calling for harm against anyone.

That makes sense, since the phrase can be interpreted nonviolently in at least two ways. One is that a two-state solution should include the territory ceded to Palestine in 1948, which touched both the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Another is that Israel and Palestine should become a single, democratic, non-racial and non-theocratic state, with rights and safety for all. Under that interpretation, “Palestine will be free” is no more a call to genocide than “South Africa will be free” was a call to kill whites during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The study does note that the slogan makes two-thirds of Jewish students feel unsafe. For that reason, Pape recommends avoiding it.

But we now have confirmation that campus officials, politicians, and the media are misleading the public about that phrase. They’re endangering the protesting students and worsening the fears of pro-Israeli students. They should stop.

Conclusion

The political scientist Bernard Cohen once wrote that, while the press isn’t always successful and telling people what to think, “it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about.” The student protests are a textbook example. The debate around these protests is focused on the false charge of antisemitism, not on the moral challenge raised by the protesters.

Does antisemitism exist among them? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic. Republicans did it with the racist Willie Horton ads in 1988. Trump does it when he highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. And politicians, journalists, and college administrators are doing it today with their charges of protester antisemitism.

CPOST’s moderate recommendations for easing campus fears include, “Clear and immediate communication by college leaders condemning violence and intimidation by students and against students on their campuses.” Instead, those leaders are ordering police violence against protesting students, as they and the political/media elite stoke more fear and hatred against them – even in the wake of the anti-protestor mob violence at UCLA. That isn’t just wrong; it’s a dereliction of duty.

As leaders, these prominent individuals have been entrusted with the care and protection of the nation’s young people. Instead, they’re slandering them and putting them at risk. Why? To distract us from a genocide.

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. It won’t be this time, either.

House Passes Bill That Defines Criticism of Israel as “Antisemitism”

Jewish-led groups slammed the legislation as a tool for silencing the movement for Palestinian rights.

By Brett Wilkins

May 3, 2024
Source: Truthout


House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve legislation directing the U.S. Department of Education to consider a dubious definition of antisemitism, despite warnings from Jewish-led groups that the measure speciously conflates legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry against Jewish people.

House members approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act — bipartisan legislation introduced last year by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Max Miller (R-Ohio), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in the lower chamber and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the Senate — by a vote of 320-91.

Both progressive Democrats and far-right Republicans opposed language in the bill. The former objected to conflating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, while the latter bristled at labeling Christian scripture — which posits that Jews killed Jesus — as antisemitic.

“Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews. Unfortunately, one doesn’t need to look far to find it these days. But the supporters of this bill are looking in the wrong places,” Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of the Jewish-led group Americans for Peace Now, said following Wednesday’s vote.

“They aren’t interested in protecting Jews,” he added. “They are interested in supporting right-wing views and narratives on Israel and shutting down legitimate questions and criticisms by crying ‘antisemite’ at everyone, including Jews” who oppose Israel’s far-right government.

“With this disingenuous effort, House Republicans have failed to seriously address antisemitism,” Susskind added. “I hope the Senate does better.”

The legislation — officially H.R. 6090 — would require the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism when determining whether alleged harassment is motivated by antisemitic animus and violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance,” including colleges and universities.

Lawler’s office called the proposal “a key step in calling out antisemitism where it is and ensuring antisemitic hate crimes on college campuses are properly investigated and prosecuted,” while Gottheimer emphasized that “the IHRA definition underscores that antisemitism includes denying Jewish self-determination to their ancestral homeland of Israel… and applying double standards to Israel.”

Critics say that’s the trouble with the IHRA working definition: It conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a “plausibly” genocidal war on Gaza.




As the ACLU noted last week in a letter urging lawmakers to reject the legislation:

The IHRA working definition… is overbroad. It equates protected political speech with unprotected discrimination, and enshrining it into regulation would chill the exercise of First Amendment rights and risk undermining the Department of Education’s legitimate and important efforts to combat discrimination. Criticism of Israel and its policies is political speech, squarely protected by the First Amendment. But the IHRA working definition declares that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are all examples of antisemitism.

Jewish Voice for Peace Action slammed what it called IHRA’s “controversial and dangerous mis-definition that does not help fight real antisemitism and is only a tool for silencing the movement for Palestinian rights.”

“The Israeli government’s bombardment and siege of Gaza has killed over 34,000 people in six months,” the group said on social media. “Congress must stop attacking the students and faculty members who are trying to stop this genocide, and instead focus on ending U.S. complicity in Israel’s attacks.”

Israel’s Gaza onslaught has sparked a wave of nonviolent student-led protests across the United States and around the world. Some of these protests have been violently repressed by police, while anti-genocide activists including Jews have been branded “antisemitic” for condemning Israeli crimes or defending Palestinians’ legal right to resist them.

Americans for Peace Now said that while it is “deeply concerned about the escalating antisemitism in the United States and globally,” the legislation “poses a significant threat to free speech and open discourse.”

“Equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism is a tactic used to stifle important discussions on Israeli policies and actions, thereby hindering the broader effort to combat true instances of hatred and discrimination against Jewish communities,” the group added.

Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Centre for the Study of Hate and lead drafter of the IHRA working definition, warned years ago that “Jewish groups have used the definition as a weapon to say anti-Zionist expressions are inherently antisemitic and must be suppressed.”

“Imagine if Black Lives Matter said the most important thing the [Biden] administration could do to remedy systemic racism is adopt a definition of racism, and that definition included this example: opposition to affirmative action,” Stern wrote in 2020.

“Obviously, sometimes opposition to affirmative action is racist and sometimes it is not,” he added. “The debate about systemic racism would be changed to a free speech fight, and those with reasonable concerns about affirmative action correctly upset that the state was branding them racist.”

War, Money and Universities

By Robert Koehler

May 3, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

“UT Austin, where Texas state troopers are barring students from accessing the other side of the campus.” (@balagonline, Twitter)

Peaceful protest, violent response – that says it all.

Human politics – from global to local – remain mixed with hatred, dominance and . . . well, dehumanization. We’ve organized ourselves across the planet around one primary principle: the existence of an enemy. The division between “us” and “them” can be based on anything: a difference in race, language, culture – or simply a difference of opinion, which is beginning to happen on campuses across the country, as peaceful, intensely determined protesters, demanding their institutions divest from the Israeli war machine, face violent resistance from police and/or counter-protesters.

Yes, the peaceful protesters are interrupting the status quo – setting up encampments, even occupying university buildings. For instance, at Columbia University, students actually renamed the occupied Hamilton Hall, declaring its new name to be Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli armed forces, along with the rest of her family (and several aid workers), as they were fleeing their home in Gaza. The point of the protests is, indeed, to change the world: to stop U.S., including university, support of the devastating “war” (i.e., carnage). They’re not trying to eliminate an enemy but, rather, illuminate the situation – putting themselves on the line to do so.

Some of the responses to the protests are definitely illuminating. A statement from UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, for instance, noted:

“The life-threatening assault we face tonight is nothing less than a horrifying, despicable act of terror. For over seven hours, Zionist aggressors hurled gas canisters, sprayed pepper spray, & threw fireworks and bricks into our encampment. They broke our barriers repeatedly, clearly in an attempt to kill us.”

Furthermore, the account went on:

“Campus safety left within minutes, external security the university hired for ‘backup’ watched, filmed, and laughed on the side as the immediate danger inflicted upon us escalated. Law enforcement simply stood at the edge of the lawn and refused to budge as we screamed for their help. . . .

“The university would rather see us dead than divest.”

In other words, those damn students are the enemy. Even when the response to the protests isn’t outright violence, it’s often rhetorically violent, such as GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee calling the protesters terrorists and declaring, “Any student who has promoted terrorism or engaged in terrorist acts on behalf of Hamas should be immediately added to the terrorist watch list and placed on the (Transportation Security Administration) No-Fly List.”

This is utterly linear, minimalist thinking. Critics aren’t engaging in a debate on the nature (and necessity) of war, plunging, with the protesters, into a complex discussion of global politics, military industrialism, and the morality of killing. That’s too much trouble! They’re simply calling the outraged protesters “the enemy” – just a bunch of terrorists, same as Hamas. And yeah, no doubt part of that good old axis of evil.

This is the thinking the protesters are trying to disrupt! Alas, it’s also solidly part of the infrastructure of the status quo. Militarism is baked into the American core. When we’re not waging our own wars, we’re enabling various allies to do so.

As Heidi Peltier, writing at Brown University’s Costs of War Project, points out, regarding this country’s annual budget of nearly $2 trillion:

“Almost half of the U.S. federal discretionary budget is allocated to the Department of Defense and more than half of the discretionary budget goes to ‘defense’ overall, which includes not only the DoD but also nuclear weapons programs within the Department of Energy and additional defense spending in other departments. . . .

“As a result, other elements and capacities of the U.S. government and civilian economy have been weakened, and military industries have gained political power. Decades of high levels of military spending have changed U.S. government and society – strengthening its ability to fight wars, while weakening its capacities to perform other core functions. Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out.”

The campus protests around the country, at which, so far, more than 2,000 students have been arrested, primarily address the twisted irony of money. Universities have multi-billion-dollar endowments – donation money – which they then invest in the stock market, in various companies, including . . . well, yeah, weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and many more. Oh, the mysterious, ironic flow of money!

At New York University, a spokesman there informed protesting students that the university is not divesting from such companies because it needs to maximize its investment returns in order to “help the university fulfil its research and educational mission.” You know, to bring truth and knowledge into the world – for the sake, among other, of the protesters themselves.

American college students are facing this irony head on – at a personal cost. But the cost, as they say, is minimal, compared to the one being paid by Palestinians, and by victims of war all around the world.



Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club.

A War Against Humanity Itself

By Abby Zimet

May 3, 2024

Source: Common Dreams



Amidst the ongoing, unfathomable slaughter, hunger, maiming, razing in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s “voracious death machine,” its leaders now openly vow “total and utter destruction” by what they still grotesquely call “one of the most moral militaries in the world,” murdered newborns and all. But the hypocrisies and protests mount. “One of this genocide’s aims is to drown us in our own sorrow,” says one of Balfour’s “savages.” Part of their resistance, in turn, “is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza.”

The litany from Israel’s mass killing, “monstrous and largely indiscriminate,” to date: Almost 35,000 dead Palestinians, including well over 14,000 “ungrievable” children; more than 77,000 wounded, half children; at least 17,000 orphans, 5,000 children whose limbs have been amputated, thousands more buried under rubble, a child killed or injured every 10 minutes; hundreds of dead journalists, doctors, teachers, poets, aid workers, academics; most homes leveled, along with 400 schools, 12 universities, over 30 hospitals; starvation levels “the highest ever recorded.” Thanks in part to $26 billion more the U.S. just awarded Israel, its “most decisive vote of confidence in genocide since the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” the hellfire still rains down. Each day the count grows: Air strikes kill 22, mostly children, kill 20, mostly children, kill 13, nine of them children, kill eight children and two women from one family, kill three women and six children. Fathers sob over small bodies, mourning “a world devoid of all human values.” A strike killed a man, his very pregnant wife, their three-year-old; doctors saved the baby. A sniper killed a West Bank man for going up on his roof; days later, his wife named their new son for him as their toddler played in sand strewn on his father’s blood.

When upright IDF forces retreated from Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals after mindlessly pulverizing them, rescue workers uncovered mass graves – up to 400 bodies in one, over 200 in another – of bodies mutilated, beheaded, hands tied behind them. The IDF detain medics, block Red Crescent ambulances, storm hospitals and attack staff even as new victims “pile up,” bloody and stick-thin, in rubble-strewn facilities with no supplies. “You can’t imagine it unless you see it,” says an Egyptian doctor working in the north. His most haunting memory: One orphan, an arm amputated, a leg broken, almost entirely burned, “constantly asking where her father, mother and siblings were.” Say other doctors, Gazan and foreigh, of amputating limbs without anaesthesia, delivering babies at risk of starvation, laboring beneath the relentless noise and threat of drones where there is “no safe plae, even in our minds,” “We are alive, but we are not OK.” One Gazan doctor recalls a broken fellow-psychologist, leaning his head on his knees, in tears. “He asked me what he was supposed to do, where he was supposed to go,” he said. “I had no answers to give him.”

Still, Israel, “whose founders longed to be a light unto the nations,” persists in its “gallop into the abyss” by blocking food aid and facilitating “catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation,” a preventable famine “unprecedented in modern history.” Rights workers say Gaza’s entire population of 2.2 million do not have enough available calories; half are on the brink of starvation; a third of Gazan infants are acutely malnourished. In Rafah, where half of Gaza has taken shelter, dazed people spend their days “in a perpetual state of survival,” seeking or standing in line for water and food. The trickle of aid is grossly inadequate, and often fatal: Having survived an air strike that killed 17 relatives but only wounded him – “God saved him,” said his grandfather – Zein Oroq, 13, was killed when a pallet of beans, rice and other food dropped by an unopened parachute hit him in the head; the stampede of people “were also hungry” and didn’t stop for him. When a pharmacist mother of three, displaced six times, got a text message of an UNRWA food voucher, she stood in line five hours to get two eggs. En route home, crying, she met her 70-year-old aunt who had lost her husband and two chiuldren in an airstrike. She gave her one egg; at the tent, “We divided the egg into portions to share.”

Last month’s targeted killing of sevenWorld Central Kitchen aid workers in a well-marked convoy – “it was very clear who we are and what we do” – seemed a sort of turning point: In what some called “a story of Western racism.” The deaths of white foreigners, who “risked everything to feed people they did not know and will never meet,” caused an outcry that many, while not diminishing their generous courage, couldn’t help but note: “We need not delude ourselves that (media) would have run the story on its front page had the dead carried Arab names, (when) countless Palestinians, equally heroic and innocent, have been slaughtered by Israeli forces’ actions in the same way.” The workers – a Palestinian, Australian, Pole, three Brits and a dual US-Canada national – were “the best of humanity,” saidWCK founder and chef José Andrés. “The seven souls we mourn today were there so that hungry people could eat,” he said at a remembrance. “There is no excuse for these killings.” Angrily rejecting Israeli claims of “mistakes” – “the perpetrator cannot be investigating himself” – he argued “the death of one humanitarian, one child, one civilian is too many.” “This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel,” he said. “At this point, it seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”

In the midst of Israel’s far-right “Kahanist Spring,” its political and military leaders are astonishingly unshy on that genocidal score. This week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly called for “total annihilation” of Gaza: “There are no half measures – Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat…’Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek’…There is no place for them under heaven.” Echoing fellow war-monger Itamar Ben-Gvir – “God forbid, Israel does not enter Rafah, God forbid, we end the war” – Smotrich is so opposed to “strategic concessions” that would mean “the surrender of the State of Israel,” he’s threatened to boltNetanyahu’s coalition if he doesn’t invade Rafah: “I will pursue my enemies and destroy them. We should deliver the decisive blow.” “In any normal country,” notedHaaretz’ lead editorial the next day, five minutes after his remarks (Netanyahu) would have convened a press conference, fired the minister in disgrace, and publicly declared (that) people with such a worldview have no place in the Israeli government.” Instead, in Netanyahu’s Israel, “the leader of the far right is openly advocating genocide, but there’s not one person in the government willing to stand up and say ‘enough’.” Because, in Netanyahu’s Israel, it apparently never is.



The grisly evidence is everywhere. On Friday, the eldest daughter, two-month-old grandson, and son-in-law of beloved Palestinian poet and mentor Refaat Alareer, assassinated last year in a targeted airstrike that also killed his brother, sister, and her four children, were reported killed in another strike in Gaza City. “I have beautiful news for you,” wrote illustrator Shaima Refaat Alareer to her slain father after giving birth. “Do you know you have just become a grandfather? This is your first grandchild, Abdul Rahman…I never imagined I’d lose you so soon before you got to meet him.” Heartbreak upon heartbreak, much like the murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who became a symbol of the carnage visited upon Gaza when she called for help – “I’m so scared, please come” – while trapped in a car with dead relatives under Israeli fire; weeks later, her decomposed body was found alongside them and an ambulance crew sent to rescue her, because in Netanyahu’s Israel, nothing is still ever enough. “For too long, Palestinians have been lectured about the value of human life and dignity,” says Gazan AFSC worker Yousef Aljamal of the “deafening international silence” on Israel’s atrocities, “only to discover that the value of their lives and their dignity are exceptions to the rule.”

Finally, though, the horrors have “struck a chord” on American campuses with the largest student anti-war protests since the end of the Vietnam War. Nationwide, dozens of solidarity encampments have sprung up, from UCLA to New York’s NYU and Columbia University, where protesters unfurled a banner renaming the historic Hamilton Hall “Hinds Hall,” for Hind Rajab. Insisting they’ll remain “inescapably visible,” students cite the hypocrisies and contradictions “between what our governments say they stand for in terms of democracy, human rights, freedom, and (the) actions they are supporting in Gaza” – ostensibly promoting human rights but enabling genocide, supporting free speech but siccing violent police on peaceful protests, etc. Some schools – Northwestern, Johns Hopkins – have successfully negotiated compromises, like agreeing to review college investments in return for limiting protests; laudably – “This is democracy at work” – Brown agreed to a formal divestment vote from Israel. Still, the “unhinged” response by many school administrations and riot-geared law enforcement, including a Strategic Response Group meant to combat public unrest and “counter-terrorism,” aka young people opposed to genocide, has been blasted as “an authoritarian escalation.”

Speaking of: Netanyahu, meanwhile, clings to the rabid, rigid rhetoric he’s used since Oct. 7, declaiming his “iron-clad determination to achieve the goals of our war” against “an outrageous assault on Israel’s inherent right to self-defense” by “barbarians” and “genocidal terrorists,” which evidently include newborns, six-year-olds, entire families and thousands of children, journalists, doctors, aid workers and other innocents. Reportedly worried the ICC may soon issue arrest warrants for himself and other Israeli leaders as “war criminals,” he’s made the “very unusual appeal” to families of the hostages – whom in his venomous investment in war he’s declined to free when he repeatedly could have – “asking” them to lobby Hague officials not to arrest him. Posting a surreal speech with, “You have to hear this to believe this,” he argues “trying to put Israel in the dock” for genocide would be “an outrage of historic proportions,” the “first time a democratic country fighting for its life according to the rules of war is itself accused of war crimes,” “fueling the fires of anti-Semitism already raging on campuses” and, by targeting “the democracy called Israel, (the) targeting of all democracies” in their fight against “savage terrorism and wanton aggression.” Yes: phantasmal pot/kettle.

As he harangues, lest we forget, the head of UNICEF just declared of the harrowing conditions in Gaza, “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.” A UNICEF spokesperson began an op-ed with, “The war against Gaza’s children is forcing many to close their eyes. Nine-year-old Mohamed’s eyes were forced shut, first by the bandages that covered a gaping hole in the back of his head, and second by the coma caused by the blast that hit his family home. He is nine. Sorry, he was nine. Mohamed is now dead.” In central and northern Gaza, surviving Palestinians seeking to return to their homes have found “only ruins, and the smell of death…The streets have turned to sand….It is not fit for life.” And still they are terrorized: Rights groups say the IDF is luring returnees into the open with recordings of cries and screams to be shot at by snipers or drones. At Nuseirat refugee camp, a 35-year-old “son of this city” found only “mountains of rubble.” Yet Gaza, he insists, has risen before: “I will wait for the water lines to be extended in the area, and I will put up a tent and sleep in it with my children.” Says another former resident, “We will teach our children in tents, under the sun, and anywhere else.”

“What does the liberation of Palestine mean?” asks philosopher Judith Butler, when “the grief over Jewish lives lost is very often humanized and memorialized in ways that Palestinian deaths are not.” Simply, she offers “a vision of cohabitation,” that Palestinians and Jews and other inhabitants of that land find a way to live together. Either next to each other or with one another, under conditions of radical equality,” where occupation is dismantled. As a Jew, she also dismantles the myth that Jews, having suffered genocide, cannot be enacting genocide: “There is nothing that keeps a people who have suffered massively in life from afflicting massive suffering on others…There is nothing in the history of the world that precludes that.” Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, newly installed as Glasgow University Rector, has seen and lived that reality. Except for himself, all his forefathers were born in Palestine, a land given away by Arthur Balfour, a former Glasgow rector who in his 46-word declaration announcing British support for Palestine noted, “A survey of the world (shows) a vast number of savage communities.” After a lifetime as a war surgeon, said Abu-Sittah, students at the school once headed by Winnie Mandela reached out to him, and “one of Balfour’s savages” was elected.

“Students understood what we have to lose when we allow our politics to become inhuman,” said Abu-Sittah of what he views as a vote of solidarity with too-long-ignored Palestinian suffering. Citing “the ravening beast” that is “the genocidal erasure of a people,” he argued Gaza is the “axis of genocide” by western powers: “The quadcopters and drones fitted with sniper guns – used so efficiently (one) night at Al-Ahli hospital we received over 30 wounded civilians shot outside our hospital – today in Gaza will be used tomorrow in Mumbai, Nairobi and Sao Paulo.” For those who have “seen, smelt, and heard what the weapons of war do to a child’s body,” have “amputated the unsalvageable limbs of wounded children,” have witnessed the “othering” by which many would be horrified by “the barbarity” of Israel killing 14,000 puppies or kittens, but not children – for all those, somehow, he urged hope. “When powerlessness is at its most acute, the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, complicatedly matters the most,” he said. “It is your world to fight for. It is your tomorrow to make.” Dedicating his address to dead family and colleagues, “but mostly to our land,” he ended with the words of Bobby Sands: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”