BET Awards highlight Black voices as artists turn political

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In this video grab issued Sunday, June 28, 2020, by BET, rapper DaBaby performs "Rockstar" as an actor playing a police officer presses his knee on DaBaby's neck, replicating the last few moments of George Floyd's life, during the BET Awards. (BET via AP)


NEW YORK (AP) — The BET Awards served as an extension of the voices of Black people protesting in the streets about the inequalities Black people face daily, as artists used their performances to highlight the Black Lives Matter movement, civil rights and the lives of those lost because of police officers, including George Floyd.

DaBaby, with his face pressed against the ground as an officer’s knee crippled his neck — replicating the last moments of Floyd’s life — rapped a verse from the Black Lives Matter remix of his hit song “Rockstar.” His performance also featured images from protests, a reflection of the current world in the wake of Floyd’s death and the death of others, including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.

Sunday’s show, a virtual event because of the coronavirus pandemic, featured a number of highly produced, well-crafted and pre-taped performances. The BET Awards kicked off with Black artists rapping and singing anthems about the Black experience and fighting for equal rights.

Keedron Bryant performs "I Just Wanna Live" during the BET Awards.

The 12-year-old sensation Keedron Bryant, who turned heads on social media with his passionate performance about being a young Black man in today’s world, started the show with an a cappella performance of his poignant song “I Just Wanna Live,” which earned him a record deal. That was followed by an all-star performance of Public Enemy’s 1989 anthem “Fight the Power,” featuring Nas, Black Thought, Rapsody and YG adding new lyrics to the song, even namedropping Taylor and others.

Michelle Obama highlighted Beyoncé’s commitment to the Black community before presenting her with the humanitarian award, saying: “You can see it in everything she does, from her music that gives voice to Black joy and Black pain, to her activism that demands justice for Black lives.”

Beyonce accepts the humanitarian award during the BET Awards.

Beyoncé used her speech to encourage viewers to vote “like our life depends on it” in the upcoming election.

“I want to dedicate this award to all of my brothers out there, all of my sisters out there inspiring me, marching and fighting for change. Your voices are being heard and you’re proving to our ancestors that their struggles were not in vain. Now we have one more thing we need to do to walk in our true power, and that is to vote,” she said. “There are people banking on us staying at home during local elections and primaries happening in states across the country. We have to vote like our life depends on it, because it does.”

Sunday’s show celebrated BET’s 20th awards show and BET’s 40th year as a network. The three-hour event, which aired on CBS for the first time, was hosted by comedian, actress and TV personality Amanda Seales, who starred in several skits, including one about women who identify as “Karen,” a common stereotype and term for racist and privileged white women.

Roddy Ricch wears a shirt that says Black Lives Matter while performing during the BET Awards.

Other artists were political during their performances, including Roddy Ricch, who wore a Black Lives Matter shirt while he rapped, Alicia Keys, Anderson Paak and Jay Rock, as well as brothers SiR and D Smoke, who performed with their mother Jackie Gouché.

Lil Wayne paid tribute to NBA icon Kobe Bryant, who died in January, with a performance of his 2009 song “Kobe Bryant,” weaving in new lyrics. Wayne Brady, in a glittery suit, rolled around on top of a piano as he sang a medley of Little Richard hits.

Nipsey Hussle, who was named best male hip-hop artist and earned the humanitarian award at last year’s BET Awards, won video of the year for “Higher,” a clip he filmed with DJ Khaled and John Legend shortly before he died .

“This is for Nipsey Hussle and hip-hop,” Khaled said in a taped video. “Nipsey Hussle, thank you for working with me on this ‘Higher’ record. I appreciate you. Nipsey’s family, we love you.”

Chloe x Halle perform during the BET Awards.

The BET Awards, one of the first awards shows to air virtually, featured performances that were sharp with artsy stage production, giving extra life to the songs being performed. It was a welcome break from the “living room” and homebound performances hundreds of artists have shared on social media since the pandemic hit in March.

Chloe x Halle, who have successfully performed for various TV shows and events during the pandemic while promoting their new album, gave an epic performance of their songs “Do It” and “Forgive Me.” R&B star Summer Walker, who played guitar and sang, was also impressive during her performance, which featured Usher.

Megan Thee Stallion went to the desert with background dancers as she twerked and rapped her No. 1 hit “Savage.” She won best female hip-hop artist, beating out Cardi B and Nicki Minaj.

Megan Thee Stallion performs during the BET Awards.

“Oh my God, I probably recorded this video like 10 times. It feels so crazy doing this from my house,” she said. “I used to watch the BET Awards all the time thinking, ‘One day that’s going to be me going up there accepting my award’ — and now it is.”

Though the BET Awards are technically about handing out trophies, the awards were an afterthought. During the live telecast, Richh won album of the year for his debut “Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial”; Lizzo was named best female R&B/pop artist; and Burna Boy won best international act. Overall, Chris Brown, Beyoncé and Ricch were the night’s big winners, taking home two honors each. Beyoncé won the BET HER award for “Brown Skin Girl,” shared with daughter Blue Ivy Carter as well as Wizkid and Saint JHN. The song also won Beyoncé and Blue Ivy a Soul Train Music Award last year.

ALICIA KEYS

China forces birth control on Uighurs to suppress population
By The Associated Press

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Alif Baqytali hugs his mother, Gulnar Omirzakh, at their new home in Shonzhy, Kazakhstan. Omirzakh, a Chinese-born ethnic Kazakh, says she was forced to get an intrauterine contraceptive device, and that authorities in China threatened to detain her if she didn't pay a large fine for giving birth to Alif, her third child. (AP Photo/Mukhit Toktassyn)The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

After Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh, had her third child, the government ordered her to get an IUD inserted. Two years later, in January 2018, four officials in military camouflage came knocking at her door anyway. They gave Omirzakh, the penniless wife of a detained vegetable trader, three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children.

If she didn’t, they warned, she would join her husband and a million other ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps ¬— often for having too many children.

“God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong,” said Omirzakh, who tears up even now thinking back to that day. “They want to destroy us as a people.”

The result of the birth control campaign is a climate of terror around having children, as seen in interview after interview. Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.

The hundreds of millions of dollars the government pours into birth control has transformed Xinjiang from one of China’s fastest-growing regions to among its slowest in just a few years, according to new research obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication by China scholar Adrian Zenz.

“This kind of drop is unprecedented....there’s a ruthlessness to it,” said Zenz, a leading expert in the policing of China’s minority regions. “This is part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry referred multiple requests for comment to the Xinjiang government, which did not respond. However, Chinese officials have said in the past that the new measures are merely meant to be fair, allowing both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities the same number of children.

For decades, China had one of the most extensive systems of minority entitlements in the world, with Uighurs and others getting more points on college entrance exams, hiring quotas for government posts and laxer birth control restrictions. Under China’s now-abandoned ‘one child’ policy, the authorities had long encouraged, often forced, contraceptives, sterilization and abortion on Han Chinese. But minorities were allowed two children — three if they came from the countryside.

Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, those benefits are now being rolled back. In 2014, soon after Xi visited Xinjiang, the region’s top official said it was time to implement “equal family planning policies” for all ethnicities and “reduce and stabilize birth rates.” In the following years, the government declared that instead of just one child, Han Chinese could now have two, and three in Xinjiang’s rural areas, just like minorities.

But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law.

State-backed scholars have warned for years that large rural religious families were at the root of bombings, knifings and other attacks the Xinjiang government blamed on Islamic terrorists. The growing Muslim population was a breeding ground for poverty and extremism, “heightening political risk,” according to a 2017 paper by the head of the Institute of Sociology at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences. Another cited as a key obstacle the religious belief that “the fetus is a gift from God.”

Outside experts say the birth control campaign is part of a state-orchestrated assault on the Uighurs to purge them of their faith and identity and forcibly assimilate them into the dominant Han Chinese culture. They’re subjected to political and religious re-education in camps and forced labor in factories, while their children are indoctrinated in orphanages. Uighurs, who are often but not always Muslim, are also tracked by a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

“The intention may not be to fully eliminate the Uighur population, but it will sharply diminish their vitality, making them easier to assimilate,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uighurs at the University of Colorado.

Some go a step further.

“It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide,” said Joanne Smith Finley, who works at Newcastle University in the U.K. “These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”

A Uighur child in a courtyard home in Hotan, a large, Uighur-majority city in Xinjiang.

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For centuries, the majority was Muslim in the arid, landlocked region China now calls “Xinjiang” — meaning “New Frontier” in Mandarin.

After the People’s Liberation Army swept through in 1949, China’s new Communist rulers ordered thousands of soldiers to settle in Xinjiang, pushing the Han population from 6.7% that year to more than 40% by 1980. The move sowed anxiety about Chinese migration that persists to this day. Drastic efforts to restrict birth rates in the 1990s were relaxed after major pushback, with many parents paying bribes or registering children as the offspring of friends or other family members.

That all changed with an unprecedented crackdown starting in 2017, throwing hundreds of thousands of people into prisons and camps for alleged “signs of religious extremism” such as traveling abroad, praying or using foreign social media. Authorities launched what several notices called “dragnet-style” investigations to root out parents with too many children, even those who gave birth decades ago.

“Leave no blind spots,” said two county and township directives in 2018 and 2019 uncovered by Zenz, who is also an independent contractor with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a bipartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “Contain illegal births and lower fertility levels,” said a third.

Officials and armed police began pounding on doors, looking for kids and pregnant women. Minority residents were ordered to attend weekly flag-raising ceremonies, where officials threatened detention if they didn’t register all their children, according to interviews backed by attendance slips and booklets. Noticesfound by the AP show that local governments set up or expanded systems to reward those who report illegal births.

In some areas, women were ordered to take gynecology exams after the ceremonies, they said. In others, officials outfitted special rooms with ultrasound scanners for pregnancy tests.

“Test all who need to be tested,” ordered a township directive from 2018. “Detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”

Abdushukur Umar was among the first to fall victim to the crackdown on children. A jovial Uighur tractor driver-turned-fruit merchant, the proud father considered his seven children a blessing from God.

But authorities began pursuing him in 2016. The following year, he was thrown into a camp and later sentenced to seven years in prison — one for each child, authorities told relatives.

“My cousin spent all his time taking care of his family, he never took part in any political movements,” Zuhra Sultan, Umar’s cousin, said from exile in Turkey. “How can you get seven years in prison for having too many children? We’re living in the 21st century — this is unimaginable.”

Fifteen Uighurs and Kazakhs told the AP they knew people interned or jailed for having too many children. Many received years, even decades in prison.

Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp — what the government calls “education and training” — for parents with too many children is written policy in at leastthreecounties, notices found by Zenz confirmed.

In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county. While fines also apply to Han Chinese, only minorities are sent to the detention camps if they cannot pay, according to interviews and data. Government reports show the counties collect millions of dollars from the fines each year.

Gulnar Omirzakh's fine for 17,405 RMB, or $2865, for having a third child.

In other efforts to change the population balance of Xinjiang, China is dangling land, jobs and economic subsidies to lure Han migrants there. It is also aggressively promoting intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uighurs, with one couple telling the AP they were given money for housing and amenities like a washing machine, refrigerator and TV.

“It links back to China’s long history of dabbling in eugenics….you don’t want people who are poorly educated, marginal minorities breeding quickly,” said James Leibold, a specialist in Chinese ethnic policy at La Trobe in Melbourne. “What you want is your educated Han to increase their birth rate.”

Sultan describes how the policy looks to Uighurs like her: “The Chinese government wants to control the Uighur population and make us fewer and fewer, until we disappear.”

___________

Once in the detention camps, women are subjected to forced IUDs and what appear to be pregnancy prevention shots, according to former detainees. They are also made to attend lectures on how many children they should have.

Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile.

It’s unclear what former detainees were injected with, but Xinjiang hospital slides obtained by the AP show that pregnancy prevention injections, sometimes with the hormonal medication Depo-Provera, are a common family planning measure. Side effects can include headaches and dizziness.

Dina Nurdybay, a Kazakh woman, was detained in a camp which separated married and unmarried women. The married women were given pregnancy tests, Nurdybay recalled, and forced to have IUDs installed if they had children. She was spared because she was unmarried and childless.

One day in February 2018, one of her cellmates, a Uighur woman, had to give a speech confessing what guards called her “crimes.” When a visiting official peered through the iron bars of their cell, she recited her lines in halting Mandarin.

“I gave birth to too many children,” she said. “It shows I’m uneducated and know little about the law.”

“Do you think it’s fair that Han people are only allowed to have one child?” the official asked, according to Nurdybay. “You ethnic minorities are shameless, wild and uncivilized.”

Nurdybay met at least two others in the camps whom she learned were locked up for having too many children. Later, she was transferred to another facility with an orphanage that housed hundreds of children, including those with parents detained for giving birth too many times. The children counted the days until they could see their parents on rare visits.

“They told me they wanted to hug their parents, but they were not allowed,” she said. “They always looked very sad.”

One of Xinjiang's internment camps in Artux, China.

Another former detainee, Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.

Ziyawudun and the 40 other women in her “class” were forced to attend family planning lectures most Wednesdays, where films were screened about impoverished women struggling to feed many children. Married women were rewarded for good behavior with conjugal visits from their husbands, along with showers, towels, and two hours in a bedroom. But there was a catch – they had to take birth control pills beforehand.

Some women have even reported forced abortions. Ziyawudun said a “teacher” at her camp told women they would face abortions if found pregnant during gynecology exams.

A woman in another class turned out to be pregnant and disappeared from the camp, she said. She added that two of her cousins who were pregnant got rid of their children on their own because they were so afraid.

Another woman, Gulbakhar Jalilova, confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their children. She also saw a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant. And she met doctors and medical students who were detained for helping Uighurs dodge the system and give birth at home.

In December 2017, on a visit from Kazakhstan back to China, Gulzia Mogdin was taken to a hospital after police found WhatsApp on her phone. A urine sample revealed she was two months pregnant with her third child. Officials told Mogdin she needed to get an abortion and threatened to detain her brother if she didn’t.

During the procedure, medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body. She was taken home and told to rest, as they planned to take her to a camp.

Months later, Mogdin made it back to Kazakhstan, where her husband lives.

“That baby was going to be the only baby we had together,” said Mogdin, who had recently remarried. “I cannot sleep. It’s terribly unfair.”

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The success of China’s push to control births among Muslim minorities shows up in the numbers for IUDs and sterilization.

In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that jumped more than 60 percent to nearly 330,000 IUDs. At the same time, IUD use tumbled elsewhere in China, as many women began getting the devices removed.

A former teacher drafted to work as an instructor at a detention camp described her experience with IUDs to the AP.

It started with flag-raising assemblies at her housing compound at the beginning of 2017, where residents were forced to chant: “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists....That means we have to go to the training centers.” After every flag-raising ceremony, police rounded up parents with too many children – over 180 – until “not a single one was left,” she said. Officers with guns and tasers hauled her neighbors away at night, and from time to time pounded on her door and swept her apartment for Qurans, knives, prayer mats and of course children.

“Your heart would leap out of your chest,” she said.

Then, that August, officials in the teacher’s compound were told to install IUDs on all women of childbearing age. She protested, saying she was nearly 50 with just one child and no plans to have more. Officials threatened to drag her to a police station and strap her to an iron chair for interrogation.

She was forced into a bus with four armed officers and taken to a hospital where hundreds of Uighur women lined up in silence, waiting for IUDs to be inserted. Some wept quietly, but nobody dared say a word because of the surveillance cameras hanging overhead.

Her IUD was designed to be irremovable without special instruments. The first 15 days, she got headaches and nonstop menstrual bleeding.

“I couldn’t eat properly, I couldn’t sleep properly. It gave me huge psychological pressure,” she said. “Only Uighurs had to wear it.”

Chinese health statistics also show a sterilization boom in Xinjiang.

Budget documents obtained by Zenz show that starting in 2016, the Xinjiang government began pumping tens of millions of dollars into a birth control surgery program and cash incentives for women to get sterilized. While sterilization rates plunged in the rest of the country, they surged seven-fold in Xinjiang from 2016 to 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures. The Uighur-majority city of Hotan budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations in 2019 — about 34% of all married women of childbearing age.


Even within Xinjiang, policies vary widely, being harsher in the heavily Uighur south than the Han-majority north. In Shihezi, a Han-dominated city where Uighurs make up just 2% of the population, the government subsidizes baby formula and hospital birth services to encourage more children, state media reported.

Zumret Dawut got no such benefits. In 2018, the mother of three was locked in a camp for two months for having an American visa.

When she returned home under house arrest, officials forced her to get gynecology exams every month, along with all other Uighur women in her compound. Han women were exempted. They warned that if she didn’t take what they called “free examinations”, she could end up back in the camp.

One day, they turned up with a list of at least 200 Uighur women in her compound with more than two children who had to get sterilized, Dawut recalled.

“My Han Chinese neighbors, they sympathized with us Uighurs,” Dawut said. “They told me, ‘oh, you’re suffering terribly, the government is going way too far!’”

Dawut protested, but police again threatened to send her back to the camp. During the sterilization procedure, Han Chinese doctors injected her with anesthesia and tied her fallopian tubes — a permanent operation. When Dawut came to, she felt her womb ache.

“I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted another son.”

___________

Looking back, Omirzakh considers herself lucky.

After that frigid day when officials threatened to lock her up, Omirzakh called relatives around the clock. Hours before the deadline, she scraped together enough money to pay the fine from the sale of her sister’s cow and high-interest loans, leaving her deep in debt.

For the next year, Omirzakh attended classes with the wives of others detained for having too many children. She and her children lived with two local party officials sent specially to spy on them. When her husband was finally released, they fled for Kazakhstan with just a few bundles of blankets and clothes.

The IUD still in Omirzakh’s womb has now sunk into her flesh, causing inflammation and piercing back pain, “like being stabbed with a knife.” For Omirzakh, it’s a bitter reminder of everything she’s lost — and the plight of those she left behind.

“People there are now terrified of giving birth,” she said. “When I think of the word ‘Xinjiang,’ I can still feel that fear.”

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org

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Images of brutality against Black people spur racial trauma

By NOREEN NASIR


In this July 8, 2010, file photo, Wanda Johnson, center, mother of Oscar Grant, who was killed by transit officer Johannes Mehserle, speaks during a news conference in Los Angeles. As videos and stories of Black people being killed at the hands of police officers make the rounds online, many Americans have been called to protest racial injustice in recent weeks. For many Black Americans, those videos are also contributing to a sense of grief and pain. Psychologists call it racial trauma, the distress experienced because of the accumulation of racial discrimination, racial violence or institutional racism. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

Since Wanda Johnson’s son was shot and killed by a police officer in Oakland, California, 11 years ago, she has watched video after video of similar encounters between Black people and police.

Each time, she finds herself reliving the trauma of losing her son, Oscar Grant, who was shot to death by a transit police officer. Most recently, Johnson couldn’t escape the video of George Floyd, pinned to the ground under a Minneapolis officer’s knee as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe.

“I began to shake. I was up for two days, just crying,” she said. “Just looking at that video opened such a wound in me that has not completely closed

Johnson’s loss was extreme, but, for many Black Americans, her grief and pain feels familiar. Psychologists call it racial trauma — the distress experienced because of the accumulation of racial discrimination, racial violence or institutional racism. While it can affect anyone who faces repeated prejudice, in this moment, its impact on Black people is drawing particular attention.



The unfortunate irony is that the very tool that may be helping to make more people aware of the racism and violence that Black and other people of color face is also helping to fuel their trauma. In the weeks following Floyd’s death, the spread of the video that captured it has been a major catalyst for protests demanding a reckoning with racism — attended by people of all races, many of whom never before participated in such activism. And in a few weeks, the national conversation has shifted dramatically: The term “Black Lives Matter” has been adopted widely, including in corporate America, monuments of Confederate figures have come down, and calls for criminal justice reform have yielded new laws.

“It’s really frustrating that that’s what it takes for a lot of people in this country to actually start caring,” said Alasia Destine-DeFreece, 20. “It takes showing something that’s actively harming those of us who are Black and then having it spread on social media.”

Destine-DeFreece, who remembers often being the only Black person in many situations growing up in Rhode Island, notes that such images have been used to great effect before. She learned in school about Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was abducted, beaten and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Her class saw photos of Till’s brutally beaten face — images, in part, that had helped spur the civil rights movement.

“Seeing that type of imagery being spread further and faster now has taken a toll on me. You’re seeing somebody who looks like you die,” she said.

Ke'Moriae Font, left, hugs Mihrell Reece while listening to a speaker during a youth-led demonstration in Los Angeles calling for an end to racial injustice and for police accountability (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

Symptoms of racial trauma can include anxiety and depression and be similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. The triggering event could be a shouted slur on the street or poor treatment because of one’s race or creed. The profusion on social media of graphic images of harm to people of color means they are often inescapable.

“If you are in a situation where the danger seems ever-present, whether you’re seeing a bird watcher in Central Park being harassed, or someone falling asleep in their car in a parking lot ... there is that constant physical presence of danger and the psychological awareness that danger is just around the corner,” said Dr. Altha Stewart, past president of the American Psychiatric Association and currently a senior associate dean at the University of Tennessee Science Health Center.

That “constant bathing of our organs” in stress hormones can lead to a state of “near dysfunction,” she said.

The video of Floyd’s killing is one in a litany. Before it, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery’s fatal shooting was also captured on camera, and no one was charged until public pressure mounted after the video made the rounds. Since then, many have watched an officer fatally shoot 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in the back following a struggle.

“It feels like it’s just been an endless cascade of hashtags of Black people dying,” said Christine Ohenzuwa, 19, who recently protested outside the Minnesota state Capitol. “I feel like for me and a lot of other Black people, it reaches a point where it’s just very traumatic to constantly see Black people being killed.”

When video of Floyd’s graphic death began to circulate online last month, Joi Lewis refused to watch it.

“I know what it looks like. I’ve seen Black death,” the life coach and self-care expert said. Lewis, who is Black, had watched the death of Philando Castile in real time four years ago, after the 32-year-old Black man was shot by a Minneapolis police officer and video of the immediate aftermath streamed on Facebook.

But to inspire those who have been pushed into action in new ways in recent weeks, Lewis conceded: “The video had to be played.”

Therapist and racial trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem near his home in Minneapolis (AP Photo/Noreen Nasir)

Anyone might be upset by seeing such graphic images — and many are — but Resmaa Menakem, a Minneapolis-based racial trauma specialist, says, for many Black people, that pain is amplified.

“When something like this happens, it is not just the grief of watching that brother be destroyed, it is the 400 years of grief that was never addressed,” said Menakem.

Aaron Requena periodically takes breaks from Twitter to avoid such images. The 25-year-old photographer in Los Angeles says he’s struggled to balance keeping up with what is happening with not torturing himself at the same time.

Photographer Aaron Requena in Los Angeles (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
“It hits close to home for me because I’ve had interactions with the police where I was just minding my business and had to wonder, ‘Is this going to end for me the way that a lot of these situations end?’” asked Requena, who is Black. “It hits close to home because you know that it could be you next.”

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Nasir is a member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow Nasir on Twitter at https://twitter.com/noreensnasir.

Worst virus fears are realized in poor or war-torn countries

By GERALD IMRAY and JOSEPH KRAUSS

1 of 20 https://apnews.com/911c9cdb10a0319fb5f36dc5ddff9d40

FILE - In this Sunday, June 14, 2020 file photo, medical workers attend to a COVID-19 patient in an intensive care unit at a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen. For months, experts have warned of a potential nightmare scenario: After overwhelming health systems in some of the world's wealthiest regions, the coronavirus gains a foothold in poor or war-torn countries ill-equipped to contain it and sweeps through the population. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — For months, experts have warned of a potential nightmare scenario: After overwhelming health systems in some of the world’s wealthiest regions, the coronavirus gains a foothold in poor or war-torn countries ill-equipped to contain it and sweeps through the population.

Now some of those fears are being realized.

In southern Yemen, health workers are leaving their posts en masse because of a lack of protective equipment, and some hospitals are turning away patients struggling to breathe. In Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region, where there is little testing capacity, a mysterious illness resembling COVID-19 is spreading through camps for the internally displaced

Cases are soaring in India and Pakistan, together home to more than 1.5 billion people and where authorities say nationwide lockdowns are no longer an option because of high poverty.

In Latin America, Brazil has a confirmed caseload and death count second only to the United States, and its leader is unwilling to take steps to stem the spread of the virus. Alarming escalations are unfolding in Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Panama, even after they imposed early lockdowns.

The first reports of disarray are also emerging from hospitals in South Africa, which has its continent’s most developed economy. Sick patients are lying on beds in corridors as one hospital runs out of space. At another, an emergency morgue was needed to hold more than 700 bodies.

“We are reaping the whirlwind now,” said Francois Venter, a South African health expert at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg.

Worldwide, there are 10 million confirmed cases and over 500,000 reported deaths, according to tally by Johns Hopkins University of government reports. Experts say both those numbers are serious undercounts of the true toll of the pandemic, due to limited testing and missed mild cases.

South Africa has more than a third of Africa’s confirmed cases of COVID-19. It’s ahead of other African countries in the pandemic timeline and approaching its peak. If its facilities break under the strain, it will be a grim forewarning because South Africa’s health system is reputed to be the continent’s best.

Most poor countries took action early on. Some, like Uganda, which already had a sophisticated detection system built up during its yearslong battle with viral hemorrhagic fever, have thus far been arguably more successful than the U.S. and other wealthy countries in battling coronavirus.

But since the beginning of the pandemic, poor and conflict-ravaged countries have generally been at a major disadvantage, and they remain so.

The global scramble for protective equipment sent prices soaring. Testing kits have also been hard to come by. Tracking and quarantining patients requires large numbers of health workers.

“It’s all a domino effect,” said Kate White, head of emergencies for Doctors Without Borders. “Whenever you have countries that are economically not as well off as others, then they will be adversely affected.”

Global health experts say testing is key, but months into the pandemic, few developing countries can keep carrying out the tens of thousands of tests every week that are needed to detect and contain outbreaks.

“The majority of the places that we work in are not able to have that level of testing capacity, and that’s the level that you need to be able to get things really under control,” White said.

South Africa leads Africa in testing, but an initially promising program has now been overrun in Cape Town, which alone has more reported cases than any other African country except Egypt. Critical shortages of kits have forced city officials to abandon testing anyone for under 55 unless they have a serious health condition or are in a hospital.

Venter said a Cape Town-like surge could easily play out next in “the big cities of Nigeria, Congo, Kenya,” and they “do not have the health resources that we do.”

Lockdowns are likely the most effective safeguard, but they have exacted a heavy toll even on middle-class families in Europe and North America, and are economically devastating in developing countries.

India’s lockdown, the world’s largest, caused countless migrant workers in major cities to lose their jobs overnight. Fearing hunger, thousands took to the highways by foot to return to their home villages, and many were killed in traffic accidents or died from dehydration.

The government has since set up quarantine facilities and now provides special rail service to get people home safely, but there are concerns the migration has already spread the virus to India’s rural areas, where the health infrastructure is even weaker.

Poverty has also accelerated the pandemic in Latin America, where millions with informal jobs had to go out and keep working, and then returned to crowded homes where they spread the virus to relatives.

Peru’s strict three-month lockdown failed to contain its outbreak, and it now has the world’s sixth-highest number of cases in a population of 32 million, according to by Johns Hopkins University. Intensive care units are nearly 88% occupied, and the virus shows no sign of slowing.

“Hospitals are on the verge of collapse,” said epidemiologist Ciro Maguiña, a professor of medicine at Cayetano Heredia University in the capital, Lima.

Aid groups have tried to help, but they have faced their own struggles. Doctors Without Borders says the price it pays for masks went up threefold at one point and is still higher than normal.

The group also faces obstacles in transporting medical supplies to remote areas as international and domestic flights have been drastically reduced. And as wealthy donor countries struggle with their own outbreaks, there are concerns they will cut back on humanitarian aid.

Mired in civil war for the past five years, Yemen was already home to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis before the virus hit. Now the Houthi rebels are suppressing all information about an outbreak in the north, and the health system in the government-controlled south is collapsing.

“Coronavirus has invaded our homes, our cities, our countryside,” said Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Azraqi, an internal medicine specialist and former hospital director in the city of Taiz, which is split between the rival forces. He estimates that 90% of Yemeni patients die at home.

“Our hospital doesn’t have any doctors, only a few nurses and administrators. There is effectively no medical treatment.”

___

Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg, Emily Schmall in New Delhi, Isabel DeBre in Cairo, Franklin Briceño in Lima, Peru, and Michael Weissenstein in Havana contributed to this report.

___

Follow all of AP’s coronavirus coverage at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Coronavirus: Egypt’s doctors outraged as prime minister blames them for deaths

Egypt's medical union says real reason behind surge in Covid-19 cases and fatalities is shortage of PPE and ICU beds

Prime minister Mostafa Madbouly has suggested doctors are to blame for the spike of coronavirus deaths in Egypt (Reuters/File photo)

By MEE staff Published date: 24 June 2020


Egypt’s top medical union has decried remarks by Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly who attributed the recent spike in coronavirus deaths in the country to the absence of medical staff.

On Tuesday, Madbouly cited “the absence of a number of doctors” and “the irregular work performance” among medical staff as the cause of some deaths of Covid-19 patients.

The statement has triggered furious reactions by doctors and the Egyptian Medical Syndicate (EMS), which argued that the real reason for the spike in cases and fatalities is the shortage of medical equipment and ICU beds in the country.


Coronavirus in Egypt: Unprotected and fearful doctors close to revolt

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“Since the beginning of the pandemic, Egyptian doctors have been an extraordinary example of sacrifice and working under immense pressure,” the syndicate said in a statement.

It also highlighted the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) in some hospitals and assaults on a number of medical personnel without accountability for the perpetrators, referring to people attacking doctors for turning them away due to the lack of beds or equipment at hospitals.

In one incident, the family of a coronavirus patient beat up his doctor after the man succumbed to the illness.

The union condemned the delay in issuing a law that would criminalise such attacks, a demand that doctors have made for years.

It added that remarks blaming doctors, such as the one made by the prime minister, constitute “an incitement against doctors” that would only fuel anger against them, therefore contributing to more attacks.

The syndicate demanded an apology from the prime minister, urging him to instead investigate the surge in the deaths of healthcare workers, which have now reached nearly 100, and the more than 3,000 injuries they have sustained.

A cabinet spokesperson responded to the syndicate later on Tuesday saying that a government investigation has found that the absence of some medical staff has led to the death of two coronavirus patients, and that the prime minister's statement should not be generalised.

Crackdown on doctors

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many medical professionals have voiced their opinions online, mainly complaining about the lack of PPE in the country and the lack of government funding for the overstretched health care sector.

In response, authorities have detained at least five doctors and accused them of spreading false news or joining a terror group, two of the most commonly used charges against political dissidents.

Two of the doctors, according to the union, have been arrested from their private clinics.

Egypt, home to 100 million people, has so far recorded 58,141 cases of coronavirus and 2,365 deaths - the highest death toll in the Arab world.

A study by the Egyptian polling think tank Baseera, published Monday, estimated that more than 600,000 people have contracted Covid-19. Only 12 percent of those who reported symptoms have been hospitalised, according to the survey, explaining the discrepancy between official numbers and the actual spread of the disease.

OUTSOURCING/CONTRACTING OUT

Russian mercenaries enter Libya's largest oil field as Sirte battle looms
Libya's National Oil Corporation says fighters entered the Sharara oil field on Thursday in an attempt to block production

The Sharara oil field in southwest Libya has the capacity to produce one-third of the country's crude output (MEE/Tom Westcott)

By MEE staff Published date: 26 June 2020 

Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) said on Friday that Russian and other foreign mercenaries entered the southwestern Sharara oil field on Thursday in an attempt to block production there.

Production in Sharara had only this month resumed after months of closure by forces loyal to eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar, who is backed by Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

According to a statement by the NOC, a number of Russian and foreign mercenaries entered the field on Thursday in dozens of armoured vehicles and met with representatives of the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG). It was not immediately clear whether they had seized control of the oil field.

"We do not need mercenaries from Russia or any other country to enter Libyan oil fields because all they seek is to block oil production," head of the NOC Mustafa Sanallah said.



US reveals new evidence of Russian aircraft activity in Libya

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"There are a number of countries who benefit from the absence of Libyan oil in international markets.

“Whereas these countries have publicly expressed their regrets that Libya has been unable to resume its oil production, they have been covertly doing their best to support the forces who are behind the closure of the oil fields," he added, referring to countries backing Haftar.

The NOC is the only entity allowed to export Libyan oil, with all revenues going to the Central Bank in Tripoli, where the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) is based.

Since 2015, oil-rich Libya has been divided between Haftar's forces in the east and the GNA in the west, with oil fields and export facilities mainly located in territory controlled by Haftar's self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA).

With the central bank located in Tripoli, however, Haftar has not been able to access payments for the oil exports, which was seen as one of the motivations for his unsuccessful offensive on Tripoli in April last year.

The Sharara oil field, which lies about 900 kilometres south of Tripoli, has the capacity to produce 315,000 barrels per day, approximately one-third of the country's crude oil output.

However, it was shut down by Haftar's forces in January, forcing a halt in production and costing the treasury more than $5.2bn, according to the NOC.

Following the GNA's capture of the strategic al-Watiya air base in May and city of Tarhouna in early June, and the subsequent withdrawal of Haftar's forces, the NOC announced that production at the Sharara oil field had resumed.

At the time, the NOC said that due to the damage caused by the closure, production would resume at a capacity of 30,000 barrels of oil per day until it reaches full capacity within 90 days.

Sharara is run by the Akakus company, a joint venture between NOC, Spanish oil giant Repsol, France's Total, Austria's OMV and Norway's Statoil.
'Distraction from Sirte'

Khaled Fouad, an energy and political analyst, said that blocking production at Sharara after a brief period of operation would deal a huge financial blow to the GNA.

"It is one of the major sources of income for the GNA," he told Middle East Eye.

"Entering the oil field by Haftar's allies at this time could be an attempt to distract the GNA forces now on the front lines of the battle for Sirte," he said.

"It seems like an attempt to open a new front for the GNA forces, far away from the military battles in the north."


Conflict, partnership, stalemate: Egypt and Turkey's Libya options

Read More »

Since the start of June, increased Turkish support has enabled pro-GNA forces to take control of northwest Libya, ending Haftar's assault on Tripoli.

The GNA advance is now halted outside the coastal city of Sirte, a strategic access point to Libya's key oil fields that remain under Haftar's control.

On Thursday, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the GNA demands that Haftar's forces withdraw from the Sirte and Jufra region as pre-conditions for ceasefire talks.

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) said last week that Russian jets were flown to Libya via Syria in May and are being actively used in Jufra and in the vicinity of Sirte.

"There is concern these Russian aircraft are being flown by inexperienced, non-state PMC [private military company] mercenaries who will not adhere to international law; namely, they are not bound by the traditional laws of armed conflict," said Bradford Gering, AFRICOM's director of operations.

Nandy calls for UK import ban on Israel settlements over annexations: Report

Labour hardens stance to apply import ban if Israel's West Bank plans go ahead amid mounting international opposition

NOW THAT SOCIALIST CORBYN IS GONE WILL THE RIGHT WING ZIONIST LOBBY STOP CLAIMING LABOUR IS ANTI-SEMITIC

Move would require "courage that so far ministers have not 

been willing to show", UK's shadow foreign secretary 

Lisa Nandy says (AFP/File photo)

By MEE staff 27 June 2020 

The UK must ban the imports from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank if Israel presses ahead with annexation plans, said Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, the Guardian reported.

The move would be a "major step" and require "courage that so far ministers have not been willing to show", she said. But "such a blatant breach of international law must have consequences".

Nandy's proposal, backed by party leader Keir Starmer, is a significant toughening of Labour's policy on Israel. In its 2019 manifesto, the party merely called for a diplomatic solution, the Guardian noted.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has said Israel will "apply sovereignty" to as much as 30 percent of the occupied West Bank as early as Wednesday, despite mounting international opposition and warnings that annexation would kill off a future Palestinian state.



Kushner tells Netanyahu to 'greatly slow' annexation processRead More »

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier this week called on Israel to abandon its plan to annex large parts of the occupied West Bank and Jordan Valley, saying it would violate international law and "grievously harm" the prospect of a two-state solution. The warning was echoed by other world leaders, including the Arab League, which said Israel's actions may trigger a major escalation of conflict in the region.

On Wednesday, more than 1,000 European legislators from 25 countries urged their leaders to stop Israel's annexation plans, AFP reported. In a letter published in newspapers and sent to European foreign ministers, the parliamentarians, including 240 UK signatories, said they were "deeply worried about the precedent this would set for international relations".

On Friday, the Belgian Chamber of Representatives voted to create a list of potential "counter-measures" that could be implemented should Israel go forward with its West Bank annexation plans.

In February, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK government's position on Israel-Palestine was unchanged in the wake of Donald Trump's proposals for the region, but the US president's plan should be given "genuine and fair consideration". Trump's so-called "deal of the century" is widely seen as a one-sided blueprint for Israeli annexation.

The Trump administration’s support for Netanyahu's plan might discourage UK action for fear of jeopardising a UK-US trade deal, Nandy said. But Britain has a "unique moral responsibility and must step up. Should we fail to do so, the world will pay the price for a long time to come.

"It is a shameful proposition to which the UK cannot be a silent witness. Across the world, concern is growing... So far, the UK government has been conspicuously absent from this global response," the Guardian quoted Nandy as saying.

"This is now urgent. The government must be clear with the Israeli coalition government that concrete action will follow, including a ban on goods entering Britain from the illegal settlements in the West Bank. This is a major step, but such a blatant breach of international law must have consequences. It will take a level of courage that so far ministers have not been willing to sho

Will the world finally stand up to Israel over West Bank annexation?
If Israel goes ahead with annexation, it will mean the definitive end of the two-state solution, and leave the current single state as the only reality

A man waves a Palestinian flag during a protest to mark Nakba Day (AFP)

On 15 May it will be 72 years since Israel's establishment and the Palestinian Nakba it led to.

The consequences of this seminal event for Palestinians have been with us to this day: six to eight million refugees dispersed in camps or in exile inside and outside the original homeland; a previously whole country now fragmented into a series of territories ruled by Israel but of unequal status; and what looks like a grim future.

None of this was inevitable. Had it not been for the protected status accorded to Israel by Western states that has shielded it from sanction no matter what it did, the course of Palestine's modern history would have been wholly different.
An exceptional state

That exceptionalism has existed from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which led to the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. The Zionist project behind the establishment of Israel and its subsequent policies was consistently encouraged and supported by Western powers.

If Israel had been a normal state, it would not have been allowed to expel the natives of Palestine, refuse their return, acquire their territory by force, or subjugate and besiege them

If Israel had been a normal state, accountable for its conduct and subject to punishment and sanction, it would not have been allowed to expel the natives of Palestine, or refuse their return, or acquire their territory by force, or subjugate and besiege them, or the myriad other crimes it has committed against them.

There would have been no Nakba to commemorate on 15 May and no refugees, and Gaza would be free.

Thanks to Western indulgence, however, today Israel is a regional superpower, invincible on the world stage, and wielding power and influence far beyond its size and capabilities. There is little doubt that Israel only attained this dominant position through the guaranteed impunity from sanction it enjoys.

As the experience of Israel's 72 years of existence has shown, no infringement of international law, egregious crime against defenceless Palestinians, or even disloyalty to its American patron has succeeded in eroding this impunity.
The appropriate response

There were times in the history of the conflict when international outrage at Israel's behaviour could have sparked an appropriate response.

The dire situation of Gaza is a case in point: a draconian, purposeless, 13-year old siege that violates every aspect of human rights; Israel's repeated military assaults on Gaza's helpless population, the worst in 2014; and the Israeli sniper fire against unarmed Gaza protesters, that have prompted questions about Israeli war crimes.


There were times in the history of the conflict when international outrage at Israel's behaviour could have sparked an appropriate response

An international community determined to bring Israel to heel could have countered these abuses in many ways. World markets could have been closed to Israeli settlement produce, relations with Israel suspended, past agreements with it reviewed or not renewed, and, in the last resort, economic or diplomatic sanctions imposed.

Yet, apart from verbal censure and exhortations to amend its behaviour, Israel has suffered no ill effects. By contrast, Russia's 2014 "annexation" of Crimea, not agreed by everyone as annexation, was unequivocally rejected and condemned. The US and EU punished Russia for its "illegal invasion and annexation" by imposing restrictive and wide-ranging sanctions, still in force.
End of special impunity?

Might these sanctions become a precedent for similar action against Israel's proposed West Bank annexation? And could that mark the beginning of the end of Israel's special impunity?

The plan recently announced by Israel's unity coalition government aims to initiate the process of annexing the Jordan Valley and the 128 Jewish settlements on 1 July.

A Palestinian woman argues with a member of the Israeli occupation forces as they disperse a demonstration outside the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem on 15 May 2018 (AFP)

That amounts to 30-40 percent of the West Bank, which, after annexation, will become subject to Israeli sovereignty. This has elicited international opposition, but in reality, it will make little difference.

The actual status of these areas, which have been administered under Israeli civil law, and regarded as de facto part of Israel since 1967, will hardly change.

Despite that, the Palestinian president has threatened to tear up all agreements with Israel and America if the annexation goes ahead. An advertisement in Israeli newspapers last month signed by 220 retired Israeli army generals and security officials called for blocking the plan.

The EU, Arab League, and Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states which have peace treaties with Israel, have all condemned it.

Eleven members of the US Congress have called on Israel to halt the annexation. In an unprecedented move, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution opposing Israel's West Bank annexation.
A step too far

As against that, Israel's 53 years of occupation of the 1967 territories has been tolerated by the international community, but this latest move seems a step too far.

It is true that annexation was outlawed by the UN Charter in 1945, and the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force" was the basis of Security Council Resolution 242 which is still on the statute books.

Netanyahu's annexation plan will kill Israel Read More »

Annexation will also starkly expose the apartheid system Israel operates in the Palestinian territories. In the past Israel has always managed to camouflage its most egregious crimes by clever PR, but such flagrant breaches of international law cannot be disguised.

They demand a response. Without it, the West, the Arab states, and the Palestinian leadership will be glaringly exposed as toothless weaklings. In a long history of capitulation to Israel's wishes, even they fear they cannot allow this annexation to pass, if only to save face.

Does that mean they will sanction Israel, as has happened with Russia? On past evidence it is unlikely, and Israel will still manage to find a formula to mollify their opposition.

On the other hand, if Israel goes ahead with the annexation plan, it might not be a bad thing for the Palestinians. It will mean the definitive end of the two-state solution, and leave the current single state as the only reality.

The Jewish Israelis and Palestinians who live there are now unequal. But with more Palestinians demanding equal citizenship in the annexed areas, as Daniel Pipes, ardent US supporter of Israel, fears, that will change.

And the Nakba commemoration this month might well be the last.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Ghada Karmi is a former research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. She was born in Jerusalem and was forced to leave her home with her family as a result of Israel’s creation in 1948. The family moved to England, where she grew up and was educated. Karmi practised as a doctor for many years working as a specialist in the health of migrants and refugees. From 1999 to 2001 Karmi was an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where she led a major project on Israel-Palestinian reconciliation.

Netanyahu's annexation plan is a sham. Apartheid has been decades in the making

Richard Silverstein
24 June 2020 

Proposed annexation is a red herring, relieving liberal Zionists of responsibility for Israel's broader apartheid system and ongoing Palestinian suffering

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting on 14 June (Reuters)


Annexation is a sham.

Don’t get me wrong: this doesn’t mean that Israel’s proposed annexation of the Jordan Valley won’t further dispossess Palestinians. Israel will be stealing 30 percent of the land set aside for a Palestinian state under previous, failed peace proposals, causing further suffering to Palestinians.

But this particular annexation proposal, to which the new Israeli government agreed in its coalition deal, is a red herring - a distraction from the systemic nature of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. It permits liberal Zionists and the international community to focus their attention on undoing this particular evil, relieving them of responsibility for the entire apartheid system Israel has developed, both inside and outside the green line.
Religious intolerance

Statements from British Jewish leaders, US Congress members, European Union officials and human rights experts have warned of the consequences of annexation. They have targeted the soft, “moderate” underbelly of the governing coalition, Blue and White MKs, telling them how badly the world would look upon Israel if this proposal was enacted.

But all of this liberal whining avoids a far greater evil: a Judeo-supremacist regime built on religious intolerance and ethnic cleansing.


The present Israeli regime has as much, or more, in common with Iran's Islamic republic, Saudi Arabia's Islamic protectorate, or the Afghan Taliban than it does with western democracy

The problem with the Israeli state is not one particular policy, no matter how odious. It goes back to the very foundations of the state and the thinking of its founders, foremost among them David Ben-Gurion. While there were some voices among early Zionist leaders who sought integration, or at least peaceful coexistence with their Palestinian neighbours, Ben-Gurion was a maximalist who espoused ethnic cleansing in his diaries and letters well before he founded the state.

The sine qua non of statehood for him was a Jewish majority and Jewish superiority. “Arabs” might remain inside the new nation’s borders, but only if they acquiesced to their diminished status.

Even then, Ben-Gurion feared the Palestinian presence so much that he and the Palmach militia organised and conducted Plan Dalet, which resulted in the Nakba - the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in conjunction with the 1948 founding of Israel.

Palestinian communities that survived the war remained under martial law for two decades, though they posed no security threat.
Boiling the frog

As an American Jew, I was raised on liberal Zionism. I was taught from an early age that Israel was a Jewish and democratic state. I was taught to be proud of the mutual coexistence of those two terms. But the religious component of Israeli identity, as it has come to be defined, precludes democracy; they cannot coexist. It took me decades to realise this.

While it would be ill-advised to attempt to eliminate or suppress religion in a truly democratic state of Israel-Palestine, religion must be separated from the political realm if this state is ever to become normalised.

The religions of Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens will remain critical to them and their identities. If practised appropriately, they will enrich the fabric of the state without prejudicing one religious or ethnic group over another. But the present Israeli regime has as much, or more, in common with Iran’s Islamic republic, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic protectorate, or the Afghan Taliban than it does with western democracy.

Palestinians protest against Israel’s annexation plan near Ramallah on 19 June (AFP)

One of the clever elements of Zionist expansionism is to pursue its goals gradually, rather than all at once. The poor frog doesn’t realise that he’s being boiled in the pot until it’s too late, because the flame raises the temperature gradually and almost imperceptibly.

Thus, Netanyahu has already backed off his original proposal of annexing the entire Jordan Valley. He is now entertaining “annexation-lite”, absorbing the major settlement enclaves of Ariel, Maaleh Adumim and Gush Etzion, while leaving the remaining territory unannexed. This hides the fact that once these blocs become part of Israel, the surrounding territory is Palestinian in name only; whatever is left will be hemmed in by Israeli fences, roads and infrastructure. And Israel could, at a later date, annex the rest.
Silver lining

In a recent Middle East Eye webinar, Professor Rashid Khalidi described annexation as “largely a red herring”, noting that it has been ongoing since 1967 in various ways, with Israeli law already applying throughout the occupied territories.

“We have to be thinking in broader terms than the narrow diplomatic language that’s been used. Israel has been annexing and creating a one-state reality since 1967. This [current annexation plan] is just a tiny step in the process,” Khalidi said, noting that Netanyahu’s more limited proposal regarding the three settlement enclaves amounts to a “charade”.

World must fight back against Israeli annexation - whether formal or not 

Read More »

“We should be talking in much more fundamental terms about the systemic structural problems that are going to have to be addressed if this problem is to be resolved on a just and equitable basis,” he said.

If there is any silver lining in the annexation plan, it is that liberal Zionists, who once denounced the boycott movement and anyone labeling Israel as an apartheid state, have been forced to reckon with the failure of their vision.

South African anti-apartheid campaigner Benjamin Pogrund, who has spent decades fighting the notion that Israel is an apartheid state, recently said in an interview: “If we annex the Jordan Valley and the settlement areas, we are apartheid. Full stop. There’s no question about it.”

South Africa’s bantustans “were simply a more refined form of apartheid to mask what it really was”, Pogrund added, noting that the consequences of Israel’s planned annexation “will obviously be extremely grave. Friends of ours in the world will not be able to defend us”.

Cracks and divides

Similarly, the pro-Israel German party Die Linke has also called for sanctioning Israel if it goes forward with this plan. “Should the Israeli government resolve to carry out the annexation, Die Linke will advocate for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement,” it said in a statement.

This EU protocol is important not only because it offers Israel tariff-free trade and privileges of member states, but also because of the status it confers on Israel, both in Europe and around the world. To lose these privileges would be an economic and political blow.

As we've seen in the past, just as tectonic plates can crack and divide, geological forces can drive them back together again

The party’s statement, as noted by journalist Ali Abunimah, comes close to abandoning a two-state solution, which is at the very heart of the liberal Zionism Die Linke upholds: “In the face of the Israeli government’s seeming rejection of a just two-state solution, in which citizens from both sides would live with equal rights, Die Linke calls for equal civil rights for Palestinians and Israelis,” the party stated.

“For Die Linke, the following principle holds everywhere and at all times: all inhabitants of every country should enjoy equal rights - irrespective of their religion, language or ethnic group.”

It’s important not to exaggerate the significance of these changes. They certainly mark a shift in the ranks of Israel’s liberal advocates. There is also no doubt about the tectonic shifts in US politics on Israel/Palestine, which have considerably widened discourse. But as we’ve seen in the past, just as tectonic plates can crack and divide, geological forces can drive them back together again.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times)

BELGIUM DECLARED AN ANTI-SEMITIC STATE BY ZIONISTS

Belgium calls for sanctions against Israel if it annexes West Bank

In 101-0 vote, Belgium's Chamber of Representatives approves measure challenging Israel's plans to annex large parts of occupied West Bank

Belgian legislators stand at Federal Parliament in Brussels earlier this year (AFP/File photo)

By MEE staff Published date: 26 June 2020

The Belgian Chamber of Representatives voted to create a list of potential "counter-measures" that could be implemented should Israel go forward with its West Bank annexation plans.

In a 101-0 vote, with 39 abstentions, Belgium's parliament on Friday called for the government to create a series of reactive proposals to come into play if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes ahead with annexing parts of the occupied West Bank on 1 July.

The proposed measures, which have yet to be published, will be "geared at responding in a proportional manner to any Israeli annexation of occupied Palestinian territory", according to the resolution.

They also call for Belgium to push for resolutions against annexation in the UN Security Council, of which it is currently a member.

The motion urges the government to "to take the initiative with third countries, at European and multilateral levels, to prevent the annexation [by] Israel of the Palestinian territories, or parts of them".

The chamber was originally scheduled to vote on the sanctions measure, as well as a second resolution to recognise Palestine as a state, on Thursday, but the vote was postponed over objections from some MPs.

On Friday, the Palestinian statehood resolution was postponed again amid last minute amendments, the Times of Israel reported.

Socialist MP Malik Ban Achour, one of the supporters of the statehood resolution, said such a move would symbolise Belgium's support for a two-state solution based on "coexistence" and "the right to live in peace and security with mutually recognised, accepted and respected borders".

Both resolutions were proposed by MPs from left-wing parties, including the Socialist Party and members of the French and Green parties.

Earlier this week, more than 1,000 parliamentarians representing 25 European countries signed a letter warning Israel against annexing parts of the occupied West Bank.

The legislators "share serious concerns about President Trump’s plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the imminent prospect of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory", referring to the US administration's so-called "deal of the century" proposal.

In the event of annexation, the European Union would require consensus among its 27 member states to implement significant sanctions against Israel, but some countries, including Hungary and Austria, are widely expected to veto any strong initiatives.
Widespread calls to halt annexation

On Wednesday, the UN and Arab League called on Israel to "abandon" its West Bank annexation plans.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, addressing a virtual meeting of the Security Council, said Israel's annexation of Palestinian land would be a "watershed moment" and mark a "serious violation of international law".

"I call on the Israeli government to abandon its annexation plans," he said.


Meanwhile, the Arab League said Israel's actions may trigger a major escalation of conflict in the region.

"For three decades, real peace and the creation of an independent Palestinian state, remain elusive... despair is dominating the Palestinian mood and scene," said Ahmed Aboul Gheit, head of the Arab League.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki warned that any annexation would be a "crime", adding that Israel's objective had for decades been to seize "maximum Palestinian land, with minimum Palestinians".

"Israel is testing the resolve of the international community, thinking that its colonial apartheid will prevail… We must prove it wrong," Maliki told the Security Council.

Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Malta and Finland have also taken stances against Israel's proposed annexation.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday it was up to Israel to decide whether to annex settlements in the occupied West Bank. His comments came after senior aides to Trump met for a second day to discuss whether to give Netanyahu the green light for the move.

While presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner had reportedly asked Netanyahu to delay the 1 July schedule for annexation, Pompeo, speaking to reporters this week, said extending the annexation was a decision "for Israelis to make".