The Latest | Israel's planned invasion of Rafah risks killing hundreds of thousands, UN says

May 3, 2024




A student encampment is shown at Middlebury College as they protest the Israel-Hamas war in Middlebury, Vt., on Thursday, May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Lisa Rathke)





A man stands in the ruins of the Chahine family home, after an overnight Israeli strike that killed at least two adults and five boys and girls under the age of 16 in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Friday, May 3, 2024. An Israeli strike on the city of Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip killed several people, including children, hospital officials said Friday. (AP Photo/Ismael Abu Dayyah)
MMA



Ethiopian Orthodox Christian worshippers walk the Way of the Cross procession that commemorates Jesus Christ's crucifixion on Good Friday, in the Old City of Jerusalem,

 Friday, May 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

The United Nations humanitarian aid agency says hundreds of thousands of people would be “at imminent risk of death” if Israel carries out a military assault in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The border city is a critical entry point for humanitarian aid and is filled with displaced Palestinians, many in densely packed tent camps.

An Israeli airstrike in Rafah overnight Friday killed seven people — mostly children. The Biden administration, which provides Israel crucial military and diplomatic support, says it opposes a Rafah invasion unless Israel provides a “credible” plan for protecting civilians there.

Turkey, an important Israeli trading partner, has suspended all imports and exports to Israel. The country's trade minister says the move was in response to “the deterioration and aggravation of the situation in Rafah."


International mediators are trying to broker a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, and a leaked truce proposal hints at compromises by both sides after months of stalemated negotiations.

The Israel-Hamas war has driven around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes, caused vast destruction in several towns and cities, and pushed northern Gaza to the brink of famine. The death toll in Gaza has soared to more than 34,500 people, according to local health officials, and the territory’s entire population has been driven into a humanitarian catastrophe.

The war began Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked southern Israel, abducting about 250 people and killing around 1,200, mostly civilians. Israel says militants still hold around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

Currently:

— Hamas is sending a delegation to Egypt for further cease-fire talks in the latest sign of progress. What’s on the table for Israel and Hamas in the latest cease-fire talks?

— Colombia breaks diplomatic ties with Israel, but its military relies on key Israeli-built equipment.

— Turkey halts all trade with Israel over military actions in Gaza.

— Nearly 2,200 people have been arrested during pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. college campuses.

— The unprecedented destruction of housing in Gaza hasn’t been seen since World War II, the United Nations says.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Here's the latest:

UN says Israeli civilians vandalized some humanitarian aid as convoy traveled through West Bank

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations reports that a U.N. convoy carrying humanitarian aid from Jordan to Gaza had “a limited amount of goods” vandalized by Israeli civilians when it went through the West Bank. It was also rerouted by armed men when it entered Gaza to the wrong U.N. facility.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters Friday “there was a miscommunication” with the convoy Wednesday and the trucks were ultimately directed to the U.N. World Food Program warehouse in Beit Hanoun.

Referring to Hamas, he said the U.N. has clarified the misunderstanding with “the de facto authorities in Gaza to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.” They reiterated their commitment to respect the delivery of humanitarian aid, he said.

“All of the goods have been subsequently accounted for and are being distributed by the U.N.,” Haq said.

The U.N. humanitarian office reported that the convoy started in Jordan and entered Gaza “via back-to-back transfer at Erez crossing, following inspection by Israeli authorities only at Allenby Bridge,” he said.

The bridge links Jordan to the West Bank, and Haq said “Going through the West Bank, Israeli civilians offloaded and vandalized a limited amount of goods from the convoy,” which included food parcels, sugar, rice, supplementary food for those malnourished and milk powder.

The U.N. doesn’t think the incident should impact further aid deliveries from Jordan, Haq said.

Biden to host Jordan’s King Abdullah II for talks at the White House

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will host Jordan’s King Abdullah II for talks at the White House next week in the midst of the latest push for a cease-fire deal to end the Israel-Hamas war can soon be reached, according to the White House.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed that the private talks would happen at some point next week but did provide further details.

The meeting comes as Israel and Hamas were negotiating a potential cease-fire in Gaza and the return of Israeli hostages. A leaked truce proposal hints at compromises by both sides after months of stalemated talks.

Biden last hosted Abdullah, a close ally, for White House talks in February.

Israel to seek to reduce economic ties between Turkey and the Palestinians in retaliation for Turkey’s trade ban with Israel

JERUSALEM — Israel said Friday it will seek to reduce economic ties between Turkey and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza in retaliation for Turkey’s trade ban with Israel over its military actions in Gaza.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “wants to harm Israel” with the ban “but will primarily harm the Palestinian economy.”

The Foreign Ministry said it would take “action to minimize all economic ties between Turkey and the Palestinian Authority and Gaza.”

It did not elaborate on how it would do so. Israel controls all entry points into the occupied West Bank, both through its own territory and from neighboring Jordan. It imposes inspections on good entering the West Bank but has imposed a wholesale block on imports, though it did stop all Palestinian exports to Israel for weeks in 2020 during a trade dispute with the Palestinian Authority.

Multiple times in the past, it has withheld customs duties on imports that it collects on behalf of the authority, which controls enclaves around the West Bank. Since the war with Hamas began in October, it has blocked entry to almost all commercial goods to Gaza, except for a trickle of supplies along with international aid entering the territory.

After Israel, Turkey is the largest importer to the Palestinian Authority, accounting for about 18% of its imports.

The ministry said it would also seek sanctions against Turkey at international economic forums for violating trade agreements.

“The Israeli economy is strong, and the Turkish economy will be much more affected than the Israeli economy due to the trade balance between the countries. It’s a mistake Erdogan will regret,” Katz said.

Turkey imposed the ban on Thursday, suspending all imports and exports to Israel. Erdogan said his country could no longer “stand by and watch” the violence in Gaza.

A 23-year-old Israeli originally believed abducted by Hamas was killed during the militants’ Oct. 7 attack, military and support group say

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military and a support group for the families of Israeli hostages confirmed Friday that Elyakim Libman, a 23-year-old Israeli who had been believed abducted by Hamas, was killed during the militants’ Oct. 7 attack. His body was found in Israel.

The Hostages Families Forum Headquarters said Libman was working as a security guard at a music festival that was attacked by the militants after they stormed out of Gaza. It said he helped evacuate the wounded during the mayhem before being killed.

The military said it, the police and forensic officials had identified the body after it was found in Israeli territory.

At least 260 people were killed at the Nova music festival, taking place in an open space near Gaza when Hamas militants rampaged through communities in southern Israel. Some 1,200 people were killed in the attack, and militants took around 250 hostage. Because of the chaos of the day, a few believed taken captive were later determined to be among the dead.

Israel says Hamas is holding about 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others in Gaza, after many were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November. Since the Oct. 7 attack, Israel’s bombardment and offensive in Gaza has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians.

CIA chief arrives in Egypt as Hamas considers cease-fire accord with Israel

CAIRO — Two Egyptian security officials say CIA director William Burns has arrived in Egypt amid a push to seal a cease-fire accord between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza war.

Burns’ visit comes as Hamas is considering the latest proposal for a cease-fire and hostage release put forward by U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators, who hope to avert an Israeli offensive against Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost town.

Hamas has said it will send a delegation to Cairo in the coming days for further discussions on the offer, though it has not specified when.

The two Egyptian officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press, did not give details on Burns’ visit. U.S. officials would not comment on the report.

The latest proposal reportedly calls for a three-stage cease-fire, starting with a six-week halt in fighting during which Hamas would release a number of hostages it holds, including women and elderly, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Talks would then take place on a permanent calm, during which Israel would withdraw troops from Gaza and Hamas would release all the remaining hostages.

An Egyptian official has said Hamas is seeking firmer language in the text to ensure a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an end to its offensive and bombardment – as well as the return of Palestinians displaced from the north of the territory.

On Thursday, Hamas supreme leader Ismail Haniyeh said he had spoken to Egypt’s intelligence chief and “stressed the positive spirit of the movement in studying the cease-fire proposal.”

Hamas is believed to still hold around 100 Israelis in Gaza, as well as the bodies of around 30 others who died in captivity. Israel launched its campaign in Gaza vowing to destroy Hamas after the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel.

2 PALESTINIANS FROM GAZA DIED IN ISRAELI CUSTODY, INCLUDING A SURGEON FROM SHIFA HOSPITAL, GROUP SAYS

BEIRUT — The Palestinian Prisoner’s Club said two Palestinian detainees from Gaza have died in Israeli custody, including a prominent surgeon seized by troops during a raid on a hospital.

The cause of their deaths was not immediately known. Israeli and Palestinian rights groups have reported harsh conditions in Israeli prisons for the hundreds of Palestinians detained from Gaza, including beatings and medical neglect.

The Israeli prison authority and army officials had no comment.

The surgeon, Dr. Adnan al-Borsh, 50, was head of the orthopedic department in Gaza City’s Shifa hospital. After an Israeli siege in November crippled Shifa, he worked in nearby al-Awda Hospital, which Israeli troops later stormed, detaining him and others inside in December.

Abdullah al-Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, said they were informed by the Palestinian Administrative Affairs office, which coordinates with the Israeli military, that al-Borsh died in Ofer Prison in the West Bank on April 19. He said the body was still being held by Israeli authorities.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre said she could not speak specifically about the case but that it was “devastating to hear” that a doctor was killed.

“Dead on Arrival”: Doctors Back from Gaza Describe Horrific Hospital Scenes, Decimated Health System

MAY 03, 2024

GUESTS Ismail Mehr
anesthesiologist and chair of IMANA Medical Relief.
Azeem Elahi
pulmonary and critical care physician.
SIMANA Medical Relief

Nearly seven months of constant bombardment, siege and obstruction of aid deliveries have annihilated the healthcare system in Gaza. Last week, the Palestinian Health Ministry said that around 600,000 Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip no longer have access to any kind of healthcare. The World Health Organization has said that Israel is “systematically dismantling” the health system in Gaza. Only 11 hospitals out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning. At both of Gaza’s largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and Nasser, Palestinians found hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves after Israel raided and destroyed the facilities. Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Ismail Mehr and Dr. Azeem Elahi just after they volunteered at the largest hospital still operating in Gaza, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. “The healthcare system has been always in a noose, and that noose tightens at times when there’s conflict,” says Mehr. “Right now that noose has completely just hung the healthcare system.”

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“This Militaristic Approach Has Been a Failure”: Meet Hala Rharrit, First U.S. Diplomat to Quit over Gaza

STORY MAY 03, 2024

GUEST

SHala Rharrit
First State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy.

Democracy Now! speaks with Hala Rharrit, the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s policies backing Israel’s assault and siege of the Gaza Strip. Rharrit is an 18-year career diplomat who served as the Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department in the region. “I could no longer be a part of the State Department and promote this policy. It’s an inhumane policy. It’s a failed policy that is helping neither Palestinians, neither Israelis,” Rharrit says. “We are not authorized to send military equipment, weapons to countries that commit human rights abuses. ICJ has determined plausible genocide, yet we are still sending billions upon billions of not just defensive weaponry, but offensive weaponry. It is tantamount to a violation of domestic law. Many diplomats know it. Many diplomats are scared to say it.” She adds, “I read the talking points that we were supposed to promote on Arab media. A lot of them were dehumanizing to Palestinians.” Rharrit also discusses how “corruption” in government allows for arms sales to continue. “I could not help but be concerned about the influence of special interest groups, of lobbying groups on our foreign policy and, as well, on Congress — on the people that decide whether or not some of those shipments of arms get sent. The bottom line is that our politicians should not be profiting from war. And unfortunately, we have some institutionalized corruption that enables that,” she says.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: Israel has killed at least 26 Palestinians in Gaza over the past day, including at least seven people, four of them children, in an airstrike on Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where over 1.4 million Palestinians have sought refuge. Nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed over the past nearly seven months, with 7,000 others missing and believed to be buried under the rubble. Nearly 78,000 have been wounded.

A new United Nations report called the level of casualties in Gaza “unprecedented” in such a short period of time. The report also said the world has not seen the level of destruction of housing in Gaza since World War II.

Here in the United States, a massive student protest movement with Gaza solidarity encampments in university campuses across the country has been met with public raids, mass arrests and violence. Nearly 2,200 people have been arrested at 43 colleges and universities in recent weeks. President Joe Biden addressed the protests Thursday for the first time in weeks in unscheduled remarks from the White House.


PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education. Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.

AMY GOODMAN: As President Biden concluded his remarks, he was asked whether the student protests would prompt him to reconsider his foreign policy.


REPORTER: Mr. President, have the protests forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region?


PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: No.

AMY GOODMAN: The Biden administration’s financial, military and diplomatic backing of Israel’s assault on Gaza has sparked dissent within the U.S. government, with resignations and walkouts by government employees.

Today we’re joined by the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the war on Gaza. Hala Rharrit is an 18-year career diplomat who recently resigned from the State Department. She’s the third State Department employee, but the first Foreign Service officer, to do so. Hala Rharrit served as the Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department in the region. She joins us now in her first TV interview since her resignation.

Hala Rharrit, welcome to Democracy Now!

HALA RHARRIT: Thank you so much, Amy. It’s an honor to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you start off by talking about why you have publicly resigned?

HALA RHARRIT: Absolutely. Honestly, I wasn’t intending to publicly resign. I was intending to resign. My profile at the Dubai Media Hub, my last assignment, was quite high-profile. My role was to speak to Arab media about American policy, so it inevitably made the news when I did resign. It first made the news, I believe, here in the region and in the United States.

But the reason why I resigned is really because I could no longer be a part of the State Department and promote this policy. It’s an inhumane policy. It’s a failed policy that is helping neither Palestinians, neither Israelis. And I want to stress that point, that it’s not strictly the horrific mass killings that we have all been watching over the course of over 200 days, the targeting of journalists, of healthcare workers, over 14,000 children massacred, but it’s also not keeping Israelis any safer. The hostages are still in Gaza. Israelis know that there is going to be a vicious cycle of violence after so many have been killed in Gaza. This does not help anyone.

And the militaristic policy is not the solution. As a diplomat, as someone that believes in diplomacy, in the power of diplomacy, I did everything I could from within to try to explain this on a daily basis, through reports, through cables. Nothing was working, until finally I made the decision that I could no longer be part of the system.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you feel President Biden and your boss at the State Department, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, could do right now that would be most effective?

HALA RHARRIT: They need to abide by national domestic law and international law. We have systems in place within the State Department to ensure situations like this don’t happen. We are not authorized to send military equipment, weapons to countries that commit human rights abuses. ICJ has determined plausible genocide, yet we are still sending billions upon billions of not just defensive weaponry, but offensive weaponry. It is tantamount to a violation of domestic law. Many diplomats know it. Many diplomats are scared to say it. It’s a violation of international law, what we’ve been seeing happening in Gaza.

And we cannot make exceptions for our allies. It does not help our allies to make exceptions, because, again, all that this is doing is creating a vicious cycle of violence. And it has clearly failed its objectives. It has failed. The hostages are still not back with their families where they belong. The situation in Gaza remains intensely unstable. People continue to suffer on a daily basis.

It’s time for President Biden and Secretary Blinken to realize that this militaristic approach has been a failure and they need to stop. They need to abide by U.S. law, and doing so will create a lot of leverage. If we are able to condition military aid, we will be able to pressure Israel. We will also be able to work with our Arab allies to pressure Hamas, to have real, substantive change on the ground. That’s what’s necessary at this time, not more arms.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think President Biden does not do that? As he says he’s heartbroken by the number of casualties and he says he admonishes the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly the arms flow continues, Washington Post, New York Times reporting on, you know, the well over 100 arms transfers that are made, or arms sales, just under the threshold that would require Congress to approve it.

HALA RHARRIT: Absolutely. You make a very good point, Amy. Right under the threshold, willfully enabling the crimes that are happening in Gaza. And that’s why I could no longer be part of the State Department, because it’s willful.

It’s a very difficult answer to give you, and it’s one question that I ask myself every single day: Why doesn’t President Biden act? Why doesn’t Secretary Blinken act? If I had the answer to that, perhaps I — you know, I’d be somewhere else right now. I’d be within the system still trying to effect change.

But the bottom line to me and what it appeared like to me from within the system, and also as a spokesperson who was reading the talking points, is that, fundamentally, an Israeli life was not worth — or, a Palestinian life was not worth the same as an Israeli life. And it’s heartbreaking for me to say that as someone that has proudly served my country for 18 years. But I read the talking points that we were supposed to promote on Arab media. A lot of them were dehumanizing to Palestinians. Thirty-four thousand people killed in Gaza right now, and we’re still insisting that this is the only option, when it’s not.

Also, as a diplomat, I could not help but be concerned about the influence of special interests, of the arms lobby, of other special interests that serve foreign governments. It is very, very frustrating when you’re working on a daily basis on American foreign policy, but you know that no matter what you do and no matter what very senior officials in the department are doing, and despite all of the recommendations going up to Washington from the field, the policy is not changing. I could not help but be concerned about the influence of special interest groups, of lobbying groups on our foreign policy and, as well, on Congress — on the people that decide whether or not some of those shipments of arms get sent. The bottom line is that our politicians should not be profiting from war. And unfortunately, we have some institutionalized corruption that enables that. And as an American diplomat, my concern was U.S. national security interest. And I protested against this, but unfortunately could not effect enough change, that I had to submit my resignation.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned institutionalized corruption. Can you explain that further, Hala?

HALA RHARRIT: It is public knowledge that our politicians are able to profit significantly from the arms industry, from campaign contributions. That is something that is never allowed for a diplomat. We have no ability to gain any financial gain from anything, really. Everything has to be very transparent for us. We obviously have secret — top-secret security clearances. Our lives are really open book when we’re a diplomat. And that’s how it should be, because we’re serving our country. We’re not serving ourselves. We’re serving the people of the United States. We’re implementing the laws of the land. And it should be for the sake of U.S. national security, not for personal gain, not for campaign contributions. And as a diplomat, it was very concerning to me knowing that our domestic system clearly has an influence on our foreign policy, because we were not being heard.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about how the administration, to the highest levels, Blinken and, of course, ultimately, Biden, respond to criticism and how much they hear. The latest news, among a lot of other reports, more than 250 former staffers in the Obama administration and campaign workers for the Obama-Biden ticket sent a letter to their former bosses demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and calling for the U.S. to end its staunch support for Israel. You then have the number of people who have resigned publicly and more privately. I’m wondering their response to you? But have you spoken directly with President Biden, with Tony Blinken, the secretary of State, your, well, previous boss?

HALA RHARRIT: Did you ask, Amy, if I’ve spoken to them directly?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

HALA RHARRIT: I have not spoken to them directly, I mean, not in this particular occasion. I have in the past for Secretary Blinken, but not for this particular occasion. But what we do as diplomats is we send reporting. We send information back. That’s why we are overseas in our embassies and our consulates. And our job is to try to help Washington in making informed decisions. We do that. And we do hear from Secretary Blinken. We do hear about a culture of “We want to hear about dissent. We want to hear critical feedback.”

I can tell you that, for me, it was a mixed bag. I provided that critical feedback. I provided daily reports, for example, showing what pan-Arab media was covering in terms of the Gaza crisis, showing how American — there was growing anti-Americanism. Every single day, I could see growing anti-Americanism, which was extremely concerning. And I was trying to raise this on a daily basis to Washington, explaining we need to change course, this is hurting our own national security interests if we maintain this policy. And I was met with silencing. I was met with being sidelined. I was also met with “Thank you for your critical feedback. This is going to the highest levels of our government. We need more of this.” I was met with more silencing, more sidelining. So, for me, it was really a mixed bag.

And I have to be honest that there were people that were trying to ensure that those messages were heard, but at the end of the day and what was the most frustrating is that, in particular, with my particular role as Arabic spokesperson, I explained that our messaging posture was hurting more so than helping us, yet our messaging posture never changed. We’re still using the talking points directed to the Arab world even if it’s inflaming the tensions, even if it’s instigating people across the region, even if it’s making people across the region hate us more and be more frustrated with us, because they hear the double standard. They hear the double standard when we condemn an attack on Israeli interests, but we don’t condemn the death of Palestinians, only show concern. They are very, very in tune with these double standards. And it hurt us to continue to amplify these talking points. And it was very frustrating for me that there was the continued expectation that we would do that despite all of the data, despite the clear proof that it’s not helping America, it’s hurting America.

AMY GOODMAN: You refused to comment — you were the Arabic-language spokesperson to the Arab world. You refused to comment on U.S. policy in Gaza. Can you explain why you made that decision?

HALA RHARRIT: Absolutely. Just as I mentioned right now, I made it abundantly clear, through daily reports, of the ramifications of our messaging. Abundantly clear. I showed every day what was happening, what the reaction was. And I also was monitoring Arab social media and sharing with Washington the images that were going viral across Arab social media. And these — thank you, as well, Amy, for amplifying the voices of the Palestinian families at the top of the hour. Those are things that sometimes Washington does not hear. But it is what the Arab public is consuming on a daily basis. And these pictures of dead children, of maimed toddlers, they’re traumatizing. And my point back was, “Look at these images that people in this part of the world are consuming on a daily basis.”

There is an absolute disconnect with what people in the Arab world are seeing happening in Gaza and our talking points. There’s an utter disconnect. And it does not serve our interest to continue pretending like what’s happening in Gaza is not happening, and we keep promoting things that are just instigating. So, my role was to be a spokesperson, but I also believe my role to be to serve the United States, to advance American interests, to have effective messaging, not just messaging. And I could not in good conscience do something and go out on Arab TV knowing that it was hurting my country doing that, not helping it.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain more specifically, because this is a serious, important critique and charge, that the president, that the secretary of state are actually endangering U.S. national security with the position and the support of Israel that they are taking right now.

HALA RHARRIT: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we had three of our troops killed in Jordan. That was in direct reaction to our Israel policy. And when that happened, I said, again, “I will not be part of this.” And then, if an attack happens on American interests in the region, I would not be able to sleep at night, because my face on that screen, on that Arab news channel, may have been the thing that prompted the person to go and retaliate or commit an act of terror.

The anger in the region is palpable, and it is traumatic. When people are consuming daily images of massacres, of people suffering, and yet they hear that the United States is willfully enabling it by continuing to send bombs, it makes people lose complete faith in the United States. And this is what was so painful to me as an American diplomat. I’ve worked for the last 18 years to strengthen ties between the United States and other countries, to advance U.S. interests, to promote America’s image. But this policy made it impossible. How can we talk about press freedom when we remain willfully silent about the killings of so many journalists? I mean, I personally worked to try to get a statement out on the killing of journalists in Gaza, and I was met with so much pushback. And I was so shocked at my own colleagues that would push back on that. It is a fundamental American value to be promoting freedom of press. We cannot have exceptions. We cannot have double standards.

As American diplomats, we need to apply our values, our standards on the situation. That is what we are supposed to be about. And until we do that, we are hurting — I keep on repeating this word, but I fundamentally believe it, and it’s a concern of mine that I expressed over the course of months. We are hurting ourselves, not just the Palestinians and not just the Israelis, but we’re hurting the United States of America.

AMY GOODMAN: You are publicly resigning, but there are others who have simply resigned, saying they don’t think they’re important enough to announce that they are resigning. Can you talk about the number of people who have left and also who have expressed, like you have, through the official channels, going all the way up, your concern?

HALA RHARRIT: I actually don’t know of any others that have resigned within the Foreign Service. There may be, and I may not know about them, but I do not know of any others, other than Josh and Annelle, who are not Foreign Service officers but were Washington-based, that have resigned. But I know for sure that a lot of people expressed frustrations of wanting to resign.

And I know this mostly from after my own resignation was announced internally. It was quite a surprise to me. I did not know how people would react to me, honestly, when I was still on the inside, because my resignation was announced internally before it became public externally. And at that point, so many people approached me and talked about how they’ve been so frustrated with the policy. They felt like they couldn’t say anything. They felt like they couldn’t do anything. They were worried about their careers. They were worried about if they spoke up internally, what would that do to them? And it was very disheartening to hear. It’s not what the State Department is supposed to be about. Many told me that they wished they could resign, because they really could not keep maintaining every single day under this policy, but that they couldn’t for financial reasons, for other considerations related to their families.

And so, it is a sad time within the department, as far as I’m concerned, and I can only share of my experience, of course. The State Department is a very large institution, but I can tell you, after 18 years of service, you get to know a lot of members of the diplomatic corps. And it’s an unprecedented time. It’s very uneasy. And I think everyone wakes up hoping that the next day will be better. But we really do need some fundamental changes to this policy, because it is such a failed policy that is just hurting all parties involved.

AMY GOODMAN: And your response to President Biden speaking out yesterday for the first time on the college campus unrest, the thousands of students who have been arrested — also professors have been arrested — saying that that protest across the country has no effect on his foreign policy?

HALA RHARRIT: Honestly, I was intensely disappointed that he would speak about constituents in that way, that he would speak about voters in that way, that he would speak about Americans in that way. He is supposed to be a representative of the people.

And the fact that these students have been dismissed, these students have been labeled — the bottom line is, I think there is a fundamental generational shift in not just the United States, but globally, because these students, much like people across this region, have been consuming on a daily basis the images coming straight out of Gaza. They’ve been seeing on their social media feeds the children that have been dying of starvation. They are seeing on their social media feeds the bloody toddlers that are being carried with an arm blown off. They’re seeing this on a daily basis. And it took them seven months to rise. If President Biden, if Secretary Blinken had solved this crisis, there would have been no student protests.

The buck stops with the president. Again, I’m going to say it: It is a failed policy. It has not succeeded in bringing home the hostages. It has not succeeded in making Israelis safer. And when students are seeing a potential, plausible, ongoing genocide, they are reacting to it. They are reacting to the fact that their academic institutions may be financially invested in the killings of innocent people in Gaza. They’re reacting to the fact that their governments — that their government is continuing to enable the killing of innocent civilians. And it is a fundamental democratic right in the First Amendment. And it was very, very disheartening to hear the president just dismissing them that way without even addressing the source of their concerns.

Of course, I am absolutely against any type of violence on campus or anywhere else. It should be inclusive. No students, regardless of their religion, of their race, of ethnicity, need to be targeted whatsoever, and that is clear, and that should go without saying. But it is also clear that there was so much community in these protests. There were Jewish students with Muslim students, with Christian students, with atheists, with agnostics — it doesn’t really matter. People were unified in calling for an end to the carnage and an end to the violence. And suppressing them in such a violent manner is horrific. And it’s also not necessary. Again, as a diplomat, I fundamentally don’t believe in solving conflicts through arms or through violence. I believe in sitting down and talking with individuals, sitting down and negotiating, not in suppression.

AMY GOODMAN: Hala Rharrit, I thank you so much for being with us. Hala Rharrit is the first State Department diplomat to resign over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. She is an 18-year career diplomat. This is her first television interview since resigning.

Coming up, we speak with two doctors just back from volunteering at the largest functioning hospital in Gaza. Stay with us.

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Indian school principal faces axe for 'liking' a pro-Palestine tweet

Right-wing Indian media is attacking an educator for expressing support for Palestinians.


Public displays of solidarity with Palestine often lead to Indian police targeting demonstrators. / Photo: Reuters

A Muslim principal of a school in Mumbai was asked to resign after she was scandalously targeted by a Hindu right-wing propaganda news website because she had ‘liked’ social media posts that supported Palestine.

Parveen Shaikh, who had worked for The Somaiya School in Mumbai’s Vidyavihar for 12 years, was asked by the school management to step down after OpIndia published an article attacking her on April 24.

OpIndia is India’s most-visited right-wing news website.

Shaikh is the latest victim of the online harassment led by Hindu nationalists linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

India has become Israel’s key arms-trade partner and the two sides cooperate on surveillance technology. Tens of thousands of Indian workers are expected to work in Israel, replacing Palestinians who have been barred entry by Tel Aviv since October.

Shaikh has refused to resign and several parents have come out in her support.

A Hindutva website

Parveen Shaikh only became aware of OpIndia's coverage when the school management brought it to her attention.

During a meeting held a day after the article's publication, the management acknowledged her dedication and contributions to shaping prestigious Somaiya School. However, they expressed that “they were under immense pressure to take action against her,” Shaikh said in an interview with Hindustan Times.

The OpIndia article has taken dozens of Shaikh’s innocuous X posts and twisted them around.

The tweets Shaikh liked include one that asks, "Who stands with Palestine? Raise your hand," and another that lists the countries that voted in favour of Palestine's admission into the United Nations.

“My social media interactions, including tweets, likes and comments align with our nation’s constitutional principles of secularism and free speech, and they reflect India’s long standing support for the Palestinian cause,” Shaikh said in an interview.

However, India's stance on the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian cause has significantly shifted since Modi came to power in 2014.





Shift in policy


While Narendra Modi was among the first world leaders to express solidarity with Israel after the October 7 attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, labelling the group as "terrorists," his stance differs from the country’s diplomatic policy, which does not designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

At the same time, India also chose to abstain from backing a UN resolution on October 27, 2023, which called for a "humanitarian truce" in Gaza.

India's historical ties with both Israel and Palestine paint a contrasting picture than what Modi government’s policy.

In 1947, India voted against the partition of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly and it was the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974.

As the Asian country acknowledged the establishment of Israel two years after its inception, in 1950, it did not establish formal diplomatic ties until 1992.

Previous Indian administrations before Modi also largely maintained discreet dealings with Israel. In 2017, Modi made history by becoming the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel

The reasons behind this shift include the rapid rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, the Modi government's emphasis on maintaining robust relations with the United States, and of course, economic and military benefits.

Today, India buys about $2 billion worth of arms annually from Israel, constituting over 30 percent of Israel's total arms exports.

Fake news by Indian media

Modi's discourse on the matter appears to resonate with the Indian media and public, to a remarkable extent.

An AI study analysed 4,316 tweets from the Indian timeline, with 2,200 mentioning the Israel-Palestine conflict. Of these, over 1,250 expressed support for Israel, while around 250 favoured Palestine, showing a five-to-one ratio in favour of Israel.

It was also reported that right-wing accounts originating from India are significant purveyors of anti-Palestinian misinformation and fake news regarding the Gaza war across various social media platforms.

The Indian media was found to have played a significant role in disseminating false information about 40 beheaded babies, a claim that was subsequently proven to be false and repeated in the OpIndia article on Parveen Shaikh.

Not only Indian media but also its streets have seen a consistent presence of pro-Israel rallies since the outset of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, while public expressions of solidarity with Palestine have reportedly faced continuous suppression, often resulting in government targeting of demonstrators.

India's current policy advocates for a two-state solution involving Israel and Palestine.

BDS

Which are the behemoths in the crosshairs of students protesting Gaza war?

Students in solidarity with Gaza and Palestinians are rallying in protest, demanding that universities take action by divesting from companies they accuse of supporting Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged enclave.


Student protesters march around their encampment on the Columbia University campus, Monday, April 29, 2024, in New York. / Photo: AP

Students protesting against Israel's war on Gaza are demanding of their universities to divest from companies contributing to the seven-month-long military offensive which has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, more than seventy percent of them children and women.

At its epicentre is New York City’s Columbia University — the Ivy League institution where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment began and sparked a wave of similar protests across the country after university president Minouche Shafik called on police to suppress the peaceful demonstrations that resulted in the arrest of more than 100 students.

Protesters, who have since rebuilt the encampment, are urging the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, accused of genocide as its war on Gaza enters its 206th day.

The students are taking a page from Columbia’s own history books. In 1968, students then took a similar stand against the Vietnam War and demanded the withdrawal of the US Army in what is one of the largest mass detentions in New York City history. In 1985, Columbia students won their first major successful protest in favour of divestiture after they protested the university’s investments in corporations that operated in apartheid South Africa.


‘No tech for apartheid’

The university has investments in some of the better-known companies doing business with Israel, namely Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon, and Microsoft.

Amazon and Google are part of a $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government called the Nimbus Project. Workers from both companies have protested against their respective company’s dealings with Israel through the No Tech for Apartheid movement.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure is used in the Al Munaseq app by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to issue permits to Palestinians for work, family visits, and medical or legal needs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of 116 student organisations urging Columbia to divest all economic and academic stakes in Israel.

The students have noted Columbia also invests in funds that hold shares in a variety of lesser-known companies they say are complicit in Tel Aviv’s war on Gaza, from defence contractors to those that provide services to Israeli police and prison service.


How do these companies enable settler colonialism and the war on Gaza?


Defence contractors


According to American weapons maker Lockheed Martin, it has been providing the Israeli Air Force with fighter aircrafts for several decades now, including the F-16 variant, which is frequently used in major assaults on Gaza.

It has been used to drop bombs on refugee camps — like the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, an incident also known as the Battle of Jenin — and residential buildings and offices, including the notable 2021 destruction of two media offices, Al Jazeera and Associated Press in Gaza.

In 2016, Israel became the first country other than the US to acquire F-35 fighter jets, Business Insider reported, after signing a letter of agreement to select the aircraft through the US government's Foreign Military Sales process.

"We are flying the F-35 all over the Middle East and have already attacked twice on two different fronts," then-Israeli Air Force chief Major-General Amikam Norkin said in 2018, Reuters reported.

Lockheed Martin also supplies the Israeli military with its Longbow Hellfire missiles and surveillance technology, which other Palestinian solidarity groups have said is “actively used in its ongoing air and ground assault on Gaza.” Lockheed Martin ranks 60 on the Fortune 500 List, and on April 23, reported that its earnings were up 14 percent.

Other defence contractors students are asking Columbia to divest from include Raytheon, which supplies Israel with bombs and missiles; Boeing, which provides Israel with a range of military attack aircrafts and missiles, as well as maintenance for Apache helicopters and Pegasus military transport aircrafts; and General Dynamics, which supplies bombs, weapons used on Lockheed Martin's F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, and engines used in Israel's main battle tank, the Merkava IV.


Heavy machinery makers


Students are calling on Columbia to drop investments from several firms that provide heavy machinery to Israel. US multinational manufacturer and provider of civil and military engineering machinery, Caterpillar Inc, which has supplied machinery used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes, is among them.


In this photo taken Tuesday, September 28, 2010, workers use ground moving equipment at a construction site in the Jewish settlement of Revava, near the West Bank city of Nablus.

As far back as 2004, Human Rights Watch urged Caterpillar to stop selling bulldozers to Israel, which uses the firm’s D9 model, “as its primary weapon to raze Palestinian homes, destroy agriculture and shred roads in violation of the laws of war.” The D9 bulldozer was used by an Israeli soldier to kill American activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003.

A Fortune 500 company, Caterpillar has appeared in Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list for several years, as recently as 2020.

Students also want Columbia to disinvest funds from Doosan Corp, a South Korean multinational conglomerate that owns Bobcat Company, and Japanese firm Hitachi, both of which produce construction equipment used in the creation of illegal separation walls and settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Profiting from Israel's illegal occupation

Based in Shanghai, China, JA Solar Technology Co Ltd, a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock market, designs, develops, manufactures, and sells solar products.

Protestors are urging for university divestment from it, citing its solar farms installed in industrial zones of illegal settlements located in the occupied West Bank.

According to the Who Profits research centre, Siemens Israel received 122,936 solar panels from the Chinese company for five projects, including three in the Arava Desert and two in the Naqab.

There is also Dutch online travel agency Booking.com, owned by parent company Booking Holdings Inc., which hosts listings in illegal settlements in places like the occupied West Bank.



“At the very core, the companies are operating on land that belongs to Palestinians and which has been unlawfully appropriated from them – criminal acts which amount to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and war crimes and crimes against humanity within the purview of the International Criminal Court,” the head of legal research and advocacy for Palestinian rights group al-Haq, Susan Power, told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, students say that the Indian multinational automotive company Tata Motors Ltd, with subsidiaries such as Jaguar and Land Rover, and Japan's Mitsubishi Corporation, are both on the list of companies Columbia should divest from because they provide vehicles to Israeli police and military.

For more on Columbia’s investments, the full list by Columbia University Apartheid Divest is available here.

Eric Adams Is the Lying Face of the Campus Crackdown

New York’s mayor is the right man for the job of standing up for the indefensible.

JEET HEER / MAY 3, 2024
THE NATION

Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, speaks at a press conference on February 8, 2024.(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Journalism, a trade that where the need to maintain access often requires euphemism, is rich in evasive language to describe people like Eric Adams: dissimulator, equivocator, teller of tall tales, prevaricator, fabulist, among many others. But to be perfectly frank—something that Adams is incapable of—the New York mayor is a bald-faced liar. He is willing to say anything to advance his immediate interest, with little or no regard for the truth. Adams doesn’t just tell the occasional fib. He lies on a legendary scale, comparable to Baron Munchausen, the Wizard of Oz, or Pinocchio. Adams is second only to Donald Trump in his wanton mendacity. In a very entertaining 2023 profile of Adams for The New Yorker, Ian Parker made clear just how essential lying is to Adams’ persona, to the point that where Adams will tell lies denying the lies he had previously told.

Adams regularly called himself a vegan. When Politico reported in 2022 that he ate fish, Adams, according to Parker, “initially denied this” and then “he denied to me, untruthfully, that he’d ever claimed to be a vegan.” Later, Adams said, “If I see a piece of chicken, I’m going to nibble on it.”

In 2021, Adams said he had never boxed before. Two years later, he boasted that he often boxed when younger, doing well in the gym but quickly got knocked out in the ring. Adams has claimed he was born in Alabama (which is where his mom was born, he himself entering the world in a Park Slope hospital). He claimed his father sometimes took him to see Malcolm X speak—virtually impossible since the civil rights leader was assassinated when Adams was four. Adams has boasted that “When I played football for Bayside High School, we used to win championships all the time.” He also denied to Ian Parker ever playing football for Bayside.

Adams’ deceptions have even required the fabrication of evidence. As Parker relates:

Last year, after the murder of two police officers in Harlem, Adams made a speech in which he described having long carried, in his wallet, a small photograph of a police-officer friend who was murdered in 1987. A week later, Adams showed this crumpled keepsake to journalists. The Times recently reported that, in the days following the speech, City Hall aides had manufactured the wallet photograph by downloading an image from the Internet, then staining a print with coffee, to make it look old.

One thing that Adams does not lie about, it seems, is his love of Israel. Of course, it’s not unknown for New York politicians to work up an expedient enthusiasm for the Jewish state. But Adams seemed genuine when he said he planned to retire in Israel. Asked where, Adams said “the Golan Heights” (which, to be sure, is actually Syrian territory occupied by Israel).

All the various strands of Adams’ political personality—his Zionism, his pro-cop stance, and his habit of lying—came together this week when he became the public face of the nationwide campus crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism. To be sure, this crackdown is supported by a dismayingly wide bipartisan consensus, headed by President Joe Biden. But Biden reserved his major pro-crackdown sentiment to a speech of less than four minutes, shameful but mercifully brief. By contrast Adams has been rushing into the limelight to make arguments on behalf of a large sweep of Columbia University on Tuesday which led to more than 300 arrests.

The campus crack-down, at both Columbia and schools across the nation, is indefensible. But when you are defending the indefensible, you need a spokesman like Adams, as prolific an inventor of fables as Scheherazade.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Adams offered this strange rationale for the crackdown:


There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it. This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children, and I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York.

This is a bizarre justification for a police action in a nation where free expression is constitutionally protected. After all, there is nothing illegal about “radicalizing” students, who are not, in any case, children. Adams is openly confessing to violating the First Amendment. The phrase “professionals” was much used by Adams and his administration as was the even more nakedly authoritarian “outside agitators.” Even as he talked of “outside agitators” on Tuesday, Adams acknowledged that the concept had a disreputable past. The “outside agitator” trope was much used by racists in the Jim Crow south as a way to demonize the civil rights movement. It is, as Columbia historian Mae Ngai noted, a “bogeyman narrative.” But the toxic history of the phrase didn’t stop Adams from using it.

When Adams tried to specify who the outside agitators were, he repeatedly botched the facts. As Nia Prater of New York notes:


Adams cited one woman, Nahla Al-Arian, whose husband he claimed was “convicted of terrorism.” But Al-Arian wasn’t on Columbia’s campus this week, and she told the AP that Adams had misstated her husband’s legal past. Another woman, Lisa Fithian, a longtime activist who has made appearances at Occupy Wall Street and many other protests, was seen instructing protesters on how to barricade a door outside Hamilton Hall the night it was first occupied. But Fithian, whom the NYPD describes as a “confirmed professional agitator,” told the New York Times that she wasn’t on campus Tuesday evening when the arrests were made.

Finally, there was the lie about the terrorist bicycle chain advanced by the Adams administration. On Wednesday, Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard was allowed to go on the Morning Joe show to hold up a chain and claim, “This is not what students bring to school. This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities.” What Sheppard was holding up was a common chain bicycle lock. As The New York Times’ Eric Toler noted, “This bike lock is/was available for sale on campus via Columbia’s Public Safety department.”

The current crackdown is predicated on the idea that pro-Palestine protesters are violent and pose a unique threat to academic well-being. This is the core lie and it is spread by both Adams and Joe Biden. But the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, with much of the violence that has occurred coming from cops and pro-Israel counterprotesters—very notably at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The police violence can be seen in shocking videos such as one from Dartmouth, where the police threw to the ground professor Annelise Orleck who is the former head of the Jewish Studies program at Dartmouth and 65 years old.

A report by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a think tank that tracks conflict, concluded: “While some notable violent clashes have recently taken place, such as on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus, where demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fought at a student encampment overnight on 30 April, the overwhelming majority—99%—have remained peaceful.”


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The violence at UCLA is instructive. The pro-Israel counterprotesters were organized by a group funded by billionaire Bill Ackman and friends, including Jessica Seinfeld (wife of the erstwhile comedian Jerry Seinfeld). Many of the hired protesters seem to have been Iranian monarchists—a group that tends to be pro-Israel because of the old alliance between the deposed shah of Iran and Israel.

As both the Los Angeles Times and The Forward have reported, the pro-Israel counterprotesters were extremely violent. According to the LA Times:


Four student journalists who work for the UCLA Daily Bruin were attacked shortly before 3:30 AM. Wednesday by Pro-Israel counterprotesters during a campus demonstration that turned violent.

Daily Bruin news editor Catherine Hamilton, 21, told The Times she recognized one of the counterprotesters as someone who had previously verbally harassed her and taken pictures of her press badge. The individual instructed the group to encircle the student journalists, she said, before they sprayed the four with mace or pepper spray, flashed lights in their faces and chanted Hamilton’s name.

As she tried to break free, Hamilton said, she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen; another student journalist was pushed to the ground and beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. The attack was first reported in the Daily Bruin.

The pro-Israel counter protest is complex, since it has elements of both an organic movement and an AstroTurf campaign. Surely the logic behind it was to turn a peaceful protest violent in order to bring in the police—which is exactly what happened. It is notable that this violent pro-Israel agitation has not received any widespread political criticism.

As the police intervene, the chances of real violence rapidly increase. On Tuesday night, the New York Police Department fired a gun in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. This event is still mysterious since the NYPD has been evasive about the incident, which seems to have been an accident. But even a misfire can lead to real death. The police escalation is making campuses much less safe.

As Yousef Munayyer of the US Campaign for Palestinian rights notes, “What is happening in NYC between Adams and the Columbia admin reeks of scandal and cover up to the high heaven. They made up a pretext and lied to initiate a police raid, trotted out a clown with a bike lock, then didn’t say anything about firing a weapon on campus.” Amid the current dangerous moment, the American political elite desperately needs a shameless liar. Eric Adams is clearly the right man for this task.

Shady far-right groups behind Texas Tech professor’s suspension

Omar Zahzah The Electronic Intifada 3 May 2024

Jairo Fúnez-Flores speaks at a Palestine vigil in March. Charles H.F. Davis IIICampus Abolition Research Lab

Palestinian scholarship and education have been a consistent target of Zionism’s settler-colonial violence against Palestinians.

As we enter the seventh month of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, this targeting, originally identified as “scholasticide” by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi in 2009, has escalated.

Israel has destroyed or severely damaged all 12 of Gaza’s universities and institutions of higher learning, struck more than 80 percent of all schools across the Gaza Strip, and killed 95 university professors and 261 teachers.

“Israel kills poets, artists and academics who can mobilize people with their work and give Palestinians a shared cultural sense,” writes Sewar Elejla. “The killings are undertaken so that the goals of Zionism – Israel’s state ideology – can be attained … Israel has a 75-year history of killing Palestine’s great minds.”

Educators and students in the US are not being physically exterminated by Israel’s genocide. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the connection between scholasticide in Palestine and the Zionist imperative to eliminate any and all criticism of the Israeli colonial project within US educational spaces.

This is a process that unfolds with full US institutional support. Assassinating Indigenous Palestinians and repressing critics abroad both serve Zionism’s broader goal of achieving impunity for its colonial project.
Heightened backlash

Of course, none of this is exactly new: as far back as 1984, Edward Said wrote of how a “disciplinary communications apparatus exists in the West both for overlooking most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light, and for punishing those who try to tell the truth.”

But this dynamic has dramatically sharpened following 7 October. The backlash to US students and faculty who speak out against Israel’s atrocities is alleged by some commentators to have been so intense that it has resulted in a rate of politicized professional retaliation unseen since the McCarthy era and the Vietnam War.

As students and faculty brave arrests, violent police repression, firing and suspension for taking part in demonstrations to call for a direct end to their universities’ complicity in genocide and Zionist colonization, universities across the country are proudly entrenching themselves as punitive zones prepared to abet genocide in Gaza by stamping out criticism of Israel and Zionism by whatever means necessary.

And it’s not only physical acts of protest that are met with ceaseless repression: On 4 March in a move that echoes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s firing of Steven Salaita,Texas Tech University suspended Jairo Fúnez-Flores for his Tweets on X (formerly Twitter.)

Fúnez-Flores is assistant professor of curriculum studies and teacher education.

While Fúnez-Flores was eventually reinstated on 12 April after an investigation by the University’s Office of Equal Opportunity found no evidence of discrimination, the details of his case are worth revisiting at length as they provide broader insight into the repressive atmosphere at universities at this moment in time, and the potential dangers faced by outspoken faculty.
Spurious narrative

Although university officials described Fúnez-Flores’ tweets as “hateful, anti-Semitic and unacceptable,” which was given as the reason for the suspension, they did not provide a direct example of anti-Semitic content to media either during his suspension or following his reinstatement.

This is because they couldn’t. An avowed supporter of Palestinian liberation, Fúnez-Flores, whose research interests include decolonial theory, is clearly anti-Zionist. To consider that anti-Semitic can only be done by enforcing a false conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

But this remains a dominant strategy for Israel and its allies to make support for Palestine costly for dissenters.

“We take the First Amendment’s application to public universities seriously; however, we are also committed to providing a safe learning and working environment that is free from harassment, including anti-Semitic harassment, and will not tolerate behavior that crosses the line into harassment and interferes with or limits the ability of an individual to participate in the educational activities of Texas Tech University (TTU),” university president Lawrence Schovanec and Texas Tech’s System Chancellor Tedd Mitchell wrote in a joint statement justifying Fúnez-Flores’s suspension.

Shovanec and Mitchell also referenced the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Department of Education to schools across the US on 25 May, 2023, as further justification for their actions. This letter, purportedly written as a reminder to US schools of their duty to “provide all students, including Jewish students, a school environment free from discrimination,” was part of the Biden administration’s first ever “US National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism.”

It was a plan that, as Ali Abunimah wrote last year legitimizes the false conflation of anti-Semitism and support for Palestinian freedom by laundering the repressive Anti-Defamation League’s spurious narrative that Palestine activism and advocacy on college campuses somehow threatens Jewish students.
An outside organization

But there are also more local forces at play.

As with many instances of individuals facing workplace retaliation for their views on Palestine, Fúnez-Flores’s story begins with an outside organization.

On 22 February, a far-right publication called Texas Scorecard ran a hit-piece against Fúnez-Flores titled “Texas Tech Professor Publicly Expresses Anti-Semitism.”

Authored by Kristen Stanciu, the article was a clear attempt to ensure that Texas Tech take action against Fúnez-Flores for his views.

Employing a format evocative of anti-Palestinian blacklist sites such as Canary Mission, the piece opens with a lede stating Fúnez-Flores “publicly posted anti-Semitic remarks,” then proceeds to enumerate a cached list of Fúnez-Flores’s Tweets from 11 February 2024 to 7 October 2023 in a deceptively clinical manner suggesting expressions of support for Palestinian liberation are self-evidently declarations of anti-Semitism.

The majority of interviewees, including Dallas Jewish Conservatives President Benji Gershon, directly call for Texas Tech to fire Fúnez-Flores. The piece also cites Texas Tech’s Code of Ethical Conduct, suggesting the university has run afoul of its own protocol, and ends by uplifting Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ attacks on higher education as an example of the possibility for “serious reform of higher education.”

A quick glance at Stanciu’s other articles reveals a repeated anxiety about Chinese Communist Party “infiltration” of Texas Tech and business institutions, often described as a “red threat”.

In short, the article was an unsubstantiated partisan attack, and not the kind of material university officials genuinely concerned with student well-being ought to have ever been swayed by in the first place. Yet the attack seems to have borne fruit: Fúnez-Flores told The Electronic Intifada that a day after the piece appeared in Texas Scorecard, he was called into a meeting with the university’s dean, where he was confronted with screenshots of his tweets and questioned about their contents, including the use of profanity.

Ten days later, on 4 March, Fúnez-Flores said, he received an email from Texas Tech president Schovanec informing him that he was being officially placed on suspension due to the anti-Semitic nature of his tweets. Immediately after he was suspended, Schovanec and Mitchell released their statement to the media, suggesting that the outcome had been planned in advance.
A partisan organ

It’s unclear why Texas Scorecard chose this specific moment to target Fúnez-Flores.

What is clear is that the Scorecard is not an independent, impartial publication, but a partisan organ that emerged from a constellation of powerful, highly conservative and anti-democratic local organizations and business interests.

Texas Scorecard began as a publication of the Tea Party-aligned conservative advocacy group Empower Texans, which was largely funded by Tim Dunn, an oil billionaire dubbed by TexasMonthly as “the billionaire bully who wants to turn Texas into a Christian Theocracy.”

The publication also describes Dunn as “the largest individual source of campaign money” in Texas “by far.” Though Texas Scorecard supposedly became independent of Empower Texans in 2020, it continues to run material critical of political candidates opposed by Dunn, who uses his inordinate wealth to sway elections and promote far-right, Christian nationalist causes with astroturfed media outlets and PACs such as Empower Texans and Defend Texas Liberty PAC.

In October 2023, Jonathan Stickland, the then-president of Defend Texas Liberty hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who received $3 million from the organization, pledged that his campaign would spend the same amount on Israel bonds after initially framing the meeting between the Hitler supporter and Defend Texas Liberty PAC as nothing more than “a serious blunder.”

The Texas Tribune reported that Defend Texas Liberty, funded by Dunn and Texas billionaire Farris Wilks, is “a key part of a sprawling network of campaigns, institutions, dark money groups and media companies that they have funded to push their far-right views.”

Dunn reportedly gave at least $9.85 million to Defend Texas Liberty PAC since the start of 2022.
Not the first time

As The Austin Chronicle revealed, Texas Tech’s suspension of Fúnez-Flores is not the first time that Texas Scorecard has initiated a campaign against Texas Tech, of which Dunn himself is an alumnus.

Maggie Q. Thompson reported that Dunn also vice chairs the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is dedicated to defunding public education. As Thompson argues, attacks on Texas Tech reveal how Texas Scorecard serves as the “propaganda arm” of the movement to “eliminate public education altogether.”

However, Fúnez-Flores’ suspension from 4 March to 12 April may be the first time that Texas Scorecard succeeded in directly pressuring the university administration to do its bidding.

The suspension of Jairo Fúnez-Flores, then, had nothing to do with genuine concern for anti-Semitism or student well-being, and the university’s initial capitulation to anti-democratic Christian nationalist forces reveals the degree to which unconditional support for Zionism is weaponized to inoculate institutions and powerful actors from charges of anti-Semitism – even when these institutions are directly tied to literal anti-Semites.

On their part, students called for Texas Tech to reverse its decision and reinstate Fúnez-Flores. On 5 March, Texas Tech Students for Justice in Palestine issued a statement of support for Fúnez-Flores.

“The widespread punishment of university faculty is parallel to the recent pervasive destruction of myriad academic and cultural landmarks in Gaza, including universities, libraries and bookstores. It is deeply disappointing that Texas Tech University is contributing to the oppression of voices within our community,” the statement read.

Recognizing the danger of letting Texas Tech’s actions go unchallenged, organizations from PEN America, MESA, Texas American Association of University Professors and FIRE issued letters of support for Fúnez-Flores.
Reinstatement

In a welcome turn of events, Fúnez-Flores was reinstated on 12 April after the investigation predictably failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing.

“After completing the investigation, OEO [Office of Equal Opportunity] did not find evidence of a violation of Texas Tech policy for discriminatory harassment. As a result, Prof. Fúnez-Flores’ suspension with pay has concluded, and he is cleared to return to his job functions,” read a statement sent to Texas Tech faculty on 12 April by Schovanec and Mitchell.

But Schovanec and Mitchell’s latest statement still maligns Fúnez-Flores’s social media posts in support of Palestine, notably relying on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which automatically conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism:

“It is important to reiterate that we deplore the social media posts by Prof. Fúnez-Flores’ and find them to be hateful, anti-Semitic and antithetical to our Code of Ethics,” Mitchell and Shovanec wrote.

“The sentiments he has expressed are anti-Semitic according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism. This definition has also been adopted by Texas Government Code, the US Department of State, and the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.”

The invocation of IHRA to further delegitimize Fúnez-Flores’s views at the very instance Schovanec and Mitchell were forced to concede they could find no evidence of wrongdoing reflects how it was always Fúnez-Flores’s anti-colonial politics which were at issue, and that universities remain committed to the false conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as a means of muzzling dissent.

Fúnez-Flores told The Electronic Intifada that the weaponization of the IHRA definition to stigmatize political speech on Palestine serves to deflect from the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as from the actual anti-Semitism of white nationalist movements in Texas.

It also reflects a willful ignorance of his actual pedagogical practice.

“As a decolonial scholar, I begin my courses speaking about the dehumanization of Muslim and Jewish peoples in Spain, and how this was exported to the Americas during conquest,” Fúnez-Flores said. “Texas Tech’s case against me is debunked by what I actually teach.”

While he was still under suspension, Fúnez-Flores told The Electronic Intifada that he was undeterred: “Speaking out as a genocide unfolds is the least we can do,” Fúnez-Flores said at the time. “We have to speak out no matter the consequences.”

This commitment has not wavered.

“I don’t intend to be silenced, especially after my reinstatement,” Fúnez-Flores said. “I’ll continue to speak out, despite the consequences.”

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University.