Plastic, Plastic Everywhere — Even at the UN’s “Plastic Free” Conference

At a conference meant to address the plastic crisis, pro-plastic messaging was inescapable. Meanwhile, industry insiders — some positioned as government delegates — were given access to vital negotiations.

By Lisa Song

May 11, 2024
Source: ProPublica

Pro-plastic ads near the Ottawa, Ontario, convention center where the United Nations plastics treaty negotiations took place Credit:James Park for ProPublica


When I registered to attend last month’s United Nations conference in Canada, organizers insisted it would be a “plastic free meeting.” I wouldn’t even get a see-through sleeve for my name tag, they warned; I’d have to reuse an old lanyard.

After all, representatives from roughly 170 countries were gathering to tackle a crisis: The world churns out 400 million metric tons of plastic a year. It clogs landfills and oceans; its chemical trail seeps into our bodies. Delegates have been meeting since 2022 as part of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in hopes of ending this year with a treaty that addresses “the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.”

The challenge before delegates seemed daunting: How do you get hundreds of negotiators to agree on anything via live, group editing? Especially when representatives from fossil fuel and chemical companies would be vigorously working to shift the conversation away from what scientists say is the only solution to the crisis: curbing plastic production.

But when I got to the meeting, I discovered those industry reps were not the sideshow; they were welcomed into the main event.

They could watch closed-door sessions off limits to reporters. Some got high-level badges indistinguishable from those worn by country representatives negotiating the treaty. These badges allowed them access to exclusive discussions not open to some of the world’s leading health scientists.

In a setting that was supposed to level the inequalities among those present, I watched how country delegates and conference organizers did little to minimize them, making what was already going to be a challenging process needlessly opaque and avoidably contentious.

With such high stakes, I asked the INC Secretariat — the staff at the UN Environment Programme who facilitated the negotiations process — why they hadn’t set rules on conflict of interest or transparency. They told me that wasn’t their job, that it was up to countries to take the lead. But in some cases, countries pointed me right back to the UN.

Over five days, I would come to understand just how hard it will be to get meaningful action on plastics.A pro-plastic ad Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Day 1: Represent the Public? Stay Out.

From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center.

Their message: Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. (I could almost see the marketing pitch: Think of the children!)

These plastics deliver water, read one, depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.

I headed to the media registration desk and got my green-striped badge, which placed me at the lowest rung of the pecking order.

At the top were people on official delegations. Their red-striped badges opened the door to every meeting, from the large “plenaries” where rows of country representatives spoke into microphones, to smaller working groups where negotiators hashed out specifics like whether to ban certain chemicals used in plastic.

The majority of the attendees wore orange badges. This hodgepodge of so-called observers included scientists, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and some industry reps, though the color code made no distinction among them.

Observers were allowed into certain working groups at the discretion of government delegates.

Reporters could attend only plenaries.

These huge, open sessions were like the UN equivalent of Senate floor speeches: declarations and repetition to get ideas into the public record.

Veteran observers tracked the real action in the margins, standing in the back of the ballroom to watch who was talking to whom. It was an art, they said: You want to stroll close enough to read the small print on name tags, but you have to be chill about it.

I was not chill about the lack of access, which prevented sources from talking about what happened behind closed-door proceedings. They were governed by rules that prohibited those present from recording the meetings or revealing who had said what.

Reporters trying to inform the public and hold governments accountable were completely shut out. Yet somehow the rules allowed the industry whose survival depends on more plastic production to dispatch reps to watch negotiators at work.

The rules follow the “norms when it comes to fundamentals of negotiating, multilateralism, and diplomacy amongst UN Member States,” said a statement from the INC Secretariat. These meetings are managed by the countries negotiating the treaty, the statement said; the countries set the rules.

But when I asked the U.S. State Department, which led the U.S. delegation in Ottawa, whether journalists should have more access, a spokesperson directed me back to the UN.An environmental health advocacy group near the Ottawa convention center Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Day 2: “The Human Right to Science”

I heard about an exhibit at the nearby Westin hosted by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. It sounded like an environmental group, but an online search showed it was founded by corporations including Dow and ExxonMobil. Dow didn’t respond to a request for comment. ExxonMobil said it attended the conference “to be a resource, bring solutions to the table and listen to a broad range of views by all stakeholders.”

As I wandered through the ballroom stocked with refreshments, shiny videos and diagrams promoted the potential of “circularity,” a marketing term that’s often focused on recycling. Independent research shows pollution will skyrocket if companies don’t curb production, but the industry has, for decades, shifted attention from that with false promises about waste management.

“The work we do is not the whole solution,” the alliance later told me in an email.

But I could easily see someone leaving the exhibit with that impression.

The finer points of plastic science, from its toxic manufacturing process to the limits of recycling, are highly technical and complex.

While countries like the United States could afford to fly in multiple experts to inform government delegates, other countries could not.

Later that day, I met Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, who was among 60 independent, volunteer researchers who had traveled to Canada in hopes of bridging that gap in access to expertise.

As part of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, they shared fact sheets and peer-reviewed studies and made themselves available for questions. Carney Almroth said ensuring the integrity of the group was vital. Members must have a proven track record of researching plastic pollution and follow a conflict-of-interest policy to prevent bias.

“The human right to science,” she said, “includes the right to transparency.”Bethanie Carney Almroth, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, is on the steering committee of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Day 3: “No Such Thing as Conflict of Interest”

For the first two of these conferences, the INC Secretariat didn’t include the participants’ affiliations when they released the list of people who had registered for the event, making it hard to tell who worked for the industry. That has since changed, making it easier for advocacy groups to scour lists for fossil fuel and chemical company affiliations.

After the UN released the roster of the 4,000 people who had registered for Ottawa this year, the Center for International Environmental Law released its analysis of industry attendees. It found about 200 people with observer-level badges.

What’s more, the group said, 16 industry representatives had received the red badges usually reserved for government delegates. They were invited onto official delegations by China, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and Uganda. I later learned an Indonesian delegate was listed as part of its Ministry of Industry; LinkedIn revealed him to be a director at a petrochemical firm.

I reached out to officials from all 10 countries. Most did not respond.

(The United States wasn’t on the list. “As a matter of policy, the United States does not include any industry or civil society representatives in our official delegation,” said a spokesperson from the State Department.)

There is “no such thing as conflict of interest in International negotiations,” the executive director of the Uganda National Environment Management Authority, Barirega Akankwasah, told me in a WhatsApp message. It’s “a matter of country positions and not individual positions,” he said, adding that the conference was “open and transparent” and stakeholders were “all welcome to participate.”

An official from the Dominican Republic, Claudia Taboada, told me that environmental groups and academic scientists had been consulted before the Ottawa conference and that the two industry reps on the country’s eight-member delegation had restricted privileges. They were barred from internal meetings where observers weren’t allowed, she said, and they couldn’t negotiate on behalf of the government.Claudia Taboada was part of the official delegation from the Dominican Republic. She is director for science technology and environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Those industry reps weren’t trying to influence the government’s position, added Taboada, who is director for science, technology and environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I found that hard to believe. Who would sit through days of bureaucratic meetings just to observe?

A red-striped badge provides tangible benefits, multiple attendees told me, like access to email lists and WhatsApp chats that are closed to observers. A university scientist who’s part of Fiji’s official delegation, Rufino Varea, said it’s easier to talk to official delegates from other countries when you have that badge. It shows only a person’s name and country, making it impossible to tell at a glance whether someone works for the government or for private interests.

A press release issued that day showed a counter-analysis of the entire list of attendees from the International Council of Chemical Associations, which said that industry observers were vastly outnumbered by more than 2,000 members from nongovernmental organizations like environmental advocacy groups.

Many of these groups are “incredibly well funded” and supported by billionaires, said a subsequent email from the American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest plastics lobby. It noted that at least eight countries had NGO representatives on their official delegations.Rufino Varea is in his final semester as a doctoral student in ecotoxicology at the University of the South Pacific. Varea said Fiji’s delegation supports a strong treaty that limits plastic production. Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Day 4: Fighting for Attention

For every NGO with millions in the bank, there were others whose members couldn’t afford the trip to Ottawa. Many had to compete for limited travel funds from sources like the UN or larger advocacy groups.

I sat down with John Chweya, a friendly man in a leather jacket who makes a living as a waste picker in Kenya. A single salad at the conference cost more than a day’s pay.

As president of the Waste Pickers Association of Kenya, he wanted delegates to understand how plastic impacts the millions around the world who collect garbage and sort the recyclables they can sell in places without formal waste disposal. Toxic fumes from plastic burning in landfills make his fellow workers sick, he told me. They wake up with swollen necks, joints that don’t work and mysterious tumors. Chweya wants the world to make less plastic; he came to Ottawa to fight for protective gear and health care.

The specificity of his story brought home how the experiences of front-line communities could inform the understanding of the plastics crisis.John Chweya traveled to Ottawa to advocate for waste pickers in Kenya. Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Others like Chweya tried to give voice to huge portions of the world’s populations that are suffering from every step in the plastic life cycle: residents of Indigenous communities and Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” breathing dangerous plant emissions; Pacific Islanders seeing their coral reefs entangled in abandoned fishing nets; activists from lower-income countries that are swimming in Americans’ discarded plastic.

I watched them trying to grab the attention of government officials with handwritten posters, events in cramped rooms and limited speaking slots during the plenary.

None of it matched the flash of the billboards I could not seem to avoid, which heralded their own impending health emergency.

These plastics save lives, one decreed, featuring a girl in a hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask.

Negotiators couldn’t even agree on setting voluntary reductions for plastic production, I thought. Nobody was proposing to eliminate enough plastic to cause hospital shortages.

Chweya called the prevalent ads “traitorous.”

Day 5: The UN Isn’t Powerless

UN officials had warned against the inequities playing out in Ottawa.

In November 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement during the first conference to negotiate the treaty, held in Uruguay.

Even though they weren’t hosting it, human rights officials had advice on how to proceed. “The plastic industry has disproportionate power and influence over policy relative to the general public,” they wrote. “Clear boundaries on conflict of interest should be established … drawing from existing good practices under international law.”

They recommended policies similar to those adopted by the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a separate UN treaty. Government representatives meet every two years to evaluate results. Recognizing that the tobacco industry’s presence was fundamentally incompatible with protecting public health, the countries agreed to virtually ban Big Tobacco from those meetings.

“It is irresponsible and inaccurate to liken plastics to tobacco,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement in response to my questions about this comparison. “Unlike the tobacco industry, the plastics industry is playing a vital role in helping meet the UN’s sustainability goals by contributing to food safety, healthcare, renewable energy, telecommunications, clean drinking water, and much more. …

“Keeping plastic producers out means a less informed treaty,” the council said. “We are essential and constructive stakeholders in the global effort to prevent plastic pollution.”

Short of barring the plastics industry, many have wondered why the UN can’t start with smaller steps, like giving industry observers a different kind of badge.

The fossil fuel companies “that are manufacturing plastics” are “not coming to these negotiations with solutions,” Baskut Tuncak, a former UN special rapporteur for human rights and toxics, told me. They’re here “to throw a wrench in the process, or two, or three.”

When I asked if it intended to introduce conflict-of-interest controls, the INC Secretariat said it couldn’t impose rules unilaterally. Governments would have to decide for themselves.

Some U.S. and European politicians have requested such reforms. Negotiators should consider measures “to protect against undue influence of corporate actors with proven vested interests that contradict the goals of the global plastics treaty,” said a letter last month sent to President Joe Biden and the secretary-general of the United Nations.

It was signed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who’s often criticized the fossil fuel industry’s influence on public policy, along with 11 other members of Congress and a member of the European Parliament. Industry reps should be required to disclose lobbying records and campaign contributions, the letter suggested.

The UN isn’t powerless, said Tuncak and Ana Paula Souza, a UN human rights officer I met on my last day in Ottawa. There’s more the institution could do to raise the profile of the issue, they said. Souza said the UN could also increase funding to allow more of those most affected by plastic pollution to attend these meetings.An art installation outside the Ottawa convention center Credit: James Park for ProPublica

Looking Ahead

The Ottawa conference ended with limited progress. Negotiators have a long way to go to reach a final draft at the last scheduled conference this November in Busan, South Korea. Smaller groups of delegates will meet before then; it’s unclear how many observers will be able to attend.

It’s tempting to feel pessimistic. This could easily end up like the UN climate treaty — anemic, voluntary and dragging on forever.

And it’s not like a conflict-of-interest policy would magically solve everything. Countries with powerful plastics lobbies, including the United States, can still advocate for corporate interests.

But it’s worth stepping back to recognize the magnitude of what’s happening.

Nearly every government on Earth signed up for days of painstaking sessions on plastic as a global threat — even places confronting existential crises, like Haiti, Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine. The world recognizes the importance of figuring this out. And despite all the industry influence, capping plastic production remains a possibility.

Great Expectations – Germany’s Petite Bourgeoisie

By Thomas Klikauer, Danny Antonelli 

May 11, 202
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




For the past few years, Germany’s petty bourgeoisie or middle class has been losing confidence in society, politics, and capitalism.

They are increasingly at odds with the democratic parties they have trusted so far and which they have elected regularly in various constellations in past decades.

This applies to what a recent study identifies as two different sub-groups within Germany’s middle class:Traditionalists:

The first group is the “nostalgic-bourgeois milieu”. These are those who hang on to a conservative and traditional worldview. Members of this group strive for a high degree of economic security and social harmony. Traditionalists have a desire for secure socio-economic conditions. They tend to stick to traditional rules while longing for the so-called “good old days” – even though this may be no more than a romantic hallucination.Modernizers:

The second group is composed of those in the “adaptive-pragmatic milieu” of the German middle class. They are younger and have a more modern outlook. Modernizers tend to be furnished with a relatively high level of education. This section of Germany’s middle class tends to be innovative, performance-oriented, and displays a willingness to adopt to ever-changing socio-economic conditions.

Interestingly, only one in four – just 26% of people – in the nostalgic bourgeois milieu and only one in two or about 50% in the adaptive-pragmatic milieu are optimistic about the future. Worse, there has been a 20% overall decline in confidence in the future since 2022.

This decline in being confident about the future among Germany’s middle class is twice as high as in Germany’s average population. More than other Germans, this section of the German population – the middle class – fears what the future will bring.

Germany’s democratic parties are losing support in both sub-milieus of Germany’s center – the traditionalists and the modernizers. This impacts on the current governing coalition or what is called the “traffic-light-coalition”.

Currently in government, the traffic-light-coalition consists of three political parties representing the three colors of a traffic light: the social-democratic SPD (red);
the neoliberal FDP (yellow); and,
the environmentalist The Greens (green).

Surprisingly, the decline of support for Germany’s governing coalition did not lead to an upswing for the democratic opposition, the conservative CDU. Because German conservatives are stagnating in public polling, the CDU fails to benefit from the overall decline in support for the government.

Germany’s conservative CDU only gained a meagre 7% from the traditionalist cohort of the middle class. And from the pragmatic group, it got even less support – just 3%. In other words, the decline of support for Germany’s governing “traffic-light-coalition” did not result in an advantage for Germany’s conservatives.

Beyond all that, the overall decline in support for the government and in its democratic institutions, and even an erosion of support for its democratic opposition is in line with a global trend, a worldwide decline in democracy.

At the same time, almost three quarters – a whopping 73% – of all Germans are convinced that it is better for the government to borrow money today in order to invest in the future, and the middle class agrees with this. This is a rather robust rejection of fiscal tightening and austerity.

More than two-thirds of people in the middle class also see it that way. Both – the average German and members of the middle class – support more investment in schools, infrastructure, and climate protection.

State support, in turn, would strengthen the confidence of the center, i.e. the middle class and would strengthen the overall support for democracy.

The middle class has long been a stabilizing element of West Germany’s post-Nazi society. However, this seems to be changing. Once ready to embrace democratic and economic change, today’s middle class seems to be more unsettled and worried.

Among other things, they are unsettled by the frequent crises of capitalism. The recently noticed shift from confidence to trepidation has only been increasing.

While it has been getting a lot of public attention in Germany’s media recently, the decline in confidence has been a longer-term development that has very clearly emerged over the last twenty years.

The once overtly self-confident petty bourgeoisie of the mid-2000s was characterized by an acceptance of a somewhat fictional belief in the “normality” of economic growth.

In short, the petty bourgeoisie fell for the neoliberal promise of eternal growth – a factual impossibility given that earth’s resources are not unlimited.

Once hooked on the glittery promises of neoliberal capitalism pushed by media capitalism, an awareness has increasingly begun to sink in that other – non-economic – values are rising in the consciousness of many people inside as well as outside of the middle class.

These values might be called “post-material values”. They are, for example, ecology, emancipation, interculturality, and so on. This shift in values – linked to an increased awareness of the false promises of neoliberalism – put pressure on the fabricated “certainties” of Germany’s middle class.

Since about 2015, these pressures have slowly led to a new development within Germany’s middle class. It has resulted in an ever more marked differentiation of the middle class into a traditional and nostalgic petit-bourgeois section and an adaptive, modernistic, and pragmatic section.

Despite the split, there are also elements that unite them. One thing is that both technically remain part of the working class because members in both groups are forced to sell their labor to make a living. Both parts also remain united in their quest for social harmony, predictability, job security, and economic prosperity.

Meanwhile, the traditional-nostalgic petty bourgeoisie part feels under pressure due to the constant demand for change caused by, for example, digitization, an ever more diverse society, and how to deal with global warming.

The traditionalists seem to follow the motto: “If something has to change, then only so that everything remains as it is.” The middle class is challenged by:the lack of innovation,
the lagging behind in digitization,
the ever-increasing level of bureaucracy,
the escalating exposure to global competition that challenges its quasi-religious credence that “competition is good”, and
the shortage of skilled workers that impacts Germany’s labor market and businesses.

All this is making life difficult, if not precarious, for the middle class. Unlike the traditionalists, the modernizing and adaptive-pragmatic part of the middle class remains more optimistic about the future.

Their ambitions towards modernization are, however, challenged by an aging post-war infrastructure in urgent need of repair. More worryingly, their belief in eternal growth is being challenged by a flattening economic growth. The deceitful promises of capitalism are slowly catching up with Germany’s petty bourgeoisie.

Optimism about the future of capitalism and eternal economic growth has decreased by a gigantic 20% within just two years and it has done so in both parts of the shrinking middle class.

This is striking but not at all surprising. Much worse than these findings is that the declining optimism has been accompanied by a growing openness to right-wing populist propaganda.

Still worse, far-right propaganda is constantly seeping through into both of the parts.

Paradoxically, the current overall satisfaction with life in general in the middle classes has remained rather high. This is counteracted by the fact that many people in the middle class see their immediate future as deeply clouded. This also impacts on politics.

When taken together, Germany’s democratic parties used to receive a whopping 75% of the electoral vote. Until a few years ago, the neofascist AfD was far behind with only 10% to 12%. The pragmatic center of Germany’s middle class used to remain firmly in the hands of Germany’s democratic parties.

This changed in 2023 and 2024. On the famous Sunday-Question about federal elections: “Who would you vote for if next Sunday where election day?”, support for the three-party traffic light coalition had almost halved by the end of February 2024. But by late April 2024, the coalition had regained some ground.

One of the more recent polls showed: conservative CDU 30%; social-democratic SPD 15%; environmental The Greens 13%; neoliberal FDP 5%; socialist Die Linke 4%; BSW 7%; and the neofascist AfD 18%. In other words, Germany’s traffic-light coalition would receive 58% in mid-April 2024 – still a governing majority.

Nevertheless, the fact that the neo-Nazi AfD remains at 18% is worrying – and that is despite massive rallies against the AfD for the past few months. The impact of the roughly 1700 anti-far-right rallies with between 3.7 and 4.9 million people on the public polling of the AfD does not seem to have been that great.

Both political parties, the AfD and BSW, seem to have taken over the mood of large sections of the nostalgic middle class. If combined, they would have 25% of voter support, with 18% coming from the neofascist AfD and 7% coming from the BSW. This used to be the political space traditionally occupied by the conservative CDU.

The CDU’s strategy of imitating the AfD’s racist dogwhistle politics does not seem to be paying off. Things have been made even worse through their strategy of confrontation. Instead of conversation that leads to compromise, confrontation blocks any fruitful talk about the central issues of German domestic, economic and social policy.

Because of this strategy, the conservatives have, so far, failed to achieve their goal of moving the CDU back into the 40-plus percentage region of voter support which they once had under Kohl and Merkel.

The conservatives have not been able to benefit from the erosion of support for the traffic light coalition. The CDU’s strategy does not seem to be able to break the 30% glass ceiling barrier.

Also, overall, the democratic parties of the traffic-light-coalition do not currently appear to be able to show a sufficient problem-solving ability – at least as presented in the media, which leans mostly neoliberal and further to the right than the general population.

In the end, the mood inside Germany’s middle class remains miserable. The traditionalists, especially, are looking less and less optimistically into the future. Their loss of confidence shapes the social mood, and this is transferred to the wider milieu of the entire middle class.

At the same time, middle class support for Germany’s democratic center is waning, although still managing to remain above the 50% threshold.

Unfortunately, there is a resurgence of polarization and social conflicts in Germany. This, together with the developments outlined above, has led to a strengthening of right-wing populism that increasingly shapes polls and has the potential to impact election results.

The shift to the right might come to the forefront in the upcoming European parliament election and, later in the year, in three state elections in the former East-Germany. The neofascist AfD leads in the polls in Saxony with 31.3%; in Thuringia with 30%; and in Brandenburg with 26.2%.

Unlike the staunchly neoliberal economic policy of the AfD – one of Germany’s most reputable economic research institutes called it “vote AfD and lose” – Germany’s middle class, just like the vast majority of all people in Germany, do not want neoliberalism nor do they want austerity.

They want the exact opposite, namely more investment in the important areas of life, a better functioning infrastructure, better schools and hospitals.

State investment – not austerity, neoliberalism, and the free market – will, so Germany’s middle class believes, foster a better life and that, in turn, will nurture the resilience of democracy.

Overall, Germany’s middle class has remained – more or less – resistant to the lure of right-wing populism. Yet the AfD has made some inroads into Germany’s middle class, mostly into the nostalgic traditionalist sector. Fortunately, these inroads are nowhere close to the inroads Hitler’s Nazi made in 1933.




Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).

Weaponizing Antisemitism

Why we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults.

By Ellen Cantarow, Jennifer Loewenstein 

May 11, 2024
Source: Common Dreams





All of us—and we are legion across the worldmust keep our eyes on the genocide in Gaza, as well as on the vicious pogroms underway in the West Bank. A recent statement by James Elder of UNICEF reports that in Rafah, “The European hospital is crammed with severely injured and dying children. A military offensive here will be catastrophic.”

At the same time, throughout the West Bank, mobs of fascist settlers torch homes, steal possessions including livestock, kill Palestinians and drive them off their land. All of this has been enabled by President Joseph Biden, who has sent fulsome amounts of aid to Israel to carry out its genocidal and ethnic cleansing assaults on the Palestinian people. A holocaust, underwritten by the greatest military power in the world, is underway in both occupied territories.

Promoting the savageries Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said, “Whoever perpetrates against the Jewish people like these evil ones have perpetrated on us, will be destroyed, they will be annihilated, and it will echo for decades and decades onwards.” In another statement he declared: “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, total and utter destruction that will erase the memory of the Amalek from under the skies.”

This is the fulfillment of Israel’s dream of inhabiting all of what was once historic Palestine, making it a land unencumbered by its indigenous Arab population. Israel’s ongoing efforts since 1948 to kill or expel all Palestinians from what was historic Palestine have triggered student sit-ins and demonstrations on some 120 American college campuses.

Israel has become a country with powerful fascistic tendencies, headed by fanatics and demagogues catering to a population so filled with hatred of Arabs that it welcomes the genocide. In a recent article, “Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide,” Ellen recalls visiting the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s and seeing graffiti on walls that proclaimed, “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.” At that time renowned Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their victims bear out his prophecy. This hatred is pervasive in Israel. There are courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted something worse.

The student protests that for weeks have been under public scrutiny have been peaceful mass gatherings of citizens outraged at Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza. Yet early on, riot police were summoned to Columbia’s campus as well as that of the City College of New York, the University of Texas-Austin, UCLA, and others, to dismantle the encampments, arrest, and sometimes beat up students and supporting faculty. Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC last week showed images of a mob hurling fireworks at the UCLA protesters, spraying them with pepper spray, and beating them with sticks and other weapons.

In tandem with the police actions, cries of “antisemitism” have arisen about the protests. When interviewed in print or on television, the Jewish student activists have said unanimously that these protests are neither antisemitic nor hate-filled. Moreover, the antisemitism claims are irreconcilable with the fact that thousands of Jewish students nationwide are participating. Two leading protest organizations, Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now, are Jewish, proclaiming that never again may genocide take place against any people, not just Jews.

Both of us writers of this article have experienced real antisemitism. Ellen remembers, in her early childhood, around 1945, her mother saying that the local grocer, a Mr. McGonigle, was glad Hitler was “mopping up all the kikes.” She remembers the child in her third-grade class who called her “a kike.” Jennifer remembers being pelted with spitballs by classmates shouting “Jew!” at her for making a Star of David design in her art class. Meanwhile, her father recalled being chased around the block by a neighborhood bully holding a knife saying, “You killed Christ!”

These experiences mirror what until now has been the guiding definition of antisemitism, that of The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA): “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Yet the campaign against alleged “antisemitism” has gone forward, adding criticism of Israel to the definition of the term. In Congress, the House of Representatives on May 1 passed a bill entitled “The Antisemitism Awareness Act.” It makes speech seemingly threatening the existence of Israel newly “antisemitic,” citing, for example, the cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and of the Jews in it. It makes no difference that Jewish students and people like the writers of this article have chanted that slogan, intending its meaning to be that Palestinians should be free within a redefined state.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a longtime supporter of Israel and a Zionist, has criticized the bill: “While there is much in the bill that I agree with,” he said, “its core provision would put a thumb on the scale in favor of one particular definition of antisemitism to the exclusion of all others to be used when the Department of Education assesses claims of antisemitism on campus.” He continued that the new definition includes “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” adding: “The problem is that these examples may include protected speech, in some contexts, particularly with respect to criticism of the State of Israel.”

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide, is the author of an article entitled, “Weaponizing Language: Misuses of Holocaust Memory and the Never Again Syndrome.” In a recent dialogue with the Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, the two discussed antisemitism and “the perils of antisemitism and its current weaponization.”

In an April 30 interview on Democracy Now!, Bartov noted the peaceful nature of the University of Pennsylvania demonstration as well as the one at Brown University. Of antisemitism he said that it “is a vile sentiment, it’s an old sentiment, it has been used for bloodshed, for violence, and for genocide. But it has also become a tool to silence speech about Israel. And that, too, has quite a history, and numerous governments under Benjamin Netanyahu have been pushing this agenda of arguing that any criticism of Israeli policy, not least, of Israeli occupation policies, is antisemitic.” He added that there are Jewish students who feel threatened, for instance by the term “Intifada,” which literally means “shaking off,” as in the shaking off of the 57-year-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “But there’s nothing threatening about opposing occupation and oppression.”

The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which indeed weaponizes antisemitism against those protesting Israel’s savagery in Gaza and the cruelty of its overall occupation policies, is soon to be voted upon by the Senate. Its enactment would mark a giant step towards degrading the U.S. Constitution, in particular its protection of freedom of speech, assembly, and a free press. It also threatens the status of academia as a realm in which the free exchange of ideas can flourish.

Fascism threatens American democracy embodied in a Republican Party that has long ceased to be a political party and is rather, according to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of The American Enterprise Institute, “an insurrection.” The reelection of Donald Trump would import an Israeli-style fascism embodied by Netanyahu and Smotrich, while the reelection of Joe Biden will allow these smoldering tendencies to ignite the flames of that ideology within the U.S. If the Antisemitism Awareness Act is passed by the Senate, the erosion of civil liberties long anchored in the Constitution seems all but certain.

Like all forms of prejudice and ethnocentrism, antisemitism has no place in an enlightened society. But what about genocide? Is that an acceptable manifestation of a modern society? Are those denouncing protests against Israel’s genocidal and ethnic cleansing actions OK knowing that over 100,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed, wounded, and maimed in indiscriminate bombing raids across the Strip since Oct. 7th?

Meanwhile, all the focus on alleged antisemitism has diverted national attention from the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric settler actions in the West Bank. The official number of Gaza’s dead is close to 35,000 with another 8-10,000 people unaccounted for under the rubble. If 6,000 of these people were Hamas fighters, that still leaves a total of nearly 40,000 civilians dead.

News of atrocities within this holocaust continues. Recently, UN Special Rapporteur of the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese stated, “I am extremely alarmed by information that Dr. Adnan Albursh, a well-known surgeon at #alshifa_hospital, has died while detained by Israeli forces in the Ofer military prison. While I acquire more information, I urge the diplomatic community to intervene with CONCRETE MEASURES to protect Palestinians. No Palestinian is safe under Israel’s occupation today.”

Israel is neither a democratic nor a peace-loving society. It is an arm of US regional hegemony and a US client state that receives $3.8 billion annually in military aid and that has received over $30 billion additional military aid since October 7th. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received $158 billion in military support, making it the greatest recipient of US military aid in history. Israel has nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons the only such power in the Middle East to have this kind of arsenal. [We] suggest the next time someone complains that “little Israel” is “surrounded by enemies” (a false statement to begin with), people consider these facts. We need look no further than Tel Aviv to determine which nation is the real destabilizing force in the region.

If the Antisemitism Awareness Act passes the Senate, what will befall student protests? Will they all become acts of civil disobedience? What about the alternative press, whose independent organs have become invaluable given the corporate media’s pussyfooting or downright ignoring of the Gaza holocaust and West Bank atrocities? Will it be shuttered by the federal government on the grounds of banned “hate speech”? Will what we write be rejected by publications that fear for their survival?

“As a Jewish person who stands hand-in-hand with my Palestinian brothers and sisters and works daily against anti-Arab hate, I find this weaponization of my identity particularly disgusting,” states Arab-American Antidiscrimination Committee staff attorney Chris Godshall-Bennet. “Criticism of Zionism and of the Israeli government is not antisemitic, and conflating the two only serves to provide cover for Israel’s numerous, ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law, as well as its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Declares Palestinian poet Mohammad Al Kurd, “I am asked to have patience for these kinds of debates that tell me that words are genocidal. The Israeli regime is engaging in a war of attrition against the Palestinian people and yet we are asked to talk about chants and slogans… But this is about our moral obligation as human beings to reject genocide, the real genocide that is happening in real time.”

All people of conscience must keep this in mind. And we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults, to settler violence, and ultimately to the occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza.

We must honor the student demonstrators and all who champion them as the heroes they are, cease the opportunistic abuse of the term ‘antisemitism,’ and urge them to continue their protests.

Under the Pretext of “Antisemitism”, the Suppression of the Palestinian People is Accompanied by an Attempt to Suppress the Defense of their Cause

By Gilbert Achcar

May 10, 2024

Source: Daraj



The intensity of reactions from pro-Israel circles against that movement is only a confirmation of the importance of this development, which it would not be exaggerated to describe as historic.


The global movement denouncing the Zionist war of genocide going on in the Gaza Strip (and in the West Bank, at a lower intensity) – and in the context of that movement, most particularly, the youth movement that has developed in U.S. universities and is spreading from there to other countries – is the only glimmer of hope in the bleak and horrific scene of the destruction of Gaza. The intensity of reactions from pro-Israel circles against that movement is only a confirmation of the importance of this development, which it would not be exaggerated to describe as historic.

Indeed, the emergence of a mass movement sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in Western countries, especially in the home of the superpower without which the Zionist state would not be able to fight the current genocidal war, constitutes a very disturbing development in the eyes of the pro-Israel lobby. It threatens to establish among the new generation a rejection of Zionist barbarism that rivals the rejection of U.S. imperial barbarism more than half a century ago, which was one of the major factors leading Washington to stop its aggression against the Vietnamese people and withdraw its forces from their country in 1973.

This historical precedent is strongly present in the minds of Israel’s supporters in all Western countries, as the anti-Vietnam War movement included them all and even played a prominent role in the wave of leftist political radicalization among the student movement on a global scale at the end of the sixties. The alarm bell has hence rung in Zionist circles and their supporters, prompting them to launch a violent campaign against the movement standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine, seeking to silence it in various repressive ways, from ideological violence to police violence accompanied by legal violence.

These oppressive efforts are not new, of course, but are part of an ideological war that started from the beginning of the Zionist project and intensified as it moved into implementation in Palestine under the auspices of British colonialism. The battle reached its peak in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United Nations, which was newly established at the time under the hegemony of countries of the Global North, considered the issue of partitioning Palestine and granting the Zionist movement the right to establish its state there. At that stage, the Zionist effort in the “war of narratives” focused on portraying the Palestinians’ refusal of the establishment of a Zionist state on most of their homeland’s territory as if it were inspired by “antisemitism” of a sort akin to the Nazis’ hatred for the Jews and constituting a continuation of it. They portrayed the Zionist seizure of most of the land of Palestine in 1948, coupled with the uprooting of most of its indigenous people, as the last battle against Nazism, thus distorting and disguising the reality of that usurpation, which was in fact the last episode of settler colonialism (*).

Over time, Zionist propaganda became more fervent in its resort to labelling anyone hostile to the Zionist project as a Jew hater and a contin6uator of the Nazis. Two examples, among others, are Gamal Abdel Nasser, and after him Yasser Arafat, both depicted by that propaganda as counterparts of Adolf Hitler. This equation reached the height of absurdity and grotesque in the response of Menachem Begin, leader of the Likud Party whose fascist roots are well known, and Israeli Prime Minister when the Zionist army invaded Lebanon in 1982, to Ronald Reagan, then President of the United States who, in a letter to Begin, had expressed his concern about the fate of the civilian population in besieged Beirut. In his response, Begin wrote: “I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’, where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.”

The zeal of Zionist propaganda increased in its resort to accusations of anti-Semitism and comparisons to Nazism, as the image of the Zionist state became more degraded in international public opinion, and Western public opinion in particular. The fact is that this image has steadily deteriorated as the State of Israel has moved from the myth of a state redeeming the Nazi extermination of the Jews and run by pioneers of a socialist dream led by a “workers’ party”, to the reality of an expansionist militaristic state, led by the far right. This image transformation accelerated with the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territories (1982-2000) and the suppression of the first intifada in the occupied territories in 1967, which reached its peak in 1988, and later with the repeated bloody and destructive attacks on the Gaza Strip, starting with the “Gaza massacre” in 2009.

As the image of the Zionist state declined, its supporters’ propaganda focused on rejecting any radical criticism of it by accusing it of antisemitism. In 2005, some pro-Israel circles formulated a definition of antisemitism that included “examples” such as “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” (meaning that the comparison by the Zionists between several of their Arab enemies and Nazism is acceptable, just as the comparison between any state and Nazism is, except for the Zionist state, whose comparison with Nazism constitutes a form of antisemitism simply because it is “Jewish”) and “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” (in other words, describing any project that aims to create a state on the basis of racial or religious discrimination as racist is acceptable, except for the “Jewish State” project, for which that label is taboo).

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted that definition, prior to a campaign it launched in various Western countries, calling on them to officially adopt it to stifle criticism of Zionism. The campaign succeeded in getting the parliaments of countries such as Germany and France to adopt the definition. It culminated in an attempt to get the UN General Assembly to adopt the same definition. This attempt failed, however, especially after the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism advised in October 2022 against adopting the IHRA definition. Of course, the fervour among the supporters of the Zionist state has returned and reached frenzied forms in the face of the current escalation of global condemnation of the genocidal war that the Zionist state has been waging in Gaza for seven months.

Since the United States itself is a major theatre for this condemnation, especially among the student youth as emphasised at the beginning of this article, the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress adopted on the 1st of May a bill, submitted by a Republican representative in October of last year, calling for the adoption of the IHRA definition as a basis for “the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes”. 320 representatives voted in favour of this bill, compared to 91 who voted against it. 133 Democratic Party representatives joined the Republicans in voting in favour of the bill, while 70 Democratic Representatives and 21 Republican Representatives voted against it (with 18 abstaining from voting). While it was normal for representatives of the Democratic Left to vote against the pro-Israel bill, it was very odd to see representatives of the Republican far right reject it too, including the frenetic reactionary Representative Marjory Taylor Greene, the most extreme of Donald Trump’s supporters – so much so that the latter almost appears moderate in comparison to her.

Do not, dear reader, think that the rabid Republican rightists objected to the effort aimed at suppressing the movement denouncing Israeli barbarism because of attachment to the freedom of speech. They are the most enthusiastic devotees of the Zionist state, especially since the latter’s government has been including people who, like them, belong to the far right. They are also in favour of suppressing freedom of speech whenever it concerns opinions that they hate, and they frantically call for an escalation of repression against the students who oppose Israel’s genocidal war. The reason for their opposition to the bill lies simply in their loyalty to traditional antisemitism, which has long inspired a major section of Zionism’s supporters. These antisemites agree with Zionism in the view that the State of Israel is the Jews’ sole homeland, while hating the presence of Jews in their countries (just as they hate the presence of Muslims).

Whereas one of the traditional antisemitic arguments for hostility towards the Jews was to hold them collectively responsible for “the killing of Christ” on the pretext that the Gospels blamed a Jewish crowd for sentencing Christ to death, and since the examples of antisemitism given by the IHRA definition included “claims of Jews killing Jesus”, the Republicans who voted against the bill justified their position not by the fact that it would prevent criticism of Zionism and its state, which they of course welcome, but by their fear that it would prohibit traditional antisemitic positions, if turned into law. That is why the most enthusiastic supporters of the “Jewish” state objected to restricting the freedom of true Jew haters. Should one laugh or cry?

Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is a Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. His books include The New Cold War: Chronicle of a Confrontation Foretold. Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising; The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising; The Clash of Barbarisms; Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy; and The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. He is a member of Anti-Capitalist Resistance.

The “Antisemitism” Smear Weaponized

The ATC editors

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor encampment May 1, 2024

WHILE THE HORROR of the Israeli-United States genocidal war on Gaza continues with no letup or resolution in sight, there has been only one really hopeful development: the outpouring of pro-Palestinian activism in many U.S. communities, most especially the magnificent movement on college campuses organized in encampments demanding an immediate permanent ceasefire, and divestment from corporations tied to Israel’s machinery of massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Because of this movement’s moral authority and power in the face of a monstrous slaughter funded by U.S. tax dollars, it’s not surprising that it has come under attack from multiple directions including reprisals by campus administration and violent police action against students and sympathetic faculty members.

We want to focus here on a specific smear against the movement: that it is “antisemitic” or advocates “genocide of the Jewish people.” This lie is endlessly cycled through much of the media, in the spectacle of Congressional hearings and now legislation mandating “antisemitism watch” offices at universities, and of course through the “pro-Israel” lobby groups spearheaded by AIPAC (America Israel Political Affairs Committee) and the Anti-Defamation League.

Much of the hysteria in Congress and media is propelled by far-right MAGA elements who, of course, had little to say about the torch-carrying “Jews will not replace us” white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. It’s actually part of a broader Republican campaign to discredit and ultimately crush any progressive expressions in college education, especially liberal arts.

The “antisemitism” smear against Palestine solidarity makes a convenient opportunist addition to existing targets such as Diversity-Equity-Inclusion programs, Critical Race Theory, gender studies, anything “woke” and other perceived threats to what the right wing regards as western civilization. Not coincidentally, it’s also a pretext to slash huge holes in protections of free speech and to purge academic institutions.

This includes a drive to literally criminalize slogans of “Free, free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (No one proposes to outlaw the statement from Israel’s ruling Likud party and prime minister Netanyahu, “from the river to the sea, total Israeli sovereignty.”) Whatever these phrases might mean to different people in different places, there can be no excuse for banning them as so-called hate speech or “genocide of the Jewish people.”

In this climate it’s necessary both to defend Palestine solidarity activism and to state clearly what antisemitism is – and isn’t. Antisemitism is an ideology of hatred and contempt for Jews, as a people and as individuals. While it has centuries-old roots in religious bigotry, for the past 150 or so years, beginning in Europe, antisemitism has taken the form of pseudo-scientific racial theory. Like all forms of racism it is irrational, and in the specific case of antisemitism it ascribes to Jews various schemes to control finance, politics, media etc.

In its most extreme forms, of course, antisemitic ideology and myth fueled the Nazi extermination machinery that almost wiped out Jewish life in much of Europe. At less visible levels it persists and tends to arise at moments when racism in general raises its ugly head – as for example in the United States in the anti-Black backlash following the election of president Obama and the ascendancy of Donald Trump.

Antisemitism as a set of racial anti-Jewish stereotypes is not to be confused with critical analysis of the Israeli state. Israel’s “crimes of apartheid and persecution” (as called by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) against the Palestinian people are no more immune from scrutiny than those of the United States in Vietnam and Iraq, Russia in Ukraine or China against the Uyghur people, the Indian government’s Hindutva campaign against Muslims, etc. Israel’s ideological claim to act as the “nation-state of the Jewish people” falsely – and dangerously — seeks to make all Jews responsible for its criminal acts.

Under these conditions, and with live-streamed genocidal atrocities in Gaza growing by the day, it may be surprising and encouraging that so few actual antisemitic incidents have actually occurred. More of these have occurred off campus than on, such as the Proud Boys gathering near Columbia or one hate-speech ranter outside the gate. (One campus protest organizer musing about “killing Zionists” was immediately repudiated.)

In the notorious case of Northeastern University in Boston, administration called police onto campus after “Kill the Jews” chanting was reported – which video footage showed coming from an apparent counterdemonstrator carrying an Israeli flag.

There have been many more physical attacks and threats against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim than against Jewish students. All of them, of course, are vicious and absolutely unacceptable on campus or anywhere else. Attacks on Jewish students are both morally repugnant and damaging to the Palestine solidarity movement.

It’s important however to emphasize a point made by Columbia and Barnard professor Nadia Abu el-Haj, who herself has been a target of Zionist smear campaigns during her academic career. Everyone on campus, she states, has an absolute right to be safe. That does not give anyone a right to shut down speech or protest just because they don’t feel safe.

In fact, part of the purpose of the right-wing attack – joined deplorably by much of the center-liberal establishment – on the pro-Palestine campus struggle is aimed to make Jews feel unsafe. Weaponizing Jewish insecurity in this way, as a tool against an anti-genocide struggle, can be seen itself as a manipulation of antisemitism.

Is real antisemitism increasing in the United States today? Probably so (although unfortunately the once-useful statistics compiled by the ADL are now entirely unreliable since it acts as a propaganda and intelligence outpost of the Israeli state). It needs to be resolutely fought, along with all other expressions of racism. It is not to be confused with denunciation of what must be understood, again, as the joint Israeli-U.S. genocide in Palestine.

Biden’s War On Gaza Is Now A War On Truth And The Right To Protest

The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed.

By Jonathan Cook

May 12, 2024

Source: Middle East Eye


Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march back to George Washington University's University Yard on 7 May 2024 in Washington, DC (AFP)

As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden.

The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone.

Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.

This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US.

According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police.

In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”

One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space.

The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man.

Yes, Joe Biden.
Law-breaking Biden

The “order” the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged.

Biden has been so indulgent of Israel’s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government crossed the president’s supposed “red line” this week. Israel launched the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there.

Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians. Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.

The White House has authorised vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.

Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers’ money to Israel, the majority military aid – just as mass graves of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light. He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes.

Human rights groups have warned his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law.

At least 20 of Biden administration’s own lawyers are reported to have signed off on a letter that Israel’s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s investigations show that, even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank.

There, Israel doesn’t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate “collateral damage” in an operation to “eradicate Hamas”. The West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.

Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don’t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.
Protest quicksand

In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel’s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term – and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq.

And it is all happening in a presidential election year.

The students’ immediate aim is to stop their universities’ complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.

The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week’s attack on Rafah, the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month.

When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel’s Rafah “invasion”, or plans for the “day after” in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families’ agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.

The students’ second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel’s actions – from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah.

The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking.

But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.

Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.

Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned that northern Gaza was in the grip of “full-blown famine” and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. “It’s horror,” she said.

The head of Unicef warned last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.”

A separate UN report recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years.

As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.

The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.
Feeling ‘unsafe’

The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful – a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden’s approval.

Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns.

Initially, the idea that student protests were violent depended on a highly improbable claim: that chants calling for the liberation of Palestinians from occupation, or for equality between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, were inherently antisemitic.

The coverage had to studiously ignore the fact that a sizeable chunk of those protesting on campus were Jewish.

The media’s manufactured narrative was then put to further, mischievous purpose. Zionist Jews on campus – those who identify with Israel rather than the global movement to stop a genocide – were reported to be uncomfortable when faced by the protests. Or “unsafe”, as the media preferred to call it.

In all this hysteria, no one seemed to care how “unsafe” anti-Zionist Jewish students felt, or Palestinian and Muslim students, after being publicly labelled antisemitic and a threat to “order” by Congress and their own president.

But this would soon become about a lot more than a clash of feelings. Stoked on by Biden’s condemnations and by political and financial pressures on the universities, administrations took the unusual step of inviting local police forces on to their campuses. Soon police in riot gear were massed against the students.

With the political and media climate mounting against academic freedom and the right to protest on issues of Israel and genocide, university staff turned out in a show of support for their embattled students.

At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, for example, a Jewish professor, Annelise Orleck, joined colleagues hoping to protect their students by placing themselves between the police and the encampments. It was a pattern repeated across the country.

The police, she told Democracy Now, were clearly determined to break up the encampments using force.

Orleck, a former Jewish studies department head, was one of many grey-haired professors filmed being assaulted by police. In her case, she was videoing the violent arrests of students when a police officer body-slammed her from behind. When she tried to get up, she was thrown to the ground, pinned with a knee in her back and zip-tied.

Jill Stein, another prominent Jew and the Green Party candidate in the presidential elections later this year, was also violently arrested at a demonstration.
Moral panic

The media has worked hard to offer rationalisations for this assault on freedoms once taken for granted.

One moral panic – an entirely fake story about campus protest “violence” against a Jewish student at Yale – illustrates the depths being plumbed.

The Jewish student’s own video of the incident shows her pressing herself up against a campus protest march, presumably as part of her own counter-protest in favour of Israel continuing its genocide. At one point, a small Palestinian flag brushes her face.

Video artist Matt Orfea’s clips of the resulting hysterical coverage would be hilarious were the stakes not so grave. A stream of headlines and TV hosts scream in horrified tones: “Jewish student stabbed in the eye” and “Stabbed for being a Jew.”

The investment by the media in shocked outrage on behalf of one student – who, even in her own assessment, says the worst injury she suffered was a headache – over one unremarkable confrontation at one of the many dozens of campus protests in the US is the real story.

Had the media industry even a tiny conscience, the journalists lavishing concern on a Yale student with a headache might pause to wonder if some of that concern ought to be redirected elsewhere – as the campus protests demand.

Such as towards the tens of thousands of children being killed by US bombs and starved with the help of a US funding blockade on the UN’s main relief agency, Unrwa. Or towards Israel’s destruction of every one of Gaza’s 12 universities.

Similar mendacity was fully on display in the media’s coverage of the protests at UCLA when the police briefly backed down from their stand-off with students. A masked group of pro-Israel activists – seemingly not enrolled at the university – seized the opportunity to invade the campus, throw fireworks into the encampment, tear it down and beat the students.

Police took several hours to show up. None of the “counter-protesters” seems to have been arrested.

Despite the clear, filmed evidence of the attack on the students, the media uniformly painted it as a “clash” between two rival groups of violent protesters. In many cases, the reporting, including by the BBC, insinuated that the students – the victims – had initiated the “clashes”.

It was off the back of this confected “fake news” that Biden was able to characterise the student protests as chaotic, dangerous and a threat to “order”.

Drawing on a well-worn trope used by racists to tar the civil rights movement back in the 1960s, New York’s black mayor joined other politicians in claiming that “outside agitators” were behind the campus protests.

Meanwhile CNN host Dana Bash exploited the manufactured narrative to falsely compare the students to “Nazis”.

When the police returned to the UCLA campus, it was to increase the crackdown, stepping up arrests and firing rubber bullets at the students.
Furious backlash

The UK’s own version of this manufacturing of a moral panic is playing out too. Last weekend the Metropolitan Police arrested four people for displaying what police claimed was a banner “supporting a proscribed organisation”. The four, reportedly including a doctor and parents of students, were protesting outside University College London in solidarity with a protest camp there.

The banner showed a white dove – a symbol of peace – carrying a key flying through a breach in Israel’s apartheid wall around the West Bank.

According to reports, police claimed the four were Hamas supporters based on the fact that the sky behind the dove was “clear blue”, supposedly a reference to the clear skies on the day of Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Police seemed to be unaware that the sky is regularly clear blue in the Middle East.

According to witnesses, police officers had consulted with pro-Israel counter-demonstrators shortly before making the arrests.

The reality the political and media class are working to obscure is that some universities, rather than calling the police, have been allowing the protests on their campuses to play out peacefully.

And – in what seems to be the real fear among the political and media class – the protesters are also slowly having some impact in isolating Israel as well as moving public opinion. Extraordinarily, given the uniformly hostile coverage of the protests, suggesting they are antisemitic, four in ten American voters have still concluded that Israel is committing genocide, according to a survey published this week.

Largely unreported, several universities – in an attempt to end the protests without violence – have quietly made promises to limit their complicity in Israel’s genocide. In most cases, their good faith has yet to be tested.

Under countervaling pressure from 5,000 alumni who signed a letter threatening to withhold donations, the University of California Riversideappears to have agreed to divest from companies with ties to Israel, as well as stopping joint study programmes with Israel.

This week, Ireland’s Trinity College, in Dublin, reached a settlement with protesters that will see it quickly divest from Israeli companies involved with the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

A college statement read: “We are in solidarity with the students in our horror of what is happening in Gaza.”

Goldsmith’s college in London has promised an ethical investment policy that may see it divest from Israel’s decades of occupation of the Palestinian territories. It has also agreed to set up scholarships for Palestinians living under an Israeli occupation that has all but destroyed higher education for them.

And Goldsmith’s is to review its adoption of the new, highly controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism that has been aggressively promoted by the Israel lobby and widely adopted by western public institutions.

Paradoxically, the definition intentionally blurs the distinction between Jews and Israel – a favoured tactic of antisemites – and has been key to helping Israel and its allies smear anti-genocide protests as Jew hatred.

Concessions that ended protests at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, have included holding talks with student representatives about investments in arms firms assisting Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the setting up of a Palestine studies course mirroring an existing Jewish studies programme, and establishing a long-term collaboration with a Palestinian university in the West Bank similar to Rutgers’ relationship with Tel Aviv university in Israel.

Those minimal concessions have already provoked a furious backlash from 700-plus members of the local Jewish community. They accused Rutgers of “capitulating to the extreme demands of the lawless mob”, one that is supposedly inciting “hatred and violence against Jews and the Jewish state”.

The group has threatened to bring the university to its knees by pulling “donations and financial support”. Meanwhile, the four largest Jewish federations in New Jersey are reported to be demanding a state investigation of Rutgers.

Gaza playbook

In reporting on the campus protests, the establishment media have simply rolled out the same well-thumbed playbook they used to cover up Israel’s genocide in Gaza: strip out context, distort chronology, reverse the roles of aggressor and victim, and push the messaging so hard it sticks.

Over the past seven months, the western media have erased the context of decades of Israeli structural violence: its belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities to establish in their place illegal settlements of armed Jewish militias.

Even more specifically, they have disappeared the imprisonment and slow-motion starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians through a 17-year medieval-style siege of Gaza.

Instead, Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October is presented as coming out of the blue – that clear blue sky. It has served as a rationalisation for genocide by Israel that just keeps on giving.

The student protests are being exploited for a similar purpose. The media have been able to expand their self-serving narrative from foreign fields – where every Palestinian, even a child, can be painted as a potential terrorist – to domestic turf, where anyone clamouring against Israel’s genocide is considered a likely antisemite.

Leaks from the New York Times show that the company has effectively imposed a ban on staff using terms such as “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to Israel, making it impossible to name the reality faced by Palestinians or the reasons for solidarity among western publics with them.

It is clear that the Times’ policy is shared across the establishment media.

Now, Congress is preparing to bring down the same free speech and free thought shutters on American citizens. Their First Amendment rights are in the process of being shredded to protect a foreign country, Israel, from criticism.

This month the House of Representatives passed by an overwhelming majority an “antisemitism awareness” bill that would once again expand the definition of Jew hatred to criminalise critical speech against Israel. The Republicans who introduced the legislation specifically referenced the bill’s use against the student protests, which call for universities to stop investing in genocide.

The goal is to chill speech in the last places – campuses and social media – where it still exists outside the imposed consensus of the political and media class.

The politicians and media are not disinterested. They are in thrall to Big Money interests, such as the arms, surveillance and oil industries, for whom Israel is a critical element, both in the projection of western power into the Middle East and in the construction of a western narrative of permanent victimhood, even as the West and its allies continue to wreck the region.

From their campuses, the students are calling out as loudly as they can that western institutions are complicit in arming a genocide, that the emperor is every bit as morally exposed as he appears. It is time to stop listening to those gaslighting us. Now is the time to believe our own eyes.

Jonathan Cook
British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).