Univ. of Toronto Protesters Vow to Continue Gaza Encampment as Admin Demands Police Clear It

By Mohammad Yassin, Deb Cowen , Amy Goodman 

May 31, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!

A judge in Canada this week ruled that a student protest encampment could remain standing at the University of Toronto until at least mid-June, when a top court will decide on an injunction filed by the school requesting the police to clear the pro-Palestinian protesters off campus. Students and faculty launched the encampment on May 2 to protest Israel’s war on Gaza. It quickly became one of the largest encampments in North America with 175 tents, hundreds of campers, and a sacred fire led by Indigenous elders. Administrators at the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest university, had wanted to clear the encampment before graduation ceremonies begin in early June. “We know what we’re doing is just. And all of us are willing to stand our ground no matter what happens,” says Mohammad Yassin, a graduating senior, spokesperson for Occupy University of Toronto and a member of the student negotiating team. Yassin is Palestinian with family members currently in Gaza. We also speak with geography professor Deb Cowen, part of the Jewish Faculty Network, who says the encampment is a “precious learning space” bringing students together. “We have maybe never seen our campus be so alive with the spirit of debate, of creative thought, of rigorous conversation and dialogue,” Cowen says.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We go now to Canada, where a judge yesterday responded to an injunction filed by the University of Toronto for the police to clear a pro-Palestinian encampment on its downtown campus. The judge set the injunction hearing dates for June 19th and 20th. In the court filing, the judge acknowledged that those dates do not accommodate the university’s interest in clearing the encampment before graduation ceremonies begin in early June, but he said a fair opportunity must be given to the protesters to make their case.

Students launched the encampment, known as “The People’s Circle for Palestine,” on May 2nd. It quickly became one of the largest encampments in North America with 175 tents, hundreds of campers, and a sacred fire led by Indigenous elders. The camp is supported by faculty, university staff, alumni and others.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, the university issued a trespass notice to protesters, threatening disciplinary measures for students and staff supporting the camp, threatening an unprecedented mass termination of faculty. On Tuesday, dozens of faculty members held a news conference to speak out against the university’s request for the police to clear the encampment.


DEBORAH COWEN: We say to our administration, if you decide to move against the students, you’ll have to go through us first.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Deb Cowen, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto. She joins us now from Toronto. She’s also a steering committee member of the Jewish Faculty Network. And we’re joined by Mohammad Yassin, a graduating senior at the University of Toronto studying economics and statistics. He’s a media spokesperson for Occupy University of Toronto and a member of the student negotiating team. Yassin is a Palestinian with family members currently in Gaza.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! We’re seeing a replay of what’s happening in the United States in Canada. You have these professors bringing police onto college campuses, as they’re being hauled before — in the United States, it’s Congress. In Canada, the president of University of Toronto — right? — just spoke, professor Deb Cowen, before the Canadian Parliament. You said that the police have to go through you, the faculty, before getting the students in the encampment. Mohammad Yassin, can you start off by talking about what are your demands?

MOHAMMAD YASSIN: Yeah. First off, thank you for having us.

You know, our demands are very clear, and they’re very simple. Our first demand is for the University of Toronto to disclose all investments held in endowments, short-term working capital assets and other financial holdings. The second demand that we have is for them to divest their endowment capital assets and other financial holdings from all direct and indirect investments that sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlements of Palestine. Our third demand is for the University of Toronto to terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that operate in settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or support or sustain the apartheid policies of the state of Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Deb, could you talk about the level of faculty support at the University of Toronto, how you became involved with this, and how you’ve been working with students?

DEBORAH COWEN: Oh, for sure. And thank you so much for having me. It’s a true honor to be here with one of the brilliant students, Mohammad here, and also as a very small part of what is a groundswell, a massive groundswell of support on our campus and well beyond. In addition to the hundreds of faculty that have been actively supporting the People’s Circle for Palestine, there are staff, there are alumni, there are — excuse me — honorary doctrines who have been stepping forward.

And the quote that you shared with me about standing with faculty in front of and to protect the students from any kind of police raid of the camp actually was an echo of something that was said the day before in an extraordinary labor rally by Laura Walton, who’s the president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, which represents a million workers and 45 unions. And she said, “If you move against the students, you’ll have to go through workers first.” So, on Tuesday at the faculty rally, we echoed that same commitment to defend and protect our students in their very righteous, courageous stand.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mohammad, could you describe — describe the encampment, how the tents were set up, how all of the students organized, and what prompted the organization of the students at this time. To what extent were you inspired by what began at Columbia University right here in New York?

MOHAMMAD YASSIN: Yeah. So, with regards to, you know, what inspired us to do this, obviously, we did take heavy inspiration from our fellows at Columbia. But organizing at the University of Toronto, at least from our student segment, has been going on for at least seven months, at least in our capacity. We’ve had our demands sent to the university and the president directly, who continued to ignore us for about six months, until we had similar actions, including the occupation of the president’s office for about 36 hours. This encampment is simply an escalation on that, as the university has refused to meet with Palestinian students and meet our demands, you know, even more simply than that.

With regards to the encampment itself, it was a night in which a lot of people came together. And at about 4:00 in the morning, we entered King’s College Circle, as it was called, now the People’s Circle for Palestine, which was fenced off by the university in anticipation of something like this. When things started happening at Columbia, the University of Toronto set up a fence around the circle, expecting us to take that area, knowing that it’s the heart of the university, right in front of the building in which the administration meets, in which President Meric Gertler has his office. And as such, they tried to prevent us from taking that space. As students, we, you know, have all the right to be there. It’s our university. It’s our space. And so, at early morning on May 2nd, at 4:00 in the morning, we entered that space anyways and set up all of our tents.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Deb Cowen, if you could explain: How is the Faculty Association at U of T responding to faculty, such as yourself, who have shown solidarity with the encampments? What is the level of faculty support? And how has the administration responded so far to faculty who have supported the encampments, the pro-Palestine encampments?

DEBORAH COWEN: Yeah, like Mohammad here, I would want to say that the faculty support has been long-standing. And certainly, faculty organizing around Palestinian liberation has taken place for many, many years on the University of Toronto campus. In fact, I think one of the reasons why we’ve seen such strong and such united faculty support for the student-led movement is because of many years of relationship building, of collaboration between a series of networks, including the Jewish Faculty Network, a Healthcare Alliance for Palestine and the Faculty for Palestine group itself, and even before that. So, those groups have been working together for many years. We had a major censure of our campus just a few years ago for the unhiring of Valentina Azarova at the Law Faculty because of her work on the Occupied Territories. And even well before that, the University of Toronto campus is known for having been the place where Israeli Apartheid Week was first founded and where BDS campaigns were led by graduate students, you know, decades ago. So, I think there’s a long tradition of relationship building, of trust building and of, I think, very powerful solidarity between students, staff, librarians, faculty and wider community members.

And I can say the Faculty Association responded to preemptive threats from the administration accusing any potential student encampment of being unauthorized, of being an act of trespass. And also the Faculty Association wrote a letter also suggesting that the kinds of — the language of the kind of threat and unsafety was also deeply racialized language, which is not insignificant, given that the student movement is led primarily by students of color, and, in particular, Palestinian, Arab, Black, Muslim and Indigenous students, and, of course, many, many Jewish students — all groups that have either been — that have been historically or ongoing in terms of the racialized stigmatization. So, the Faculty Association challenged the whole university framing of the illegality and unauthorized nature of the protest. And that legal letter that was sent to the administration over a month ago now has never actually received response.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammad, before we end, I want to ask how your family is in Gaza right now and what your plans are to the end? I mean, it looks like the injunction is — there’s going to be a court hearing right around graduation in a few weeks.

MOHAMMAD YASSIN: Yeah. With regards to my family in Gaza, I’m in communication with them whenever, you know, they get the chance to talk. Obviously, they’re not in a situation where they can constantly respond to us. We do get mail from them. They’re watching our encampment very closely, actually. They send us letters that are heartbreaking. You know, anytime I read them, I quite literally can’t stop crying. The sentiment is shared by everybody in the camp who I read these letters to.

But, you know, it’s because of that that we have faith in what we’re doing. We know what we’re doing is just. And all of us are willing to stand our ground, no matter what happens. Everybody went into this expecting that a police response is a possibility. Our fellows in other universities up in Alberta were brutalized by the police when they had their stands at their encampments. We’re ready to face the same, because what we understand is that anything that we go through is not even a fraction of what our brothers and sisters in Gaza are going through.

My family in particular, you know, they’ve had to eat leaves and grass because they have no food to eat. You know, they’ve had to wake up every single day under bombardment. Their children are terrified constantly. They’ve lost all of their innocence. They can’t even live normally day to day.

Yet we’re expected to sit here and just watch. You know, we can’t do that. And as students and as faculty, I’m sure, and as labor workers who have come together for this, we all understand that we have a duty to these people. We have power in our hands. We are put here in a specific position, in this specific time and place, where we can exercise some sort of ability to make a change. And we are all more than committed to do that, no matter the consequences.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Cowen, when the Canadian Parliament holds hearings on antisemitism, if you can respond, as a member of the Jewish Faculty Network?

DEBORAH COWEN: I mean, I think those hearings have been widely dismissed as quite the sham, compared to having fossil fuel hearings entirely staffed or entirely constituted by pro-fossil fuel or pro-oil companies. I mean, there is not a single member or group represented that diverges from a pro-Israel, a strong pro-Israel lobby. And many groups are even boycotting those hearings.

And I’d like to just bring it back to what the camp has been doing, which is — in some senses, it’s even baffling that we have to have this conversation, that we’re facing these threats of discipline, and even termination for tenured faculty, and certainly various kinds of discipline for students, because, from my perspective and, I think, from the perspective of many faculty who have been teaching at the university for years and years, we have maybe never seen our campus be so alive with the spirit of debate, of creative thought, of rigorous conversation and dialogue and debate. It is, for me, one of the most precious learning spaces I’ve ever experienced.

And that’s in the context — our president likes to keep saying that, you know, convocation must happen, our graduation ceremonies must happen, because this is the COVID generation, and they need those kinds of spaces. Well, it’s the COVID generation that has built this camp. And they have built a space of multifaith collaboration. We’ve had Shabbat. We’re planning our fifth Shabbat for Friday night, where we have prayers in both Arabic and Hebrew. We have these incredible spaces of conversation, of learning. And the learning goes all directions. It’s not one direction.

So, the very promises of our university, which were, of course, compromised deeply during lockdowns — and I think the university almost seems to prefer the disconnected, heavily managed student body, as opposed to what is really a manifestation, a kind of emboldening of our institution’s Statement of Institutional Purpose that is happening at the Circle for Palestine, the People’s Circle for Palestine. So, many of us not only defend the basic rights of our students in their stand, in their protest and in their rights to freedom of speech and assembly, but we feel incredibly protective of the beautiful, beautiful experiment in relationships, in learning, and in a future that is very, very different from what the world is giving us. And we feel a personal stake in defending that space.

AMY GOODMAN: Deb Cowen, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of geography and planning at University of Toronto and steering committee member of the Jewish Faculty Network, and Mohammad Yassin, graduating senior at the University of Toronto studying economics and statistics, media spokesperson for Occupy University of Toronto, a member of the student negotiating team. Yassin is Palestinian with family members currently in Gaza.

The Student Intifada Links Racism, Mistreatment of Indigenous People, Policing, Global Warming, Anti-Colonial Struggles Around the World, Capitalism and Imperialism

By Gary Olson

June 1, 2024

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

Gaza solidarity campus encampment




Those protesters have started a fire that’s going to burn straight through the whole system. Shahid Bolsen


Palestine has become the icon of freedom for the people of the world. Author Unknown


The protest movements — which have spread around the globe —are not built around the single issue of the apartheid state of Israel or its genocide against Palestinians. They are built around an awareness that the old world order, the one of settler-colonialism, western imperialism and militarism used by the countries of the Global North to dominate the Global South, must end. They decry the hoarding of natural resources and wealth by industrial nations in a world of diminishing returns. These protests are built around a vision, and the commitment to it, that will make this movement not only hard to defeat but presages a wider struggle beyond genocide in Gaza. Chris Hedges

The national security state is alarmed by recent student protests. Alex Karp, ardent Zionist and CEO of Palentir, an advanced data mining company whose customers include the CIA, NSA, FBI and Israel, recently shared this fear: “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show. If we lose the intellectual debate, we will be unable to deploy the army in the West, ever.”

We are indebted to Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone for interpreting the elite’s penultimate nightmare as follows: If this model spreads and succeeds, the U.S. will not be able to maintain its imperial army and 800 bases around the world and the U.S. will begin to resemble a normal country. This, of course, is impermissible because empathy devoid psychopaths like Karp and the rest of the parasitic elite would no longer be the recipients of corporate welfare at the expense of the rest of us. The students, and allies who agree with their demands, are an existential threat to the system because they’re hitting the third rail.

Our ideological gatekeepers expend prodigious amounts of time and resources to create empathy-deficient cultural programming that dampens any public empathic engagement. As suggested above, the parasitic elite fear an empathy epidemic. However, they’ve been overwhelmed by 24/7 images from Gaza and the campus protests. We see that the dominant cultural narrative is not hermetically sealed from efforts to produce counter-narratives that connect to other struggles. For example, at M.I.T., students stress that their Gaza protest is not a separate struggle but one struggle synchronizing resistance movements against white supremacy, patriarchy, and issues involving Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the exploitation of resources in the Congo. (Austin Cole, Black Agenda Radio, 5/24/24). Interviews with protesters across the country reveal that students have done their due diligence and frequently salted their explanations with “academic terms like intersectionality, colonialism and imperialism, all to make the case that the plight of Palestinians is the result of global power structures that thrive on bias and oppression.“

Ilf Jones, a first year student at Emory University in Atlanta linked her activism to the civil rights movement in which her family had participated. “The only thing missing was the dogs and the water, she said. Another student, Katie Rueff a first year student at Cornell, linked it to climate justice, saying “It’s rooted in the same struggles of imperialism, capitalism — things like that. I think that‘s very true of this conflict, of the genocide in Palestine.” (The New York Times, 5/2/24)

At Emory, protesters occupying the quad chanted “Free Palestine,” along with opposing the Atlanta Public Training Facility or “Cop City,” an enormous $90 billion dollar, 318 acre site just outside Atlanta. It’s on land stolen from the Muscogees while Israel‘s “Little Cop City” is on land in the Negev stolen from the Palestinians. Emory students see a considerable overlap between greater justice in policing and what’s happening in Gaza as hundreds of police trainees are sent from the U.S. to Israel to train with their counterparts under the guise of “homeland security.” Israel’s military connection to iAtlanta is emblematic of the partnership between the two countries in approaching unrest. Much of the cost of Cop City is being footed by corporations like Delta, Amazon, Wells Fargo, Waffle House, J.P. Morgan, UPS and Chick-fil-A.

Further, revealing the widespread complicity of university research for the Pentagon is one reason for the swift and harsh response to the protests as this is something that can’t be negotiated away under the existing system. For example, in 2024,Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh had received more than $2.8 billion for research from the Pentagon since 2008, only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Johns Hopkins University have received more, at $18 billion and $15.billiion. MIT does research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, a fact not lost on protesters there.

One additional damning truth, and one that bears explication in the future, is the US empire manger’s longterm project for imperial primacy in the region. That is, the tripartite security pact of U.S., Saudi Arabia and Israel that was temporarily derailed by Hamas’ 7 resistance attack and Israel’s response. This grand bargain or “deal of the century,” a phrase coined by Egypt’s president Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, would entail Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel. In turn, the U.S. would turn on the spigot of offensive weapons heading to the Kingdom — a major boon to the American war industry. Israeli officials estimate an eventual benefit of trade with Saudi Arabia amounting to $45 billion. For now, “Plan B” is that Israel be excluded from the pact until Gaza is resolved. If this arrangement occurs, it will mean more injustice for the Palestinians, including stepped up Zionist violence in the West Bank, and because the deal is so unpopular with the “street Arabs,” even more oppression of people under autocratic US allies in the region.

The1960s and 1970s witnessed powerful movements centered around racism and the Vietnam War. Many of us older folks were radicalized by this period and it has defined our lives ever since. However, over time, powerful elites were able to reimagine these events as one-offs, in part, because we treated them as such and failed to identify them as endemic to the system of capitalism itself and required dismantling the empire.

Ted Morgan, a scholar of the 1960s social movements, told me via an e-mail that “1960s activism was largely wiped out by a combination of distorted media coverage, a potent right-wing, corporate backlash, and a cooptive narcissistic culture of consumption and entertainment. In 1968, the US war helped to trigger the global protest movement — well documented in Tariq’s Ali’s “1968.” However, 1968 was also the turning point for the rise of neoliberalism and the New Right in US politics. The neoliberal order was resisted again and again against the U.S. role in Central America, against the nuclear arms race, against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the climate crisis and global warming and ecocide and by the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter. However, it wasn’t until the rising global movement against the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza and the West Bank— and US complicity in that assault — that the potential of 1968 has been revived.” (For more, see, Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened in the 1960s, University of Kansas Press, 2011).

When the “student intifada” of campus encampments sprang up, we could say, along with The Electric Intifada’s Susan Abdulhawa, “This time is different from the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a new sense of global interconnection, an emerging class consciousness and foundational political analyses predicated on post-colonial studies and intersectionality.”

We also know that members of Generation Z (18-29) are far more distrustful of the media than older adults and according to Gallup/Knight they pay close attention to an outlet’s transparency of facts and research . Students have been informed by information outside of mainstream sources like The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, which act as the U.S. government’s echo chamber. Many have turned to Al Jazeera which has 1.0 million followers on TikTok and 4.6 million on Instagram. Cameron Jones an organizer with Jewish Voices for Peace at Columbia University told The New York Times ”There’s a fair amount of misinformation and just a clear bias when it comes to the Palestinian issue.” And Hussein Irish of the Arab States Institute in Washington, added that “There’s a third worldish, anti-imperialist point of view, that many college kids have adopted.”

An encouraging sign for this summer and evidence that encampments are not the end, is the Coalition to March on the DNC in Chicago which already has 76 organizations on board and looks to have 200+ by August. Gaza is the catalyst bringing together immigrant, women, LGBT, union reps and opponents of police repression. This helps to cement the connection between domestic and international affairs.

As suggested earlier, it’s this growing capacity of students, and allies who agree with their demands, to begin connecting the dots — and sharing that insight with clear, concise language — that constitutes the real fear of the ruling class. It explains their hysterical response like attempts to ban TikTok, police state crackdowns, rending of the First Amendment, demonization of anti-war protesters, blaming “outside agitators,” and the media’s weaponizing of antisemitism.

Given the above, the potential for identifying with “the other” has never been so auspicious. If combined with critical thinking, patience, ingenuity in communication and Gramsci’s “optimism of the will,” we dare to say that the possibility for transforming Gaza into a broader class struggle lies before us for the taking.


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Gary Olson
Chair, Department of Political Science, Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pa.

Indigenous People of Guam Are Fighting US Militarism and Environmental Ruin

US military activities are damaging the environment and livelihoods of Indigenous CHamoru people.

By Sara Mar

June 1, 2024

Source: Truthout





The Indigenous Pacific Islander community in Guam — known as CHamorus — has long called out the United States military for the environmental and cultural damage enacted on their homeland. This process of occupation and destruction began when Guam was colonized in 1898 and continues to this day, as nearly one-third of the 30-mile long island remains occupied by the U.S. military.

Several years ago, I traveled to Guam on a reporting fellowship and spoke with CHamoru community members about the sacred area of Litekyan, located on the northwestern coast of the island. Among the idyllic white sands, lush forests and turquoise waters, lie two imminent threats to CHamoru land: a live-fire training range complex and an open burning and detonation zone.

The firing range was built to train approximately 5,000 U.S. Marines being relocated to Guam from Okinawa, Japan. The Marines, who started arriving to Guam in 2023, are stationed at nearby Camp Blaz where more than 1,000 acres of limestone forests were destroyed to create the base. Nearly 4,000 acres of land on Andersen Air Force Base will be used for the range and more than 5 million rounds of ammunition will be fired every year.

Parts of Litekyan and the open ocean lie in the surface danger zone, where munitions could ricochet or land. These munitions, such as bullets from machine guns, contain a range of heavy metals, including lead. Over time, lead from these bullets can accumulate in the soil and eventually contaminate the aquifer located below the firing range. Guam only has one aquifer that supplies 80 percent of all drinking water to its residents, meaning contamination of the aquifer could threaten access to clean drinking water across much of the island.

Along with environmental contamination, the firing range poses direct threats to the ancestral and cultural heritage of the CHamoru people. At least 20 archeological sites listed in the National Registry of Historic Places could also be directly and adversely impacted by this military project. And while the Department of Defense put $12 million toward establishing a cultural repository, this will result in the disinterment of CHamoru remains from their original and sacred burial grounds. When I discussed this with a community member, she pointed to a nearby rock lightly covered with moss and said, “It’s like the moss. You don’t take that and put that in a repository. It’s not going to thrive in the same way.”

In addition to the firing range, the U.S. Air Force applied to renew a permit with the Guam Environmental Protection Agency that would allow them to openly burn and openly detonate (OB/OD) 35,000 pounds of bombs and other munitions on Tarague Beach, another Indigenous area in Litekyan. These munitions, classified as reactive hazardous wastes, are largely leftover from World War II. The presence and disposal of this waste can release toxic vapors, with the potential to cause respiratory problems, skin irritation, and in more severe cases, cancer.

CHamoru community members are currently engaged in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force. The lawsuit cites that Anderson Air Force Base failed to conduct a proper analysis of the environmental impacts of OB/OD operations and did not consider other alternatives for disposal. According to Monaeka Flores, a CHamoru organizer involved in the lawsuit, the OB/OD site is “close to everything. Migratory birds, sea turtles, fisheries … traditional medicines that grow in that area … and our water of course.” Similar to the firing range, the OB/OD site lies above Guam’s aquifer. Detonation of munitions could contaminate the land with heavy metals and toxic “forever” chemicals like PFAS, which may leach into the groundwater below.

In March 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a proposed update to their OB/OD guidance — the first revision since the 1980s — stating that OB/OD facilities must consider alternatives for treating these types of hazardous waste. Various alternative treatment technologies exist, including removing the reactive material or freezing and fracturing the munition. However, until the U.S. Air Force properly evaluates (and implements) alternative methods at the site, open detonation will continue to be allowed at Tarague Beach.

Community members across Guam have been speaking out against these military projects for generations, demanding an end to the environmental destruction and the return of their Indigenous land. Nonprofits like Prutehi Litekyan are actively working to stop the firing range and OB/OD activities by educating community members, organizing protests, circulating petitions and writing letters to policy makers.

For many CHamorus, resisting militarization is part of a larger vision to decolonize Guam and regain their sovereignty. Since 1946, Guam has been listed by the United Nations as a nonself-governing territory, meaning they lack full self-determination. For example, Guam residents cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections and they do not have voting representation in Congress. Groups like Independent Guåhan have organized CHamoru members to testify at the United Nations to speak about decolonization and the environmental impacts of more than a century of U.S. militarization.

What’s happening in Guam is just one example among many across the country, and the world, of the work of Indigenous people to secure and reclaim rights to their homeland.

As we close out Asian Pacific Islander Heritage month, we must stand behind the Indigenous people of Guam and other Pacific Islanders living in the U.S. territories in their fight against the ongoing militarization of their occupied homeland.

The Real Trap of Consumerism

By Our Changing Climate

June 1, 2024

Source: Our Changing Climate

In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at the real trap of consumerism. Specifically, I dive into why consumerism is not actually the real cause of exploitation and the climate crisis, but instead a symptom of capitalism. Capitalist overproduction drives companies and corporations to create false needs and desires, which leads to overconsumption. We need to shift our attention away from consumerism and overconsumption and towards overproduction.

Norman Solomon Admonishes the Flawed American Special Policy Towards Israel That Causes Us All Harm

Author & activist Norman Solomon discusses America's Israel hypocrisy. The war in Gaza is immral, and we are complicit.

By Norman Solomon, Egberto Willis

 June 1, 2024

Source: Politics Done Right

To Continue The Gaza Genocide, Israel And The US Must Destroy The Laws Of War

The world's two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities

By Jonathan Cook

June 1, 2024

Source: Middle East Eye

The world’s two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Separate announcements last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) should have forced Israel on to the back foot in Gaza.

A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza.

Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.

On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly “safe zone” crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight months.

The air strike set fire to an area crammed with tents, killing dozens of Palestinians, many of whom burnt alive. A video shows a man holding aloft a baby beheaded by the Israeli blast.

Hundreds more, many of them women and children, suffered serious injuries, including horrifying burns.

Israel has destroyed almost all of the medical facilities that could treat Rafah’s wounded, as well as denying entry to basic medical supplies such as painkillers that could ease their torment.

This was precisely the outcome US President Joe Biden warned of months ago when he suggested that an Israeli attack on Rafah would constitute a “red line”.

But the US red line evaporated the moment Israel crossed it. The best Biden’s officials could manage was a mealy-mouthed statement calling the images from Rafah “heart-breaking”.

Such images were soon to be repeated, however. Israel attacked the same area again on Tuesday, killing at least 21 Palestinians, mostly women and children, as its tanks entered the centre of Rafah.
‘A mechanism with teeth’

The World Court’s demand that Israel halt its attack on Rafah came in the wake of its decision in January to put Israel effectively on trial for genocide, a judicial process that could take years to complete.

In the meantime, the ICJ insisted, Israel had to refrain from any actions that risked a genocide of Palestinians. In last week’s ruling, the court strongly implied that the current attack on Rafah might advance just such an agenda.

Israel presumably dared to defy the court only because it was sure it had the Biden administration’s backing.

UN officials, admitting that they had run out of negatives to describe the ever-worsening catastrophe in Gaza, called it “hell on earth”.

Days before the ICJ’s ruling, the wheels of its sister court, the ICC, finally began to turn.

Karim Khan, its chief prosecutor, announced last week that he would be seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.

Both Israeli leaders are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attempts to exterminate the population of Gaza through planned starvation.

Israel has been blocking aid deliveries for many months, creating famine, a situation only exacerbated by its recent seizure of a crossing between Egypt and Rafah through which aid was being delivered.

The ICC is a potentially more dangerous judicial mechanism for Israel than the ICJ.

The World Court is likely to take years to reach a judgement on whether Israel has definitively committed a genocide in Gaza – possibly too late to save much of its population.

The ICC, on the other hand, could potentially issue arrest warrants within days or weeks.

And while the World Court has no real enforcement mechanisms, given that the US is certain to veto any UN Security Council resolution seeking to hold Israel to account, an ICC ruling would place an obligation on more than 120 states that have ratified its founding document, the Rome Statute, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should either step on their soil.

That would make Europe and much of the world – though not the US – off-limits to both.

And there is no reason for Israeli officials to assume that the ICC’s investigations will finish with Netanyahu and Gallant. Over time, it could issue warrants for many more Israeli officials.

As one Israeli official has noted, “the ICC is a mechanism with teeth”.
‘Antisemitic’ court

For that reason, Israel responded by going on the warpath, accusing the court of being “antisemitic” and threatening to harm its officials.

Washington appeared ready to add its muscle too.

Asked at a Senate committee hearing whether he would support a Republican proposal to impose sanctions on the ICC, Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, replied: “We want to work with you on a bipartisan basis to find an appropriate response.”

Administration officials, speaking to the Financial Times, suggested the measures under consideration “would target prosecutor Karim Khan and others involved in the investigation”.

US reprisals, according to the paper, would most likely be modelled on the sanctions imposed in 2020 by Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s predecessor, after the ICC threatened to investigate both Israel and the US over war crimes, in the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan respectively.

Then, the Trump administration accused the ICC of “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels” – allegations it never substantiated.

Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the time, was denied entry to the US, and Trump officials threatened to confiscate her and the ICC judges’ assets and put them on trial. The administration also vowed to use force to liberate any Americans or Israelis who were arrested.

Mike Pompeo, the then US secretary of state, averred that Washington was “determined to prevent having Americans and our friends and allies in Israel and elsewhere hauled in by this corrupt ICC”.
Covert war on ICC

In fact, a joint investigation by the Israeli website 972 and the British Guardian newspaper revealed this week that Israel – apparently with US support – has been running a covert war against the ICC for the best part of a decade.

Its offensive began after Palestine became a contracting party to the ICC in 2015, and intensified after Bensouda, Khan’s predecessor, started a preliminary investigation into Israeli war crimes – both Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza and its building of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their lands.

Bensouda found herself and her family threatened, and her husband blackmailed. The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Yossi Cohen, became personally involved in the campaign of intimidation. An official briefed on Cohen’s behaviour likened it to “stalking”. The Mossad chief ambushed Bensouda on at least one occasion in an attempt to recruit her to Israel’s side.

Cohen, who is known to be close to Netanyahu, reportedly told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

Israel has also been running a sophisticated spying operation on the court, hacking its database to read emails and documents. It has tried to recruit ICC staff to spy on the court from within. There are suspicions at the ICC that Israel has been successful.

Because Israel oversees access to the occupied territories, it has been able to ban ICC officials from investigating its war crimes directly. That has meant, given its control of the telecommunications systems in the territories, that it has been able to monitor all conversations between the ICC and Palestinians reporting atrocities.

As a result, Israel has sought to close down Palestinian legal and human rights groups by designating them as “terrorist organisations”.

The surveillance of the ICC has continued during Khan’s tenure – and it is the reason Israel knew the arrest warrants were coming. According to sources that spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, the court came under “tremendous pressure from the United States” not to proceed with the warrants.

Khan has pointed out that interference in the court’s activities is a criminal offence. More publicly, a group of senior US Republican senators sent a threatening letter to Khan: “Target Israel and we will target you.”

Khan himself has noted that he has faced a campaign of intimidation and has warned that, if the interference continues, “my office will not hesitate to act”.

The question is how much of this is bravado, and how much is it affecting Khan and the ICC’s judges, making them wary of pursuing their investigation, expediting it or expanding it to more Israeli war crimes suspects.
Legal noose

Despite the intimidation, the legal noose is quickly tightening around Israel’s neck. It has become impossible for the world’s highest judicial authorities to ignore Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza and near-complete destruction of its infrastructure, from schools and hospitals to aid compounds and bakeries.

Many tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed, maimed and orphaned in the rampage, and hundreds of thousands more are being gradually starved to death by Israel’s aid blockade.

The role of the World Court and the War Crimes Court are precisely to halt atrocities and genocides before it is too late.

There is an obligation on the world’s most powerful states – especially the world’s superpower-in-chief, the United States, which so often claims the status of “global policeman” – to help enforce such rulings.

Should Israel continue to ignore the ICJ’s demand that it end its attack on Rafah, as seems certain, the UN Security Council would be expected to pass a resolution to enforce the decision.

That could range from, at a minimum, an arms embargo and economic sanctions on Israel to imposing no-fly zones over Gaza or even sending in a UN peacekeeping force.

Washington has shown it can act when it wishes to. Even though the US is one of a minority of states not a party to the Rome Statute, it has vigorously supported the arrest warrant issued by the ICC against Russian leader Vladimir Putin in 2023.

The US and its allies have imposed economic sanctions on Moscow, and supplied Ukraine with endless weapons to fight off the Russian invasion. There is evidence, too, that the US has been waging covert military operations targeting Russia, most likely including blowing up the Nordstream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.

The Biden administration has orchestrated the seizing of Russian state assets, as well as those of wealthy Russians, and it has encouraged a cultural and sporting boycott.

It is proposing to do none of that in the case of Israel.
Divisions in Europe

It is not just that the US is missing in action as Israel advances its genocidal goals in Gaza. Washington is actively aiding and abetting the genocide, by supplying Israel with bombs, by cutting funding to UN aid agencies that are the main lifeline for Gaza’s population, by sharing intelligence with Israel and by refusing to use its plentiful leverage over Israel to stop the slaughter.

And the widespread assumption is that the US will veto any Security Council resolution against Israel.

According to two former ICC officials who spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, senior Israeli officials have expressly stated that Israel and the US are working together to stymie the court’s work.

Washington’s contempt for the world’s highest judicial authorities is so flagrant that it is even starting to fray relations with Europe.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has thrown his weight behind the ICC and called for any ruling against Netanyahu and Gallant to be respected.

Meanwhile, on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his outrage over Israel’s attacks on Rafah and called for them to stop immediately.

Three European states – Spain, Ireland and Norway – announced last week that they were joining more than 140 other countries, including eight from the 27-member European Union, in recognising Palestine as a state.

The coordination between Spain, Ireland and Norway was presumably designed to attenuate the inevitable backlash provoked by defying Washington’s wishes.

Among the falsehoods promoted by the US and Israel is the claim that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel’s military actions in Gaza because neither of them have recognised Palestine as a state.

But Palestine became a state party to the ICC way back in 2015. And, as Spain, Ireland and Norway have highlighted, it is now recognised even by western states usually submissive to the US-imposed “rules-based order”.

Another deception promoted by Israel and the US – a more revealing one – is the claim that the ICC lacks jurisdiction because Israel, like the US, has not ratified the Rome Statute.

Neither believes international law – the legal foundation constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War to stop future Holocausts – applies to them. Which is yet more reason to discount their assurances that there is no genocide in Gaza.

But in any case, the argument is entirely hollow: Palestine is a party to the ICC, and the Rome Statute is there to protect its signatories from attack. It is only violent bullies like the US and Israel who have no need for the ICC.
Might makes right

Both the ICJ and the ICC are fully aware of the dangers of taking on Israel – which is why, despite the dissembling complaints from the US and Israel, each court is treading so slowly and cautiously in dealing with Israeli atrocities.

Pick at the Israeli thread of war crimes in Gaza, and the entire cloth of atrocities around the world committed and promoted by the US and its closest allies starts to unravel.

The unspoken truth is that the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and years of brutal occupation of Iraq by US and British troops, and the even lengthier and equally bloody occupation of Afghanistan, eviscerated the legal constraints that would have made it harder for Putin to invade Ukraine and for Israel to put into practice the erasure of the Palestinian people it has dreamed of for so long.

It is Washington that tore up the rulebook of international law and elevated above it a self-serving “rules-based order” in which the only meaningful rule is might makes right.

Faced with that stark axiom, Moscow had good reason both to take advantage of Washington’s acts of vandalism against international law to advance its own strategic regional aims and to suspect that the relentless military expansion of a US-led Nato towards its borders did not have Russia’s best interests at heart.

Now, as Netanyahu and Gallant risk being put in the dock at The Hague, Washington is finally finding its resolve to act. Not to stop genocide. But to offer Israel protection to carry on.
War crimes overlooked

For that reason, Khan did everything he could last week to insulate himself from criticism as he announced that he wants Netanyahu and Gallant arrested.

First, he made sure to weigh the accusations more heavily against Hamas than Israel. He is seeking three Hamas leaders against two Israelis.

In his indictment, he implicated both the Hamas political and military wings in war crimes and crimes against humanity over their one-day attack on Israel on 7 October and their hostage-taking.

By contrast, Khan completely ignored the Israeli military’s role over the past eight months, even though it has been carrying out Netanyahu and Gallant’s wishes to the letter.

Notably too, Khan charged the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar, not Gaza. All the evidence, however, is that he had no foreknowledge of the attack on 7 October and certainly no operational involvement.

Further presenting Hamas in a worse light, Khan levelled more indictments against its leaders than Israel’s.

That included a charge rooted in a prominent western establishment narrative: that Israeli hostages held in Gaza have faced systematic sexual assault and torture. There appears to be little persuasive evidence for this allegation at this stage, unless Khan has access to facts no one else appears to know about.

By contrast, there is plenty of objective evidence of Palestinians being kidnapped off the streets of Gaza and the occupied West Bank and subjected to sexual assault and torture in Israeli prisons.

That, however, was not on the charge sheet against Netanyahu or Gallant.

Khan also ignored plenty of other Israeli war crimes that would be easy to prove, such as the destruction of hospitals and United Nations facilities, the targeted killing of large numbers of aid workers and journalists, and the fact that 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock has been made uninhabitable by Israel’s US-supplied bombs.
Taking on Goliath

In making the case against Israel, Khan clearly knew he was taking on a Goliath, given Israel’s stalwart backing from the US. He had even recruited a panel of legal experts to give its blessing, in the hope that might offer some protection from reprisal.

The panel, which unanimously endorsed the indictments against Israel and Hamas, included legal experts like Amal Clooney, the nearest the human rights community has to a legal superstar. But it also included Theodor Meron, a former legal authority in the Israeli government’s foreign ministry.

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, explaining his reasoning, Khan seemed keen to preempt the coming attacks. He noted that an unnamed senior US politician had already tried to deter him from indicting Israeli leaders. The prosecutor suggested that other threats were being made behind the scenes.

The ICC, he was told, was “built for Africa and thugs like Putin” – a criticism of the court that echoed complaints long levelled against it by the Global South.

In Washington, the ICC is expected to serve as nothing more than another institutional tool of US imperialism. It is not there to uphold international law dispassionately. It is there to enforce a US ‘rules-based order’ in which the US and its allies can do no wrong, even when they are committing atrocities or a genocide.

The predictably skewed framing of the interview by Amanpour – that Khan needed to explain and justify at length each of the charges he laid against Netanyahu and Gallant but that the charges against the Hamas leaders were self-evident – was one clue as to what the court is up against.

The ICC prosecutor made clear that he understands all too well what is at stake if the ICC and ICJ turn a blind eye to the Gaza genocide, as Israel and the US want. He told Amanpour: “If we don’t apply the law equally, we’re going to disintegrate as a species.”

The uncomfortable truth is that such disintegration, in a nuclear age, may be further advanced than any of us cares to acknowledge.

The US and its favourite client state give no sign of being willing to submit to international law. Like Samson, they would prefer to bring the house down than respect the long-established rules of war.

The initial victims are the people of Gaza. But in a world without laws, where might alone makes right, all of us will ultimately be the losers.



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).

Europe, Gaza and The Spectre Of Settler Colonialism

By Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese 

June 2, 2024

Source: Overland

A Palestine solidarity demonstration in Ireland, 7 November 2023

 (Photo: Sophie Popplewell)

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of settler colonialism. Across its nation states, the unacknowledged, undead pasts of settler colonialism trouble the present as the fact of genocide is brought once again into public view. In London and Paris, galleries cancel scheduled exhibitions. In Berlin and Vienna, universities ban academics and censor students. On city streets, words and chants in solidarity with Gaza are criminalised as metropoles that prided themselves on free speech now reveal themselves in a state of panicked denial. As in the US, the phrase settler colonialism paired with genocide, is subject to suspicion, derision and repudiation.

In a recent series of talks in Vienna, we were repeatedly questioned as to the relevance of speaking about settler colonialism in the present moment. It is a term of which Europe professes ignorance and from which it dissociates itself. What is at stake in these refusals, bans and disallowances? What do they reveal both about the past and the present?

*

As we write this brief reflection, the expulsion from Rafah has begun, with close to a million Gazan civilians yet again forcibly on the move and under fire. Across the globe, protest against Israel has intensified with South Africa returning to the International Court of Justice to call for an urgent intervention. In the U.S campus encampments in solidarity with Gaza have multiplied even as authorities have resorted to unprecedented levels of violence in response. In Australia student have set up encampments at Curtin, Melbourne and Sydney universities. They face Zionist counter-protest, targeting and harassment. We view the students’ actions in the light of a recent statement by the Jewish Israeli historian Raz Segal, one of the earliest among genocide scholars to identify what is happening in Gaza as a “text book case of genocide.” More recently Segal stated:


If we finally recognized Israel for what it is, which is a white supremacist settler state, then the problem is that it’s not just confined to that. We have to recognize the whole system behind it, its support, its allies, including white supremacy and settler colonialism in the U.S.

We offer a scattered itinerary of settler colonialism, its long duration, wide reach and transnational deathscapes, and its structural implications in genocidal practices. In doing so, we follow a course traced by Raphael Lemkin, formulator of the term genocide. “New conceptions require new terms,” Lemkin wrote as the opening words of the chapter entitled “Genocide” in his magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Yet, as Lemkin would realise over the remaining years of his career, genocide was not a new or singular event. He would go on to map its core constituents across a range of places and times.

Lemkin’s Axis Rule provided the basis for the eventual inclusion of the new crime of genocide at the Nuremberg tribunals, and later for the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The coordinated “techniques of occupation” documented in Axis Rule lay bare the steps through which a program “to destroy or cripple the subjugated people in their development” was differentially applied across the conquered territories of Europe by the Nazi state and its puppet regimes. These techniques included: the renaming and partitioning of occupied lands and the redrawing of existing borders; the preferential treatment of inhabitants associated with German ancestry; the confiscation of land and property belonging to other inhabitants to make way for German settlers; the introduction of a “starvation rationing system for non-Germans”; “killing or removing elements such as the intelligentsia which provide spiritual leadership”; and mass death.

Lemkin summed up the techniques of occupation revealed in the decrees of Axis states as


a gigantic scheme to change, in favour of Germany, the balance of biological forces between it and the captive nations for many years to come.

In East West Street, the legal scholar Phillippe Sands writes that the decrees that Lemkin documented in painstaking detail implemented “ideas shared in Mein Kampf on Lebensraum, the creation of a new living space to be inhabited by Germans.” In a recent commentary in the London Review of Books, Eyal Weizman offers an additional source for “lebensraum,” drawing on the 1897 work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, and marking its similarity to the US doctrine of Manifest Destiny on the Western Frontier. In the context of Germany’s colonization of Southwestern Africa in the 1880s, Weizman describes lebensraum as


the space that was needed to sustain a species or people in their Darwinian struggle for survival. To allow German settlement, Indigenous peoples had to be moved out of the way.

As David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen document in The Kaiser’s Holocaust, Germany’s establishment in 1883 of a settler colony in what is present day Namibia was enabled by campaigns of colonial warfare and the development of the first concentration camp: the Shark Island camp in the South Atlantic, to which Ovaherero and Nama prisoners were shipped. Shark Island became the site for their industrial-scale elimination. A few decades later, Germany would deploy this model in its industrial-scale elimination of Jews, Romani people, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people in its occupied territories in Europe.

In Berlin in January 2024, the leaders of the Nama and Ovaherero peoples, in conjunction with Weizman’s Forensic Architecture group, presented new findings from the Shark Island concentration camp. Afterwards, they issued a statement of solidarity and affinity, marking that their presentation was occurring as South Africa brought Israel before the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza. “When we spoke about one,” the leaders wrote:


we remembered the other. Presenting an event about the Namibian genocide, while the Gaza genocide was unfolding, brought into focus a complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity.

The leaders’ statement emphasised that, for the Nama and Ovaherero peoples, these lines of affinity extended to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and to the Palestinian people.

The statement continued:


We the Nama and Ovaherero people are all too familiar with the relation between settler colonialism and genocide, with the way genocide emerges as a direct consequence and culmination of violent settler colonialism. We know that the Zionist movement intends to turn Palestine into the “land without people”, it originally imagined it to be, in order to make a living space (similarly to the German lebensraum) for settler Jews.

The leaders’ statement pinpoints critical historical relations that are largely ignored. Although central to Lemkin’s analysis, lebensraum is the absented third term in present day discussions of Zionism and settler colonialism. The forgetting or absenting of lebensraum is a repression of the knowledge of European genocide as inextricably connected to other genocidal acts: acts informed by shared “techniques of occupation” calculated to “change … the balance of biological forces” within a conquered territory.

By insisting that the World War II genocide in Europe was a singular and unprecedented event, institutional memory in Europe refuses a body of conceptual, structural and material links that looks both backwards to prior colonial genocides and forward to the program of Zionism. The “complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity” that the Ovaherero and Nama so movingly identify are precisely the entanglements and affinities that this form of memory wishes to repudiate in its acts of censorship and cancellation.

*

European political Zionism, in theory and practice, emerged from a nineteenth-century European context of imperialism, settler colonialism and racialised violence. Forged in the crucible of violent European anti-Semitism, as Edward Said notes:


Zionism also coincided with the period of unparalleled European colonial territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and it was part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl.

Nur Masalha underscores:


Despite its distinct features and its nationalist ideology … political Zionism followed the general trajectory of colonialist projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America: European colonising of another people’s land while seeking to remove or subjugate the indigenous inhabitants of the land.

The settler colonial doctrine of terra nullius, with its genocidal imperatives, found its Zionist articulation in the imagining of Palestine as “a land without a people.”

In such characterisations, the longstanding historical association of Jewish and Palestinian people with the land of Palestine is first erased, then recast and reconfigured through the proclamation of a new state entity, “Israel,” and buttressed by new discriminatory regulations of citizenship, rights and belonging for some and non-belonging for others despite their long-standing inhabitation. It is in this act of remaking the land and recasting the existing relationships within, by making anew the identities of native and settler, citizen and refugee, that the state of Israel—as Mahmoud Mamdani argues in Neither Settler Nor Native — reveals itself to be “settler colonial.”

*

Lemkin put it simply:


Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor [and the consequent] colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.

Situated within this context, the settler colonial occupation of Palestine emerges as structurally connected “to a global history of settler colonialism”. This history, Somdeep Sen writes,


might explain why Indigenous communities from around the world have stood in solidarity with Palestinians, while settler states like the United States, Canada and Australia seem to perpetually waver in their support for Palestinian rights.

Similarly, adherence to a European perspective that understands genocide in the terms set by the Holocaust might explain the persistent obliviousness to the “techniques of occupation” documented by Lemkin that are at the heart of the settler colonial genocide underway in Gaza.

In our opening sentence we invoked Marx and Engels’ resonant phrase—”a spectre is haunting Europe.” The Manifesto continues: “All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.” This haunting pronouncement speaks to the present, as the Powers of old Europe work assiduously to exorcise the spectres of European-fomented genocides that have been unleashed by Israel’s war on Gaza. The ghosts of old Europe’s (repressed) campaigns of genocide in Namibia, Algeria, Libya, Ethiopia, the Congo — to name but a few — are at once animated and repressed by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. That they can still be so effectively repressed, as attested to by Europe’s continuing disavowal of the genocide in Gaza, points to the intimate link, noted by Derrida in Spectres of Marx, between the logic of hauntings and the power of hegemony:


Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.

Even as the Powers of old Europe deploy virulent campaigns of silencing and criminalisation directed at those attempting to speak to the truth, a chorus of dissident hauntings continues to unsettle its hegemonic regimes of repression.

In the current moment, the scattered itineraries of settler colonialism and its structures of genocide that we have traced find their intolerable manifestation in Israel’s war on Gaza. In this war, the crime of genocide assumes its full-blown structural dimensions of elimination, encompassing ecocide, urbicide, scholasticide and so on. The settler-colonial-genocidal past is not dead. On the contrary, in Gaza it is very much alive — as a lethal spectre that insists on bringing into focus an otherwise disavowed “complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity” that continues to shape the genocidal present.

The Anti-War Left Makes Inroads in Israel: An Interview With Standing Together’s Uri Weltmann

By Uri Weltmann, Federico Fuentes 

June 2, 2024

Source: Links



First published in Spanish at Nueva Sociedad. Translation by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Omdim be’Yachad-Naqef Ma’an, or Standing Together, is a Jewish-Arab social movement in Israel that organises against racism and occupation, and for equality and social justice. Federico Fuentes interviewed Standing Together’s national field organiser Uri Weltmann to discuss the growing peace movement inside Israel, how activists are confronting far-right extremists seeking to disrupt humanitarian aid going to the Gaza Strip, and the left’s recent electoral breakthroughs.

How has the peace movement inside Israel developed since October 7? Is the movement succeeding in shifting broader public opinion and undermining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war efforts? And what role is Standing Together playing within the movement?

After October 7, Israeli police limited people’s right to protest and exercise their civil liberties. It was nearly impossible to get a permit to demonstrate. That is why, throughout October and November, most of the actions taken by the peace movement — including Standing Together — were not necessarily marches, pickets and rallies. Instead, we hung posters in the streets saying “Only Peace Will Bring Security” and organised emergency Jewish-Arab conferences in two dozen towns and cities across Israel, where we raised the demand for an alternative path to the government’s.

Only in December did openings arise to organise larger protests. Standing Together brought hundreds to a rally in Haifa on December 16, and then a further thousand people to a rally in Tel Aviv on December 28. In January, we had our first march against the war. A coalition of more than 30 peace movements and organisations mobilised thousands of people.

The latest, and biggest, demonstrations to date occurred in early May, involving Palestinian and Jewish speakers and thousands marching in Tel-Aviv under the banner “Stop the War, Bring Back the Hostages”. One of the speakers was Shachar Mor (Zahiru), whose nephew is being held captive in Gaza by Hamas. He strongly criticised the cynicism of Netanyahu and his allies, and called for an end to the war in order to bring back the hostages. Avivit John — a survivor of the massacre in Kibbutz Beeri, where many innocent civilians were murdered on October 7 — told the crowd that while she lost friends and family in the Hamas attack, she did not want us as a society to lose our humanity as well. She called for an end to the war, recognition of the shared humanity of Israelis and Palestinians alike, and to bring back the hostages.

Alongside these protests, there has also been a broader movement calling for the return of the hostages, which over time has developed along explicit anti-war lines. In the first months after October 7, families and friends of the hostages organised demonstrations to raise awareness of their plight, with a strategy of lobbying the government. However, two months ago this movement shifted to the left when it linked up with anti-Netanyahu organisations. They publicly announced that they had concluded that Netanyahu and his government were an obstacle to a ceasefire agreement that could return the hostages alive. Instead, they said, what is needed is mass protest to bring down his government and force early elections.

A few weeks ago, when negotiations between Israel and Hamas seemed on the brink of an agreement, this protest movement openly declared that they supported ending the war in exchange for returning the hostages. They held one of their mass Saturday protests in Tel Aviv — attended by tens of thousands — under the slogan “Hostages, not Rafah”, and popularised the chant “Kulam Tmurat Kulam” (in Hebrew: “[Release] all of them, in exchange for all of them”), which is a call to release the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jail in exchange for the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.

This broad protest movement has shifted the political climate in Israel: the right-wing parties that comprise Netanyahu’s coalition are losing ground. While they won 64 out of 120 seats in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) in the November 2022 elections, according to recent polls they would only win between 45-52 seats if new elections were held. This spells trouble for Netanyahu, as it not only means he would be ousted from office, but that his trial over corruption would resume and he could possibly end up in jail. So he has both a political and personal interest in a prolonged and protracted war on Gaza, as demanded by his far-right coalition partners. He knows that a hostage deal will most likely mean an end to the war. And an end to the war would mean the unravelling of his coalition government and early elections — and with that political defeat and possibly loss of personal freedom. This assessment is what brought the broad protest movement calling for the return of the hostages to realise that Netanyahu is an obstacle that must be removed, rather than a mere stakeholder that requires convincing.

Standing Together members have intervened in these mass protests — in Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, Kfar Sava, Karmiel and elsewhere — stressing that the safe return of the hostages must be accompanied by an end to the war and the further killing of innocent civilians in Gaza. Furthermore, our message is that the long-term safety of both peoples will not be achieved through war, occupation and siege. Rather, it requires ending the occupation and achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that recognises the right of everyone to live in freedom, security and independence. There are millions of Jewish-Israelis in our country — and none of them are going anywhere. There are also millions of Palestinians in our country — and none of them are going anywhere. This must be the starting point of our politics if we are to imagine a future of justice, liberation and security.

Standing Together established the Humanitarian Guard to counter far-right attempts to block aid convoys going to Gaza. What can you tell us about this initiative?

In mid-May, the Israeli public’s attention was drawn to images and videos of violent and extremist settlers, known as “The Hilltop Youth”. They attacked supply trucks at the Tarqumiah checkpoint — a main border crossing connecting the Occupied Palestinian West Bank with Israel — that were carrying food and other humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. Palestinian truck drivers were beaten and hospitalised, bags of flour and wheat trashed and trucks set on fire. These violent attacks received media attention, locally and internationally, especially as they occurred in front of Israeli soldiers and police who did nothing to stop them.

In response, Standing Together announced the formation of the Humanitarian Guard. This is an initiative to bring together everyday peace activists from across Israel to act as a physical barrier between the extremist settlers and trucks at the Tarqumiah checkpoint, document what is happening and force police to do their jobs. To date, more than 900 people have signed up as volunteers. Everyday, dozens of people come to the checkpoint via organised transport from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv or by private cars. Our protective presence at the Tarqumiah checkpoint allowed hundreds of trucks to safely pass during the first two weeks of the Humanitarian Guard, delivering tons of food to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip where there is growing mass starvation and an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

The first day I was there, police were forced to push the settlers aside and allow aid trucks to pass, with drivers honking their horns in support. The settlers looked visibly upset by our presence and the fact we far outnumbered them. They left the checkpoint, but we found out by monitoring their WhatsApp group chats that they were reassembling down the road to attack the aid trucks before they arrived at the checkpoint. When we arrived at the intersection where they were, we found them pillaging a truck, destroying food packets and throwing food on the side of the road. It was only when we arrived that the police reluctantly moved them to the side of the road, allowing the ravaged truck to drive away. Our activists collected the food from the side of the road and loaded it onto the next trucks. We also documented the attacks by the settlers and filed complaints, which resulted in the police detaining a few of them.

We see the Humanitarian Guard as both a way to express solidarity with people in the Gaza Strip and to wage a fight over the character of our society: we refuse to allow Israeli society to be modelled after the morality of the far-right fanatic zealots who dehumanise Palestinians and promote a politics of death. Standing Together, as a movement, is rooted inside Israeli society, with all its complexities, and is working to shift public opinion and organise Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel to build a new majority within our society — one that can advance towards peace, equality, and social and climate justice.

The United Nations recently voted to upgrade Palestine’s status while certain European governments have now officially recognised Palestine. Even the US has drawn a line at supplying Israel with bombs to attack Rafah. Is there a sense within Israel that it is losing international support? What impact is this having on the public’s views towards the government?

The UN vote to upgrade the recognition of the State of Palestine, as well as the statements made by several countries, including Spain, Norway and Ireland, are important diplomatic steps towards reinforcing the international legitimacy of the fight for Palestinian liberation and statehood. I am convinced — and there is broad international consensus around this — that UN resolutions serve as the best basis to allow Palestinians to win their right to national self-determination, through the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Green Line (the pre-June 4, 1967 boundary) would serve as the basis for the border between the Palestinian and Israeli states. Such a peace agreement would have to include: dismantling all Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank, which are illegal according to international law; a just and agreed-upon solution for Palestinian refugees based on UN resolutions; taking down the so-called Separation Wall built in the early 2000s; and releasing Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, including the more than 3600 “administrative detainees” who have been held captive without charges, trial or convictions, in some cases for many years.

Within Israel, the mainstream media portrays this shift in public opinion abroad and diplomatic moves as supposedly aimed against all Israelis. The Israeli political establishment tries to conflate the government and state with regular people. It tries to portray international criticism of the Netanyahu government’s action in Rafah as criticism levelled against all Israeli citizens, while war crimes accusations against Netanyahu and other high-ranking Israeli officials are portrayed as accusations made against all Israelis. This has the effect of consolidating people around the Netanyahu government, so that even people who are critical of its actions or who seek a political alternative find themselves siding with him against the Hague.

This shows the importance of creating a space inside Israeli society for criticising the policies of the political establishment. If all critique is external, or if criticisms conflate the people and government, it will have the effect of closing rather than widening the gap between the majority of people and the current leadership.

Amid the ongoing war, local elections were held a couple of months back in which, for the first time, Standing Together obtained representation on the Tel-Aviv and Haifa municipal councils. What can you tell us about these results and their significance in terms of building a new left in Israel?

Local elections were held in Israel on February 27. Originally planned for October, they were postponed due to the war. Held once every five years, these elections determine the makeup of the municipal councils that run the affairs of cities and towns, approve budgets and devise local policy. In the months prior to the elections, two new urban movements, both in ideological affinity with Standing Together, emerged in Tel-Aviv and Haifa to contest those elections.

In Tel Aviv, the local movement, Purple City, is headed by Itamar Avneri, a member of the Standing Together leadership. It unites a coalition of mostly urban youth around questions of housing and climate justice. In September, it joined with others on the left, such as the Communist Party, a local environmental movement and some community activists, to form an electoral coalition called We Are All the City. This coalition obtained 14,882 votes (7.6%) at the election and won 3 out of the 31 seats on city council. Avneri, who was the third candidate on the coalition’s slate, was elected as a city councillor.

In Haifa, the local movement, The City’s Majority, is headed by Sally Abed, another member of the Standing Together leadership. It contested the elections on its own and won 3451 votes (3%), electing Abed as the movement’s sole city councillor. This was the first time a slate for the Haifa city council was headed by a Palestinian woman. The slate also included Orwa Adam, an openly gay Palestinian activist — a first in Israeli electoral history.

Both tickets were joint Jewish-Arab movements and although organisationally, legally and financially independent from Standing Together — as required by electoral laws — both were publicly recognised as in line with our “brand” of politics. These experiences of successful electoral breakthroughs from below are important to build a new, viable, people’s left in Israel — one that is grassroots-based, internationalist in its orientation and grounded in socialist values. In the coming years, this is the main challenge facing everyone who hopes to see a combative left in Israel capable of confronting the mainstream institutional hegemony and building power around an alternative political project.