The Israel Lobby vs a Pro-Palestine Socialist in Brooklyn

BY THEODORE HAMM
06.24.2024

JACOBIN

In a Brooklyn state house race, pro-Palestine socialist Eon Huntley is challenging incumbent Stefani Zinerman. Zinerman is receiving funding from a pro-Israel PAC as well as rich donors like the Walmart heir — money that she is calling “reparations.”

Eon Tyrell Huntley is running to represent New York State Assembly District 56 in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. (Eon for Assembly)


Is “Palestine on the ballot” in a race for New York State Assembly in Central Brooklyn’s 56th District? Challenger Eon Huntley clearly thinks so. As for incumbent Democrat Stefani Zinerman’s view of the slaughter in Gaza, that depends on who you ask.


Backed by New York City’s chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and closely tied to Jabari Brisport, the area’s state senator and a DSA leader, Huntley’s campaign poses a threat to the Brooklyn Democratic Party old guard. Hakeem Jeffries and Tish James are trying to circle the wagons behind Zinerman, a former aide to longtime state senator Velmanette Montgomery, Brisport’s predecessor.

Zinerman, as reported by New York Focus, is one of nine candidates receiving funding from Solidarity PAC, a pro-Israel group that publishes a “Wall of Shame” that disparages elected officials critical of Israel.

Late last week, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams announced his somewhat unexpected endorsement of Zinerman. Unlike Jeffries and James, Williams has been a vocal supporter of a cease-fire in Gaza.

In a statement, Williams cited Zinerman’s “experience and leadership as a Black woman representing Central Brooklyn.” Regarding Gaza, Williams explains that “I am also glad that Zinerman has called for a ceasefire, which is immediately needed to end this violence.”

Zinerman’s position on the Palestine crisis may be news to many voters, since it can’t be found via any simple Google search. Her campaign also does not have an active website.

“We haven’t seen any evidence that the assemblywoman supports a cease-fire,” Huntley says. “My record is clear,” he adds, citing his participation in several peace protests and Palestine solidarity teach-ins held in his campaign office.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Brisport says regarding Williams’s description of Zinerman’s position.

Zinerman did not respond to our requests for comment.

Huntley and Brisport stress that Zinerman has not signed on to the “Not on Our Dime!” legislation that prohibits New York nonprofits from funding settlements in the occupied territories. DSA’s Zohran Mamdani is the lead sponsor in the Assembly, with Brisport at the forefront in the State Senate.

Other DSA legislators, including Brooklyn’s Phara Souffrant Forrest and Julia Salazar, are cosponsors. So is State Senator Robert Jackson, a veteran Harlem Democrat. But the Democratic Party leadership is not yet on board.

“It would be a meaningful expression of support for Zinerman to cosponsor Not on Our Dime,” says Huntley, although he is not holding his breath.

In addition to the pro-Israel PAC funding, Zinerman has received four-figure contributions from Emma Bloomberg, the former mayor’s daughter, as well as Walmart heir Jim Walton (a Koch brothers ally) and various Wall Street players.

Zinerman raised eyebrows by telling Politico last week that “Everyone is spending money on the district, so as far as I’m concerned it’s reparations.”

“That is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard in my life,” says Brisport. “It degrades the concept of reparations.”

“People tell themselves anything when they are taking money from the same forces that are initiating displacement in our neighborhood,” observes Huntley. “I would never be so flippant about resources that are only benefiting me.”

Asked whether he agrees with Zinerman’s “reparations” comment, Williams opted not to respond.

Money clearly talks in the current Democratic primary. On June 25, we’ll find out what walks.Republished from The Indypendent.
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Theodore Hamm is chair of journalism and new media studies at St Joseph’s College in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. His book, Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sanders’ Politics is now available from O/R Books.

Movement Lessons from Climbers With Palestine’s Yosemite Banner Hang

“Oh, you don’t know how to organize a sit-in at an Israeli consulate? No problem. What do you know how to do? Do that thing, but for Palestine.”

By Brooke Anderson

June 26, 2024

Source: Convergence

Earlier last week, a group of seasoned rock climbers calling themselves “Climbers With Palestine” scaled the 3,000-foot wall of the iconic El Capitan granite monolith in Yosemite National Park (on the ancestral lands of the Mewuk people) to unfurl a massive banner reading “Stop the Genocide.”

The June 17 action, coordinated by Palestinian and Jewish climbers, among others, demanded an end to the US-backed genocide in Gaza and to Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine. The action quickly went viral on social media and received significant coverage in both climbing and mainstream press.

The route up “El Cap” (as it is affectionately known in the climbing community) is daunting and arduous. World-class climbers travel from around the world and some spend years training to test their skills on this climb. Climbing “big walls” like El Cap involves hauling hundreds of pounds of rope, equipment, food, and water up a sheer rock face, and sleeping for multiple nights on the wall itself on ledges or portaledges (portable cots that attach to otherwise sheer vertical faces).

Spending several days on the ground in Yosemite supporting this action, I was reminded of an important principle of movement building. For our social movements to win, we need both escalating direct actions that create real economic, political, and social consequences for those committing, financing, and sanctioning genocide (which, due to the secrecy and stakes of those actions, often entail a limited number of people) and we need hundreds of thousands of people organizing the communities that they already belong to and leveraging the skills that they already have.

Start where you are

Increasingly bold and disruptive actions for a permanent ceasefire and a free Palestine in which we’ve taken over or shut down highways and bridges, state capitals and federal buildings, Israeli consulates and weapons manufacturers, may make it feel like the only way to get involved is through high-stakes, technical actions or mass mobilizations in the streets. Both are absolutely critical, but the high-stakes actions are often not publicly announced and marching and chanting while holding a sign simply isn’t for everyone. As a result, many people horrified by the genocide want to take action but don’t know where, when, or how to do so.

What then is to be done? As one friend recently joked, “Oh, you don’t know how to organize a sit-in at an Israeli consulate? No problem. What do you know how to do? Do that thing, but for Palestine.”

Climbers With Palestine’s epic banner hang in Yosemite is just one example of that idea, but it offers us three important lessons about growing our movement ranks:Organize in the communities you’re part of, where you live, and around the multiple diverse identities that matter to you and make you a whole person (e.g. parent, teacher, student, health care worker, midwife, elder, artist, union member, soccer coach, etc.);
Leverage the skills that you have (e.g. climbing, construction, art-making, cooking, growing food, conflict resolution, writing, speaking, event planning, etc.) to take strategic action to advance the movement to end the genocide; and
Build relationships with others who can support you with the technical expertise you’ll need to make your action or efforts successful (e.g. legal advice, media lists, sound equipment, documentation, help with safety and de-escalation, etc.).

For Climbers With Palestine, it all started with two climbers who noticed each other posting about Palestine. The group held events in key climbing strongholds like Bishop, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite National Park to educate climbers and build support. At those gatherings, they screened the film “Resistance Climbing,” held Zoom Q & A’s with climbers in the West Bank, and raised funds for organizations like the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and Doctors Without Borders.

Having first done that education and built that support in prior months, Climbers With Palestine then felt ready to take bolder action on El Cap. Their escalation paid off in two important ways.

First, with the action going viral, the entire climbing world is talking about Palestine. Climbing communities are now abuzz with climbers asking how to learn more about what is happening in Gaza, how to educate more climbers where they are already (e.g. gyms, national parks, online forums, etc.), how to continue to build with climbers in Palestine, and how to leverage our climbing, rigging, and anchor-building skills to support direct actions.

Secondly, because the banner was also visible from the Yosemite Valley floor, it was seen by thousands of tourists from around the world who pass through the park daily, many of whom viewed the banner through binoculars pointed up at the rock provided by the park’s “Ask a Climber” station.

One key reason that their action was so wildly successful is because Climbers With Palestine did what they knew so well and then called on others who had expertise in areas they did not. For instance, they asked friends with more experience in direct action to make the banner, provide legal advice, write press releases, make pitch calls, do social media, and document the action.
Create your opportunity

Just to be clear: you don’t need to be able to scale a 3,000-foot granite wall! Rather, Climbers With Palestine is just one example among hundreds of efforts in which people who don’t necessarily consider themselves “activists” are nonetheless organizing their “sector of society” to stop a genocide.

Parents have organized Palestine story hours and chalk-ins. Teachers have developed ceasefire curricula. Artists, musicians, DJs, comics, and other cultural workers are making the movement irresistible, and calling on art institutions to back the call for a free Palestine. Medical workers are speaking out against the bombing of hospitals. Healers and counselors are offering their skills to activists traumatized by police violence. Kayakers are blocking oil tankers with ties to Palestine. Chefs, farmers, and other workers in the food, beverage, and hospitality industries are providing food to the movement, lifting up Palestinian cuisine against cooptation and erasure, and boycotting Israeli goods.

In other words, don’t wait for an invite to the kind of genocide-fighting action that speaks to you. Create it, then invite your people.

Who are you? What communities do you belong to? What skills do you have to leverage in service of stopping the genocide? What do you genuinely love doing together with other people you have trusting relationships with? Could you do that same thing in a way that would lift up the call for a free Palestine or move resources to communities doing that work?

Climbers With Palestine is just one example of this principle in action (and actually, only one of many formations of climbers supporting Palestine, such as Climb the Wall), but here are some of their members in their own words explaining how they organized within their communities while doing the thing they love:

Miranda Oakley

Miranda Oakley, Palestinian American professional climber, guide, and co-founder of Climbers With Palestine, carries her climbing haul bag, rope, and helmet back from the base of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park after the banner hang. Oakley is the first woman to rope solo El Cap in a single day. She has traveled to Palestine to climb with Palestinian climbers there.Brooke Anderson

“I hope that other climbers feel emboldened or inspired to speak out for the causes they believe in, especially about Palestine because I know it can be an intimidating subject to talk about. I also hope that our friends in Palestine feel the love and solidarity that we’re trying to send them. We’ve been doing some interviews on Zoom with Palestinian climbers, which was really cool to share with our climbing communities in the US. This genocide in Gaza has been hard on them, and there have been a lot arrests in the West Bank for speaking out. I’m speaking out here today because I can, and I know there are a lot of people who can’t. We went up El Cap because that’s something we can do. Even though there are risks in climbing, I honestly felt safer flying a banner up there than I would have down here on the ground. Since we’re all skilled in climbing, it’s something we could do to share our message. Now we’re asking folks to do what they can do. Obviously, not everyone can climb a wall. If you can, great. If you can’t, you can call your representative, boycott Israeli products, and talk to friends and family about it.”

Alix Morris

Alix Morris, co-founder of Climbers With Palestine and a former Yosemite Search and Rescue team member, sorts climbing gear in El Cap Meadow at the base of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park as the sun goes down on the eve of their ascent of El Capitan.Brooke Anderson

“I’m doing this because I care about our shared humanity, about people suffering, and about the unnecessary bloodshed in retaliation for the October 7 attack. It is really heartbreaking. It didn’t need to happen. I’m honestly surprised that more climbers haven’t used El Cap as a way to protest atrocities in the world. Why aren’t more climbers politically active? For me, based on my experience with El Cap—I’ve climbed it 27 times now—it is so natural to say ‘I have this skill set. I love this wall. I love Yosemite. I care so much about human rights. It’s a great way to blend the two.’ I wish other climbers could use their skills for the things that they believe in. I hope that climbers that see [the banner] on social media think more about [the genocide], have more conversations about it. We’ve all lost people close to us, especially climbers and those of us who’ve worked Search and Rescue, but the decimation of families in Gaza by the Israeli government, with US backing, is creating unfathomable suffering and is entirely preventable. It has to stop.”

Emily Meg Weinstein

Emily Meg Weinstein, a Jewish American climber and co-founder of Climbers With Palestine, on the ground at the base of El Cap in Yosemite National Park. Weinstein is a longtime climber who led the El Cap banner ground support and press team. Her debut memoir, Turn to Stone, is forthcoming from Simon Element in 2025.Brooke Anderson

“Climbers are known for being apolitical, but I don’t think that’s true. Climbers have a deep ethical and moral sensibility, as well as a spiritual connection to nature and all living things. Climbing as a sport—and our community as a whole—is all about protecting and even saving each other’s lives.

I’ve always loved how climbing instills and develops a warrior mindset, but a nonviolent one. The way those values are built into the climbing ethos and community creates an almost innate moral imperative to act to help others and protect life. That’s already in our blood as climbers. It warms my heart to see this community that we all rely on for so much love and connection reaching out across the world to do what climbers do, which is take bold action to protect each other. It also means a lot to me to speak up as a Jew, because at the bedrock of my Jewish identity is a deep love and respect for all life. Our toast is “l’chaim”—to life. There is an ancient idea that we Jews are meant to live in diaspora, in communities all over the world, so we can be “a light unto the nations.” We have been wanderers for millennia, and we have always been a multiracial, multiethnic, multinational community that has thrived wherever we have lived in freedom and safety, just as our Palestinian siblings once did, and shall again. My direct ancestors escaped and survived the genocidal violence of the Holocaust, as well as centuries of genocidal pogroms before that, at the hands (and hatchets and swords) of white Christian nationalists in the borderlands of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus. But many more of my ancestors were martyred in those catastrophes. I honor the ancestors who gifted me my own life by being a light unto my own nation, and I honor our own martyred dead by standing up and speaking out for the living and the beloved in Palestine, who are just as much my blood as any Jew or gentile, and whose lives matter just as much as mine. There is nothing about Israel and America’s genocide against the Palestinian people that serves my Jewish light, life, or freedom, and anyone who claims otherwise tells a murderous lie. It is my mission as a Jew, an American, a writer, and a climber to use every skill and breath I have to fight until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea.”

Arjunia & George Oakley

Miranda Oakley’s parents, Arjunia (left) and George (right) Oakley, sit in the El Cap Meadow in Yosemite National Park as they watch Miranda deploy the “Stop the Genocide” banner. Brooke Anderson

Arjunia: “My family is from Ramallah, Palestine and we trace our family back 500 years to Ramallah. My parents immigrated in the 1950s. My parents had actually been in Jaffa in 1948 during the Nakba [what Palestinians call the great catastrophe, when they were forcibly displaced from their homes]. They had a life and a business there, but were forced out so they went back to Ramallah with hundreds of thousands of other people. They had a home there, but after ‘48 there was no opportunity, so we got refugee status and came to the U.S. by boat when I was just two years old. [The genocide] has been so horrible to watch, like a dark cloud. I worry about Miranda up there. I mean, I know she’s a good climber, but today she also has to haul that big banner. But mostly I’m just really proud of her, her passion for social justice and for Palestine.”

George: “When I was watching her climb, I knew she’d done the climb many times, including solo, it was unnerving to see how big [the rock] is and how small she is. But I’m really proud to see her take her passion and put it toward something that needs the message to get out.”

You can follow Climbers With Palestine on Instagram at @ClimbersWithPalestine.

Don’t Buy The Tariff Lie

BY THOMAS KNAPP

 JUNE 24, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“If he returns to the White House,” Bloomberg reports, “Donald Trump has pledged to enact a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports that he says will raise billions of dollars in revenue to pay for more tax cuts.” He’s even floated the idea, per CNBC, of an “all tariff policy” and elimination of the federal income tax.

Think tanks of pretty much every stripe — from the “left-wing” Center for American Progress to the “centrist” Peterson Institute for International Economics to the “libertarian” Cato Institute agree: The math doesn’t work. It would take some pretty insane tariff levels to “pay for” elimination of the income tax. And you’d likely pay more in tariffs than you used to pay in income tax.

Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly wants you to believe that “the notion that tariffs are a tax on US consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”

She’s the one who’s lying. “Protectionism” doesn’t “protect” you — it protects the revenues of domestic businesses with friends in Washington, and it does so at the expense of anyone and everyone who buys the “protected” items.

A 60% tariff on a $1 Chinese item means you either pay $1.60 for that Chinese item … or $1.59 for the American version that used to cost $1.29 (if American companies bothered to make it at all). Tariffs make you, and foreign manufacturers, poorer so American manufacturers can get richer without having to compete for your patronage on price.

But let’s get to a bigger lie: The notion that tax cuts have to be “paid for.”

When a politician uses that phrase, he or she means that if the government isn’t taking a dollar from you, it must get that dollar somewhere else.

That’s not a “cost.” The dollar in question doesn’t belong to the government in the first place. It’s a dollar the government wants, not a dollar it has.

If I don’t break into your car and steal your stereo, I don’t have to find a way to “pay for” not having your stereo. My lack of a stereo is not a “cost” to me. It’s just you keeping what’s yours instead of me taking it.

Then there’s the biggest lie: The notion that “tax cuts” are really even on the table.

The only way for taxes to go down is for spending to go down … and the politicians bragging about “tax cut” proposals clearly have no intention of reducing their spending.

The “national debt”  stands at not quite $35 trillion, with another $2 trillion to be added this year. Every dollar of debt and deficit represents taxes the government has promised to take out of your hide, and your descendants’ hides, in perpetuity, with interest. It’s just another tax,  with payment partially deferred.

Government spending is a lot like the three-card monte card, without the prospect that you’ll even occasionally be allowed to win. And Trump’s proposals are just another variant of that game, not a plan to reduce the amount he and his cronies steal from you.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Property Law, Settler-Colonialism, and the Vatican

BY STEVE KELLY

 JUNE 25, 2024
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Photograph Source: Dietmar Rabich – CC BY-SA 4.0

Newsflash!  Property law in the U.S. is not rooted in the Constitution. America’s legal foundation for property law (possession), “anti-Indian law,” and the concept of nation-states is religious, not secular.

Where did this deep sense of entitlement, hierarchy, and dominion over unknown lands and its original sovereign peoples originate?

How was this wilderness continent, upon which its people depended – for millennia – for survival, end up being converted into “real estate” by a bunch of European Christian princes and pirates?

Most people who own real estate, work and live on this settler-colonized land we now call “America,” cannot answer the question.  So, how can we discern a proper answer?

U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall, the fourth, and longest-serving chief justice (1801-1835), told us so – over 200 years ago.

The Doctrine of Christian Discovery originated in Europe in the 15^th Century and is melded into the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedent case, Johnson v. McIntosh (1823).

Careful decoding of the imaginative legal language in this seminal U.S. Supreme Court case reveals the fascinating history that informs present legal thinking and how we arrived at this place and time.

To grasp a deeper comprehension of how the age-old doctrines of settler-colonialism, religious discrimination and wars of conquest influence our lives today, Steven T. Newcomb’s book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (2007) is essential reading.

Old Testament stories provide the underpinnings, retold in the Roman Church’s 15^th Century papal bulls.  Centuries later, these Vatican policy documents helped to ‘legitimize’ the conceptual source of U.S. government legal doctrine that persists today to define nation-states, property, and anti-Indian law.

Legal precedents written in the early 19^th Century remain hidden under opaque strata of human imagination, cultural conditioning, and consciousness.

In 1493, the bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI, granted the monarchs of Spain ownership of roughly half the “discovered” world.  Representatives contracted by Spanish and Portuguese monarchs exploited that official church license to claim “discovered” lands, with extensive state military backing to guarantee success.

“English Royals” crafted their own (legal) rights of imagined ownership, certified by its homegrown Anglican form of “civilized Christianity.”  In 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a charter from the Crown authorizing him to

“…discover and take possession of such remote, heathen, and barbarous                                                                                                   lands, as were not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people…”

Decades later, the Crown granted others charters to conquer, loot and plunder unclaimed territory in the “New World.”

Comprehending the relationship between settler-colonialism, Old Testament stories, European monarchs and the Vatican’s holy decrees is essential to understanding the chaos and war in the world today. What is most important to understand is how the Doctrine of Christian Discovery impacts our world, here and now.

This 500-year-old religious dogma is still being used.  In the 21^st century the U.S. Supreme Court continues to rationalize the “dominion” and “chosen people” dogma and mindset of the Old Testament and 15^th century Christendom.

Property:

The exclusive right of possessing, enjoying and disposing of a thing; ownership. In the beginning of the world, the Creator gave to man dominion over the earth, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air,and over every living thing. This is the foundation of man’s property in the earth… Prior occupancy of land and of wild animals gives to the          possessor the property of them.   Webster’s (1828).

This is the pathology of the hierarchical dominating mentality that moves all settler-colonizer societies.

“Their god was on their side.”  Where have we heard that lately?  Enough of this nonsense!

Steve Kelly is a an artist and environmental activist. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.