Experts Say Israel's 'Buffer Zone' Plan Violates International Law

"Why are they making these explosions other than part of their plan of forced displacement?" asked one human rights advocate regarding Israel's demolition of more than 1,000 buildings in the planned zone.


A picture taken from southern Israel on January 24, 2024 shows destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip.
(Photo: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)


JULIA CONLEY
Jan 25, 2024

COMMONDREAMS


Along with openly flouting the Biden administration's demand that Palestinian territory not be reduced by Israel's bombardment of Gaza, human rights and policy experts on Wednesday said that Israel's efforts to create a so-called "buffer zone" by demolishing buildings near its border structure are a violation of international law.

After satellite imagery and verified online videos have for weeks shown the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carrying out controlled demolitions of buildings, including some near the Israel-Gaza border, Israeli officials for the first time this week acknowledged they were pushing ahead with clearing border areas of residential and other buildings to create a "buffer zone."

The IDF said it aims to create additional "layers of security" following Hamas' October 7 attack on southern Israel, but with Israel's Channel 12 reporting that 1,100 out of 2,850 buildings in the planned half-mile buffer zone already demolished, experts posited that the clear aim is to further shrink the already densely-populated enclave.

"If the Israeli government wants a buffer zone, it has every right to create one in far larger Israel, but it has no right to seize land in Gaza, squeezing the 2.3 million Palestinians into an even tinier area," said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Israel acknowledged the plans less than a week after videos of one of its most high-profile recent demolitions, that of Israa University, were posted online. The institution was destroyed when the IDF detonated more than 300 mines on the campus—an operation that would have required Israel to "have full control" of the site, one observer noted, suggesting that the military could not have been targeting Hamas as it has repeatedly claimed.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that it has also verified recent videos showing the demolition of residential buildings about one kilometer from the fence separating Gaza and Israel, including one in which 11 buildings were destroyed at once.

"Civilian properties are protected under international humanitarian law," Basel al-Sourani, an advocacy officer for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, told the Post. "These houses are empty, and nobody is in them. Why are they making these explosions other than part of their plan of forced displacement?"

"Now with this 1-kilometer buffer they are talking about, and I'm sure it's more, what are we going to do?" he added.

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, noted that the Biden administration has previously suggested it would be against the construction of a buffer zone within Gaza's borders, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying in November that the U.S. would support "no reduction in the territory of Gaza."

But on Thursday, Al Jazeera reported that the Biden administration's position on the issue is now "subject to some uncertainty," with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby reiterating that Gaza's territory should not be reduced but Blinken saying the White House may support a buffer zone for some amount of time.

Blinken said on Tuesday that security measures enabling Israelis to return to their homes in southern Israel may be "appropriate."

"If there need to be transitional arrangements to enable that to happen, that's one thing," he said. "But when it comes to the permanent status of Gaza going forward... we remain clear about not encroaching on its territory."

Geoffrey Nice, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor, toldAl Jazeera that Israel's "landgrab" of farmland near the border which is "crucial to Gaza's economy" is clearly illegal.

"If you want to a demilitarized zone that you're going to fill with landmines, why not have it on the Israeli side and stop people crossing it?" Nice told the outlet. "What they're proposing, effectively and in anyone's interpretation, is occupation."

"But the process has already started," he said. "A large number of buildings have already been flattened. It is unjustified, by any view, under international law."

The Flawed—and Deadly—'War on Terror' Mindset Endures in Israel


If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with Rear Adm. David Saar Salama at the Ashdod Naval Base on October 29, 2023.
(Photo: Office of Benjamin Netanyahu)

MAHA HILAL
Jan 27, 2024

TomDispatch

In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not only eagerly embraced by Israel in 2001, they also lie at the heart of that country’s justification of the genocidal campaign that’s been waged against the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023.

On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would justify endless war. The United States, he said, was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the first time, stating (all too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the “terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar Richard Jackson later noted, the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse… specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently ‘good.’”

Your Fight Is Our Fight

The day after the 9/11 attacks, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a televised address to Israelis, saying that “the fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together, we can defeat these forces of evil.” Sharon, in other words, laid out Israel’s fight in the same binary terms the American president would soon use, a good-versus-evil framework, as a way of rejecting any alternative explanations of those assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City that killed almost 3,000 people. That December, Sharon responded to an attack in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers by saying that he would launch his own “war on terror… with all the means at our disposal.”

On the day of Bush’s September 20th speech, Benjamin Netanyahu, then working in the private sector after holding various positions within the Israeli government, capitalized on the president’s narrative by asserting Israel’s enthusiastic support for the United States. In a statement offered to the House Government Reform Committee, emphasizing his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism, Netanyahu stated, “I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say today, we are all Americans — in grief, as in defiance.”

Israel’s “9/11”

Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves,” neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. In remarks at a bilateral meeting with President Biden 11 days later, however, Prime Minister Netanyahu strategically compared the Hamas attacks to the 9/11 ones, using resonant terms for Americans that also allowed Israel to claim its own total innocence, as the U.S. had done 22 years earlier. In that vein, Netanyahu stated, “On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s 20 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy.”

But 9/11 doesn’t live in infamy because it actually caused damage of any long-lasting or ultimate sort to the United States or because it far exceeded the scale of other acts of global mass violence, but because it involved “Americans as the victims of terror, not as the perpetrators” and because of the way those leading the country portrayed it as uniquely and exceptionally victimized. As Professor Jackson put it, 9/11 “was immediately iconicized as the foremost symbol of American suffering.” The ability to reproduce that narrative endlessly, while transforming 9/11 into a date that transcended time itself, served as a powerful lesson to Israel in how to communicate suffering and an omnipresent existential threat that could be weaponized to legitimize future violent interventions. By framing the Hamas attacks on October 7th similarly as a symbol of ultimate suffering and existential threat, Israel could do the same.

Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President Biden stated that “since this terrorist attack… took place, we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s. The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into… some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States.”

It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Terrorism: How the West Can Win that spoke to themes similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However, in responding to Hamas’s attacks, Israel’s discursive strategy was both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.

“Surprise” Attacks

The power of that “primal feeling” was intensified by the way both the United States and Israel feigned “surprise” about their countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both were privy to. That evidence included a President’s Daily Brief that Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” and the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document detailing the potential attack a year in advance.

Just as Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who clearly stated that U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring Israel’s longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack, Netanyahu asserted that “we are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens.”

By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched. Netanyahu typically asserted on October 30th that, “since October 7th, Israel has been at war. Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But Israel will win this war.”

All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate “an extremely narrow set of ‘political truths’” (or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public consciousness by the United States or Israel, such “truths” were meant to dictate just who the “terrorists” were (never us, of course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why intervention — full-scale war, in fact — was necessary. An additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative, whether American or Israeli, as a “natural interpretation” of reality, not a constructed one.

Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians. Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as “driven by fanaticism,” as Scott Poynting and David Whyte note, while state violence, in contrast, is “presented as defensive, responsible, rational, and unavoidable — and not motivated by a particular ideological bias or political choice.”

The Threat of Terrorismand Moral Equivalencies

Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have represented terrorism as “catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American [or Israeli] way of life,” and “a threat commensurate with Nazism and Communism.”

As with Bush’s argument that the 9/11 attackers were the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century” and that “they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism,” Netanyahu urged a mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a similar basis. To this end, he asserted that “just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas.”

American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the country’s inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the War on Terror, Bush said at a press conference: “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic… I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other “counterterrorism” operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given the staggering number of civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the United States and “Islamic extremists” based on the slaughter of innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was the all-too-dehumanizing “collateral damage”).

No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies, Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas’s attacks in order to distinguish them from Israel’s. For example, he described Hamas as “an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids, youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids, who just wanted to have fun on the holiday.” But like the United States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to. In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel’s war, it is believed to have killed more than 10,000 children (and those figures will only rise if you include children who are now likely to die from starvation and disease in a devastated Gaza).

Birds of Violent Rhetorical Feathers Flock Together

In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said, “These guys — they make al-Qaeda look pure. They’re pure — they’re pure evil.” Then, nearly three weeks after those October 7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu asserted that his country was in “a battle” with “the Axis of Evil led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions.” More than two decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words, referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” who were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

In each case, the “evil” they were referring to was meant to communicate an inherent and innate desire for violence and destruction, irrespective of the actions of the United States or Israel. As the saying goes, evil is as evil does.

As scholar Joanne Esch has noted, “If they hate us for who we are rather than what we do, nothing can be gained from reexamining our own policies.” In other words, no matter what we do, the United States and Israel can insist on a level of moral superiority in taking on such battles as the harbingers of good. And it was true that, positioned as a battle of good versus evil, the all-American war on terror did, for a time, gain a kind of “divine sanction,” which Israel has used as a blueprint.

In response to the recent International Court of Justice complaint submitted by South Africa charging Israel with genocide, a defiant Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that his country would continue its Gazan war until it was over. He also mentioned a meeting he had with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which he told him, “This is not just our war — it is also your war.”

If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring. This has enabled both states to make use of specific schemas that were constructed and deployed in Washington to explain the 9/11 attacks — and now to justify a genocidal war in a world where “terror” is seen as an eternal threat to “liberal democracies.”

In his book Narrative and the Making of US National Security, Donald Krebs argues that, when it comes to politics, language “neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics.” In this vein, it remains critical to subvert such destructive and pervasive narratives so that countries like the United States and Israel can no longer maintain “necropolitical” rule domestically or globally — that is, in the words of Cameroon historian and political theorist Achille Mmembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”

© 2023 TomDispatch.com


MAHA HILAL
Dr. Maha Hilal is a researcher and writer on institutionalized Islamophobia and author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Common Dreams among others. She is the founding Executive Director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, an organizer with Witness Against Torture and a Council member of the School of the Americas Watch. She earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, D.C. She received her Master's Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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It's Time to Stop Simply Asking Israel to Do the Right Thing

Gaza's humanitarian crisis is not a natural disaster. It's the direct result of choices made by political leaders, none more than Benjamin Netanyahu.



U.S. President Joe Biden holds a bilateral meeting with Israel's prime minister at a hotel in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

BERNIE SANDERS
Jan 27, 2024

The Guardian

Many of us are watching with horror the severe humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues in the House of Representatives and US Senate are choosing to ignore this reality and evade their congressional responsibilities.

Let’s be clear: what’s happening in Gaza is not just some unfortunate tragedy taking place thousands of miles from our shores. The United States provides Israel with $3.8bn in military aid every year, and the bombs and military equipment that are destroying Gaza are made in America. In other words, we are complicit in what is happening.

And what’s happening is unspeakable.

My staff and I have spoken in recent days with the United Nations, the World Food Programme and other humanitarian organizations struggling to deal with the disaster in Gaza.

The bottom line is this: the coming weeks could mean the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people. If we do not see a dramatic improvement in humanitarian access very soon, countless innocent people – including thousands of children – could die of dehydration, diarrhea, preventable diseases and starvation.

The World Health Organization predicts that the number of deaths from sickness and starvation could exceed the very high number killed in the war thus far.

And let’s be clear: this is not a natural disaster. It is a human-made crisis. This is the direct result of choices made by political leaders, none more than Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel’s extreme rightwing government.

Hamas began this war with its horrific terrorist attack on 7 October, which killed 1,200 innocent Israeli men, women and children, and took 240 hostages. Israel had the right to respond to that attack and go to war against Hamas. It did not and does not, however, have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people – which is exactly what is happening.

More than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed in this war, and 62,000 wounded – 70% of whom are women and children. Thousands more are believed to be trapped under the rubble. At least 152 UN aid workers have been killed so far, more than in any previous war.

Unbelievably, 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes, almost 80% of the entire population of Gaza. These are people who were already impoverished and who are now living in crowded UN shelters or out in the open in winter conditions. They lack adequate food, water, fuel and medical supplies. And they have no idea what the future holds for them.

About 70% of the housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Most of Gaza’s critical infrastructure has been made inoperable – including many water wells, bakeries, power plants and sewage treatment facilities. Much of the area has been without cellphone service for weeks, making communication extremely difficult.

Water is scarce, and what little is available is often contaminated. Public wells are operating at just 10% capacity, and just one of three water pipelines into Gaza is functioning. For several months now, children in southern Gaza are surviving on just 1.5-2 liters of water per day, far less than what is needed. And that is in the area where UN aid can be delivered. The situation is worse elsewhere.

The lack of clean water is leading to a spike in waterborne diseases and diarrhea – a very serious condition which accounts for nearly 10% of all deaths among children under the age of five worldwide. In Gaza, the UN reports 158,000 cases – more than half among children under the age of five – a 4,000% increase from before the war. Humanitarian groups say they fear many thousands of children will die from diarrhea before they starve to death.

Hunger and starvation are now widespread. Before the war, Gaza had 97 bakeries – just 15 are now operating, and none are functioning in the north, closed by the combination of airstrikes and a lack of fuel and flour. Hundreds of thousands of children go to sleep hungry each night, and desperate people are mobbing the few relief trucks that can reach beyond the border crossing.

Right now, the UN says that 570,000 people in Gaza are facing “catastrophic hunger” equivalent to famine. This is the most severe category of starvation, but the UN reports that “the entire population of Gaza – roughly 2.2 million people – are in crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity”. Virtually every household is regularly skipping meals, and most are down to a single meal a day, often just bread.

Experts say infants and young children will succumb first to hunger. Without enough food, or with no clean water to make formula, their vital organs will begin to shut down. Many will die of infection before they reach that point. The technical term for this stage – child wasting – is too horrific to contemplate. Yet that is what we are watching unfold in slow motion as the world looks on.

Gaza’s healthcare system is under tremendous strain. Most healthcare facilities are inoperable or functioning at diminished capacity. Faced with tens of thousands of casualties, health workers have, with enormous courage, struggled to save lives amid frequent bombardment in overcrowded hospitals without electricity or adequate fuel or medicine. Three hundred and thirty-seven health workers have been killed.

The lack of basic necessities and overcrowded conditions are contributing to a dramatic increase in disease, and 10% of the population now has acute respiratory infections. Those with long-term conditions that require advanced treatment have little hope of receiving adequate care.

Amid this devastation, approximately 180 women give birth in Gaza every day, receiving completely inadequate medical care. Without enough food or clean water, let alone necessary medications and antibiotics, many of these women face serious complications, and their children will bear lifelong scars from this war.

That is life in Gaza today. The American people must not ignore it. The Biden administration must not ignore it. Congress must not ignore it.

We also cannot ignore what is causing this disaster. And the answer is pretty clear: at every step, the Israeli government has failed to provide even the most basic protections to civilians. Every humanitarian move has been extracted only after weeks of delay and outside pressure from the United States and others.

The result is that today just 20-30% of what is needed is being allowed in. Not enough food. Not enough water. Not enough medical supplies. Not enough fuel.

Onerous Israeli border inspections are a major cause of this crisis. Today, there is a three- to four-week wait for trucks to get into Gaza. Many trucks are unloaded and reloaded numerous times, often to be searched for the same items. Israel is rejecting items like tent poles, feminine hygiene kits, hand sanitizers, water testing kits and medical supplies. If a single item is rejected, the truck has to go back to the start of the process. The Kerem Shalom crossing, the main entry point equipped to process trucks in large numbers, is only open eight hours a day.

It is hard to see this process and not conclude that it’s a deliberate effort to slow humanitarian aid. And sure enough, just last week, Netanyahu said that Israel is only allowing in the absolute minimum amount necessary.

When trucks do eventually get across the border, they face a new set of problems. Israel is bombing targets across Gaza, and its ground forces have closed many major roads amid the fighting. The process for coordinating aid convoys with the Israeli military has broken down, and the first half of January actually saw a deterioration in humanitarian access.

So let’s be clear: Netanyahu’s rightwing government is starving Gaza. Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and restrictions on essential humanitarian aid have created one of the most severe humanitarian catastrophes of recent times.

For months, the United States government has pleaded with Israel to take urgent steps to avoid further civilian death. But despite these requests, including from President Biden himself, Netanyahu has done nothing.

That has to change now. Tens of thousands of lives hang in the balance, and every day matters.

This war is being fought primarily with US arms and equipment. That means the United States is complicit in this nightmare. We must end it. The United States has to use its leverage to make Netanyahu change his approach.

As part of that effort, I have tried to force what I consider to be a very modest step in the US Senate: a resolution requiring the state department to report on any human rights violations that may have occurred in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The resolution is based on longstanding US law requiring that any security assistance or military equipment provided to anycountry be used in line with internationally recognized human rights.

Sadly, only 11 senators voted for this first congressional effort to hold Israel accountable, but the momentum is shifting. More and more Americans – and more elected officials – understand that we cannot continue turning a blind eye to the suffering in Gaza. Given the scale of the disaster unfolding with American bombs and military equipment, Congress must act.

Prime Minister Netanyahu recently said, while rejecting a two-state solution, that “the prime minister needs to be able to say no, even to our best friends”. Well, now is the time for the United States to say NO to Netanyahu.

Congress is now considering a supplemental bill with another $14bn in military aid for Israel. The United States must make it clear to Netanyahu that the we will not provide another dollar to support his inhumane, illegal war. We must use our leverage to demand an end to the indiscriminate bombing, a humanitarian ceasefire to allow aid to flow to those who are suffering and to secure the release of the more than 130 hostages still being held in Gaza. And we must demand that the Israeli government take steps to lay the groundwork for a two-state solution.

The United States must stop asking Israel to do the right thing. It’s time to start telling Israel it must do these things or it will lose our support.

© 2023 The Guardian


BERNIE SANDERS
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. Sanders ran to become the Democratic Party presidential nominee in both 2016 and 2020 and remains the longest-serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
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'The US Is Complicit in the Nightmare' in Gaza, Says Bernie Sanders

"This should not be seen as just a terrible crisis taking place many thousands of miles away from our shores," said the Vermont senator. "Much of what is happening right now is being done with U.S. arms."


Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Kuwait Hospital for treatment following an Israeli attack on a family home in Rafah, Gaza on January 25, 2024.
(Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

COMMONDREAMS
Jan 25, 2024

Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to decry U.S. complicity in Gaza's humanitarian disaster, which the Vermont independent blamed on Israel's "extreme right-wing government" and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Netanyahu's right-wing government is starving the Palestinian people on top of its indiscriminate bombardment," Sanders said. "Israel is imposing onerous restrictions that are blocking the delivery of essential humanitarian aid. All of this is unacceptable. We are running out of time as we face one of the most severe humanitarian catastrophes of recent times."

The senator's floor speech came as Israel continued bombarding much of the Gaza Strip, where virtually the entire population is displaced and at risk of famine, with children facing the brunt of the crisis.

The head of the United Nations' agency for Palestinian refugees said that Wednesday was "another horrific day in Gaza," pointing to the Israeli military's attack on a facility sheltering tens of thousands of displaced people.

"Once again a blatant disregard of basic rules of war," said Philippe Lazzarini.

The attack was carried out using tank rounds that the U.S. has rushed to send the Israeli government in recent weeks, bypassing congressional oversight and ignoring warnings that the shells are indiscriminate and are being used against civilians in violation of international humanitarian law.

In his remarks on Wednesday, Sanders stressed the role that U.S. weaponry has played in fueling Gaza's humanitarian emergency.

"This should not be seen as just a terrible crisis taking place many thousands of miles away from our shores," said Sanders. "This is a tragedy in which we, the United States of America, are complicit. Much of what is happening right now is being done with U.S. arms and military equipment. In other words, whether we like it or not, the U.S. is complicit in the nightmare that millions of Palestinians are now experiencing."

Hours earlier, 16 leading human rights called for an immediate halt to arms transfers to both the Israeli military and Palestinian militants.

Sanders went on to criticize his Senate colleagues for overwhelmingly voting against his resolution that would have required the U.S. State Department to produce a report on Israel's adherence to human rights law. The Biden administration has said repeatedly that it is not formally assessing whether the Israeli government is complying with the laws of war.

"Given the scale of the disaster, how could any member of the Senate tell us that they do not want to know how billions in U.S. military aid is being used? How can we not want to have that very simple information?" Sanders asked. "My colleagues and I will continue to push for this information, which is absolutely necessary for Congress to conduct its oversight duties."

The senator said U.S. lawmakers and the Biden administration must use "every tool" at their disposal to force Netanyahu to "change the direction he has taken."

"We must now use our leverage to demand an end to the bombing, a humanitarian cease-fire to allow aid to flow to those who are suffering, and to secure the release of the more than 130 hostages still being held in Gaza," said Sanders, who has previously voiced opposition to calls for a lasting cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

"We must also demand that the Israeli government begin the necessary work to lay the groundwork for a two-state solution," Sanders continued. "There is a horrific catastrophe taking place right now. We cannot continue to ignore it. We must act."

Openly defying calls from the Biden administration, Netanyahu has in recent days made clear that he vehemently opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, a position that has drawn vocal rebukes from lawmakers, human rights groups, and the head of the United Nations.

Nearly every member of the Senate Democratic caucus, including Sanders, has signed onto an amendment led by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) expressing support for "a negotiated comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulting in two states with Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace."

The only Democratic senators who haven't backed the amendment are Sens. John Fetterman (Pa.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.).

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are shown in this undated photo.
(Photo: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

BRETT WILKINS

COMMONDREAMS
Jan 23, 2024

Amid a nearly 16-month strike by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette employees, the union representing workers at Pennsylvania's top newspaper by circulation on Monday filed an official grievance condemning the use of artificial intelligence to create an illustration published in the previous day's edition.

"The Post-Gazette's attempt to replace our labor with artificial intelligence is a serious concern to journalists not just in Pittsburgh, but all across the country," Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh president Zack Tanner said in a statement Tuesday. "As newsroom jobs continue to disappear due to corporate greed and mismanagement, we stand firmly against any use of AI that takes work out of union members' hands."

Post-Gazette production, distribution, and advertising workers have been on strike since October 2022, primarily over the loss of their healthcare plan. According to union officials, Block Communications, the paper's owner, refused to pay an additional $19 per week for each employee to keep workers' existing coverage.

The paper's workers have been without a contract since March 2017, when the previous collective bargaining agreement expired without a replacement.

Newspaper Guild workers are demanding:An end to the impasse in contract negotiations;
Undoing the unilaterally imposed working conditions and reinstatement of terms of the expired 2014-17 newsroom contract;
A return to the bargaining table to reach a fair deal with the journalists represented by the Newspaper Guild; and
Meeting the healthcare demands of striking sister unions.

Block Communications has hired more than two dozen strike-breaking workers to ensure continued Post-Gazette publication during the prolonged union action. However, this is apparently the first time management has passed over human workers in favor of AI.

"AI will not scab us," the Newspaper Guild defiantly declared, using the colloquial labor term usually reserved for human beings who cross picket lines.

Common Dreamsreported last year how the AI and fake content industries pose an increasing threat to journalists' livelihoods around the world.

"As the [Post-Gazette] resists working with us to put an end to this strike, they continue to sink to new lows in an effort to crank out whatever product they can cobble together," Jen Kundrach, a striking illustrator at the paper, said Tuesday. "That they've resorted to the use of inferior, AI-generated images rather than custom art by a staff illustrator shows how little they must value the talent of their guild staff. They'd rather squander that talent and put out a subpar newspaper than come to the table and reach a fair agreement with us."

Post-Gazette workers are buoyed by a January 2023 National Labor Relations Board ruling that found management did not negotiate in good faith, imposed illegal working conditions, and unlawfully surveilled unionizing workers. Block Communications legal representatives appealed the decision. Strikers and their supporters are slated to attend a Saturday strategy session at the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers Union Hall at 10 19th Street in the South Side Flats.

Tanner asserted that if management thinks "that this fight is over, they are dead wrong."

"Workers on strike won't stop fighting, because Pittsburgh deserves a newspaper created by union labor, not artificial intelligence or scab workers," he added.

Democracy Cannot Thrive Without Thriving Labor Unions

With voting rights under attack, it is hard not to see the decline of labor unions as an enabling factor in the erosion of America’s democratic institutions.


Shawn Fain, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW), speaks during the United Auto Workers union conference at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2024.

(Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

ADAM DEANJAMIE MCCALLUMJAKE GRUMBACH
Jan 27, 2024

EPI Blog

On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that the share of workers represented by unions was 11.2% in 2023, down slightly from 11.3% in 2022. This news of stagnation is especially sobering for the American labor movement because the past year was full of major victories and growing momentum. The UAW’s ‘stand up’ strike led to record contracts for autoworkers, graduate students around the country won union elections, and public support for labor unions reached near-record highs—especially among young Americans.

The decline of the American labor movement since the 1970s has been a major cause of stagnating wages and rising income inequality, and contributes to U.S. workers facing more dangerous working conditions than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. With the 2024 presidential election approaching, however, it is crucial to look beyond these economic consequences—as important as they are—and to recognize that the decline of American labor unions also leaves American democracy vulnerable.

That is the conclusion of our recent EPI report on labor unions and the use of ballot drop boxes during U.S. elections. Since ballot drop boxes are a highly secure way to increase access to voting during elections, the Republican Party has sought to limit their use as part of a broad assault on voting rights. During the 2022 midterm elections, for example, we found that unified Republican control of a state government was associated with a 95% decrease in ballot drop boxes per capita. Seventeen states completely banned ballot drop boxes—and all but one of them had either a Republican governor or a Republican-controlled legislature. By contrast, Democrats championed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA) of 2021—national legislation that included protections against numerous state-level voting restrictions, including those related to ballot drop boxes. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), however, joined Republicans to block these reforms in early 2022.

In the face of these threats, labor unions have led a struggle at every level of government to defend and expand voting rights. At the national level, labor leaders endorsed the VRAA and lobbied for greater access to ballot drop boxes. As AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler demanded, “We need mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes… in every community… in every state.”

At the state level, unions recently coordinated simultaneous protests in Atlanta, Washington D.C., Miami, Phoenix, and Houston against disenfranchisement laws sweeping Republican-led states. “The most brazen of these bills—some already passed into law—would suppress high-turnout voting methods by banning ballot drop boxes,” one protest organizer explained. Unions even fought for access to ballot drop boxes at the county level. For example, when a councilmember in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, proposed banning drop boxes during the 2022 midterm elections, unions rallied outside the local courthouse to voice their dissent.

To examine the relationship between such union efforts and access to ballot drop boxes, we analyzed data on all 17,935 drop boxes available during the 2022 midterm elections. As Figure 1 displays, we found a positive association between county-level union density and ballot drop boxes per capita. Using multilevel negative binomial regression models and controlling for various county-level socioeconomic factors and the partisan control of state government, we found that a one-percentage-point increase in union density was associated with a 9.8% increase in the number of ballot drop boxes per capita. This means that a new organizing drive that brought just 1 out of every 10 workers into a labor union, for example, could more than offset the decrease in ballot drop boxes associated with Republican control of a state government.

Figure 1: Relationship between county-level union density and ballot drop boxes per capita during the 2022 midterm elections.







With this week’s BLS report in mind, however, we must remember that the reverse also holds: Decreases in union density can lead to further restrictions on ballot drop boxes. Consider the state of Wisconsin, where union density decreased by 4.4 percentage points after then-Governor Scott Walker eliminated collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers. Our results suggest that a decline in union density of that magnitude is associated with the disappearance of more than 40% of ballot drop boxes in the average county.

With voting rights under attack, it is hard not to see the decline of labor unions as an enabling factor in the erosion of America’s democratic institutions. We need a resurgence of the labor movement not only to improve wages and working conditions for U.S. workers, but also to enable unions to continue their vital fight to defend American democracy.

© 2023 Economic Policy Institute


ADAM DEAN
Adam Dean is associate professor of political science at George Washington University
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JAMIE MCCALLUM
Jamie K. McCallum is associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College.
Full Bio >
JAKE GRUMBACH
Jake Grumbach is an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley
Full Bio >

'Donald Trump Is a Scab': UAW Endorses Joe Biden for President

"Rarely as a union do you get so clear of a choice between two candidates," said UAW president Shawn Fain. "Donald Trump is a billionaire, and that's who he represents."
United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain and U.S. President Joe Biden appear at a union conference at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., on January 24, 2024.
(Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT
Jan 24, 2024

After a month-long delay partly related to electric vehicle policy, the United Auto Workers on Wednesday endorsed Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection in November.

The announcement came on the final day of a UAW conference in Washington, D.C., and on the heels of an unsanctioned primary in New Hampshire—which Biden won as a write-in candidate, as he did not appear on the ballot due to a dispute between state leaders and the Democratic National Committee.

After a victory in the GOP's Iowa caucuses earlier this month, former President Donald Trump also won in New Hampshire on Tuesday, setting up a likely rematch between him and Biden later this year—despite the Republican's legal issues, some of which stem from his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.

"We can stand up and elect someone who stands with us and supports our cause. Or we can elect someone who will divide us and fight us every step of the way."

Confirming the endorsement in a Wednesday speech, UAW president Shawn Fain stressed the differences between Trump and Biden—who in September became the first sitting president to stand with strikers on a picket line when he joined UAW members during their battle with the Big Three automakers, just months after working with Congress to thwart a threatened rail strike.

"This November, we can stand up and elect someone who stands with us and supports our cause. Or we can elect someone who will divide us and fight us every step of the way," said Fain. "That's what this choice is about. The question is, who do we want in that office to give us the best shot of winning? Who gives us the best shot of organizing? Who gives us the best shot of negotiating strong contracts? Who gives us the best shot of uniting the working class and winning our fair share once again?"

"Rarely as a union do you get so clear of a choice between two candidates," argued Fain, who has gained a national profile for last year's strike and his ongoing push to improve conditions for the working class. He shared a slideshow with details about how Trump and Biden have handled issues important to UAW members, highlighting that during the strike, the Republican "went to a nonunion plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union."



"Donald Trump is a scab," Fain declared, using a derogatory term for someone who crosses a picket line. "Donald Trump is a billionaire, and that's who he represents. If Donald Trump ever worked in an auto plant, he wouldn't be a UAW member. He'd be a company man, trying to squeeze the American worker. Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a union, as a society."





Biden also took aim at his predecessor, telling the UAW conference crowd that "when Donald Trump was in office, six auto factories closed around the country. Tens of thousands of auto jobs were lost nationwide during Trump's presidency. During my presidency, we've opened 20 auto factories, with more to come. We've created more than 250,000 auto jobs all across America."

"We have a big fight in front of us. We're fundamentally changing the economy in this country... All anyone wants is just a fair shot," Biden added. "That's what my economic plan is all about. That's what the UAW is all about. That's what your battle has been about. The days of working people being dealt out of the deal are over in this country as long as I'm president."



CNNreported Wednesday that "although it's a key endorsement for Biden, the backing from union leadership may not convince all of the rank and file to vote for the president in November. Biden won the endorsement of the UAW in the 2020 campaign, even though many rank-and-file members supported Trump."

The president has collected various endorsements from labor and other groups throughout the campaign, though at least one organization recently revoked its primary support for Biden due to his position on Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, and others are facing similar pressure to do so. The UAW has notably called for a cease-fire in the besieged Palestinian enclave.


The UAW has about 400,000 active members and more than 580,000 retired members, many with ties to Michigan, a swing state. Reutersnoted that the president narrowly won the state in 2020 and "a Biden campaign official said this endorsement will mean more in November in Michigan than the anger among Muslim voters in the state over the administration's support for Israel."



The battle to win over organized labor continues. According toPolitico: "Trump, for his part, is scheduled to meet with Teamsters President Sean O'Brien and union members next week, as that union also has held out on a presidential endorsement. The Teamsters invited Biden to a roundtable with members that same day, the union said."

UAW Chief Says Billionaires—Not Migrants—Are Real Threat to Working Class

"In reality, we're all on the same side of the war against the working class," Shawn Fain said in a wide-ranging speech on Monday.


UAW president Shawn Fain speaks at the National Community Action Program Conference in Washington, D.C., on January 22, 2024.
(Photo: UAW/YouTube/Screengrab)

OLIVIA ROSANE
Jan 23, 2024

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain argued that the current fear-mongering around the U.S. border with Mexico is an attempt by the wealthy and political elites to divide workers.

The remarks came in a wide-ranging speech at the UAW's National Community Action Program Conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday, in which Fain repeated the union's call for a cease-fire in Gaza, confirmed plans for a 2028 general strike, and laid out a vision for a wider U.S. political movement led by the working class.

"They try to divide us nationally by nationality," Fain said. "Right now, we have millions of people being told that the biggest threat to their livelihood is migrants coming over the border. The threat we face at the border isn't from the migrants. It's from the billionaires and the politicians getting working people to point the finger at one another, when in reality, we're all on the same side of the war against the working class."

"We fight for a political program that serves humanity, not the inhumane interest of the wealthy and corporate greed."

Fain added that the issue of immigration was personal to him because his grandparents had traveled between states to get jobs as autoworkers and become UAW members.

"They went somewhere else to find a better life. That's all these people are trying to do," Fain said.

The UAW has emerged as a major leader in a reinvigorated U.S. labor movement after its "stand up" strike won historic contracts against the Big Three automakers in 2023. As part of the final deal, the UAW negotiated a shared April 30, 2028 expiration date for all three contracts, opening up the possibility of a May Day strike. Fain has previously called on other unions to coordinate their contract expiration dates for the same date to allow the working class to "flex our collective muscles."

Fain repeated and strengthened that call on Monday, endorsing a general strike.

The U.S. has not seen a mass, cross-union walkout in decades, according to The Guardian, and Fain argued that this was a mistake.

"We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in [1981] when Reagan at the time fired PATCO [Professional Air Traffic Controllers] workers, everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out," Fain said. "We missed the opportunity then, but we're not going to miss it in 2028. That's the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries."

Fain said the union's success in 2023 gave him hope.

"We shocked the billionaires," he said, "and you know what that tells me? That if we can do things we've never tried before as a new UAW, we can win things we've never won before."

He also pointed to the 75% support the strike had from the U.S. population.

"Our issues are the public's issues," he said.

Fain said that the union's fight was larger than just its own contracts. For example, he noted that the union had failed to end the two-tiered system for retirement benefits. Those hired after 2007 receive a 401(k) with matching contributions instead of a pension and post-retirement healthcare, as The Detroit News pointed out. Fain argued that the UAW could resolve this in part by broadening the fight for retirement security to include the whole nation, though he said they would continue to push the Big Three as well.

"Either the Big Three guarantee retirement security for workers who give their lives to these companies or an even bigger player does: the federal government," he said.

He added: "We can't just fight for good contracts for our members alone. We fight for a society—from union contracts, to federal legislation, to our political system as a whole, that serves the working class and poor, that serves the people. We fight for a political program that serves humanity, not the inhumane interest of the wealthy and corporate greed."

He also criticized the wealthy for using issues like gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and nationality to divide the working class, and it was in this context that he criticized the scapegoating of immigrants. He also emphasized the UAW's history of backing civil rights and environmental justice.

"We have to, as a union, lead in the area of environmental safety," Fain said. "It does no good to bargain for another dollar an hour or another week's vacation, if on the vacation you take you can't swim in the lake, because it's dirty, and you can't breathe clean air."

Further, he emphasized the importance of international solidarity. The UAW was also the largest union at the time to officially demand a cease-fire in Israel's war on Gaza, a demand he repeated Monday to chants of "cease-fire now!"

"We don't stop our fight for justice at the workplace. We don't stop our fight for justice because it's not the right time. When and where there's a war, whether it's in Vietnam or Gaza, we call for peace," Fain said.

The UAW has not yet endorsed a candidate for president in the 2024 election. Fain criticized former President Donald Trump on Monday, telling reporters he was "pretty much contrary to everything we stand for," according to The Guardian. But he did not endorse his presumptive opponent President Joe Biden.

"We have to take the issues that matter to the working class and poor, and we have to make our political leaders stand up with us," Fain said. "Our message in doing this is simple: Support our cause, or you will not get our endorsement."

 

A long-lasting neural probe

Researchers develop implantable device that can record a collection of individual neurons over months

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES

Recording the activity of large populations of single neurons in the brain over long periods of time is crucial to further our understanding of neural circuits, to enable novel medical device-based therapies and, in the future, for brain–computer interfaces requiring high-resolution electrophysiological information.

But today there is a tradeoff between how much high-resolution information an implanted device can measure and how long it can maintain recording or stimulation performances. Rigid, silicon implants with many sensors, can collect a lot of information but can’t stay in the body for very long. Flexible, smaller devices are less intrusive and can last longer in the brain but only provide a fraction of the available neural information.  

Recently, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with The University of Texas at Austin, MIT and Axoft, Inc., developed a soft implantable device with dozens of sensors that can record single-neuron activity in the brain stably for months.

The research was published in Nature Nanotechnology. 

“We have developed brain–electronics interfaces with single-cell resolution that are more biologically compliant than traditional materials,” said Paul Le Floch, first author of the paper and former graduate student in the lab of Jia Liu, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS. “This work has the potential to revolutionize the design of bioelectronics for neural recording and stimulation, and for brain–computer interfaces.”

Le Floch is currently the CEO of Axoft, Inc, a company founded in 2021 by Le Floch, Liu and Tianyang Ye, a former graduate student and postdoctoral fellow in the Park Group at Harvard. Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has protected the intellectual property associated with this research and licensed the technology to Axoft for further development.

To overcome the tradeoff between high-resolution data rate and longevity, the researchers turned to a group of materials known as fluorinated elastomers. Fluorinated materials, like Teflon, are resilient, stable in biofluids, have excellent long-term dielectic performance, and are compatible with standard microfabrication techniques.

The researchers integrated these fluorinated dielectric elastomers with stacks of soft microelectrodes — 64 sensors in total — to develop a long-lasting probe that is 10,000 times softer than conventional flexible probes made of materials engineering plastics, such as polyimide or parylene C.

The team demonstrated the device in vivo, recording neural information from the brain and spinal cords of mice over the course of several months.

“Our research highlights that, by carefully engineering various factors, it is feasible to design novel elastomers for long-term-stable neural interfaces,” said Liu, who is the corresponding author of the paper.  “This study could expand the range of design possibilities for neural interfaces.”

The interdisciplinary research team also included SEAS Professors Katia Bertoldi, Boris Kozinsky and Zhigang Suo.

“Designing new neural probes and interfaces is a very interdisciplinary problem that requires expertise in biology, electrical engineering, materials science, mechanical and chemical engineering,” said Le Floch. 

The research was co-authored by Siyuan Zhao, Ren Liu, Nicola Molinari, Eder Medina, Hao Shen, Zheliang Wang, Junsoo Kim, Hao Sheng, Sebastian Partarrieu, Wenbo Wang, Chanan Sessler, Guogao Zhang, Hyunsu Park, Xian Gong, Andrew Spencer, Jongha Lee, Tianyang Ye, Xin Tang, Xiao Wang and Nanshu Lu.

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Harvard University Materials Research Science and Engineering Center Grant No. DMR-2011754.

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JOURNAL

Nature Nanotechnology

DOI

10.1038/s41565-023-01545-6