Israel is a Jewish nation, but its population is far from a monolith

Jessica Trisko Darden, Virginia Commonwealth University
Fri, February 9, 2024 

THE CONVERSATION

Israeli soldiers attend the funeral of Staff Sgt. Emanuel Feleke, an Ethiopian Israeli who was killed in Gaza in December 2023. Ohad Zwigenberg


As the toll of the Israel-Hamas war continues to mount, Israeli military casualties are shedding new light on a topic that rarely gets international media attention – Israel’s ethnic diversity.

In Israel’s single largest casualty event since the Gaza invasion began in October 2023, 21 Israeli soldiers were killed in an explosion on Jan. 22, 2024.

Among the dead was reserve soldier Sgt. 1st Class Cedrick Garin, a 23-year-old Filipino-Israeli whose mother came to the country to work before he was born.

Earlier in the war, Staff Sgt. Aschalwu Sama, an Ethiopian Jew, saved his comrades after being fatally wounded in an explosion at the entry to one of Gaza’s tunnels.

Other Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza include reserve Sgt. Maj. Rafael Elias Mosheyoff, born in Colombia, and reserve soldier Sgt. 1st Class Yuval Lopez, who moved to Israel from Peru at the age of 6.

I am a scholar who examines the roles of minority groups in armed conflict. I find the ethnic diversity of people fighting in and otherwise affected by the Israel-Hamas war exceptional.

Hamas’ roughly 240 hostages, for example, were nationals of 25 different countries, including Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines and Tanzania. Hamas kidnapped Muslim citizens of Israel alongside Jewish Israelis, Americans and other dual nationals.

The mother of Israeli-Filipino soldier Cedric Garin, killed in Gaza on Jan. 23, 2024, grieves during his funeral in Tel Aviv.

Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images

Israel’s diversity

Israel has close to 9.7 million residents. About 75% of these people identify as Jewish. Almost 80% of Israeli Jews were born in Israel. Much smaller groups of Israeli Jews were born in Africa and Asia, in countries including India and Uzbekistan.

Roughly 20% of Israelis are Arab, including Muslims, Christians and Druze, a group of people who observe a distinct monotheistic religion.

Israel is also home to Muslim ethnic minority communities. This includes the Bedouins, formerly nomadic Arab herdsmen who have lived in the area for centuries, and the Circassians, Muslims who were expelled from the Caucasus region of the Russian Empire during a period of ethnic cleansing in the 19th century.

Another 5% of Israeli residents are neither Jewish nor Arab, including more than 25,000 African migrants who live in Israel.

Military service requirements

Israel has different rules for military service for its citizens, depending on their background.

Every Israeli citizen over the age of 18 who is Jewish, Druze or Circassian must serve in the military, unless they are religiously observant and/or married when conscripted. Israeli Arabs are not required to serve but can volunteer to do so. Women serve for a minimum of two years, while men must serve for 32 months.

The Israel Defense Forces has long been considered the central institution that unifies Israeli society. Mandatory service brings together Israelis of all backgrounds, forces them to work together and instills a sense of obligation to the broader society.

While military casualty figures are not broken down by religion or ethnicity, my analysis of death notices shows that Israel’s minorities, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are prominent among those killed fighting for the world’s only Jewish state.

Relatives and friends attend the funeral of Maj. Jamal Abbas, an Israeli-Druze soldier killed in Gaza in November 2023. 

Amir Levy/Getty Images

Minorities in Israel

Ahmad Abu Latif, a Bedouin Israeli who previously served in the military as a sergeant major, wrote a social media post in October 2023 highlighting Israeli Arab contributions to the war effort.

“Unfortunately, among the casualties of war are Bedouin and Druze soldiers, Muslims and Christians, who fell as heroes during the defense of the country,” Abu Latif wrote.

Abu Latif, who was called up as a reserve soldier, was killed in the Jan. 22, 2024, blast in Gaza.

The vast majority of the 370,000 Bedouins in Israel are citizens and identify as Muslim. Thousands of Bedouins also live in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon but do not have citizenship there. Their tribes failed to officially register with these countries when they became independent in the 1940s.

Unlike Jewish Israelis and Druze men who are required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, Bedouins volunteer. In 2020, a record number of 600 Bedouins joined the Israel military. They are typically placed in scouting or tracking units because of their familiarity with the Negev Desert.

Another minority group in Israel, the Druze people, have a long history of Israeli military service.

Twenty-three-year old Jamal Abbas, a major in the military and a member of the Druze community, was killed in combat in southern Gaza on Nov. 18, 2023. Abbas’ grandfather was one of the first Druze soldiers to attain the rank of brigade commander.

Another Israeli Druze soldier, Lt. Col. Salman Habaka, responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. When Habaka was killed in Gaza only a month later, the 33-year-old was the highest-ranking Israeli soldier killed in the war.

Although they make up only 1.5% of Israeli households, roughly 40 Druze civilians have been killed since the start of the war, representing roughly 3.5% of Israeli deaths (including the Oct. 7, 2023, victims). One reason is that their community’s traditional location near the Lebanese border has made them vulnerable to incoming fire from the Hezbollah militant group.

Jewish minorities

Even the deaths of Jewish soldiers reflect the complexity of Israeli society. In all, Jewish soldiers killed in the conflict have ties to at least 12 countries other than Israel.

Soldiers killed in Gaza include Staff Sgt. Yonatan Chaim, an American who converted to Judaism after taking a college course on the Holocaust and then moved to Israel.

Fallen members of Israel’s 170,000-person Ethiopian community include Staff Sgt. Alemnew Emanuel Feleke, a 22-year-old commando who was wounded on Dec. 5, 2023, in southern Gaza and died the following day. Staff Sgt. Birhanu Kassie died in an explosion in late December.

Equal in war?

The visible presence of Israel’s minority communities in the military is partly a result of a long-standing military policy called the Haredi exemption. This exempts ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up approximately 13% of the country, from military service. Women as well as men studying at a yeshiva, a Jewish religious college, are excused from service so they can follow strict religious observances and study religious texts.

In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled this policy was discriminatory and unconstitutional. But the ruling has not been enforced because of pressure from religious conservative political parties. In August 2023, only 9% of eligible ultra-Orthodox men served in the military, compared with an 80% national average among other Jewish Israelis.

Yet even the Haredi exemption is being undermined by the war. More than 2,000 Haredi men have volunteered for service since the war began. At least 150 have been formally drafted. War continues to shape the relationship between Israel’s citizens and the military that protects them.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jessica Trisko Darden, Virginia Commonwealth University

Read more:


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a dilemma: Free the hostages or continue the war in Gaza?


Reflections on hope during unprecedented violence in the Israel-Hamas war


Israel’s military reservists are joining protests – potentially transforming a political crisis into a security crisis

Jessica Trisko Darden is Director of the (In)Security Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University and Director of the Security & Foreign Policy Initiative at William & Mary's Global Research Institute.

U$A
Brown University students enter eighth day of hunger strike over Israel-Gaza

Nadine Yousif - BBC News
Fri, February 9, 2024 

A group of Brown University students have entered the eighth day of a hunger strike to pressure their school to divest from businesses they say benefit from Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.

The 19 students began their protests on 2 February.

They said they will continue until Brown officials consider divesting.

It is likely the longest hunger strike in the US since the beginning of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war.

The strike at the Ivy League university in Rhode Island has been organised by campus groups Palestine Solidarity Caucus and Jews for Ceasefire Now.

It is led by both Palestinian and Jewish students, said Ariela Rosenzweig, one of the students striking.

More than 27,900 Palestinians have been killed and at least 67,000 injured after Israel launched its campaign in the Palestinian enclave, according to the health ministry - which is run by Hamas.

The campaign followed an unprecedented assault by Hamas gunmen on 7 October, in which more than 1,200 people in southern Israel were killed, according to Israeli officials.

• Israel-Gaza inflames tensions on US college campuses

• Israel Gaza war: History of the conflict explained

Ms Rosenzweig, 22, said it was inspired by a similar 11-day hunger strike on campus in 1986 which called for divestment from firms operating under apartheid in South Africa.

"I see our hunger strike as part of a lineage of student organising," she told the BBC on Friday, adding that it follows months of protest at the university, including a sit-in in November where 61 students were arrested.

"It is a desperate plea for the university to not only hear our voices, but the voices of thousands who have been murdered in Gaza," Ms Rosenzweig said.

As part of the hunger strike, the students said they have only consumed water and pedialyte - an electrolyte solution - for over a week.

They added they have spent each day at the university's campus centre, taking part in protests and other programming to raise awareness about Israel's ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and have received support from other students and faculty.

Their action seeks to pressure Brown to consider a proposal recommending that it divest from companies that "profit from human rights abuses in Palestine".

The 16-page proposal, penned in 2020 by Brown's advisory committee on corporate responsibility in investment policies (ACCRIP), names 11 companies, including RTX Corporation, a weapons manufacturer and Northrop Grumman, a military company, among others.

The strike was timed ahead of a series of closed meetings by the Corporation of Brown taking place Thursday and Friday, where the students hoped their demands would be discussed.

In a letter sent to the students at the beginning of the hunger strike, Brown President Christina Paxson expressed concern for their wellbeing, but added that "the bar for divestment is high".

"It requires a demonstration that the University's investments in the assets of specific companies create social harm, and that divestment will alleviate that harm," she said in the letter, dated 4 February.

The president added that the university rejects using the endowment "as a tool for political advocacy on contested issues".

In an email, Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told BBC that the university is not directly invested in any defence stocks or large munition manufacturers.

And while a large percentage of the university's endowment is overseen by third-party managers, he said Brown is "confident that our external managers have the highest level of ethics and share the values of the Brown community, including the rejection of violence".

Sherena Razek, a PhD student and one of the organisers of the divestment campaign, said she believes the university's response shows "a lack of regard" for the students undertaking the hunger strike and their request.

She noted that the university has used divestment in the past to protest other issues, like the South African Apartheid, the Darfur genocide in Sudan and the tobacco industry.

Ms Rosenzweig said that given the university's divestment history, she and the other students believe their request is not impractical.

The hunger strike began as Hisham Awartani, a Palestinian-American student, returned to Brown's campus after spending months recovering from a gunshot wound to his spine.

Mr Awartani, who is among the students supporting the calls for divestment, was one of three young Palestinian-Americans who were shot in Burlington, Vermont on Thanksgiving weekend, in what they believe was a hate crime.

The suspected gunman, 48-year-old Jason Eaton, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of second-degree attempted murder.

During the hunger strike, some students carried signs that read "no others like Hisham".

The protests at Brown are among many that have taken place across American university campuses, which have become the backdrop to heated debates on the ongoing Israel-Gaza war since October.

While it is likely the longest hunger strike in the US since October, it is not the first. Advocates, including Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon, staged a five-day hunger strike in November outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

A Gazan man in Bristol was in hospital in December after being on a hunger strike for nearly two months over the war.

Israel's war in Gaza claims lives of 85 journalists, media watchdog group CPJ says

Reporters Without Borders filed a war crimes complaint

Fri, February 9, 2024 

Smoke and fire mark the skyline in Rafah in the southern region of Gaza earlier this month. The Committee to Protect Journalists said 85 media workers have died since fighting started between Israel and Hamas militants on Oct. 7. Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI

Feb. 9 (UPI) -- At least 85 journalists and media workers have been killed while covering Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza since the initial attack on Oct. 7, the Committee to Project Journalists said on Friday.

The organization said the number represents the deadliest period for journalists since 1992. Overall, more than 27,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza and another 1,200 in Israel.

The CPJ said of those killed, 78 were Palestinian, four were Israelis and three were from Lebanon. The committee said 16 more have been injured in fighting, four remain missing and 25 have been arrested.

"CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties," Sherif Mansour, the organization's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said in a statement.

"Journalists across the region are making great sacrifices to cover this heart-breaking conflict. Those in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threat."

Last month, CPJ said that, since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel rose to sixth place among countries that have arrested the most journalists -- behind China, Myanmar, Belarus, Russia and Vietnam.

Three months ago, Reporters Without Borders filed a war crimes complaint with the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes committed during the war.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Israel is holding up food for 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, the main UN aid agency there says

JULIA FRANKEL
Fri, February 9, 2024 

Palestinians protest against the suspension of funds from several donor countries to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, in front of Agency's offices in the West Bank city of Beitunia Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024. Several countries suspended funding worth some $440 million, almost half of the UNRWA's annual budget following Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

 (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser) 


JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel has imposed financial restrictions on the main U.N. agency providing aid in the Gaza Strip, a measure which prevented a shipment of food for 1.1 million Palestinians from reaching the war-battered enclave, the agency's director said Friday.

The restrictions deepened a crisis between Israel and UNRWA, whose operations have been threatened following Israeli accusations that some of its workers participated in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered Israel's war in Gaza. Those accusations have led major donor nations, including the U.S., to suspend funding to the U.N. organization and left its future in question.

UNRWA's director, Philippe Lazzarini, said Friday that that a convoy of food donated by Turkey has been sitting for weeks in the Israeli port city of Ashdod. The agency said that the Israeli contractor they work with received a call from Israeli customs authorities “ordering them not to process any UNRWA goods.”

That stoppage means 1,049 shipping containers of rice, flour, chickpeas, sugar and cooking oil — enough to feed 1.1 million people for one month — are stuck, even as an estimated 25% of families in Gaza face catastrophic hunger.

The World Food Program warned Friday that Gaza could be plunged into famine as early as May. The U.N. food agency defines a famine as when 30% of children are malnourished, one-fifth of households face acute food shortages and two of every 10,000 people are dying from hunger or malnutrition.

Israel declared war and imposed a siege on Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage. The war has led to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with only a trickle of humanitarian aid entering the territory each day.

Israel has long railed against UNRWA, accusing it of tolerating or even collaborating with Hamas and perpetuating the 76-year-old Palestinian refugee crisis. UNRWA, which serves about 6 million Palestinians whose families were displaced during the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948, denies the charges. But the tensions have only intensified following the latest allegations by Israel.

Juliette Touma, communications director for the agency, said that UNWRA's bank account with Bank Leumi, which the agency has held for decades, was also frozen this week. In addition, Touma said that Israeli customs authorities notified the agency that UNRWA will no longer be granted tax exemptions.

Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, tweeted on Thursday that “the state of Israel will not give tax benefits to terrorist aides.”

Smotrich, a far-right ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, didn't respond to a request for comment.

The agency has been able to reroute other aid shipments through Port Said in Egypt, but Lazzarini warned Friday that the holdup means further difficulties in the already challenging task of aid distribution to Gaza. About 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war.

UNWRA is the main provider of aid to Palestinians in Gaza, but Israeli bombardment and combat between Israel and Hamas has made much of the territory too dangerous for aid convoys to cross. For the last two weeks, the agency has been unable to deliver aid to around 300,000 Palestinians estimated to still be in the northern half of Gaza, where the World Food Program says food insecurity is the worst.

Lazzarini said efforts have instead focused on the 1.3 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in the makeshift tent camps of Rafah, a city on the border with Egypt where the agency relies on local police to escort aid convoys to distribution points and prevent theft. But that has also grown increasingly challenging, as Israeli warplanes bomb targets in the city.

Airstrikes there killed eight police officers in the city over the last four days, Lazzarini said, making police reluctant to continue helping the agency. Three strikes have taken place near an UNWRA clinic, Lazzarini said. Israeli media have portrayed the police escorts as an attempt by Hamas to seize aid shipments for its own use.

Lazzarini said that the police the agency works with weren't affiliated with militant groups. Touma said that the police escort was necessary to prevent people from throwing stones at the convoy and attempting to steal aid from them.

Israel alleged last month that 12 employees of the aid agency participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel. Several countries suspended funding worth about $440 million, almost half of the agency’s annual budget.

Two U.N. investigations are underway, including an independent review announced this week. The review, headed by a former French foreign minister, is supposed to focus on the way the agency ensures that it remains neutral and responds to allegations that it failed to do so. Colonna’s team plans to look at whether the system works and how it might be improved.

Lazzarini said Friday that he immediately fired the workers, rather than suspending them, without first investigating the evidence against them. Two had been killed by the time the allegations surfaced. Lazzarini said there was too much pressure on the organization — and current conditions make investigating the workers difficult — to do anything else.

“Knowing that the organization is under fierce and ugly attacks,” he said, “I could not take the risk ... I could have suspended them, but I fired them.”

Undercover Israeli killings in West Bank hospital may be war crimes: UN experts

Reuters
Fri, February 9, 2024 at 8:42 

Aftermath of an Israeli raid, in Jenin


GENEVA (Reuters) - The killing of three Palestinian men in a hospital in the occupied West Bank last month by Israeli commandos disguised as medical workers and Muslim women may amount to war crimes, a group of U.N. experts said on Friday.

The three militants were killed on Jan. 29 in a joint undercover operation by the army, Shin Bet security service and border police in the Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin, one of the most volatile cities in the West Bank, Israel's military said.

"Under international humanitarian law, killing a defenceless injured patient who is being treated in a hospital amounts to a war crime," the U.N. experts said in a statement, referring to Basel Al-Ghazzawi, a patient being treated for injuries it said were caused by an Israeli air strike.


"By disguising themselves as seemingly harmless, protected medical personnel and civilians, the Israeli forces also prima facie committed the war crime of perfidy, which is prohibited in all circumstances," they added, calling for Israel to conduct an investigation.

The experts concerned are special rapporteurs engaged by the United Nations to examine a specific human rights issue.

Israel’s military was not immediately available for comment on their statement.

CCTV footage from the hospital showed a group of about 10 people, dressed variously in civilian clothes and medical garb and including three in headscarves and women's clothing, pacing through a corridor, armed with assault rifles.

Israel's military has said that one of the men killed in the hospital was a member of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the others worked for Jenin Brigade and the armed wing of Islamic Jihad.

The West Bank has seen an explosion of violence since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the subsequent invasion of Gaza by Israel.

(Reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva; Additional reporting by Emily Rose in Jerusalem; Editing by Gareth Jones)

UN calls for mental health support for children impacted by Gaza war

Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
Updated Thu, February 8, 2024

Aftermath of an Israeli strike on a house in Rafah


By Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber

GENEVA (Reuters) -A United Nations committee appealed on Thursday for "massive psychosocial support" for children traumatised by violence in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Israel and said it would review Israel's treatment of children later this year.

Israel's military offensive in Gaza, launched in the wake of a deadly rampage by Hamas militants in southern Israel on Oct. 7, has displaced most of the Palestinian enclave's 2.3 million people, left homes and infrastructure in ruins and caused acute shortages of food, water and medicine.

Children and women make up the bulk of the nearly 28,000 people killed during the offensive, according to the authorities in Gaza. In their Oct. 7 attack in Israel, the militants killed about 1,200 people and took 253 hostages.

"The rights of children living under the state of Israel's effective control are being gravely violated at a level that has rarely been seen in recent history," said Ann Skelton, chair of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

"We call for massive psychosocial support for children and families to relieve the traumatic and long-lasting impact of war, including Israeli children who were victims of, or witnesses to, the (Oct. 7) attacks and those whose family members have been taken hostage," she told a news conference.

UNICEF said last week that nearly all children in Gaza were thought to require mental health support.

Skelton said the committee "deeply regrets" that Israel had postponed its participation in a planned dialogue on child issues and that it was now scheduled to take place in September.

Israel's diplomatic mission in Geneva said officials were focused on the war effort against Hamas, which made them "unable to dedicate the necessary resources to prepare and appear before the Committee in January."

"It is regrettable, but sadly not surprising, that the CRC does not convey understanding for Israel's request to postpone its review before the Committee, due to the state of the war," the Permanent Mission of Israel in Geneva said in a statement.

Skelton also voiced concern for children living in the occupied West Bank, which she said faced "facing arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings and violence committed by occupying forces and settlers".

Israel's military has said it operates against suspected militants in the West Bank.

The West Bank had already been experiencing the highest levels of unrest in decades during the months preceding the Oct. 7 assault on Israel, but confrontations have increased sharply following the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza.

(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Gareth Jones and Cynthia Osterman)

Palestinian woman says she was mistreated after Israel detained her in Gaza

Fri, February 9, 2024 
By Mohammad Salem

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Israeli soldiers seized Tamam al-Aswad after their tanks crashed through the walls of a Gaza City school where she was sheltering in December, later imprisoning her for weeks in Israel where she says she was insulted and mistreated.

Aswad says she was freed on Thursday at the Kerem Shalom crossing point from Israel into Gaza and has been unable to contact her family after last seeing them at the moment of her arrest.

Israel's military did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on Aswad's detention and allegations of mistreatment. It has previously said it detains Palestinians in accordance with international law and its protocols are to treat prisoners with dignity.

"Two tanks entered the school. I was watching from a hole in the wall and I saw them entering homes and blowing them up. I heard women's voices from inside those homes. It was terrifying," she said.

Aswad is one of many Palestinians that Israel has detained during its four-month-old assault on Gaza, an offensive that has led to massive devastation across much of the tiny, crowded enclave, pushing most of its inhabitants from their homes.

Palestinian health authorities say nearly 28,000 people have been killed in the war.

Israel says it wants to crush the militant group Hamas which rampaged across the border on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages according to Israeli tallies.

Israel has won control of much of northern and central Gaza, areas it told civilians to leave early in the conflict and says it has killed about 10,000 of the group's fighters, though Hamas disputes that.

When Israeli forces entered the Omar Ibn al-Aas school in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan district where Aswad was sheltering on Dec. 14, they lined up the men and ordered them to strip before taking the women to the side, she said.

They assembled captives at the al-Taqwa mosque nearby. "They were interrogating me, asking 'which faction do you belong to?'" she said. Aswad said she told them she was only a housewife and had not harmed anybody.

"They told me: 'You are a threat to Israel's security. You will be detained for five years'," she said. She was then handcuffed and blindfolded and put on a bus with other detainees, she said.

ABUSE

During the drive, the soldiers insulted her and other detainees, she said. She was told to keep her head bent over and despite this being very uncomfortable, they hit her on the head, arm or neck if she tried to lift her head. The same was done to others on the bus, she said.

The first place where they were held for several days "was bitterly cold", Aswad said. She was then blindfolded again, handcuffed and shackled, and transferred to Damon Prison in Haifa, she said.

Israel has not said how many people it has detained during its military operations in Gaza. Rights groups have estimated that the number is in the thousands.

"It was forbidden to raise your head even if your neck or back hurt. It was forbidden to say anything even if you were in pain," she said.

In detention, she said soldiers ordered her over to a wall where there was an Israeli flag. "The soldier said to me 'kiss the flag, kiss the flag'," she said. When she refused, he banged her head into the wall and then hit her on the back, she said.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm any of the allegations.

Eventually a soldier told the detainees "all the women of Gaza will return to their homes", she said. Her return was "an indescribable joy", but it is incomplete. She is now in Rafah in the south and believes her husband and children are still in Gaza City, where much of the worst fighting has happened.

"God willing, we will reach each other," she said.

(Reporting by Mohammad Salem, writing by Angus McDowall, Editing by William Maclean)

NORTH AMERICA

Construction Industry Grapples With Its Top Killer: Drug Overdoses

J. Edward Moreno

The New York Times
Fri, February 9, 2024

Construction workers work at a site, in New York, on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023.

 (Andres Kudacki/The New York Times)

At One Madison, a high-rise under construction on 23rd Street in Manhattan, workers face dangers daily: live wires, electrical hazards, heavy machinery. Cold gusts of wind whip around them as they lay concrete and operate forklifts. Access to the upper floors of the 28-story building is a ride on a noisy construction elevator.

City and federal officials visited the site recently to give a safety presentation, but they weren’t there to remind workers how to avoid falls or injuries. They were showing workers how to prevent the biggest killer in the industry: a drug overdose.

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“We ask you to do things based on getting home at the end of the day,” Brian Crain, a compliance assistance specialist at the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told a crowd of more than 100 workers in hard hats. “Addiction works the same way,” he said.

Construction workers already had the highest on-the-job death toll of any industry. Now they are more likely to die of overdose than those in any other line of work, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That disparity stems in part from addictive medication workers are prescribed to manage pain from injuries, which are common because of the physical nature of the work.

It’s an issue that the industry — which is already trying to protect its workers from falls, electrocutions and chemical hazards — has struggled to get a handle on for more than a decade. The presentation at One Madison in November was just one example of how the industry has started reckoning with the problem in recent years. Unions now employ full-time addiction and mental health specialists, and workplace safety experts have increasingly had to focus on preventing overdoses.

The industry has the highest death rate attributed to overdose, according to the CDC study, which was published in August. The report, the agency’s most comprehensive examination of overdose deaths by occupation, found that there were more than 162 overdose deaths per 100,000 construction workers in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available. The food service industry, with nearly 118 deaths among the same number of workers, had the second-highest rate.

But in the same year, the number of overall deaths on the job in construction was about 10 workers per 100,000, according to data from the Department of Labor, suggesting that workers were roughly 16 times as likely to die of an overdose as they were from a work-related injury.

“Statistically, this is a bigger threat to construction workers’ health and safety than the actual work,” said Brian Turmail, a spokesperson at the Associated General Contractors, a construction industry trade group.

The industry mirrors demographics vulnerable to addiction: A majority of construction workers are men, who are more likely than women to die of overdoses overall. Hispanic people are overrepresented in the construction industry and have a rising overdose mortality rate overall.

The industry is often rife with casual substance use, said Aaron Walsh, an addiction recovery specialist with the St. Louis Laborers’ health and welfare fund. Walsh, who is in recovery for drug addiction, is one of two people the union employs full time to help members struggling with drug addiction.

“It’s pretty prevalent in our population,” he said.

Injuries in construction are more common than in other fields. The job is often stressful and hard on workers’ bodies, making them susceptible to injury and more likely to seek medical attention for pain relief.

In many cases, workers carry heavy tool bags on their shoulders and spend long periods bent down or on their knees. One-third of construction workers have muscle or bone ailments, which make them three times as likely to be prescribed opioids for pain. They also do not often get paid sick leave, which could make opioids an option for getting back to work quickly.

Brendan Loftus knows that experience firsthand. In 1998, he fell down an elevator shaft at a construction site. He learned that he had a spinal injury while in the emergency room but decided to not manage his pain with opioids because he had already overcome an opioid addiction. He was getting married in a month, so against medical advice, he returned to work after only two weeks. “I had a wedding to pay for,” Loftus said.

Construction work tends to be cyclical, adding to the pressure to work whenever possible. Once one project is done, a worker may not know when the next one will come. Wayne Russell, 32, a construction worker from New Jersey, has been out of work since November.

“Money can stop coming in, but your bills don’t,” he said. Russell spent some of his time off taking a mental health and addiction course offered by his union, the International Union of Elevator Constructors. At a recent meeting, four of the 10 men in attendance, including Russell, had struggled with substance abuse.

Loftus, who now provides addiction services for members of the International Union of Elevator Constructors, said that his union had begun to notice that the overdose problem was getting severe in 2015 when it lost five members to overdoses in 11 months, and that the problem had gotten only worse.

“If we had lost five members to on-the-job fatalities, people would be picketing in the streets,” Loftus said. “But nobody wanted to talk about this, because it was a dirty little secret.”

One of the first members Loftus helped with recovery was Michael Cruz, a 25-year-old construction worker who had an opioid addiction.

In October 2016, Cruz had just bought building supplies at Home Depot for an upcoming job when Loftus invited him to dinner. Cruz had recently checked out of a 30-day rehab program and was eager to get back to work. He was particularly excited about the next project because it would be the first he would be able to work on from start to finish.

Cruz declined the dinner invitation. Later that night, he was found at his aunt’s apartment in Queens, dead of an apparent overdose, lying next to a bag with the measuring tape and other supplies he had bought that evening.

Loftus was the last person to speak to Cruz. “That’s how it happens,” he said. “It’s that fast.”

Across the country, overdose deaths are on the rise. That is in part because many who are addicted to prescription painkillers may turn to street drugs such as fentanyl and other potent synthetic opioids, which health officials say are often mixed with other stimulants. The pharmaceutical industry has been widely accused of profiting off the nation’s opioid crisis, which killed nearly 645,000 people from 1999 to 2021, according to the CDC.

Cruz’s addiction started with painkillers that he had been prescribed after a car accident left him with lingering back pain. Eight years later, he had just earned his first paycheck after checking out of rehab when he died.

“He was hiding it well enough,” his sister, Lizbeth Rodas, said at her home in Morristown, New Jersey, which was adorned with framed family photos, including two of her brother. She described Cruz as both a jokester and a gentleman who was like a brother to her children. “We thought he was cured, and everything was back to normal.”

Rodas’ husband and son both work in construction. Two years ago, when one of her sons was in a car accident, he was prescribed OxyContin for the pain. Rodas said she had begged him not to take it, and he complied.

“It was so scary for me, to think of going through the same thing again,” she said.

Cruz’s toxicology report showed traces of codeine, fentanyl and heroin in his system. Loftus, the union counselor, said most workers addicted to substances like heroin had been addicted to prescription painkillers first. Among workers’ compensation claims with at least one prescription, about one-fourth had one for an opioid, according to data from 40 states gathered by the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

Part of the challenge the industry faces is breaking the stigma of addiction. Rodas said that when she and her family were preparing Cruz’s funeral, they were unsure whether they should tell people he died of an overdose. Per their mother’s wishes, they chose to tell the truth.

“So many people came forward after that,” she said, including union colleagues.

Tackling such a pervasive issue is a gargantuan task for the industry’s safety leaders, who are used to protecting workers from physical injuries. Increasingly, construction companies are stocking job sites with Narcan, a brand name for the opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone.

“It’s not just about the physical safety of the workers on our job sites, it’s also what goes on when they’re not on the construction site,” said Rebecca Severson, director of safety at Gilbane Building Co., one of many that have started adding Narcan to its first-aid kits.

The Center for Construction Research and Training, a nonprofit created by a federation of construction unions, has sponsored research projects on the effectiveness of various mitigation measures, including having Narcan on job sites and offering workers paid sick leave.

Chris Trahan Cain, the center’s executive director, has decades of experience making construction jobs safer. She is an expert on chemical exposure, which is a vital concern in an industry where workers can often handle materials containing asbestos and lead.

Cain did not initially see preventing overdoses as a particularly integral part of her job. Now, it is the most acute safety issue in her field. Since 2018, she has led the group’s response to the overdose crisis ravaging the construction industry.

“As I was preparing to create this task force, I cried,” Cain said. “It’s really beyond my scope of expertise.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company

PROTECTIONISTS VS FREE MARKET

US Lawmakers Say Sequoia, Other VC Firms Fueled China’s Tech Rise

Mackenzie Hawkins
Thu, February 8, 2024


(Bloomberg) -- US lawmakers say five top venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, have fueled China’s technological rise with at least $3 billion of investments in key strategic sectors.

Almost two-thirds of the investment from Sequoia and its peers — including Qualcomm Ventures, Walden International, GSR Ventures and GGV Capital — has gone to Chinese artificial-intelligence companies that have supported the country’s military and enabled human rights abuses, the bipartisan US House Select Committee on China said in a report. More than $1 billion has gone to Chinese semiconductor firms, the panel said, as chip technology has become a key geopolitical battleground between Washington and Beijing.

Some of the firms criticized the report as outdated or exaggerated. It follows a months-long investigation into years of China investments by the five VC giants. The lawmakers called out investments into companies like ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, as well as entities that are now blacklisted by the US. VC firms also invested $35 million in a Chinese semiconductor firm after it was sanctioned, the report says, without naming the specific firms involved.

Sequoia Capital said in a statement that “we take US national security issues seriously and have always had processes in place to ensure compliance with US law.” It said its Chinese offshoot is now “fully independent” with its own brand, HongShan.

“Qualcomm Ventures invests in companies worldwide as part of its engagement with the global technology ecosystem,” spokesperson Christie Thoene said in a statement. “Qualcomm’s investments are generally small in any given market compared to venture firms and constitute less than 2% of the total investments discussed in today’s report.”

The remaining three firms didn’t respond or couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the committee’s findings, which were reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

The US has been working to curb China’s development of advanced semiconductor technology and AI models, citing the prospect that cutting-edge technology could give Beijing a military edge. President Joe Biden has issued restrictions on shipments of chips and chipmaking equipment to China, and is standing up a screening program for US investments in key strategic sectors including AI, semiconductors and quantum computing. A broad bipartisan effort to codify those investment restrictions failed late last year due to some Republican opposition, and key lawmakers have been meeting over the past several months to try to hash out a deal.

“Decades of investment — including funding, knowledge transfer, and other intangible benefits — from US VCs have helped build and strengthen” China’s priority sectors,the lawmakers wrote in their report.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism 

Published: First published in mid-1917 in pamphlet form, Petrograd. Published according to the manuscript and verified with the text of the pamphlet. Source: ...

US considering curbs to keep Chinese 'smart cars' out of the country - Bloomberg News

Reuters
Thu, February 8, 2024 

Cars to be exported sit at a terminal in the port of Yantai

(Reuters) - The Biden administration is considering restricting imports of Chinese "smart cars" and related components amid growing U.S. concerns about data security, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The measures would also apply to electric vehicles and parts originating from China, no matter where they are assembled, in a bid to prevent Chinese makers from moving cars and components into the United States through third countries such as Mexico, the report said.

The measures could also apply to other countries about which the U.S. has data concerns, Bloomberg said.

According to the report, U.S. officials are particularly concerned about the troves of data collected by so-called smart cars, including EVs and other types of connected and autonomous vehicles.

(Reporting by Angela Christy and Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Gerry Doyle)

Solar company CubicPV scraps plans for US silicon wafer factory

Thu, February 8, 2024 

 Plants grow through an array of solar panels in Fort Lauderdale


By Nichola Groom

(Reuters) - Solar energy equipment manufacturer CubicPV on Thursday said it had scrapped plans to build a major U.S. silicon wafer factory, citing a collapse in product prices and soaring construction costs.

The announcement is a blow to the Biden administration's ambitions to create a homegrown solar energy supply chain to support surging U.S. demand for the renewable energy source. China produces about 98% of the world's wafers, the building blocks of solar cells that are assembled into panels.

CubicPV, which is backed in part by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, had been seeking to become a pioneer in domestic wafer manufacturing with plans to complete a 10 gigawatt factory this year.

The company was poised to leverage generous new federal tax credits for solar projects that use American-made equipment. But rules unveiled last year allow solar facilities to claim the subsidy even if their panels contain overseas-made wafers -- an obstacle for rolling out domestic wafer factories.

At the same time, global prices for solar wafers have fallen 70% since the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden's landmark climate change law. A wave of new Asian solar production has prompted broad concern about the fate of many proposed U.S. factories.

A CubicPV spokesperson, Laureen Sanderson, would not comment on how specific policies impacted the project.

Instead of focusing on wafers, CubicPV said it will restructure and use its proprietary technology to make panels.

"Together with our Board, we've concluded that the one thing that could truly make a difference in humanity’s fight against climate change and the US's ability to realize a solar manufacturing renaissance is to invent a better panel," CubicPV Chief Executive Frank van Mierlo said in a statement.

Van Mierlo, who has led the company for 16 years, will step down as CEO. Tim McCaffery, global investment director with Thai industrial conglomerate SCG, a CubicPV investor, will lead the company through a transition period.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; editing by Diane Craft)

US chipmakers don't have enough workers. Biden hopes a new $5 billion plan will help.

Ben Werschkul
·Washington Correspondent
Fri, February 9, 2024 

Chipmakers are struggling to get enough Americans trained for the positions needed to keep pace with growing demand. The Biden administration on Friday announced its latest effort to help alleviate the problem.

The White House said Friday that the US expects to invest more than $5 billion in a public-private consortium aimed at supporting research and development in advanced computer chips.

A key part of the mission of this National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) would be to stand up a "Workforce Center of Excellence" funded with hundreds of millions of those dollars. The center plans to set up shop in different regions of the US to try and spur the training of more semiconductor engineers.

"I cannot overestimate how important this is," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said of the workforce efforts on a call with reporters this week. "Every semiconductor company we talk to says their success will rely upon having enough highly trained, qualified people to work in the industry," she added.

It remains to be seen if the new effort will be enough to make a dent in labor market concerns that have emerged as a significant roadblock in the effort to bring more chipmaking to the US, not to mention President Biden’s reelection efforts.

Until this week's announcement, much of the responsibility for training workers fell to state and local governments as well as the companies themselves. But observers repeatedly warned that those efforts wouldn’t be enough, with more dramatic policy solutions likely becoming inevitable.

And with efforts to alleviate the problem via immigration likely foreclosed by the political climate in Washington, the focus has turned toward training new workers.

Arizona is set to be a hotbed of the growing US chip sector but has already seen labor issues impinge on those plans. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is at work on a flagship fabrication plant in northern Phoenix but recently announced a delay in the plant's full-scale launch from 2024 to 2025. It cited worker shortages as a reason for the delay.

Intel (INTC) is also reportedly slowing the construction timetable on its $20 billion plant in Ohio, but that delay has primarily been caused by a slowing chip market as well as issues with the rollout of government grant money, according to the Wall Street Journal.

President Joe Biden toured the under-constructon TSMC Semiconductor Manufacturing Facility in Phoenix in December 2022. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images) 

A need to 'scale up'

The White House's workforce plan, per a fact sheet released by the administration, is to launch new programs but also leverage the existing local efforts to "scale up proven education and training programs."

A senior administration official added this week that the workforce efforts would be focused on both supporting the manufacturing capacity as well as the emerging research and development efforts.

The overall goal of the Biden administration’s effort is to reverse a downward spiral for the industry in the US in recent decades. American semiconductor manufacturing’s share of the global market has fallen from nearly 40% in 1990 to less than 10% today, according to the White House.

The situation is even worse with the world’s most advanced semiconductors, 100% of which are currently manufactured overseas. The plants under construction in the US are designed to change that, but the workforce issues could only grow in the years ahead.

"It's just become a huge issue, ... and it's just not clear where these workers are coming from," noted Greg Wright, a professor of economics at the University of California Merced, in an interview last week.

"If we can't even get the workforce straightened out, I don't know what's going to happen," he added.


President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law on Aug. 9, 2022, and it has been the subject of intense lobbying in the 17 months since. Semiconductor giants like Intel, Micron (MU), IBM (IBM), and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company have all been vying for a piece of the money.

In total, the bill sets aside about $50 billion for grants to the semiconductor sector. That is divided between $39 billion earmarked for manufacturers and $11 billion set aside for chip research and design purposes.

Friday’s announcement was focused on that latter pot of money, with the NSTC being described as the centerpiece of the administration’s R&D efforts.

Still to come are the highly anticipated direct grants to companies. Most of that money has not yet been allocated, but administration officials promise more details within the next two months.

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

White House touts $11 billion US semiconductor R&D program

Fri, February 9, 2024


By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House on Friday touted the U.S. government's plan to spend $11 billion on semiconductor-related research and development and said it was launching the $5 billion National Semiconductor Technology Center.

Congress in August 2022 approved the landmark Chips and Science Act. The law provides that $52.7 billion, including $39 billion in subsidies for semiconductor production and $11 billion research and development. It also creates a 25% investment tax credit for building chip plants, estimated to be worth $24 billion.

The centerpiece of the R&D program is the National Semiconductor Technology Center, which will conduct research and prototyping of advanced semiconductor technology.

The center is a "public private partnership that the government, industry customers, suppliers, academics, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists to come together to innovate, connect, network, solve problems and allow Americans to compete and out compete the world," U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said at a White House event.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the effort was part of an "industrial strategy around chips" to preventing the loss of jobs overseas and add American jobs. "A nation that does not do R&D is a weak nation," Granholm said at the event. "We are not going to be weak anymore."

NSTC will establish an investment fund to help emerging semiconductor companies advance technologies toward commercialization.

The 2022 law also creates the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program and new Manufacturing USA institutes focused on semiconductors.

Raimondo on Monday said Commerce plans to make several major awards to fund chip manufacturing within two months. "We're in the process of really complicated, challenging negotiations with these companies," Raimondo told Reuters in an interview. She did not identify the companies. In the "next six to eight weeks, you will see several more announcements. That's what we're striving for."

The semiconductor manufacturing program is intended to subsidize chip production and related supply chain investments. The awards will help build factories and increase production.

"These are highly complex, first-of-their-kind facilities" in the U.S., Raimondo said, noting that TSMC, Samsung, Intel, are among companies that have proposed them.

"These are new-generation investments -- size, scale complexity that's never been done before in this country," Raimondo said.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Anirudh Saligrama in Bengaluru; Editing by David Gregorio)

The Chip Wars are heating up, with Biden subsidies poised to make an impact after a slow first year

Dylan Sloan
Fri, February 9, 2024 


A year and a half after President Joe Biden signed the $53 billion CHIPS and Science Act into law, the U.S. share of global semiconductor manufacturing has actually decreased, and the government has spent less than half a percent of the money it committed to revitalizing the American microchip industry.

But the tide is turning. The Biden administration this morning announced it would direct $5 billion in CHIPS Act money toward a new training facility to boost workforce participation in a semiconductor industry dominated by foreign talent. That’s an indicator of much more to come: After a lengthy review period, the government will start giving out billions more over the coming months, primarily in the form of grants to domestic chip manufacturers such as Intel.

In any case, experts say, it’s too early to ring the alarm bells on what was always designed to be a long-term policy.

“It’s like complaining [during] the eighth month of a pregnancy that nothing has appeared yet,” said Georgetown global innovation policy professor Charles Wessner in an interview with Fortune. Wessner, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the CHIPS Act “an unprecedented program, both in its focus and its scale … I would venture that they’ve actually made great progress.”

The act aims to reverse a three-decade decline in American semiconductor manufacturing: The United States produced just 12% of the world’s chips in 2020, down from 37% in 1990. East Asian manufacturers such as Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung have emerged as leaders, with a near-complete duopoly on the advanced microprocessors that power high-consumption tech like virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

The CHIPS Act is the Biden administration’s effort to turn the tide. It committed $53 billion toward subsidizing labor force development, semiconductor R&D, and building chip factories back in August 2022. But as of last month, almost a year and a half later, the government has doled out only about $200 million in grants—0.4% of the money it’s committed. That’s largely the product of a lengthy application process requiring chipmakers to wade through months of red tape in order to secure funds.

Big-name projects have also been pushed back: TSMC announced last month that its $40 billion plant outside Phoenix would delay production a second time, potentially until 2028. And America’s share of the global semiconductor market has continued falling, with no signs of a rebound: from 12% in 2020 to a projected 9.8% in 2024, per a SEMI study.

Still, in one key way, the policy has already earned its worth: The private-sector investment the CHIPS Act has already attracted dwarfs the government’s stake.

“The chip industry is very simple,” said Wessner. “If you want to play, you have to pay—you have to provide incentives. We’re incentivizing small amounts, relatively … The good news is that $50 billion [in federal money] has already attracted $200 billion in commitments from the private sector … The federal money isn’t an incentive, it’s a catalyst. We’re not paying for the whole thing by any stretch.”

The CHIPS Act spawned similar policies worldwide. Japan, South Korea, and the EU all enacted laws promoting domestic semiconductor manufacturing last year. And China is putting a whopping $140 billion behind building its own chips as it bets hard on electric vehicles and AI.

In China, the impacts are already showing up: Nikkei reported last September that with the help of government aid, over 80% of Chinese semiconductor manufacturers increased their R&D expenses in the first half of 2023.

“Are we making progress on these? Yes. Would everyone like it to be going faster? Yes,” said Wessner. “When you have a weapons program in the Defense Department, and it doesn’t work, and it costs three times what it’s supposed to cost, we reboot and we keep working on it—because we want the weapon. You have to take the same perspective here.”

The semiconductor world was thrown for a loop yesterday when the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking up to $7 trillion (yes, trillion) in capital to reshape the global semiconductor supply chain and expand computing capacity to meet the demands of AI. Even if Altman secures the money—the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank have been floated as potential investors—he’ll run into the same problem the Biden administration has been dealing with: Building up semiconductor infrastructure takes time.

“There are two things that we usually criticize [the government] for,” said Wessner. “The first is that it’s taking too long. And secondly, that the grants were made too hastily. You can write that [article] in another couple months.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com