https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-hamas-crisis.html
Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza Worsens as Israel Prepares a Possible Invasion
As
Israel retaliates for the Hamas assault last weekend and plans a
potential ground attack, its airstrikes have left Gazans without power,
water and medical care.
Six days of Israeli airstrikes have left more than 300,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip homeless, with two million residents facing critical shortages of food, water and fuel, while Israeli troops prepared on Thursday for a possible ground invasion after Hamas’s deadly weekend assault.
Retaliating for the bloodiest attack on Israel in 50 years, Israel is pummeling Gaza with a ferocity not seen in past conflicts and has cut off vital supplies to the coastal territory. Health officials in Gaza, home to two million people, said the Israeli bombardment had killed more than 1,500 people and injured over 6,600 others.
Israel’s military says that it is hitting places used by Hamas, which controls Gaza, including mosques, houses and other outwardly civilian locations. Gazans say the airstrikes are doing indiscriminate damage to civilians and civilian sites, and independent observers have confirmed that schools and ambulances have been destroyed.
The retaliatory strikes began after Hamas terrorists broke through the border fence with Israel on Saturday morning and attacked towns, kibbutzim and a military base, killing more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, wounding about 3,000 others and kidnapping about 150 hostages, the Israeli government said.
Gaza’s only power plant stopped generating electricity on Wednesday for lack of fuel, shutting down everything from lights to refrigerators, and much of the region lacks running water. Hospitals are overwhelmed with wounded patients and running out of vital supplies; fuel for generators and vehicles is dwindling rapidly; food and water are growing scarce; and it is not clear when humanitarian aid might be allowed in.
“We are facing a huge disaster,” Adnan Abu Hasna, an official with the United Nations agency that aids Palestinian refugees, said by phone from Gaza. He described conditions as “absolutely horrible.”
With the United States stepping up its weapons shipments to Israel, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a military base in Tel Aviv to reinforce support for Israel “as long as America exists.”
“I come before you not only as the U.S. secretary of state, but also as a Jew,” said Mr. Blinken, whose stepfather, Samuel Pisar, survived Nazi concentration camps. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews and for Jews everywhere.”
He added, “This is, this must be, a moment for moral clarity.”
But Mr. Blinken also suggested the need for caution in Israel’s retaliation. “It’s important to take every possible precaution to prevent harming civilians,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu has said that Hamas shot children in the head, burned people alive, raped women and decapitated soldiers.
In a videoconference call to NATO headquarters, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel showed a video of the Hamas attacks that Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, called “horrific.” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III later added, “We are appalled by the emerging scope of the atrocities committed by the terrorists of Hamas.”
The
White House said 27 U.S. citizens were killed in the Hamas attack, and
the State Department said there were 500 to 600 Americans living or
visiting in Gaza whose safety it was trying to guarantee.
In a televised speech, the Hamas spokesman Abu Ubaida said the group had achieved more than it had hoped for in its attack, which he said involved a 3,000-person battalion and a 1,500-person backup force. He confirmed reports that Hamas had successfully duped Israeli intelligence into believing that it did not want a major conflict.
“We are telling the enemy, if you dare enter Gaza, we will destroy your army,” he said.
Israel has called up 360,000 reservists and is building up a large force on the border with Gaza — as well as a smaller one near the northern border with Lebanon — amid widespread speculation that it will invade the Hamas-held territory, which it last did in 2014.
The military “is preparing multiple operational contingency plans” for what it expects will be a protracted war, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, told reporters. “We’re waiting to see what our political leadership decides about a potential ground war. This has not been decided yet.”
He said Israeli warplanes were concentrating on striking targets belonging to an elite Hamas unit known as the Nukhba, which is believed to have led the attack on Israel. “We plan to get every one of those people,” he said.
Though Israeli forces retook all of the area overrun by the incursion within a few days, Hamas fighters were still trying to enter Israel, including by sea, Colonel Hecht said, adding that two were captured and five were killed on Wednesday.
In Gaza, 338,000 people have been displaced, the United Nations said, with most of them taking shelter in U.N. schools. Egypt, which with Israel has enforced a blockade of Gaza for 16 years, has refused to allow people fleeing the bombardment to enter its territory. U.S. officials said the Biden administration was talking with Israel and Egypt about safe passage for civilians to leave and relief supplies to enter.
Israeli warplanes have bombed 88 educational facilities in Gaza, including 18 U.N. schools, two of which were being used to shelter civilians, said Stéphane Dujarric, a U.N. spokesman.
A steady stream of broken and lifeless bodies was flowing into Gaza’s largest medical center, Al Shifa Hospital. Ambulances, yellow cabs and private vehicles screeched to a halt at the entrance to deliver the wounded. Adults arrived carrying injured children or pushing people on stretchers or wheelchairs.
Inside, bloodied patients sat or lay on the tile floor, waiting for treatment. Outside, bodies wrapped in white cloth lined the sidewalk waiting to be identified or collected by loved ones.
Many of the limestone villas and high-rise buildings surrounding the hospital in its affluent Gaza City neighborhood of Al Rimal have been reduced to rubble in the bombing. The Israeli military says the neighborhood is a financial hub for Hamas
Several medical and emergency workers have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza since Saturday, including four Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance drivers and paramedics who were killed on Wednesday, the group said.
Israel’s siege of Gaza, cutting off water, food and medical supplies, is “not acceptable,” Fabrizio Carboni, the Middle East director of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at a news briefing. He added, “We need a safe humanitarian space.”
A steady stream of broken and lifeless bodies was flowing into Gaza’s largest medical center, Al Shifa Hospital. Ambulances, yellow cabs and private vehicles screeched to a halt at the entrance to deliver the wounded. Adults arrived carrying injured children or pushing people on stretchers or wheelchairs.
Inside, bloodied patients sat or lay on the tile floor, waiting for treatment. Outside, bodies wrapped in white cloth lined the sidewalk waiting to be identified or collected by loved ones.
Many
of the limestone villas and high-rise buildings surrounding the
hospital in its affluent Gaza City neighborhood of Al Rimal have been
reduced to rubble in the bombing. The Israeli military says the
neighborhood is a financial hub for Hamas.
Hamas is backed by Iran, which is eager to derail efforts to normalize relations between its two regional archenemies, Saudi Arabia and Israel. U.S. officials say that, so far, they have seen no evidence of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack.
But on Thursday, the United States and Qatar agreed to refreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue, preventing Tehran from spending it. The Biden administration agreed in August to release the money for Iran to spend on humanitarian needs in exchange for the release of Americans held prisoner in Iran.
The Hamas attack on Saturday came as a shocking setback for Israel, with its powerful military and renowned intelligence services. The security apparatus failed to anticipate the incursion, failed to see that its border defenses could be defeated easily and failed at first to grasp the breadth of the assault and coordinate a response. People pleading for help waited hours for police officers or troops to arrive.
While Israelis have largely shown solidarity in the aftermath, Israeli politicians have begun to face a backlash. On Wednesday, Idit Silman, a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party who serves as environmental minister, faced a heckling crowd while she visited injured people at a hospital.
“You are responsible! Go home,” yelled one person, according to video published by Ynet, a popular Israeli news site.
Transportation Minister Miri Regev was chased to her car and cursed at Thursday when she tried to visit the injured at a hospital, and security guards restrained a young man who hurled objects at her car. She has been widely criticized for not arranging emergency transportation for troops called to duty on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when most public transportation shuts down.
Nir Barkat, the economy minister, also confronted a displeased crowd at a hospital, when he met with the wounded in Tel Aviv, according to video shared on social media.
In an interview with Channel 14 in Israel, a man named Shirel Chogeg grew increasingly irate as he described wounds his sister sustained when Hamas gunmen overran the Kfar Azza kibbutz and set fire to her family’s safe room.
“This terrible nightmare is registered on the names of all the Knesset members and on the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, these reckless people who don’t even take responsibility,” he said.
Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, acknowledged on Thursday that the military had not lived up to its responsibilities. “We will learn; we will investigate,” he said, “But now is the time for war.”
Edward Wong reported from Tel Aviv, and Hiba Yazbek from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Samar Abu Elouf from Gaza City; Steven Erlanger, Raja Abdulrahim, Aaron Boxerman and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem; Nicholas Casey from Madrid; Victoria Kim from Seoul; Farnaz Fassihi and Nadav Gavrielov from New York; Lara Jakes from Brussels; Monika Pronczuk from London; and Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Lebanon.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 24 years from New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. He was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. More about Edward Wong
Hiba Yazbek reports for The Times from Jerusalem, covering Israel and the occupied West Bank. More about Hiba Yazbek
The U.S. must stop enabling Israel’s brutal collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza.
Since last weekend I’ve been glued to the news and frantically checking on my family and friends in Gaza and the West Bank. I grieve for the loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives and I mourn with all those who lost loved ones and those who continue to suffer the consequences of the longest occupation in modern history.
This week’s violence did not start with Hamas’s October 7 act of armed resistance against Israel, which surprisingly shocked Israelis and the world. As a result of the attack — which some have argued is better understood not as an act of war but as an “open-air prison revolt,” due to the suffocating conditions of the never-ending siege of Gaza — Israelis have momentarily experienced what Palestinians have endured on a daily basis for decades. The nightmare that has unfolded is the direct and inevitable result of a decades-long policy of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Since taking office, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has moved quickly — together with his racist, far right, anti-Palestinian partners — to implement new policies that have escalated the violence. These new policies include intensified military raids and targeted assassinations of Palestinians labeled as threats by the Israeli state, stepped-up demolitions of Palestinian homes, and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land.
It is heart-wrenching to see the images of death, massive destruction and demolition of entire residential neighborhoods in Gaza, including schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and mosques. As I write, Israeli missiles and airstrikes are pounding Gaza indiscriminately in violation of international law and human rights law.
In a press conference after forming an emergency war government with opposition leader Benny Gantz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Every Hamas member is a dead man … Hamas is ISIS, and we will crush and eliminate it.” He then ordered the carpet bombing of Gaza targeting not only Hamas but also hammering Palestinian residential neighborhoods indiscriminately. According to the Gaza health ministry, the death toll after the fifth day of bombardment exceeded 1,200 Palestinians, including over 300 children and nearly 200 women. Israel is utilizing its military might — which includes one of the world’s most powerful and dangerously equipped army, air force and navy, with a significant unacknowledged nuclear arsenal — against a caged, occupied and crowded population. Israeli politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel army Major General Ghasan Alyan, are calling for “turning Gaza into rubble” and “opening the gates of hell.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made a genocidal announcement and ordered an even more complete “full blockade” of Gaza and said that Israel will “cut all water, electricity, fuel and food…. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
The nightmare that has unfolded is the direct and inevitable result of a decades-long policy of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
How many times before have we heard Israel threaten the “flattening” of Gaza? It is outrageous and shortsighted to describe Hamas’s actions as “an unprovoked attack,” as U.S. mainstream media, the White House and members of Congress are doing. (Notably, some voices in Israeli media such as Haaretz are more willing to acknowledge the roots of the violence.)
Over 2 million Palestinians — most of whom are refugees from the wars of 1948 and 1967 — have been under siege since 2007 and subjected to relentless airstrikes every few years that have caused a tragedy of unimaginable proportions: families displaced from their destroyed homes; a shattered economy with 42 percent unemployment rate; no freedom of movement; lack of life-sustaining resources such as food, water, and fuel; and 80 percent of the population relying on international humanitarian aid for survival. The root cause of the violence is the oppression of a people, who for decades have been struggling to gain their freedom and equality and are witnessing an “international community” unwilling to address the injustice, systemic gross violations of international law, denial of their rights and the horrific conditions they have endured.
A friend in Gaza said to me recently, “What is worse than dying in Gaza is living [in Gaza].” The dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza — coupled with shortages of food, electricity, fuel and medical supplies — have left Palestinians without life-sustaining goods and services, and with endless misery and hardship.
As I write, Israeli missiles and airstrikes are pounding Gaza indiscriminately in violation of international law and human rights law.
It is the continuous, nonstop aggression, settler violence and abhorrent crimes of apartheid that provoke an armed response. Let us also be clear that the U.S. government is complicit in these acts and is the prime enabler of the continued oppression and dehumanization of Palestinians. The U.S. and other European allies who are supporting the Israeli military as it carries out collective punishment against Palestinians — bombing apartment buildings, razing entire neighborhoods and cutting electricity to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza — bear full responsibility for the bloodshed. In a telephone conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Biden reiterated the U.S.’s “rock solid and unwavering support” and ordered U.S. military ships to move closer to the eastern Mediterranean. According to a report by CBS News, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group includes the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, which is the largest warship in the world, as well as five guided missile warships.
We call on our elected officials and all those who care about justice and human life to do everything they can in order to secure an immediate ceasefire, to stop the annihilation of Palestinians, to end the 17-year-old suffocating blockade on Gaza and end U.S. funding of the Israeli apartheid regime with taxpayers’ dollars. Sending more U.S. weapons to Israel will only add fuel to the violence and result in more deaths and devastation.
On October 10, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Gregory W. Meeks (D-New York), joined by 390 of their colleagues, introduced a bipartisan resolution “standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists and condemning Hamas’ brutal war against Israel.”
Without a change in current U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine and without Congress’s ability to see that a “barbaric war” against the Palestinians has been taking place since before 1948, there will never be a just peace in the region.
Isn’t it time to put an end to all this suffering by supporting freedom and equality for all?
International human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have issued extensive reports that concluded that Israel practices apartheid. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory Francesca Albanese has come under vicious attacks following her report highlighting Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. Hagai El-Ad, director of B’Tselem, Israel’s oldest human rights organization, recently said in its report, “Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: It is one regime between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.” Yet, our elected officials disregard all of this, including the International Criminal Court’s labeling of apartheid as “a crime against humanity.”
Why hasn’t the U.S. government shown Palestinians the same empathy, compassion, support and resolve that it has shown our brothers and sisters in Ukraine? In a clear display of double standards, U.S. government officials hail Ukrainians fighting the illegal Russian occupation as heroes and supply them with arms to defend themselves, but Palestinians — who also struggle to end an illegal occupation — are routinely labeled as terrorists (long before Hamas even existed). Some officials falsely accuse American supporters of Palestinian rights of antisemitism, while others slander Jewish supporters of Palestinian rights as self-hating Jews.
This outrage must end. There can be no hope for peace until there is an end to the occupation; until Palestinians get justice, freedom and equal rights; and until Israel adheres to international law. Those who care about humanity — and those who care about the lives of Israelis and Palestinians — will have to ask themselves a simple question: Isn’t it time to put an end to all this suffering by supporting freedom and equality for all?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michel Moushabeck is a Palestinian American writer, editor, translator
and musician. He is the founder and publisher of Interlink Publishing, a
36-year-old, Massachusetts-based, independent publishing house. Follow
him on Instagram: @ReadPalestine.
Israel Orders Mass Evacuation of Over 1 Million Palestinians in Northern Gaza
The order comes as many fear that a ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces is imminent.
Late Thursday night, Israel’s military ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to flee the northern half of the territory within 24 hours — an evacuation order that one U.N. spokesman said would be “impossible” to execute without “devastating human consequences.”
The order comes as many fear that a ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces is imminent.
Since Hamas’s killing of around 1,300 Israelis last weekend, Israel has launched a relentless and indiscriminate bombing campaign against Palestinian territories, leveling entire residential neighborhoods, wiping families off the population registry and killing more than 1,800 Palestinians, a figure that is likely to climb in the coming days. A third of the death toll are children.
Western media has largely focused on Hamas, framing the Israeli military attacks on civilians as justified — but many journalists are pushing back on that narrative, noting that Palestinians have faced decades of dispossession, settler violence and apartheid under Israeli occupation.
“This was not a provocation by Hamas, the provocation is that the Israeli regime has for decades placed Palestinians under colonial occupation,” said Yara Hawari, a senior analyst for Al-Shabaka, in a Sky News interview.
“The level of dehumanization is so phenomenal, you can’t even see us as humans,” Hawari added.
Israel’s attacks over the past week have destroyed key infrastructure in the region, including hospitals. The Israeli government has also cut off Gaza’s food and water, as well as other basic necessities, and health centers are running out of medical supplies to care for the wounded.
On Friday, Israel ordered Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate to Egypt or the southern portion of the territory. The area is highly populated — over 2 million Palestinians reside in Gaza overall, making the region one of the most densely populated areas of the world, with around 5,700 people per square mile. In the northern part of Gaza, that rate is closer to 9,000 people per square kilometer. Nearly half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18.
The United Nations is urging Israel to reverse course, with U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric saying that the order will turn “what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
The World Health Organization has also condemned the order, noting that it would be “impossible” to follow, particularly for the thousands of Palestinians who have been injured and are being treated at health care facilities. Those awaiting treatment would be subjected to a “death sentence” under Israel’s demand for displacement, a spokesperson for the organization said.
Thousands have already begun fleeing northern Gaza for the southern part of the region.
“I’m seeing people holding their bags like they want to run away but where should we go? It’s a small city there’s no escape, we’re trying to save our lives,” Gaza City resident Farah Abo Sedo said. “They bomb us every single night without any mercy, there’s nothing left.”
“No-one protects us or sends us help, there’s no safe place here, there are a lot of children and pregnant women and no-one helps us,” Abo Sedo added.
Human rights advocates have warned that the order (and the subsequent military campaign that is likely to follow) will escalate the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has issued warnings of a possible “second Nakba,” referring to the catastrophic mass displacement and killing of Palestinians in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war, violence that has continued long afterward.
“So many roads have been destroyed & most don’t have vehicles. They know that this is impossible,” Palestinian journalist Yara Hawari said on social media. “This is ethnic cleansing & the world knows it.”
Moving more than a million people out of northern Gaza is “obviously impossible,” noted Palestinian American writer and analyst Yousef Munayyer. “Israel is preparing for mass atrocities.”
A video has recently gone viral of a teenager in Gaza begging for international solidarity with the Palestinian people, showcasing the devastating human toll of the occupation.
“We’re not pieces of trash. We’re humans,” the unnamed teenage girl says in her missive shared on X. “We have rights. It’s unfair that you think of us as trash. We’re stuck in here. And we can’t get out.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of
Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the
early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues
of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on
Twitter: @thatchriswalker
As a Palestinian American, I am heartbroken to watch U.S.-backed war crimes unfolding in Gaza.
Part of being Palestinian American is having to watch Israel treated as the U.S.’s “special ally” and essentially the 51st state. This week, that feeling is particularly acute as the U.S. is planning to augment its aid to Israel with an additional $2 billion, even as Israeli officials call for genocidal acts, horrific human rights abuses and collective punishment in the Gaza Strip.
In these moments, Palestinian Americans like me face the constant guilt that our tax dollars are funding the oppression and apartheid conditions faced by our families and people in Israeli-occupied Palestine. For instance, U.S. funds help subsidize Israel’s illegal settlements across the West Bank. Israel has now placed Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank under closure, and Israeli forces have just provided already heavily armed Israeli settlers with over 1,000 additional M16 rifles, which is terrifying given the history of settler violence.
While my family in the West Bank live in fear from soldiers and settlers, the reports from our friends and contacts in the Gaza Strip are nightmarish. Israeli officials are referring to Palestinians as “human animals” and confirmed having cut off access to water, electricity, food and medicine. Israeli bombardment has been underway for days now in preparation for a ground invasion in Gaza.
The past few days have been grueling on so many levels, particularly as Israeli officials — in what has been described as the most far right government in Israel’s history — call for and carry out atrocities against Palestinians with full backing from U.S. officials.
U.S. leaders have been inciting Israel to inflict large-scale assaults on Hamas without regard for civilian life in a besieged and impoverished territory where half the population are children and most are refugees. Already there are reports of Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons and Israel’s bombardment killing women, children, men, journalists and medics, while Gazan hospitals are on the brink of losing power.
A core part of the Palestinian American experience in moments like these is our escalated experience of systemic racism and the silencing of our voices — not only in Palestine/Israel, but here in the U.S. as well. The campaigns of demonization of Palestinians and targeting of visible voices are in full force as we speak. Students and others in the U.S. who are attempting to raise awareness about the need for Palestinian rights and protection are being smeared, doxed and even fired by their employers.
As I worry about my own loved ones back home and try to keep up with the staggering statistics on the decimation of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, I also am grieving for Israeli civilians as they process the unprecedented scale of killing they experienced this past weekend. I know Palestinians and Israelis who have been killed, maimed and displaced, and who are missing, and my heart is broken in a million pieces.
It has also been painful to endure the barrage of accusations and suspicion. Palestinians, despite our immense heterogeneity like any other people, are writ large associated with Hamas. While some Palestinians support Hamas for political, religious or utilitarian reasons, others oppose Hamas on ideological or practical grounds.
Most Palestinians merely want to lead ordinary lives with dignity and now cannot think of anything beyond survival. I keenly experience how, as a Palestinian American, I am deemed guilty of support for “terrorism” until proven innocent. In the U.S., individuals overwhelmingly tend to assume that we are sympathetic to Hamas and to the massacres and war crimes they carried out this weekend that have resulted in over 1,300 Israeli deaths. Of course, I am unequivocally opposed to the targeting of Israeli civilians. But it’s demeaning for us to endure being asked to declare this so constantly. As a pacifist, I am deeply committed to nonviolent resistance, even as we are aware of Israel’s history of repression against nonviolent resistance. The expectation seems to be for Palestinians to acquiesce to our oppression and the theft of our ancestral homes, lands and natural resources.
It’s also surreal to be pressured to muzzle ourselves about the 75 years of Israeli state-sponsored terrorism against the Palestinian people. For my 39 years of existence on this planet, my homeland has always been under Israeli military occupation, with massive violations of international law. Within American academia, scholars such as myself, who specialize in the Middle East and are people of color, often face heightened surveillance from external organizations and internal forces that decontextualize our words and attempt to smear us as violent and antisemitic.
While my family in the West Bank live in fear from soldiers and settlers, the reports from our friends and contacts in the Gaza Strip are nightmarish.
Certainly, antisemitism must be named, condemned and combatted with moral clarity. Yet false accusations of antisemitism should not be leveled against individuals advancing informed criticisms of the Israeli state and its egregious human rights violations. The Palestinian freedom movement includes many Jewish and Israeli voices who are furthering solidarity between our communities and who are challenging the chilling of free speech on Palestine/Israel.
It is disheartening to witness political forces in the U.S., who are instrumentalizing compassion regarding Israeli suffering, to help channel further U.S. military support for Israeli violence against innocent Palestinians in Gaza. It is an upsetting experience to realize that many of the same folks justifiably expressing horror about the murder and abduction of Israeli women, men, children and the elderly have never uttered a word about the murder and disappearance of Palestinians, even though Palestinians have disproportionately shouldered the casualties of this conflict and settler colonialism.
I find the empathy and compassion that so many Americans have for Israeli life to be beautiful. Yet the extreme imbalance in recognizing the humanity of Israelis versus Palestinians has been relentlessly stoked by the biases of mainstream U.S. media, which have yielded a U.S. public that has largely never seen the countless images of Palestinian children being abducted from their beds and neighborhoods and taken to Israeli dungeons over decades now. I hope that one day we will get to the point that the sort of empathy that the majority of people in the U.S. so readily feel for Israelis can also be extended to the Palestinian people as well.
Moving forward, the global movement for Palestinian freedom continues, and the U.S. is a major part of this equation. Americans in solidarity with Palestine play an important role in lobbying their elected officials to push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and to provide humanitarian protection to all civilians. We also raise public awareness about the gross violations of human rights in the Occupied Territories.
Achieving sustainable peace necessitates addressing the root of the Gaza crisis: the ongoing displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people. As we embrace political rather than military solutions, we also call for an end to unconditional U.S. aid to Israel, and demand that international law be consistently applied to Israeli, Palestinian and American parties to the conflict. There are organizations on the ground worthy of our support, including Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and Medical Aid for Palestinians.
I hope for an immediate end to the bloodshed, the return of Palestinian and Israeli detainees to their homes, and building peace and justice for all in Palestine/Israel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sa’ed Atshan is an associate professor of peace and conflict studies and anthropology at Swarthmore College.
Republican Moves to Censure Rashida Tlaib for Call to Stop Israeli Apartheid
Rep. Jack Bergman targets the only person of Palestinian origin in the House with the resolution.
A Republican House member has filed a resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian in Congress, who is facing a deluge of fierce criticism from both sides of the aisle after she called for an end to Israel’s apartheid in a statement this weekend.
The resolution was filed on Wednesday by Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Michigan), who parroted unverified information from Israeli forces that Hamas had beheaded infants in its attack last week and smeared Tlaib as antisemitic — a longtime tactic of Zionists to discredit those who stand against Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine. Another Republican, Rep. Morgan Luttrell (Texas), joined Bergman in filing the resolution.
“There is no moral equivalence between Israel defending itself and Hamas attacking innocent Israeli civilians,” he said, as Israel launched thousands of bombs at Gazan citizens and cut off electricity and water to the area, which many have noted is a war crime, after decades of committing settler violence against Palestinians. The resolution condemns Tlaib for “calling Israel an apartheid state and insinuating the United States should end its support for the State of Israel.”
On Saturday, Tlaib released a statement mourning the loss of Israelis in Hamas’s attack while also calling on Israel to end their apartheid. “I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,” she said.
“The path to that future must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance. The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer. No person, no child anywhere should have to suffer or live in fear of violence,” she continued. “As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
Related Story:
Only 9 House Reps Vote Against Resolution Denying Israeli Apartheid
It is telling that Bergman would target the only person of Palestinian origin in the House with the resolution, even though lawmakers like Representatives Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) put out similar statements.
The resolution also criticizes Tlaib for hosting an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic) — when Israeli militants violently expelled three quarters of all Palestinians from their homes between 1947 and 1949.
A censure, which requires only a simple majority vote, represents a strong rebuke of a lawmaker and can also come with a removal from committee assignments. It’s unclear if the censure resolution would pass.
However, both Republicans and Democrats alike have been repeating the same line on supporting Israel unconditionally, even as Israeli officials began warning 1.1 million Gazans on Friday to evacuate to the southern part of the region or face relentless bombing that has leveled entire residential neighborhoods. Some are likening this move to a second Nakba, saying it is an escalation of the ongoing genocide that has been happening in plain sight.
Earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that statements like Tlaib’s and Omar’s were “repugnant” — unlike, perhaps to Jean-Pierre, decades of settler violence and apartheid. The few pro-Palestine lawmakers in Congress have faced similar attacks from Republicans and Democrats alike.
As some commentators have pointed out, however, statements like Tlaib’s and Omar’s are not that far from what even some Israelis have been saying about the current attacks; Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and top adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told BBC over the weekend that both the Hamas attack and any retaliation involving killing civilians are wrong, as The Nation pointed out.
That American lawmakers would be so roundly condemned for what even some Israeli officials are saying is a show of how strong the pro-Israel propaganda is in the U.S.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
