Tag Archives: Gaza

Why I’ll Still be Participating in the Protests at the DNC Next Month

 (photo: AP/Jose Luis Magana)

By all accounts, the Democratic Party is closing ranks at lighting speed. As of this writing, Vice-President Harris now has more than enough delegates to clinch the party’s nomination, with a virtual roll-call planned prior to the convention in Chicago next month. The endorsements from powerful Dems continue to roll in, including from virtually all of those who might be considered viable as her potential opponents. Just two days after Biden’s withdrawal from the race, her coronation as the Democrats’ candidate is now all but assured.

I fully understand the euphoria of this moment. With Biden as the Democratic candidate, the prospect of another Trump presidency was becoming more terrifyingly real by the day. But make no mistake, Biden’s downfall was not the product of one horrible debate. On this point, I am in total agreement with Palestinian-American community organizer Linda Sarsour, who recently posted on her Facebook page:

They will never admit this but Joe Biden became a political liability for the Democratic Party on Gaza. Period. The media won’t say this. The pundits will talk around it and the party will say it’s not the case as not to offend their pro-Israel donors – but they knew that they could not win states like Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and they had lost big chunks of important constituencies like young people, Arab and Muslim voters, and many progressives. The fact that anyone thinks we are going to believe that one dismal debate performance was the reason they pushed Biden out is just ludicrous.

Absolutely. While the doubts over his age may have motivated his donors to abandon him in the end, Biden was fatally weakened as a candidate by his unabashed support for Israeli genocide – and the solidarity movement that held him to account. As was reported as far back as January, “It’s not just the major prime-time rallies that are now attracting the anti-Gaza war crowd’s wrath. Everywhere Biden goes he is being dogged, whether it is outside the church he attends near his home in Delaware or along the route of his presidential motorcade.”

Many are noting that Harris has been marginally better on the issue of Palestine/Israel than Biden. Last December, it was reported that she was pushing the Biden administration to “to show more concern publicly for the humanitarian damage in Gaza.” During a speech in Selma last March she called for a temporary ceasefire, adding that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.” In the same speech, she spoke empathetically about Gazans seeking aid who “were met with gunfire and chaos.”

At the same time, we should have no illusions about Harris’ record of unconditional support for Israel. During a speech at the 2017 AIPAC conference, she offered the requisite oath of fealty, ““Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.”  And during her 2019 Presidential campaign, she was praised by the lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel for running to the right of Obama on the Iran deal. Indeed, despite her softer tone, Harris has been in lockstep with the Biden administration – indeed with, the entire Democratic Party leadership – on this issue.

For the past several months I’ve been actively involved in the Palestine solidarity movement holding the Biden administration to account for enabling and support Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. Along with scores of others, I’ve made plans to participate in the protests planned at the Democratic National Convention next month. Even with Kamala Harris now leading the ticket, I have no intention of changing those plans.

Those of us who are part of this movement have not forgotten the essential reason for our organizing: we are living in a time of genocide – one that is being aided and abetted by a Democratic government. Whether it is Biden or Harris at the top of the ticket, nothing has changed in this regard. Moreover, conventions are the place where party policy and platforms are decided. Those of us who have been holding our government to account all year have a solemn responsibility to continue to do so: to demand that the governing party enact an arms embargo on the Israeli government and to establish a foreign policy centered in human rights.

Though news of Gaza has been swept off the front pages, Israel’s carnage against the Palestinian people has continued with impunity. It was reported today that “at least 84 Palestinians were killed over the past day in (Khan Yunis), with more than 300 others wounded. Medical staff at the Nasser Medical Complex report they are completely overwhelmed and have been forced to treat patients on hospital floors.” Yesterday, the World Health Organization revealed there is now a high risk of the polio virus spreading across Gaza – and beyond its borders – due to the dire health and sanitation situation there. The Israeli military has just announced that it will start offering the polio vaccine to its soldiers though there are not enough vaccines – or the distribution capacity – to reach the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza.

In other words, now is not the time to let up. In the words of Linda Sarsour, “no matter what, our work doesn’t change.” Or as Waleed Shahid of the Uncommitted Movement has correctly said:

We are making clear that we think that Biden and the White House’s disastrous policy on Gaza makes it harder for them to defeat Trump. In fact, having a campaign based on democracy, having a campaign fighting far-right authoritarianism, while sending bombs to one of the world’s biggest far-right authoritarians in Netanyahu, who is now visiting Washington, DC, makes a mockery of that party’s claim to be fighting on the right side of history, fighting on the behalf of democracy. And we want to see that party change course.

That’s why, no matter who is heading the ticket, I plan to be on the front lines with my friends and comrades when the DNC comes to town next month.

Don’t Normalize the Political Violence in Gaza

Israel killed at least 90 people in Al-Mawasi in several airstrikes on an area the military had designated as a “safe zone.” Here a child reacts as bodies are salvaged from the site on July 13. 
 Omar AshtawyAPA images

Warning: this post contains descriptions of extreme violence.

On Saturday, while the world was riveted to the news about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Israel unleashed airstrikes on Al-Mawasi in Central Gaza – in an area previously designated as a “humanitarian safe zone.” Gazan health officials reported that approximately 90 people were killed and at least 300 injured in this attack. Eyewitness testimonies attested to unspeakable carnage. According to 16 year old Gazan Shaima Farwameh:

A leg hit me, and I saw dismembered bodies a few meters away. I saw a young child screaming. He lost his lower limbs and was crawling on his hands and screaming. The bombs didn’t stop, and suddenly the boy disappeared. I saw how he vanished before me while we ran and lowered our eyes to the ground, unable to do anything but run…What a life we ​​live in these tents that we have to see the dismembered bodies of our siblings and families fly over our heads.

Yesterday, Israel bombed Southern and Central Gaza once again, killing more than 60 Palestinians. Among the targets was a UN school in Nuseirat where families were sheltering. Other strikes in Khan Younis and Rafah killed 12 people, according to medical officials and AP journalists. According to AP, “footage showed the school’s yard covered in rubble and twisted metal from a structure that was hit. Workers carried bodies wrapped in blankets, as women and children watched from the classrooms where they have been living.”

Given the reality of such hideous violence, it was difficult to ignore the irony in the rhetoric following the attempted assassination attempt last Saturday. For me, the most egregious example occurred when Biden said, In his speech to the nation, “There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever.  Period.  No exceptions.  We can’t allow this violence to be normalized” (emphasis mine).

This statement is truly breathtaking in its hypocrisy. The genocidal violence Israel has been unleashing on Gazans for the past ten months has long been been normalized for most, save the Palestinian people and their allies. Even as the death toll has now reached nearly 40,000. Even as a new report in the British medical journal Lancet estimates that the actual death toll in Gaza could eventually reach 186,000 or even higher — roughly 8% of Gaza’s population.

It truly takes a special kind of moral gall for Biden to say “we can’t allow violence to be normalized” when it is his very administration that is unconditionally providing Israel with the very bombs that have killing and maiming Gazans on a daily basis. In terms of sheer numbers, President Biden is enabling the deadliest political violence in the world at this very moment.

There has been a chorus of condemnation of “political violence” from across the political spectrum over the past several days. As I’ve listened to the robotic sameness of these responses, it’s occurred to me that they are all unified over one common assumption: political violence is worthy of condemnation when Americans kill other Americans for political purposes – but when the US government commits or enables political violence around the world, it amounts to mere background noise.

Of course, the US itself was created by means of political violence – through the genocide of indigenous inhabitants and the stolen labor of black slaves. This country engages in political violence every day through deadly systems of mass incarceration and policing. And of course, the US has historically expanded its imperial power and influence throughout the world by fomenting the political violence of regime change. MLK famously made this point in his speech A Time to Break Silence when he excoriated “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”

So please don’t stop raising your voice about Gaza. Please don’t allow this political violence be normalized. Please heed the words of my friend and colleague Jehad Abusalim (who comes from Deir Al-Balah in Gaza):

This is annihilation. There are no words left to capture the horror. Gaza is being obliterated—people are being murdered, starved, and displaced for months on end. Repeating these words feels like a hollow echo and a useless endeavor. But we have no choice but to persevere and keep pushing for an end to the genocide, for accountability, for justice, for healing, for rebuilding, and for liberation. We on the outside have no excuse. As long as Gaza’s defenders, doctors, nurses, first responders, and volunteers keep working and pushing, we have no choice but to keep working and pushing. Gaza needs your activism, your courage, your dedication, your boycott, your presence on the streets, and your donations now more than ever. This is a battle for hope, and hope is the last thing we’ve got. Let’s not let them take it away from us.

On Gaza: Religion, Politics and Solidarity

Here are my remarks from, “Gaza: Religion, Politics and Solidarity,” a program sponsored by Bright Stars of Bethlehem on May 5, held at the First Presbyterian Church in Evanston. It was my honor to speak in conversation with Palestinian liberation theologian Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb (founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem), Dr, Rami Nashashibi, (founder and Executive Director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network) and Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, (General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference).

To view the entire program, click here.

On Tu B’Shevat, Our Call for Ceasefire Affirms the Sacredness of All Life

Guest Post by Maya Schenwar

Remarks by Maya Schenwar, from last night’s Tu B’shvat gathering sponsored by Tzedek Chicago and the Jewish Fast for Gaza. (Maya is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also a coordinator of the Jewish Fast for Gaza and a member of Tzedek Chicago.)

Many of those of us involved in Jewish Fast for Gaza are breaking our fast tonight. We’ve been fasting weekly on Sundays since mid-October, and we will keep fasting weekly until a ceasefire. We donate the money we would’ve spent on food to organizations supporting people in Gaza in this time of starvation and mass death. And each week, we are also reflecting on and renewing our commitment to solidarity with our Palestinian co-strugglers and people around the world who are calling for an end to this genocide, an end to US funding for Israel’s weapons, an end to colonization and apartheid.

When we call for a ceasefire, when we fast for a ceasefire, we are uplifting a call for life. In the months since October 7, I’ve heard many people quote Ruth Wilson’s Gilmore’s sacred words, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” And one of the things Ruthie is saying, with that message, is that in societies where life is actually treated as precious—where they don’t have the death penalty and life sentences and large-scale state violence and state-sanctioned environmental devastation—in those places, violence is less likely overall, the culture is less violent, because life is affirmed.

We should bear in mind that as the US fuels Israel’s genocide in Gaza, here in the US, Alabama is preparing to carry out the US’s first execution via nitrogen gas—which is torture—on the day of Tu B’Shvat.

People are more likely to treat life as precious when their own lives are treated as precious. So we have to create the conditions in which everyone’s life is treated as inherently sacred and irreplaceable. That work is on all of us.

Our Fast for Gaza draws inspiration from the Jewish tradition of fasting as an act of mourning, and it also draws inspiration from Palestinians incarcerated inside Israeli jails, who have launched many hunger strikes to protest their incarceration, and the incarceration of all Palestinians under occupation, to INSIST that their lives are precious.

When Ruth Wilson Gilmore first introduced this idea—where life is precious, life is
precious—she was at an environmental justice conference for youth, where, among other things, the youth denounced the effects of pesticides, including on humans– and of course, pesticides also have impacts on native plants and animals. I think this is significant, for Tu B’Shvat. Recognizing that all life is precious means recognizing our interconnection with all life around us. It means we need to, in the words of Thich Nhat Hahn, “awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” It means recognizing the ways that trees have been weaponized to push Palestinians off their land. It means recognizing Israel’s mass destruction of olive trees.

Trees themselves recognize that where life is precious, life is precious. Forests are social
systems in which trees support each other through their root systems, through chemical signals in their leaves, through the social climate they create. As we celebrate the trees’ birthday today, we can also celebrate their preciousness, the preciousness of all the life they nurture and that nurtures them. And we can express that through our urgent calls for a ceasefire, for Palestinian liberation, and for collective liberation.

When we say ceasefire now, we are also saying environmental justice now. When we say ceasefire now, it is a call for Indigenous liberation now, from Palestine to Turtle Island and beyond.

Ceasefire now can be a call to stop death penalties of all kinds, including this execution that is set to happen in our own country on the day of Tu B’Shvat. Let’s insist on the preciousness of people, and of trees, and of the interconnectedness of all beings.

Chag Sameach and peace to you all.

Reenacting Pharoah’s Genocidal Decree in Gaza

(Photo: EFE)

The introduction to the book of Exodus, which we begin reading this Shabbat, has never resonated so deeply or so powerfully for me as it does this very moment.

We’re all familiar with the events that spark the Exodus narrative: a new Pharoah arises over Mitzrayim who does not know or remember Joseph. Alarmed that the Israelite minority is growing, he oppresses them with forced labor – but the more he oppresses them, the more the Israelites increase in number.

Pharoah then attempts to stem the Israelite birth rate directly by ordering the Hebrew midwives Shifra and Puah to kill every newborn boy. When they defy his order, Pharoah orders that every newborn boy be cast into the Nile. Commentators differ on why Pharoah made this very specific decree. Some say that in his paranoia, he believed the boys would eventually grow up to be soldiers and take up arms against his people. Other say his soothsayers predicted the birth of Moses. Still others say Pharoah believed that the Israelite women would intermarry and assimilate into the majority culture.

Whatever the reason, it is striking to note that Exodus’ liberation narrative begins with Pharoah’s efforts to head off the Israelite birth rate. As I’ve noted before, there are powerful parallels between this narrative and the state of Israel’s regard of the Palestinian people as a “demographic threat” to their Jewish majority. But in the midst of Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, I’m finding that these verses now resonate with a brutal – and almost unbearable – urgency.

On November 3, less than a month into Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza, UNICEF, the World Health Organization and other NGOs reported that “Women, children and newborns in Gaza are disproportionately bearing the burden of the escalation of hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territory, both as casualties and in reduced access to health services.” More recently, the UN estimated that “around 50,000 pregnant women are currently living in Gaza, with more than 180 births taking place every day amid the ‘decimation’ of its healthcare system.”

The most devastating details on the impact of this onslaught on Gazan mothers can be read in the South African government’s application to the International Court of Justice, formally accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. I strongly recommend reading this document in its entirety. Though South Africa’s claim was cynically dismissed by the White House as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” its 84 page report is painstakingly researched, citing 574 independent sources. Though it is often near-unbearable to read, I believe it is an immensely important document and deserves the widest possible readership.

Here is a sample of the report’s findings on impact of Israel’s genocidal violence on pregnant women and newborn babies. Please be warned: the following quote it includes very graphic descriptions of traumatic violence inflicted on women and children.

Pregnant women and children –– including newborn babies –– are also particularly impacted by displacement, lack of access to food and water, shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation, and lack of access to health services. These effects are severe and significant. An estimated 5,500 of approximately 52,000 pregnant Palestinian women in Gaza giving birth each month are doing so in unsafe conditions, often with no clean water, much less medical assistance, “in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise”. Where they are able to get to a functioning hospital, pregnant women are having to undergo caesarean sections without anaesthetic.

Given the lack of access to critical medical supplies, including blood, doctors are being compelled to perform ordinarily unnecessary hysterectomies on young women in an attempt to save their lives, leaving them unable to have more children. Indeed, the Minister of Health for the State of Palestine, Dr May al-Kaileh, confirms that the only option facing Palestinian women in Gaza who ‘bleed out’ after giving birth is to undergo a hysterectomy in order for their lives to be saved. The lack of available drugs, such as the anti-D injection –– given to Rhesus negative women on the birth of a Rhesus positive baby –– also seriously impacts the possibility of future healthy pregnancies for affected women.

Premature births have reportedly increased by between 25-30 per cent, as stressed and traumatised pregnant women face a myriad of challenges, including being compelled to walk long distances in search of safety, attempting to escape from bombs and being crowded into shelters in often squalid conditions. Particularly in northern Gaza, cases of placenta abruption –– a serious condition that occurs to pregnant women during childbirth which is potentially life-threatening to both mother and baby –– have more than doubled.

An ever-increasing number of Palestinian babies in Gaza are reportedly dying from entirely preventable causes, brought about by Israel’s actions: newborns up to three months old are dying of diarrhea, hypothermia, and other preventable causes. Without essential equipment and medical support, premature and underweight babies have little to no chance of survival. Palestinian newborn babies have died due to the lack of fuel to supply hospital generators; others have been found decomposing in their hospital cots, medical staff taking care of them having been forced by Israel to evacuate.

On 3 November 2023, the World Health Organisation warned that “[m]aternal deaths are expected to increase given the lack of access to adequate care”, with deadly consequences on reproductive health, including a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births. The impact will necessarily be long lasting and severe for Palestinians in Gaza as a group. By 22 November 2023 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, has expressly warned that:

“[T]he reproductive violence inflicted by Israel on Palestinian women, newborn babies, infants, and children could be qualified as… acts of genocide under Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide … including “imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group”. She stressed that “States must prevent and punish such acts in accordance with their responsibilities under the Genocide Convention.”

(Sections 96-100)

If there could be any doubt as to the question of intentionality behind these barbaric measures, the section immediately following these findings includes exhaustive quotes by Israeli politicians and military leaders that make their genocidal intentions all too clear. Most chillingly, it offers this quote from 95-year old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre during the 1948 Nakba — who was called up for reserve duty to “boost morale” amongst Israeli troops ahead of the ground invasion: Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live. . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. (Section 102)

In this week’s Torah portion, the cry of the oppressed Israelites rises up to God, who hears and hearkens to their pain. This year, there can be no more critical question posed by our Torah portion: will God hearken to the collective cry of the people of Gaza?

The answer, as ever, is up to us all.