But it should go without saying that extremists and ideologues exist in all communities. No one should get a pass. And when they are backed up by those in power, it’s a dangerous combination. It would also be a mistake to allow a phalanx of religious nationalist settlers and their far-right political supporters in government to co-opt Jewish identity and to write off legitimate criticism of their beliefs and their actions as an expression of bigotry.
Settler colonialism begets settler colonialism.
A lot of this settler delusion is because of education. If you didn’t know, states like Texas are trying to ban Between The World And Me by Ta Nehisi Coates, a relatively moderate and liberal man, because white children are realizing they come from a deeply racist past. Many white parents and white fascist government bodies in the South feel as if that’s an infringement on their civil liberties—how dare you make their children care and have a conscience? Whiteness seems to obstruct you from social accountability. Sometimes it’s truly absurd to witness.
...
Inevitably, I do think there is a moral arc to the universe, but where do you go when a vast majority of your country refuses to understand that its “strengths” are built on slave labor, exploitation, and the mass murder of an Indigenous population who lived on this land for thousands of years. That kind of denial… well that kind of denial breeds Israel.
The US National Institutes of Health describes scientific racism “an organised system of misusing science to promote false scientific beliefs in which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as being superior”.
The ideology rests on the false belief that “races” are separate and distinct. “Racial purity is a fantasy concept,” said Dr Adam Rutherford, a lecturer in genetics at University College London. “It does not and has not and never will exist, but it is inherent to the scientific racism programme.”
Prof Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Harvard University, said that “broadly speaking there is essentially no scientific evidence” for scientific racism’s core tenets.
The writer Angela Saini, author of a book on the return of race science, has described how it traces its roots to arguments originally used to defend colonialism and later Nazi eugenics, and today can often be deployed to “shore up” political views.
In multiple conversations, HDF’s organisers suggested their interests were also political. Frost appeared to express support for what he called “remigration”, which Ahrens had told him would be the AfD’s key policy should the party win power.
...
The principal benefactor
Andrew Conru founded his first internet business while studying mechanical engineering at Stanford. In 2007, he hit the jackpot, selling his dating website Adult FriendFinder to the pornography company Penthouse for $500m.
In recent years, the entrepreneur has turned his attention to giving away his money, declaring on his personal website: “My ultimate goal is not to accumulate wealth or accolades, but to leave a lasting, positive impact on the world.”
His foundation has given millions to a wide and sometimes contrasting range of causes, including a Seattle dramatic society, a climate thinktank and a pet rehoming facility, as well as less progressive recipients: an anti-immigration group called the Center for Immigration Studies, and Turning Point USA, which runs a watchlist of university professors it claims advance leftist propaganda.
“The situation is bleak, black and bloody,” he said. “There are people who want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law. In whose interest is that? Either you have the rule of law or you have the rule of the jungle. There is no in-between. At present it is the powerful and mighty that are winning.”
Sourani reserves some of his strongest criticism for the international criminal court (ICC), with which his centre has been formally engaging about the occupation since January 2015, long before the Israeli response to Hamas’s 7 October attack led the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of collective starvation and crimes against humanity.
Sourani said he was aghast when the first ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, told him he could not act against Israel without US permission. “He said ‘I am a polite man’ but I said to him you are meant to be the global guardian of international law, you are the legal conscience of victims across the globe, and you are telling me if the Americans do not give you the green light then you’re not going to move anywhere? I mean, I am shocked, and shame on you.”
Coates closes his remarkable book with a strong — and accurate — indictment of U.S. media coverage of Israel/Palestine. He says he feels “betrayed” by his “colleagues in journalism.” Here is part of his conclusion:
An inhuman system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think that they are not part of such subsystems, that they are independent, objective and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion. . . [The result is] an effort to forge a story told solely by the colonizer, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by American states, the revocation of articles by journals, the dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, the shooting of journalists by army snipers. . .”
CNN and MSNBC’s pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media’s consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign, backed by unending American military and political support, that is unprecedented in the 21st century, according to Oxfam International. Israel’s operations have been characterized by a level of brutality that is difficult to capture with statistics, but here are two examples: As of January, Save the Children was reporting that an average of 10 children a day in Gaza were losing one or both of their legs per day, and in April, UN Women estimated that 19,000 children had been orphaned.
This analysis examines the media discourse that emerged in the first 100 days of both conflicts when the narratives that enabled this kind of onslaught were established. We chose this time frame because it is long enough to get a meaningful sample, but early enough to allow the study to think critically about how US media played a role—from the outset—in justifying Palestinian deaths while protesting and properly contextualizing Ukrainian and Israeli ones.
...
One common rejoinder to this double standard is that Israel doesn’t intentionally kill civilians, whereas Hamas and Russia do. But this assertion is based entirely on unsubstantiated conventional wisdom and is belied by scores of data points.
Aside from the fact that IDF personnel routinely film themselves committing apparent war crimes, there are numerous reports from third-party organizations as varied as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and even the US State Department documenting the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of collective punishment. The International Court of Justice’s January 26 ruling laid out several points of evidence showing the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. Law for Palestine, a group of legal researchers, has collected these and hundreds more pieces of evidence detailing Israeli officials’ genocidal intent, including top Israeli officials expressing their intent to depopulate Gaza and engage in collective punishment:
... Coates finds the evasions employed by the state of Israel—which he is only now coming to understand—remarkably similar to those embraced by the U.S.—which he understands all too well.
The state project of the U.S. and the state project of Israel are both, Coates reflects, based on ethnic hierarchy, a “system of supremacy [that] justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.” The maintenance of this hierarchy, this system of inequality written into the law, has been carried out in Israel for the last 50 years with “the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.” This Coates finds intolerable. And by the end of The Message he hopes that you will too.
Occasionally the parallels he discovers between the U.S. and Israel are astonishing, as when Coates visits Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank outside of Hebron with a fractious history. Although this settlement is viewed as illegal by many in the international community, Coates finds that “settlements like Kiryat Arba are not the work of rogue pioneers; much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen.” Incredibly, even Coates’s evocation of redlining—another echo that carries over from “The Case for Reparations”—does not adequately capture the lunacy of this arrangement. Kiryat Arba resembles nothing so much as a community established in the 1870s in America’s Western frontier, where settlers knew that their presence would invalidate treaties that allocated land to someone else.
The city of Gaza, home to more than half a million people a year ago, lies in ruins, with much of its surviving population crammed into unsanitary refugee camps in the southern end of the Gaza Strip that Israel has also bombed and from which there is no escape. In January, Oxfam calculated that Palestinians were dying at a daily rate that exceeded civilian casualties in any other recent conflict, including Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, or Yemen. An International Court of Justice ruling that same month determined it “plausible” that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza. This is to say nothing of the war’s expansion beyond Gaza, including Israel’s major attacks on the occupied West Bank and in Lebanon, killing hundreds more civilians in recent weeks.
For the most consistent and left-wing critics of Israel’s occupation, this inventory of horrors has become rote, while for Israel’s far-right governing coalition, it is an inventory of successes. In June, the Israeli government tweeted a video in which a freed hostage says, “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” and if one accepts that genocidal premise then it follows that Israel’s slaughter has been productive. Israel and its left-wing critics may be diametrically opposed in their goals, but they agree on some basic facts: that Israel is ruthlessly pursuing the destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza, with no regard for moral niceties or international law, and with the unapologetic belief that Jewish life is sacrosanct and Arab life is worthless.
...What the historian Rashid Khalidi has aptly characterized as a hundred-year settler-colonial war on Palestine is rendered, in the liberal Zionist imagination, as a tragic conflict between two peoples alike in dignity—though it is obvious most liberal Zionists identify more strongly with the people who are dying less.
...the liberal Zionist position: unshakeable support for Israel and its war paired with boilerplate criticism of Netanyahu’s wartime leadership, as though that were somehow separable and unrepresentative.
...By scapegoating Netanyahu, who has dominated the Israeli political system for most of the past fifteen years, liberal Zionists have been able to preserve in their imaginations the idealized Israel many of them fell in love with decades ago—the Israel that was founded by secular socialists from Eastern Europe and that branded itself as a paragon of enlightened governance, even as it engaged from the beginning in colonization, land theft, murder, and expulsion on a scale that Netanyahu’s coalition can only envy. By denying the essential nature of the Zionist project and its incompatibility with progressive values, liberal Zionists have also been in denial at every stage about the war to which they have pledged at least conditional support. They have insisted that the situation is “complicated,” which is the framing Ta-Nehisi Coates absorbed during his tenure at the predominantly liberal Zionist Atlantic, and which he denounced as “horseshit” following a trip to the occupied West Bank in the summer of 2023. “It’s complicated,” Coates told New York magazine last month, deriding that common talking point, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
Israel’s brutal onslaught in Gaza since October 7, 2023 has been apocalyptic for Palestinians. But for Israeli weapons makers, it’s been an unprecedented time of financial success and a unique opportunity to show off their latest tech.
In December last year, the CEO of Israeli defense company, Smart Shooter, told the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, how proud she was of assisting Israeli forces in Gaza because her product had allowed them to eliminate a swarm of seven attack drones.
Gaza was the first time Smart Shooter’s SMASH had been used in active war and the company was receiving orders from militaries across the globe including the US and Britain. Business was booming.
CEO Michal Mor was asked about her “vision” for the future and she proudly explained how “the ultimate goal is to make our technology a standard on every rifle in all armies, and to continue developing features for non-combat purposes as well, such as dispersing demonstrations; when you don’t want to kill but deter, the system will know how to hit, for example, only below [the] knee.”
During the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019, when thousands of Palestinians marched in Gaza to the “security fence” with Israel, Israeli soldiers opened fire, killing hundreds and injuring tens of thousands. Some Israeli snipers proudly recounted how many Palestinians knees they’d hit, making them disabled for life.
I’ve spent more than a decade investigating the Israeli arms industry, regularly reporting from Israel and Palestine since 2005 and living in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020. I’m an Australian, German Jewish independent journalist and film-maker, my work and life was recently featured in a film broadcast by Al Jazeera English, and my latest book is the global bestselling The Palestine Laboratory.
Understanding the Israeli weapons trade, an industry that’s worked with some of the most repressive nations on the planet since the Jewish state’s birth in 1948, is vital to decode a key rationale behind the Israeli military mindset; endless occupation and war is so profitable that it’s seen as literally insane to even think about stopping them. War in Gaza and the West Bank and exploding pagers in Lebanon are a unique opportunity to teach, sell, and inspire other states who want to repress their own minorities, unwanted populations, or dissidents. Israel will show them how.
This four-part podcast series will take listeners on a global journey into the Palestine laboratory, how it developed, how it works, why it’s so attractive for many nations, how it’s fueled by anti-Palestinian racism and been deployed on a massive scale since October 7, 2023.
This project has been a collaborative effort since late 2023 with a team of experienced producers, researchers, artists, musicians and sound designers. We’re honored to feature voices from Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and across the globe.
Rashid Khalidi turns 76 this year; he is the same age as the state of Israel, and this incident was the latest example of what has been happening to Palestinians since the founding of Israel: in his words, “systematic, massive dispossession and theft”.
..The book [The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine] presents a persuasive framing that what has happened to Palestine is the consequence of a settler-colonial project, and the resistance that that has prompted.
..His next book will focus on Ireland, and how it was a laboratory for Palestine. It stems from a fellowship he had recently at Trinity College, Dublin. He says that to understand Palestine, you have to understand British colonialism more broadly. He is hoping to examine key figures in the British aristocracy whose Irish experience was central to everything they did afterwards – people such as Arthur James Balfour, Sir Charles Tegart and Gen Sir Frank Kitson. He is hoping to show how the Irish experience was exported to India, Egypt and Palestine, and then returned to Ireland again during the Troubles, having been magnified in the colonies. “It is astonishing how personnel and counter-insurgency techniques, like torture, assassination, find their roots with the British in Ireland,” Khalidi says.
...When he looks back at the 1990s, he is reminded of what the Palestinians were up against, and why they didn’t stand a chance. And why the peace efforts of the time were destined for failure. Not only did Israel have its own lawyers, combing over every detail, it had the backing of the US too. Khalidi understands that it was a fundamental error on the part of Yasser Arafat and his team to think that the US could be an honest broker.
“That is what drives me: Israel cannot do any of this – killing this number of Palestinians [more than 40,000 at the time of writing] without the US and western European countries. The US gives Israel the green light. It is a party to the war on Palestine. That is what drives me as an American. I am not just at this because I am a Palestinian. It is because I am an American. Because we are responsible.”
To recognize Palestinians are human has become a flashpoint, a red line to not be crossed in Washington discourse, an invitation to be tagged as an antisemite, whether by your cousin at a Passover seder or by a network morning news anchor on live national television (more on that later). The Discourse tells us there is a “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and that it is “complicated.” But somewhere in this word soup we have simmered long enough to deflect attention from how power works, who benefits from it and who loses everything, the remaining goop to be scraped from the bottom of the pot can no longer be accurately conveyed as “conflict” but instead a stark, wrong binary between Palestinian existence and a broad definition of antisemitism, which if we choose as a society to accept, will only serve to drive us deeper into the void.
This week, I was horrified to witness one such attempt to drag a reasonable and humane person into this toxic abyss, in the form of what was supposed to be an interview of award-winning writer, thinker, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS Mornings’ Tony Dokoupil. Whatever promise of reasoned discourse producers may have made to Coates when they booked him for the show instantly vanished for the audience the moment Dokoupil started questioning the author. Dokoupil opened his questioning with a bizarrely aggressive monologue that patronized Coates by calling his book extreme and positing that it only could have been produced by someone who harbors ill will toward Jewish people.
“No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their abilities to exist through force, as America did,” Coates told Dokoupil. “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question I would be faced with, with any other country.
“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are,” Coates continued.
To me, Coates’s calm in the face of the anchor’s aggression and willful misinterpretation of his work reminded me of the Passover parable of the four sons. In it, we are instructed on how to explain the story of the journey from Jewish enslavement to freedom to a son who does not even know how to ask a question, and our clear articulation to him of the meaning of freedom is what opens up our deepest understanding of the truth.
...
We have watched Israel kill civilians, parents, children, doctors, aid workers, journalists, and many more, ostensibly in the name of Judaism but more likely in the furtherance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s craven political career—and ultimately in the abandonment of every value our religion and basic human rights should uphold.
....
We’re waiting for similar reparations from another television news outlet that engaged in similar slander. A week prior to Coates’s on-air mugging, Representative Rashida Tlaib was baselessly smeared on CNN, with anchor Jake Tapper fabricating comments from Tlaib to frame a “gotcha” question for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, trying to get Whitmer to condemn Tlaib as antisemitic for something she never said.
But on a deeper, darker level, CNN’s refusal to interrogate why it is allowed to comb every word Tlaib says for antisemitism while never having to confront whether wrongly and constantly accusing Tlaib of antisemitism—a serious accusation!—is Islamophobic is part and parcel with our society’s refusal to recognize Palestinians as full people. Because if Palestinians do not get to exist fully in the world, then certainly the first Palestinian woman elected to Congress cannot enjoy the full benefits and privileges afforded to every other member of the House of Representatives.
Republicans in the US do not want to pass arms legislation. They want to natter about thoughts and prayers instead of, or more precisely so they don’t have to, pass gun control legislation. Similarly, it’s become clearer and clearer that Biden’s reiterated statements calling for a ceasefire are not meant to get the region to a ceasefire. They are meant to shield the administration from criticism as they pursue their preferred policy of doing nothing while Israel kills and kills and kills—probably substantially more than 186,000 people now, over half women and children.
It's probably true, in an abstract sense, that Biden would like Israel to stop committing war crimes in Gaza, just as it’s true, in an abstract sense, that the GOP would like an end to mass shootings. At the least, mass death which you don’t want to do anything about is politically inconvenient. It makes you look callous; it makes you look weak. It makes you look like a hypocrite. Sometimes it makes you look so bad that you even have to address it halfheartedly—which is why the GOP signed on for a weak gun control bill under Biden, and why Biden did pause weapons shipments briefly.
Such hesitant, vacillating actions show that politicians do, in fact, understand that if you want to stop violence, you have to take steps to stop violence. Standing on the sideline and muttering about thoughts and prayers and ceasefires doesn’t do much, and everyone recognizes that it doesn’t do much. It is designed not to do much, and to excuse and justify not doing much.
The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.
The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
...
The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.
...
But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy — along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.
Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.
“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”
The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.
“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”
Gaza’s health ministry has identified 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in the territory, publishing a list of names, ages, gender and ID numbers that cover more than 80% of Palestinians killed in the war so far.
The remaining 7,613 people included in its death toll, which is now above 41,000, are Palestinians whose bodies have been received by hospitals and morgues, but whose identities have not yet been confirmed.
The identified people include 169 babies born after the Hamas attacks of 7 October that began the war, and a man born in 1922 who had survived more than a century of war and upheaval.
The document runs to 649 pages, with the dead listed largely by age. Gaza’s population is youthful, and the register underlines the high toll of Israeli attacks on Palestinian children.
More than 100 pages are filled with the names of victims under 10 years old, and the first adult names do not appear until page 215.
“I am a private investigator. My firm was hired by Columbia University to conduct an investigation into an unauthorized meeting that took place on March 24 at Q House. I believe it’s called ‘Resistance 101,’” the investigator said in the voicemail, which Spectator obtained. “They asked us to look into the matter and see if any of the instances pose a threat to any of the faculty, staff, or students. So we were just looking for your assistance. I believe the University is requiring your cooperation.”
The private investigator identified himself in the voicemail and was also named in emails from Holloway to students. He has worked for the investigations and forensic accounting firm Renaissance Associates since February 2023, according to his LinkedIn page.
Renaissance Associates’ website states that the firm “works with clients to develop an effective surveillance strategy” and “employs experienced surveillance teams equipped with advanced technology.” It also reads that “former law enforcement agents” sit on some of their teams.
A Renaissance Associates spokesperson declined to comment. The spokesperson did not confirm or deny that Columbia hired the firm for its investigation into “Resistance 101.”
Shuman attended “Resistance 101” but was not involved in its planning or organizing, he said. He said he didn’t know the event was unsanctioned by the University until after it occurred and that he complied with the investigation because he felt he had “nothing to hide.”
During his meeting with private investigators, Shuman said they showed him security footage of himself standing outside of Q House, an LGBTQ residence hall on campus where “Resistance 101” was held. The private investigators showed photos of different students from security footage and asked Shuman to identify them, he said. He said he told them that he didn’t recognize the other students in the photos.
In June, Shuman was found “not responsible” for any charges related to “Resistance 101” through a separate disciplinary process under the Center for Student Success and Intervention, he said. Despite the dropped charges, Shuman said he continues to feel surveilled by the University.
“I feel like I’m always on my toes. You know, if I see Public Safety, I got my eye on them. If I see the police anywhere near campus, I have my eye on them. It’s just a very uneasy feeling to even be living in Columbia residential still. I don’t feel comfortable,” Shuman said. “I try to not go on campus as much as possible.”
#palestine#free palestine#gaza#isreal#genocide#colonization#apartheid#us politics#american imperialism#police state#solidarity encampments#gaza solidarity encampment#solidarity#solidarity movements#columbia protest#settler colonialism#settler racism#settler universities#settler violence#surveillance
