Free Palestine
According to the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees, two million people in Gaza, half of whom are children, have just run out of water. No humanitarian supplies have been allowed into the area for a week now. If Gazans aren’t provided with fuel to collect and distribute water, thousands upon thousands of people will die.
What I’ve seen out of Israel and Gaza these past few days I will never forget for the rest of my life. The rampant dis/misinformation. The racist and fascistic crackdown on the right to protest in cities and countries around the world. Palestinians and their supporters doxxed and fired and censored and threatened with violence. The ethnic cleansing apologia. The photos and videos of dead children.
It’s urgent and imperative that we raise our voices, protest in the streets, give to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and reach out to our representatives to demand an immediate ceasefire. Thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of them children, have already been killed in the past week alone, but neither the American nor British political establishment have condemned Israel’s war crimes, including the confirmed use of phosphorus bombs.
I’m collecting here some of the stories and reporting I’ve read that I’ve found helpful in understanding the urgency and context of this moment. As a journalist and human being, I have been very angry and, frankly, very scared to see the level of lies and propaganda spread all over the internet by most of the news media, a bunch of my random acquaintances on Instagram, and President Biden himself—who announced to the world he’d seen photos of beheaded Israeli babies killed by Hamas in last weekend’s massacre, before the White House later clarified he hadn’t actually seen any evidence of this horrifying and unverified claim. And I am enraged and heartbroken that Israel is killing journalists who are trying to bring the truth of what’s happening to Gazans to the world.
Maybe you already know all of this and you’re just as horrified as I am. Maybe you’ve avoided reading up much on the news, because it’s too depressing, or because you think you’re not informed enough on the issue, or you think it’s too complex, or that we must listen to “both sides.” Maybe you think supporting Palestinians is anti-Semitic (it isn’t). If you’re anywhere in the latter categories, I hope you’ll read some of these resources and check out lots of others—ones that have been verified by multiple sources. We must not and cannot look away.
Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here, by Isaac Chotiner in the New Yorker — an interview with Tareq Baconi, the president of the board of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network:
This is the first time I have been interviewed by The New Yorker, and it’s happening because Israelis were killed. What happened when Palestinians were killed in the thousands, just in the fifteen years that I’ve been covering Hamas? And so, when we really want to think about what this driver of violence is—and the pictures that have been coming out are sickening—we need to understand that colonial violence instills dehumanization both in the oppressor and in the oppressed. And it’s completely out of mind. It’s mind-boggling to me that Israeli protesters go out to protest for democracy in an apartheid regime. The only way they can hold that contradiction is if they accept that Palestinian lives are absent or expendable. And so we have to understand this violence, which, again, is heart-wrenching, in that context.
Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté: “You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas multiplied by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression, and killing, and dispossession of Palestinians."
Video here.
The last tweet from a Palestinian father who runs an animal rescue out of his home, forced to flee with his family, fearing for their lives, while leaving a week’s worth of food out for his dozens of pets and leaving a key with his neighbor to check in on them completely broke my heart.
“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” — the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents on recommitting to our movements in this moment:
As Israelis count their dead, politicians in Israel and the US call for Palestinian blood in direct, genocidal language. “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant yesterday. “Finish them, Netanyahu,” said former Ambassador to the United Nations and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. “Neutraliz[e] the terrorists,” said Democratic senator John Fetterman. Jews share memes about the highest number of Jewish casualties since the Holocaust, not bothering to ask who, right now, is being ethnically cleansed, or how many massacres of this size Gaza has seen in the last dozen years. This language deploys the bombs that fall on Gazans from the sky, leveling whole neighborhoods, wiping out families without warning, huddled in their homes because they have nowhere to flee. “There are body parts scattered everywhere. There are still people missing,” one man north of Gaza City told CNN. “We’re still looking for our brothers, our children. It’s like we’re stuck living in a nightmare.” We will likely soon see this genocidal impulse spread, as the Israeli government hands out automatic weapons to West Bank settlers, many of whom were already armed eliminationists. In this way, Jewish grief is routed back into the violence of a merciless system of Palestinian subjugation that reigns from the river to the sea. It is mobilized by US politicians who support Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government, which has intensified Palestinian death and displacement and disappeared any hope of a diplomatic solution. It is marshaled to drum up support for sending weapons to Israel, even as we know that, as Haggai Mattar wrote in +972 Magazine, “there is no military solution to Israel’s problem with Gaza, nor to the resistance that naturally emerges as a response to violent apartheid.”
On Mourning and Statehood: A Response to Joshua Leifer, by Gabriel Winan, on how to grieve, what meaning to give those tears, is cruelly a political question whether we like it or not:
The genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief. “Soon, the last sliver of electricity and connection will be exhausted,” tweeted the Palestinian doctor Belal Aldabbour on Wednesday from Gaza. “If I die, remember that I, we, were individuals, humans, we had names, dreams, and achievements, and our only fault was that we were just classified as inferior.” Gaza is often called an open-air prison, but equally, the images of bombed neighborhoods reveal a vast unmarked mass grave.
The Israeli government doesn’t care if you, a principled person, perform your equal grief for all victims: it will gobble up your grief for Jews and use it to make more victims of Palestinians, while your balancing grief for Palestinians will be washed away in the resulting din of violence and repression. The impulse, repeatedly called “humane” over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized. If only it were so—but this would be the end of Zionism, after all. More tragically, the sentiment of those who want peace and justice for all and express this by chastising those in the West whom they see to be reacting with insufficient grief and excessive politics have only given amplification to the propaganda machine that is now openly calling for the blood of the innocent and the silence of doubters.
A Textbook Case of Genocide, by Raz Segal in Jewish Currents: Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?
The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
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The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—more bombs than the US dropped on all of Afghanistan in any year of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water.
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Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so [emphasis mine].
Ceasefire now. Peace and justice for Palestine.