"The University administration respects all student protests, just not this one. Students have fought for many important causes over the years, and their right to protest is sacrosanct. In this case, however, we must arrest and slander them.
“We will not look back and regret this decision. Although we were wrong about not admitting women, abolitioning racial quotas, US involvement in Vietnam, and divesting from apartheid South Africa, we are confident that this time is different."
Love, but not for the colonized: responding to repression of Palestine solidarity at CUNY
"However, what we find particularly affronting and are driven to address here is the insidious way in which WAC coordinators weaponized the language of love, antiracism, and care to silence support for Palestinian liberation. This hypocrisy is part of a broader trend in left academia and is thus important to address."
"The Biden administration plan for the “day after” in Gaza is rooted in American hubris and ignorance, and therefore doomed to failure."
"The United States has a long history of misunderstanding the Mideast, but this level of ignorance and willful blindness far surpass anything we’ve seen before."
In this article Sonia Boulos and Tamir Sorek discuss the policing of the use of the "Genocide" word.
"Abstract: Both societies, Israeli and Palestinian, harbor a collective trauma of annihilation and a national ethos of victimhood. While it is understandable that both sides see themselves as victims of genocidal acts in the current unprecedented wave of violence, when the term “genocide” is used in Western academia and public debates to describe the Israeli attack on Gaza, it is highly policed and is quickly associated with antisemitism. Considering that the Gaza Strip has lost almost one percent of its inhabitants while Israeli leaders use explicit annihilatory language, language policing surrounding genocide has become fatal for Palestinians."
On #entitlement, #presumption, #fragility:
"For Jewish Zionists, the shock induced by Hamas’ breakout and attack is compounded by a sense of rage and indignation that Palestinian fighters momentarily turned the tables, piercing through Israel’s years of military siege and occupation. This [is] “the loss of the prerogative, only and always, to be the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never to be in the position of having one’s own boundaries transgressed” — arguably explains why Israelis were so quick to describe Hamas’ attack as Israel’s 9/11. It explains why the reflexive response, like the U.S. after 9/11, was to exact revenge not only for the Israelis killed or held hostage but for the colonized and the occupied to dare to fight back against the oppression; to dare to transgress the besieged boundaries of Gaza and claim freedom and life."
Haaretz Editorial: "The freedom from arbitrary arrest marks a line between real, freedom-seeking democracies and 'pseudo democracies.' The police under Ben Gvir’s shadow cannot be relied to give freedom of expression the importance it warrants"
"Haaretz is widely considered Israel's leading liberal news source, but it has published and promoted some of the most harmful propaganda in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza."
A spokesman for #JStreet, accused Aipac of attempting to impose a narrow definition of what it is to be pro-Israel:
“#Aipac may hope to silence and intimidate political leaders who believe that settlement expansion, endless conflict and permanent occupation are harmful to Israel, the Palestinian people and US interests. Ultimately, however, these common-sense views are too popular, widespread and important to be suppressed.”
"As conflation and confusion abound after 7 October, we need clear thinking about antisemitism"
by:
David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism,
Brendan McGeever, senior lecturer at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who teaches at the University of #Haifa, #israelPalestine, explained the paradox: “One can detest Jews and love Israelis, because Israelis somehow are not Jews. Israelis are colonial fighters and settlers, just like Afrikaners. They are tough and resilient. They know how to dominate. Jews are different. They are, among other qualities, gentle, non-physical, often passive, intellectual. So one can go on disliking Jews while admiring the Israelis.”
"The Campaign Against Antisemitism #CAA was formed in 2014, after a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Its explicit founding purpose was to counter the antisemitism that arises in Britain when Israel pummels Palestinians and, implicitly, to defend Israel’s right to pummel. Chief executive Gideon Falter is also vice chairman of the Jewish National Fund #JNF UK, which is reported to have provided funding to the CAA in the past. The JNF enjoys charitable status and its existence predates the Balfour Declaration. For over a century, it has bought up land in historic Palestine, helped plan the Nakba, furthered exclusive Jewish settlement and transformed colonised land into parks and forests to erase what had been before."
Amira Hass wrote on possible explanations for Israeli indifference in the face of destruction and cruelty in Gaza:
[Sorry for the poor translation from Hebrew]
⸺
The Gaza strip is being erased and gone. Of her families. Of her people. Of her children, their smiles and laughter. What allows most residents of the Jewish state to support this systematic and mass erasing? to see in it an appropriate answer to the massacre carried out by the Hamushi Hamas and their companions, to the military humiliation suffered by Israel and to the indescribable suffering of the kidnapped, the injured, the survivors, their families and the families of the hundreds of dead?
The IDF is erasing the Gaza cities, streets, countryside, fields and surprising mistakes, the alleys of the refugee camps there. Her beach promenade. He is erasing her cultural institutions and the universities, her archaeological sites. Hamas's military infrastructure is also being destroyed, thousands of its militants are killed. But the organization itself and its officials will recover and prosper, in every community and place where the degradation of Gaza will continue to occur.
What allows most Jews in Israel not to be shocked by the fact that in about two months we have killed about 7,000 children (temporary data) with the enhanced bombs that the United States provided us? What allows the majority of Jews not to suffocate in the horror of a compression of 1.8 or 1.9 million people in an area of 120 km, which is also constantly exploded? and not to cry out for the reports of the hunger and thirst of 2.2 million Palestinian citizens and the diseases that spread due to the density and lack of water and hospitals? What enables the erasure and mass slaughter of children, with our active and passive participation?
Here are some answers:
• Decades of education on the knees of absolute #belief in the exclusive ability of a military power to ensure the existence and prosperity of the country, while denying rights from the Palestinian people.
• Deleting all "context" — which incitement has made it a synonym for supporting Hamas and justifying its horrors.
• The #monopoly we took, the Jews, on the concept of suffering caused by the cruelty of the other.
• The choice not to know and not to watch the unbearable images that show Palestinian children trembling and gray-faced from dust, torn from the Russian walls. And you don't know who is more lucky: them or those who died.
• Every mass slaughter or tiffin-tiffin that we commit on Palestinians in years, every looting, humiliation, abuse, goes through thousands of media, psychological and academic filters. The effect is the self conviction that their situation is better than that of Somalis or Syrians, so let them not complain.
• Remembering every massacre Palestinians have committed on us. You have forgotten every massacre we have committed.
• The decades-old practice of living in peace and well five minutes away from our backyard, where israel (that is us) destroys for Palestinians and builds for Jews, flows water to Jews and exploits Palestinians. And all the rest is written in the reports "The Focus for the Protection of the Individual", "Betzelem" and "Adalea".
• Decades-old ignorance of warnings of "moderate" Palestinians, about who robbed the lands and freedom and violence of the settlers with the help of the state — and inspired by its violence — reduce the horizons of their children and generate desperation and belief only in the power of weapons and revenge.
• The essential perception of the world: Palestinians are terrorists because they are like that. Born with the genes of hating us. A direct sequel to Hamelnitsky and Titus.
• The self-conviction that we are a democracy even though for more than 56 years we have controlled millions of people without civil rights, in their land and economy.
• The deep racial disrespect of Palestinians, that we developed in order to cognitively and psychologically justify their trampling under our feet.
• Denial of Palestinian history and the roots of Palestinian existence between the river and the sea.
• Elimination of Gaza is possible because since 1994 we have deliberately missed the opportunity — offered to us by the Palestinians — to get rid of our characteristics as an occupying and settling entity and to give them a state of 22% of the territory west of Jordan. I wrote in July 2021: "In the light of the talk about apartheid is fading and eclipsing the dynamic, active and dangerous dimension that is Jewish-ass colonialism." This is an ideology in which the Palestinians are 'giving up', it is the actions that have shaped this ideology, which are inspired and nourished by it. In short: it is possible and desirable that only the Palestinians are bounded. Their existence here is conditional, by grace and not merit, depends on our will and our kindness, it's a question of time. The 'indulgence' ideology is a poison that spreads especially when the colonial process is in full swing. Settler colonialism is in a constant movement of land acquisition, eradicating historical boundaries, redesigning, and expulsion of the original inhabitants".
I then referred to the Palestinian "luxuries" in the West Bank and warned against the intentions for Gresham. I thought that the treatment of the people of Gaza as "giving up" resulted in the separation from their boredom and their families beyond the Erez checkpoint. But here, now the "indulgence" is manifested in their deportation ("willingly", in the shadow of the bombs) and in the physical erasure of the inhabitants and plans for the renewal of Jewish settlement in the Strip. Woe to them and woe to us.
⸺ https://www.haaretz.co.il/blogs/shabahit/2023-12-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/0000018c-738a-d798-adac-f7af51de0000@israel@terrorism
Exposing the role of #AirBnB in the Israeli settlement enterprise, in the economic exploitation of Palestinian and Syrian land, labor, and resources, as well as its dependency on the apparatus of control exerted over occupied populations: https://www.whoprofits.org/companies/company/3815?airbnb
"History shows that in a settler-native conflict, the cycle of violence may end with the disappearance of the settler or the disappearance of the native. The alternative to these extreme scenarios lies in the ability of the settling group to change, stop the colonization processes and build an egalitarian society."
"Palestinians across the West Bank describe how Israeli settlers, with military backing, are intensifying their takeover of land for illegal construction."
University teachers suspended, employees sacked: in #israelPalestine, the authorities punish the slightest expression of support for Palestine on social media. In the course of a week, at least 170 people have been arrested for their online activities. https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-war-political-persecution/
"Successive Israeli governments convinced the world that its policies toward Gaza were justified by security, something for which Israel will not have difficulty garnering sympathy and understanding for years to come. But the main objectives of the disengagement, the siege, and the policy of separation were purely political: to ensure the survival of a regime of apartheid. That was never a secret." https://www.972mag.com/gaza-broken-paradigm-biden-complicit/
Amjad #Iraqi explains why Palestinians identify with Khader #Adnan, a prisoner who died on hunger strike, for his struggle against #israel#prisons.
"Those trying to undermine public anger over the hunger striker's death don't want to talk about the violent carceral regime that he struggled against."
#UNICEF: “This year has been the deadliest year on record for children in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with conflict-related violence reaching unprecedented levels.
“83 children have been killed in the past twelve weeks – more than double the number of children killed in all of 2022, amid increased military and law enforcement operations. More than 576 have been injured and others have reportedly been detained. Furthermore, the West Bank has been heavily affected by movement and access restrictions."
#WestBank, occupied #Palestine:
'The neighbourhood has now become completely isolated from the town, without services, medical centres, or even access to schools'