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Most of those I follow have been very quiet on this. Complex or not, US tax dollars support Israel. If this is genocide and you’ve remained silent, consider that.
The “G” word – genocide – “can be used recklessly, carelessly, insensitively, as an emotional shutting of the gates, rather than an opening to an important conversation,” Mehdi says. But it’s a conversation we need, given the rhetoric from Hamas & Israeli officials.
The G Word: Mehdi examines accusations of genocide against Israel & Hamas - YouTube
Israel is actively committing the crime of genocide. The evidence is clear: Israel has taken diverse methods to ensure “the destruction of the essential foundations of the life” of Palestinians. These actions include the 16-year-long siege on Gaza. They have cut off food, water, fuel, and electricity, denied access to healthcare, ordered 1.1 million people out of their homes, bombed evacuation routes, and even bombed and targeted hospitals, churches, mosques, and health workers. Incitement to genocide is also punishable under the Genocide Convention. Israeli officials have openly called for the annihilation of the captive population.
Since 1967, Israel has imposed tight restrictions on travel and essential goods such as food, fuel, medicine, and water in its occupied territories. In 2007, those restrictions became even tighter in Gaza after Hamas seized power there. Since then, it has been nearly impossible for Palestinians to leave Gaza or to access an adequate supply of essential goods.
Joy Reid commentary on Israel bombing Gaza in the Israel-Hamas war is right on. She provides historical context of US involvement in the conflict and region including our ineffective, misguided response to 9-11, attacking Iraq and Afghanistan.
US foreign policy in the region and this conflict designed to increase violence and destabilize. It’s criminal.
The Middle East conflict between Israel and Hamas is dividing the world. “Given that these bombings are being done using our tax dollars, perhaps we should ask some questions.”
Amid growing alarm that more Israeli airstrikes will hit hospitals in Gaza, we speak with two physicians about Gaza’s medical system and Israel’s orders to evacuate key hospitals. Dr. Mads Gilbert, who has helped provide emergency trauma care in Gaza for over four decades, condemns Israel for using allegations of military activity to attack civilian hospitals without proof. “This is all part of this immense intimidation of the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
“This Has to Stop”: Doctors Denounce Israel’s Targeting of Gaza Hospitals - YouTube
We bring you the voices of Jewish Voice for Peace and their allies who shut down the main terminal of Grand Central Station during rush hour Friday in one of New York's largest acts of civil disobedience in 20 years to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. The multiracial, intergenerational movement says about 400 people were arrested, including rabbis, famous actors and elected officials from the New York State Assembly and Senate and the City Council.
After a few years of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events, Ripple’s experience is a sign of how climate scientists — who once refrained from entering the public fray — are now using strident language to describe the warming planet. References to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” once used primarily by activist groups like the U.K.-based Extinction Rebellion or the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, are spiking in the academic literature.
To a growing number of scientists, climate change is an ‘emergency’ - The Washington Post
Dr. Gabor Maté shares his reflections on Israel/Palestine including recent tragic events on and following October 7th, 2023. This conversation was recorded on October 28, 2023, and was facilitated by Hannah Maté. Please be mindful to engage in respectful discourse in the comments amidst inevitable political disagreement on this subject matter. Resources - Cited in Video: Places to donate: The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund Dror Israel
Description of video has a list of suggested resources and books including: The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by Simha Flapan Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé Dr. Gabor Maté on Israel/Palestine - YouTube
“In six days the government of Israel dropped more bombs in the small concentrated are of Gaza than the United States had dropped in an entire year in the entire country of Afghanistan.” - Source: Washington Post
My take: The indiscriminate killing of children and adult civilian Palestinians in Gaza is a war crime and genocide. The target is not Hamas. Israel is razing the entirety of Gaza.
Updates on #CeasefireNOW| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube
We speak with philosopher Judith Butler, one of dozens of Jewish American writers and artists who signed an open letter to President Biden calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. “We should all be standing up and objecting and calling for an end to genocide,” says Butler of the Israeli assault. “Until Palestine is free … we will continue to see violence. We will continue to see this structural violence producing this kind of resistance.”
“The majority of Americans see some fairly severe environmental harms as likely to happen over the next 30 years,” says Alec Tyson of the Pew Research Center, who helped lead the survey. “For example, 73% say they think a growing number of plant and animal species will go extinct, 61% say they think heat waves will cause large numbers of people to die in the U.S. every year and 58% think rising sea levels will force large numbers of people in the U.S. to move away from the coast.”
Reality slowly setting in.
Americans expect climate impacts to worsen, survey finds : NPR
Just the last few years, a brief glimpse of the violence of occupation and apartheid supported by the US.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has been tracking deaths in the conflict since 2008 and its data shows that 5,600 Palestinians died up to 2020 while 115,000 were injured. 250 Israelis died during the same period while 5,600 were injured.
Chart: The Human Cost Of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict | Statista
Israel says it has refused visa to UN official to ‘teach them a lesson’
Israel refuses to admit to the violence of its ongoing occupation and apartheid. As called out by the UN Secretary-General addressing the UN:
The attack on Israel did not happen “in a vacuum” and followed “56 years of suffocating occupation” for the Palestinian people by Israel, adding “They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
“Due to his remarks we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives. We have already refused a visa for under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths. The time has come to teach them a lesson.”
Israel has called on UN secretary general Guterres to resign after he said that the“appalling attacks” by Hamas against Israel on 7 October cannot justify the “collective punishment of the Palestinian people”, and spoke of “the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza.”
Guterres had said “Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets. All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions.”
In recent years, human rights organizations and legal experts have increasingly described Israel’s policies toward Palestinians as apartheid…
Apartheid, a term originating from the South African government’s systematic oppression of Black residents, is a crime against humanity under international law. At its core, it refers to policies intended to elevate one racial group over another, with the goal of maintaining the dominant group’s hegemony.
The argument that Israel practices apartheid, explained - Vox
President Biden is in Israel to show more support for its relentless assault on the Gaza Strip, which has reduced much of the territory to rubble, killed at least 3,300 Palestinians and displaced more than a million people. Israel also continues to maintain a complete siege, refusing to let in food, water, fuel, medicines and other necessities.
One of the fundamentals of international law – at the heart of the Geneva Conventions – is a prohibition on collective punishment: that is, retaliating against the enemy’s civilian population, making them pay the price for the acts of their leaders and armies.
Very obviously, Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found. Even in “quiet” times, its inhabitants – one million of them children – are denied the most basic freedoms, such as the right to movement; access to proper health care because medicines and equipment cannot be brought in; access to drinkable water; and the use of electricity for much of the day because Israel keeps bombing Gaza’s power station.
Israel has never made any bones of the fact that it is punishing the people of Gaza for being ruled by Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to have dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland in 1948 and imprisoned them in overcrowded ghettos like Gaza.
What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment. It is a war crime: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of every year, for 16 years.
Israel has never made any bones of the fact that it is punishing the people of Gaza for being ruled by Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to have dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland in 1948 and imprisoned them in overcrowded ghettos like Gaza.
What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment. It is a war crime: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of every year, for 16 years.
And yet no one in the so-called international community seems to have noticed.
Lawless in Gaza: Why Britain and the West back Israel’s crimes
Published February 2022:
Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, Amnesty International said today in a damning new report. The investigation details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights. This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other countries.
The comprehensive report_, _Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity__, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
What we are seeing in the United States today is the coming together of a network of far-right corporate donors determined to remake the world, a major political party their grantees have radicalized beyond recognition, and vigilantism in multiple arenas being spurred by highly profitable media outlets.
Decades of planning led up to 2021 attempt to overthrow the election and those “events could be a pilot for and prologue to a far worse outcome in the future.”
Folks surprised at this don’t know US policy in the Israel/Palestine Conflict. US escalation has been ongoing for decades. This is just the most recent example:
State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: ‘de-escalation/ceasefire,’ ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm.’