January 8, 2024
Ordinary
people can fix the broken postwar international system and deliver global
justice to Palestinians and oppressed people worldwide.
In
the past few weeks, the number of innocent Palestinian civilians killed in
attacks by the Israeli government has reached unprecedented levels. Both a
majority of people around the world and a majority of governments oppose the
mass atrocities against civilians in Gaza. Why is this common-sense view not
translated into action that stops these international crimes? And what can
normal people do to end atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere?
Before
answering these questions, I would like to start from my personal experience on
the day this last round of violence started.
Like
a scene in a horror movie, my Oct. 7 started the way many other Saturday
mornings do — my 3-year-old daughter woke me up with a cry: “Aba, Aba!” (Hebrew
for dad). But the normal morning shattered into pieces as I saw the news from
Gaza.
My
heart pounding, I immediately opened my family and friends WhatsApp chat
groups. Living in Ann Arbor, where I lead a research project on global
governance, wars and civil resistance at the University of Michigan, I am seven
hours behind most of my family in Israel. While I was relieved to learn that
they were all fine, I soon discovered some friends had lost family members in
the Hamas attack or had them taken hostage. Palestinian friends in Gaza and the
West Bank were posting on social media that the Israeli army had started
attacking and that civilians were being killed. The Israeli government soon
declared war.
Like
many millions around the world, I was scrolling through pictures in my news
feed in shock. I couldn’t stop thinking of the question I am often asked by my
students when we talk of wars and mass atrocities in class: “How can this be
stopped?” As I tell my students, my inconvenient answer starts not with a
“they” but with a “we” — the atrocities against civilians in the Israeli
kibbutzes and in the Palestinian city of Gaza are a symptom of a system we have
built, a system that requires our active or passive consent daily. We can
re-build that system if we choose to. We have the power, and therefore the
responsibility, to change the system that allows the atrocities in Gaza.
Resisting
war, occupation and apartheid
Hamas’s
attack that day killed more than 1,200 Israelis, including more than 40
children. Even before we knew this, it was clear the attack was serious enough
to register as a societal shock in Israel — something comparable to what Sept.
11 was to Americans.
Within
a few hours, the Israeli army started attacking the Gaza Strip. Since then,
those attacks have killed over 22,500 Palestinians, with the majority of them
being children and women, who do not usually participate in fighting. To give
some perspective: The United States killed fewer civilians in Afghanistan
during its 20 years of occupation — and Afghanistan’s population is about 20
times larger than Gaza’s. More specifically, in Afghanistan, one in 3,225
civilians were killed by the U.S. government in over 20 years. In Gaza, Israeli
government attacks are estimated to have killed one in 128 civilians in under
three months.
Serving
as a volunteer on the board of Refuser Solidarity Network, a global network of
8,000 people who function as an international base of support for war resisters
and peace activists in Israel, I have spent many nights and weekends since Oct.
7 working to amplify the voices of Israeli war resisters, trying to help in any
way possible.
This
was and is a difficult period for war resistance, anti-occupation and
anti-apartheid groups in Israel. (Again, this is perhaps comparable to U.S.
antiwar organizing challenges in the post 9/11 period). Binational groups of
Jews and Palestinians working for peace together have faced significant
strains, dealing with two national narratives of the events that were at least
initially largely unreconcilable. At one point, the national head of the
police, Yaakov “Kobi” Shabtai, threatened to send antiwar protesters to Gaza.
“Whoever wants to become an Israeli citizen, welcome,” Shabtai said. “Anyone
who wants to identify with Gaza is welcome. I will put him on the buses heading
there now.”
The
police have also refused to authorize antiwar demonstrations and conferences
since the beginning of the war, particularly in Arab towns in Israel. A small
invitation-only demonstration organized by a few former parliament members was
met with arrests, despite being under the 50-person limit for which police
authorization is required. Four former parliament members — all Palestinian
citizens of Israel — were arrested by police, sparking demonstrations in Tel
Aviv and Jerusalem, only to be met with more arrests. When Hadash, a socialist
Arab-Jewish parliamentary front, organized an antiwar conference, police
threatened the venue owner to retaliate if he did not cancel the event.
The
network I volunteer with has been documenting and amplifying these antiwar
voices — along with the police attacks against them — on social media and in
our newsletters, while also coordinating international solidarity to help them.
While it has taken up nearly every free moment, it is inspiring to see the
Israeli antiwar movement find a way to focus on empathy and stopping the
endless cycle of violence, even in this time of extreme hurt.
For
15 years Israeli war resisters have been telling Israelis that the status quo
in Gaza in unsustainable — that we cannot continue to keep millions of
Palestinians in a large open-air prison and expect this to go on forever, or to
end well. No amount of F-16 planes, billion dollar walls and high-tech weaponry
funded annually by billions of American taxpayer dollars can change that
reality. Even before the Israel-Hamas war, a majority of citizens in global
north countries opposed the status quo in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and
supported an end to the Israeli occupation and apartheid.
Citizens
in poor countries are unfortunately not often surveyed on their views on global
politics, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but the governments in
the Global South publicly state that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians
territories was the root cause of the conflict. At the same time, a majority of
governments in various international organizations repeatedly vote for
resolutions against the Israeli rule over the Palestinian Territories. And yet
— because our international system is broken — this worldwide consensus does
not (and will not) translate into action to stop Israeli apartheid and Israeli
occupation.
A
single garment of destiny
My
students often challenge me with a justified request: “So what is the solution
to Palestinian-Israeli conflict? How do we fix this?” Often those asking want
some kind of a quick fix. But after 10 years of research on conflicts and
global governance, it is my difficult role to say that the Israel-Hamas war is
a symptom of a far graver problem: the fact that our world system is broken.
The good news is that we, normal people around the world, can repair it.
In
1964, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a text called “The Greatest Hope For World
Peace,” which was only published recently. King argued there that the ultimate
answer to war is the creation of a democratic supranational authority. Echoing
language from his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he wrote that it would
“lessen many tensions that exist today, and it would also enable everybody to
understand that we are clothed in a single garment of destiny, and whatever
affects one nation directly in the world, indirectly affects all.”
In
advocating such a form of international democracy, King was following in the
footsteps of the likes of Albert Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi and suffragist
Rosika Schwimmer, who two decades earlier, in opposition to the creation of the
postwar system, the One World movement and vadvocated for international
democracy. Today, it is perhaps best understood as advocacy for a kind of
worldwide European Union, or worldwide African Union. Einstein told a friend
that he would devote his life to that vision, and indeed did so in his final
years. Gandhi said in a speech: “I believe in One World…I would not like to
live in this world if it was not to be One World.”
My
research on the One World movement led to the conclusion that their struggle
against the remaking of the postwar order failed because they did not escalate
their campaign to the point of using methods from the civil resistance toolbox
(which I will get to in a moment). Nevertheless, while their theory of change
failed, history has proved their analysis of the problems in the postwar system
to be correct. Taking in the horrors of the Gaza massacre of Oct. 7 — like the
intractable war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, the
rise of artificial intelligence, recurring financial crises, and the rise of
ultra-nationalism and extremism — we cannot ignore what is staring us right in
the face: Like Gandhi, Einstein, Schwimmer and King warned, the international
system built in 1945 is simply not equipped for the challenges of the 21st
century.
In
the face of our broken world, I possess the same bitter optimism that a
realistic observer might have felt in 1944 about the future of Europe. The end
of the war was in sight, and the majority of people on the continent then
understood that the status quo was unsustainable. At the same time, a small but
growing number of people realized that normal people have the power to change
Europe’s political structure. And because normal people had the power to change
Europe, they also had the responsibility to try. Still, in the midst of a world
war and the Holocaust, a few realistic observers nevertheless saw fertile
ground for change. It was that limberness and vision that would give rise to a
European Union emerging out of the ashes of the war.
Now,
to address the challenges we are facing in the 21st century, we must draw on
that same limberness and vision. We must strengthen and radically democratize
the international system, remaking the failing mechanisms we built to confront
global crises.
Fixing
a broken world
The
failing international mechanisms we built to confront global crises suffer from
one core problem: The lack of popular control and democratic legitimacy leads
to injustice and gridlock, in Gaza and beyond. A few examples of how this
broken system works include:
·
The U.N. Security Council and the veto power that allows the
United States to authorize war crimes against Palestinians, Russia to authorize
war crimes against Syrians and China to authorize crimes against Tibetans.
·
The secretive Basel Committee on Bank Supervision, where
decisions on the levels of risk allowed in the global economy are decided in
meetings between government officials from a handful of rich governments and a
handful of bank lobbyists (who later give the first ones jobs).
·
The U.N. sponsored climate change negotiations, where inaction
by governments and corporations is hidden by a smoke screen of
inter-governmental “summits” and “conferences of the parties” (COP 1 – COP 28)
for over 30 years. Similar to the U.N. Security Council, a veto power over
climate negotiations gives the most polluting superpower governments a tool to
force non-binding “targets.”
·
The World Health Organization, whose policy of uncritically
echoing statements by member states, and especially China, might have prevented
earlier action, costing millions of lives in the recent pandemic.
In
my forthcoming book “The World Is Broken,” I look at these organizations and
the international postwar system as a whole, and suggest three minimum
components of any real international democracy.
1.
End the dictatorship of funding. Rich governments often
control international organizations using a funding model that is based on
voluntary and conditional contribution. This gives governments, and especially
the rich governments total control. To be democratic, these institutions need
to have independent public funding.
2.
End the dictatorship of veto. In the postwar era, the
U.N. Security Council was tasked with maintaining international peace. It, and
it alone, can authorize the legal use of force internationally, as well as
financial sanctions against threats to international peace (that is, for example,
how the sanctions on Iran and North Korea were established, and how individuals
related to financing terrorism are blacklisted). But in the council, five
superpower governments — the U.K., France, Russia the U.S., China and Russia —
can veto or block any decision. This veto power was used by the United States
to protect Israeli governments at least 53 times. The U.S. used its veto again
and again to protect the Israeli government against an international community
that rightly sees actions of the Israeli government — including the building of
Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian lands — as war crimes according to
international law. Other international organizations have similar mechanisms of
formal or informal veto powers. We need to take this veto power away from the
superpowers and move to rule by majority, where powerful governments can no
longer force their will on the rest of the world.
3.
End the dictatorship of the executive. Only governments have
real power in international organizations. The democratic idea of the
“separation of powers” — such as judicial, executive and parliamentary — is
about breaking political power to protect citizens and create checks and
balances. But in the postwar international system, governments (the executive
power) are unchecked; nothing can hold them accountable or balance them.
Civil
resistance offers a strategic path forward
Two
important proposals on ending these three dictatorships have gained momentum in
recent years. There’s the campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
modeled after the European Parliament and the Pan-African Parliament, but
involving parliamentarians from all countries around the world. The other
initiative aims to create a permanent sortition-based Global Citizens’ Assembly
similar to the bodies that helped Ireland legalize abortion and the state of
Michigan to redistrict itself in a democratic non-partisan way.
Citizens
assemblies — at all levels, including the global — are advocated by the
visionary international climate movement Extinction Rebellion, as well as many
experts and civil society organizations around the world. Citizens’ assemblies
are composed of normal people that are selected by lottery (like a jury) but
through a process that makes them representative of the general population
demographically (such as by gender, income, education level, political views,
etc). In 2022, a global citizens assembly was piloted for the first time,
involving 100 normal citizens who represented the global population and were
selected by lottery.
While
it may seem like a radical idea to govern the international system
democratically, it actually makes common-sense in a very real way: In the rare
cases when normal people are asked how they want the world to be governed, they
overwhelmingly favor this option. For example, a 2005 poll in 17 countries
including the United States, China and Russia found 58 percent support for
eliminating the veto in the Security Council (with a majority favoring in every
country except Russia). Meanwhile, 74 percent (and a majority in each country
polled) favored “having your country’s official representative to the United
Nations General Assembly be elected by the people of your country.” And 63
percent (also a majority in every country polled) supported “creating a new
United Nations Parliament, made up of representatives directly elected by
citizens, having powers equal to the current U.N. General Assembly (that is
controlled by national governments).”
As
Dr. Farsan Ghassim of Oxford University shows by reviewing polls done in
multiple countries over the past few decades — as well as by conducting new
polls himself — support for international democracy is generally consistent
across countries and nationalities. Ghassim’s own survey in 2020 found strong
support for international democracy in all five countries polled: Brazil,
Germany, Japan, the U.K. and U.S.
Many
will question whether normal people have the power we need to fix the world. My
bitter optimism is fueled by the conclusion that history shows repeatedly that
we do have the power to fix our world. Civil resistance, a social change
methodology, offers a path to achieve that necessary change and fix our broken
system of global governance.
Civil
resistance has led movements of normal people around the world to
victory,especially in campaigns to democratize political structures and
especially against powerful opponents. Examples abound, such as the crusade
that won voting rights for women, the campaign that won India’s independence
from British colonialism, the U.S. civil rights movement that expanded
equality, freedom and voting rights, and the present-day global climate
movement that is increasingly succeeding in making the climate crisis a central
political issue in societies around the world.
The
WTO protests as a model
One
particularly apt example showing how civil resistance can successfully
challenge the rules of global governance is the series of mass protests against
the World Trade Organization in the 1990s. With its roots in the Indigenous
Zapatista uprising in Mexico against the North American Free Trade Agreement,
the WTO protests were aimed at stopping global trade agreements benefiting rich
countries and damaging workers everywhere, particularly in poorer countries.
Mass
direct actions were organized around WTO summits worldwide, with the most
well-known taking place in Seattle in 1999. A brilliantly organized walkout by
Global South governments inside the summit was coupled with a brilliantly
organized action of mass civil resistance outside the summit. This led to
cancellation of the summit’s first day and later the collapse of trade
agreement that had been negotiated. These protests ultimately helped usher in a
wider understanding of “free trade” as anti-democratic and prevented the WTO
from ever completing another new trade agreement.
Looking
at the number of deaths in Gaza and the U.S. veto blocking action in the
Security Council, it’s hard to understand why the brilliant organizers in
Jewish peace groups and many other antiwar groups are blockading Wall Street
and shutting down Grand Central Station while not also targeting the U.N.
Security Council. After all, the Security Council and the veto is what shields
the Israeli government from the enforcement of international law. The
undemocratic structure of the United Nations is what prevents the deployment of
peacekeeping troops to protect civilians, economic sanctions and an arms
embargo on the Israeli government. It prevents an International Criminal Court
referral by the council and economic sanctions against individual Israelis who are
the perpetrators of international crimes.
What
would a 1999 Seattle shut down moment look like in the United Nations Security
Council? Could a coalition led by Global South governments inside the United
Nations be joined by social movements outside to disrupt what is both the
central pillar and one of the weakest pillars on which the Israeli occupation
depends? Could the protests demand a global citizens’ assembly on the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict to make decisions on economic sanctions and an
arms embargo instead of the Security Council? The United States and other
superpowers need a functioning U.N. Security Council for various reasons — so
if the Security Council were shut down like the World Trade Organization in
1999, “business as usual” could not continue.
One
key to the success of the 1999 protest in Seattle was the way it brought trade
unions and environmentalists together in action. A diverse coalition could
potentially be formed here too, as the victims of the Security Council veto are
not just Palestinians but also Syrians, Ukrainians, Tibetans and other victims
of mass atrocities. What’s more, environmental groups could also get involved.
After all, the council has adopted over 70 resolutions that involved climate,
but avoids taking real action on the subject. With the climate crisis already
fueling wars and conflict and posing a threat to peace worldwide, we could
really use a Security Council — a democratic one that is run by majority rule
instead of a dictatorship of veto — to sanction corporations and individuals
responsible for endangering the planet.
Another
way of challenging the Security Council using tactics from the civil resistance
toolbox is to go after its finances. It’s a little known fact that the Security
Council is funded by taxpayer money from each country around the world. Because
of the way the United Nations is structured, no real enforcement mechanism was
ever set up, which is a weakness often used by the superpowers to dominate, but
rarely used by citizens. That funding includes payments collected by many
governments who openly oppose the atrocities in Gaza, and taxes from each of
us. Why are these governments and us, their citizens, funding an institution
that, by design, allows for the atrocities in Gaza to continue?
Why
is there no national, regional or global campaign demanding that governments
defund the Security Council unless it democratize? Why are we funding an
institution that shields the war criminals who kill civilians, in Gaza and
worldwide?
Toward
international democracy
Civil
resistance has been used for thousands of years — with the first documented act
being a strike of tomb builders in ancient Egypt. It’s only until quite
recently, however, that systematic research into the methods of civil
resistance has occurred. For the most part, that research has focused on
national democratic transitions, leaving a huge gap in the literature when it
comes to understanding how civil resistance can challenge international
injustice and democratize international organizations.
Nevertheless,
the success of civil resistance movements leaves much room for optimism. The
two best-known examples — the U.S. civil rights movement and the Indian
independence movement — were led by organizers who saw themselves as part of an
anti-colonial transnational movement aimed at altering the international power
structure and ending direct colonialism in most of the world. But old forms of
domination, such as colonialism, ended up being re-created. The Security
Council and its veto power are prime examples of this new system — which some
called neo-colonialism and Albert Camus referred to as the international
dictatorship. Building on that language, the alternative to this system could
perhaps be best described as international democracy.
I
believe that an international civil rights movement using nonviolent struggle
to fight for international democracy is not only possible but necessary.
Repairing the world is possible — it has been done many times before. History
shows us it is something normal people can do and have done many times in the
past, by organizing and winning, even against the most powerful opponents.
In
the days since Oct. 7, when I look at my daughter, I can’t help but think how
illusory our sense of security is. Invading Afghanistan, we now understand, did
not create real and lasting safety, any more than blockading and then
re-occupying Gaza is going to create real and lasting safety. Until we develop
an international system of global governance enabling us to deliver
accountability to war criminals (regardless of their nationality) and protect
children ( regardless of their citizenship), none of our children will be safe.
We are clothed in a single garment of destiny.
Hundreds missing from Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital amid Israeli
bombardment
WHO
and UN officials say patients arrive every few minutes in central Gaza hospital
operating with 30 percent of staff.
Hundreds
of patients and staff are reported to be missing from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital
in central Gaza, which is struggling to cope amid intense air strikes across
the enclave.
The
majority of medical staff, as well as around 600 patients, have been forced to
leave the complex to unknown locations with no information of their
whereabouts, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN)
reported on Monday.
The
two institutions note chaotic scenes as the remaining staff at the hospital
continues to try to cope with an influx of injured people as “heavy Israeli
bombardment from air, land, and sea intensified across much of the Gaza Strip”.
Staff
from the WHO and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA) visited the only functioning hospital in the governorate of Deir
el-Balah in central Gaza on Sunday. They noted that intense bombing had driven
many to seek medical help at Al-Aqsa.
The
Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that 225 Palestinians were killed and 296
people injured due to Israeli attacks on January 5 – 7.
The
officials said that large numbers of wounded were being treated by very few
staff at the facility and called for more protection for medical centres.
The
director of the hospital reported that because of increasing hostilities and
ongoing evacuation orders, most local health workers and about 600 patients
have been forced to leave the facility to unknown locations.
WHO
official Sean Casey said that new patients were arriving at the hospital every
few minutes, adding that due to evacuation orders and the dangerous situation,
there were only five doctors left to oversee hundreds of emergency cases and
casualties.
“It
is really a chaotic scene. The hospital director just spoke to us, and he said
his one request is that this hospital be protected, even though many of his
staff have left,” Casey said.
“This
hospital is currently operating with about 30 percent of the staff that it had
just a few days ago. They are seeing, in some cases, hundreds of casualties
every day in a small emergency department.”
Medical
Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) stated
that their emergency medical team had been forced to cease activities at the
hospital and leave the facility, as a result of increasing Israeli military
activity.
‘Sickening
scenes’
WHO
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that his staff had witnessed
“sickening scenes of people of all ages being treated on blood-streaked floors
and in chaotic corridors”.
“Al
Aqsa is the most important hospital remaining in Gaza’s Middle Area and must
remain functional, and protected, to deliver its lifesaving services,”
Ghebreyesus stated.
“Further
erosion of its functionality cannot be permitted – doing so in the face of such
trauma, injury and humanitarian suffering would be a moral and medical
outrage.”
Casey
said his team delivered some medical supplies and beds to the hospital on
Sunday for thousands of patients in need of dialysis and trauma care.
He
added WHO was looking into deploying emergency staff for Al-Aqsa which is “on
its knees” like many other medical facilities in Gaza.
Despite
growing international pressure for a respite, Israel continues its attacks on
Gaza’s health facilities and residential areas in Gaza.
The
WHO says hospitals in northern Gaza are completely out of service.
Ghebreyesus
has expressed shock at the scale of health needs and devastation in northern
Gaza after security concerns forced WHO to cancel a visit to the region’s
al-Awda Hospital.
“Urgent,
safe and unhindered access to the region is needed to deliver humanitarian aid.
Further delays will lead to more death and suffering for far too many people,”
he declared.
Overall,
at least 22,835 people have been killed – including 9,600 children – in Israeli
attacks on Gaza since October 7, according to the authorities in the enclave.
Israel says about 1,139 people were killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Poll: Americans have no Idea what Biden Means when he says he is
a Zionist, or What Israel’s Ideology is
Ann
Arbor (Informed Comment) – Shibley Telhami and Michael Hammer have a new
commentary out based on their polling at the University of Maryland’s Critical
Issues Poll during the past year. One of the three issues they address is
Israel/ Palestine.
They
found that 62% of Americans have no idea what Zionism is. Zionism is, of
course, a form of Jewish nationalism born in Central Europe in the late 19th
century, which seeks to turn the Jewish religion into a platform for a state,
and which excludes non-Jews from sovereignty over territory claimed by this
Jewish state.
In
the case of Palestine, this ideology has produced the statelessness of
Palestinians under Israeli occupation and has made citizens of Israel of
Palestinian heritage into second-class citizens. That is, Zionism is akin to
other ethnic supremacist ideologies such as white nationalism or the Baathist
form of Arab nationalism (which made Kurds second-class citizens in Iraq and
perpetuated their non-citizen status in Syria).
The
mantra often found among US politicians, that Israel must be democratic and
Jewish, reflects the ethnic supremacism implicit in Zionist thinking. What
would happen, for instance, if the proportion of Israelis of non-Jewish
heritage rose to become a majority? If the state must be “Jewish,” this
development would presumably require the expulsion or disenfranchisement of
non-Jews.
Such
demographic developments are not theoretical but are apparent in the
contemporary world. Lebanese Christians were 51% of Lebanon’s population in
1930 but probably only 22% or so today.
Saying
that Israel must be democratic and Jewish is like saying the United States must
be democratic and white or democratic and Christian. The second, ethnic
supremacist, demand is profoundly undemocratic and so the second part of the
phrase stealthily negates the first.
Joe
Biden says he is a Zionist, and given his behavior during the past three
months, I think we have to conclude that he is an extreme sort of Zionist. It
is baffling that the overwhelming majority of Americans doesn’t even know what
he means when he says this, or what the ideology is of the country that
receives more US aid than any other in the world. 
Interestingly,
12% of Americans have a negative perception of Zionism, and 8% have a positive
one. Some 19% don’t care one way or another. Presumably this 39% comprises the
bulk of those who say they know what Zionism is.
Americans
who view Zionism negatively are more likely to be Democrats or Independents
than Republicans, though the spread is not that great (8% are Republicans, 13%
Democrats, 14% independents).
Some
15% of Americans believe that criticizing Israeli policies is a form of
antisemitism (bigotry toward Jews). Only 37% say that such criticism does not
constitute anti-Jewish prejudice. 48% don’t know.
If
we zero in on the 52% who had an opinion on the matter, 70% said that
criticizing Israel does not amount to being prejudiced toward Jews. It is
worrying, however, that 28% of those who said they knew the answer to the
question believe that the only way to avoid anti-Jewish bigotry is to be silent
about Israeli policies and actions.
This
issue is of the utmost importance, since 38 states have passed laws forbidding
the boycott of Israel and punishing it by denial of state government contracts
(including speaking fees to professors and journalists and writers). That is,
the belief that you can’t criticize Israel is undermining basic first amendment
freedoms of Americans, among them the freedom to boycott enterprises with which
they disagree. The Civil Rights movement probably could not have succeeded if
it had been illegal to boycott white-owned businesses practicing segregation.
The
United States and France are characterized by civic nationalism, or at least
that is their constitutional tradition. As long as people are loyal to the
Constitution in each country, their ethnicity ideally shouldn’t matter in the
law. Obviously, it does matter, de facto, but even so the terms can change.
See, e.g., Barack Obama, who probably could not have been president of the USA
until the 21st century. At that point, we were truer to our constitutional
tradition of civic nationalism than we had earlier been. Progress is possible
in civic nationalism in a way that ethnonationalism forestalls.
The
big takeaway from the University of Maryland poll for me is that the corporate
news media have again failed to do their job. Americans are not being educated
about the world in which they live, which is consequential for our own
democracy. If we are simply ignorant, it is more likely that we will get policy
wrong and that we will give away our birthright as a free people with a Bill of
Rights.
A
Voice That Doesn’t Belong: Perspectives of an American-Born Palestinian
I am a
20-year-old Egyptian and Palestinian woman living in America, and by the time I
write this, no words are extreme enough to describe the horrors in Palestine we
are all watching in real time. Thousands of people have infinitely more
knowledge and firsthand accounts of what is occurring in not only Gaza, but the
West Bank and even Lebanon under Israel’s catastrophic reign of collective
punishment. So, my voice is not equipped to speak of the facts and statistics
of the current atrocities. I instead wish to share a perspective. One that I
know is not nearly as important as those on the front lines, but a perspective,
nonetheless.
As my ethnicity
suggests, I have always been…aware of things. Some of my earliest memories
involve my mother taking me and my brother to protest for the Egyptian
revolution against Hosni Mubarak. And it wasn’t very long into my adolescence
that I learned that there was a seemingly never-ending battle taking place over
the country my father and his family were born in, and whether it has the right
to exist at all. I took to the streets in 2021, pouring faith and outrage into
the movement for Palestinian liberation that I thought would never fade. But as
with everything in the media, the news stopped reporting. The protests died
down; the social media posts once again sunk into the background. And then, on
October 7th and the days following, my reaction, along with many others I’m
sure, was simply of dread. We all knew that this attack was what Israel was
waiting for. The final nail in their coffin of excuses of why their treatment
of the Palestinians was justified, and why they ought to make their mission of
eradication so much louder.
And all the
louder they became. Over the constant sound of explosions and gunfire they told
us that it was a right to self-defense. That Islam was a religion of violence,
so the Muslim innocents were, not in fact, innocent. That they would never bomb
a hospital. Then they were justified in bombing that hospital. That the
“children of darkness” brought this upon themselves. And as per the words of
David Azoulai of the Metula Council, “It (Gaza) should resemble the Auschwitz
concentration camp.” And loudest of all was the hateful yet self-vindicated cry
of ‘HAMAS.’ “The people elected and
support Hamas, so they reap what they sow.” “Blame Hamas for all the dead
civilians.” “But Hamas raped and killed 1300 people!” “Hamas beheaded 40
babies!” “Do you condemn Hamas? Do you support Hamas?”
Hamas.
Hamas.
HAMAS.
The west became
more obsessed with the existence and alleged actions of Hamas than the entire
Palestinian American community had ever been. People like Piers Morgan screamed
its name over our attempts to share our truth, demanding that we bow our heads
in shame and denounce everything a band of orphaned resistance fighters stood
for before being deemed worthy enough to speak. By proxy of originating from
the same country that this group was fighting to liberate, our deaths, our
family’s deaths, our people’s deaths, were to be considered collateral damage
of Hamas’ sin, not at all resulting from the missiles fired into Gaza and
Lebanon. And our attempts to refute this condemned us to join the growing
circle of so-called terrorist supporters facing mass demonization. The word
‘Hamas’ threatened to deafen us all.
And so, we responded with our own noise. We
once again took to the streets. I stood outside my college, surrounded by
barricades and police and old men cursing me and my peers out, calling us
terrorists, alongside councilwoman Inna Vernikov who illegally flashed her gun
before our very eyes as we called to the officers present about this threat to
our safety, only to be ignored for over fifteen minutes. At Bay Ridge, the
police halted our march and corralled us by the hundreds onto the sidewalks
before laying siege on us with their fists and handcuffs. Despite it all, we
continued to make noise.
But even so, it
felt like there were barriers. Not the kind that currently surround Gaza, but
metaphorical walls, each consisting of another fact about my identity that
drives me further apart from the idea of what an Egyptian Palestinian woman is.
Me and my brother were born in America, and raised to speak English. Both sides
of my family are Christian by majority, not Muslim. My father was born in West
Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in 1948, and he was lucky enough to
exist simply as an Arab citizen rather than a Palestinian remnant in the eyes
of others. And we have always lived in neighborhoods that were mostly white.
And when the people weren’t white, they weren’t Middle Eastern. And when the
people were Middle Eastern, they were somehow more of it than us. So, the noise
that I have made has always felt quieter. Separate from those of my peers,
teetering on the line of a voice that has no business joining this movement. I
grieve for my country that I have never been to, for my people that I do not
speak the same language as or even share any religious beliefs with, for the
attack on my identity that seems to exist as an Americanized version of the sum
of its parts. At times I feel as if I exist only as another face to support the
sheer numbers of our outcry for liberation. The noise I make, and the voice I
cry out with, may in some way push the volume of this outcry higher, but more
than anything, I have come to find that it mostly bounces off of these walls
and echoes back into myself, a reminder that I am not quite Palestinian enough
to be integrated with my peers, but not distanced enough to be considered a
supporting ally.
So then, where
does this leave me? My voice supposedly does not belong with the others, yet I
still attend a college under a student body president responsible for helping
stoke the flames against anti-Zionist sentimentalities, in perhaps the most
Zionist city in America, under a federal government pouring our tax dollars
into the bombs that are blowing children to pieces right now. The genes in my
blood that just so happen to come from my father’s side of the family may not
make me fully Palestinian relative to more ‘Arab’ people, but it will always
make me a terrorist sympathizer under the gaze of our opposition. My keffiyeh
will always be judged as a symbol of extremist ideologies. And my voice, by
default of joining the demands for an end to the senseless killing by the IDF,
will always be perceived as one amplifying the goals of Hamas. So, to all of
those who feel as if their voices do not belong, who are starting to feel
crushed under the weight of their own echoes, do not despair, because the ones who
wish to silence and exterminate us are knocking our walls down for us. And in
uniting us under their attempts of mass demonization, they are giving us more
power and opportunities to use our voices in our cries of defiance than they
ever have before.
How Israel Leverages Genocide With Hamas ‘Massacres’
In
the days after Hamas entered Israeli kibbutzim near Gaza on Oct. 7, foreign press accounts of what happened have
broadly reflected the Israeli interpretation of events of the deliberate
slaughter and dismemberment of innocent civilians by Hamas fighters.
Those
stories were blood-curdling in the extreme: Babies beheaded. People dismembered
and deliberately burned to death. And the total of innocent civilians murdered
in cold blood were said to be as high as 1,400.
The
Israelis quickly recycled parallels between Hamas and the Islamic State, with
its glorification of killing innocents.
But
a reconstruction of how that story line emerged as the dominant theme in early
press coverage shows that it was deliberately created by a decision by top
Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was done by inventing stories about
nonexistent atrocities and planting them with credulous U.S. news outlets.
Origins
of the Hamas Atrocity Stories
The
documentary evidence now available shows that the stories about Hamas
atrocities committed in the Kfar Aza Kibbutz and elsewhere were politically
motivated fabrications. And how and why those atrocity stories became the
dominant political reality within days of the offensive is an important
political question bearing on the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The
first explanation for those stories is that they came from Israeli private
“first responder” organizations with an obvious self-interest in peddling such
a line: they were competing with one another to generate the biggest donations,
as reported by Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone.
But
the real source of those Hamas atrocity stories from Kfar Aza was the Netanyahu
government itself, and it is now clear that the objective was to ensure that
the Biden administration would go along with the plan to reduce all of Gaza to
a pile of rubble.
In
an address to the nation on Oct. 9 Netanyahu invoked a long-time basic Israeli
propaganda line: Hamas is ISIS. “We have always known what Hamas is,” he
declared. “Now the whole world knows Hamas is ISIS.”
When
he spoke to the nation the day after the Hamas offensive, of course, the rest
of the world had no such idea. That is why Netanyahu ordered a special project
of hasbara — the Israeli term for propaganda to reshape public opinion abroad —
to ensure that both the U.S. public and the Biden administration fully
supported the Israeli position on Hamas’ attack.
The
first part of that program was to have a senior IDF commander pass information
to the news media, who were allowed to enter Kfar Aza Kibbutz on the morning of
Oct. 10, while ensuring that a senior IDF commander would be on hand to speak
to the press about Hamas atrocities in the kibbutz.
Thus
Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Depth Corps, told
CNN correspondent Nic Robertson that women, children, toddlers and the elderly
had been “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”
A
later CNN story quoted Gen. Veruv as saying,
“I
saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and
all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room
to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms.”
Veruv
had not seen anything of the sort himself, but it was emblematic of the IDF
manipulation of the Western press on the issue. When Business Insider contacted
the IDF from New York about the story, spokesperson Major Nir Dinar claimed
that its soldiers had found the decapitated corpses of babies at Kfar Aza.
But
when the Turkish Anadolu Agency and The Intercept sought confirmation of the
claim of beheaded babies from the IDF on Oct. 10 and 12, respectively, the IDF
couldn’t back up the statement by Veruv.
Anadolu
reported in a post on “X” that the IDF had “no information” confirming the
allegations of beheaded babies.
And
the IDF spokesperson told The Intercept that the military had not been able to
independently confirm the claim.
Despite
the absence of actual evidence for that propaganda claim, a cascade of such
stories were aired by major U.S. television networks and the BBC. It was a
major triumph of deliberate Israeli deception by manipulating broadcast media
eager for Hamas atrocity stories.
The
second part of the Netanyahu plan — ensuring the full political support of U.S.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Biden for the utter destruction of the
urban society of Gaza — was easy as well.
Blinken
was already fully committed to the Zionist cause. When he arrived in Jerusalem,
he invoked his Jewish ancestry and likened the Hamas attacks to those of the
Nazis against Jews.
And
he endorsed the Israeli claim of “babies slaughtered, bodies desecrated, young
people burned alive, women raped, parents executed in front of their children,
children in front of their parents.”
Behind
IDF’s ‘Preliminary Estimate’ of Civilians Killed
On
Oct. 14, the IDF put out a “preliminary estimate” of 1,400 innocent civilians
killed by Hamas in the attack, a figure that stood until Nov. 10, when the
Israeli Foreign Ministry reduced the estimate of civilians “murdered in cold
blood” to 1,200.
However,
that figure, too, was shown to be seriously misleading when IsraeI’s Social
Security Administration in mid-December released a complete list of those
killed in the attack, with the circumstances of death of each.
That
official document showed that 695 of the deaths were Israeli civilians, 373
were Israeli security forces, and 71 were foreigners, for a total of 1,139
victims.
Hamas
gunmen certainly did fire indiscriminately during the rampage, and they caused
a large number of civilian deaths when their plan for taking hostages quickly
went awry, because people refused to come out of their houses.
To
force the occupants to jump out through open windows, some Hamas gunmen set
fire to the houses, but some families never made it and were burned to death.
Hamas
operatives were not the only ones to destroy houses and kill those inside it,
however.
In
the two communities where the largest number of civilians said to have been
killed — Kfar Aza, where total civilian deaths was variously estimated at
between 38 and 46; and Be’eri, where it was estimated at 112, numerous civilian
deaths from tank and/or helicopter fire — including the deaths of a number of
those who were being held as hostages — have been well documented.
The
IDF commanding officer who unleashed violence on Be’eri spun an elaborate lie
to cover up the actual circumstances in which many houses were destroyed by
Israeli tank fire or by rockets from helicopters.
In
a report in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz, the deputy commander of an IDF
armored reserve battalion, Brig. Gen Barak Hiram, described how his tank unit
“fought…from house to house, with tanks” in Be’eri, adding, “We had no choice.”
In
another interview, this time in The New York Times, Hiram also presented a
completely falsified and self-serving account of his handling of the situation
he encountered at one house where Hamas gunmen held 14 hostages.
He
claimed that one hostage, Yasmin Porat, had managed to escape, and that the
gunmen inside then fired two RPG rounds at IDF troops outside the house they
were occupying. In fact, however, the Hamas group’s leader had decided to
surrender and contacted the police by phone.
He
gave himself up along with Porat, according to her account, leaving the other
Hamas gunmen to fend for themselves. But Gen. Hiram immediately demanded that
the house be taken by force “even at the cost of civilian casualties,” with the
result that all 13 remaining hostages but one were killed.
In
Kfar Aza, which had more than 49 civilian deaths, a parallel process unfolded,
as Lt. Col. Golan Vach similarly ordered a tank attack on houses that Hamas had
taken over and in which 19 Israeli hostages were being held.
Both
decisions reflected the explicit implementation of the IDF’s “Hannibal
Protocol,” under which it is required to kill Israeli hostages to ensure that
they could not be exploited by Israel’s enemy — even though that requirement
was supposedly canceled by the IDF in 2016.
Most
of the civilian deaths appear to have taken place at or near the grounds of the
early morning music festival, where 260 bodies were found.
Hamas
operatives sought to take people hostage as they fled from the grounds, but
many of the victims were killed by firing from helicopters from troops who were
unable to distinguish Hamas operatives from revelers.
No
one knows how many were killed by each side but the 28 Israeli helicopters were
firing rounds of 30-millimeter cannon mortars, without any intelligence to
guide their shooting, certainly took a share of the human toll, especially in
the chaotic scene during the flight from the rave that morning, according to
Electronic Intifada.
In
light of the new evidence, the number of innocent civilians killed by Hamas was
clearly significantly less than the 695 civilian victims identified by the
Israeli Social Security Administration and a fraction of the 1,200 civilians
the Netanyahu government has claimed, because the IDF itself was responsible
for a significant proportion of the deaths of innocent civilians.
It
is also clear, however, that the Hamas offensive was poorly conceived and badly
executed. And most importantly, it handed Netanyahu and the whole extremist
Israeli socio-political system a golden opportunity to pursue their genocidal
plans in Gaza.
Within
24 hours of Hamas’ operation, that Israeli genocide plan had already gone into
operation with its campaign of phony atrocity stories. And nearly three months
later, little or nothing has been done to stop its murderous progress toward
its genocidal goal.
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