On a Unified Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza

Eric Cheyfitz

January 31, 2024

A response to Representative Mike Sigler’s comments at the Tompkins County Legislature’s meetings on Jan 2, and 16, 2024, concerning  A Unified Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza; Urgent Humanitarian and Local Imperatives of the Tompkins County Human Rights Commission:

I make the following comments as a citizen of Tompkins County, a Jew with a daughter and three grandchildren who are Israeli citizens and live in Tel Aviv. I do not represent Cornell University but am a professor of Indigenous studies at Cornell, who teaches classes and publishes articles on Palestine/Israel in its historical context.

Let me begin by noting that all the comments I heard from supporters of the ceasefire proposal at both meetings were informed with a precise historical understanding of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and were accompanied with deeply felt humanitarian concerns.

In contrast, Mr. Sigler’s comments in response seemed unconcerned with the ongoing genocide, which, as I noted at the Jan. 16th meeting, has to date effected at least 23,708 Palestinians killed and at least 60,005 wounded, an estimated 70% of whom are non-combatants in the Gaza Strip. Of these over 7,000 are children and “Save the Children” notes that at least 10 children per day have lost a limb in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023. As I write these deadly and heartbreaking figures continue to rise and the threat of a wider war increases. Even worse than his lack of concern, Mr. Sigler’s comments were misinformed, and he used his platform as a legislator to misinform others.

Here, I take up some of his assertions, which I think a wider public in the U.S. may share because of similar government and major media misinformation.

+  At the Jan. 2 meeting, Mr. Sigler noted that Hamas’s charter declared war against the Jews. In fact, while Hamas’s original charter of 1988 did this, its revised charter of 2017, as I quoted at the Jan.16thmeeting, expressly stated: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity” (Article 16). Hamas is correct. Judaism and Zionism are not identical so that an attack on Zionism, which is a politicized religious ideology, is not an attack on Jews or Judaism, though many supporters of Israel collapse the two.

+ At the Jan. 16th meeting,  Mr. Sigler stated that Hamas had repeatedly rejected calls from neighboring Arab countries for a ceasefire. In fact, the situation is precisely the opposite. Here is a section of a Reuters article from Dec. 20th on the situation:

“Hamas leader visits Egypt amid intensive talks on new ceasefire” by Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Bassam Masoud and Dan Williams

There remains a huge gulf between the two sides’ publicly stated positions on any halt to fighting. Hamas rejects any further temporary pause and says it will discuss only a permanent ceasefire. Israel has ruled that out and says it will agree only limited humanitarian pauses until Hamas is defeated.

“Hamas’ stance remains; they don’t have a desire for humanitarian pauses. Hamas wants a complete end to the Israeli war on Gaza,” a Palestinian official said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated that the war would end only with Hamas eradicated, all hostages freed and Gaza posing no more threat to Israel.

“Whoever thinks we will stop is detached from reality…All Hamas terrorists, from the first to the last, are dead men walking,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

Informed opinion tells us that Hamas will never be eradicated; in fact, Israeli violence only makes it grow. Palestinian political analysts Ibrahim Dalalsha notes “the political organization of Hamas is going to get bigger because of the level of support that it’s picking up from Palestinians, and not only in Gaza. It may lose half popular support in Gaza, but Hamas has a major public incubator in the West Bank,” where Israel has also been increasing the violence with nearly 400 dead to date. So, Netanyahu’s stance prescribes an endless war, which is not only destroying Gaza but also undermining Israel’s social and economic life.

In terms of Hamas rejecting ceasefire offers, on Dec. 25th Reuters reported the following from Cairo: “Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad have rejected an Egyptian proposal that they relinquish power in the Gaza Strip in return for a permanent ceasefire, two Egyptian security sources told Reuters on Monday.” Coming from the Egyptian dictatorship, a treaty partner of Israel that helps enforce the siege of Gaza, the offer is both suspect and clearly unacceptable. Why not ask the Israeli government, which is committing genocide and enforcing apartheid to step down in exchange for a ceasefire? Egypt’s offer suggests that Hamas is the sole cause of this war, when the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel has a context: 75 years of apartheid, the continual dispossession of the Palestinian people and the 16 yr. siege of Gaza, which has been termed by human rights groups “the largest outdoor prison in the world.”’ Context is no excuse for Hamas’ crimes, but neither should be ignored in any diplomatic process.

+  Finally, on Jan. 16 in response to the pro-ceasefire comments, Mr. Sigler, following the Israeli government’s distorted comparison of the Hamas attack with the Holocaust, analogized Hamas to Nazi Germany under air attack by the allies (the firebombing of Dresden) in order to argue that just as the mass bombing of German civilians did not produce more Nazis so the bombing of Gaza would not produce more members of Hamas. What this analogy demonstrates is a complete misunderstanding of not only the position of the German people at the end of WWII, defeated and demoralized, but also what Rashid Khalidi has termed in the title of his book The Hundred Years War Against Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. Germany under Hitler was, as it still is, a nation state. It was clearly the aggressor with international range and a powerful armed force in the air, on land, and sea, and a program of genocide against the Jews. So the analogy with Hamas and Gaza not only doesn’t fit but doesn’t make sense. It is totally incoherent: Hamas represents one arm of Palestinian resistance fighting against an illegally occupying power, the nation-state of Israel. And while Allied power brought an end to the war with Germany, Israel’s genocidal aggression  is only increasing Palestinian resistance and that of its Arab allies (Hezbollah, Ansar Allah [Houthis], and the Shiite militias in Iraq, all supported by Iran).  Thus, while Hamas’ committed war crimes on Oct. 7, Hamas is not analogous to the Nazi regime.

In fact, if one were to analogize, a close fit would be between Nazi Germany and Israel, a power with nuclear arms that has been operating an apartheid government (think ghettos) for 75 years and is now committing genocide in Gaza. Hamas, although the perpetrator of the Oct. 7th violence, was responding to the 75 years of Israeli settler-colonial oppression without an air force or the massive armaments that Israel has at its command.  Given the power difference, one might ask how Hamas was able to carry out its attack.

Since 1967 and the June war, Israel has been in violation of international law, specifically UN resolution 242, which called for the withdrawal of Israeli troops after the June war; the Fourth Geneva Convention, which interdicts the transfer of members of the occupying powers population to the occupied territories (hence all of the Israeli settlements are illegal under international law); and the institution of an apartheid government. Under international law apartheid is a human rights violation, a crime against humanity.

In this respect, according to UN figures, it should be noted that from 2008-to 2020 for every Israeli killed, including combatants, by Palestinian resistance, 22 Palestinians, mostly non-combatants, were killed by the IDF. The disproportionality points to another of Israel’s crimes against humanity, collective punishment. Let it also be noted that self-defense, including armed response (though not against non-combatants) is legal under international law.

In historical context, then, and context is crucial, Israel is the aggressor and Hamas is an arm of the Palestinian resistance. To be clear, this does not absolve it of the war crimes committed on Oct 7, any more than Israel is absolved of the war crimes and crimes against humanity noted here. But the context, of which Sigler is either ignorant or willfully ignoring, flips his analogy. As one of the speakers for the ceasefire said on the 16th and I paraphrase: In the correct analogy, Israel is Germany, and the Palestinians are the Jews. This dark and dispiriting irony should not be lost on us.

When my Cornell students come to class, it is expected that they will have done their homework, and they do, so that the class can have a coherent conversation about the subject at hand.

While making remarks at a legislative meeting is not the same as a classroom discussion, we should be able to expect that if our representatives comment, they exhibit some degree of factual knowledge about the concerns brought to them by their constituents.

At the meeting with the legislature on January 2nd, I asked the question: Who would not want a ceasefire? i.e.  who would not want to stop the killing on both sides, but overwhelmingly of Palestinian non-combatants including thousands of children? Apparently, the answer is: those who do not want to face history.

I encourage my students, who are in the process of facing history, when they encounter injustice to speak to it, making audible their opposition. I believe this makes a difference, however small, and perhaps sooner or later it will be a voice in a chorus. Speaking to injustice through recognizing history is what I am asking the Tompkins County Legislature to do in support of the ceasefire resolution.

 

Defunding UNRWA aimed at starving Palestinians to death and completing Israel’s plans for ethnic cleansing

Chris Marsden

The withdrawal of funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) by the United States and other imperialist powers epitomizes their direct collusion with the Netanyahu regime in bombing and starving the Palestinians out of Gaza, with the aim of seizing it for Israel.

It is part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, including in the West Bank and throughout the Middle East.

On January 27, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel must “take all measures within its power” to avoid acts of genocide. Within hours, Israel launched a pre-planned counterattack. UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini, acting under instruction from Washington, reported just hours later unsubstantiated allegations handed to him a week ago by Israel’s security services claiming that 12 of his 13,000 personnel in Gaza had taken some part in the October 7 Hamas-led incursion into Israel.

The US immediately suspended all funding to UNRWA. Washington was followed by 10 other states, including Germany, the UK and France.

The implications are horrific.

Some 21 international aid agencies, including Save the Children, ActionAid, Oxfam and the Danish Refugee Council, wrote that they were “deeply concerned and outraged” at the decision taken “amid a rapidly worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

Their joint letter continued:

The suspension of funding by donor states will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza. The population faces starvation, looming famine and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s continued indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate deprivation of aid in Gaza.

Palestinian groups, including the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Rafah, described the move as “a continuation of the genocide practiced by the occupation forces in Gaza,” which would lead more than two million Palestinians in the Strip to “die of starvation.”

Death by starvation is the clear intent of Israel and all of its backers, no matter what cynical statements to the contrary they may occasionally make. All of the imperialist powers have unwaveringly defended Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself,” as its armed forces slaughtered around 30,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, wounded 65,000 others, razed more than half Gaza’s essential infrastructure to the ground and left 1.9 million people (85 percent of its population) internally displaced.

Without blinking an eye, Israel and its allies have now signed a death warrant for tens of thousands more.

A harrowing report by CNN details children fighting over stale bread and being forced to eat grass to assuage gnawing hunger. There is no clean water and illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea are rife, with no functioning hospitals to care for the sick. Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief chief, tells CNN that the “great majority” of 400,000 Gazans characterized by UN agencies as at risk of starving “are actually in famine.”

Destroying UNRWA is an explicit goal of Israel’s war on Gaza, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) mounting hundreds of attacks that have killed over 150 of UNRWA’s staff and hundreds more civilians sheltering in its facilities. A classified Israeli foreign ministry report leaked in December proposed the elimination of UNRWA, beginning with a campaign alleging cooperation of UNRWA staff members with Hamas.

In January, Noga Arbel of the right-wing Kohelet Foundation told the Knesset, “It will be impossible to win this war if we do not destroy UNRWA” and prevent it from “allowing terrorists to be born” by providing services to Palestinian refugees. Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared that his aims included “promoting a policy ensuring that UNRWA will not be a part of the day after” an Israeli victory in Gaza.

This aim extends far beyond Gaza. Including Gaza and the West Bank, some six million Palestinians in 58 refugee camps, spread as well over Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, depend on aid funneled through UNRWA and its 30,000-strong staff.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established in 1950. As with a number of short-lived organisations that preceded it, its mission was to provide aid for refugees worldwide, mostly European Jews who had survived the horrors of the Nazi regime and World War II, to seek voluntary repatriation and local integration or resettlement in a third country.

But UNRWA, established in 1949, was kept as a separate entity because repatriation for the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of Palestine following the establishment of Israel and the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war was anathema to the Zionist regime. Neighbouring Arab countries mostly refused citizenship, while cynically proclaiming the confinement of the Palestinians in squalid, overcrowded camps to be an expression of their opposition to dispossession by Israel.

This left the Palestinians totally at the mercy of wholly inadequate funding provided by the imperialist powers, led by the US and Germany, for food, shelter, healthcare and education. Israel has repeatedly sought to block UNRWA’s funding, claiming it to be a front for Hamas. In 2018, President Donald Trump ended US funding of the agency, which was only partially restored under Biden.

The Zionists now view UNRWA as an obstacle to the eradication of the Palestinians as a recognizable people because it keeps millions of them together and allows them to demand their right of return to their homes, enshrined in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief of the right-wing Jewish News Syndicate, laid out the Zionist position in detail, complaining: “Unlike every other refugee population, the Palestinian Arabs were not resettled,” but “kept in place to wait for the day when they could ‘go home’ to their former villages in what was now Israel… So, let’s not waste much time arguing about the details of UNRWA’s complicity in Oct. 7 or other acts of terror. The only discussion that needs to be held is one about its abolition and replacement by a genuine refugee agency.”

A “Victory of Israel Conference” held Sunday in Jerusalem confirmed Israel’s intention to permanently annex the occupied territories. The event was attended by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and many other government ministers and Knesset members. It called for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza and their expansion in the West Bank.

Workers and youth throughout the world have marched in their millions, week after week, to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza. They have been told this can be accomplished by mass pressure to demand a ceasefire, only to see their governments continue backing Israel while politely appealing for it to avoid killing so many civilians.

They were then told to rely on the UN, with the ICJ preliminary verdict hailed as proof that there was still a glimmer of hope for a return to the rule of law. Instead, not only did the ICJ not even call for a temporary ceasefire—despite this being the official majority position of the UN—but its humble appeals to Israel to rein in the IDF only solicited still greater war crimes.

Conclusions must be drawn. The fight against the genocide is a fight against US-NATO imperialism, for which Israel is the primary agent in the Middle East. Washington, London and other capitals back Israel in Gaza because eliminating the “Palestinian question” paves the way for a broader war in the Middle East targeting Iran and its allies, which is itself bound up with plans for war against Russia and China to secure unchallenged control of the world and its resources.

Preventing Israel, the US and the other imperialist powers from realizing their goal of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians therefore demands the development of an international and socialist movement of the working class against war, against both the war-mongering governments and their nominal opposition parties, and against the capitalist system of global exploitation which they all defend.

 

For Western media, Israel’s bombing of Gaza is not ‘deadly’

MRonline

 

Twenty-four Israeli soldiers were killed in two separate incidents in Gaza on 22 January. Mainstream media outlets around the world reacted in unison: that this was the “deadliest day” for Israel since 7 October.

This exact phrase was used in headlines on 23 January carried by news agencies such as Reuters and AFP, and major broadcasters including the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC and ITV News.

The exact same phrase was also used by leading news titles including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Daily Telegraph, the Sun, Jerusalem Post, Guardian, London’s Evening Standard, Financial Times, Independent and Yahoo News.

On the same day, Israeli forces killed almost 200 Palestinians in Gaza including at least 65 people in Khan Younis alone.

These deaths received no headlines in the above outlets. Where they were reported, they were listed as part of the regular daily round-up of events in an unfolding genocide that has now seen more than 26,000 people killed in Gaza.

How is it possible that the world’s media could embrace exactly the same phrase in relation to Israeli victims but largely ignore the identities of the much higher number of Palestinians killed?

Why would 22 January be described as “deadly” for one group of people but not for another?

Unequal value

You might expect that editors took the “deadliest day” phrase from press statements from the Israeli government or military.

Yet Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari did not use this phrase in his statement and neither did the IDF Chief of the General Staff, Herzi Halevi, who instead simply called it a “difficult day”.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanhayu also described it as “one of the most difficult days” while Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, spoke of “an unbearably difficult morning”.

He used the same language as both Knesset speaker Amir Ohana and minister Benny Gantz, both of whom referred to a “painful morning”.

Of course, it is possible the phrase was used in private and informal briefings to the press on the morning of 23 January. It is, however, equally conceivable that this was a trope that came “naturally” from a deep-rooted idea in the western media that the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are not of equal value.

And, therefore, that measuring the “deadliness” of a particular day should only be done for Israelis (where every life matters) and not for Palestinians (whose individual lives clearly appear to count for less).

‘Deadliest day’

Indeed, a search of the Nexis database of UK national and local news (including BBC broadcast bulletins) reveals that there were 856 uses of the phrase “deadliest day” from 7 October 2023 until 25 January 2024, none of which directly referred to evidence of Palestinian deaths in Gaza.

The only exception to this were some BBC bulletins on 25 October which mentioned “Palestinians reporting the deadliest day in Gaza” (emphasis added).

Otherwise, there was not a single reference during this period across the British media to “the deadliest day for Palestinians” or “for the people of Gaza”.

The other approximately 850 references directly related only to Israeli casualties. Some 28 per cent of them focused on the killing of IDF soldiers on 22 January.

The vast majority referred to the events of 7 October, described either as “the deadliest day for Jews” or “the deadliest day for the Jewish people” which accounted for some 25% of all references.

Many of these stories were focused on the words of U.S. president Joe Biden who, in a much publicised speech to Jewish leaders at the White House, described the Hamas attack on 7 October as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”.

Biden’s words alone make up 20% of all references to the “deadliest day” trope.

Perhaps Biden’s words were on the minds of editors across the world as they listened to Israeli spokespeople on the morning of 23 January and that the deaths of 24 IDF soldiers merited such a phrase when talking about Israeli lives.

Framing the war

But why has the phrase not been used in relation to Palestinians and, indeed, why is there so little preoccupation with days when particularly large number of Gazans are killed?

Precisely because the war is not framed in a way which recognises the equal worth of all those affected—in other words, a situation where every instance of significant Palestinian casualties would deserve a headline—it’s hard to be certain of which have been the very deadliest days for the residents of Gaza.

However, it’s clear that the period immediately after the temporary ceasefire in the last week of November saw particularly intense airstrikes and there were, according to Al Jazeera, at least 700 Palestinians killed on 2 December alone.

Yet there was no mention in the UK media about this being the “deadliest day” for Palestinians. Instead, the Guardian simply ran with a headline of “‘Israel says its ground forces are operating across ‘all of Gaza’” while the Sunday Times wrote that “Fears for hostages as Gazans say bombardment is worse than ever”.

According to the Mail Online,

Israel says it is expanding its ground operations against Hamas’ strongholds across the whole of the Gaza Strip as IDF continues to bomb territory after terrorists broke fragile truce.

The BBC’s TV news bulletins on 3 December carried distressing footage of casualties but also featured a quote from an adviser to Netanyahu saying that “Israel was making the ‘maximum effort’ to avoid killing civilians” without carrying an immediate rebuttal of this outrageous claim.

In other words, despite the fact that 30 times more Palestinians were killed on 2 December than when the 24 IDF soldiers were killed, there was no recognition of the “deadliness” of that day.

Instead, the framing was all about the strategic plans of the Israeli military rather than the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

‘Intensive strike’

On 26 December, a further 241 people were killed by Israeli bombs. Britain’s “newspaper of record”, The Times, responded with the headline: “Israel-Gaza war: Palestinians hit by ‘most savage bombing’” with a sub heading that “Israel launches most intensive strike since Hamas attack on October 7”.

You could be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing deadly about this episode because, after all, Palestinians were only being “struck” as opposed to brutally killed.

But this was hardly an exceptional day given that Oxfam reported earlier this year that Israel’s military was killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, a figure it said exceeded the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.

There is clearly a brutal politics to counting the dead. The New York Times ran an article on 22 January headlined “The Decline of Deaths in Gaza” arguing that average daily deaths across a 30-day period have now fallen below 150.

For the NYT, it is “plausible that a lower percentage of deaths are among civilians now that Israel’s attacks have become more targeted and the [average] daily toll has declined”.

Not only, however, is there little evidence that the IDF is in any way opposed to killing civilians but the idea that casualties are declining at a time when we are soon likely to see a total of 30,000 Palestinian deaths is profoundly shocking.

Any slowdown in the rate of killing is hardly a consolation to the millions who still live in fear of IDF raids and rockets.

Media consensus

The media consensus that only Israelis are the victims of the “deadliest days” in the region and not Palestinians, despite the latter accounting for 95% of deaths since 7 October, is one of the many illustrations of the unequal and profoundly distorted coverage of this war.

Until the South African government submitted its partially successful claim to the International Court of Justice, news organisations were unwilling even to investigate the genocidal language of Israeli political and military leaders.

The media also routinely uses dehumanising and differential language where Israelis are “massacred” while Palestinians simply “die”. This illustrates the awful role of the mainstream media in paving the way for the ethnic cleansing we are currently seeing.

The real reason you don’t see or hear the media talk about a “deadly day” for Palestinians is that every day is deadly when you live in Gaza.