April 25, 2024
A
top official for the militant group has said it will turn into a purely
political party if the Palestinians are given their own state
Hamas is willing
to lay down arms if a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
reached along the pre-1967 borders, a top political official for the group,
Khalil al-Hayya, has told AP. Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of
Israel, had previously outright rejected such a possibility.
In an interview
on Thursday, al-Hayya said Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) to form a unified government that would control Gaza and the
West Bank.
Hamas would
agree to “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the
international resolutions” along Israel’s pre-1967 borders, he claimed.
As a result of
the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations, the Jewish
state occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Syria’s Golan Heights, and other areas.
If a two-state
solution is reached, the military wing of Hamas will dissolve, the official,
who represents the group in the now stalled ceasefire and prisoner exchange
talks with Israel, insisted.
“All the
experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became
independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces
done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting
forces have turned into the national army,” al-Hayya explained.
According to AP,
it is “unlikely” that Israel would consider such a scenario as Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting Hamas until its complete
elimination, and has repeatedly spoken out against a sovereign Palestinian
state.
In January,
another senior Hamas official – Khaled Mashal – told Kuwaiti podcaster Amar
Taki that “we have nothing to do with the two-state solution.” The
group’s members “reject this notion, because it means you would get a
promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the
legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity,” he said.
Mashal insisted
that the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, in which at least 1,200 people
were killed and 250 taken hostage, was a sign that the Palestinians could
retake all their lands. “I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine
from the river to the sea and from the north to the south has been renewed,”
he said.
Seraj Assi
April
24, 2024
The
Columbia professor’s legacy is a scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy and
moral corruption of U.S. liberal institutions.
Students
across the United States are rising up against Israel’s
genocide in Gaza, bringing to memory the student movements of the 1960s. From
Columbia to Brown, from Yale to Harvard, students are staging sit-ins, hunger
strikes, class walkouts, and interfaith prayers, demanding an end to U.S.
support for Israel and the complicity of their academic institutions in the
ongoing genocide.
While
some U.S. institutions are treading a delicate path, the Columbia University
administration, led by President Minouche Shafik, has violently cracked down on
its own students, summoning the NYPD to mass arrest over 100 students, and
suspending others with a 15-minute notice. In an unprecedented brutal crackdown
on free speech on campus, the police destroyed solidarity encampments and
student belongings, while charging arrested students with “trespassing” on the
campus that they are charged a whopping tuition of more than $60,000 a year to
attend!
In
its attempt to appease far-right extremists in Congress, and to save Columbia
from “being cursed by God,” as a Republican Congressman warned Shafik, Columbia
has sided with genocide, thus undermining its own legacy of safeguarding free
speech and peaceful protest on campus.
The
violence has backfired, as hundreds of students continue to protest at
Columbia, sparking a ripple effect across U.S. campuses, and defying what they
see as a growing McCarthyism in U.S. academia. An early target of this academic
McCarthyism was the prominent Palestinian-American intellectual and
distinguished Columbia Professor Edward Said, whose writings on
postcolonialism, humanism, and democratic criticism are required readings at
Columbia and across the humanities.
Said
was a victim of anti-Palestinian intimidation himself. His office at Columbia
was occasionally raided and vandalized. He received several death threats and
was smeared with terrorism accusations and spied on by students and AIPAC
agents. Shortly before his death, Said became the target of a vicious academic
persecution, which he survived only because Columbia still had a shred of
academic and moral integrity at the time.
In
July 2000, Said went to South Lebanon on a solidarity tour, where he hurled a
rock toward an Israeli guardhouse from the Lebanese border, which he described
as “a symbolic gesture of joy” to mark the end of Israeli occupation of
southern Lebanon. A photographer caught the action, featuring Said with his arm
reached far behind him, ready to throw. The Israeli lobby, led by
Anti-Defamation League, called on Columbia to punish Said. Columbia refused to
be intimidated, though it took the administration two months of eerie silence
to respond. In its five-page letter response, the university said that Said’s
action was protected under the principles of academic freedom. Citing John
Stuart Mill as well as from the Columbia Faculty Handbook, the letter asserted:
There is nothing more fundamental to a
university than the protection of the free discourse of individuals who should
feel free to express their views without fear of the chilling effect of a
politically dominant ideology… This matter cuts to the heart of what are
fundamental values at a great university.
In
defense of Said, the letter added: “If we are to deny Professor Said the
protection to write and speak freely, whose speech will next be suppressed and
who will be the inquisitor who determines who should have a right to speak his
or her mind without fear of retribution?”
The
era of moral clarity and intellectual integrity in academia is now unraveling
amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The tragic irony is that the current atmosphere
of anti-Palestinian McCarthyism on U.S. campuses—led by an unlikely coalition
of far-right Republicans, mainstream media, and liberal academic
institutions—was foreseen by none other than Said himself. In his seminal
essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (1979), Said warned:
The special, one might even call it
the privileged, place in this discussion of the United States is impressive,
for all sorts of reasons. In no other country, except Israel, is Zionism
enshrined as an unquestioned good, and in no other country is there so strong a
conjuncture of powerful institutions and interests—the press, the liberal
intelligentsia, the military-industrial complex, the academic community, labor
unions—for whom […] uncritical support of Israel and Zionism enhances their
domestic as well as international standing.”
Presaging
the rise of anti-Palestinian McCarthyism in academia, Said detected a state of
academic repression and campus policing in which Palestinians “have no
permission to narrative” and are increasingly demonized and silenced in the
name of fighting antisemitism—a loaded concept that has become a shield for
Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Perceptively, Said
warned of weaponizing antisemitism and the plight of Jews in Europe as a means
to suppress and vilify Palestinians, and to justify Israel’s oppression of its
victims. He understood that systematically inflating antisemitism with the
critique of Zionism was feeding anti-Palestinian sentiments in U.S. academic
and media discourse. He further warned:
One must admit, however, that all
liberals and even most “radicals” have been unable to overcome the Zionist
habit of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Any wellmeaning person can
thus oppose South African or American racism and at the same time tacitly
support Zionist racial discrimination against non-Jews in Palestine. The almost
total absence of any handily available historical knowledge from non-Zionist
sources, the dissemination by the media of malicious simplifications (e.g.,
Jews vs. Arabs), the cynical opportunism of various Zionist pressure groups,
the tendency endemic to university intellectuals uncritically to repeat cant
phrases and political clichés (this is the role Gramsci assigned to traditional
intellectuals, that of being “experts in legitimation”), the fear of treading
upon the highly sensitive terrain of what Jews did to their victims, in an age
of genocidal extermination of Jews—all this contributes to the dulling,
regulated enforcement of almost unanimous support for Israel.
The
assault on Columbia students is an attack on constitutional rights and the
basic tenets of democracy. It’s deplorable that the one of the most violent
crackdown on student protests in U.S. history is coinciding with one of the
worst genocides in recent memory, which has killed over 35,000 Palestinians in
Gaza, most of them children, and displaced nearly two million others.
One
day after the mass arrests at Columbia, Palestinians in Gaza unearthed large
mass graves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, containing hundreds of civilians
and patients who were massacred or buried alive by Israel. More deplorable,
from the young generation’s standpoint, is that this genocide is being backed
and sustained by U.S. weapons and tax money, diplomatic support, and media and
academic complicity. (The Biden administration is preparing to send its largest
military aid package to Israel in U.S. history, with bipartisan blessing.)
Despite massive protests, U.S. colleges have refused to divest from Israel over
its genocidal war in Gaza (with few notable exceptions that include Rutgers and
UC Davis.) Several universities, including Columbia, have suspended the
chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Edward
Said’s legacy reads today as a scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy of U.S.
liberal institutions, their moral corruption, and the hollowness of the very
values that they profess to teach. This irony is best illustrated by a Columbia
student’s protest sign, which read:
“Columbia,
why require me to read Prof. Edward Said, if you don’t want me to use it?”
Jake Johnson
With the support of nearly 80% of
the chamber’s lawmakers, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved a sprawling
foreign aid package that includes $17 billion in unconditional military
assistance for the Israeli government as it ramps up its catastrophic assault
on the Gaza Strip.
The final vote on the $95 billion
package, which also included military aid for Ukraine and Taiwan, was 79-18,
with just three members of the Senate Democratic caucus—Sens. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)—and 15 Republicans
opposing the bill.
Sanders called Tuesday “a dark day
for democracy,” condemning the upper chamber’s refusal to even allow a vote on
his proposed amendment to cut offensive military aid to Israel from the
legislation.
“I voted no tonight on the foreign
aid package for one simple reason: U.S. taxpayers should not be providing
billions more to the extremist Netanyahu government to continue its devastating
war against the Palestinian people,” Sanders said in a statement following the
vote. “Thirty-four thousand Palestinians have already been killed and 77,000
have been wounded—70% of whom are women and children.”
“The housing in Gaza is destroyed;
the infrastructure in Gaza is destroyed; the healthcare system in Gaza is
destroyed; the educational system in Gaza is destroyed,” Sanders added. “Enough
is enough. No more money for Netanyahu’s war machine.”
The bill, which passed the House
over the weekend, now heads to the desk of President Joe Biden, who is expected
to sign it in the coming days.
“That Congress passed many billions
of dollars for new weaponry for Israel that will be used to devastate Gaza, and
could be used in a war against Iran, is deeply disturbing,” said the National
Iranian American Council.
The 79 senators who voted to pass Biden's foreign aid bill/expand Israel's genocide in Gaza:
Overwhelming congressional and White
House support for arms and military support stands in stark contrast to U.S.
public opinion, which has increasingly turned against Israel’s assault on Gaza
in recent months as the grisly death toll and humanitarian emergency have
worsened and evidence of Israeli war crimes has mounted.
As Tuesday’s vote took place,
thousands of Jewish New Yorkers and allies rallied outside of Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) home to voice outrage over U.S. lawmakers’
growing complicity in Israel’s military assault.
“We’re here as thousands of Jewish
New Yorkers, calling on Senator Schumer to halt weapons funding to Israel as it
massacres and starves Palestinians in Gaza,” said Eva Borgwardt, national
spokesperson for IfNotNow, one of the groups that organized the mass
demonstration on the second night of Passover.
A Gallup survey released last month
found that 55% of U.S. voters—including 75% of Democrats, 60% of Independents,
and 30% of Republicans—disapprove of Israel’s military assault on Gaza. A
separate poll commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research
showed that a majority of American voters support halting U.S. weapons
shipments to Israel.
Since October, the Biden
administration has quietly approved more than 100 arms sales to Israel,
flouting U.S. laws that prohibit weapons deliveries to countries that are
violating human rights or blocking American humanitarian aid.
“As I have said countless times,
sending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government the munitions it is
using to destroy Gaza is wrong and inconsistent with our foreign policy goals,”
Welch said Tuesday after voting against the aid package. “It is unthinkable
that an ally of the U.S. would conduct its military campaign with planes,
tanks, bombs, and artillery supplied by the U.S., while impeding access for aid
trucks to destitute civilians under its occupation.”
“Urgent calls for peace are loudly
echoing across the country but seem to fall on deaf ears on Capitol Hill.”
Days before the Senate vote, mass
graves were discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently
raided and destroyed. The United Nations Human Rights Office on Tuesday
demanded an international probe into the mass graves, noting that bodies of
Palestinians were found stripped naked with their hands tied.
“Victims had reportedly been buried
deep in the ground and covered with waste,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson
for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva on
Tuesday.
One Gaza official toldCNN that a
total of 300 bodies were found in a mass grave at the Nasser Medical Complex in
Khan Younis and that “there were signs of field executions.”
“The U.S. government is arming a
regime creating mass graves in Gaza, indeed turning all of Gaza into a mass
graveyard,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab
World Now, wrote on social media Tuesday.
On the heels of the Senate vote,
Agence France-Pressenoted that one of its correspondents and eyewitnesses
“reported heavy bombardment of several areas of northern Gaza.”
“Early Wednesday, hospital and
security sources in Gaza reported Israeli air strikes in Rafah, as well as the
central Nuseirat refugee camp,” the outlet reported.
The anti-war group CodePink said in
a statement after Tuesday’s vote in the U.S. Senate that “urgent calls for
peace are loudly echoing across the country but seem to fall on deaf ears on
Capitol Hill.”
“People and the planet desperately
need healthcare, housing, and climate justice, not a further descent into
darkness through this massive war bill that funds death and destruction,” the
group added. “Every elected official who voted in favor of this bill has blood
on their hands.”
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