Israel Is Committing One of history’s Great Crimes in Gaza

Ellen Cantarow

April 15, 2024

Since October 8, I’ve been riveted by the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the Israeli military, which had prepared for it in a retrospectively unsettling fashion by decades of dehumanizing Palestinians.

 

 A boy holds a banner showing a child and written 'Gaza Stop Genocide!' during a pro-Palestine demonstration held in front of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs in the French capital, Paris, France on February 14, 2024.(Photo: Umit Donmez/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having blocked all medical supplies).

It has taken the Jewish state’s savagery to break decades of silence about its history of crimes against humanity. U.S. military historian Robert Pape has called the onslaught against Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour has said that we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate of any military… since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

An Unsent Letter

Palestine is finally an international cause. Outrage surges via global demonstrations. Israel has become a pariah in the Global South. In the United States, organizations including A Jewish Voice for Peace, CODEPINK, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights have been marching against the horrors now underway.

Within this charged atmosphere, the 66th reunion of my 1958 Philadelphia High School for Girls graduating class will take place in June 2024. Girls’ High was that city’s leading academic public high school of my time, together with its brother school, Central High (attended by Noam Chomsky). It was stellar not only for its academic excellence but for its integration of Black and White students at a time of deep segregation elsewhere. My mother, who graduated from Girls’ High in 1924, sent me there because of its policy of racial inclusiveness.

I recently began preparing an open letter to my classmates about the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing settler pogroms of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank—houses burned, olive trees uprooted, Palestinians made to flee. Ours is the prototypical Zionist generation, and I particularly wanted to address my former classmates, some of whom still cling stubbornly to their allegiance to Israel. I was told, however, that there wouldn’t be time to read the letter at our reunion which lasts just a few afternoon hours. What follows, then, is based on the letter I was preparing to read then, had the time been available.

Zionism and The Six Day War

In the early 1950s, my best childhood friend collected money to plant trees in Israel. At one point, her synagogue, which sponsored that project, needed “straight pins.” Somehow, I heard “shraypins” instead, a mysterious Hebrew word my imagination concocted and that her friends would find funny indeed. Zionism, in other words, was simply foreign to me.

The first time I recall a thrill from it came right after Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six Day War. I was then actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement on my graduate school campus and, on a trip to Paris that year, didn’t want to identify as American. I spoke French quite well and not being able to tell from my slight accent that I was an American, someone asked me where I was from. Searching for a nationality I wouldn’t be ashamed of, I blurted out that I was an “Israelite.”

“Oh, your people!” he exclaimed. “Such a small people, but such a brave people!” For the first time, I felt deeply proud of being Jewish, not the sort of Jew who had (to my mind) cowered in a ghettoized Europe, but a strong, triumphant Jew with a powerful army. Soon after, my husband told me about Israel’s history—its 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs and its exploitation of the territories it illegally occupied after the 1967 war. Not long after that, I read Noam Chomsky’s first book about Israeli settler-colonialism, Peace in the Middle East?, and never looked back.

Settler Violence in the 1970s

My husband, Louis Kampf, taught in the humanities department of MIT. Chomsky was a colleague and became a good friend. It was under his influence that, in 1979, I first went to Israel and visited the occupied West Bank. I had an assignment to write about Israeli women—I was then a feminist columnist for Cambridge’s The Real Paper—and also agreed to do pieces for New York’s The Village Voice and Liberation Magazine. For the Voice I wrote about Gush Emunim—the Bloc of the Faithful, the ancestor of the Jewish settlers’ movement. For Liberation, I wrote about a Palestinian village, Halhul, two of whose teenagers were murdered by Israeli settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba.

I stayed in Kiryat Arba, thanks to a distant cousin of my husband’s who got me there in an undercover fashion. One of my interviewees assured me that she believed in “a great chain of being,” Jews on top, all other humans below, with Arabs at the very bottom, just before animals, vegetables, and minerals. Her husband referred to the Talmudic injunction to “rise and kill first.” Another settler assured me that the Arabs could stay on the West Bank only if they would “bow their heads.”

Muhammad Milhem, Halhul’s mayor, led me to the highest hill in his village and, pointing toward Kiryat Arba, said, “This is a cancer in our midst.” I wonder if he realized how tragically prophetic his words would prove to be.

Genocide in the 2020s

Since October 8, I’ve been riveted by the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the Israeli military, which had prepared for it in a retrospectively unsettling fashion by decades of dehumanizing Palestinians. Hamas clearly committed war crimes on October 7, but international rules still govern war. A nation’s reprisal for acts against its population must still be proportional to the original crime, which Israel’s war on Gaza isn’t—not faintly! Instead, it’s been distinctly genocidal. On March 28, Reutersreported that, according to Gaza’s health ministry, at least 32,552 Palestinians had been killed and 74,980 injured in Israel’s post-October 7 military offensive in the Gaza Strip, while more than 7,000 Gazans are missing, many likely buried under the rubble.

Israel has cut off most food and water to the region. A March 18 Oxfam press release announced that Gaza hunger figures are the “worst on record.” The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that famine, a rare and catastrophic circumstance, is imminent. Usually caused by extreme natural events, the famine in Gaza is wholly human-made. Famine leaves the body prone to all sorts of horrendous diseases. According to the WHO, “[I]llness may ultimately kill more people than Israel’s offensive. Infectious diseases are ‘soaring,’ particularly among children with 100,000 reported cases of diarrhea, 25 times higher than before Israel’s assaults.”

Were I able to show my classmates scenes from the hell that is now the Gaza Strip, where would I begin? Would it be the infant whose face was partially blown off by an Israeli strike? Would it be the 12 year old with burns over 70% of his body? Would it be the countless unarmed civilians, including children, shot in the head and upper body with murderous intent? Would it be a baby with both legs amputated, who will never learn to walk?

Dr. Yasser Khan, an ophthalmologist specializing in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, spent 10 days in Gaza and, in an interview with a reporter from TheIntercept, described what he had seen in the European Gaza Hospital, now barely functioning, where 35,000 people were reportedly sheltering. People were cooking in the hallways of a building in which no sterile environment was possible because there was nothing with which to sterilize. The medical workers were still often performing 14 or 15 amputations on children daily. Khan saw patients like an eight-year-old girl, rescued from the rubble with a fractured leg, all of whose family—mother, father, aunts, uncles—was wiped out. And there are thousands more like her, suffering from trauma that coming generations will undoubtedly inherit. They have given rise to a new acronym: WCNSF, or Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Khan removed the eyes of patients whose faces had been damaged by shrapnel, leaving an appearance he dubbed “shrapnel face.”

Aid Workers Targeted

I would have wanted to remind my classmates that Israel has frequently targeted aid workers, killing seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) employees in early April. The Israelis claimed that it was an accident and fired the officers it held responsible. But chef Jose Andres, WCK founder, insisted the attack was purposeful, that Israel had targeted the aid convoy “car by car.”

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” Andres said. “This was over 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful logo that we are obviously very proud of. It’s very clear who we are and what we do.”

“WCK is not just any relief organization,” wrote Jack Mirkinson in TheNation magazine. “Andrés is a global celebrity with ties to the international political establishment. WCK had been working closely with the Israeli government both in Gaza and in Israel proper. It would be difficult to think of a more mainstream, well-connected group.” It was as if Israel were showing off, Mirkinson added, “flaunting its ability to cross every known line of international humanitarian law and get away with it.”

International Court of Justice Ruling

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on January 26 that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is a plausible case of genocide, and additional testimony from Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” only emphasized that point, given how little is left but rubble in so much of Gaza. The majority of its homes no longer exist, nor do its schools, universities, libraries, or music conservatories.

Violating the 49th Geneva Convention, Israel has fired on ambulances and killed more than 685 health workers, while wounding about 900 of them. It has destroyed all but a few of Gaza’s 36 formerly flourishing hospitals, claiming that Hamas fighters are hiding in tunnels under the buildings. Against the civilian population Israel has used weapons like white phosphorous, which burns to the bone and cannot be easily extinguished. In the past, the Israeli military has been known for using Gaza as a laboratory for weapons experiments and the same is true of the current round of fighting.

Israel’s “war” against Gaza did not, of course, start on October 7. In 2006, after Gazans elected Hamas to govern them, Israel imposed a siege on the strip. As lawyer Dov Weisglass, then an aide to the prime minister, said at the time, he wanted to keep Gazans just below starvation level—not enough to kill them, but not enough to fill them either. The present siege has turned Gaza into what’s been called the largest open-air prison on Earth, a virtual concentration camp. A U.N. commentator described this as “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.” Such conditions helped produce the October attack.

Occupying the West Bank since 1967, Israel has distinctly contravened international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.” Israel, however, has settled about 700,000 Israeli Jews in the West Bank. Once upon a time, there was indeed room for a separate Palestinian state. No more.

Arabs to the Gas Chambers

When I visited the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s, I saw graffiti on walls that proclaimed: “ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS.” Back then, the renowned Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their victims bear out his prophecy. Fascism is now pervasive in Israel. There are courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted something worse. I wish I could have told my classmates that, should they care about Israel, it’s their responsibility to speak out now.

The genocide in Gaza has been enabled, of course, by President Joe Biden, who continues to send billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, including devastating 2,000-pound bombs, to Israel. Without those arms, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t be acting as it is. While it purports to be searching for and killing Hamas perpetrators of the October 7 atrocities, it’s actually gone to war against the entire population of Gaza. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe sees it as “a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing of depopulation.”

When Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazis, the world turned away. Now, the world has awakened to Israel’s crimes. Many American Jews, like those in Jewish Voice for Peace (whose demonstrations I’ve attended) are indeed speaking out.

It’s often asked how a people who suffered so much could cause such suffering. In fact, almost all the survivors of the Holocaust are dead. Obviously, none of the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank were in European concentration camps. In a 1979 interview, renowned Israeli dissident Hebrew University chemistry professor Israel Shahak pointed out that no Holocaust survivor had ever been a member of the Israeli government. Israel frequently uses the Holocaust to justify its actions in the Palestinian territories. This is a sacrilege, while one of history’s great crimes is being committed, and this member of the class of 1958 knows it.

 

Gun Culture, Israeli Style

Mitchell Plitnick

 

( Waging Nonviolence ) -Firearms are not uncommon in Israel. Armed security guards have long been a routine sight at shopping malls, clubs, and other large gathering spaces that present potential targets for attacks by militants. Police are heavily armed, and off-duty soldiers are constantly seen with their weapons in public as they head to or from their military posts. Settlements in the West Bank have armed guards around them.

Yet as militarized as Israeli society has always been, civilian gun control laws there have been restrictive, especially compared to the United States. In the most recent global study, the 2017 Small Arms Survey found that gun ownership was most widespread in the United States, unsurprisingly, with 120.5 guns per 100 people in the population. Israel, by stark contrast, had only 6.7 guns per 100 people. And Israel’s restrictive gun ownership laws and the difficulty of getting a license for a firearm did not change significantly until Itamar Ben Gvir came into office.

A far-right extremist, Ben Gvir became the Minister for National Security  through Israel’s last election in 2022. He is a long-time extremist activist, head of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, who, in 2007, was convicted on charges of incitement to racism. His extremism is so virulent that he was exempted from serving in the Israel Defense Forces because of it. Soon after assuming office, Ben Gvir vowed to increase the gun permits issued by his ministry from around 2,000 to 10,000 a month, and to reduce the waiting period from six to eight months to two to three.

Long before the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Israeli society was already witnessing a rise in gun ownership. From 2021 to 2022, applications for gun ownership more than doubled, according to a March 2023 report by the BBC. But Ben Gvir wanted more. He wanted a large vigilante force among the citizenry — especially those Israelis who live in West Bank settlements and in mixed Arab-Jewish towns in Israel. It’s not hard to read that as an intent to promote Jewish Israelis shooting Palestinians, both citizens of Israel and those residing in the West Bank.

In April, Ben Gvir got the government to concede to his plan for a “national guard” that was essentially a private militia under his authority. He demonstrated what that authority would look like over the summer when he announced that settlers who shoot at Palestinians in the West Bank would no longer have their weapons confiscated. Until then, police would confiscate the weapon, usually temporarily, as they investigated the incident. Although the settlers would routinely get the weapons back, the change in policy sent a very clear message that it was open season on Palestinians.

Since October 7, Ben Gvir has moved even faster. “The minister’s policy to distribute weapons to eligible Israeli citizens is clear and ongoing,” read a statement in early December from Ben Gvir’s office.

“Ongoing” is an understatement. Since Oct. 7, the National Security Ministry has received about 255,000 firearm applications, and approved some 20,000, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. And those approvals are not coming about legally.

On Dec. 3, Yisrael Avisar, the head of the ministry’s firearms division, was forced to resign because he followed Ben Gvir’s directive to circumvent the process for gun ownership in order to accelerate approvals. Ben Gvir had appointed dozens of “temporary licensing officials” with virtually no training to expedite certain gun ownership applications. Given Ben Gvir’s stated intention to give guns to Israelis in settlements and in mixed towns, it is clear who was being prioritized.

One ministry official described it as giving out guns “like candy.” Consequently a country now engaged in the most destructive behavior in its history, as it literally flattens Gaza, is also moving more toward resembling its patron, the United States, in internal gun violence, as its once-restrictive attitude toward guns fades away in the shadow of rage and fear.

A recent incident illustrated the consequences to Israelis.

On Nov. 30, Israeli attorney Yuval Doron Kastelman was driving to work in Jerusalem when he saw an attack underway at a bus stop across the road. Hamas gunmen had undertaken the attack, which ended up killing three people and wounding eight before the attackers themselves were gunned down.

Kastelman, who had a licensed pistol, intervened to stop the attack. According to reports, it was he who killed the militants. But when Israeli soldiers arrived at the scene, they shot him. Worse, video of the incident shows that he threw down his weapon, opened his coat to show he was unarmed, and pleaded with the soldiers not to shoot. They killed him anyway.

Although the soldier who killed Kastelman was arrested, the action was one that would have been routine in Israel had Kastelman been the “terrorist” the soldier presumably believed him to be.

Palestinian attackers are routinely killed whether or not they still present a threat. In one case, in 2016, a soldier, Elor Azaria, killed a Palestinian man, Fattah al-Sharif, as he lay wounded and helpless on the ground. Azaria ultimately served only nine months in prison for the killing.

Al-Sharif was barely conscious, and had only been armed with a knife. He and another Palestinian had attacked Israeli soldiers as they enforced Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; they did not attack civilians.

During and after his trial, Israeli military and political officials said Azaria’s actions were against military regulations and “serious,” but did not condemn him. Some of the more militant leaders, such as Avigdor Liberman and future prime minister Naftali Bennett, even excused Azaria’s actions. Bennett called for him to be pardoned.

Many Israelis shared this sentiment. There was clearly a sense among those Israelis that even after Palestinian militants presented no threat, they were deserving of immediate execution without trial.

This atmosphere has only grown more intense over the intervening years. As Israel’s government lurched farther rightward and incursions into Palestinian areas became more frequent and violent the sense that any Palestinian militant must die has grown stronger. A December 2, 2023 editorial in Haaretz noted that this view has been promoted for years by Israeli politicians and more recently by social media influencers and right-wing media figures.

This is the dangerous atmosphere into which Minister of Public Security Itamar Ben Gvir stepped. Almost immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks, Ben Gvir announced the purchase for distribution of 10,000 rifles, along with some number of helmets and bulletproof vests. All of this was intended not for Israeli security, police, or military, but for private citizens.

Ben Gvir even caused consternation among Americans when a video went viral showing him at public events simply handing out rifles. The events were right-wing political rallies in the towns of Bnei Brak and Elad, two strongholds of religious Zionism in Israel. The videos were taken seriously enough that even the administration of Joe Biden, which has backed Israel to the hilt in its assault on Gaza, threatened to stop selling Israel rifles if they were going to be distributed to civilians.

Yuval Kastelman’s killing reflects a shoot-first mentality when it comes to Palestinian assailants, or those whom security forces mistake for Palestinians. But the principle that you don’t shoot, much less kill, a person who is no longer — or perhaps never was — a threat, is there precisely to avoid tragedies like the one that befell Kastelman.

The United States has failed to learn that lesson, to our sorrow. The list of people killed by police unnecessarily is distressingly long. Kastelman’s death resonates particularly with the police killing in a Chicago suburb of Jemel Roberson in 2018. He was a security guard at a club who subdued a shooter and was gunned down by police when they arrived.

Israel is always a more tense place than the United States. Its dispossession of Palestinians and ongoing occupation widen the likelihood that there will be some sort of unexpected attack. That has been the case for all of its history, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the subsequent massive violence Israel has unleashed on Gaza and the intensified attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since Hamas’ operation greatly raises that state of tension. While that state of fear and alarm leads, unsurprisingly, to many Israelis wanting to arm themselves, it is also the most dangerous atmosphere into which to pump a large flow of firearms.

As the already-mentioned editorial in Haaretz pointed out about the Kastelman killing, “The link between this campaign [to justify killing Palestinians even if they no longer pose a threat] and the policy of wholesale distribution of firearms initiated by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has brought anarchy and the Wild West to Israel. In the incident in Jerusalem the mistake was made by soldiers, but there is no doubt that the continued distribution of weapons will lead to further mistakes in the future.”

Long-time Israeli peace and justice activist Rela Mazali told the BBC in March 2023 that there is no evidence that more guns reduces either the number of attacks or the number of victims. “It is claimed and claimed again, and it’s claimed so often that it’s widely believed to be the truth. But there are really no supporting statistics,” she said.

Instead, Mazali said, more guns have led to more murders in Israel and to a general rise in gun violence, with the victims being largely focused in the community of Palestinian citizens of Israel and disproportionately affecting women, both Jewish and Palestinian.

A Times of Israel report by Jeremy Sharon at the end of April, 2023, backed up Mazali’s words. It noted that in the first four months of that year, homicides in Israel had doubled over the same period in 2022. This was largely due to Ben Gvir’s inattention to crime in the Palestinian communities of Israel, yet homicides among Jews had risen as well.

But the greatest concern is in the West Bank. Attacks by settlers under the protection of the Israeli army had already been rising before Oct. 7, but they have grown since. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, between Oct. 7 and the beginning of December Israeli settlers murdered eight harmless Palestinian residents of the West Bank, all by shooting them with guns.

More guns also means more impunity. As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reports, settlers have led the ongoing campaign to force Palestinians to abandon their villages in the West Bank, an object that has characterized many of the armed settler attacks since Oct. 7.

Despite Ben Gvir’s efforts, Israel still has a long way to go before it even begins to approach the United States in its internal gun epidemic. But if that epidemic in the U.S. is greatly exacerbated by issues of institutional racism and societal misogyny, those same conditions exist in similar forms in the context of Israel — and in Israel they are magnified by the trauma of Oct. 7, not to mention the heightened tension in the country due to the massive killing of Palestinians (over 27,000 as this goes to press, mostly women and children) in Gaza.

While the Biden administration displayed a welcome bit of good sense in making it clear to Israel that it would not supply guns to be given to civilians, Ben Gvir is unlikely to allow that to stop him. Few Israelis will object right now to equipping settlers with rifles, as hostility toward Palestinians in general has intensified. But a permissive attitude toward guns will only lead to an increase in violence and, just as importantly, will crystallize the anger felt by both sides, making any hope of justice and reconciliation even more remote.

 

Israeli Firms Are Working Overtime to Sell Stolen Palestinian Land to US Jews

Eleanor Goldfield

April 13, 2024

 A Zionists encircle anti-Zionist protesters standing with keffiyehs and a sign reading "Waterfront properties built upon bulldozed bodies" outside of Shomrei Emunah in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Your chance to own a piece of the Holy Land!” exclaims the cheerful advertising copy on a real estate website aimed at attracting buyers in the U.S. and Canada to purchase land located in Israel and in a number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The site describes five land sale events that occurred this spring in the U.S. and Canada.

Another land sale event held in Baltimore invited attendees to “Buy Your Home in Israel Now!” But, as with the other events, attendees couldn’t just be anyone interested in some freshly stolen land. You have to be Jewish, but not just any kind of Jewish.

Greg Kaplan, a local Jewish community member who wanted to learn more about these restrictive events and who tried signing up for the April 1 land sale event in Baltimore, which was hosted by the Jerusalem-based CapitIL Real Estate Agency, told me:

I got a call from Shmuly Eisenmann of CapitIL. He asked me where I daven, who the rabbi is there, and for the rabbi’s number, seeming incredulous that I wouldn’t just have the rabbi’s number stored in my phone. He said he would check on me with the rabbi and asked if the rabbi would know who I was. I said probably not because I don’t go to shul that much. He asked if there was someone at another shul who could vouch for me.

Kaplan was not allowed into the event, which was scheduled to take place at Shomrei Emunah, “a full-service shul and Jewish center” in Baltimore whose list of speakers and scholars in residence includes an IDF lieutenant colonel.

Gillian Stoll, a member of the New Jersey chapter of IfNotNow, who tried to register for the Teaneck, New Jersey, event on March 31, received a series of phone calls. On the first call, Stoll admits to being caught off guard by a slew of questions including the name of her temple and rabbi, his direct number as well as what the reading was at the temple that week. She gave the name of her old rabbi and temple, and the man calling seemed satisfied for the moment, offering that they had to cancel previously “because of protesters.” She then “got a second call from another not so nice guy saying he called the rabbi and he hadn’t heard of me … and asked how old I was … and if I’d been to Israel.” Stoll was also not allowed into the event.

Needless to say, I — as a secular Jew who hasn’t been to temple since about 2007 and whose most recent run-in with a rabbi involved one chanting alongside me at an anti-Zionist action — didn’t even get a phone call. And while these discriminatory practices might be necessary to avoid a bunch of anti-Zionist protesters in your midst, they are, in fact, illegal.

A recent press release from the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation (PAL) Law Commission pointed out that these land sale events “are illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Civil Rights Act of 1965, since registration, entry, and participation are denied on the basis of identity (i.e., race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion).”

The commission added that these events violate not only U.S. law but also international law with regard to hosts “exhibiting and offering properties on West Bank settlements recognized as illegal by the U.S. Department of State and by international law” including “Article 49 of the Geneva Convention … Settlements have been found to be grave breaches of international law, and therefore war crimes, by the International Court [ICJ] of Justice in 2004, and are also currently under review by the ICJ in the context of the case of South Africa v. Israel for crimes of genocide, and by the International Criminal Court.”

PAL Law Commission has filed notices and complaints with attorneys general and real estate licensing authorities, and has also served formal cease and desist letters alongside notice and demand letters regarding their findings.

When asked about responses from hosts or organizers, PAL spokesperson Hena Zuberi said:

The response we’ve received is them shifting their events online and/or sponsors pulling out of the events, at least publicly. Although this hasn’t been a direct communication with us it came as an effect directly following our legal action and served as a major legal and grassroots victory for the case and the campaign overall. We’ve shut down several events and moved others online through this action.

One such event was scheduled to take place in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at the Khal Bnei Avrohom Yaakov Simcha Hall and was later moved online after both legal action and local protests. Indeed, it’s impossible to say whether legal action, direct action or a combination of the two has pushed the cancellation or relocation of land sale events. Either way, it’s clear that hosts and organizers are uncomfortable with the attention, as they should be.

On the site listing the event in Flatbush as well as events in Montreal; Toronto; Teaneck, New Jersey; and Lawrence, New York, a banner reads “Our expert speakers will address all your questions about purchasing real estate in Israel and focusing on: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramat Beit Shemesh, Modiin, Givat Shmuel, Raanana, Neve Daniel, Efrat, Motza, Haifa, Ma’ale Adumim, Ashkelon, Netanya.”

When I sent this list of location names to Nora Barrows-Friedman, an associate editor at The Electronic Intifada who has covered Palestine for 20 years and has a deep understanding of various demarcated zones and boundaries, she explained:

Neve Daniel and Efrat are major settlements in the area between Bethlehem and Hebron in the West Bank. Efrat is the settlement Palestinians call “the snake” because it’s a narrow but long settlement that snakes atop the hills. Ma’ale Addumim is one of the largest settlements in the West Bank, and Ashkelon is the city just north of Gaza.

Without more information on Modiin, she couldn’t say whether or not it’s Modiin Illit, which is “part of the Ariel/Maale Addumim/E-1 settlement bloc.” However, even without that clarification, it’s clear that much of the property on offer at least five of these land sale events falls within the West Bank. But, as Barrows-Friedman pointed out, “it’s all occupied land, of course.”

Meanwhile, violence and displacement has skyrocketed with roughly 4,000 Palestinians displaced in the West Bank in 2023, the majority after October 7, according to a February report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Tamara Nassar at The Electronic Intifada reported in late March that “Israeli forces and settlers have injured nearly 5,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, more than 700 of them children.” The Express Tribune, a Pakistani partner paper of The New York Times, reported on March 30 that some 27,000 decares of land (roughly 6,600 acres) in the West Bank have been confiscated by Israel just since October 7.

This displacement and violence looks many different ways, from airstrikes and targeted demolition by “military operations,” to physical attacks by armed settlers, to what a friend of mine once called “paper genocide” vis-a-vis Palestinians not having Israeli-issued building permits — permits basically no Palestinian can get because of the apartheid regime’s discriminatory permitting policies. Zuberi points out that, like the violence against Palestinians, these land sale events “have been occurring over a significant period … well before the recent events in Gaza.”

Though an escalation in violence is clear, we must be careful to see October 7 and its aftermath as a continuation of this colonial violence, rather than a beginning. Likewise, the current critical attention being given to land sale events is a credit to the growth of the Palestinian movement, not an indication of Israel having adopted a new colonialist tactic.

In short, be it 1948, 1967, 2014 or today, Palestine is occupied land, Israel upholds apartheid, and these land sale events are one of many tactics being used to disappear an Indigenous people and culture, to wipe them off the map literally and figuratively, much as was done here in the so-called United States with mass land sale events of so-called “Indian land” in the West.

Outside the land sale event held on the stolen land known as Baltimore, our protest was powerful. Palestinian flags waved above my head along with placards and homemade signs decrying genocide and demanding justice and liberation. Bullhorns carried the message of “Free Palestine” and “Occupation is a Crime.”

A woman paused in front of me and offered up a box of dates. I smiled and took one, thanking her. She smiled back, adjusted her hijab and continued to weave her way between the small crowd that had assembled across the street from Shomrei Emunah, where the land sale event was scheduled to take place.

Meanwhile, across the street in front of Shomrei Emunah, a crowd of Zionist counterprotesters waved the Israeli flag, and several marched across the street to get in our faces, spitting and yelling abuse and threats.

Police presence grew over the course of the evening, but it hardly dissuaded the violent Zionists from harassing our group of peaceful protesters, some of whom were at prayer. Several drivers hurled insults and threats as they drove by, some coming around several times waving Israeli and U.S. flags. A few cars revved their engines and slammed on their brakes in front of us, reminding me very starkly and grotesquely of the terrorist in Charlottesville, Virginia, who drove his car into our group of anti-fascist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others.

As the evening wore on, we heard news that the land sale event had been moved last minute to a new location. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Zuberi told me, “These victories would not have been possible without the relentless pressure mounted by the PAL legal team and the local PAL chapters’ and allies’ grassroots support and organizing.” This grassroots organizing included the Baltimore chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ office in Maryland, and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) as well as individuals such as me who, though not affiliated with any one organization, felt the need to show up.

Cassidy Cohen with Jewish Voice for Peace’s Baltimore chapter added: “We come from a Jewish tradition that has for millennia opposed empire, colonization and nationalism, that values every human life, and is rooted in social justice…. As Jews, we oppose all displacement and genocide of Palestinians. We say never again for anyone.”

In other words, to act in solidarity with tireless Palestinian leadership in the struggle for their liberation is the mandate of all who believe in justice, especially us Jews.