June 18, 2024
The genocide in
Gaza has captured the attention of the world, but nowhere in Palestine is safe
from Israel’s onslaught. Israeli repression, land grabs, and deadly raids in
the West Bank have increased dramatically since Oct. 7. Long subjected to a
brutal apartheid system and routine attacks from settlers and the IDF,
Palestinians in the West Bank now face a more aggravated Zionist threat than
before, with “no light at the end of the tunnel.” Palestinian-American
humanitarian Joyce Ajlouny, director of the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC), joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss her recent trip to Ramallah,
West Bank, her decades of on-the-ground humanitarian work in Palestine, and the
services AFSC aid workers continue to bravely provide to hundreds of thousands
of people under the worst of conditions.
Transcript
The following is
a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made
available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the
Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s wonderful to
have you all with us.
As some of you
know, I’ve been deeply involved in working to end the Israeli occupation of
West Bank and Gaza since 1968. Here at The Real News, I’ve been producing a
series called Not in Our Name, with Jewish voices standing up to Israel, saying
not in our name. But now this slaughter has taken hold.
What’s happening
now is breaking my heart. It’s mind-numbing. On the day we taped this
conversation, the war on Gaza is in its 244th day. No less than 36,654
Palestinians, 71% of them women, children, and infants, have been slaughtered.
83,309 people wounded, with more than 10,000 buried under the rubble of bombed
homes. Almost all of 2.5 million Gazans have been displaced. Communities,
hospitals destroyed, or wastelands.
My guest today
is Joyce Ajlouny, who’s been leading the American Friends Service Committee
since 2017. She’s a Palestinian American and a Quaker, who served as a country
director for Palestine and Israel with Oxfam Great Britain, chaired the
Association of International Development Agencies, and, for 13 years, was the
director of the Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank, which is a K through
12 Quaker school.
Remember the
three Palestinian college students who were shot in Vermont? They were
graduates of that school.
Joyce, welcome.
It’s good to have you with us.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Good to be here.
Thanks for having me, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
I almost don’t
know where to begin. I’ve been covering this so deeply, and you were there
recently. I’ve read the things that you’ve written. To me, it’s almost
impossible to put your hands around what is going on at the moment. I
understand it from people who survived the camps and fought in the Warsaw
ghetto against the Nazis, and I can’t believe that what’s being done in our
name to Palestinian people at this moment.
You’ve been
witnessing it. Tell us a bit about what you feel and what you’ve seen on the
ground.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yeah, it’s true.
Where do we begin, Marc? This is such a deeply concerning issue for us at the
American Friends Service Committee, but also for me personally, where I have
lived most of my life in Ramallah on the West Bank. I have dear friends in
Gaza. Just to see that the world has allowed this level of destruction and
killings to that level of a genocide, to me, is mind-boggling.
It’s hard to
understand when we were relying on so many systems in the world, an order that
will prevent, especially after so many genocides and the Holocaust, that we
have systems in place to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening.
Join thousands
of others who rely on our journalism to navigate complex issues, uncover hidden
truths, and challenge the status quo with our free newsletter, delivered
straight to your inbox three times a week:
A lot of people
ask me, how am I feeling? How am I doing? Myself and Palestinians all over the
world, we’re stunned. We have no more words. We are speechless.
Just watching
our feed only today, 68 innocent people were killed as they were sleeping and
taking shelter in a school. Yesterday, 101. It’s just mind-boggling that this
continues. To me, what really is most frustrating is the complicity of our
government and for them not to do more.
Marc Steiner:
I know on March
7, you participated in a demonstration with AFSC and others where you blocked
the route of Biden’s motorcade. You had some very strong things to say about
what could and should be happening instead of what’s happening now from our
government.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes. Yes. I
think it takes, we have to stretch ourselves to do courageous things, and civil
disobedience is one of them. I was, yes, one of those who took part in that
civil disobedience action, blocking the road at the time of the State of the
Union Address.
It seems like
I’ve been on the Hill many times, I’ve been to the State Department, I’ve been
to the White House, speaking on behalf of AFSC, and to urge the government to
call for a permanent ceasefire, and demand it now, to call for an end to
fueling Israel with weapons, and to ensure that humanitarian access is granted
unfettered to the Palestinian community in Gaza.
Unfortunately,
eight months in, myself and the so many courageous people on the streets taking
the lead of Palestinian Americans, Jewish Americans, people of all faiths, it’s
going to deaf ears, and we are getting lip service in return.
We have seen
some shifts, of course, and we think it’s due to the protest movement, but when
someone, a staffer in a congressman’s office tells us that the phone calls that
they receive calling for a ceasefire are 20 to one, yet that congressman is not
doing anything to call for a ceasefire. It puts to questions, like, nothing is
urging the government to take concrete steps to stop the onslaught.
I think it’s a
phone call away. I think Biden can actually do it if he had the will and the
intention to stop military aid and put pressure on the Israeli government to
stop the onslaught.
Marc Steiner:
He doesn’t have
to play the political game and condemn Israel. I think it would be nice, but he
can bring parties together and create peace like Carter attempted to do at Camp
David.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yeah, I think
you’re right. I think he can, but I also, if and when that happens, it doesn’t
seem like he’s moving in that direction, unfortunately.
Marc Steiner:
No.
Joyce Ajlouny:
I think that
what I have not seen is a vision for a peace process that breaks away from the
past 30 years of this Oslo paradigm that has failed miserably. Unfortunately,
there has to be a reckoning with that, and say, okay, the role that the US has
played for the past 30 years-plus, beyond the Biden administration, has not
brought peace to Palestinians nor Israelis. It has not provided. It wasn’t even
in the best interest of the United States.
Look at where we
are today. In my visit to Palestine last month, people were questioning me
about the role of the United States on our tax dollars and why they are not
doing more. People are pointing the finger at the United States, saying they
are complicit in what is happening in Gaza.
I hope that
whatever happens that it doesn’t take us back to the status quo, and that the
United States can be an honest broker, provide that impartiality as a mediator,
reroute us in international law, in the moral authority for humanity, and
equality, and all the good stuff, UN resolutions past and present, to reroute
us there and to ensure that the Palestinians have the right to
self-determination in whichever way. As long as those principles are upheld,
and that Israel has its security as well.
There are things
that can be done, but I think it takes a will. What I’m not seeing in this
administration very clearly is a will.
Marc Steiner:
Talk a bit about
what you saw when you went to Palestine last month.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Well, I went to
see family and meet staff. AFSC has staff in Gaza. I’d like to talk a little
bit about that, Marc, in a bit.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, please,
please.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes, to visit
family and friends. But let me start a little bit with, I did manage to meet
our staff in Gaza Online. Obviously, my heart was with them. I wanted to go,
people don’t realize how close… Gaza is 60 miles away or so from Ramah where I
was. Yet we had no access, of course, to going.
We did meet them
online in that special moment when they had internet access. That was good
enough. They poured their heart out. I’m just in awe of them, because they are
three staff. They work with many, many volunteers.
Marc Steiner:
Three?
Joyce Ajlouny:
Three, yeah,
they’re three staff: Adham, and Firas, and Serena. But as I said, they work
with other organizations, partner organizations. They have provided food,
hygiene kits, they’ve done activities with children. They have served over half
a million people since Oct. 7.
I am just in awe
of how they do it, because they have lost their homes themselves. They have
been displaced time and time again. It’s just every few weeks, they’re saying,
we’re moving again, we’re moving again.
Last time they
moved from Rafah, and now they are in tents. And yet they wake up in the
morning, they tent for their families, making sure they have food and water if
they can. Then they go off and do AFSC work and provide humanitarian aid as
much as possible, as much as they can find.
We have been
supporting them with that. We have an operation in Egypt. As you know, trucks
of aid that we’ve purchased, just like all other international organizations,
have been stuck at the border. Israel is not letting them in.
Our last truck
that was coming in through Jordan was attacked by the settler motorcade.
Luckily, the flour on the truck was intact and we were able to bring it in. We
are, us old humanitarian organizations, are having a hard time getting our
humanitarian aid in. Nonetheless, the work continues. We continue to support as
much as we can on the ground. We know it’s a drop in the ocean.
But my stay was
in Ramallah. I think one thing that has been absent in the media these days
here in the United States is a focus on what’s going on the West Bank.
It was
petrifying to be there. I couldn’t go on the road to go to a nearby village
because my son who’s there and my mother who’s there were like, no, no, no,
it’s not safe, because of the settler violence.
That has been,
to me, a very stark difference from in the past, where we kind of knew what
roads to avoid, et cetera, to stay safe. This time around, there was this aura
of insecurity that was very stark. I think also settlers are raiding towns
every day.
One family
member had a young daughter, she’s 22 or 23, and they kidnapped her at night.
The Israeli soldiers came in, kidnapped her at 3:00 in the morning and took her
in.
What people
don’t realize is that, since Oct. 7, Israel has detained more than 8,000
Palestinians. That, to me, is an astounding number. The only reason, in my
opinion, that they’ve detained so many people is that they want to use them as
bargaining chips. That’s what happened during the last exchange.
After that deal
as just a temporary ceasefire deal, I believe Israel released some 1,000
Palestinian prisoners, but the next day, they can go back and round them up
again, or round up others. That is what’s happening on the West Bank. It’s
very, very dire. People don’t feel safe. Israeli raids, settler raids are the
name of the game.
Then there’s
this sense of despair, Marc, was what I felt of people who wanted to do so
much, yet they couldn’t. They wanted to reach out to their people in Gaza, to
go there, help out with the humanitarian effort. And that sense of
helplessness, feeling alone, that they couldn’t do much to help their own
people.
At the same
time, I saw a lot of creativity, and I keep talking, I like to talk about the
silver lining sometimes. A radio station that was putting on some educational
materials so young students in Gaza can tune in and learn a thing or two, or
the local university there, Birzeit University, offering the students in Gaza
classes online so they can finish their university degrees.
One architecture
school, they sent images of how to build your own tent to their Gazan
colleagues, et cetera. I think these are the sort of things that I like to talk
about, because it talks about the resilience of the Palestinian community, and
that’s what I saw there.
Marc Steiner:
That is really a
critical point, I think, and for people to understand, is the resilience inside
the Palestinian world, and how people are doing everything they can to survive
and to help one another survive.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
It’s
unfathomable. If I try to explain to people, to talk about what it’s like to
not have your freedom, to not be able to go from village to village, to not see
your parents, to be taken to jail for no reason, other than you’re Palestinian.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yeah. I think,
Marc, I think people don’t understand that this is not an Oct. 7 start date for
this occupation and this apartheid system. I’ve lived through it all my life as
a child. Where do I begin to explain the ins and outs of what it means to be under
the military control of a belligerent, settler-colonial system that wants to
ethnically cleanse me from the land? I believe that that is what’s happening.
It’s really about that. It’s a continuation of that.
So many of my
family members left 10, 20 years ago from Ramallah. They’re living in the
United States, and the reason they left is that Israel has made it unbearable
for people to live there.
I think that
that’s what people don’t realize is that the day in and out of our lives, the
daily humiliation that I remember as a child, and as leading a school there,
seeing how brutal the occupation is. And the trauma, the collective trauma that
has caused for generations. That’s something people can’t really understand,
that now we’re surrounded by walls, and total impunity of anyone who attacks a
village.
There’s no
accountability. Take it from even an American citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh, the
journalist who was targeted and killed, there was no accountability. And times
thousands and tens of thousands now in Gaza who are being targeted and killed,
aid workers. I fear for our staff as aid workers.
There was so
much attention given to the central food kitchen aid workers who were sadly and
tragically targeted and killed, and rightly so, but no one’s talking about the
tens of Palestinian aid workers that have been targeted and killed at the same
time. There’s just the total impunity.
We as
Palestinians, we continue to live in a world that we feel doesn’t regard us as
of value or of equal human beings. That’s how we feel. At the same time, we do
see how the people in the street in the United States and all over the world,
people joining us in our struggle in solidarity that is so strong from the
student encampments, to Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, so many other
groups that are walking the talk and are putting their bodies on the line for
its cause.
To me, when I
was in Ramallah, it was in the midst of those encampments and at the height of
it. I can’t tell you, even our staff in Gaza mentioned them to me, and they
said how much hope they give them. There’s something to be said about the
difference that they have made, at least to lift up the spirits of those who
are living under the gun. That’s important that they continue.
Marc Steiner:
I think that
there’s so much I wanted to talk to you about, maybe we can do it over a
different period of time. One of the things in all the years that you’ve been
doing the work you do, and the years you ran that school, and I watched you on
my friend Amy Goodman’s show reading those poems from the young people who were
from your school that wrote these poems when they were in the sixth grade. I’m
talking about the young people who were shot in Vermont.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Well, two
things. Let me just start with this: Where do you think this goes from here,
and what do you think we have to do to get us there?
Joyce Ajlouny:
I think if
there’s one thing that is positive, if I want to say that, because it’s hard to
put anything positive in it —
Marc Steiner:
I understand.
Yeah.
Joyce Ajlouny:
You understand,
is that for once the Palestinian narrative and the Palestinian story is now out
there, and our narrative about our dispossession in 1948 and our Nakba, our
catastrophe, that narrative is out there. I know there are so many attempts to
silence it, and that’s been the case for decades. Now, people are asking
questions. They are wondering, who are those Palestinians, and why have they
been dispossessed for years?
I think that we
need to do some reckoning with that. People in this country need to do some
reckoning around that, and around their role as the US government in supporting
it. I think that we have seen the people are speaking. And I don’t have the
latest polls, but even so many of the Democrats are saying, we are against what
Israel is doing, and we are against supporting them. There are huge
percentages.
This are the
first time Israel’s being called out, and in such large numbers, because no one
supports genocide. No one wants to put their name next to genocide. It’s going
to come back and haunt us. I know that. I think what we need to do is to stay
the course.
At AFSC, Marc,
I’d like to just say a few things about what we are doing.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, please do.
Joyce Ajlouny:
We’re doing work
on the ground, as I said, the humanitarian work. I don’t know if you know that
AFSC was called by the United Nations in 1948 after the Nakba to set up camps
in the Gaza Strip. We were the first, I think, only organization there doing
that. We were doing the bulk of the work. It was soon after we received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. I think that’s why we were in the limelight a little
bit. The UN asked us to go to Gaza, and we went, and we set up the camps.
Then after that,
the UNRWA, the UN Agency, was created and took over. We remained there since.
We’ve been in Gaza since 1948. On the ground here in the United States, we have
been relentless about our advocacy for Palestinian rights.
For example,
today, we have something we call the Apartheid Free Campaign. We are inviting
faith communities and congregations and organizations to step away from
supporting the apartheid system, and occupation, and settler colonialism. We’re
asking them to take a pledge.
That’s been two
years now in the making, this campaign, because what it does is also opens
conversation. Okay, apartheid, why are you calling it apartheid? Let’s talk
about it. Communities, and congregations, and faith communities are coming
together to discuss and to see if they feel comfortable with the pledge. We
are, in all, over 130 congregations that signed the pledge so far.
What also, the
other thing that we do is that we have a weekly action hour for Ceasefire Now
where people sign up. It’s every Friday at 12:00 PM Eastern, and where they can
get updates from us straight from the ground in Gaza.
Also, they can
take actions collectively together. They call elected officials, or they write
to the editor, or they make calls to their elected officials. That’s something
that we do every Friday. Thousands have registered for this with us. We’re very
happy with that.
Another thing
that I’m really, really proud of what we’re doing is that we have for years
been working on economic justice issues we have developed. We do a lot of
research on corporate complicity in oppressive systems, especially on
apartheid. We produce a lot of research on these companies. We have an online
screen called Investigate where folks can go in and plug in their investments
and see if they are on the divestment lists or not.
We have been,
sort of on the back end, supporting the BDS movement in doing so. As of late,
because of the student encampments and their demand for divestment from their
universities, I think we have stepped that up.
We also have a
guide that guides students on how to negotiate and how to talk to their
university investment committees. It’s a full-fledged guide with resources and
how-to. It’s also on our website: afsc.org/divest. We have been on this for a
long time, because as a Quaker organization, we believe in nonviolence as a
tool for resisting injustice. We find that divestment is a very powerful tool.
We’ve seen it at work ending the South African apartheid.
We are behind
the scenes doing a lot of that work for the movement. That these are some of
the things we are doing. We published a book called Light in Gaza that was
published two years ago. It’s an anthology. We asked Gazan writers to write
about their imaginations of Gaza without occupation. That’s why it’s called
Light in Gaza. It’s beautiful.
One of the
authors was Dr. Refaat Alareer, who, as you may know, was killed. He’s the one
who wrote the poem “If I Must Die”. It’s a very popular poem.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, yes.
Joyce Ajlouny:
He’s one of the
authors in that book. We have been for years trying to bring the voice of
Gazans. We have a campaign called Gaza Unlocked, where the aim of that is to
bring the voices of Gazans into the US mainstream. We have been supporting
study towards the mastermind behind the Gaza march, The Great March of Return,
if you remember that. It was every Friday on the border.
Marc Steiner:
I do.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes. The
mastermind is Ahmed Abu Artema, and we invited him to the United States three
or four years ago. We did a tour for him around the country, talking to
different media and organizations about his notion and his vision for
nonviolent resistance.
That is what we
do as a Quaker organization. We need to speak truth to power, but also promote
the efforts towards justice that are nonviolent. That’s why we are very much in
support of the divestment effort.
Marc Steiner:
Well, the work
you’re doing is very critical.
One thing, we
don’t have a lot of time, but just to… Where do you think, as an activist, as a
leader of organization, as a onviolent activist, someone who’s been working at
this their whole life, where do you see the role and power of nonviolence
playing in this? How does that work when an Israeli army is decimating and
slaughtering people all around you?
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yeah, it’s hard.
I remember at the time with my students when I was leading the school, and they
see their people getting killed, their own families, their homes demolished or
imprisoned, and they’re angry. What do you do with this anger? What do you do with
this anger? How do you channel it in ways that are nonviolent?
I can’t say
that… What we have to do as leaders who believe in the power of nonviolent
resistance is to put those options, make them available to them, and make
compelling arguments for why, in the hope that that they will understand and
follow through.
It’s difficult.
Not everybody prescribes to that. Some people are too angry, especially during
this time of the genocide in Gaza. I’ve had friends and people that I know that
have always been proponents of nonviolent resistance, always supported it. Today,
they’re questioning it. They’re like, we’re stuck. We’re stuck.
I do understand
that, but I think as a Quaker organization, we need to really be pushing that
as much as possible. I saw the beauty of the impact of nonviolent resistance
during the first Intifada when I was living on the West Bank.
Marc Steiner:
That’s right,
you lived through that. That’s right.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes, I lived
through that, and I saw how beautiful it was and how impactful it was, and it
changed public opinion. The Oslo Peace Process started, I think, because of
that.
I remember the
civil disobedience we did, the community protection that we did. Israel closed
all the schools. I was teaching at the Ramallah Friends School then, and they
shut down all schools for months. We were teaching kids in our clandestine
classrooms and planting community gardens. We had neighborhood watch, and had
peaceful demonstrations. Of course, we were attacked, and boycotted Israeli
goods. It was just really beautiful to see that power of it.
The Great March
of Return is one that, unfortunately, that’s the thing: you do the nonviolent
methods, but then you are faced in return by Israeli aggression. During The
Great March of Return, I believe 100 and some, I can’t remember how many, I
think 200, 214 Palestinians were killed by snipers, and 46 children during
those nonviolent things.
One film that I
urge your listeners to go and look for is the Five Broken Cameras. It’s an
Academy Award-nominated film because it talks about one village in the West
Bank and how they were on a path resisting the settlement expansion and
building around their village. For seven years, they were documenting their
movement, and it’s called Five Broken Cameras.
We have some
amazing examples of resistance, but unfortunately, the response has been quite
violent against them. I always know that that’s the only way. There should
always be room for diplomacy, and for shared humanity, and moral courage to
really rise above. That is, our leaders today are, especially in Israel, are
not showing that. We need to keep at it. There’s no other way, really. There’s
no other way.
That’s why
working for a faith community like the American Friends Service Committee and
AFSC grounds us in our values. I think we need to always refer to them as our
foundation for our moral grounding and ethical frameworks of how we want to
deal with conflict in the world, going back to messages of our compassion, and
peace, and justice. We have to keep the course. It takes time. It’s not going
to happen overnight.
Unfortunately,
that’s how I feel that the situation in Palestine, and the occupation, and the
apartheid, and the genocide is going to continue. I don’t see a light at the
end of the tunnel, unfortunately. That’s why people need to be, continue the
course of standing up and raising their voice as high as can be, so folks…
We’ve seen it
historically from all sorts of civil rights movements, that that’s what it
took, the people speaking up. The anti-war movement, that’s what it took,
people speaking up, and standing up boldly, and courageously, and staying the
course until freedom and justice is attained.
Marc Steiner:
Very well said
and very true. That’s what it does take. It heartens me to see the growing
number of Jewish Americans, the people I grew up with, standing up and saying,
not in our name. We have to get more of us out there to do that.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes. I can’t
tell you enough what it does to our spirits. I have been working very closely
with JVP and If Not Now, and it’s what’s giving us hope. All my Palestinian
friends here and Palestinian Americans, all they want to talk about is how
moved they are by the courage of young and old Jewish activists who are really
standing up saying, not in our name.
That has been
really fueling us to do more because we know we’re not alone. We have so many
constituents, so many communities that are standing by us boldly, doing the
hard work. That’s all been incredibly hopeful for us.
Marc Steiner:
I want to thank
you for being with us today. I want to thank you for the work you do. As we
leave each other today, when you were on Democracy Now! and you read those
poems of the kids who were graduates of your school in Ramallah, who were also
the kids who were shot and attacked in Vermont, and the poems they wrote when
they were in the sixth grade, I should say, in 2015.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
I don’t know if
you have them in front of you. I do.
Joyce Ajlouny:
I don’t.
Marc Steiner:
I do.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Okay, okay.
Marc Steiner:
I think it
speaks to the power of young Palestinian children and Palestinians in general.
I think it speaks to the incredible work that the Friends School does in
Ramallah. People should know about this. I’ll be linking to all that when this
goes online.
Joyce Ajlouny:
That’s great.
Marc Steiner:
I should release
one of them. I don’t know whether it should be “Hope Dwells in my Heart”, or
“My Ears Are Pounding”.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Yeah, because
it’s been a while since I read them. It’s been months, so I can’t —
Marc Steiner:
Let me just read
them, [inaudible 00:35:32].
Joyce Ajlouny:
Okay, sure.
Marc Steiner:
This is by
Hisham Awartani.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Awartani, yeah.
Marc Steiner:
He was a
graduate of the Friends School. He wrote this in the sixth grade. He was one of
the kids who were young men who was shot in that attack in Vermont. He wrote,
and remember folks, I said he wrote this in the sixth grade:
“Hope dwells in
my heart. It shines like a light in darkness. Light cannot be smothered. It
cannot be drowned out by tears, and the screams of the wounded. It only grows
in strength. The light can outshine hate. This light can outshine injustice. It
outshines segregation and apartheid.
“As a Greek
legend, Pandora opened a box, and when she did, all the evil escaped. Luckily,
Pandora closed the jar before hope could escape. As long as hope stayed in that
jar, hope would never escape. I ask you one thing, learn from that story. Learn
to never give up hope. Learn to never give power in the darkest times, and let
the light shine.”
The other poem
I’m going to leave you all with as well — And is by the same person who wrote
the same poem — This is, I’ll read this to you, Tahseen wrote this, sixth
grade:
“My ears are
pounding. Children dying. Mothers crying. Authorities lying. My ears are
pounding. My ears are pounding. Missiles destroying. Bombs exploding. Bullets
killing. My ears are pounding. Press careless. Dreams traceless. Lands
ownerless. My ears are pounding. Kids without mothers. Beds without covers.
Palestine without others. My ears are pounding. My ears are pounding. There is
one sound I heard. Not from a breeze or a bird. The sound of darkness. My ears
are pounding. My ears are pounding. I’d rather be deaf.”
Joyce, thank you
so much for the work you do.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Of course. Thank
you, Marc, for having me. Enjoyed the conversation.
Marc Steiner:
I look forward
to having many more and staying in touch. Joyce Ajlouny, who’s doing the work
that needs to be done as head of the AFSC, fighting for human rights across the
globe and in Palestine, Israel, thank you so much for being with us.
Joyce Ajlouny:
Thank you, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
Once again,
thank you to Joyce Ajlouny for her work and for joining us today. We thank all
of you for joining us today. We’ll link to the work of the American Friends
Service Committee in Gaza and the West Bank on our site here at The Real News.
We’ll keep you up to date on issues happening in Palestine and what the Friends
are doing as you heard at the end of our conversation.
Thanks to
Cameron Grandino for running and editing the show today, and the tireless Kayla
Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real
News for making this show possible.
Please let me
know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover.
Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you.
Once again,
thank you to Joyce Ajlouny for this enlightening conversation. For the crew
here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and
take care.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S.
Davies
On June 13, Hamas responded to
persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S.
proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has
“dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a
cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues
to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any
Israeli official voicing approval.”
U.S. Marines and IDF soldiers in
joint maneuver Intrepid Maven, Feb. 28, 2023. Photo: US Marines.
The full details of the U.S.
proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and
release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further
negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza
in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of
negotiations would succeed.
As former Israeli Labor Party prime
minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza
military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we
still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”
Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out,
Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire
proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists
that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing
authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in
central and southern Gaza.
The basic disagreement that
President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is
that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the
Israeli and U.S. governments do not.
Biden or Netanyahu could end the
slaughter very quickly if they wanted to – Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent
cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel.
Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic
support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in
an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging
the war for his own political benefit.
The U.S. is still sending weapons to
Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the
International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu
to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the
International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an
arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and
murder.
The United States seems determined
to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from
all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General
Assembly and Security Council.
But perhaps this is appropriate, as
the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By
its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security
Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international
accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to
pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing
outrage of people and countries across the world.
This pattern of U.S. support for
Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine
unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN
allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and
neighboring countries already firmly opposed.
The massacres, the bulldozed
villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba
have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign
to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they
never happened.
The U.S. was the first country to
grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in
the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally
seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France
and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure
of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it
could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.
Unconditional U.S. support for
Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the
past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly
extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal
territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace
their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other
countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present
themselves.
Israel’s de facto expansion has been
facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and
Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and
other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s
conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal
mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.
But as we see even in the midst of
the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break
this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or
neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and
civil rights.
Qatar mediated a temporary
cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been
upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals,
cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all
but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even
when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or
counterproductive.
The UN General Assembly is united in
support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an
end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have
recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN
membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into
suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.
One way that the nations of the
world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its
assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General
Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security
Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a
permanent member.
Israel has demonstrated that it is
prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the
Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution
could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an
economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its
complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take
action against the U.S. too.
A General Assembly resolution would
change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from
Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the
lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.
It is time for the United Nations
and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side,
and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take
responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation
of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.
Jake Johnson
Israeli forces killed at least 17
people early Tuesday in attacks on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza,
the site of a recent operation in which Israel’s military massacred more than
270 Palestinians to rescue four hostages.
Reporting from central Gaza, Al
Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said it has “been another bloody night” in the area,
noting that Israeli forces attacked two homes in Nuseirat that were
“accommodating displaced families who had recently evacuated from Rafah.”
“The first strike killed 10 people,
including women and children. Five of them were from the same family. We’re
looking at double the number of injuries. More people are still trapped under
the rubble,” Mahmoud added. “An hour later, the second attack targeted another
family’s home. The victims include not only the parents and their children, but
also the grandparents.”
“Another day, another Israeli war
crime,” Progressive International co-founder Yanis Varoufakis wrote in response
to the strikes.
The attacks came after an Associated
Press investigation detailed how Israel’s relentless, U.S.-backed bombardment
of Gaza is wiping out entire Palestinian families. Examining 10 deadly Israeli
strikes across the Gaza Strip between October and December, the outlet found
that “in no case was there an obvious military target or direct warning to
those inside.”
“In one case,” AP added, “the family
said they had raised a white flag on their building in a combat zone.”
The analyzed strikes killed more
than 500 people from several families, AP found. “Nearly every Palestinian
family has suffered grievous, multiple losses,” the outlet observed. “But many
have been decimated, particularly in the first months of the war.”
The Israeli military carried out
Tuesday’s strikes on Nuseirat less than two weeks after killing at least 274
Palestinians in an operation at the refugee camp that rescued four hostages
taken during the Hamas-led October 7 attack on southern Israel.
The United Nations Human Rights
Office said last week that the number of Palestinian civilians killed during
the Israeli operation “seriously calls into question whether the principles of
distinction, proportionality, and precaution — as set out under the laws of war
— were respected by the Israeli forces.”
The attacks on Nuseirat came amid
Israel’s continued assault on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza that more than a
million people have fled in recent weeks in the face of an Israeli ground
invasion that has further imperiled efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to
starving Palestinians.
According to Reuters, residents of
the city reported “heavy bombardments from tanks and planes in several areas”
on Tuesday. One resident, identified by Reuters as a father of six, told the
news agency that “Rafah is being bombed without any intervention from the
world, the occupation is acting freely here.”
Another resident, who was displaced
to central Gaza, said that with every “hour of delay, Israel kills more
people.”
“We want a cease-fire now,” he
added. “Enough of our blood, I say it to Israel, America, and our leaders too.
The war must stop.”
No comments:
Post a Comment