August 20, 2024
The Israel
Defense Forces has decided to downsize the Oketz unit, Unit 7142, ahead of its
cancellation. The unit for dogs and their trainers has been suffering from a
shortage recently. Quite a number of dogs have been killed in the Gaza Strip,
and it was therefore decided to use cheaper, more efficient means. It turns out
that the new unit, which has yet to be given a name by the IDF computer, brings
the same operational results. There’s no need to train dogs for months, no need
for the iron muzzles that shut their frightening jaws, and their food will be
cheaper,pp too: Instead of expensive Bonzo dog food, leftovers from battle
rations.
And the money
for burial and commemoration will also be canceled: The Oketz dogs were
generally given ceremonial military burials, with weeping soldiers and
tear-jerking articles on the first page of the IDF newsletter Yedioth Ahronoth.
The replacements have no need for burials, their bodies can simply be tossed
out. The annual August 30 memorial ceremonies for the dogs can also be
dispensed with. The new dogs will have no monument. The sensitive souls of the
soldiers who handle them will no longer be damaged when they die.
The pilot
project is now in process and there’s already one dead in the new unit. Soon,
the IDF will export the knowledge it has acquired to other armies worldwide. In
Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen and maybe even in Niger, they’ll be happy to rely on it.
According to the
Oketz Wikipedia page: “The unit activates unique war materiel—the dog, which
provides unique operational advantages that have no human or technological
substitute.” Oops, a mistake. There may be no technological substitute, but a
human substitute has been found. “Human” is an exaggeration of course, but the
IDF has a new type of dog, cheap, obedient, and far better trained, whose lives
are worth less.
The IDF’s new
dogs are the residents of the Gaza Strip. Not all of them of course, only those
that the army scout chooses carefully, out of 2 million candidates; the
auditions take place in the displaced persons camps. There is no age
restriction.
The army’s
headhunters have already found children and elderly people, and there are no
restrictions on the activation of the new manpower. They use them and then toss
them out. Meanwhile they haven’t been trained for attack missions and for
identifying explosives by smell, but the army is working on that. At least they
won’t bite Palestinian children in their sleep like the previous Baskerville
hounds.
On Tuesday,
Haaretz published a photo of one of the new dogs on the first page: a young
resident of Gaza in handcuffs, dressed in rags that were once uniforms, his
eyes covered with a rag, his gaze downcast, armed soldiers standing next to
him. Yaniv Kubovich, the most courageous military correspondent in Israel, and
Michael Hauser Tov revealed that the IDF uses Palestinian civilians to check
tunnels in Gaza. “Our lives are more important than their lives,” the
commanders told the soldiers, repeating what is self-evident.
These new “dogs”
are sent to the tunnels in handcuffs. Cameras are attached to their bodies, and
from them one can hear the sound of their frightened breathing.
They “cleanse”
shafts, are held in worse conditions than Oketz dogs and their activity has
become widespread, systematic. Al-Jazeera, boycotted in Israel for causing
“damage to security,” revealed the phenomenon. The military denied it, as
usual, with its lies. Two Haaretz reporters brought the full story on Tuesday,
and it’s terrifying.
There were
soldiers who protested at the sight of the new “dogs,” several brave ones even
gave testimony to Breaking the Silence. But the procedure, which was once
specifically forbidden by the High Court of Justice, has been adopted on a
broad scope in the army. The next time that the public protests the fact that
Benjamin Netanyahu ignores High Court rulings, we should remember that the army
also brazenly ignores its rulings.
The process of
dehumanization of the Palestinians has reached a new height. Haaretz reported
that the IDF senior command knows about the new unit. In the opinion of the
army, a dog’s life is worth more than a Palestinian’s. Now we also have the
official version.
Joshua
Leifer
August
20, 2024
What
can be done to challenge the Biden administration’s unflinching support for
Israel’s war in Gaza? That is the question progressive organizers in the United
States have been asking for the last 10 months, since the start of Israel’s
devastating aerial bombardment and ground invasion of the besieged territory.
In the absence of a large anti-war caucus in Congress, and with limited
national organizing capacity, it has not been easy to answer.
Against
the backdrop of this year’s Democratic primaries, and as the death toll in Gaza
mounted each day, veteran progressive strategist Waleed Shahid, along with
other activists, launched the Uncommitted campaign, urging primary voters to
withhold their support for President Joe Biden. The idea was to send a message:
not only that the Biden administration was out of step with a large part of his
party’s base, but also that Biden’s approach to Gaza risked alienating Muslim
and Arab voters in key swing states like Michigan. To continue unconditionally
backing Israel’s war, the Uncommitted campaign argued, would be to risk a
second Trump victory.
I
talked to Shahid, who is the director of the Bloc and the former spokesperson
for Justice Democrats, in mid-June. This was before the attempted assassination
of Donald Trump; before Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris became
the presumptive Democratic nominee; and before two members of the “Squad,”
Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, lost primary races to opponents heavily backed by
hawkish pro-Israel groups. Our conversation dealt not just with the Uncommitted
campaign but also with the possibilities for shifting the Democratic Party on
Israel-Palestine and the fate of progressive electoral politics more broadly in
the shadow of the ongoing war.
In
many ways, despite the drama of the last several months, the basic political
terrain remains largely unchanged. While Harris has adopted different rhetoric
from Biden, she has given little indication that her administration would break
with its predecessor on Israel-Palestine. The Uncommitted movement is,
therefore, bringing its challenge to the Democratic National Convention this
week, where its leaders are now pushing for the party to support an arms
embargo against Israel. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for
clarity.
October
7 changed a lot about American politics, especially progressive politics. It
seems like, had the Gaza war not happened, there’d be a lot less progressive
discontent with the Democratic Party.
There’s
been a generational shift on Palestinian human rights, with those under the age
of 30 largely having sympathies that lie with Palestinians under occupation.
You can almost match that one-to-one with where that generation gets its news —
from online sources, Instagram, TikTok — whereas those over 30, whose
sympathies tend to lie with Israel, get their news from broadcast and print
sources.
There
was polling done in January that showed that half of people who voted for Biden
believe that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And
there are only a handful of Democrats in Congress who share that opinion.
Public opinion doesn’t automatically translate into political representation —
it has to be forged. And unfortunately, the movement infrastructure isn’t there
yet.
Justice
Democrats had the ability to elect pro-Palestinian candidates indirectly.
Palestinian rights wasn’t a major reason for challenging incumbents, but it was
a part of our platform. Now a generational tide is shifting, and AIPAC is
spending $100 million this year to slow that shift.
You
were one of the organizers of the Uncommitted vote — to get people to write
“uncommitted” on their ballots in the presidential primary to protest the U.S.
government’s backing for Israel’s war. That produced roughly 700,000 primary
votes. What did you discover about the task of translating protest to politics?
The
reason I wanted to do the Uncommitted campaign was based on my theory that most
people understand politics through elections, because the media covers politics
through elections. So we had to find a way to bring the war in Gaza into a
frame that most people would understand, and most journalists would cover.
Ideally, it would’ve led to an anti-war primary challenger to Biden, but no one
was willing to run, especially that late in the cycle.
For
many Muslim and Arab organizers, this wasn’t just a leftist problem; there are
many young people, and Arab-American Democrats or Muslim Democrats, who might
identify as moderate but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for someone who was
financing a genocide in Gaza. When I first tried to organize this effort, some
people said, “We have less than two months until the Michigan primary. What if
we only get 2 percent, and we look stupid?” Sometimes, though, the most radical
thing you can do is put your hypothesis to the test. If you really believe that
people care about this, you need to see if you can actually mobilize the votes
for your position.
We
raised $200,000 for Michigan; that’s nothing for a statewide campaign. And as I
mentioned, there really isn’t the electoral or donor infrastructure around
Palestinian human rights advocacy. So, to me, the Uncommitted movement is the
floor of what’s possible in terms of bringing protest politics into electoral
politics. It made me really optimistic about the future, because this was such
a grassroots, low-cost effort, and if you invested more time and resources and
organizing capacity into it, you could really build something important. There
were more Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and Jewish progressives involved in
primaries this cycle than there had ever been before.
How
did you respond to people who were anxious, or are still anxious, that the
discontent over the war might translate into defection in swing states?
There
were polls that came out last November showing that a majority of Arabs and
Muslims in Michigan were already done with Biden. For me, this was a way to
show that those polls were serious. If you wanted to defeat Trump, you needed
to pay attention to these people. I think we did a service to the Democratic
Party by revealing this constituency to them. There’s a broad politics of
disillusionment, powerlessness, and despair, and we were trying to give a
productive place for people to express that.
Some
people don’t know that Muslim and Arab voters voted for George W. Bush in 2000.
They might defect to the Republican Party out of anger. That’s a real
possibility. In the same way that you’ve seen a slow realignment of Latinos
toward Republicans, I think this election will show a slow realignment of Arabs
and Muslims toward Republicans.
Do
you have a sense of where all this leads?
The
movement’s leaders and base are going through not only grief about the civilian
casualties in Gaza, but also political grief. This happens with most movements.
We can respond with disillusionment and cynicism, or — and this is the harder
thing to do — we can grapple with the limitations of our power and our
infrastructure and dedicate ourselves to building it. The Palestinian rights
movement needs to increase its influence and power in the Democratic Party.
One
way this could happen is if center-left Jewish, pro-Israel organizations begin
to shift on this issue in a significant way, which I’m fairly pessimistic about
based on the way that J Street and the Jewish Democratic Council of America
have aligned with AIPAC or stayed neutral in these primary races. Otherwise,
progressive, young, and Arab and Muslim Democrats have to provide some sort of
infrastructure that can match the level of influence that pro-Israel
organizations have. The third possibility — and this is the theory that I’m the
most skeptical about — is that if the Democrats lose due to a margin that you
could say is because of the Gaza war, the party would fundamentally rethink its
approach to Israel-Palestine.
It
seems to me that before October 7, the first possibility was much more imminent
than it had been before. The Israeli right’s attempted judicial overhaul had
pushed left-of-center Jewish-American organizations into a place of
unprecedented criticism of Israel. In the event of any sort of attack on
Israel, there was always going to be a rally-around-the-flag effect.
One
of the things that has been difficult is that there is a really big substantive
misalignment between the Palestine solidarity social movements — certainly in
their rhetoric and description of their own end goals — and the center-left
Jewish organizations. There are parts of both that don’t want cooperation, even
though there could actually be grounds for overlap in concrete demands, like
putting conditions on U.S. military assistance to Israel. Yet the ideological
misalignment is too great.
The
youth wing of the ceasefire movement is pretty opposed to, or ambivalent about,
party politics and electoral politics, and is much more focused on mobilization
and disruption in a way that is similar to Occupy Wall Street.
Or
even Black Lives Matter.
Yeah.
And there is a significant contingent, with groups like the Party for Socialism
and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, that have historically supported
third-party strategies and are opposed to any involvement in the Democratic
Party. To my knowledge, very few of the groups that have been mobilizing for a
ceasefire were involved even in the Jamaal Bowman or Cori Bush primaries.
I
have heard some people express a theory that you can unite the Rashida Tlaibs
and the Rand Pauls of the world to create conditions for ending weapons aid. We
don’t have the numbers for that, and you have to create a majority. The same
majority that passed the Inflation Reduction Act could either pass legislation
or pressure the president to do something through the executive branch. But I
don’t see a situation where liberal Zionists wouldn’t play some role in that
coalition just based on the math of congressional majorities.
It
has been striking to see that, for all of the progressive organizing that’s
been done on domestic issues, when it came to foreign policy, the vacuum got
filled by older sectarian left groups that aren’t interested in electoral
politics, or even a counter-hegemonic shifting of public opinion. It seems to
me like the foreign policy organizing is where the economic justice movement
was pre-Occupy.
[Political
consultant] David Shor is someone who I disagree with a lot, but he rightly
said that the center-left and progressive donor establishment has had months to
try to organize a more coherent and productive political vehicle, and they
haven’t. And part of the reason is because that donor establishment has never
engaged in Palestinian human rights. There also hasn’t been much established
organizing on the Muslim and Palestinian side of this, where people are starved
of resources, criminalized, and pushed into corners.
Demographically,
there is a space for stronger Muslim political organizing. There are more than
4 million Muslims in the United States, and the strength of the ceasefire
movement seems to reflect the growing political organizing capacity of a new
generation of Muslim Americans. But the politics here also seem complicated,
because it’s not as if Muslim voters are only in the Democratic Party.
If
you look at the 2016 and 2020 elections, the numbers of Muslim and Jewish
Americans supporting the Democratic Party are comparable. And the place where
Muslim Americans have leverage is in the states where they have higher numbers
of voters, including Michigan and Georgia.
A
lot of reporters in the winter were saying to me, “Don’t you think if Biden
swings toward Muslims in Michigan, he will lose Jews in suburban Philadelphia?”
And my hypothesis is that Muslim partisan loyalty to the Democratic Party is
much thinner than it is with Jewish Americans, who are part of the Democratic
Party for many reasons that have nothing to do with Israel — liberal and
democratic values, social justice values. Over the years, polls have shown that
Jewish voters generally do not list Israel among their top five issues. Many
Muslims are part of the Democratic Party for its anti-racist values, so when
the [party’s support for the] Gaza war is in contradiction with those values,
it’s easy for them to leave.
In
October and November, I was honestly skeptical of the Democratic Party and the
White House’s appetite to respond to Muslim-American and Arab-American
organizing, in large part because I know the pro-Israel constituency in the
Democratic Party is well-organized, with voters, donors, and institutions that
have been part of the party for decades. I did a lot of work with Jewish Voice
for Peace and IfNotNow, because I thought we needed a Jewish movement to build
an alternative to the J Streets and AIPACs of the world.
But
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Muslim and Arab organizing in Michigan
and other states was able to apply pressure on the party in ways that made me
question my own hypothesis. I no longer think only Jewish organizing and Jewish
pressure can change the political dynamics of this issue. It’s a factor, but I
don’t think it’s the biggest factor.
You
probably need both to hit a majority.
Yeah.
In March when Kamala Harris came out in favor of a ceasefire in Selma at an
event for Black voters, that gave me a sign that the party was thinking beyond
the constituency of pro-Israel Jewish voters.
How
are you thinking about the possibility of a Trump victory? In some ways,
Trump’s last term was a boon to progressive organizing, despite being a
disaster for the country. Could that happen again?
Part
of the reason progressive organizing excelled in the Trump era was because
Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016. There was an infrastructure and a
constituency created around progressive organizing that wasn’t only about
Trump. The fact that there was an alternative provided in the 2016 primary to
Hillary Clinton could continue to give people a different vision. Those
conditions don’t exist today, so I’m very skeptical that a Trump victory would
lead to a boon in progressive organizing.
I
think a Trump presidency would be horrific for America, for our democracy, for
the communities we care about, for the progressive movement, and for
Palestinians. And I think it’s very likely that Trump could win. So all the
organizing I’ve been doing for the past six months is in the service of
convincing the Democrats that there’s a constituency of voters that they can’t
afford to lose in this election. That includes people within my own family, who
have voted Democrat in every election since they’ve been registered voters,
even if they don’t identify as liberals or progressives.
It’s
very hard for me to imagine four years of Trump that doesn’t look like a
January 6 presidency. Last time there were moderate Republicans within Trump’s
cabinet. This time it will be dominated by far-right authoritarians, and my
sense is the United States could end up like Hungary or Brazil. The show trials
that are happening now with university presidents over Palestine will expand to
cover LGBTQ issues, race, and women’s rights. Trump has the judiciary and will
likely have the legislature on his side to do whatever he wants.
Eman Abdelhadi
August 19, 2024
Chicago, we all know why we are
here.
We are drowning, and our hearts are
broken.
We are drowning in debt. In medical
bills. In rising rents. In inflation.
We are under attack in this country.
The Right has declared war on people of color, on trans people, on women. They
are trying to dismantle our systems of education, trying to criminalize
teaching Black history and the realities of racism, oppression and exploitation
in this country.
They openly call for mass
deportations and want to strip Black people of voter rights.
Every year, the climate crisis kills
more people of heat, of floods, of fires. Every year, the number of climate
refugees at home and abroad climbs and climbs.
And in this moment of absolute
disaster, of absolute crisis.
The American ruling class —the
people descending on this city for the Democratic National Convention — have seen fit to spend our money on killing children in
Gaza.
They have provided an infinite
supply of bombs to destroy Gaza’s homes, its schools, its hospitals, its
playgrounds, its mosques, its churches, its croplands, its infrastructure.
As the most powerful country on
earth, they have bullied the rest of the world in the name of protecting a
far-right government openly committing a genocide.
And now …
Now they want our votes.
They say they have earned them by
showing a little more empathy towards those poor Palestinians they happened to
kill.
Vice President Harris, we hear your
shift in tone.
But …
Your tone will not resurrect the
dead.
Your tone will not shelter the
living.
Your tone will not pull bombs out of
the sky.
Your tone is not enough.
Genocide Joe would still be on the
ticket if it were not for this movement, for all of us. Our movement is one of
the main reasons that you are now the Democratic candidate for President in the
most powerful country on the planet.
You, Vice President Harris, get to
run for office because we ousted your predecessor right here in these streets.
But it was never just about him. It was about the 40,000 Palestinians he helped
kill.
And now we are telling you that “Not the other guy” is not a platform.
We are telling you that you actually
have to earn our votes.
And we are telling you exactly how
to earn them.
We are telling you we want a weapons
embargo.
We are telling you we want a
permanent ceasefire.
And we are telling you that we want
them NOW.
You keep telling us that democracy
itself is on the line.
You keep telling us that fascism is
knocking at the door.
You keep telling us that Trump would
be worse.
But the majority of Americans, in
poll after poll, say they disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Study after
study shows that a weapons embargo would earn you more votes, would secure you
this election.
Vice President Harris, why are you
risking the end of democracy, the rise of fascism, the return of Trump to
protect Netenyahu’s war on children?
You are not the protector of
democracy.
We are the protectors of democracy.
If you want to see democracy, look
to Chicago’s streets this week. We are democracy speaking back to power, saying
we will not be ignored.
We want to house our unhoused.
We want to feed our hungry.
We want to heal our sick.
We want to guard our planet.
We want to build our future, not rob
Gaza’s children of theirs.
You may think that the people who
make it into the United Center today are the ones who get to shape the future
of this country.
That’s not true.
We make the future of this country.
We make it where we’ve always made it, right here on the streets.
Vice President Harris, you have a
choice. You could join a movement for justice. You could make a place for
yourself in history. You could be a leader who chose to listen to her people
rather than the interests of the war manufacturers. Or you could aid and abet a
war criminal.
Vice President Harris, if you want
Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, WE ARE SPEAKING.
Hear us. We will not be placated by
tone.
We need you to act — and we will not leave the streets until you do.
No comments:
Post a Comment