Mera Aladam
Palestinian
rights groups have accused Israeli authorities of committing a "medical
crime" following the death of a Palestinian prisoner who was denied
treatment.
MLA Members for Justice in Palestine lead a
die-in during the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly in New
Orleans on January 11, 2025. (Photo: MLA Members for Justice in Palestine)
Moataz Mahmoud
Abu Zneid, 35, had been suffering from severe health problems but did not
receive medical care until he fell into a coma on 6 January, according to a
statement from the Palestinian Prisoners' Club and the Commission of Detainees
and Ex-Detainees Affairs.
His death was
announced on Sunday at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, Israel.
According to his
family, Abu Zneid, from the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, had not suffered
from any health problems before his arrest on 27 June 2023.
"The prison
administration deliberately delayed transferring him to the hospital and
perpetrated a medical crime against him," the two groups said.
"Abu
Zneid's case... constitutes a new crime in the record of the Israeli brutality
system."
The death of Abu
Zneid, who has previously gone on hunger strikes in protest against his
administrative detention, brings the total number of known Palestinians to have
died in Israeli detention since the start of the war to 55.
The two groups
said that since the start of the war on Gaza there has been a rise in the
number of fatalities amongst Palestinian prisoners, who are living through a
"humanitarian catastrophe" in Israeli prisons.
According to
their findings, prisoners endure torture, starvation, sexual assault, medical
negligence, as well as being held in poor conditions, which leads to their
detriorating health.
The statement
held Israel "fully responsible" for the deaths of Palestinians in
prison, urging the international human rights system to hold Israeli
authorities accountable for war crimes.
'Welcome to
hell'
Since the
Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Israeli authorities have cracked down on
Palestinians across the West Bank and within Israel.
Over 10,400
people have been arrested in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone during that
time, with 3,376 of those held in administrative detention without a trial and
without having committed an offence.
In August,
Israeli rights organisation B'Tselem said in a report that Israeli authorities
are systematically abusing Palestinians in torture camps, subjecting them to
severe forms of violence and sexual assault.
In the 118-page
report, B'Tselem accused the Israeli government of conducting a policy of
institutionalised abuse and torture against all Palestinian detainees since the
start of the war on Gaza.
Torture was
recorded in civilian and military detention facilities across Israel, resulting
in the death of dozens of Palestinians in Israeli custody in less than 10
months.
The systematic
nature of the abuse across all facilities left “no room to doubt an organised,
declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities”.
The report,
titled “Welcome to Hell”, is based on 55 testimonies from former detainees from
the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and citizens of Israel,
the overwhelming majority of them held without being tried.
B'Tselem said
the Israeli violations against Palestinian detainees lead to the “inevitable
conclusion that Israel is committing torture that amounts to a war crime and
even a crime against humanity”.
The group called
for international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, to
immediately intervene to “stop the brutal treatment of Palestinians in these
detention facilities”.
January
11, 2025
Ahmad
Ibsais
For
the last few days, I have stared at my phone watching houses, history, and
memories burn. But this time, it wasn’t Gaza. I was watching the Palisades
burn. The hills are alive with fire, a haunting echo of another inferno raging
thousands of miles away. For fifteen months, I’ve witnessed Gaza’s land, and
people, burn through screens and headlines, and now as I watch the skies over
an American city fill with smoke, the distances between these catastrophes
collapse into a single, searing truth: these flames speak the same language of
destruction – colonialism.
The
fire consuming the Palisades isn’t just a California wildfire – it’s a mirror
reflecting a global crisis of connected catastrophes. When I close my eyes, the
images blur together: hills ablaze in California, olive groves burning in Gaza
and historic Palestine, horizons choked with smoke that knows no borders.
Research
from Lancaster University has revealed that in just the first sixty days
following October 7, the military response in Gaza generated more
planet-warming gases than twenty climate-vulnerable nations emit in an entire
year. In a single month – October 2023 – Israel dropped 25,000 tons of bombs on
Gaza, releasing climate-warming gases equivalent to burning 150,000 tonnes of
coal. American cargo flights delivering weapons consumed 50 million liters of
aviation fuel by December, spewing 133,000 tonnes of CO2 into our shared
atmosphere – more than the entire nation of Grenada emits annually.
But
this environmental catastrophe didn’t begin with the current Genocide. For
decades, Palestinians have lived and worked sustainably with their environment,
maintaining indigenous landscapes and growing a rich variety of crops from
watermelon to olives – the latter forming a central part of Palestinian culture
and identity. Since 1967, Israel has systematically uprooted at least 2.5
million trees in the occupied Palestinian territory, including nearly one
million olive trees, which were a primary source of food and income for many
Palestinians. Israel replaced these trees with imported European vegetation,
perhaps reflecting their own European roots. This destruction has led to
habitat fragmentation, desertification, land degradation, and soil erosion that
affects the entire region’s climate resilience.
When
we include the climate cost of war infrastructure – the tunnels, the walls, the
military installations – the total rises to 450,000 metric tonnes of CO2
equivalent, exceeding the annual emissions of 33 countries. Each bomb that
falls on Gaza sends ripples through our collective future, its impact felt in
rising seas, warming temperatures, and yes, in the fires that now threaten
California’s hills.
I
think of Gaza’s farmers, who for generations tended 170 square kilometers of
flourishing orchards and fields – nearly half their land dedicated to feeding
their people. Now, satellite images show a wasteland where gardens once grew.
The Israeli military has destroyed 70% of northern Gaza’s water wells,
demolished thousands of greenhouses, and transformed fertile soil into toxic
earth. This has occurred alongside the decimation of 80% of all Gazan
infrastructure. Between October 2023 and March 2024 alone, 48% of Gaza’s tree
cover was lost or damaged, either destroyed by military operations or cut down
by desperate people seeking fuel under the blockade.
The
bitter irony doesn’t escape me: LA Mayor cut $17.6 million to its fire
departments while California sent $610 million to Israel through taxpayers. The
Wonderful Company, controlling nearly 60% of California’s water through the
Resnick family, pumps millions into supporting the very territorial expansion
that has turned Gaza’s landscape into an environmental catastrophe. That
already, in 2025, Biden is trying to push for an additional 8 billion in
military “aid” to fund a Genocide while thousands of U.S. citizens from
Ashville, NC to Los Angeles are suffocating under the climate crisis. We are
funding the flames that will eventually reach our own doorsteps.
The
environmental wounds in Gaza will not heal easily. Thirty-seven million tonnes
of debris now litter the landscape, a toxic legacy that will poison soil and
water for generations. Each day, 130,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage pour
into the Mediterranean Sea – not because Palestinians choose this devastation,
but because Israeli violence has shattered their infrastructure, their ability
to care for their land as they have for countless generations.
When
I see environmental activists who turn away from Gaza, I want to shake them
awake. The reconstruction of Gaza’s 100,000 damaged buildings alone will
generate 30 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases – equivalent to New
Zealand’s annual emissions and higher than 135 other countries, including Sri
Lanka and Lebanon. This is a climate debt we all must pay, a fire we all must
fight.
The
flames I see consuming the Palisades carry echoes of Gaza’s suffering: homes
turned to ash, landscapes transformed, lives upended. But they carry something
else too – an urgent warning about our shared fate. When we permit the bombing
of Gaza’s aquifers and the poisoning of its soil, we accelerate the climate
crisis that now sends California up in flames.
The
ecocide in Gaza – recognized as a war crime under the Rome Statute – isn’t just
a distant tragedy. It’s a harbinger of our collective future if we continue to
allow environmental warfare and genocide to go unchallenged. As Benjamin
Neimark from Queen Mary University of London warns, “The military’s
environmental exceptionalism allows them to pollute with impunity, as if the
carbon emissions spitting from their tanks and fighter jets don’t count. This
has to stop.”
What
burns in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease: a
system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, expansion
over existence. This is the legacy of a worldview that has sought to silence
indigenous voices who understood what we must now learn – that the earth’s
wounds are our own.
What
you allow in Gaza, you allow everywhere. Today it’s their fields burning under
thousand-pound bombs; tomorrow it’s our forests. The fires that connect us
demand that we finally see this truth: we either stand together against this
destruction, or we all burn separately.
Brett
Wilkins & Olivia Rosane
January
12, 2025
"The
more they try to silence us, the louder we will be!"
That
was the message that protesters at the Modern Language Association Delegate
Assembly in New Orleans wanted to send Saturday after the executive council of
the MLA—the preeminent U.S. professional group for scholars of language and
literature—blocked them from holding a member vote on a resolution endorsing
the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for
Palestinian rights.
Like
the resolution recently passed by the American Historical Association, the
declaration issued by MLA Members for Justice in Palestine accuses Israel of
committing scholasticide in Gaza, where—in addition to killing over 46,000
Palestinians, wounding nearly 110,000 others, and displacing around 2 million
more—15 months of relentless Israeli onslaught has obliterated the embattled
enclave's education infrastructure.
The
MLA resolution—which supports the initial 2005 BDS call issued by Palestinian
civil society groups—also acknowledges that international law experts accuse
Israel of genocide and that the International Court of Justice, which is
weighing a genocide case against Israel, has "determined that Israel is
maintaining a system of apartheid."
"The
MLA's commitment to 'justice throughout the humanities ecosystem' requires
ending institutional complicity with genocide and supporting Palestinian
colleagues," the statement asserts. "Therefore, be it resolved that
we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call."
Karim
Mattar, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, took part in Saturday's demonstration, during which supporters of the
resolution staged a die-in and walkout, chanted slogans, and held a banner that
read, "MLA Is Complicit in Genocide."
"I
consider the executive council's decision to be a cowardly one," Mattar
told Common Dreams. "The MLA is a humanities advocacy organization, and by
repressing a membership vote, a democratic process to deliberate on the
necessity of institutional divestment with companies that profit from genocide,
it's actively contributing to the problem."
"I
think it's a fundamental contradiction in the MLA's values between these stated
values and principles of advocacy for the humanities and the blocking of a
mechanism by which such advocacy might be facilitated," he added.
Mattar—who
is Palestinian American and whose relatives were among the more than 750,000
Arabs who fled or were ethnically cleansed from Palestine during the Nakba, or
"catastrophe" during the establishment of the modern state of
Israel—said Saturday's protest brought tears to his eyes.
"To
see this protest, this movement emerging at the MLA, to see this national and
international movement of solidarity with Palestine to emerge in the last year,
has been incredibly moving for me," he said.
Protest
co-organizer Neelofer Qadir, an assistant professor of English at Georgia State
University, told Common Dreams that protesters "really wanted to draw
attention to how institutions are being destroyed, like universities, like
libraries, like archives, which makes certain that there is a deep commitment
to genocide and why scholasticide is part of genocide because the Israeli
government intends to destroy all possible evidence of Palestinian life, past,
present, and therefore no longer in the future."
"And
we feel that it is our responsibility as the largest North American
organization of scholars of literature and language to protest and stand with
our colleagues who are being murdered for their existence," she added.
Last
month, the MLA executive council explained that while it is "appalled by
the continued attack on Gaza," it believed that "supporting a BDS
resolution was not a possible way forward for the association to address the
crisis" due to "legal and fiduciary reasons."
Qadir
dismissed the council's excuse, saying she believes the MLA is "engaged in
a formal program of organized abandonment that is part and parcel of fascist
and neoliberal governance that's happening in the U.S., Canada, and across the
world."
St.
John's University associate English professor Raj Chetty, who also organized
Saturday's action, told Common Dreams that "whatever the MLA has said
about the 'fiduciary concerns' about this, we're like, you're going to find out
some other fiduciary concerns as you notice that both intellectual work and
membership dues are going to start evaporating."
As
part of their effort, MLA Members for Justice in Palestine are urging
supporters to not renew their MLA membership "until there's a meaningful
substantial change in position," as Chetty put it.
"This
[protest] is a real call to humanity, a real call to justice, a real call
against complicity, and a real call to support Palestinian life and rail
against Israeli actions that are ending Palestinian life in all the ways that
Neelofer talked about," he said.
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