Tag: israel

For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians, Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism

For eighteen years I had the great privilege of working as Executive Director of Harvard Hillel.

As a leader of Jewish communities on campus, in New England, and around the nation, I have helped cultivate a new generation of Jewish leaders and citizens. I navigated moments of tension and war: the tumultuous 1990s, as the Oslo Accords began to crumble; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and its fallout; the Iraq War; Israel’s Second Lebanon War and its war on Gaza in late 2008.

During my long career as a Jewish educator and leader — including thirteen years living in Jerusalem — I have seen and lived through my community’s struggles. Now, as an elder leader, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel compelled to speak to what I see as a disturbing trend gripping our campus, and many others: The cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel.

In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies.

The recent effort to smear our new University President, Claudine Gay, is a case in point. I applaud the decision by the Harvard Corporation to stand by Dr. Gay amid the ludicrous charges that she somehow supports genocide against Jews, and I hope Harvard will continue to take a clear and strong stance against any further efforts by these powerful parties to meddle in university affairs, especially over personnel decisions.

The toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been. Our vigilance must be up to the task.

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66 percent of all U.S. voters and 80 percent of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically-connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

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Over 100 Journalists Killed in Less Than Three Months

Nearly 100 journalists have been killed in less than three months in Palestine. And that’s not by accident. They aren’t collateral damage. They weren’t human shields. Most were targeted deliberately. Their offense: exposing the deceit behind the propaganda flushed out by the Israeli government, and our own government, our president, and the mainstream media, many of whom don’t function as journalists. Instead, they act like stenographers for the state, for the military-industrial complex. Which is profiting massively off of this slaughter, banking on people being uninformed and indifferent to it.

Well, real journalists are preventing that, because the real journalists are standing in defiance of power, standing in the face of the war machine, and are bravely documenting its crimes. Documenting the daily horror raining down on millions of civilians trapped on a small slice of land.

So the powerful want these journalists silenced, by any means necessary, because they are proving to be very powerful themselves. I’ve gone to many rallies for Palestine over the years, and I’ve never seen the groundswell like we are witnessing now.

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In Gaza, the next generation of radicalization begins

“The lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently made headlines by warning.

“You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” he said. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

Austin’s remarks, made at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December, should be sobering for the sizable cohort of Israeli and Western officials and commentators who insist that a “military solution” to Hamas is the only way for Israel to ensure its long-term security. While the horrendous civilian death toll of Israel’s military campaign is regrettable, this line of thinking goes, the threat from Hamas means Israel has no choice but to prosecute the war until the group is eliminated, as long as it takes, and no matter the cost.

If it’s allowed to survive, it will simply choose another moment in the future to attack, and Israeli citizens will never know peace.

Yet Austin is only one prominent voice in recent months that has pointed out the faultiness of this logic, and reminded the world that when a state battling terrorism leaves a trail of human carnage in its wake, the resulting rage, bitterness and despair fuel the very problem it’s fighting, and many times over.

When Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. was asked directly if he feared that high civilian casualty numbers would create future Hamas members, he replied, “Yes, very much so.” “We’ll be fighting their sons in four or five years,” former Shin Bet chief Ya’akov Peri told the New York Times.

“Israel Is Fostering the Next Generation of Hatred Against Itself,” read the headline of a recent column by Haaretz’s Gideon Levy, as he warned readers to “look what hatred was sown in the hearts of almost all Israelis by one barbaric attack,” and consider what an even worse, prolonged slaughter might do to the Palestinian population. “These children will never forgive the soldiers. You’re raising another generation of resistance,” one Palestinian father, his young son killed by Israeli soldiers, told Levy.

Former UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace recently warned, with reference to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, “that radicalisation follows oppression” and that “a disproportionate response by the state can serve as a terrorist organisation’s best recruiting sergeant.”

Security services in the United States and around the world have already backed up these warnings. FBI Director Chris Wray cautioned last month that U.S. support for Israel’s war had led multiple terrorist organizations to call for attacks against Americans and the West, and had significantly “raised the threat of an attack” inside the United States.

That’s on top of advisories and intelligence findings by various U.S. government agencies warning of credible threats by groups like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah over U.S. support for the war. Both the German and British spy agencies have likewise sounded the alarm over the war potentially fueling militant radicalization, citing specific threats being made by jihadist groups and those sympathetic to them.

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Israeli Evidence of Hamas Command Center in al-Shifa Hospital Falls Short: Report

LAST MONTH, THE world watched as a spectacle rarely seen in modern warfare unfolded in Gaza. The Israeli military tore through al-Shifa Hospital, the Gaza Strip’s main hospital, forcing the evacuation of patients and refugees as part of a siege on the medical complex that resulted in dozens of patient deaths and an untold number of additional casualties. 

Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza has already resulted in more than 20,000 Palestinian deaths since Oct. 7, many of them civilians and children. Even in a conflict as brutal as the one currently unfolding in Gaza, an organized military operation against a hospital is virtually unheard of. Israel for weeks had made public its preemptive justification for an incursion into a medical establishment that is typically protected under humanitarian law — asserting that al-Shifa contained a Hamas command center within a network of tunnels and secret rooms that used patients and doctors as human shields against Israeli military action. 

The Biden administration continues to back Israel’s position on the matter, and earlier this week reasserted their own claims of possessing “evidence that Hamas was operating underneath al-Shifa Hospital before Israel attacked.” On Monday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters in a press briefing that the U.S. remains “confident” that “Hamas was using al-Shifa as a command and control post, as it uses other civilian sites to hide terrorist infrastructure, to hide weapons, to hide fighters and ultimately to use civilians as human shields.” 

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Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate In Leveled Gaza

Palestinians and their supporters this week condemned a proposal by an Israeli real estate developer specializing in the construction of illegal settlements to build beachfront homes for Jewish colonists over the bombed-out ruins of Gaza.

“A house on the beach is not a dream,” reads an advertisement published by Harey Zahav—an Israeli company notorious for building settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank—that drew international attention following last week’s Practical Preparation for Gaza Settlement Conference in Tel Aviv.

The ad depicts an artist’s rendering of luxury homes superimposed over an actual photograph of a Gaza neighborhood destroyed by Israeli attacks—which have killed nearly 20,000 people while displacing over 85% of the embattled strip’s 2.3 million people since early October.

While the Israeli government funds settler organizations, Harey Zahav’s proposal is not believed to be state-supported. However, critics noted that Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel has drafted a plan to forcibly expel Gazans into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and that a separate proposal by the right-wing think tank Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy declared that “there is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”

Such plans have been compared with the Nakba ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs—by deadly violence and forced displacement—from Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

“An Israeli real estate firm is already cashing in on genocide, churning out blueprints to build Israeli homes in Gaza on land leveled by bombs,” activist Sarah Wilkinson said Tuesday on social media.

Harey Zahav’s proposal comes amid statements by Israeli political and military leaders that critics say incite or advocate genocide of Palestinians. Evem prior to the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, numerous Israeli officials called for the recolonization of a Gaza Strip from which some or all of the Palestinian residents—around two-thirds of them the descendants of Nakba refugees—have been removed.

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Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content

Meta’s content moderation policies and systems have increasingly silenced voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook in the wake of the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undue removal and suppression of protected speech including peaceful expression in support of Palestine and public debate about Palestinian human rights. Human Rights Watch found that the problem stems from flawed Meta policies and their inconsistent and erroneous implementation, overreliance on automated tools to moderate content, and undue government influence over content removals.

“Meta’s censorship of content in support of Palestine adds insult to injury at a time of unspeakable atrocities and repression already stifling Palestinians’ expression,” said Deborah Brown, acting associate technology and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Social media is an essential platform for people to bear witness and speak out against abuses while Meta’s censorship is furthering the erasure of Palestinians’ suffering.”

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Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency

CONFRONTED WITH AN endless list of well-documented Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration has responded with overwhelming support for a genocidal war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza. For more than two months, the White House has engaged in a public campaign of gaslighting as it has feigned concern over the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents while simultaneously maintaining the flow of weapons, intelligence, and political cover to an Israeli regime that has made clear its intent to “flatten” Gaza and force its intentionally dehumanized survivors into an ever-shrinking killing cage.

President Joe Biden, facing historically low popularity heading into the 2024 election, reportedly now wants Israel to move to a “less kinetic” phase of its war by early next year. This is simply the latest effort by the administration to recast the public narrative about its consistent support for slaughter.

Ten weeks into this industrial-scale rampage, more than 25,000 Palestinians are dead, including nearly 10,000 children. Two dozen hospitals have been attacked by the U.S.-backed Israeli forces and some 300 health workers have been killed. Nearly 100 journalists have died under Israel’s bombs and attacks. Not even the Catholic Church in Gaza has been spared from Israel’s war crimes. On December 16, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women taking shelter in the Holy Family church in Gaza, spurring Pope Francis to state bluntly that Israel is committing acts of terrorism.

Gazans have been systematically denied the most minimal vital necessities. International aid organizations, warning of starvation and the spread of infectious disease, have repeatedly begged for an immediate ceasefire. And it has been the U.S., and the U.S. alone, that has insured that this would not happen. “The United States and Israel have never been more determined and aligned in our shared values, our shared interests and our shared goals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as he stood alongside U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week in Tel Aviv. “Our common enemies around the world are watching, and they know that Israel victory is the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.”

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Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis

Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.

The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists.

The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill her job, while demands by billionaire pro-Israel donors and politicians for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay have grown by the day. Both stand accused of refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, even though no such calls have taken place on their campuses.

Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the forces orchestrating the carefully choreographed, heavily-funded campaign to crush Palestine solidarity activism on campus.

The law firm leading the assault on the universities has included David Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, among its partners. Until 2021, this firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, was registered with the US Department of Justice as a foreign agent on behalf of an Israeli principal.

The firm’s clients include associates of a jailed Ukrainian billionaire who bankrolled neo-Nazi militias, along with a who’s who of corporations accused of defrauding and even killing consumers.

Meanwhile, the “Jewish student” witnesses who set the stage for the attacks on Magill and her fellow university presidents at the House Antisemitism Committee were employed on at least a semi-professional basis by Israeli lobbying cutouts.

They included Jonathan Frieden, a Harvard Law student who moonlights as president of Alliance for Israel; MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the president of MIT Israel Alliance; and Bella Ingber, co-president of NYU’s Students Supporting Israel.

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Murder

On the BBC, the Daily Politics show – which consists of discussion between senior British MPs – does not discuss Palestine at all, because the British political class supports the genocide, so for them there is nothing to discuss.

Also in Jabalia, the Israelis today destroyed the last remaining bakery.

It is worth stating why this is plainly a genocide in Gaza:

1) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure which supports the civilian population, including water treatment, electricity, sewerage systems, bakeries and fishing boats;

2)  Deliberate destruction of almost all medical facilities;

3) Deliberate destruction of educational facilities, from universities to primary schools;

4) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of civil society, including Supreme Court, Parliament, Ministries and Council buildings and deliberate destruction of administrative records;

5) Deliberate blocking of food aid inducing mass starvation;

6) Massive and indiscriminate bombardment. In wars the general percentage of children among those killed varies from 6 to 8 percent. In Ukraine it is 6 percent. In Gaza it is 42 percent. This is indiscriminate destruction of an ethnic group;

7) Mass executions of civilians;

8) Acts of dehumanisation of the Palestinians, including parading prisoners naked for public and media show and humiliation, beating and sexually abusing them;

9) Forced mass movement of population;

10) Deliberate targeting of religious and cultural heritage buildings;

11) Deliberate targeting of intellectual leadership, including journalists, doctors, poets, university lecturers and senior administrators;

12) Numerous declarations of open genocidal intent from the President and Prime Minister down through almost the entire fabric of both civilian and military establishment.

This is the official definition of Genocide in international law, from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

On Tuesday I attended a session called by Palestine at the United Nations in Geneva. Over 120 states attended. While the formal session consisted of statements of national position with few surprises, I was able to discuss with a large number of delegates in the corridors why the Genocide Convention has not been activated triggering a reference to the International Court of Justice.

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Israel Resuming Hostage Talks After Ugly Details Emerge Of ‘Friendly Fire’ Incident

Israel’s Mossad spy agency director David Barnea has been dispatched back to Doha amid reports that the Netanyahu government is open to pursuing a second temporary truce and hostage deal. 

Axios describes it as “the first meeting between senior Israeli and Qatari officials since the collapse of the seven-day ceasefire that led to the expansion of the Israeli military operation to southern Gaza.” Looming in the background is intensifying pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu in the wake of Friday’s ‘friendly fire’ incident which killed three hostages who had been trying to escape Hamas captivity.

Talks are “just a beginning” is is likely to be “long, difficult and complicated” – according to a source speaking to Axios. CIA director Bill Burns and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel are also said to be part of efforts to revive talks. Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to complete Gaza operations which have the aim of eradicating Hamas.

But already at a time that hostage and victim’s families have led huge protests demanding more be done to secure the release of the over 100 captives that remain, both domestic and international pressure is at breaking point.

The new to emerge details made known by a preliminary military investigation are very ugly and will drive controversy against military and government decision-makers into overdrive. The three young men killed by IDF troop fire were shirtless, waving a white-flag and shouting in Hebrew when they were gunned down by Israeli forces. According to the Times of Israel based on military statements:

Three hostages shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood Friday were shirtless, and one of them was carrying a stick with a makeshift white flag, the IDF said Saturday after an initial probe into the tragic incident.

Yotam Haim, Samar Talalka and Alon Lulu Shamriz managed to escape Hamas captivity before they were mistakenly shot dead by troops on Friday morning at around 10 a.m.

According to a senior officer in the Southern Command, citing an initial probe, the incident began after a soldier from Bislamach Brigade’s 17th Battalion stationed in a building identified three suspicious figures exiting a building several dozen meters away.

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