#Israel visa processing

[raizinggroup12]

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[allthecanadianpolitics]

Montreal, Canada – Israa Alsaafin’s grief was piling up.

She was already grappling with the loss of her brother, Ahmed, who was killed in an Israeli attack as he fled his home in northern Gaza in October 2023, just days into Israel's war on the Palestinian territory.

And she had spent months trying to get her parents and relatives from Gaza to Canada, a process stymied by strict visa requirements. Ultimately, she was forced to spend thousands of dollars just to get them to relative safety in neighbouring Egypt. [...]

In Canada, this wave of hate has fuelled a push by Palestinian Canadians to name and recognise anti-Palestinian racism as a distinct form of discrimination – and take concrete action to address it.

“I know a lot of Palestinians, now they are hiding their identity. They don’t speak up. They don’t say that they are from Palestine because they are scared that they are going to be targeted,” said Alsaafin.

“It’s very important to talk about it, [to] point fingers towards the anti-Palestinian racism situation that we face.” [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @vague-humanoid, @newsfromstolenland

[girlactionfigure]

the Zionists and the Nazis AUGUST 8, 2024

THE HAAVARA AGREEMENT

Immediately following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Nazis wasted no time in passing antisemitic legislation, including a boycott of Jewish businesses, and, between 1933-1938, a process known as “voluntary Aryanization” (which later became “mandatory Aryanization”) transferred Jewish businesses and assets to Germans. German Jews became increasingly desperate to flee, but no countries wanted to take in Jewish refugees, and this economic marginalization made emigration virtually impossible.

In 1933, Eliezer Hoofein, the director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and the Reich Economics Ministry negotiated the Haavara Agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Jews fleeing persecution in Germany could use their assets to purchase German goods for export, thus salvaging their assets and facilitating emigration to Palestine under the immigrant investor visa, in spite of severe British antisemitic immigration restriction policies.

Even so, the Haavara Agreement was met with staunch opposition, both among Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. In response to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, Jews worldwide enacted a boycott on German goods themselves. The Haavara Agreement was not in line with the Jewish anti-German boycott, as the Jewish community in both Germany and Palestine would be purchasing German goods. German public opinion also opposed the agreement. The Haavara Agreement was dissolved after World War II broke out in 1939.

The Haavara Agreement, though deeply controversial, ultimately saved the lives of some 60,000 German Jews. For context, the Haavara Agreement was similar to making a hostage deal with Hamas…making a deal with a hostile, genocidal enemy to save the lives of your own people. It wasn’t Zionist-Nazi “collaboration” by any stretch of the imagination.

LEHI-NAZI TIES

Lehi, pejoratively known as the “Stern Gang,” was an extremist right wing Jewish terrorist group in Mandatory Palestine. Believing that the British occupation of the Land of Israel was a much bigger threat to world Jewry than Nazism, they tried to establish contact with the Nazis twice, hoping to establish an alliance. The Nazis rejected them both times, because the Nazis would not ally with Jews, regardless of their views.

Lehi constituted no more than 300 members, whose views were fringe and non-representative of the Jewish community.

Ultimately, the Nazis never would’ve allied with any Zionist group.

In 1937, a Nazi document on foreign policy read, “(1) The formation of a Jewish state or a Jewish-led political structure under British mandate is not in Germany’s interest…(2) Germany therefore has an interest in strengthening the Arab world as a counterweight against such a possible increase in power for world Jewry.”

JEWISH PARTISANS

The organized Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was predominantly Zionist. In fact, Zionism was a major motivator for Jews joining the resistance.

In Poland, the main partisan organization, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), meaning “Jewish Combat Organization,” was formed out of Zionist youth groups.

The first Jewish resistance organization in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Lithuanian Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO), meaning “United Partisan Organization,” had a strong Zionist presence. Two of its three leaders, Abba Kovner and Josef Glazman, were prominent figures in the Zionist movement. 

In France, Jews, who comprised one percent of the total French population, formed between 15-20 percent of the resistance. In 1942, French Jewish partisans founded the Zionist Armée Juive, meaning “Jewish Army.”

Among the most recognizable Jewish partisan groups during the Holocaust were the Bielski brothers, who hid in the forest and rescued over a thousand Jews, and whose story was depicted in the film Defiance. The oldest Bielski brother and commander of the group, Tuvia, had long been interested in the Zionist youth movement.

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which lasted from April 16 to May 16, 1943, was the largest Jewish uprising against the Nazis during the Holocaust. 

In March of 1942, a number of Zionist Jewish youth groups inside the Warsaw Ghetto first proposed the creation of a Jewish self-defense force.

After 250,000+ Warsaw Jews were deported to the Treblinka death camp in the summer of 1942, two Zionist organizations — the left-wing socialist Jewish Combat Organization and the right-wing Jewish Military Union — formed and began training.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a last-ditch effort to resist the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto — that is, the deportation of all of Warsaw’s Jews to extermination camps to be gassed or worked to death. The uprising was led by the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union, which, again, were both Zionist groups.

According to German records, the only German casualties in 29 days of fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were 17 Nazi soldiers. The Germans responded by burning the entirety of the ghetto, resulting in 13,000 Jewish deaths, most of whom suffocated to death or were burnt alive. Another 36,000 Jews were sent to death camps.

THE YISHUV

The Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine fiercely opposed the Nazis, so much so that the Jewish paramilitaries, the Haganah and the Irgun, temporarily halted their resistance operations against the British and instead joined the British war effort against Germany. In 1944, the British established the Jewish Brigade, comprised of Jewish citizens of Palestine, seen in the above photo. Some 30,000 Jews volunteered to join the Brigade.

The Yishuv sent a number of paratroopers to Europe to rescue Jews from deportation to death camps, most notably Hannah Szenes, who was captured and executed.

Despite temporarily halting most anti-British operations, the Haganah continued carrying out Aliyah Bet to the best of their ability, illegally smuggling Jewish Holocaust refugees to Palestine with varying success.

Chaim Weizmann, the future first president of Israel, played an important role in convincing the British government to accept the Kindertransport, the organized rescue of 10,000 Jewish children, who were given refuge in the United Kingdom.

ORIGIN OF THE ZIONISM = NAZISM LIBEL

The accusation that Zionists are Nazis has its roots in the British Foreign Office during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. In March of 1945 — about two months before the Nazis even surrendered— the High Commissioner of Palestine, Lord Gort, told the Colonial Secretary in London that “the establishment of any Jewish State in Palestine…will almost inevitably mean the rebirth of National Socialism [i.e. Nazism] in some guise.”

In 1969, the United Nations passed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Both the United States and Brazil wanted to add a clause including antisemitism. The Soviet Union, which had been heavily oppressing its Jewish population, worried that such a clause would be used to rebuke them for persecuting Soviet Jews. As such, they included a counter proposal, which was a clause that equated Zionism to Nazism. That way, they could say they were persecuting Zionists, not Jews. Neither clause passed.

In 1985, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public published a propagandist brochure known as the “Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism,” which claimed that there was irrefutable proof that the Zionists not only had collaborated with the Nazis, but were also responsible for the genocide of Jews, Slavs, and others in Europe. When Israel captured and tried Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s, the Soviets painted the Israel-West Germany relationship as “evidence” that the Zionists had colluded with the Nazis. Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world was so pervasive that it even influenced the dissertation of current so-called “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” According to Abbas, Israel captured Eichmann “to prevent the ‘sacred secrets’ of this [Zionist-Nazi] collaboration from becoming public.”

rootsmetals

Hannah Szenes wasn’t tortured and executed for your disrespectful ass to come and say the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis 🙄

[perfectlyvalid49]

Hey! Thanks for the feedback and think there’s a lot of validity in what you’re saying. I think my frustration is that even within the “3%” minority, that applies to most things given how diverse human experience is. Trans/Intersex people, various disabilities/genetic “defects” (re: Type 1 Diabetes, anemia, etc) are probably around the same percentage and still LARGELY matter. Same applies to other Native people’s who have also experienced genocide.

I largely push back on the notion that “no Jews exist in the surrounding countries of Israel” given that:

A) Kurds exist and are a part of the Semitic diaspora

B) that’s like saying that no queer people exist in North Korea because they’ve systematically attempted to kill everyone who “looks gay”. People (ESPECIALLY the Jewish spirit) exist everywhere because

C) I have a Jewish friend who is adopted from China which is a WILD set of identities to fathom existing simultaneously but I promise you there’s a lot of power in solidarity

My biggest Christicism (this was a typo but I’m keeping it because I think it’s funny lololol) of the Abrahamic faiths is the rigidity of structure and lack of intercommunication between faiths because it all seems extremely isolating which, fine, but there is something weirdly healing about more henotheistic beliefs which feel just as empowering. I think that’s why Kabbalah is so appealing

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from scrolling through your blog, it seems that you are not Jewish. If you are not part of the community, then you can only be coming at this from an outsider’s perspective.

To discuss the 3% thing (no idea why you felt the need to put it in quotes) – In the US, the Native American population is about 3% of the total. You hear a lot more about Native American struggles in the US (still not enough) than you would in England. Similarly, that 3% of non-Western Jewish voices are heard more inside of the Jewish community than outside of it. If you want them heard outside of the Jewish community, you might start by advocating for goyim to listen to Jews at all.

Your pushback is full of shit given that I didn’t say that “no Jews exist in the surrounding countries of Israel” (don’t put it in quotes if you’re not quoting buddy, I refuse to be your strawman) I said “there are many countries in the world with 0 Jews (several of them share borders with Israel)” and also:

A) Most Kurds are not Jewish. They don’t identify as Jewish, and Jews don’t identify them (as a group, not individuals) as Jewish. Most Kurds are Muslim. There is no such thing as a Semitic people, only Semitic languages, and if you’re counting all speakers of Semitic languages as Jewish, then all speakers of Arabic would be Jewish, an assertion that I feel they would object to. You trying to make people Jewish because they’re “Semitic” is at best a sign that you don’t know what you’re talking about and at worst a sign that I’m about to hear some antisemitic nonsense.

B) You can’t be Jewish just because you have “the Jewish spirit.” Judaism is a semi-closed religion, so to be Jewish you either have to be born to Jews, or you have to convert, a process that can require months to years of study, and cannot be finalized without the presence of other Jews. You could argue that there are people who would convert if given the opportunity everywhere, but they are not Jews until the conversion process is complete. And we have census data from these countries saying that there are no Jews. There are no Jews in Jordan, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Oman or Saudi Arabia. There are fewer than 50 in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, or Yemen.

C) Chinese Jewish is actually not that weird of a combination. There were Jews in China hundreds of years ago that got there on the silk road, and there were Jews in China in the 1940s because of basically one heroic bureaucrat that was approving visas to move there for Jews escaping Europe at a time when no other country was accepting them. There are more Jews today in China than there are in all of the countries I listed in the last paragraph combined. I’m not sure what that has to do with the lack of Jews outside of Israel in the middle east though.

As I mentioned above, Judaism is a semi-closed religion, and Kabbalah is restricted practice even within Judaism. If you are not Jewish, then you need to stay away from Kabbalah. Interacting with it is cultural appropriation of the highest order and as disgusting as putting on black face, or putting some feathers in your hair and dancing around and claiming that you’re doing a Native American ritual.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Never have and never will eat a bagel. But that’s also just known as bread. Not a crazy creation. There is no such thing as isr **li traditions because it hasn’t been around long enough. Jewish and isr**li are not interchangeable.

Nice to know I live in your head rent free 🤣

Bagels aren't just bread, there's a whole ass extra process that's included which is has a whole host of interesting scientific effects that changes them from "just bread". Are bagels a type of bread? Yes. In the same way focaccia is a type of bread, or brioche, or challah, or a white bloomer from the shop. Different recipes come from different places, and there are literal historical explanations as to why Jews started boiling their bread before baking which makes it significantly different to just a roll with a hole.

Israel has been around in one form or another for literally thousands of years, there are literally Egyptian hieroglyphics which refer to "yisrael" as a nation. Jewish traditions and festivals are literally based around seasons in Israel.

Israeli culture is a fascinating case study in how traditions and culture develop on a measurable scale. There have been multiple generations since Israel was ratified as a country by the UN. This is plenty of time for culture to blend and traditions to develop. It's a melting pot of traditions and foods eaten by Jewish communities around the world, from the Levant, to north Africa and Europe (among others).

You're right, Jewish and Israeli are not interchangable because Israeli is a nationality and Jewish is an ethnicity (along with a religion). That doesn't change the fact that as a majority Jewish state, Israeli culture and tradition is heavily influenced by Jewish ones, and visa versa - Jewish culture around the world can be found in Israel.

Lots of levantine cultures and countries have the same food traditions because it's what is ✨naturally available✨ there, and the foods developed before modern boarders. So it makes sense Israeli food reflects the food of the region as mizrahi Jews make up the largest sub-group within the country and as they moved there after being forced out of Arab lands (I'll get onto your other message and debunk that one in a minute), they took their food with them. Or should people leave their entire identity behind? Should Chinese people in the UK not eat Chinese food? Or maybe any Indian or Bangladeshi immigrants to the US should never touch Indian and Bangladeshi food again?

[deadpanwalking]

My wife’s family also went through the Vienna-Rome pipeline. Did your family also get pressured to move to Israel instead of America by the international aid organizations? She says there is a lot of animosity in Israel for Soviet Jews who didn’t choose to immigrate .

I mean, all Soviet Jews literally had to use Israel’s Law of Return as a pretext in order to leave since going to the US was out of the question, my family included. Despite Jewish communities existing in the European part of Russia since the early medieval period, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union designated Jews as a nation, and required that they identify themselves on internal passports and legal papers. The rationale was that Jews qualified as a nation rather than just a religion because they were an ethnic group, with shared language (Yiddish), cultural practices, and historical ties that distinguished them from “real” Russians; the reality is that Jews were isolated socially (as well as geographically) and subjected to discrimination, restrictions, and pogroms. We weren’t Russian Jews so much as Jews who lived in Russia.  Do you see where I’m going with this? 

Lenin—correctly—disparaged Zionism as bourgeois nationalist ideology, but thanks to centuries of antisemitism, this played perfectly into the preexisting concept of Jews as a nation and complemented centuries of antisemitism in Europe.  As such, they were presumed to be inherently Zionist, disloyal, and counterrevolutionary (on the heels of being presumed to be Communist radicals plotting a Revolution against the Tsar).  Under Communism, all Jews were ostensibly granted full rights as Soviet citizens, and antisemitic restrictions on movement and professions were officially lifted but categorizing Jews as a distinct nationality allowed the state to better regulate Jewish life and manage the "Jewish question" in Soviet society. It facilitated antisemitic policies around population registration, migration, and designated us as targets for civilian and state-sponsored violence.

Soviet Jews were not allowed to emigrate until after The Six-Day War in 1967, then the restrictions were lifted slightly after both international orgs and countries in the West put pressure on Russia to let its Jews, who had lived there for over a millennium, make Aliyah to their “real” ancestral homeland, a country formed less than 20 years prior, in a region which their actual ancestors hadn’t set foot in since before the destruction of the Second Temple. This way, the Soviet Union didn’t even have to admit that its Jews were fleeing from political and religious repression, they were simply “repatriating” and reuniting with their heritage.

Anyway, in order to secure the exit visa, you had to get a vyzov (formal invitation letter) from a “family member” in Israel—this could be literally anyone, ours came via a random guy my dad met via the shortwave radio thing he did.  That vyzov got Soviet Jews as far as Vienna, and then all bets were off. There, Soviet Jews were given the first actual choice in their adult lives: where they wanted to live.  At Vienna station, we were met by a lot of different agencies that could help us get where we wanted to go—the big ones were HIAS, JDC, and Nativ (the Israeli liaison bureau). There was pressure from Nativ to make Aliyah in that it was incentivized: we could leave directly for Israel from Vienna instead of moving to Rome to deal with the American immigration process, we would be granted full citizenship on entry, there was government funding for programs specifically designated for Soviet olim ("those [Jews] who ascended") that could help with everything from transportation to immediate housing, education, and employment service, etc.  The derisive name they had for families like mine and your wife’s was “noshrim” (dropouts), we were seen as abandoning the mission of Aliyah and undermining the Jewish state, since Israel had invested considerable diplomatic and financial resources to secure emigration for more settlers vulnerable refugees—by choosing the US, we really were, as the Russians had always said, disloyal and rootless.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) strongly condemned the change in policy by the Biden Administration towards Israelis seeking permeant resident status in the United States or requesting a visa. Sometime in the last few months, Israelis seeking a response from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have begun to face detailed questioning about their service in the IDF, with the clear implication that routine service in the army of the Jewish State may constitute war crimes. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter last week to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (see https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-to-mayorkas-your-job-is-to-protect-our-borders-not-interrogate-our-allies) demanding answers about the apparent change in American policy. It is clear that the context of the new policy is to increase the pressure on Israel to avoid the total destruction of Hamas. It is reprehensible that the Biden administration is joining with various UN agencies to prevent an Israeli victory in Gaza.

The facts are undisputed. Israelis living in the United States and routinely applying for a green card have been asked very detailed questions about service in the IDF, including if the applicant had been in combat, commanded troops, guarded ‘detainees,’ worked with explosives, or fired any weapon. An IDF female veteran routinely seeking a Visa to America at a European consulate was asked similar questions and then unceremoniously denied entry without any explanation. The letter sent by Senator Cotton demands answers about this new policy, and ZOA strongly agrees that Secretary Mayorkas should provide them to Congress and change this outrageous policy.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said:

“The entire Biden administration has displayed a disturbing hostility to Israel as it fights for its life against Iran and the Nazi-like Islamic terrorists of Hamas. The pattern of this new policy against heroes who have served their country honorably, combined with the slow walking of needed munitions while Israel is at war, is beyond despicable. ZOA agrees with Caroline Glick – Biden is implementing a “whole-of-government policy of criminalizing Israel and its citizens.” (https://www.jns.org/bidens-whole-of-government-hostility-to-israel/) The Jewish community in the United States has not spoken up enough about this pattern of hostility, but ZOA will not be silent and will do everything it can to draw attention to this bizarre and self-defeating treatment of our best ally in the region.”

ZOA Director of Government Relations Dan Pollak said:

“ZOA thanks Sen. Cotton for his leadership in drawing attention to this outrageous and inappropriate weaponization of the visa and immigration process to try to achieve a political result. It will not help President Biden in his political campaign anyway, but combined with other actions taken by the administration, it is becoming clear that that is not really the point. There is an effort within the American government to sacrifice our country’s actual interests for ideological points of some kind. When the answers to Senator Cotton’s reasonable questions come back, ZOA calls on all members of Congress to hold the administration accountable.”

[eretzyisrael]

by Jessica Costescu

"The Jewish and Israeli community at MIT … has undergone some of the worst violence, hatred, and injustice in the past 7 months," Khan and Moore wrote in a Monday letter to Kornbluth, "and we have seen the MIT Administration stand idly by as classmates, lab partners, and even our professors praised the murder of our friends and family, called for violence against Jews, and most recently chanted 'Death to Zionists' on MIT campus."

"You claim that if we are willing to wait just one more week, on top of the seven months we have already waited for you to act, you will finally support the Jewish community and take action against those calling for our deaths and the deaths of our loved ones," the students continued. "We don't believe you. … We will hold our celebration of Jewish self-determination, as planned."

Kornbluth's failed attempt to clear the encampment—and shifting deadline to do so—comes as the president faces congressional scrutiny into her handling of campus anti-Semitism.

The House Education Committee formalized an investigation into MIT in March, roughly three months after Kornbluth appeared before the committee alongside then-Harvard University president Claudine Gay and then-University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. The hearing was a disaster, and both Magill and Gay resigned in its wake.

Now, the committee, led by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), is in the process of obtaining internal documents regarding Kornbluth's response to campus anti-Semitism. In a March letter sent to Kornbluth, Foxx expressed "grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of MIT's response to antisemitism on its campus," citing "hypocrisy and selective enforcement of Institute rules."

MIT did not respond to a request for comment.

In her Monday directive to disband the encampment, Kornbluth said student protesters who opted to leave voluntarily would avoid suspension. Those who stayed in the encampment would face immediate suspension, she said.

Hours later, after protesters breached the campus lawn and retook the encampment, Kornbluth issued a Monday evening "update." She said most students "had left the enclosed tent area" on Monday afternoon before "a large number of outside demonstrators arrived" and caused a "surge." None of those demonstrators were arrested, Kornbluth said.

"As we write, about 150 students and others are standing in a circle around the tents and others are nearby chanting," she said. "While no arrests have been made on campus, police officers from MIT, Cambridge and the state remain on the scene to preserve public safety."

"We have much work still to do to resolve this situation, and will continue to communicate as needed," Kornbluth said.

Kornbluth has a history of walking back promises to discipline anti-Israel protesters. In November, she threatened to expel students engaged in unsanctioned protests before opting to place those students on a "non-academic suspension," which allowed them to continue attending class. Kornbluth said she did so to protect foreign students, citing "serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues."

[silicacid]

UN says Israel will not renew visa for top aid official

Israel has told the United Nations it will not renew a visa for the top U.N. humanitarian aid official for the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank, a U.N. spokesperson said on Friday.

Canadian-born Lynn Hastings, a veteran U.N. official, has served as the deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process and U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory for nearly three years.

"We've been informed by the Israeli authorities that they would not renew the visa of Ms Hastings past the due date at some point later this month," U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

He said U.N. staff do not overstay their visas in any country, but stressed that U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has full confidence in Hastings. Dujarric did not say whether Hastings would be replaced.

A spokesperson for Israel's Foreign Ministry accused the United Nations of being biased and described as "disgraceful" the U.N. response to an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants that Israel says killed 1,200 people.

"That's why Israel decided to check on - one by one - the visas that are issued to representatives of the U.N.," the spokesperson said.

At the end of October, Israel's Foreign Ministry accused Hastings - in a social media post - of failing to be impartial and objective, which the United Nations rejected.

"You've seen some very public attacks on Twitter against her which were utterly unacceptable," Dujarric said. "Personal direct attacks on U.N. personnel anywhere around the world is unacceptable and puts people's lives at risks."

Guterres on Wednesday warned the U.N. Security Council that the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas, was in the midst of an "epic humanitarian catastrophe."

Since the Oct. 7 attack, Israel has focused its retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, bombarding it from the air, imposing a siege and launching a ground assault.

More than 15,000 people are confirmed killed, some 40% of them under the age of 18, according to Palestinian health authorities deemed reliable by the United Nations. Many others are feared buried under the ruins.

This is what she posted:

[hoperays-song]

Today, I went into my local community college to register for some classes. I was immediately bustled into a room with two older women, who were also filing out the online application with a state software. The one next to me, who was about my mum's age, smiled when I sat down, complemented my bag, and said something about how it was good to see young people interested in education. I thanked her and we both went back to our application. I didn't pay much attention to anything other the the application for a while but when I paused to look some stuff up on my phone for it. She saw the back of my case, which is decorated with pride flags and a "love is love" popsocket, and she immediately tapped it with a smile, proclaiming "I love that! There needs to be more of that in the world!" I had been pretty stressed up until this point due to the area I live in not being that safe for queer people, but just that simple comment made me relax and smile, thank her again, and agree to watch her stuff while she ran out of the room to talk to a counselor.

But this random lady's support to the clearly nervous queer kid at a Texan community college is not the point of this post. What happened after this is. She came back with a counselor and they began talking about her about the family history section of the application. Now, I wasn't trying to eavesdrop but we were seated shoulder to shoulder so I heard the entire conversation anyways. Her parents had graduate degrees and as part of the application you have to put what schools they went to and where those schools are. Her parents' schools did not exist in the software. Wanna know why? Because they were located in Gaza. And Palestine didn't exist in the software, as a country or occupied territory. And for the next ten minutes, the counselors just kept asking her if she would be willing to put her parents' and their degrees coming from either the West Bank or Israel. She had to keep explaining to them on why she would not do that the entire time before they eventually decided to move to conversation to another room as it was becoming clear that both me and the other woman in the room, who actually was a recent Ukrainian immigrant, were clearly getting extremely mad at what they were telling this lady to do.

Because not only were they telling her to put her visa at stake by putting down different info on a government form, but they were telling her to erase her entire heritage as well just to make the admission process a bit easier for them. Fuck that. Palestinians deserve their heritage and freedom. Stop trying to erase them from history. Apply Texas, go fuck yourselves.

[plethoraworldatlas]

In an aggressive and desperate act of retaliation, Google has fired 50 workers, including non-participating bystanders, as a response to April 16th's historic, coast-to-coast sit-ins that took place inside Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office in Sunnyvale, CA, as well as the 10th floor commons of Google NYC. Through this historic, worker action — and the first of its kind in tech — tech workers with the No Tech For Apartheid campaign demanded that Google cut its $1.2B contract with Israel, known as Project Nimbus.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian are genocide profiteers. Through Project Nimbus, Google is actively aiding & abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has so far killed, disappeared, and wounded over 100,000 Palestinians, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Just two weeks ago, TIME Magazine confirmed that Google has been lying to its own workers, consumers & the press for years, and is providing direct cloud/AI services to the Israeli Occupation Forces. What’s more, the corporation has actively deepened its partnership with Israeli military during the genocide in Gaza, signing a new $1M agreement as recently as one month ago.

These courageous workers put their bodies & jobs on the line inside their own workplaces, demonstrating their unwavering commitment to Palestinian liberation. For three years, through the No Tech For Apartheid campaign, thousands of workers at Google and Amazon have called on their employers to cut the billion-dollar Project Nimbus contract. It's simple: Workers at Google and Amazon don't want their labor to power Israeli apartheid or the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Google’s indiscriminate mass firings are a clear attempt to quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them. Google is terrified of worker organizing for Palestine and embarrassed by last week’s show of worker power. In an attempt to assert control, Google decided to unceremoniously, and without due process, upend the livelihoods of over 50 workers, including many who did not actively participate in last Tuesday’s sit-ins. Google even called the police on its own workers at both sit-in locations, leading to the arrests of the Nimbus Nine, who were charged with trespassing at their own offices.

Unjustly fired Google workers include Palestinians who financially support families back home, workers with urgent healthcare needs, as well as those who relied on work visas to reside and work in the U.S. Irrespective of these extenuating circumstances, Google lashed out at any worker that was physically in the vicinity of the protest or who they identified through a dragnet of in-office surveillance.

Tech workers and workers everywhere will not allow their labor rights to be trampled on, nor their voices silenced. Workers need their voices heard, to be able to speak out in support of fellow workers who experience harassment and discrimination at work and who are personally and directly impacted by their bosses’ decisions about how their labor is used—in this case Palestinian Googlers being forced to watch their company’s tech being used to massacre their own people.

Join us to demand Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, and Google's Chief of HR Fiona Ciccone reinstate the 50 fired workers & stop the retaliation against workers speaking out on Palestine. Workers' sit-in demands included that the company stop allowing the harassment and discrimination of Palestinians, Muslim and Arab Googlers, and address the workplace health and safety crisis that Project Nimbus has created for Google workers who do not want their labor to power a genocide.

[raizinggroup12]

UAE Citizens: Discover the Wonders of Israel in 2024! 🇦🇪✈️

Thinking about your next getaway? Israel offers a unique blend of culture, history, and stunning landscapes that you won't want to miss!

✨ Top Experiences:

Explore Jerusalem: Walk through ancient streets and visit sacred sites.

Enjoy Tel Aviv: Immerse yourself in the vibrant nightlife and culinary scene.

Relax at the Dead Sea: Experience the magic of floating in its mineral-rich waters!

UAE travelers can easily navigate visa requirements!

For all the latest info and tips, visit Israel Visa UAE Or contact us today .

[ausetkmt]

Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans

Former President Donald Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up people living in the United States without legal permission on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.

Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a COVID-19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — although this time, he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

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He plans to scour the country for immigrants living here without legal permission and deport people by the millions per year.

To help speed mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due-process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

In a public reference to his plans, Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September, “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”

The constellation of Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of immigrants living in the country without legal permission would be banned from the U.S. or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.

And Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents living in the country without legal permission — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description yet of Trump’s immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error. Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group that repeatedly fought the Trump administration, said the Trump team’s plans relied on “xenophobic demagoguery” that appeals to his hardest-core political base.

“Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Schulte said.

The Tools to Exploit

Since Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is reelected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.

The ebbing of the COVID-19 pandemic and resumption of travel flows have helped stir a global migrant crisis, with millions of Venezuelans and Central Americans fleeing turmoil and Africans arriving in Latin American countries before continuing their journey north. Amid the record numbers of migrants at the southern border and beyond it in cities like New York and Chicago, voters are frustrated, and even some Democrats are calling for tougher action against immigrants and pressuring the White House to better manage the crisis.

Trump and his advisers see the opening and now know better how to seize it. The aides Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, Cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions — like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John Kelly — had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.

In a second term, Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him.

Since much of Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.

The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration.

DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.

Miller said Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Trump replaced her with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Trump’s rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.

His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.

As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

Trump had similarly vowed to carry out mass deportations when running for office in 2016, but the government only managed several hundred thousand removals per year under his presidency, on par with other recent administrations. If they get another opportunity, Trump and his team are determined to achieve annual numbers in the millions.

Keeping People Out

Trump’s immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much further. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.

One example centers on expanding first-term policies aimed at keeping people out of the country. Trump plans to suspend the nation’s refugee program and once again categorically ban visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries, which President Joe Biden called discriminatory and ended on his first day in office.

Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Miller said. For example, a second Trump administration would seek to reestablish an agreement with Mexico that asylum-seekers remain there while their claims are processed. (It is not clear that Mexico would agree; a Mexican court has said that deal violated human rights.)

Trump would also push to revive “safe third country” agreements with several nations in Central America and try to expand them to Africa, Asia and South America. Under such deals, countries agree to take would-be asylum-seekers from specific other nations and let them apply for asylum there instead.

While such arrangements have traditionally only covered migrants who had previously passed through a third country, federal law does not require that limit, and a second Trump administration would seek to make those deals without it, in part as a deterrent to migrants making what the Trump team views as illegitimate asylum claims.

At the same time, Miller said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would invoke the public health emergency powers law known as Title 42 to again refuse to hear any asylum claims by people arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration had internally discussed that idea early in Trump’s term, but some Cabinet secretaries pushed back, arguing that there was no public health emergency that would legally justify it. The administration ultimately implemented it during the coronavirus pandemic.

Saying the idea has since gained acceptance in practice — Biden initially kept the policy — Miller said Trump would invoke Title 42, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like RSV and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”

Trump and his aides have not yet said whether they would reenact one of the most contentious deterrents to unauthorized immigration that he pursued as president: separating children from their parents, which led to trauma among migrants and difficulties in reuniting families. When pressed, Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out reviving the policy. After an outcry over the practice, Trump ended it in 2018, and a judge later blocked the government from putting it back into effect.

Mass Deportations

Soon after Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president last November, he met with Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants.

In an interview, Homan recalled that in that meeting, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

Trump advisers’ vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.

Miller cast such disruption in a favorable light.

“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” he said. “Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.”

One planned step to overcome the legal and logistical hurdles would be to significantly expand a form of fast-track deportations known as “expedited removal.” It denies immigrants living in the country without legal permission the usual hearings and opportunity to file appeals, which can take months or years — especially when people are not in custody — and has led to a large backlog. A 1996 law says people can be subject to expedited removal for up to two years after arriving, but to date, the executive branch has used it more cautiously, swiftly expelling people picked up near the border soon after crossing.

The Trump administration tried to expand the use of expedited removal, but a court blocked it, and then the Biden team canceled the expansion. It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court will rule that it is constitutional to use the law against people who have been living for a significant period in the United States and express fear of persecution if sent home.

Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.”

The Supreme Court has upheld past uses of that law in wartime. But its text seems to require a link to the actions of a foreign government, so it is not clear whether the justices will allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity.

More broadly, Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of immigrants living in the country without legal permission all at once.

To make the process of finding and deporting immigrants already living inside the country without legal permission “radically more quick and efficient,” he said, the Trump team would bring in “the right kinds of attorneys and the right kinds of policy thinkers” willing to carry out such ideas.

And because of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, they plan to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.

Miller said the new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border.” He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security. While he cautioned that there were no specific blueprints yet, he said the camps would look professional and similar to other facilities for migrants that have been built near the border.

Such camps could also enable the government to speed up the pace and volume of deportations of people who have lived in the United States without legal permission for years and so are not subject to fast-track removal. If pursuing a long-shot effort to win permission to remain in the country would mean staying locked up in the interim, some may give up and voluntarily accept removal without going through the full process.

The use of these camps, he said, would likely be focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a long-standing court order known as the Flores settlement. So any families brought to the facilities would have to be moved in and out more quickly, Miller said.

The Trump administration tried to overturn the Flores settlement, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the matter before Trump’s term ended. Miller said the Trump team would try again.

To increase the number of agents available for ICE sweeps, Miller said, officials from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.

While a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids the use of the armed forces for law enforcement purposes, another law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act at the border, enabling the use of federal troops to apprehend migrants, Miller said.

“Bottom line,” he said, “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from Robert Scott Horton]

* * * *

Biden is busy doing the people's business

June 5, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, President Biden has been busy doing the people’s business. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order that suspends the asylum process when “encounters” with immigrants illegally crossing the border surpasses 2500 per day. Biden’s effort was born of frustration. Congress was within days of passing a bipartisan immigration and border security bill in May when Convicted Felon Trump ordered the GOP to kill the bill to preserve immigration as an issue in the 2024 election.

In issuing the order, Biden relied on the same theory of executive power that Trump invoked when he sought to ban travel from majority-Muslim nations. The ACLU plans to sue the Biden administration to overturn the executive order.

The details of the order are here: FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces New Actions to Secure the Border | The White House. For a description of how the plan will work in. practice, see How Biden's new order to halt asylum at the US border is supposed to work | AP News.

As expected, the proposal did not satisfy everyone in the Democratic Party. See WaPo, Democrats divided over Biden’s immigration executive order. (Accessible to everyone.)

Biden issued a statement with the executive order, saying, in part,

I would have preferred to address our issues at the border through bipartisan legislation because that’s the only way to actually fix our broken system – But Republicans in Congress have left me no choice. So today, I’m announcing actions that bar migrants who cross our southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum – unless they seek it after entering through established lawful processes.

Biden also listed recent actions to address immigration and border security:

Strengthening the asylum screening process

New docket to address cases and make asylum decisions within 6 months versus 6 years

Revoking visas of CEOs and government officials who profit from the exploitation of vulnerable migrants

Expanding efforts to dismantle human smuggling and support immigration prosecutions

Enhancing immigration enforcement

Seizing fentanyl at our border

As President Biden is trying to solve the challenges at our southern border, he is also actively pressuring both Israel and Hamas to reach a complete cease fire that results in the release of all hostages. See ABC News, Biden takes a big swing at hostage-for-truce deal, puts onus on Israeli, Hamas officials to step up.

As noted in the ABC article, President Biden’s strategy is an aggressive approach to an intractable problem. Per ABC,

White House officials on Monday said Biden's decision to make public what it describes as an Israeli proposal — just one day after it was delivered to Hamas — was driven by a desire to put Hamas on the spot. The move diverged from the U.S. administration's position throughout the conflict to allow the Israelis to speak for themselves about hostage negotiations. [¶] “This wasn't about jamming the prime minister, the war cabinet,” [National Security Advisor Spokesperson John] Kirby said. “This was about laying bare for the public to see how well and how faithfully and how assertively the Israelis came up with a new proposal. It shows how much they really want to get this done."

Finally, Biden sat down with Time Magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief (on 5/28) for an on-the-record, full-transcript interview. See Time Magazine, President Biden on World Leadership, War, and 2024 Election. Overall, the tone of the interview is begrudgingly respectful toward President Biden. But as with most political discussions today, it normalizes Convicted Felon Trump by discussing his policy positions as if they are not the product of a criminal who attempted a coup and incited an insurrection.

Per the Time interview,

Biden’s record in facing these tests is more than just nostalgic talk. He has added two powerful European militaries to NATO, and will soon announce the doubling of the number of countries in the Atlantic alliance that are paying more than the target 2% of their GDP toward defense, the White House says. His Administration has worked to prevent the war in Gaza from igniting a broader regional conflict. He brokered the first trilateral summit with long-distrustful regional partners South Korea and Japan, and coaxed the Philippines to move away from Beijing’s orbit and accept four new U.S. military bases. He has rallied European and Asian countries to curtail China’s economic sway. “We have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world,” Biden says, so that “we are able to move in a way that recognizes how much the world has changed and still lead.”

While the Time interviewer noted Biden’s “stiff gait” and “fitful syntax” (a product of his lifelong stutter), the sweep of the interview, Biden’s command of the facts, and the breadth of his career clearly impressed the author.  Read the article—all of it. You will be impressed (again) by the remarkable career and accomplishments of Joe Biden.

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[mariacallous]

This was not supposed to happen. Israel’s vaunted military and ruthlessly efficient security services had Hamas bottled up in the Gaza Strip. Sure, every few years there was a conflict that followed a similar pattern: a provocation, Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli air strikes, Egyptian mediation, and then quiet again. Meanwhile, Israel’s diplomatic achievements piled up as it expanded its circle of peace to include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Until a few days ago, Washington was debating when Saudi Arabia and Israel would normalize relations.

That was when people began getting news alerts on their devices informing them that Hamas had invaded Israel, killed many civilians and soldiers, and had yet to be subdued while a salvo of anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 rockets rained down on Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Tel Aviv.

By now, whatever has been said about Hamas’s “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” as this latest assault has been dubbed—that it’s unprecedented, a quantum leap, Israel’s 9/11—has become cliché. However folks want to describe it, it should be clear that the merciless lethality of Hamas’s invasion of Israel has—at the risk of another cliché—changed everything. The familiar pattern of Israel-Hamas conflict is now something of the past. There is simply no way the Israeli government will not unleash the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the Gaza Strip on the ground, in the air, and by sea to destroy Hamas and, in the process, kill or capture leaders such as Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif.

As a result, the issues that the world of Middle East experts, punditry, and officialdom was concerned with just a week ago—Israel’s eligibility for the U.S. visa waiver program and the prospect of Saudi-Israeli normalization—suddenly seem irrelevant. The starting point for the new Middle East will be an Israeli reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, not an Israeli Embassy in Riyadh.

This parlous state of affairs is only really a surprise because bad assumptions about the region hampered a clear view of the Middle East’s complex political dynamics. This is particularly acute when it comes to the Palestinian issue and its alleged diminution in parallel with the march toward regional integration, the idea that the problem is Israel’s occupation, and the persistent belief—despite so much evidence—that U.S. diplomacy can alter Iran’s behavior for the better.

Take each one in succession. First, although some Middle Eastern governments want to establish ties with Israel, the issue of Palestinian rights has not lost its importance for the vast majority of Arabs who view normalization dimly. Lost in the miasma of violence in recent days is the fact that Israel has occupied the West Bank for 56 years and, along with Egypt, maintains a cordon sanitaire around the Gaza Strip. Prominent features of life for Palestinians in these areas are violence, dispossession, and dehumanization.

Under these circumstances, there are few Palestinians who regard resistance as illegitimate. This was perhaps best articulated in a media interview with Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, who is neither aligned with Hamas nor its political rival, Fatah. Without explicitly condoning or condemning Hamas’s rampage throughout southern Israel, he focused on what he sees as Israel’s culpability. He told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that the Hamas attack was a reaction to a host of actions, including settler attacks on and evictions of Palestinians in the West Bank; attacks on Muslim and Christian holy sites by Israeli extremists; and Israel’s normalization with Arab countries, which Barghouti characterized as an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “liquidate” Palestinian rights and the Palestinian cause.

It was likely hard for many viewers to hear at a moment when the full horror of the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians was coming to light, but Barghouti accurately characterized the situation for many Palestinians.

Now that war has broken out, it has brought into sharp relief the fact that the Palestinian issue is not just a “checkbox” ahead of a Saudi-Israeli signing ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. Security, rights, and justice for the people in the West Bank and Gaza remain critical pieces of the normalization that so many Israelis want.

To their credit, U.S. President Joe Biden and his advisors understood this and pushed the Israelis to take the issue seriously. Still, in Washington, until Saturday morning there was an overall sense that the primary obstacles to Saudi-Israel normalization were not the Israeli occupation and Palestinians’ lack of rights, but rather a radical far-right Israeli government and a toxic Saudi leader who was unworthy of the goodies the White House was willing to offer for coming to terms with Israel.

Those may be valid reasons to be skeptical of a deal, but it’s clear that, now especially, Arab countries will not be able to move forward with normalizing relations with Israel so long as the Palestinian grievances remain unaddressed.

Second, anyone attuned to the issue will have seen placards at pro-Palestinian rallies that declare “End the Occupation!” The underlying assumption is that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the end of the blockade of Gaza will go a long way toward ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

That seems unlikely, but also beside the point—because when Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, affirms that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood aims to end the world’s longest occupation, he does not mean the 56-year occupation that began with Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. He means the occupation of what he sees as the land of Palestine—to include Israel. This is something that Palestine’s supporters would rather be left unsaid; or, when it is raised, will protest that the Hamas Charter was revised in 2017 to soften the group’s view of Israel. That is hardly the case, however. Article 18, for example, states:

The following are considered null and void: the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution, and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them. The establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal and contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah [global Muslim community]; it is also in violation of human rights that are guaranteed by international conventions, foremost among them is the right to self-determination.

It also states, “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.” This should bring into sharp relief Hamas’s goals. Taking over towns in Israel, rather than targeting settlements in the West Bank, belies the apologists’ claim that Hamas aims to liberate the Gaza Strip and West Bank only.

So yes, the occupation as understood by the international community is a problem, but it is not the problem. For Hamas, the problem is that Israel exists. And although the vast majority of people in the Arab world do not subscribe to Hamas’s methods, if some of the polling on normalization is any indication, their view of Israel as illegitimate is not dissimilar from Hamas’s own view. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has thus laid bare a problem at the heart of all the talk about a new integrated Middle East: Without justice for the Palestinians, the support for normalization is thin at best.

Third, the notion that the United States can coax changes in Iranian behavior through diplomacy is misguided. It remains to be seen to what extent Iran had a hand in Hamas’s infiltration of Israel, but there are tantalizing signs that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force played a role.

That group’s commander, Gen. Esmail Qaani, met with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah in the spring to encourage coordination among the groups and attacks on Israel. Hamas leaders have also said publicly that Iran provided weapons, money, and equipment for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The sophistication of Hamas’s operation and its stunning change in tactics also suggest the possibility that the group received outside assistance. And the Iranians have warned countries against normalization with Israel, a clear confluence of interest with Hamas.

If the Iranians had a hand in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it should bring an end to the assumption that both Democratic and Republican administrations have held that, with Iran, “good will begets good will.” There is very little evidence of this. Instead, the Iranians pocket U.S. goodwill, regard it as weakness, and pursue their goal of undermining the regional order, including by confronting Israel.

Now, in response, the Israelis are laying siege to the Gaza Strip in order to destroy Hamas. It will be a long, hard fight, as the Israelis acknowledge. Given the scale of Hamas’s attacks, Israel will likely have unusual amounts of leeway from the United States, Europe, and even some of its Arab partners to achieve this goal—despite what will likely be an enormous loss of civilian life.

But then what? The Israelis have been trying to offload the Gaza Strip for decades. They were even willing to give it to Yasser Arafat. Given that there are no good options, the Israelis may now find themselves occupying the same territory they withdrew from almost 20 years ago. Even if they do not intend to do so, Gaza is a trap. This will surely set back normalization in the region and much else. Victory to the Iranians.

[maslows-pyramid-scheme]

BOYCOTT FOR PALESTINE

FOA (Friends of Al-Aqsa) have organized a boycott in support of palestine.

Here are the key companies to boycott:

HP (Hewlett Packard) provides hardware and services for the Israeli Prison Service and the Israeli police who enforce apartheid on Palestinians within Israel.

Coca-Cola operates on stolen Palestinian land by having a factory in Atarot, an illegal israeli settlement. These Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. Coca-Cola is defying international law.

Israeli produce should be left on all shop shelves. When shopping always #CheckTheLabel to make sure you don't accidently buy any produce labelled from 'Israel'.

PUMA sponsors the Israel Football Association (IFA) and the Israeli national team. The IFA manages several football teams in illegal Israeli settlements, built on stolen Palestinian land.

We encourage all our supporters to focus on boycotting these 3 companies and to #CheckTheLabel on produce, to be more effective in ending Israeli apartheid. We aren't saying other companies aren't complicit, but we need to be targeted and strategic to make a boycott successful, just how we have been in the past with South Africa.

Please help to spread the word.

CONTACT YOUR GOVERNMENT AND DEMAND A CEASEFIRE FOR PALESTINE For Eu look up: Voices in Europe for peace For USA look up: US campaign for Palestinian rights

Good - and hopefully still current? - advice, I hope they've been feeling the pinch.

I'd also recommend getting in touch with your government to see if they are willing to either loosen current visa requirements for Palestinians (price, eligibility) or introduce an entirely new, targeted visa regime (to expedite an otherwise slow process).