#jewish maryland

[utilitycaster]

Also because I've been soliciting voter stickers in exchange for me telling you your ttrpg PCs are cool, here is mine (early voted) ft my most Maryland magnet

[flagpeace]

A flag for Jewish Marylanders. It combines the flag of Maryland with the Star of David.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

A sign reading “We Support Israel” outside a synagogue in Bethesda, Maryland was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti this week, according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.

“The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is deeply disturbed by the discovery yesterday of antisemitic graffiti on a ‘We Support Israel’ sign outside Congregation Beth El of Montgomery County,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Jewish Federation noted that the incident came just two days after similar antisemitic graffiti was found near Bethesda Elementary School in Maryland this past weekend. “Israel rapes men, women, and children” was spray-painted on a school sign, and “Free Gaza” was reportedly painted onto a nearby crosswalk and sidewalk.

“We call on our community and allies to continue making it clear that antisemitism and hate speech have no place in Greater Washington,” the Jewish Federation said in its statement. “We are in close contact with local law enforcement, and we appreciate their swift responses to these incidents to ensure our community’s safety.”

The Bethesda area has a large Jewish population — about 45 percent of Maryland’s Jewish community lives in Montgomery County.

The latest incidents of vandalism came amid a troubling wave of antisemitic incidents in Maryland.

Baltimore police announced on Saturday that they arrested a man who is suspected of a hate crime for setting a fire outside the Jewish Museum of Maryland earlier this month. The museum is located between two historic synagogues on Baltimore’s Lloyd Street: the Lloyd Street Synagogue and the B’nai Israel Congregation. The fire on Aug. 4 was set outside the museum but also right next to B’nai Israel, which reportedly shares a security gate with it.

Weeks earlier, Baltimore’s mayor and police chief denounced a slew of antisemitic incidents in which the homes of Jewish families in the Glen section of the city were graffitied with swastikas. As many as 10 homes were targeted in the spree of hate, according to a local NBC affiliate, shocking locals who were dismayed that the incidents occurred in their neighborhood.

Such outrages aren’t new. In December, for example, vandals twice slashed a pro-Israel sign displayed on the lawn of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in Pikesville, local media reported. In a later incident in March, a gang of teenagers mugged and assaulted two Jewish men who were walking into their synagogue. The youths reportedly chased one of the men and stole a “large amount of cash” from the other. More recently, an Israeli flag was ripped and stolen from the porch of a doctor’s office earlier this summer.

Across the state of Maryland, which had the seventh most antisemitic incidents in the US in 2023, outrages targeting the Jewish community increased 211 percent compared to the prior year, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s latest data.

[eretzyisrael]

by Michael Starr

The University of Maryland reversed its decision to allow an anti-Israel protest on the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre, following backlash from local Jewish groups.

UMD Students for Justice in Palestine and UMD Jewish Voice for Peace had been set to hold their October 7 vigil for Gazans killed in the Israel-Hamas war at the campus’s Mckeldin Mall, but the University System of Maryland (USM) said in a statement on Sunday that on the day of the Hamas-led pogrom it would limit campus events requiring permits or approval to those supporting “a university-sponsored Day of Dialogue.”

“From the beginning of the war, we have come together as a University System to urge that we use this moment to encourage conversation, compassion, and civility; to engage with one another across our differences and draw on our shared humanity and our shared values to bridge what divides us,” said USM. “These dialogues aren’t new.

USM said its intent was not to infringe on the free expression and speech of students, but to be sensitive to the needs of students as October 7 was a “day of enormous suffering and grief for many in our campus communities.”

UMD Jewish Student Union, Maryland Hillel, Terps for Israel, and Israeli American Council Mishelanu at Maryland welcomed the USM decision and thanked UMD leadership in a joint social media statement on Sunday.

[la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre]

It shouldn't be a radical take to say that Jews have the right to exist. Yes, all Jews.

The Jewish woman in Maryland who is involved with her reform shul, celebrates all the Jewish holidays, and also celebrates xmas with her goyische husband? Has the right to exist.

The antizionist activist Jew in New York who goes to all the pro-Palestine events and swears she isn't being used as a token? Has the right to exist.

The homophobic rabbi in Jerusalem who advocates for bringing back the death penalty? Has the right to exist.

The secular Jew who was in komsomol back in the USSR and is now a militant atheist in Canada actively preventing his children and grandchildren from reconnecting? Has the right to exist.

The Israeli terf who would personally kill every Palestinian man? Has the right to exist.

The American kahaneist who's been living on the west bank for the past seven years? Has the right to exist.

The transgender reform Jew who writes a blog about disability? Has the right to exist.

The Jew in Iran who is an outspoken antizionist because he's afraid of the consequences if he isn't? Has the right to exist.

The Mexican Catholic who converted to Judaism after discovering crypto-Jewish ancestry and is finding her place in the Jewish world? Has the right to exist.

The non-binary, non-zionist convert who sponsors the weekly kiddush at their Conservative synagogue in Oklahoma? Has the right to exist.

The descendant of Nazis who converted to Judaism and moved to Israel and served in the IDF? Has the right to exist.

The chassid who thinks zionism is heresy? Has the right to exist.

You are going to disagree with some of these people. You are going to find some of them repulsive. You have every right to disagree, to explain why you disagree. That does not mean you can take an individual's right to exist.

[metamatar]

To counter what they view as a rising tide of prejudice, the HAF and other Hindu American groups have turned to American Jewish organizations, which they have long seen as “the gold standard in terms of political activism,” as Maryland State Delegate Kumar Barve said in 2003. Since the early 2000s, Indian Americans have modeled their congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and AIPAC; Indian lobbyists have partnered with these groups to achieve shared defense goals, including arms deals between India and Israel and a landmark nuclear agreement between India and the US. Along the way, these Jewish groups have trained a generation of Hindu lobbyists and advocates, offering strategies at joint summits and providing a steady stream of informal advice. “We shared with them the Jewish approach to political activism,” Ann Schaffer, an AJC leader, told the Forward in 2002. “We want to give them the tools to further their political agenda.” Shukla told Jewish Currents that the HAF continues to work closely with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the AJC, whether by “being co-amici curiae on briefs to the US Supreme Court,” or by “lending our support to one another’s letters to Congress.”

[...] Faced with rising scrutiny over India’s worsening human rights record, Hindu groups have used “the same playbook and even sometimes the same terms” as Israel-advocacy groups, “copy-pasted from the Zionist context,” said Nikhil Mandalaparthy of the anti-Hindutva group Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR). Hindu groups have especially taken note of their Jewish counterparts’ recent efforts to codify a definition of antisemitism—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition—that places much criticism of Israel out-of-bounds, asserting that claims like “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” constitute examples of anti-Jewish bigotry.

[...] In 2003, Gary Ackerman—a Jewish former congressman who was awarded India’s third-highest civilian honor for helping to found the Congressional Caucus on India—told a gathering of AJC and AIPAC representatives and their Indian counterparts that “Israel [is] surrounded by 120 million Muslims,” while “India has 120 million [within].” Tom Lantos, another Jewish member of the caucus, likewise enjoined the two communities to collaborate: “We are drawn together by mindless, vicious, fanatic, Islamic terrorism.”

Driven by that sense of shared purpose, the AJC and AIPAC helped train new Indian American political groups—such as the Indian American Political Action Committee and the United States India Political Action Committee—to achieve their aims in Washington. The AJC hosted seminars on political activism in DC and New York; it also brought several delegations of Indian Americans to Israel to meet with members of the Israeli government and military. “We’re fighting the same extremist enemy,” the AJC’s capital region director Charles Brooks told the Forward in 2002.

[gaelic-symphony]

An added bonus of Chanukah (and other Jewish holidays) lasting multiple days is that it makes it so easy to celebrate with multiple different sets of loved ones! My girlfriend and I are both Jewish and both from the same part of Maryland, and her parents are also divorced, so we potentially have THREE “candles and latkes with the parents” evenings this year, but that still leaves us five nights to celebrate with friends or at shul or at home by ourselves. We don’t have to choose to spend our holidays one way. And we get to do the same for first and second night Seders at Pesach, for High Holidays, and for Sukkah parties.

[hazbin-but-good]

another hazbin hotel rewrite/redesign?

yup! and i'm so serious about it that i made a whole blog for it. i'm a white queer ex-cath tran doing this as an art and writing exercise, so feedback from other creatives + jewish and/or racialized folks is especially welcome.

i'm putting this post and only this post in the main tags for visibility. also, not gonna link my main, but i do make my own original stuff, and i encourage fans and haters alike to do the same.

anyway, here's a mostly good-faith 1.7k-word essay on the original. i think it's pretty funny and brings up some less talked-about points. correct me on the facts, disagree with my opinions, and ask clarifying questions, but don't come at me with any piss-poor reading comprehension.

the hellaverse is garbage, and here's why

cw: strong language, stronger opinions, intersectional feminist critical discourse analysis

1. vivienne medrano, the person

medrano was born as a well-off white-passing latina (salvadoran-american) in bougieass frederick, maryland. while attending new york's top art school, she got popular on deviantart-tumblr-twitter by being a prolific multifandom fujoshi furry who's more into ornamental character design than storytelling. upon graduation, she leveraged her fanbase and industry connections to make the hazbin and helluva boss pilots, get helluva made for youtube, and get hazbin made for amazon prime.

like every woman online, she gets harassed for no good reason, and as a certified autist, i will defend her right to be dumb, weird, annoying, and bad with words. however, there are legit reasons to criticize her:

racism, misogyny, homophobia, fatphobia, some antisemitism, past transphobia, past ableism

shitty boss, bad friend

cowardly, vindictive, manipulative, thoughtless behavior

skeevy friends

sucks at taking criticism

in short, i think she desperately needs a PR person and someone to clean up her digital footprint.

2. medrano's art

incurious

inauthentic

noncommittal

creatively stagnant

overindulgent, and the indulgence isn't even fun

shallow and childish framed as complex and mature

bland and boring framed as shocking and subversive

to be clear, i'm at peace with the existence of suckass art like this; i just think the money, attention, and praise it gets are unearned and should go to more interesting works, of which there are infinite.

medrano's had the time, money, and social cache to grow as an artist, learn from the best, and take creative risks, but she hasn't. if she truly has nothing more to offer, she should let her collaborators take the wheel, but she doesn't do that either. instead, she keeps getting more and more resources to make the same baby bullshit, and that pisses me off. she could be the nicest person ever, and this fundamental arrogance would still make her art blow.

stop with the pointless guilt: liking medrano's work does not make you stupid or evil. however, if you stay in the kiddie pool of culture, if you refuse to engage with a diversity of art, if the hellaverse is your point of reference for anything media-related, you can't expect to have your opinions on art, media, or culture taken seriously. you have not earned a seat at the table. you gotta hit the books first.

i cannot emphasize enough how much incredible stuff is out there if you're willing to look further than what social media and streaming services put right in front of you. if you come away from this blog having learned about just one new artist or piece of art, i'll be a happy camper.

3. the hellaverse

a. empty and confused

hazbin and helluva's content and marketing has no clear target audience. the subjects are inappropiate for teens, but the execution is too childish for adults, and lemme tell you what i don't mean by that, first.

not inherently inappropriate for teens:

sex and sexuality

violence, including when it intersects with the above

politics and religion

not inherently childish:

animation (any style)

comedy

episodic writing and/or loose continuity

young characters

fun, happiness, optimism, the power of friendship, cuteness, tenderness, sincerity, etc.

what i mean is that these shows are literally about adult characters who fuck, smoke, drink, do drugs, go clubbing, work full-time, manage their own finances, and deal with stuff like bureaucracy, sexual violence, domestic abuse, marriage, divorce, late adoption, and family estrangement.

however, none of these "adult" things are given enough specificity to create drama or comedy. it's all too stock, vague, flat, weirdly sanitized, and thus utterly banal—pure aesthetics on top of bad saturday morning cartoons. it's exactly what i'd expect from a sheltered disney kid who needs to log off and get into their local gay scene ASAP so their only contact with things like poverty, policing, addiction, and sex work stops being facile movies and TV.

if the shows were aware of this and played with it, that could be amazing, but they're not. they give you the mickey mouse version of the world with a straight face and then play looney tunes sound effects to try to make you laugh and sad_violin.mp3 to try to make you cry. now that's funny.

b. old and tired

let's make like americans and pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist. even within the confines of the USA, home of the hays code, the red scare, and reaganite propaganda, this neopuritan fascist state ruled by 1000 megachurches in a trenchcoat, the indie/underground animation scene has been doing crazier shit for decades. anti-war films in the 60's, bakshi movies in the 70's, the simpsons shorts and r-rated movies in the 80's, adult swim and MTV in the 90's, flash/newgrounds/youtube in the 00's, streaming in the 2010's—so what are we doing in the 2020's with this wet white rice drowned in expired ketchup? i feel crazy making this point because it's obvious if you've watched these things, but if you haven't, you're gonna be like "well, there's gotta be something new here". no! there isn't! in the words of jimmy "the scot" jordan, nothing, nothing, NOTHING!

c. ideological purgatory

actually, there is one thing in these shows i've never seen before: the presbysterianism. shout out some interesting or at least intentional presbysterian art in the comments, because the way these ideas are presented here is not compelling. it just makes the rainbow neoliberalism even more confusing and contradictory.

i guess the big presbysterian things are protestanism, calvinism, and, uh, big church government? presbysterians, get your shit together. get your brand down. catholics have BDSM and vampires, evangelicals have TV and corporatism; what do you have? celtic crosses? no wonder medrano has such uninspired ideas on divinity.

d. queer deficiency

when i look at a piece of art, i ask myself: "what does this give me that i can't get from the hunchback of notre dame (1996)?" if the answer is as limp as "uhh, gay people, i guess", i can probably look for my gay shit elsewhere and rewatch the hunchback of notre dame (1996) in the meantime.

but let's say that you have no standards. you've been waiting for ages for a show about gays by the gays for the gays, and by god you're gonna get it. this is it! here we go! time for some

generic twink obliteration

male sexuality as aggression and dominance displays

WLW (sex and chemistry not included)

a couple straight femdoms

and the stalest sex jokes known to man

...yeah, it's not very queer. and by "queer", i mean "questioning or subverting gender norms (including sexual roles) within a given cultural context regardless of creator identity and intent". i'm not a queer studies scholar so LMK if there's a more specific term for this, but whatever you call it, it's not in the hellaverse much.

there's not even any transness, literal or metaphorical, just ancient drag jokes. i guess the writers thought we would've been too controversial. so much for an indie animation studio that prides itself in the diversity of its staff both above and below the line, bakshi-style. i wonder how medrano, a bisexual woman, would've felt if told that a lesbian main couple in hazbin would be "too controversial".

4. spindlehorse and the vivziepop brand

spindlehorse toons underpays its overworked staff and keeps outsourcing more and more labor to even more overworked freelancers overseas to cut costs. a rainbow sweatshop is still a sweatshop, and just because these practices may be "industry standard" doesn't make them any more ethical.

the studio has also been repeatedly accused by current and former employees and contractors of creating a hostile and abusive workplace. AFAIK, it still has no dedicated HR person, and victims are too afraid of retaliation like blacklisting and online harassment to speak out.

this is exactly the stuff that unions exist to prevent. as i'm writing this, the IATSE (the parent union of TAG, which is the parent union of all US animation unions) is negotiating with entertainment industry executives for better working conditions, and if the execs fuck around like last year, it's strike time again. so watch this space, voice your support, and don't cross any picket lines.

i hope spindlehorse unionizes, but until then and for these reasons, i don't think you should give money to the company.

first of all, all content on amazon-owned platforms is ok to pirate, and all youtube ads are ok to block. everyone involved in making the episodes has (or should have) been paid upfront, so you're not taking the bread out of anyone's mouth.

next, let's look at the succulent offerings of the official vivziepop merch shop:

$10 pins and keychains

$15 sticker packs

$20 mugs and acrylic cutouts

$25 shirts

$30 metal cards (not even tarot)

$40 lounge pants

$50 mini backpacks

random $80 skateboard deck

forgive my latin americanness, but this is all stuff you can get made by a local metalsmith, print/sublimation shop, or just crafty people in your life. it's cheaper, customizable, and better for the environment to skip all the shipping and packaging. also, not painting your own skateboard is poser shit.

the hazbin website also has $15 pins, one $20 keychain, and $6 trading card packs. people are weird about trading cards, so if for some reason you wanna gamble for a mass-produced bit of cardboard, plastic, and tinfoil, at least bulk-order for all the vivziepoppers in your area so it's less of a huge waste. better yet, trace the designs and make infinite bootlegs.

at the end of the day, buying merch is not activism. your bulk order of trading cards will not save any wage slaves from getting evicted from their overpriced studio apartments. however, the shop links you to all the credited artists/designers, and more of your bucks will actually reach them if you buy their designs directly, then turn them into body pillows or life-sized bronze statues or whatever the fuck.

go through the credits of any episode of helluva or hazbin, and you'll find even more creatives you might wanna support. get jinkx monsoon's albums on CD. subscribe to actually good artist, animator, and composer gooseworx. lots of voice actors now have patreon, cameo, or self-hosted pages where you can write better lines for their characters and have them read it. these things may not look as shiny as Official Merch™, but we all need less plastic shit and more culture anyway.

[brightlotusmoon]

I was just listening to my husband telling our roommate the story of how when he was young in the 80s living in Prince George's County in Maryland, their new black neighbors were getting harassed by Klan members, so his parents - the only Jewish family in the neighborhood - went over with weapons and his mom sat by an upstairs window with a rifle and his dad (who had worked for the government as a man in black) stood like a sentry on the lawn and put out the burning cross and threatened to stab anyone who came at them. Yes, they all moved out. No I don't have more details. But the conversation sprang from how one of our neighbors, an older white guy, was wondering why we weren't ever going to support Trump.

Punch Nazis. Tell others to punch Nazis. Be loud about punching Nazis. Help your neighbor watch Nazis through a rifle lens. Etc.

[flagwars]

Second Place Flag Wars: Round 1

This tournament features the second place winners of every Flag Wars tournament I’ve held! So many amazing flags have made it to second place and have come so close to winning. This is why I’m giving all of these flags a second chance to win a tournament. Let me know in the comments which flag you want to win!

Round 1:

1. Aroace version of Gilbert (Gilbert, West Virginia Pride Flag Wars) vs. Bisexual People’s Flag of Milwaukee (Bisexual Fusion Flag Wars) vs. Wales (Dragon Flag Wars)

2. Inuvialuit (Native American and First Nations Flag Wars) vs. Lesbian Seychelles (National Pride Fusion Flag Wars) vs. Chuhuiv redesign by Горіхус (People’s Flag Wars 2)

3. Moscow, Russia (Olympic Flag Wars) vs. Rockville, Maryland (Maryland Flag Wars) vs. Commune of Revachol (Disco Elysium) (Video Game Flag Wars)

4. Rägavere Parish, Estonia (Historical Flag Wars) vs. The Federation Flag by The-Hill-Billy (Australia flag redesign) (People’s Flag Wars) vs. Pocatello, Idaho (2001-2017) (Worst Flag Wars)

5. Raseborg, Finland (Finland City Flag Wars) vs. Lesbian (Flag Wars) vs. Kyoto Prefecture (Japanese Prefecture Flag Wars)

6. Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Russian Federal Subject Flag Wars) vs. Amphibious Amigo by pinchemijita (Animal Crossing Flag Wars) vs. Byhalia, Mississippi (2023 New Flag Wars)

7. Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine (Regional Flag Wars) vs. Stráz pod Ralskem, Czechia (Sunflower Flag Wars) vs. Lesbian recolor of Salem (Salem-Verse Flag Wars)

8. Denobula (Star Trek Flag Wars) vs. Inverted Queer Chevron (Inverted Pride Flag Wars) vs. Bechlín, Czechia (2023 New Czech Flag Wars)

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Do you have any advice for vetting sources on I/P? I just got a book at a local bookstore and was wondering how I should go about determining any biases?

Great question. I addressed this in my I/P Reading List. I'm pasting below my section on the methodology and source vetting process I followed while compiling this list:

In compiling this list, my process and methodology were as follows: I first wrote down all the relevant works I could think of off the top of my head, all hailing from my fields of Biblical Studies and Modern Jewish History. I then reached out to my friends in Modern Middle Eastern History, Conflict Studies, Jewish History, etc for recommendations, lists, and insight; one of my friends, an ABD PhD candidate in Modern Middle Eastern History, was particularly helpful in helping me understand Israeli historiography, and pointing me towards the best works in the field of Arab Nationalism. After taking their recommendations, I conducted a series of google searches using “‘relevant search term’ site:.edu” to ensure that I received results from only academic domains. From there, I read syllabi for university courses, and examined comprehensive exam reading lists. After that, I searched the catalog of the New York Public Library using any and all relevant search terms, and I also conducted targeted searches on Amazon. By the time I finished, I had a 50 pages filled with book titles. My next step was to divide the list into categories, deleting irrelevant titles and repeats as I went along. After dividing the books into categories, I put each title through a rigorous fact checking process. I checked the publication material for each book to ensure that it was either a. published by an academic press with a built in peer review process, and/or b. written by an academic historian—either a faculty member, or someone with an MA or PhD in history. If I was still unsure after that step, I searched the title in the University of Maryland’s database system, and read the academic (meaning, peer reviewed) book reviews of the title. From there I either kept it on the list or removed it. As I approached the late-Ottoman period, I became extra-critical of relevant titles. At this point, I made sure to read book reviews from at least two academic journals in different fields/subfields to ensure not only the text’s legitimacy, but its ability to hold firm against the scrutiny of scholars in multiple fields. I tended to remove a work if the word “polemic” appeared in the reviews. This said, many of the works on this list, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Post-1948, Arab Nationalism and the Modern Middle East, Conflict Overviews, and Historiography Narratives, Memory and Theory categories will be slanted, or biased. Considering the topic at hand, this reality is both inevitable and perhaps necessary. I do advise you, however, to read any books you select from these categories critically. The vast majority of these books are academic histories (simply put, I don’t trust popular historians with this topic), so if you are not accustomed to that type of writing, be sure to read the Introduction of whichever books you select very carefully, and understand that you are reading to learn—not necessarily to enjoy. In terms of my categorization…it is imperfect and becomes admittedly fuzzy once we get into the late Ottoman Period. I’m not even 100% comfortable with some of these categories, but alas, if there is one thing I learned from Library Science it is that categories are both terrible and inevitable in the organization of information.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Sales of stolen Palestinian land must be stopped!

Across the United States, demonstrations have been organized against the illegal sale of stolen Palestinian lands. Protesters compare these events to the “Indian Land Sales” that were conducted in the U.S. West.

Many of these protests have been viciously attacked by police and Zionist thugs. That was the case in Los Angeles at the Adas Torah synagogue on June 25. Brutal police attacks against protesters have also occurred in Pikesville, Maryland (just outside Baltimore), and Nassau County, New York (near New York City.)

These sales of stolen land are usually conducted in Jewish neighborhoods, often inside synagogues. Protesters — many of whom are Jewish — make clear that they are demonstrating in solidarity with Palestinians, not attacking Jewish people.

That doesn’t prevent the corporate media and capitalist politicians from smearing these righteous protests as “anti-Jewish.” Arkansas statesman Tom Cotton issued a statement demanding “action from DOJ [Department of Justice] and White House on synagogue attack by pro-Hamas mob.”

[eretzyisrael]

Good News From Israel

In the 16th July 23 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:

Israeli personally tailored therapies can cure infections and infertility.

Israeli surgeons don’t need electricity to save a life in Ethiopia.

Israeli scientists won awards from France and NASA.

A new European fund is to invest a quarter of a billion dollars in Israeli startups.

An Israeli startup will generate electricity from Taiwan’s choppy seas.

The Israel Premier Tech cycling team won the 9th stage of the Tour de France.

An Israeli NGO is saving the bees – one swarm at a time.

This newsletter edition is entitled "Chai-Tech", merging the term "Hi-Tech" with "Chai" - the Hebrew word for "Living" / "Lives". The reason is that there is so much recent news about Israeli technology to benefit human lives.

Almost all the medical articles involve Israelis using hi-tech to save lives, including breakthroughs in personalized medicine, global vaccines, stroke monitors, digital  insoles, brain disease diagnosis, prescription checkers and the innovations of Sheba Medical Center.

Israeli life-saving climate-tech features high in this newsletter with Israel's plans for a 1,000-strong delegation to COP28, the recent climate-tech delegation to the UK, 15 Israeli Climate Awards candidates, France's award to an Israeli hydrogen scientist, and Taiwan implementing Israel's wave energy solution.  Israeli hi-tech is also benefiting the environment by using seaweed to generate electricity, turning potato waste foliage into a food source, more vegan substitutes for meat, sustainable farming solutions and ultra-efficient space propulsion.

Other hi-tech programs include multi-million investments into Israeli companies developing 3D printed organs, security for schools, digital health, food-tech and agri-tech solutions. No wonder Israeli hi-tech startups are actively being sought by the US States of Virginia and Maryland.

The photo shows the construction of a solar roof over the soccer pitch of our local school in Netanya, providing shade to the young players, and green electricity for the school and the grid. Another "high"-tech solution making life better for the next generation.  Am Yisrael Chai!

Read More: Good News From Israel

[vague-humanoid]

The role of the death penalty as a toll of the racist system of criminal punishment has been long documented. In the case of Alameda County, California, the inside story of how prosecutors influenced jury selections to increase the likelihood of death penalty convictions demonstrates how the racism of capital punishment remains with us in the 21st century. For decades, prosecutors worked to limit jury participation from Black and Jewish individuals in order to produce juries that were more likely to support capital punishment. Michael Collins, Senior Director of Government Affairs at Color Of Change, joins Rattling the Bars for a revealing discussion on prosecutor misconduct, and what it tells us about the state of the criminal injustice system.

Transcript

Mansa Musa:  Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.

The death penalty in the United States of America. At one point in time, the Supreme Court had put it on hold because of the manner in which it was being given out. At that time, the way it was being given out is upon a person being found guilty of a capital offense, the judge made the ultimate determination whether they got the death penalty or not.

Throughout the course of litigation and the evolution of the legislative process, the death penalty started taking on the shape of a jury determining whether or not a person gets the death penalty or not after they were sentenced.

What we have now, in this day and age — And when I first heard it, it startled me to even believe that this was taking place — But in California, they have, in certain parts, the death penalty being given out, but more importantly, the death penalty given out by the prosecutor and the courts through their systematic exclusion of people’s juries of their peers.

The prosecutors, along with the courts, have systematically set up a template where they look at anybody that they think is going to be fair and impartial and have them removed from the jury. Subsequently, a lot of men and women are on death row in California.

Here to talk about the abuse of this system and the discovery of the process and exposing it is Michael Collins from Color of Change.

Welcome, Mike.

Michael Collins:  To be here. Thank you for having me.

Mansa Musa:  Hey, first, tell us a little bit about yourself, then a little bit about your organization before we unpack the issue.

Michael Collins:  I’m originally from Scotland, as you can probably tell. In the US since 2010, so like 15 years or so. Was in Baltimore for 10, 12 years off and on, and then I’m now in Atlanta.

Color of Change, where I work, is one of the largest racial justice organizations in the country. I oversee a team that works on state and local policy issues. We do a lot of work on prosecutor accountability and criminal justice reform, which is how we became involved in this death penalty scandal.

Mansa Musa:  All right.

And right there, because when I was at the conference in Maryland, [inaudible] Maryland, one of the panelists was one of your colleagues, and the topic they was talking about was prosecutorial misconduct. And in her presentation she talked about, and you can correct me as I go along, in I think it’s Alameda County in California?

Michael Collins:  Yep. That’s where Oakland is. Yeah.

Mansa Musa:  Right. In Oakland, they had, since 2001, the prosecutors always had set up a system where they systematically excluded minorities, poor people, anyone that they thought would be objective in evaluating the case, they had them excluded, therefore jury nullification, and stacking the jury that resulted in numerous people getting the death penalty.

Talk about this case and how it came about.

Michael Collins:  Yeah, it really was shocking when we first heard about it. You know, we had been doing work on prosecutor accountability in Oakland in Alameda County, and there was a prosecutor elected, a Black woman, called Pamela Price, who was elected on a platform of trying to reform the justice system and use prosecutorial discretion to right the wrongs of racial injustice and do more progressive policies within the office.

And she discovered, or one of her staff discovered, that over a period of three or four decades, prosecutors in the office had been systematically excluding Black and Jewish people from death penalty juries.

Now, in other words, how this happened was, when you go into a trial, there’s a process of jury selection, and prosecutors and defense lawyers can strike certain people from juries. Maybe people have seen some of this on TV.

Constitutionally, you are not allowed to strike people for race reasons, for religious reasons. But there was a sense from these prosecutors, who were very tough on crime prosecutors, who wanted to… They saw the death penalty as a trophy, almost, to be achieved, and they wanted to win at all costs.

And so they believed that Black people and Jewish people would be less sympathetic to the death penalty, and more likely, perhaps, to find an individual not guilty. More squeamish, if you like, about finding someone guilty who would then get the death penalty.

And so what Pamela Price, this district attorney, discovered was a series of notes and papers that documented the ways in which individual prosecutors were excluding people from juries in this way and really giving people an unfair trial.

And California has, for a number of years now, had a moratorium on the death penalty. They’ve essentially hit the pause button on the death penalty. But for a number of years it was really a state that carried out the death penalty [cross talk].

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, you’re right.

Michael Collins:  And also, one of the more startling things about this is Pamela Price, she came in, she discovered these notes. I think her reaction was, this is crazy. How does this happen? And it actually turns out that somebody raised the alarm bell about this as far back as 2004.

A prosecutor in the Oakland office who came out and he was like, listen, I was leading the trainings on this. I was somebody who was part of making these policies. And the admission went before judges, it went before courts of appeals, and they threw it out, they didn’t believe this guy. And they hounded this guy, the death penalty prosecutor, who essentially had a change of heart, and they hounded him out of town. And he now lives in Montana and practices law.

And I think he probably feels a sense of vindication about this, but it’s very troubling for us, the cover-up that’s gone on, and the number of people that are implicated. So far, we know of at least 35 cases of individuals.

The DA is investigating this. It’s probably going to be more than 35 cases. Right? It probably extends beyond the death penalty, to be honest. It probably extends to other, I would say, serious crime cases where, as I say, prosecutors wanted to win at all costs and use any tactic to get a guilty verdict, including, essentially, tampering with the jury.

And we are in a position now where I think what we want is some level of accountability. We want these individuals who have been sentenced to be exonerated. They were given an unfair trial, that’s abundantly clear. The judges and the prosecutors who were involved in this scandal, who stole lives, and who essentially put people on a path to the death penalty, what is the accountability for them? And so that’s something that Color of Change is really pushing.

Mansa Musa:  All right, so talk about the… Because now you’re saying over three decades… First, how long has the moratorium been on?

Michael Collins:  Since the current governor took office. So I think it’s four or five years.

Mansa Musa:  Okay, so four or five years. So prior to that, they was executing people.

Michael Collins:  Yes.

Mansa Musa:  All right, so how many people, if y’all have this information, how many people have been executed in that period [crosstalk] period?

Michael Collins:  We don’t have the numbers on that. I think what we are looking at just now is 35 cases where they’ve identified people who are now serving life sentences as a result of the moratorium. Because when the governor said, we’re not doing the death penalty anymore and hit the pause button on the death penalty…

And again, I’ll stress that it is a pause button, right?

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, right, right.

Michael Collins:  A new governor, a new person could take office. It’s not like it’s been eliminated. But when we hit the pause button on the death penalty, there were a number of people who had their death penalty convictions converted into life sentences.

And that was how part of this process was uncovered, because Pamela Price, this district attorney, her office was working on what kind of sentence that people, they were working with a judge to try and figure out some sort of solution to these cases where people were having their cases converted to another sentence, like perhaps a life sentence, life without parole, something like that. And in the process of working with a federal judge, that’s when they discovered these notes and files and [crosstalk].

Mansa Musa:  Let me ask you this here.

Michael Collins:  Yeah.

Mansa Musa:  Okay, so I know in the state of Maryland where I served my time at, and I’m in the District of Columbia now, the sentencing mechanism, as I opened up, was a case came out, Furman Act v. United States. That’s the case that… Furman v. United States. That’s the case that they used to change the way the death penalty was being given out back in the ’70s. Because during that time, Andre Davis had just got arrested, so there was a campaign out in California to abolish the death penalty.

But what wound up happening is they had a series of case litigation saying they violated the Eighth Amendment. So what ultimately happened was that the Supreme Court ruled that the way the death penalty was being given out, which was the judge was the sole person that gave it out, they changed it to now they allowed for after the person was found guilty, then the jury would determine whether or not they got the death penalty, that was based on the person that’s being looked at for the death penalty, or have the opportunity to allocute why it shouldn’t be given.

But how was the system set up in California? Is the person found guilty and then given the death penalty? Or is the person found guilty and then they have a sentencing phase? How is the system in California?

Michael Collins:  Yeah, I think a person’s found guilty and then there’s a sentencing phase. And there were a lot of articles about this and about the different lawyers in California. I think there’s obviously a movement to end the death penalty, and it’s gathered a lot of momentum in the last five or 10 years.

But I think if you go back to the ’80s and the ’90s especially, this era, whether you were in Maryland or whether you were in California, whether in Kentucky, just across the country, this very tough on crime era and harsh sentences, I think that the death penalty for prosecutors, or what we’ve been told and what we’ve read, the death penalty cases were almost like a prize for the prosecutors [crosstalk] do the cases.

[They were] the most complex cases, it had the most prestige attached to it, and they were really valued on their ability to win these cases. And so they would send their best prosecutors to do these cases. They would ask for the death penalty frequently.

And that’s why we have a situation where, at the very least, we know in a place like Oakland, which is not a huge place, we have 35 cases right now that they’re looking at. One of the cases has already been overturned, the conviction has been quashed for an individual. We expect that to happen in a lot of these cases as they examine the evidence, how much the jury selection was a key factor in the conviction.

But yeah, I mean, it certainly was the case that the death penalty was used very frequently in California.

Mansa Musa:  Okay. So the reason why I asked that question, I’m trying, for the purpose of educating our audience, to see at what juncture was the exclusion taking place? Or was it across the board, because [crosstalk] —

Michael Collins:  So my understanding is the exclusion took place as they were selecting the jury. You start off with a pool, maybe some of your audience have been selected for jury duty, when you go in and you’re sitting in a room and there will be maybe 100 people, and then eventually they whittle it down to 12 people and some alternates. And in that process, as a prosecutor and as a defense lawyer, you’re striking people from the jury and saying, no, I don’t want this person.

The reasons for doing that are supposed to be ethical and constitutional, like, what do you think of the… You’ll be asked, what do you think of the police? What do you think of law enforcement? Do you trust the judicial process? They’re trying to figure out, are you going to be able to properly serve on this jury? Are you tainted in some way?

But the notes were really about a feeling that Black people were not sympathetic to the death penalty, [they would] not convict. Or Jewish people, because of their beliefs, because of their religion, were also not sympathetic to the death penalty. And so the prosecutors were trained and instructed to make sure, if they found out a person was Jewish, if they had a Jewish last name or something like that, or if a person was Black, ask some questions, figure it out, but essentially get them off the jury.

And there was even a case, I mentioned before, we’re talking a lot about prosecutors, judges were involved in this as well. There was a case where a judge pulled the prosecutor after jury selection into his chambers and said, you have a Jewish person on the jury. What are you doing? Get that person off the jury.

Mansa Musa:  Oh my goodness.

Michael Collins:  And so the depths of the scandal are beyond prosecutors. It’s a real institutional crisis.

And that’s why we want the governor to get involved, Governor Newsom to get involved and provide resources to investigate this. We want the attorney general to get involved and investigate this. Because this is a very clear and obvious scandal.

And it’s not enough to, in our opinion, re-sentence these individuals, exonerate them. Other people did some very, very shady things and very unethical things and illegal things, and ruined people’s lives. And as far as they were concerned, these people were going to be killed. And so we want to make sure that there’s accountability for that. They treated this like it was a sport, like it was a competition, and people’s lives have been ruined as a result. And we want to make sure that people are held accountable for what they did.

Mansa Musa:  Okay, so talk about this prosecutor, the one that came in with this reform. Was this something she campaigned on and then carried it out? What’s her background? What’s your information on her?

Michael Collins:  Yeah, it’s a good question.

So Color of Change has worked a lot on trying to reshape the way that prosecutors operate. Historically, prosecutors, they are the most powerful player in the system. They will decide how much bail you get, how long you’re going to be on probation. Everybody likes to imagine trials like judge, jury, and [crosstalk]. Most cases are a guilty plea that are executed by the prosecutor themselves. So they have tremendous power.

And very often, as we’ve seen with this scandal, prosecutors are just old school tough on crime: I’m going to get the heaviest sentence and put this guy away for as long as possible. That was their vision of justice.

And Color of Change, along with a number of other organizations, wanted to elect prosecutors that were more justice oriented, that were more reform minded, that were people who had a different view of the justice system and wanted to use some of that tremendous power within the prosecutor’s office to do good, to do justice, to reform them.

And so roundabouts of 2016, 2017, you saw a lot of prosecutors get elected that were more interested in things like police accountability: Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Kim Fox in Chicago. There was also Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.

Mansa Musa:  Philadelphia. Right.

Michael Collins:  And they came in and they did things like exonerations. They would investigate previous cases where the office itself had convicted somebody and they would find wrongdoing, and then they would overturn that verdict and the person would go free. They did things like non-prosecution of low-level offenses or diversion, stuff like that.

Anyway, Pamela Price came in as the Oakland DA, a historically Black jurisdiction. She herself had a Civil Rights background, was not a prosecutor, and took office really trying to reshape the office after decades of having a tough on crime prosecutor, mostly white-led office that was locking up Black people and throwing away the key. And she came in with a lot more of a nuanced approach.

She didn’t campaign necessarily on this scandal, but I think it’s true to say that a lot of other prosecutors, the traditional tough on crime prosecutors, would’ve discovered these files and been like, just put that back. Forget it.

Because you’re opening a hornet’s nest here, because if you think about… There’s victims involved, there’s family members, there’s cases. Some of these cases are 20, 30 years old. It’s not easy what the office is going to have to go through to reinvestigate these things.

But I think there’s this crop of prosecutors that have a different vision of justice and what justice is, and they do want to hold people accountable for wrongdoing, whether it is somebody who commits a homicide or a prosecutor who commits misconduct or a police killing, they apply that one standard of justice.

And so she was very open and found these files and then approached a federal judge and said to the judge, look, here’s all this evidence that there was this systemic racism, antisemitism that resulted in people getting the death penalty. And the federal judge was the one who said, okay, you need to review all these cases. You need to move forward with a full [inaudible]. So that’s what’s happening right now.

So that’s Pamela Price’s story. Incidentally, she’s actually being recalled in California.

Mansa Musa:  Oh yeah, yeah. Larry Krasner. He was like… In Philadelphia, it was the same thing we have with him.

Michael Collins:  Yeah, it’s the same thing. There was a big backlash [inaudible] —

Mansa Musa:  Kim Fields. Yeah, yeah. Same thing we have with them.

Michael Collins:  …Prosecutors in this sort of… You know.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, yeah.

Michael Collins:  And it’s hard because if she is recalled in November, I don’t really know what’s going to happen to these cases.

Mansa Musa:  Oh, I know. You know what’s going to happen. They’re going to go to the defendants, and they’re going to sweep it up under the rug.

Michael Collins:  Yeah. Well, that —

Mansa Musa:  But talk about the community, because that’s what led me right into this, because of what you say about her and the prospect that she might be recalled. Talk about y’all organization’s work in educating and mobilizing the community, because ultimately, if the community is engaged in the process because it’s their family members that’s being… Oakland is the birth for the Black Panther Party. Oakland has a rich history of civil disobedience, police brutality. The list goes on and on. Where are y’all at in terms of organizing or mobilizing or having some kind of coalition around this —

Michael Collins:  Yeah, we have a coalition on prosecutor accountability where we try and… Prosecutors are part of a very broken system, right? We don’t want to be cheerleaders for these prosecutors. We talk more about accountability, so prosecutor accountability.

So we have a coalition that we’re members of with Ella Baker Center and ACLU and a number of other local groups, where we meet regularly with the DA, but we try and push her to embrace more progressive policies. We try and push her to move more quickly on some death penalty cases. But at the same time, if she’s doing the right thing like she’s doing on these death penalty cases, we’re certainly going to defend her and go out there and support what she’s doing.

Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right, right. Because… Yeah. Right.

Michael Collins:  So we do community events. I’m actually in New Orleans just now where we’re holding an event with around about 100 folks from across the country from different groups to talk about, including people from Oakland, to talk about, how can you push your prosecutor and what should you do about it?

But as you know, it’s a very tough time for criminal justice reform, right?

Mansa Musa:  That’s right. That’s right.

Michael Collins:  [Crosstalk] public backlash, we’re coming out of the killing of George Floyd, there was actually a lot of mobilization of people on the streets calling for reform. And very quickly that’s disappeared and we’ve been attacked relentlessly. Anybody who engages in reform, police accountability, the establishment wants rid of them, the conservatives.

And to be honest, especially in a place like California, what we see is a lot of centrist Democrats running scared —

Mansa Musa:  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Collins:  …Using the same talking points as Donald Trump on crime. And that’s just very unfortunate. So it is an uphill struggle because there’s so much misinformation out there about crime and about prosecutors and about progressive policies.

But we’re trying, we’re trying to educate people. And when you see something like this happen, we try and tell people, look, other prosecutors would look the other way. And that certainly is what happened. As I mentioned before, this scandal goes back decades [inaudible].

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, that’s crazy.

Michael Collins:  And this woman is in office and she has had [inaudible].

Mansa Musa:  But the thing about the thing that, to highlight your point about reform and how we had the upper hand in terms of George Floyd, but George Jackson said that, and he was the best [described] person, he would describe it as reform. All the call for police accountability and divest, all those, the fascists and capitalists, they took them conversations and they twist it, and they twist it to the form like Cop City where we saying like, well, we’re doing this, the bill, to create the reform that you’re talking about, so we want better educating, better training. But you’re trained to be paramilitary.

And the same thing with what’s going on right now in terms of any type of social justice movement around prosecuting misconduct and what they call progressive prosecutors. I interned with a organization that that’s what they did. They got prosecutors, they educated them, got them involved and become progressive prosecutors. But all the progressive prosecutors are just doing what they was mandated to do, to find the truth for justice, search for the truth and justice, all them are being recalled, targeted, and organizations like yourself.

Talk about where y’all at now in terms of y’all next strategy around this issue.

Michael Collins:  So we are having conversations with the attorney general’s office because the attorney general plays this role where they themselves can identify that misconduct has happened, the unconstitutional jury instructions, and they can make a ruling. And they have more resources and more [inaudible] than the local DA.

So we met two weeks ago, I think, with the attorney general’s office to try and push them to get more involved. We’re pushing the governor to dedicate more resources and get more involved in this, somebody who himself opposes the death penalty. And we’re trying to keep the drum beat going in terms of attention. Good organizations like you guys, really appreciate you reaching out to us on this because it is so important that more people know about this.

I’m always surprised that it isn’t a bigger story. When I found out about this, I was like, oh, this is going to be front page.

Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right. It should be! Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Collins:  But I guess there’s so much going on just now, I don’t know, you never can tell what’s going to [inaudible].

Mansa Musa:  But in terms of, how can our viewers and listeners get in touch with you, and tell them how, if they want to support y’all efforts, what they can do to [inaudible].

Michael Collins:  Yeah, so Color of Change has a website called Winning Justice [winningjustice.org], which is our prosecutor accountability work. And if you go on there, you’ll see a number of actions that people can take around this death penalty scandal, even with their own local prosecutors, trying to get involved, set up coalitions, actions that can be taken where you can push your own prosecutor, whether they’re progressive or not, to do more justice and engage in [crosstalk].

So yeah, Winning Justice is our website. And if you search for it, you’ll find it and you’ll see a ton of actions and our positions on a bunch of different issues and what we try and do with prosecutors to get them to engage more in reform.

Mansa Musa:  Well, thank you, Mike.

There you have it. The Real News Rattling the Bars. It might be strange, it really might be a stretch of your imagination to believe that elected officials would actually say that if you are Black and you are Jewish, that you don’t have a right to serve on the jury because you might be sympathetic to the defendant, be it the death penalty, be it the defendant’s economic and social conditions.

But because they think that you might be sympathetic to that, that is saying like, well, you might just be objective to see that it’s a set of circumstances that contributed to the outcome of the charge. But no, as opposed to do that and search for the truth, what I do as a prosecutor, I put a playbook together and say, these people, under all circumstances, cannot serve on the jury, and do it for over three decades, not knowing how many people has been executed as a result of this malicious behavior.

Yet ain’t nobody being charged, ain’t nobody being indicted, ain’t nobody being fired. They’re being awarded a medal of honor for this dishonorable act.

We ask that you look into this matter and make a determination. Do you want your tax dollars to support this type of behavior? We ask that you look into this matter and check out what Color of Change has to offer in terms of their advocacy and see if it’s something that you might want to get involved with.

Thanks, Mike. Thank you for coming on.

Michael Collins:  I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

[icedsodapop]

By pausing time on October 7th and excluding its aftermath, the tours reinforce that myopia, consolidating a focus on Jewish victimhood and a refusal to see Israel as the perpetrator of Palestinian suffering. In the process, they succeed in bolstering American Jews’ sense of identification with Israel. As one rabbi who participated in a Federation mission from San Diego wrote upon her return home: “I saw the result of evil. I feel more committed to Israel and its future than I have felt in a long time.

(...)

Scholars have explored the ways in which visiting sites of atrocities, however disturbing, can also be “a means to affirm and reproduce particular identities,” in the words of Duncan Light, a professor of tourism studies. Visiting the 9/11 memorial—which drew 37 million people between its opening in 2011 and 2018—can bolster Americans’ sense of patriotism, even in the face of the long and deadly wars that followed; visiting the beaches of Normandy can inspire pride not only in the Allies’s World War II victory, but in the US-led world order it produced.

(...)

Death camp tours “make the victim so much the object of identification that one comes to see oneself as if one is at the gates of the crematorium, instead of [Israel] being a country with nuclear capacity,” Feldman told me in an interview. “It becomes impossible to identify with anyone other than the victim, and the victim is me, and this is our eternal condition.”

(...)

Not unlike prior forms of Jewish “dark tourism,” the trips I joined seemed intended to reassure participants that they could support Israel while retaining the moral clarity of the victim. For example, at the end of the Kfar Azza tour, Shpak, the kibbutz member, explained that the community had once been invested in peace and co-existence efforts, “but everything was broken and trampled in our children’s blood.” Shpak told our group that in the past, he had found it painful to witness the suffering of the other side. “I admit and confess that not this time. I have no sympathy for what’s happening on the other side,” he said. Other leaders on the trips I witnessed frequently glorified the war effort. In one case, a group’s Israeli driver boasted about having driven bulldozers bigger than our large bus into buildings in Khan Younis. Various guides echoed well-worn pro-Israel talking points arguing that Palestinians are not a people, or that the Nakba—the mass dispossession of Palestinians in 1948—was not a case of ethnic cleansing. This messaging has clearly affected participants. “There aren’t a lot of ‘innocent’ Gazans,” one member of a rabbinic trip wrote in a blog post. “After hearing the stories from those who were there, I am truly sad to say that this is the reality.” Greg Harris, a rabbi from Bethesda, Maryland, who led a trip for his congregation, told me that while, in the US, “it is perceived that Israel is retaliating against the Palestinian people,” in fact “that is not what is happening”—a truth that participants grasped “just by being there in Israel.”

(...)

As I walked through the festival grounds, the earth was literally shaking beneath me. The artillery fire and explosions from Gaza were the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life, and everyone, myself included, instinctively jumped at each blast. Just two words into the kaddish that one tourist recited for the festival victims—yitgadal veyitkadash—an explosion sounded so closely and powerfully that I felt the vibrations in my spine. And yet, aside from their reflexive flinching, the tour guides did their best to ignore the din.

When trip leaders did acknowledge the sight of Gaza on the horizon, it was usually to emphasize how close danger lies to the Gaza Envelope communities. Standing at a lookout point over the enclave, Ehrlich, the tour guide, gestured back at the Israeli city of Sderot behind us, saying, “See the beautiful houses being built despite years of attacks?” And when trip leaders made note of the sounds of death all around us, it was only to assure us that we were safe. “Don’t worry too much about the booms. They’re our booms. They’re not coming in on this end,” one group I followed was told. And, later: “You’re going to hear a lot of booms. There’s currently something going on in Khan Younis, literally across the border here. It might shake you up a little bit, but don’t worry, it’s us, not them.”

(Emphasis mine)