#palestinian heritage center

[documenting-apartheid]

Palestinian children smile and dance together at the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem. Date unknown. Source.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sanjana Karanth at HuffPost:

Whether it’s in the halls of power or out in the streets, Jewish Americans are uniting against the abduction of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil — and demanding the Trump administration stop its free speech crackdown under the guise of fighting antisemitism. A dozen Jewish organizations — including some pro-Israel groups — called Thursday for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to stop efforts to detain and deport those who are student visa holders or legal permanent residents without due process, according to a letter first obtained by HuffPost. “In the past, laws and policies that limit the right to free speech have often been wielded against the Jewish community, and we are worried that we are seeing signs that they are being wielded against Muslim, Arab and other minority communities now,” the letter said, particularly expressing concern for Khalil. A green card holder himself, Khalil and his pregnant wife had just reached their university-owned apartment in New York City on Saturday when federal immigration agents took him without a warrant and sent him to a detention center in Louisiana. The Columbia University graduate was abducted for helping lead anti-war student protests last year on campus and has not been charged with a crime. “President Trump is dressing up his assault on free speech and due process as if it was about fighting antisemitism. That is a lie,” New Jewish Narrative President Hadar Susskind told HuffPost. “Trump is exploiting very real concerns about rising antisemitism to mask his anti-democratic agenda. As a Jew, I am offended and worried.” Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers, including rabbis and activists, demonstrated on Thursday in support of Khalil and in opposition of the Trump administration weaponizing their Jewish identity to further crush free speech. The protesters wore red shirts saying, “Not in Our Name” while staging a sit-in at the Trump Tower’s lobby. About 100 protesters were arrested in the demonstration, according to Jewish Voice for Peace. [...] The 2024 student protests against Israel’s military campaign had already faced violence, harassment and academic consequences under the Biden administration, notably so in Columbia. But under Trump, the government’s crackdown is in line with a far-right Zionist blueprint called “Project Esther” ― named after the heroic queen celebrated during the Jewish holiday of Purim. But despite the far-right coopting the story, some Jewish protesters tried to reclaim it on Thursday, the start of Purim.

[...] While the Heritage-created strategy paper markets itself as a champion against antisemitism, the contents are largely fascist, xenophobic and racist, and seek to quash any kind of dissent, including among anti-Zionists and progressive Jewish Americans whom the blueprint says it sees as complacent. Trump’s executive order that led to Khalil’s arrest can be traced back to the project.

Happy to see Jewish Americans stand up to anti-Semite Donald Trump’s craven exploitation of Jewishness by protesting the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil.

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚨

MASSIVE LOSS AND DESTRUCTION IN THE GAZA STRIP TALLIED BY AL-JAZEERA

📹 Footage from the widespread destruction evident after 8 months of war and genocide against the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, including a tally of the economic losses suffered in the enclave.

Beginning with an estimate of $33 billion in economic damages inflicted on Gaza, the Israeli occupation forces have completely destroyed 138,400 units of housing.

Similarly, 110 schools and universities have been completely obliterated, while another 321 schools have been partially destroyed.

The Israeli occupation also obliterated 206 heritage and archeological sites, while 604 Mosques have been completely destroyed and another 200 have been partially destroyed.

The occupation has also targeted and destroyed 3 Christian Churches.

Similarly, 33 Hospitals and 55 healthcare centers have been put out of service by the occupation army as a result of the blockade of Gaza and the occupation's bombing.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[elusive-phantom]

Federal immigration authorities on Saturday detained a well-known activist who played a major role in Columbia University's pro-Palestinian student movement last year, his lawyer said on Sunday.

The arrest of the activist, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was a significant escalation of President Trump's crackdown on what he has called antisemitic campus activity.

The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, is of Palestinian heritage and graduated in December with a master's degree from the university's school of international affairs, according to his LinkedIn. His lawyer, Amy Greer, confirmed that he was a green card holder and said the arrest would face a vigorous legal challenge.

"We will vigorously be pursuing Mahmoud's rights in court, and will continue our efforts to right this terrible and inexcusable - and calculated — wrong committed against him," Ms. Greer said in a statement. The arrest, she said, "follows the U.S. government's open repression of student activism and political speech."

Ms. Greer said she was not sure of Mr. Khalil's "precise whereabouts," and that he may have been transferred as far away as Louisiana. Mr. Khalil's wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, tried to visit him at a detention center in New Jersey but was told he was not being held there, Ms. Greer said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The State Department said it could not comment on individual visa cases.

The immigration agents who detained Mr. Khalil told him his student visa had been revoked, Ms. Greer said, even though he does not currently hold such a visa. Revoking a green card is quite rare, said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants' rights clinic at Columbia Law School, and in a vast majority of cases where it does happen, the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses, she said.

If the government was to revoke Mr. Khalil's green card "in retaliation for his public speech, that is prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution," Ms. Mukherjee said, adding that she was still learning details about this particular case.

Jodi Ziesemer, the director of the immigrant protection unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said the revocation process is typically lengthy. A green card holder can be detained, but not deported, during that process, she said.

Mr. Khalil was a fixture at the protests that engulfed Columbia last spring, making the Manhattan campus the national epicenter of demonstrations against the war in Gaza. He described his role to reporters as a negotiator and spokesman for Columbia's pro-Palestinian group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

The Trump administration has made Columbia the first target of its push to punish what the president has deemed elite schools' failures to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

On Friday, the administration announced that it had canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to the university. In a social media post last week, Mr. Trump vowed to punish individual protesters his administration considered "agitators."

"All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests," Mr. Trump wrote. "Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested."

In a statement on Sunday, Columbia administrators did not comment directly on the arrest.

"Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community," the statement read. "We are also committed to the legal rights of our students and urge all members of the community to be respectful of those rights."

The arrest drew swift condemnation from some free speech groups, immigrant rights' activists and politicians on Sunday.

Donna Lieberman, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that the detention "reeks of McCarthyism." She added that the arrest was "a frightening escalation of Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestine speech and an aggressive abuse of immigration law."

Zohran Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman who is running for mayor, called the detention "a blatant assault on the First Amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump." Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has faced backlash from some pro-Israel groups for his criticism of Israel.

And Murad Awawdeh, the president of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement, "This blatantly unconstitutional act sends a deplorable message that freedom of speech is no longer protected in America."

Mr. Khalil told Reuters before his arrest on Saturday that he feared that he would be targeted by the federal government.

"Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system," he said.

Mr. Khalil was active as a negotiator for protesters last week at Barnard College, a women's college affiliated with Columbia, which erupted after the college announced that it was expelling two students for disrupting a course on modern Israel. When Barnard's president, Laura Rosenbury, called protesters on the phone to negotiate during one sit-in on campus, Mr. Khalil held up a megaphone to amplify her voice.

Mr. Khalil himself was briefly suspended from Columbia last spring for his role in the protests before the school reversed the decision. He has a diplomatic background and has worked at the British Embassy in Beirut, according to an online biography.

Over the last few days, critics of the protest movement at Columbia have singled out Mr. Khalil on social media. Shai Davidai, a vocal pro-Israel professor at Columbia who was barred from campus after the university said he intimidated and harassed employees, called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport Mr. Khalil.

On Sunday, Mr. Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil's arrest and issued a broad promise: "We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."

[leroibobo]

when the homes in the depopulated palestinian village of lifta were originally built is impossible to tell and most likely varies from house to house. the area's been known since ancient times, including having been written about in the hebrew bible. it's retained multiple different names throughout history - lifta by romans, nephto by byzantines, clepsta by crusaders, then lifta again by arabs. in more recent times, the area saw battle in the early 19th century, when it saw a peasant's revolt against egyptian conscription and taxation policies. (egyptian-ottoman ruler muhammad ali had attempted to become independent from the ottoman empire, and sought to use the area of "greater syria" which palestine was apart of as a buffer state.)

the village was predominantly muslim with a mosque, a maqām for local sage shaykh badr, a few shops, a social club, two coffee houses, and an elementary school which opened in 1945. its economy was based in farming - being a village of jerusalem, farmers would sell their produce in the city's markets. an olive press which remains in the village gives evidence to one of the most important crops its residents farmed. the historically wealthy village was known for its intricate embroidery and sewing, particularly of thob ghabani bridal dresses, which attracted buyers from across the levant.

lifta also represents one of the few palestinian villages in which the structures weren't totally or mostly decimated during the 1948 nakba. 60 of the 450 original houses remain intact. from zochrot's entry on lifta:

israel's absentee property law of 1950 permits the state to expropriate land and assets left behind, and denies palestinians the right to return to old homes or to reclaim their property. it's estimated that there's around 400,000 descendants of the village's original refugee population dispersed in east jerusalem, the west bank, jordan, and the palestinian diaspora.

like many depopulated palestinian houses, some of those in lifta were initially used to settle predominantly mizrahi immigrants and refugees, in this case 300 jewish families from yemen and kurdistan. the houses weren't registered in their names, and the area generally saw poor infrastructure and no resources including water and electricity provided by the government. most left in the early 1970s as a part of a compensation program to move out people who'd been settled in depopulated palestinian houses - if they didn't, they were referred to as "squatters" and evicted. (holes were even drilled in the roofs of evacuated buildings to make them less habitable). the 13 families which remain there today only managed to do so because they lived close to the edge of the village.

in 1987, the israeli nature reserves authority planned to restore the "long-abandoned village" and turn it into a natural history center which would "stress the jewish roots of the site", but nothing came of it. several more government proposals on what to do with the land had been brought up since then. this culminated in in 2021 when the israel land administration announced without informing the jerusalem municipal authorities that it issued a tender for the construction of a luxury neighborhood on the village's ruins, consisting of 259 villas, a hotel, and a mall. since 2023, they've agreed to shelve and "rethink" these plans after widespread objection.

the reasons for the objections varied significantly between the opposing israeli politicians - who see the village as an exemplar of cultural heritage and "frozen in time" model of palestinian villages before 1948 - and palestinians - who largely see the village as a witness of the nakba and a symbol of hope for their return. lifta is currently listed by unesco as a potential world heritage site, a designation netanyahu has threatened to remove several times.

many palestinians who are descendent from its former residents still live nearby. like with many other depopulated palestinian villages, they've never ceased to visit, organize tours of the village, and advocate for its preservation.

[fairuzfan]

Al-Aqsa mosque in Jersualem is one of the most contiguous places in all of Palestine, as it serves as a religious, cultural, and political center for Palestinians. Watch this video to learn more about Al-Aqsa, its significance as a Holy site, and the dangers the Zionist Israeli occupation poses to such an essential part of Palestinians' cultural heritage.

[edenfenixblogs]

hi, i wanted to give you an update on that post of mine you reblogged. heritageposts has informed me that they were using the red triangle in this context: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231123-one-small-red-triangle-palestine-we-are-finally-looking/

i was wrong about what they meant with the 🔻 emoji and i am officially rescinding my previous statement

I am all for fact checking and I would love to believe that Heritage Posts did not mean this particular horrible thing they did.

However, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) is not a reliable source for information in this conflict. If HP is actually using MEMO for news, they should focus on more reliable ones going forward.

There are plenty of other left-leaning sources with more reliability, credibility, sourcing, and transparency.

They have failed several fact checks for misleading and occasionally false information. The publication is explicitly and repeatedly pro-Hamas, and they often omit vital information to skew their stories.

While they are not rated as an outright propaganda publication or as a source of conspiracy theories, they do often cite sources which do and are.

Finally, they are funded by donations. Of course these donations largely come from people who support the kind of reporting that people who donate to them support. They are a nonprofit organization, which is not inherently a bad thing. But this means their interests are not based in journalistic ideals but in political ideology. This is not a reason to completely discount a source, but it is something to keep in mind.

In general, with a topic this intense and with such profound consequences for so many people, I’m only engaging with sources who receive a “reporting” rating of “high” or better and a “credibility” rating of “high credibility.”

I would POSSIBLY consider a “reporting” rating of “Mostly factual” if it had a “high credibility” rating and several extenuating circumstances and reduced media bias to compensate for its lower score in another area.

Leftist sources worth referencing instead:

Forward Progressives

Haaretz

International Policy Digest

Current Affairs

And many others

Personally, though, (for this particular conflict especially) I tend to prefer sources that fall into the central three categories: left-center biased, least biased, and right-center biased.

No news source is perfect or without bias. But this conflict is so fraught that I frankly don’t trust anyone reporting with extreme ideological intentions. And I also don’t want to only read sources that make me comfortable. I am personally very leftist in all of my personal politics and voting. However, I also know that the far left has been more hostile to me based solely on my Jewish ethnicity than anyone else in these past months. Furthermore, I think politicians should be more left, but journalism should always prioritize facts and a full scope of a situation over any one viewpoint. I am the daughter of a journalist. I am deeply in favor of journalistic freedom. And I absolutely do NOT believe in “both sidesism.” Sometimes, there really aren’t two sides to a situation that are both equally worth listening to. There is no alternative viewpoint to “Black Lives Matter” for example that is not deeply racist.

There are not “two sides worth teaching” when it comes to The Holocaust.

But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not so simple. Israel should stop its bombing of Palestine. Palestinians should have full and equal rights. Jewish people in Israel and around the world should not have to live in constant fear or attack, harassment, or murder. There are a lot of extremely valid perspectives from Palestinians, Muslims, Israelis, Arabs, and Jews. And right now, the far left and the far right are weaponizing their ideologies to reduce all of the aforementioned groups to their worst actors. That is not something that will help anyone with regard to this conflict.

Left Leaning Sources

ABC News

Associated Press

Atlantic Media

Boston Globe

The Forward (This is a Jewish source. They had one failed fact check in the last five years, but issued an official correction.)

Human Rights Watch

Institute for Middle East Understanding (This is a Palestinian source and it has a completely clean fact check record)

Least Biased Sources

Jewish Telegraphic Agency (Obviously a Jewish source)

Reuters (this has a Very High reporting rating)

American Press Institute (not only have they not failed a fact check in five years; they have never failed a fact check ever)

The Conversation

Pew Research

Foreign Policy

Foreign Affairs

Sky News UK

Right Leaning

Note: As I stated numerous times, including in this post, I am a leftist. However, something important for American readers of this post to know is that, when it comes specifically to matters involving military analysis of foreign conflicts, a slight right lean in perspective is common and sometimes preferable to leftist idealism. I say this as someone who votes and holds opinions that are about as far left as one can get. However, I also say this as someone with a background in university studies of international politics. Because analysis of military conflicts is often done by those with experience in and understanding of the military, most of the most credible and detailed analyses of foreign military affairs do tend to be more right leaning than sources of equal worth focused on domestic political matters. Furthermore, a leftist tendency toward pacifism (which I share) tends to mean less leftist involvement in military-involved political matters at all. Of course, none of this means there are no quality leftist sources on the current conflict (which I obviously demonstrated by linking to such sources above). I am simply explaining the value of such sources to those who may justifiably be skeptical of anything right-leaning after the hellish past two decades of domestic policies and US-caused violence in other countries.

Note 2: There are plenty of right-leaning sources that received “high” credibility ratings and “high” reporting ratings. I found no sources that had both “very high” credibility and “high” reporting ratings in the “right-center” category.

Boston Herald

Chicago Tribune

Counter Extremism Project

Foreign Policy Research Institute

The Jewish Press (clearly a Jewish source, this publication is geared toward the Modern Orthodox Jewish community. They have no failed fact checks)

ITV News

Jewish Unpacked (this source has no failed fact checks. this source is right-leaning by necessity because of its historical examination of antisemitism in leftist spaces making those spaces inherently unsafe for Jews—not specifically in this most recent flare up in the I/p conflict, but for years).

Right Bias

Note: I don’t personally follow or read any of these sources. But I did list leftist sources with high credibility and reporting ratings, so I will do the same here in the interest of fairness. It should be noted that all other source bias ratings had results several pages long. Right Bias sources with high credibility and reporting ratings were confined to one page only. There are no Right Bias Sources with Very High reporting ratings and high credibility.

Economic Policy Journal (no failed fact checks now or ever)

Influence Watch (tends to view liberal and progressive politics as “extremist,” but has no failed fact checks.)

I am not inclined to trust HP simply because their most recent antisemitic behavior fell short of hoping for Jewish genocide. I have a higher bar for accounts than that.

[mightypurplethunder]

I don't want to see any of you usamericans talk about "punching nazis" ever again. I don't want to hear yall pat each other on the back and say shit like "If I had been alive during the holocaust I would have done something about it", or any other white savior shit like that.

You don't care about jews, you didn't care about them back then, just as you don't care about palestinians now. Yall repeat and repeat "the holocaust was terrible, we should condemn it", not because you care, but because it lifts yourselves up. Because it's the only war that the US won where they just happened to be on "the good side", so it portrays you as heroes, warriors of justice, which happens to be excelent propaganda material, so you exploit it. You make memorials, you make films, hundreds of them, fetishizing the jewish suffering and portraying yourselves as the force of good that saved them all. Meanwhile, dozens of other genocides - many of them even bigger and bloddier than the holocaust - happen around the world, many of them endorsed or supported by your government. But yall don't care. It's not the holocaust. You're not the good guys in this one so why bother making a movie, why pay atention to it at all? It's hard to keep track of everything happening in the world, it has nothing to do with you. So you just keep scrolling your socials paying no mind to whatever fucked up shit is happening out there, until you run into some fucker from the global south posting something mildly critical of israel, or about how the United States shamelessly exploits jewish history for the sake of warfare, or how victim mentality is a dangerous thing for a marginalized group to hold on to, and you get furious. How dare they say things that don't align with the narrative I've been fed my whole life?? They are anti-semitic!! They hate jews!! They are nazis!! And you tell them so, you put them in their place, because you are a democrat and a good guy and you won't tolerate nazis. And then you reblog "support our troops" posts and write letters to your president begging him to bomb brown people on the other side of the planet because they are terrorists, I think. And I'm here to tell you that you are not the good guy, you are not a hero. You are a victim of indoctrination and an idiot, and your domestic white politics mean absolutely nothing to the rest of the world.

Yes, I did watch Schindler's list. No, I don't hate jewish people. Yes, I'll aggresively condemn Israel's actions and anyone blind enough to say that one genocide justifies another, and I will always support palestinian people. And if you happen to be a jewish person that has somehow found themselves in the center of a conversation that isn't even about you, and getting negative attention you don't deserve, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that no matter what you do or where you live, you keep being used as a scapegoat and your life and history exploited for colonialist propaganda, your heritage is worth more than that.

So keep calling yourselves the good guys, keep pulling the anti-semite card or the "Palestine is homophobic" argument. Keep playing your white politics in your white country that you stole from non-white people. The rest of the world is watching you and history will remember you as what you are and always have been; fucking colonizers.

[athena5898]

(Al Mayadeen) Members of the American Historical Association (AHA) have passed a resolution condemning "Israel" for the “intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system.” The resolution, titled Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza, was approved during the association's annual conference on Sunday with 428 votes in favor and 88 against. The resolution accuses the Israeli occupation of destroying 80% of schools in Gaza, leaving 625,000 children without access to education, as well as all 12 university campuses in the territory. It further highlights the destruction of Gaza’s archives, libraries, cultural centers, museums, and heritage sites, including 195 historical landmarks, 227 mosques, three churches, and the al-Aqsa University library. Introduced Historians for Peace and Democracy, the resolution calls for a permanent ceasefire and proposes the establishment of a committee to aid in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.

[documenting-apartheid]

Women of the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem pose with founder Maha Saca in front of the apartheid separation walls. Date unknown. Source.

[inariedwards]

Palestinians call to boycott “Islamic Archaeology Conference” that normalizes Israel's apartheid regime and #GazaGenocide

The conference, at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, November 7-9, centers Israeli speakers as “experts” in the field of Islamic antiquities & features primarily those from the Israel Antiquities Authority, which is deeply complicit in in serious crimes against the Palestinian people, our heritage and our Arabic, Islamic and Christian civilization, in the systematic destruction and looting of this heritage carried out by Israel, and in its persistent attempts to erase Arab and Islamic identity and landmarks in the Palestinian homeland, in blatant violation of international law and of basic ethical principles that should guide this discipline.

-

(The image source is a link to the Instagram post. Tumblr suppresses links to the BDS Movement website which is why I didn't include a direct link to it. Please take the time to visit bdsmovement dot net.)

[melhindips]

⭕️ update of the most important statistics of the genocide being carried out by the "Israeli" occupation against the Gaza Strip for the (335th) day – Thursday, September 5, 2024:

◻️ (335) days of the genocide.

◻️ (3,556) massacres committed by the occupation army.

◻️ (50,878) martyrs and missing persons.

◻️ (10,000) missing persons.

◻️ (40,878) martyrs who reached hospitals.

◻️ (16,715) child martyrs.

◻️ (115) infants born and martyred in the genocide.

◻️ (36) died as a result of starvation.

◻️ (11,308) female martyrs.

◻️ (885) martyrs from medical teams.

◻️ (82) martyrs from civil defense teams.

◻️ (172) martyrs from journalists.

◻️ (7) mass graves established by the occupation inside hospitals.

◻️ (520) martyrs were recovered from 7 mass graves inside hospitals.

◻️ (94,454) injured and wounded.

◻️ (69%) of the victims are children and women.

◻️ (178) shelters targeted by the "Israeli" occupation.

◻️ (17,000) children living without both parents or one of them.

◻️ (3,500) children at risk of death due to malnutrition and lack of food.

◻️ (121) days since the closure of all Gaza Strip crossings.

◻️ (12,000) injured needing to travel abroad for treatment.

◻️ (10,000) cancer patients facing death and in need of treatment.

◻️ (3,000) patients with various diseases needing treatment abroad.

◻️ (1,737,524) affected by infectious diseases due to displacement.

◻️ (71,338) cases of hepatitis infections due to displacement.

◻️ (60,000) pregnant women are at risk due to lack of healthcare.

◻️ (350,000) chronically ill patients at risk due to the prevention of medication entry.

◻️ (5,000) detainees from the Gaza Strip during the genocide.

◻️ (310) detentions from healthcare staff.

◻️ (36) journalist detentions whose names are known.

◻️ (2) million displaced in the Gaza Strip.

◻️ (200) government buildings destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (123) schools and universities completely destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (335) schools and universities partially destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (110) scientists, university professors, and researchers executed by the occupation.

◻️ (610) mosques completely destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (214) mosques partially destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (3) churches targeted and destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (150,000) housing units completely destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (80,000) housing units uninhabitable due to destruction by the occupation.

◻️ (200,000) housing units partially destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (82,000) tons of explosives dropped by the occupation on the Gaza Strip.

◻️ (34) hospitals rendered out of service by the occupation.

◻️ (80) health centers out of service by the occupation.

◻️ (162) health institutions targeted by the occupation.

◻️ (131) ambulances targeted by the occupation.

◻️ (206) archaeological and heritage sites destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (3,130) kilometers of electricity networks destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (34) facilities, stadiums, and sports halls destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (700) water wells destroyed and rendered out of service by the occupation.

◻️ (33) billion USD in direct preliminary losses due to the genocide.

[mariacallous]

One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head��I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are enemies.”

[thatstormygeek]

But one key group was left out. The Uncommitted Movement, the antiwar, pro-Palestinian action that placed second to Joe Biden in this spring’s discarded primaries, had spent weeks trying to move the convention, both in matters of symbol and substance, against the U.S.-armed slaughter in Gaza. In the end, their efforts had boiled down to one extremely achievable ask: to give a Palestinian-American — any Palestinian-American — or a doctor who had witnessed the suffering at the hands of the Israeli military a brief speaking slot, at any time during the four-day-long national pep rally. ... But the word that had come down on Wednesday turned out to be final. No Palestinian would be allowed to speak. ... Nevermind, too, that there was already a tearful presentation on the horrors of October 7, from the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American veteran of the IDF who is still being held hostage in Gaza — a presentation that the Uncommitted delegates made sure to attend in solidarity with the families of Israeli hostages, by the way. ... The refusal to platform a Palestinian speaker echoes nothing so much as the refusal, on orders of then-President and candidate Lyndon Johnson, of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, under the leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer, at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, sixty years ago this month. It similarly ignores the substantive divide between the protesters outside the convention and the uncommitted delegates inside — the fact that the latter are trying to work within and in coalition with the institutional Democratic Party. While some, like some in the MFDP, will likely continue to work for Harris’ election this fall, the refusal to give the reformers even a token platform on the main stage fuels arguments that the party, and perhaps the entire political system as it stands, is too hopelessly corrupted to work with, and thus must be challenged or overthrown.

It seems that those instincts are now operating — that the Harris-Walz campaign and the convention planners decided they could afford to alienate Palestinian-Americans and their ever-growing contingent of allies on the antiwar left. That it would be better to disappoint and insult them than to challenge, in the mildest of ways, the pro-Israel contingent or the reactionary center. It was clear from last night’s programming that their play is going to be to appeal to disaffected Republicans and so-called “moderate” independents, by focusing on militarism, police, and Harris’s career as a prosecutor, locking away criminals and “securing” the border. She telegraphed that in the foreign policy section by declaring with almost Reaganite bravado: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” I really think they could have done both. I don’t think that having a Palestinian woman, hijab and all, deliver what was at bottom a bog-standard Democratic convention speech, with a shoutout to her father’s Jerusalemite origins where others shouted out their Hispanic or Native American heritage would have necessarily detracted from that pivot. I think they could have shored up part of the Michigan Arab-American vote without scaring away the voters they hoped to gain by trotting out ex-Republican congressmen and the Genesee County sheriff. I want to believe that sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Gazans, along with the other Omelas children of the world, in Haiti, Congo, and elsewhere, is not really the intractable trolley problem — a trade between potential victims of American fascism at home and the victims of American militarism abroad — it is made out to be. But maybe I’m naïve.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Perhaps the most damning statements came from Omar and Tlaib, who share the privilege of being America's first Muslim women elected to Congress. Tlaib, who is of Palestinian heritage, said Sunday that a peaceful solution "must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance."

Anti-Israel "activists" and militants alike often use the term "resistance" to describe violent activity aimed at their perceived oppressors, from throwing stones to targeting civilians in suicide bombings.

"The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer," Tlaib wrote, pushing a theory that Israeli civilians invited the atrocities experienced on Oct. 7.

In a lengthy social media thread, Omar declared, "Palestinians have few recourses for justice and accountability," suggesting that the massacre of innocents was an acceptable course of action. She pointed to "lifelong psychological and physical trauma" experienced by Palestinians," whom she claimed live under "occupation and systemic apartheid."

Although Israel maintains external control of Gaza, the military occupation ended in 2005. The following year, Palestinians elected Hamas, a hardline terrorist government that fired thousands of rockets at Israeli population centers and launched countless terrorist attacks in Jewish towns and cities.

Along with her colleagues, Omar warned against perpetuating "a cycle of violence," an offensive cliche that implies Saturday's intentional attack on innocent civilians was a morally equivalent answer to past Israeli military operations, equal in scale to the ferocious savagery exhibited by Hamas.

In reality, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) take great pains to avoid civilian casualties, following strict rules of engagement and punishing negligence. Conversely, Hamas uses human shields, fires rockets from launch sites in schoolyards and hospitals, and tunnels underneath residential neighborhoods.

Omar, Tlaib, and Bush each called for ending vital U.S. military aid to Israel at a time when it needs the funding more than ever. Since Israel's founding, the U.S. has provided more than $270 billion in assistance so that its closest Middle Eastern ally maintains a military advantage over its Arab neighbors, which have collectively invaded Israel multiple times in recent history.

[historyforfuture]

🔴 The Government Media Office releases an update on key statistics of the genocide carried out by the occupation in Gaza Strip, Day 385, Friday, October 25, 2024:

◻️ (385) days of genocide.

◻️ (3,738) massacres committed by the occupation army.

◻️ (52,885) martyrs and missing persons.

◻️ (10,000) missing.

◻️ (42,885) martyrs received by hospitals (Ministry of Health).

◻️ (17,210) child martyrs.

◻️ (171) infants born and martyred in the genocide.

◻️ (786) children martyred during the war, under one year of age.

◻️ (1,206) Palestinian families entirely erased from civil records.

◻️ (37) martyred due to famine.

◻️ (11,742) female martyrs.

◻️ (1,047) martyrs from medical personnel (Ministry of Health).

◻️ (85) civil defense martyrs.

◻️ (177) journalist martyrs.

◻️ (7) mass graves established by the occupation within hospitals.

◻️ (520) martyrs recovered from 7 mass graves inside hospitals.

◻️ (100,544) injured and wounded individuals received by hospitals (Ministry of Health).

◻️ (396) journalists and media personnel injured or wounded.

◻️ (69%) of the victims are children and women.

◻️ (197) shelter centers targeted by the Israeli occupation.

◻️ (35,055) children living without one or both parents.

◻️ (3,500) children at risk of death from malnutrition and lack of food.

◻️ (171) days of complete closure of all Gaza Strip crossings.

◻️ (12,000) injured needing travel for treatment abroad.

◻️ (12,500) cancer patients facing death and in need of treatment.

◻️ (3,000) patients with various diseases needing treatment abroad.

◻️ (1,737,524) infected with communicable diseases due to displacement.

◻️ (71,338) hepatitis infection cases due to displacement.

◻️ (60,000) pregnant women at risk due to lack of healthcare.

◻️ (350,000) chronic patients at risk due to medication shortages.

◻️ (5,280) detainees from Gaza during the genocide.

◻️ (310) detentions among healthcare staff (3 doctors were assassinated).

◻️ (38) journalist detentions with known names.

◻️ (2) million displaced in Gaza Strip.

◻️ (100,000) tents have deteriorated, becoming unfit for the displaced.

◻️ (205) government buildings destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (126) schools and universities completely destroyed.

◻️ (339) schools and universities partially destroyed.

◻️ (12,700) students killed by the Israeli occupation during the war.

◻️ (785,000) students deprived of education by the Israeli occupation.

◻️ (750) teachers and educational employees killed during the war.

◻️ (130) scholars, academics, university professors, and researchers executed by the occupation.

◻️ (814) mosques completely destroyed.

◻️ (148) mosques heavily damaged, in need of restoration.

◻️ (3) churches targeted and destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (19) cemeteries destroyed entirely or partially, out of 60 total cemeteries.

◻️ (2,300) bodies stolen by the occupation from various cemeteries in Gaza.

◻️ (150,000) housing units completely destroyed.

◻️ (80,000) housing units made uninhabitable by the occupation.

◻️ (200,000) housing units partially destroyed.

◻️ (85,500) tons of explosives dropped by the occupation on Gaza.

◻️ (34) hospitals taken out of service by the occupation.

◻️ (80) health centers taken out of service by the occupation.

◻️ (162) healthcare institutions targeted by the occupation.

◻️ (132) ambulances targeted by the occupation.

◻️ (206) historical and heritage sites destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (3,130) kilometers of electric grids destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (125) ground electricity distribution transformers destroyed.

◻️ (330,000) meters of water networks destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (655,000) meters of sewage networks destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (2,835,000) meters of roads and streets destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (36) facilities, sports venues, and gyms destroyed by the occupation.

◻️ (700) water wells destroyed and put out of service by the occupation.

◻️ (86%) of Gaza Strip destruction rate.

◻️ (36) billion USD estimated initial direct losses from the genocide.

25, October Official website -Hamas movement