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People Across the Globe Disrupt “Business as Usual” for Palestine

Natalia Marques

Around the world, people took action in solidarity with Palestine on November 9, determined to disrupt the “business as usual” that has led to almost 11,000 killed in the Gaza Strip. The call to “Shut It Down for Palestine” was convened by the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition, the People’s Forum, the International Peoples’ Assembly, Al-Awda-NY, and the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC)-NJ.

JASOD, a socialist party in Bangladesh, organized a demonstration in Dhaka, which condemned the US, the EU, and G-7 countries for their support of Israel.

In Italy, students occupied the University of Padua in solidarity with Palestine. “After the occupation of the rectory’s courtyard and the insufficient response of the University of Padua, we decided to occupy the Humanities pole of our university,” wrote the students on Instagram. “Let more and more voices be raised to stop the genocide in Palestine, for the freedom of Palestine.”

A group of transport trade unions in Greece, Italy, and Turkey issued a joint call to “stop and prevent any loading and unloading of weapons, war material or any means that could continue to fuel the massacre of the Palestinian people.”

“We call on the trade unions of dockers, ship workers, airport workers, railway workers, and all transport workers in Europe to support our initiative and call for joint action by workers in our sectors across Europe,” continued the statement, signed by USB Transport in Italy, the Greek unions ENEDEP-COSCO Dockers Union, Piraeus Port, STEFENSON, PEMEN, and PEEMAGEΝ, and the Turkish union Nakliyat Is.

The left-wing coalition Bloque de Resistencia Y Rebeldía Popular of El Salvador organized a rally to stop the genocide in Gaza in Plaza Palestina in San Salvador.

Palestine solidarity activists occupied Union Station in Toronto, Canada, in an action organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement.

In the United States, the biggest financier of Israeli occupation in the world, students organized numerous walkouts of high schools and universities. Georgia State University students rallied in front of the Georgia-Israel Law Enforcement Exchange Office in Atlanta. High school students at numerous schools in New York City walked out of classes, including the Young Women’s Leadership School of the Bronx.

Afrin, a senior at the Young Women’s Leadership School, said at the walkout, “Students have historically been at the forefront of struggles for justice. But especially struggles against war and militarism.” “The people who we call our representatives and leaders are nothing but pawns of power,” she continued. “Our power is greater than their power and our morals are stronger than their hypocrisy.”

In the morning of November 9, a group of demonstrators occupied the lobby of the BlackRock headquarters in New York City, unfurling a list of names of the 11,000 murdered by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Protesters shamed BlackRock for holding major shares in weapons companies such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics that supply Israel, and began reading the list of names. Demonstrators did not even finish reading out the last names that began with “A” before police escorted them out.

A group of writers and journalists occupied the New York Times building in New York City, reading out a shortened version of the list of 11,000 Gazans killed by Israel and protesting pro-zionist mainstream news coverage. Protesters covered the lobby in fake New York Times newspapers entitled “The New York (War) Crimes.”

Thousands of protesters also rallied in front of the New York Public Library, marching to the New York Times building to join the media workers gathered inside.

Organizers announced in a statement that the November 9 global shut down is the first in a series of global days of actions that will continue “until Gazans can live with dignity and Palestine is free!” Yara Shoufani of the Palestinian Youth Movement said.

They said in the statement that the actions seek to build “a political climate that makes Israel’s business of genocide unsustainable.” Meanwhile, on the same day, Israel continued to launch airstrikes against vital areas in Gaza. On November 9, Israel attacked several medical facilities, further endangering both patients and people who have taken refuge there.

(Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch, an international media organization with the mission of highlighting voices from people’s movements and organizations across the globe.)

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The Growing Pro-Palestine Protests are Becoming a Mass Movement

Yaseen Al-Sheikh

On October 20, thousands of protesters marched through the streets of New York City to call for an immediate cease-fire and an end to hostilities in Gaza. Jeremy Cohan, cochair of New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a Jewish organizer, told reporters that “we have to do what we have to do for justice and for peace.” Sumaya Awad, a prominent Palestinian member of DSA and author, said much the same that night: “We’re out here, it’s pouring rain, we’re wet, but they have blood on their hands.”

These are the sentiments of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have mobilized for a cease-fire in recent weeks, as Israel carries out its indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza following the brutal October 7 Hamas attacks. Just one month into the ongoing crisis, with well over nine thousand Palestinians in Gaza killed (the vast majority of them civilians, including some four thousand children), and with international pressure heightening, the United States is witnessing perhaps its largest and most coordinated antiwar movement since the demonstrations against America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A week ago, Palestinians in New York marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in droves, while demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco drew thousands the last two weeks of October. Hundreds rallied in Austin, Texas, last weekend. Students have walked out at universities in New York and California, defying the on-campus repression that organizations like the Anti-Defamation League are trying to stoke. Tens of thousands showed strength in the Palestinian stronghold of Chicago through a series of marches last month, demanding an immediate cease-fire and the end of Israel’s decades-long occupation. Thousands of young Jewish Americans staged dazzling actions over the last two weeks, including a sit-in on Capitol Hill and an occupation of Grand Central station in New York and the 30th St Station in Philadelphia.

All of this culminated in yesterday’s National March on Washington for a Free Palestine, which is being hailed as the largest demonstration for Palestine in US history and which organizers say boasted 300,000 protesters. Organized by a variety of groups — including the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition, the People’s Forum, and many others — the historic march brought together labor organizers, black civil rights activists, Jewish anti-Zionists, antiwar veterans, and relative newcomers invigorated by events like the George Floyd protests of 2020. Prominent Palestinians such as Noura Erakat and Dr. Omar Suleiman condemned the failings of the international order to prevent the atrocities in Gaza and called on supporters of Palestine to use their voice to demand change. Elsewhere in the United States, tens of thousands conducted concurrent marches in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Provo, Utah.

As the casualties mount and horrific images circulate of bombed refugee camps and ambulances, the outcry from all walks of life in the United States is rising. Already, polling indicated that the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel in their pursuit of a Gaza invasion was not as popular as anticipated. New polling from Quinnipiac University released last Thursday shows that trend is only sharpening, with 49 percent of Democrats disapproving of how Israel has approached the war and a majority, 52 percent, of 18–34-year-olds across all identifications disapproving.

The age divide on the issue is as wide as it has ever been, building on both growing intra-Jewish tensions and the broader US youth’s shift left on Israel and Palestine. A majority of Americans across every demographic and partisan affiliation want the United States to provide humanitarian assistance to those suffering in Gaza. The political environment in the United States, while certainly plagued by neo-McCarthyism, is not nearly as pro-Israel as the sentiment inside the halls of Congress might indicate.

Despite the gap between Congress and the public, it is also increasingly clear that the demonstrations and pressure campaign for a cease-fire — including the DSA’s No Money For Massacres phone-banking campaign, which has made over 219,000 calls as of this writing — are moving members on the margins. Since Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib introduced their “Ceasefire Now” resolution, prominent progressives such as Ayanna Pressley, Greg Casar, and Jamaal Bowman have signed on. Tlaib and Bush’s fellow DSA member in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has also added her name to the resolution, after calling for a cease-fire as early as October 9. In total, eighteen members of Congress have signed onto the Tlaib-Bush resolution. The presence of these figures in the federal legislature is a marked improvement from the ideological makeup of the Democratic caucus in Congress even just nine years ago, during the 2014 war in Gaza.

The movement for a cease-fire is proving intense enough that it has caused various sections of the Democratic caucus to move in distinct directions. Other figures in Congress have called for a cease-fire while refraining from signing on to the Tlaib-Bush resolution, including Minnesota representative Betty McCollum and Texas representative Veronica Escobar. By contrast, progressive congresspeople from Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey to New York’s Jerry Nadler have proposed a “humanitarian pause” in line with the White House’s rhetoric and orientation on the issue. Notably, despite deploring the loss of innocent life in Gaza and criticizing Israel’s “indiscriminate warfare,” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has stuck with the demand of the latter group.

The growing movement for a cease-fire, and, more broadly, for Palestinian liberation, has drawn comparisons from some older organizers to the antiwar demonstrations against America’s invasion of Iraq. Many antiwar activists and democratic socialists see a new and more diverse mass movement developing before their very eyes, this time with lessons learned and new techniques and strategies deployed. There’s a burgeoning relationship between Jewish and Muslim organizations opposed to the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime, an essential development for winning democracy for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And even though the presidency and Senate are controlled by the center-left party, hundreds of thousands, some seasoned organizers of the US left and some relative novices, have mobilized on the streets to express solidarity with Palestine. As Saoirse Gowan, a member of Metro DC DSA, put it to me, “We have learned lessons, and we are not going to go away just because this is happening under a Democratic presidency.”

The movement for a cease-fire and for freedom for all those who live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean does not end with yesterday’s massive day of national action, but it showcases its growing strength among the public. Palestinian and Jewish partnership and the support of the working class worldwide will lead the way to liberation.

Two years ago, in the middle of the May 2021 crisis, democratic socialist and Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib took to the floor of the House of Representatives and declared with steadfast zeal, “The freedom of Palestinians is connected to the fight against oppression all over the world.” It was true in 2021, and it’s perhaps even more prescient now.

(Yaseen Al-Sheikh is a writer and organizer active in the Democratic Socialists of America and in international solidarity work between Israel and Palestine and the United States. Courtesy: The Jacobin, an American socialist magazine.)

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Latin America’s Solidarity with Gaza Defies US Imperialism

Simón Rodríguez Porras

In the past month, tens of thousands have taken to the streets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, Santiago, Bogota and other Latin American cities to protest against Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza, demanding a ceasefire and the breaking of diplomatic relations with Zionist apartheid.

On 31 October, the Bolivian government even broke diplomatic relations with Israel following the massacre at the Jabalia refugee camp. The same day, the governments of Colombia and Chile recalled their ambassadors to Israel for consultations. Honduras did the same on 3 November.

The Brazilian government, initially equidistant, has become more critical of Israeli actions as the weeks go by.

“What we have now is the insanity of Israel’s prime minister, who wants to wipe out the Gaza Strip,” said Lula on 27 October, two days after he called it a genocide.

On 15 October, the Brazilian delegation to the UN Security Council proposed a very modest resolution recommending “humanitarian pauses”, winning 12 in favour, with Russia and the UK abstaining and the US vetoing. Israel responded by blocking the departure of 34 Brazilian citizens from Gaza to Egypt, a policy the Brazilian government called discriminatory.

The Mexican government, traditionally neutral on the Palestinian issue, finally made some criticism last week at the UN of the indiscriminate Israeli attacks and mentioned that, “reprisals are contrary to international law”, demanding an immediate and lasting cessation of hostilities.

Even the Argentine government, usually inclined to support Israel, issued a communiqué on 1 November stating that, “nothing justifies the violation of international humanitarian law and the obligation to protect the civilian population in armed conflicts”.

Israel has responded predictably, condemning Bolivia’s alleged support for “terrorism” and “submission to the Iranian regime”, and accusing the Colombian government of “anti-Semitism”.

Historically, Israel has tended to have better relations with the region’s corrupt dictatorships, like Pinochet, Trujillo, Somoza and Videla. In 2021, Honduras moved its embassy to Jerusalem under the administration of Juan Orlando Hernandez, currently imprisoned in the US for drug trafficking.

Bolivia had broken diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 and had declared Israel a terrorist state in 2014 but in 2020, during the de facto government of Jeanine Añez, diplomatic relations with Israel were reestablished. Now, Bolivia has joined Venezuela and Cuba as the third country in the region to sever diplomatic ties.

The Nicaraguan government broke off relations with Israel in 2010 but reestablished them in 2017, and after its dictatorial turn in 2018 has maintained them.

On 27 October, a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a humanitarian truce was finally approved. Only the governments of Guatemala and Paraguay voted against it, while Haiti and Panama abstained.

On 2 November, Chilean president Gabriel Boric and Colombian president Gustavo Petro attended a regional summit in Washington, where they claimed to have raised their concerns about Israeli crimes with Biden.

Three days before, the Colombian president had expressed: “It is called genocide, they do it to get the Palestinian people out of Gaza and appropriate it. The head of state who does this genocide is a criminal against humanity. His allies can’t talk about democracy.” Israel suspended arms sales to Colombia in mid-October after Petro compared Zionist methods to those of the Nazis.

In recent decades, Colombia has been one of the main Latin American military clients of Israel, which also played an important role in the repression of guerrillas and social movements, the creation of ultra-right paramilitary groups and the extermination of a leftist party.

Apart from North Korea, the only non-Muslim-majority states that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel are in Latin America. This underlines the strategic importance of the region for the possibility of an international anti-apartheid bloc.

(Extract. Simón Rodríguez Porras is a Venezuelan Socialist and writer. He is the author of “Why did Chavismo fail?” and editor at Venezuelanvoices.org. Courtesy: The New Arab, a pan-Arab news website headquartered in London.)

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Why So Many Jews Denounce Israel’s War on Gaza

Yakov M. Rabkin

Israel’s assault on Gaza has made many Jews worldwide, particularly the young, to recoil from any association with the state of Israel. But at least just as many refused to remain “Jews of silence” and came to denounce Israel’s vengeful response to Hamas’ attack on its territory on October 7, 2023.

Especially in the United States, Jews have prominently cried out against the violence in Gaza. Hundreds of protesters closed down New York’s Central Station asking for an immediate ceasefire.

A week earlier, Jews wrapped in prayer shawls staged a sit-in at the U.S. Congress in Washington. After demanding an end to the violence, they opened prayer books and began reciting the ancient words that have steadied Jews for generations. Just a few days ago, Jews unfurled banners reading “Palestinians should be free” at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox Jews have burned Israeli flags at their protests around the world. They believe that the Zionist state is not simply an ‘appropriation’ of their Jewish symbols and identity, but the root cause of a bloody conflict in which innocent Jews and Palestinians suffer.

Indeed, Israel is a Zionist state. Calling it Jewish only creates a confusion because it is hard to define it. Israel embodies European ethnic nationalism shaped in late 19th century, rather than Judaism that has developed for millennia. From the start, Zionists despised Jews and Judaism as they aimed at breeding a new species: the intrepid Hebrew warrior farmer. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Israel has built a mobilized society and a formidable high-tech war machine. As Israeli society has moved steadily to the right, it has consolidated the support of right-wing extremists and racists, including antisemites, around the world, such as white supremacists in the United States.

Israel is the most recent settler colony. Rhodesia and Algeria are now a distant memory. South Africa has freed itself from the official apartheid. While settlers in the Americas and Oceania perpetrated genocide against the aboriginals in the 19th century, Israel initiated massive ethnic cleansing rather late, only in 1947. Some, like the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who documented it, regretted that the Zionists did not complete the job like the white Americans, Argentines or Australians, who wiped out most of the local populations. Indeed, Israel now has under its control approximately equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews, but most Palestinians don’t have political rights.

Many Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, have been trying to come to terms with the contradictions between the Judaism they profess to adhere to and the Zionist ideology that has taken hold of them. A new variety of Judaism has taken root in Israel: National Judaism, dati-leumi in Hebrew. For some Jews, this new faith assuages these contradictions.

Among its most fervent followers one finds the assassin of prime minister Itzhak Rabin who had attempted to find an accommodation with the Palestinians, and prominent members of today’s Israeli government. National Judaism is also the ideology of many vigilante settlers who, since the onset of the war on Gaza, have intensified the harassment, dispossession, and murder of Palestinians on the West Bank. The vigilantes armed with rifles are proud to complement what the Israeli army is doing with tanks, bombs, and rockets in Gaza.

Quite a few Jews now wonder if this separate state for the Jews chronically generating violence is “good for the Jews.” The tardiness of this questioning reflects the success of Israel’s masquerading as “the Jewish and democratic state”, a theoretical and ideological oxymoron. The bombing of Gaza has punctured that propaganda balloon and exposed Israel’s character as a bellicose settler colony, victim of its own practice of exclusion and oppression.

Many Jews deplore this practice because it contradicts all that Judaism teaches, particularly the core values of humility, compassion, and kindness. They realize that those Jews – in truth, the vast majority of them – who rejected Zionism over a century ago, may have been right. Other Jews also find themselves in an emotional bind. Deeply saddened by Hamas’ attack on Israel and likewise devasted by Israel’s implacable response, they are also worried about the surge in anti-Jewish sentiment all around them.

The deadly Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 shows how Israel’s displacement and oppression of the Palestinians breeds their hatred. Consequently, it physically endangers Jews in Israel. The subsequent killing of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza imperils Jews both in Israel and elsewhere. (Muslims do become targets too, as the tragic killing of a six-year-old American Palestinian shows.)

When Israel claims to be the state of all the Jews it turns them into hostages of its policies and actions. When Jewish community organizations declare “We stand with Israel!” they act as proxies for Israel rather than representatives of Jews. To be more precise, they represent those Jews whose identity has become mainly political: believers in Israel, right or wrong.

Israel and Zionism have long polarized the Jews. While Jews worldwide are largely split between these “Israel-firsters” and those who denounce Israel, neither camp influences Israel’s actions. They are akin to fans, rooting for one or the other side, watching from the outside as the situation unfolds. Blaming and attacking Jews for Israel’s actions is wrong and antisemitic. It also strengthens the core Zionist claim that Jews can be safe only in Israel.

It remains to be seen whether the fracture between those who hold fast to Jewish moral tradition and the converts to ethnic nationalism may one day be repaired. However fateful for Jews and Judaism, this fracture is less important for Israel, which nowadays counts many more evangelical Christians than Jews among its unconditional supporters.

Massive world-wide protests have so far neither affected Israelis’ vengeful violence in Gaza nor the supply of American weapons to support it. There is reason to despair. But Judaic tradition encourages Jews to continue, even in seemingly hopeless circumstances: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it…” (Pirke Avot 2:16) This is why many Jews remain at the forefront of the struggle against Israel’s wanton violence. But when the violence ends, many will realize that their protests have emancipated them from Israel’s emotional stranglehold.

This emancipation from the Zionist state has been observed in very different Jewish communities, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, strictly observant and more liberal. Thus, an ultra-Orthodox critic of Israel, usually antagonistic to Reform Judaism, commends a Reform rabbi for saying that “when Israel’s Jewish supporters abroad don’t speak out against disastrous policies that neither guarantee safety for her citizens nor produce the right climate in which to try and reach a just peace with the Palestinians … they are betraying millennial Jewish values.”

The nuclear armed Israel endangers not only the Palestinians and the Jews. It threatens an Armageddon for the region and the Samson option for the world. These apocalyptic scenarios may be triggered if an Israeli government decides that the country cannot cope with an existential threat. This may mean not only the threat of physical destruction but also the looming end of the institutionalized dominance of Israeli Jews over the Palestinians, the end of ethnocracy.

There is hope. England oppressed Ireland for centuries. France and Germany bitterly fought many wars. What will it take for Israelis and Palestinians to live peacefully side by side? Many Jews and many more Palestinians believe that the apartheid-like structure of the Zionist state, which explains why it has lived by the sword since its inception, must change. They know that only when all the inhabitants of the Holy Land enjoy equal rights and have a stake in whatever political arrangement is reached (one state, two states or something else) will the cycle of death stop.

(Yakov M. Rabkin, author of “A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” and “What is Modern Israel?” is professor emeritus of history and associate of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Montreal (CERIUM). Courtesy: Pressenza, an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence with offices in several cities around the world.)