Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 15, 2023
Hello All – In a departure from the Newsletter's regular format, this edition will focus entirely on the Gaza War. After a few introductory remarks, I will post a dozen or so commentaries on the war that I think are useful/valuable, not least because they differ from the mainstream media interpretations of the war. The major difference between the "mainstream" and "dissenting" commentary is the inclusion of some context or historical perspective in the latter, usually/often omitted in the mainstream. I think this will make the commentaries useful irrespective of one's views about the war.i
It seems that Israel's invasion of Gaza – presumably preceded by bombing even more intense than that which has happened so far – will begin very soon. While the moral weight of the civilian casualties (1300) suffered last week by Israelis has not faded, the events of the last few days have highlighted the humanitarian disaster now suffered by the residents of Gaza. According to a recent report, 2,670 Palestinians have been killed, and around 9,600 wounded. More than 700 of the dead are children. According to a UN agency, more than a million residents of Gaza (out of a 2.1 million population) have been displaced in the last week. Israel's order to the residents of northern Gaza to flee to the south or run the danger of being killed has added to the chaos caused by the blockade of food, fuel, and medicine.
Over the last few days, the war has expanded and threatens to engulf other countries, or millions of Palestine's supporters, in the conflict. This useful report by the defense analyst of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes the spreading tensions in the region. Massive solidarity with Palestine rallies have taken place around the globe.. On his visits to many Middle Eastern capitals, US Secretary of State Blinken has been told by several heads of state, nominal allies of the US, that Palestinian protests are justified, and (presumably) warning that massive popular pro-Palestinian mobilizations threaten the most stable of monarchies and dictatorships.
I think it's clear that the United States is the key to any hopes of altering Israel's apparent determination to inflict revenge on Palestinians, killing thousands and tens of thousands. So far the Biden administration has been unwavering in its "solidarity with Israel," and has now dispatched two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to warn other nations, or entities such as Hezbollah, not to intervene on the side of the Palestinians. Dissent from the government's position is beaten down by Biden spokespeople or by the mainstream media. Indeed, a State Department memo has emerged warning US diplomats to refrain from using the expressions "de-escalation/ceasefire," "end to violence/bloodshed" and "restoring calm."
Yet these banned phrases are exactly what is needed. An international call for a cease fire and negotiations to free the hostages, end the blockade of Gaza, and start on the (long) path towards humanizing the relations between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine is our only hope. In this crisis, "an eye for an eye," in Gandhi's words, "will make everyone blind." As the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem puts it, "Suffering does not justify suffering and, one injustice does not justify another and one crime does not warrant another. Revenge cannot be a plan of action for a state. We can – and must – demand other solutions: ones that are based not on more death, destruction and loss, but on a fundamental acknowledgement that all human beings are equal and deserve to live. Every single one."
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
Some Comments on the Israel/Gaza War
Democracy Now! – The programs on Democracy Now! this week have been outstanding. Each day, 3 or 4 segments present knowledgeable and insightful people from Israel, Palestine, the US, and elsewhere. Almost all that they have to say is excluded from the mainstream news. All these programs are available at www.democracynow.org. If I could single out just a few, presented in chronological order:
(Video) "Dark Days": Israeli Human Rights Leader Orly Noy on Israel's War on Palestinians After Hamas Attack [October 9, 2023]
---- We spend the hour discussing the unprecedented developments, starting in Jerusalem with Orly Noy, chair of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem and editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call. "There is a really strong sense of demanding revenge within the Israeli public," reports Noy, who says the attack catching Israel off guard is a massive military intelligence failure. "Once the immediate crisis is over, the Israeli public will be demanding answers from the government and Netanyahu." [See the Program]
(Video) Historian Rashid Khalidi: Palestinians "Living Under Incredible Oppression, … It Had to Explode" [October 9, 2023]
---- In New York, we speak with Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, who lays out how this weekend's extreme violence between Hamas and Israel will force "a paradigm shift." Colonial powers will no longer believe they can force people to live under the conditions Israel has subjected Palestinians to and expect no retaliation of the oppressed, says Khalidi. "That idea has exploded as a result of the horrific events over the past two-and-a-half days," says Khalidi, who calls the blockade of Gaza "a pressure cooker. It had to explode." [See the Program]
(Video) Mohammed El-Kurd: How Much Palestinian Blood Will It Take to End Israel's Occupation & Apartheid? [October 10, 2023]
---- Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd says Western reaction to Israel's assault on Gaza has once again highlighted the double standard when it comes to how Israeli and Palestinian lives are valued. "One wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end for all of this violence to end." [See the Program]
(Video) Human Rights Lawyer Michael Sfard: "Israelis Must Maintain Their Humanity Even When Their Blood Boils" [October 12, 2023]
---- Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and expert on international human rights, calls for Israel to act within international law in response to Hamas's attack on civilians Saturday. Sfard says Israel should end its bombing and lift the blockade on Gaza because civilians do not deserve punishment for militant attacks. "Modern international law prohibits, with no exception, collective punishment."[See the Program]
(Video) A Second Nakba? Israel Orders 1.1 Million Palestinians to Evacuate Northern Gaza Amid Bombing & Siege [October 13, 2023]
---- Israel's military on Friday ordered 1.1 million civilians in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate "southwards" in just 24 hours, a demand that aid groups say will cause untold human suffering. We speak with Gaza writer Muhammad Shehada, who condemns the international community and mainstream media for its complicity in Israel's destruction of Gaza. "These things are unimaginable horrors that are inflicted on Gaza right now with no one intervening to stop it," he says. "This is pure madness." [See the Program]
A ground invasion of Gaza is a disaster foretold
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [October 15, 2023]
---- Israel is about to launch a catastrophic ground invasion of the Gaza Strip – or will have already launched it by the time this column appears. The invasion is liable to end in a fiasco the likes of which Israel and Gaza have never experienced. We may be looking at mass slaughter. Large numbers of Israeli soldiers would be killed pointlessly. Residents of Gaza would face a second Nakba, the first signs of which are already apparent on the ground. No one would emerge from these horrors for the better. [Read More]
There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.
By Peter Beinart, New York Times [October 14, 2023]---- Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. … That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child. [Read More]
Arriving Again at the Cycle of Vengeance
By Amira Hass, Haaretz [Israel] [October 10, 2023]
---- In a few days Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing – military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road, siege, fear, anxiety over loved ones, captivity, being targets of vengeance, indiscriminate lethal fire at both those involved in the fighting (soldiers) and the uninvolved (civilians), a position of inferiority, destruction of buildings, ruined holidays or celebrations, weakness and helplessness in the face of all-powerful armed men, and searing humiliation. Therefore, this must be said once again – we told you so. Ongoing oppression and injustice explode at unexpected times and places. Bloodshed knows no borders. … The automatic Israeli conclusion, as on previous occasions when its normalcy was shattered a bit, is that if death and destruction haven't achieved their goal until now, more aerial killings of Palestinians and more destruction and vengeance are the answer. That's the conclusion of both the government and the army, but also of many Israelis. And it's also apparently the conclusion reached by Western governments, which raced to voice support for Israel while ignoring Israel's structural violence and cruelty, and the context of the Palestinian people's ongoing dispossession from their land. [Read More]
The Violence of Demanding Perfect Victims
By Noura Erakat, Jadaliyya [Arab Studies Institute] [October 10, 2023]
---- Hamas has launched an unprecedented attack against Israel, taking aim at the apartheid and colonial regime that has subjugated Palestinians for 75 years. Few Western observers have highlighted the context of Israel's structural violence that has condemned Palestinians to a slow death, thus missing a critical opportunity to advance a true, durable solution in the region. … This crisis and looming war must be understood as more than a hostage situation of significant magnitude. It is a crisis of political will to challenge the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel which have led us to this point. Ongoing failure to properly contend with this context is tantamount to telling Palestinians that they must die quietly. This is an immoral and impossible demand that threatens far more than Palestinian life. Any condemnation of Palestinian violence now must begin and end with demands to lift the siege, end the occupation, and dismantle Israel's apartheid system. [Read More] Also of interest is Democracy Now!'s interview with Erakat on October 13: "Western Leaders & Media Are Justifying Israel's 'Genocidal Campaign' Against Palestinians" [Link].
The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel's Plans for Gaza
By Rashid Khalidi, New York Times [October 15, 2023]
[FB - Rashid Khalidi is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.]
---- The depopulation of Gaza would be manifestly inhumane and a violation of international law. President Biden and his advisers should ask themselves how it can be in the national interest of the United States to allow another mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Such a cataclysm would be a second nakba, or catastrophe, as the displacement of 1948 is called. The United States would thereby be a partner with Israel in creating a future for the Palestinians that offers only periodic death, destruction and dispossession and permanent subjugation or expulsion. [Read More]
In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun
By Naomi Klein, The Guardian [UK] [October 11, 2023]
---- The Israeli state's current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days So how do we confront this violent ideology? For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews. And antisemitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism. What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love. It's certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I'd like to be part of a left like that. [Read More]
Israel's Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is only the latest in a Long History of such Massacres
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [October 14, 2023]
---- Half of Gaza consists of children, most born after 2006 when Hamas came to power in the Strip through elections insisted upon by George W. Bush. Large numbers of these children are set to be killed, and several hundred already have been, by Israeli aerial, tank and artillery bombardment. Although the stated military objective is to destroy the Hamas guerrillas, that objective is being pursued with obvious reckless disregard for the welfare of civilian noncombatants. Hamas viciously attacked Israel and committed unspeakable war crimes, and it is legitimate for the Israeli armed forces to go after it in a determined way. It is not legitimate to ethnically cleanse civilians in Gaza or to blow them to smithereens in pursuit of ethno-national revenge. Anyone who thinks the latter is not happening doesn't have eyes in their head, and the reason for which Israel has cut off the internet in Gaza (not a legitimate move since it endangers noncombatants) is to ensure that no real-time record can emerge of the coming massacre. [Read More]
