Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 9, 2024
Hello All –Israel's raid on a Gaza refugee camp succeeded in rescuing 4 hostages held by Hamas since October 7th. The raid came at a high cost: 3 other hostages (including one American) were killed. One Israeli soldier was killed and as many as 274 Palestinian civilians were killed, while at least 800 were wounded. According to Gaza's health ministry, among the dead were at least 64 children, 57 women, and 37 elderly people, At least one US military unit participated in the attack/rescue, though details remain obscure.
Keeping in mind that more than 100 hostages were freed in November via a ceasefire and negotiations, we might ask what we can learn from the rescue operation. Coming on the heels of two rejected attempts at a ceasefire, it is clear that Israel has chosen the military path, which might rescue four hostages while killing three, to a ceasefire and negotiated release of many hostages (in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners). We might conclude that Israel's goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible, pushing as many as possible out of Gaza and into Egypt, and reclaiming possession of the land. We might think that "rescuing the hostages" is a smoke-screen to allow the war to continue.
As noted in some articles linked directly below, this week Israel's cruelty towards the children of Gaza put them on a UN "blacklist" of countries responsible for such crimes. They share this honor with ISIS, Syria, et al. Needless to say, Israel denies and rejects the UN move, claiming (once again) that the UN is antisemitic and biased against Israel.
But the fact remains that Gaza's children bear the brunt of Israel's war. Children make up half of the population of Gaza. Of the 37,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since the war began, more than 15,000 of them are kids. The results of the "rescue raid" are typical: for each hostage rescued, 16 children were killed, an unknown number were wounded or orphaned, and many lost family members and/or had their homes destroyed. How can the perpetrators and enablers (Biden, et al.) turn away and not see?
As Peter Beinart explains in a video linked below, the ethical issue for the United States is not whether we approve or disapprove of Israel, Hamas, etc. etc., but what we do to affect the on-going massacre in Gaza: what do we do with our money, weapons, and UN veto. As long as we do not exercise the responsibility to use these assets wisely, hand-wringing and declarations of concern for civilian casualties are so much hot air.
Illuminating The Week That Was
Israel Is on the UN Blacklist of Countries That Harm Children, and Justifiably So
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [June 9, 2024]
---- Somalia, Syria, Myanmar, Boko Haram – and Israel. Together, and not by coincidence. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' decision to add Israel to the blacklist of countries that harm children insulted and shocked Israel. We and Syria? Yes, we and Syria. In Israel, everyone went on the attack, but no one asked: What did we think as the army was killing thousands of children? That the world would remain silent? That the UN would show restraint? Its role is to cry out and that is what it did over the weekend. … The evidence is solid, piling up unequivocally, unforgivable. Eight months of a war against children. Eight months of children missing limbs, of orphans, hungry, sick and in shock, dying and dead. [Read More] Also of interest is "How will Israel react after it's added to a 'list of shame'?" from Aljazeera English ["Inside Story"] [June 8, 2024] [Link].
(Video) The Strangeness of US Policy Toward Israel
Snatch-and-Grab Israeli Style: Disappearing into the Gulag
By Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch [June 7, 2024]
---- The arbitrary arrest, detention and interrogation of Rasha Kareem is nothing new. During the First Intifada, more than 100,000 Palestinians were arrested, many of them without warrants or trials, under an administrative detention policy that was a relic of the British Occupation of Palestine. At least 85,000 were subjected to torturous interrogations. Now this oppressive scheme is being revived. Since October Israel has arrested more than 9,000 Palestinians, including 300 women and 635 minors, from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, alone. There's no accurate count of the number of Palestinians Israel has detained from Gaza but it's certainly more than the 9000 arrested in the West Bank. [Read More]
Divest from Death: Resisting the Complexes of Empire [The Students]
By Ray Acheson, Counterpunch [June 2, 2024]
---- As we enter the eighth month of Israel's genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world's "largest open-air prison," in a country and people bordered and confined by a violent settler colonial state, the relationships between the profiteers of the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the border industrial complex come starkly into focus. And in the demands of the student encampments, the connections of these structures of state violence to universities becomes clear as well. [Read More]
The Bowman Campaign
America needs brave leaders like Jamaal Bowman
By Naomi Klein, New York Daily News [June 9, 2024]
---- When I first met Jamaal Bowman in 2019, he was a longshot challenger running against a 30-year incumbent in Congress. At the time, the Green New Deal was considered a scary, lefty idea, and I was struck by how unapologetically this Bronx middle school principal laid out the case for both its sweeping vision and its real-world pragmatism. … Bold and effective policies pose a threat to entrenched economic interests, which is why Bowman is facing a fierce primary challenge. By any measure, George Latimer is the type of corporate-backed politician that progressives have sought to replace ever since Democrats failed to defeat Trump's pseudo-populism in 2016. … Last fall, shortly after the introduction of the congressional resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza, I met Congressman Bowman again, as part of a delegation of Jewish anti-war organizers. While representatives in much safer seats still feared speaking out against Netanyahu's U.S.-backed bloodshed, Bowman did not hesitate to lead once again, knowing full well that AIPAC would likely launch the most expensive congressional primary ever against him in retaliation. [Read More]
Also about the Bowman campaign – "George Latimer's run against Bowman splits grassroots activist groups in Westchester," by Peter Sterne, City and State [June 7, 2024] [Link]; and "Pro-Israel Groups Back Challenger to Jamaal Bowman in High-stakes New York Primary Race," by Ben Samuels, Haaretz [Israel] [June 3, 2024] [Link].
News Notes
From Haaretz [Israel] [June 6, 2024]
---- The NAACP urged President Joe Biden on Thursday to "indefinitely" halt all weapons deliveries to Israel and pressure the U.S. ally to end its war in the Gaza Strip, sending a reminder that his support for Israel could hurt him among Black voters in November's election. The NAACP's call was a rare instance of the influential civil rights organization taking a position on U.S. foreign policy towards a country without a significant Black population. It appeared likely to deepen the Democratic president's election-year challenges as he tries to back a key ally abroad and temper unrest among his supporters at home. … The NAACP, which has advocated for racial justice and rights for Black Americans, said the U.S. must use its influence with Israel to bring a permanent cease-fire to Gaza. [Read More]
Announcing the launch of the online Popular University for Gaza
FB – Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is a resident of Westchester and a professor at San Francisco State University. The university, which has repeatedly tried to prevent Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi from teaching about Palestine, has now cancelled her summer course on Palestine. In response, Dr. Rabab will teach her course – Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice" – without being paid, and will open it to everybody. For more information, and to register for the course, go here.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Mondays from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards! The Rewards for stalwart Newsletter readers this week come from a new compilation of tunes by New Orleans jazz band Tuba Skinny, which helped me put this edition of The News together. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
The CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Israel's Descent
[FB – This illuminating essay is a review of several recent books about Israel/Palestine and the background to the current war.]
---- It isn't surprising that on the student left the word 'Zionist' has become an epithet for those who oppose equal rights and freedom for Palestinians, or who, even if they claim to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state, persist in thinking that the desires of Israeli Jews, by virtue of their ancestors' persecution in Europe, outweigh those of Palestine's indigenous Arabs. But, as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a 'cultural Zionism' that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha'am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten 'one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it'. … Ben-Gurion's movement was also on a collision course with those who, like Kohn and Arendt, sympathised with the idea of a Jewish cultural sanctuary in Palestine, but rejected the maximalist, exclusionary, territorial vision of the state associated with Israel's creation in 1948. Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. [Read More]
For the sake of the living and in the name of the dead: Stop This Slaughter in Palestine
By Arundhati Roy, Hammer and Hope [Spring issue]
---- The most bewildering conundrum of our times is that all over the world people seem to be voting to disempower themselves. They do this based on the information they receive. What that information is and who controls it — that is the modern world's poisoned chalice. Who controls the technology controls the world. But eventually I believe that people cannot and will not be controlled. I believe that a new generation will rise in revolt. There will be a revolution. Sorry, let me rephrase that. There will be revolutions. Plural. I said we, as a country [India], have lost our moral compass. Across the world millions of people — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Communist, atheist, agnostic — are marching, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. But the streets of our country, which once was a true friend of colonized people, a true friend of Palestine, which once would have seen millions marching, too, are silent today. Most of our writers and public intellectuals, all but a few, are also silent. What a terrible shame. And what a sad display of a lack of foresight. As we watch the structures of our democracy being systematically dismantled and our land of incredible diversity being shoehorned into a spurious, narrow idea of one-size-fits-all nationalism, at least those who call themselves intellectuals should know that our country too could explode. [Read More]
Israel's Legal Reckoning and the Historical Shift in Justice for Palestinians
By Reed Brody, The Nation [June 6, 2024]
---- If the past few weeks have been devastating for the people of Gaza, they have also marked a historic turning point in efforts to hold the Israeli government and its leaders accountable for their crimes. The announcements in The Hague, four days apart, by International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders and by the International Court of Justice ordering Israel under the Genocide Convention to halt its military offensive in Rafah, were a powerful one-two punch to Israel's decades-long impunity. The unprecedented actions by the world's two top international courts had hardly sunk in when The Guardian and the Israel-based magazines +972 and Local Call revealed on May 28 that the Israeli government, over the course of nine years, had shamelessly "deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the [ICC's] inquiries" as they inched along. In a campaign run by Netanyahu's close ally Mossad director Yossi Cohen, with which the prime minister was "obsessed, obsessed, obsessed," Israel routinely spied on the phone calls made by former prosecutor Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. [Read More]
Also of interest – "Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War," b[Link]; and "Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence Campaign," by Omer Benjakob, Haaretz [Israel] [June 5, 2024] [Link].
The War on Gaza
The Destruction, Starvation and Death in Gaza Are Israel's Defeat
By Amira Hass, Haaretz [Israel] [June 4, 2024]
---- Israel was defeated and is still being defeated, not because of the fact that at the start of the ninth month of this accursed war, Hamas has not been toppled. The emblem of defeat will forever appear alongside the menorah and flag, because the leaders, commanders and soldiers of Israel killed and wounded thousands of Palestinian civilians, sowing unprecedented ruin and desolation in the Gaza Strip. Because its air force knowingly bombed buildings full of children, women and the elderly. Because in Israel people believe there is no other way. Because entire families were wiped out. The Jewish state was defeated because its politicians and public officials are causing two million three hundred thousand human beings to go hungry and thirsty, because skin ailments and intestinal inflammation are spreading in Gaza. The only democracy in the jungle was overwhelmingly defeated because its army expels and then concentrates hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in increasingly smaller areas, labeled safe humanitarian zones, before proceeding to bomb and shell them. Because thousands of permanently disabled people and children with no accompanying adults are hemmed in and suffering greatly in those targeted humanitarian areas. [Read More]
(Video) Gaza: The War on Hospitals
From Aljazeera [June 1, 2024]
--- Hospitals are supposed to be immune from attack in times of war but Israel has repeatedly bombed and shelled them since October 7, 2023. This film looks at Israel's destruction of Gaza's hospitals in the context of its historical expansion at the expense of the Palestinian population, going back to 1948. The Israeli army cut off water, power, fuel and medical supplies to Gaza and has attacked most of its hospitals. It claims that al-Shifa Hospital shielded a Hamas command centre and attacked it despite the hundreds of civilians sheltering there – but produced little evidence to support that claim. The alleged war crimes that the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for on both sides include Israel's deliberate targeting of civilians, many of whom have taken shelter in Gaza's hospitals. [See the Program]
Also of interest – "Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans," bPatrick Kingsley and [Link]; and "Israel's AI-Powered Genocide," by Sarmad Ishfaq, Middle East Monitor [June 4, 2024] [Link].
A Wider War? [Lebanon]
The Solution to Israel's Entanglement in the North Lies in Ending the War in Gaza
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [June 5, 2024]
---- The Third Lebanon War that is at the gates will be depicted of course like its predecessors, the first of which was called Operation Peace in Galilee and broke out, incidentally, on June 6, 1982, and the second of which broke out in July 2006, as a war that was forced upon us: What can you do when the Galilee is abandoned and going up in flames? Just sit there and keep quiet? Bow our heads? The discussion of a war in the north is a one-sided discussion. No one is presenting the alternative (and there is an alternative). The only question is about timing. … Of course there is an alternative. In the midst of all the noise and fire and suffering by the inhabitants of the north, the reason Hezbollah is attacking has been forgotten, and has been made to be forgotten: the war in Gaza. Now there are two alternatives: The one, towards which we are heading, is to replicate the fiasco of Gaza all the way to the outskirts of Beirut. The second, which is too good – is to stop the war in Gaza. Peace in the Galilee will be achieved only that way. An agreement will always ensure more than another war, which is liable to be the worst of Israel's wars. [Read More]
Also of interest – "The Biden administration must stop Israel before it escalates in Lebanon," by Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [June 8, 2024] [Link]; and "Israel to soon decide on Lebanon offensive as fighting with Hezbollah flares," by Ellen Francis, et al., Washington Post [June 5, 2024] [Link].
Palestinian Voices
The other side of Gaza Palestinians want you to see
From Aljazeera English ["The Stream"] [June 7, 2024] ---- When you say Gaza, what do you see? What images come to mind? For many people, it will be the death and destruction of the last few months. But there is another side to Gaza that its inhabitants are keen to highlight - its beauty. And remembering that now, is its own form of resistance. Stunning sunsets. Families picnicking on the beach. Teenagers riding horses through cobbled streets. The destruction of a people - genocide - comes through the destruction of its culture and living space. As the International Court of Justice examines the case against Israel, we remember Gaza in all its glory to remind us all of the true picture of Palestine's coastal lands. [See the Program]
Standing Together: The anti-war left makes inroads in Israel
---- Omdim be'Yachad-Naqef Ma'an, or Standing Together, is a Jewish-Arab social movement in Israel that organises against racism and occupation, and for equality and social justice. Federico Fuentes interviewed Standing Together's national field organiser Uri Weltmann to discuss the growing peace movement inside Israel, how activists are confronting far-right extremists seeking to disrupt humanitarian aid going to the Gaza Strip, and the left's recent electoral breakthroughs. [FB – Questions include "How has the peace movement inside Israel developed since October 7?"; establishing "the Humanitarian Guard to counter far-right attempts to block aid convoys going to Gaza"; and Standing Together's role in local elections.] [Read More]
The Student Uprising
'The generation that says no more': Inside the Columbia University encampments for Palestine
By Hoda Sherif, Mondoweiss [June 6, 2024]
--- Headlines about mass graves and dark-site concentration camps filled with innocent Palestinian prisoners have become routine. Elementary schools and hospitals in Gaza are carpet bombed daily, hovering armed quadcopters mimicking the sounds of crying babies are documented for the world to see on Instagram live, and war drums are Palestinian babies' newest bedtime stories. What about any of this is normal? As a graduate student from Columbia University, I've spent a great deal of time in each of the encampments constructed by students. Throughout, one lesson has become painstakingly clear: far from Gaza, on indifferent highways or unfamiliar streets of alien cities, many are not engaging with the ongoing horrors of this war everyday. Then there are those whose existence is entirely consumed by it: our students. Today it is them who teach, educate, and lead. And the lessons they're imparting in these spaces surpasses the value of any classroom at any institution in this world. [Read More]
The State of the Union
[FB – This week The Nation published an issue primarily focused on what a Trump administration would try to accomplish if he were re-elected in November. The several essays are based on the Heritage Foundation publication Mandate for Leadership, the "Project 2025" blueprint for a right-wing agenda. The authors claim, I think rightly, that these terrible programs have deep support within the Republican Party and Trump's inner circle. Frightening.]
Project 2025's Guide to Subverting Democracy
By John Nichols, The Nation [June 4, 2024]
---- Donald Trump has made no secret of his determination to govern as a "dictator" if he regains the presidency, and that's got his critics warning that his reelection would spell the end of democracy. But Trump and his allies are too smart to go full Kim Jong Un. Rather, the former president's enthusiasm for the authoritarian regimes of Russia's Vladimir Putin, Turkey's Tayyip Erdoğan, and Hungary's Viktor Orbán suggests the models he would build on: managing elections to benefit himself and his Republican allies; gutting public broadcasting and constraining press freedom; and undermining civil society. … The outline for such a scenario emerges from a thorough reading of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, which specifically proposes a Trump-friendly recalculation of the systems that sustain American democracy. The strategy for establishing an American version of Orbán's "illiberal democracy" is not spelled out in any particular chapter of Mandate. Rather, it is woven throughout the whole of the document, with key elements appearing in the chapters on reworking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In the section on the DHS, for instance, there's a plan to eliminate the ability of the agency that monitors election security to prevent the spread of disinformation about voting and vote counting. [Read More]
Other essays/topics include: "Under Trump, the DOJ Will Become the Legal Wing of the MAGA Movement," by Elie Mystal, [Link]; "The Mandate for Leadership, Then and Now," by Kim Phillips-Fein [Link]; "Conservatives Are Gearing Up for a Major Military Expansion Under Trump 2.0," by William D. Hartung [Link]; and "The Theocratic Blueprint for Trump's Next Term," by Chris Lehmann [Link].
Civil Liberties
The Criminalization of Solidarity: The Stop Cop City Prosecutions
By Tadhg Larabee and Eva Rosenfeld, Dissent Magazine [Spring 2024]
---- The criminalization of a left-wing movement comes as no surprise. But Georgia's sweeping and openly political application of conspiracy law is a particularly concerning case. It was this tactic that shattered the left roughly a hundred years ago, when the U.S. government targeted growing socialist parties and increasingly militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition. Now, as then, conspiracy stands in as the evil double of plain solidarity—the tool we need to fight repression, and what makes protest possible. [Read More]
