things i heard at the library, an occasional series # 42: why i'm not letter-writing this year, part 1 #w4r2024

This is the first time in 16 years that I am not spending Christmas and Boxing Day writing letters. This time of year, I normally participate in Write for Rights, Amnesty International's global human rights letter-writing event. I decided to give myself the year off, for two reasons -- one positive, one not so much.

I've tried many times to organize a group for Write for Rights, but never found enough interest to get it off the ground. This changed with the amazing team now working at the Port Hardy Library. We are offering our customers the opportunity to participate in Write for Rights for an entire month, beginning on December 10, International Human Rights Day.

I reached out to Amnesty Canada, and they sent a great package of swag -- t-shirts, buttons, bandanas, pens, water bottles. Our team created a beautiful display, featuring petitions for each case, and a box for letters.

For every letter they write, customers receive one entry to a draw for a prize package. We do the mailing, and I'm paying the postage as my donation.

The prize package includes a copy of Letters to a Prisoner, a beautiful, wordless picture book about what Write for Rights is all about, which Amnesty sent us. 

This program has shown me something about Write for Rights that I had forgotten: many people don't know these issues exist. Many people do, of course. Some folks, after seeing our Facebook posts, have come in specifically to write letters. But for many people, the cases are beyond eye-opening -- they are staggering. They didn't know that peaceful activists are targetted, jailed, tortured, and even killed, or their families threatened or killed, for standing up for their communities. 

As people scan through this year's cases, I hear quiet gasps, or expressions of shock and horror. I see people brush away tears.

This program is very labour-intensive for library staff. Multiple times each day, we explain what Write for Rights is, what the cases are, what we are inviting them to do. I've been so impressed with our staff's willingness and energy for doing this. It's a powerful reminder of the role public libraries play in education. 

As always, I am grateful to the good people at Amnesty whose Herculean efforts make Write for Rights happen.

Stay tuned for the second and unhappy reason I am not letter-writing this year.

what i'm reading: three retellings of classics: julia (1984), james (huckleberry finn), finn (huckleberry finn)

When I first heard about Julia, Sandra Newman's retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from Julia's perspective, I wasn't sure I would read it. Orwell is one of my very top writers, and 1984 is, for me, a foundational work. It's one of the few books I've read multiple times, and every time I read it, I find more in it. Did I want to revisit it with another author? Knowing that the Orwell estate approved Newman's use of the original, and being drawn to the words "feminist retelling," I decided I would.

I would have been foolish to skip it. Julia is a gripping, suspenseful, devastating look at women's lives under a totalitarian state. It intersects with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (more the brilliant TV series than the book) and some other dystopian novels, and is simultaneously true to the Orwell masterpiece.

Julia is, in a sense, more fully fleshed out than 1984. Sandra Newman has a huge body of dystopian work in which to situate Julia. In Orwell's day, there was no genre called "dystopian fiction". Not that there weren't other dystopian novels -- this page from Miami Dade College has a good overview of earlier works, many now obscure. But dystopian fiction was not the cluttered field it is now, with at least a dozen subgenres, and hundreds of forgettable, derivative knock-offs.

1984 is dystopian in the sense that The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsiders are YA novels. They can be thought of as proto-genre, or the grandparents of the modern genre. So reading Julia post Hunger Games and Divergent and Uglies and and and and... has a wholly different effect and impact.

More importantly, Julia explores what is absent from 1984: the plight of women in the totalitarian (or simply authoritarian) state: the control of our reproduction. Much of it already exists, in the U.S. and in dictatorships and fake democracies around the world, and the details that might not exist are merely extrapolation. Similarly, Julia also makes the reader reckon with the features of Orwell's dark future that have come to pass -- the surveillience state, the re-writing of history. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Newman, writing now, can more fully connect our world to this future dystopia. How did we get here? What opportunity is there to re-write the future? Is it too late? Delving into Julia's childhood offers some possible answers.

The climactic chapter of this book is one of the most page-turning, pulse-pounding sequences I've ever read. Granted, most of my reading is not of the pulse-pounding variety, but the penultimate scenes left me gasping.

I highly recommend Julia, but if you haven't read 1984, I hope you will do that first. 

James

Coincidentally, I read James immediately before reading Julia. James is a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved person who has escaped his bondage and is on the run with Huck.

This novel, too, is devastating. It brings you so close to the horrifying reality of chattel slavery that at times it is painful to read. Where it differs from Julia, however, is that it is also devastatingly witty and downright funny. Everett employs humour to send up the idiocy of the slavers and the white world in general. This is marvelous, and brings James closer to Huckleberry Finn and Everett closer to Twain. 

Everett also offers an unexpected plot twist that aligns perfectly with some of the central themes of Twain's masterpiece. I loved this. I also recalled the themes of Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone. (Curious? Read it.)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as you may know, is often "challenged" by parents seeking to keep it out of school libraries and off class reading lists. Part of this is based on Twain's use of the word nigger throughout the book. I was pleased that Everett doesn't answer to that parochial mentality. Surely when a slaveowner is referring to his human "property," he is not going to use a polite term or a euphemism. Writing around this truth would only dilute the power of the book. 

Similarly, when referring to the sexual assaults that enslaved women (and no doubt, many men) were subjected to on a regular basis, Everett uses the word rape. Although there were one or two places where I questioned if the victims would have known that word, I was very grateful to see it there on the page, with no sugar-coating and no qualifiers. 

Finn

A few years ago, I read Finn, Jon Clinch's 2008 debut novel, the story of Huckleberry Finn's abusive, alcoholic wretch of a father. Pap (as he is called in Huck Finn) is only a minor character in Twain's book, but the abuse he visits on Huck is well known to everyone in the community, and a prinicpal motivator in Huck's "adventures". 

Who was this man? What made him so mean, so reprehensible? Why was he so awful to Huck? In Finn, Clinch imagines the answers. He creates a terrifying and wholly believable portrait of how a man is reduced to degradation. He even manages to induce a bit of sympathy in the reader. Every abuser has a trauma story of their own, and Pap is no exception.

The author doesn't defend Finn or his actions. He just imagines how he came to pass. Clinch also creates some brilliant suspense and plot twists. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Clinch followed Finn with Marley, an alternate-point-of-view of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I didn't do well with this one, but I think I may try again.

* * * *

This fiction "what i'm reading" trio is brought to you by meaningful, complex nonfictions exploring a topic of great importance to me. In other words: I am struggling mightily with another post, needed a break from it, and this was the result.

what i'm reading: the red parts: a powerful, haunting memoir of trauma, loss, and the limits of justice

This is why I keep a running book list that is decades long. For more than 15 years, my list has included this note.

The Red Parts - Maggie Nelson - murder of aunt she never knew

The Red Parts was published in 2007. I never would have remembered it. But it remained on my list, and last month, I found it at Powell's. I'm not a fast reader, but I read this book in two sittings. I was riveted.

* * * *

In 1969, Jane Mixer was 23 years old, a law student at the University of Michigan. She was on her way to her parents' home to announce her engagement. She never arrived. When her body was found, it was clear she was murdered. 

Maggie Nelson was born four years later. Jane Mixer was her mother's sister. 

In 2004, Nelson was about to publish Jane: A Murder, a collection of poetry and research snippets about the aunt she never knew, and about her death. Out of nowhere, a bomb dropped: Jane's case -- unsolved for 35 years -- had been reopened. Then: an arrest, a trial, media attention. A re-opening of wounds. Fresh trauma.

*  *  *  *

Nelson never knew her Aunt Jane, but her life was profoundly affected by her murder. The echoes of Jane's horrific death reverberated through her life and the lives of everyone in her family.

When Maggie Nelson wrote this book, I don't think the expression intergenerational trauma was commonly used, and Nelson never refers to her family's situation in such clinical terms. But this book is a view of intergenerational trauma from the inside -- from deep inside.

Although the subtitle of this book is "The Autobiography of a Trial", The Red Parts is more memoir than trial reporting. Although there is an investigation, a court room, a jury, an autopsy report -- and autopsy and crime scene photographs, which the family must decide whether or not to view -- and although producers of true-crime TV are already re-packaging the story into a series of clichés -- the book is not a procedural or a legal thriller. It is a profoundly emotional recounting of how trauma plays out in our lives. 

It's very difficult to write clearly about emotions, to bring a reader close to an emotional truth without resorting to melodrama, hyperbole, or cliché -- without being gruesome, but without pulling punches. Nelson comes as close as any writer I've ever read: raw, unflinching, self-aware, humbled and sometimes overwhelmed by the responsibility she has taken on. She is brutally honest, and courageously revelatory about her own life. How much of what she reveals was the result of the trauma of Jane's murder is left for the reader to contemplate.

Threaded through the book is an undercurrent: the author's thoughts on justice -- what passes for justice in the legal system, what real justice might look like, questioning whether justice can ever truly exist. There is no soapbox, no lecture, no statistics. Nelson simply questions everything, interrogating the popular conceptions of healing and closure, and the relative value our society places on certain lives. Her conclusions are only more questions.

I'm grateful to Maggie Nelson for her opposition to the death penalty, and for her recognition of the relative value of lives as reflected in the media. But mostly I'm in awe of her writing and grateful for her honesty.

what i'm reading: operation paperclip: the secret intelligence program that brought nazi scientists to america

Many years ago, I wrote about how the label conspiracy theory is used to shut down inquiry and squelch the questioning of authority: two words, part one, two words part two. */**

Never have I been more aware of this than after reading two books about real events that could easily sound like the wacky imaginings of the tinfoil hat crew. 

Both books are impeccably researched and written.

The subjects of both books are incontrovertible fact. 

Both are about programs organized and run by members of the US government, kept secret from most people in government -- something many people believe is impossible to do. 

The first book, I wrote about here: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. The capsule summary: 

From the early 1950s to at least the mid-1970s, a tiny group of men within the CIA, led by Gottlieb, conducted research into biological and chemical weapons, experimenting on human subjects who lives were considered expendable. 

Without informed consent from their subjects, and usually without the subjects' knowledge at all, these CIA men tortured people (and to a lesser extent, animals) by feeding them LSD and applying other techniques of psychological torture. This went on for decades and involved thousands of vulnerable people -- drug users, prison inmates, psychiatric patients. Gottlieb also invented deadly new poisons and ways to secretly administer them, with the goal of assassinating foreign leaders. The program was known as MK-ULTRA.

The second book, I read earlier this year: Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. (Unsurprisingly, these two bizarre and shameful pieces of US history intersect.)

These were not easy books to read -- the content is highly disturbing -- but I'm very glad I read both. I wish everyone would.

Here's what happened, in the briefest form possible

Immediately after the end of World War II, a small and highly classified group within the US government began to smuggle Nazi scientists out of Germany and into the United States. 

The program expanded and continued throughout the 1950s. In all, more than 1,600 Nazis were safeguarded this way.

This program was not reserved for the rank-and-file, the "we were only following orders" Nazis. Quite the opposite. Operation Paperclip gave a new lease on life to elite, high-ranking Nazi scientists, men who were part of Hitler's and Himmler's inner circle. 

Paperclip included the highest-level specialists in their fields: biological weapons, chemical weapons, and atomic weapons. They were also sadistic, amoral men who devised and carried out hideous experiments on human beings. They were war criminals. 

The American officials in charge of Operation Paperclip were not Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. They didn't give a fuck about the scientists' politics or what they had used their scientific knowledge for. They had only one, single-minded purpose.

The Nazis were miles -- light years -- ahead of the United States in the development of biological and chemical weapons, and the men of Operation Paperclip wanted their knowledge. 

Some were obsessed with keeping the scientists away from the Soviet Union. (The Soviets had a similar program and were also scooping up Nazi scientists as fast as they could.) Others were obsessed with the military implications of these weapons. All were neutral about something that should defy neutrality.

Some people within the program raised objections. Some within government, and in a position to curtail the program, raised objections. Those men were overruled and excised from decision-making positions.  

In theory, Operation Paperclip screened for war criminals and required the rescued scientists to undergo "denazification". In reality, none of that happened. War criminals were given new identities. Their families were relocated to the US. Many became US citizens. They were treated well and enjoyed comfortable, long lives. 

Content warnings, at least for me

As a child, I was inundated with Holocaust education. I remember coming home from Hebrew school after one of these lessons -- numb, nauseated, and unable to sleep. It's one thing to know this happened. It's another thing to know it would have happened to you. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a series of highly-regarded documentaries about the Holocaust. After watching one of them, I declared myself done. I decided I would never read or watch anything Holocaust-related, ever again. I felt I had nothing left to learn that could possibly do any good, and I was done exposing myself to this personalized horror. 

(This is specifically about Hitler's Holocaust. I have learned a lot about many genocides, in the past and present, and all over the globe.)

I don't know why it didn't occur to me that reading Operation Paperclip (the book) would require me to break that vow, and in a big way. Of course, in order to understand the import and implications of Operation Paperclip (the program), it is necessary to understand what these Nazi scientists did. 

So. I learned something new about the Holocaust. New-to-me details about the system of slavery used by the Nazis that I hadn't known. This was among the worst things I've ever heard of in my life. 

For a while, I didn't think I could continue reading. The details were so hideous; it felt so traumatic. But I was very motivated to read this book, for many reasons, so I continued. I'm glad I did, but/and now I know more things I wish I didn't know. If you read this book, which I hope you do, brace yourself.

Review in a nutshell

This is an outstanding book, an absolute tour de force of investigation and narrative nonfiction. 

One final note

In both Poisoner in Chief and Operation Paperclip, there is reference to something that has never been declassified. Hidden facts that neither Stephen Kinzer nor Annie Jacobsen were able to crack. A location so secret, so deeply classified, that it is still not known what went on there. Given what has been declassified and what is known, this may be the most disturbing idea of all.

---------

* Written before I understood how to use post titles properly

** Posted only weeks before the date after which all comments are wiped out.

write for rights 2023: my fifteenth year #w4r2023

2023 marks the fifteenth year that I have participated in Amnesty Interntional's Write for Rights.

Fifteen years ago, I chose one case, one person. I wrote to officials about them, and wrote to them as well. 

I upped the ante a bit more every year, until the year (date unknown!) when I challenged myself to write a letter for every featured case. Since then I've written at least one letter for each of the 10 featured cases, and at least one letter of support.

In 2014 I also joined Amnesty's Urgent Action Network. Urgent Action sends you cases on an occasional basis; you write to officials on their behalf if you can. I respond to about half the emails I receive, depending on what's going on in my life. 

There is one more piece I want to add: I want to organize a virtual letter-writing group event. This is an obvious step for me, but so far I haven't been able to get it off the ground. But I haven't let go of the idea. Eventually I'll figure it out.

I'm not sharing this to win praise or admiration. I'm sharing it to encourage you to write with me.

It's very easy

My annual W4R letter-writing takes about an hour -- and that's because I choose to write for every case, 10 global cases plus one from Canada. You could easily do the whole thing in 15 or 30 minutes.

The only cost involved is international stamps, as I like to send paper mail when possible. I consider this part of my end-of-year charitable donations (albeit not the tax-deductible kind). If postage money is a barrier, you can easily choose only cases that can be contacted by email.

Amnesty offers tons of support. There are sample letters, toolkits, case cards. If you're intimidated by doing this on your own, there are groups you can join to help motivate you. There are also resources for educators and organizers. 

This year there was even an option to receive a paper kit by postal mail. That's a lot of paper, so I didn't order a kit, but if it would help motivate you, sign up for Write For Rights and Amnesty will send you one.

It works

Amnesty has developed Write For Rights because it works: go here and scroll to "success stories".

Last year, people in more than 200 countries took over 4.6 million actions -- letters, emails, tweets, petitions. They helped individuals in dire circumstances, while exposing conditions and highlighting urgent issues.

Write For Rights saves lives. It gives comfort and support to people who are suffering for their activism. It shows families of these heroes that they are not alone. 

W4R 2023: this year's global cases

This year's global cases focus on these individuals, countries, and human rights.

➤ Maung Sawyeddollah, in Myanmar, is exposing Facebook's role in the murderous campaign against people from the Rohingya ethnic group. 

➤ In Australia, two Indigenous people known as Uncle Pabai and Uncle Paul are fighting to save their ancestral lands from the ravages of climate change. To save a culture that has been passed down through generations for thousands of years, they have gone to court to demand Australia take immediate and meaningful action against climate change.

➤ Thapelo Mohapi, in South Africa, is in hiding and fears for his life. Thapelo is a leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a grassroots movement working to improve the lives of people in South Africa. Members of the group are being targetted and murdered.

➤ In Tunisia, Chaima Issa speaks out against an autocratic government. She has been arrested, detained, and banned from meeting with others or speaking in public. She remains defiant, despite facing decades in prison.

➤ Rocky Myers is an intellectually disabled Black man in the US state of Alabama. He is on death row for murder, despite there being no evidence linking him to the crime. His trial was a riddled with issues, including a witness who has since admitted that they lied. After nearly 30 years on death row, Rocky could be executed at any time. 

➤ Justyna Wydrzyńska, in Poland, has been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for helping women access safe abortions.  

➤ In the United Arab Emirates, Ahmed Mansoor is being held in an isolation cell. Ahmed's "crime" is speaking the truth about the UAE, providing the world with a very rare glimpse of the rampant human rights violations in that country -- including fake trials, and the detention and torture of dissenting voices. For more than a year, no one knew where Ahmed was being held. Now he faces a decade in prison.

➤ Thulani Maseko, in the southern African nation of Eswatini, endured more than a year in prison, until he was executed in his own home. Thulani's "crime" was defending human rights in a country ruled by an absolute monarchy.

➤ In Brazil, the son of Ana Maria Santos Cruz organized "Walks of Peace", where people would speak out against police abuses. He was repeatedly threatened, and then murdered. Ana continues to fight for justice for her son.

➤ In Kyrgyzstan, Rita Karasartova leads the Institute for Public Analysis and is a member of a democracy movement. For her peaceful work against poverty and injustice, Rita was arrested, detained, and denied access to healthcare. She is now under house arrest, charged with attempting to "violently overthrow the government".

Human rights abuses in our own backyard

In the list of annual cases, Amnesty reserves one spot for the letter-writer's country. I love this idea. It reminds us that urgent human rights issues don't happen only in faraway lands. The cases in Canada usually involve Indigenous peoples, and are often taking place in my own province -- still known as "British Columbia".

➤ The Wet'suwet'en First Nation is under threat from a huge pipeline being constructed through their traditional and unceded territory. Wet'suwet'en land defenders have been harassed, intimidated, forcibly removed, and criminalized by the RCMP, Canada's national police force. They need our support.

from the archives: my journey to palestinian solidarity and the myth of the self-hating jew (a three-part story)

This seems like a good time to re-post this three-part series. It remains one of the best pieces I've written. 

Part one, my Jewish identity: my journey to palestinian solidarity and the myth of the self-hating jew

Part two, my awakening: my journey to palestinian solidarity and the myth of the self-hating jew, part 2

Part three, my response to typical anti-Palestine and pro-Zionist arguments: my journey to palestinian solidarity and the myth of the self-hating jew, part 3 and final.

There were many interesting comments on the original posts, now gone. I'll make commenting available on this post, with the caveat that this blog is not a forum for debate, nor for racism, anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia.

a genocide is happening right now and nations are doing nothing to stop it

Right now the State of Israel is committing genocide against the people of Gaza. Many humans around the globe are horrified, grieving, raging. But people with the power to stop it are either defending it or remaining silent. And as we know, silence equals complicity.

In this post, I have collecting my Facebook posts from the past weeks, saving them here for my own reference, in reverse chronological order. 

I have turned off commenting on this post. 

29 October

Blaming victims for their own deaths is different than seeing actions in context. Or: providing political context is not victim-blaming.

"The left" was supposedly insensitive and morally bankrupt about the deaths of the Israelis terrorized and killed on October 7. I can't speak for "the left" (obviously), but I can say this. What happened on October 7 was mind-boggling, terrorizing, murderous, horrendous, and absolutely undeserved -- because no human beings deserve to be slaughtered. And I can say that Israeli apartheid, imperialism, and the continuing subjugation of Palestinians stoked Paliestinian hatred, put Israelis at risk, and led directly to terrorist violence. Both of these things are true.

I don't see anti-Semitism in that sentence, and the idea that there's a "fine line" between denouncing apartheid and hating Jews is bullshit. Maybe some who speak out against apartheid do hate Jews -- I've never encountered it, but of course it may exist, since Jew-hating is a popular pastime -- but that doesn't mean the two are the same or even similar. (I've encountered plenty of antisemitism, but none of it was connected to the anti-apartheid movement.)

It's important to write and talk about these things, and I'm glad that is happening, but meanwhile the world is debating these concepts WHILE GENOCIDE IS TAKING PLACE.

* * * *

Between 200 and 300 people were arrested in Grand Central Terminal two days ago, in a demonstration organized by Jewish Voices for Peace. I know that there were huge protests all over the world, but this, in my hometown, from Jewish people... it makes me weep. A feeling so profound, I cannot name it.

28 October

My friend Beth reports: 

There is now no land or cell phone service in Gaza, no power, no water, no internet.  Henceforth the people can be obliterated in a vaccuum.  And no government cares.

Jews who have wondered how the world let the Holocaust happen, where are you now?? What can possibly justify this slaughter???

This was taken in Grand Central Terminal, NYC, on Friday October 27. Lots of arrests. I'm heartened to see so many people willing to get arrested for peace.

27 October

Join Amnesty, the world's conscience, in demanding a ceasefire.

From The Globe and Mail:

Aid convoys to Gaza were ‘set up to fail,’ UN official says, as humanitarian crisis worsens

By Geoffrey York, Mark MacKinnon

With aid convoys stalled and dwindling, and Gaza on the verge of civil disorder, a senior United Nations official says the Palestinian territory and its humanitarian workers are victims of a system that was “set up to fail.”

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, told The Globe and Mail that some of Gaza’s two million people will soon be dying from Israel’s siege of the territory, not just from the relentless bombardments that have reportedly killed thousands. Water, food, fuel and medicine are all nearly exhausted.

Mr. Lazzarini described a riot that erupted Thursday in a southern district of Gaza after people were falsely told in text messages that the UN would be distributing food there. “Civil order is breaking down,” he said. “People are just completely desperate.”

Aid agencies were able to get 40 trucks of relief supplies into Gaza from Egypt last weekend, and Western leaders said that was just the beginning, with an increase in the daily number of trucks expected. Instead, the number has dropped, with only 34 trucks entering the territory over four days this week. Aid trucks have routinely been held for many hours at Israeli inspection zones, with Israel saying it must ensure that no weapons or fuel are reaching Hamas fighters.

Before this war, Mr. Lazzarini noted, Israel was able to inspect about 500 trucks daily at the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza. “So why does it take so long now for a handful of trucks?” he asked.

“It’s a very good question. There is certainly a lack of will. If there was a will, we would have much more. … The system in place today is set up to fail.”

........

“Everything is crumbling and collapsing,” Mr. Lazzarini said. “People are struggling the entire day to try to find some clean water. Sooner or later, under our watch, we will see people dying not just because of the bombardment but also because of the impact of the siege being imposed on the population of Gaza. How is this possible, when this is unfolding live, 24 hours a day, on all possible media, social media and television?”

The world’s focus on a small number of aid trucks is “almost disgraceful” when it is abundantly clear that the convoys are a tiny percentage of what is needed to avert deaths from starvation or dehydration, he said. The siege has resulted in the “collective punishment of an entire population.”

“You have a weakened community of the people. They are completely exhausted after two weeks of war. Many of them are displaced two or three times. They don’t find clean water or proper food.”

UNRWA had warned that it would have to halt its humanitarian operations in Gaza if it did not receive fuel supplies by Wednesday night. It was able to push the deadline back by tightly rationing its use of fuel, he said.

“We have given less to hospitals, given less to bakeries, and that has allowed us to go one or two more days. Maybe we will decide not to go to our shelters every day, just to add one day or two. But we are coming to the end. We’ve done all possible to ration our limited remaining resource. We have agonizing decisions all the time. We are on the edge of a breakdown of our operations.”

........

He added that the situation in the West Bank, the other half of the Palestinian Territories – which he characterized as “already boiling” before Oct. 7 – was also deteriorating rapidly. He described a dangerous mix of economic pain, as Palestinians who work in Israel have lost their jobs since the Hamas attacks, alongside a rising number of attacks on Palestinians being carried out by Jewish settlers who live in illegal settlements in the occupied territory.

“All this is a recipe for more violence,” Mr. Lazzarini said, pointing out that October has already seen the highest death toll among Palestinians in the West Bank in two decades, since the height of the last intifada. More than 90 West Bank Palestinians have died in clashes with Israeli security forces since the start of the war in and around Gaza.

.......

Mr. Lazzarini said the hardest part of his job has been managing the organization while 43 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff members have been killed over the past three weeks, a number he said roughly correlated with an overall situation that has seen more than 7,000 Palestinians killed, according to the Ministry of Health in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Just like the rest of Gaza, UNRWA staff have lost homes and families, and many have become aid recipients themselves.

“It’s deeply distressful to see so many colleagues, not just our staff [who have died] but all the other staff who have lost kids, have lost relatives. It’s just endless,” he said. “You feel powerless. Your word is not enough any more. Being UN is not enough any more to bring safety. You feel that Gaza is definitely a place where there is no safe place for anyone.”

* * * *

25 October

Please read this powerful, honest, heartbreaking essay by Hala Ayan, a Palestinian American writer, psychologist, and professor. 

Why Must Palestinians Audition for Your Empathy?

Oct. 25, 2023 

By Hala Ayan

I’ve moved back to the United States twice since my birth. Once as a child, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Then again for graduate school. I’d had the privilege of a youth — adolescence and young adulthood — in countries where being Palestinian was fairly common. The identity could be heavy, but it wasn’t a contested one. I hadn’t had to learn the respectability politics of being a Palestinian adult. I learned quickly.

The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.

If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts?” When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?

It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.

***

In 2017, I published a novel about a Palestinian family. It was published by a respectable publisher, got a lot of lovely press, was given a book tour. I spoke on panels, to book clubs. I answered questions after readings. There was a refrain that kept coming up. People kept commenting on how human the story was. You’ve humanized the conflict. This is a human story.

Of course, literature and the arts play a crucial role in providing context — expanding our empathy, granting us glimpses into other worlds. But every time I was told I’d humanized the Palestinians, I would have to suppress the question it invoked: What had they been before?

A couple of weeks ago, in a professional space, someone called Palestinians by name and spoke of the seven decades of their anguish. I sat among dozens of co-workers and realized my lip was quivering. I was crying before I understood it was happening. I fled the room, and it took 10 minutes for me to stop sobbing. I didn’t immediately understand my reaction. Over the years, I’ve faced meetings, classrooms and other institutional spaces where Palestinians went unnamed or were referred to only as terrorists. I came of professional age in a country where people lost all sorts of things for speaking of Palestine: social standing, university tenure, journalist positions. But in the end, I am undone not by silence or erasure but by empathy. By the simple naming of my people. By increasing recognition that liberation is linked. By spaces of Palestinian-Jewish solidarity. By what has become controversial: the simple speaking aloud of Palestinian suffering.

These days, everyone is trying to write about the children. An incomprehensible number of them dead and counting. We are up at night, combing through the flickering light of our phones, trying to find the metaphor, the clip, the photograph to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task. We ask: Will this be the image that finally does it? This half-child on a rooftop? This video, reposted by Al Jazeera, of an inconsolable girl appearing to recognize her mother’s body among the dead, screaming out, “It’s her, it’s her. I swear it’s her. I know her from her hair”?

***

Take it from a writer: There is nothing like the tedium of trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine the president of [ ] going on NBC and saying all [ ] people are [ ]. Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It is about the same size as Philadelphia. Or multiply the entire population of Las Vegas by three.

This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember? That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.

I don’t hesitate for a second to condemn the killing of any child, any massacre of civilians. It is the easiest ask in the world. And it is not in spite of that but because of that I say: Condemn the brutalization of bodies. By all means, do. Condemn murder. Condemn violence, imprisonment, all forms of oppression. But if your shock and distress comes only at the sight of certain brutalized bodies? If you speak out but not when Palestinian bodies are besieged and murdered, abducted and imprisoned? Then it is worth asking yourself which brutalization is acceptable to you, even quietly, even subconsciously, and which is not.

Name the discrepancy and own it. If you can’t be equitable, be honest.

There is nothing complicated about asking for freedom. Palestinians deserve equal rights, equal access to resources, equal access to fair elections and so forth. If this makes you uneasy, then you must ask yourself why.

***

Here is the truth of the diasporic Palestinians: They are not magically diasporic. Their diaspora-ness is a direct result of often violent, intentional and illegal dispossession. One day a house is yours; one day it is not. One day a neighborhood is yours; one day it is not. One day a territory is yours; one day it is not. This same sort of dispossession is grounded in the same mind-set and international complicity that is playing out in Gaza.

I’m a poet, a writer, a psychologist. I’m deeply familiar with the importance of language. I’ve agonized over an em dash. I’ve spent afternoons muttering about the aptness of a verb. I pay attention to language, my own and others. Being Palestinian in this country — in many countries — is a numbing exercise in gauging where pockets of safety are, sussing out which friends, co-workers or acquaintances will be allies, which will stay silent. Who will speak.

Here’s another thing I know as a writer and psychologist: It matters where you start a narrative. In addiction work, you call this playing the tape. Diasporically or not, being Palestinian is the quintessential disrupter: It messes with a curated, modified tape. We exist, and our existence presents an existential affront. As long as we exist, we challenge several falsehoods, not the least of which is that, for some, we never existed at all. That decades ago, a country was born in the delicious, glittering expanse of nothingness — a birthright, something due. Our very existence challenges a formidable, militarized narrative.

But the days of the Palestine exception are numbered. Palestine is increasingly becoming the litmus test for true liberatory practice.

In the meantime, Palestinians continue to be cast paradoxically — both terror and invisible, both people who never existed and people who cannot return.

Imagine being such a pest, such an obstacle. Or: Imagine being so powerful.

Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in New York City. She is the author of the novels “Salt Houses” and “The Arsonists’ City,” and several collections of poetry, including the forthcoming “The Moon That Turns You Back.”

* * * * 

21 October

20 October

Headline of Nicholas Kristof's column: "We must not kill Gazan children in order to protect Israel's children." I'm glad he's writing this but WHY DOES THIS EVEN NEED TO BE SAID????? WTF people??? And seriously, if you believe for one moment that Israel did not bomb that hospital, you need a crash course in the history of imperialism.

* * * *

The Onion: Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas

19 October

Gabor Mate: The Beautiful Dream of Israel Has Become a Nightmare

As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: “How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?”

It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach.

In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?

There is no understanding Gaza out of context — Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians — and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability.

Israel wants peace? Perhaps, but as the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has pointed out, it does not want a just peace. Occupation and creeping annexation, an inhumane blockade, the destruction of olive groves, the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands, torture, daily humiliation of civilians, house demolitions: these are not policies compatible with any desire for a just peace. In Tel Aviv Gideon Levy now moves around with a bodyguard, the price of speaking the truth.

I have visited Gaza and the West Bank. I saw multi-generational Palestinian families weeping in hospitals around the bedsides of their wounded, at the graves of their dead. These are not people who do not care about life. They are like us — Canadians, Jews, like anyone: they celebrate life, family, work, education, food, peace, joy. And they are capable of hatred, they can harbour vengeance in the hearts, just like we can.

One could debate details, historical and current, back and forth. Since my days as a young Zionist and, later, as a member of Jews for a Just Peace, I have often done so. I used to believe that if people knew the facts, they would open to the truth. That, too, was naïve. This issue is far too charged with emotion. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, “a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution.”

“People’s leaders have been misleaders, so they that are led have been confused,” in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. The voices of justice and sanity are not heeded. Netanyahu has his reasons. Harper and Obama have theirs.

And what shall we do, we ordinary people? I pray we can listen to our hearts. My heart tells me that “never again” is not a tribal slogan, that the murder of my grandparents in Auschwitz does not justify the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, that justice, truth, peace are not tribal prerogatives. That Israel’s “right to defend itself,” unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.

A few days ago I met with one of my dearest friends, a comrade from Zionist days and now professor emeritus at an Israeli university. We spoke of everything but the daily savagery depicted on our TV screens. We both feared the rancour that would arise.

But, I want to say to my friend, can we not be sad together at what that beautiful old dream of Jewish redemption has come to? Can we not grieve the death of innocents? I am sad these days. Can we not at least mourn together?

* * * *

Bomb and death threats prompt major Muslim group to move annual banquet

A national Muslim civil rights group said Thursday it is moving its annual banquet out of a Virginia hotel that received bomb and death threats possibly linked to the group's concern for Palestinians caught in the Israel-Hamas war.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, canceled plans to hold its 29th annual banquet on Saturday at the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The group, which has used the hotel for a decade, will imove the banquet to an undisclosed location with heightened security, the group's statement said.

* * * * 

18 October

You claim your point of view is righteous and just. Then why is it necessary to silence opposing views? Job offers pulled, academic admissions rescinded, books removed from prestigious conference. Hiding behind specious claims of anti-Semitism -- while pretending that all Palestinian people are terrorists. Jewish people should know better, and should do better.

* * * * 

Canadians, you can make tax-deductible donations to humanitarian aid to Gaza through the CJPME Foundation. 

As I'm sure you know, Facebook posts are being blocked, job offers are being rescinded, people have been fired, novels (longlisted for the Booker Prize!) dropped from international book fairs -- all for showing support to the Palestinian people. And in at least one instance, for being Palestinian. 

This week Israel dropped bombs on a hospital -- and we're being censored for supporting the victims. 

17 October

I hope American Jews who are still defending Israel's actions in Gaza will read and heed this column by Michelle Goldberg. She is a Jewish person who supports Israel and who sympathizes with Jews who equate Hamas' attacks in Israel with genocide. I hope that any of my American Jewish friends who are still seeing my feed (i.e. have not yet un-followed me) will read and share this with their own communities.

Piling Horror Upon Horror

Michelle Goldberg
New York Times
October 16, 2023

Watching from afar as people race toward an abyss, I find it hard to know what to write except “no,” over and over. In the face of massacres that for Jews around the world brought back memories of genocide, the language of some Israeli leaders has, in turn, become murderous. On the cusp of a likely ground invasion of Gaza, many people I’ve spoken to, Jewish and Palestinian alike, are terrified that this rhetoric will become reality.

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, said that the “entire nation” of Gaza was “responsible” for the attacks at a news conference on Friday, telling reporters, “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.” Herzog later clarified that civilians are not legitimate targets, but his words, coming from a member of Israel’s center-left Labor Party, were still chilling, suggesting a broad political consensus that Gazans are collectively to blame for the horror that befell Israel. “All gloves are off,” Ron Prosor, a distinguished Israeli diplomat, told Politico.

In such an environment, the ruling Israeli right, some of whose members spoke of forcing Palestinians out of Israel even before Hamas’s latest rampage, has little to restrain it. Tally Gotliv, a member of the Knesset from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, urged the use of “doomsday weapons” on Gaza. Another member of Likud called for a second nakba, the Arabic word referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians at Israel’s creation in 1948.

I can empathize with liberal Jews both in Israel and throughout the diaspora who feel too overwhelmed, at this moment of great fear and vulnerability, to protest the escalating suffering inflicted on Palestinians. It is not fair that events are moving too quickly to give people time to grieve the victimization of their own community before being asked to try to prevent the victimization of others. Nevertheless, as atrocities are piled on atrocities, I hope Jews will attend to what is being threatened in our name. And all Americans should pay attention, given how much our country underwrites Israel’s military.

In Gaza, mass death has already begun. Last week the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced that Israel was cutting off Gaza’s water, electricity, food and fuel. There was hopeful reporting over the weekend that at the urging of President Biden’s administration, water to a town in Gaza’s south had been turned back on, but for many, drinking water is still unavailable. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that clean water has run out in U.N. shelters across Gaza. On Saturday, UNICEF reported that, according to local sources, more than 700 children in Gaza had been killed. The number by now is surely higher.

Some readers, I suspect, will respond that while this is all terrible, it is also all Hamas’s fault. In many ways, I agree. Hamas’s terror is clearly the immediate cause of the hell raining down on Gaza; most countries attacked as Israel was attacked would respond with war. That does not, however, license Israeli indifference, or worse, to the lives of civilians. Israelis have a right to their rage; I imagine that if I were Israeli, I would share it. But incitement against Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom have nothing to do with Hamas terrorism, is leading us toward somewhere even darker than where we are right now.

Influential voices in America are intensifying the bloodthirsty atmosphere. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” the Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas dismissed worries that mass civilian casualties in Gaza will work to Hamas’s advantage on the world stage. “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza,” he said. That phrase, “bounce the rubble,” is a reference to a Winston Churchill quote about apocalyptic military overkill. To Cotton’s right, the language is even more incendiary. “If it comes down to ethnic cleansing — you want to cleanse my people, I’ll cleanse yours first,” said Joel Pollak, a senior editor at large at Breitbart News, on the webcast of the leading young conservative Charlie Kirk.

We can already see where the total dehumanization of Palestinians leads. This weekend, a 6-year-old boy in Illinois was allegedly stabbed to death by his landlord, who is also accused of gravely injuring the boy’s mother. According to the local sheriff’s office, the victims were targeted “due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”

If this is the atmosphere in parts of the United States, it is exponentially more fevered in Israel. On Monday morning I spoke to Diana Buttu, a Canadian Palestinian lawyer in Haifa who once served as a legal adviser for the Palestine Liberation Organization. “I can understand what my grandmother felt in 1948 when she fled” from a town near Nazareth, Buttu said. “Because it’s a climate of total fear that you’re next. And this isn’t just in the Gaza Strip; it’s also spread to the West Bank.” Already, according to Al Jazeera, at least 55 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed, some by soldiers and others by settlers. Haaretz reported that five Palestinians were shot dead by settlers in the village of Qusra. A message to the village on WhatsApp said, “We have no red lines. We’ll punish you in order to make an example out of you.”

Buttu sent me a link to a mostly Hebrew-language Telegram group with over 82,000 subscribers in which people had posted celebratory photographs of dead and injured Palestinians. “The people of Gaza are not innocent!” said an introductory message for English speakers. If and when those who believe this act on it, we can’t pretend we weren’t warned.

16 October

I stand with Fred. I stand for peace and justice for all people, including Palestinians. I also believe in the right of every person to express their views. Thank you Fred Hahn for being a voice for truth and justice. Please share and tag CUPE Ontario.

13 October

"Israel has a right to defend itself." That's what the Zionists say. 

Any Jewish person who defends or rationalizes this has lost their way.

12 October

As per usual, anything less than 100%, unequivocal, lockstep support for Israel meets accusations of antisemitism and support of terrorism. I am so friggin sick of that. I hope Fred Hahn does not apologize for anything he has said.

Sharing this oldie but goodie from wmtc (with all the great comments gone: a simple lesson: how to tell the difference between hatred of a people and criticism of a nation's policies

11 October

Here's something to think about. Every Israeli attack on Gaza -- every single bomb, every blockade, every shooting, every bulldozing, every siege -- and there have been many -- for years and for decades -- have been attacks on civilians. ALL OF THEM. This does not justify the Hamas attacks in any way. It does, however, make me wonder at all the horror and sadness being poured out for Israeli dead -- all the shock over civilian targets. I've never heard that kind of shock and horror when Israeli bombs drop on the civilians of Gaza.

Is it really so shocking that after a country isolates, abuses, and subjugates a people, that some of those subjugated people will strike back with violence? Is it shocking that Israel's imperialism has put its own people at risk? Not only isn't it shocking, it's inevitable.

10 October

Does "Never Again" mean never, for all the world's peoples, or does it only mean never again *to us*? Because if you don't support freedom and independence for Palestine, if you support Israel's apartheid state, you're not concerned with humanity. You're only concerned with your own kind. How does that square with the rest of your values? 

Hearts are breaking for the deaths of Israelis, and rightly so. But for the deaths of Gaza? Silence.

Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price

Gideon Levy

Get email notification for articles from Gideon Levy

Oct 9, 2023

Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed.

Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed.

We’ll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms. We'll visit Joseph’s Tomb, Othniel’s Tomb and Joshua’s Altar in the Palestinian territories, and of course the Temple Mount – over 5,000 Jews on Sukkot alone.

We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right.

We’ll build a terrifying obstacle around Gaza – the underground wall alone cost 3 billion shekels ($765 million) – and we’ll be safe. We’ll rely on the geniuses of the army's 8200 cyber-intelligence unit and on the Shin Bet security service agents who know everything. They’ll warn us in time.

We’ll transfer half an army from the Gaza border to the Hawara border in the West Bank, only to protect far-right lawmaker Zvi Sukkot and the settlers. And everything will be all right, both in Hawara and at the Erez crossing into Gaza.

It turns out that even the world's most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great. This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped despite the billions poured into it and all the famous experts and fat-cat contractors.

The Gaza Palestinians are willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Will Israel learn its lesson? No.

We thought we’d continue to go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits – always contingent on good behavior – and still keep them in prison. We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.

We’ll keep holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners, sometimes without trial, most of them political prisoners. And we won’t agree to discuss their release even after they've been in prison for decades.

We’ll tell them that only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution, only because we don’t want to deal with all that, and everything would continue that way forever.

Once again it was proved that this isn’t how it is. A few hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in a way no Israeli imagined was possible. A few hundred people proved that it’s impossible to imprison 2 million people forever without paying a cruel price.

Just as the smoky old Palestinian bulldozer tore through the world’s smartest barrier Saturday, it tore away at Israel’s arrogance and complacency. And that’s also how it tore away at the idea that it’s enough to occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones – and sell them to half the world – to maintain security.

On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance. The Gaza Palestinians have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Is there any hope in that? No. Will Israel learn its lesson? No.

On Saturday they were already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza “as it has never been punished before.” But Israel hasn’t stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment.

After 75 years of abuse, the worst possible scenario awaits it once again. The threats of “flattening Gaza” prove only one thing: We haven’t learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay, even though Israel is paying a high price once again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza.

Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.

9 October

I can see how if a person sees only US or Canadian mainstream sources, it could seem like Hamas attacked Israel out of the blue, unprovoked. That's how one-sided the coverage is. There's no context. Occupation, pogroms, blockades, deliberate power and water outages, settlers claiming more and more land, a denial of the very right to exist. The daily brutality that Americans and Canadians are rarely, if ever, exposed to. When a colonized people lash out, it is never out of the blue.

8 October

When the oppressed rise up against their oppressor, they are not starting a war.

Israeli lawmaker blames pogroms against Palestinians for ‘terrible’ attacks

Ofer Cassif says he warned the situation would ‘erupt’ if Israel did not change its treatment of Palestinians.

By Eliyahu Freedman

8 Oct 2023

An Israeli lawmaker has told Al Jazeera that his party warned about events like Saturday’s Hamas attack on Israel if the country’s government continued its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.

Hamas launched a multipronged assault at dawn on Saturday with thousands of rockets fired at Israel, and the Gaza-based group’s fighters infiltrating Israeli towns and illegal settlements.

The attack left at least 600 Israelis dead, including dozens of soldiers, with bodies strewn on roads. Meanwhile, at least 313 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,700 others wounded in Israeli bombardments of the besieged Gaza enclave.

Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset and leftist Hadash coalition, said he warned the situation would “erupt” if the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not change its policies towards Palestinians. Hadash has four seats in the 120-member Knesset.

“We condemn and oppose any assault on innocent civilians. But in contrast to the Israeli government that means that we oppose any assault on Palestinian civilians as well. We must analyse those terrible incidents [the attacks] in the right context – and that is the ongoing occupation,” Cassif said.

“We have been warning time and time again… everything is going to erupt and everybody is going to pay a price – mainly innocent civilians on both sides. And unfortunately, that is exactly what happened,” he said.

“The Israeli government, which is a fascist government, supports, encourages, and leads pogroms against the Palestinians. There is an ethnic cleansing going on. It was obvious the writing was on the wall, written in the blood of the Palestinians  – and unfortunately now Israelis as well,” he added.

in which an email reminds me to resurrect a very old post: join athena to change amazon

Do you support Athena?

Athena is a broad coalition of people and organizations who seek to change Amazon's practices through a variety of tools and tactics, including from the inside. 

In a braindump called the post of orphaned notes, I found this.

athena is organizing against amazon, and you can help -- even if you use amazon. especially if you use amazon.

That's the title of an empty post, sitting in drafts since December 2020. When I received an email from Athena about Juneteenth, I thought it was finally time to post about them.

Athena invites everyone -- Amazon workers, customers, shareholders, and anti-Amazon activists -- to join their coalition to improve Amazon's working conditions, business practices, and environmental practices, and to push back against Amazon surveillance.

Fighting a behemoth as powerful as Amazon is akin to overthrowing an empire. Every legal  option must be on the table. (Although no empire has ever been overthrown entirely by legal means -- since the empire controls the law.) Certainly when it comes to a corporate empire, boycotts alone are pointless.

A personal boycott of Amazon, like any personal boycott, is fine if it works for you. I have a few personal boycotts myself. But I don't delude myself: my not shopping at Walmart makes no difference to Walmart. 

No boycott could never be widespread enough to make even a tiny dent in Amazon's corporate empire. It's also not reasonable to ask people to pay more for a product offered at a lower price elsewhere, or to pay for shipping when a free-shipping option is available, or to track everything Amazon owns, including their streaming platform. 

Then there are folks who rely on Amazon. "Shop local" works if you live in a big metropolitan area, but for many people who live in rural and remote areas, boycotting Amazon would be a difficult sacrifice. I do "try local first," as we say here. And I do buy directly from companies' websites whenever possible. Amazon is not my first go-to. But it's an option that I can't afford to ignore.

That's why I support Athena.

The Athena coalition has come together on these principles.

Corporations like Amazon are dangerous to our communities, our democracy, and our economy. Together, we need to:

• Govern our own communities. It’s we who should decide what is best for us in our communities — not big corporations. We can stop Amazon’s sweetheart tax deals from local governments, draining of public resources, and big-footing into our neighborhoods with no regard for the rest of us.

• Put our health before their bottom line. Amazon relies on, and profits off, the oil and gas that poisons our communities and worsens our climate crisis. It’s time to end that.

• Shield our local economies, so they can thrive.  Amazon is so big it can prey on and manipulate customers, small businesses, and help themselves to tax money that should go to schools, housing, transit, and whatever else our communities need. No more.

• Protect people from Amazon’s dangerous surveillance. We must block Amazon from selling and using technologies to track us at home and work, mining our personal data for profit, and fueling harmful and discriminatory policing of immigrants and communities of color.

Here's Athena's Juneteenth email that prompted me to finally post about this.

* * * *

Every year, through MLK Day, Black History Month, and now Juneteenth, Amazon plans to cover its website, pitch newspapers, and run ads celebrating itself for what it claims to be its commitment to Black people, from its workers, to small businesses and its customers.

This Juneteenth, Amazon decided to stay quiet, knowing that this movement will continue to spotlight their offensive celebrations (like offering dress up day or chicken and waffles instead of a day off and attempting to put Jeff Bezos’ name alongside that of MLK) and redirect back to the how Amazon is part of, serves and chooses to profit from anti-Black systems.

Here are some things Amazon could have not ignored on Juneteenth:

• Amazon can stop supporting Cop City. Amazon sits on Atlanta Police Foundation’s board that is proposing to destroy the equivalent of 298 football fields in Weelaunee Forest to build a mock city near one of America’s largest Black populations. The purpose of this city is to train police across the nation on military tactics against civilian populations and activists, and people are fighting back.

• Amazon could end its Ring-police partnerships. Amazon collaborates with over 2,500 police departments across the US, providing them with warrantless access to footage from Ring cameras, giving police unprecedented power. Sometimes even without consent from owners of Ring devices. During the George Floyd uprisings, the LAPD was found to request footage seeking surveillance of protestors. Ring’s privacy protections are so bad that Amazon had to pay over $30M for illegally surveilling its own customers, including children.

• Amazon can stop paying Black workers less than white workers. NELP found that Amazon is paying Black workers 63 cents on every dollar paid to their white coworkers in its Shakopee, Minnesota warehouse.
  

• Amazon can stop targeting Black neighborhoods for pollution. Breathing exhaust from high concentrations of vehicles puts people, especially elders and kids, at increased risk of asthma, cancer and heart attacks and may cause premature births and miscarriages in parents. Consumer Reports and The Guardian recently showed how Amazon opens their facilities deep inside Black and brown communities.
  

• Amazon can stop targeting the unhoused. In King County, Washington, home to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, Black adults are evicted almost 6x more than white adults, contributing to Black adults making up nearly 30% of the unhoused, which is 4x more than their percentage of the population. When its city council considered a very small tax on ultra wealthy corporations to support affordable housing programs, Amazon threatened to pause its expansion, and heavily leaned on local government until it was killed.

• Amazon can stop targeting Black worker organizers. Amazon can end its pattern of targeting Black workers for termination and retaliation for worker organizing. From the peak of COVID lockdown, Chris Smalls was one of several Black workers being fired after advocating for safe warehouses, all the way to just last week when Amazon was forced to reinstate Jennifer Bates, who it illegally fired after her shareholder activism.
  

• Amazon can end its plan to destroy sacred South African land. Amazon is pushing through against the will of indigenous people, to build a massive site on top of sacred land commemorating one of the first African fights against colonialism.
  

• Amazon can stop funding racist lawmakers. When we found that many January 6th insurrection supporters were lawmakers supported by Amazon, Amazon vowed to end donations to them. That is until it didn’t: right before elections.
  

• Amazon can stop helping ICE. Black immigrants are 7% of the undocumented population but over 20% of those in deportation proceedings. By providing the Department of Homeland Security specialized cloud computing technology, Amazon is directly fueling and profiting from ICE’s inhuman detention and deportation system.
  

What not to miss this week:

• Bernie Sanders launches Senate Investigation into Amazon labor practices. On Tuesday morning, Sen Sanders, as chair of the Senate Committee on Healthy, Education, Labor and Pension, launched an investigation into workplace health and safety practices at Amazon.
  

• NY Warehouse Worker Protection Act in Effect! Starting this week, all Amazon workers across New York State are protected by the WWPA, which greatly limits Amazon’s ability to use quotas and surveillance to push workers into serious injuries. ALIGN NY, Amazon Labor Union, Teamsters and RWDSU led the way to this victory.
  

• Keep Standing with Writers. In LA and NYC, join picket lines with Writers Guild of America to win a fair contract with Amazon Studios and others. RSVP to your local picket location.

Go here to join Athena.