Protesters during a National March for Palestine in central London, January 13, 2024
JEWISH campaigners accused the government of exploiting fear for its own political purposes today.
The backlash came after the government’s counter-extremism commissioner said London has become a “no-go zone for Jews” during weekend pro-Palestinian marches. Around 145,000 Jews live in the city.
Robin Simcox, previously a Margaret Thatcher fellow at the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, said protests were “becoming ever more vociferous” in an article in the Daily Telegraph.
He said that the government had “more power to tackle extremism than it sometimes thinks” and that it should “move faster, be bolder and be willing to accept higher legal risk if it means implementing policies that keep us safer.”
In response, Downing Street said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was taking the concerns “extremely seriously.”
dizzy: Football or rugby matches are also no-go zones on weekends for others. It’s a matter of simply staying out of the way of huge numbers, not applying apartheid by banning sporting events at the behest of a privileged class.
Newly elected MP for Rochdale, George Galloway, speaks to the media outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London after he was sworn in following his victory in the Rochdale by-election last week, March 4, 2024
GEORGE GALLOWAY’S “emphatic” victory in the Rochdale by-election is a warning to Labour, Britain’s communists say.
The Communist Party’s international secretary Kevan Nelson reminded its political committee earlier this week that the Workers Party candidate had overturned a 10,000 Labour majority.
He argued that Mr Galloway’s campaign “had combined internationalist support for the Palestinian people of Gaza with serious class politics,” calling for the return of A&E and maternity services and town centre regeneration.
A Palestinian man holds a child as he mourns the death of twin babies Naeem and Wissam Abu Anza, killed in an overnight Israeli air strike, during their burial in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 3, 2024. (Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)
The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war.
The following is a statement written by Arundhati Roy and delivered on her behalf at the meeting of Working People Against Apartheid and Genocide in Gaza, at the Press Club, New Delhi, on Thursday March 7, 2024. The remarks were first published by Scroll, an independent media outlet in India.
The richest, most powerful countries in the Western world, those who believe themselves to be the keepers of the flame of the modern world’s commitment to democracy and human rights, are openly financing and applauding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Gaza strip has been turned into a concentration camp. Those who have not already been killed are being starved to death. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced. Their homes, hospitals, universities, museums, and infrastructure of every kind has been reduced to rubble. Their children have been murdered. Their past has been vaporized. Their future is hard to see.
Even though the highest court in the world believes that almost every indicator seems to meet the legal definition of genocide, IDF soldiers continue to put out their mocking “victory videos” celebrating what almost looks like fiendish rituals. They believe that there is no power in the world that will hold them to account. But they are wrong. They and their children’s children will be haunted by what they have done. They will have to live with the loathing and the abhorrence the world feels for them. And hopefully one day everybody – on all sides of this conflict – who has committed war crimes will be tried and punished for them, keeping in mind that there is no equivalence between crimes committed while resisting Apartheid and Occupation, and crimes committed while enforcing them.
They and their children’s children will be haunted by what they have done. They will have to live with the loathing and the abhorrence the world feels for them.
Racism is of course the keystone of any act of genocide. The rhetoric of the highest officials of the Israeli state has, ever since Israel came into existence, dehumanized Palestinians and likened them to vermin and insects, just like the Nazis once dehumanized Jews. It is as though that evil serum never went away and is now only being recirculated. The “Never” has been excised from that powerful slogan “Never Again”. And we are left only with “Again”.
Never Again.
President Joe Biden, head of state of the richest, most powerful country in the world, is helpless before Israel, even though Israel would not exist without US funding. It’s as though the dependent has taken over the benefactor. The optics say so. Like a geriatric child, Joe Biden appears on camera licking an ice-cream cone and vaguely mumbling about a ceasefire, while Israeli government and military officials openly defy him and vow to finish what they have started. To try and stop the hemorrhaging of the votes of millions of young Americans who will not stand for this slaughter in their name, Kamala Harris, US vice-president, has been tasked with the job of calling for a ceasefire, while billions of US dollars continue to flow to enable the genocide.
And what of our country?
It is well known that our prime minister is an intimate friend of Benjamin Netanyahu and there is no doubt where his sympathies lie. India is no longer a friend of Palestine. When the bombing began, thousands of Modi’s supporters put up the Israeli flag as their DP on social media. They helped spread the vilest disinformation on behalf of Israel and the IDF. Even though the Indian government has now stepped back into a more neutral position – our foreign policy triumph is that we manage to be on all sides at once, we can be pro- as well as anti-genocide – the government has clearly indicated that it will act decisively against any pro-Palestine protestors.
President Joe Biden, head of state of the richest, most powerful country in the world, is helpless before Israel, even though Israel would not exist without US funding. It’s as though the dependent has taken over the benefactor.
And now, while the US exports what it has in abundant surplus – weapons and money to aid Israel’s genocide – India too is exporting what our country has in abundant surplus: the unemployed poor to replace the Palestinian workers who will no longer be given work permits to enter Israel. (I’m guessing there will be no Muslims among the new recruits.) People who are desperate enough to risk their lives in a war zone. People desperate enough to tolerate overt Israeli racism against Indians. You can see it expressed on social media, if you care to look. US money and Indian poverty combine to oil Israel’s genocidal war machine. What a terrible, unthinkable, shame.
The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war. They, their journalists, their doctors, their rescue teams their poets, academics, spokespeople, and even their children have conducted themselves with a courage and dignity that has inspired the rest of the world. The young generation in the Western world, particularly the new generation of young Jewish people in the US, have seen through the brainwashing and propaganda and have recognized apartheid and genocide for what it is. The governments of the most powerful countries in the Western world have lost their dignity, and any respect they might have had. Yet again. But the millions of protestors on the streets of Europe and the US are the hope for the future of the world.
Arundhati Roy Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor, and screenplay writer in India. Her most recent book, a novel, is: “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” Her other books include: “Listening to Grasshoppers: Fields Notes on Democracy,” “The God of Small Things,” and “The End of Imagination.
This blog is named after and in tribute to Roy’s 2002 article which now seems difficult to find. She made a speech at the World Social Forum on 27 January 2003. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” I consider that this article answers and satisfies the question I posed in my recent Coming Soon: Should it properly be called Fascism?
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) delivers a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 6, 2023. (Photo: Sen. Bernie Sanders/YouTube Screengrab)
“Of course we have the leverage,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. “We are funding the war.”
Flanked by photos of hungry children and destroyed buildings, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a speech Wednesday that the Biden administration must stop merely asking the Israeli government to halt its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and begin using real leverage to bring about an end to the war and ensure the free flow of aid to the territory’s starving population.
“The U.S. government should make it clear that failure to open up access immediately and feed starving people will result in the Netanyahu government not getting another penny of U.S. taxpayer military aid,” said Sanders (I-Vt.), who noted that “right now we have the incredible situation where a U.S. ally is using U.S. weapons and equipment to block the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid.”
“And if that’s not crazy,” the senator added, “I don’t know what is.”
More than a dozen children in Gaza have reportedly died of malnutrition and dehydration in recent weeks as U.S.-backed Israeli forces continue to obstruct the delivery of humanitarian aid—including by firing on aid convoys and crowds of desperate people gathering in the hopes of bringing sacks of flour back to their families.
In the absence of sufficient food and clean water, many people in Gaza have resorted to eating leaves, grass, and animal feed and drinking contaminated water. Gaza’s food production infrastructure has been decimated by Israeli bombing.
“If humanitarian organizations do not intervene urgently,” one Gaza doctor said last week, “you will find people and children dying in the streets.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department admitted earlier this week that Israeli officials have blocked critical humanitarian aid, including flour, from entering Gaza. But the administration has refused to use its leverage to force the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change course, relying instead on private meetings with Israeli officials and mild public criticism.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the Biden White House has approved more than 100 separate arms sales to Israel over the past five months, even as it has publicly expressed concerns about the staggering civilian death toll in Gaza. Citing unnamed U.S. officials, Axios reported Thursday that “the Biden administration has no plans to restrict military assistance to Israel at this time.”
Sanders said during his floor speech Wednesday that it is “absurd to criticize Netanyahu’s war in one breath and provide him another $10 billion to continue that war in the next.”
“But perhaps the most remarkable thing about this disaster is the fiction we tell ourselves here in Congress that there is nothing, just nothing, that we can do,” the senator continued. “Isn’t this awful, my goodness. Look how all of those buildings have been destroyed—70% of the housing units, terrible. Children going hungry, terrible. Children coming down with disease, terrible. Terrible. Nothing we can do.”
“Really? Everybody knows what is happening,” said Sanders. “We see it every day in the news and we see the pictures, the emaciated children, of people bombed while they sleep. And yet Congress pretends as if we are powerless to stop it. If we had the courage to stand up to some very powerful special interests, yes, we could stop it. We could stop the destruction and we can make sure that these kids do not starve to death.”
Sanders argued that ending the war and addressing the humanitarian emergency would require the Biden administration and Congress to “use the incredible leverage we have over the Israeli government to secure a fundamental change in their disastrous policies.”
“Of course we have the leverage,” Sanders said. “We are funding the war.”
Other members of the Senate Democratic caucus have joined Sanders in recent days in criticizing the Israeli government’s restriction of badly needed humanitarian aid and demanding that the Biden administration cut off weapons shipments to Israel if it refuses to end its suffocating blockade.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in a floor speech earlier this week that he asked the State Department why it is not applying a U.S. law that prohibits military exports to a country that is blocking the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
“I haven’t gotten an answer to the question I posed about three weeks ago,” said Van Hollen. “There is no good answer.”
It’s obvious PM Netanyahu & extremists in his govt like Ben-Gvir & Smotrich have restricted humanitarian aid to Gaza. They’ve said so. That’s why I recently took to the Senate Floor to call on the Biden Admin to use US law already on the books to get more aid to starving people⬇️ pic.twitter.com/8aT6jqBDH1
— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) March 5, 2024
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Wednesday that “we must face the contradiction of what we are doing.”
“We are airdropping food to famine-stricken Gaza today and supplying bombs for Israel to drop on devastated Gaza tomorrow,” said Welch. “We call for humanitarian relief, but how can that call be meaningful when aid workers are killed in their effort to deliver it and Palestinians are killed in their effort to retrieve it?”
It's time for us to acknowledge what the entire world knows: It's impossible to deliver humanitarian aid in a very active war zone.
That's why I've called for a ceasefire and voted against supplying more bombs for Israel to drop in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/0CAoIA3ZEL
— Senator Peter Welch (@SenPeterWelch) March 6, 2024
In a social media post late Wednesday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) wrote that she hopes President Joe Biden will listen “to his close friends in the Senate even if he won’t listen to his voters.”
“This is a catastrophe and he can’t keep going down this path,” Omar added. “Grateful for these senators who are pushing him to act like a president with serious leverage.”
A picture taken from a position in southern Israel along the border with the Gaza Strip on January 19, 2024. (Photo: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
The expert warns of the consequences of Israel invading Rafah.
A United Nations expert on Wednesday expressed her disgust with what Israel is doing during its assault on Gaza.
Paula Gaviria Betancur, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, specifically focused on the Israeli government’s evacuation orders for Rafah.
“I am appalled to hear that Israel intends to extend these orders to Rafah, the only semblance of refuge for nearly 70% of Gaza’s surviving population and the only functional entry point for humanitarian aid, should Israel’s demands in negotiations not be met by the unilaterally imposed deadline of 10 March,” Betancur said.
“Although Rafah has already come under periodic attack by Israeli forces, a full-scale ground assault would lead to unimaginable suffering. Any evacuation order imposed on Rafah under the current conditions, with the rest of Gaza lying in ruins, would be in flagrant violation of international humanitarian and human rights law, forcing people to flee to conditions of certain death—deprived of food, water, healthcare, and shelter,” she added.
Betancur also condemned the Flour Massacre, saying she was “horrified by the depravity of killing civilians while they are at their most vulnerable and seeking basic assistance.”
“'Israel’s evacuation orders have not made the people of Gaza safer; on the contrary, they have been used to forcibly transfer and confine the civilian population in unlivable conditions,' said Paula Gaviria Betancur, UN Special Rapporteur." https://t.co/LGZO4bTZXbpic.twitter.com/GTduhurDqL
Israel has bombed many homes and mosques in Rafah, and the region is facing a severe food shortage. Some Democrats in Congress have said that an invasion of Rafah would “likely” violate U.S. President Joe Biden’s requirement that military aid be conditioned on Israel adhering to international law.
A leaked U.S. cable obtained by The Intercept recently outlined how the looming invasion of Rafah would be devastating for the region.
“A potential escalation of military operations within Southern Gaza’s Rafah Governorate could result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response,” the cable reads, citing relief actors’ warnings to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Levant Disaster Assistance Response Team.
Betancur is adamant that there is only one solution to the worsening humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
“An immediate and permanent cease-fire, coupled with meaningful measures to document and ensure accountability for atrocities as well as secure the fundamental rights of Palestinians in Gaza, is the only path forward for the sake of our shared humanity,” Betancur said.
