Members of Jewish Voice for Peace stage a sit-in at Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ office in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 2024. (Photo: @JvpAction/X)
“Our Jewish communities are rising up to say, ‘Never again is now,'” said organizers.
Sharpening their focus on the influence that pro-Israel lobbyists have had for decades on U.S. policy regarding Palestinians, Jewish progressives on Tuesday held a sit-in at the Capitol Hill office of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, one of the largest recipients of campaign funds from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The protesters, who are members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Action, prominently displayed a sign reading, “AIPAC gave $829,835 to Hakeem Jeffries, who opposes cease-fire,” before proceeding to the New York Democrat’s office.
The sign referred to AIPAC’s contributions to Jeffries throughout his career.
“Our Jewish communities are rising up to say, ‘Never again is now,'” said JVP Action. “We refuse to be bystanders as the Israeli government wages a genocidal campaign in our name and funding by U.S. tax dollars.”
At the sit-in, the organizers held signs saying, “AIPAC funds genocide” and, “Jeffries: Reject AIPAC.”
BREAKING: As AIPAC lobbyists take to Capitol Hill to tell Congress to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, JVP Action members occupied the office of Rep Hakeem Jeffries, once of the largest recipients of AIPAC funding, telling him to #RejectAIPACpic.twitter.com/NCTKHXuhTp
— Jewish Voice for Peace Action (@JvpAction) March 12, 2024
Israel has killed at least 31,184 Palestinians since it began its U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza in October, and at least 25 people have died of starvation due to Israel’s blockade on nearly all humanitarian aid. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East said Tuesday that more children have been killed in Gaza in the last four months than the number of children killed worldwide in wars over the last four years.
JVP Action is among several rights groups that announced a new coalition, Reject AIPAC, on Monday. AIPAC and its political action committee are planning to spend $100 million this election year to unseat lawmakers it views as insufficiently supportive of Israel.
As JVP Action noted Tuesday, while Democratic lawmakers who continue to back Israel’s assault on Gaza may retain the support of AIPAC, they are out of step with Democratic voters, 77% of whom are demanding the U.S. call for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Since October, the Israeli military has killed over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Polls show that 67% of voters and 77% of Democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza, yet many US lawmakers have not yet called for an end to the genocidal bombardment.
— Jewish Voice for Peace Action (@JvpAction) March 12, 2024
“If members of Congress vote to send Israel more bombs and weapons now, it’s because AIPAC demands it,” Justice Democrats, another member of the coalition, said Monday. “Reject AIPAC because Palestinian lives should matter more to our leaders than campaign checks.”
People take part in a pro-Palestine march in central London during a national demonstration for ceasefire in Gaza, March 9, 2024
Defiant protesters reject ‘extremism’ label by MPs to stop marches
CAMPAIGNERS have slammed the government’s “repressive” attempts to clamp down on the right to protest and redefine extremism, warning they are “poorly drafted and open to legal challenge.”
Communities Secretary Michael Gove is expected to announce a looser definition of extremism within days.
Organisations and individuals that breach the new definition will be banned from receiving public funds, engaging with government agencies and appearing at university campuses.
Several Muslim groups are reportedly set to be on the list, including the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Engagement and Development NGO.
Mr Gove claims he aims to ban groups which “undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy.”
Human rights activists of Amnesty International hold traffic boards showing the way to the International Criminal Court for the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog on March 10, 2024 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. The President of Israel is in Amsterdam to open the Holocaust Museum. (Photo by Pierre Crom/Getty Images)
“How is it possible that such a sacred space is being used to normalize genocide today?” asked one Dutch Jewish organizer behind the protest.
Human rights activists in The Netherlands greeted Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday with large protests and directed him towards the International Criminal Court at The Hague over his nation’s alleged war crimes against the Palestinian people in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Herzog was in Amsterdam to attend the opening of the new National Holocaust Museum, but demonstrators said Herzog’s presence needed to be challenged given the large scale death and destruction that Israel’s military has unleashed in Gaza over the last five months.
Dutch Jewish anti-Zionist organization Erev Rave, which organized the demonstrations at the musuem’s opening with the Dutch Palestinian community and Socialist International, said that while it is important to honor the memory of Holocaust victims, it cannot stand by while the war in Gaza continues.
“For us Jews, these museums are part of our history, of our past,” said Joana Cavaco, an activist with Erev Rav, addressing the crowd before the museum’s opening ceremony. “How is it possible that such a sacred space is being used to normalize genocide today?”
A pro-Palestinian Dutch organization, The Rights Forum, called Herzog’s presence “slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land.”
Along Herzog’s route through the city, members of Amnesty International—which has accused Israel of apartheid and backed the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which said policies in Gaza may amount to genocide—carried fake detour signs pointing the motorcade towards the nearby ICC.
As the president of Israel, Amnesty International Netherlands said Herzog “is the political symbol of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. It is unfortunate that Herzog was invited after his controversial statements. That is why we are taking action.”
This is how Israel’s President Isaac Herzog was greeted in Amsterdam today: Signs ushering him to the Haag, where he'll be prosecuted for war crimes in Gaza.
Israel should care that an entire generation of youth in the West will forever see Israel as a pariah. pic.twitter.com/Z7EymLdkAz
Amnesty and other rights groups have documented numerous incidents in Gaza and the West Bank that they say may amount to “war crimes,” including the indiscriminate bombing of civilians areas, the use of prohibited weapons like white phosphorous, attacks on hospitals and emergency medical personnel, the blocking of life-saving food, water, and other supplies, and other acts of “callous disregardfor Palestinian lives.”
At a square nearby the museum where Herzog gave his speech, reportsReuters, demonstrators crowded the streets and chanted slogans like “Cease-fire Now!” and “Stop Bombing Children!” as they held signs that read “Jews Against Genocide” and “The Grandchild of a Holocaust Survivor Says: Stop Gaza Holocaust.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended an opening of Amsterdam’s Holocaust museum, where pro-Palestinian protesters demanding an end to Israel's assault in Gaza booed him https://t.co/L3NceMdAwkpic.twitter.com/ZspcNrl8FF
Ahead of Sunday’s opening, the Jewish Cultural Quarter that operates the new museum, said in a statement that it was “profoundly concerned by the war and the consequences this conflict has had, first and foremost for the citizens of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.”
The statement said the museum stands “for a just and resolution for all those directly involved” and the impact the ongoing violence and hatred is having beyond the Middle East:
The reduction to black-and-white opposites and apparently incompatible arguments – oppressed against oppressor, good against bad, truth against lie. This polarization has spread hatred toward Jews and Islamophobia. It takes courage to speak out against injustice. It takes courage to recognize that the real world is complex and contradictory, and that our empathy need not be confined to one side.
At the heart of the National Holocaust Museum’s mission is the desire to build a just society in the Netherlands by signalling the danger of dehumanizing and excluding those who live among us. That is the message in our presentation, our educational program and our events.
The group said Herzog had been invited to attend the opening prior to the Hamas-led attack on October 7 of last year, but that the fighting since has only further revealed the importance of remembering and learning from the past.
That “the war continues to rage,” the statement concluded, “makes our mission all the more urgent.”
Pro-Palestinians in New York City join “Shut down colonial feminism” rally in front of Senator Kristen Gillibrand’s office, U.N. Women office and New York Times building on Friday, January 12, 2024. (Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Now more than ever, Americans deserve objective, diverse, trustworthy, and contextualized coverage of Gaza.
Rather than providing the kind of objective, fact-based reporting integral to an informed citizenry, our mainstream press bombards us with explicit and implicit biases, false narratives, dehumanization, and misdirection, serving to stifle public dissent and justify, rationalize, and conceal the systematic oppression and extermination of the people of Gaza.
As dependable propaganda tools for Israel’s aggression, our news censors truth not only by what they choose to cover and how they spin it—but what they deliberately omit. This orchestrated disinformation campaign helps ensure the ongoing and unconditional support of the U.S. government and its continued role as Israel’s dutiful genocidal benefactor.
This isn’t war. It’s mass murder. But this isn’t what most Americans are watching, reading, and hearing on the news.
How does a Palestinian-American with family in the region reconcile the disconnect between “reality” and the “story” our press is “telling”?
Consider a day in the life in Gaza: Palestinian schools, hospitals, universities, places of worship, and heritage sites are being systematically destroyed. Civilians, nearly half children, are being murdered on a mass scale (over 30,000 dead, nearly half children). The calculated deprivation of food and water is literally starving families to death. Babies are being born into a living hell, with screams of terror, the ear-piercing explosions of limb-searing U.S.-made bombs, and the painful moans of their parents among the first sounds they hear. The electricity powering the oxygen machines keeping sick patients alive cut off, leaving them to struggle to gulp each of their final breaths. Amputations of children’s limbs without anesthesia with barbed wire have become obscenely routine. Broken, but alive, Palestinian bodies riddled with shrapnel require each piece to be pulled from their flesh. Hungry children are found dead with single Israeli sniper shots to the head because they made the mistake of seeking out food from an aid truck. The deliberate decimation of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure has left families unable to communicate with one another, or with the world, allowing daily atrocities to become increasingly invisible and unreported.
American Media’s Israel Bias and Censoring Journalists
Quantitative analyses conducted by The Intercept, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and an independent collective of U.S. journalists, writers, and media makers of coverage in The York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lay bare our news media’s dramatic pro-Israel bias. The litany of press failings are disturbing in their sheer scope and intention. Findings included the systematic undermining of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim perspectives and the invocation of inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes. Misinformation spread by Israeli officials is commonly printed along with consistent failures to scrutinize Israel’s indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza. Israeli deaths are disproportionately emphasized, and more humanizing language is used to describe them than Palestinians. This is to name just a few.
Case-in-point: In what’s now being called the Flour Massacre, at least 112 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and hundreds more injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians while waiting for food from desperately needed aid trucks. Leading news media descriptions referred to the slaughter as “food aid deaths,” “food aid-related deaths,” “chaotic incident,” and “reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy.”
Do these headlines properly convey the massacre of starving civilians?
Sadly, censored journalists who speak out are paying the price. The Los Angeles Times recently banned 38 journalists from covering Gaza for at least three months after they signed an open letter criticizing Western newsrooms for their biased reporting on Israel and their role in dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
But it’s not just print that is to blame. The Guardian reported the accounts of six CNN staffers from multiple newsrooms, including more than a dozen internal memos and emails, finding that daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict pro-Israel guidelines on coverage. Every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau—which has close ties with Israel’s military—before broadcast or publication.
Holding Media Accountable, Supporting Journalists, and Promoting Independent News
There is no shortage of ways people can help bring this nightmare to an end. Among them should include pressure campaigns on the corporate media to commit to journalistic integrity and truth. Outlets like CNN and The New York Times have a unique opportunity to educate millions by providing rigorous, evidence-based reporting that could serve to end the ongoing genocide—rather than enable it.
Petitions to hold CNN and The New York Times accountable deserve support. But petitions aren’t enough. (including protests, boycotts, and sit-ins) and strategies that target these institutions’ advertisers, revenues, and reputational interests are also required.
Israel’s ongoing genocidal annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza will be reviled by history—rendering the once solemn rallying cry “Never again!” cruelly hollow.
Finally, independent, non-corporate news serves as dependable sources of fact-based information and a powerful check on the official narratives of their corporate counterparts. Now more than ever, Americans deserve objective, diverse, trustworthy, and contextualized coverage of Gaza. Thankfully, these alternatives exist, and need our support, from Pacifica radio to a long list of independent news sites.
Israel’s ongoing genocidal annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza will be reviled by history—rendering the once solemn rallying cry “Never again!” cruelly hollow. “Never again” is not meant to be a phrase of remembrance, but a call to action. Let’s not let the corporate media forget it.
Demonstrators outside of the Capitol blocked Biden’s motorcade, causing a delay in his State of the Union speech (Photo: NYC-DSA)
US President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israeli genocide in Gaza has earned him the nickname “Genocide Joe” and made it necessary to hide from constituents on the campaign trail, due to the frequency of pro-Palestine disruptions at his events.
Yesterday, on March 7, Biden gave the annual “State of the Union” address amid protests from lawmakers themselves on his Gaza policy. When Biden began to bring up Gaza in his speech, Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian in Congress, was joined by several other progressive representatives in holding up signs that said “lasting ceasefire now.” Biden did say in his speech that “we’ve been working non-stop to establish an immediate ceasefire that would last for at least six weeks,” however, he still does not support a permanent ceasefire. Israel seeks the ability to revisit any ceasefire after six weeks.
Outside of the Capitol, where Biden gave his speech, hundreds of protesters gathered to hold a “People’s State of the Union” and blocked the major streets outside the building. The protest was large enough to cause Biden’s motorcade to take the “long way” to the House of Representatives chamber to give his address, delaying his speech. Protesters held banners that read “Biden’s legacy is genocide” and “The people demand: stop arming Israel”. Left-wing and Palestine solidarity organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, Dissenters, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Adalah Justice Project participated in the demonstration.
“Biden, Biden you can’t hide, We charge you with genocide.”
During Biden’s speech, he claimed that he is directing the US military to build a temporary pier on the Gaza coast that would increase the amount of humanitarian aid entering the Strip. At least five people were killed on March 8 after being struck by aid dropped into Gaza via planes. The United States has been carrying out aid drops, despite posing danger, in lieu of pressuring Israel to open land routes to allow aid trucks to move into Gaza freely.
Aid to the besieged Gaza Strip has fallen due in part to Israeli restrictions on two crossing points, according to the UN. In February, an average of just 98 trucks entered Gaza per day, in comparison to around 200 trucks per day in January. Before October 7, Israel would allow around 500 trucks a day into the besieged territory for a population of over 2.3 million.
“That’s not what Gaza needs,” said a protester outside of the Capitol. “Gaza needs liberation. They need an end to US military funding for Israel, and they need to be able to finally end… 75 plus years of ethnic cleansing.”
Biden caves to right-wing on immigration
In his speech, Biden also appeared to continue the process of caving entirely to the right-wing about tougher policies against migrants and refugees, and the further militarization of the US-Mexico border. Biden was heckled at one point during his speech by ultra-right-wing lawmaker Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who shouted about Laken Riley, a student in Georgia allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant.
The right-wing has been using the example of Riley to push a racist anti-migrant policy, despite many studies showing that undocumented immigrants are less likely to engage in violent crime than US residents.
Instead of challenging the right, Biden caved to Taylor-Greene’s remarks by holding a pin that allegedly she gave him, and going on an anti-migrant rant. Getting Riley’s name wrong and referring to undocumented migrants as “illegals”, Biden made a jumbled comment saying, “Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right. But how many of the thousands of people being killed by illegals—to her parents, I say my heart goes out to you.”
Biden also promoted a bipartisan bill to restrict immigration at the border, which would expand the authority of the president to crack down on migrants. “It would also give me as President new emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming,” he said.
Protest votes threaten Biden’s run
Biden has been hemorrhaging support in the statewide Democratic primaries, with large percentages of Democratic voters casting protest votes against the incumbent President. This movement began with the Michigan primary, where over 100,000 voters voted “uncommitted”, with Arab-majority city Dearborn voting 56.22% uncommitted. The recent Democratic primary in US-occupied Hawaii generated 29.1% uncommitted votes, the highest percentage of any statewide primary in this election cycle.
The growing deluge of protest votes against Biden poses a looming threat for him in the election. Anger at Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide is growing in states like Georgia, which, like Michigan, became critical for Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election. In 2020, Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a board member with CAIR Action, the newly formed political arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR Action is a part of the Listen to Georgia coalition, which is encouraging Georgia voters to cast a protest vote against Biden in the March 12 Georgia Democratic primary.
“The people of Georgia, like many people across America, do not want our tax dollars funding a genocide overseas,” Mitchell said. “That’s why Georgia voters are trying to send a message to President Biden in the Democratic primary. The message is: you risk losing the state of Georgia and the 2024 election if you continue to enable the genocide in Gaza.”
