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Nearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah ‘Injured, Sick, Malnourished,’ Says UNICEF

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Palestinians, including children, collect remaining belongings from the rubble of destroyed houses after Israeli attacks on May 1, 2024 in Rafah, Gaza.
 (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

A full-scale Israeli assault on the crowded southern Gaza city “would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children.”

“The children in Gaza need a cease-fire.”

That’s how Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), concluded a brief video Wednesday about the harrowing conditions across the Gaza Strip, particularly in Rafah, where about 1.5 million of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million residents have sought refuge from Israel’s devastating assault.

The video was released nearly seven months into Israel’s retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack—which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in Gaza, wounded another 77,816, and left thousands more missing—and as a full-scale Israeli assault of Rafah looms.

The war has already taken “an unimaginable toll,” and a major military operation against the crowded southern Gaza city “would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children,” Russell warned. “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.”

“Many have been displaced multiple times and lost homes, parents, and loved ones,” the UNICEF chief noted. “There is nowhere safe to go in Gaza. Homes throughout the Gaza Strip lie in ruin. Roads are destroyed and the ground littered with unexploded ordnances.”

“Rafah is also the main hub for the humanitarian response, which includes UNICEF, and the city has some of the last functioning healthcare facilities,” she explained.

Israeli forces launched at least 435 attacks on health facilities or personnel during the first six months of the war, and just 10 of the enclave’s 36 hospitals remain partially functional, according to the World Health Organization. As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, thousands of Palestinian child amputees are struggling to recover due to the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system.

“UNICEF continues to call for the protection of all women and children in Rafah and throughout the Gaza Strip—and the protection of the infrastructure, services, and humanitarian aid they rely on,” said Russell. “We repeat our calls for the unconditional release of all hostages in Gaza who need to be home with their children and families. The violence must end.”

The agency’s five core demands for Gaza are:

  1. An immediate and long-lasting humanitarian cease-fire;
  2. Safe and unrestricted humanitarian access;
  3. The immediate, safe, and unconditional release of all abducted children, and an end to any grave violations against all children;
  4. Respect and protection for civilian infrastructure; and
  5. Allow patients with urgent medical cases to safely access critical health services or leave.

As Russell called for peace in video form, James Elder, UNICEF’s global spokesperson, penned a Wednesday opinion piece for The Guardian following his recent trips to Gaza. He began with a startling anecdote:

The war against Gaza’s children is forcing many to close their eyes. Nine-year-old Mohamed’s eyes were forced shut, first by the bandages that covered a gaping hole in the back of his head, and second by the coma caused by the blast that hit his family home. He is nine. Sorry, he was nine. Mohamed is now dead.

“From looming famine to soaring death tolls, the latest fear is the much-threatened offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza,” he wrote. “Can it get any worse? It always seems to.”

“Rafah will implode if it is targeted militarily,” Elder stressed. “Water is in desperately short supply, not just for drinking but sanitation. In Rafah there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people. The situation is four times worse for showers. That is, around one shower for every 3,500 people. Try to imagine, as a teenage girl, or elderly man, or pregnant woman, queueing for an entire day just to have a shower.”

On October 31, just weeks after the start of what the International Court of Justice has since determined is Israel’s plausibly genocidal assault, UNICEF called Gaza a “graveyard” for children.

“Can it get any worse? It always seems to.”

“Last month I saw new graveyards in Rafah being constructed. And filled,” wrote Elder. “Every day the war brings more violent death and destruction. In my 20 years with the United Nations, I have never seen devastation like that I saw in the Gaza Strip cities of Khan Younis and Gaza City. And now we are told to expect the same via an incursion in Rafah.”

Elder recalled that “in the north of the territory, close to where a UNICEF vehicle came under fire last month, a woman clutched my hand and pleaded, over and over, that the world send food, water, and medicine. I will never forget how, as I felt her grasp, I tried to explain we were trying, and she continued to plead.”

“Why? Because she assumed the world did not know what was happening in Gaza. Because if the world knew, how could they possibly let this happen?” he continued. “How, indeed. The world has certainly been warned about Rafah. It remains to be seen how many eyes stay, or are forced, shut.”

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingNearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah ‘Injured, Sick, Malnourished,’ Says UNICEF

Antisemitism: The Big Lie Smearing Campus Protesters

Original article by RICHARD ESKOW republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators and workers gather and take to the streets to protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza during ”May Day Rally” in New York, United States on May 01, 2024.  (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. This time will be no different.

Mainstream journalists and politicians have engaged in a campaign of mass slander against U.S. college students protesting the Gaza genocide. Their “antisemitism” Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

A newly published survey provides some important context for these protests and undermines the smear campaign against the protesters.

Students Are Not Antisemitic

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a project of the University of Chicago, recently published “Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them,” subtitled “a non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults.” Robert A. Pape, political scientist and CPOST’s director, writes that its findings “are an opportunity to re-center the national discussion around students and away from politics.” Let’s hope so.

Understandably, Pape and his colleagues focus on the steps that should be taken to make all students feel safe on campus, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics. In doing so, their report includes important findings that deserve wider attention.

Their “antisemitism’ Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

Is there a “climate of antisemitism” on campus? CPOST’s study found that college students are less Islamophobic than the general population, but they are not more antisemitic. The level of student bias against Jews is the same as their bias against Muslims, but no greater.

Why, then, is there a national debate about campus antisemitism and none about the comparable scourge of Islamophobia? What message does that send to the Muslim students whose fears are being ignored?

The Protests Aren’t Antisemitic, Either

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants a vote on the “Countering Antisemitism Act,” but neither he nor the president have proposed similar safeguards against Islamophobia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that Columbia protesters have begun “to threaten lives and intimidate and harass people,” has an even more draconian antisemitism bill—also without plans to address Islamophobia.

President Biden, like the others, has condemned what he calls “antisemitic protests.” That slur is challenged by the Chicago study. The authors found that “while college students are not more antisemitic than the general population,” they are “more anti-zionist.” They also found that “prejudicial antisemitism and anti-zionism are largely separate phenomena,” with an “overwhelming” absence of any overlap between antisemitism and a negative view of Israel.

We’ve know for decades that the lie which equates anti-zionism with antisemitism serves a political goal by suppressing speech. We now have evidence to back it up.

“From the River to the Sea”

One protest slogan has been cited over and over as “antisemitic,” with accusers claiming it calls for genocide against Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Most students do not use it in anything approaching a genocidal way. The CPOST study found that only 14 percent of Muslim students, or roughly one in seven, interpret that slogan “to mean the expulsion or genocide of Israeli Jews.” That figure is too high, as is the 13 percent of students who believe that violence against Muslims is sometimes justified. But it also tells us that most people who use the slogan are not calling for harm against anyone.

Does antisemitism exist among [protesters]? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic.

That makes sense, since the phrase can be interpreted nonviolently in at least two ways. One is that a two-state solution should include the territory ceded to Palestine in 1948, which touched both the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Another is that Israel and Palestine should become a single, democratic, non-racial and non-theocratic state, with rights and safety for all. Under that interpretation, “Palestine will be free” is no more a call to genocide than “South Africa will be free” was a call to kill whites during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The study does note that the slogan makes two-thirds of Jewish students feel unsafe. For that reason, Pape recommends avoiding it.

But we now have confirmation that campus officials, politicians, and the media are misleading the public about that phrase. They’re endangering the protesting students and worsening the fears of pro-Israeli students. They should stop.

Conclusion

The political scientist Bernard Cohen once wrote that, while the press isn’t always successful and telling people what to think, “it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about.” The student protests are a textbook example. The debate around these protests is focused on the false charge of antisemitism, not on the moral challenge raised by the protesters.

Does antisemitism exist among them? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic. Republicans did it with the racist Willie Horton ads in 1988. Trump does it when he highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. And politicians, journalists, and college administrators are doing it today with their charges of protester antisemitism.

CPOST’s moderate recommendations for easing campus fears include, “Clear and immediate communication by college leaders condemning violence and intimidation by students and against students on their campuses.” Instead, those leaders are ordering police violence against protesting students, as they and the political/media elite stoke more fear and hatred against them—even in the wake of the anti-protestor mob violence at UCLA. That isn’t just wrong; it’s a dereliction of duty.

As leaders, these prominent individuals have been entrusted with the care and protection of the nation’s young people. Instead, they’re slandering them and putting them at risk. Why? To distract us from a genocide.

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. It won’t be this time, either.

Original article by RICHARD ESKOW republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingAntisemitism: The Big Lie Smearing Campus Protesters

‘An Affront to the World’: Shell Posts Billions in Profits as Planet Burns

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)

“The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal,” one campaigner said.

Oil major Shell announced $7.7 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2024 on Thursday, as well as a $3.5 billion share buyback program.

The news comes as every month covered by the period was the hottest of its kind on record. The three-month period also saw the second-largest wildfire in Texas history, extreme heat in West Africa and the Sahel, and the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef’s fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. Scientists have clearly linked global heating, and the weather disasters it exacerbates, to the climate crisis driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

“As extreme weather accelerates and the cost-of-living crisis rumbles on, Shell’s latest billion-pound profits are an affront to the world,” Izzie McIntosh, climate campaign manager at Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal.”

“This is the sad irony of the global energy system in which those causing chaos are the ones getting rich.”

Shell’s profits for the first three months of 2024 were around 20% lower than for the same time in 2023, CNBC reported. However, the company brought in $1.2 billion more than analysts had predicted. The world’s largest oil firms, including Shell, saw record profits in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis that followed.

“Shell has beaten expectations by a reasonable margin, despite the impact of lower gas prices during the first quarter,” Stuart Lamont, an investment manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said in a statement shared by CNBC.

Global Witness pointed out that Shell’s earnings to date amounted to over $58,000 a minute, more than the average U.K. nurse makes in a year.

“Shell continuing to rake in huge sums of money shows us that huge polluter profits were not a one-off but are the twisted reality of an energy system that benefits climate-wrecking companies to the cost of everyone else,” Global Witness fossil fuel campaigner Alexander Kirk said in a statement.

Shell announced its profits one day after the U.S. Senate held a hearing on how large oil and gas companies, including Shell, have continued to deceive the public about the dangers of their products, moving from outright climate denial into making commitments they don’t intend to keep or touting false solutions like carbon capture and storage that they then fail to develop. Shell, according to the testimony of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), spent only 11% of its capital on low-carbon technologies between 2009 and 2023.

The hearing sparked calls for accountability from the fossil fuel industry—such as mechanisms to make climate polluters pay for the transition to renewable energy—and the news of Shell’s profits generated more.

In the U.K., Labor Shadow Energy and Climate Minister Ed Miliband proposed increasing the tax on energy company profits. Shell paid the U.K. government around $1.4 billion in taxes in 2023, of which around $300 million went to the Energy Profits Levy, according toThe Guardian. Also last year, it paid its shareholders $23 billion, nine times more than it invested in its “Renewables and Energy Solutions” program.

“These results show yet again why it is so damning [that Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax on the oil and gas giants,” Miliband said. “These are companies that have made record profits at the expense of working people. Labor says tax these companies fairly so we can invest in clean homegrown energy that will end the cost of living crisis and make Britain energy independent.”

Greenpeace U.K. called Shell’s latest profits “shameless.”

“Their reckless hunt for profits needs to end,” the environmental advocacy group wrote on social media. “When will world leaders find their backbone and make polluters pay?”

When one commenter suggested governments held back out of desire to keep collecting Big Oil’s taxes, Greenpeace fired back, “What taxes?” and noted that Shell avoided paying U.K. taxes for years.

“At the end of the day we want clean, cheap renewable energy not to face the worst impacts of climate change,” Greenpeace continued. “Solutions exist, we just need the political and industrial will to get them in place.”

Global Witness and Global Justice Now also took the opportunity to call for an energy transition.

“This is the sad irony of the global energy system in which those causing chaos are the ones getting rich,” Kirk said. “This spiral won’t stop until we make the urgent switch to a fairer renewable energy system that puts both people and planet first.”

McIntosh concluded: “We urgently need to bring a fair and organised end to the fossil fuel era, and that means companies like Shell must stop trying to extract new oil and gas, and start paying what they owe for the loss and damage they’ve caused. Profit announcements like this for a corporate dinosaur like Shell need to become a thing of the past.”

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘An Affront to the World’: Shell Posts Billions in Profits as Planet Burns

This May Day, workers mobilized for Palestine

Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Student workers of Columbia organized in UAW 2710 participate in May Day rally. Photo: Wyatt Souers

On International Workers’ Day, workers around the world continued to join hands with the student movement to stand with Palestine

On May Day, workers around the world mobilized for the liberation of Palestine. “This May Day, workers of the world are called to declare their solidarity with Palestine, to denounce the Israeli Genocide, and to call for an end to all aggressions in the region and to all wars,” wrote the International People’s Assembly.

“Beyond the call for a ceasefire we must say no to the transportation of arms and arms caches to Israel. Workers in all industries – especially workers in the transport sector – that can withhold their labor in order to halt the continued slaughter of the people of Palestine are emphatically called to do so!”

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa released a statement calling on workers around the world to mobilize for Palestine. “The working class are the creators of wealth, and it is the united power of the working class that has the power to overthrow hateful, brutal regimes like Apartheid Israel,” wrote the union. “On this Workers Day, we call on workers of the world to unite in defense of Palestine so that its people can be free, from the river, to the sea!”

“The working class in South Africa must celebrate the defeat of Apartheid, because its destruction was due, largely to the unity of workers, who used their labor power to collapse the system through rolling mass action, strikes and protest,” the union added.

Several Palestinian union formations have called the people in the world to action against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. This includes the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, which in March called on US unions in particular to “be our voice and advocate inside and outside America.”

“What our people are experiencing and what workers and unions in particular, are exposed to is the most horrific catastrophe known to humanity in recent decades,” the PGFTU wrote. “We ask that you convey our message and give voice to the suffering of hungry, starving workers and their families—not just to the American people, not just to your unions, but to the entire world.”

Palestinian trade unions have also responded in support of the student movement for Palestine that has taken the world by storm. “The Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Palestine extends our deepest solidarity to you, the revolutionary youth who are changing the world,” reads a statement of support from a prominent Palestine farmworkers’ union, addressed to the students movement around the world that is taking action in solidarity with Gaza. “We write to you from Palestine to tell you that your actions are resonating across oceans. In you, we see the echoes of our struggle, the echoes of our resistance, and the echoes of our hope.”

“Our people, along with all the workers and free people of the world, commemorate the first of May this year, at a time when they are subjected to the most brutal and fierce campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, surpassing in savagery and bloodiness the fascists and the Nazis, at the hands of a group of murderers calling themselves an army for an invasive replacement entity, under the leadership, partnership, support, cover, and complicity of the American administration and the colonial Western imperial powers, the enemies of humanity,” wrote the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in a pre-May Day statement. “We send a salute of respect and pride to the university students all over the world, especially to the students at American universities, who are protesting against the crimes of the occupation and the support of the American administration for it, and who demand a halt to the aggression against the Palestinian people.”

Within the student movement in the US, university workers are mobilizing their unions to stand with their students in solidarity with Gaza. On April 29, within the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the City College of New York in New York City, university workers organized under the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) held a town hall meeting to deliberate on how to use their labor power to support the five demands of the student encampment. The members attending the town hall organized a wildcat sick-out, in which union members will call in sick en masse to disrupt business as usual at the larger City University of New York (CUNY) system. Workers in the United States face a variety of strike prohibitions, including a nationwide ban on striking for political reasons rather than economic issues such as wages and benefits under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

Nevertheless, the PSC faculty at the town hall voted overwhelmingly to stage a sick-out. “At UT Austin, faculty did a one day job action in support of their students. Palestinian trade unions, National SJP, and National Faculty for Justice in Palestine have called for a mass job action on May 1st,” faculty wrote in a statement. “Our students are taking incredible risks to support the Palestinian people. They have asked for our help. We must stand ready to struggle alongside them, and to take these risks.”

Workers organized with the United Auto Workers, which also represents many graduate student workers across the country, staged a rally in Washington Square Park on April 26 in support of their students staging Gaza Solidarity Encampments at NYU, Columbia, and the New School.

Workers engaged in mass mobilizations around the world on May 1.

Thousands took to the streets in major US cities including Washington, DC and Los Angeles. In DC, demonstrators marched to the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at George Washington University.

‼️🇵🇸A massive May Day march in Los Angeles takes the streets for Palestine! pic.twitter.com/YfDrwNiBis

— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) May 1, 2024

✊🏽🇵🇸RIGHT NOW: A massive May Day march is en route to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at George Washington University pic.twitter.com/esXOVUrhqv

— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) May 2, 2024

In New York City, unions such as the United Auto Workers and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance expressed explicit support for the Palestinian cause in a march of 20,000, which ended at the New York University Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

Havana, like every year, was flooded with huge crowds on May Day as President Miguel Diaz-Canel sent an explicit message in support of Palestine and the pro-Palestine student movement. “All our solidarity with the students in the United States, who have taken the side of justice, have come out to support the cause of the Palestinian people, and are brutally repressed on their own university campuses. Today our [May Day] is also going through Palestine,” Diaz-Canel wrote.

In Bogota, President Gustavo Petro made a special announcement during the May Day celebration in front of thousands of Colombians: the nation would officially cut all diplomatic ties with Israel.

Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingThis May Day, workers mobilized for Palestine

Students’ Gaza protests spread across Britain

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/students-gaza-protests-spread-across-britain

A student adjusts a sign at an encampment on the grounds of Newcastle University, protesting against the war in Gaza, May 2, 2024

Wave of campus occupations launched at six unis

THOUSANDS of pro-Palestine students across Britain are mobilising at their universities to demand an end to “complicity in Israel’s genocide” following violent demonstrations across US campuses.

Students in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol have joined peers in Warwick by pitching tents outside university buildings in protest against the war in Gaza.

Bristol students said they were golding the action “in protest of the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,” while Apartheid Off Campus Newcastle said its own action was to “highlight the institution’s investment strategy and its complicity in the Israeli military’s war crimes.”

Student activists elsewhere have also held marches and protests.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/students-gaza-protests-spread-across-britain

Continue ReadingStudents’ Gaza protests spread across Britain