… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Tag: apartheid

  • ‘McCarthyism Is Alive and Well’: Google Fires 28 for Protesting Israel Contract

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

    Google employees demand the company terminate its contract with the Israeli government at a protest on April 16, 2024. 
    (Photo: No Tech for Apartheid/Medium)

    “These mass, illegal firings will not stop us,” said organizers. “Make no mistake, we will continue organizing until the company drops Project Nimbus and stops powering this genocide.”

    The peace coalition No Tech for Apartheid accused Google of a “flagrant act of retaliation” late Wednesday night as the Silicon Valley giant announced it had fired 28 workers over protests against its cloud services contract with the Israeli government.

    The firings came after Google organizers held two 10-hour sit-ins at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California and New York City, demanding the termination of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract under which Google and Amazon provide cloud infrastructure and data services for Israel—without any oversight regarding whether the Israel Defense Forces uses the services in its occupation of Palestinian territories and bombardment of Gaza.

    Workers have denounced Project Nimbus since it was announced in 2021, but Israel’s killing of at least 33,970 Palestinians in Gaza since October and its intentional starvation of civilians led employees to escalate their protests.

    No Tech for Apartheid said in a statement that Google officials called the police to both offices to arrest nine protesters—dubbed the Nimbus Nine—on Tuesday morning, before utilizing “a dragnet of in-office surveillance” to fire nearly two dozen other employees on Wednesday.

    “They punished all of the workers they could associate with this action in wholesale firings,” said the coalition, which includes Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower Change, a Muslim-led anti-war group.

    Google accused the workers of “bullying,” “harassment,” defacing property, and physically impeding other employees—allegations No Tech for Apartheid rejected as it noted organizers “have yet to hear from a single executive about” their concerns over Google’s collaboration with Israel.

    “This excuse to avoid confronting us and our concerns directly, and attempt to justify its illegal, retaliatory firings, is a lie,” said the workers. “Even the workers who were participating in a peaceful sit-in and refusing to leave did not damage property or threaten other workers. Instead they received an overwhelmingly positive response and shows of support.”

    The organizers staged the sit-ins on the heels of reporting in Time magazine about new negotiations between Google and the Israeli government regarding further potential tech contracts.

    Kate J. Sim, a child safety policy adviser at Google who said she was among those fired this week, said the terminations show “how terrified [executives] are of worker power.”

    Google employees have a history of harnessing worker power to change policies at the company. In 2018, Google terminated a deal with the U.S. Defense Department to develop drone and artificial intelligence (AI) technology through a contract called Project Maven. The decision followed the resignations of several employees and the condemnation of thousands of workers.

    Calling Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian “genocide profiteers,” No Tech for Apartheid said Wednesday that they will not stop demonstrating against Project Nimbus until they get a similar result.

    “The truth is clear: Google is terrified of us,” said the group. “They are terrified of workers coming together and calling for accountability and transparency from our bosses… The corporation is trying to downplay and discredit our power.

    “These mass, illegal firings will not stop us,” No Tech for Apartheid added. “On the contrary, they only serve as further fuel for the growth of this movement. Make no mistake, we will continue organizing until the company drops Project Nimbus and stops powering this genocide.”

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

  • Instead of Holocaust Museum, Detour Signs Direct Israel’s Herzog to The Hague

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    Original article by COMMON DREAMS STAFF republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    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.

    As Al-Jazeera reports:

    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.”

    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 disregard for 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.”

    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.”

    Original article by COMMON DREAMS STAFF republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Israeli President Herzog Opens Holocaust Museum In Amsterdam … ›

    With Genocide in Gaza, the Word ‘Never’ Has Been Stripped From ‘Never Again’

  • UN Human Rights Chief Decries ‘War Crime’ of Rapidly Expanding Israeli Settlements

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

    U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk speaks during a press conference in Cairo, Egypt on November 8, 2023. (Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images)

    “The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state.”

    The United Nations human rights chief on Friday condemned the record expansion of illegal Israeli apartheid settlements in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem and the “dramatic increase” in violence against Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces and settlers, developments that are occurring while the world’s attention is focused on the Gaza genocide.

    “Reports this week that Israel plans to build a further 3,476 settler homes in Maale Adumim, Efrat, and Kedar fly in the face of international law,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement responding to the far-right Israeli government’s latest settlement expansion scheme.

    Türk submitted a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council affirming that Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention by “effectively transferring the civilian population of Israel to the occupied territory while displacing the Palestinian population from their land.”

    “Such transfers amount to a war crime that may engage the individual criminal responsibility of those involved,” the report states.

    Both the occupation and settlements are illegal under international law. Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in Syria in 1967 and has occupied the territories ever since. Although Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza and dismantled Jewish settlements there in 2005, Israel maintains a crippling physical and economic stranglehold that has become a total siege since October 7, when the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a genocidal war in response to Hamas-led attacks.

    The U.N. report notes that approximately 24,300 new homes in existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank were advanced between November 2022 to the end of October 2023, “the highest on record since monitoring began in 2017.”

    According to the publication:

    The policies of the current government of Israel appear aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into the state of Israel…

    During the reporting period, there was a dramatic increase in the intensity, severity, and regularity of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, which is accelerating the displacement of Palestinians from their land, in circumstances that may amount to forcible transfer. This violence further spiked following the attacks on October 7, 2023.

    “The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state,” said Türk.

    According to the report, Israeli occupation forces and settlers have killed at least 413 Palestinians—including 107 children—while wounding more than 4,600 others in the West Bank since October 7. Palestinians killed 15 Israelis including four soldiers in the occupied territories during the same period.

    In one of the most recent incidents, Israeli troops fatally shot 10-year-old Amr Mohammad Ghaleb Najar in the head while he sat in the front seat of his father’s car with his younger brother as they drove through the village of Burin on Monday. Soldiers then opened fire on Palestinians trying to rescue the child, wounding two other people.

    Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also heads the Civil Administration—the governing body in the occupied territories—said this week that 18,515 new housing units have been approved in the settlements over the past year.

    “The enemies try to harm and weaken us, but we will continue to build and be built up in this land,” the far-right minister said on social media.

    The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which has sanctioned a handful of extremist settlers, last month reversed a Trump-era policy shift under which the United States no longer officially viewed Israeli settlements as illegal. The U.S. State Department first declared the settlements unlawful in 1978.

    “Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month. “And in our judgment, this only weakens—it doesn’t strengthen—Israel’s security.”

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

  • PM warned not to stir up fear of peace demos

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/pm-warned-not-to-stir-up-fear-of-peace-demos

    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.”

    …

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/pm-warned-not-to-stir-up-fear-of-peace-demos

    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.

  • With Genocide in Gaza, the Word ‘Never’ Has Been Stripped From ‘Never Again’

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

    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.

    Palestine will be free.

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

    Arundhati Roy quoted.
    Arundhati Roy quoted.
    • 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?